I’ve got a lot on my plate today, so I’ll direct you to some items you may not have seen. (Thanks again, to all those readers who send me tips – it’s impossible to use all but a few, but I do appreciate your effort).
A good clean piece by Charles Krauthammer, The Neoconservative Convergence;
The post-Cold War era has seen a remarkable ideological experiment: Over the past 15 years, each of the three major American schools of foreign policy–realism, liberal internationalism and neoconservatism– has taken its turn at running things. (A fourth school, isolationism, has a long pedigree, but has yet to recover from Pearl Harbor and probably never will; it remains a minor source of dissidence with no chance of becoming a governing ideology.) There is much to be learned from this unusual and unplanned experiment.
A must read, especially for those who have learned everything they know about “neo-conservativism” at the feet of Jon Stewart.
From Victor Davis Hanson, to those who think the west is “our own worst enemy”. You’re wrong – but we certainly are our own worst accomplice.
When the killer of the Dutch filmmaker Theo van Gogh confessed last week, he boasted, “I can assure you that one day, should I be set free, I would do exactly the same.”
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If many progressives in the Netherlands expected the Dutch-Moroccan Mohammed Bouyeri would cite past ill- treatment by Westerners, they were sorely disappointed.
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Instead, the psychopath icily advised the mother of the murdered van Gogh: “I have to admit I do not feel for you, I do not feel your pain” and “I cannot feel for you. … because I believe you are an infidel.”
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Thousands of innocent civilians such as van Gogh have been murdered by Islamic extremists — in Darfur, Gaza, India, Israel, Lebanon, London, Madrid, Malaysia, Pakistan, the Philippines, Thailand, Tunisia, Turkey and the United States. The carnage gives credence to the adage that while the vast majority of Muslims are not terrorists, the vast majority of global terrorists most certainly are Muslims.
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The killers always allege particular gripes — Australian troops in Iraq, Christian proselytizing, Hindu intolerance, occupation of the West Bank, theft of Arab petroleum, the Jews, attacks on the Taliban, the 15th-century reconquest of Spain, and, of course, the Crusades.
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But in most cases — from Mohamed Atta, who crashed into the World Trade Center, to Ahmed Sheik, the former London School of Economics student who planned the beheading of Daniel Pearl, to Magdy Mahmoud Mustafa el-Nashar, the suspected American-educated bomb-maker in London — the common bond is not poverty, a lack of education or legitimate grievance. Instead it is blind hatred instilled by militant Islam.
Switching gears, Publius extends stats posted yesterday on crime in Canada, by placing them in the context of First Nations population. (In a comment that jumps head first into parody, a self-described “Indian activist” chastizes him for not writing letters to the government and the CBC.)
What isn’t factored into his simple chart is the skewing of crime figures through the phenomenon of organized aboriginal youth gangs. Taking on names like “Crazy Cree” and “Indian Posse” – the clear message is that membership is race based, so those who wish to protest the characterization can take it up with them. I suspect much of the violent crime reported in Saskatoon and Regina is directly related to gang involvement in drugs and prostitution, turf warfare, initiation rites. (There are reportedly 13 or 14 such gangs in Saskatoon.)
Exacerbated by the absurdly lenient Youth Criminal Justice Act which recycles so-called “young offenders” back onto the streets faster than police can apprehend them, the situation is especially maddening at a time when so many First Nations kids are finally making their way into the work force through traditional entry level positions in the private sector.
Darcey has thoughts on this, too.
That’s all for a while. Discuss, if you wish, and feel free to add your own links. Sort of an open thread.
