TOXIC HONOR

The more I travel, study history and read the papers, the more convinced I become of the superiority of rationalism. With that attitude, I should spend all my time traveling to northern Europe and Japan.

However, fate has also seen fit to send me to many places where people think with their viscera and gonads instead of their brains. The more I see it in action, the more convinced I become that societies that place personal "honor" before everything else are truly cursed.

This value system has ramifications that pervade the societies infested with it. It is, in my view, (more…)

RESCUING ISLAM FROM ITSELF

The recent brouhaha surrounding Pope Benedict XVI comments on Islam delivered in Germany should give Moslems a pause.  What the Pope said allows me, as a Moslem, to ponder self-examination and not rush into a reaction of condemnation.

Islam, throughout its history, delivered its share of great minds to humanity during times of peace and prosperity. Scientists like Mohammad al-Khawarizmi who invented algebra and Avicenna who contributed greatly to medicine lived in an era of "political prestige, financial power, and intellectual pursuit with Baghdad as the epicenter" as Saadia Iqbal described it in a recent National Geographic article.

We Moslems, (more…)

THE DAWN OF MORAL CLARITY

There is a historically fairly predictable pattern to the unfolding strategies and views of great wars. They often start with a morally ambiguous view of the enemy, a more limited conception of the war's magnitude and a restrained application of violent tactics.

Eventually, moral clarity is obtained, war objectives expand – often to grandiosity, and tactics become ferocious.

For example at the start of our Civil War in 1861 at the Battle of First Manassas, spectators came out by carriage with picnic lunches to observe the event. By 1865, Gen. Sherman executed a campaign of civilian terror and material obliteration (more…)

THE DAMASCUS SCAM

Syrians Foil US Embassy Bombing blared the BBC headline regarding the terrorist attack on the American Embassy in Damascus, Syria on September 12.  US Lauds Syrian Forces in US Embassy Attack was the CNN headline the next day.  Then came the clincher when the Associated Press ran a story headlined Isolated Syria Hopes Attack on US Embassy Will Warm Relations with US.

Syria playing Uncle Sam for a sucker yet again.  For the "attack," you see, was staged.  It was planned by Assef Shawkat, head of Syrian Military Intelligence, whose agents provocateurs provoked a few hothead fools, provided them (more…)

REGRESSIVE PROGRESSIVES

At my university I was sitting at one interminably long meeting where sadly much time is wasted and little gets done. But during one of the discussions the person who was the leader made the point that there are faculty members of two different political persuasions, conservative and progressive. He was trying to be simply descriptive.

Ah, yes, "progressive," that into which liberals have been transformed.

Yet the designation fails to fit folks on the Left altogether.  Because instead of moving forward, getting away from past practices, of making progress, those on the Left are actually regressive, even reactionary, in (more…)

OUR SECRET VICTORY IN AFGHANISTAN

The last thing America's Traitor Media would report is that we are winning in Afghanistan.  Yet that's what's happening.  NATO forces – combining US, Canadian, Australian, Polish soldiers plus 1,000 French (!) – have been rolling up the Taliban in a ball over the last several months. 

The "resurgent" Taliban that Democrats like John Kerry claimed today (9/14) are "running amok across entire regions" of Afghanistan are in reality being wiped out.  Victory over them is quite near.

Taliban guerrillas are being killed by the gross – dozens, scores, at a time, hundreds a week.  Over 500 have been killed (more…)