THOUGHTS ABOVE THE RIM

DESPITE ALL THE NATIONAL TREASURE spent for the sake of others over the past sixty or so years, the inimitable West is still trying to reclaim lost ground in the culture war. We believe that the following paragraphs may very well be grounded in truth, with one exception. Oil money has allowed the frothing deeply-entrenched Jew-hatred of Islam to once again rise to the top of their poisoned cup. Russia may have poured gasoline on the festering resentment, but they didn't invent it.

"In 1972, the Kremlin decided to turn the whole Islamic world against Israel and the U.S. As KGB chairman Yuri Andropov told me, a billion adversaries could inflict far greater damage on America than could a few millions. We needed to instill a Nazi-style hatred for the Jews throughout the Islamic world, and to turn this weapon of the emotions into a terrorist bloodbath against Israel and its main supporter, the United States. No one within the American/Zionist sphere of influence should any longer feel safe.

"According to Andropov, the Islamic world was a waiting petri dish in which we could nurture a virulent strain of America-hatred, grown from the bacterium of Marxist-Leninist thought. Islamic anti-Semitism ran deep. The Muslims had a taste for nationalism, jingoism, and victimology. Their illiterate, oppressed mobs could be whipped up to a fever pitch."

Read it all in the National Review article Russian Footprints, authored by former Soviet General Ion Mihai Pacepa, the highest ranking intelligence officer to have defected from the former Soviet bloc.

In a simple twist of fate, some pundits think that France will be the first European country in modern times to be overwhelmed by Muslims due to her very large, violent immigrant population and effeminate native populace. Others point to the Netherlands, from which native Dutch people are beginning to flee in the face of hostile Islam among the immigrants in that densely-populated nation. But Russia—a huge nation with vast natural resources, thousands of nuclear warheads, and until recently a global superpower—may be the first to capitulate to Muslim sensibilities. This seems possible even though Russia suffers little from those suicidal bouts of uncritical tolerance and multiculturalism that afflicts Western Europeans.

In 2015, less than ten years from now, Muslims could make up a majority of the Russian military. Military service is compulsory for young Russian men, though only 10% actually serve due to college deferments, bribes to escape duty, and the like. Given the famously brutal Russian military, perhaps avoiding military service is a forgivable trait. But will the generals be able to avoid having a Muslim military if most young men who haven't fled Russia are Muslim? Will such a military operate effectively given the fury that many domestic Muslims feel toward the Russian military's tactics in the Muslim region of Chechnya? What if other Muslim regions of Russia—some of which contain huge oil reserves—rebel against Moscow? Will Muslim soldiers fight and kill to keep them part of the Russian motherland?

With birthrates, death rates, and emigration rates the way they are now, it is highly plausible that Russia could be majority Muslim by 2040. And there are other opinions.

Writes Bill Abbott, sparing few feelings, "The demographic implosion of the West is due to feminism and women's refusal to accept the role either God or nature (depending on one's belief) has given them. The acceptance of this responsibility by most Muslim women is what will win for Islam in the end. In no other species, does the female not understand that continuation and survival of the group is her responsibility and, for the most part, hers alone. Among some homo sapiens, selfishness reigns. It has been said that a society that sends its daughters, sisters and even mothers into harms way will not long survive. I wonder if it even deserves to survive."

Read more on this topic here and here.

US SECURITY AND ISLAM

We continue to read that Defense officials involved in waging the global war against Islamist extremism are increasingly frustrated by the apparent failure of senior military and civilian officials in distinguishing between the good guys and the bad guys. In fact, as far as most of us who aren't fixated on celebrity sightings and other useless pursuits of happiness are concerned these so-called community outreach efforts have helped legitimize some U.S. Islamic groups with covert or overt ties to extremists, a problem that also is occurring at the FBI and Justice Department.

The Pentagon's problem was highlighted by a recent Marine Corps ceremony marking Ramadan. The little-noticed "iftar," or fast-breaking, was held Sept. 26 at the Washington Navy Yard in Southeast and was hosted by Marine Corps Deputy Commandant Gen. Robert Magnus. Among the guests was Agha Saeed, national chairman of the American Muslim Alliance (AMA), a political group that has been linked to Muslim organizations that continue to voice support for Hamas and Hezbollah terrorists. In rare candor, several Pentagon and military officials have stated to the media that official Pentagon backing for the Marine Corps event and a similar Pentagon iftar celebration on October 1 were demoralizing.

"During the Cold War, we at least had the brains to recognize Soviet front groups and didn't invite them to the Pentagon for vodka and caviar," one defense official said. "Now, the Islamic militant front groups are [the Department of Defense's] guests of honor."

According to the Web site—DiscoverTheNetworks.com—AMA is a political group that works to get Muslims elected or appointed to senior influential positions in the U.S. government.

"AMA is an active member of the American Muslim Political Coordinating Council," DiscoverTheNetworks stated. "It also is affiliated with Muslim groups—such as the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) and the Muslim Public Affairs Council—whose members have publicly supported Hamas and Hezbollah, or have been linked to the funding of terrorist activities."

Stephen Coughlin, a counterterrorism analyst on the Joint Staff, has warned in a recent memorandum that U.S. government efforts to work with front groups for the extremist Muslim Brotherhood had increased the danger that instead of countering Islamist extremists, the government is helping to legitimize groups that are potential terrorist and insurgent support groups. Officials said Deputy Defense Secretary Gordon England has been among the least careful in associating with various suspect Muslim groups and their leaders. But that's not all.

This report is an outrage. The same groups who do everything they can to thwart investigations, impede police surveillance activity, and hamstring the judicial process when dealing with jihadists then cite statistics about prosecutorial success as evidence that there is no threat. That the report apparently does not acknowledge these impediments, and does not cite any rationale for ignoring them, means that the authors are agenda-driven. And their agenda is denial.

Morgaan Sinclair in a slightly different take, writes:

I have had Muslim friends for about 35 years, and have worked with Muslims from some 18 countries. So I have a very personalized picture [of the general Muslim public in the West] over almost four decades now.

My theory is that about 85% of Muslims are actually practicing a spiritual (not orthopraxic) Islam that is NOT part of any of the eight formal schools of fiqh. This is rather best exemplified by the Soheib Bencheikh, the former Mufti of Marseilles. It would nice if you would sometime read up on this fellow, and there are quite a number of others as well.

They are headed as fast as they can toward the Ninth Mahdhab. And this is likely the only way that we can pull this off. Only if there is a formalized Ninth Mahdhab—certainly a possibility since the 8th was created only in 2003 (a mystery that!). There is the real possibility, given the creation of a mahdhab so recently, that another may be created, the joining of which, will start to draw immense amounts of energy OUT OF the radical system.

The only way to fight a bully is to get off the gameboard. That means that WE ought to be getting off oil as fast as possible, refusing admission to people from countries supporting terrorism, shutting the borders, refusing trade, et cetera. Especially stop training them in our universities.

Adopt Israeli rules of border crossing: You cross into Syria and you never get to come back. You go to Pakistan, you don't come home.

BUT THEN, the Ninth Mahdhad becomes the energy drain off of radical Islam. Just back away. The problem right now is that the Mufti of Marseilles, et al., have no formal mahadhab but are trying to create one. That is something we should support. Otherwise we're left with people like you bitching about it with no solutiosn whatsoever EXCEPT a world conflagration in which we do hand-to-hand combat with 1.6 billion angry Muslims.

And so it goes. Forty years ago things were different. Times have changed, and allianaces and impetus change. But this much is self-evident. The enemy continues to thwart our collective and personal visions of world peace without bloodshed. But we, in our sinister resolve, haven't completely lost our dignity (which ain't never been photographed by the way) as we crawl about on our hands and our knees searching for solutions to God's own mystery dance in the fair calling meant only for those two or three gathered...

Duh Swami elsewhere says, "This reminds me a little of fishing. Where the guys in the boats are trying to cast close to the shore, while the fishermen on the shore, are trying to cast out where the boats are. Terrorists train here for fighting over there. While terrorists over there are training for fighting over here. It only makes sense if you are a fisherman or a terrorist..."

Time of the Assassins. The marching, the wincing, the evidence, the plea. Guilty, filthy, frothing as sin, there's you, oh yes, and me...

GT

THE ILLUSION OF METASTABILITY

Here's an insight into these global events by a man named Frank:

I think it was Yeltsin who said of the USSR that in the end the society had become a land of hypocrites where no one would dare speak the truth and the few who did were in grave danger. The malaise, the stagnation of everything was blamed on the US and a false front was put up of a land of equality, a place where there was universal health care, no homelessness, etc. We were told the USSR was nothing like America and even Dan Rather waxed warm on the pre-schools and day care for Soviet kids in one of his reports. But it was all a lie, self-deception, delusion. It is much like that with Islam. And as with the USSR, every reason for Islamic failure is projected outward and there is no self-criticism, no permissions to critical analysis, no alternatives are possible because no one is really free to dissent from the system.

I once read a description of the Soviet system as being "meta-stable". Apparently it's a word from physics that means a system appears very stable until outside forces are introduced and then it becomes violently unstable. The Islamic world, especially the Mideast, is affected by the transport and communications revolutions of the past 50 years and those revolutions are striking and shattering their metastable system. Islam is in a condition similar to the Soviet system but it's more dangerous and its potential for lethal violence is greater than the Soviet system. We are in a period of history more dangerous than the Cold War.

MUTUALLY ASSURED DECEPTION

Sheikyermami says, "When the Ayatollah Khomeini came to power in Iran he immediately set upon the useful idiots who were assisting him in what they believed would be some kind of socialist revolution. When the Russians pulled out of Afghanistan they left an operator named Najibullah behind. Google 'Najibullah' and check what happened to him, which is likely what would happen to Karzai, the darling of the West."

Word to that. V S Naipaul—in Among the Believers—spent time with the earnest Persian socialists—the people who read the leftist and Soviet literature and truly believed in people's revolution and all that. Khomeini took them—and their Russian sponsors—for a ride.

The Jihad mobsters used left-speak, communist speak, anything available to persuade the Ruskies to hand over weapons, money, et cetera. In other places, other times, they used different, Western-style jargon to persuade the West to hand over weapons, money, et cetera. The 'Palestinians' were particularly clever at this maneuver—until Hamas ripped the mask off.

Frankly, the driving force has been Islam, Islam, Islam all along.

I would BET my bottom dollar that just as America and the EU are being fed a truckload of taqiyya and kitman, so too are the Chinese and the Russians. Just because the Russians and Chinese are users of propaganda, doesn't mean they are any more immune to an ancient and lethal system that is 1200 years older than theirs is. Living in an fog of lies makes you more, not less prone to be deceived.