Tag: Clash of Civilizations

A succinct argument

A debate on free speech in Denmark ends abruptly:

One dead in shooting at a Copenhagen cultural centre, where a meeting about freedom of speech was being held – organised by a Swedish artist who had caricatured the Prophet Muhammad. Police hunt for lone Danish-speaking gunman behind attack.

• 40-yr-old Danish man killed in shooting at cultural centre
• Three policemen reported injured
• Police hunt for lone Danish-speaking gunman
• Danish PM says attack was terrorism
• French ambassador to Denmark inside but unharmed
• Meeting about freedom of speech was being held at the time
• Gathering organised by controversial Swedish artist Lars Vilks
• Lars Vilks caricatured Prophet Muhammad in 2007

Well, I guess that is one way to reach consensus.

UPDATE: A man, aged 40, has died after masked gunmen opened fire on the
Krudttoenden cafe in Copenhagen during a meeting
entitled Art, Blasphemy and Freedom of Speech. Two people were taken
away on stretchers after the attack after the cafe
was sprayed with 200 bullets. The French ambassador, who was present at
the debate on free speech, has said it was an attempt at a Charlie
Hebdo-style attack in the Danish capital.

200 shots and one kill? It certainly sounds like jihad. By way of comparison, Anders Breivik required 121 shots to kill 77.

Anti-theist murders Muslims

Isn’t it amazing how often the actual news is contra the atheist narrative? Consider this comment from Brett when the news first broke of the shootings in North Carolina:

“white terrosrist Christian executes three Muslim students in cold blood. I cant help but think he was a fan of voxday…”

Now, Mr. Hicks may be a fan, but it seems unlikely:

A suspected radical atheist is in police custody after allegedly murdering three young Muslims in the North Carolina college town of Chapel Hill, media reports indicate. According to the British newspaper the Independent, the three Muslims, who were all from the same family, were in their home when a 46-year-old man identified by police as Craig Stephen Hicks gunned them down.

That being said, it will not be terribly surprising if Christians in the West are eventually observed killing Muslims. There certainly hasn’t been any shortage of Muslims killing Westerners, both Christian and non-Christian, to say nothing of the Muslim slaughter of Christians in Africa and the Middle East.

Perhaps it was just a parking dispute. Or perhaps it is another step towards the Clash of Civilizations war that so many experts have been expecting for decades.

UPDATE: Apparently Mr. Hicks was not merely an atheist, but an aggressive anti-theist. “Included in his many Facebook ‘likes’ are the Huffington Post, Rachel
Maddow, the Southern Poverty Law Center, Freedom from Religion
Foundation, Bill Nye ‘The Science Guy,’ Neil deGrasse Tyson, Gay
Marriage groups, and a host of anti-conservative/Tea Party pages.”

Unready for 4GW

No one serious believed that Obama was even remotely capable of handling foreign policy, but most erroneously assumed that he was smart enough to hand off responsibility for it to foreign policy veterans. That has not turned out to be the case, as Jerry Pournelle notes Peggy Noonan’s recent column in the Wall Street Journal:

No one thinks this administration is the A Team when it comes to foreign affairs, but this is unprecedented push-back from top military and intelligence players. They are fed up, they’re less afraid, they’re retired, and they’re speaking out. We are going to be seeing more of this kind of criticism, not less.

On Thursday came the testimony of three former secretaries of state, Henry Kissinger (1973-77), George Shultz (1982-89) and Madeleine Albrigh t (1997-2001). Senators asked them to think aloud about what America’s national-security strategy should be, what approaches are appropriate to the moment. It was good to hear serious, not-green, not-merely-political people give a sense of the big picture. Their comments formed a kind of bookend to the generals’ criticisms.

They seemed to be in agreement on these points:

  • We are living through a moment of monumental world change.
  • Old orders are collapsing while any new stability has yet to emerge.
  • When you’re in uncharted waters your boat must be strong.
  • If America attempts to disengage from this dangerous world it will only make all the turmoil worse.

Mr. Kissinger observed that in the Mideast, multiple upheavals are unfolding simultaneously—within states, between states, between ethnic and religious groups. Conflicts often merge and produce such a phenomenon as the Islamic State, which in the name of the caliphate is creating a power base to undo all existing patterns.

Mr. Shultz said we are seeing an attack on the state system and the rise of a “different view of how the world should work.” What’s concerning is “the scope of it.”

Correct diagnosis, wrong prescription. Observe that these foreign policy experts are more than a decade behind William Lind, who described these extra-state upheavals in both ON WAR and FOUR GENERATIONS OF MODERN WAR.

And Lind is also correct to assert that America MUST disengage from “this dangerous world”, as the very danger is primarily the result of disastrous Anglo-American meddling in the Middle East. Islam is what it is, but it would not not be resurgent and aggressively expansionary if the British, followed by the Americans, had not made it possible through their insanely inept Middle East policies.

The West needs to adopt a siege mentality, expel the non-Westerners, and let the fire burn itself out. Continued engagement only guarantees that it will be necessary to fight an indefinite number of fires within the West itself.

Next year in New York

A Dutchman believes he has the key to world peace:

A Dutch former cabinet minister reportedly said that world peace would be achievable if Israel’s population was forced to move to the United States. The statement was attributed to Herman Heinsbroek, who served as the Netherlands’ minister of economic affairs in 2002, in an article that appeared Thursday in the online edition of the prestigious financial monthly Quote, based on an interview with Heinsbroek.

“It was a historical error to give the Jews their own country in the middle of Islam,” he is quoted as saying. “You’ve had nothing but war ever since and you’ve had anti-Semitism resurging, too. My idea: Give the Jews their own state somewhere in the United States and 25 years to move their state over there.”

Heinsbroek is also quoted as saying that, if implemented, his solution “will finally create, perhaps, peace in the world.”

Well, it has to be admitted that half the world’s Jews do appear to prefer the East Coast of the USA to Israel anyhow. And it’s mildly amusing to anticipate the outrage this will likely inspire among the very people who are also outraged by the notion that Jews should move to Israel.

Actually, I think it would be a cataclysmic mistake for the West to pull the Jews out of Israel, even assuming that a nuclear power would be entirely amenable to the geographic relocation. If nothing else, Israel is a second front (or to be more accurate, fourth front), in the ongoing Clash of Civilizations between Islam and the West. Does Heinsbroek imagine that Islam will stop aggressively expanding into Europe, Asia, and North America simply because it is no longer distracted by a small piece of real estate in the Middle East? That’s absurd.

Even if you are a confirmed anti-semite, you cannot rationally deny that the continued existence of the State of Israel is absolutely in the interests of the West. That doesn’t mean that Israel’s interests are US interests, much less Dutch interests, but its existence is.

ADDENDUM: With the King of Saudi Arabia now reported dead at the age of 90, I tend to doubt that the Wahhabists are going to become more moderate or that tensions in the Middle East are going to cool significantly any time in the near future.

Today Yemen, tomorrow the West

I have no doubt that the governments of Egypt, Iraq, and Yemen didn’t think it was likely that jihadists would manage to topple them either:

Shiite insurgents tightened their grip on Yemen’s capital Wednesday, seizing control of a missile base and keeping the president as a virtual hostage in a showdown threatening a key American ally in the fight against al-Qaeda.

Days of fast-moving advances by the Houthi rebel faction — believed to be backed by Iran — has left the Western-backed government of President Abed Rabbo Mansour Hadi backed into a corner with rapidly diminishing options.

Just hours after storming the presidential palace on Tuesday, the Houthi leader gave what amounted to an ultimatum: Hadi can either move ahead with reforms that include giving rebels more power or risk intensified attacks that could topple his government.

The brinksmanship and uncertainly has pushed Yemen closer to a full-scale political breakdown that could resonate deeply in Washington and among its key regional allies, including neighboring Saudi Arabia.

Fortunately, we’ve been assured that Islam is a religion of peace and jihad is a personal, spiritual struggle, so there is no chance that a second Islamic State will aggressively seek to foment jihad in its neighbors. And even if it did seek to so, what could be more stable than a neighboring monarchy ruled by a 91 year-old man?

It’s an Arab Spring in the making, it’s just not a secular Arab Spring.

War is coming

Whether the West is ready or not. As with the National Socialists, the frightened appeasers of the West are unwilling to listen to what their self-proclaimed enemies are saying:

Jurgen Todenhofer, the first Western reporter to embed with Islamic State fighters and not be killed in the process, spoke to Al Jazeera about his time with the terror group. Todenhofer lived side by side with the jihadist fighters for ten days in the Islamic State-stronghold city of Mosul, Iraq. He was accompanied only by his son, who served as his cameraman.

“I always asked them about the value of mercy in Islam,” but “I didn’t see any mercy in their behavior,” explained Todenhofer. He added, “Something that I don’t understand at all is the enthusiasm in their plan of religious cleansing, planning to kill the non-believers… They also will kill Muslim democrats because they believe that non-ISIL-Muslims put the laws of human beings above the commandments of God.”

The German reporter then elaborated on how shocked he was about how “willing to kill” the ISIS fighters are. He said that they were ready to commit genocide. “They were talking about [killing] hundreds of millions. They were enthusiastic about it, and I just cannot understand that,” said Todenhofer.

At this point, the Western governments are more interested in suppressing the only forces that will save them, the Christians and the nationalists. But they will go, one way or another. Either they’ll be thrown out democratically by the pro-survival Western elements, or they’ll eventually find themselves in the position of the Yemeni Prime Minister.


Armed Houthi militia have encircled the Prime Minister’s residence in
Yemen just hours after gunmen opened fire on his convoy, according to a
government spokesman.

It’s a start

Interesting to see the New York Times run an opinion piece written by the leader of France’s Front National, Marine LePen:

These mistakes must also be called by their names. I will mention only three, but they are of crucial importance.

First, the dogma of the free movement of peoples and goods is so firmly entrenched among the leaders of the European Union that the very idea of border checks is deemed to be heretical. And yet, every year tons of weapons from the Balkans enter French territory unhindered and hundreds of jihadists move freely around Europe. Small surprise then that Amedy Coulibaly’s machine gun came through Belgium, as the Walloon media have reported, or that his partner Hayat Boumeddiene fled to Syria under the nose of law enforcement.

Second, the massive waves of immigration, both legal and clandestine, our country has experienced for decades have prevented the implementation of a proper assimilation policy. As Hugues Lagrange, a sociologist at the French National Center for Scientific Research (C.N.R.S.), has argued, culture has a major influence on the way immigrants relate to French society and its values, on issues such as the status of women and the separation of state and religious authority.

Without a policy restricting immigration, it becomes difficult, if not impossible, to fight against communalism and the rise of ways of life at odds with laïcité, France’s distinctive form of secularism, and other laws and values of the French Republic. An additional burden is mass unemployment, which is itself exacerbated by immigration.

Third, French foreign policy has wandered between Scylla and Charybdis in the last few years. Former President Nicolas Sarkozy’s intervention in Libya, President François Hollande’s support for some Syrian fundamentalists, alliances formed with rentier states that finance jihadist fighters, like Qatar and Saudi Arabia — all are mistakes that have plunged France into serious geopolitical incoherence from which it is struggling to extricate itself. Incidentally, Gerd Müller, Germany’s federal minister of economic cooperation and development, deserves praise for having the clear-sightedness, like the Front National, of accusing Qatar of supporting jihadists in Iraq.

It would appear that events in Paris have so frightened the editors of the New York Times that they’re actually willing to countenance the discussion of immigration and Islamization. What LePen is suggesting is far from sufficient, obviously, but it is a start.

However, the fact that both the French and German governments have banned anti-Mahometan marches this week tends to indicate that some sort of democratic upheaval will be required before any serious action is taken.

A Pink SF pet on the Oscars

Saladin Ahmed ‏@saladinahmed
Not a single one of the TWENTY actors/actresses nominated for Oscars in 2015 is a person of color. Not one. That’s called white supremacy.

Vox Day ‏@voxday
Actually, white supremacy is what prevents people like Saladin Ahmed from throwing gays off rooftops.

Mr. Ahmed, in case you were unaware, is Pink SF’s token Mahometan. He was an affirmative action nominee for the Hugo, Nebula, Crawford, Gemmell, and British Fantasy awards in 2013 for a mediocre debut novel called Throne of the Crescent Moon. It’s rather amusing to see him alternate SJW poses with statements like his post-Hebdo assault on free speech in the New York Times.

The question for writers and artists, then, is not whether we ought to limit ourselves, but how we already limit ourselves. In a field dominated by privileged voices, it’s not enough to say “Mock everyone!” In an unequal world, satire that mocks everyone equally ends up serving the powerful. And in the context of brutal inequality, it is worth at least asking what preexisting injuries we are adding our insults to. The belief that satire is a courageous art beholden to no one is intoxicating. But satire might be better served by an honest reckoning of whose voices we hear and don’t hear, of who we mock and who we don’t, and why.

‘Twas also more than a little amusing to see how quick the pinkshirts were to rush in and assure Mr. Ahmed THEY STILL CONSIDER HIM TO BE ONE OF THEM. They’ve learned absolutely nothing from the Charlie Hebdo massacres. So I suspect it’s going to be even more amusing to watch as they gradually turn on him over the next decade.

D Franklin ‏@D_Libris
Or hollow laughter at the hypocritical, mendacious evil of VD, & hugs for Saladin who has to put up with that shit

Charlie Stross ‏@cstross
congratulations! You’ve drawn the ire of SF’s very worst self-defeating loser. You level up!

Haralambi Markov ‏@HaralambiMarkov
That’s not cute. That’s just insulting. Oh My Everything.

Sean ‏@Sea_Bunker
I musta missed the part where you (SA) are a violent homophobe. Vox, on the other hand…

Jim C. Hines ‏@jimchines
That … but … huh?

Always Randy ‏@RandyTheRandom
What is preventing me from throwing White Supremacist Assholes from rooftops, though?

Charlie Stross ‏@cstross
if I followed VD’s totalising logic, gay unitarians would be as dangerous to Jews as the Aryan Nations.

BenjanunSriduangkaew ‏@bees_ja
Holy shit. Sorry he’s using queer people to concern-troll you, wow.

Matt Forbeck ‏@mforbeck
Ah, what a jackass. I’d stay “stunning jackass” but we’ve come to expect it by now.

Bootleg Girl ‏@BootlegGirl
Seriously though I “love” how atheist libertarians who are massive bigots project their own desires onto Muslims

Jim C. Hines ‏@jimchines
VD stretching the truth? I am shocked. Shocked, I say!

Rae Carson ‏@raecarson 31m31 minutes ago
Ugh, Saladin, I’m so sorry you have to deal with shitbags like him.

Nightjar UrsulaV ‏@UrsulaV
Its’s like he’s got a bigot magnetic poetry kit and arranges these on his fridge.

Fledgist ‏@Fledgist
One should be measured by the enemies one attracts.

Charlie Stross ‏@cstross
Yes, but going by VD is like measuring yourself against the stench of the dog turd you just stepped in.

One subtle irony that will probably escape the average reader is the way Benjanun Sriduangkaew is attempting to worm her way back into the warren here. She was quasi-excommunicated from the Pink SF community two months ago when her alternate identity was exposed as being the notorious Requires Only That You Hate.

UPDATE: See, the pinkshirts are really all about the tolerance. And free speech.

Really Tired Wanker ‏@benfromcanada
@saladinahmed god damn these people

Underlining their case

We don’t appear to be dealing with strategic masterminds here:

Foreign intelligence agencies have intercepted discussions by Islamist militants about possible attacks on weekly marches organised by Germany’s new anti-Islamic movement, a news weekly reported on Friday, without citing its sources.

Der Spiegel magazine said that foreign intelligence services had picked up the content of communications by some “known international jihadists”, without giving specific details.

The intelligence, which was passed to German authorities, indicated they had discussed possible attacks on the rallies organised by the so-called group, “Patriotic Europeans Against the Islamisation of the Occident” (Pegida), the magazine said in a pre-released story to appear in this weekend’s edition.

I can’t think of a better way for Muslims to transform the anti-Islamic marchers into anti-Islamic soldiers. Then again, I wouldn’t put it past the European authorities to try to scare the growing pro-Pegida forces into staying home.

And nothing fails like past success. Since intimidation has succeeded so brilliantly for so long in Europe, it may be that this is a case of jihadists with a hammer seeing a nail. Meanwhile the French authorities are already demonstrating that they, at least, are not Charlie:

Justice Minister Christiane Taubira said yesterday the French government was going to tighten laws against racism and anti-Semitism.

It astonishes me how abysmally stupid these people are. Do they really believe placing the cause of free speech in ideological alignment with the most virulent racists and Jew-haters is going to change the way anyone thinks or feels? Especially in light of assertions such as these:

“To laugh at the Prophet… is something very different from “free speech”
as usually understood. It is a violent act.” – Abdal Hakim Murad, the Telegraph

Lind > Mitchell + Douhet

William S. Lind was right. Again.

ISIS has almost doubled the land it controls in Syria since the US-led coalition began airstrikes against the extremist group in the summer, a new map has revealed. The extremist group has continued to expand its ‘caliphate’, despite more than 800 airstrikes hitting targets in ISIS-controlled areas since last summer.

The map, created by the Coalition for a Democratic Syria (CDS), shows just how much land has fallen to ISIS – which now has a third of the country under its control. Before the summer, the militants controlled just half that.

Airpower is nothing more than a supporting arm. Sans nukes, it has never succeeded in accomplishing anything on its own. It’s interesting to see that even in combination with non-US ground forces in Iraq, all it has been able to do is prevent ISIS from expanding further.

Even those with zero interest in things military should keep this in mind, because what it means is that any politician threatening air strikes is essentially promising to do nothing. Note that immigrants, who are a form of boots on the ground, are far more dangerous than air strikes.