IRAN'S NEW VOICE

The moxy media team of Middle East Youth, the pro-Western freedom-seeking network with a quite encouraging all-inclusive presence on MySpace, has created a hilarious new video called Iran's New Voice. This satirical video, based on the words of Martin Luther King, Jr. Gandhi, and President JFK depicts an Iran where women are granted equality, religious and ethnic minorities are granted full citizenship and where individual rights are respected.

FLAGS OF ISLAM

THE MISNAMED WAR ON TERROR takes more casualties. The smiling day is overcast. The incessant caterwauling continues. Lest we forget who we are fighting in the name of freedom and liberty, regardless of the soil, the oil, the misery, the toil, let's turn an eye to the flags of our enemies, before the Marxist Left and the Unrepairable George Bush completely miss the point.

Note that the flag of Islam in the era of its warlord prophet was solid black. Someone over there in the Camp of Islam should notice that the would-be renewed caliphate has lost its path, forsaken the mores of Mohammed, and abandon the green flag with white crescent facing right with a five pointed star (shown above) to return to its all-black all the time flag. Makes sense, at least as far as following the often incomprehensible halal and haram strictures of the flag waving thuggery.

In fact, I have seen pictures of Middle Eastern Muslims toting the solid black flag. Those hardliners must be the Al-Qaeda reps in the crowd. Hey, there's a clue for the Crusaders. Grab it!

WHEN THE LAMB IS SILENT

SOMEONE FROM THE MIDDLE EAST told me once that Westerners play games, looking for win-win outcomes. Islamists play for win-lose outcomes. Liberals have a very difficult time dealing with the kind of triumphal attitudes inherent in Islamism. They think that everyone should be able to paint reality in subtle shades of gray. Islamic intolerance and barbarism is often excused as merely cultural expression.

Several years ago my family was involved in liberating a young Philippina girl who had been given as a wedding gift to a Saudi student attending our local university. When challenged about the enslavement of this young girl by one of his students, the university provost cautioned that we should be more sensitive, because in Saudi culture this sort of thing is acceptable.

Silence can only be construed as tacit consent of the Left. Two million Southern Sudanese were killed in the 20 years of terrible blood letting. This genocide was a direct consequence of the jihad instigated by the Islamic Front leaders in Khartoum. Religious conservatives were in the forefront of the movement to halt the slaughter and bring about a comprehensive peace. When that same Khartoum regime launched its jihad against Muslims in Darfur, religious conservatives again protested. This time they were joined by liberals in calling for an end to the violence. In fact, liberal organizations made it the cause de jour for a myriad of celebrities. All well and good, but where were they when Christians and animists were being murdered?

All that the Christians and other non-Muslims of the Middle East want from the Left is a little more consistency in compassion. The liberal press has occasionally been responsive to the plight of the Christians of Iraq, but one suspects that it is not because of an authentic sense of solidarity, but the fact that the issue provides one more opportunity to show the failure of the Bush administration.

These comments are excerpted from an interview with Rev. Keith Roderick, a defender of religious prisoners of conscience since 1982 as the Director of the Society of St. Stephen and Co-Director of the International Taskforce on Soviet Jewery. After responding to the appeals of Coptic Christians in 1987, he began working for Christians and other minorities from predominantly Muslim countries. He organized the Coalition for the Defense of Human Rights in 1993, the largest umbrella organization representing these minorities. Fr. Roderick also serves as the Washington Representative of Christian Solidarity International and is the Canon for Persecuted Christians for the Diocese of Quincy, the only Canon defending persecuted Christians in the Episcopal Church.

Actually, I must add my own two cents in the form of a question. Where is the outrage of the Right? Where is the howl from the righteous independents we hear so much about around US election time? Roderick is one voice, strong and on the money with regards to understanding the historically persistent threat from Islam to these communities, but he certainly is not loud enough, and is only one voice in this never-ending cacophony of globally active agitators on the prowl. Where are these televangelists who claim to know God's will? Where are the million strong marches coming from the so-called powerful right-wing lobby for anything but their own self-interests? May God help us all as Islam continues its bloody and suffocating reign across the lands of peace-loving peoples, while everyone else stands around, hands in pockets, making excuses for these ruthless totalitarians! The long predicted weeping and the gnashing is surely not far away, if this blindness continue unchallenged at every level of confrontation.

Read the entire interview here.

FREEDOM WITH STRENGTH

"Whatever are we to do in the face of Islamic terrorism?" says Alice through the looking glass.

Of course, there are freedoms that can be sacrificed in the name of security. If one blindly follows intellectual papers written at the end of the 18th century without consideration, one will fall behind in a rapidly changing world. Tough times require tough decisions and sacrifices. Some people sound like a spoiled children who don't want a toy taken away.

It's easy for Americans in our geographically comfortable position to sometimes criticize Europeans for whom they choose to ally themselves. Look at whom we have claimed as allies over the years and currently. Pakistan and Saudi Arabia just to name two.

European countries have known the terrors and futility of war and so it is understandable that they will try every thing they can to avoid it, even if it means appeasement to what many consider the Islamic enemy. Europeans feel the sensible thing is to keep their neighbors happy for as long as is reasonably possible. They don't do this because they are cowards. They do this because they have seen death, starvation and the complete destruction of their cities for centuries upon. America is still a young nation and full of brash overconfident fools. Until the US has had to endure foreign troops marching through its own cities hoisting opposition flags, we will never understand the deep and lasting cultural effect war has on nations.

Europeans are hesitant of confrontation for now but they are not cowards.

CULTURAL IDEOLOGY COUNTS

A western education for an Islamic true believer only makes him a more efficient and capable jihadi. Western education will not convert or moderate a true believer. It's a mistake to think that these scholastic immigrants already enslaved by an aggressive philosophy like Islam will be able to connect the good things and bounty of the western free world to the principles at the foundation of those nations, particularly when at any given moment the popular culture of that civilization seems hell-bent on its own destruction through feckless greed, trendy idolatries, and willful neglect of those higher values which gave them the platform to exercise those freedoms and advantages.

It's not an accident that the western-style representative republics with their guaranteed protection of minority and individual rights ONLY developed in the West. It's not by chance that ONLY in the western-style representative governments that rule of law is the norm, with due process, an independent judiciary and application of impartial law to enforce contracts and protect property rights has come into being.

Just as it's no accident that the nations under sharia law have ended up the way they are.

The performance of nations in any objective measurement is due to its institutional systems, and hence we can easily observe disparity in results.

Case in Point: Haiti and the Dominican Republic occupy different halves of the same island. Haiti, under a series of despotic rulers, is a land of squalor virtually unmatched on the planet while the Dominican Republic with its transitional representative democracy, sports beautiful forest reserves and exports cigars and world-class baseball players.

In another example, genetically, the people of India and Pakistan are very similar if not directly related. A major reason for the accelerating success of India and the seething marginalization of Pakistan is the difference in belief systems. The Islamic belief system leads to regression in a bankrupt and fragmented Pakistan while India grows stronger in trading and more educated, while playing well with the free world.

What is the primary cause of such huge disparity in results worldwide?

The answer is simple. Governing belief systems. The third world will continue to experience cholera, genocide, child starvation, oppression of women and minorities and the rest of the preventable tragedies associated with the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse until the world as a whole demands more effective and compassionate behavior from local governments. The scourge that plays out in places like Darfur, Sudan, Tehran, Iran and Pyongyong, North Korea will continue as it always has until unenlightened leaders and belief systems used to control peoples are held accountable as the root cause of unnecessary death and destruction.

If the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, a founding document of the United Nations, were to be honored by every regime on earth we'd have something to be proud of as members of the human race.

The UN must start enforcing its own standards, subsequently removing members not meeting them. Having a seat at the UN should not be a 'right'. A seat and a voice should be earned through measurable, objective results.