timeimmortal

Pope Benedict XVI will pray, at Ground Zero in New York, for the redemption of the Islamic terrorists who felled the Twin Towers, and will call on all who follow the ways of Islamist terror to convert to Christianity, abandoning their god of hatred and rage for the one true God of love and understanding.

Calls for his head on a platter will likely follow in lockstep with his praying thusly. But he’s saying what needs to be said, and I for one think it is long past time that Catholicism, globally, stopped taking a conciliatory tone where radical Islam is concerned.

It’s rather funny, you know? Historically, it was up to soldiers of the Church to fight and die on the battlefield in order to clean up the messes made by Islam’s conquests. In the modern era, it seems to be falling to Catholics to fight on the rhetorical battlefield against new advances, in that arena, by the same old foe.

Update: Welcome, Steynians!

A useful site that uses Google Maps as its tech base, and then overlays information in the news about terror attacks on it. It updates every 300 seconds or so. Very cool, if somewhat sobering.

What’s interesting to note is that while the whole world is indeed affected by acts of terrorism which get displayed on the map (there was even a recent incident in Prince George, B.C., in which a drunken man hijacked a bus with five passengers), there is a palpable difference in the “quality” of the incidents in, say, North America versus those in the Muslim world. The most violent incidents are, obviously, found in the latter.

I’m dead tired this morning, so this will kind of just be a list of things that I noticed on my morning browse through a few parts of the internet. Regular posting will resume tomorrow, ideally.

Apparently, the Milky Way is twice as thick as was previously thought — 12,000 light years, instead of 6,000. That’s kind of interesting, admittedly, although also rather “ho hum” — given the massive distances we’re talking about here, what’s a factor of two? Apparently, the researchers at the University of Sydney were just doing some basic fact-checking on internet-available data and realized the error after a few hours of computation. Guess it just goes to show: science is never 100%.

Moving on to more terrestrial matters, it appears that Danish “youths” — “mainly with immigrant backgrounds” — are burning things again, mainly cars, but also schools and trash bins. Officially, it’s not clear what caused the riots to trigger. Personally, I’m thinking that this is another case where we can strike out the words “immigrant youths” and replace them with “Muslims.” Probable cause? Here’s one guess:

(In Soviet Russia, hat tips you: RightGirl)

Speaking of Terrorism (since really, what else can we call it when Muslims are rioting and burning things?), the possibility is emerging that those undersea cables that got cut, thereby denying Internet access to millions of users across the Middle East and Africa, may have been destroyed in an act of sabotage, not in an accident as previously thought.

I hope nobody is too surprised by that.

In a follow-up to yesterday’s post about demographic winter, I see that Vox Day has added his own thoughts on the phenomenon to the virtual din.

You can’t completely grasp the extent of Europe’s post-Christian decline until you walk through the ghost towns of Italy, populated by no more a dozen elderly women and one old man sleeping in the sun. It’s not something that any tourist is going to see in Florence, Venice or Rome, much less Milano, but go outside the tourist tombs and the desolation of demographic winter is impossible to miss. And the imported African hookers scattered along the truck routes in the countryside are hardly adequate compensation for what were once famously vibrant family units.

There’s a large and spectacular church on the outskirts of a town near which we like to wander. Its doors are only unlocked for an hour or so every month, because despite its gorgeous interior architecture and painted ceilings, there’s not only no one around to attend it, there’s not even anyone left to visit it.

There is no cause of the demographic decline that is now afflicting much of the West that has done more to exacerbate the problem than secular progressivism and related ideologies. Put plainly, the societies we have built for ourselves (and, indeed, most human societies in general) are predicated on the expectation of a populace that maintains an almost “Catholic” birthrate — an average of 2 to 3 kids per woman. Our present fad of 0 to 1 kids per woman, and then usually one “designer” baby at age 35 (I shamelessly crib Mark Steyn’s phrasing here) is, quite frankly, insufficient to sustain Western society. To keep up our end, we need immigration.

That will, I think, be our untimely end.

Should Canada require its immigrants to “earn” their citizenship?

In the past, simply having lived in Britain for a sufficient length of time was enough to qualify a person for citizenship there. Now, a move is afoot to have immigrants “move on” through a system that encourages citizenship by encouraging the adoption of national traditions and values (possibly at the expense of the traditions and values those immigrants have brought with them from the “old country”), at the end of which they may achieve citizenship…or may be asked to leave, if in fact they do not integrate satisfactorily.

Methinks we need something like that in Canada.

According to the Associated Press, pro-lifers and other ‘domestic’ extremists account for “most of the damage” from terror-type attacks committed on American soil, to a larger degree than even Islamic terror.

As a pro-lifer, I’m pretty accustomed to having all manner of lies told about me and my beliefs — it comes with the territory. But the above assertion is pretty egregious, if somewhat easily refuted. Just for context, Muslim terrorists killed nearly 3,000 people in one day back in 2001, and destroyed two of the tallest skyscrapers in America in the process. Since 1973 (the year of Roe vs. Wade), misguided pro-lifers have killed just seven people in the U.S.

But clearly, those pro-lifers account for “most of the damage” done in acts of terror on American soil. The newsman says so!

Ezra Levant remarks that since it’s clear that Stephen Harper is gunning for an election, the Conservative government might as well try passing a few different pieces of increasingly more ambitious legislation, all via confidence motions, until Stephane Dion finally slips up and stops trying to avoid bringing the government down.

Gun control, the Wheat Board, tax cuts — and how about a gentle amendment to Section 13 of the Canadian Human Rights Act?

The irony is that last bill wouldn’t be controversial at all. Other than a lone Liberal lobbyist who hasn’t been in the party’s good graces for four years, and a fringe ethno-political special interest group, I don’t think anyone in the country would even consider such an amendment controversial.

As they say in the funnies…”it’s just crazy enough to work!”

And speaking of pro-life issues, the ladies of ProWomanProLife are suggesting contacting the Governor General directly to let her know that Henry Morgentaler does not deserve the Order of Canada. Fully 85% of online respondents to the Globe & Mail’s poll on the issue said “no,” and while that can hardly be called a truly “representative” number, I think it does indicate rather clearly that a majority of Canadians think that giving Morgentaler this sort of official recognition is a very bad thing.

The PWPL ladies also provide the names of the various people who sit on the “independent” advisory council that considers nominations for the Order of Canada.

Update: Suzanne Fortin sends in the following additional information by email. Here’s the process one can follow to contact the Governor General’s office:

It’s easy.

First call the Governor-General’s Office. Phone numbers:

Ottawa: 613-993-8200

Rest of Canada: 1-800-465-6890

You will get a receptionist.Ask to speak to Madeleine Proulx (pronounced “Prew”). She deals with the Order of Canada. When I phoned today, I got a voicemail and I have been told by another pro-life caller that calls about Henry Morgentaler are being re-directed to her voicemail. State your name. Tell her that you want to register your objection to Henry Morgentaler receiving the Order of Canada. State the reason why. Please try to be neutral in your tone– calling him a bloodthirsty murderer probably won’t gain us a lot of credibility. I stated that he’s a symbol of inequality as he is the reason that unborn children have no legal status today and that I believe in the equality of all human beings, and that he fought this struggle in my name as a woman, and I resent that.

And that was it.

If you’re a pro-lifer, O Reader, or even if you aren’t but nevertheless think that Henry Morgentaler doesn’t deserve the Order of Canada, I encourage you to follow the steps above. Be civil and be articulate, and choose your words carefully. Calling him a murderer with blood on his hands might seem like a reasonable objection to raise, but it’s also a very good way to ensure that your phone message gets ignored. Present your case fairly and without appeal to emotion or horror, and it will be listened to.

The venerable Mark Steyn has not been overly kind to Tony Blair or the government of the United Kingdom in recent weeks, since the bombings early in July. And it’s not a stretch to say that there’s good reason for that — how serious can a nation be in its denunciations of terrorism when that same nation does not come down like God’s Holy Wrath on the mayor of a certain large English city (which we will call “London“) who entertains and allows to speak in a public forum a radical Muslim imam who openly supports the terrorists and their agenda?

Not serious at all, right?

Steyn, and others, have also observed (again rightly) that many Western governments seem in many respects paralyzed by, or wilfully blind to, the terrorist threat. Consider:

It’s not black (the bomber) and white (the rest of us); there’s a lot of murky shades of grey in between: the terrorist bent on devastation and destruction prowls the streets, while around him are a significant number of people urging him on, and around them a larger group of cocksure young men gleefully celebrating mass murder, and around them a much larger group of people who stand silent at the acts committed in their name, and around them a mesh of religious and community leaders openly inciting mayhem, and around them a savvy network of professional identity-group grievance-mongers adamant that they’re the real victims, and around them a vast mass of progressive elites too squeamish about ethno-cultural matters to confront reality, and around them a political establishment desperate to pretend this is just a managerial problem that can be finessed away with a new bureaucracy and a bit of community outreach.

Taken from: The Daily Telegraph, August 02, 2005

There’s something to this order of things, really. When you consider that in Leedsyou can buy jihadist video games in which you too can slaughter the infidel and become a holy martyr, or when you consider the blatantly foolish edicts coming out of English police adminstration — remove your shoes when storming the house of a suspected Islamist terrorist, out of respect, are you at all surprised that (much!) less than a week after the initial bombings in which over 50 people died, there were more attempts that the police didn’t catch?

Yet the bombers are, so to speak, able to hide in plain sight - pests in a street full of pests, in a Britain where clerics freely incite violence; and where the Guardian hires a trainee reporter knowing he’s a member of a radical Islamist group banned in other European countries; and where the BBC cannot bring itself to drop its preferred euphemism of “militants”, even as suicide bombers advance from the Zionist Entity to the corporation’s own Tube station at .

Taken from: The Daily Telegraph, August 02, 2005

And as various quarters sound in with talk of a backlash against Muslims in Britain, which to my knowledge is still pending, radical imams continue to denounce Western governments, including the British government under which they live and which they ostensibly claim legal protection (and, in the case of some of the bombers, publically funded fiscal support) from, and you can still buy those damn games in Leeds. But everywhere, the spirit of appeasement seems alive and well.

Responding to Islamist terrorism in Britain and elsewhere, Germany is considering introducing a Muslim public holiday. As Mathias Dopfner, chief executive of Axel Springer, put it: “A substantial fraction of Germany’s government - and, if polls are to be believed, the German people - believe that creating an official state Muslim holiday will somehow spare us from the wrath of fanatical Islamists.”

Taken from: The Daily Telegraph, August 09, 2005

It’s not unreasonable to expect Tony Blair, and indeed all Western governments, to take measures, however drastic, to protect their respective populations from harm. That’s one of the reasons the government is there, right?

Tony Blair talks a good talk, explaining the rationale for war far better than President Bush. But he now needs not just to talk but to act. In France, the interior minister, Nicolas Sarkozy, has just expelled another dozen Islamists. By contrast, Mr Blair seems paralysed. In the weeks after 9/11, Mr Bush rethought 40 years of US policy in the Middle East. The Prime Minister has a more difficult task: he has to rethink 40 years of British policy in Leicester and Bradford and Leeds and Birmingham.

Taken from: The Daily Telegraph, August 02, 2005

So it is encouraging to see things like this coming out:

British prosecutors said yesterday they would consider treason charges against any Islamic extremists who express support for Terrorism.

Taken from: The Vancouver Province, August 08, 2005

Islamic extremists who incite violence or praise suicide attacks in Britain could face charges of treason, it emerged Sunday.

Taken from: Victoria Times Colonist, August 08, 2005

And hopefully, there is less to this article than there seems to be:

Tony Blair’s anti-terrorist drive was in disarray Monday after rapidly retreating from threats to invoke treason laws against extremists.

Taken from: The Windsor Star, August 09, 2005

One of the key strengths of the American, and to an equal degree the Austrailian, counter-terrorism initiatives, and indeed their relief initiatives related to the Indian Ocean tsumani, was and is quick, decisive action that they committed to and stuck to. This same quick-minded and unflappable determination has been seen in a number of smaller applications as recently as a week ago, when in ninety seconds flat, 309 people were able to evacuate from a burning airplane that skidded off the runway at Pearson Airport in Toronto — from a plane crash that was rated as “low survivability”, not one fatality was suffered. Nations need to work on the same principle when dealing with the terrorist threat — act quickly, decisively, and take care of the problem. If that means detaining imams that advocate for and profess support and praise for bombings, so be it. If that means profiling, so be it. If that means “no fly” lists, so be it. If that means, Heaven forbid, stricter immigration laws, or even temporarily suspending immigration, so be it. How many more Londoners, Iraqis, Americans, and Spaniards need to get blown up before people get this through their skulls?

In the wake of the London bombings, the British police have done wonders to investigate the attacks, and have even made a few arrests in the process. Thus far, they have identified about 30 suspects with al-Qaeda links. A backlash is also underway, though not against Muslims, as was feared by some. It is instead a backlash against London mayor Ken Livingstone, for his continued support of the radical Muslim cleric Sheikh Yusuf al-Qaradawi, who has publically endorsed terrorist bombers. He also publishes the occasional fatwa, which you can sometimes find on the IslamOnline website.

Mark Steyn has recently been on about dirty nukes, truly horrific weapons of mass destruction which, in addition to causing low-range kiloton-range damage against a target, spew increased volumes of very radioactive material over a wider raduis. These bombs are brutal weapons of mayhem with one purpose…limit the damage to structures, and instead kill the inhabitants with astronomical levels of radiation.

In particular, you can find the discussion in his Mailbox, and in specific as a response to one letter, cited below:

SECURITY RESTRAINED THEIR FIREPOWER
The inestimable Mr Steyn: “In other words, the scale of the carnage was constrained only by the murderers’ ambition and their manpower.”

I hesitate to disagree with someone whose thought I so respect, and whose command of language so far exceeds my own, but the carnage was also constrained by the murderers’ firepower, which has been downgraded from commercial airliners to backpacks as a result of stepped-up security. This is not an insignificant improvement.

Meyer Shields

MARK REPLIES: That’s correct in a sense. But what happens when it’s a dirty nuke in the backpack?

He’s also talked about portable nukes in one of his recent columns for the New York Sun. Again, the relevant passage is cited below:

Meanwhile, across the borders pour not primarily suicide bombers or suitcase nukes, though they will come in the end, but ideology — fierce, glamorous and implacable. That’s the final irony of the Israelification of Europe: distressing as it may be to Continental anti-Semites, in this scenario they’re the Jews.

At first, I was willing to put this down to Mr. Steyn’s usual talent for hyperbole and conjecture, but it appears that now it’s becoming something else. Say what you like about al-Qaeda, but they usually follow-through on the threats they make. One of the suspects in the London Bombings — Abu Musam al-Suri — recently was the subject of a Global Terror Alert, in which he asserts:

“I was honored to participate in the Afghani jihad against the Russians and the communists until we exterminated their forces and lowered their flanks and made an example out of them — as we will also do with America, with the help of Allah…I was honored to become acquainted with Shaykh Abdullah Azzam, and I worked with him during the days of the Afghani jihad in 1987. Then in 1988, I was honored by coming to know Shaykh Usama [bin Laden]…I was honored to become a member of Al-Qaida, and I worked with the group until 1992. During that time, I trained its first elite fighters and I was an instructor at its camps and other Arab-Afghan camps in various military and organizational methodologies, especially given my own high degree of specialized training in explosives production, special operations, and guerilla warfare that I received in Jordan, Iraq, and Egypt. All praise be to Allah for his blessing.“

A short while later in the article, he is again quoted:

“I emphasize my complete denial of what was reported in the American media and uttered by American official that I had any connection to or prior knowledge of the glorious and heroic September 2001 attacks. I only heard about it through the media, and I — along with many millions of other Muslims — enjoyed watching the beginning of the collapse of America. May Allah reward those who carried out [the attacks] with the best of rewards [martyrdom].“

The thing is, we can probably take him at his word about his non-involvement…and this is the tie-in between this report and Mark Steyn’s invocation of the spectre of dirty nukes. In an internet posting back in December 2004, al-Suri asserted that:

“…if I had been consulted about [the September 11] operation, I would have advised them to select aircraft on international flights and to have put weapons of mass destruction aboard them… now that the American administration has revealed the evil and wickedness of its forces… it is not a far cry from justice to adopt the slogan, ‘Dirty Bombs for a Dirty Nation’… Let the American people—those who voted for killing, destruction, the looting of other nations’ wealth, megalomania, and the desire to control others—be contaminated with radiation!“

As I said before, you can say what you like about the jihadi, but they usually make good on threats. It seems clearer and clearer now that in my lifetime, I will hear news of a backpack nuke going off in a major urban centre somewhere, probably in America. But really, it could be anywhere, because this is the ‘war’ that al-Qaeda is fighting. They are not waging a war of protest, or fighting so that America or any other Western nation will give them land or other concessions. They are fighting to kill the indifel.

We are all of us infidels to them.

My thoughts and prayers go out this day to the victims of the terrorist attacks in London — I pray that God’s merciful salvation will see the many dead received into His arms, and that the Holy Spirit will guide and aid the healing of the wounded.

In the aftermath of these terrorist attacks, there will probably be a lot of commentary (again and again, flogging the dead horse again…) about the “root causes” of Terrorism, and I think that most of this commentary will eventually devolve into scathing condemnations of three things:

a) George Bush
b) The “Zionist” entity and Israel
c) the “quagmire” in Iraq

And none of it will even come close to the truth.

The root cause of terror, this terror, isn’t a desire to promote a political cause, nor is it a method of protest against oppression. Not in the case of al-Qaeda. Their “root cause” is much simpler than economic disenfranchisement or neo-Marxist “liberation”. They seek to kill the infidel…which would be us. Mark Steyn weighs in with a timely quote from a couple years back, when some French ships were the target of terror attacks. It appears the terrorists were hoping to take out an American ship, but the French boats worked too…they were all infidels. Here’s the relevant excerpt, for people too lazy to click on the link:

…

On which subject, the Independent’s Robert Fisk thinks the Aussies were targeted for a more specific reason—blowback for being too cosy with the Great Satan: “The French have already paid a price for their initial support for Mr Bush. The killing of 11 French submarine technicians in Karachi has been followed by the suicide attack on the French oil tanker Limburg off the coast of Yemen. Now, it seems, it is the turn of Australia….” And don’t worry, there are plenty of others who’ll be getting theirs any day now. Just in case al-Qa’eda had missed one or two, Fisk helpfully provides a useful list of legitimate targets: “Belgium, which hosts Nato HQ; Canada, whose special forces have also been operating in Afghanistan; Ireland, which allows US military aircraft to refuel at Shannon…”. Blessings be upon you, Mister Robert, we had entirely forgot to add “Kill the Irish” to our “To Do” list.

I wonder if it was a cautious editor who added “initial” to that French “support for Mr Bush”. The French were supportive for about ten minutes after 11 September, but for most of the last year have been famously and publicly non-supportive: throughout the spring, their foreign minister, M. Vedrine, was deploring American “simplisme” on a daily basis. The French veto is still Saddam’s best shot at torpedoing any meaningful UN action on Iraq. If you were to pick only one Western nation not to blow up the oil tankers of, the French would be it.

But they got blown up anyway. And afterwards a spokesman for the Islamic Army of Aden said, “We would have preferred to hit a US frigate, but no problem because they are all infidels.”

No problem. They are all infidels.

…

(c) Copyright Mark Steyn, 2005, all rights reserved.

And even as I see that there are some people already weighing in with “root cause” commentary that pretty much follows the above predictions (see here, here, here, here, and here for starters…and then here for some laughable CIA paranoia), I’d just like to say that I hope the British government will show itself to be above such hypocrisy and address the real causes — the terrorists themselves, and the war they have declared against the infidel.

Because really, this “root cause” bleeding-heart talk is all pretty hypocritical, if you get right down to it.

Think about it…if al-Qaida or Hamas is justified in blowing up a bus in England or a restaurant in Tel Aviv because they perceive that the western Zionist oppressors are killing innocent Iraqis or Palestinians without cause and are driving the Islamic faith to ruin, then why isn’t some anti-abortion activist justified in blowing up an abortion clinic because s/he perceives that the pro-abortion oppressors are killing innocent unborn children without cause and are driving the moral fabric of society to ruin? Whether it’s a bus or an abortion clinic, it’s terrorism and it’s murder to blow it to pieces and kill people in doing so, so if you’re going to legitimize one and not the other then you’re committing a hypocrisy.

And if now you’re thinking “hah, now at least you’re admitting that Christians commit acts of terror too when they blow up clinics”, then I think you should read one of the recent articles at relapsedcatholic, and then the article that the author, Kathy Shaidle, links to from there. That’s not to say, of course, that there isn’t blood on the hands of some of those who claim to be Christian…but it IS to say that in many cases, the amount of blood is probably far less than many of my more liberal-minded acquaintances would prefer to see on the hands of members of a faith system they hate with almost irrational passion.

It’s both funny and tragic to me, and Mark Steyn has again commented on this (although sadly it appears that the relevant article is no longer linked from his page), that many of the same people who speak out against violence against women, oppression of women, violence against homosexuals, and discrimination against minority religions (i.e. “non-Christian” religions in the West), and who speak out in support of corruption-free elections and a vague concept of “freedom”, do so only in the West, in their own nations. On the global stage, many of these self-same people would be willing to plant themselves in the camp of fanatical theocrats and dictators who force women to wear burqas, who believe that the removal of the clitoris is the rite of passage into womanhood, who behead homosexuals — or toss them off rooftops, as the Taliban were fond of doing — and whose electoral process makes a mockery of concepts like democracy and “freedom”, all in the name of opposition to the even greater world threat: America. Saddam Hussein can execute and gas his own people, the Sudanese government can slaughter and rape Christians willy-nilly for the crime of not converting to Islam, and the “socially liberal” champions of individual rights here in the West are often the first to criticize America, Austrailia, and even Britain when they decide to go toe-to-toe against a dictator like that…or, come to think of it, when a Christian tries to peacefully convert them by handing them a pamphlet. If the Sudanese government stopped at pamphlets, there’d be a few thousand more Christian human beings alive today, and a few less trees. As sad as it is, for some people, the trees are the more important item.

And us conservatives are the scary ones, eh?

Well, so be it…consider yourself officially chilled to the bone.