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The old embassy is supposed to be an official shrine to that bold act of national defiance, which defined for the world the glorious 1979 revolution, a kind of Iranian counterpart to America’s Boston Tea Party—but more central and significant. Yet in the four times I went to the embassy during trips to Iran in the past year, it was empty of visitors. A bookstore just outside the entrance, which was once known for selling anti-American literature and reprints of the thousands of secret embassy documents seized in the takeover (the infamous “spy den documents”), was vacant when I first saw it in December, its racks empty, but nine months later appeared ready to reopen as a bookstore for children. The slogans and spiteful artwork that had been spray-painted on the embassy’s brick outer walls by angry crowds during the tumultuous hostage crisis had faded—including an image of the Statue of Liberty with its face portrayed as a death mask and a sign in English that said “DEATH TO THE USA.“

For a visiting American, Iran is like Bizarro World, the mirror universe in Superman comics in which everything is inverted. Bad is good and good is bad. In Tehran patriotic symbols of the United States are everywhere, but always wrenched into images of violence, evil, and defeat. The American flag is shown in the shape of a gun; the bald eagle is shown going down in flames. In the West we are bombarded with advertising images of youth, beauty, sex, and life; in Tehran the preponderance of advertising images celebrate death. There are murals everywhere honoring martyrs—primarily those who died in the eight-year Iran-Iraq War, in the 1980s, but also more recent Islamic martyrs, including Sheikh Ahmed Yassin, the spiritual leader of Hamas, who was assassinated by Israeli forces in Gaza earlier this year. Billboards in the West often feature scantily dressed, provocatively posed teens, but in Tehran the gigantic wall murals tend to depict robed grandpas and grumpy-looking white-bearded clerics—especially common are the bespectacled face of the current Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, and the more imposing, threatening visage of the late Imam, Ruhollah Khomeini, the major force behind the overthrow of the Shah in 1979, and the father of Iran’s theocratic state.

The hostage-taking was an outrageous violation of international law and of the age-old rules governing diplomatic relations between civilized nations; but as shocking as it was at the time, in today’s world of vicious Islamist terrorism the gerogan-giri seems almost quaint.

Ibrahim Asgharzadeh, a ringleader of the takeover who has become a reform politician and newspaperman, is emphatic in his assessment: “Hostage-taking is not an acceptable action under international norms and standards. The hostages underwent severe emotional difficulties. Prolonging it affected both countries in a negative way. The chaos caused such tension between Iran and the United States that even now, after two decades, no one knows how to resolve it.”

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Reminder for the dimwitted: Islam is an oppressive totalitarian ideology with which no co-existence is possible.

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Muslim countries in the Middle East and north-central Africa lead the world in human trafficking, according to a new U.S. State Department report.

See also Bernard Lewis. Race and Slavery in the Middle East.

Christopher Hitchens tells it like it is.

Iran and its citizens are considered by the Shiite theocracy to be the private property of the anointed mullahs. This totalitarian idea was originally based on a piece of religious quackery promulgated by the late Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini and known as velayat-e faqui. Under the terms of this edict—which originally placed the clerics in charge of the lives and property of orphans, the indigent, and the insane—the entire population is now declared to be a childlike ward of the black-robed state. Thus any voting exercise is, by definition, over before it has begun, because the all-powerful Islamic Guardian Council determines well in advance who may or may not “run.” Any newspaper referring to the subsequent proceedings as an election, sometimes complete with rallies, polls, counts, and all the rest of it, is the cause of helpless laughter among the ayatollahs. (“They fell for it? But it’s too easy!”) Shame on all those media outlets that have been complicit in this dirty lie all last week. And shame also on our pathetic secretary of state, who said that she hoped that “the genuine will and desire” of the people of Iran would be reflected in the outcome. Surely she knows that any such contingency was deliberately forestalled to begin with.

John Bolton thinks the unthinkable.

Actually, there isn’t a lot the Iranians can do.

* They can’t close the straits of Hormuz, because that would get them in a pissing contest with the U.S. Bad move. One carrier-based air strike on their few gasoline refineries and everybody in Iran is either walking or riding donkeys. They know it, we know it, and the only people who don’t know it are the “journalists” whose business it is to know these things.

* They can’t cut oil production, because their economy needs oil revenue worse than the world needs their oil.

* They can’t attack U.S. and allied forces in Iraq and Afghanistan, because they’re already doing that … as much as then can get away with short of getting into a pissing contest with the U.S. (See option 1 supra)

* They can’t launch missile attacks on Israel without giving Israel a beautiful excuse to clean their clocks and reveal what a house of cards the Iranian military actually is.

* They can’t support Hamas and Hezbollah attacks against Israel … because they’re already doing that.

Many argue that Israeli military action will cause Iranians to rally in support of the mullahs’ regime and plunge the region into political chaos.

As if it weren’t already.

Read it.

Hint: No.

“There is far more violence in the Bible than in the Qur’an; the idea that Islam imposed itself by the sword is a Western fiction, fabricated during the time of the Crusades when, in fact, it was Western Christians who were fighting brutal holy wars against Islam.”[1] So announces former nun and self-professed “freelance monotheist,” Karen Armstrong. This quote sums up the single most influential argument currently serving to deflect the accusation that Islam is inherently violent and intolerant: All monotheistic religions, proponents of such an argument say, and not just Islam, have their fair share of violent and intolerant scriptures, as well as bloody histories. Thus, whenever Islam’s sacred scriptures—the Qur’an first, followed by the reports on the words and deeds of Muhammad (the Hadith)—are highlighted as demonstrative of the religion’s innate bellicosity, the immediate rejoinder is that other scriptures, specifically those of Judeo-Christianity, are as riddled with violent passages.

The truth is that the “violence” in the Bible is in the Old Testament, and isn’t of the “go forth and conquer the world” type that Islam promotes. And there’s no sponsorship of violence — indeed, not even any endorsement of it; quite the contrary — in the New Testament. So this is “cultural equivalence” meme is all bullshit promoted by ignorant partisans.

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That’s some fine Religion o’ Peace™ you got there, fella.

Ever notice how you never hear anything about Christian suicide bombers or Jewish suicide bombers?

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1. Within 20 years, Europe will be a collection of Islamic states.

2. Within 10-15 years, active Moslems are likely to outnumber active Christians in Canada.

3. Islam is preparing for a serious-minded and well financed missionary activity in the West.

The “clash of civilizations” that started in the 7th century is far from over. Orthodox Christianity has been on the front lines of the struggle against Islamic aggression during the whole of that time. That is experience that you ignore at your peril.

The demographics are radically on the side of Islam. They do not have to convert even one person in order to be able to dominate Europe. People in Western cultures are reproducing at a rate below 1.5; Moslems living in the West are reproducing at a rate of 4-6, even 8. Christians have abortions, Moslems do not. Christians have small families: on average, 1 or 2 children; Moslems have large families, on average 6 to 8 children. Moslems maintain their traditions, most Christians do not. Commitment and attendance at Mosques outstrips that of Christian commitment and attendance in Church.

Within your lifetime you will be required to choose — if you’re lucky — what sort of world you want to live in. It’s not too early to start to think about what your answer will be.

Faith can only be challenge by faith; commitment can only be faced with commitment.

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Read it.

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An appeals court yesterday upheld the legality of federal raids on a Herndon-based network of Muslim charities, businesses and think tanks, a case that caused a firestorm in the Muslim community.

I’d certainly like to cause a firestorm in the Muslim community. It is, after all, their turn.

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Somalia has a government? Who knew?

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You can’t make this stuff up.

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While the rest of the world seems to understand that swine flu is not really about the swine, Egypt continues its mass slaughter of every pig in sight. It is on a national campaign to rid the country of its estimated 300,000 pigs in the name of public health.

Which brings us to the second reason for the pig assault in Egypt: the Coptic Christian pig owners. Egyptians never seem to miss an opportunity to unsettle its Coptic minority.

Copts complain about harrassement, discrimination in employment and lack of representation in government. Some live in fear that their children will be kidnapped and forcibly converted to Islam. They have taken to tattooing a Coptic cross to the wrists of their children as a sign of their identity.

Remember that the Copts are the native Egyptians, from before the Arab invaders arrived.

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When refugees seek safety in Afghanistan, of all places, the desperation and terror they leave behind can only be imagined.

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But of course Islam is a Religion of Peace™. Ask anybody.

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The Hamas terrorist organization that controls the region has used the ceasefire following the IDF’s recent Operation Cast Lead to bring in advanced weapons through new tunnels built to replace those that were destroyed during the war. On Thursday, two Arab smugglers, or workers, were killed when a tunnel collapsed underneath the border at the town of Rafiah, where an official border crossing terminal between Gaza and Egypt is also located.

My, what a surprise. Aren’t you surprised? I’m sure surprised.

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As has often been noted, jihad — violence against the infidel for the purpose of spreading Islam — is just one of the tactics used by Muslims to Islamize the infidel world. Various forms of “stealth jihad” supplement and support terrorism as a means of extending Islam’s reach.

Zakat, the religiously-mandated giving of alms, is one such supporting function. Islamic scripture and tradition require that charitable giving be used for the support of violent jihad, in addition to the more mundane eleemosynary functions.

It’s hard to fight this process. Who, after all, objects to charitable organizations?

Every time a Western prosecutor goes up against a Muslim “charity”, the deck is stacked against him due to our intuitive misconception of what an Islamic charitable organization must be like. Add to this the routine dissimulation of Muslims (which is also required by scripture and tradition), and you arrive at the toxic situation we face today: large amounts of money used to fund terrorism flow through the world’s banking systems in accounts maintained by Islamic “charities”.

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Tragic. Agonizing. And for me, the story is frustrating, even infuriating. It raises gigantic questions and then seems determined not to answer them. It appears that the journalists involved in this project thought it was important not to try to seek answers. Why?

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I would have favored his being lowered millimeter by millimeter into boiling oil – it’s traditional – but I suppose waterboarding will have to do.

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We claim that the only requirement for evil to succeed is that good people do nothing. Letting evil go unpunished ipso facto becomes the equivalent of rewarding it.

In its past and present manifestation, Islam is a pluperfect example of the way evil concentrates and does not diffuse. While good works unavoidably distribute their positive influence by increasing the overall quality of life, Islam can only spread itself by the sword. I doubt there exists a single historic example of a non-Muslim culture spontaneously and voluntarily abandoning its original belief system in favor of Islam.

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Christopher Howse is surprised to discover that for 400 years, a half of the world’s professing Christians lived under Muslim rule.

As virtual slaves.

In place of knowledge a series of myths has grown. One is of a cultural golden age in Islamic Spain, with Muslims, Christians and Jews living in harmony. Yet Americo Castro, who coined the word convivencia to describe the life of the three faiths in the caliphate of Cordoba, wrote, in his book The Structure of Spanish History: “Each of the three peoples of the peninsula saw itself forced to live for eight centuries together with the other two at the same time as it passionately desired their extermination.”

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A Guantanamo Bay prisoner who was given permission to telephone a relative instead called the al Jazeera television network and gave the channel its first interview from inside the prison.

William Ayers with a beard.

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In the name of Allah, the Compassionate, the Merciful.

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In the name of Allah, the Compassionate, the Merciful.

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Yup, Pakistan will have to be next, after Afghanistan.

Assuming, of course, that the Obamateurs actually win in Afghanistan.

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Donald Payne, from New Jersey and a member of the foreign affairs committee, arrived in Mogadishu for talks with President Sharif Sheikh Ahmed and his prime minister on rampant piracy off the country’s coast.

You would think that after all this time they would have learned how to shoot better than that.

Yaacov Ben Moshe is right, as always.

This is a mugshot of Nour Hadid. Nour lives near Chicago. She is a muslim woman who has confessed to beating her two-year-old niece, Bhia Hadid, to death over a four day period of torture.

Nour’s husband, Alaeddin Hadid, who surely must have been away on a business trip or was so deeply immersed in the study of islamic texts that he did not notice the “head to toe”bruises, screams and what must (at least by the third day of beatings!) have been severely altered behavior, is very upset. Is he upset by the death of little Bhia? Is he devastated that his wife has confessed to this brutal, extended torture and murder?

No, actually, Alaeddin seems to be most upset by the photograph above. He prefers focussing and raging on the fact that his wife’s mug shot was released by the police and published in the press. He is upset because the mug shot shows her without her Hijab and with her shoulders exposed by the tank top she was wearing. He has been quoted as saying that the police are “really going to be in big trouble” because this is against their religion. He’s going to sue.

Read it.

Darwin Award nominee.

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Qatar’s leader embraced Sudan’s president in a red-carpet welcome Sunday as he arrived to attend an Arab summit in his most brazen act of defiance against an international arrest warrant on charges of war crimes in Darfur.

Just another find day in the Dar al-Islam.

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I’ve been considering a request from a post-graduate student who wants to do a thesis on Islamophobia in Australia. She writes: “I am researching the topic Islamophobia, and I am trying to prove whether Islamophobia is based on religion fear or cultural fear of Islam.”

What about proving that Islamophobia exists at all? That would be the logical, ethical and scholarly starting point. But it appears the outcome has already been decided. This would fit the prevailing orthodoxy in academia that the default position for Muslims in Australia is victim. The jargon, “Islamophobia” is part of this ideological construct. Literally, it means fear of Muslims.

Let us rather say that “Islamophobia” isn’t as widespread as it ought to be. Islam is an oppressive totalitarian ideology with which no co-existence is possible; to fear such a system is utterly rational.

Read it.

A good explanation of why talking to Muslims will not stop their attempts to conquer the world.

In less than four centuries Christianity was able to win the Roman Empire over to itself. This happened from the bottom up, without force or violence, without government intervention or support. On the contrary, the government of the Roman Empire, by persecuting Christians from time to time, hindered Christianization with force and violence.

The Muslims managed to conquer roughly the same area as that of the ancient Roman Empire in about a century, with the exception of Western Europe, where they were stopped in France by Charles Martel (732), and with the exception of Turkey and the current Balkans, where the Muslims were stopped by the Eastern Roman Empire, the Byzantines, until the middle of the fifteenth century.

There is not a single Muslim who is unaware of this century of conquests. The military successes of that time are generally perceived by Islamic theologians as proof of the truth of Islam and the correctness of the statements made by Muhammad about himself and his mission. This century of conquest plays a major role in Islamic apologetics. If Islam were not God’s own religion, Muslims reason, and if Muhammad were not the messenger of God, they think, then these conquests would not have taken place and would not have been so successful. These conquests can be considered as akbar dalaala alla Sidq muHammad, “the best proof of the sincerity of Muhammad,” as a comment in the Qur’an at one point expresses it.

Those who wish to may apologize for the later Christian violence, even though their personal share in the mistakes that were committed during those centuries is small. Because of the “confession” that is part of the Christian liturgy, Christians are perhaps trained too well in the confession of guilt, and that contrasts with the views of most Muslims, who are in fact proud of the warfare of Islam against the Christians, and of the military triumphs that were achieved, at least in the early days. Later the balance of power changed in favor of Christianity. But we need to understand fully that the Muslims could have stayed at home in Medina. They did not do so; they marched out to battle. According to Islamic tradition, Muhammad settled in Medina in 622, and since then the Muslims have increasingly engaged their neighbors with the use of arms. Time and again, the Muslims declared war on their neighbors at the borders of their ever growing empire.

Read it.

Just another fine day in the Dar al-Islam.

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It’s so hard to get good help these days.

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My, what a surprise. Aren’t you surprised? I’m sure surprised.

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Fascists of a feather flock together.

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Islamization proceeds on all possible fronts: political, judicial, commercial, cultural, academic, and social. It affects the media, the classroom, the courts, the marketplace, and all other areas of human activity. Sharia law prescribes and proscribes all categories of behavior. Nothing is exempt.

Reminder for the dimwitted: Muslims want to rule the world. It’s a key and essential part of their religion.

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In an Islamic state governed by sharia, the relationship between the rulers — the Muslims — and the ruled — the dhimmis and the slaves — is very straightforward.

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And this is from al-Reuters, so you know it has to be true, right?

Yusuf said the killings took place in Balad town, 30 km (19 miles) north of Mogadishu. He also accused al Shabaab militants of decapitating three elderly women last weekend. Al Shabaab officials could not immediately be reached for comment.

Hey, cutting people’s heads off takes a lot of effort. Sometimes you just can’t return calls until later.

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The 23-year-old, brought to worldwide attention after an Independent campaign, was praying that Afghanistan’s top judges would quash his conviction for lack of evidence, or because he was tried in secret and convicted without a defence lawyer. Instead, almost 18 months after he was arrested for allegedly circulating an article about women’s rights, any hope of justice and due process evaporated amid gross irregularities, allegations of corruption and coercion at the Supreme Court. Justices issued their decision in secret, without letting Mr Kambaksh’s lawyer submit so much as a word in his defence.

A useful reminder that Afghanistan, although better than it was, is still locked in the hell of Islamic law. The ironic part is that the Chattering Classes in the West, who would be the first to take to the streets if a Christian nation did something like this, are loudly silent. The sad part is that our people are dying, and our wallets bleeding, in order to buy these idiots the freedom to oppress each other.

Isolationism in foreign affairs never looked so attractive.

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C’mon, Barry, you promised we could invade Pakistan.

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A Christian minister who has had heated arguments with Muslims on his TV Gospel show has been brutally attacked by three men who ripped off his cross and warned: ‘If you go back to the studio, we’ll break your legs.’

Yup, that’s a religion o’ peace, alright.

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A BRITISH mother of two is being held in jail after being found guilty of adultery – for having a cup of tea with a male friend.

A useful reminder that there is no such thing as “moderate Islam”.

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El Inglés has written about the near inevitability of civil war in Europe, with a particular focus on Denmark. Recent events suggest that the prodromal stage of the coming conflict is already in progress.

The early phase seems to be the violent conflict between Danish Hells Angels and various immigrant gangs. Both the natives and the newcomers are recruiting new members so rapidly that the police are unable to monitor them.

It was precisely this sort of street fighting between Nazis and Communists that punctuated the 1920s and early 1930s.

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Bey IV said he had to “sacrifice a soldier” to “take out” the Oakland Post editor to protect the bakery, according to the statement taken by the Alameda County District Attorney’s office from a confidential informant. Bey IV remains uncharged in the Aug. 2, 2007 killing of Bailey; he is jailed awaiting trial on unrelated kidnapping and torture charges.

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For those who haven’t been paying attention: “Hudna” is a temporary truce that Muslims are allowed to do during jihad when they need a break to rest and re-arm. There is no permanent peace when it comes to Islam. Remember, “Islam” doesn’t mean “peace”, it means “submission”.

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Muslims are bigots? I’m shocked, I tell you, shocked.

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I am not making this up.

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For the uninformed, Forbes magazine is not a wingnut publication.

Most of the Muslims I know (me included) can’t seem to accept that Obama is not Muslim.

Hm. What do that know that we don’t?