Crusader War College

In an interview last month on Al-Arabiya TV, former Saudi Shura Council member Ibrahim Al-Buleihi said that Arab individualism has been erased, rendering the Arab "incapable of independent thinking," and that what prevails is "the spirit of the herd that cannot free itself from the captivity of the prevailing culture."

In the interview, which aired on February 26, 2010, Al-Buleihi sang the praises of Western civilization, saying that notions such as human rights are not "an accumulated achievement, in which all societies played a role, but an achievement of the West." Arab societies "should benefit from this rich experience," rather than remaining "a burden on the West."

The transcript is here.

Thanks to tipper at Rantburg.

Very illuminating. Complete with references to the Koran which can be confirmed via the link in the right sidebar menu.

Hattip ed via Rantburg.

The link is a tragic example of how compassion and the desire to serve do not compensate for an unwillingness to face the truth. A good heart does not shield one from an empty head. The American people are about to learn the lesson the Haitians learned, and with equal sorrow and bitterness.

Truth comes in all forms, but the most brutal is that of Physical Reality. And it is also true that, though it is the most brutal, that does not make it, as the Secular Materialists would hold, the ONLY Truth there is.

Jerusalem

And did those feet in ancient time
Walk upon England's mountains green?
And was the holy Lamb of God
On England's pleasant pastures seen?

And did the Countenance Divine
Shine forth upon our clouded hills?
And was Jerusalem builded here
Among these dark Satanic mills?

Bring me my bow of burning gold!
Bring me my arrows of desire!
Bring me my spear! O clouds unfold!
Bring me my chariot of fire!

I will not cease from mental fight,
Nor shall my sword sleep in my hand
Till we have built Jerusalem
In England's green and pleasant land.

-- William Blake

...by muslims.

Dozens of Muslim protesters attacked participants of Bosnia's first-ever gay rights festival in Sarajevo on Wednesday, injuring at least two journalists and one police officer.

The scuffle broke out at the end of the opening ceremony of the four-day festival in front of the Academy of Fine Arts in downtown Sarajevo.

Police said at least eight people were injured when attackers dragged some people from vehicles and beat others in the street. A policeman was also injured.

Worth looking at.

An excellent article on the soulsearching and revisions of the chief Islamist theoretician, Dr. Fadl. It's a large article, with a lot of food for thought.

A great post by a Marine Infantry officer whose e-mail was hosted by Wretchard at Belmont Club.

The bastards are back AGAIN.

Eight months ago he returned to Israel from the United States after generating a research breakthrough that changed his life. Berzin, the founder of GreenFuel Technologies - a U.S. company that produces green fuel from algae - discovered that "green slime" contains one of the keys to the alternative fuel the world is seeking. His company is the first ever to develop and produce biofuels from algae that are bred on gases emitted by power plants.

It might sound like some sort of magic trick to put algae, CO2 and sunlight into a box and come out with fuel, but Berzin did it.

God bless the Jews and Israel! Through them, they continue to bless the world!

Hattip twobyfour via Rantburg.

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

Hattip Wretchard via Belmont Club.

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.