I've been meaning to do a piece on the world's so-called Progressives and point out that they are, in fact, anything but. James Lewis has a piece at American Thinker - What Kind of Person Calls Himself 'Progressive'? that I can use as the basis for some of my thoughts.
We all want progress. We may disagree whether gay marriage or drug legalization constitutes progress or not. But we all want better things for the world -- better food, better health and well-being, scientific and technical advances, wiser political systems, more peace and freedom, more happy children, more humane treatment of animals, more tolerance, more prosperity for the world, you name it. That's called being a decent person.
Viktor Frankl was a Jewish psychiatrist who suffered the horrors of a Nazi death camp and whose family was gassed. After the Holocaust, he was asked, "Do you hate the Germans?" "No, I don't," he replied, "because there are only two races, the decent and the indecent."
So what kind of person has to label himself "Progressive?" Obviously somebody who believes he (or she) understands real progress better than the rest of us. Because if you are a Progressive it implies that everybody else, let's face it, is a Regressive, or maybe just a Stagnant. It's a smirky, self-flattering way of saying you're a lot better than the rest.
It's more than that. People label themselves as progressive in order to hide their real agenda.
So what kind of ego needs do you have to have to call yourself that? And what do you believe about others? In fact, Progressives must believe that other people are worse than they are; that only they can Save the Planet, or create Peace on Earth, or Solve Inequality, or whatever sin bedevils mankind.
Like the preacher who is focused on nothing but sin, Progressives must emphasize the alleged flaws of other people. They need to pinpoint those flaws, to feel important. Because Progressives make it clear that the real obstacle to Progress is Other People. In fact, if you really ask a "Progressive" what other people are like, you're likely to hear that much of humanity is either ignorant or evil.
The word Progressive first became popular in the late 19th century, but has now been adopted as a popular synonym for "socialism." Americans tend not to like socialism, associating it with the Soviet Union and other bad characters. But "Progressivism" sounds fine. So it is a euphemism for something people fear; a cover-up label.
When the Soviet Union fell its supporters in the West needed a new vehicle in which to drive their agendas. Fortunately for them and unfortunately for the rest of us those vehicles were parked on the political sidewalk ready to be taken over by new drivers.
Hardcore Marxists now infest the environmental movement, which is one of the reasons that all of the answers to supposed climate catastrophe require 'world government' answers or the 'suspension of democracy', as Clive Hamilton at the Australia Institute put it recently.
USSR supporting socialists, and naive political newbies, have simply reinvented themselves as 'Progressives'. Because the term itself is positive, and the motives of many of its members are undoubtedly pure, the general population does not understand the regressive, destructive nature of progressive politics.
The odd thing, of course, is that real progress in the world is almost never achieved by self-proclaimed "Progressives." They generally make things worse rather than better. (See all the mad utopian schemers from Bin Laden to Stalin and Ahmadi-Nejad.) As a group, they are strikingly ill-equipped to even understand the world in any depth. Rather, it's farmers, business people, engineers, teachers, laborers, scientists, soldiers, cops, doctors, writers, inventors, all of whom create real progress --- or who keep the world from sliding back into barbarism.
'Progressives' such as Mao, Stalin and Hitler progressed over a hundred million people into early graves. Naturally, post-modern progressives reject any connection to someone like Mao - the greatest mass killer of all time - but even a cursory look at Mao's policies will demonstrate their 'progressive' nature. After all, what else is The Great Leap Forward as an idea but progressive? Legal abortion to control of the number of children to one per family? Progressive. Progressives have bought into the environmental gobbledegook that there are too many people in the world so reducing the number of children is one way of fixing that 'problem'.
All the radicals in the world together have not created as much economic progress as the inventor of Diet Coke or the Post-It Note. I'm sorry, but it's plainly true. So the "Progressive" ego trip is really only an ego trip.
It's actually almost impossible for 'progressives' to create anything. Their policies tend to mirror socialism, an ideology that does nothing to promote invention or innovation. Don't believe me? Please tell me how, in a socialist or progressive system, a Playstation can be invented. Or television. Or radio.
The same thing goes for "post-modernism," and so many other labels on the Left. If you're a "post-modernist," you plainly imply that everybody else is past it: dead and gone. The Progressive part of the world has moved beyond modernism, or whatever ism is to be surpassed. Well, why would you believe something as obviously false as that? Basically, to flatter yourself and your fellow deludees.
I've said it before and I'll say it again - to the Left, truth is not valued as highly as compassion and good intent. After all, what else is political correctness but the avoidance of telling the truth in order to protect people's feelings?
The "in" thing is to be "post." Various Left movements love to call themselves "post-industrial," "post-structural," post this, post that. It all means, "you're a dead White male, and your time is past and buried."
So what kind of person needs to believe that? What kind of shriveled self-respect makes you want to feel that nobody is as Progressive and "post" as you are? What school curriculum has taught you to have such contempt for others?
Or take "anti-racism." If you define yourself as an "anti-racist," it means that a lot of others must be a racists, right? But how do you know that? Not many people go around wearing Kluxer sheets. You have to want to believe it, or to be more ready than the rest of us to point your finger at suspects. You're a racist! You're a homophobe! Ultimately, in many cases, being a white middle aged male is enough to make one suspect. Since the Archie Bunker series All in the Family, Hollywood and television have adopted a visual code for evil (white, fat, middle-aged, male) and good (non-white, slim, young, and/or female). Watch CSI and you'll see the code working. And with that little piece of "Progress," the Left has created its own racism, judging people purely by their appearance. The new racism is just as invidious as the old kind, and it is much more pervasive, being propagated by high-tech media.
It's all very childish, with very pernicious effects. It cultivates an accusatory, suspicious sense of victimhood and rage at the rest of humanity. And being based on mere appearances, it is incredibly superficial.
It really is very childish, which is why I refer to progressives and their ilk as 'intellectually adolescent" - they grow up physically but not intellectually. This is particularly true of university professors in the arts faculties. On the whole, they leave school, enter university, become lecturers themselves and end up as tenured professors never once having had to create real world value. When Professor John Quiggin describes Kyoto as 'a sensible policy response' to global warming this vapid, intellectual adolescence is on clear display. Symbolism and good intentions come first; the truth of damaged economies, which hurts those at the bottom the most, is irrelevant.
All of Political Correctness, the dominant cultural theme of the Left, depends upon such allegations and accusations. It is incredibly shallow and superficial - but it is also very effective as a power-play. If you can put the world at a disadvantage by implicitly accusing them of sin, you can also manipulate and oppress others, conscious of your own moral superiority. Evidence is not required. It is the pervasive McCarthyism of the Left.
I prefer to give people the benefit of the doubt. If they don't talk like haters, I'm happy to believe they're not haters. Most people want the best for humanity, and appealing to their goodness seems kinder than accusing them of evil.
I have many friends on the left. They're good people with good hearts who truly do not understand the impact of their feel-good policies and deny, or rewrite, history that demonstrates the disastrous impact progressive policies have had. They also lack an understanding of how value is created, which is why they believe governments can solve problems more readily than the free market.
There's a lot more to write on the regressive Progressive movement. For now it's enough to highlight that it's made up of the old Soviet Union supporting soft left and a bunch of new, wide eyed, well intentioned intellectual adolescents.
Regular readers will know that I keep an eye on the online polls looking for any evidence of any manipulation. I have previously posted many examples of one side of a poll being heavily supported, which always happens overnight. In every instance except one the side favouring the Labor Party has been the one receiving the votes.
I didn't take a screen capture of this poll because, quite frankly, I didn't think anyone would bother playing around with it. With about 50,000 votes cast it was Yes: 34% and No 66% but look what happened overnight:
The Yes vote has received about a quarter of a million extra votes.
I've been wondering whether it's people connected with the Labor Party themselves who are behind this poll manipulation. Because I'm not big into conspiracy theories I didn't really believe that to be the case but I must admit that I'm starting to wonder a little more now.
Labor really doesn't want to face John Howard at the next election. They've had their media allies (including about 80% of the Canberra press gallery) hammering Howard for ages. The anti-Howard strategy has been very well worked out and executed, including having Maxine McKew stand in Bennelong against the PM. We know that the media has been hammered into submission by Kevin Rudd who has been threatening journalists who are looking to run negative stories (and they're mightily pissed off about it, too, but they want to see a Labor government themselves so they're torn between their political beliefs and journalistic integrity).
If the next poll, which is due out early next week, shows the government losing further support then I'm of the opinion that Peter Costello will mount a challenge and Labor's tactic will have worked.
That's if it's not just a conspiracy theory, of course.
From the New York Times comes this article, Seeking Terror’s Causes, Europe Looks Within.
Since the terror attacks on the United States on Sept. 11 six years ago, Europe has faced far more new attacks and reported plots than the United States.
But, apparently, the fact that there have been no terror attacks carried out on US soil does not gain George W Bush and his administration any credit.
Train bombings in Madrid three years ago killed 191 people, the London transit attack two years ago killed 52 commuters, and a string of plots have been discovered and foiled. Then last week, arrests were made in Germany in a plot that the police said could have caused even worse carnage than in Madrid or London.In response, Europeans for the most part are looking inward to explain why Islamist extremists have made the Continent a favored target, while the United States has been spared — despite its position of world leadership and the anger it has stirred waging wars in two Muslim countries.
What the heck is an "Islamist extremist"? Isn't an Islamist an extreme believer in Islam?
In that setting, questions about how minority populations of Muslims are integrated into the mainstream are coming to the fore, along with basic questions about Islam itself. Less attention is being focused on finger-pointing at the United States, analysts say.
That's because Islam is at its core a violent, expansionist political doctrine wrapped up in a religious cloak. At some point people will work that out.
German newspapers reporting on the arrests last week of three men — two German citizens who converted to Islam and a Turkish resident of Germany — did not mention the Bush administration. Instead, they focused on the debate about tougher security measures, and on Islam itself. An editorial in Bild on Friday said: “There are no easy answers. But the 1.4 billion or so Muslims owe it to the rest of the world to at least try to give answers and find a remedy. A religion with bloody margins does not belong in a world which wants to and must move closer together.”
The margins may be bloody but it's fair to say that mainstream Islam provides significant moral and financial support to the extremists. In fact, they couldn't exist without that support. Muslims are happy to go nuts, burn hundreds of cars, destroy property and threaten to murder (or actually murder) those that publish a few crappy cartoons, write a book they don't like (The Satanic Verses) or make a film that shows Islam in a poor light (which cost Theo Van Gogh his life) but when school children are beheaded in Southern Thailand, a whole school is taken hostage in Beslan, thousands of innocent people are killed on 9/11, children are targeted in suicide attacks in Iraq and tourists are killed in Egypt the response from mainstream Islam is...? Silence.
France and Germany both opposed the war in Iraq, and both countries have been targets of terrorist plots by Islamist extremists, noted François Heisbourg, a French expert on terrorism and a special adviser to the Foundation for Strategic Research in Paris.“Bush is incredibly reviled in Germany, and Iraq is viewed as a total disaster, which it is,” he said. “But it doesn’t lead people to say we have terror because of Bush. Why? Because these guys strike a country that is against the Iraq policy.”
While Bush is certainly going to be somewhat unpopular in some European countries, that's the type of over the top statement of the type generally held by leftist 'elites' and 'intellectuals' so it's probably a personal view.
A French government white paper in 2006 described 11 attempts by Islamist jihadists to blow up targets in France in the past 10 years, some of them before 9/11, Mr. Heisbourg said. This showed, he said, that just because France has criticized the Bush administration and stayed out of Iraq, it enjoys no immunity from terrorism.
"Islamist jihadists"!!!! What other type of jihadist is there???? Buddhist jihadist? Christian jihadist? Jewish jihadist?
The foiled attack announced by the German government last week was probably motivated by Germany’s involvement in Afghanistan, said Jeremy Shapiro, a specialist in European affairs at the Brookings Institution in Washington.
These people have got Three Monkeys' syndrome. The reason Germany, France and England are being targeted by Islamists is because of the one thing Islam needs in order to expand - opportunity. These countries' declining cultural and values weakness presents them with the opportunity they need.
German troops in Afghanistan have been targets of the Taliban, and demands for a withdrawal are growing in the German Parliament. A vote on German participation in the war is scheduled for next month.Europeans’ concern about their vulnerability to terrorism was highlighted last week when the German Marshall Fund released a survey showing a sharp increase in the number of Germans who fear international terrorism.The survey found that 70 percent of Germans felt they might suffer a terror attack, 32 percentage points more than in 2005. That brings the level of fear among Germans close to the level among Americans, which stood at 74 percent in a similar survey, said John K. Glenn, the director of foreign policy at the German Marshall Fund.The increased alarm in Germany follows the failure of an attack during the World Cup last year in which two suitcase bombs were placed on commuter trains but did not explode. Two Lebanese suspects in that plot were said to have been angered by cartoons published first in a Danish newspaper that lampooned the Prophet Muhammad.
Is there any greater example of the adolescent immaturity of the Islamic mind than wanting to kill and maim hundreds of people because of a bunch of cartoons? No wonder the left gets on so well with Islamic extremists given their parallel intellectual adolescence.
The growing anxiety of Germans could also reflect stepped-up warnings of the danger of attacks from the interior minister, Wolfgang Schäuble.The most recent results by the Pew Global Attitudes Project show that the United States continues to be held in low regard in Europe. In a 2007 survey in Germany, the proportion of respondents with a favorable opinion of the United States fell to 30 percent, from 60 percent in 2002; and in France the percentage with a good impression of the United States fell to 39 percent, from 62 percent. The surveys had margins of sampling errors of plus or minus 3 or 4 percentage points.
Why is the NYT so dishonest when it presents data to the public? They always pick outlier years as the basis for comparisons. Climate change comparisons use the mid-70s or 1850 as the comparison year, as they're low points in the temperature record. In 2002, shortly after 9/11, favourable opinion of the US was at a high. Why not compare to 1999 when Bill Clinton was in charge or 1985 under Reagan, a time at which the US really was reviled in Europe?
In Spain, a great majority of the population concluded after the attacks on commuter trains in March 2004 that if José María Aznar, as prime minister, had not dispatched Spanish troops to Iraq in league with the Americans, the attacks would not have happened, said Juan Aviles, a professor of contemporary history at the National University for Distance Learning.Even so, he said that a February 2005 survey by the Royal Elcano Institute, a Madrid research center, found that 63 percent of respondents felt that Islamist terror sprang mainly from religious fanaticism, up from 59 percent in May 2004, and that only 17 percent believed that anti-American sentiment was the cause, down from 24 percent nine months earlier.
Spain is the front line of European defence against Islam so it's no surprise that people there are getting somewhat nervous about Islamic antics and their seeming lack of correlation to anything the United States has done.
The deep uneasiness about the spread of Islamist radicalism has taken hold across Europe, said Christoph Bertram, the former director of the Institute of International Security Affairs in Germany.
Good.
“There is a sense in our societies that the radicalism was not created by the United States but caused by the lack of integration,” Mr. Bertram said. “One of the points we all recognize is that it has been extremely difficult to integrate the third generation.”
Of course there's been a lack of integration. Idiot left wing governments have been caught up in the myth of multiculturalism and moral equivalence while introducing legislation that ensures pluralism, the only thing that ensures true integration, doesn't get any oxygen.
Each European country has encountered its own set of problems trying to deal with its Muslim population.
Really? Each one? Does that mean every one? Of course it does. But apparently the problems are due to victimisation, US foreign policy or, shock horror, the Jooooos.
In France, for example, the riots in 2005 in Paris among mostly North African immigrants, many of them Muslims, were mainly about economic discrimination, said Mr. Heisbourg, the terrorism expert. In Britain, the Muslim population is overwhelmingly Pakistani and is reasonably well integrated economically, but many Pakistanis feel stronger cultural ties to Islam and Pakistan than to Britain.
The French really have dug themselves a quite deep hole that will be a tad hard to climb out of. The British still have a little time for common sense to prevail even though I think they'll be the first country to crack down really hard on their Muslim population.
In response to the 2005 attacks on the London transit system by four suicide bombers, and before last week’s foiled attack in Germany, the British and German governments were searching for ways to better integrate their Muslim populations.
Knock Sharia Law on the head. Ban burqas and other forms of Muslim oppression of women (including female circumcision). Throw trouble making Imams and Clerics out of the country. Stop providing social security to anyone that turns up. Only allow immigration from countries that share cultural norms. Problem fixed.
Constanze Stelzenmuller, the director of the German Marshall Fund of the United States in Berlin, said earlier government attitudes of “indifference masquerading as tolerance” had now been shunted aside. Now, she said, German-language courses are offered to Turkish immigrants, particularly women, to better integrate those at the edges of the population of Turkish origin, which totals 2.7 million.
Why are Turks allowed to migrate to Germany if they can't speak the lingo? It guarantees that communities won't integrate.
The core of the 9/11 attackers hatched their plan in Hamburg, so “no one is blaming the Americans,” Ms. Stelzenmuller said. “A reasonable German on the street will say that the jihadists are brought on by their rejection of society, and that Western foreign policy is a root cause of that.”
Well then, the 'reasonable German on the street' needs a lesson in reality. Why do we have to bend our foreign policy to suit lunatic Muslims' agenda when the foreign policies of their native countries are so profoundly at odds with ensuring peace and security?
Bad news reported on Slattsnews that the terrific blogger Charles Murton of the highly regarded Diogenes Lamp has succumbed to cancer.
David Revelman called tonight with the sad, unexpected news that Charles Murton had died. Charles, master of the Diogenes Lamp blog and creator of the incomparable Bunny Champers, had been in a lengthy battle with cancer. He was a scholarly, witty and magnanimous chap and I regret we didn’t enjoy more of our irregular lunches in which the troubles of the times were healed amid many amusing reminiscences. He will be missed.
Charles was a man of clear vision, strong moral standards and a wry sense of wit.
Varney: Welcome to "The Journal Editorial Report." I'm Stuart Varney, in for Paul Gigot.
As the top U.S. military commander in Iraq, Gen. David Petraeus, prepares to deliver a much-anticipated progress report to Congress next week, many fear that military successes is some provinces are being overshadowed by political turmoil in Baghdad.
Fouad Ajami is a professor of Middle Eastern studies at Johns Hopkins University and the author of the book "The Foreigner's Gift: The Americans, the Arabs and the Iraqis in Iraq." And he just returned from a three-week visit to Iraq, where he met with top U.S. and Iraqi officials.
Professor, welcome to the program.
Ajami: Thank you very much, Stuart, for having me.
Varney: Iraq is portrayed as a political failure. No accommodation between Sunni and Shia, a government that has not brought together all of the warring factions. Your opinion on that?
Ajami: This is the American perception of Iraq. We think that this is a hopeless land. We think that this is, all our sacrifices have been in vain. There's a kind of consensus, this is the shape of the Iraqi order of things. And Prime Minister Maliki is someone Americans don't know. He speaks not a word of English. He has no access to the United States. So we exaggerate the failure in Iraq.
Here is, if you will, the general sweep of things. For one, the Sunni Arabs have turned away from the insurgency, have turned away from al Qaeda, and we can talk about this. There have been gains in the Anbar province, which was a lost province; now it's been retrieved. So there is a turning away from the insurgency by the Sunni Arabs. And there's a change in the Shia order of things, where the young brigand Moqtada al-Sadr is really on the fringe of things.
Varney: But are Sunni and Shia getting together politically? Is there any form of consensus between them we can claim as a political success in Baghdad?
Ajami: That's a hard one, because in fact, as the prime minister of Iraq himself said at one point something really, I think, very descriptive and very telling. He said Iraqis are not living in the same time period in some way. For the Kurds, it's a time of taking. For the Shia Arabs it's a time of restitution, for the things they were due. For the Sunni Arabs it's a sense of loss and a time of loss.
But by and large we should not really exaggerate the impasse between the Sunnis and Shiites. Sunnis are part of the government. Sunnis are part of the political game. And money from the central government is going to these Sunni provinces. And the Sunnis are beginning to understand that al Qaeda and the insurgency and the armed--and the carrying of guns has really brought them no gains.
Varney: The Sunnis are always going to be a minority--
Ajami: Yes.
Varney: --in Iraq in terms of just numbers.
Ajami: Yes.
Varney: They used to be in power--
Ajami: Yes.
Varney: --exercising majority power, in fact.
Ajami: Absolutely.
Varney: Have they gotten used to the fact that they are a permanent minority?
Ajami: That's a good question. I think it's--they're beginning to accept it. See, because the Sunnis have a legend. The Sunni Arabs in Iraq have a legend that they are 42% of the population. And like all legends, it has to be precise. It can't be 40%; it has to be 42%. But gradually it's dawning on them that they are a minority in the country, that the age of Sunni supremacy is gone, and that the Arabs beyond Iraq--this is really of tremendous importance--that the Arabs beyond Iraq, the Jordanians, the Egyptian, the Saudis, the Gulf Arabs, will not ride to their rescue. That no cavalry is coming from the Arab world.
Varney: Is your position that there is political progress in Baghdad? We must give it time to come to fruition?
Ajami: As the man said, it's my story; I'm sticking to it. There is a sense of Iraqi nationalism. That great soccer victory by the Iraqis over the Saudis told the story. There is really a sense of Iraqi nationalism, and even in Kurdistan. People tell you that the Kurds want out of Iraq. They really don't want out of Iraq. They want a fair measure of autonomy. They want claims on the central treasury. So here is Iraq--it's held by the sense of nationalism, and it's held by the fact that this is a country that lives off oil income.
Varney: Yeah, but how long do we have to wait in America? There's a sense of frustration. Get on with it. Make an agreement about the division of oil revenues.
Ajami: Of course.
Varney: How long do we have to wait?
Ajami: Well, I think this is it. There has been--you know, America is not a terribly patient country.
Varney: No.
Ajami: I mean, we are not we are used to all things being fast, from food to other things in life. And the Iraqi clock, the Iraqi calendar, is very different. We are rightly impatient with the Iraqis. We are rightly disappointed in the political progress and the pace of the political progress, but we should grant them the credit for what they have done.
We should also understand that they have been trying to run this country, they have been trying to build a political order in the midst of an insurgency and in the midst of a hostile Arab setting, when Saudis, Jordanians, Egyptians, Yemenis, people as far away as North Africa cross to Iraq bearing guns, bearing money, to commit deeds of suicide against both the Iraqis and the Americans. It's not easy.
Varney: I have heard talk a fatwa is going to be issued by leading Sunni and Shia clerics, including Ali Sistani, that that fatwa would be against violence, against terrorism, which would be an enormous political and theological step forward. Is that going to happen?
Ajami: No, you're absolutely right. At any rate, Sistani has always issued fatwas against violence. I mean, I happen to be, maybe, perhaps--I don't want to say I am the only American citizen who's seen them. I may be--
Varney: But he's not been joined by Sunni clerics, has he?
Ajami: They are coming around. They are beginning to understand. For example, during that bombing of the Golden Dome in Samarra in February of 2006, the Sunni clerics refused to condemn the bombing and insisted that it was an Iranian plot. Now they understand that they have carried violence too far and they have begun to step back from the brink. I talk to many Sunni clerics who understand that religion has been sullied there and has become an instrument for violence.
Varney: If I may, I would like to conclude with a personal question, if you don't mind, professor.
Ajami: No.
Varney: You're a Middle Easterner. You're a professor at a major university. You are vigorously pro-American. You take the American position in Iraq.
Ajami: Yes.
What's the reaction of your colleagues and friends and acquaintances personally to you as a pro-American Middle Easterner?
Ajami: I am not only pro American but I also have this odd, if you will, background. I am also a Shia. And in fact, when you go to Iraq, people are very, very pro-American. A university went up recently in Kurdistan, in Sulaymaniyah. I am on the board of trustees of this university. It's an American university with an American curriculum, and guess what the selling point is? The word American University of Iraq in Sulaymaniyah.
Jalal Talabani, the president of Iraq, was asked, he said, What's the secret of the success in Kurdistan? He was asked by people in Anbar. And his answer was alliance with the United States. America is immensely popular in Iraq.
A man we bumped into on the streets of Baghdad looking at his car--dirty, dusty, old--he said, "Perhaps the Americans can get me a new car, because they can do everything."
Varney: That, sir, is breaking news.
Ajami: Yes.
Varney: Prof. Fouad Ajami, thanks very much for joining us.
Ajami: Thank you very much.
Now, when do you ever hear a voice like that in the mainstream media? The New York Times et al are busily making sure to dampen the positive impact of the Petraeus report in order to maintain the "all is lost" position of the Democratic Party.
The fact is that remarkable achievements are taking place. Finally. There's no doubt that the United States prosecuted a successful war to remove Saddam Hussein. Job done. The huge mistake, which will have consequences for generations to come, was the "light footprint" approach to dealing with the aftermath of the war. It was clearly a mistake, as it allowed nations in the region, and especially Iran, to build significant influence that is now shown to be the major source of deaths of coalition forces.
Is there political progress? Of course there is - particularly in the Sunni regions such as Anbar (the largest region of Iraq) where tribal leaders have turned against Al Qaeda, with whom they were formerly aligned, and joined forces with the United States.
Is the fact that there's less political progress in Baghdad than desired less than ideal? Probably. It's a bad analogy but it's worth remembering that even countries like Italy have a chequered history in that regard. Chalk the positives up in the plus column and work on fixing the negatives. That's how progress is made.
How long will it take for Iraq to emerge as a solid, stable nation on the world's stage? Probably twenty years.
When non-Europeans look at that region of the world they should make a sober note about what's in store and what it means for our relationship with them.
Europeans love to mock the salience of religion in American society, but they won’t be laughing for very long. The de-Christianization of Europe in the name of “tolerance” is rapidly driving the spiritually shiftless continent into the arms of Islam. And now, amidst the postmodern theological confusion that defines contemporary Europe, even Catholic clergy are jumping on the Islamomania bandwagon.
The latest post-Christian theological spectacle comes to us from the Netherlands (of Ayaan Hirsi Ali fame), where the Roman Catholic Bishop of Breda, Tiny Muskens, says he wants Christians to start calling God “Allah” because he believes such a gesture would promote “rapprochement between Christianity and Islam”. Appearing on Dutch television, the 71-year-old cleric said: “Allah is a very beautiful word for God. Shouldn't we all say that from now on we will name God Allah? ... What does God care what we call him?”
Inquiring minds want to know: If the bishop really thinks the names “God” and “Allah” are interchangeable, why doesn’t he ask Muslims to start calling Allah “Yahweh”, the biblical name for God? But he won’t, because he knows they won’t. Indeed, just because Christianity, Judaism and Islam are called “monotheistic” faiths, it does not follow that Christians, Jews and Muslims pray to the same God. So for those pre-postmoderns who believe that words still mean something, a quick survey of archaeology, history and theology — accompanied by a dose of common sense — can answer the question of whether the Allah of Islam is really the God of the Bible.
What archaeology says about Allah
Muslims claim that in pre-Islamic times, “Allah” was the biblical God of the Patriarchs, prophets and apostles. Indeed, the credibility of Islam as a religion stands or falls on its core claim of historical continuity with Judaism and Christianity. No wonder, then, that many Muslims get uppity when the claims of Islam are subjected to the hard science of archaeology. Because archaeology provides irrefutable evidence that Allah, far from being the biblical God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, was actually the preIslamic pagan moon-god. Indeed, it is an established archaeological fact that worship of the moon-god was the main religion of the ancient Middle East.
But what about the Arabian Peninsula, where Mohammed (570-632) launched Islam? During the last two centuries, prominent archaeologists have unearthed thousands of inscriptions which prove beyond any doubt that the dominant religion of Arabia during Mohammed’s day was the cult of the moon-god. In fact, for generations before Mohammed was born, the Arabs worshipped some 360 pagan gods housed at a stone temple in Mecca called the Kabah. According to archaeologists, the chief deity of Mecca was the moon-god called al-ilah (meaning the god or the idol), which was shortened to Allah in pre-Islamic times. Pagan Arabs even used Allah in the names they gave themselves: Mohammed's father (Abdallah), for example, had Allah as part of his name.
What history says about allah
Historians say that pre-Islamic Arabs worshipped the moon-god by bowing in prayer toward Mecca several times a day. They would also make a pilgrimage to Mecca, run around the Kabah seven times and throw stones at the devil. And they fasted for one month, which began with the appearance of the crescent moon and ended when the crescent moon reappeared.
These same rites form the core of Islam today: Muslims bow in prayer toward Mecca; they make a pilgrimage to Mecca and run around the Kabah seven times; and they still throw stones at the devil. They also observe the fast of Ramadan, which begins and ends with the crescent moon. Moreover, the ancient symbol of the pagan moon-god, the crescent moon, is the official symbol of Islam; it appears on the flags of Muslim countries, as well as on the tops of mosques and minarets everywhere.Historians say that Mohammed, who as a traveling trader was exposed to Judaism and Christianity during his visits to different parts of the Middle East, tried to mimic those monotheistic faiths by taking Allah, the main deity within the Arabian pantheon, and making it the only god. Indeed, the basic confession of Islam is not that “Allah is Great” but that “Allah is Greater”. Greater than all the other idols, that is. But Islam also draws from other pagan traditions. For example, the tale of Mohammed’s night journey into heaven parallels the Zoroastrian story of Arta Viraf.
Zoroastrianism also inspired the Islamic belief that dark-eyed virgins await every man who enters heaven. And the Islamic ritual of praying five times a day? That, historians say, originates with the Sabeans, Syrian pagans who practiced an ecumenical mixture of Babylonian and Hellenic religion. No surprise, then, that some scholars refer to Islam as monotheistic heathenism.
What theology says about Allah
Muslims claim that Islam is Judaism and Christianity reformed. They say the Koran confirms the truth of the Torah and the Gospels. But since those texts did not jive with Mohammad’s beliefs, they accuse Jews and Christians of changing and distorting the original versions. Muslims therefore assert that the Koran “clarifies” the Bible. Even if that were the case, the Koran and the Bible present ideas about God (especially about His character) that are so diametrically opposed that any reasonable observer would conclude that each book refers to a distinct deity. The Koran, for example, states unequivocally that Allah is an unknowable and non-personal deity. By contrast, the God of the Bible allows Himself to be known and desires fellowship with human beings on a personal basis. Indeed, the Bible says that Abraham (the same Abraham whom Muslims say they venerate) was the “friend of God”.
The Koran also portrays Allah as a vindictive deity who hates sinners and desires to afflict them. But the Bible says God is love. Moreover, the New Testament teaches that God loved humanity so much that He came to earth to pay the debt for man's sin, and that that act of grace is available for free to anyone who believes Jesus Christ is their personal Savior. But Islam denies that Christ was God or that He died in order to save humanity. Indeed, Allah does not provide any way for man to be reconciled to God. And the theological differences go on and on, so much so that the God of the Bible cannot possibly be the Allah worshipped in Islam. Unless, of course, a Dutch bishop says so.
Allah and Eurabia
Mohammed thought the Jews and Christians of his day would receive him as a prophet. But the Bible says that any new revelation must agree with what is already established in Scripture (Isaiah 8:20). So they rejected his Allah as a false god. And Mohammed replied by setting his Islam on a permanent warpath against Judaism and Christianity that continues to this day. The Dutch bishop and other Muslim fellow travelers think they can buy a fake peace with Islam by playing relativistic word games as a part of an “inter-faith” dialogue. But Muslims understand much better than do post-modern Europeans that ecumenical appeasement is a symptom of a Judeo-Christian civilization that is weak and dying.
The irony is that the real danger from Islam stems not so much from ordinary Muslims as it does from sickly Europeans who have subverted their Judeo-Christian heritage in search of secular hedonism. Because they live only for the moment, they are willing submit to anything, including Islam, as long as it doesn’t interfere with the pursuit of pleasure today. It has been more than 50 years since the late Christian apologist C.S. Lewis first warned about Western Civilization’s disastrous lurch into post-Christianity. But even he would be surprised to see how quickly Islam is filling the religious and cultural vacuum that is post-Christian Europe.It’s not that Europeans haven’t been forewarned. It’s that they couldn’t care less.
My view is that a huge conflict will erupt in Europe as the native populations try and expel the Islamic cancer from their midst. That's the history of the place and, as they say, history has a habit of repeating.
Australian Crawl was an Australian rock band formed by James Reyne (lead vocals/piano) and Simon Binks (lead guitar) in 1978 and joined by Guy McDonough (co-lead vocals, rhythm guitar), Bill McDonough (drums, percussion), Paul Williams (bass guitar), and Brad Robinson (rhythm guitar). The band was named after the front crawl swimming style also known as Australian crawl. The band's music was a defining feature of Australian surf culture during the 1980s.
Once the band’s escalating popularity brought them into the city they caught the attention of Little River Band’s guitarist David Briggs, who helped them to a recording contract and produced their first single. Their 1980 debut album The Boys Light Up had a number of hit singles including the title track; "Indisposed"; "Downhearted" and "Beautiful People". The band made one of the most memorable debuts on the ABC-TV pop show Countdown (performing "Beautiful People") when James Reyne appeared with both arms encased in plaster. He had been hit by a car, an episode chronicled in the track "Indisposed" on the debut album. The Boys Light Up spent more than 50 weeks in the Top 30 and sold five times platinum, one of the biggest selling Australian albums of the 1980's.
As CO2 Science points out, the loss of ice on Mount Kilimanjaro has nothing to do with CO2 induced global warming.
In a fascinating article published in the July-August issue of American Scientist, Mote and Kaser (2007) present an illuminating review of the comprehensive field work that has been conducted over the past twenty years on tropical glaciers in general - and those of Mount Kilimanjaro in particular - in which one of them (Kaser) was intimately involved, writing within the context of current concerns over possible CO2-induced global warming and the connection that a number of high-level climate alarmists (Al Gore, John McCain and Hillary Clinton come to mind) have attempted to make between this conjectured phenomenon and the disappearing ice fields of what they call the "shining mountain."
The two researchers begin by stating "there is scant evidence ... of a direct connection between current global climate trends and the shrinking of the ice cap atop Kilimanjaro in tropical East Africa, despite its new role as a climate-change poster child," particularly as portrayed in the film An Inconvenient Truth. In fact, they say that "warming fails spectacularly [our italics] to explain the behavior of the glaciers and plateau ice on Africa's Kilimanjaro massif .. and to a lesser extent other tropical glaciers."
So what has actually been observed atop Kilimanjaro over the years? .. and what has caused the shrinking of its fabled ice cap?
Observations suggest that between 1880 and 2003, there was a shrinkage of almost 90% in the ice-covered area of Kilimanjaro; but Mote and Kaser note that "much of that decline [66%] had already taken place by 1953." This "pacing of change," in their words, "is at odds with the pace of temperature changes globally." In fact, at the closest point of reanalysis temperature data availability in the vicinity of Kilimanjaro's peak, they say "there seems to be no trend since the late 1950s." Consequently, and based on a long list of other observations, the two researchers ascribe the long-term wasting away of ice on Kilimanjaro "to a combination of factors other than warming air - chiefly a drying of the surrounding air that reduced accumulation and increased ablation."
Another interesting conclusion of Mote and Kaser is that "the historical records available suggest that the large ice cap described by Victorian-era explorers was more likely the product of an unusually wet period than of cooler global temperatures," which leads them to the most mind-bending conclusion of all.
"Imagine," they say, "a scenario in which the atmosphere around Kilimanjaro were to warm occasionally above 0 degrees," so that "sensible and infrared heating of the ice surface would gradually erode the sharp corners of the ice cap [and] gentler slopes would quickly develop." If precipitation increased simultaneously, as is typically predicted by most climate models, they say that "snow could accumulate on the slopes and permit the ice cap to grow," which scenario leads them to the ultimate conclusion that, "ironically, substantial global warming accompanied by an increase in precipitation might be one way to save Kilimanjaro's ice." Alternatively, or concurrently, they suggest that "substantially increased snowfall, like the 2006-07 snows, could blanket the dark ash surface so thickly that the snow would not sublimate entirely before the next wet season," and that "once initiated, such a change could [also] allow the ice sheet to grow."
Clearly, the misguided scientific, political and theatrical rushes to judgment that have elevated Kilimanjaro's predicted demise by CO2-induced global warming to iconic status should give everyone pause to more carefully evaluate the evidence, or lack thereof, for many similar doom-and-gloom claims related to the ongoing rise in the air's CO2 content, which are likewise paraded as truth, but that could well be 180 degrees out of phase with reality.
The reality is that "much of that decline [66%] had already taken place by 1953" but that doesn't stop the Climate Faithful from using it as proof of global warming as Al Gore did in his infamously inaccurate An Inconvenient Truth.
There's a reason why the general public are becoming less concerned about the hysterical predictions of global warming induced doom and gloom - they can see it's hooey. Climate Brown Shirts have been telling us for years that we must take action 'now' and that we've only got a few years to destroy our economies and implement world government. As those years pass, people can see that there's a fair amount of crying wolf going on.
You'd thing that the lack of real world observations of the supposed effects of climate change would give Climate Brown Shirts pause for thought that, perhaps, their wonderful computer models are somewhat less than accurate. However, I don't refer to believers as the Climate Faithful for nothing. Reality is not something that they rely upon in their unscientific, politically driven arguments.
The debate over global warming has taken a pretty odd twist in Northern California. Up on Mount Shasta, the glaciers are not behaving like you'd expect.
Big mountains often produce their own weather patterns. Mount Shasta, at 14,162 feet seems to have a mind of its own these days. Shasta has seven glaciers. The biggest is the one on the middle, Whitney Glacier. What has surprised scientists about the glacier is that if the theories about global warming are true, the glacier ought to be shrinking, but it's not.
Oops. Another inconvenient truth for the Climate Faithful.
“Unlike most areas around the world, these glaciers are advancing, they are growing. Thirty percent in the last fifty years,” says scientist Erik White.
Advancing? Growing? Oh, no!
White and mountain climber Chris Carr are Shasta experts.
Ah. That's OK. They're not climate experts. What they say doesn't count.
"Every year it's a little bit different. But the glacier changes dramatically, year to year," says Carr.
So why are the glaciers larger today than they were a century or more ago?
"Mount Shasta is right at the very northern end of areas influenced by El Nino and were at the southern end of areas affected by La Nina. So between the two we get to see the benefits of that which means more snow and rain in this area," says White.
Snow scientists have been tracking the glaciers' size by comparing photos from a century ago to those taken decades later, and then using satellite data and computer modeling to determine the rate of growth.
Those models predict Shasta will continue to receive more than normal snowfall, but if the temperature continues to rise, the glaciers will begin to recede.
For now, the growing glaciers are good news to the town of Mount Shasta which hosts the thousands of tourists who come to here to experience the thrill of ice climbing.
You can climb mountain Shasta all the way to the glaciers to see for yourself, but, you'd better have good hiking equipment and be in good shape too!
Another small thumb tack in the coffin of the non-science of global warming.
The work that Steve McIntyre and others are doing to uncover the fudging of the US surface temperature record by James Hansen is some of the most important work being done in science anywhere in the world. If what passes as science in the field of climate change is applied to other disciplines then we're not going to be making many scientific discoveries in the future.
It's worth remembering that the opposition Labor Party voted, and campaigned, against the reforms that have led to Australia's ongoing terrific economic strength that includes low unemployment.
The official work force figures for August show a national jobless rate of 4.3 per cent, where it has stood for four months in a row. It has not been lower since 1974.
In the latest month, almost 32,000 extra jobs have been created, 29,000 of them full-time.
Some economists had thought unemployment might rise as a result of the Federal Government's Welfare to Work changes, implemented from July.
The Australian Bureau of Statistics says it is unable to estimate the impact of those changes, but the work force participation rate has edged up to a record high 65.1 per cent of the civilian population over 15 years of age.
Treasurer Peter Costello says the new participation rate of 65.1 per cent is a record high.
"We can't tell you how much of that is people who were previously on welfare, what we can tell you is that we have tightened eligibility to welfare and encouraged people to move off welfare and to look for work," he said.
But he says the Australian economy is not out of the woods, as the fallout from the US subprime mortgage crisis is more significant than the Government had hoped.
TD Securities senior strategist Joshua Williamson says the figures show the economy is in very good shape.
"The economy has created an average of 22,500 jobs per month over the last year or over 270, 000 new jobs," he said.
"Now most of those jobs have been full-time so that tells us the economy is growing very strongly."
When the faux campaign ends and the gloves come off, the government's economic credentials will be their greatest weapon. Climate change will be a huge millstone around the opposition's neck, as they're intent to sign Kyoto demonstrates they're prepared to sacrifice Australian jobs and prosperity at the temple of symbolism.
Beautiful mountain scenery, great accommodation and a terrific golf course as well. Burnsville, Mountain Air in North Carolina looks like my sort of place.
The headline for the following article from Australia's left-of-centre ABC is Map-making highlights impact of climate change.
Now, you'd naturally think that changes to the earth's climate are showing up on maps, right?
Map-making has always been political, and wars have started over the drawing of a boundary, but climate change has injected a new political element into modern cartography.
It has been four years since the last edition of The Times Comprehensive Atlas of the World, and cartographers say they have had to redraw coastlines and reclassify land to reflect significant geographical changes since then.
The atlas's editor-in-chief says the new maps will let us see environmental disasters unfolding before our eyes.
Right.
Some of the most marked changes highlighted in the new atlas include the Aral Sea in central Asia, which has shrunk by 74 per cent since 1967, Lake Chad in Africa, which has shrunk by 95 per cent since 1963, and the Dead Sea in the Middle East, which is 25 metres lower than it was 50 years ago.
Notice how the Climate Faithful never pick the same base year for their then-and-now comparisons? At least this time they're within 20 years of each other rather than the 100 years that the BBC uses as proof of climate change.
As well, sections of the Rio Grande, Yellow, Tigris, and Colorado rivers dry out each summer, and sometimes they fail to reach the sea.
The Bangladesh coastline has had to be redrawn as more land and islands are lost to the sea, while the lowest country in the world, the Pacific nation of Tuvalu, is now only five metres above sea level.
Not Tuvalu again! Those poor old Tuvalu islanders must suffer terribly from the stress of not knowing whether they'll wake up in the morning and still be above the man made climate change sea level.
Coastline impact
Dr Peter Cowell, from the School of Geosciences at Sydney University, has looked closely at the impact of climate change on coastlines.
He says areas of environmental stress here in Australia already feature prominently in news reports.
"The Murray-Darling is clearly a canary in the mine, telling us that something is wrong," he said.
"Places like Cairns are already susceptible to marine flooding and that can only continue into the future, along with other low-lying cities or towns, ones like Ballina on the east coast of Australia, which has just been built on essentially, not just flood plains, but the old remnants of infilled lagoons, infilled by nature and natural sedimentation.
"So increasingly, as sea levels rise and [we see] changes in the hydrograph, that is, the way the rivers flood, the nuisance value of such flooding is just going to get gradually and imperceptibly worse, and will require expense to solve through engineering works or relocation."
He acknowledges there is concern about persevering with such engineering projects.
"They're unlikely, for legal reasons and present conditions anyway, to be abandoned," he said.
"The big mistake would be to continue to occupy those sorts of environments," he said.
"We need to be able to undertake the good planning based on good science, to identify, on a subtle level, which are the places to avoid and which are the places we can profit through development on without actually incurring a liability in future."
So far so good for the Climate Faithful. The story is right on message to the Gospel according to Al Gore.
Environmental mismanagement
In fact, Dr Cowell says environmental mismanagement currently plays a greater role in land degradation than climate change.
What have we here? An actual different reason for climate change?
The evidence provided by The Times atlas simply suggests we still have not got the right balance between economic imperatives and care for ecosystems operating in natural climate cycles.
"There's little doubt that that's the case," he said.
And there's little doubt that the current focus on CO2 takes the focus off the real causes of localised climate change - land use.
"The climate change impacts in most cases will be relatively small.
Hahahaha. These geologists are great. Pretty much to a man they believe that climate change is a non-issue.
"None of this means that climate change is not happening. It just means that it's complicated trying to unravel which are the actual causes and the contributions from each source to these changes."
Climate change is high on the agenda of the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) leaders meeting agenda this week and Dr Cowell says the question of what needs to be done is difficult.
"That's a huge question and plenty of more heroic souls than myself have attempted to answer it," he said.
"Clearly, it's political and it involves things like Kyoto and other international agreements.
Clearly, it's political. Unfortunately, it's not scientific.
"The reality of it is that climate is going to change and is changing, and environmental change is occurring as well.
Reality? C'mon, it's unfair to bring reality into a discussion about climate change.
"It's not all necessarily as grim as Tuvalu indicates. Tuvalu has probably never been much more than five metres above sea level, whatever the sea level has been in the last centuries.
What what what? as Sheila Broflovski would say. Tuvalu has never been more than five metres above sea level? As I said, geologists are great.
"So in some cases it is not as bad as it looks although it might get worse.
Not as bad as it looks? How did this article ever pass muster at the ABC?
"Overall, at this stage, it looks like the best bet is to learn how to adapt to the environmental changes that are occurring because they are going to occur anyway - that's in the immediate term.
"Over the long-term, one hopes that we learn somehow to collaborate internationally to curtail the effects on the atmosphere that we think are going to precipitate much larger changes into the future."
The article headline indicates that maps demonstrate climate change yet there's actually nothing in it to support the claim.
In creating the anti-Iraq war film, Redacted, Brian De Palma wins the award as America's greatest coward; an award he picks up from the execrable Michael Moore.
Two Hollywood films that take up the politics of the Iraq war grew out of the conviction that the American public was not getting the full picture of the violence.
Brian De Palma says he wants to stop the war with his film, Redacted by exposing a wider audience to images of horror that he says are not being delivered by the mainstream media.
With Vietnam, "we saw pictures of the destruction and the sorrow of the people who were traumatised. We saw the soldiers ... being brought back in body bags. We see none of that in this war," De Palma told a news conference Friday. One of his previous films, Casualties of War, dealt with the Vietnam war.
The title, Redacted, is a term meaning edited that is often used when sensitive material is expunged, or blacked out, from a document. De Palma's film, inspired by material he found on the Internet, is shot on video to present the film as though it were a series of clips that could be downloaded to your computer.
Inspired by actual events, the movie tells the fictionalised story of a group of young soldiers who rape a 15-year-old Iraqi girl, kill her family and then shoot her.
De Palma said he wanted to examine how the soldiers had gone so wrong. The movie doesn't present the judicial resolution, but it does show one soldier who came forward being treated with hostility by the military, in contrast to the more comfortable interrogations of the two main perpetrators.
In reality, four soldiers have been convicted in the case that inspired the film and handed sentences of up to 110 years in prison. A fifth man, who left the Army before being charged, faces a federal death penalty trial. The case has received wide media coverage.
The filmmakers had to negotiate a "legal minefield" to present real events as fiction, De Palma said, and the film opens with a disclaimer, which is slowly blacked out.
The final scene is a montage of real-life photographs of Iraqi war dead, including maimed and dead women and children, their eyes blacked out on the advice of lawyers because the film used actors and is not a documentary.
"The irony of Redacted is that it was redacted," De Palma said.
So why is De Palma America's greatest coward?
Firstly, it takes no courage to have a go at the US or its military, especially if you're part of the anti-war, loopy-left that makes up 99% of Hollywood 'elites'. What would take courage is if De Palma produced a movie showing the good that had occurred in Iraq, in spite of the errors along the way, the progress that the Iraqi people are making and the toll being inflicted upon Al Qaeda and its allies.
The main reason that he is a coward, though, is his presentation of one egregious incident of the war as being typical of the US military in an effort to portray the military as being made up of buffoons and thugs.
If someone made a movie about someone you loved, say your mother or father, who was a good and decent person who spent their life representing high moral values and had many achievements on behalf of their community, focused only on one particular incident in which a youthful transgression was dealt with before a court and used this incident as being typical of that person then you would have to draw the conclusion that the film maker had little regard for the person.
Equally, Brian De Palma clearly has little regard for the United States or its terrific achievements over, especially, the last 100 years.
By making such a film, De Palma demonstrates that he is not only morally bankrupt but also a profound intellectual coward.
Icehouse were formed in 1977 as Flowers by Iva Davies (born Ivor Arthur Davies, on 22 May 1955, in Wauchope, New South Wales, Australia), who was the main creative force, and a classically trained musician; and bass player, Keith Welsh. for a number of years they also obtained the services of Bob Kretschmer, until he was replaced by young guitarist Paul Gildea. Since 1980 Icehouse has released seven albums, several compilations, and music from collaborations with other artists including dance companies. The 1987 album Man of Colours was released at the apex of their fame and international success.
The original band's first album was called Icehouse. When it discovered that a band in the US had a similar name they changed from Flowers to Icehouse. Iva Davies has a long and distinguished musical career in Australia behind him, including the iconic Great Southern Land, a song about this country.
Most people know that the world's most populated Muslim nation is Indonesia with 234 million people of which 86% are Muslim. What people probably don't know is that the country with the second highest number of Muslims is India where 13% of their 1.1 billion people are Muslim.
Another fact that most people don't know is that India has been dealing with home-grown Islamic terrorism for decades. Is this terrorism created by poverty or oppression such as Western liberals claim as the root cause of 9/11, and other, atrocities? Hardly. Even India's richest man is a Muslim.
From the Time Of India comes this article questioning why India hasn't introduced similar laws to Western countries to deal with Islamic terror:
As bombings in Bali, Madrid, Mumbai and London provided chilling evidence that New York's 9/11 was not a one-off event, a number of mature democracies like the UK, France, Germany, Australia, US and even New Zealand — all with decent track records on human rights — have either enacted new laws or tweaked existing ones to give greater teeth to their counter-terror operations (US' record has been somewhat sullied by Guantanamo Bay and Abu Ghraib, but they were treated as war camps and weren't meant for American citizens).
In India, where terror has taken a much bigger toll than in any of these countries, special laws were initially enacted and then withdrawn as they were found to be 'draconian'. Was that the right thing to do? Are special laws, or even a relook at laws to make them more aligned for the purposes of fighting terror, necessary? TOI looks at the global experience to find answers to these questions.
Take New Zealand, first. After the first flush of concern following 9/11, support for anti-terror laws weakened until Bali happened. Of the 202 dead, three were New Zealanders. The reaction to this was swift — parliament passed the Terrorism Suppression Act with wide support. The law armed agencies to nip extremist organisations and gave them powers to track money trails. In six separate bills the agencies were empowered to deal with a wide range of offences, including infecting livestock and food contamination.
Wiretaps without warrants in emergency situations were allowed and laws aligned, like use of evidence gathered under one law was allowed to be used against an offence under another law. Any sort of support to terrorism was banned. Overall, these measures were not very different from those taken by other countries against techno-savvy terrorists. Japan went a step further. Its constitution lays down a clearly pacifist foreign policy agenda, but the Bill to Respond to Armed Attacks for the first time allowed Japanese forces to consider a pre-emptive strike if the interests and safety of citizens were endangered.
Canada, too, enacted a special law against those who knowingly "either directly or indirectly" provide funds for terror crimes. This has apparently made fund raising for various causes more difficult.
Canada had no specific terror law. Post 9/11 is set down life imprisonment for those guilty of "instructing" anyone to carry out a terrorist strike and a 10-year jail term for harbouring a terrorist. It did away with the need to demonstrate electronic surveillance as a "measure of last resort" while allowing such surveillance. At the same time, it is viewing the setting up of DNA data banks of criminals and terrorists with favour.
Not surprisingly, these measures, as well as similar measures in Germany, UK, Australia, France and the US, faced strong opposition. The debate over special laws in legislatures and in the public domain have taken note of concerns over curbs on individual and human rights. Most laws have safeguards such as parliamentary oversight and independent reviews. CIA and FBI officials have to present testimonies to congressional committees. But, as the French law notes, on balance, collective security has been given precedence.
Indian laws don't have any such skew at present. In response to a demand for bringing back the Prevention of Terror Act, it's been argued back that Pota couldn't prevent the 13/12 attack on Parliament. How was it then effective, or even desirable? Other democracies have, however, maintained that terrorists were very cunning and hence they might strike despite special laws, but these laws would make their operations tougher.
Hence, apart from enacting these laws, these countries have integrated laws to allow wiretaps, have doubled or trebled border guards, customs and investigators, enhanced coordination between banks and other financial institutions and regulators, made sharing of data banks easier, introduced video surveillance, mandatory maintenance of telephone records, designation of terrorist crime and, above all, fast trials and tough sentences for the convicted.
They have also brought down firewalls between intelligence agencies, police organisations, customs, immigration, airport security, border guards, white collar crime investigators and narcotics control. Countries like the US, Germany and UK have realised that the lines that divide these crimes are thin and that terrorist outfits with a global reach and agenda stride all these worlds with chilling ease.
Is all this relevant for us? In India, the variables of a terror attack are many — it has neighbours like Pakistan and Bangladesh, where terror groups like JeM, LeT and HUJI find shelter, and perhaps much more. Besides, there are no racial distinctions between the operatives of these groups and Indians, unlike in western democracies. On top of this, there are pockets in the country which appear to have been influenced by extremist doctrines; thus, it's not as difficult to find logistical support in India as it is in western democracies.
Still, the US has enacted the PATRIOT Act in the teeth of liberal opposition and has prevented a strike on the American mainland since 9/11, even though it's controversial — and many will add, stupid — engagement in Iraq would have given a lot of angry youngsters the 'rationale' to hit back at the US with means fair or foul. In UK, which has a mixed population, the laws are not as stringent as PATRIOT. It has has suffered 7/11, but also busted the Birmingham plot.
Apart from its practical aspects, targeting terrorism through special laws is a declaration of intent and signals the political and societal resolve to take on an enemy. It's a call to arms and tells those on the frontline that the authorities recognise the nature of beast and are prepared to confront it. That there will be no half-measures in a war against opponents who do not believe in dialogue, rather are convinced that their cause will be served by killing innocents.
In India, we are still shying away from doing any of this in the fear that the wider powers given to agencies would be abused. Is that good enough reason to weaken the battle against terror? Or, should we have special anti-terror laws, and like in other democracies, make them open to legislative oversight and reviews? Will that give our warriors against terror a level playing field? TOI believes it will.
Puts the leftist blathering in our neck of the woods into some perspective, doesn't it?
