After all the violence and double talk, it is refreshing to find someone who still speaks the truth. Jamie Glazov, the ace editor of FrontPage magazine, has just released a new book, Showdown With Evil: Our Struggle With Tyranny and Terror, consisting of his incisive interviews with many pivotal figures on the contemporary scene -- oh, and I'm in there, too. Here is an excerpt from Richard Perle's foreword to the book:
In this extraordinary collection of interviews, Jamie Glazov demonstrates that consistent, searching questions can both enrich and impart coherence to disparate answers: for what emerges from 29 interviews conducted over eight years is an illuminating and important commentary on the largest issues facing America and the West.It is a commentary whose preoccupation reflects history--Jamie's Glazov's history, rich in the issues of identity, freedom, truth telling and courage. Jamie, it may be said, has had rather more history than he needed--as a man whose parents were dissidents in the Soviet Union and who was taught the values of freedom and the courage to fight for it from the beginning. It is no wonder that he is so wholly absorbed in understanding and opposing, radical, political Islam and its apologists. Today's "useful idiots," like those who preceded them, are drawn almost entirely from the Left. Indeed, many of the individuals are the same, as is the intellectual foundation of their obsessive disdain for the liberal values of an open society. In one way or another nearly all the interviews in this book touch on the readiness of the Left, in an often ludicrous pursuit of political correctness, to accept, and even to advance, the Islamist agenda that has replaced communism as the principal threat to western values and civilization.
Part I, "Obama's Destructive Path," certainly deals with the destructive qualities of a number of policies--but, sadly, support for these policies goes well beyond Obama and his administration. The refusal to recognize that we are gravely threatened by Islamist terror--by deeply ideological extremists who are prepared, even eager, to die in the act of killing infidels (that is, all of us including "moderate Muslims")--is neither original with President Obama nor limited to his administration. Ranging along a spectrum from myopic to willfully blind, the community of academics, journalists, politicians, clerics, establishment lawyers, non-governmental organizations and others who believe we are confronted only by a small number of miscreants who can be effectively dealt with by our criminal justice system (after being Mirandized, of course) is alarmingly large. The idea that those who hate and wish to kill us have been given reason and cause by failures of our own making--aggression against Saddam's murderous regime or the Taliban or support for democratic Israel or the failure to censor blasphemous words or drawings or the use of harsh methods of interrogation, and the like--goes well beyond the current administration (and is likely to outlast it).
Like Bush before him, Obama has done nothing to recognize publicly the Islamist nature of the terrorist threat. But, unlike Bush, his apologetic tone when addressing the Muslim world implies that we are somehow responsible for Islamist extremism. Victor Davis Hanson knows what the President should, but will never say: "Dear radical Muslims, you, not us, created your present misery through religious intolerance, gender apartheid, statism, corruption, tribalism, anti-scientific fundamentalism, and autocracy, and we have neither regrets about our own success nor responsibilities for your own self-induced miseries, unfortunate as they are."
No one, least of all Jamie Glazov, would be surprised at the Media and liberal Left's misplaced sympathy for Islamist militancy, sympathy that obscures the underlying Islamist motives in even such obvious cases as the Fort Hood massacre. As Robert Spencer sagely observes: "They reflexively deny and ignore these conclusions because they are completely sold out to the idea that Muslims, as non-white, non-Christian, non-Westerners, cannot possibly be anything but victims."...
Most of us are already familiar with Glazov and appreciate his work over the years at Front Page Magazine and his previous book, United in Hate. Showdown with Evil promises to be equally interesting and important. So far, though, Amazon is "out of stock." Since the book is only out for the past two weeks we can assume there isn't yet time for it to circulate through the system effectively, meaning we might consider ordering it anyway and prompting Amazon to push the title.
I have some personal interest in this work, the publisher, Howard Rotberg of Mantua Books (Toronto) being a semi-regular visitor at our weekly Thursday evening Covenant Zone meetings at the Vancouver Public Library in Vancouver, Canada. Rotberg is a dedicated advocate of those values we share here, and his publishing reflects that deeply. I would encourage people to order this book and wait for delivery. Knowing Glazov's work, I think we can all expect a great reward from it, and we can further our efforts by supporting Canada's counter-jihad publishing industry at the same time.
Dag. Vancouver, Canada.
I see that Glazov's book is available on demand through the following link.
www.mantuabooks.com
As Hugh repeatedly wrote on these pages, we must learn as much as we can about our enemies, and this is yet another resource we will gain from.
Dag.
Well, I don't get it. I'm fine with books, but the computer often defeats me. Here's the link again.
http://www.mantuabooks.com/index.html
One of these has to work!
http://www.mantuabooks.com/index.html
Sounds like an excellent book. I'll be checking it out.
"As Robert Spencer sagely observes: "They reflexively deny and ignore these conclusions because they are completely sold out to the idea that Muslims, as non-white, non-Christian, non-Westerners, cannot possibly be anything but victims."
But the Muslims are the victims - the primary victims of a murderous inhuman fascist ideology that has never been eradicated from the surface of the earth during almost 1400 years of war - on and off - with the non-Muslim world. We - all the non-Muslims - are of course the secondary victims of this evil ideology disguised as a religion and a civilization. That´s the main problem as I see it. Religion - the relation between man and God - is something to be respected in itself no matter the specifics.
When the West was fighting the fascist regimes in the 20th century during WWII the goal was unconditional surrender followed up by eradicating the ideology from the mind of the "believers" and turning them into good democrats respecting the democratic values, first of all political equality. The goals were achieved after denazification of Germany and a similar process was used in the other countries belonging to the Axis powers.
Islam has never been fought with the same goals and intentions. Even when almost total victory was achieved against Muslim jihadist conquests in Europe we showed mercy and tolerance for the very reason that Islam was considered as a variant of Christianity - almost a sister religion.
For your reflection let me go back to the wars on the Iberian Peninsula conquered by jihad from 711-718. They were liberation wars with the limited scope to recapture land lost to the Muslims. The Reconquista (a Spanish and Portuguese word for "Reconquest") began in far north with the Battle of Covadonga in 718 and lasted almost 800 years. The Treaty of Granada completed the Spanish Reconquista in 1491.
The victory in 1492 was as close Western Christendom ever got to completely crush the Islamic civilization. This is not only my view but also how modern Muslim leaders see it:
"But halfway through the building of the great Islamic civilization came new interpreters of Islam who taught that acquisition of knowledge by Muslims meant only the study of Islamic theology. The study of science, medicine etc. was discouraged.
Intellectually the Muslims began to regress. With intellectual regression the great Muslim civilization began to falter and wither. But for the emergence of the Ottoman warriors, Muslim civilization would have disappeared with the fall of Granada in 1492."
(Quoted from speech by Malaysian Prime Minister Datuk Seri Dr Mahathir Mohamad at the opening of the 10th Session of the Islamic Summit Conference on Oct 16, 2003).
The 1491-treaty guaranteed a set of rights to the Moors, including religious tolerance and fair treatment in return for their surrender and capitulation.
The Muslims were not expelled. Instead they were given rights such as:
“- That no Christian should be allowed to peep over the wall, or into the house of a Muslim or enter a mosque.
- That any Muslim choosing to travel or reside among the Christians should be perfectly secure in his person and property.
- That no badge or distinctive mark be put upon them, as was done with the Jews and Mudejares.
- That no muezzin should be interrupted in the act of calling the people to prayer, and no Muslim molested either in the performance of his daily devotions or in the observance of his fast, or in any other religious ceremony; but that if a Christian should be found laughing at them he should be punished for it.
- That the Muslims should be exempted from all taxation for a certain number of years.”
Of course there is no rational reasons why a fascist and racist ideology that is also a religion should be treated any different from a secular fascist and racist ideology like Nazism. All the reasons are emotional and irrational and they have remained powerful to this day.
Let me give you a modern example.
In the spring 1940 Karen Blixen, the famous writer was in Berlin as war correspondent for the Danish newspaper Politiken. In Letters from a Country at War she wrote:
"Has there ever been anything like The Third Reich? Of the phenomena I have encountered through my life Islam, the Muslim world and the Muslim world-view come closest. The word Islam means submission and apparently that’s what the Third Reich is saying by its show of hands: I am Yours in life and death.”
Like Nazism the Muslim world view is informed by an immense arrogance and pride: The orthodox believer is above all infidels, one orthodox soul is of more value than all the gold in the world. Islam in its essence destroys all classes as the Third Reich does. Muslims no matter if they are emirs or second-ranking people are equally good. There’s a strong team spirit and readiness to help one another – one has to give up 10 pct. of his fortune to Muslims in need, and it’s not charity, it’s a debt you pay. The rituals of Islam are similar to The Third Reich: Orthodox believers do not have time to turn into strangers to one another. Some things in (Hitler’s) Mein Kampf are similar to chapters in the Koran.”
But the essential and defining difference Blixen attributed to Islam being a religion and that submission in Islam is a submission to God, an acceptance of the fundamental conditions of life, while Nazism is submission to the race and fatherland.
In this assumption Blixen was wrong. Islam is submission to a religion of laws and as such also an utopian ideology influencing all aspects of life, not just the spiritual aspects.
It seems that Christianity and Western man always have been and still are unable to deal with Islam in a rational way.
I think this is a valid point to bring into the debate.
I loved Glazov's last book, and I read his work at Front Page frequently. I don't have a copy yet of this latest, but I think most of us already understand that it will be as good as we have come to expect from Glazov.
I don't know that I put up a good link there but it can't be too hard to find out how to order it direct from Mantua. Sorry about the inconvenience.
The publisher is a guest at our meetings on occasion, I'll mention again, and that invitation is open to all who care to join us Thursday evenings from 7-9:00 p.m. at Vancouver Public Library. It's going on for five years now, predating Tea Parties by a long shot. Our meetings are along the same idea, just vastly smaller. This is a good thing because you can easily get to know everyone in a couple of weeks.
Regards, Dag.
How many times must we repeat "Islam is not a race", so how can those critical of it and its texts and tenets be racists?
People of many races are Muslims. The founder of Islam himself, Muhammad, was a white man (Arabs are descendants of Abraham, a white man), the father of both Jews (through Isaac) and Arabs (through Ishmael).
It is important to remember that Muhammad was himself a racist, who referred to Blacks "raisinheads" and was an Arab supremacist; Muslim Arabs were the "best of peoples", and all other Muslims were lower on the Islamic totem pole. And of course the Kuffars were all lower creatures to be treated with contempt.
The last wild animal in the White House, effectively gave Iraq to Iran. Screw your denials! And the current jackass is prepared to deliver the entire Middle East to the enemy.
http://www.fas.org/pubs/_docs/2010_07_IranGiveUp20Enrich.pdf
Future generations will hold pilgrimages to spit on the graves of the malfeasants sacks of s*** who refused to prevent the development of a nuclear tipped ICBM threat to US soil. By supporting the machine-politics - with the Tea Party idiots being only the latest version - have aided and abetted this suicidal wheel-spinning.
Rule Number One: when islamonazis Murder over 3,000 Americans on US soil, don't facilitate nation-building that includes islamonazis.
This never sinks in here, but yet again:
Number of islamonazis in Egyptian prisons on 9-11 = 19,000
Number of islmaonazis in Egyptian prisons during the bush monstrosity = 1,000
Lesson: put people in the White House who have an understanding of islamonazism. And if candidates look like glad-handling idiots, then you can be certain that they are.
Lesson: put people in the White House who have an understanding of islamonazism. And if candidates look like glad-handling idiots, then you can be certain that they are.
John, has there ever been or will there ever be a presidential candidate with an understanding of 'islamonazism'? Tom Tancredo understands our vicious enemy and he was called a radical, islamophobic, racist hatemonger. Before we can elect an informed president, we need an informed citizenry and a candidate with the guts to name the enemy. I'd say that the latter does not exist and the former is years away.
Muslims seen by white Western people as victims? Ha! They are even acting like victims in southern Sudan! They are too clever...poor little weak things...those black people might pick on them, try and take revenge, not let them screech from the mosque or something. POOR THINGS! (Of course, they don't HAVE TO live there, they just WANT TO.)
"How many times must we repeat "Islam is not a race", so how can those critical of it and its texts and tenets be racists?"
It is a matter of how you define ”racism” and what restrictions a society is prepared to put on the right to freedom of expression. That means it is a sociocultural, political and legal question.
It is paradoxical that the basic texts of Islam are themselves ”racist” because they demand unequal treatment solely based upon religious belief, but saying so may constitute verbal racism or a hate crime against people belonging to Islam.
From this alone we may conclude that the definitions are not consistent and therefore must be false. Or that they are unable to describe reality in a realistic way.
Dag:
I had no problem with the link.
CGW
It's also available at amazon dot com but not at amazon dot ca.
Thanks for that, CGW.
I think this is a worthwhile book for our friends and familiars here. Both Glazov and Spencer share a close association with Horowitz at Frontpage, so this seems particularly appropriate here.