Today being Halloween it should be called "Islam Day" in honor for the lovely veils and shrouds Muslim women wear all year long. And let's not forget the unkempt looking beards and turbans the men wear (think Adam Gadahn here). If nothing else, Islam manages to celebrate Halloween all year long. Heaven knows it provides enough frights and horrors on a daily basis.

Posted by: ISLAMSFORLOSERS at October 31, 2006 9:02 AM

Thank you for these thoughts, Robert.

I am always aware that one of the things that attracted me to both this site & dhimmiwatch is you & Hugh both write with so clear a love of Western civilization. Not vaguely, but with deep knowledge of its fruits.

Looks like we all share the same heartache. Wish there were a simple pill for it.

Posted by: Vee at October 31, 2006 9:29 AM

With islam every day is HELLOWEEN

Posted by: shiva at October 31, 2006 9:39 AM

A very, very interesting take on WW2 which I think is applicable to the current conflict (from a free email from the daily reckoning, a financial email). What the author writes about the Japanese needs to be applied to Mo's followers - with the first two paragraphs directly applicable - unconditional surrender:

"Had the Americans told the Japanese one other thing, namely, that if Japan surrendered the Americans were prepared to let them retain their Emperor, there would have been much less incentive for the Japanese to keep on fighting. Truman and the American military would give the Japanese no such assurance. Surrender had to be unconditional or not at all.

"You have to understand how the Japanese viewed their Emperor - having him deposed, or even perhaps executed as a war criminal as was being proposed for the Nazis, would have been as if the United States was required to renounce Christianity, demolish every church in the land, and execute every minister or person holding religious office, as well as demolish the Statue of Liberty and to melt down the Liberty Bell. In other words, the complete destruction of the American culture and it holds dear. Faced with that, Americans too would have been prepared to fight to the last man, woman or child.

"Most Japanese heard the voice of their Emperor for the first time in their lives, as the recording of his decision to surrender was played on the radio in 1945.
He was a remote and godlike figure, almost as if Jefferson, Washington, Madison, Lincoln, and Jesus Christ, all wrapped up in one man, were to live on after 200 years, secluded from the people, on some remote Mount Olympus. He was the very soul of Japan for the Japanese people."

Posted by: Jerusalem at October 31, 2006 9:43 AM

Thank you for being all-inclusive, Robert, for one man's opiate could well be hemlock to another! JW is doing a good job of rescuing Western civilisation out of untimely demise from its Lethe immersion.

Islam is a daily Holloween spectacle, blisterin' blue barnacles. Like Pakistani cricketers with long unruly beards prostrating themselves to kiss the earth of the Holy Land in India, and losing despite saying namaz on field! When they are not cheating with steroids and tampered balls, i.e. When their leader asks them to play for Islam, they oblige by losing every match.

But Western civilisation could prove a true challenge for Islam, if the Taliban censors were asked to ensure that every image of Veronica, Lois Lane, Olive Oyl and so on was clothed in the shroud. Or Superman and Batman displayed the correct length of Islamic beard while flying on the magic carpet to Baghdad. Forget Baywatch.

Wonder what Hilaly would say of Hagar the Horrible, or what Tin Tin would say to Hilaly.

Posted by: pagandkapitat at October 31, 2006 10:48 AM

Sometime in the 1970s, the "In Memoriam" section on the Obituary Page of The Times -- often the most interesting and least tendentious part of the paper --there appeared, not on Keats's birthday, October 31, but on the day of his death, February 23, of tuberculosis, in his rooms overlooking the right side (looking hopefully up)of the Spanish Steps, the following:

Keats, John. I always made an awkward bow.

Nothing else. Just the name, and the last sentence of his last letter, written in Rome to Charles Brockden Brown on November 30, 1820.

Who called The Times in advance of the death-day, who paid for the petite annonce, in order to honor Keats and remind us of him and literature and everything else, merely by reprinting without comment Keats's own laconic and haunting farewell? I had to know. I called the paper. Nobody knew. Nobody offered to find out.

Captains and kings have come and gone. Communism has receded. Islam is on its menacing as-yet uncomprehended and therefore unimpeded march. Who's in, who's out, and what's to come -- all still unsure.

And I still don’t know who placed that tribute to Keats in The Times. Thus this Notes-and-Queries request, in the seine of the Net, so that someone who knows someone may see this, and that sought someone may at last be identified and, though he (or she) needs no thanks, thanked.

Posted by: Hugh at October 31, 2006 11:20 AM

Also, it's Halloween.

Geoff

Posted by: Geoff at October 31, 2006 12:58 PM

Shiva is right. And while on that topic, how many of you are going to dress up as Muslims tonight while you are trick or treating be it in KKKesque niqabs, or ugly gray beards?? ;-)

Posted by: Infidel Pride at October 31, 2006 2:17 PM

It's also the eve of All Saint's Day.

Happy Halloween, Prophet Geoff!

Posted by: Isabellathecrusader at October 31, 2006 5:37 PM

Thank You for quoting John Keats. The Sun shall never set on Civilization...we will emerge stronger!

Reiterating King Vikramadithya's wisdom, as long as *Dhairya (Courage/ Absence of demoralization)Laksmi* is courted, all the Rest of the *Lakshmis* (Bestowers of various boons)cannot but follow the supplicant.

Posted by: Crows&Cows at November 1, 2006 3:02 AM

I stood tip-toe on a little hill.
The air was cooling and so very still,
That the sweet buds which, with a modest pride
Pull droopingly, in slanting curve aside
Their scantly leaved and finely tapering stems
Had not yet lost those starry diadems
Caught from the early sobbing of the morn.
The clouds were pure and bright as flocks new shorn
And fresh from the clear brook. Sweetly they slept
On the blue fields of heaven. And then there crept
A little noiseless noise among the leaves
Born of the very sigh that silence heaves.
For not the faintest motion could be seen
Of all the shades that slanted o'er the green.
There was wide wandering for the greediest eye,
To peer about upon variety.
Far round the horizon's crystal edge to skim
And trace the dwindled edgings of its brim,
Or by the bowery clefts and leafy shelves
Guess where the jaunty streams refresh themselves.
I gazed a while and felt as light and free
As though the fanning wings of Mercury
Played upon my heels. I was light-hearted
And many pleasures to my vision started.
And so straightway I began to pluck a posy
Of luxuries bright, milky, soft and rosy.

That's about the only poetry I know by heart. No doubt I got a few details wrong. It's a part of a longer poem by Keats.

Posted by: traeh at November 1, 2006 5:38 AM

Mmmm--thank you, Traeh. This is from Keats poem (titled like the first line), "I Stood Tip-Toe Upon a Little Hill". To bring this back on topic, remember how most interpretations of radical Islam ban all art--painting (my field), music, prose (except fot the Qu'ran, Hadith and commentaries), and poetry itself.

Keats poem goes on to say:

O Maker of sweet poets, dear delight
Of this fair world, and all its gentle livers;
Spangler of clouds, halo of crystal rivers,
Mingler with leaves, and dew and tumbling streams,
Closer of lovely eyes to lovely dreams,
Lover of loneliness, and wandering,
Of upcast eye, and tender pondering!
Thee must I praise above all other glories
That smile us on to tell delightful stories.
For what has made the sage or poet write
But the fair paradise of Nature’s light?

I for one much prefer Keats' vison!
............

P.S. I spent last night engaged in the only "terror" I consider acceptable--scaring the bejesus out of the night's trick-or-treaters (before giving them piles of quality chocolate treats).

I always do a big thing for Hallowe'en--scary chain-rattling music, lots of jack-o'lanterns, my trusty life-sized skeleton, Konrad, hanging from the porch. I dress up as the wicked witch--full theatrical latex nose and chin covered in warts, green makeup, and an evil witch laugh shamelessly copied from Margaret Hamilton, who played the witch in the film version of the Wizard of Oz.

I'm just 5'2", and usually look like everybody's favorite cookie baking auntie. But at Hallowe'en, I've been known to scare the heck out of full-grown men (and even better, teenagers!) Happy Hallowe'en to all!

Posted by: gravenimage at November 1, 2006 11:32 PM