Probably the most relevant work for Thanksgiving is that entitled Bradford’s History of the Plymouth Settlement, written by William Bradford, who has the distinct advantage over the revisionists of having actually been there as governor of the new colony. As such, he has only a literal axe to grind.  So, what were the reasons the pilgrims came to this land? Were they out to kill everything in sight and selfishly exploit all possible resources of the country to which they were targeting?

First, we must remember what the revisionists conveniently forget. The pilgrims knew very little about the land to which they were sailing. They were leaving civilization as they knew it for a life of unknown hardship. Indeed, in the first year, half of the settlers died in the wilderness into which they had come. To put this into a 21^st century perspective, what they undertook would be roughly comparable to a band of pilgrims building a starship for a trip to Mars with the intention of colonizing that planet and with no expectation of a return trip. What would cause sane human beings to give up so much for seemingly so little?

William Bradford actually lists four primary reasons for this endeavor.

First, they saw by experience that the hardships of the country were such that comparatively few others would join them, and fewer still would bide it out and remain with them. Many who came and many more who desired to come, could not endure the continual labor and hard fare and other inconveniences which they themselves were satisfied with. ... For, though many desired to enjoy the ordinances of God in their purity, and the liberty of the gospel, yet, alas, they preferred to submit to bondage, with danger to their conscience, rather than endure these privations.

So first of all, the religious freedom that is the traditional reason for the pilgrims’ trip seems to be accurate (imagine that!). Even in their adopted country, the pilgrims experienced pressures from the established churches to conform to rituals they deemed unbiblical. Also note their concern for others in this passage; there is not a desire to get but a desire to give.

Secondly, they say that though the people generally bore these difficulties very cheerfully, and with resolute courage, being in the best strength of their years; yet old age began to steal on many of them, and their great and continual labors, with other crosses and sorrows, hastened it before their time; so that it was not only probably, but certain, that in a few more years they would be in danger of scattering by the necessities pressing upon them.

Still no genocidal tendencies in this second reason, but a focus on others: the concern for the physical welfare of those enduring the hardships caused by their obedience to God’s Word as they saw it, and particularly the elderly.

Thirdly, as necessity was a task-master over them, so they themselves were forced to be, not only over their servants, but in a sort over their dearest children; which not a little wounded the hearts of many a loving father and mother, and produced many sad and sorrowful effects. Many of their children, who were of the best disposition and who had learned to bear the yoke in their youth and were willing to bear part of their parents’ burden, were often so oppressed with their labors, that though their minds were free and willing, their bodies bowed under the weight and became decrepit in early youth, - the vigor of nature being consumed in the very bud, as it were. But still more lamentable, and of all sorrows most heavy to be borne, was that many of the children, influenced by these conditions, and the great licentiousness of the young people of the country, and the many temptations of the city, were led by evil example into dangerous courses, getting the reins off their necks and leaving their parents. ... So they say their posterity would be in danger to degenerate and become corrupt.

This is perhaps the most amazing, and is almost never cited even by traditionalists. They were concerned for the physical and spiritual well-being of their children! They saw the corruption of the society in which they had taken refuge, and the evil influence it had on some of their children alarmed them to the extent that they considered migration a viable option despite any difficulties it may have entailed. Imagine that!

Last and not least, they cherished a great hope and inward zeal of laying good foundations, or at least of making some way towards it, for the propagation and advance of the gospel of the kingdom of Christ in the remote parts of the world, even though they should be but stepping stones to others in the performance of so great a work.

Oh, dear! Here’s a thought sure to send your liberal leftist friend into apoplectic shock! A clear religious intent in the founding of our country! And not just any religion either. Now, my experience with Christianity is that it generally wants to convert the lost by persuasion, not execute them. The only imperialist invasion here is that of the kingdom of Christ and even Charles Darwin was impressed enough to note in his Voyage of the H.M.S. Beagle the positive effect of Christian missionaries on the lives of those they evangelized. (Not that an evolutionist or leftist will acknowledge such, or is even aware of such.)

One such post I repost in full below despite its length because it so clearly articulates the hidden drivers of current MSM and Administration responses to this most recent terrorist attack on U.S. soil. Again, I apologize for the length, but I believe it will amply reward the effort to read through the whole thing. (Please recognize that some of the statements reflect the milieu of June 2007. I have not updated any such references.)

_____

The Nature of the Conflict: Liberalism versus Islamism

Posted 6/28/2007

I don’t know if I should be disappointed or relieved. Having somewhat addressed the internal conflict we face in this country relative to our leftist Marxist comrades in previous posts, (e.g., here and here) including the finale of my Amusing Ourselves to Death series, I’ve been collecting information specific to the external (and sometimes internal) conflict we currently face with the Islamofascists to present a more detailed analysis thereof. And then I find that, not one but two people have written up concisely what I’ve found and essentially what I wanted to say!

The first writer, Melanie Phillips, hails from Britain, a country considerably further along in its capitulation to Islamofascism, and she is the author of Londonistan, so there is probably a reason for her to having beat me to the punch. Her posted essay so clearly states what should be obvious that it is worthy of a full verbatim re-posting here, which can be found below with [my humble comments] to place emphases and [my own thoughts] alongside Ms. Phillips. Hopefully this synthesis will prove enlightening to whatever readers stop by. The original can be found here. (Again, remember that the author is British; thus some of the spellings below are the English version of the words, not the American.) There are no emphases (bold) in the text of original; all such emphases are added by yours truly.

Liberalism versus Islamism

Posted By Melanie Phillips On May 18, 2007

Presentation at Neo conference, Stockholm, Sweden, 11 May 2007

First of all, let me define my terms and say what I mean by Islamism and liberalism. Islamism is the politicised version of Islam which mandates jihad, or holy war against the infidel and conquest of the non-Islamic world for Islam. I’m well aware of the argument that there’s no difference between Islamism and Islam: that’s a theological argument for others to have.

[My second author will have more to say regarding this argument, and as a Persian himself, probably has a better perspective. See upcoming post.]

By liberalism I mean the commitment to a free society, founded above all on the separation of secular government from religious worship — from which follow the concepts of equal respect for all people, freedom of conscience, tolerance and the rule of law.

[I think this must be what Dennis Prager means when he says he is a liberal. In the odd twisting of our language, this actually now describes a more conservative position that what we usually consider the liberalism currently in vogue, which is permeated by leftist Marxism.]

These two concepts, Islamism and liberalism, are currently engaged in a fight to the death. My argument is that liberalism is in danger of losing this fight because it has so badly undermined itself and departed from its own core concepts that it is now paralysed by moral and intellectual muddle.

[A significant portion of the undermining has been at the hands of the Marxist-Leninist with the specific goal of the overthrow of capitalistic societies in favor of communism. It has not happened in a vacuum. Liberalism as defined here has been thrown over the cliff, as it were, by a determined enemy long before the Islamists appeared on the recent scene as a substantial threat.]

Liberalism is the creed of modernity. The driving force behind the Islamic jihad is the fight against liberalism and modernity. All the iconic conflicts — Iraq, Israel, Kashmir, Chechnya, Sudan —are secondary to the fundamental aim of the jihad to prevent liberalism and modernity from destroying Islam.

The founding ideologue of modern Islamism, Syed Qutb, made clear in his writings that at the core of the salafi interpretation of Islam was opposition to the separation of religion and temporal power that resulted in liberalism and democracy. His governing impulse was the fear that the instinct for liberty was so powerful it would spread to and infiltrate the Muslim mind unless it was checked by the most repressive possible form of Islam.

[Here is a critical point that so often is ignored by the left and right together: the Islam to which we are opposed, that is at war with us, is not a religion as we normally understand religion. Again, the second author to which I will point on this topic will have much more to say on this. But we must come to realize the truth that Islam goes far beyond the private and corporate worship of Allah in peaceful coexistence with other religions.]

The Big and Little Satans themselves, America and Israel, are proxies for liberalism and modernity. That’s why Islamism says they must be destroyed. Qutb famously went to America and concluded from seeing men and women dancing at a church hop that America was one giant brothel. And much of the bitter hostility to the Jews who started returning to Palestine in the 1920s was because the women wore shorts and were sexually free.

[As a Christian, I, too, lament the moral laxity of our permissive, lawless culture. It’s getting so you can hardly drive down the road without a sexually explicit billboard assaulting your eyeballs. But I don’t go around chopping off people’s heads in response.]

The Islamist goal is to destroy the virus of freedom and modernity before it infects the Islamic world, and to replace it with Islam. That is the core of the profound threat it poses to the west, a threat mounted through the pincer movement of both terrorism and cultural takeover.

This cultural takeover, or the aim to Islamise the west, was explicitly laid out in a programme of subversion for Europe by the Wahabbi Muslim Brotherhood almost 30 years ago. In 1978, the Organisation of the Islamic Conference sponsored a seminar in London which said Muslim communities in western countries must establish autonomous institutions with help from Muslim states, and lobby the host country to grant Muslims recognition as a separate religious community as a step towards eventual political domination.

In Britain in 1980, a book called ‘The Islamic Movement in the West’ by Khuram Murad advocated an ‘organised struggle to change the existing society into an Islamic society…and make Islam…supreme and dominant especially in the socio-political spheres…’ A Muslim Brotherhood document seized in Switzerland in 2001, known as ‘The Project’, outlined a twelve-point strategy to ‘establish an Islamic government on earth’. And the Brotherhood has now set up an intricate network of bodies across Europe to put all this into action.

[They keep telling us exactly what they plan to do, what their goals are, and then act in accordance with those announcements, yet our leadership continues to ignore them. Very reminiscent of how we used to ignore the Soviet threat despite that fact that their leaders told us bluntly that they were going to buy from us the rope they would use to hang us. This is a case where those who refuse to hear and heed history are not just doomed to repeat it, but are doomed, period.]

Many Muslims in Britain and around the world are deeply opposed to this; indeed Muslims are the most numerous victims of the jihad. That’s why I use the term Islamism, to distinguish those who believe in Islamic conquest from those who merely draw upon Islam for spiritual sustenance.

But at the same time, it is false to deny that Islamism is the dominant force in the Muslim and Arab world, false to deny that it is radicalising millions of Muslims in the west, and false to deny the huge inroads it has made into western society through this pincer movement of terrorism and cultural pressure.

[See upcoming post, the second author to whom I keep referring, regarding this issue of the existence of the "moderate" Muslim. One can also question the implication that the Muslim victims of the jihad are victims because they opposed the jihad.]

But many in the west do deny it. They ignore the clear evidence of the goal of Islamising the west. They choose to believe instead that the reason for Islamist terror lies in the wrongs the west has done to the Islamic world —Iraq or Palestine, discrimination or Islamophobia. Indeed, even to speak in this way is to invite the deadly label of Islamophobia — a term invented to shut down legitimate and vital debate about Islamism. Far from defending core liberal values that are thus singled out for destruction, such people thus side with or appease those who attack them. So Europe — bastion of free speech — attacked those newspapers which published and re-published the Mohammed cartoons. And liberals committed to human rights march on the streets of London, behind banners saying Free Iraq and Free Palestine, shoulder to shoulder with Islamists who believe in death to gays.

[Note the strategy used here: seeking to control the language of the discussion to effectively shut down the discussion altogether by intimidation. We must recognize the strategy and counter it by not allowing them to control the language.]

Why is a liberal society so reluctant to defend its own most cherished values of freedom and tolerance? The answer, I suggest, lies both in the intrinsic nature of liberalism — and also in what I would call our dominant culture of corrupted liberalism, in which true liberal values have actually been turned on their heads.

Corruption of liberal values

Our corrupted liberal culture has torn up the key precepts of liberalism so that it no longer knows what they are, let alone stands ready to defend them to the death.

Authentic liberalism was a doctrine of social progress based on maximising the good in people’s behaviour and minimising the bad. It thus depended upon making moral distinctions between good and bad.

[Critical point here: multiculturalism denies the ability to make such moral distinctions, and so becomes a suicide bomber of its own culture. See below as Ms. Phillips continues her analysis.]

But these distinctions have been destroyed by a combination of hyper-individualism —which grew out of liberalism — and a form of cultural Marxism whose agenda is to destroy liberal values. Between them, these trends tore up the concepts of objectivity, authority and the Judeo-Christian moral codes underpinning western values and substituted emotion, subjectivity, and moral and cultural relativism.

[The Marxist threat is one we’ve discussed here already at some length. Please note this corroboration that I’m not nuts to do so. Others recognize it too. Notice, too, the transition to the emotional, to subjectivity. Those who have gone through my series on Postman’s work should recognize the root causes behind this transition.]

All lifestyles were now deemed to have equal status. Social or moral norms were intolerable because by definition they excluded by those who lay outside them. So normative values were replaced by those of groups hitherto deemed to lie outside them. Such self-designated ‘victim’ groups became unchallengeable: they could now do no wrong, while the dominant culture could do no right. And ‘universal’ human rights law became the judicial weapon for minorities to overturn the values of the dominant culture.

[The paralysis that results from this culture of victimhood results in perpetual victimhood, and gives power to those who allege to be seeking to overcome their victimizers. But success is never allowed, because then the power would transfer to the victorious "victims" who would no longer need their champions. Sound familiar?]

Under the banner of liberal values, this actually destroyed the core precept of liberalism — the distinction between right and wrong, good and bad, truth and lies. Instead, feelings and emotion became most important. The particulars of a culture were deemed hurtful and thus illegitimate because by definition they divided one culture from another. The nation, rooted as it is in the particulars of history, religion, law, language and tradition, became seen as the cause of all the ills of the world from prejudice to war. And the culture of a nation had to be replaced by multiculturalism.

Multiculturalism

Many people think multiculturalism just means showing respect and tolerance to other cultures and faiths. If that were so, it should be unarguable. We should all support respect and tolerance. But that’s not what multiculturalism is at all. It holds that all minority values must have equal status to those of the majority. Any attempt to uphold majority values over minorities is a form of prejudice. That turns minorities into a cultural battering ram to destroy the very idea of being a majority culture at all. And so, since no culture can assert itself over any other, liberalism cannot assert itself as a dominant cultural force. Instead society must fragment into a kaleidoscope of equal — and opposing —values, and liberal values must give way to their opposite.

[This essay on the true meaning of tolerance is particularly vital to understand where the fallacy lies relative to that word. Here again is an example of the power of language being altered to fit the reality desired, and thus make language itself a tool wielded as a weapon. True tolerance respects people, but can make value judgments and distinctions about the ideas they hold. The current view of tolerance flips that on its head: the ideas must be respected and not the people who hold them. Thus, those with opposing ideas may be attacked by any means possible, ad hominem being a prominent one where the rule of law still holds, while murder and destruction reign in many lands where Muslims rule.]

That is what happened over the Mohammed cartoons. Freedom of expression is a key liberal precept. But under multiculturalism, that cannot trump a minority faith which holds that to publish these images is to give offence. So the minority wins over the liberal majority value, and Europeans decry not the violence and intimidation, the kidnappings, riots and murder which followed the publication of the cartoons but the offence to minority religious feelings that was given in publishing them.

Multiculturalism has produced furthermore two particularly lethal effects. First, it has left all immigrants abandoned, and none more lethally so than young Muslims. For if there is no longer an overarching culture, there is nothing into which minorities can integrate. Many young Muslims in Britain, stranded between the backward Asian village culture of their parents and the drug, alcohol and sex-saturated decadence that passes for western civilisation, are filled with disgust and self-disgust. They are then given, in our multicultural schools and wider culture, absolutely nothing to educate them about or fill them with respect and affection for the western society of which they are citizens.

Indeed, worse than that our schools fail to teach them historical truths. If they were taught the truth about, say, the crusades, slavery or the history of Israel and the Arabs — truths they will never have heard —this might make a huge difference to their attitudes. Instead, their heads are filled with distorted anti-western and anti-British propaganda which only reinforces the lies they are told in the Arab and Muslim world, deepens their feelings of grievance and resentment towards the west and further inflames their hatred of Americans and Jews. They are thus intensely vulnerable to the predatory jihadis recruiting in youth clubs, in prisons and on campus, who promise them self-respect and a purpose to life based on holy war.

[A catch-22 for the Leftists in control of education. Their goals require anti-western propaganda be the primary pablum doled out in their classrooms, yet it is this which aids and abets the enemy that would remove their heads from their shoulders just as fast as from the shoulders of those on the right.]

Second, and worse still, multiculturalism has reversed the notions of truth and lies, victim and victimiser. Since minorities can do no wrong, they cannot be held responsible for acts such as suicide bombings which must instead be the fault of their victims. This key confusion, which has caused intellectual and moral paralysis in the west, plays directly into the pathological Muslim victim culture which makes dialogue impossible. Because so many Muslims genuinely believe they are under attack by the west, which is a giant conspiracy to destroy Islam. So they perceive their own aggression as legitimate self-defence, and the west’s defence as aggression.

[Here again we see that multiculturalism is a pathology that is unhealthy to the extreme, leading to confusion of thought, if, indeed, any thought is allowed. It is particularly important what is taught in the schools, and here in America, the schools are failing on so many levels. In part, this is why homeschooling and private schooling have become such a viable option for so many.]

This fundamental untruth has created a dialogue of the demented. Because instead of treating it as the mad discourse that it is and refusing to play along with it, Britain regards it as an extension of its own multicultural, minority rights doctrine which routinely reverses victim and aggressor. So the untruths driving the terror are merely deepened – particularly since the left, which controls British and European culture, demonises America and Israel. So the central Islamist perception of the Big and Little Satan, America and Israel, is echoed in mainstream British discourse where anti-Americanism is rampant and Israel is well on the way to being delegitimised altogether. This acts as an echo chamber for Muslim prejudice, reinforcing it and fuelling the sense of paranoia and victimisation. And it has also released the virus of Judeophobia, with claims of a world Jewish conspiracy that are a re-run of the medieval blood libels leading to rising numbers of physical attacks on Jews.

Our debased liberalism thus negates the power of reason, the key characteristic of liberal thinking, promotes murderous prejudice and weakens the west in its defence against Islamism by paving the way for its distortions and twisted thinking to take even deeper root.

[A dialogue of the demented indeed! In other words, we have a virus replicating among us with the ultimate goal of our destruction, but we are told it’s really not the problem, you are the problem. After all, if you weren’t alive, the virus would have no place to replicate!]

What are the limits of tolerance?

People say, however, that the only alternative to multiculturalism is intolerance of minority faiths and cultures. This is completely wrong. It is a false antithesis; and it betrays a profound confusion between multiculturalism, which is fundamentally illiberal, and pluralism, which is the essence of a liberal society. Pluralism allows for many different groupings but, unlike multiculturalism, does not try to impose one uniform status on all of them. It allows a thousand flowers to bloom, with minorities forming communities of faith, ethnicity or culture within a society — but under the overarching umbrella of a national identity to whose core values everyone signs up. It is only by having that overarching set of common values — monogamy, freedom of conscience, equal rights for women, freedom of expression —that a society coheres as a common project. And a liberal society is no exception. If a liberal society doesn’t accept a hierarchy of values, that there are core principles which are non-negotiable and to which everyone must sign up, then by definition it can no longer remain a liberal society but must fragment into a kind of Balkanised tribalism in which the strongest groups win through intimidation or force.

[This is an exquisite paragraph. I so wish I had written it. By recognizing the false logic (the fallacy of the excluded middle), Ms. Phillips is able to not just diagnose the problem but suggest a solution – a return to true pluralistic liberalism which is actually quite conservative.]

A liberal, tolerant society — which is what Britain once was — welcomes and respects minorities within the overarching framework of British values. These provide a set of cultural norms from which groupings can deviate in their own private space, provided they do not conflict with the core precepts of our society. This is the basis of tolerance — and it has a quid pro quo. Ever since the Enlightenment the deal has been that, while the state makes no demands upon minorities practising their faith and culture in the private sphere, minorities in turn make no demands that the state must either adopt their own practices or turn a blind eye where the conflict is fundamental. Minorities do their own thing, but where their values conflict with the bedrock values of majority culture – freedom of speech, monogamy, women’s rights – they must give way.

[Here is one of the key points: minorities do not trump the majority - period. Here is the foundation of true assimilation: an adoption of, or at least a compliance with, the values of the majority culture associated with the country into which you are assimilating. These values are usually expressed in the founding documents and subsequent laws of the land.]

Most minorities accept this. Many Muslims accept it, and manage to reconcile their faith with acknowledging that sharia law must give way to English law and values. But a third to a half of British Muslims want to live in Britain under sharia law, even though its precepts —such as polygamy, the subordination of women or the death penalty for apostates or gays —are totally inimical to western society. And multiculturalism gives them the muscle to insist that their practices must become mainstream.

[Most versus many. This is a telling contrast, for the many that do not accept this still present a significant threat to the country so invaded. It is a legitimate question to ask why such individuals who cannot accept the laws and values of the country into which they immigrate want to immigrate to that country in the first place. I do not use the term "invasion" lightly or mistakenly.

The last sentence is just one reason multiculturalism must be abandoned as a dead-end philosophy.]

This confusion over liberalism and its multicultural antithesis is paralysing our ability to defend our way of life — and also defend those Muslims who need our protection from the Islamist threat to their liberty. In Britain, it has surfaced in controversies over the veil. In one legal case, the courts ruled that a 16 year old pupil had a ‘human right’ to wear the full length jilbab to school, even though the head teacher had banned it on the basis that it would cause other girls at the school to be intimidated and coerced into wearing it and signing up to extremism. And indeed the pupil herself was clearly being manipulated by Islamist groups. This ruling was eventually overturned. More recently, a huge debate erupted over whether Muslim women should be entitled to wear the face-concealing niqab veil in public situations such as consulting a member of Parliament, appearing as a witness in court or teaching children in class. Many thought they should not, and were promptly denounced for religious intolerance.

It took Muslims themselves to point out to these muddled multiculturalists that wearing such veils was not a religious requirement at all but a wholly political act, designed to keep women servile, to intimidate the public and to recruit yet more to extremism.

[This last point regarding the veil is interesting.]

What should be done, and isn’t being done

In the fight to defend the west, true liberals should face down the mind-twisting manipulation and say this: that Muslims are welcome and deserve respect for their way of life, but on the same terms as everyone else. There can be no discrimination, after all, as even multiculturalists must agree. And these are the terms laid down for everyone since the Enlightenment: that minorities are welcome to form communities of faith or culture, but they must accept that where there is a conflict with the host culture, the minority gives way. If they do not accept this but insist that the host society must change to accommodate their values, then they are by definition not moderate but extremists; not citizens but colonisers; not Muslims seeking religious freedom but Islamists seeking to destroy freedom.

[Amen! Here is the catch-22 for the multiculturalist: how do you not discriminate against and consider equal a worldview that is discriminatory to the extreme, that would deny the validity of any other culture but their own, and do so with predatory zeal and suicidal militancy? How do you consider your equal someone who will cut off your head if you don’t agree 100% with them?]

And for Islamists there is no room in a liberal society. True liberals never thought they had a duty to accommodate fascism. True liberals always fought it. So must we do with religious fascism. Liberalism separates the religious from the secular; so we too must separate Muslim conscience, which we should respect, from Islamist conquest, which we must resist.

[Here is some needed clarity.]

In the fight for liberalism, we must not give an inch. We must defend our society in two ways, negative and positive. On the negative side, we must stop Islamists recruiting to extremism and terrorism in our countries. On the positive side, we must staunchly reassert our own values. But we are actually doing neither of these things.

[Well said, but, alas, poorly executed by those in power to do so.]

In Britain, despite some welcome success in stopping terror plots, we are doing virtually nothing to stop Islamists recruiting in the mosques, in prisons, in youth clubs and on campus. Last January, an undercover TV documentary revealed that certain prominent ‘moderate’ mosques were advocating the murder of homosexuals, the beating of women and hatred of Christians and Jews. Nothing is being done to address this.

Despite the Prime Minister’s promise to outlaw the radical group Hizb ut Tahrir (which believes that Britain should be an Islamic state), the Government refuses to do so. Yet this group is telling countless British Muslims that it’s their duty to wage holy war, and that Muslims have a duty ‘to be prepared to launch attacks on Britain from within’.

As for our values, far from reasserting them they are going down like ninepins. While our universities refuse to act against Islamists on campus on the grounds of freedom of expression, Leeds university cancelled a proposed lecture on the links between the Nazis and Islamic antisemitism after protests by two Muslim students. And after students at Cambridge university published a magazine satirising religion and which published one of the images from the Mohammed cartoons, they were disciplined by the university, threatened with prosecution by the police and forced to apologise to Muslims, Christians —and Jews, who hadn’t even been mentioned.

[The same is happening slowly here in America, and the leftists in control of our campuses are blithely unaware that their heads will be the next to roll should the Islamists come to true power. Their appeasement, though logically consistent with their worldview, is but danegeld...worthless to the extreme due to the disconnect between their worldview and reality.]

Above all, Britain must not allow the encroachment of sharia. Yet it is paving the way for sharia. There are now areas of the country under the informal parallel jurisdiction of sharia law. A blind eye has been turned to honour killings, forced marriage and polygamy – now polygamous men settling in Britain are even receiving welfare benefits for their multiple wives. We have sharia-compliant mortgages; our tax authorities are considering recognising polygamy for inheritance tax purposes; and the government is encouraging London to become the global hub of Islamic banking, despite the fact that such arrangements will force those who make use of them to conform to sharia law.

[God help us! (And I mean that sincerely, not vainly.)]

The problem is that we seem to suffer from the innate weakness of liberalism while failing to benefit from its strengths. Those strengths lie in its claim to universalism, its governing belief that liberty and equality are the inalienable rights of human beings everywhere. But we don’t uphold this because multiculturalism tells us it’s wrong to impose our standards on those who don’t share them.

[Thus we have a choice: either multiculturalism goes, or we do.]

At the same time, we have the innate weakness of liberalism in spades. We see everything through the prism of the profound liberal delusion that the world is governed by reason and that all people have goodwill. This means that liberals cannot grasp that some of the things that divide people are insuperable barriers and are not susceptible to reason. They cannot acknowledge the transcendent and irreducible nature of religious fanaticism. They think instead that everything is subject to negotiation and compromise. So their instinct is to reach out to Islamists to reason with them, to draw the poison of this extremism by giving it rewards and inducements that will play to the fanatic’s self-interest and turn him into a pillar of western society. That is why liberals do appeasement; and Britain, the cradle of liberalism, does it better than anyone else.

[Here is where mental disease comes into liberal thought. Reality seems to be something they cannot handle properly, and Ms. Phillips accurately nails the most relevant of the areas in which their delusions are going to kill us all.]

Liberals also think they are superior in intelligence to everyone else. So they don’t understand that the Islamists are actually playing them for suckers, exploiting the intrinsic weakness of a liberal society they correctly assess as decadent: no longer prepared to fight for its values because it no longer even knows what they are.

[This idea that the elite need to govern is prevalent on the left. But pride goeth before destruction, and a haughty spirit before a fall.]

What we are living through in the west is nothing short of a repudiation of the Enlightenment, a repudiation of reason; and its substitution by irrationality, obscurantism, bigotry and clerical totalitarianism — all facilitated by our so-called ‘liberal’ society, and all in the name of ‘human rights’. Western liberalism now embraces its Islamist mortal enemies and attacks its American and Israeli allies in the fight to defend civilisation.

[Right on target!]

We are giving the Islamists the message that we are theirs for the taking. This is how liberalism may disappear up its own backside.

The behavior, and the character as revealed by that behavior, of this alleged Senator from Illinois (my current residence; have pity on the land of Lincoln with idiots like this supposedly representing us) make it very difficult for me to accord this induhvidual with the respect to which his office is entitled, for both the aforementioned have been beneath contempt. His most recent assault upon reality is described below in his own website’s words:

Between October 28, 2009 and November 13, 2009 we asked Americans to rank their support for various forms of the "public option" currently under consideration by Congress for inclusion in the final health care reform bill. We've always known that a majority of Americans support the public option, and the 83,954 respondents who participated in our poll reflect the fact that Americans want the strongest possible public option that can pass the Congress:

• Four out of five survey respondents voiced full support for a "50 state public option."
• A majority of respondents voiced moderate to high support for a public option that includes a state "opt-out" provision.
• Roughly three out of four survey respondents voiced little or no support for a public option bill that requires states to "opt-in" before they can participate, and
• Only 12% of respondents voiced moderate to full support for a so-called "trigger," with 65% completely opposed to such a compromise.

I hope you will take a moment to review these results in greater depth below, as I share our findings with my colleagues in the Senate to encourage the inclusion of a robust public option in the final health care reform bill.

There is so much excrement in this alleged analysis that it is difficult to know where to begin, but let’s do as he suggests and look at this poll “in greater depth,” putting on our critical thinking caps and carefully examining this classic example of innumeracy running rampant.

First, he let’s the cat out of the bag, so to speak, when he proudly proclaims, “we’ve always known that a majority of Americans support the public option.” In other words, please ignore the hundreds of thousands of Tea Party protests throughout the nation. We have 84,000 respondents to our web poll that validate our preconceived idea of what you, the American people want, so don’t confuse me with facts.

Well if you already knew the answer, why did you create the poll?

Now 84,000 does sound like a large number, and I’m sure to someone of Senator Durbin’s stellar intellect this is very impressive indeed. However, that this represents the opinion of the entire nation (he speaks of “the majority of Americans”) is stretching it a little beyond the limits of credulity for those of us with functioning neurons between our ears. According to the official tally, at least for 2008, there are 7,203,827 registered voters in just Illinois alone (the number of living ones is open to question; Chicago is in Illinois after all). (For those of you public school edjumacated, and Senator Durbin, this is a number much larger than 84,000.) So it turns out that this 84,000 is actually only 1.2% of the registered voters in just one state. If one were to include all 50 states, the sample size dwindles to a small fraction of 1%, rendering any sweeping conclusions null and void.

In addition to sample size, there is the question of how representative the individual respondents are to the total population. Small sample sizes can only be valid to the extent that they encompass the entire range of variability within a population and in the same proportions. So, how many conservatives and moderates as opposed to liberals responded to the poll and are these proportions consistent with the population composition? This data was not collected and so any bias in the data is hidden. Given the groundswell evidenced in the Tea Party movement, it is highly unlikely that this sample is actually representative. In addition, this poll was not publicized, nor were responses solicited from the country as a whole, rendering any generalized conclusions so much vapor of an elevated temperature.

The Bushes entered and departed the sprawling military facility in secret, having told the base commander they did not want press coverage of their visit, a source told Fox News.

Former President George W. Bush and his wife Laura secretly visited Fort Hood last night and spent "considerable time" consoling those who were wounded in Thursday's shooting spree, Fox News has learned.

The Bushes entered and departed the sprawling military facility in secret, having told the base commander they did not want press coverage of their visit, a source told Fox News.

The couple was described as "deeply concerned" about military families on Fort Hood after Army Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan allegedly opened fire on soldiers and civilians, killing 13 and wounding 38.

The Bushes, who have a 1,600-acre property known as Prairie Chapel Ranch less than 30 miles from Fort Hood in central Texas, spent between one and two hours visiting the wounded and their families.

Where was the current Commander-in-Chief?  He loves to fly around so much, where was he?  And don't tell me he had more important things to do, like denying that Islamic ideology had anything to do with the shootings!

 

I reported on a similar incident during Bush's term here so that this is no isolated incident.  And note too the absence of media coverage at their express request.  Had The One chosen to go, you know how much media coverage there would have been.

 

Such uncaring and thoughtless hubris is an ugly thing to behold, especially in an alleged national leader.

 

 

Possibly first and foremost is the assumption of the ability to universally enforce a law prohibiting the carrying of guns. Yes, if only the police and military had guns, then homicide by gun would be eliminated – problem solved. Unfortunately, there is significant and undeniable truth in what only appears to be a trite saying that "if you outlaw guns, only outlaws will have guns." Unless you can guarantee swift and thorough disarmament of everyone, it is an ineffectual, unthinking and irresponsible assumption to believe you can outlaw guns. To belabor the obvious because it isn’t obvious to so many, criminals, BY DEFINITION, do NOT obey the law. Hello?! So if you have a law that says, "No, no, you naughty boy! Turn in that gun now!" who do you think is going to ignore it? That’s right, the very ones for which you created the law in the first place, the one’s you want to disarm, because they don’t obey the law by definition.

In his recent column, Mark Alexander notes Jefferson quoting Cesare Beccaria’s On Crimes and Punishment, to the same point:

"Laws that forbid the carrying of arms...disarm only those who are neither inclined nor determined to commit crimes.... Such laws make things worse for the assaulted and better for the assailants; they serve rather to encourage than to prevent homicides, for an unarmed man may be attacked with greater confidence than an armed man."

This brings me to the critical question one needs to ask those advocating legislative gun control: Just how would rendering me defenseless protect you from violent criminals? (HT: Rounds Out!) This can probably be phrased a number of ways, but this is the quintessential question.

This question encompasses the second assumption made by gun control advocates, that we, the average, law-abiding citizens, are simply too incompetent, stupid, and untrainable to be able to use firearms intelligently and with discretion (of course, this begs the question, from where do the candidates for the police and military come if not from this same population of supposed simpletons, and why are they trainable and we are not?). Rather than promoting gun control, perhaps we should be promoting training in the proper care and use of guns? Let’s deputize the nation rather than criminalizing the nation! (To be clear, I am not advocating putting guns into the hands of children, or those too handicapped to use them, or convicted criminals. It is not an all or none proposition. And for a very interesting discussion in this regard on the meaning of the 2^nd and 3^rd amendments, I will refer you here.)

Lastly, the aforementioned question also embraces the most far reaching assumption made by gun control advocates, that true evil embodied in the violent criminal element does not really exist and thus does not need to be addressed by the average citizen. This inability to comprehend the presence of evil in the world leads to such disastrous legislation as that which disarmed the Virginia Tech campus and made it a prime target for Cho who apparently wanted to go out in "a blaze of glory."

Just how ineffectual, unthinking and irresponsible are gun control advocates in their pursuit of a gunless nirvana? Do we have objective evidence to support the effectiveness of gun control laws? Mr. Steely over at Rounds Out! brings to our attention the alleged success of the British gun ban which their MSM boasts as working. Yet the actual data show that here again we have a nice theory (really, a presumption) shot down [oh, pun accidental but appropriate!] by an ugly gang of facts.

"The number of crimes in which a handgun was used in England and Wales has risen from 299 in 1995 to 1,024 last year (2006). Offenses committed with all types of firearms, including air guns, have also increased."

Do the math: an increase of 725 gun crimes in 11 years = a 242% increase. Their gun control, despite what the MSM tells you, is ineffectual, unthinking, irresponsible by definition. Fecklessness on a rampage.

Going back to Mark Alexander’s essay, the faulty logic of gun control advocates is amply demonstrated by attempting to apply the same illogic to similar problems. If mass murder is a "gun problem" then we may similarly conclude that "cigarette lighters cause cancer, sex causes abortion, steering wheels cause car accidents, toxic-warning labels cause poisonings, ladders cause falls and bottles cause deaths associated with alcohol abuse."

What is the real problem? Mr. Alexander notes the explanation of Cato Institute Senior Fellow Robert Levy:

"Many politicians have exploited a few recent tragedies to promote their anti-gun agenda. But gun controls haven’t worked and more controls won’t help. In fact, many of the recommended regulations will make matters worse by stripping law-abiding citizens of their most effective means of self-defense. Violence in America is due not to the availability of guns but to social pathologies – illegitimacy, dysfunctional schools and drug and alcohol abuse. Historically, more gun laws have gone hand in hand with an explosion of violent crime."

The fact of the matter is that gun control laws have not worked to halt gun related crimes. They certainly didn’t stop Cho.

Mark Steyn’s inimitable analysis in Let’s be realistic about reality points to the fundamental issue at stake and identifies why I called this a particularly virulent form of fecklessness (emphases added):

"The ‘gun-free zone’ fraud isn’t just about banning firearms or even a symptom of academia’s distaste for an entire sensibility of which the Second Amendment is part and parcel but part of a deeper reluctance of critical segments of our culture to engage with reality. Michelle Malkin wrote a column a few days ago connecting the prohibition against physical self-defense with ‘the erosion of intellectual self-defense,’ and the retreat of college campuses into a smothering security blanket of speech codes and ‘safe spaces’ that’s the very opposite of the principles of honest enquiry and vigorous debate on which university life was founded. And so we ‘fear guns,’ and ‘verbal violence,’ and excessively realistic swashbuckling in the varsity production of ‘The Three Musketeers.’ What kind of functioning society can emerge from such a cocoon?"

The reality with which such a cocoon is refusing to engage is the reality of Evil in the world, and I mean that with the capital "E." As we have had repeatedly demonstrated for us, there are those who would go so far as to kill you if you stand in the way of their goals, and indeed, there are those that will do so no matter how good and kind and pleasant and appeasing you are, just for the sheer pleasure of killing you. We may, and indeed, should, recoil in horror at the existence of such sentiments, and fortunately, such individuals are in the great minority. But to deny their existence is a denial of reality that is tantamount to suicide.

So I conclude with this question, again, the quintessential question:

If you're a fan of sci-fi, ABC's "V," which premiered Tuesday, may be right up your alley. And if you have a nose for insightful political commentary conveyed through art, ABC's "V" may be even farther up your alley. The setting is all too familiar: A time of political turmoil during which a charismatic, inspiring new leader arrives seemingly out of the blue. The message of hope and reconciliation is simple and it catches on, particularly with an adoring media. The newcomer promises to deliver wonderful things like universal health care but acknowledges, "Embracing change is never easy." Some skeptics don't buy the hype, however, and they begin to question the leader's origins and intentions, despite being attacked by a sycophantic media. "We're all so quick to jump on the bandwagon," says one of the skeptics, a priest, in a sermon. "A ride on the bandwagon, it sounds like fun. But before we get on, let us at least make sure it is sturdy."

Yet that's where the ugly similarities with real life end -- at least we think so. The "visitors" (called "V's") are actually alien space lizards in human disguise, and they're here to eat the humans and take over the world.

It's remarkable that Hollywood could produce something as politically pointed and accurate as "V" appears to be. Indeed, the whole lizard thing makes us want to keep an even closer eye on Rahm Emanuel.

For those who remember, the show currently being broadcast is a remake of both a miniseries and a later TV series from the 1980's.  Hmmm...history repeates itself???  Prophetic?

 

(a) informed;

(b) up to date;

(c) watching.

One of the few advantages to the country in having Congress overwhelmingly in the hands of one party is that the lack of need to compromise lets the leaders of that party reveal themselves for what they are-- in this case, people with unbounded arrogance and utter contempt for the right of ordinary people to live their lives as they see fit, much less the right to know as citizens what laws are going to be passed by their government. The question is whether voters will remember on election day in 2010.

A Side Note on the Administration’s Defense of the Stimulus. The President and his economic team have claimed that the plan is working as intended, that they’re on track to save the original goal of 3.6 million jobs, but somehow, despite practically drowning in success, we’re going to have to live with high unemployment for years to come. Oh, and that everything is still Bush’s fault.

These claims have been debunked by a variety of sources, including the AP (and here), the Chicago Tribune, the Denver Post, USA Today, the Wall Street Journal, and blogs such as Political Math (H/T d3ft punk).

But forget the quantitative treatment for a moment and consider what the Obama team’s graph said on a qualitative level. The graph says that within a couple of quarters, the stimulus package will stop the increase in unemployment and reverse the employment trend. That was the real mission of the stimulus. Stop job loss. Get the private sector hiring again.

So no matter how convoluted and fanciful the “jobs created or saved” numbers get, we just have to remember what the point used to be, and realize how far short we’ve fallen. And whose fault that really is.

Among the most pathetic letters and e-mails I receive are those from people who ask why I don't write more "positively" about Obama or "give him the benefit of the doubt." No one-- not even the President of the United States-- has an entitlement to a "positive" response to his actions.  The entitlement mentality has eroded the once common belief that you earned things, including respect, instead of being given them.  As for the benefit of the doubt, no one-- especially not the President of the United States-- is entitled to that, when his actions can jeopardize the rights of 300 million Americans domestically and the security of the nation in an international jungle, where nuclear weapons may soon be in the hands of people with suicidal fanaticism.  Will it take a mushroom cloud over an American city to make that clear? Was 9/11 not enough?