A correspondent recently complained about the tendency of generic conservatives to adopt "Islam oppresses women" as a major reason for opposing Muslim assertiveness and expansion. Doesn't that approach (he asked) play into a feminist analysis of society, and end by supporting feminist solutions generally? And as a factual matter, can it really be true that Muslim society is fundamentally a system whereby men oppress women? Doesn't it have other more basic problems, and wouldn't there be more give and take on that particular point?

I'm sympathetic with such concerns. The "Muslims oppress women" theme tends to merge opposition to violent jihad and the spread of Islam in the West into a general crusade for global liberation understood in a left/liberal sense. It easily turns into "religion oppresses women" and "tradition oppresses women" unless there's a focus on the specific nature of Islam, which there never is.

More basically, though, the Muslim treatment of women is their problem. Why should we get involved in their problems, when we've got our own and can't do much about theirs anyway? I'd prefer "Muslims engage in terrorism" and "Muslims are anti-Western" as themes, where "Western" refers to something more specific and complex than universal principles of freedom, equality, and scientific rationalism. I suppose "we don't want to be Muslim" should be part of the mix, and the position of women is part of that, but it's not as if relations between the sexes are in great shape in the West, so it's odd to put it first and foremost.

We do need to know what we're dealing with, so we should discuss the merits. On that point I'd say women are unquestionably at a disadvantage in Islam. Men can have several wives, and they can divorce at will. So the bond between man and woman is weaker and less balanced, and there is less mutual trust and more use of force than in traditional Western society.

Principles like that have some effect on day-to-day life, and a big effect on the likelihood of the kind of extreme situation that makes the news. So there are a lot more honor killings and stonings for adultery in Muslim societies, just as there are more babies who get their skulls punctured and brains sucked out in liberal societies.

General principles don't determine everything though, and in any event there are also general Islamic principles requiring fair treatment and whatnot. On the whole, people are people, life is mostly particular events, domestic ill-feeling is no fun, and women know how to get their way even if men are supposedly in charge. So I don't think the "generalized system of sexist abuse" theory holds water. How could such a system be maintained in household after household century after century over whole continents? Why would so many people go to such an effort?

I know something about life among at least some Muslims, since I spent a couple of years before all the unpleasantness began as a Peace Corps math teacher at a government boarding school in a small village in Afghanistan.

(The school where I taught, in Helmand Province, has since become Forward Operations Base Delhi. You can see a row of classrooms I taught in at around 1:40 in this video.)

There weren't many polygamous marriages where I was, and a lot of them had to do with special situations (your brother dies so you've got a second wife all of a sudden). And there were few or no divorces. There really can't be: at the crudest level, bride price might be 5 years salary for a schoolteacher, and the woman's family isn't going to be pleased if you toss her aside, so basically you make a go of what you've got.

It was hard for a single foreign man to observe family relations directly, but you could pick up this and that. Girls went around freely in public until they were 12 or so, and fathers seemed no less attached to them than to boys. There was one teacher--a very intelligent man who had studied in America and spoke excellent English--who notoriously beat his wife, and people looked down on that. There was another who was reputedly a great lover, and the women would giggle and tell stories behind the scenes.

Mostly the bits and pieces I heard about sounded like normal domestic life--A's wife had worry B about the children, C's wife wanted some sort of fancy cloth so he picked it up for her, etc. The most respected of the teachers, who everyone called "Father," had a much younger wife people called "Mother" who went around without a veil and did what she wanted. She was a very spirited woman, and nobody messed with her.

So far as I could tell, a lot of the differences had to do with the nature of the society rather than Islam as such. The two are connected, but it's complicated. Maybe it's something of a chicken-and-egg problem--Islam catches on in societies to which it's adapted. Or maybe the nature of the pre-Islamic society makes a big difference in how Islam turns out. Others will have to say.

The women didn't have much public presence where I was, but that didn't mean what people here would expect. There's less public life in Muslim countries. The classic Middle Eastern city was a bazaar and some palaces, mosques, and barracks in the public sphere, and also walled quarters where people lived among their own and ran their own affairs.

The family was generally a unit of production as well as consumption, so the idea of "career" was mostly irrelevant. That's still largely true, by the way. Career depends on large formal organizations, and such things don't work well in the radically divided societies you find in the Middle East and Central Asia. People are mostly farmers, artisans, or shopkeepers, and the ideal is having enough to live on so you can sit at home drinking tea.

I remember a guy in Kashmir (another Muslim region) asking me--very tentatively, he didn't want to seem like a fool who takes everything he hears seriously--whether it was true that in the West people didn't think it was enough to have money to live on and hang with their friends but also wanted to work as a positive good thing.

So the basic idea has always been that everything's behind walls, with extended families living together in compounds, and outsiders only admitted to the relatively small public areas. Behind the scenes, which is where everything took place, the women were much freer and certainly part of what was going on. There was also lots of to and fro through back doors into other compounds. The images of imprisonment you get in the West aren't at all accurate.

I suppose another influence leading to the absence of women from public life was the possibility of abduction. It's expensive to get a wife, so why not steal one? That can be a real possibility in a radically divided society without much public order in which everything takes place in walled quarters and compounds and there's more emphasis on arbitrary fortune than free choice anyway. That's not the sort of thing that's a big current issue, but I think it had a role in how the system developed and the possibility still has an influence somewhere in the background.

A problem with the whole picture is that the way of life doesn't transplant to all settings. It doesn't work at all in a bureaucratic and industrial society in which people live in small apartments in large buildings and make their livings as operatives and functionaries in big organizations. So traditional Muslims in the West have problems and modernization runs into problems in Muslim countries. I have no doubt that one result is increased conflict and violence.

Whether the Muslims will be able to pick and choose among aspects of modernity and come up with something that works for them I don't know. If they want to convert to Catholicism I'd be glad to send them a catechism or even explain why it's a good idea, but if they want to do their Islamic thing I can't help them.

Converting them to liberalism--by force or any other way--doesn't seem to be the answer. We in the West have our own problems, and we're in no position to straighten other people out. Let the Muslims have a go at it where they run things and let's leave each other alone. Each should mind his own business, barring extraordinary circumstances, and maintain boundaries for the sake of peace.

We're now witnessing the embarrassing implosion of the über-hawks in the conservative movement: John Bolton is apparently considering a presidential run on a "Bomb Iran" platform:  

Not shy about his position on a wide range of issues, would this critic-in-chief consider a run for commander-in-chief in 2012? Bolton didn’t reject the idea out of hand.

“[I]t is a very great honor that anybody would even think of asking. I’m obviously not a politician. I’ve never run for any federal elective office at all and, you know, it is something that would obviously require a great deal of effort,” he said. “What I do think, though, and what concerns me, is the lack of focus generally in the national debate about national security issues. Now, I understand the economy is in a ditch and people are concerned about it, but our adversaries overseas are not going to wait for us to get our economic house in order.”

When pressed as to whether that means he would consider a run, Bolton seemed to suggest that he might do it, at the very least to help put national security issues at the top of the debate agenda.

“In the sense that I want to make sure that not only in the Republican Party, but in the body politic as a whole, people are aware of threats that remain to the United States. You know, as somebody who writes op-eds and appears on the television, I appreciate as well as anybody that…there is a limit to what that accomplishes,” he said. “Whereas, some governor from some state in the middle of the country announces for president they get enormous coverage even if their views are utterly uninformed on major issues.”

When pressed a third time about running, he said that while “he is not going to do anything foolish,” he added, “you know, I see how the media works…you have to take that into account.”

Again, not a no.

ht: TAC 

Many of us with good reason cheer the decline of the mainstream media.  We shouldn't be too happy if there ever comes a time where there are no major investigative journalistic outlets however, as there's only so much research blogs and specialized magazines can do.  The Washington Post has done a special on the national-security industrial complex that's developed in the aftermath of 9/11.  Here's how it starts.

The top-secret world the government created in response to the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, has become so large, so unwieldy and so secretive that no one knows how much money it costs, how many people it employs, how many programs exist within it or exactly how many agencies do the same work.

These are some of the findings of a two-year investigation by The Washington Post that discovered what amounts to an alternative geography of the United States, a Top Secret America hidden from public view and lacking in thorough oversight. After nine years of unprecedented spending and growth, the result is that the system put in place to keep the United States safe is so massive that its effectiveness is impossible to determine.The investigation's other findings include:

* Some 1,271 government organizations and 1,931 private companies work on programs related to counterterrorism, homeland security and intelligence in about 10,000 locations across the United States.

* An estimated 854,000 people, nearly 1.5 times as many people as live in Washington, D.C., hold top-secret security clearances.

* In Washington and the surrounding area, 33 building complexes for top-secret intelligence work are under construction or have been built since September 2001. Together they occupy the equivalent of almost three Pentagons or 22 U.S. Capitol buildings - about 17 million square feet of space...

The Pentagon's Defense Intelligence Agency, for example, has gone from 7,500 employees in 2002 to 16,500 today. The budget of the National Security Agency, which conducts electronic eavesdropping, doubled. Thirty-five FBI Joint Terrorism Task Forces became 106. It was phenomenal growth that began almost as soon as the Sept. 11 attacks ended.

Nine days after the attacks, Congress committed $40 billion beyond what was in the federal budget to fortify domestic defenses and to launch a global offensive against al-Qaeda. It followed that up with an additional $36.5 billion in 2002 and $44 billion in 2003. That was only a beginning.

With the quick infusion of money, military and intelligence agencies multiplied. Twenty-four organizations were created by the end of 2001, including the Office of Homeland Security and the Foreign Terrorist Asset Tracking Task Force. In 2002, 37 more were created to track weapons of mass destruction, collect threat tips and coordinate the new focus on counterterrorism. That was followed the next year by 36 new organizations; and 26 after that; and 31 more; and 32 more; and 20 or more each in 2007, 2008 and 2009.

I'm not going to respond directly to Srdja Trifkovic,  since he said that our correspondence was over (for the record: in a responspe to a comment where I told him the same thing first), but there is an argument used by him and other professional Muslim haters that I can't stand.  It's called the "True Islam theory."  It goes like this. 

Oh so you think we can exist on the same planet as Muslims?  Do you know that in 1453 the Grand Turk said that the Holy Roman Emperor looked like a homo?  That in 1652 there were Muslim tourists who spit on the Sistine Chapel?  That the Koran says a woman is worth three toenails of a man?  That the great Muslim theologian Kareem Abdul-Jabar wrote in 1068 that moving to Europe to live off the welfare state and rape blondes is part of jihad? Read up on the real Islam, and what the religion is really about.  Then you'll be ready to debate.

The problem is that it doesn't take any historical or theological knowledge to know that "True Islam" is a chimera.

I knew this from the first time I picked up the Bible as a child.  I saw a passage commanding that disobedient children be stoned to death.  Nobody I knew did this, so nobody I knew was a real Christian.  Jesus tells us that "If any man come to me, and hate not his father, and mother, and wife, and children, and brethren, and sisters, yea, and his own life also, he cannot be my disciple," (Luke 14:26) while one of the commandments is to honor one's parents.  Other blatant contradictions can be found.  Not only would people who practiced some of the more bizarre edicts in the Old Testament be locked in mental institutions, but for there to be a true version of an ideology that contradicts itself is a logical impossibility.

Of course practicing Christians believe that there is a "True Christianity," usually the one they just happen to be born into.  For the rest of us, the faith where it is practiced is simply one of the many historical and sociological factors that blend in with a group's innate characteristics to produce what we call a "culture."

Both sides in the Civil War thought Christ was on their side, as did the most fanatical slaveholders and abolitionists.  John Calvin, Martin Luther King,  Jr., Jim Wallis, Jerry Falwell, Al Sharpton, Jeremiah Wright, Phillip Berryman, David Koresh, Jim Jones, Herbert Armstrong, St. Augustine.  All and a thousand others claimed to be men of God and shared the same Savior and same Bible.  Arguing over which of these are the "True Christians" is a project fit for morons.

It is the same with Islam.  Followers of Muhammad are told both to slay the infidels and that there is no compulsion in religion.  Here's a website that lists Koranic contradictions. A simple Google search will find you several sites that similarly take apart the Bible.  Do Malaysians, Saudis or Bosnians practice the "True Islam"?  Each of these groups has filtered Islam and the Koran through their respective biological makeups and pre-Islamic cultures.  The most populous Muslim country in the world is Indonesia, with a population of 238 million.  The fact that its culture is not that of Pakistan is due to a large extent to genetic differences. (Someone should ask Trifkovic if he believes in evolution or racial differences.)

Looking across the world, it seems that Muslim ethnies tend to have more in common with biologically related groups than they do genetically distant coreligionists.  Is Indonesia more like Thailand or Afghanistan?  Are Albanians more like Serbs or Saudis?  I by no means underestimate the importance of culture.  Indonesia and Buddhist Thailand are very different but in the former case Islam has not made a pacific race into a nation of holy warriors. 

As for Christians who go on about Islam's bloody history, “why do you look at the speck in your brother's eye, but do not consider the plank in your own eye?"  The religion that gave us the rack, the Inquisitions, burning at the stake, witch hunts and the Crusades has little room to talk.  A body count comparing the two faiths wouldn't even be close.

But Christians and Jewish and Serbian activists would agree with none of this.  They take the worst practices from the worst cultures of a community that makes up a sixth of the world's population and tell us that this is the "True Islam."  I think the motivations of the Zionists have been rehashed plenty of times already, but as for those of the Christian Muslim haters, I think one commentator to Trifkovic's last thread put it well and is worth quoting at length.

Those conservatives itching to start another Crusades (this time, against a feckless, inbred, infighting foe) are either evangelicals or Jews. Both have strong psychological need for an absurd Dar al-Islam bogeyman that has little to do with love of Western civilization.

Starting with Christians: let's face it... it's very hard for someone well-educated to believe in Bronze-Age Abrahamic gibberish. But many people still do (people who for similar reasons tend to be political conservatives; they 're simply overwhelmed to unreason by the prospect of a metaphysically unknowable, cruelly material world). Seeing how much more devoted Muslims are to their God (how many Christians would leave their EZ-loungers and die for their God?) embarrasses them; it also braces them by suggesting relativism (all religions can't be right, but all can certainly be wrong), setting into stark relief the superstition of religious belief in general. Thus, they need to believe Allah is the very incarnate of Evil, a false diabolical temptation. (It also doesn't hurt to have a common enemy to build morale among those Christians embarrassed at the effeminacy of the modern church.)

Then, more importantly, don't be fooled: Christians cannot care first and foremost about the eugenic advancement of the European races. Christianity is, after all, universalist (the mother of universalism, really). Because they must believe their eternal salvation is more important than any worldly consideration, devout Christians like Trifkovic have an "Apres Christianity, le deluge!" mentality. For them, the answer to all our problems has to be a rebirth of Christianity. Hoste is free to consider the fascinating question of what a European Islam would be like (Nietzsche: "If Islam despises Christianity, it has a thousandfold right to do so: Islam at least assumes that it is dealing with men"); Hoste is free to consider the possibility that, perhaps, Europe owes its greatness to the superiority of the European people, to eugenic breeding arrangements, and to classical values, not Christian values (which are obviously Jewish in origin, though certainly refined by Europeans over millennia); Hoste is free to wonder whether, in fact, these very Christian values that Trifovic wants to rehabilitate (especially when co-opted by Jewish Leftists) sunk the West into the pitiful state it's in today. Trifkovic, on the other hand, has no such freedom. He is forced to consider the spread of Islam the moral equivalent of European genocide.

I stand by my statement about Turks having a superior culture to that of the Swedes.  Men having to sit down to pee, toddlers finding examples of gender stereotyping in animal stories, large scale projects to get men to take maternity leave, men trying to breastfeed their babies, little boys being forced to wear dresses, a state Church that approves of "homosexual marriage," etc.  If you don't prefer Albania to this (and we can agree that a Swedish Islam would be no more misogynist than that of of Albania), one is not of the Alternative Right, but of the Neo-con or Christian Zionist variety.  The main problem with a mass conversion would be possibly seeing even more non-white immigration-exacerbating Europe's racial problems.  These, however, can only be solved by spatial separation, not through a Holy War of our own which brings out the aspects of the historical West we don't want to revive.

With all due respect to Mr. Trifkovic, if his latest piece on Islam was written by somebody of Jewish descent 90 percent of the commentators would’ve been telling the author that he was being hyperbolic and to fight his own battles.

I'm no fan of Muslim immigration. In fact, I think that best case scenario most European countries will have a significant Muslim minority hostile to their societies forever.

But here in this country -- and Trifkovic doesn’t seem to differentiate between the U.S. and Europe -- of a Muslim population of six million or so, there have been at most 50 arrests for terrorism in the last decade (most of which are probably fake). Considering U.S. support for Israel, the sanctions on Iraq and Iran and the bombings of Iraq, Afghanistan, Sudan and Yemen, American Muslims have behaved with incredible restraint. For comparison’s sake, and to see what a real problem population looks like, know that one in three black males can expect to spend time behind bars over his lifetime as can six percent of whites.

As I’ve written elsewhere,

And those ringing the warning bells of a “creeping Sharia” are even more moronic. Of 535 members of the US Congress, there is one Muslim and he supports homosexual marriage.  There are no Muslim governors, no Senators, no major media personalities, not even (probably) any Muslim police chiefs or mayors!

So there is no Muslim threat in America, from the position of either terrorism or a building up of institutional power. This couldn’t have been predicted beforehand, of course, so Muslim immigration was a bad idea from the start.  But the West’s problem is non-whites and enforced diversity, not Islam qua Islam, as the case of North American Muslims shows.

Trifkovic actually goes as far as calling for a “ban” on Islam if it doesn’t reform itself to his standards.  In this, he should know that he’s more fanatical than Osama bin Laden, who would let Christians live and practice their religion in Muslim lands.  Would he like to ban the Islam of Muslims indigenous to Europe like that practiced by Albanians and Bosnians, too? Or perhaps have the EU or NATO supervise each mosque to see if it’s sufficiently progressive, as they determined at what point the Serbs were badly enough behaved to be bombed?

We get the ominous warning,

If that loss is not reversed, the game is over anyway -- proving yet again that where God retreats, Allah advances.

I’m sure a man as intelligent and as educated on religious and cultural matters as the distinguished author knows that Allah is the Arabic word for God, a name which Middle Eastern Christians have been ascribing to their deity before the faith became that of Europe.  Literally, what the above statement says is “where God retreats, God advances.” If he’s speaking metaphorically, then we can interpret this as a linguistic point: Trifkovic worries that Arabic will replace the native European languages. But then again not all Europeans speak English. It would’ve made more sense to say “when God/Dieu/Gott retreats, Allah advances.”  Whatever the case may be, language differences with the new migrants is the least of Europe’s troubles.

The author states

America gave whole-hearted support to the worst nation on earth: Saudi Arabia, a veritable hotbed of raw barbarity that makes Kim Jong Il look eminently clubable.

This could only have been written by somebody who either knows nothing about North Korea or thinks sexual promiscuity is the only true freedom, in which case the author would have much in common with Geert Wilders, Ayaan Hirsi Ali, the tyrants from Brave New World, and Larry Auster (when it’s convenient for his ethnic interests.)  In Saudi Arabia, there’s no death penalty for using cell phones, the economy is freer than most other places in the world (it is in 65 on the Index of Economic Freedom, just behind France, compared to 179th, or last for the Hermit Kingdom), foreign TV shows and the Internet aren’t banned (though censored), citizens can leave the country and come back and there are no concentration camps filled with families of government enemies. Even Christians are better off in Saudi Arabia. Once again, aside from the issue of sex it’s hard to see in what way the Saudi Kingdom is within the same universe of totalitarianism as North Korea.

In Trifkovic’s conclusion, that more Europeans may convert to Islam as time goes by and the religion gains power, I actually think he may be right.  But most of them would be converting from Secular Humanism, not anything that can be called Christianity.  It would be a mistake to believe that whites would be Muslims in the same way Pakistanis or Saudis are; the faith would be molded to conform with the biological characteristics of its adopters, or “Europeanized” as Christianity was in the first place.  I don’t know what a Swedish Islam would look like, but it probably wouldn’t be half as ugly as the feminist-communist dystopia that the country is today.  The culture of that Nordic state repulses me a lot more than that of, say, Turkey.  Not that I advocate a European mass conversion -- such an event would have unforeseen consequences beyond what any mortal could predict -- though I could imagine a situation where a Muslim Europe was the least of all evils.

One thing we may consider: from the perspective of white survival, Islam may be the best bet. What would be lost to miscegenation would be more than made up for in higher birthrates. Whether a European Islam would have higher or lower rates of immigration is harder to say. Whites may sympathize with their new Arab and North African cousins, or they may become like other Muslim countries, i.e. restrictionists. Once again, too many variables to make solid predictions. We must have a realistic picture of the Muslim people though and not turn the abstraction "Islam" into some sort of Satanic prototype we expect people to conform to. 

If we are going to reject this scenario, and stick it out with Christianity no matter how much it's failed or try for a revival of Paganism, we have to understand that the hostile minority in the heart of Europe is there to stay. The BNP used to favor repartition. Imagine how much money it would take to convince your average Pakistani or African immigrant (or one who was born in the West and doesn't even speak the language of his ancestors) to go back to his country of origin, multiply it by the number of non-whites and you would easily see that such schemes are impractical for all countries but those maintaining the largest white majorities (you think entitlement programs are expensive!). Genocide should be off the table; the same with regards to crazy ideas like banning Islam or the Koran which would lead to civil war and be incompatible with civilized society.  What options are left? I have no good answers, and neither does anyone else.

On October 2, 2001, less than a month after the collapse of the Twin Towers, the Ayn Rand Center took out a full page ad in the New York Times with the title “End States Who Sponsor Terrorism.” Written by the organization’s director Leonard Peikoff, the page referred to “the notion that a terrorist is alone responsible for his actions” as a “guarantee of American impotence” in dealing with radical Muslims. The author seconds Paul Wolfowitz’s view that the American government must overthrow regimes that support terrorism making sure that such battles are “fought in a manner that secures victory as quickly as possible and with the fewest U.S. casualties, regardless of the countless innocents caught in the line of fire.” The death of civilians can be laid at the feet of their terror loving governments, for “[t]here is no way for our bullets to be aimed only at evil men.”

Peikoff suggests that while taking out the Taliban would be a good start, Afghanistan is, in the big picture, insignificant.  The Iranian government is the most fanatical in the Middle East and must be dealt with. Even though in the long run this is a battle of ideas against an implacable foe, as of now the American military must use everything in its arsenal to destroy the nation’s enemies.

Unsurprisingly, the face that the ARC presents to those visiting its website makes what it published in the Times appear pacific. A page entitled “In Moral Defense of Israel” informs the reader that although the Jewish state isn’t perfect, it, like the US, “retains a significant respect for individual rights. Its citizens, whatever their race or religion, enjoy many freedoms, including freedom of thought and speech, and the right to own property.” Therefore, “Israel has a moral right to exist” in contrast to the absolute collectivists which oppose her.

In no sense can one say that the center the bears her name has perverted Ayn Rand’s message. When asked about what the U.S. should do with regards to the 1967 Israeli-Arab war, she called on the Americans to do what they could to help the Jewish side.  Her main reason, she admited, for supporting Israel was that the Arabs are “typically nomads” (unlike the Jews!) and “savages who don't want to use their minds.” Rand wasn’t making a special exception to her philosophy when it came to Israel. She always held that if there was an aggressive country which made war on another, the people who live under the belligerent state are responsible for their passivity if nothing else.  In the Cold War context she once pontificated,

If we go to war with Russia, I hope the "innocent" are destroyed along with the guilty. There aren't many innocent people there -- those who do exist are not in the big cities, but mainly in concentration camps.

Well, Obama has gotten rid of that insubordinate general! And he can now rest assured that no prominent military man will ever make fun of him or Biden again. The president’s claim at today’s press conference that McChrystal’s ouster marked a “change in personnel, not policy” was apparently meant to be comforting … but in fact, indicated that the useless Afghan war will probably drag on for another decade.

AltRight reader “Niccolo” left the following astute -- though, I must say, potentially dangerous -- comment regarding my last piece on McChrystal:

Obama should consider himself very, very lucky that civilian rule of the US Armed Forces is sacrosanct. Had this not been the case, he could have been very easily brushed aside by such men.

The president as “Commander-in-Chief” has become one of the most beloved phrases in the American political lexicon -- a trend that culminated in John Kerry’s corny “reporting for duty” salute at the 2004 Democratic convention. Americans aren’t likely to give up on this notion any time soon. (It should be noted that the Constitution authorizes the president to be “Commander in Chief of the Army and Navy of the United States, and of the Militia of the several States, when called into the actual Service of the United States,” though the language clearly indicates that the Founders never dreamt that a president would be presiding over an unending state of war in multiple parts of the globe.)

Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal likely has abiding disgust for civilians like Obama, Biden, and Holbrooke, who have been designated his superiors; however, I don’t think for a moment, he ever contemplated suspending Constitutional dictates, declaring a State of Emergency, and for the good of the nation, dismissing Obama and installing himself as a temporary dictator, as the Romans understood it. And the fact that he lacks a popular following in the country is only a secondary reason why he would never do such a thing.

Personal ambition is always a factor in matters of state; however, it’s certain that Francisco Franco recognized that accepting the legality of the general elections of 1936 would lead to the further subversion of the state, leftist attacks on the Spanish nation and Church, and eventually, Communist rule in his homeland.

We’re certainly not experiencing anything like the dire exigent in which Franco and the Spanish Right found themselves during the summer of 1936; however, if we were, our military higher-ups seem to lack, entirely, the vision one needs to take wise, decisive action.

McChrystal -- a skilled, efficient, “get ‘er done” operator and, as we’ve witnessed, a brutally honest man -- probably represents the best the armed services have to offer at the moment. (Others who have worked their way up the chain of command include the shrewd “political general,” David Petraeus, and the new breed of military diversicrats like Doug Casey, whose views -- “Our diversity, not only in our Army, but in our country, is a strength” -- seem to resemble those of the Columbia English department.)

Alas, McChrystal seems to only know how to figure out the best way to develope a counter-insurgency strategy -- which tells one nothing about why one’s fighting or what one’s fighting for.

In a clip from Morning Joe I came across, host Joe Scharborough claims that Washington has been “shaken to its foundations” by the content of Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal’s Rolling Stone interview, which the magazine put online this morning. The general has reportedly been summoned to the White House, and most expect him to be cashiered. Niall Ferguson was on the show as well to give historical context, and compared McChrystal’s insubordination to MacArthur’s criticism of Truman’s “limited war” in Korea in 1951.

Besides a crude “Bite me” pun in reference to the vice president, here are the highlights from “McChrystal Uncensored”:

According to sources familiar with the meeting, "McChrystal thought Obama looked "uncomfortable and intimidated" by the roomful of military brass.

It was a 10-minute photo op," says an adviser to McChrystal. "Obama clearly didn't know anything about him, who he was. Here's the guy who's going to run his fucking war, but he didn't seem very engaged. The Boss was pretty disappointed."

Fresh off his calls to strip Americans of their citizenship for having the wrong political sympathizes so they can be legally tortured, Joe Lieberman has proposed giving the president the authority to shut down the internet in "times of war."

"We need this capacity in a time of war. We need the capacity for the president to say, internet service provider, we've got to disconnect the American internet from all traffic coming in from another foreign country, or we have to put a patch on this part of it," Lieberman told CNN's Candy Crowley Sunday.

"So I say to my friends on the internet, relax. Take a look at the bill. And this is something that we need to protect our country. Right now China, the government, can disconnect parts of its internet in case of war and we need to have that here too," he said.

 

 

And remember, as conservatives like to remind Obama, we're at war as long as there's an anti-American goat herder somewhere in the world with a tape recorder.

Knowing there are patriotic Americans like Joe Lieberman out there worrying about our safety allows me to sleep easily at night.  One man doing so much to protect us. 

Europeans have their own version of George W. Bush.

José Maria Aznar, former prime minister of Spain, published an opinion article with the London Times Thursday saying the world must support Israel because "if it goes down, we all go down".

Aznar, who has joined the 'Friends of Israel' campaign to which David Trimble, a foreign observer taking part in Israel's flotilla raid probe, also belongs, calls on Europe to refuse to put up with cries to eliminate Israel as part of global Christian-Jewish cooperation.

"Anger over Gaza is a distraction. We cannot forget that Israel is the West’s best ally in a turbulent region," Aznar writes of the IDF's calamitous raid on a flotilla bound for Gaza on May 31. 

Actually, Egypt, Turkey and Jordan are by far better allies than Israel.  None of these countries has ever launched an attack killing dozens of Americans, planned to get the US involved in a foreign war by bombing Western interests or had agents caught in a major spy ring.  As a matter of fact, not even Iran or Syria has done those things.

Aznar says the real threat to the region is extreme Islamism, "which sees Israel’s destruction as the fulfillment of its religious destiny and, simultaneously in the case of Iran, as an expression of its ambitions for regional hegemony".

"Both phenomena are threats that affect not only Israel, but also the wider West and the world at large," he adds.

Aznar concludes by saying that Israel is the West's first line of defense against the chaos set to erupt in the Middle East, and therefore must be protected.

How does one say “We fight them over there so we don’t have to fight them over here” in Spanish?

Is there any stupider argument than the first line of defense one?  This is an immigration issue, not a 19th century land war.  Muslims settlers are legally flying into Western airports and the politicians who facilitate this act as if the only way to Europe is to march through the Levant!  Hold the line Judea!

Perhaps they mean this metaphorically.  Something like “Muslims will be emboldened if they destroy Israel.” But even this is nonsensical.  What act of “appeasement” with regards to Israel lost parts of the Netherlands, Sweden and France to Islam?  

If Aznar was really concerned about Islamization, he could’ve spoken up against Muslim immigration when he was Prime Minister.  In fact, he didn’t and went ahead with European integration.  The only time he bucked the globalist consensus was when he joined Bush’s war on Iraq.  If men this stupid are the defenders of the European peoples and their cultures, we are truly in trouble. 

Please, spare me the talk about the “West” and what we must do to defend it coming from those who are destroying it by mistaking bad metaphors for reality.  We need to ask ourselves why today a “conservative” is one who invokes the “West” when he means Israel and Europe and an "extremist" is one who invokes the “West” when he means Europe only.