Muddling Toward Maturity Blog

ROBERT SPENCER'S NEW BOOK: "THE COMPLETE INFIDEL'S GUIDE TO THE KORAN"

Robert Spencer  announced today, "My latest book, The Complete Infidel's Guide to the Koran, is coming September 21 from Regnery Publishing." 

Me:  Judging from the enthusiasm of those recommending the book (all of whom I highly respect), I think I'll seriously consider adding this book to my personal library.

"Robert Spencer incarnates intellectual courage when, all over the world, governments, intellectuals, churches, universities and media crawl under a hegemonic Universal Caliphate‘s New Order. His achievement in the battle for the survival of free speech and dignity of man will remain as a fundamental monument to the love of, and the self-sacrifice for, liberty. In our epoch of intellectual jihadism, this honest book is essential to understand the challenges of the twenty-first century.” — Bat Ye'or, author of Eurabia; The Decline of Eastern Christianity Under Islam; and Islam and Dhimmitude

"Unlike most of today’s self-styled experts, Robert Spencer won’t tell you that ‘slay the idolaters wherever you find them’ really means ‘love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you.’ In The Complete Infidel’s Guide to the Koran, Spencer shows once again that he is

KRAUTHAMMER - OBAMA NOW A MERE MORTAL

In a brilliant essay, Charles Krauthammer, tells "what went wrong" with the Messianic pretensions of Obama.  He concludes:

He's become ordinary. The spell is broken. The charismatic conjurer of 2008 has shed his magic. He's regressed to the mean, tellingly expressed in poll numbers hovering at 50 percent.

For a man who only recently bred a cult, ordinariness is a great burden, and for his acolytes, a crushing disappointment. Obama has become a politician like others. And like other flailing presidents, he will try to salvage a cherished reform -- and his own standing -- with yet another prime-time speech.

But for the first time since election night in Grant Park, he will appear in the most unfamiliar of guises -- mere mortal, a treacherous transformation to which a man of Obama's supreme self-regard may never adapt.

Read the whole thing.

Krauthammer rightly calls attention to Fouad Ajami's earlier astute observations (likewise required reading).  I note this incidental line, "In contrast [to President Ronald Reagan] there is joylessness in Mr. Obama. He is a scold. . ."    So true.

WAFA SULTAN - "ISLAM'S POLITICAL IDEOLOGY AND SHARIA MUST BE FOUGHT RELENTLESSLY BY WESTERN CIVILIZATION"

We need desperately to listen to people like Dr. Wafa Sultan.  Political correctness and multiculturalism have dismantled and rendered inoperable the "baloney detectors" of Western culture's elites.  Dr. Sultan, a Syrian-born certified psychiatrist, human rights activist, & author of the forthcoming book A God that Hates, laments this fact and has written about it in the article that follows.

      As an Arab woman who suffered for three decades living under Islamic Sharia, it is clear to me that Islam’s political ideology and Sharia must be fought relentlessly by Western civilization to prevent its application in a free society.

However, I have found myself fighting on two fronts. The first front is against Islamists, a daunting fight indeed. But the other front is one shaped by too many uninformed individuals who like to view themselves as open minded “progressives”. They seem to somehow claim superiority on compassion, on peace, on open-mindedness and on appreciation of other cultures.  Regarding themselves as tolerant, free thinking individuals, they avoid questioning Muslims’ harmful intentions. They restrict themselves to self-criticism, and make politically-correct excuses for Islamism. Regrettably, they show their indisputable acceptance of ‘others’ at the expense of the public’s responsibility to learn the truth about Islam’s detrimental tenets.

HUMOR - (FROM AN E-MAIL -- "WHY MEN SHOULDN'T TAKE MESSAGES")

OBAMINATIONS (OBAMA AS MESSIAH)

- Obama bathed in light (photo on the right) from the White House website!!  Pretty subtle, huh?  (HT: Jonah Goldberg at the Corner).

- NewsReal -  Obama using National Endownment for the Arts to Create a Cult of Personality

- Michelle Malkin - Obama's classroom campaign.  Then needing to whitewash the teacher's talking points.  Update:  Malkin video interview.

- Then there's Jude's take (with a question why Joe Biden's photo never appears alongside Obama's as Cheney's did alongside Bush). 

- Victor Davis Hanson, interviewed by Hugh Hewitt, commenting on Obama addressing U.S. school children:

This is what totalitarian societies do. They reach out to children in the schools who don’t have any choice. The teacher apparently can’t say you know what? I don’t want to do this, or a child can’t say I don’t want to read this, because it’s part of a mandated curriculum. . .  I’ve been to Libya, and the first thing you see when you get into downtown Tripoli, is that everybody has to have a green book, and all the children have to wear green, and the same thing in China with the red scarf and the former Soviet Union. And that’s a method of the totalitarian manner, that children en masse have to hear a great leader speak to them. The Great Leader is never a guy with a Hitlerian mustache. He’s always a sympathetic, big brother-type figure that’s compassionate, soft-spoken, and that’s what Orwell was trying to get at. He was trying to warn people that totalitarianism is not going to come from an easy identifiable brown shirt. It’s going to come from somebody who’s going to take care of you. He’s going to tell you what kind of car you should have bought. He’s going to give you money when you make your mistakes. He’s going to help you get out of your mortgage. He’s going to take over the car industry for you. He’s going to give you health care. And he’s going to do all these things for you. That’s what’s really creepy about this entire broad assault on the traditional notion of what America used to be.

VIDEO INTERVIEW WITH JAMIE GLAZOV - AUTHOR OF "UNITED IN HATE: THE LEFT'S ROMANCE WITH TYRANNY AND TERROR"

Click here for a 47-minute video interview with FrontPage Magazine’s editor Jamie Glazov discussing his new book United In Hate: The Left’s Romance with Tyranny and Terror.

See Jamie’s previous NewsReal posts here [related to Glenn Beck], here [related to Congresswoman Diane Watson], and here [commenting on a woman Muslim woman caught laughing.]

JOURNALISTS EUNA LEE AND LAURA LING TELL THEIR STORY OF IMPRISONMENT IN NORTH KOREA

The story is well worth reading. 

We had traveled to the area to document a grim story of human trafficking for Current TV. During the previous week, we had met and interviewed several North Korean defectors -- women who had fled poverty and repression in their homeland, only to find themselves living in a bleak limbo in China. Some had, out of desperation, found work in the online sex industry; others had been forced into arranged marriages.

Now our guide, a Korean Chinese man who often worked for foreign journalists, had brought us to the Tumen River to document a well-used trafficking route and chronicle how the smuggling operations worked.  . .    Feeling nervous about where we were, we quickly turned back toward China. Midway across the ice, we heard yelling. We looked back and saw two North Korean soldiers with rifles running toward us. Instinctively, we ran. . .   [MORE . . .]

DENNIS PRAGER - BIG GOVERNMENT PRODUCES DIMINISHED PEOPLE

Dennis Prager offers insightful observations:

Those of us who oppose a massive increase in the role the national government plays in health care ("ObamaCare") do so because we fear the immense and unsustainable national debt it would incur and because we are certain that medical care in America would deteriorate. But there is a bigger reason most of us oppose it: We believe that the bigger the government becomes, the smaller the individual citizen becomes.

Here are five reasons why bigger government makes less impressive people.

HOW THE BURQA AND THE NIQAB POSE CRIMINAL AND TERRORIST THREATS

Daniel Pipes writes:

What's new on the niqab and burqa front?

To remind, both garments are designed for the modesty of Muslim females; the niqab covers all but the eyes and the burqa covers the entire face. In "Ban the Burqa – and the Niqab Too," two years ago, I documented how these two items pose criminal and terrorist dangers.

Is that still the case?

Criminality: Jordan offers a glimpse into the potential for niqabs and burqas as illegal accessories: one news report indicates that 50 people committed 170 crimes using Islamic garments during the past two years, or roughly one incident every four days, a crime wave that has prompted some Jordanians to call for restricting or even banning these Islamic head coverings.

No other country reports nearly so many head-garment-related crimes, but Philadelphia, Pennsylvania boasts multiple robberies (3 banks and 1 real estate leasing office) in a sixteen-month period in 2007-08, including the murder of a police officer. . .

Pipes goes on to cite incident after incident of crimes and terrorist attacks occurring around the world.  Pretty fascinating, if dismaying, reading.

Pipes concludes:

(For greater detail on all these incidents, see my weblog entry, "The Niqab and Burqa as  Security Threats.")

I have previously called for a ban on "these hideous, unhealthy, socially divisive, terrorist-enabling, and criminal-friendly garments" from public places. Now joining with fed-up Jordanians, I reiterate that call. Islam requires that women wear neither niqab nor burqa, while public welfare emphatically requires their public prohibition. How many more cases of robbery and terrorism must occur for this common-sense stricture to be applied from Afghanistan and Jordan to the United Kingdom and Philadelphia?

Update: On a somewhat different theme, Phyllis Chesler takes Naomi Wolf to task for supporting the burqa.  Update 2: Jamie Glazov demolishes Naomi Wolf who had objected to Chesler and Glazov's representations.  It's a devastating, stunning response.

HUGE "OBAMA-STYLE" UPSET IN JAPANESE ELECTIONS

For many of us, events in Japan rarely penetrate our radar screens, but Matt Gurney's discussion of recent elections should capture our attention.  He writes:

Prime Minister-designate Yukio Hatoyama stands in stark contrast with his LDP predecessors. He considers himself a reformer, views capitalism with skepticism, wants to reform the mighty Japanese civil service, and seeks new relationships with America and Japan's Asian neighbors. During the short campaign, Hatoyama received veritable rock star treatment, and was at times surrounded by cheering supporters, an unheard of phenomenon in staid Japanese politics. With his calls for optimism, change, and reform, he has become something of a Japanese Obama, and young voters have enthusiastically rallied to his side. . .

With Japanese voters concerned about the stagnating economy, Hatoyama has found a convenient culprit to energize the public: free-market capitalism. In a recent op-ed in the New York Times, for instance, Hatoyama railed against “unrestrained market fundamentalism and financial capitalism” and blamed the recent economic crisis on “American-style” free-market economics.    [Read the whole thing. . .]