Just the sort of thing the blogosphere is good at. Seems that Hezbollah’s version of what happened at Quran is unravelling. I don’t have time for pretty formatting, so I give you a bunch of links, starting with Jonah Goldberg and Mona Charen on The Corner.
Know anybody who reads Arabic? I’d like to know what the poster says: See here and here.
Then just look at the links here, here, here, here, and here.
And who is this man?
That’s today’s oxymoron. Stuart Buck asks the musical question, “Are liberals more empirical than conservatives?”
The saddest quote is this one from Andrew Greely:
I often regret that I ever became engaged in this area of scholarly investigation. It has been a waste of time. Doctrinaire slogans, conventional wisdom, shallow ideology, pessimism, and nonsense have dominated the discussion of Catholic education for so long that I have little hope that mere findings, no matter how solid, will be taken seriously. Certainly my own work and that of the research heritage I have described has had no impact at all.
It’s a deadly mistake, as is made clear by the man who translated al Quada’s manual. His thoughts are in this column.
In “The Management of Savagery,” Naji argues that the jihadis failed in the past to establish an Islamic state because they were focused on toppling local regimes. These efforts were fruitless, he argues, because jihadis were seen as fighting their own people, which alienated the masses. Moreover, the local governments proved impervious to revolution as long as they were supported by the U.S. Based on his understanding of power politics, Naji says that the jihadis had to provoke the United States to invade a country in the Middle East.
This would 1.) turn the Muslims against local governments allied with the U.S.; 2.) destroy the U.S. aura of invincibility, which it maintains through the media, and 3.) create sympathy for the jihadis, who would be viewed as standing up to Crusader aggression. Moreover, the invasion would bleed the U.S. economy and sap its military power, leading to social unrest at home and its ultimate withdrawal from the Middle East.
Naji had hoped that Afghanistan would play out in this manner for the U.S., as it did for the Soviets. Now, Naji places his hopes on Iraq. Once the U.S. withdraws from Iraq, he contends, the jihadis must quickly move to invade neighboring countries.
Read the translated manual here. And keep this in mind every time the MSM opens its yap about the war.
England, described by an English immigrant as the country where freedom was lost so long ago that the English don’t even realize they aren’t free. Yet it finally seems to be dawning on some just how corrosive multiculturalism is.
Brick Lane is a glorious streak of neon and curry, of clubbers and fundamentalists, of old Jewish immigrant stories and new Muslim ones, in the guts of the East End. It is my home, and over the past week I have been sharing it with a little news story – and with another small sign that free speech in Britain is slowly sandpapered down by reactionary mini-mobs.
Read it and despair.
Whenever the elites promise to “reform” or “streamline” something, especially taxes, count the spoons. Heed the warning of California’s voice in the desert, Ray Haynes.
[T]here is an effort nationwide, in which California is participating, to develop the Streamlined Sales Tax Project (SSTP). The SSTP would force businesses that do mail order and internet sales to collect sales taxes from citizens of other states. SSTP would require Congress to enforce the system and would use an organization called the Multistate Tax Commission to collect and audit the sellers. Congress is being asked to force all sellers, even if they operate in a state that does not participate in the SSTP to collect taxes from buyers in states that do participate.
