US ARMY SURRENDERS TO ENEMY, AGAIN

Well, first he's in the background, then he's in the front,
Both eyes are looking like they're on a rabbit hunt.
Nobody can see through him,
No, not even the Chief of Police.
You know that sometimes Satan comes as a man of peace.
—Bob Dylan

We live in a political world
Where courage is a thing of the past
—Bob Dylan

WHILE THE PENTAGON DUMPS on Franklin Graham, here's a clarifying article from the Washington Times which shows us who's running the show nine years after the atrocities of September 11...

Since all of Guantanamo's inmates, mirabile dictu, happen to be members of the same famed band of Muslim extremists, the Army has seen fit to distribute Korans. So far, so good, I guess. But the Army doesn't just distribute its Korans like any other religious book. That is, the Bible may get passed around, rifled through, dropped, tossed and stuffed into hotel room drawers. But not the Koran. According to Army policy, the standard operating procedure is: "Handle the Koran as if it were a fragile piece of delicate art."

What's going on here? By official order, a whole lot of "respecting the dignity of the Koran." According to Section 6-5-c(3), should a Koran need to be removed from a detainee's cell—you know, carried somewhere—and the detainee is personally unable to move it (best option), and the Muslim chaplain, librarian and interpreter are also unable to move it (second-best option), then the U.S. Army guard, as a very last resort, may take action—but only "after approval by the DOC (who notes this in the DIMS)."

Then the insanity really begins. The guard is directed to don "clean gloves ... in full view of the detainees prior to handling." He must use "two hands ... at all times when handling the Koran in a manner signaling respect and reverence." Why "respect" alone isn't abundantly sufficient isn't mentioned. While signaling two-handed respect and reverence, however, the guard must be mindful that "care should be used so that the right hand is the primary one used to manipulate any part of the Koran due to the cultural association with the left hand."

It goes on. There's more "reverent manner," more instructions for conveying the book inside a "clean, dry detainee towel." The cockeyed picture is clear. But it doesn't explain what's going on.

At first glance, this scene may seem to exemplify a bizarre excess of good manners, an absurdly obsequious respect for a largely foreign faith. Since when does the United States specifically direct its soldiers to show two-handed "reverence" in the handling of any religious book? But it seems to me that there's more behind this charade. The "clean gloves" and "detainee" towels are the tip off. The fact is, under Islamic law, non-Muslims are deemed unfit to touch the Koran. That much is generally known. What is not usually considered is the reason: According to the Islamic law, we are unclean.

The term is "najis." On the multilingual Web site of the Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Husseini al-Sistani, the leading Iraqi Shi'ite cleric, there is a catalogue of Islamic laws (www.sistani.org). This includes a list of "najis things." There are 10, beginning with an assortment of excretions and body fluids—obvious stuff that really shouldn't need special mention. On the "najis" list with urine, feces, etc., are the pig, the dog and the "kafir." That means the Christian, the Jew, the unbeliever in Islam—and chances are, the Gitmo guard.

In effect, then, with its official policy of clean gloves and detainee towels, the military is promoting, enabling and accepting the Islamic concept of najis—the unclean infidel—a barbarous notion that has helped fuel the blood lust of jihad and the non-Muslim subjugation of dhimmitude. Our soldiers are many things: self-sacrificing, bold, loyal and true. They are not unclean.

Is this political correctness run amok? Not exactly. It's something else again, a new threat from within that needs vigilant redress. PC is about victimology, the elevation of perceived victim groups to the canonical pantheon. The Gitmo rules are more blatantly about surrender, a voluntary, self-extinguishment, a spreading condition of denial of what is right and worth standing for. Not what you expect from the United States Southern Command.

One doesn't have to be a Franklin Graham or even a Jesus Christ fanatic to recognize that this unfortunate move by the Pentagon only fuels the taqiyya-inspired oil-financed Islamic ascendancy increasingly marked by bolder and bolder encroachments into weakened kafir territories witnessed globally, territories crippled with jihad.

Mr. Graham is nobody's fool. We can applaud his unapologetic stance in choosing truth and love over submission to the duplicitous and wicked death cult as Islamic forces slither its power tentacles into every nook and cranny it seeks to paralyze, torture, and dominate with its sharia impulses...

What is the purpose of pretending that Christianity with all its faults is not diametrically opposed to Islam with all its faults. There's no reason to extrapolate here again what we can only interpret as pure evil, given the historical record, and as the History Channel puts it, history being made every day.

Muslims? Dunno. I'll take them as I find them, but with a strong dose of caution, not so much with a wink but with a scowl. Humans are the hardware. Ideology is the software, Evil gets its juice from many dark places? But in the case of the Religion of Peace, it's the ideology, stupid.

We don't have to return to the Inquisition days when bad acts were performed in the name of Christianity. The contrast between modern Christianity and Islam couldn't be more stark. Right now, this very day, tens of millions of Muslim women and young girls, and in some places, young boys, live in terror of the men of Islam.

Muslim females are subjected to unbelievable oppression while being treated as little more than chattel. Islam, as practiced every single day across the planet, sanctions female genital mutilation, honor killings, public flogging of women, and many more brutal, disgusting and degrading acts against women and children. All religiously and tribal sanctioned, without question for over 1400 years.

These terrifying acts against their own families and tribesmen are not anomalies. There is no freedom of choice, or protection by the law. This terror is the law, sharia law, the deeply ingrained by-product of a sick and perverted cult founded by a sick and perverted warlord from the seventh century.

The veracity of our time is the current struggle between Islam and the Western world where Judeo-Christian principles are dominant. All religions are not equal and are certainly not deserving of equal respect.

Our moral codes originated in religion. The Western world owes an immense debt of gratitude to the Judeo-Christian tenets which undergird our societies and way of life. Life is always a work in progress.

Look at how Muslim infiltration into Great Britain and France has divided those countries. Radical Islam must not be allowed to establish a beachhead in the United States. We should be comforted instead by the belief that most Americans would fight to the death to stop this madness disguised as the perfect religion called Islam. The election of Barack Obama and his shape shifting radical policies has placed our nation at the greatest peril we have faced to date as a free nation, bar none. May God be with us.

Pointed threats, they bluff with scorn
Suicide remarks are torn
From the fool’s gold mouthpiece the hollow horn
Plays wasted words, proves to warn
That he not busy being born is busy dying

As some warn victory, some downfall
Private reasons great or small
Can be seen in the eyes of those that call
To make all that should be killed to crawl
While others say don’t hate nothing at all
Except hatred

It’s easy to see without looking too far
That not much is really sacred
—Bob Dylan

You talk about day
I'm talking 'bout night time
When the monsters call out
The names of men
Bob Dylan knows
And I bet Alan Freed did
There are things in night
That are better not to behold
—Marc Bolan

CRASHING THE UTOPIAN BUS

SCRAPING THE BARREL and putting in buckshot, hey, get your hands off my scripture, and help me out from under this utopian bus, please. No, I didn't stay at a Holiday Inn Express last night, but I did find this tasty bit of humor at the clutch hitting Confluence site. Man, will I be glad when this election is over, EVEN if it means that REAL HOPE becomes as rare as the great spotted owl, also. The suspense is killing me! Anyhoover, read on...

Came into work today and saw this notice in the employee lounge:

Notice to All Employees

As of November 5, 2008, when President Obama is officially elected into office, our company will install a few new policies which are in keeping with his new, inspiring issues of change and fairness:

1. All salespeople will be pooling their sales and bonuses into a common pool that will be divided equally between all of you. This will serve to give those of you who are underachieving a “fair shake.”
2. All low level workers will be pooling their wages, including overtime, into a common pool, dividing it equally amongst yourselves. This will help those who are “too busy for overtime” to reap the rewards from those who have more spare time and can work extra hours.
3. All top management will now be referred to as “the government.” We will not participate in this “pooling” experience because the law doesn’t apply to us.
4. The “government” will give eloquent speeches to all employees every week, encouraging it’s workers to continue to work hard “for the good of all.”
5. The employees will be thrilled with these new policies because it’s “good to spread the wealth.” Those of you who have underachieved will finally get an opportunity; those of you who have worked hard and had success will feel more “patriotic.”
6. The last few people who were hired should clean out their desks. Don’t feel bad, though, because President Obama will give you free healthcare, free handouts, free oil for heating your home, free food stamps, and he’ll let you stay in your home for as long as you want even if you can’t pay your mortgage. If you appeal directly to our Democratic Congress, you might even get a free flat screen TV and a coupon for free haircuts (shouldn’t all Americans be entitled to nice looking hair?)!

If for any reason you are not happy with the new policies, you may want to rethink your vote on November 4th.

Okay, that was a wonderful parody of the Obama Doctrine, but did you ever wonder where all this bright-eyed and bushy-tailed utopianism of the Uber Left got started? Here is a scholarly look at this utopianism and its more recent by-product that is currently sweeping the globe, and why incidentally, Barack Obama seems to feel that he is not necessarily America's first Black President, but he expects to be hailed as the first Black Global President by general acclamation, titular head of the United Nations, one presumes.

Don't you just LOVE the truth! Here is a short excerpt from the Lee Harris lengthy essay—The Intellectual Origins of America-Bashing (The Utopian Leanings of Latter-day Radicalism).

America-bashing has sadly come to be “the opium of the intellectual,” to use the phrase Raymond Aron borrowed from Karl Marx in order to characterize those who followed the latter into the twentieth century. And like opium it produces vivid and fantastic dreams.

This is an intellectual tragedy. The Marxist left, whatever else one might say about it, has traditionally offered a valuable perspective from which even the greatest conservative thinkers have learned—including Schumpeter and Thomas Sowell. But if it cannot rid itself of its current penchant for fantasy ideology of the worst type, not only will it be incapable of serving this purpose; it will become worse than useless. It will become a justification for a return to that state of barbarism mankind has spent millennia struggling to transcend—a struggle that no one felt more keenly than Marx himself.

For the essence of utopianism, according to Marx, is the refusal to acknowledge just how much suffering and pain every upward step of man’s ascent inflicts upon those who are taking it, and instead to dream that there are easier ways of getting there. There are not, and it is helpful to no party to pretend that there are. To argue that the great inequalities of wealth now existing between the advanced capitalist countries and the Third World can be cured by outbreaks of frenzied and irrational America-bashing is not only utopian; it is immoral.

The Left, if it is not to condemn itself to become a fantasy ideology, must reconcile itself not only with the reality of America, but with its dialectical necessity—America is the sine qua non of any future progress that mankind can make, no matter what direction that progress may take.

The belief that mankind’s progress, by any conceivable standard of measurement recognized by Karl Marx, could be achieved through the destruction or even decline of American power is a dangerous delusion. Respect for the deep structural laws that govern the historical process—whatever these laws may be—must dictate a proportionate respect for any social order that has achieved the degree of stability and prosperity the United States has achieved and has been signally decisive in permitting other nations around the world to achieve as well. To ignore these facts in favor of surreal ideals and utterly utopian fantasies is a sign not merely of intellectual bankruptcy, but of a disturbing moral immaturity. For nothing indicates a failure to understand the nature of a moral principle better than to believe that it is capable of enforcing itself.

It is not. It requires an entire social order to shelter and protect it. And if it cannot find these, it will perish.

Read it all.