Fitzgerald: And because I love you so much, he loves you too

"The first is the result of simple ignorance, of unfamiliarity with history, of refusing to believe that ideologies matter."

....you would think that the daily accumulation of bodies and body parts would at least raise an eyebrow.....or the proverbial lightbulb turning on....

....some people are incapable of thinking....blinded by ignorance...

Previous appearances of Bremer as "Jack Armstrong, All-American Boy" at JW are to be found in the following posts, which are dated at the end, but in my view, they do not date. They stand solidly up:

1. The destruction of the Iraqi regime was completely justified. One might even justify sticking around to make sure the disarming of the country was complete, that the major figures around Saddam were killed or captured, and that a start was made on establishing institutions that represent the most decent government Iraq has ever had -- or ever likely to have, because Ambassador Bremer, doing his impersonation of Jack Armstrong All-American Boy, is morally superior, as are every one of the American generals there, to the collection of bad villains (al- Sadr), nice villains ( al-Sistani), cheats (Adnan Pachachi) and charmers (the only slightly louche Chalabi) who are part of the passing parade.

It is idiotic to risk American soldiers' lives to "win hearts and minds" -- stony hearts, primitive minds. The fact that most Kurds, and all the Iraqi Christians, for their own good reasons, welcome the American presence, should not tie us down to Iraq. Some among the Muslim, Shi’a, Arabs would also like us to stay to promote their own wellbeing (just as the most plausible among them, Kanan Makiya, Chalabi, and so on, who wanted Saddam Hussein out, but are not reformers in the Ataturk line, who dare to recognize that Islam, not a "lack of democracy" or "modernity," is the problem) – and even an old Sunni crook like Pachachi, of course, also wants that American money flowing in, and flowing in, unstaunched as the blood of the American soldiers for whom he cares not a whit.
Let us leave Iraq not because we have failed, but because the Iraqis have failed. They proved to be just as violent, meretricious, and thoroughly unpleasant, whether it is the frenzied mobs in Falluja, or Sadr's Mahdi Army, or the men and officers trained and equipped by the Americans who leave their posts, or run away, or even turn their weapons on Americans, including the civilians some of them have helped to kidnap and kill.

But as Iraq is left, make sure that a series of measures are taken so that no one will mistake for a defeat. Make sure it is seen as, instead, part of a final realization that the problem is Islam, and so we, in consort with other Infidels whose support we will woo and win, will work to create precisely those conditions which permitted Ataturk to constrain Islam. Instead of prosperity, the opposite. Instead of yielding to Arab demands, no yielding on anything. American marines, when they leave the Sunni Triangle (or even before) should seize control of the southern Sudan -- here popular opinion must be prepared, by spotlights being focused on the 20 years of Arab Muslim genocide. It might take 5,000 marines, to wipe out the Arabs engaged in massacre. Let it be known that self-determination has finally come to the blacks of the southern Sudan, who have been persecuted and murdered for decades. The oil of the south will belong to them. It will be impossible even for the Euro-Arab Dialoguists to come out on the side of genocide against blacks -- who are, after all, truly impoverished, and unlike the Arabs, represent the real Third World. It will be a measure supported by black African states, particularly those who will see it as representing a way to stop the further Islamic conquest, through money funded to mosques and madrasas, of black Africa. It will, above all, show that the Dar al-Islam can, and will be were appropriate, simply thrust back, parts of it cut off and reintegrated into Dar al-Harb.

And if this is combined with other measures, such as:

1) raising taxes on gasoline, and explicitly linking such a tax to the need to "deprive the Jihad" of the "money weapon"
2) ending all foreign aid to Egypt, Jordan, and any other Muslim country, if those countries persist in having military forces beyond rifles and jeeps, and if, further, they allow their media to foment anti-Americanism and antisemitism 3) shooting down the satellites that make possible Al-Jazeera and similar propaganda stations. It is absurd to allow them to continue to operate; they are directly responsible for American deaths in Iraq through their lies
4) deny visas to all those in the Arab and Muslim ruling circles, and to all their family members, so that that which they so desire -- to both attack the United States, and harm its citizens, and promote the Jihad, even as their own children receive educations in the United States, or they get medical care, will no longer be possible. The kissing has to stop.

There are many more measures that might be taken, so that when we leave Iraq to become the new Somalia -- and look at Somalia today, it represents no threat at all -- we will make it clear we are leaving not because we have listened to Dominique de Villepin, but because the supposedly "hard-headed" measures we are taking in Iraq are in fact naive, and we have hardly been sufficiently hard-headed at all. Paul Wolfowitz, I'm afraid, is credited with being far more tough than he is; a believer in the "two-state solution" -- the phrase itself shows an utter ignorance of Islamic jurisprudence, and the model of Al-Hudaibiyya -- he is, as Richard Pipes told a Boston Globe interviewer some months ago, a weapons specialist, not someone who understands the importance of culture and ideology on people.
Men, materiel, money, and poltical capital are now mis-allocated to Iraq. Better, having rescued the largely ungrateful and completely untrustworthy Iraqis, from a mass murderer, having shown every effort to build and rebuild, repair and re-repair, the roads, schools, hospitals, oil wells, having been offered, in requital, at best indifference and passivity (yes, Americans, you fix up the country -- and wake us when it's over), at worst the murder, mayhem, and hamza-halted torrents of hysteria and hate, that one can find everywhere in the Arab Muslim world.

Iraq is not a quagmire, but it is a tarbaby.

It is not true that "democracy" will self-evidently help constrain Islam. What will constrain Islam is the creation of conditions which will force its own adherents to recognize, in some way, that Islam itself, the source of the hatred of all non-Muslims and hence of the JIhad, with all of its instruments, must be limited as Ataturk attempted, because the texts of Qur'an and hadith cannot be changed, and the doctrine of abrogation, which deals with the contradictions in the texts, always works in favor of the later, much more uncompromisingly malevolent suras.
"Stay the course" -- yes, the course of anti-Jihad, and that requires an exit from Iraq, understanding that divide and conquer remains the first principle of dealing with an enemy. The Marshall Plan model is not of universal application; it fit, in fact, only the conditions of Western Europe in the post-World War II period. It makes no sense while the ideology that is most hostile to us -- Islam -- is now as powerful, or even more powerful, than it was before. Iraq has been disarmed; so has Libya; those are great achievements. Nothing else in that line can be accomplished by remainnig in Iraq. Time to leave, and at every level, with low cunning and high, to thwart or push back the enemy, by reversing the "Euro-Arab Dialogue" mentality in Europe, by exposing the Islamic infiltration in the U.N. (Edward Mortimer, Kofi Annan's Director of Communications, for example, deserves investigation for his islamisant and anti-Israel sympathies), by silencing major Arab satellite channels, depriving Arab states of military hardware, working hard to diminish Saudi oil revenues in every possible way, and as both humanitarian intervention, and a way to push back the dar al-Islam in the most politically palatable manner, securing the southern Sudan for the southern Sudanese, who will then provide, should we need it, a boost to the anti-Islam forcdes in Nigeria, Kenya, and elsewhere in black Africa.

President Bush seems to have had an idea; now the idea has him. He must see that to remain in Iraq now gets in the way of the counter-Jihad; letting Iraq decline, or disintegrate, is from the Infidel point of view, a matter very much to be encouraged. Letting conditions in the Muslim world reach a state where local Ataturks will arise (all the while, through airpower, including missiles, making sure that Bin Laden-style camps will never again be permitted to exist untouched) is the course that, history teaches, is the only way to constrain or limit Islam.

[Posted by: Hugh at April 20, 2004 01:01 PM]

2.

"An all-out civil war in Iraq could further inflame Sunni extremists elsewhere. More militants among Saudi Arabia’s Wahhabi sect, who practice an austere and radical brand of Islam, might try to aid Iraq’s minority Sunnis."
-- from the AP article, editorializing, above

When Saddam Hussein was deposed, Sunni rule in Iraq ended. The army, with its Sunni officer corps and overrepresentation of Sunni Arabs in the ranks (they make up only 20% of the population), could have prevailed, had another Sunni quickly been put in to replace Saddam Hussein.

That did not happen. It did not happen because the Americans were exceptionally clever. Every good thing that will come out of Iraq now, as far as Infidels go, will be entirely the result not of anything the Americans have done deliberately, but of what they have managed to do quite by accident, and in most cases in direct contradiction to what the Americans have tried to accomplish. It is that crazy, that much a comedy of errors that will, in the end, if they only begin to grasp a few home truths about Islam and about Iraq, will make this intervention in Iraq not only better for all those within Iraq (not "Iraqis") but better, in the end, for all Infidels and for all Muslims (if one defines "better" as weakening the hold, the power of Islam, over Muslims themselves, who are mostly born into a cult they did nothing to deserve, and which from birth they are inculcated and only the most intellectually and morally aware, at least at this point, can see through and then, if they dare, and if filial piety and a sense of "Arabness" does not hold them back, can even throw off).

When Saddam Hussein's sons were killed, when he was captured, when the Americans played so successfully that amusing game of Fifty-Two Pick-Up and left only a handful, when Jack Armstrong, All-American Boy (I mean Bremer, of course) dissolved that army, then the Shi'a (whose most plausible and unrepresentative representatives – subtle Chalabi, Nafisi-esque Ambassador Francke, soft-voiced Kanan Makiya -- were so influential in Washington in presenting such a rosy picture of Iraq the Model, Iraq the Light Unto the Muslim Nations -- the Sunnis who had ruled the pseudo-nation-state of modern Iraq from its founding, from the Shatt al-Arab to the mountains of Kurdistan, despite their steadily declining share of the population (for the Shi'a have been outbreeding them, just as Muslims in general outbreed non-Muslims -- a nice example of that demographic conquest, within a Muslim country, by one Muslim sect, that is now taking place within Western Europe), kept control through force and the threat of force.

It is no different in Syria, where Alawites, a military caste first thrust into that position by the French, who chose them precisely because among the various kinds of Muslims, the Alawites, with their worship of Mary (Mariam, whose picture adorns the houses in Alawite villages), were sufficiently syncretistic to meet the needs of the French authorities. Indeed, the Alawites are -- and this has to be kept in mind -- awful, but nonetheless as far as Christians in Syria are concerned, their only protection against the even more awful "real" Muslims (as Armenians from Haleb describe them to me). By the way, under the world press's radar, the Alawites in early September killed a number of "real" Muslims in Hama -- not five, as was reported in Jane's, but considerably more. And the reason the Syrian government will not do much to stop those "real" Arabs from flowing into Iraq is 1) if they were to do so, they would be showing themselves to be insufficiently loyal to Islam as Alawites, in cahoots with both the American Crusaders (in Muslim eyes, fellow Mary-worshippers)and more loyal to their fellow Shi'a, those Rafidite dogs now taking over Iraq which, of course, belongs to the true Arab Muslims, the Sunnis.

This editorializing by the AP is nothing new. It presumes to warn us about the "dangers" of civil war. Whose side is AP on? It appears to be presenting information from a Muslim viewpoint, and even from the viewpoint of Abdullah of Saudi Arabia (I just can't bring myself to write "Prince" Abdullah any more than I can refer to the "King" of Bahrain -- these are just tribes, full of Emperor-Jones-like self-promotions), who "warns" of "civil war" to the Americans. If he "warns," and the Arab League "worries," should the Americans care? Isn't this a very good sign, that they fear the consequences of that civil war, because they know that such a war has a great likelihood of using up men, materiel, and money on both sides, with the two chief beneficiaries (no, America was NOT the chief beneficiary world-wide; no, Israel was NOT the chief local beneficiary) of Saddam Hussein's removal -- Iran and Saudi Arabia -- will see that benefit dissipate as they become involved in what will be the proxy war of Sunni and Shi'a, right smack through Iraq. And there is no possibility of this being resolved to the satisfaction of the Sunnis. While they may, in the larger world of Dar al-Islam, constitute 80% of the population, in Iraq they are 20%, and the longest of all of Iraq's porous and impossible-to-police borders (save by the mighty American forces, and even they have problems) is that set down by the Treaty of Erzerum in 1847, a treaty between the Ottoman Empire and the Persian Empire (as it was then named). Iranians of the more enthusiastic sort will willingly help their co-religionists, even if many of those co-religionists will be wary of the Iranian version of an Islamic polity -- for where else can the Shi'a in Iraq turn?

And while the Sunnis have to date been far more ferocious and ruthless, the Shi'a have a 3-1 advantage in population, have used their free time to construct militias, have received more and more training from the innocent Americans who keep thinking they are building an "Iraqi" army and an "Iraqi" police force when what they are really doing -- without realizing it -- is training the Shi'a to defend themselves, and more than defend themselves, against the o'erweening Sunnis.

And the Sunnis suffer, as Muslim Arabs so often do, from delusions. Their delusion is that their numbers are far greater than in fact they are. They really believe that they are not 020% of the population, but more like 42-50%. Some even talk confidently of a "Sunni majority" because they somehow count the Kurds, who are largely though not completely Sunni, as on "their side." Oh no they aren't. The Kurds are for the Kurds, and they have had it, up to here, do gorla, au ras bord, with the Arabs, Sunni and Shi'a, for the forced arabization of historically Kurdish lands, for all those Arabs who participated in the persecution and mass-murder of Kurds (decades ago Kurdish pilots, flying MIGS of the Iraqi Air Force, tellingly defected, with their planes, to Israel), mass-murder conducted by Arabs, silently approved by Arabs, and not mourned by a single Arab statement either from the Arab League, or from any Arab government, or from any Arab "intellectual" as some presumptuously call themselves.

While the Arabs, Sunni and Shi'a, are at each others' throats, the Kurds can get on with what they should do, the opportunity for which will never come again -- establishing their own state, and taking back the oil fields of Kurdistan, which for the entire history of those oilfields, have been exploited for the purposes of Sunni Arabs, the revenues used to fund the very oppressors of those Kurds (just like the oil in the Christian south of Nigeria funded the Muslim army that conducted a Jihad against the Christian Ibos during the Biafra War, or as the northern Arab Muslims will take the oil revenues that will flow from the fields in the southern Sudan, to fund their once and future war against the non-Muslims in that southern Sudan). What could be better than to have Sunni and Shi'a Arabs fighting while the Kurds, once they have silenced their own tiny group of domestic fanatics, more Muslim than Kurd -- the Ansar al-Islam -- can work to achieve their ends.

And what about Iran? Whatever aid is extended to the Shi'a in Iraq, will simply drain away men, materiel, and money that would otherwise go toward aggressive policies elsewhere. It is money that might be spent on the nuclear weapons project, or sent to Hezbollah in Lebanon (come to think of it, would Hezbollah not be in a quandary if the Shi'a were on the ropes in Iraq, or seemed to be? Could they stand by? Would they?).
Iranians within and without Iran who detest the Islamic Republic might see a civil war in Iraq, in which the worst elements in Iran participated, as helping to weaken rather than strengthen the Islamic Republic within Iran, and those opposed to the regime might take the occasion (like the Kurds) to strengthen themselves at a moment when the government's attention is diverted.
The American policy has been to sacrifice lives -- yes, including the lives of those who quite justifiably never expected to be fighting except in case of a major, world-shaking conflagration, those Reservists and National Guard members who for the past two months have constituted 56% of the casualties in Iraq -- and money (what if that $300-350 billion had been spent on alternative energy and conservation projects instead? Where would the world-wide Jihad be if the OPEC oil revenues were to diminish, and the rich Arabs cut down to pre-1973 size, when the Jihad as an idea and a duty existed, but those huge undeserved oil revenues, had not yet been available to supply the wherewithal?), not to promote civil war, but to do everything possible to prevent it.

The American policy has been to ignore the real nature of Iraq: those few who kept insisting that the Sunni-Shi'a split was real and deep and had lasted for nearly a thousand years before the United States existed, were simply paid no attention to. Those who insisted that the Kurds deserved to be supported, were also dismissed -- not only because they failed to make the argument that has been made at Jihadwatch (and only here) for two years -- that an independnet Kurdistan would be an inspiration to other non-Arab Muslims chafing under, and resentful of, Arab cultural, linguistic, and political dominance (the Berbers of North Africa come swimmingly to mind).

And the great intelligence failure of the entire war was to misaprehend the nature of Islam. It is not a "war on terror" so much as a war against the Jihad. Terror is one weapon. How slow, how painful, how halting, how awkward, how inarticulate, has been the slow realization of something like reality by this Administration, by the President and his dutiful, but not historically aware staff, including Condoleeza Rice. She in particular, a good girl who has Done All the Right Things, is not exactly an original thinker and would never ever suggest that there is something wrong with the Party Line about Islam (a "great, peaceful, tolerant religion hijacked" etc.) and about the Light Unto the Muslim Nations Project in Iraq, and who not only has hectored the Kurds (as she hectors the Israelis to get with the program, the program being this idiotic "two-state solution" that would simply accommodate the Slow Jihadists, and reveals her misunderstanding of how further territorial concessions can only whet, not sate, Muslim Arab appetites. Will no one inform her? Will she not take the time to do a little less hithering-and-yonning by superdeduper plane, and instead sit at home, and read a bit more, and think? Remember: the greatest Foreign Minister in 19th century England was Lord Palmerston -- and he never left England. He didn't have to -- he knew history, he understood the influence of culture, or belief-systems, on men. Reception speeches at airports, the busy motorcade, the exhaused round of seemingly instructive meetings with leaders or rulers or despots who are plausible, smiling, and often lying, does far less to make matters clear, especially in the case of Islam, than would be a few days spent reading around to find out what it is, by god, that Muslims are taught in Qur'an, Hadith, and Sira. And a few hours with Robert's guide for the perplexed, or Bat Ye'or's various studies of what happened to non-Muslims under Muslim rule, or her study of what has been happening, under American and even European noses, to contribute to the seemingly unstoppable, and certainly unappeasable, Muslim presence in Europe, and finally the study of the immutable doctrine of Jihad, from the texts collected by Andrew Bostom, and just published for the edification of all those who wish, ignoring whatever contretemps they may have experienced in their dealings with the compiler, to find out about Jihad.

The best thing, the most intelligent thing, the thing that will cause the least further damage to American and Infidel interests, is to get out now. And among the things being obviously harmed are the morale, and quality, of the Reservists and possibly the regular army as well, both of which have suffered because the folly of the Iraq policy has not gone unnoticed by most of the officers and men who have already served in Iraq. Men and officers may accept the Party Line the first time they are in Iraq, but when they have had time to think, and when they return to Iraq a second or a third time, they can compare the official business of how wonderful and democratic the "Iraqis" are with what they see on the ground, what their experience is whenever they come into contact with those same "Iraqis." The officers and men cannot be fooled indefinitely. And the disconnect between what Rice (prating about how the situation in Iraq is like that of postwar Japan and Germany) and Bush, who keeps hallucinating about Islam and about his plan for "democratic" Iraq while every day demonstrates that Islam is not on the ropes but on the march, not least within the Lands of the Infidels (as they call them), and that military means are perhaps the least of the instruments that need to be employed to counter the Jihad.
Doctors take an oath to Do No Harm. Perhaps Infidels should take an oath as well. Do not move heaven and earth to patch things up within warring or resentful sects within Islam. Let them go at it. Take advantage of whatever situation offers the possibility of such division and demoralization. Iraq offers, as no other place on earth offers, the two main kinds of exploitable divisions within Islam: the sectarian split between Sunni and Shi'a, and the ethnic split between Arabs, with their supremacist ideology, and non-Arabs, with their justified resentments at the consequences, political and economic and civilizational, of that Arab supremacist ideology of which the vehicle is Islam. "The national religion of the Arabs" and the promoter of "Arab imperialism" -- as non-Arab apostates such as Anwar Shaikh have called it. Do No Good to the World of Islam, except that which will necessarily lead to a weakening of Islam itself (perhaps that is what Bush thinks his Democracy-Is-On-the-March project will do -- but it won't, not in Iraq anyway).

Do not sacrifice the lives, the money, the morale of American Infidels in order to convince the Sunnis and Shi'a to live together harmoniously, as supposed Partners in a Democratic and Prosperous Iraq. The effort will be costly. And it will fail. And it was never the right thing to do in the first place. But victory can be plucked from seeming defeat, or since such words as "victory" and "defeat" are not appropriate for a war of self-defense against the Jihad that will go on probably forever, rather gains can be made out of seeming losses, if only what is going on is understood correctly, and correctly exploited.
Stop thinking that making things better for Muslims, giving them prosperity, shelling out more billions for example to the corrupt and clever (the Slow Jihadists), or uncorrupt and more immediately violent (the Fast Jihadists) fo the endless war by Muslim Arabs against the tiny Jewish state, which no territorial concessions by Israel will do the slightest, in the end, to mitigate, but will only, like the money being supplied by the foolish E.E. bureaucracies and their counterparts in the State Department, can only strengthen the Arab side, and whet rather than sate its appetite. That appetite arises not from "poverty" but from something else -- from the texts of Islam, from the example of Muhammad, from Qur'an, Hadith, and Sira.

So strong is the ethnic identification of even some Christian Arabs with Islam that one may have been fooled in the past, by the facade of a few Palestinian islamochristians, such as Hanan Ashrawi or Naim Ateek (who has quite a number of Christian religious groups doing his sinister bidding in divesting themselves, not so much of stock, as of any sympathetic interest in, the fate of the Jews -- an extraordinary accomplishment, particularly at a time when the Arab Christians are persecuted and murdered by Muslims in Bethlehem and the rest of the West Bank, and fleeing either to Israel itself, or to countries far from the Middle East).

Infidels, many in Western governments appear to believe, can dampen the hostility of Muslims by giving very large amounts of aid, as is now done to Egypt, to Pakistan, and of course to the "Palestinians" who have what is and will always be a non-viable polity, for while the absence of natural resources is not an obstacle for others, it is for those so richly endowed with that attitude of inshallah-fatalism, combined with a resentful twisting of their aggressive Jihad ideology into a belief that Infidels at least owe them a living, in the form of permanent support. And Infidels have been inclined to participate in this meretricious and vicious fantasy, in which the fantasy-victims now usefully self-promoted to a fantasy-people (the "Palestinian people"), engage in extortion. Even when the Crime Boss died, taking with him apparently the bank account numbers to that had been $5-6 billion in funds supplied entirely by Infidels, this has not stopped the Infidel governments in Europe and the United States form emptying the pockets of their own helpless taxpayers yet again, to support those who would, given their world-view, not only destroy all of Israel (and the Christian access to the Holy Land, one can be sure, would no longer be easy once, with Israel removed, there would be less need to play to Christian audiences -- especially since, in Europe, the most formidable -- so far -- among the organized opponents of islamization have been the Catholic Church and the Protestant Evangelicals.

The rich Arabs have benefited from the largest transfer of wealth in history. All of that wealth, some $10 trillion since 1973, has been entirely the result of a geological accident, and not of any hard work or entrepreneurial activity on their part. They have not, with that money, created modern economies but rather wage-slave (and sometimes outright slave) economies, that use outside workers from Asia, Europe, and America, and with a sliding social and legal scale, in which all non-Muslims are at the bottom, and among the Muslims, Shi'a are like Infidels, and non-Arabs below other, Arab Muslims, and finally the local Sunni Arabs lead all the rest.

Yet Infidel governments have not seen fit to force the issue of rich Arabs not supporting poor Arabs. The poor Arabs would vastly take their wealth from the Infidels -- after all, it is only right, it is only just. It is as close to the looting of non-Believers that Muhammad, in his many campaigns, so encouraged and that is set out in the Sira for all to read about. Or, to take another relevant source for the attitude that the Infidels simply must pay for us, but we owe them nothing but continued and relentless hostility -- for they are Infidels -- is the jizya itself. The jizya was a tax that had to be paid. Non-Muslims did not dare to stop paying it, because if they did so, or if even one non-Muslim did so, the entire community could suffer the consequences, which might even include, given that the status of being "protected people" (protected from the Muslims themselves) would be removed, death.
But what is Infidel aid to Egypt, or to the "Palestinians" (i.e. local Arabs, scarcely distinguishable from all the other local Arabs, on either side of either the Green Line or the Jordan River), if not the jizya? For the Infidel governments are afraid to end them. Though Egypt is a world center of antisemitism and anti-Americanism, though the Egyptian press and television are non-stop in their encouragement of the most vicious canards about Americans and about Jews, the American taxpayer has sent about $60 billion to Egypt, and there is no sign of it stopping -- even as Egypt, in 2004, was the third-largest buyer of arms abroad (after China and India), spending some $7.5 billion. To be used, those arms, against whom?

The entire policy toward the states and peoples of Islam, in the Middle East, in Africa, in Asia, and within the Lands of the Infidels, has to be rethought, and reworked, by those who have taken the time not to accept the word of the vast army of Western apologists for Islam, but to study the texts, and study the Western experts on Islam whose work was so carefully sanded over, insabbiato, by the dunes which Muslim and non-Muslims, hirelings or true believers, constructed so as to hide the work of those -- Clement Huart and Arthur Jeffery, K. S. Lal and Charles-Emmanuel Dufourcq, C. Snouck Hurgronje and Antoine Fattal, and many dozens of others, who knew Islam in a way that not only the Armstrongs and the Espositos do not and could not possibly know it, but also in a way that Bernard Lewis, with his personal and professional ties to Turkey, and to kind hosts in Amman, and his apparent inability to get an practical policies right (he was an enthusiastic supporter of the Oslo Accords from the beginning; he was an enthusiast for recreating Iraq, even co-signing with James Woolsey an astounding political advertisement for his friend and patron Prince Hassan of Jordan to be the new Sunni monarch of Iraq; he still appears to be studiously ignoring the work of Ibn Warraq and still ignoring, if no longer belittling, the work of Bat Ye'or, and one wonders if he has yet considered the work of people who, like him, were linguistically gifted, and who, unlike him, were not fooled by the temporary phenomenon of Kemalism, or by other considerations, into mistaking Islam for other than what it was, and lived at a time when one uninhibitedly could write the truth.

Victory in Iraq, or gains in Iraq, will only be won by Infidels if Iraq becomes a source for division and demoralization of Islam itself. It will, if the Sunnis are left on their own, face to face with the Shi'a, to recognize that they have forever lost power in Iraq, and there is nothing they can do about it -- which will not stop them from trying. It will, if the Kurds are promoted, and the Turks forced to accept the new situation (in return for American guarantees not only of Turkish territorial integrity, but of backing for Turkey in any disputes with Syria over the water of the Euphrates).

This should be obvious. In 1933, or 1936, or 1938, it was obvious to some what Hitler was up to, and what should be done about it. Had a certain French minister not been shot, along with Alexander of Yugoslavia, in 1934, had Leon Blum and other French leaders not been intimidated by the cagoulards so that, when Hitler remilitarized the Rhineland, the French could have responded by moving troops in and precipitating, before the Nazi military machine was ready, a telling conflict, had back in 1918 the American and British and Czech Expeditionary forces been not 19,000 but ten times as many, supporting Denikin (see "Put' russkogo ofitsera" by him), then Soviet Russia might have died aborning.

Well, what was not obvious yesterday, or still today, for even at Jihadwatch one encounters a wilful refusal to see that same obvious, will be sooner or later. Even by those still toeing, out of timidity or toadyism, or sometimes both, the party line.

One hopes sooner.

[Posted by: Hugh at October 11, 2005 12:19 PM]

"In any case, the Americans cannot possibly distinguish Sunni from Shi'a, Kurd from Arab, or True Believer who will kill them now"

Hugh is absolutely correct. However, the Americans CAN distinguish between the persecuted Chaldeo-Assyrian Christians and the Kurds or Arabs who are killing them. The ONLY "Iraqis" who should be admitted are the non-Muslims. Assyrians, Chaldeans, Mandeans, Yezidis all face genocide under the US imposed Islamic regime. Since the US is directly responsible for their current plight, these are the people the US has an obligation to save.

"So strong is the ethnic identification of even some Christian Arabs with Islam that one may have been fooled in the past, by the facade of a few Palestinian islamochristians, such as Hanan Ashrawi or Naim Ateek..."

Hugh,
These two are not even worth considering. They have absolutely no following or support among Palestinian Christians, who are overwhelmingly Melkite or Orthodox. Both Ashrawi and Ateek are Protestants, a group that makes up less than 2% of the Palestinian Christian population. Ashrawi was elected by Muslims and serves their interests while Ateek makes money off of liberal Westerners. The Christians who deserve attention are people like Archbishop Elias Chaccour of Nazareth, Patriarch Theophilus III of Jerusalem, and the many others ignored by the media.

Truth was the only advantage we had we this conflicted resolved again after 9/11 The president carelessly flung it out the window when he set policy stated Islam is a noble religion of peace that has been hijacked by terrorist,
We he said that he set US on a path of destruction ..He missed the econd half of the fight,
If you are going to argue Ideological values you have to at last try to show where the other ideology is flawed, He acts more like a person considering reversion than and an American.

Don't let in those 7,000 Iraqis. It is suicidal. Nobody can screen them. Learn from the mistakes of others. Consider what is happening in Europe.

Again just today people in Switzerland were shocked to read that a 26 year old employee of a bank randomly fired an assault rifle in a bar in the small town of Baden. This happened yesterday evening on Thursday, 12. April 2007, at 21:40 in the evening. Police arrested the man 10 minutes later after his ammunition ran out.

Two teenagers were wounded, one of which in critical conditions. Two men aged 50 and 59 were also shot. A fifth victim, a 71-year old man died on the spot.

Most of the newspapers parrot what one can read in the reputable Neue Zürcher Zeitung. Here’s a free translation.

“The motive is still entirely unclear, the interrogation is difficult. The statements of the man are blurry and contradictory.”

“The perpetrator, according to Police sources is a 26 year old bank employee from the region of Baden, who works at one of the large Zurich banks. He attended public school in Baden and makes an intelligent impression”.

Such an act is without precedence in this canton, the chief of the cantonal police said.

But readers of Jihadwatch have heard from time to time about such “acts without precedence” before. As usual, one must dig to find out the background of this seemingly surprising tragedy.

The Blick newspaper, a non-politically correct Swiss daily, explains that this 26-year old Swiss citizen of Iraqi roots grew up in Baden. He was employed as a janitor at a bank. He is known to the police from about one week ago, due to a case of domestic violence between a father and son. The man who shot into the bar on Thursday apparently was the victim of that domestic quarrel.

So here we have it again. A seemingly intelligent Swiss national. Went to school, and was employed, how else, in a bank. Out of the blue he goes and shoots around in a hotel bar until his cartridge runs out. The public is shocked confounded. He was not even intoxicated. For most of the newspapers that is all we need to hear and need to know.

It starts to make more sense as we learn that this was a man of Iraqi extraction. He had an argument with his father. Apparently the police was alerted. There was violence.

And then suddenly something breaks. The guy takes a gun, goes out and shoots around wildly in a bar. The script is known. Elementary education. Simple job, Violence in the family. Something snaps. Inculcated by Islam, these people always have a scapegoat. And a predisposition to violence.

Don't let this happen in America.

Let the Iraqis destroy themselves and let us get out of Iraq.
Fight dhimmitude and visit http://www.masada1234.blogspot.com

Hugo Schmidt-Fischer quoted an article:

The motive is still entirely unclear, the interrogation is difficult. The statements of the man are blurry and contradictory.

We've seen several of those "blurry and contradictory" statements made by past attackers. Such as "I am a jihadist, and I am doing this attack in the name of Allah". Most news accounts, like this one, don't tell us what the comments actually were. If the comments finally do come out in one paper after two or three days on some back page, they are always printed with the assurance that the individual suffered from "mental illness", and that he had "no known ties to Al Qaeda".

Let them fight it out in Mecca until they either civilize their damned "religion" or kill one another off because of it.

Bringing more of these homicidal irrationalists into the West only guarantees: 1) more terrorism, 2) greater security expenses, 3) a further erosion of freedom in order to guard against them and keep up the heightened state of readiness required to monitor this new influx of infil-traitors, and 5) blindly allows the soft-jihadists to vampirize the social services as they breed more of their 5th Column Ummah in our midst.

A total madman couldn't devise a worse plan than inviting in more Moslem trouble when in the middle of a giobal war (cravenly-undeclared) against the militant true belivers in this unrepentently intolerant creed.

special_gest, you are right.

Today's newspapers describe how the shooter cold bloodedly fired into the bar and restaurant.

Then the following statement.

As a motive, the shooter gave confused explanations. "a terristic or politcal background cannot be excluded, according to the head of criminal police Urs Winzenried"

Blick, 13 April: Zum Tatmotiv macht der in Zürich bei einer Bank tätige Schütze wirre Angaben. «Ein terroristischer oder politischer Hintergrund ist nicht auszuschliessen», sagt Kripo-Chef Urs Winzenried.

This affair has it's typical consequences. Opponents of firearms in Switzerland are calling to curb permits to carry guns. These are the same people who are trying to suppress reporting of the national background of perpetrators in such acts of crime and violence. But guns are of course, not the root of the problem. On the contrary, private individuals should be encouraged to carry guns as long as the menace of disgruntled muslims roaming around Europe continues to endanger life on the old continent.