There are too many excellent quotes to take from this piece. I'll give you a few, but you really should go and read the whole thing. Mr. Steyn is brilliant and entertaining at the same time.
The other day, six Anglican archbishops called for the church to bless the unions of same-sex couples. The Anglican Church of Canada is about to have a big vote on the issue, and depending which way they swing it will either deepen the schism within the worldwide Anglican Communion or further isolate the Episcopal Church of the United States.
But never mind all that. What struck me was the rationale the archbishops came up with. This gay thing, they sighed. We've been yakking about it for years. Let's just get on with it, and then we can get back to the important stuff. "We are deeply concerned that ongoing study," they fretted, "will only continue to draw us away from issues which are gradually destroying God's creation — child poverty, racism, global warming, economic injustice, concern for our aboriginal brothers and sisters, and the growing disparity between the rich and the poor."
That's it? Anglicans need to fast-track a liturgy for gay couples so they can free up time to deal with the real issues like global warming? Half that catalogue of horrors seems to be different ways of saying the same thing ("child poverty … economic injustice … growing disparity") in order to give a bit of pro forma padding to the totally cool cause du jour of global warming. Which is so cool that, if an Anglican archbishop shows up at a climate-change conference, he'll be lucky to get in the room and if he does he'll be stuck at the table with the wonky leg next to the toilet, barely able to see the Most Reverend Almer Gortry up on stage doing his power-point presentation and warning that rising sea levels will send tidal waves crashing through every gay wedding reception in Provincetown by Saturday afternoon.
And on health issues,
The argument for this is that the state has an interest in a healthy workforce: If you're poor and you get lung cancer, you'll be filling up hospital rooms at public expense. If that's true, then the state arguably has a greater interest in you continuing to smoke and dying young: the ever aging population of the western world will be the biggest single burden on state resources in the coming decades.
But in the broader picture it might be truer still to say that the individual, unlike the state, therefore has an interest in stopping and reversing the government annexation of health care — because that argument can be used to justify almost any restraint on freedom — and, in the end, you may not get the government health care anyway.
Under Britain's National Health Service, smokers in Manchester have been denied treatment for heart disease, and the obese in Suffolk are refused hip and knee replacement. Patricia Hewitt, the Health Secretary, says that it's appropriate to decline treatment on the basis of "lifestyle choices." Today, it's smokers and the obese. But, if a gay guy has condom-less sex with multiple partners, why should his "lifestyle choices" get a pass? Health-care costs can be used to justify anything.
And, if becoming a charge of the state is the issue, then Governor Schwarzenegger is a complete squish on California's real health crisis. His state's emergency rooms have been reduced to Quebec-level waiting times because of the strains of providing free health care to the legions of the undocumented Americans. One third of the patients in Los Angeles County hospitals are illegal immigrants, and they've overwhelmed the system: dozens of emergency rooms in the state have closed this decade after degenerating into an unfunded de facto Mexican health-care network. If you're a legal resident of the State of California, your health system is worse than it was a decade ago and will be worse still in a decade's time. Fortunately, by then your action-hero governor will have cured "all these terrible illnesses" and there will be no need for California's last seven hospitals.
After more than 2000 years a Christian community that is so ancient that when it formed Mohammad (the Voice of Satan) would not be born for CENTURIES will be exterminated at the hands of the Islamists of Hamas. Of course the very trustworthy leaders of Hamas (a terror organization that also seeks to exterminate the Jews of the Middle East) tells us that there is no problem and they are committed to the protection of Christians.
GAZA CITY, Gaza Strip (AP) - Broken crucifixes and shards from a statue of Jesus have been swept up, but Gaza's tiny Christian community says the violent warning sent by Islamic militants cannot be erased.
The ransacking of a Catholic convent and an adjacent Rosary Sisters school during Hamas' sweep to power broke more than wood and plaster. It signaled the end of a relatively peaceful, if sometimes uneasy, relationship between Gaza's 1.4 million Muslims and 3,000 Christians.
Despite promises of protection by Hamas leaders, Christians fear more attacks, and some say they want to leave. Gaza's flock already has been hit hard by emigration in recent years, and a new exodus could remove what is left of one of the Arab world's oldest Christian communities.
"We don't trust them. Our time is coming," said a Greek Orthodox Christian, who in the current climate of fear asked not to be identified.
Pray for the Christians of Gaza. They are set to be destroyed.
Officials at the Public Broadcasting Service (PBS) dropped Islam vs. Islamists: Voices from the Muslim Center from its America at a Crossroads series. They give numerous false reasons for this. Simply, PBS is a leftist™ outfit that supports Islamism and want us to understand that we deserve the terrorism directed against us. Their support of Palestinian terrorism against Israel is well documented so I'll not address that just now.
During a hearing before the House Appropriations subcommittee that oversees the federal budgets of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB) and Public Broadcasting Service (PBS) Rep. Jim Walsh (R-Syracuse) asked the leaders of those two organizations about the suppression of Islam vs. Islamists. He wanted to know why the voices of moderate Muslims (who liberals™ presumable care a great deal about) were so hard to hear. Where is their voice of outrage at terrorist attacks?
You would think that supporting moderate Muslims concerned about what is happening to them would be something on which liberals and conservatives would be able to agree.
"The answer," Rep. Walsh explained to PBS President Paula Kerger and her CPB counterpart, Pat Harrison, "is that there’s a concerted and substantial effort on the part of radical Wahhabist Islam to silence these voices with physical intimidation [and] verbal intimidation. And [the filmmakers] document it in the United States, in Canada and around the world: Denmark, France."
Then Walsh threw down the gauntlet: "Based on what I’ve heard, there has been a longstanding and concerted effort to ensure that the American people, who paid for the production of this documentary, do not see it."
The responses to these remarks were, at best, inaccurate and misleading. Two exchanges are illustrative. At one point, PBS’s Kerger told Rep. Walsh that Islam vs. Islamists had "not been rejected for air. The film is still in development and production. The film that you have is not a finished film." Mr. Walsh replied, correctly, "I spoke with the producer. That film is finished."
Then CPB’s Harrison interjected: "The problem is…they have two hours of material. They must get it down to one." The congressman held up the finished, 52-minute show, saying, "I believe this…DVD is an hour long."
The barefaced mendacity of officials of the CPB and PBS is staggering. This is your tax dollars at work.
Most probably the objection was spurious, having much more to do with my political beliefs than with PBS guidelines. One of the "Crossroads" producers actually asked our colleague, accomplished filmmaker Martyn Burke, "Don’t you check into the politics of the people you work with?" Imagine the uproar if a conservative (say, former CPB chairman Ken Tomlinson) had asked such a question of a liberal director.
Mendacity and hypocrisy, that is the CPB and PBS.
It is no small irony that, in a $20 million, taxpayer-underwritten series like "Crossroads," whose very purpose is to expose PBS’s audience to a broader array of filmmakers’ stories and perspectives, our film is being black-balled by the Left, which largely decides what will be broadcast on publicly funded airwaves.
Tonight I watched (most of) Banned by PBS: Muslims Against Jihad. Of course the fact that this was broadcast by FOX News by itself sends liberals into blithering fits. None the less, it was an excellent production that actually serves to make one more sympathetic to what is happening to the regular people who are Muslims and who are suffering under the extremists as much, or more than, anybody else.
To see the pain of the face of a mother who can no longer recognize her son because of what he became under the influence of the jihadis is to understand the evil of the Islamists at the level where we live. Most of us will never witness a suicide bombing, but we can all see the suffering of a mother who sees that she has lost her son. Yet, the Leftist™ morons at PBS believe that this is not fair to the Islamists, and so will not show it.
PBS' big editorial complaint against Islam vs. Islamists is that it was not sympathetic to the Islamists, and therefore unbalanced and unfair to the Islamist extremists. Again, from Mr. Gaffney's piece;
Then there were the myriad efforts by PBS and its "coordinating entry station," Washington’s WETA, to force us to change the character, structure, and content of Islam vs. Islamists so as to make it less "unfair" to the Islamists. These changes are not to be confused with constructive editorial suggestions. We received a number of those, and repeatedly incorporated them into the finished film. Rather, they were incessant demands from PBS and WETA that the film be redone so as to tell at greater length the story of "conservative imams" and others who oppose the anti-Islamist Muslims we set out to profile. The stated object of this revision was to provide more "context" for the positions taken by the former group. [Yes, it is unfair not to give terrorists their "context"]
Banned by PBS: Muslims Against Jihad is an excellent program and reminds us that Muslims love their friends and family too. But, PBS doesn't want you to see that.
Officials of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting often point out that the money that they get from the Government is insignificant to their operations. They are bluffing. I say that we should call their bluff and defund the Corporation for Public Broadcasting including PBS and NPR (National Public Radio). They do not deserve our tax dollars.
The musician known as Cat Stevens said in a British television program to be broadcast next week that rather than go to a demonstration to burn an effigy of the author Salman Rushdie, "I would have hoped that it'd be the real thing."
The singer, who adopted the name Yusuf Islam when he converted to Islam, made the remark during a panel discussion of British reactions to Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini's call for Mr. Rushdie to be killed for allegedly blaspheming Islam in his best-selling novel "The Satanic Verses." He also said that if Mr. Rushdie turned up at his doorstep looking for help, "I might ring somebody who might do more damage to him than he would like."
"I'd try to phone the Ayatollah Khomeini and tell him exactly where this man is," said Mr. Islam, who watched a preview of the program today and said in an interview that he stood by his comments.
In Islam there is a line between let's say freedom and the line which is then transgressed into immorality and irresponsibility and I think as far as this writer is concerned, unfortunately, he has been irresponsible with his freedom of speech. Salman Rushdie or indeed any writer who abuses the prophet, or indeed any prophet, under Islamic law, the sentence for that is actually death. It's got to be seen as a deterrent, so that other people should not commit the same mistake again.
Tawfik Hamid, a former terrorist with Jemaah Islamiya has apparently come to his senses and offers a little help for terror enabling liberals™ in sorting out the "roof causes" of terror.
Not many years ago the brilliant Orientalist, Bernard Lewis, published a short history of the Islamic world's decline, entitled "What Went Wrong?" Astonishingly, there was, among many Western "progressives," a vocal dislike for the title. It is a false premise, these critics protested. They ignored Mr. Lewis's implicit statement that things have been, or could be, right.
But indeed, there is much that is clearly wrong with the Islamic world. Women are stoned to death and undergo clitorectomies. Gays hang from the gallows under the approving eyes of the proponents of Shariah, the legal code of Islam. Sunni and Shia massacre each other daily in Iraq. Palestinian mothers teach 3-year-old boys and girls the ideal of martyrdom. One would expect the orthodox Islamic establishment to evade or dismiss these complaints, but less happily, the non-Muslim priests of enlightenment in the West have come, actively and passively, to the Islamists' defense.
These "progressives" frequently cite the need to examine "root causes." In this they are correct: Terrorism is only the manifestation of a disease and not the disease itself. But the root-causes are quite different from what they think. As a former member of Jemaah Islamiya, a group led by al Qaeda's second in command, Ayman al-Zawahiri, I know firsthand that the inhumane teaching in Islamist ideology can transform a young, benevolent mind into that of a terrorist. Without confronting the ideological roots of radical Islam it will be impossible to combat it. While there are many ideological "rootlets" of Islamism, the main tap root has a name--Salafism, or Salafi Islam, a violent, ultra-conservative version of the religion.
It is vital to grasp that traditional and even mainstream Islamic teaching accepts and promotes violence. Shariah, for example, allows apostates to be killed, permits beating women to discipline them, seeks to subjugate non-Muslims to Islam as dhimmis and justifies declaring war to do so. It exhorts good Muslims to exterminate the Jews before the "end of days." The near deafening silence of the Muslim majority against these barbaric practices is evidence enough that there is something fundamentally wrong.
"This is an occasion for the world's 1.5billion Muslims to look at the seriousness of this decision," said Mohammed Ijaz ul-Haq, Pakistan's religious affairs minister.
"The West is accusing Muslims of extremism and terrorism," he told his country's parliament.
"If someone exploded a bomb on his body he would be right to do so, unless the British government apologises and withdraws the 'sir' title."
No, we wouldn't want to accuse Muslims of extremism.
That would actually be elegant and expensive food for Kim Jong-il and friends, not for the people of North Korea. You know, the ones referred to in the title Democratic People's Republic of Korea. Nope, not them.
WASHINGTON -- A senior State Department official told members of Congress in a recent classified briefing that funds transferred to the North Korean government by the United Nations Development Program were used by the Kim Jong Il regime to pay enterprises involved in weapons sales, as well as to purchase buildings in Europe and technology that could be used in a nuclear weapons program.
And because UN money is not enough,
The memo, which the State Department says is based on eyewitness accounts from program officials and internal UNDP business records, also alleges that the program's local employees withdrew from the UNDP's account at Pyongyang's Foreign Trade Bank tens of thousands of dollars worth of what UNDP officials identified as counterfeit U.S. currency.
It is instructive to note that this is not shocking to anyone anymore, and that we just let it go on and on.
"It is disturbing but it should not be surprising," said Mike Green, a scholar at the Center for Strategic and International Studies and senior director for Asian affairs at the National Security Council until the end of 2005. "Cash transfers to the North Korean regime are tightly controlled at the top to ensure Kim can procure dual-use materials for his weapons programs, finance his operations abroad and provide luxury goods for the elite. This is all fungible money."
How I wish we had a government that would not roll over for monsters.
Here is a post that I planned for early April, but with the chaos in my life (TDY to San Diego, house demolition and remodeling, etc) I was unable to post. I have heard nothing of this in the Fifth Column Fourth Estate. I am not surprised by that, but this is very important. Considering that fact that we are now rolling over for monsters like the Dear Murdering Freak-Boy Kim Jong-il I expect that nothing will come of this. We are now ignoring acts of war being committed against us. Here is the post.
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When one nation counterfeits the currency of another nation, it commits an act of war against that nation. Counterfeiting in large amounts weakens the currency and damages the victim economy.
It is no secret (although Kim Jong-il would like it to be) that North Korea has been manufacturing bogus U.S. $100 bills. It seems that they have had a little help.
UNITED NATIONS — As federal investigators examine how the leading U.N. agency in North Korea illegally kept 35 counterfeit American $100 bills in its possession for 12 years, documents indicate that more officials were aware of the existence of the fake currency — and earlier — than the agency has reported.
Spokesmen for the United Nations Development Program have said top officials at the agency's New York headquarters learned in February that their safe in Pyongyang contained the counterfeit bills and immediately reported it to American authorities. But several documents shown recently to The New York Sun indicate that higher-ups knew much earlier that the safe held counterfeit money.
The documents are part of a worldwide reporting system that allows the agency to keep track of the contents of its office safes.
One "safe contents count record" — shown to the Sun with the stipulation that the paper omit such details as the exact issuing date, which was before February — confirms that fake money was in the safe in Pyongyang. According to a source familiar with the system, this and similar records were filed with UNDP headquarters twice a year.
Internal UNDP communication shown to the Sun also indicates that in at least one incident, a Pyongyang office manager reported the existence of the counterfeit money to his successor. Similar reports were filed with the seven managers that have served in North Korea since 1995. Some of these managers have returned to UNDP headquarters since then and now serve as top officials there.
If federal prosecutors can return an indictment and confirm this activity, the UN will face a much tougher time in the US than it did in the Oil-for-Food Programme scandal. In that case, they turned a blind eye and enabled Saddam Hussein to enrich himself through a vast kickback scheme. If the UN helped hide North Korea's counterfeiting ring, that is a direct insult to our sovereignty, as well as our hospitality.
It would be an insult that we cannot afford to let pass. If the UN does not immediately fire everyone involved in this scandal and revoke their immunity, then we must cut off all funds for the UN and create a timetable for withdrawal from this thoroughly corrupt organization. We have no need of a debating society whose members transform refugee camps into seraglios, who stuff the pockets of dictators with money meant for those they oppress, and who actively assist other nations in undermining our currency. If the UN fails to cooperate, it's time to push Turtle Bay into the water and bid adieu to the last of the Cold War anachronisms.
I agree. The U.N. is worse than useless and should be disbanded.
I am a retired Navy Chief Petty Officer and a freelance performing 'cellist who brews his own beer. I am an Orthodox Christian. I am NOT a professional journalist, therefore nothing prevents me from writing what is true. I am now working as an Engineering Technician at Puget Sound Naval Shipyard.
