The Rant

I have sometimes heard Islam praised for its strict criminal law system. The practice of chopping off hands for petty theft, for example, is admired as a no nonsense path to the paradise of perfect law and order. I am not sure as to the proper context for problems with "civil unrest" currently plaguing Gaza, and Iraq, in battles between Shiites and Sunnis, and Hamas and Fatah. Replacing petty crime with civil war is not quite my idea of perfect justice. Leaving those questions aside, it is also true that some strict law and order types fail to consider that under Islamic law, theological questions are also matters for the criminal courts. There is not doubt that Moslems take these matters very seriously. For example, the penalty for apostasy (dropping out of Islam), sometimes called changing your mind in the west, is death . If this be the case, what would be a reasonable and just punishment for merely thinking about leaving the faith, such as by talking to Christians or re...

The religion of peace demonstrating that it has sympathy with mercy killing; the ultimate path to peace is well worn in Islam. Gunmen Invade Gaza and Kill Injured Patient Gaza - Ma'an – Gunmen disguised in Executive Force uniform invaded the Kamal Adwan Hospital and assassinated injured patient, Ramadan Sa'ed Ghaben, as well as shooting two women who were with him, on Thursday night. The Palestinian health ministry condemned the attack and issued a statement warning that several hospitals and medical centres in Gaza are in danger of similar attacks. The statement added that such attacks are negatively affecting the work of medical staff, and hospitals are seriously considering ceasing work, in order to protect staff. Ma'an News Agency _________________

by Hugh Fitzgerald (from Dhimmi Watch ) It has been nearly six years since the World Trade Center attack. It has been four decades since the Six-Day War, which signaled for the Arabs and Muslims a recognition that regular warfare, in the Lesser Jihad against Israel, would not do, and terrorism would have to be employed. And so began plane hijackings, and letter-bombs in embassies, and the seizing of schoolchildren and their subsequent murders (Ma'alot), and the explosions of planes in mid-air (that TWA plane that rose to a certain height and then, bam!), the smuggling of explosives onboard through the use of innocent Infidels (that pregnant Irish girl, given a "package" to unwittingly deliver on an El Al flight by her "Palestinian" boyfriend whom she loved so very much -- but apparently he had other ideas). It has been four and a half years since the Iraq War began, a war whose folly can only be properly understood not by those who counsel appeasement, not by...

Interesting video

LONDON, Jun 4 (APP): Prime Minister Shaukat Aziz on Monday said attempts to equate Islam with terrorism must be rejected, as Islam offers the message of humanity, egalitarianism, moderation, tolerance and coexistence. "There are perverse attempts to equate Islam with terrorism. We must reject this travesty" he said in a video address at the opening of the 'Islam in the World Today' conference at Lancaster House, central London. __________________________ Well, if Aziz is right, how come whenever I run "terrorist attack" on Google News, I get articles like these: (and I can't find any articles about Christian terrorists, or Humanist terrorists, for that matter). Killing for Allah At JFK In August 2006, Russell "Mohammed" Defreitas, a retired employee of New York's JFK Airport, confided to an acquaintance his "vision" for a jihad terror attack that, he said, would make the attack on the World Trade Center seem small. The plot invol...

Is this true? As Britain’s Tony Blair wrote in The Sunday Times: “Extremism will be defeated only by recognising that we have not created it ... pandering to its sense of grievance will only encourage it.” Blair confronted the argument that Muslims hate the West because it has taken military action in Afghanistan and Iraq: “Tell me what exactly they feel angry about? We remove two utterly brutal and dictatorial regimes; we replace them with a UN-supervised democratic process. And the only reason it is difficult still is because other Muslims are using terrorism to try to destroy the fledgling democracy and, in doing so, are killing fellow Muslims. Why aren’t they angry about the people doing the killing?”

by Bob Clasen Currently, the Administration is trying to wage a War on Terror. But Terror is not an entity. It is a method of warfare, like automatic weapons, or aircraft. One cannot wage war against a technique or technology. I suggest that what is needed is not more soldiers to be sent to Iraq, but greater clarity of thought. Who, exactly, is our enemy? It would appear that one of America's enemies is Fundamentalist Islam. Why is Fundamentalist Islam our enemy? Because Fundamentalist Islam defines unbelievers as infidel and urges its members to wage war against them. This is the doctrine of jihad. The problem is not with extremisist who hijacked a peaceful religion. The problem is the doctrine of Jihad, or Holy War is found throughout the Koran. This doctrine can be re-interpreted by modern liberal types as a psychological warfare against one's own sins, but that is not how many people throughout history have interpreted it. Anyone who is given to literal interpret...

Would it be immoral for Americans to leave Iraq, or to allow it to dissolve? Some have said so. But as to the question of morality, I don't even understand the question. The Kurds resent the Arabs for good reason. Why should they not try to make a move for independence, and if by helping them the American government can weaken Syria and Iran, and have a semi-reliable ally in what was northern Iraq, why not? What is immoral about that? And as to the sectarian divisions, they date back a thousand years before the founding of the United States. The depth and duration of that division, in other words, owes nothing to us. It is the Americans who have tried, at great human and economic cost, to make the Iraqis less tribal, less selfish, more imbued with a sense of a nation -- and a nation that is not merely a place to be controlled by their sect or tribe or family. The Americans have tried to encourage entrepreneurial activity instead of reliance, as in so many other Muslim states, on ei...

Recess appointments are a way of giving a post to an individual without Senate confirmation. The process is used for political hot potatoes like John Bolton. Bush rewards Swift Boat donor. Apparently recess appointments of ambassadors are not eligible for pay; however, that doesn't stop the Bush administration from trying to reward special people. The Department of State will not rule out paying a salary to Sam Fox, the major Swift Boat Veterans For Truth donor who was recess appointed as US Ambassador to Belgium by President George W. Bush yesterday.

I recently read a book on Madison and the Bill of Rights. Thom Hartman's news letter had a very well discussed commentary on the Military Commissions Act and Habeas Corpus...or what's left of it. Repeal the Military Commissions Act and Restore the Most American Human Right by Thom Hartmann "The power of the executive to cast a man into prison without formulating any charge known to the law, and particularly to deny him the judgment of his peers, is in the highest degree odious, and the foundation of all totalitarian government whether Nazi or Communist."-- Winston Churchill The oldest human right defined in the history of English-speaking civilization is the right to challenge governmental power of arrest and detention through the use of habeas corpus laws. Habeas corpus is roughly Latin for "hold the body," and is used in law to mean that a government must either charge a person with a crime and allow them due process, or let them go free. Last autumn the ...

Extracted from Right Web Feith cannot be described by a single label. A fervent militarist with close ties to the military-industrial complex, Feith has repeatedly aligned himself with hardliners in government, working with Richard Perle in the 1980s and then becoming part of the Vulcans along with Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, and Dick Cheney in the Bush II administration. He worked as a corporate lobbyist in the 1990s for Northrup Grumman, among other military contractors. His political orientation has been distinctly neoconservative, as evident in his affiliations with such groups as the Middle East Forum (MEF), Center for Security Policy (CSP), and Institute for Advanced Strategic and Political Studies (IASPS), and the Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs . Feith has also been associated with the National Institute for Public Policy (NIPP), which promotes missile defense, space weapons, and nuclear weapons development. Feith, along with Max Kampelman , was a team leader for N...

These moderates are in fact fanatics, torturers and killers The longer the US and Britain back dictatorial regimes in the Middle East the more explosive the region will become Mai Yamani Tuesday February 6, 2007 The Guardian UK Politicians, especially in times of geopolitical deadlock, adopt a word or a concept to sell to the public. In 1973, at the peak of cold-war tensions, the US secretary of state, Henry Kissinger, coined the term "detente". Such words gain a currency and become useful political tools to escape policy quagmires. As the Middle East lurches from crisis to crisis, Tony Blair, George Bush and Condoleezza Rice compulsively repeat the word "moderates" to describe their allies in the region. But the concept of moderate is merely the latest attempt to market a failed policy, while offering a facile hedge against accusations of Islamophobia and anti-Islamic policies. Western leaders have simply chosen a few Arab rulers they believe are still saleable to...

I hope Media Matters doesn't attack my use of a piece of their article about talk show host Melanie Morgan......a certified idiot... On a January 12 special " no-holds-barred " discussion on the ABC-owned Bay Area radio station KSFO, conservative radio host Melanie Morgan read portions of a letter from Media Matters for America President and CEO David Brock, in which Brock implored ABC to stop airing violent rhetoric and racist fearmongering. Morgan then attacked "the hate from David Brock at Media Matters" and warned that she and her co-hosts "would not be intimidated by your thuggish tactics." One of Morgan's co-hosts, known as Officer Vic , also accused Media Matters of extortion: "[H]ere we have people using the First Amendment ... as a tool or a club. ... [W]hen you start taking financial action, you start going after people's jobs, taking money away from them, using, ostensibly, the First Amendment as the excuse and a tool, then yo...

Bob: Are you aware of the "Spocko" controversy raging on several blogs.? See this link http://blogintegrityblogspotcom.blogspot.com/2007/01/spockos-brain-lives.html Blogger took on right-wing talk showhosts by exposing their more radical statements to their corporate advertisers. We have a "wing-nut" station up here with the call sign KSFO. Their radio hosts have been the primary focus of this assault. Interesting issues related to "fair use" have been raised because the assault by Spocko used copyrighted material.......audio clips of the talk show hosts' own words. Disney owns KSFO and has sent in the cavalry to try an shut down Spocko's blog.

Bob: These guys never quit. I think the NRA is its own worst enemy. But hey, if works, just keep saying the jackbooted Democrats are going to take away all guns. NRA Sounds Alarm of Not-So-Imminent Threat By Jeffrey H. BirnbaumTuesday, January 2, 2007; Page A15 In lobbying, a threat is good for business, whether it's genuine or not. This might help to explain the dire warnings being issued by the National Rifle Association as the Democrats prepare to take control of Congress this week. "The new leadership could be one of the most unfriendly to the National Rifle Association," declared Andrew Arulanandam, spokesman for the NRA. "If there's an effort to pursue gun control, we will mount an active defense." The famously combative lobby, with 4 million members, is displeased with the voting histories of Speaker-elect Nancy Pelosi (Calif.) and other top Democrats in the House and is putting them on notice that it won't tolerate passage of anti-gun measures....

I am sure many Republicans, given the benefit of hindsight, would nix invading Iraq. I certainly would. I do believe that the last five years has been a learning experience for Americans, forced to take their minds off the sports schedule and latest electronic gadget or new car in order to try and focus on this confusing group of world citizens called Moslems. As they listen to news from London and Paris and Spain about what the Moslem immigrants are up to, as they listen to what Moslems all over the world have to say about the United States and the west, as they examine the way politics works in Iraq, Saudi Arabia, "Palestine," Lebanon, Syria, Afghanistan, etc. it is slowly dawning on our somewhat slow witted masses that Moslems are not necessarily "just like us." Nor is Islam just like Christianity or Judaism. Moslems do not believe in "turning the other cheek." THings we take for granted such as freedom of speech, freedom o...

Bob: An small part of the Vanity Fair article available in the Jan 07 issue or at www.vanityfair.com . I think what is interesting is that the orignal premise...going to Iraq is not questioned. Iraq Neo Culpa Please don't call them "architects of the war": Richard (Prince of Darkness) Perle, David (Axis of Evil) Frum, Kenneth (Cakewalk) Adelman, and other elite neoconservatives who pushed for the invasion of Iraq are beside themselves at the result. by David Rose January 2007 A preview of this article was published on VF.com on November 3, 2006. Iraq-war cheerleader Richard Perle now says an invasion may have been the wrong way to topple Saddam Hussein. Photographs by Nigel Parry. I: About That Cakewalk … I remember sitting with Richard Perle in his suite at London's Grosvenor House hotel and receiving a private lecture on the importance of securing victory in Iraq. "Iraq is a very good candidate for democratic reform," he said. "It won't be Westmi...

In considering the mess in Iraq, not to mention other areas of the world I was moved to be thankful that I live in the U.S.A. We may not be perfect, but we can hold an election with a low probability that the candidates will be assasinated. We have a dominant religion that promotes peace, not jihad. We are able to hand over power from party to party quite regularly without violence. Our courts are relatively fair and bribery is rare in my experience. We have the best set of colleges in the world, as is reflected by all the foreign students seeking to come here. Overall, this is a great country and we are lucky to live here. One of the chief problems in Iraq is that they do not seem to have the basic buidling blocks for building a Constitutional democracy. They come from a culture of violence, where all disputes are settled with guns or swords. You can lead a horse to water but you can't make them drink. I think it is time to turn Iraq over to the Iraquis with our best wishes. Onl...

Bob: I was watching the Colbert Report last night. He reports our great vice-president annouced recently that.....drum roll please...... Don Rumsfeld is the greatest Secretary of Defense our nation has ever had........ I just wanted you to know.

Here is another suggestion by Diana West to just withdraw and let the Muslims continue their 1000 year old sectarian battle. _______________ Funny thing about the recent op-ed by Nawaf Obaid in The Washington Post outlining likely Saudi actions if the United States withdraws from Iraq: namely, that Saudis would both support Sunnis in Iraq (versus Shi'ites supported by Iran) and manipulate the oil market to "strangle" the Iranian economy. I think it sounds peachy, this let-them-devour-each-other strategy — which I'm guessing many Americans mutter to one another in frankness, if not also in confidence. You can read the entire thing here. --------------- I note that this sort of suggestion was not included in the Iraq Study Group. It has increasing appeal to me because I am less sanguine about the possibility of "moderate Muslims" who would appreciate our efforts to institute a western style Constitutional democracy. They say they want this, to get our mon...