As if in immediate reply to my last entry, Front Page Magazine today carries an article about one foresightful American who wants to take measures against the encroachment of sharia. 

International reaction was almost uniformly negative last week when news broke that Britain had officially granted Muslim Sharia courts permission to rule on everything from divorce to domestic violence. After all, in its strictest form, Sharia law requires the stoning of women accused of adultery, and the execution of converts from Islam, among other draconian punishments for offences that aren’t even considered crimes in the West. In the U.K. and abroad, pundits and politicians denounced Britain’s capitulation, but only one elected official responded with a daring proposal aimed at preventing Sharia law from gaining such a foothold in America.

That that politician was Rep. Tom Tancredo won’t surprise observers of American politics. The Colorado congressman has long been an outspoken critic of the unofficial “open-borders” policy that encourages millions of undocumented immigrants – including would-be terrorists – to enter the U.S. each year. During his short-lived presidential campaign in 2007, Tancredo repeatedly raised the immigration issue during televised debates. He also aired a provocative television ad in which he promised to “stop all visas to nations that sponsor terrorism and [to] arrest and deport any alien who preaches violence and hatred.”

The ad earned Tancredo scorn on the Left and also on some parts of the Right. Undaunted, he has now proposed a “Jihad Prevention Act” that “would bar the entry of foreign nationals who advocate Sharia law [and] make the advocacy of Sharia law by radical Muslims already in the United States a deportable offense.” In his official announcement on September 18, Tancredo observed: “This is a case where truth is truly stranger than fiction. Today the British people are learning a hard lesson about the consequences of massive, unrestricted immigration.”

“When you have an immigration policy that allows for the importation of millions of radical Muslims,” he explained, “you are also importing their radical ideology – an ideology that is fundamentally hostile to the foundations of western democracy – such as gender equality, pluralism, and individual liberty. The best way to safeguard America against the importation of the destructive effects of this poisonous ideology is to prevent its purveyors from coming here in the first place.”

 

A disaster far more devastating even than universal economic collapse is underway, and our governments, our pundits, our professoriat, the most powerful of our movers-and-shakers, are averting their eyes from it, pretending it is not happening.

Europe is dying. Unless it is prevented by some as yet unproposed and almost unimaginable means, its greatness is coming to an end. The shadow of Islam, an ideology out of the Dark Ages, is advancing over it day-by-day, mile-by-mile, state-by-state. The European nations are dwindling and Islamic peoples are replacing them.  Perhaps because the disaster is too dreadful to contemplate,  we distract ourselves with imaginary urgencies like climate-change, racism, feminism, gay marriage, and, with the loudest hullabaloo, the zealous promotion of the very cause that is destroying us: ‘multiculturalism’, the pretence or fatal illusion that there are other civilizations not just equal to but worthier than our own, and that to them we must give way.

What is threatening is nothing less than the Second Fall of Civilization.  European governments are doing nothing to stop it happening.  In various ways they are expediting it: admitting millions of Muslims as immigrants; permitting the establishment of sharia courts, sharia-compliant finance, Saudi-supported madrassas that teach the fundamentalist Wahhabi creed, and the building of thousands of mosques; bestowing tax-payers’ on Muslim groups without control over how it is used; all-too-easily accommodating Muslim demands for footbaths or prayer-rooms (even in Buckingham Palace); knowingly sheltering terrorist leaders and supporting them and their families; policing those who expose Muslim sedition rather than the seditious themselves; laying down Newspeak rules for official commentators so that Islam cannot be associated with the terrorism that Muslims carry out – and so on. The list could be very much longer.

In the late eighteenth century Edward Gibbon wrote, in The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire: ‘The system of arts, of laws, of manners … distinguish, above the rest of mankind, the Europeans and their colonies. The savage nations of the globe are the common enemies of civilized society; and we may inquire with anxious curiosity, whether Europe be still threatened with a repetition of those calamities which formerly oppressed the arms and institutions of Rome.’ 

Rome fell. It was arguably the greatest disaster in history. Darkness descended over Europe for a thousand years. Like a mansion decayed, deserted by its owners, half buried by an encroaching wildness, it sheltered precariously under its broken roof tribes of lawless and illiterate barbarians restrained only by the terrible would-be-totalitarian power of the Catholic Church. 

But the essence of Rome never died. Light broke again, eventually. Europe rediscovered its Roman heritage. Our culture is fundamentally Roman – or to be more precise, Greco-Roman.

The silver age of Rome (no golden age ever existed) was the Republic.  The republican idea – surely one of the greatest ideas that humankind has ever conceived – arose in ancient Greece: the idea that people of different origins and customs could live together, pursue their chosen trades and occupations, bring knowledge and information, inventions and techniques from many sources, contribute in individual ways to the general prosperity, act and express themselves freely, provided only that they accept the rule of the same law; and the law was to be made by the people themselves. It was the innovation of popular self-government, revolutionary and unique.

The citizens of the Greek city-states realized that they could dispense with the autocratic authority of a king, a chief, a headman. They alone in all the world broke the old universal pattern of human organization – adherence of person to family, of family to tribe, of the tribe being rooted in a piece of earth, its cohesion forcefully maintained by the arbitrary rule of an hereditary chief. To this day the old tribal pattern prevails in Africa and the Middle East. It continues among native peoples of all continents, even where European colonists have established themselves as permanent populations. In Europe itself there are traces and remnants of tribalism, persistent in atavistic sentiment, and lately in active political movements for reversion (for example, among Celts in Britain, Basques in Spain, the Flemish in Belgium.) Such political movements are pathetically nugatory in the dying days of the continent.  

The Renaissance was the re-birth of Greco-Roman civilization.  Again, as in Rome and classical Greece, thinkers began to speculate freely, in defiance of the Universal Church. Science and philosophy could flourish there again, and flourish they did. Exploration and discovery opened new worlds. Europe rapidly became the most fertile and powerful civilization of all time. In the most potent and productive states, kings weakened into figureheads; the people ruled.

From Europe and its erstwhile colonies, the science, the technology, the inventions that the world desires, have flowed. The inventions themselves are copied by far distant nations, which grow wealthy on their production and sale. But few of those countries copy the condition of freedom-under-the-law, and the institutions that preserve it, which allow and therefore foster innovation and experiment, those magnificently daring adventures into the new, with all its risks and rewards. So what will the world do if the source dries up?

Now ‘those calamities’ which threatened Rome are again threatening Europe, as Gibbon feared they might. It is not a clash of civilizations, but of civilization with barbarism. If Europe will not raise a finger to save itself, will America be willing once again to save Europe? What could it do? And if it can do nothing, is there any attempt by Americans to prepare for the time when they’ll no longer have any European allies?

The answer may depend on what leadership comes to power in the United States in the near future.  One candidate for the presidency obviously does not recognize the approaching catastrophe, and seems even to have some sympathy with Islam. The other may see and hear it, but will he act against it?  

Whether the darkness descends slowly through change in the demography of Europe, or is hastened through aggression by a nuclear armed Iran, it will be deep and persistent, unless the American Republic resists it. This time Europe will not be lawless. Worse, it will be under a system of law that, far from protecting freedom, ensures oppression. Sharia, the law of Islam, fixed since the Dark Ages and unchangeable, will hold the people   in subjection. Less escapable and even more cruel than the mediaeval Christian Church; utterly opposed to Justice as it is conceived in the post-Enlightenment West; contemptuous of women, forbidding homosexuality, caring nothing for ‘the environment’, unfavorable to figurative art and music; resistant as iron to innovation, is the law of Islam. It proceeds, Muslims believe, from an authority higher than any king or tyrant, and more absolute: their God. To him all must submit absolutely. ‘Islam’, remember, means ‘submission’.  

Western civilization has at present the political, economic, military, and intellectual resources to prevent a second fall. What is missing as yet is the will. To gain it, we must first take pride in our achievements; recognize, believe in, and have the courage to proclaim the superiority of our customs and ideals over the customs and ideology of our enemy. 

The US presidential election of 2008 may be decisive as to whether our civilization resists and survives, or submits and falls. 

Jillian Becker

September 2008

Part of the great speech Sarah Palin would have made at the protest rally against Ahmadinejad – who is addressing the corrupt and useless United Nations today – if the stupid lefty organizers had not ‘dis-invited’ her:

The world must awake to the threat this man poses to all of us. Ahmadinejad denies that the Holocaust ever took place. He dreams of being an agent in a “Final Solution” — the elimination of the Jewish people. He has called Israel a “stinking corpse” that is “on its way to annihilation.” Such talk cannot be dismissed as the ravings of a madman — not when Iran just this summer tested long-range Shahab-3 missiles capable of striking Tel Aviv, not when the Iranian nuclear program is nearing completion, and not when Iran sponsors terrorists that threaten and kill innocent people around the world.

The Iranian government wants nuclear weapons. The International Atomic Energy Agency reports that Iran is running at least 3,800 centrifuges and that its uranium enrichment capacity is rapidly improving. According to news reports, U.S. intelligence agencies believe the Iranians may have enough nuclear material to produce a bomb within a year.

The world has condemned these activities. The United Nations Security Council has demanded that Iran suspend its illegal nuclear enrichment activities. It has levied three rounds of sanctions. How has Ahmadinejad responded? With the declaration that the “Iranian nation would not retreat one iota” from its nuclear program.

So, what should we do about this growing threat? First, we must succeed in Iraq. If we fail there, it will jeopardize the democracy the Iraqis have worked so hard to build, and empower the extremists in neighboring Iran. Iran has armed and trained terrorists who have killed our soldiers in Iraq, and it is Iran that would benefit from an American defeat in Iraq.

If we retreat without leaving a stable Iraq, Iran’s nuclear ambitions will be bolstered. If Iran acquires nuclear weapons — they could share them tomorrow with the terrorists they finance, arm, and train today. Iranian nuclear weapons would set off a dangerous regional nuclear arms race that would make all of us less safe.

But Iran is not only a regional threat; it threatens the entire world. It is the no. 1 state sponsor of terrorism. It sponsors the world’s most vicious terrorist groups, Hamas and Hezbollah. Together, Iran and its terrorists are responsible for the deaths of Americans in Lebanon in the 1980s, in Saudi Arabia in the 1990s, and in Iraq today. They have murdered Iraqis, Lebanese, Palestinians, and other Muslims who have resisted Iran’s desire to dominate the region. They have persecuted countless people simply because they are Jewish.

Iran is responsible for attacks not only on Israelis, but on Jews living as far away as Argentina. Anti-Semitism and Holocaust denial are part of Iran’s official ideology and murder is part of its official policy. Not even Iranian citizens are safe from their government’s threat to those who want to live, work, and worship in peace. Politically-motivated abductions, torture, death by stoning, flogging, and amputations are just some of its state-sanctioned punishments.

Read it all here.

 In Front Page Magazine, Faith McDonnell writes about the reception various Christian groups are holding in New York to honor the genocidal President of Iran:

Already well-established for killing Christians, Jews, Baha’I’s, and Muslims of the wrong sort, the Islamic Republic of Iran is about to descend to a new level of repression and persecution.  A proposed penal code nearing final passage in the Iranian Parliament would, for the first time, formally institute the death penalty for “apostasy.”   The Islamists in Iran would waste no time using this law against Christian converts from Islam, members of the Baha’I faith, and Muslim activists and dissidents.  So what are Christian churches in the United States doing in response to this threat to their fellow believers?  Holding prayer services?  Not one group of mainline/pacifist churches.  They are breaking the Ramadan fast (who knew they were fasting for Ramadan?) at an Iftar with Iranian President, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.

Terming their dhimmitude as “an invitation to an international dialogue between religious leaders and political figures,” the American Friends Service Committee, Mennonite Central Committee, Quaker United Nations Office, Religions for Peace, and the World Council of Churches – United Nations Liaison Office announced this by-invitation-only dinner with the Iranian leader who has denied the Holocaust took place, threatened the annihilation of Israel, and who, along with the Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, has continued the tradition that began with the Iranian Revolution of violating the human rights of all Iranian citizens. 

Arranging the Iftar at Manhattan’s Grand Hyatt Hotel, accompanied by obsequious verbiage about “the significance of religious contributions to peace,” and “building mutual understanding between our peoples, nations, and religious traditions,” the event’s sponsoring committee is just the latest example of the pattern of Western behavior towards Islam that has been so well described and foretold in the work of Bat Ye’or and others.  In some cases, these mainline Christian leaders are toadies, hoping to avert a jihad-level catastrophe by assuming the position as submissive “People of the Book.”  In other cases, mainline Christian leaders have reached the point where the doctrines of the Christian faith (for which many Iranian Christians have been willing to die) have no meaning anymore, and all religions are equivalent.

Perhaps it would be worth it to hold your nose and dine with the devil if it meant an opportunity to speak out about Iran’s repression and persecution, to be a voice for those who are suffering, and to demand that Islam offer reciprocity for the freedom of religion and decency of treatment that Muslims have received from Christians, Jews, and Baha’is.  With Iran on the verge of a new level of repression, and religious minorities in Iran facing a new level of siege because of the proposed apostasy penal code, an American Christian leader is needed to speak with courage and forthrightness over a dinner plate.  To use the phrase that mainline liberal church leaders are so fond of when it comes to attacking George Bush, a prophetic voice to speak truth to power.   Ahmadinejad will hear such voices, but he will not hear them in the posh dining rooms of the U.S. mainline church leaders.  He will hear them in the prison cells and court rooms of Iran. 

 A brave Iraqi could be sentenced to death for visiting Israel.

Al-Alusi said he went to Israel to seek international support for Iraq as it struggles against terrorism, and insisted that the outcry reflects Iranian meddling in Iraq’s internal affairs — an accusation often leveled by Sunnis like himself against Iraq’s mostly Shiite neighbor.

"Iran is behind Hamas and Hezbollah and many other terrorist organizations. Israelis are suffering like me, like my people. So we need to be together," he said. "Peace will have more of a chance."

Read the whole story here.

 Investor’s Business Daily believes that this time government is intervening in the right way to help solve the economic crisis: 

Like so many others, we believe that government should largely remove itself from functioning markets. But in a case such as this, where a market has been seriously damaged due to regulatory excess, an obligation exists to help undo the damage.

That’s the case now with the subprime crisis and housing collapse, both largely due to decades of congressional incompetence.

With world credit markets seized up and little to show for piecemeal U.S. efforts to deal with the growing financial panic, Paulson and others on the Bush financial team late last week shifted course, crafting a systematic answer to the markets’ meltdown.

This was leadership writ large… 

His controversial decision to create a new financial entity, modeled broadly on the 1980s-era Resolution Trust Corp., may just spell an end to this financial crisis. Congress, which has mostly sat on the sidelines during this crisis, should approve it right away.

Unlike the RTC, which owned actual properties, the new agency that Paulson’s Treasury is creating will buy up the impaired mortgage-backed securities and hold them for resale when the market turns favorable again.

For ailing financial markets, this was welcome tonic. At this point they care less about details of the agency than limiting the contagion of the subprime crisis so it will no longer contaminate global banks and investors’ balance sheets. Mission accomplished.

That’s why markets rallied so strongly Thursday and Friday, with the Dow industrials ahead 779 points, or 7.3%, and the Nasdaq up 175 points, or 5.8%. Bourses in London, Paris, Frankfurt, Tokyo and Hong Kong, among many others, also rebounded sharply.

Paulson’s move will have deep, and perhaps lasting, impacts on global markets. Foreign central banks had virtually thrown their hands up in despair over their inability to deal with the crisis. But in just three days, Paulson and other top finance and regulatory officials in the Bush administration cobbled together a world rescue.

In addition to Paulson’s new entity, Bernanke’s Fed extended $180 billion in credit to practice that had contributed to the growing financial crisis.

These U.S. moves should erase the doubts that existed both in the suites of global market makers and in the kitchens and living rooms of Main Street, U.S.A., over whether the American government would fiddle while the world economy burned.

Just this week, Germany’s Der Spiegel headlined a story: "The World As We Know It Is Going Down." Well, it isn’t. Thanks to Paulson and Co., America has reasserted global leadership at a time when many thought it was lost.

It finds fault with Barack Obama’s analysis and his 4-point remedy. His would be the wrong way.  

And what would Obama do instead? We’re beginning to find out. In a four-point action plan Obama presented on Friday, he goes beyond "hope" and "change" oratory and moves on to what really matters to him: the big-government spending he’s been selling all election.

And here’s what Obama proposes:

• Point one, Obama calls for subsidies to "working families" to beat high food and energy prices. The problem: High food and energy prices won’t be helped by subsidies, but by more supplies. The real solution is to force a Democratic Congress to allow domestic drilling for oil. Thus far, Obama isn’t even "present" on that one.

• Point two, dubbed "mutual responsibility and reciprocity," calls for banks to subsidize bad borrowers to "protect homeowners and the economy." This would eliminate personal responsibility. Demagoguing false details — such as about bankers getting golden parachutes, instead of 25,000 of them losing their jobs — Obama insists the solution is simple: Banks shouldn’t foreclose on delinquent home buyers. Obviously, he hasn’t heard of how bad loans drained Japan’s economy of its vitality for a decade.

• Third, Obama seeks "new oversight and regulations of our financial institutions." That means forcing new bureaucracies and regulations into the private sector, the very phenomenon that has made navigating our health care industry such a delight.

• Fourth, Obama seeks to empower unelected foreign entities to the same "globally coordinated (rescue) effort." But Bernanke and Paulson have already done the heavy lifting, as the rest of "the world" has done next to nothing. One more global bureaucracy won’t make America’s financial system any healthier.

Obama makes a final point by blasting the failure of "common-sense regulation and oversight," to the financial system.

He ought to bring this up with fellow Democrats in Congress. In the 1990s, Rep. Barney Frank blocked key reforms even as he took campaign cash from banking interests. In 2004, President Bush attempted to revive the reforms, but Democrats blocked them.

Today’s bank crisis isn’t due to the inherent evil of the private sector, as Obama claims. It’s due to Democratic leaders who were bought off by political donations and hostile to reform.

Obama, curiously enough, is one of the top recipients of cash from Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. Small wonder, then, that his main election argument would expand the scope of government by using the banks’ subprime woes as leverage.

 

 Neal Boortz confirms that the economic crisis was caused by socialist politicians, like Barack Obama, not by an ‘unregulated’ free market.

Political correctness won the day. Washington made it clear to banks and other lending institutions that if they did not do something .. and fast .. to bring more minorities and low-income Americans into the world of home ownership there would be a heavy price to pay. Congress set up processes (Research the Community Redevelopment Act) whereby community activist groups and organizers could effectively stop a bank’s efforts to grow if that bank didn’t make loans to unqualified borrowers. Enter, stage left, the “subprime” mortgage. These lenders knew that a very high percentage of these loans would turn to garbage – but it was a price that had to be paid if the bank was to expand and grow. We should note that among the community groups browbeating banks into making these bad loans was an outfit called ACORN. There is one certain presidential candidate that did a lot of community organizing for ACORN. I won’t mention his name so as to avoid politicizing this column.

These garbage loans to unqualified borrowers were then bundled up and sold. The expectation was that the loans would be eventually paid off when rising home values led some borrowers to access their equity through re-financing and others to sell and move on up the ladder. Oops.

Right now this crisis is being sold to the American public by the left as evidence the failure of the free market and capitalism. Not so. What we’re seeing is the inevitable result of political interference in free market economics. Acme bank didn’t want to loan money to Joe Homebuyer because Joe had a spotty job history, owed too much money on his credit cards, and wasn’t all that good at making payments on time. The politicians told Acme Bank to figure out a way to make that loan, because, after all, Joe is a bona-fide minority-American, or forget about opening that new branch office on the Southside. The loan was made under politicial pressure; the loan, with millions like it, failed – and now we are left to enjoy today’s headlines.

So … why aren’t you reading the whole story in the mainstream media? Come on, are you kidding me? Do you really expect the media to blame this mess on deadbeat borrowers and political interference in the free market when it is so easy to put the blame on greedy lenders and evil capitalists? Remember … there’s an election going on. One candidate is decidedly anti-capitalist. Do the math.

 Here is the lowdown on ACORN (the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now), which has a significant share in culpability for the sub-prime disaster – as mentioned in the preceding post.

The report explains that Acorn is:

 Implicated in numerous reports of fraudulent voter registration, vote-rigging, voter intimidation, and vote-for-pay scams during the 2004 election. 

 An Investor’s Business Daily editorial makes it clear who is responsible for the financial crisis, and why:  

The risk-taking was her [Pelosi’s] idea — and the idea of all the other Democrats, along with a handful of Republicans, who over the past 30 years have demonized lenders as racist and passed regulation after regulation pressuring them to make more loans to unqualified borrowers in the name of diversity.

They were the ones who screamed — "REDLINING!" — and sent banks scurrying for cover in low-income neighborhoods, where they have been forced to lower long-held industry standards for judging creditworthiness to make the subprime loans.

If they don’t comply, they are threatened with stiff penalties under the Community Reinvestment Act, or CRA, a law that forces banks to make home loans to people with poor credit risks.

No fewer than four federal banking regulatory agencies are responsible for enforcing the law. They subject lenders to racial litmus tests and issue regular report cards, the industry’s dreaded "CRA rating."

The more branches that lenders put in poor neighborhoods, and the more loans they make there, the better their rating. Those lenders with low ratings can not only be fined, but also blocked from mergers and other business transactions needed to expand.

The regulation grew to monstrous proportions during the Clinton administration, obsessed as it was with multiculturalism. Amendments to the CRA in the mid-1990s dramatically raised the amount of home loans to otherwise unqualified low-income borrowers.

The revisions also allowed for the first time the securitization of CRA-regulated loans containing subprime mortgages. The changes came as radical "housing rights" groups led by ACORN lobbied for such loans. ACORN at the time was represented by a young public-interest lawyer in Chicago by the name of Barack Obama.

Banks and other lending institutions should not be the servants of government. They should be in business to make a profit. In the end, the perversion of their purpose harmed the whole economy, and the worst sufferers are precisely those that the misdirection of their function was supposed to help.  

Investor’s Business Daily today carries an article by Ernest S Christian in which he raises the question of whether the Democratic Party will ever recover from the huge mistake of nominating Barack Obama as its presidential candidate. 

The candidate Obama, in his view, is a ‘media-created virtual person’.  The real Barack Obama is a threat to the party that nominated him, to the nation, and – we would add – to the world.

He continues in part:

Why should Americans of African heritage invest their hopes, dreams and identities in a Chicago pol with an unsavory past replete with radicals, racketeers and racists, a borderline Marxist agenda and a doubtful attitude toward America — and with whom they have nothing in common other than skin color?

How many Reagan Democrats want a left-wing collectivist in the White House, especially one who has no respect for them and their values? Even "liberals" do not actually like to pay high taxes or want the economic pie to be made smaller.

And nobody looks forward to a more authoritarian government. Who, for example, wants a government bureaucrat telling them which doctors to use, what medical care they can receive and when?

How do the real people of America, those who do the work, raise the families, pay the taxes, defend the nation and make America the truly exceptional place that it is, feel about an arrogant young man whose self-esteem is so much greater than his accomplishments?

Do they want a president who has seldom held a real job, never run a business or done much of anything other than promote himself? And what about the young idealists preparing to cast their first votes? Do they really intend to vote for an illusion? Do any Americans want a president who regards himself as a citizen of the world and may have mixed loyalties?

The potential downside consequences of an Obama presidency are enormous. And on the upside, what is to be gained? The frisson of having voted to elect an African-American president? A last-minute slap at President Bush, who will be out of office in January anyway? A pointless protest against a war that is now being won and will soon be over?

Read the whole thing here.