Insecure Gods

When Nobel Prize winner Isaac Rabi was asked to what he attributed his success, he said he always remembered that every day when he came home from school his mother would ask him, “Did you ask any good questions today?” What he imbibed was that we ultimately gain more from questions than answers. Answers bring a subject to a close; questions open us up to ever more profound and deeper understanding. That perhaps more than anything else may explain Jewish genius. From youth we explore the Torah, Talmud and commentaries with inquisitive minds encouraged to ask even when no clear response is in sight. To do otherwise would be to imply that our faith cannot withstand scrutiny, that our commitment to God is so tenuous that it is afraid of critical analysis.

from Aish.com

(emphasis mine)

Here is where Islam fails so miserably. Even if I knew nothing else about Islam, the Muslim’s fanatical objection to critiques would arouse my suspicions. But I only need to know one thing about Islam and that it is a creed that demands unquestioning submission. The God of the Jews and the Christians issues an invitation to follow Him. The Muslim god brooks no disputation. Love him or die. To me that is as pathetic as a rich man buying the attentions of a whore and pretending that he is the recipient of love and respect.

Why would I respect a god that is so small that he can’t tolerate my disrespect? Who demands that I prostrate myself before him five times a day? No thanks, I’ll take my chances with a god that gives me permission to kneel, or to walk away. My fate, if I should choose to do the latter, is on me.

On the NIE…

On the NIE, from ThreatsWatch:

As mentioned previously, the full NIE is 150 pages long, so enough collection may not be a problem. However, the fact that the authors make such an effort to couch and caveat what they think they know indicates that they are making up for a great deal of ignorance. Should we be satisfied with such ambiguous and circumspect descriptions of the information our nation’s leaders will be using to make the critical decisions of our time?

Your author has commented elsewhere on what he feels is really at work with this NIE. While it may very well be a partisan political agenda made manifest, experience suggests that the intelligence community is doing its utmost to avoid another public failure on par with Iraq’s WMD programs (or India’s nuclear weapons test, or the collapse of the Soviet Union, etc.). This includes but is not limited to using every linguistic trick in the book to ensure that anything written about any intelligence problem could be looked at in hindsight as “right” if interpreted in a particular way.

The community owes the leaders of our country, regardless of their political affiliation, better.

People laughed at former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld when he spoke of the problem of “unknown unknowns.” Odd as his verbiage was, he was driving home the point that you cannot make sound decisions about national security if you are in any way ignorant of your adversary’s intentions and activities. Does anyone really think that one of our toughest intelligence targets suddenly became transparent or is it more likely that there is more going on here than meets the eye?

Anyone in the current administration – and any aspiring presidential candidate – that is interested in leaving a noteworthy imprint on the intelligence community should make mandatory the inclusion of intelligence gaps in every NIE and major intelligence product. Our adversaries do not need to know what we don’t know, but the community would be doing itself and its customers a great service by remembering the significance of ignorance.

See also:

Iranian Nuclear Weapons Program Dispersed, Not Halted

Come On Nancy, You Know You Want it

Yet long before “waterboarding” entered the public discourse, the CIA gave key legislative overseers about 30 private briefings, some of which included descriptions of that technique and other harsh interrogation methods, according to interviews with multiple U.S. officials with firsthand knowledge. With one known exception, no formal objections were raised by the lawmakers briefed about the harsh methods during the two years in which waterboarding was employed, from 2002 to 2003, said Democrats and Republicans with direct knowledge of the matter. The lawmakers who held oversight roles during the period included Pelosi and Rep. Jane Harman (D-Calif.) and Sens. Bob Graham (D-Fla.) and John D. Rockefeller IV (D-W.Va.), as well as Rep. Porter J. Goss (R-Fla.) and Sen. Pat Roberts (R-Kan).

Individual lawmakers’ recollections of the early briefings varied dramatically, but officials present during the meetings described the reaction as mostly quiet acquiescence, if not outright support. “Among those being briefed, there was a pretty full understanding of what the CIA was doing,” said Goss, who chaired the House intelligence committee from 1997 to 2004 and then served as CIA director from 2004 to 2006. “And the reaction in the room was not just approval, but encouragement.”

Washington Post

H/T: Little Green Footballs

And, quite frankly, if Miss Pelosi is genuinely upset about torture, perhaps she and her useless cohorts in Washington – all of whom seem intent on wasting time and tax payer money on irrelevant issues, well, perhaps they could protest everyday Malaysian “justice” as demonstrated in the video linked below. After all, she has no compunction about traveling to other governments and sticking her nose where it most certainly doesn’t belong.

But you never know with liberals. Whips and naked buttocks are known triggers in their world. What’s a little S&M while you are stuck in prison. I’m sure Pelosi’s progressive NAMBLA constituency would approve. (Warning: Image below fold is nauseating)

Waiting for O’Donnell’s Scathing Denunciation of Obama’s Racism :::crickets chirping:::

This was the worst political speech of my lifetime. Because this man stood there and said to you “this is the faith of my fathers.” And you, and none of these commentators who liked this speech realized that the faith of his fathers is a racist faith. As of 1978 it was an officially racist faith, and for political convenience in 1978 it switched. And it said “OK, black people can be in this church.” He believes, if he believes the faith of his fathers, that black people are black because in heaven they turned away from God, in this demented, Scientology-like notion of what was going on in heaven before the creation of the earth.via NewsBusters

I can’t wait until little Larry applies his laser-like racism detector on Barak Obama. If there is anyone whose father’s faith disqualifies him, in my mind, as even a member of the Senate, let alone as president , it would be the man whose father and stepfather were Islamic, as well as a brother who just converted to Islam. (Yes, dear little liberal readers- Islam is a problem) But if it’s racism Mr. O’Donnell is so alarmed about, than where is his outcry about the racism that permeates Obama’s writings, family, history, and current church home.

Regarding Obama’s book “Dreams”, Steve Sailor, at The American Conservative, writes:

A racial group is a large extended family, and Obama’s book is primarily about his rejection of his supportive white maternal extended family in favor of his unknown black paternal extended family.

For the few willing to read all 442 pages, he offers important testimony about the enduring glamour of anti-white anger. It’s a bitter counterweight to the sunny hopes so widely invested in his candidacy as the man whose election as president would somehow help America finally “transcend race.”

In reality, Obama provides a disturbing test of the best-case scenario of whether America can indeed move beyond race.

[...]

Even his celebrated acceptance of Christianity in his mid-20s turns out to be an affirmation of African-American emotional separatism…..Obama falls under the spell of a leftist black nationalist preacher, Jeremiah A. Wright, who preaches African-American unity through antipathy toward whites. Reverend Wright remains a major influence on the presidential candidate.

Perhaps O’Donnell approves the inherent racism in the “afro-centricity” preached at Obama’s church, who proudly proclaim: “We are an African people, and remain “true to our native land,” the mother continent, the cradle of civilization.” I do think I’d prefer a president who received his spiritual succor from a congregation that considered themselves to be an American people and who considered America the land to whom they would “be true”.

Sadly, it appears Obama’s maternal white blood conflicted him greatly. I can’t imagine what the collective white blood of this American nation will inspire.

“I ceased to advertise my mother’s race at the age of 12 or 13, when I began to suspect that by doing so I was ingratiating myself to whites,” he wrote.

It is no surprise that he and Oprah have the same audience – an audience of dedicated victims, appeasers and self-flagellating guilty white folks.

Harris-Lacewell said such expressions of distrust toward whites will not hurt Obama in the Democratic presidential primaries, which are dominated by liberal voters.

“To win the Democratic nomination, he’s got to get a part of the progressive, anti-war, white folks,” she said. “And those white folks tend to be suspicious of any black person who wouldn’t be suspicious of white people.”

Such liberals would have little basis for suspicion after reading some of Obama’s conclusions about the white race, which he once described as “that ghostly figure that haunted black dreams.”

[...]

It was into my father’s image, the black man, son of Africa, that I’d packed all the attributes I sought in myself, the attributes of Martin and Malcolm, DuBois and Mandela.”

“Martin and Malcolm, DuBois and Mandela.” Gee, what illustrious men. But essentially, they espoused a mixture of black supremacist and separatism, all cloaked in the unassailable and priestly robes of “civil rights activists”; socialist and communists all. But those intellectual fathers probably impress a guilty white man like O’Donnell. And I really do not give a damn about their politically correct resumes – these men certainly did not and do not possess “attributes” that I want in an American president. But Obama’s reverence for their words and actions certainly explains his inability to raise his hand to his heart during the pledge of allegiance to America. His allegiance is elsewhere.

Obama wrote that in high school, he and a black friend would sometimes speak disparagingly “about white folks this or white folks that, and I would suddenly remember my mother’s smile, and the words that I spoke would seem awkward and false.”

As a result, he concluded that “certain whites could be excluded from the general category of our distrust.”

Well, there you go. Larry O’Donnell most certainly is one of those “certain whites”. Indeed, I’d guess that Oprah’s audience also qualifies to be amongst this special class of “certain self-loathing whites”.

During college, Obama disapproved of what he called other “half-breeds” who gravitated toward whites instead of blacks. And yet after college, he once fell in love with a white woman, only to push her away when he concluded he would have to assimilate into her world, not the other way around. He later married a black woman.

[...]

After graduating from college, Obama eventually went to Chicago to interview for a job as a community organizer. His racial attitudes came into play as he sized up the man who would become his boss.

“There was something about him that made me wary,” Obama wrote. “A little too sure of himself, maybe. And white.”

[...]

Such candid racial revelations abound in “Dreams,” which was first published in 1995, when Obama was 34 and not yet in politics. By the time he ran for his Senate seat in 2004, he observed of that first memoir: “Certain passages have proven to be inconvenient politically.”

Source

Please note that Obama didn’t renounce such statements, he only regretted the political toll that they might take. Perhaps he underestimates the power of white guilt. Or maybe white guilt is just the very currency that he is banking on. Larry O’Donnell is just one of too many PC addled fools in the media who will, no doubt, make hefty deposits in that bank.

YWAM Has Muslim Enemies

Perhaps the FBI might wish to investigate the “Black Knights”. They seem to have a problem with Youth With a Mission, the Christian group subject to an attack on Sunday.

Stopping the shock troops of “Youth With A Mission” a.k.a. YWAM (pronounced Why-Wham), is the duty of every Muslim. YWAM is a shadowy Cold War organization founded in 1960 that furnished a pretext for CIA involvement in third world countries that were thought vulnerable to communism. YWAM provided fresh-faced youth that masked the operations of the Central Intelligence Agency worldwide in such hotspot locations as Guatemala. Since the downfall of the Soviet Union, YWAM’s “mission” has changed from combatting communism to the destabilization of Islam and the Muslim countries. What follows are links to information about YWAM, from them as well as from those opposed to them. It is the duty of every conscientious Muslim to oppose YWAM whenever and wherever possible. Always assume that missionaries are connected with YWAM, for (as noted in the GroupWatch Report) it is their policy to maintain a low profile.

Black Knights

H/T: LGF comment

Kosovo and Israel: A Shared Betrayal

I am getting damn tired of Washington propping up Islam, as they continue to do in their push for an independent Kosovo.

Fjordman makes the case for Kosovo remaining with Serbia.

President Bush declared a “war on terror” after the Jihadist attacks on the United States in 2001. Six years later, all he has achieved is bleeding American tax payers financially and American soldiers literally while overseeing the eradication of non-Muslim communities in Iraq. Now his administration supports independence for terrorist-sponsoring Muslims in the Balkans and in the Palestinian territories. Unless he does something very substantial in 2008, George W. Bush risks being remembered as one of the worst presidents in American history.

The more I read, the less I buy of the official account of the “Balkan wars”. If Serbs “slaughtered” Muslims, it may well be they had sufficient cause. I no more believe the media’s caricature of blood thirsty Serbs than I buy their twisted portrayals of Israel. One does not understand the Balkans unless one takes into account the history of oppression that Serbs have long suffered under Muslim rule.

As Hugh Fitzgerald says, “One must keep in mind both the way in which some atrocities ascribed to Serbs were exaggerated, while the atrocities inflicted on them were minimized or ignored altogether. But what was most disturbing was that there was no context to anything: nothing about the centuries of Muslim rule. Had such a history been discussed early on, Western governments might have understood and attempted to assuage the deep fears evoked by the Bosnian Muslim leader, Izetbegovic, when he wrote that he intended to create a Muslim state in Bosnia and impose the Sharia not merely there, but everywhere that Muslims had once ruled in the Balkans. Had the Western world shown the slightest intelligent sympathy or understanding of what that set off in the imagination of many Serbs (and elsewhere, among the Christians in the Balkans and in Greece), there might never have been such a violent Serbian reaction, and someone like Milosevic might never have obtained power.” Yet, “In all of Europe, only a few French journalists and the Austrian writer Peter Handke tried to explain Serbian fears and Serbian history.”

[...]

Trifkovic cites James Jatras as claiming that Washington’s irrational Balkan policy is to a significant extent the product of the ignorant and misguided notion that the U.S. can curry favor in the Islamic world by sacrificing Kosovo’s Christians to the violent Jihad-terror elements that dominate Kosovo’s Albanian leadership: “Such an unfounded notion shows a breathtaking incomprehension of the worldwide jihadist threat.

I find this particularly disturbing.

Jevtic notes that “the fact that since the arrival of NATO to Kosovo over 150 Christian churches have been destroyed and some 400 mosques have been built, or are under construction, is for the Muslims a proof that if there is a faith which is supported by true God — it is Islam! Because, why would the Christian God, why would Jesus, permit the destruction of churches, where He, Jesus, is glorified? Why would He, at the same time, permit the construction of mosques, where His existence as God is denied? Why would He permit it, moreover, in the presence of men who bear arms and who claim to be Christians?

For secularists, the beliefs of a religious people are laughable. But it is just the left’s disdain for gods that will give Islam it’s advantage. Islamists will indeed believe their”allah” to be triumphant as they watch the west so easily abandon god and treasure without a fight. More so, it gives Islamists appetite to continue dissolving the West as the umma appears ever more likely with every western capitulation.

…writer Julia Gorin has warned, “An independent Kosovo will serve as a nod to secessionists worldwide,” and “history will show what no one cares to understand: the current world war began officially in Yugoslavia.”

Granting Jihadist Muslims independence in Kosovo after they have conducted ethnic cleansing of non-Muslims will establish an extremely dangerous precedent.

But the usual hyenas in our Congress somehow finds the establishment of a Muslim state in Europe cause for celebration. Which Arab pocket is Democrat Tom Lantos in?

The House Foreign Affairs Committee Chairman Tom Lantos (D-CA) called upon “jihadists of all color and hue” to see Kosovo as “yet another example that the United States leads the way for the creation of a predominantly Muslim country in the very heart of Europe.”

The more I dig into Kosovo, the more I am reminded of Israel.

As with Israel, the current administration has betrayed the West, it’s allies and the American people. Read the entire piece.

Related:

The Untold Story of Kosovo Negotiations

Global Jihad: The Future in the Face of Militant Islam

Serbianna

The Danish People’s Party Breaks Ranks on Kosovo

I’d Make a Lousy Jew

I support Israel. Period. End of story. But I’d make a lousy Jew. I don’t know quite how to describe this ongoing, haunting sense of loss that I have come to find that I live with everyday. But I imagine that an Israel Jew knows loss intimately, and yet, they fight on. I, I stand here benumbed, horrified at the seemingly inexorable erasure of America. I don’t even begin to know how to live with the knowledge that all that I cherish in my heart, all that I cherished for my children’s future is at grave risk. Yet, a Jew will have the courage to raise his family in Israel while her borders are besieged and a ravenous enemy chants for the death of his children.

Before 911, I never understood that so much of the faith that I have had in my ability to chart my own course in life, to win and lose on my own terms, to grab for brass rings, to envision a bright and shining future for my children….all those dreams that gave me succor were premised on a free and strong America. Yep, a Yankee Doodle Dandy, Founding fathers, Fourth of July America…. I have believed in all of it, even when as a callow youth, I scorned it. Yet, even then, I believed the surety of America’s promise would continue to be there for me and my children, just as surely as the mantle wraps the earth to it’s core. I never once imagined that America would fail to safely house our future. I never allowed that it was possible for America to be suborned so handily from within and betrayed so readily by her leaders.

But a Jew must be used to all of that. The horror that I feel as I understand that Bush has no intention of protecting our borders is nothing compared to what an Israeli Jew must feel as Israel is repeatedly raped by her leaders and supposed allies. Imagine our government allowing Mexico to lay claim to portions of the Southwest. That is the only way I can imagine the sense of violation a Jew must feel as they watch the machinations of Bush and Rice and Olmert.

The following summation of Annapolis, sadly, rings true.

Recently, I suggested that the US Administration reached a separate peace agreement with Iran. According to the US-Iran peace deal, Iran winded down its support for Iraqi guerrillas, and the US guaranteed it won’t bomb the Iranian nuclear facilities. Iran made good on its promise, and allowed the US Administration a tactical PR victory of reduced casualties in Iraq. The US Administration waited with fulfilling its part of the game until after the Annapolis peace show. Refusing to attack Iran over its nuclear program earlier would have likely derailed Israeli commitment to the Annapolis peace parley.

Women Suicide Bombers and Pink Toilets

It is often noted that feminists appear to be unmoved by the plight of women subject to the barbarities of Islam. In fact, they seem to shrug their collective shoulders as if to say – “Sorry for your luck, but hey, you were born in that culture and we honor culture over your particular agonies.”

After all, femi-nazis feminists have their priorities.

A former UI associate professor of law plans to file a Title IX complaint against the university over the pink visitors’ locker room in Kinnick Stadium.
Jill Gaulding, who spoke out against the pink locker room in 2005, said she plans to file the complaint because of the inappropriateness of the university’s action in rebuilding the pink locker room during stadium renovations. Some have complained that the pink color is derogatory toward women, intending to make visiting teams feel like “sissies.”

My guess is that feminists secretly admire the type of Muslim woman reported on below. Just think how many mythological glass ceilings that oppressed American women could finally break through with a few suicide bombers at a few corporate headquarters – and no one would ever dare suggest that a woman plop her ass on a pink toilet again.

A female suicide bomber wearing a vest packed with explosives killed 16 people in Iraq on Friday in an attack on former Sunni Arab insurgents who have joined the security forces to fight al Qaeda, police said. [...] Witnesses said a woman walked up to the building, in a street full of shops, and began asking questions. She detonated the vest she was wearing when people who were out shopping before Friday prayers began gathering around her.

Discussion at Fresh Bilge.

I’ve been involved in a discussion at Fresh Bilge where I got into something of an argument with Tatyana one of his commenters. This is one of my comments:

I’ve just been for a walk in the ravine in the snow with my camera and naturally a few thoughts occurred.
In one sense I’m in complete agreement with Tatyana. There is no God, no Creator as such, we live in a big, cold, indifferent universe. One fine, or not so fine, day our sun will end all our days, our beautiful existence will vanish as if it never existed. Schubert’s music will be gone and an infinite number of monkeys with scratchy quill pens will never bring it back, but it will have existed, nothing can take that away and that is the kind of immortality or afterlife if you like that awaits. Which also applies to ‘us’ and if that comforts some all well and good.
So there is ‘us’, the earth, the universe, also time and space and infinity, the physicists’ question, why is there something rather than nothing? All a great mystery, and there are those who use the word God for that mystery, when really there shouldn’t be a name which is why in Judaism there isn’t one. There is the answer Moses got, ‘I am what I am’. It is this realisation that there is more than we can know and something outside ourselves that is behind the religious impulse and to reduce it to paper cut outs as Tatyana is doing,even though unfortunately it does apply to too many, is to do a dis-service to a great number of very impressive people who have struggled with these difficult questions. Among that number I would include the current Pope, and the reason Tatyana should check out his writings as well as Melanie Phillips, who she seemingly hasn’t heard of, is that she might learn something.

Americans Need to Get Spitting Mad

Everyday I am reminded of our government’s perverse ineptitude. I am so grateful that my role in life as a provincial, unsophisticated rube permits me the luxury of never having to fly. I have never responded well to being ordered about and I simply would not get through airport security without my making some untoward remark that would get me arrested. But if I witnessed our servicemen forced to strip for an inept, bungling TSA tool I’d feel compelled to go off on someone.

Americans need to get very tired of being treated as suspects in their own country. That our servicemen are subjected to this outrage, but the poor, misunderstood ‘mid-easterner’ is treated with kids glove makes this old girl want to spit. Which is what I’d likely end up doing if I ever had to get through security. Might be worth the jail time.

H/T: LatterDays via Breitbart.tv

When White Men are Weak…

A man whose words I have valued since first finding him online is David Yeagley, a self-described Native American patriot and conservative. His interpretation of the recent travesty at Annapolis and the schism between the left and right is unusual and thought provoking. (my bold)

To mad Mohammadans, there is no peace. The call for peace is a manipulation against Israel. To blame Israel for the war the Mohammadans cause is a manipulation of language. It is as if liberalism or Leftist thought is all on the downward slope to barbarism, or, Mohammadanism. On might not have guessed such a thing, in modern times, but, it is quite obvious at this point.

Weak white people trying to grasp power from strong white people–that’s all this is. That’s all Left against Right, or Liberalism against Conservatism, really is. The war is between the whites. The rest of us are only pawn. Mohammadans are pawn of the Left at this point. Actually, maybe their "bishops".

(source)

Actually, my little old white self feels rather like a pawn too. I certainly have no power to move the game. But when it comes down to who is using whom, the left does not hold the trump card over Islam. Fear of an angry god just might propel the "ignorant masses", whom the left so covets, right into the arms of the Islamic moon god. Actually, it is the right and the "Christian-Judeo West" that protects the left from their own suicidal tendencies. Should the "right" succumb, the left will be fair game for the religious police that their new Muslim masters will unleash.

In the end, it will be the greediest, the wealthiest and the most powerful who will determine this new world order we inexorably march towards. It will be the likes of Clinton,  Kennedy, Soros and  Bush who move the game. If the light of the West is finally vanquished, the totalitarianism that will ensue will enslave us all and the multi-culturalists will have their way; in hell there will be no discrimination – we are all equally fodder for the state.

The following comment, left on Yeagley’s, post is sadly true, though I never would have phrased it this way. Coming from a white woman it, no doubt, would be deemed racist.

"… Many white men are very weak and will not defend their women and country from Muslims, as we see in America, Denmark, Belgium and France….It’s as if someone ripped the spine right out of them…

Ultimately, I would have to say that all good men and women in the West have become very weak. Our lives were never premised on warfare. We were all very much raised to prepare ourselves to rear children, build a future, retire and leave some small legacy. We were not raised to fight. Indeed, there is little that life in America prepares most of us for should we have to face the destitution that will ensue if the enemies of civilization have their way. Whether it is a suitcase nuke or the severe economic repression that so many will will face should the left prevail with their taxes, their national health care, their hordes of illegals or the insidious carbon credit and economy wrecking global warming hysteria – few Americans will be prepared. I guess that is when we find out who among us have a spine left.