blogolob
When I grew up in the fifties and sixties, in the aftermath of WW2, we were taught that war was a matter of life and death and the crucial thing was to win it. With sport, winning or losing was secondary. The important thing was how you played the game.
Is it the other way around now?
Hamas ‘Mickey Mouse’ killed off
A Palestinian TV station has killed off a controversial Mickey Mouse lookalike that critics said was spreading anti-US and anti-Israeli messages to children.
What the BBC means:
A Palestinian TV station has killed off a controversial Mickey Mouse lookalike that was spreading anti-US and anti-Israeli messages to children.
Can we cut the crap, please?
The International Herald Tribune reports that the journalist, Saif el-Deen Shahin, who worked for the Al-Arabiya network in the Gaza Strip, is seeking asylum in Norway after having been beaten up and threatened for describing the kidnappers of BBC reporter Alan Johnston as criminals.
“We came to Norway because I, my wife and children received death threats, and we decided to leave Gaza where I could not continue as a free-speaking journalist,” Saif el-Deen Shahin was quoted as saying in a report on [Norwegian state broadcaster] NRK’s Web site.
(via Eye On The World)
It’s no good convincing myself otherwise. As carefully as I scoop them up from the garden and drop them in a plastic bag, it makes no difference whatever. Those poos are going nowhere. And they’re going nowhere because of the bag. Protected in their totally-un-biodegradable cocoon they’re not going to make it back to Mother Earth where they might do some good.
from Ecoxiety
Always on Watch attended a lecture by would-have-been-a Jihadist and author of “The Roots of Jihad”, Dr. Tawfik Hamid, at the Ethics and Public Policy Center in Washington, D.C.
According to the lecture, these are the three primary motivators for jihadists (extracted):
1. Focus on the dream to die as a shaheed (martyr for Allah).
2. The joy of causing pain to infidels. For this reason, [some] Muslims throughout the world rejoiced on 9/11.
3. The feeling of victory. This feeling is both personal, as in Point 2 above, but also one of experiencing victory for Islam, for furthering the will of Allah. Even if the act of terror is a small one, the cause has been furthered.
Dr. Hamid thinks that the reactions of our media are counter-productive and, in fact, contribute to the enabling of the Islamists’ agenda
Our media often make a point of the ineptness and small scope of an attack, planned or carried out. Dr. Hamid maintains that dwelling on the size of an attack is a mistake. Even the smallest attack has a ripple effect on the psyches of Muslims yearning for the caliphate and for jihadists seeking their eternal reward. In other words, there is more to consider than damage and loss of life when an attack occurs.
Tackling extremist ideas
Further to my “…happening at Harry’s” piece below, Norm puts it nicely together here.
and…
Damn, I’ve lost the link for this. I’ll put it up later when I find it:
A spokesloon for the Slowshalist Wonkler Fraction and several members of the Committee for the Preservation of Pilge Johnson, Roberta Finkit-frew, Buntly Magdalena, Agh Lords-Med and Rosie ‘Courage’ Jonquiline, have just issued the following statement:
“We the undersigned hold this truth to be self-evident: that the knighthood recently awarded to Salman Rushdie is the underlying root cause of the attempted terrorist attacks in London and Glasgow, which we deeeeplawww. Therefore we utterly condemn the entire literary and political establishment of the West - and Israel - for the blood that it has on its hands, and up its nose. The knighthood was a war crime, a crime against humanity and an act of imperialism, and it was dreadfully alienating as well.”
Close textual analysis of the statement suggests that it was written by more than one hand, and possibly a foot.
Can anyone help Norm find this link?
Fuzzy Thinking Exposed
I can’t imagine there will be a shortage of journalists and commenters trotting out the ‘it’s all about Iraq’ line long after after the London and Glasgow bombs have ceased to dominate the headlines.
However such a lazy linkage of the two phenomena reveals more about the groupthink that passes for contemporary left-liberal discourse than sheds light on what’s actually driving the putative nailbombers and self-immolators.
Hassan Butt, who used to be a seeker after the Caliphate but has now renounced extremist Islamism is surely better qualified to pronounce on the subject than a whole drawing room full of Islingtonians. Here’s what he says about the mens rea of the modern jihadi:
When I was still a member of what is probably best termed the British Jihadi Network, a series of semi-autonomous British Muslim terrorist groups linked by a single ideology, I remember how we used to laugh in celebration whenever people on TV proclaimed that the sole cause for Islamic acts of terror like 9/11, the Madrid bombings and 7/7 was Western foreign policy.
By blaming the government for our actions, those who pushed the ‘Blair’s bombs’ line did our propaganda work for us. More important, they also helped to draw away any critical examination from the real engine of our violence: Islamic theology.
Marcus’ piece here
