Tony Blankley is freaking me out

His latest book, The West’s Last Chance, is coming true before our very lives.
Don Feder:

A committee appointed by the British government, composed of Muslims, wants the nation to scrap its Holocaust Memorial Day, in the name of inclusiveness and sensitivity. No word yet on whether they also want to eliminate Passover – said to be insensitive to Egyptians.

The committee recommends replacing the observance (started in 2001 and held annually on January 27) with a Genocide (a.k.a., Victimhood) Day, which would recognize the alleged mass murder of Muslims in “Palestine,” Chechnya, Bosnia, and wherever else followers of the Religion of Peace have come into conflict with the accursed infidel.

In making its case for inclusiveness, the committee somehow neglected to mention the many victims of Muslim mayhem – Armenians, Sudanese Christians, Kosovar Serbs (ethnically cleansed in the wake of NATO’s war on Yugoslavia), and Hindus – to name but a few. If an Arab stubbed his toe on the boot of a Christian knight sometime in the 11th century, it’s a crime against humanity that must be memorialized throughout the ages, according to the imams. On the other hand, the slaughter of infidels is seen as the will of Allah, and worthy of a Heavenly reward.

The committee maintains that Britain’s Holocaust Memorial Day fuels feelings of isolation and alienation among Muslim youth. And, well, to have a special commemoration of the systematic slaughter of one in every three Jews on earth (in an effort to annihilate an entire people), is grossly unfair, the committee suggests.
This is one of numerous matters that goes to the heart of the “clash of civilizations,” the premise of Blankley’s book. Muslims are not interested in assimilating, as has every other ethnicity or religion in the West. They are not interested in tolerating others who are, in the case of the Jews, non-Arab, or, in the case of everyone else, non-Muslim. The people of the West need to wake up to these facts, and quickly.
Surely, you say, not all Muslims feel this way. Surely this is simply those radical extremists the likes of bin Laden, right? Then why is there nothing but silence from the majority of supposedly peace-loving, tolerant, assimilated Muslims in the West?

Have you forgotten?

Jon asked the question. (It makes me feel old to realize he’s talking about high school classes in his remarks.)
I was getting ready for work. Kel and I had just changed places in the shower; she was watching the Today show when they went live after the first plane it. While I was shaving, I watched the second plane fly in to the second tower.
“A second plane just hit!” I yelled in to the bathroom.
What?!?!?” was the reply from my wife.
“The first plane was no accident,” I told her. The early speculation after the first plane struck was that it was an accident of some sort. I, and millions of others, knew right then it was no accident.
We both finished getting ourselves ready, watching the news the entire time. I was on the road to the office when the first tower fell. Tears were in my eyes, and the thought that kept running through my head was Those poor people…
I was at work for around an hour before they sent us home. At the time, my wife was working in the tallest building in downtown Dallas. Building management shut it down; my wife never even made it up to her office to be sent home. We spent the rest of the day in the living room, glued to the news.
Yesterday, Jeff said:

On another subject, tomorrow is the fourth anniversary of 9/11. What’s there to say about that? It seems like a lot of Americans would like to forget the events of that day. I don’t really blame them. Denial is a legitimate reaction to trauma. But I think we’d be better served by remembering than forgetting. I think we’d be better off taking the day tomorrow to think about what happened on that Tuesday morning four years ago, to remember the shock and the horror and the grief. Because I think that remembering it will honor the dead and fill us with a terrible resolve that nothing like it shall ever happen again.
Likewise, the Toad implores us to never forget.
Our pastor touched briefly on this in worship this morning. Our church is involved in several different areas of providing relief services to persons displaced by Katrina. We’ve adopted 22 families that have been relocated to the Dallas area, among other initiatives. One thing Tim told us was to keep a marathon mindset with regard to this help we were providing. Just as too many people in this nation lost sight of what 9/11 meant for our country, too many people will forget about the hundreds of thousands affected by Katrina in the coming months. We can forget neither.
Keep the long view in mind. Pace yourself; the war against the Islamofascists who attacked us on 9/11 will be a marathon, not a sprint. Do not forget.

It’s raining again, hallelujah, it’s raining again…

Since you won’t hear about it any where else, Arthur Chrenkoff has the latest good news from Afghanistan. It is amazing how much is happening in this now-free nation in such a short amount of time. It truly shows the bias and if-it-bleeds-it-leads mentality of the mainstream press that these stories are not getting more coverage. We wrought this, America, through the service and sacrifice of our sons and daughters in the armed services. They should be proud. We all should be.

Hagel Huh?

Chuck Hagel, Senator, Nebraska-D:

“We should start figuring out how we get out of there,” Hagel said on “This Week” on ABC. “But with this understanding, we cannot leave a vacuum that further destabilizes the Middle East. I think our involvement there has destabilized the Middle East. And the longer we stay there, I think the further destabilization will occur.”
Follow the good Senator’s logic with us:
1. The U.S. toppling of the Hussein government in Iraq, and construction of a democratic republic in same, destabilizes the Middle East. (Funny, we thought the fact that a mad dictator known to have invaded his neighbors and gas his own people would have contributed to the already destabilized Middle East.)
2. A continued U.S. presence in Iraq destabilizes the Middle East.
3. If the U.S. pulls out, there will be destabilization in the Middle East.
So according to the good Senator from Nebraska–who cannot be questioned because he has “absolute moral authority” as a Purple Heart-receiving Vietnam veteran–we’re damned if we do, and damned if we don’t, so we may as well damn millions of other people while we’re at it.
What the hell is wrong with people like Senator Hagel, that they wish to condemn millions of people to (a) the constant worry that the dictator’s secret police will whisk them off to a torture room (Saddam’s Iraq), or (b) sudden U.S. withdrawal will plunge them in to a hard-line Islamofascist government (Taliban-controlled Afghanistan, Iran)?
The arguments over whether or not we should have gone in to Iraq are over, people. It’s done. There is no time machine, we can’t go back and change it. (And if we could, would you really? Can you honestly say the Iraqis are worse off now than under Saddam?)
It would be nice to bring most of the troops home. (Note, I did not say “all”. We should always maintain a presence in Iraq as we move in to the future.) However, we can not wholly withdraw overnight and allow the fledgling Iraqi republic to implode. The future of the United States is, for good or ill, now tied to the future of Iraq, and for the sons and daughters of both nations, we owe the Iraqis our continued support.
[Prompted and inspired by today’s Best of the Web.]

We should stay in Iraq — for decades…

So sayeth the editors in this past Friday’s Federalist Patriot (link is a PDF):
The usual Demo-gogue suspects — Kennedy, Kerry and company — are increasing the tenor of their demands that the Bush administration commit to a timetable for withdrawing American troops from Iraq. A few misguided Republicans have even signed on to this legislative folly. Insisting that we cap our military support for the new Iraqi government is a dangerous political ploy intended to help Demos rally their peacenik constituency in the run-up to next year’s midterm elections. Dangerous, because challenging the administration to agree to a timetable only emboldens Jihadis, who would very much like to move the frontlines of the Long War from their turf to ours.
The Demos know President George Bush will not agree to such a timetable. As the president has said repeatedly, “Our exit strategy is to exit when our mission is complete.” Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld protests that any such deadline for withdrawal would “throw a lifeline to terrorists.” Indeed, but it is always easier to sell anti-war rhetoric like “give peace a chance” than it is to advocate peace through superior firepower, and to use force in defense of critical U.S. national interests.

Debunking the “chickenhawk” argument

Ben Shapiro takes aim at the anti-war mouth-foamers on the left.

Rabbi Aryeh Spero is mad

The good rabbi isn’t afraid–like so many in our nation, including the President, I’m disappointed to say–to call a spade a spade:

We were victorious during WW II because daily we were fighting a concrete, named enemy: Germany, Hitler, Nazism, and the German people supportive of the above. In contrast, today, those who show the face of the enemy are called racists. Consequently, we have chosen to call it not what it is — a war against radical Islam — but a war against terrorism, a raceless entity.

Though in all other investigations, evidence, history, and “most-likely” are the tools used to stop the next likely perpetrator, today’s political correctness labels such common sense detective work as “profiling” — the latest concoction of racism. Better to remain less protected and maybe die than to be a profiler or be called a racist. That is how silly we’ve become. Silly people do not, over the long run, win wars.

Giving in/up

This is why you cannot give in to terrorist demands. This is why it is pointless to “try to understand why” those who commit horrific acts of violence against innocents to further a religio-political agenda do so.
Hamas vows to continue fight

In a show of force, Hamas founders and political leaders appeared Saturday on a stage together for the first time in 10 years to tell the Palestinian people that the militant group’s armed struggle will go on after Israel’s impending withdrawal from the Gaza Strip.
‘Tomorrow Jerusalem,’ Abbas exults
Less than three days after he urged Palestinians to refrain from excessive celebrations over the Israeli withdrawal from the Gaza Strip and northern West Bank, Palestinian Authority Chairman Mahmoud Abbas on Friday presided over a huge celebration in Gaza City where he declared: “Today we are celebrating the liberation of Gaza and the northern West Bank; tomorrow we will celebrate the liberation of Jerusalem.”
The Israeli government acquiesced to the demands of terrorists. Hamas, Islamic Jihad, the PLO: these are terrorist organizations. They demanded land which was never theirs to begin with–that’s right, the land of “Palestine” has always belonged to some other nation, including Jordan, Syria, and Egypt, so why aren’t the Palestinians sending suicide bombers in to those nations?–through the use of terror. These are not “freedom fighters” or “insurgents,” they are terrorists.
The Israeli government caved, and it got them nothing. The reason is simple: the Palestinians, with the sometimes silent, sometimes vocal, backing of the entire Arab world, want nothing less than the complete and total destruction of Israel. They want all the Jews out of the land, dead or alive, but one could infer preferably dead. They want no Jewish state to exist.
You cannot reason with people like this. You cannot give in to their demands and hope for the best.
You kill them. You achieve total and complete victory, with overwhelming military force. Then you set about dictating the terms of the peace, and you help rebuild. It worked it Japan. It worked in Germany. It will work in Afghanistan and Iraq. It could have worked within the borders of Israel.

Denigrating military service

I felt “The Patriot Perspective” from today’s Federalist Patriot (PDF file) was worth reprinting.

War, what is it good for?

Well, victory for one thing, as Mark Steyn points out.
[via Hugh]