Islam must be defeated by exposure and argument, and so – eventually, with luck – by the sort of generalized revulsion that irredeemably condemns Nazism, Stalinism, and Maoism. (Individuals who believe in it, or have simply had the misfortune to be born into it, should not of course be harmed – unless they have committed a crime in Islam’s name, and then by the law, not by their neighbors.)

In connection with the Ground Zero Mosque controversy, and generally whether the enemy is Islam or only a “tiny radical element within Islam”, there are two arguments that liberals and Christians of the left constantly bring up  to show what nice tolerant people they are. One is the myth of a wonderfully tolerant, diversely populated, creative,  advanced civilization the Moors established in Spain; the other is the claim by Christians that “Christians have killed far more people in America than Muslims have”.

As to the first: our reader and commenter, Bornagainpagan, has drawn our attention to an article by Professor Bruce Thornton in which he accurately writes:

Andalusian Spain has particularly been evoked as an example of an interfaith tolerance unknown to Christians, as President Obama claimed in his June 2009 speech delivered in Cairo, when he extolled Islam’s “proud tradition of tolerance”.

As many historians have shown, the historical facts of Islamic rule in Spain and elsewhere belie these claims. The “proud tradition” would have surprised the several thousand Jews massacred in Grenada in 1066, or the 300 Christians crucified, per Koranic injunction, in 818 during a three-day rampage of killing and pillaging in Cordoba, or the 700 Christians slaughtered in Toledo in 806. These are just a few examples of numerous Muslim massacres of Christians and Jews in Spain, whose lives were circumscribed by prohibitions on everything from the sorts of animals they rode to the height of their houses.

As to the second, the massacres carried out by Christians, they cite the killing of Indians during the early wars of conquest. True many Indians were killed. True, the people who killed them were mostly Christians and some saw themselves as having a mission to spread Christianity. (Of course the Indians did their share of killing too, but they were “only defending themselves and their land”, comes the retort.)

What puzzles us is this: how can the fact that Christians killed Indians in wars fought hundreds of years ago mean that Americans today, of many faiths and none, have thereby lost the moral right to protest the insult of a triumphalist monument at a place of a mass slaughter committed in the name of Islam?

Verily, these liberals and lefty Christians are as muddle-headed as they’re self-righteous!

Europeans may indulge themselves in mea-culpa multiculturalism in penance  for a colonialist past, and though it’s hard to see what benefit the policy brings to anyone, one can understand their argument. But for Americans, imitatively, to put their necks on a block and ask for their heads to be cut off because their ancestors fought wars of conquest is irrational to the point of being ridiculous – and seriously dangerous for the health of the nation.

Afterthought: Strange that conservatives should find themselves having to defend America in argument with fellow Americans; stranger still atheists defending Christians in argument with Christians!

Good news. Mark Steyn is back. His latest column is full of wit and wisdom – of course. Don’t miss it. Among related matters, he discusses the international scandal of the Korans that were not burnt. We expressed our view that the best thing to do with a Koran is read it, because it’s a self-incriminating text. [See our post To fight Islam don’t’ burn the Koran – read it, September 6, 2010.]

Here’s part of what Mark Steyn says about the affair:

Take this no-name pastor from an obscure church who was threatening to burn the Koran. He didn’t burn any buildings or women and children. He didn’t even burn a book. He hadn’t actually laid a finger on a Koran, and yet the mere suggestion that he might do so prompted the President of the United States to denounce him, and the Secretary of State, and the commander of US forces in Afghanistan, various G7 leaders, and golly, even Angelina Jolie. President Obama has never said a word about honor killings of Muslim women. Secretary Clinton has never said a word about female genital mutilation. General Petraeus has never said a word about the rampant buggery of pre-pubescent boys by Pushtun men in Kandahar. But let an obscure man in Florida so much as raise the possibility that he might disrespect a book – an inanimate object – and the most powerful figures in the western world feel they have to weigh in.

Aside from all that, this obscure church’s website has been shut down, its insurance policy has been canceled, its mortgage has been called in by its bankers. Why? … Another one of Obama’s famous “teaching moments”? In this case teaching us that Islamic law now applies to all? Only a couple of weeks ago, the President, at his most condescendingly ineffectual, presumed to lecture his moronic subjects about the First Amendment rights of Imam Rauf. Where’s the condescending lecture on Pastor Jones’ First Amendment rights? …

President Obama bowed lower than a fawning maitre d’ before the King of Saudi Arabia, a man whose regime destroys bibles as a matter of state policy, and a man whose depraved religious police forces schoolgirls fleeing from a burning building back into the flames to die because they’d committed the sin of trying to escape without wearing their head scarves. …

It is a basic rule of life that if you reward bad behavior, you get more of it. Every time Muslims either commit violence or threatens it, we reward them by capitulating. Indeed, President Obama … General Petraeus, and all the rest are now telling Islam, you don’t have to kill anyone, you don’t even have to threaten to kill anyone. We’ll be your enforcers. We’ll demand that the most footling and insignificant of our own citizens submit to the universal jurisdiction of Islam. … The same people who tell us “Islam is a religion of peace” then turn around and tell us you have to be quiet, you have to shut up because otherwise these guys will go bananas and kill a bunch of people.

Yes. They are counseling us, instructing us, to be afraid of Islam.

Many of us would rather oppose it, fight it, defeat it, and ideally destroy it.

There is nothing in it that is good for the human race. Nothing.

While appalling criminal acts are being excused by radical judges (see our post immediately below, A thirst for injustice), law-abiding citizens are being punished for regulatory offenses they had no intention of committing.

The criminalization of the innocent is the subject of an article by Edwin Meese (US Attorney General 1985-1988) in the Washington Times. It needs to be read in full, but here are some extracts:

Another sign that we have lost our sense of the Constitution lies in the phenomenon of “overcriminalization.” Put simply, government is making too many criminal laws, creating traps for people who are doing their best to be law-abiding citizens. Consider: The Constitution itself identifies only three federal crimes – piracy, counterfeiting, and treason.

When the First Congress enacted the original Crimes Act in 1790, it stipulated only 17 federal crimes. Today, Congress own research service can’t even count all the federal crimes on the books. Our best estimate is that the federal code now delineates more than 4,500 federal crimes. And federal regulations create tens of thousands more. Our Founding Fathers would recognize relatively few of these offenses as crimes.

At the time of the founding, almost all criminal law punished conduct that everyone would recognize as wrongful – offenses like murder, theft, and burglary. And virtually all crimes required proof that the accused had acted with a “guilty mind” – that is, with the intent to do a wrongful act. …

Today, the vast majority of the crimes are regulatory offenses. They involve conduct that is not inherently wrong but has been made criminal only because an elite legislature – or unelected bureaucracy – has decreed it to be so.

To make enforcement of these new social norms easier, legislatures have often jettisoned the “guilty mind” requirement. As a result, people may be punished with jail time for doing things they had no idea were illegal, much less criminal. …

Hence, a 12-year old girl is arrested for eating a French fry in the Washington, D.C., Metro system. A 63-year old grandmother in Palo Alto, Calif., is arrested for failing to trim her hedges in the “officially approved manner.” Four FBI agents, in SWAT gear and armed with automatic rifles, arrest an Alaskan inventor for shipping scientific material without a federally mandated sticker on the package. A retired orchid grower spends 17 months in jail for importing orchids without the proper paperwork.

As the list of criminal acts expands, it becomes harder for the average American to get through the day without unknowingly committing a crime. This situation creates an even more insidious danger. If everyone is potentially a criminal, then the government and its employees have vast powers to decide which people to charge. With so wide a scope of possible criminal charges, we now face a situation where little but the discretion of the government determines who goes to jail and who goes free. …

The comprehensiveness of criminal law now means that it may be deployed as a weapon against the disfavored or the politically unpopular without regard to the actual blameworthiness of their conduct.

Without limits protecting citizens from haphazard application of criminal punishment, law becomes a tool of oppression rather than protection.

Five judicial nominations have been submitted for confirmation by Obama. The names are:

• Robert N. Chatigny, a federal district judge from Connecticut,
• Federal magistrate Edward M. Chen of San Francisco
• University of California at Berkeley law professor Goodwin W. Liu
• Former state Supreme Court Justice Louis Butler of Wisconsin
• U.S. District Judge John J. McConnell, Jr., of Rhode Island

According to the Washington Times –

All five nominations were held up for months because not even many Democrats want to go on the record voting for their confirmation. The nominations officially lapsed when the Senate recessed for more than 30 days in August. Rather than letting them die quietly and without embarrassment, the president renominated them – as if to emphasize his utter disdain for the usual American norms of justice.

Of Robert N. Chatigny, the editorial reports that he showed “bizarre sympathy for a serial rapist-murderer, saying his ‘sexual sadism’ was a ‘mitigating factor’ rather than reason to punish him to the extent of the law.” It quotes him further as saying:

He [the rapist and murderer] is at Cornell, he had this classmate, this petite Asian girl who is sweet, and he likes her, and he winds up killing her because he has this affliction, this terrible disease. [It was] this awful, uncontrollable impulse to sexually brutalize this person he liked and then kill her. … Michael Ross may be the least culpable, the least, of the people on death row.

So Ross was the victim of his own impulse! There is no question in the judge’s mind of holding him to moral responsibility. But isn’t that precisely what a judge’s business is – to hold people accountable for their actions?

A man who thinks as Chatigny does is either insane or deeply evil. Either way, he should be locked up, not promoted to a higher position in the judiciary where he can do more harm.

Next, Edward M. Chen is against neutral justice:

He once explained that a judge should “draw upon the breadth and depth of their own life experience. … Inevitably, one’s ethnic and racial background contributes to those life experiences.”

In other words, your judgment should be guided by your own predilections and prejudices.

Of Professor Goodwin W. Liu the paper tells us:

He has argued that the judiciary should be “a culturally situated interpreter of social meaning”…

Whatever that means. It sounds sinister, and has never before been part of a judge’s job description.

Liu also believes in “a constitutional right to welfare“. That is to say, redistribution, though such a notion is nowhere to be found or even hinted at in the actual Constitution.

Finally, there is this on Justice Louis Butler and U.S. District Judge John J. McConnell, Jr.:

They each argued in separate cases that paint manufacturers should be held liable for lead poisoning in children today for paint made decades ago even if there’s no evidence the poisoning came from paint actually made by the manufacturer in question. This is such a departure from evidence-based law – and beyond guilt by association, into an even worse guilt by insinuation – that it makes a mockery of the judicial system.

Collectively they are against personal accountability, objective justice, the constitutional role of the judicial branch, and evidence-based law.

Obama must have had scouts scouring the length and breadth of America to find these radicals for him. Such specimens must be rare. At least we hope they are.

All five are revolutionaries. They invert the values and principles on which America was founded. They are barefaced enemies of the Constitution. Even worse, they negate  justice itself.

Victor Davis Hanson has a good article at PajamaMedia on how socialism – or “statism” – is failing all over the world (as it must: what cannot work will not work), just as America is being led on to the socialist ramp down to poverty and serfdom.

We agree with much that he says – as we often do with this insightful and well-informed writer – but there is one point on which we take issue.

Here’s part of what he writes:

Survey the world’s statist systems of every stripe, from soft to hard. One sees either failure and misery or stasis and lethargy. At the most extreme, a North Korea is turning into a Neanderthal society where subjects eat grass. Castro’s Cuba is imploding, and the Great Leader in his dotage is now renouncing his communist catastrophe. Hugo Chavez’s Venezuela proves that an even an oil-rich exporter can destroy itself with self-imposed socialism.

India progressed only when it adopted free markets. People do not outsource 1-800 numbers to socialist paradises. No need to review the Soviet collapse or the change in China from a peasant to a wealth-building capitalist society. Europe for a while longer works despite (rather than because of) democratic socialism. From Germany to Greece, Europe is moving away from the encroaching public sector that has nearly destroyed the European Union.

So the trend of the world — even after the meltdown of September 2008 — is away from statism, except in the United States. I don’t say that lightly or as a slur, but empirically. The Obama administration has absorbed large sectors of the auto industry and some segments of banking and insurance. The student loan program is federalized. …

The percentage of GDP that is government-run will markedly increase; the trillion-plus annual deficits, in gorge the beast fashion, will force higher taxation to pay for redistributive payouts and entitlements — or inflate the currency to erode saved capital. The UN is worshiped and reported to. Allies are now neutrals, and enemies are courted. We seek to prove that we are not “exceptional,” but simply one among many — a sort of socialist approach to foreign policy where all nations are the same.

Symbolically the president, before and during his tenure, has called for “redistributive change,” “to spread the wealth,” and openly suggested that, at some arbitrary point (known to him alone, but apparently sufficiently high enough to allow Costa del Sol and Martha Vineyard vacations) one need not make (as in, keep one’s earnings) additional income. I could go on, but you get the picture: Obama would like to take us down a path that leads inevitably to a Greece, even as the world is racing away from it.

He goes on to list five dangers of socialism.

One of them is under the heading of Demography. It suggests how socialism may explain shrinking populations.

When one demands cradle to grave care, a classical (now scoffed at) reason for childbearing (to change diapers for those who might one day change your own in gratitude) is destroyed. And if there is no struggle to create income and savings (the state provides all needs; the state ensures against all risks; the state takes away most income; the state gobbles most inheritance), why worry about transcendence or passing anything along to children — or why children at all?

So far, so good. If people are supplied with everything they need to survive, what should they strive for, what do they live for? Some might set themselves their own purposes, but many may be content to lie in the lap of the state and purr. And growl and grumble too, of course.

But Hanson goes on:

Agnosticism leads to a shrinking population and vice versa. If the state is the god, and defines happiness as social justice in the material sense, then the here and now is all that matters. The state defines morality as the greatest good for the greatest number — as it sees it.

Lost is a sense of individual tragedy, self-sacrifice, personal accountability for sin and transgression, and appreciation for a larger world beyond and after this one. A society that does not believe in a hereafter will be sorely disappointed that the state never quite satisfies its appetites. We see that hedonism well enough from Greece to California. “Never enough” (Numquam satis) is the new de facto motto.

No sane person loses a sense of individual tragedy. Everyone is doomed to die. Everyone, from the moment of his birth, suffers. And everyone in the course of his life does harm to other people, strive though he might not to. We are all hurt, and we all inflict hurt. An apt title for a biography of Everyman would be Poor Bastard!

Everyone endures disappointment. No appetite can ever be completely satisfied. Everyone has longings that are not material.

Almost everyone suffers remorse – which is an acceptance of personal accountability for wrong-doing. (Maybe not the Christian torturers and burners of heretics, and other such tyrants defending The Truth, religious or political.)

There is no world beyond or after this one. Death is the end of life. Death defines life. That is the meaning of “mortality”. A being can only be said to be alive if it can die.

The universe is a thing. No mind exists in it except the human mind, which is to say successive multitudes of mortal human minds. Only in each of us, embodied by the same dumb stuff as everything else, is there a self-conscious, reasoning, inventing “mind”. Strictly speaking, mind is a verb; it is an activity of the human brain that emerged at this end of an immensely long process of evolution.

The realm of the mind is infinite. Forever discontented, the uniquely human imagination roams wide. It discovers galaxies and electrons. It tries socialism and regrets it. It invents gods and heavens and hells – but they remain imaginary.

Unless someone can prove otherwise.

Jillian Becker September 15, 2010

Disaster though it was, Katrina brought some good. It broke the levees of the bureaucratic mind and let common sense came flooding in – at least as far as education is concerned.

The whole country could learn from what has happened in the schools of New Orleans since the flood.

We haven’t come across a report of the good news in an American source, but this one appeared in Britain.

From the Sunday Telegraph:

Although only 16 of the city’s 128 schools survived the catastrophe intact, and about one-third of school buildings were totally destroyed, schools have improved significantly since Katrina.

The reason is simple. In the wake of the disaster, state politicians unleashed a bottom-up revolution in the city’s schools … The breaking of the levees breached a mindset that excused failure. A bureaucratic system run by local officials was torn up and handed over to a hotchpotch of philanthropists, entrepreneurs, ambitious teachers and even local universities. Parents were given freedom over where to send their children, unions were sidelined, and now standards are rising to such an extent there are lectures on the experiment at … Harvard Business School.

New Orleans schools used to be infamous, among the worst in America. Generations of children were crushed by low expectations, poor teaching, incompetent management and corruption. The statistics were damning. City schools ranked near the bottom nationally in reading and maths, with 19 out of every 20 high school seniors testing below basic proficiency in English and maths in school exit exams. In some schools, nearly one-third of seniors dropped out during the school year. …

When the storm struck shortly after the start of the school year, the struggling school district had only one month’s cash left. So it paid staff for the days they had worked, then laid them off. When people started returning to the city, the schools needed to be rebuilt and reopened. But instead of just restoring a dismal and discredited system, the state took most of the schools out of the hands of the old school board and instigated the boldest system of parental choice in the country.

The mechanism used was charter schools: non-selective, publicly funded institutions, with five-year contracts and funds allocated according to the number of pupils attracted. They were allowed to make their own decisions on hiring, curricula and school rules … although there are strict targets to meet, and profit is not a dirty word. Having made it far easier to set up charter schools, the district then eliminated collective bargaining over teachers’ pay by refusing to renew its contract with the teaching union. …

Dozens of schools converted to charter status. Stifling old rules went out the window as these new bodies competed for the best teachers and pupils, with families free to choose any school and lotteries used when there are too many applicants. Some schools reverted to single-sex lessons, while others extended school hours and terms. Uniforms are in, discipline has improved and parental satisfaction has rocketed.

Perhaps the key change, however, is that bad teachers get sacked while the best earn higher rewards. …

Indisputably … the statistics show that across the district the performance score – a tally of test marks and other performance indicators – has improved by nearly 20 per cent. …

One lesson to emerge from the agonies of Hurricane Katrina is that the combined forces of parental choice and school independence have the power to transform the lives of some of the most disadvantaged children in society.

Geert Wilders spoke at the 9/11 rally in New York protesting the building of a mosque at Ground Zero. The mainstream media seem to have chosen not to report the rally at all.

Have they drawn a line against reporting an event that reflects the opinion of most Americans?

Here’s part of what Geert Wilders said:

Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf claims the right to build a mosque, a house of Sharia here – on this hallowed ground.

But, friends, I have not forgotten and neither have you. That is why we are here today. To draw the line. Here, on this sacred spot. We are here in the spirit of America’s founding fathers. We are here in the spirit of freedom. We are here in the spirit of Abraham Lincoln, the President who freed the slaves.

President Lincoln said: “Those who deny freedom to others, deserve it not for themselves.”

These words are the key to our survival. The tolerance that is crucial to our freedom requires a line of defense.

Mayor Bloomberg uses tolerance as an argument to allow Imam Rauf and his sponsors to build their so-called Cordoba Mosque.

Mayor Bloomberg forgets, however, that openness cannot be open-ended. A tolerant society is not a suicidal society.

It must defend itself against the powers of darkness, the force of hatred and the blight of ignorance. It cannot tolerate the intolerant – and survive.

This means that we must not give a free hand to those who want to subjugate us.

An overwhelming majority of Americans is opposed to building this mosque. So is an overwhelming majority everywhere in the non-Islamic world.Because we all realize what is at stake here. We know what this so-called Cordoba mosque really means. …

Most Americans do not want this so-called Cordoba Mosque to be built here. They understand that it is both a provocation and a humiliation. They understand the triumphant narrative of a mosque named after the Great Mosque of Cordoba which was constructed where a Christian cathedral stood before the land was conquered by Islam.

An overwhelming majority of Americans is opposed to building an Islamic cultural center close to Ground Zero. There is no lack of mosques in New York. There are dozens of buildings in which Muslims can pray. It isn’t about a lack of space for prayers. It’s about the symbolic meaning. …

Nine years ago, when the news of the terrible atrocity in New York reached Europe, Muslim youths danced in the streets. In a poll, two thirds of the Muslim immigrants in the Netherlands expressed partial or full understanding for the 9/11 terrorists.

If a mosque were built here on Ground Zero such people would feel triumphant. …

But, let us also express our gratitude for the heroes of 9/11, those who went down in that Pennsylvania field, those who were standing freedom’s watch at the Pentagon, and those who were here in New York nine years ago to risk and lose their lives for the victims.

Friends, in honor of these victims, these heroes and their families, I believe that the words of Ronald Reagan, spoken in Normandy on the 40th anniversary of D-Day, resonate with new purpose on this hallowed spot. President Reagan said: “We will always remember. We will always be proud. We will always be prepared, so we may always be free.”

You’ll find the whole speech here.

We’ve seen three pigs flapping their way into the sky in the last few weeks.

The first became airborne when Barney Frank, who had protected the corrupt twins Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac with the flaming ardor of an angel at the gate of Eden, suddenly declared that they should be abolished. (See our post Gasp, August 19, 2010.)

The next swine soared up a few days ago when Fidel Castro, Communist dictator of miserable Cuba for over 50 years, announced that Communist economics don’t work. (See our post Oops! immediately below.)

Now we’ve spotted another.

Robert Fisk has spent a lifetime in journalism defending Arabs and Islam, and Palestinians in particular. He lied consistently about Israel (to my certain knowledge as I was witness to the same events during the Israeli intervention in Lebanon that he reported in 1982 and 1983 – JB.]  Now he’s suddenly discovered that Islam oppresses, tortures and murders women. We’re glad that he has ferreted out this obscure fact, that he is appalled, and that he is publishing cases, descriptions, and the names of victims. We applaud him for it. But he’s the last person we would have expected to write this report.

Harrowing though it is, it needs to be read. This time Robert Fisk, the veteran liar, is telling the truth. …

Continued in the post above, The atrocity that is Islam.

The Dove World Outreach Center, a nondenominational church in Gainesville, Florida, has announced an “International Burn a Koran Day” on the ninth anniversary of the September 11, 2001, attacks.

This is barbaric and counter-productive.

We are adamantly against the burning of books.

We are adamantly against the burning of copies of the Koran.

So is Robert Spencer, one of America’s foremost experts on Islam, and one of the strongest critics of it. He sensibly writes:

This church’s plan to burn the Qur’an on September 11 is stupid; I disapprove of it and of many other things about the pastor, the church, and the church’s approach to the jihad threat. I don’t support the burning of books; it’s tactically stupid, as it will make the mainstream media portray the church as a bunch of Nazis, and it’s wrong in principle: the antidote to bad speech is not censorship or book-burning, but more speech. Open discussion. Give-and-take. And the truth will out. There is no justification for burning books.

Marisol’s comments here are apposite: “‘International Burn a Koran Day’ does a grave disservice to the cause of spreading awareness about Islamic teachings and the threat that Sharia poses to our way of life. It is a gift to Islamic groups who would so dearly love to portray all of us who criticize and question Islamic teachings (and triumphalist mosques) as frothing reactionaries.”

It would be far better to prescribe the Koran as compulsory reading in all institutions of learning and non-Muslim religious assembly, to have it on open display in all public libraries, to read it aloud in classrooms and theaters, to serialize it in periodicals and daily newspapers, to endow the giving away of copies free of charge, and to place one in every hotel room.

It is an immoral, misogynistic, anti-human text, and the more widely it is read the more likely will Islam be to lose respect and protection, and the less likely to succeed with its proselytizing and jihad.