New Jersey jihadist arrested in Yemen worked at nuclear power plants

Oh dear.

Not *another* ridiculous item to add to the long, long List of Things That Offend Muslims?

http://amboytimes.typepad.com/the_amboy_times/2007/02/the_list_of_thi.html

Yemen seems to be the destination of choice for those who want to "study Islam". The overt reason is because the Yemenis speak Arabic closer to classical than any other. The REAL reason is that Yemen is lawless, where jihadis can train and operate with relative impunity.

As a footnote, Mark Stein makes the salient observation in 'America Alone' that by the turn of the century, little Yemen will have a greater population than all of Russia. Project that demographic reality throughout the Islamic and Western worlds respectively (one rapidly expanding, the other declining and increasingly barren), and you get a sense of the reasons for the pessimism that afflicts many of us who dare take the long view.

darcy, I noticed that story had disappeared, too. It was about a Florida professor who, besides assaulting some news reporters, had been arrested for trying to sell an expensive infrared camera to Syria. My comment was about the ITAR regulations banning export of militarily sensitive hardware that was probably invoked to arrest him.

I wonder why it was pulled?

"I wonder why it was pulled?"

Don't know. I guess someone could make inquiries of RS or Marisol.

In the meantime, read this article on the Harvard "Crimson" and post a comment about the Demographic Jihad, if you feel motivated. Our "Arafat" had posted the link on the pulled thread of yesterday, so I'm re-posting it. You must read it - it's just incredible. And remember - this is Harvard.

http://www.thecrimson.com/article/2010/3/11/center-mr-weatherhead-harvard/?dsq=39370675#comment-39370675

See ya, Eastview!

The "Crimson" posted my comment. The 2 Muslims who wrote it (along with a PC Infidel) must have p*oped their pants.

Delmar, who noted Mobley satisfied federal background checks as recently as 2008...

Of course, in a saner world, the mere fact of being a Muslim would disqualify a person from working in, or having access to, any areas where there is potential to harm people.

When the West finally wakes up to that grim necessity, it will have only two ways to handle this problem that threatens its safety: 1) total internment; 2) total deportation. Since the imperative for militant supremacist expansionism is wired into the blueprint of Islam and is only metastasizing in our time due to a confluence and concatenation of factors favorable to the aggrandizement of Muslim strength, and since it is not reasonable to expect, and to bet our safety upon, the apostatization of the vast majority of Muslims, the West will at some point come to this realization. The only question is when, and whether it will do so before, or after, a tragically high number of us are mass-murdered in various places by Muslims.

If it only happens after that point, that tragic number should be seen, in retrospect, as having been unacceptable, and at that point a Neo-Nuremberg Trial process should be set up to try and sentence to prison time all those Western PC MC idiots with influence and power who for so many decades did everything they could to hinder the Great Reawakening of the West. And for those on trial, the Esdrujula Explanation should be deemed an insufficient defense.

In the meantime, read this article on the Harvard "Crimson" and post a comment about the Demographic Jihad... And remember - this is Harvard.

The Dean of the Harvard Divinity School, William A. Graham, is also a professor of Middle East studies whose field is Islam.

Here are some excerpts from a talk he gave in 2003 (comments in square brackets are mine):

Everyone, of course, posits September 11 as the watershed moment when Islam impinges on consciousness. That is a very sad commentary on our knowledge about this major world tradition of culture and of religion. What is also sad is the kind of attitude that has been furthered by my colleague at Harvard, Samuel Huntington [Huntington, the "Clash of Civilizations" guy].

His thesis, begun as an article and then expanded into a book, is I am afraid becoming a self-fulfilling prophecy. Starting with September 11 this so-called "clash of civilizations," to take the title of article and book, has now become a watchword of foreign policy... In large part, this happened because it felt good as a basic premise for those who like to think about the world in terms of "the West and the rest."

That sort of thinking has been going on for a lot longer than our lifetimes, but this does not make it a good thing, and it particularly makes it a very dangerous thing for public policy. ... What I see, currently, is an unwillingness to think about Islam as anything except an "other" that belongs to some monolith that is the big, present danger in the world.

We have the proclaimed new "Green Menace" that is supposed to replace the Communist Red Menace of our previous xenophobia. This one happens to be the xenophobia of the moment, and I fear that it may go on being that for some time.

...

The politics of imperial and colonial expansion [i.e., it's the West's fault] that Muslim-majority countries have suffered for going on two centuries now has dictated far too much the range of allowable discourse in Muslim societies and among Muslim intelligentsia. Muslims have been on the defensive for a long time, and they are even more sharply on the defensive now. This is a very dangerous and unhappy truth for the Muslim world.

...

I won't go into how many exceptions there are to Huntington's notion that "Islam has bloody borders"...

September 11 has certainly provided a convenient way for our government and one or two others, the British notably, to begin to think in, unfortunately, purely bilateral terms.

Tonight, I want to discuss and try to understand the emergence, in the last 30 to 50 years, of so-called "Islamism." ... I think it is perfectly useful that we call it Islamism, because that is what it is called by some of the Muslims who are engaged with it.

...

In fact, Islamism, even as a set of reform movements, as a kind of radical attempt to do something different within the Muslim majority world, and internationally within the Muslim community, is many different things.

...

We lump many groups together under the term "Islamism." ... Every one of these groups is so different in terms of what it considers the "fundamentals" to be, that it is hard to form a unified idea about what "fundamentalism" might mean.

...

A second element found within the Islamist discussions is a desire to insist on what probably every religious person in any religious community ultimately insists on: that religion is a total affair, a matter of comprehending all of life. One's religious worldview is, in fact, a worldview; it is a way of viewing everything in life through the lens of one's faith and one's particular faith stance. In that sense, it is really not anything very peculiarly Islamic.

[Dean Graham's equivalence of Islamic totalitarianism with that of the mindset of all other religious people is mindbogglingly inept]

...

In many cases, real movements of liberalization [in the Muslim world in the early 20th century] simply were betrayed by events, for example the British allowing a royal house to remain, and ultimately to gain control and become very corrupt. [it's the West's fault again]

...

[Dean Graham also shows a shocking ignorance of the supremacist stealth Dawists, the Tablighi movement:]

A final thought about the integrative aspect of Islamism is that not every Islamist group has been politically engaged, or wants Muslims to be politically engaged. Probably one of the largest Islamist movements in the world today is a group called the Tabligis. The Tabligi Jama'a began in the late 1930s under a man named Mohammad Ilyas, in what is now Pakistan (at that time, it was still British India). The Tabligis have a strictly nonengagement-in-politics approach to Islamic revival and to becoming a better Muslim.

[He goes on to note what should be an alarming fact about the Tablighis:]

In numbers, they are probably the largest Islamist, that is Muslim reform, movement in the world today. We don't hear about them because they are quietists; they are apolitical in their approach.

A third aspect is the reformational quality of the Islamist movements. They do want to reform the world; they do want to make things better and different. Most of all, they want to reform religiousness among Muslims.

A major thrust of Islamist movements is to reform and to change, first of all, within, and secondly, without. By "within" I mean within the various countries in which they live, most of which are either despotic autocracies, or some other form of totalitarian regime, or at least repressive, oppressive regimes. (Again, that Third World overlap is a very important part of this.) Certainly, there are some states where that is not the case, but they are few and one can number them, probably, on one hand. The Muslim-majority states of the world tend to be in repressive political circumstances. And you have to remember that it has often been our government here or European governments that have been supporting those repressive regimes and that continue to support them, continue to be identified, in fact, with the very forces that these Islamist groups see as enemy number one.

[It's the West's fault again]

One reason that Islamist groups are now so important and powerful in many countries in the Muslim world is not because of their ideology, frankly, but because of their engagement with the social realities of their suffering peoples. They are the people that at a time like the 1992 Cairo earthquake provided all of the relief for the poor quarters of the town, which really suffered terribly. The government was hopeless about doing anything. Instead, local Islamist groups went in, got shelter for people, brought food and fresh water, and did all the infrastructure activities that the government was unable to do because of its incompetence.

[Did those Islamist groups help Christian Copts too?]

There is a seriousness about social justice in a lot of the Islamist movement that reminds me of the Social Gospel of Protestantism in this country of a century and a half ago and that still abides: a notion that being religious means being concerned about one's fellow and doing something about it.

...

We have such terrifying power and such powerful economic force, and we can use these for good or we can use them for evil. With respect to the Muslim world, I am very worried that we may be tempted to use them, or engaged right now perhaps in using them, much more for evil than for good. And that is a great tragedy.

http://www.hds.harvard.edu/news/bulletin/articles/graham.html

http://hesperado.blogspot.com/2007/03/harvard-divinity.html

Having Homer Simpson working there was bad enough. Now this.

Finally, we know the mystery state of the town "Springfield".

LOL!!!

I'd bet, Hesperado, only AFTER "a tragically high number of us are mass-murdered in various places by Muslims." Man often needs first-rate tragedy and egregious criminal behavior before doing the right thing.

Not to leave off here on too negative a note, I was encouraged just yesterday when talking with a person in the administration of the college where I work. It's important to understand that this is a very liberal individual across the board and yet nonetheless she opined that she was getting very sick of Islam. When I said to her that one of the weakest arguments one can come across in defense of Islam is that most Muslims are peaceful, as if the large majority of Communist Party members during the Cold War being peaceful made Communism OK, she readily agreed. No, she observed, there's something wrong with the whole damn religion. I left in an optimistic mood after speaking with her. A consensus is slowly forming. Yes, much tragedy still lies ahead but a consensus is slowly forming.

Thanks for posting excerpts from this talk by William A. Graham. Well, after reading it (and your appropriate comments) it confirms for me that there are dhimmis and then there are superdhimmis. Graham, of course, is in the latter group. Count on liberal arts professors to be just about the last element in Western societies to finally "get" Islam, if ever. Politicians have to get elected and the media needs customers, so it's probable these two presently clueless groups will come around before liberal arts folks, who really answer to no one, do.

I couldn't also help noticing Graham's dismissive attitude towards those concerned about Communism. Imagine if a guy like this had been running the country during the Cold War instead of the likes of Truman, Eisenhower, Kennedy or Reagan. Some folks never learn and no amount of education can prevent this. Indeed, "education" is often precisely the problem, as here.

Wellington,

I agree with your balance of optimism and pessimism: pessimism in the short term (in my estimation, at least the next 50 years), optimism in the long run.

On every level of health and power (technology, science, infrastructure, military, education, laws, politics, arts), the West is light years beyond the Muslim world and the Muslim psyche. The West is a lion, and the Muslim world is a little rodent. Currently, the lion sleeps tonight. When the lion wakes up, and notices the bloody wounds the little rat has been busy gnawing away on, it will be lights out for Islam.

(Re: Graham on anti-Communism, this is a common Leftist and even PC MC attitude -- minimizing the actual threat Communists posed to the free West for several decades, regarding the anti-Communist movement as "paranoid" and indicative of sinister attempts at exploiting (if not manufacturing) a hyped-up threat in order to insinuate fascistic controls over our societies, and having more concern over Reagan's supposed "recklessness" that "could have triggered a nuclear war" than over the real evil and the real danger, the U.S.S.R. and Red China (my father was a liberal, and he similarly blamed Kennedy for the Cuban missile crisis, rather than the appropriate culprits, Cuba and Russia). This attitude was then transplanted onto Bush and Cheney, more or less accusing them of doing the same thing with a new bugaboo, not the "Red Menace" of yore but now the "Green Menace" as Graham puts it. That's why it surprises me that your liberal colleague agreed with your Communist metaphor or analogy. Most liberals it seems to me would use the metaphor or analogy in reverse fashion, as Graham did.

Count on liberal arts professors to be just about the last element in Western societies to finally "get" Islam, if ever.

And Dean William A. Graham is a scholar of Islamic history. In that same talk, he prides himself on having studied all 14 centuries of Islamic history. I don't think Dean Graham is an evil man (i.e., that he knows the evil danger of Islam, but is consciously lying about it). And he can't be unintelligent or ignorant of the facts. Therefore, the only explanation has to be a complex one, whereby a complex paradigm in his head, inherited along with a new worldview which the West has evolved over the past 50-odd years, causes him to reconfigure the mountain of damning facts about Islam, which he could not have avoided confronting during his years of study, in such a way as to produce the camelshit he regurgitates, camelshit conducive to whitewashing Islam and Muslims. Perhaps camelshit has high quantities of lime, which makes it ideal for whitewashing.

It's been my experience that about half of liberals I have spoken to over the years understand that Marxism is aberrant and possessed of little if any good. Then's there's the other half who opine dopey things along the lines that Marxism in theory had a lot of good things to say. I rarely let such a comment stand and start to go through the major doctrines of Marxism such as determinism, dialectical materialism, labor value theory, theory of alienation, class struggle, etc. and show them to be deeply erroneous, sometimes just plain silly and always pernicious. It's instructive to note this I think because I find the same kind of ignorance regarding Islam when someone, many more times than not a liberal rather than a conservative, attempts to place Islam in a good light. Of course, in the case of someone like William Grahamm, as you noted in your other post to me, such a person does know the facts and therefore ignorance of the general sort cannot be the reason for continued fallacious thinking. Ditto for some academics where Marxism is concerned. Ah, a pattern.

darcy said: The "Crimson" posted my comment.

Outstanding! (Would you by chance be "SK"?) Arafat and you have definitely interrupted their standard disgusting anti-Israel, pro-Palistinian, "anti-apartheid" narrative. Maybe Hesperado could wander over there and dissect their logic, as well.

Arafat

Excellent! As are the web sites (particularly the one describing the multitudinous verses in the Qu'tan preaching warfare, violence and hatred against the Kuffars)

It would be less of a problem if we simply made sure that those - converts to Islam, or born to Muslim parents resident within our lands - who departed for Yemen, or to other, similar places, 'to study Islam' , were prevented from ever returning into the lands of the non-Muslims.