[Pokey78]

[VadeRetro]

Three years after September 11, the Islamist death cult is the love whose name no one dare speak. And, if you can’t even bring yourself to identify your enemy, are you likely to defeat him? Can you even know him? He seems to know us pretty well. He understands the pressures he can bring to bear on Spain, and the Philippines, and France, too. He’s come to appreciate the self-imposed constraints under which his enemy fights — the legalisms, the political correctness, the deference to ineffectual multilateralism. He’s revolted by the infidels’ decadence but he has to admit it’s enormously helpful: the useful idiots of the pro-gay, pro-feminist Left are far more idiotic and far more useful to him than they ever were to Stalin.

Steyn finds the words behind my unease.

[marvlus]

But he is arousable.

No comment required.

[GOPJ]

Radical Islamist don't understand -- there's not enough humiliation and weird kinky black outfits for their women to wear, to wash the tons of filth from their evil souls.

These idiots think Allah will smile on the child rapists, the murderers, the evil ones. Will smile if only their stupid women cover their silly heads. And cover their arms and legs and look like bondage nutcases.

Here's a flash -- even if the radical islamist women look like moving piles of black dog poop, it won't wash away the sin of one child rape. Allah hates sin.

[eureka!]

bump for later read

[federal]

bookmark

[Carolinamom]

Thanks for the ping. I can't get enough of Mark Steyn, so yesterday I ordered (Amazon) his anthology, From Head to Toe, for even more Steyn.

[TomSmedley]

Singing ‘Imagine’ is a sure sign of a failure to imagine.

Amen.

[dennisw]

bnttttttttttttttttt

[goldstategop]

Clinton's sleepiness' is a perfect visual synedoche for the West's inability to come to grips with the rise of Islamofascism. Half of the West would like to pretend the latest evil doesn't exist so they can resume their decadent lives. The other half would like to fight it but finds the division in their society prevents them from really take it to the enemy. As Mark Steyn points out, we still don't get it. Perhaps it may take a thousand Beslans before we do and by then it may be too late. History is not too comforting - the British were sleepwalking through Nazi aggression right through the fall of France. And heaven knows when all of America will get the wake up call since if 9/11 has not changed the Hate America mindset of our Left, its hard to fathom what will. The enemy knows us better than we know ourselves and he is fortified with a fanatical commitment to his cause as much as we are weakened by doubts. We need more arousal and it won't be supplied by another round of Viagra pills. The day we begin to name the enemy for who he is, is the day we will begin to finally win World War IV.

[GretchenM]

This is absolutely frightening.

Within 72 hours of the atrocity, voters sent a tough message to the Islamists: ‘We apologise for catching your eye.’ Whether or not Madrid is Rome, Berlin, etc., it certainly isn’t New York. At least in the two and a half years between 9/11 and 3/11, there was always the possibility of Europe stiffening itself. Now America lives with the certainty that it won’t, and can’t, until it’s too late.

[Ronzo]

By contrast, what have we learned? According to the Associated Press, last Sunday, at the Bercy stadium in Paris, Madonna dedicated her performance of ‘Imagine’ to what the AP reporter was still calling ‘the Russian hostage crisis’, even though by then the ‘crisis’ was over, as were the lives of the hostages. Madonna ‘urged fans to think about what happened in Russia and Lennon’s lyrics’. Okay:

‘Imagine there’s no heaven It’s easy if you try ...’

Not what I would want to hear if my kid had just been shot dead by a terrorist. More importantly, if Madonna is advocating global secularism as the answer to terrorism, she’s backing a loser. For the fellows pulling the martyrdom routines, heaven is a brothel. In Madonna terms, it’s ‘Like A Virgin’ times 72.

Mark Steyn Bump.

[B Knotts]

He really nailed Europe in this one! He's exactly right, IMO.

[dalebert]

bump

[intolerancewillNOTbetolerated]

"The perpetrators were ‘separatists’, according to the Christian Science Monitor — what, you mean like my fellow Quebeckers? They were ‘commandoes’, according to Agence France-Presse — you mean like the SAS? "

And the Democrats are desperate to elect a President who wants to sing lead in this chorus.

[91B]

I'm no longer amazed by Steyn's talent.

Now I'm just awed.

[Nevadan]

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.

[RightField]

9/11 was not ‘the day that changed the world’ but instead the day that revealed how much the world had already changed.

Steyn gets it right every time.

[VRWCer]

Steyn Bump!

[viaveritasvita]

>>>9/11 was not ‘the day that changed the world’ but instead the day that revealed how much the world had already changed.<<<

So very true!!

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