He does look like Ben Stiller. I think it’s the ears.

Sam Harris on profiling

More of the same

Always seemed like the right idea, to me.

And, frankly, I have been and remain more open-minded regarding the use of torture in connection with the struggle against the Jihaders than he is.

Once upon a time . . .

Iran - The Greatest Threat to Western Civilization - YouTube

Nikita Khrushchev famously told the West, on behalf of the communists of the world and their regimes and of the Soviet Union, in particular, “We will bury you.”

And he was not half as silly for thinking that as the Iranian mullahs who think history, in the hands of Allah (of course), is on their side.

Nor half as dangerous as their theology of suicidal martyrdom and Jihad makes them.

The nukes of Pakistan are just one or two bad days from falling into the hands of a new government just as frightful as the Iranians, though in a Sunni rather than a Shiite fashion and close to al-Qaeda, in particular.

And what of the nukes the Iranians might make for themselves?

I would have cheered if the American forces in Pakistan had found and destroyed or stolen their nukes back in 2001, I think it was, when they went there to support the impending US attack on Afghanistan.

Or perhaps it was later, during preparations for the invasion of Iraq, that the press published rumors the American forces were planning some such thing that, anyway, never came off.

Nothing like the destruction of a city and certainly not an attempt to overthrown the regime - it would only be followed by worse - but something far more focused like the killing of Osama bin Laden, I mean.

And what of Iran?

Pat Buchanan has argued in the past that the US cannot prevent the Iranians getting nukes at reasonable cost and ought to and can tolerate their having them.

He thinks any attempt with the least chance of success would provoke a war of unacceptable and disproportionate costs that would not, in the end, replace the current regime with a friendlier one and might impose unacceptable costs on the Israelis and others, too.

The Israelis appear not to agree.

Nor do the Germans, the French, the Brits, and perhaps others.

I don't know what the Obama Administration really thinks.

I think we don't need another war in the Middle East, though I must admit stopping the Muslim loons in charge of Iran getting their hands on the Bomb is a much better reason for one than because Saddam Hussein tried to kill Bush pere and paid $25K in bounty to the families of suicide bombers who struck at Israel.

Or because Rummy, Bush fils, and Cheney were stupid enough to honestly believe they could replace the Taliban regime with one much less Islamist and much chummier toward Israel and the US.

Assuming they actually believed that.

What about Israel?

I can never really make up my mind about Israel.

There is not the least reason of objective national interest for the US to uphold the cause of Israel in any degree, at all.

In fact, reasons of that kind all militate in favor of the US abandoning Israel to its own devices.

The cards have fallen out that way since 1948, for cryin’ out loud.

Any fool can see it.

There is this matter of oil, and the Israelis have none of it but their Arab enemies have lots.

And then there is the moral argument.

The opponents of Israel point out with perfect justice that “the Zionist entity” is a late-blooming and last vestige of 19th Century European colonialism.

With almost equal justice – well, some, anyway – they tell us Western support for Israel is a re-run of Western support for the crusader-state, the Kingdom of Jerusalem, in the Middle Ages, going awry only so far as no Christian power in those days would have lifted a finger to uphold a state whose job was to provide a safe place for the Jews, and so far as the modern attempt has proved somewhat quixotic.

Should not the mid-20th Century political morality of decolonization that drove much of US policy in the post WWII period have led us, and lead us now, to oppose rather than support Israel?

The claim based on Jewish ancestors having their own kingdom in Palestine 2,000 years ago obviously cut no ice against the claim of the Muslim Arabs living there up to 1948.

The claim based on German guilt for the Holocaust was hardly relevant, since Palestine was not German territory, was not administered by any German ally, and was not Germany’s to give.

The claim of the Jews based on Lord Balfour’s declaration of 1917 – he more or less representing the British Empire, the colonial power then in control of Palestine – was and is surely no better than the claim of the pied-noirs to rightfully hold Algeria as their own country because France, the colonial power controlling that area since 1831, said they did.

The claim of the Jews based on the failure of the Occident as a whole to stop Germany’s horrifically successful attempt to make Europe Judenrein supposes there was a moral duty to do that by whatever means necessary.

There was clearly no legal duty.

And few will accept there was a moral duty beyond those who, today, suppose a like duty making it incumbent upon America to rescue any people, anywhere, not only from genocide in particular but from any horror at the hands of their rulers or any others.

But even our progressive, post-WWII, post-colonialist political morality accepts that countries founded and dominated by settler populations in which not too many indigenous people live on at all or in significant political subjection have as good a right to exist as any other, even if (as was not always the case) the country at the outset was in some measure created by crime against a native population.

Or anyway I would rather it did, given we have to pay attention to such nonsense as morality at all.

So let it pass that despite the claims of those who hate it Israel has as much and as good a right to exist as any other modern state.

That still leaves open the question why America ought to spend a penny or risk the bones of a single Connecticut grenadier to support or protect the Jewish State, though arguments of national interest powerfully urge us not to.

To spite the Muslims does not seem a good enough reason.

Nor that if we don’t they will gloat they shouted in our faces and we backed down.

At least I don’t think so.

Least of all if the grenadier is my own grandchild, say.

I was not, after all, much impressed with the like arguments when conservatives made them in support of the Vietnam War.

And I am not in retrospect.

Though it was a dismal thing to see, all those helicopters carrying people from the US embassy rooftop in Saigon to aircraft carriers not far off shore, fleeing the successful Communists.

Those pictures of sailors pushing empty choppers that would not be able to make a return trip off the decks and into the sea to make room for more choppers, full of refugees, to land were heart-breaking.

All the same, I opposed that war until it ended, demonstrating, writing to newspapers and politicians, and so on.

All the same.

(And though I was cheered when the Vietnamese Communists invaded Cambodia to put an end to the mad reign of Pol Pot and save the Cambodian people, despite the opposition of Henry Kissinger, always a man to meddle stupidly and at great cost to people other than himself in Asia.)

Christian morals in secular disguise

Ending Demand Won’t Stop Prostitution

All religions are false, but some are more harmful than others.

Reading “bunk” for “false,” the same is true for moral codes.

And the Christian moral code, especially as it pertains to sex, is far more harmful than the post-Christian, secular morality evolving before our eyes.

Clericalists aiming at pumping creationism into the public schools have long since learned the trick of disguising an idea whose basis is entirely in the mythology of the Bible as a secular, even scientific view in legitimate competition with evolutionism.

They are doing the same sort of thing with their Christian views of sex and, in particular, the sex business.

Blowback and Jihad

To the extent that the blowback theory of Muslim ire is true that ire could be expected to recede with an American withdrawal from the region and American abandonment of Israel.

But to the extent that Muslim ire is genuinely religious in inspiration it will not recede solely on that account.

It has rightly been pointed out by many that the Islamic religious mind, broadly speaking, is similar to the Western, Christian mind from the triumph of Christendom in the early Middle Ages through the wars of religion of the 17^th Century.

It could be said that, like far too many Muslims today, including their religious scholars and clerical leadership, far too many Christians in those times, including their religious scholars and clerical leadership, were about as bloody-minded as humanly possible about their religion.

Christians then, like Muslims today, adhered to the idea that individuals, groups, institutions public and private, and the state were all permitted and even required to impose acceptance of Christianity on others by violence.

All were permitted and even required to punish heresy and apostasy with death, for example, and to punish atheism with death, and to punish sacrilege and speech or other forms of expression denigrating religion, denying its truth, or otherwise criticizing it with death.

And it is sometimes said that, as what put a stop to all that in the West was partly the development and spread of religion-based, Christian rejection of coercion and violence in religion through the Radical Reformation and partly the Enlightenment, similar developments within Islam will do the same, eventually, for that religion.

But the eventual acceptance of religious peace and toleration by Islam is obstructed, if not in the long run altogether prevented, by the critical difference that while no straightforward reading of the New Testament provides much by way of encouragement, much less justification, for such coercion and violence any straightforward reading of the Koran does a very great deal to justify and even demand both.

Hence, for example, while Christianity was pacifist and non-coercive for centuries after its birth, spreading by preaching and voluntary acceptance, Islam was spread from its earliest times by war, violence, and coercion.

This does not bode well for the future of Islam or of the world.

What has been the effect of the global Muslim tantrum on our impending presidential election?

Romney probably means more war over a wider area in the Muslim world.

If that strikes you as futile and a gross waste of treasure and blood, Obama is certainly the lesser evil of the two.

But the Muslim stampede since 9/11/12 has probably helped Romney even though polls say Americans are sick of the neocon wars and don't want more war because the stampede has made Americans angry.

They get angrier with every day that it continues in the headlines.

And because even Americans (and there are many, especially on the Christian right) who agree speech offensive to religion ought to be prohibited and punished are not happy to see an American president missing the moment when what he is supposed to do is stand up for his country.

No, the administration has not been apologizing.

But the administration's efforts to deflect Muslim wrath from them, from the government, from America, from the American people, and maybe even from Christians onto the schmuck who made that silly movie are a disgraceful spectacle with too much the look of terrified man in a crowd shouting at a gunman, "Hey! I didn't do it! Shoot him!"

Worse, we know that they know it was and is not really about the movie, either in Benghazi where what happened was an al-Qaeda attack or in Cairo where Muslims in a coordinated way chose the 11th anniversary of 9/11 to put on a mass demonstration of their hatred for America, or anywhere else in the wave of hate since.

Though their stupid, global arrogance in making their demands that we bow to Islam and abandon our tradition of free speech is real, and though the demands themselves are quite seriously meant, it is not and has not been all about that one little film for these Muslim masses.

What these outbursts have been saying to us and all the world is this.

“It’s September 11th, America. Many happy returns.”

And yet, despite all that, this disgraceful exercise in blame-shifting is what liberals want Obama to do, it seems, pretty much to a man.

Not just bloggers and pundits but “wise men” of the liberal establishment.

And that will hurt the president and the Democrats, and probably already has, despite the fact that Romney's foreign policy would doubtless be much stupider and certainly more bellicose than his and polls say, as I noted, that Americans are heartily sick of all that.

Romney told the truth.

For the swing voters it's more about emotion and "do they like the guy."

Obama has made them ashamed, at least of him if not of their country, and he continues to make them ashamed every day the administration continues its wave of “It wasn’t us! We didn’t do it!” propaganda addressed to the screaming masses of the Muslim world.

Anger and disgust at Muslim behavior combined with rejection of that shame will together drive people to vote for the guy who is not Obama.

And they will do that even though he is by far the greater evil, even in this matter of dealing with global, psychopathic Islam.

Update 9/22

In recent days there has been much in the news about crowds in Benghazi supportive of America demonstrating for us and against the killers of our ambassador.

Also, crowds have been attacking militias suspected of being involved and the people have been demanding the new government disband fundamentalist militias.

The government has arrested several people in connection with the embassy attack.

Meanwhile, in Egypt, the new government is seeking international warrants for the arrest of 9 Americans linked to the now infamous though boring You Tube video.

Charlie Hebdo sued by Muslims

Charlie Hebdo French cartoons: Complaint filed in Paris

Apparently, no one laughed at the Syrians and pointed out that if the cartoons incited hatred it was among the Muslims and if anything incited the French to hate Muslims it was their own inexcusable behavior.

So, let’s see, responding to a perfectly ordinary, unexciting event - the publication of these cartoons - they fly into an insane rage and then sue you for making them mad?

No, no.

That’s not what they mean.

At least I don't think it is.

Surely they mean CH has incited hatred of Islam and of Muslims among the non-Muslim French, and perhaps violence (none, anywhere, at this point) by those French against Muslims?

But only by taking all that “hate” and “violence” as referring to the hate felt by and the violence done by the Muslims rather than anything felt among or done by the non-Muslim French can anything in this charge be taken to be even remotely plausible.

And then, of course, it makes no sense at all.

Update 092812 at 1320 hrs EDT.

The French Minister of the Interior, during an inaugural speech at a new mosque in Strasbourg, told auditors in no uncertain terms France would expel those who preach hate, defy the Republic, or challenge its values.

Last week he forbade demonstrations in France against the Charlie Hebdo cartoons.

While his government was damned by American conservatives for proposing to tax the incomes of the rich at 75% it and the Minister got no credit for resisting Islamism, a favorite cause of the American right.

No doubt it did not help that in the same speech he said construction of additional mosques in France would be permitted.

Ruben Bolling to get run out of the liberal club?

I have to think the folks at KOS didn’t get it.

Daily Kos: The God-Man youtube video!

And read the comments.

Some of them are getting it without quite saying it.

I just said it outright.

But I missed the name and mistook the cartoonist for Tom Tomorrow.

So sue me.

All the same, they posted this at KOS?

Daily Kos :: Comments: The God-Man youtube video!

Not entirely sure but it seems Tom's sly point is that in actual fact Christians routinely shrug off mockery with patience while those vicious, self-infatuated, entitled Muslims do not.

In open defiance of the liberal dogma that all religions are alike and the KOS party line that American conservative Christians are just as bad as the Taliban.

Is that it?

No more Tom at KOS?

Update, that same day.

Comments posted after mine indicate some KOS readers still don't get it.

They even see the cartoon as a sort of "you're another" jibe at Christians.

None so blind.

Or maybe Ruben is just incredibly inept at getting his message across.

Why the sane Muslims keep their heads down

Pakistani accused of blasphemy over Prophet film

Once in a while I wonder whether we ought to just suddenly take every single nuke away from every single Muslim country that has one, and wreck all their reactors.

They already hate everybody who isn’t Muslim, especially us, about as much as is humanly possible.

And that’s the problem.

Way back during the initial US attacks on Afghanistan, when a whole lot of US forces moved quickly into Pakistan, The New York Times (as I recall) and then other papers published rumors that some US forces were assigned to find and seize the Pakistani nuclear weapons.

I thought then that the Pentagon and White House, reading the papers, must have been grinding their teeth for lack of a strong legal basis to imprison people for running their mouths about even rumored military operations supposedly planned for the future or then under way.

But not even so much as bitter public criticism of such treasonous irresponsibility was possible without an admission, or coming too close to an admission, in public that such a mission really had been under way.

And that would by no means have helped our relations with the Pakistanis, at the time.

A few days later the papers said the Pakistani government had moved all its nukes to new, secret, and safer locations.

Not for the first time, I hated the invincible, arrogant stupidity of the liberal establishment.

I opposed the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq at the time and have opposed them at all times since as stupid, hopeless, and shockingly costly blunders.

But taking the nukes from Pakistan would have made the world a significantly safer place.

It would have been the only really sensible part of an otherwise senseless operation.

Now that’s a provocation

Given the ferocity and volume of stuff on the Internet it’s absurd to maintain that the rather banal and insignificant 13:51 short about the life of Mohamed was an intentional provocation.

But this sure looks it.

Cartoons in French weekly fuel Mohammad furo

Charlie Hebdo is a notoriously unrestrained satiric magazine.

Wikipedia describes the magazine as having a “strongly left wing, anarchist slant.”

What was this supposed to provoke, given not only the current furor in the Muslim world but that the president of France is a Socialist?

This could be a left wing provocation intended to give the president and the government an excuse to change the law in a more Shariah friendly direction.

But it is undeniable that it is likely to aid the right by embarrassing the government and feeding French anti-immigration sentiment.

Hard to tell, sometimes, what the further left could possibly be thinking.

Says the news story,

"We have the impression that it's officially allowed for Charlie Hebdo to attack the Catholic far-right but we cannot poke fun at fundamental Islamists," said editor Stephane Charbonnier, who drew the front-page cartoon.

"It shows the climate - everyone is driven by fear, and that is exactly what this small handful of extremists who do not represent anyone want - to make everyone afraid, to shut us all in a cave," he told Reuters.

. . . .

Charlie Hebdo has a long reputation for being provocative. Its Paris offices were firebombed last November after it published a mocking caricature of Mohammad, and Charbonnier has been under police guard ever since.

Nothing in the story about a presidential reaction, though the French state is going to an awful lot of trouble to prepare for Muslim reaction.

This is AP.

Charlie Hebdo, Charb publish vulgar Prophet Muhammad cartoons in France

The story throws more light on the motivation.

Looks like pure, “Up yours” free speech advocacy.

Particularly given the history of prior provocations, for this magazine and this editor.

Give him credit for sack.

Internet attacks have crashed their site, for now.