Crusader War College

May Your Lord God watch over you, protect you, and resend the spirit of the Prophets and Kings to rescue you.

An interesting article on how building roads is defeating the Taliban in Afghanistan.

Hattip Wretchard via Belmont Club.

An excellent posting at John Ray's dissecting Leftism. Here's a sample:

When Leftists say, "There's no such thing as right and wrong", they are normally referring to moral judgments. They use that formula when confronted with something as uncomfortable as their unwavering support for murderous Communists and Muslims. And, as such, it is a transparent fraud. They themselves reveal that such talk is at best a tantrum by going on themselves to use the language of right and wrong to condemn "intolerance", "Zionists" or the Iraq war etc. Talk of right and wrong is meaningless when conservatives use it but highly meaningful when Leftists use it, apparently. To call such reasoning "sophomoric" is to praise it too highly.

And here's a real jewel, in the parenthesis:

So how come Pastor Wright can say the opposite of what is normally regarded as correct about race to thunderous applause at a NAACP convention? Simple: To a Leftist, the truth of a statement depends entirely on the use to which it is put. If a statement about an inborn difference seems to be derogatory to a favoured group (Leftists are so mentally limited that they think almost entirely in terms of groups) then that statement is WRONG. But if it defends the deviant actions of the same group it is RIGHT.

Jonathan Carson complains about how the left "nationalizes" ideas to gain unearned credibility, citing how the work of Karl Popper on scientific unfalisfiability was hijacked to delegitimize religious thought.

hattip David Coppedge at Creation Safaris.

Wretchard at Belmont Club discusses how Japan overcame Colonial stereotyping, giving this link to what Bill Cosby is saying along the same lines.

A delightful report by P.J. O'Rourke on his visit to the USS Theodore Roosevelt.

hattip Mike via Rantburg.

Whew! Talk about fire in the belly!

Hattip Sherry via Rantburg.

The link is to an article doing arm chair psychoanalysis of (thankfully) former President Jimmy Carter and why he is trying to visit Hamas: The title comes from the money quote:

When one, instead of recognizing and metabolizing his hatreds and aggressive drives, denies their existence, they continue to live on in the unconscious, empowered by the denial. The expression of such denied aggression can be seen in the Preacher who is "holier than thou" and takes great pleasure in condemning the sinner to eternal torment. Some will happily supply details of the unimaginable torments (easily imagined by the Preacher) of those unfortunate consigned to the Preacher's vision of Hell.

Another way of expressing such unacceptable impulses is via a third party. There are people who are particularly adept at stirring up others to rage. Radical Islamists are particularly talented in stirring up their followers into manic rage against those who they believe have threatened their religion. The Imams, of course, are men of peace representing the religion of peace, yet their followers commit egregious acts of violence and mayhem in their name. It requires learned academics and media people operating above their level of comprehension to explain how violence actually equates to peacefulness.

Jimmy Carter is the Godfather of the modern leftist hater. He presents a pious mien, untroubled by rage or hate. He truly sees himself as a man of peace. Yet Hamas is openly and unapologetically genocidal. Jimmy Carter hates through others maintaining deniability of his own monstrous impulses. His evil is worse than the banality Hannah Arendt described because he should know better. The compartmentalization required to embrace the murderers of innocents while proclaiming their moderation is breath taking yet never seems to give pause to our ex-President. Jimmy Carter is a hate filled and bitter man and every effort he makes seem to support monsters. It is a mystery only to him.

I don't know about the actual veracity of the theory of psychology motivating this analysis, but the bolded portion says it all: you can either hate openly and be condemned as a hater, or use proxies and maintain the facade.

Hattip John Ray at Dissecting Leftism.

Wretchard at The Belmont Club provides a link to Stanly Kurtz's book review of "Culture and Conflict in the Middle East" by Dr. Philip Carl Salzman. The book review is facinating reading.

A professor of anthropology at Montreal's McGill University, Salzman specializes in the study of Middle Eastern nomads. He, too, is something of a last survivor of a once proud band. What Salzman has managed is to have preserved, nurtured, deepened, and applied to our current challenge a once-dominant anthropological perspective on tribal societies: the study of tribes organized into "segmentary lineages." It was one of the great achievements of modern anthropology. Yet, over the past 40 years, scholars have largely rejected and forgotten the study of segmentary lineage systems.

And why is that?

The anthropological understanding of tribal social structures--especially in Africa and the Middle East--has been shunned for 40 years as exaggerating the violence and "primitivism" of non-Western cultures, discouraging efforts at modernization and democratization, and covertly justifying Western intervention abroad. Decades of postmodern and postcolonial studies have conspired against the appearance of books like Salzman's. That an academic, "on the inside," could have worked in relative concealment long enough to produce this book is testament to the possibility of cultural survival. Indeed, fully appreciating what Salzman has to teach us will first require us to dust off our records of his all-but-forgotten language, and trace the trajectory of its destruction.

Heh. He's not the only one going covert...

... decades before 9/11, the rise of terrorism as a tactic in the Palestinian struggle against Israel suggested embarrassing continuities between the endemic violence of traditional tribal life and the present. Edward Said's 1978 Orientalism was the key work in the rise of postcolonial theory, and Said, a savvy Palestinian academic and advocate, was particularly keen to keep the focus on American and Israeli policies that he claimed explained terrorism, rather than on any causes internal to Palestinian society. By attacking efforts to link terrorist violence to Middle Eastern culture as bigoted "Orientalism," Said and his followers gave a hard edge to already widespread Third World complaints about Western scholarship. That move, coupled with the growing number of faculty members entering American universities from outside the West, put paid to all but a remnant of the anthropological study of Middle Eastern tribes. The triumph of Said's perspective meant that by the post-9/11 era, when we'd need it most, the systematic understanding of Muslim tribal violence was largely lost.

That understanding, that wisdom, is power. Note this:

Disproportionately powerful though they may be, outlying tribal populations are small in comparison with peasants or city dwellers in the modern states of the Middle East. Even conceding the renewed significance of militant but marginal tribes, can we really follow Salzman in treating the tribal template as the dominant pattern of Arab culture itself? Salzman confronts this challenge persuasively and, if anything, actually understates his case.

Salzman says that it is not the details of tribal kinship structure that pervade Arab culture but the underlying principles of "balanced opposition," in which collective responsibility, honor, and feuding shape every action and thought, often calling for quick shifts in loyalty. Unite with your erstwhile enemy in opposition to a more distant foe; treat all members of an enemy group as potential targets; demand honorable behavior from members of your own group; and maintain your own and your group's honor by a clear willingness to sacrifice for the collective good. Warring Sunni and Shiite sects from Beirut to Baghdad follow principles of balanced opposition. They may be at each other's throats, yet they'll unite in opposition to an outside threat, as when Shiite Iran harbors members of Sunni al Qaeda on the run from America. In a sense, Islam's founding triumph was to raise the stakes of balanced opposition by uniting all the Arab tribes in an ultimate feud against infidel outsiders.

Since Muslims treat the tribal era of Muhammad and his early successors as the golden age of Islam, the cultural influence of the tribal template remains pervasive. To prove it, Salzman takes us on a country by country tour of Middle Eastern tribalism, from Jordan, where Bedouin form the backbone of the army, to Iraq, where even towns are heavily tribal, to Kuwait, where the strongest parliamentary opposition to women's rights emerges from tribal MPs.

Writing in 2006, Salzman cites a news report of clashes between Hamas and a powerful clan in Gaza to show tribal themes enduring in towns and cities. By early 2007, when Salzman's book was in press, the Palestinian unity government had fallen apart and Gaza was in quasi-anarchy, with Fatah and Hamas too busy fighting each other to govern. Such order as existed was enforced by brutal, battling clans.

This is no isolated occurrence. We ought to understand the emergence of Gaza's feuding clans as the revelation of a bedrock of Middle Eastern social organization ever-present and ever-influential, beneath superficial layers of Islam and state. Salzman noted the phenomenon in Gaza well before it became obvious. And long before he could have known of the tribal-based Anbar Awakening of 2007, Salzman identified it in nucleus thanks to some throwaway news reports in 2005.

Thus, Edward Said's fear that knowledge about tribalism would strip the mask off of Palestinian motivations proves true. More tellingly, the fact that he, a Palestinian, acted in a way to suppress the truth in order to tilt the playing field in favor of Palestinians shows that the traditional understanding of tribalism, updated with new finding, reveals that he himself is acting tribally. This exaltation of one's "tribe" over the truth is shared by communists and liberals, making this a marker for sub-groups/tribes that are hostile to truly individual rights. The truth is often the only defense for a poor weak individual, and justice is served if the judge/court/jury dig the truth out into the light and makes sure its implications are implemented in actual life.

Further, a knowledge of how tribes work again illustrates and proves the superiority of Judaism. While we see tribal dynamics operating from the Exodus through the times of the Judges, King David works to unify the tribes, and Solomon works to promote and exalt the position of truth and wisdom over all. Judaism thus, in a sense, incorporates elements of tribalism with elements of behaviors that promote the stability of societies in the modern western nation state. Of course I do not believe, along with pious Jews, that this is an outcome from Jews working alone and on their own: All the elements and construction plans were there in the beginning, in the Torah and other writings.

Much food for thought. I may pick the book up.

Zenster, formerly of Rantburg, has moved to Belmont Club as a regular commenter. I kinda miss being able to hit the comment link and say "right on!", so here's one of his comments from a post by Wretchard worth thinking about.

Meremortal: Mock incessantly, unceasingly, until they collapse. As they will, for there is no answer to mockery in their world. They can't kill everyone. They can't stop the mockery. They will implode.

ONE MORE TIME.
Fifty or sixty years ago? Sure, mockery would do just fine. WE ARE NOW IN THE AGE OF NUCLEAR WEAPONS. We no longer have the luxury of such genteel methods as ridicule and lampooning. Islam must be crushed and damned soon. Pakistan's tenuous control of its own nuclear arsenal should be enough to give any competent military planner conniption fits. We do not have a few decades to wait. We have less than TEN YEARS to turn this situation around before total Hell breaks loose.

All Muslim majority countries must be denied access to nuclear weapons until Islam has been neutralized. Nothing less will do. Anything short of such a policy will permit Islam to inflict sufficient damage upon the Western world that even the most brutal retaliation will not change how civilization will have been mutilated, possibly beyond all recognition.

I would sooner see every Muslim on earth perish than endure even a single major Western metropolis being immolated by an Islamic terrorist nuclear attack. WE HAVE TOO MUCH TO LOSE. The sandswept MME (Muslim Middle East) cesspits are already so close to the stone age that they have little more to sacrifice save their populations. Something they are all too ready to do. Need I remind you of Khomeini's 1980 speech in Qom?

We do not worship Iran, we worship Allah. For patriotism is another name for paganism. I say let this land [Iran] burn. I say let this land go up in smoke, provided Islam emerges triumphant in the rest of the world.

You DO NOT ridicule such insanity. You DO NOT mock such psychosis. You KILL IT in sufficient quantities whereby such concentrated evil no longer constitutes a threat. We can do this by targeting Islam's aristocracy or resign ourselve to genocide on an unheard of scale. Those are the options.

Again, Islam has nothing to lose. We have the Smithsonian, the Library of Congress, the Louvre, the Uffizi and myriad other irreplacable troves of genius that must be retained to inspire further generations of artisans yet to come.

Permitting Islam to vandalize even one such treasure is an unpardonable sin. We have worked far too hard merely so some Neanderthal cretins can bull their way through the China shop of Western heritage.

Put another way: How many of these incalculable jewels of civilization are you willing to see immolated as the price of kick-starting dormant Western intervention?

My own answer? Not a one.

Right on!`

The link is to a topic at Rantburg that cites the Turks re-looking at the validity of the hadiths, or sayings of Mohammed. G(r)omgoru, a regular at rantburg, had commented thusly to my comments at 8 and 9:

Reformation Ptah, the key word is reformation = return to Old Testament.

I had failed to come back and look for responses. On the off chance that a rantburg regular comes by, here's what would have been my response to G(r)omgoru's comment.

Ah, I see. I failed to emphasize the "Reformation" aspect of Christianity.

However, in a way, I did address it: the Protestant Reformation was not a return to the Old Testament by overlooking the New Testament, but a return to the New Testament that demanded that the Church abandon centuries of accumulated opinion that forced a specific interpretation of the New Testament. One of those abuses of interpretation was that the Church replaced Israel and that its role was to rule in the governmental realm as if it was Davidic Israel. (One thing I didn't know until recently was that Martin Luther the Reformer opposed the Crusades, but not from the point of view of being pacifistic: he objected to the Church using its power to make decisions about war and using religious extortion to force secular rulers to fight the battles. His position was that the Church should make its case for getting pilgrims free access to the Holy Land from the point of view of the pilgrims being the subjects of the rulers being petitioned. They, in turn, would decide whether to obtain that free access, and how to accomplish that free access if they decided that it was worth working toward, either by paying tolls on behalf of the pilgrims, negotiation of treaties, or making war to force the making of a treaty or to take over the Holy Land. He was not as much pacifistic as insisting that those sorts of decisions were exclusively Caesar's, not the Church's.)

That's not theology. That's HISTORY.

Goodness gracious! How Spengler spells out the obvious at the link! Go read it all, for it would be copyright infringement for me to quote all the parts that are relevant: I.e. the whole thing!

Here are some good ones:

Strictly speaking, I do not quite agree with Wilders that the Koran should be banned along with Hitler’s Mein Kampf as an incitement to violence. Nonetheless, he is doing precisely the right thing. A house divided against itself cannot stand, as Abraham Lincoln quoted the Gospels as he made ready to tear down the half that was misbehaving. No civilized state can abide a rival from within who contests the monopoly of violence of legitimate government. If governments refuse to act, the optimal course of action is pre-emptive: bring matters to a decision as fast as possible before the rot destroys the entire house.

And.

Not since lions tore apart slaves for the prurient enjoyment of the Roman mob has Europe witnessed a spectacle as revolting as Hirsi Ali’s appearance last week before the European Parliament. She has lived under guard since Theo van Gogh’s murder in 2004. To its shame, the Dutch government has stopped paying for her security. On February 14 she asked the European Parliament to fund her security, saying: "The threats to my life have not subsided and the cost is beyond anything I can pay ... I find myself in a very desperate position. I don't want to die. I want to live and I love life. I'm going to do anything legal to get help."

Before the eyes of the world, a leading citizen of the Netherlands begs the legislature of Europe to protect her against assassins whose declared goal is the destruction of Europe’s liberties as well as its civilization. The Dutch government turns its back. Europe’s Parliament listens politely and refers the matter to committee.

The best summary of the Archbishop of Canterbury sharia comment I've found is this:

I am ashamed to say that it did not become clear to me that Wilders has taken the only appropriate course of action until I read carefully the Archbishop of Canterbury’s now-infamous "sharia" speech. Stripped of casuistry, he proposed that Muslim women subject to forced marriages, genital mutilation, or domestic violence should be handed over to Muslim religious courts, rather than be offered the protection of English Common Law. To my knowledge, this is the first time that one of Europe’s spiritual leaders has proposed to abandon innocent victims to their fate.

Archbishop Dr Rowan Williams, to be sure, has a point. But he should have stated plainly what he really thinks. What he wanted to say is more or less: "To protect a few hundred or a few thousand colored ladies, the English state will have to put its big boots on, kick down the doors of Muslim homes, trample through Muslim living rooms, tear up the fabric of Muslim communities, and disrupt the social order. Why not turn such cases over to religious courts and wash our hands of them?" I reiterate: this is satanic hypocrisy.

If decent and well-meaning men like Dr Williams are so afraid of communal violence as to abandon the founding principles of common law and Judeo-Christian ethics, it is long past time to debate the fine points. Blessed are the pre-emptors, for they will get on with it.

Hattip Anguper via Rantburg, with much gratitude.

=> Read more!

Actually, the guy makes a good case.

Hattip John Ray at Dissecting Leftism.

Worth reading. I may add to the list later.

Hattip Gorb via Rantburg.