Wednesday, June 28, 2006

A Guide To True Knighthood

I HAVE DEVELOPED A "MIND EXPERIMENT" ORGANIZATION TO ME KNOWN AS "THE CRUSADER KNIGHTS OF THE TWO SWORDS". BELOW YOU WILL FIND THAT ORDER'S GUIDE FOR ITS MEMBERS.

1.Learn that whatever hardships you have to endure are but temporary and offer you
a chance to learn and to strengthen yourself.
2.Always behave correctly with courtesy to others; But, with due respect for
your own beliefs and always defend them against all violent or irrational attacks..
3.Do not fall prey to avarice, indulgence or egoism.
4.Sorrow and righteous anger are both gifts from God to be used in accordance
with His will and to allow you to grow in strength.
5.Never stray from the paths of the Faith nor that of preparation to combat, by pen
or sword, the enemies of what is Good.
6.Fear not the strong nor despise the weak—Both can teach you as friends or destroy you
as enemies.

"The Religion Of Peace?"

THE FOLLOWING ARTICLE PROVIDES SOME USEFUL REFERENCES AS TO THE TRUE NATURE OF ISLAM.

The Religion of Peace?
By Andrew G. Bostom
FrontPageMagazine.com | June 28, 2006

During the discussion period after a recent talk by the courageous secular Muslim “apostate” Wafa Sultan, Judea Pearl, father of slain Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl (who was barbarously murdered by pious Muslim terrorists), alluded to the Koran’s “verses of peace”—which certain votaries of Islam uphold as the religion's exclusive legacy. According to an observer at the event, Judea Pearl derided Ms. Sultan’s critical view of Islam by further contending that the Koran's bellicose and brutal verses were mere “cultural baggage”, akin to “similar” pronouncements in the Old Testament. The comparison was naïve, if not absurd.

Naïve because the Koran’s “verses of peace”, frequently cited by both Muslim and non-Muslim apologists, most notably verse 2:256, “There is no compulsion in religion”, were all abrogated by the so-called verses of the sword. These abrogating verses of the sword recommend beheading or otherwise murdering and mutilating non-Muslims, and Muslim apostates. According to classical Muslim Koranic commentators verse 9:5 (perhaps the most infamous verse of the sword), “Slay the idolators wherever you find them, and take them captives and besiege them and lie in wait for them in every ambush…”, for example, cancels 124 verses that promote patience and toleration.



The sacralized Islamic sources indicate that as the Muslim prophet Muhammad accrued political and military power, he evolved from a proselytizer and persuader, to a warrior (i.e., a prototype jihadist; see: The Prophet Muhammad as a Jihad Model), and dictatorial legislator. Thus the sword and other similar Koranic verses—as per the linkage between Muhammad’s biography and the Koranic narrative—capture the Muslim prophet at his most dogmatic, belligerent, and intolerant. Muslims are enjoined to fight and murder nonbelievers—woe unto those who shirk these campaigns—but those who are killed fighting for the one true religion, i.e., Islam, will be rewarded amply in the afterlife. A sampling of such verses, which established these eternal injunctions, are included below:



47:4: “Now when ye meet in battle those who disbelieve, then it is smiting of the necks until, when ye have routed them, then making fast of bonds”



9:29: “Fight those who do not believe in Allah, nor in the latter day, nor do they prohibit what Allah and His Messenger have prohibited, nor follow the religion of truth, out of those who have been given the Book, until they pay the tax in acknowledgment of superiority and they are in a state of subjection.”



4:76: “Those who believe fight in the way of Allah, and those who disbelieve fight in the way of the Shaitan. Fight therefore against the friends of the Shaitan; surely the strategy of the Shaitan is weak.”



8:12: “When your Lord revealed to the angels: I am with you, therefore make firm those who believe. I will cast terror into the hearts of those who disbelieve. Therefore strike off their heads and strike off every fingertip of them.”



8:38-39: “Say to the Unbelievers, if (now) they desist (from Unbelief), their past would be forgiven them; but if they persist, the punishment of those before them is already (a matter of warning for them). And fight them on until there is no more tumult or oppression, and there prevail justice and faith in Allah altogether and everywhere; but if they cease, verily Allah doth see all that they do.”



9:39: “If you do not go forth, He will chastise you with a painful chastisement and bring in your place a people other than you, and you will do Him no harm; and Allah has power over all things.”



4:74: “Therefore let those fight in the way of Allah, who sell this world's life for the hereafter; and whoever fights in the way of Allah, then be he slain or be he victorious, We shall grant him a mighty reward.”



9:111: “Surely Allah has bought of the believers their persons and their property for this, that they shall have the garden; they fight in Allah's way, so they slay and are slain; a promise which is binding on Him in the Taurat and the Injeel and the Quran; and who is more faithful to his covenant than Allah? Rejoice therefore in the pledge which you have made; and that is the mighty achievement.”



As Ibn Warraq notes, aptly (p.69):



…“tolerance” has been abrogated by “intolerance”



And this doctrine of abrogation, necessitated by the many contradictions which abound in the Koran, originates as putatively taught by Muhammad, himself, at verse 2:106: “Whatever communications We abrogate or cause to be forgotten, We bring one better than it or like it. Do you not know that Allah has power over all things?” . This verse, in combination with verses* 16:101, 22:52, and 87:6, was elaborated into a formal system of abrogation (naskh in Arabic) by the greatest classical Muslim Koranic scholars and jurists, which entailed (p.72),



…the suppression of a ruling without the suppression of the wording. That is to say, the earlier ruling is still to be found in the Koran, and is still to this day recited in worship, but it no longer has any legal force [emphasis added]



But it is only when viewed in the larger context of the uniquely Islamic institution of jihad war—which derives substantively from the abrogating Koranic sword verses—that Judea Pearl’s naïve equation to “similar” verses from the Old Testament, becomes entirely fatuous. From the bellicose verses in the Koran, expounded upon in the hadith (the words and deeds of Muhammad as recorded by pious Muslim transmitters), Muslim jurists and theologians formulated the Islamic institution of permanent jihad war against non-Muslims to bring the world under Islamic rule (Shari’a law).



Since its earliest inception, through the present, jihad has been central to the thought and writings of prominent Muslim theologians and jurists. The precepts and regulations elucidated in the 7th through 9th centuries are immutable in the Muslim theological-juridical system, and they have remained essentially unchallenged by the majority of contemporary Muslims. The jihad is intrinsic to the sacred Muslim texts, including the divine Koranic revelation—“the uncreated word of Allah”. The Old Testament sanctions the Israelites conquest of Canaan—a limited domain—it does not sanction a permanent war to submit all the nations of humanity to a uniform code of religious law. Similarly, the tactics of warfare are described in the Old Testament, unlike the Koran, in very circumscribed and specific contexts. Moreover, while the Old Testament clearly condemns certain inhumane practices of paganism, it never invoked an eternal war against all of the world’s pagan peoples.



Uninformed ecumenical zeal in search of a fantasy Islam yet to be created, does not excuse making intellectual, let alone moral equivalences, between the severely limited and contextualized war proclamations of the Old Testament, and the permanent proto-jihad war injunctions of the Koran. Staking out the presumptive “higher” moral ground by a thinly veiled (and ahistorical!) attack on a courageous secularist seeking profound, not cosmetic (and meaningless) changes in Islamdom, is unsavory and destructive, regardless of the misguided motivations.



* 16: 101: “And when We change (one) communication for (another) communication, and Allah knows best what He reveals, they say: You are only a forger. Nay, most of them do not know.”; 22:52: “And We did not send before you any messenger or prophet, but when he desired, the Shaitan made a suggestion respecting his desire; but Allah annuls that which the Shaitan casts, then does Allah establish His communications, and Allah is Knowing, Wise”; 87:6: “By degrees shall We teach thee to declare (the Message), so thou shalt not forget”



The discussion of abrogation/naskh draws heavily upon the insightful analysis, here pp. 67-75, of my courageous mentor and colleague Ibn Warraq.

Friday, June 23, 2006

A Blind OR Criminal FBI

The FBI's spokes-thing, on this June 23rd morning, specially emphasized that the indictment of seven (Islamic) terrorists in Florida was NOT an indictment of any religion. I am curious if that spin-doctor, or his empire-building superiors, have ever read the Koran and the other works of Islam which, among other horrid commandments, declare that Muslims are in a state of perpetual war with all other peoples until they submit to Islam AND that every Muslim must go on active and military jihad against the "unbelievers" OR actively support those who do.

I also wonder if they read the papers as to other, independent, Muslims who elect to kill or try to kill others in the name of Islam and in accordance with its horrid teachings. The cases in the San Francisco airport, where the murderer left a note on his apartment's door with the command "Read The Koran", and the more recent case of a educated Muslim trying to use his auto to kill students on a Southern university campus come to my mind.

The "conventional wisdom" that such murderous Muslims are only a "radical minority" is a lie. They are the true believers in Islam and a majority party (Remember the dancing on "Arab street" when the news of "9/11" arrived?)

The FBI maintains "profilers" who attempt to link together common elements in the crimes of serial killers and other offenders. It seems more than strange that the FBI cannot do the same as to the terrorism threat of believing Muslims as to their threat to many thousands of our citizens and legal immigrants.

Of course, they may have all of the information available and are only too "politically correct" or cowardly to proclaim the truth---That an unreformed Islam is the most dangerous ideology (NOT a religion) in the world.

It appears that the FBI would rather murder unarmed women, holding their babies, as at "Ruby Ridge" and promote such assassins, than do their duty to the truth and towards the real protection of the American People.

That failure to the Truth, the People and the USA is CRIMINAL !!!

SUCH PERSONS AS WERE JUST ARRESTED IN FLORIDA APPEAR TO HATE THE USA. IT WOULD BE UNJUST FOR US TO MAKE THEM LIVE HERE. I SUGGEST THAT THEY BE TAKEN 20.0001 MILES OFF OF FLORIDA'S COAST AND EXPELLED FROM OUR NATION BY DROPPING THEM OVERBOARD.

Sunday, June 18, 2006

Jews & Muslims In England

THERE IS A LESSON AND A WARNING FOR THE USA IN THE COLUMN BELOW.


How Cromwell gave us Joan Collins and other luminaries
By Charles Moore
(Filed: 17/06/2006)

Exactly 350 years ago, we began to be a multi-racial society. 1656 marked the return of Jews to England. They had been driven out by an edict of Edward I in 1290. In the intervening centuries - known as the Middle Period - Jews quite often came to this country on business, but they were not permitted to reside here or practise their religion. Their status, in fact, was that of Christians (and Jews) in Saudi Arabia today. In 1656, Cromwell let 300 of them return, and Jews have been here ever since.
Among the eventual consequences of this re-admission have been Benjamin Disraeli, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Yehudi Menuhin, Peter Sellers, Joan Collins, Arthur Koestler, Alan Sugar, Nigella Lawson, Lucien Freud, Tom Stoppard and Sid James.
And why not add Max Perutz, Ali G, Ernst Chain, Jimmy Goldsmith, Miriam Rothschild, Melanie Klein, Alfred Brendel, Bernard Lewis, Emeric Pressburger, Harold Pinter, Sigmund Warburg, Keith Joseph, George Weidenfeld, Karl Popper, Ronald Harwood, Ernst Gombrich, Simon Schama, Jonathan Miller, Philip Green, Rachel Weisz and Robert Winston?
Or Isaiah Berlin, Jacob Bronowski, Rosalind Franklin, Harold Abrahams, Alexander Korda, George Solti, Denis Norden, Muriel Spark, Siegfried Sassoon, Jacob Epstein, Daniel Day-Lewis, Nigel Lawson, Janet Reger, Marjorie Proops, Sam Mendes, Stirling Moss and Bernard Levin? It is even claimed that David Beckham, if not technically a Jew, is, as the old joke has it, Jew-ish.
(And since into each life a little rain must fall, one might also note Michael Winner, Esther Rantzen, Eric Hobsbawm, Jerry Springer, Edwina Currie and Robert Maxwell on the debit side of the ledger.)
Anyone who has ever studied at a university, needed good doctors, shopped at Marks & Spencer or Tesco, benefited from scientific invention, listened to classical music, sought accountants or lawyers, watched a film, bought a book or needed his head examined, has gained from Cromwell's decision. The Jewish contribution is so great that it pervades almost all aspects of British society.
I have named individual Jews deliberately because, though it is always dangerous to generalise, even favourably, about race, it does seem to my gentile eyes that there is more prodigious ability and energy per Jew than per the rest of us. The community here has never been enormous - at present, it is somewhere between 250,000 and 400,000 - but it has achievements out of proportion to its size. I like Herbert Samuel's claim that "The Jews are the same as everybody else, only more so".
But the interesting thing for British society today is to ask why such a people have been able to overcome prejudices that at first excluded them absolutely and later accepted them only on qualified terms (Jews could not sit in Parliament until the mid-19th century, for example). The answer could be useful for everyone.
The key, perhaps, is to be found in one of the earliest reports of Jews in England after their return. On October 14, 1663, Samuel Pepys found a way of visiting a synagogue in London (something very unusual for a Gentile at that time). In his diary, he described the service which he witnessed. He did not like it ("I never… could have imagined there had been any religion in the whole world so absurdly performed as this"), but he also noted that the Jews said a special prayer for the King. In other words, they accepted the civil power.
The Jews did not do this just to save their skins by sucking up to Charles II: they did it because it was part of their religious duty. It still is. No believing Jew will obey a civil law that forces him to disobey his religious law - eat pork, for example. But if there is no conflict, his religion teaches him that he must obey the law of the land. In the Talmud, the question arises of whether you should pay taxes to a secular king. Yes, comes the answer, because "The law of the kingdom is the law". In the standard collection, called Ethics of the Fathers, which brings together rabbinical wisdom over the centuries, Jews are told: "Pray for the welfare of the government, for, without the fear of it, people will swallow one another alive."
Even the most cursory study of Jewish life shows that it is full of disputes. There are splits between orthodox and reformed Jews, and within orthodoxy. There are thousands of secular Jews who feel very Jewish, but refuse to have their Jewishness defined by religion. There is ceaseless, often angry argument: when you read the Christian Gospels, you find that one of the most common scenes is of learned men quarrelling. That is still the case in Jewish culture.
But because of this basic agreement among Jews about the status of the secular law, the effect of these quarrels on the wider society is minimal. It is significant that virtually no one reading this article will have heard of Dayan Chanoch Ehrentreu. He is the chief justice of the Beth Din, the Chief Rabbi's court which adjudicates on the endless delicate points of Jewish law, often relating to diet or Sabbath observance, which come up within the community.
If Judaism were an aggressive religion, seeking to lay down its law for all mankind, then this supremely learned old gentleman could acquire menacing power. Like the Ayatollah Khomeini in Iran after 1979, Dayan Ehrentreu could tell people to kill in the name of God. Instead, his effect is the opposite. By policing so meticulously the difference between the precise duties of Jews and the duty to society at large, this scholar helps define the space necessary for people with beliefs quite at variance with those of the majority to live harmoniously among them. In this sense, people can be "fundamentalist" and yet perfectly at home in a society which is not. For 2,000 years, Jews have developed a subtle understanding of the difference between the ideal society that would exist if God's laws prevailed everywhere and the world as it is.
Without this understanding, people do indeed "swallow one another alive" and - one might add in the era of suicide bombings - swallow themselves in the process.
With this understanding, a minority community can develop enough confidence and win enough acceptance to do good beyond the confines of itself. The Jewish concept of mitzvah, on which David Cameron dwelt when he made a speech celebrating the 350 years last week, means a good deed done for its own sake. Such deeds are visible in the importance that Jews attach to charity and to education. British society needs a lot more mitzvahs. There is also the idea of "chesed", man's kindness to all men, as first shown by Abraham when he entertained angels unawares. Thus does a potentially very closed community open itself out. The difference between majority and minority is very real - but not antagonistic.
In the past half-century, Muslims have come where the Jews came earlier, and in much larger numbers. Like such Jews, they have sometimes experienced the unhappiness that comes when one's religion is misunderstood or derided. Unlike the Jews, too many of their leaders tend to teach them that such slights must be avenged, that existence as a minority is just a temporary misfortune, not a state to be lived with, and that the law of England is virtually no law at all. If that attitude continues, society is reduced to a conflict about who will swallow whom alive. To avoid that is a huge and urgent task.

Information appearing on telegraph.co.uk is the copyright of Telegraph Group Limited and must not be reproduced in any medium without licence. For the full copyright statement see Copyright

Sunday, June 11, 2006

Vigilantes, Crusaders & Other "Good Guys"

“Vigilantes” are those who are forced to band together to enforce the basic order and laws when the civil or military authorities are unable or unwilling to do so.

In this nation's “Old West” there were times when the farmers, ranchers, merchants, miners and others saw the lack of basic order-and-law as clear-and-present dangers to their physical safety, that of their families and to what they had earned by the sweat of their brows AND saw NO government willing or able to control such dangers. They did not lightly give up income producing time and effort to exercise the missing role and duties of government.

The crusaders did not form up for hundreds of years after the Muslim takeover of the Holy Land. They did so, as a special sub-set of “vigilantes”, only when Islam clearly demonstrated itself as the enemy of those who wished to peacefully worship, according to the dictates of their Christian beliefs, in that land. Although they failed there and did make errors of judgment as to the Eastern Churches, they did clear out Islamic tyranny from Spain, Sicily, the Balkans and Greece and stopped its military aggression along the borders of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, at the gates of Vienna and at the Battle of Lepento. So, the next time someone (Probably a Muslim) uses “crusader” as a derogatory term, confront and correct him on the basis of historical facts and truth.

The “Minutemen” now on watch along parts of our border with Mexico are a very law abiding and peaceful sub-class of the “vigilante” movement. They are there only because the US Government is unwilling (NOT unwilling) to execute its duty to protect this nation from foreign invaders. So, the next time anyone (Including the President of the USA) uses “vigilante” as a derogatory term, to describe those “Minutemen”, confront and correct all such persons with the facts of history and the government's unwillingness to do its duty.

Sunday, June 04, 2006

"Detroit" Is Brain Dead

Below you will find a variation from my usual themes as to Islam and Secular Humanism: Unless you wish to consider the proposals made in terms of making the USA less dependent on Arab-Muslim and Chavez-Secular oil money.

“Detroit” is the word-symbol of the corporations of and, much more importantly, the People who manage and work in the automobile industry of the USA.

“Detroit” is brain dead! They have lost the race for innovation, cost effectiveness and quality control to Japan, Korea, Germany and every other auto-producing nation except Serbia (Remember the Yugo?) and France (Who buys a solely French made auto deserves all the trouble and pain also purchased). That brain death has also yielded the death of many, good paying, jobs in this once industry-leading nation.

Since I am NOT one to complain about a problem, I offer up the follow and interrelated solutions.

First, use all citizen, labor union, stock holder organizations and “Detroit” lobbying resources to insist that the Congress and the President liquidate the incestuous relationship between “Detroit” and “Big Oil” by the following steps:
1.Make interlocking boards of directors and vast stock holder “arrangements”
between those two industries very illegal with mandatory prison sentences
and vast fines for violations of such a law;
2.Require that all automobiles and light trucks using internal combustion engines (Including “hybrids”) manufactured in or imported into the USA after
January 1, 2009 be powered by such engines as will ONLY use alcohol as
a fuel. (I am sure that the “Big Oil” company gas stations would, very quickly,
become and morph into “Gas & Alcohol Stations”);
3.Require that all fuel-alcohol be “doped” with materials that will make
its flames visible when burning in the open (Pure alcohol has a colorless fame, this being the technique used in “Indy” cars as a safety measure) and not usable as a beverage; And,
4.Tax such alcohol fuel at far less that petro-fuels.

Next, the above item #2 would hopefully be a “wake up call” for the managers and engineers of “Detroit” to take a great-leap-forward to regain the USA's prior place as a leader, not follower, in their industry and our economy. Some of the characteristics of an innovative and new-wave American auto would be:
1.A two-to-four cylinder and small, only alcohol burning, internal combustion engine would operate the auto and charge batteries when a more efficient method
(Please see below) is not available;
2.The use of the most efficient and power-dense batteries (eg “nano-tube” batteries; Look them up on your search engine) which would NOT include
the use of lead-acid batteries;
3.The ability to charge up such batteries by plugging in the auto to the much
more efficiently produced household current by use of external/internal
AC to DC converters/rectifiers;
4.For protection of batteries and for comfort purposes (In the very cold climates
of parts of the USA) such heaters (Perhaps only in use when the auto is plugged-in to external current) as would keep the batteries and passenger compartment at about 40-degrees F (“Normal heating could operate by means of the small engine OR by means of the type of supplemental heater used in the old Volkswagen buses OR by flameless or catalytic heaters;
5.The same, only when plugged-in, application of fans to maintain battery and
passenger compartment temperatures no greater that the outside temperature, which is important in our often very hot climate; And,
6.The same, very effective, flow-through flow of air (With an overhead intake and rear facing and venting back-seat weapons as in the old VW bus; I had one and it did work very, very, well) in lieu of the power demanding air conditioners now in use.

There are, no doubt, other ideas which any, non-brain-dead engineer supported by any
non-brain-dead manager could develop as to make this innovative car (Or, light truck) even better.

The real question is: “Does the Congress and 'Detroit' have the intelligence and will to do the above?”. [If not, please pass me a dictionary and grammar for Japanese or
Korean or Thai!]