The Threat

Belmont Club again makes clear why decisive action now can save unimaginable tragedy later. We must find the will to act.

Osama Bin Laden did not regard himself as some petty criminal but an inspirational leader on a global scale. But just as demonstrating Soviet impotence in Afghanistan was the key to Central Asia, Islamists may hope that an American failure in Iraq will establish the unstoppability of a universal Caliphate. What Kabul signified to the 'stans Baghdad could represent to the world. Although Islamic arms in Iraq have met only with military defeat, they have been much more successful in showing that the Western world lacks the will to resolutely oppose the emergence of a Global Caliphate. The Sunday Times says it is because President Bush declared war while refusing to name the enemy.

Under siege last week at his holiday ranch in Crawford, Texas, from the peace activist Cindy Sheehan, one of the military’s “gold star” mothers whose son died in Iraq, and under pressure from opinion polls showing dwindling American support for the war, Bush is on the defensive. Blair by contrast is getting credit for naming the enemy as Muslim extremists and for criticising the Wahhabi ideology spreading from Saudi Arabia, which remains a leading American ally. Although faulted for allowing “Londonistan” to grow into a haven for terrorism in the first place, the prime minister is regarded as going on the offensive while the Bush government dithers.

However the Scotsman observed that the proscription against self-defense had been baked into the structure of the Western political system itself. Describing the obstacles facing Tony Blair's attempts to deport murderous Muslim clerics from Britain, it wrote:

Guy Goodwin-Gill, a barrister and senior research fellow at All Souls College at Oxford University, summed up the mood within the legal camp. "I think Mr Blair has lost the plot," he said. "For a lawyer, he says some of the daftest things. It is simply not serious." Lawyers like Goodwin-Gill now contend there is no way on earth that the crackdown will survive the courts.

The problem for ministers is the array of legislation now enshrined within British law which offers protection to the very foreign extremists they are trying to expel. It is now 50 years since Britain signed up to the Refugee Convention, which, as the European Convention on Human Rights, was then incorporated into British law in 1998. Signatories must ensure "freedom from torture, inhuman and degrading treatment"; "the right to liberty"; and "freedom from discrimination."

While Islamist leaders have grasped the situation in the broadest strategic outlines, Western political systems continue to conceive the problem in the narrowest possible terms. The enemy consists of a few troublemakers within the 'Religion of Peace'; the war is confined to Iraq, or at least to that portion of the Sunni Triangle where most fighting takes place; the legitimacy for any force consists solely of denying Saddam Hussein arsenals of weapons of mass destruction under UN resolutions. Lawyers wrangle over whether it is appropriate to commingle intelligence investigations with criminal probes. Great Britain asks whether it is allowed to expel those sworn to destroying it.

Historically, most catastrophic defeats -- at Gaugamela or France in 1940 -- have not been consequent to inferiority in arms but to infirmity of concept. Defeat occurs first of all in the mind. By that standard the Global Caliphate is well on its way to imposing its will on Western politics which is intent, like some demented person, on rearranging objects on a green baize table.

As some commenters to that piece note,

Bush, Blair, and Berlesconi know what Total War is.

They have been trying (somewhat successfully) to provide a solution short of Total War.

If the west did not have so many ignorant pacifists and anti-western neophytes we probably would be much farther along than we are now. The Left’s mistrust of our culture and the use of power is hindering the effort to open the gap countries to prosperity and success. I really do not care what form of politic or nationalism develops in the gap as long as those forms are relatively peaceful and can coexist with the other civilizations in the world.

The neophytes and reflexively anti-western troglodytes are inadvertently guiding the world toward a calamitous confrontation – like those pacifists who watched Hitler reoccupy the Rhineland and consume Austria and be offered the Sudetenland. We are talking about the difference between thousands dead and a hundred million dead… We are talking about the difference between an era remembered with pride or one remembered with anguish and doubt. One of relatively ‘bloodless’ progress, and one of necessarily bloody destruction and occupation. See the self-flagellation occurring on the anniversary of the atomic bomb. Would such a weapon have been developed without the neophytes forcing us into Total War.

Luckily, neither America nor Brittan is led by a Neville Chamberlain…

This is why I have so little patience (actually, none) for the multi-culti relativists. They don't seem to take the threat seriously. For example, this is what Sharia means in Pakistan today: you can go to jail for life (if you're lucky) just for writing a book:

KARACHI: An anti-terrorism court sentenced a man to life imprisonment for writing an allegedly blasphemous book about the Quran and the Islamic justice system, a lawyer said on Friday.

It can never happen here? How about religious segregation, supported by your tax dollars, to bow to the will of muslims in Seattle?

Last month there was an article in the Seattle Times on a program where city public swimming pools have regularly scheduled hours for the exclusive use of Muslims: "Preserving modesty, in the pool"

It's Saturday evening, the end of a hot day, and a group of women and children have gathered at North Seattle's Meadowbrook Pool for their monthly swim ... The women and children — all Muslims — have been swimming in private once a month at Meadowbrook as part of a program organized by the North Seattle Family Center.

I made some calls and learned that the program, called "Muslim Sister Swim", is treated by the city's Meadowbrook Pool as any other private rental, which would be exempt from the city non-discrimination policy. However, the outfit that organizes and pays for the Muslim Sister Swim is the North Seattle Family Center, a unit of the Children's Home Society, a non-profit that gets most of its money from various government sources. As such, it should strictly comply with non-discrimination guidelines. Nevertheless, the Muslim Sister Swim is open exclusively to Muslims, no infidel women need apply. I asked a representative of the North Seattle Family Center to explain this, and she told me that it was to respect these immigrant women's culture.

But if there's ever a reason for taxpayer dollars to be used to support an immigrant's culture, it should be to support them in learning to shed whatever aspects of their culture are incompatible with American culture. The last thing we need to teach immigrants is to expect publicly-subsidized religious apartheid.

Hey, how about a whites-only day?

Where is the ACLU???

What a miserable bunch of worthless know-nothings.

As a commenter notes,

Something is beingoverlooked here- the entire premise of a Muslim-only swim isn't simply that Islam forbids swimming with non-Muslims- it forbids it because non-Muslims are unclean.

This amounts- quite literally- to taxpayers funding the continued religious bigotry of Mulims.

For the good news, things may be turning in Iraq, in spite of the wishes of the anti-Bush fanatics (via Bernoulli Effect):

Rising up against insurgent leader Abu Musab Zarqawi, Iraqi Sunni Muslims in Ramadi fought with grenade launchers and automatic weapons Saturday to defend their Shiite neighbors against a bid to drive them from the western city, Sunni leaders and Shiite residents said. The fighting came as the U.S. military announced the deaths of six American soldiers.

Dozens of Sunni members of the Dulaimi tribe established cordons around Shiite homes, and Sunni men battled followers of Zarqawi, a Jordanian, for an hour Saturday morning. [...]

The leaders of four of Iraq's Sunni tribes had rallied their fighters in response to warnings posted in mosques by followers of Zarqawi. The postings ordered Ramadi's roughly 3,000 Shiites to leave the city of more than 200,000 in the area called the Sunni Triangle. The order to leave within 48 hours came in retaliation for alleged expulsions by Shiite militias of Sunnis living in predominantly Shiite southern Iraq.

"We have had enough of his nonsense," said Sheik Ahmad Khanjar, leader of the Albu Ali clan, referring to Zarqawi. "We don't accept that a non-Iraqi should try to enforce his control over Iraqis, regardless of their sect -- whether Sunnis, Shiites, Arabs or Kurds."

The fighting in Ramadi suggested a potentially serious threat to Zarqawi's group, al Qaeda in Iraq, which is made up of Sunni extremists from inside and outside Iraq. [...]

Masked men distributed leaflets that declared the city's tribes would fight "Zarqawi's attempt to turn Ramadi into a second Fallujah," referring to the nearby city that U.S. forces wrested from insurgent control in November.

Maybe they don't want Ramadi to become Fallujah because of the pounding it took from the Marines, as seen in this music video made by Cpl. Bender of the 3rd battalion, 1st Marine Regiment in November 2004. And exercise in urban renewal.

Also be sure to read Micahel Yon, embedded with an army Stryker unit in Mosul. You won't find this kind of story told anywhere else.