Posted on 02/18/2015 11:13:18 PM PST by Rummyfan
Even the Obammyboppers of an otherwise adoring media seem to understand his big conference on "countering violent extremism" is a bit of a joke.
Undeterred, President Obama has unveiled the summit's bumper sticker: "Religions Don't Kill People. People Killed People." It got him through to the next round in the middle-school debate-team county quarter-finals, so who knows the impact it will have on the Islamic State. I'm thrilled to discover that my tax dollars are now going to fund something called the International Center for Excellence in Countering Violent Extremism. Seriously. It's in Dubai. But perhaps we can open a branch office in Mosul, and Derna, and Sana'a and Kandahar and Copenhagen. One is reminded of the Montgomery Burns Award for Outstanding Achievement in the Field of Excellence. Indeed, given the style and production values that the Islamic State have brought to Islamic snuff videos, perhaps this conference could prevail on the Oscars to introduce an Academy Award for Outstanding Excellence in the Field of Extremism.
(Excerpt) Read more at steynonline.com ...
Guns don’t kill people.. People kill people..
So he wants to disarm the decent law abiding people..
So.... the indecent law breakers can kill them...
DUuuuuuugh!..
“Now Paris is the Beirut of the West.”
LOL
Obama and every liberal east of the Mississippi and west of Plymouth Rock
Steyn ping.
“.....As it happens, being an old-school imperialist, I read a lot of history. No doubt I “could stand to read” more, as Fisher advises. Before the civil war, Beirut was known as “the Paris of the east”. Then things got worse. As worse and worser as they got, however, it was not in-your-face genocidal, with regular global broadcasts of mass beheadings and live immolations. In that sense, the salient difference between Lebanon then and ISIS now is the mainstreaming of depravity. Which is why the analogies don’t apply. We are moving into a world of horrors beyond analogy.
A lot of things have gotten worse. If Beirut is no longer the Paris of the east, Paris is looking a lot like the Beirut of the west - with regular, violent, murderous sectarian attacks accepted as a feature of daily life. In such a world, we could all “stand to read” a little more history. But in Nigeria, when you’re in the middle of history class, Boko Haram kick the door down, seize you and your fellow schoolgirls and sell you into sex slavery. Boko Haram “could stand to read” a little history, but their very name comes from a corruption of the word “book” - as in “books are forbidden”, reading is forbidden, learning is forbidden, history is forbidden.
Well, Nigeria... Wild and crazy country, right? Oh, I don’t know. A half-century ago, it lived under English Common Law, more or less. In 1960 Chief Nnamdi Azikiwe, second Governor-General of an independent Nigeria, was the first Nigerian to be appointed to the Queen’s Privy Counsel. It wasn’t Surrey, but it wasn’t savagery.
Like Lebanon, Nigeria got worse, and it’s getting worser. That’s true of a lot of places. In the Middle East, once functioning states - whether dictatorial or reasonably benign - are imploding. In Yemen, the US has just abandoned its third embassy in the region. According to the President of Tunisia, one third of the population of Libya has fled to Tunisia. That’s two million people. According to the UN, just shy of four million Syrians have fled to Turkey, Jordan, Lebanon and beyond. In Iraq, Christians and other minorities are forming militias because they don’t have anywhere to flee (Syria? Saudia Arabia?) and their menfolk are facing extermination and their women gang-rapes and slavery.
These people “could stand to read” a little history, too. But they don’t have time to read history because they’re too busy living it: the disintegration of post-World War Two Libya; the erasure of the Anglo-French Arabian carve-up; the extinction of some of the oldest Christian communities on earth; the metastasizing of a new, very 21st-century evil combining some of the oldest barbarisms with a cutting-edge social-media search-engine optimization strategy.
These are Libyans, Syrians, Iraqis, citizens of some of the most unlovely polities of the planet. But they had lives - homes, possessions, cars, children in schools, favorite restaurants... Twelve years ago, I drove through al-Baghdadi, now seized by the Islamic State and where 45 people were apparently burned alive by ISIS the other day. It was a dump but it had streets and stores. I bought some warm, sugary soda from the local market and had a reasonably pleasant social interaction, and then motored on down the Euphrates.
When you’re living history as opposed to reading it, the trick is knowing when to head for the exit........”
a shocking reality.
Could have been the plans were for Yemen since Hussein touted it as a terrorism go-getter, but I guess that's out now.
excerpt from Steyn:
But incremental evil is not as instantly clarifying as ISIS riding into Benghazi and running their black flag up the pole outside City Hall....
Europe’s Jews are living history rather than reading it.
They are living through a strange, freakish coda to the final solution that, quietly and remorselessly, is finishing the job: the total extinction of Jewish life in Europe - and not at the hands of baying nationalist Aryans but a malign alliance of post-national Eutopians and Islamic imperialists.
Mark Steyn ping. I think this is a really important column.
Freepmail me, if you want on or off the Mark Steyn ping list.
Thanks for the ping Slings and Arrows.
BTTT, and thanks for the ping
“History is written by the victors, and from West Africa to the Hindu Kush the victors are illiterate.”. Pretty much sums it up.
We would do well to be thinking about such awful eventualities in America as well. We are not immune now that we have malignant powers (Islam, Marxism) running loose in our country and sympathizers running it.
The conference on 'extremism' was scheduled BEFORE the pilot was burned alive and before 21 Christians were beheaded.
Yes, that matters.
The conference was suppose to be an 'equivalency' lie - a lie that all 'extremist' are the same... Christan extremist, Muslim extremist, right wing extremist... etc.
In short the conference was NEVER about dealing with Radical Islam. It was NEVER about the people attempting to kill Americans. It was some stupid liberal idiocy about how 'it's all the same...'
Muslim crazies took that bullsh*t away from leftist haters when they decided to burn the pilot alive... it was so graphic and so horrible that even those on the left who hate this country couldn't do an 'equivalency;...
Liberal haters were stuck with a conference that appeared to make no sense.
And yet France or Denmark is all you've ever known; you own a house, you've got a business, a pension plan, savings accounts... How much of all that are you going to be able to get out with? These are the same questions the Continent's most integrated Jews - in Germany - faced 80 years ago. Do you sell your home in a hurry and take a loss? Or maybe in a couple of years it'll all blow over. Or maybe it won't, and in five years the house price will be irrelevant because you'll be scramming with a suitcase. Or maybe in ten years you won't be able to get out at all - like the Yazidi or those Copts.
If you're living history as opposed to reading it in a sophomoric chatroom with metrosexual eunuch trustiefundies, these are the calculations you make - in Mosul, in Raqaa, in Sirte, in Sana'a, in Donetsk, in Malmö, Rotterdam, Paris...
...New York?
Wow, Steyne can write or talk some beautiful and insightful English. He has an encyclopedic brain that must have a built in WiFi link to Wikipedia.
“it was so graphic and so horrible that even those on the left who hate this country couldn’t do an ‘equivalency;...”
This statement is way too generous to the left. Example, I think the President of the United States just did a week of equivalency lectures at us.
Thank you for the post and ping.
Concur
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