It grows close to the time where the world’s non-muslims should decide how serious they are about preserving their cultures: Links 1 on April 29 – 2015

1. Nigerian Army Claims Rescue of Girls and Women From Boko Haram

2. A Chris Hitchens moment on islam

3. Finnish navy fires on mystery submarine

Incident comes amid growing military tensions with neighbouring Russia, months after Sweden mounts unsuccessful hunt for suspected Russian submarine in its waters

Finland has fired warning shots at a suspected foreign submarine off the coast of Helsinki in the early hours of Tuesday morning, amid growing military tensions with neighbouring Russia.

Carl Haglund, Finland’s defence minister, did not say whether Russia was involved, but the incident was reminiscent of a Swedish hunt for a foreign submarine in its waters last October that many thought to be Russian.

Mr Haglund told Finnish media that the target has likely left the area, adding that Finland has rarely used such warning charges.

4. Five guilty of conspiracy to defraud Woking ballot

(At this point, when you see a headline like this or anything to do with rape of children, you pretty much just do a word search for Moha)

Lib Dem Mohammed Bashir won the Woking Borough Council seat in Surrey by 16 votes in May 2012 but a judge ruled there had been corrupt and illegal practices.

Charges were brought after police investigated allegations that postal votes were fraudulently submitted.

The Conservatives won a subsequent by-election, held in September 2013.

Shaukat Ali, 56, Parveen Akhtar, 48, Shamraiz Ali, 28, Sobia Ali Akhtar, 23, and Abid Hussain, 40, all from New Haw, Surrey, will be sentenced on 9 June at Reading Crown Court.

5. Wilders and Sharia Versus Freedom of Speech on Capitol Hill

“Crude, risible pretenses about their ostensible support for the “bedrock principle” of free speech—a uniquely Western ideal—notwithstanding, the effort by Congressmen Ellison and Carson is designed to enforce antithetical Sharia-based restrictions on rational criticism of Islamic dogma, and the obvious effects of that dogmatism.”

**

Representatives Keith Ellison and Andre Carson doth takiya too much. In a letter to Secretary of State John Kerry, and Homeland Security Secretary Jeh Johnson, the good Congressmen seek to ban Dutch Parliamentarian Geert Wilders entry to the U.S. Mr. Wilders is slated to appear for a series of American events, beginning Wednesday, April 29, 2015, on Capitol Hill.

6. Nation of Islam planner of riots that shut city down. (Mayor thanks them for some reason)

Malik Z. Shabazz, the Washington-based lawyer who helped plan protests that began peacefully but ended in violence Saturday in Baltimore, is helping to organize another, even larger rally for this Saturday, he announced Tuesday.

Shabazz said the “massive national rally” would address “the burn behind the burn” — the anger over social disparities and injustice that he suggested led to Monday night’s unrest. […] Shabazz, 48, and Nation of Islam members helped plan last Saturday’s march. Shabazz was heard saying, “Shut it down,” just before violence broke out.

7. ‘Protestors’ throw trash can of burning materials at police. (Presumably as part of a ritual to bring back their colleague from the dead)

8. Isis display handwritten note in Rome outside Colloseum: “We are on your streets, we are locating targets”

Thank you ML., M., Andrew Bostom, Richard, Oz-Rita and all. More to come today pretty much for sure.

About Eeyore

Canadian artist and counter-jihad and freedom of speech activist as well as devout Schrödinger's catholic

15 Replies to “It grows close to the time where the world’s non-muslims should decide how serious they are about preserving their cultures: Links 1 on April 29 – 2015”

  1. The Russian subs remind me of the Cold War when incidents like this were common, they are not going to stop soon.

    The riots are just beginning they will continue through next summer at the shortest and will be coordinated by several black groups and race hustlers.

    ISIS is in Rome, they are in all western nations and will be active this year, here in the states they will be working with the people coordinating the riots.

  2. Chris Hitchins stated that the Roman Catholic religion was the most dangerous religion in the 1930s. I would say that it was socialism/communism that was the most dangerous religion in the world, at the time.

    Its worth noting that Nazism i.e., socialism, was allied to the far worse totalitarian system of communism. In fact, communism killed ten times more people, and was more bestial in treating whole populations then Nazism, which itself was a form of socialism/communism.

    Dostoyevski and Solzhynetsin, who both suffered under the Socialism/communism, knew that it was Atheism that was the root cause of the greatest disaster to befall humanity.

    Whatever one may say about Catholicsm, Catholics or the faith, most certainly did not kill tens of millions of people in the mid 20th century. In reality, they saved many from the butchery of socialism/communism/Nazism.

    Now the question arises – was Chris Hitchins a lefty?

    • “In July 1933, just six months after Hitler was appointed Chancellor, the Catholic Church signed the Concordat [Reichskonkordat]with Hitler. As a result of this agreement, the Catholic Church agreed not to oppose the political and social aims of the Nazi Party. Pope Pius XI hoped that the Concordat would allow the Catholic Church in Germany to operate free from any interference.”
      http://www.historylearningsite.co.uk/catholic_church_nazi_germany.htm

      “In early 1933, Hitler told Herman Rauschning that Bismarck had been stupid in starting a Kulturkampf and outlined his own strategy for dealing with the clergy which would be based initially on a policy of toleration:

      We should trap the priests by their notorious greed and self-indulgence. We shall thus be able to settle everything with them in perfect peace and harmony. I shall give them a few years reprieve. Why should we quarrel ? They will swallow anything in order to keep their material advantages. Matters will never come to a head. They will recognise a firm will, and we need only show them once or twice who is the master. They will know which way the wind blows.[22]” [My italics].

      “At a 26 April meeting with Bishop Wilhelm Berning of Osnabrück, representative of the German Bishops’ Conference, Hitler declared:

      “I have been attacked because of my handling of the Jewish question. The Catholic Church considered the Jews pestilent for fifteen hundred years, put them in ghettos, etc., because it recognized the Jews for what they were. In the epoch of liberalism the danger was no longer recognized. I am moving back toward the time in which a fifteen-hundred-year-long tradition was implemented. I do not set race over religion, but I recognize the representatives of this race as pestilent for the state and for the Church, and perhaps I am thereby doing Christianity a great service by pushing them out of schools and public functions.”[My italics]
      http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reichskonkordat

    • Actually you could write a decently long essay on how wrong Hitchens was on that point. I would argue that the Catholic Church allied itself with the Nazis only because it couldn’t do any good at all if it was destroyed so it feigned alliance with Hitler while secretly helping thousands and thousands of Jews to escape Italy. Many priests were involved with that while many more were in concentration camps themselves. And frankly Islam was just as dangerous in the 30s as it is now it just wasn’t on European radars then the way it is now. But then again, the defeat of the Ottoman empire was fresh in their memories so it might have been. Just not on Hitchen’s imaginary view of what the 30s were like.

    • Was Hitchens a leftie? He called himself one, even late in life identifying himself as a Marxist and historical materialist, and despite the alliance with Neoconservatism. Horowitz included him among his radicals in his book of that name. But he was at odds with the left after 9/11 and earlier, and was a great promoter of the second Gulf war. On the other hand, in 2008 he told his readers to vote for Obama. But he savaged the Clintons. But he reviled Reagan, and attacked ‘the American empire’ throughout the Cold War. Did he ever repudiate his hero Trotsky?

      He was scathing on Islam, though it seemed to me that he overlooked or ignored many of the best resources and people. I don’t recall seeing him respond to Andrew Bostom, Fjordman, Robert Spencer or Steve Emerson, for example. I just searched his name along with Bat Ye’or and I don’t see that he dealt with her work. Jihad Watch has an article from 2006 called ‘Anti-Dhimmitude from Hitchens’ which might be about this omission (I can’t open it). Perhaps with more thorough familiarity with Islam he would have found less time to bash Christianity. Maybe not, the animus seemed to run deep.

  3. Hitchins animus is not just againt Catholics, it is against all religions, including the Christian faith. If he is a lefty, then it doesn’t surprise me one whit. He ignores the fact that Western civilistion is founded on Christian faith, including science and engineering – most certainly not on atheism. He ignores the fact, that had it not been for Catholic faith, which put conviction and zeal against the fiery Jihad, Europe would have become Islamic long ago. Goodbye Western civilisation.

    As for Catholics. The Vatican was responsible for saving thousands of Jews from death. There was also a Catholic priest who offered to take the place of a Jew in the gas chambers. Did an atheist ever do such a sacrifice. Was atheism ever any solace to the hundreds of millions suffering under the barbarity of communism. No, it wasnt. It was the Orthodox Christian faith, and faith in Jesus, that sustained the persecuted, just as it is the same trust in Jesus, that is sustaining Christians in Islamic countries, while the EUSSR and USSA, ignores the cries of innicent Christians.

    Now if Hitchins is a lefty, I presume he believes in Marxism. Now Marxism is the ideology that led directly to the extermination of over a hundred million people in the 20th century. Does one have to be stupid of a partiicular type that continues to believe in Marxism, even when the truth of the fruits of this idelogy have been known fopr over 40 years. I realise most profs in social studies etc still do. But that does not excuse the lack of analysis and discrimination in a supposedly public intellectual like C Hitchins.

    Both Dostoyevski and Solzhynetsin agreed that Atheism was the root cause of the diusaster of the 20th century. But this would d4estroy the ethos of Hitchns.

    My opinion only – I dont think Hitchins is in the same league as Dostoyevski or Solzhynetsin. Besides until one has been to the Gulag, like Solzhynetsin, Hitchins views do not quite have the seal of truth through torture, as that of Solzhynetsin.

    • I think Hitchens found it annoying in the extreme that no matter how brilliantly he ridiculed Christianity, all any of us saw watching those performances was a quintessential product not only of the Greco-Roman inheritance but the Judeo-Christian as well, and he was probably actually more conscious of it than most, the long and rich and contradictory history.

      I think the muddle began from the Marxist ideas about human nature that he seemed to cling to even after he distanced himself from the left. If he had really accepted that there was never going to be any sort of world revolution that would reveal us all as somehow different, less refractory, more agreeable, more malleable, less aware in our bones of the unreasonableness of living and dying than we have always been, I don’t think we would have seen him throwing the very considerable weight of his intellect behind such doomed Utopian adventures as reinventing Iraq in our own image, for instance.

      And he was too clever by half, and too good at debating. It strikes me as a very English failing, having not only to win every argument, but to be seen to win it. And now he’s dead and can’t cut such maunderings as these to ribbons. How frustrating is that?

      • Don C wrote: And he was too clever by half, and too good at debating. It strikes me as a very English failing, having not only to win every argument, but to be seen to win it.

        Indeed he was good debater, and excellent in the counterpunch, winning points by rapier like thrusts.

        But those very characteristics that win public debates, and humiliate the opponent, is a mind that is unable to fathom deeper insights. Humiliating opponents is not good. One should try to win over opponents.

        To get to the deep, one requires genuine humility, and a real sense of being very likely wrong. Such characteristics were never evident in Chris Hitchins.

        • Exactly. The higher purpose of debate is to discover flaws in your own thinking, which you are guaranteed to have. Presumably Hitchens used it for that end privately, among friends, but what we saw was him protecting his reputation at the cost of hardening erroneous positions by skewering the opposition in public. Truth was too often a casualty.

        • Muslims don’t and can’t debate, of course, unless they have Western training, in which case they will debate in the lowest ways for the basest purpose, to further the reach of their unexamined ideology.

          Buddhism has an old and stimulating tradition of debate, but confined it I think almost entirely to questions of Buddhist philosophy, and so the critical thinking skills they developed never led to advances in political theory or the scientific investigation of nature. But Buddhists do understand that the point of debate is not to crush your opponent. Hitchens might have taken that from Buddhism at least, in respites from mocking it.

    • Those are good points I don’t think I ever heard Hitchens adequately rebut, that their faiths have been and are an inspiration for heroic sacrifice and a solace to millions under tyranny or in grief.

      And a source, an agency outside ourselves, of forgiveness, I would add. I take as proof of this, of something like transcendent agency, that it is the case that people are generally unable to forgive themselves for the worst things they do, but have the experience of forgiveness somehow being given, in extremis probably, probably through prayer. Then they carry on, still not having forgiven themselves, that forgiveness not having come from anything that they recognize as an aspect of the self. A Hollywood example would be the character portrayed by De Niro in The Mission, and I imagine the performance resonating with the most extraplanetary atheist. Perhaps not.

      But I would suppose all the same that this is an elemental human pattern, if probably not so cultivated outside the West. All religions are not the same. By maintaining that these dimensions of human experience were ‘white noise’ to him, as he liked to do, Hitchens made his case less convincing, as he seemed to distance himself from mere mortals.

      • Don C wrote: And a source, an agency outside ourselves, of forgiveness, I would add. I take as proof of this, of something like transcendent agency, that it is the case that people are generally unable to forgive themselves for the worst things they do, but have the experience of forgiveness somehow being given, in extremis probably, probably through prayer.

        How true. There is no faith other then the Christian faith, where the Christian is asked to do good to those who hate you. That is, forguveness and love, stops the nomaic codfe of “eye for an eye” society, replacing it with a civilosed society, where justice is done with due process, and tempered with Christian compassion and mercy.

        It is not surprising then, that Christendom is the font of modern civilisation – engineering, science, art, music and societal norms, all accepted as the standard all over the world. Islam is kicking against it, but the Truth will win, and Muslims will reject Islam.

        I’m looking forward to the day when I’m affectionately assailed by fresh Christians-from-Islam, for not being Christian enough, while eating delicious fresh halawa.

  4. Apologies

    Corrrected version. Ignore the previous post.

    Don C wrote: And a source, an agency outside ourselves, of forgiveness, I would add. I take as proof of this, of something like transcendent agency, that it is the case that people are generally unable to forgive themselves for the worst things they do, but have the experience of forgiveness somehow being given, in extremis probably, probably through prayer.

    How true. There is no faith other then the Christian faith, where the Christian is asked to do good to those who hate you. That is, forgiveness and love, stops the nomadic code of an “eye for an eye” society, replacing it with a civilised society, where justice is done with due process, and tempered with Christian compassion and mercy.

    It is not surprising then, that Christendom is the foundation of modern civilisation – engineering, science, art, music and societal norms, all accepted as the standard all over the world. Islam is kicking against it, but the Truth will win, and Muslims will reject Islam.

    I’m looking forward to the day when I’m affectionately assailed by fresh Christians-from-Islam, for not being Christian enough, while eating delicious fresh halawa.

  5. Don

    Thanks for clarifying the issue.

    And perfectchild

    And EEyore, for bringing C Hitchins to the fore.