Former federal prosecuter Andy McCarthy has a must read piece at NRO:
Here’s a riddle: What begins with words “In the Name of God, the Merciful, the Compassionate,” a formal Islamic salutation also commonly used by militants in their warnings, fatwas, and claims of responsibility regarding terrorist acts?What extols the virtues of “rightful jehad” (also known as jihad) in its very first sentence?
What in its first article declares its sovereignty to be an “Islamic Republic,” and in its second installs Islam as the official “religion of the state”?
What, in its third article announces to the world that, within the territory it governs, “no law can be contrary to the beliefs and provisions of the sacred religion of Islam”?...
The answer, which will come as no surprise to followers of the Abdul Rahman apostasy trial in Kabul, is the Afghan constitution. This is the celebrated foundational law which came into force on January 4, 2004, to the ringing praises of Zalmay Khalilzad, then the American ambassador under whose kneading the drafting process was completed....
Read it all.
Constitutions in Islamic countries are not worth the paper they are printed on. In any shari'a state the canon of Islam (Qur'an, ahadith, and Sira) are by definition, the constitution. National constitutions are a Western concept and have no relevance to Muslims. Western diplomats who trumpet the "success" of constitutional governance in post-Taliban Afghanistan and post-Saddam Iraq are deluding themselves and the people of their own nations who have unwittingly agreed to expend the blood of their sons and daughters in the Quixotic cause of a false "democratic freedom".
True democracy means sovereignty of the people, not sovereignty of gods or high priests. That is why shari'a is fundamentally incompatible with democratic self-rule. It is one or the other, folks. It is the light of true freedom or it is the darkness of Islamic slavery. There is no compromise. It really is that simple.
There certainly is nothing wrong with believing in god, nothing wrong with total devotion to god. Pay all day long if you like, thats a fine thing. As people of these land have done since the memory of man in one way or another, only why, oh why, in gods name should anyone need to bow down to Mecca. Come to your sences. God the creater knows every grain of sand, every hair on your head, every thought you have. No need to bow down to anyone or anywhere. Let alone to the arabs or their land.
Why doesn't someone make McCarthy stop denying the Armenian Genocide?
I wonder if that article will ever be read by any of our Congressmen and women? One can hope.
I wonder if that article will ever be read by any of our Congressmen and women?
Seeing as how they have ignored a great break chunk of history, I am not hopeful
Please indulge me friends...and allow me to share another snippet from Bruce Bower's 'While Europe Slept.'
"Even after Madrid, alas, most of the West European establishment continued to embrace the pretense that Islamist terrorism was too complex, too ambiguous, and too nuanced a problem to make possible any direct, forceful response. "How can one fight against such a danger?" Jean-Marie Colombani pretended to ask in 'Le Monde.' Not, he argued, in the American way, which was too big on "simplisme" and emotional appeals.
"Instead, he argued "against the enemies of Democracy, the only answer is more Democracy." More Democracy was precisely what America was attempting to bring about in Afghanistan and Iraq - but Colombani obviously didn't mean THAT. He didn't really mean anything.It was just alot of Gallic jibber-jabber. French politicians and journalists are good at such rhetoric. For them it was an art unto itself. It had nothing to do with action. On the contrary, it was a substitute for action.
" 'Le Figaro' suggested that "if Europe really exists, it must be mobilized to help Spain to find serenity." This, apparently, was the only kind of mobilization some members of the elite could accept: mobilization in the cause of Spanish SERENITY!
"Reading one eloquently impotent editorial after another, I couldn't help feeling that those who have described Western Europe as doomed to succumb to radical Islam were right."
This file which is a historic record gleaned from an old newspaper will make you ask "Whats changed?" note the authors almost Spencer approach at the start.
Fairly long and written in archaic language, on the days after the Britsh Government announced it decision to send in 3 Ironclads to Constantinople, because it objected to the deal Russia made with the Turks, they were recalled on the 31 January the day after this piece was published.
JANUARY 30, 1878.
THE COLLAPSE OF TURKEY
The collapse of the Ottoman power and the panic in Constantinople appear to surprise Englishmen, but there is nothing in either phenomenon to justify surprise. The Ottoman Empire is an ordinary Asiatic despotism, governed by a dynasty which, though unusually vigorous – the mothers of the Sultans being always selected for their personal qualities, and irrespective of birth – is at last wearing out, and defended by an armed caste which has ceased to conquer, and in such a State the following is the regular course of events.
When the stronger rulers have passed away, the central government, usually composed of rather effeminate persons belonging to the Royal House – effeminate, because jealousy secluded from affairs – and favourites adepts at intrigue, when attacked, send its bravest troops to the front, chooses the best generals it can find, selecting by preference unknown men not likely to become too powerful, and raises supplies for them like a Committee of Public Safety. Munitions are bought with any moneys available, all distribution of pay cease, and the civil subjects of the Empire are placed under requisition. All men fit to fight, all horses fit to draw, all carts that can be drawn, and all supplies of food not actually on the ground are seized by half-military agents and hurried off to the camps, the waste on the road being fearful, and usually aggravated by systematic embezzlement, corrected by occasional executions.
If the armies fight well – which outside of China they usually do, all the dominant Asiatic races being physically brave – the invaders may be driven back and a peace concludes on the basis of the status quo, and then everything goes excellently well. A few score thousand families have been ruined; two or three provinces have become “exhausted” and are thenceforward traversed, sometimes for years by armed gangs of brigands; but the “Government” maintains its authority; the mass of the population still dread it, and until the next convulsion, or as in Persia, the period of depopulation arrives, all goes on as before. The governing class becomes a little feebler; the cities sink a little further into decay, the villages become a little poorer, but there is nothing visible to show that the Empire has been so much as weakened.
If however, the enemy is civilised or very determined, and the soldiers begin to be beaten, or to suffer a series of defeats, the inherent weakness of the Government at once declares itself. The ruling clique loses its head, and the soldiery lose heart. The Generals are changed as if by mere caprice, but really whenever they sustain a reverse, or make a remonstrance, or affront any of the half dozen people possessed of the Sovereign’s ear, as they have not won victories, they have no power of resistance. Soldiers gradually become unprocurable, and are replaced by men willing enough to fight, but wholly unable to withstand the moral pressures of disaster, men who will one day defend an old wall like Englishmen or Prussians, and on the next surrender in masses on the field. The good officers – always few, for favouritism discourages severe training- are used up. The area of requisitions is enlarged, till half the recruits perish on the road and three-fourths of the provisions collected are lost before they reach their destination. The Generals either lose moral nerve and do nothing, or attempt great isolated feats of no particular military use, the fortresses surrender, and the people, wild with fears such as spread only among Asiatic’s and maddened by the outrages of a disbanded soldiery, swarm in on the fortified towns, to consume their stores and make them indefensible. One of the greatest difficulties of an Asiatic government is the readiness with which the common people, once stricken with panic, flock towards the towns. Moral authority disappears. Every waverer becomes a traitor, and every traitor tries to make separate market. Treason penetrates to the very centre, till every invading General receives offers of aid from within the capital, sometimes so astonishing that he rejects them for mere incredulity that men can intend to be so base.
If the enemy halts, and will make peace, peace stops the disintegrating process, and sometimes allows of singular revivials; but if the enemy presses on, the Empire attacked is, invariably either dissolved or transmuted. There is scarcely an instance, we believe, in the history of an Asiatic monarchy, surviving the military capture of its capital. Either the country has lost its independence or the dynasty its throne. The true Government, the central group which controls the only effective source of power, the Sovereign’s mouth, from the moment the capital is threatened is paralysed by a new difficulty, the fear of the dynasty for its lofty position. In every Oriental State there exists a dynasty policy and a public policy, the former overrides the latter. The ruler knows that the throne, with its magical grandeur, its immunities, its luxuries, its semi-sacredness, is an object of pitiless ambition to all his chiefs, of passionate hatred to whole sections of the populace, of even more dangerous adoration to its devotees, who hold it must be worthily filled, and is not worthily filled while filled by a beaten man against whom Providence itself has declared.
Each of these sections denounces the Palace as the fountain of all misfortunes, and calls for a change there as the only hope of reversing the decree of Fate. To the agitation felt by inexperienced civilians in the presence of great military dangers, to the wild excitement created by the anger of the populace, by the rush of half maddened refugees, by the torrent of counsels to yield, to fight, to overawe, the people, to lead the people, to pardon everybody, to massacre everybody, is added to the supreme fear that the throne will fall, that the dynasty will be condemned, or that the individual monarch will be assassinated, executed, or superseded.
Every General is dreaded, every counsellor is distrusted, and the city itself, with its unknown multitudes, becomes such an object of terror, that flight becomes from the capital seems a dictate of expediency. No defensibility of the capital relieves the monarch of this fear, and no degree of personal courage will prevent his favourites from sinking under a risk which does not threaten there lives as much as their fortunes, their positions, and their power. The House of Othman as a dynasty has less perhaps to fear from this source than any other in Asia, because of the popular faith in its importance to Islam, but no individual member of it can, since the fall of Abdul Aziz, feel sure of his own security. If there is one thing patent on the surface of recent Turkish history, it is that the Government of Turkey, from the Sultan downwards, dreads the populace of Constantinople; that it has never yet possessed such influence among the garrison as to make it safe, and that it has repeatedly considered projects of removing the seat of Government to a more independent position. When General Gourko first crossed the Balkans, Constantinople was full rumours about a flight to Broussa; and if the armistice is not signed and the panic rises higher with the Russian advance, this project may be revived in a more effective form. It is the regular course of events in Asia. The “armies were defeated, the Prince fled, the country submitted” is but a sentence out of Rollin. With the flight of the Sovereign, order of course disappears, and the capital is fortunate if the enemy enters it speedily enough to avert is total destruction.
It is this inchoate anarchy within the capital of an Oriental State which so often in history prevents its serious defence, and which incapacitates the rulers of Constantinople from defending the lines of Tchatildja, as under some circumstances they might do, till the assailants were wearied out. The Palaeologi did for years resist an attack directed from Adrianople, but then they were soldiers, they had superior ammunition, in the form of the still undiscovered Greek Fire, and they had a population on which, partly from creed, partly from habit, and partly from the fear of their mercenaries, they could implicitly rely. The Sultan’s government would have to defend against scientific attack a position eleven miles long, scarcely yet fortified, and requiring 100,000 men for full defence, resting for base on an enormous city full of armed ruffians, unaccustomed to severe control, with an immense population of non-combatants, and with one half of the people so far friends with the invader that any internal movements would be made known to him at once.
They would never be certain that the throne might not be vacated by an Emuek*, that the civil population might not insist on peace, stopping the soldier’s supplies, or that some one of the eleven redoubts would not be sold to the enemy. They would have to defend it hampered by the traditional feelings of their soldier’s that some day or other Islam would be driven out by the reluctance of Europe to see such a contest continue while three Ironclads would end it, and by the knowledge that if they failed, if Constantinople were taken after a siege the Empire would be at an end.
* UNKNOWN WORD (Root word Emir)
Copyright Dunstable Gazette
Compilation Copyright James Kennedy