Posted on 09/09/2004 6:40:41 AM PDT by Pokey78
No, I base my assumption on the fact that they half a self-defense reflex...
In a way, it takes a lot to awaken democracies... World war II showed it...
For instance, do you know that the most restrictive laws against Muslim immigration were now passed in... denmark? And that Norway has found a way to deny immigrant status to Muslim spouses of its own citizens?
By the way, while travelling in France this summer, I was flabbergasted to see how full the churches were (outside Paris) on sundays...
Allah hates sin.
Obviously not or we wouldn't be in a war for our very lives.
I certainly hope you are right.
Madrid didn't pass the test. Of all the European nations, one would think Spain would be one of the strongest, since they actually are an partner in word and deed before that event.
He really nailed Europe in this one! He's exactly right, IMO.
Just brilliant, he nails it again.
bump
History repeats and repeats and repeats...
"When they came for the gypsies I did nothing..."
Why is it that we are able to bring ourselves to outlaw the Nazi party in Europe but we can't even call this Muslim effort by its true name: Islamic Fascism?
Must 20 million more people die before the blinders come off? If so, then this world wags on, lamentable in all its unteachable misery.
Re#11 I don't foresee that, yet. I do see that France is way behind the curve. The present holds many troubling facts for the future, that's for sure....
And the Democrats are desperate to elect a President who wants to sing lead in this chorus.
I must have been unarousable during WW III?
Yes, there's still hope, at least on my part, that the people of Spain will awaken, and in time. It's happened here in the US, I have faith, it can happen in Spain, too. Of course, witnessing the activities of Communist Party, Intnl.. gives me pause -- this org has a strong foothold in Spain.
Yeah...Al sure is intrigueing to me. And I like crushed glass with milk for breakfast.
It was against the Soviet Union.... They claimed they would bury us.. but they got burried by Ronald Reagan.
Steyn always gets it right.
Now I'm just awed.
Wow, goldstategop, what a perfectly elegant (and eloquent) observation! Thanks for the ping to this wonderful thread, Pokey!
...And it can't happen fast enough.
With Steyn's references to John Lennon's mindless song, "Imagine", I was reminded of the excellent critique of it by Joel Engel, published in the Weekly Standard last year. Here it is:
Imagining "Imagine"
On the anniversary of John Lennon's death, it's worth taking a look at the gibberish in his beloved anthem.
by Joel Engel
12/08/2003 12:00:00 AM
TODAY MARKS the 23rd anniversary of John Lennon's murder by a deranged fan, an act that at once revivified the ex-Beatle's career and established his 1971 song "Imagine" as the official utopian anthem. For millions of people around the world, the song's three minutes of bumper-sticker slogans describe the best of all possible worlds.
But before the faithful gather in memoriam to light candles and sing "Imagine" together, as they always do on the anniversary, a few of them might want to stop and consider that the lyrics are hardly a recipe for universal bliss. Chaos may be closer to the truth.
Put aside for a moment the inconvenient fact that John once admitted he'd written "All You Need Is Love" as irony. Or that, as a Beatle, his most spirited vocals may have been on the group's cover of "Money (That's What I Want)," which begins: The best things in life are free / But you can keep them for the birds and bees. Or that, on his solo debut album, recorded a year before "Imagine," he sang: I told you before, stay away from my door / Don't give me that brother, brother, brother, brother . . . Let's just take the words of "Imagine" at face value.
Imagine there's no heaven . . . No hell below us . . . Imagine all the people living for today. Okay, let's imagine that; let's imagine six billion people who believe that flesh and blood is all there is; that once you shuffle off this mortal coil, poof, you're history; that Hitler and Mother Teresa, for example, both met the same ultimate fate. Common sense suggests that such a world would produce a lot more Hitlers and a lot fewer Teresas, for the same reason that you get a lot more speeders / murderers / rapists / embezzlers when you eliminate laws, police, and punishment. Skeptics and atheists can say what they like about religion, but it's hard to deny that the fear of an afterlife where one will be judged has likely kept hundreds of millions from committing acts of aggression, if not outright horror. Nothing clears the conscience quite like a belief in eternal nothingness.
Imagine there's no countries . . . Nothing to kill or die for / No religion too / Imagine all the people / living life in peace. Hmmm. A single, borderless entity. No passports or customs inspectors rifling through your luggage. So far, so good. But wait a second. By what laws, rules, cultures, customs, and mores would we all be living? America's? Saudi Arabia's? Iceland's? Cuba's? Obviously, organizing billions of people from different traditions around a common mindset would require some serious coercion that progressives (many of whom will be out in force tonight with lighted candles) keep reminding us is not our prerogative--not even in countries with brutal dictators. And if there's nothing to kill or die for, then there's really nothing to live for, either--not equality, not liberty, not justice. It bears remembering that those young Englishmen who declared, in the 1930s, that they wouldn't fight for king and country did nothing for the cause of peace; quite the opposite. Lennon's own Oxford Pledge may warm the hearts of pacifists, but it's true music to a tyrant's ears.
Imagine no possessions, I wonder if you can / No need for greed or hunger, a brotherhood of man / Imagine all the people, sharing all the world. . . . Let's begin implementing the third stanza's message by splitting up the royalties to this copyrighted song. Mrs. Lennon, I imagine, will be only too happy to share with the rest of us the proceeds from the semiannual checks she receives for its licensing. In fact, why don't we all participate in every revenue stream created by John's invaluable catalogue? No, even that's not good enough. John wants us all to own everything, so we're each entitled to an equal share of not only his catalogue but also every album, tape, and CD ever made--by every artist. True, in such an egalitarian world, there soon won't be any record stores from which to take home recorded merchandise, since the owners will have nothing left to sell and are anyway no longer the owners (we all are). Nor will there be anything to play or record the music on (assuming any artist still wants to record), since there'd be no one to build the equipment. Why should anyone volunteer to work in a factory making hard goods when everyone else is living in the poshest houses and eating at the finest restaurants for free? Of course, housing and food are going to be problems, too, unless someone volunteers to mine the quarries, hammer nails, plant corn, and catch salmon for the rest of us. In John's imagined world, su casa es mi casa. So is su radicchio.
And the world will live as one. One what? Violent mess, apparently.
Imagine that.
Joel Engel is an author and journalist in Southern California.
Steyn gets it right every time.
I agree.
The only way to stop this sort of thing is to make the cost of misbehavior unbearable.
We can cling to the illusion that humans today are somehow more sensitive or moral than they were during WWII, or that the Germans were somehow a flawed people, but the fact is that all humans have the capacity for barbarity.
Civilization is a thin veil over the ugly face of self-preservation at any cost -- A fact the Islamofascists have embraced.
We are in a cultural war, and will remain so until there is a winner. Islam in its present state cannot survive in the face of economic and social progress, and civilization cannot advance with the ball and chain of fundamentalist religion or extremism gnawing away at it.
In assymetrical warfare, the distinction between militant and civilian is blurred. We fear enraging the Islamic world while ignoring the fact that they only real method they have available to fight us is terrorism. We balk at breeding more extremist recruits, or at damaging the mosques that they are indoctrinated in.
The Soviets understood one thing: Fear is a universal motivator. A young man willing to die in a blaze of nail-bomb glory may balk at the idea that his mosque, family, and city would be razed in retaliation. Radical Islamic clerics may realize that inciting their adherents to violence is shrinking the religion rather than expanding it when their cities begin disappearing one by one in retaliation for school bombings.
The empire-builders of bygone years understood that pacifying people required making the cost of insurgency and rebellion so great that those who would be inclined to participate were cowed.
We may not be building an empire, but we had better be prepared to win the war. Not just against the Islamists, but against a world who would see our sovereignty and right to self-defense diminished to subordinated to an international body.
World opinion means exactly nothing to me. Survival, safety for my children, and a proud, self-sufficient America means everything to me.
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