Fewer and Fewer

Glenn Reynolds relates, via Strategy Page, this good news: of theTaliban counter-offensive into Afghanistan of 1000, 1/2 of them are killed or captured. Reynolds says:

Yes, as Bill Roggio noted, and Michael Yon confirmed, the news reports, rather exaggerated to begin with, are of the form "Dozens killed in renewed fighting," without mentioning that most of those killed are people who should be killed.

Economic Article for the Day

John McIntyre has this to say today:

The Washington Post's Sebastian Mallaby is on a crusade to discredit pro-growth or supply-side economic policies. Today's column titled "The Return of Voodoo Economics" makes one wonder about what he doesn't like about 4% growth, under 5% unemployment, housing and the stock market higher, wealth being created and tax revenues at all time highs. I guess he pines for the pre-Voodoo Economics days of the 1970's when the highest marginal tax rate was 70% and the country had anemic growth, high unemployment and a Dow languishing below 1,000.

(ht: JPod at Corner)

Another Remarkable Muslim: Farish Noor

I wanted to expand on my claim below ("Romance of Multiculturalism") that there are reasons to hope for a moderation of Islam, particularly, the exclusiveness of Islam. For unlike its other monothesitic siblings (Judaism and Christianity), Islam, at least in its contemporary manifestations, not only holds its exclusive rights to truth and right recognition and worship of God but a complete lack of regard of anyone outside Islam. There are only two possibilities, those who are in the House of Islam or those in the House of War. In other words, for good neighbors it does not make .

Enter Farish Noor:

For Farish Noor, the great challenge for contemporary Muslims is to overcome this exclusive parochial thinking and to extend their solidarity beyond the Muslim community to embrace all of humanity. For a long time, Noor found himself torn between his feelings of solidarity with his fellow Muslims and his belief in universal ideals.

A turning point came when he lived in Britain in the early 1990s. During the first Gulf War, he found a group of elderly women in a small provincial church praying during a night vigil 'for the people of Iraq.'

"Here was an example. Here were Christians in England praying for Iraqis who were being killed; people whose idea of Christian charity did not stop at the Christian community. For a while I felt a sense of shame because never had I been to a mosque where I saw Muslims praying for Christians, Hindus or Buddhists. We show charity, love and sympathy but only for fellow Muslims."

Noor went on to advocate what he describes as an 'Islam without borders'. Islam, he argues, has always claimed to be a universal religion which is not limited to one race or people. As such it was able to unite different peoples across ethnic and cultural boundaries. The real challenge for Islam presented by globalisation is now to rid itself of this last vestige of cultural partisanship and to reaffirm its universal message across the boundaries between Muslims and non-Muslims:

"I think for Islam to progress, we have to progress beyond the Muslim community. We talk of a universal God of love. If God's love is infinite, if it does not stop at your colour, race or religion, then why should ours? If we want to be real Muslims we have to go in that direction."

Here for more. (ht: Ayaan Hirsi Ali)

Ayaan Hirsi Ali Moving to USA

I don't know all the details, but apparently Ayaan Hirsi Ali (blogsite) lied to attain citizenship in the Netherlands, where she went on to become a member of Parliament and helped Theodore van Gogh make Submission (2004), the film about women in Islam that later provoked his violent murder.

At any rate, news (Michele Malkin) has it that she will be emigrating to the States to take up a position at the American Enterprise Institute this September. This is good news for us and her I think. She is one of the people I listed below as reason to hope about the moderation of Islam, especially seeing how she, a woman, was in a position of influence and power in Europe. But, alas, for our mulish allies, she will be leaving.

UPDATE (17 May): Here is her account of these developments. Among other things, she says:

I am therefore preparing to leave Holland. But the questions for our society remain. The future of Islam in our country; the subjugation of women in Islamic culture; the integration of the many Muslims in the West: it is self-deceit to imagine that these issues will disappear.

Mother's Day

Now, for something completely different....

Jozsef Cardinal Mindszenty (1892—1975):

“The most important person on earth is a mother. She cannot claim the honor of having built Notre Dame Cathedral. She need not. She has built something more magnificent than any cathedral—a dwelling for an immortal soul….The angels have not been blessed with such a grace.”

(ht: Peter Robinson at the Corner)

"The Romance of Multiculturalism"

As always, pithy about the particular as well as the universal situation, Victor Hanson pens a great term about what enables Islamicist's success....

Q: I just finished Oriana Fallaci's Force of Reason. She paints a very dark and foreboding future, while you seem much more optimistic, at least for the Islamic world. What is your take on her work? Is Europe finished? Is there no reconciliation with Islam and modernity? Are the Kurds the exception not the rule?

Hanson: I just finished it as well. If one puts aside the bombast and furor, which is the charm of her style, and sticks to her message and courage, then one sees her point is unmistakable. We in a tired West just want our blessed lives not to be interrupted, so we invent all sorts of exemptions, euphemisms, and considerations for a fascist core of radical Islamicists who brilliantly have played on the entire multicultural romance [emphasis mine] that we embrace. That being said, Turkey, the Muslims in India, Kurdistan, and Muslims elsewhere can and do live under democratic auspices.

The problem is the toxic brew of autocracy, statism, oil revenue, and terrorism that leads to creepy results whether in Iran or Saudi Arabia. The Islamist is parasitical on the West for his critique of the West, and, usually of the middle and upper classes, hates himself for wanting what his own culture cannot produce, and always finds victimhood in his own feeling of inadequacy. If Hamas declared a truce tomorrow, reformed its economy, became truly democratic, and copied a Singapore or Switzerland, then it would have little beef against Israel — but then it wouldn’t be Hamas, would it?

Remember how in ages gone by it was thought noble and the mark and ideal of a civilized person to be chivalrous? As a matter of fact, much literature of the Middle Ages and after was dedicated and most people harkened to the 'romance of chivalry'. But now, it is mostly discredited, through ridicule (see Monty Python's Search of the Holy Grail for but one contemporary example) and, to be sure, through radicalization of western notions of equality of the sexes but not, and this is key, through some failure of its ideals.

Today chivalry is replaced with the 'romance of multiculturalism', wherein no one culture is better or worse than the other. It prevails even while it recedes due to the sudden and ruthless intervention of the real, that is, events such as 9-11 and every other subsequent terrorist action. Before 9-11 (go back to 1972, the Olypmics in Munich), when the threats were distant or rendered innocuous by leaders using euphemisms like 'blowback against Orientalism', or a 'criminal activity' which would be prosecuted with the 'full weight of the law'--thereby lulling us into a false sense of security and the slumber of the '90's--, the multiculturalist believers could and did turn a blind eye to the dozens of terrorist actions all over the world; usually justifying the terrorist and their horrific actions with a 'Well, what can we expect? We deserve it! Moreover, it's what our founding fathers did!'

You see the infernal situation multiculturalism put us in: we are either as bad as they are; or they are as good as we. It can't be any other way. It cannot be that this particular radical faction of Islam--whose men brutalize and subjugate their women to domestic servitude (indeed, their rewards in the afterlife indicates their true opinion of woman--the man with the most sexual slaves after death is the man among men), which cultivates homicidal bombers out of their children, whose best idea of government does not recognize the fundamental human aspirations for life, liberty and happiness for its denizens let alone its enemies, and whose recourse with those they disagree, in word and in deed, is untethered to anything good, moral, sane, or civil--it cannot be that this cultural is inequal, or less worthy, or (Cole or Chomsky forbid!) more evil than our culture! That would be just too imperialistic and perhaps even a racial thing to say!

But, some are worse than that! One might be tempted to say what Churchill said:

How dreadful are the curses which Mohammedanism lays on its votaries! Besides the fanatical frenzy, which is as dangerous in a man as hydrophobia in a dog, there is this fearful fatalistic apathy. The effects are apparent in many countries. Improvident habits, slovenly systems of agriculture, sluggish methods of commerce, and insecurity of property exist wherever the followers of the Prophet rule or live. A degraded sensualism deprives this life of its grace and refinement; the next of its dignity and sanctity. The fact that in Mohammedan law every woman must belong to some man as his absolute property, either as a child, a wife, or a concubine, must delay the final extinction of slavery until the faith of Islam has ceased to be a great power among men.

Individual Moslems may show splendid qualities — but the influence of the religion paralyses the social development of those who follow it. No stronger retrograde force exists in the world. Far from being moribund, Mohammedanism is a militant and proselytizing faith. It has already spread throughout Central Africa, raising fearless warriors at every step; and were it not that Christianity is sheltered in the strong arms of science, the science against which it had vainly struggled, the civilisation of modern Europe might fall, as fell the civilisation of ancient Rome. (The River War, 1899, p. 248-50)

Unlike Churchill, I hold the hope that the problem is not with Islam, but with either a medieval understanding of Islam or, what's more likely, a decadent, hyper-critical western understanding of medieval Islam and the West. (I suppose that Churchill's damning observations, based on his exposure to the Sudanese Muslims whose problems pre-date the Muslim invasion in 9th Century, are not quite applicable to all Muslims. Indeed, the Muslims he refers to could not have built an empire which rivaled the Roman Empire in breadth and arts of civilization that the Islamic Empire did, in fact, do in its prime.) To be sure, I think we see the fruits of moderate, modern Islam here in the West today--in the growing presence and influence of people like Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Irshad Manji, Salman Rushdie, Farish Noor, among others).

So, while it may be the case that the truly noble has been displaced through the ridicule of the low, but it is reality, 9-11 in particular, that has begun and will thoroughly discredit the vacuous idealism masquerading as a virtue in our day. And ideals more sane, moral and humane will then prevail.

"The Present Debacle"

Continuing to pluck the cord I know so well...

Following up Robert Scales hypothetical history (below) Victor Hanson has just written a column as if from near the end of WWII in the persona of a contemporary MSM critic of our current war, harping on all the mistakes and failures.

It begins:

May 21, 1945 — After the debacles of February and March at Iwo Jima, and now the ongoing quagmire on Okinawa, we are asked to accept recent losses that are reaching 20,000 dead brave American soldiers and yet another 50,000 wounded in these near criminally incompetent campaigns euphemistically dubbed “island hopping.”

Meanwhile, we are no closer to victory over Japan. Instead, we are hearing of secret plans of invasion of the Japanese mainland slated for 1946 or even 1947 that may well make Okinawa seem like a cake walk and cost us a million casualties and perhaps involve a half-century of occupation. The extent of the current Kamikaze threat, once written off as the work of a “bunch of dead-enders,” was totally unforeseen, even though such suicidal zealots are in the process of inflicting the worst casualties on the U.S. Navy in its entire history.

God Bless Atwar Bahjat

Now, someone might legitimately say, given all my calls for spine and resolution in our war effort (below), that this specific war is not right, or worthy. Germany and Japan were without question valid threats and we were rightly unified against them. However, he might conclude, until someone could prove that the current Islamic jihadists were actually a threat, or were actually, say, evil (to use a term problematic to our day and age but one that haunts us), dissent and not unity is not only permissable but perhaps even called for. After all, are the lives of our young men and women worth it?

To that challenge then, consider the following incident: the murder of a woman journalist Atwar Bahjat, one of the best examples of the future of a moderate, good Iraqi, and see where now things stand. --And it's not just that she was good that makes this threatening; she represents a western woman (at least, that's what the Iraqi terrorists seem to think....), someone who think women should be equal, who esteem a free and vigilant press and a tolerance of religions, and whose life and death speaks volumes for her faith in the hope and love of goodness to overcome evil.

Mind you, this is not for the faint of heart. But, then, neither is self-government or adulthood or anything great or that gives great joy.

In truth, it represents a depth of depravity achieved over centuries. From the description, her killers hadn't just conceived or improvised their method of execution on the spot - they seem to have been well practiced. But such is the nature of the enemy in this war, and perhaps this is their most sacred and well honed knowledge: if a brutality can be inflicted that exceeds all human ability to comprehend, the humans will find a way to deny it.

Or excuse it.

Or simply look the other way.

Robert Scales' Useful Hypothetical History

This article lays out the best analogy I have yet seen to the current and ongoing criticism 3 years into our war effort. Robert H. Scales asks us to consider what a book critical of FDR and American war effort would have looked like a similar length of time after Pearl Harbor.

Such a book would have hit the bookstores at Christmas time in 1944. Messrs. Gordon and Trainer would most certainly have written about the unconstitutional arrogance of an administration that violated international neutrality laws by taking sides with Great Britain against Germany. They would have recognized that Pearl Harbor was the greatest intelligence failure in American history. We would have read the whole horrific story of the humiliating surrender at Corregidor that signaled the shameful loss of the entire American Army in the Philippines.

The condemnatory tenor of the book would continue with depictions of the useless slaughter at "Bloody Buna" in New Guinea, the humiliating loss to the German Army at Kasserine Pass in North Africa, the failure of Dwight Eisenhower to trap the retreating Germans in Sicily, the horrifically wasteful daylight bombing campaign against Germany in 1943. Messrs. Gordon and Trainer would have reserved their worst for the conduct of George C. Marshall and Dwight Eisenhower in their abortive "Crusade in Europe."

(HT: Michael Barone)

AMBER ALERT!

Doing my utmost to keep you posted....










(H/T: Jonah at the Corner)

The Solution to Mistakes in War

Below, I spoke on Churchill and the vagaries of war. To that, I would add this excerpt from Victor D. Hanson's reply to an "Angry Reader" about the place of humility in wartime when facing the "unforeseen" and, it is safe to say, mistakes:

You suggest I am arrogant, but repeatedly I have called for some humility in understanding that in war, whether in the summer of 1864, in Okinawa in 1945, or at the Yalu in 1950, the unforeseen happens and is corrected only with resolve not self-incrimination. If you review American history, I think you will see the context in which a Grant, even after Cold Harbor, proved wiser than the loud McClellan or a calm Ridgeway even during the chaos of retreat was more sober than a hypercritical and publicly furious MacArthur.

And, to all the shrill alarmists, this advice:

There is currently a great illness in this country, but it is mostly on the hysterical left that cannot stand any support for the effort in Iraq that it equates not with idealism or support for democracy, but with either ignorance or arrogance. Yet, grant that if we are successful, in five years people like yourself will look back and think the democratization of Iraq following the removal of a mass-murderer was a good thing, with all its attendant ripples from Lebanon to Libya. So get a grip, tone down the slurs, and learn to reason rather than vent.