Un. Freaking. Believable. The NYTimes ombudsman, Byron Calame, buried a bombshell mea culpa in his column today–reversing his prior defense of the Times’ blabbermouth report on a once-secret terrorist banking data surveillance program and now admitting the paper was wrong to publish it:
The Church of Scientology is a rich and vengeful religious cult, or as one critic puts it, “a cross between the Moonies and the Mafia.” But it would be a mistake to dismiss its underlying technology as harmless or ineffective. Scientologists know a great deal about thought control, social control, rhetorical judo (defeat by misdirection, deft use of logical fallacies) and high pressure sales, though as victims of their own technology, they wouldn’t characterize it that way.Despite its extensive advertising campaign, including half-hour TV infomercials for Dianetics, the Church has been careful to maintain a veil of mystery about its teachings, in part by outlawing any meaningful discussion or analysis of them. (See the policy bulletin prohibiting verbal tech.) To learn the inner secrets of the cult requires years of strict obedience and large monetary donations.
In return, Scientology promises its adherents “total freedom”. The Internet, through sites like this one, is going to make good on that promise. This web site is dedicated to exposing the various technical tricks behind Scientology, until all its secrets have been laid before the public at no charge.
by Daniel Pipes
New York Sun
October 24, 2006
As coalition policy reaches a crisis, may I resurrect an idea I have been flogging since April 2003? It offers a way out of the current debate over staying the course (as President George W. Bush has long advocated) or withdrawing troops on a short timetable (as his critics demand).
My solution splits the difference, “Stay the course – but change the course.” I suggest pulling coalition forces out of the inhabited areas of Iraq and redeploying them to the desert.
This way, the troops remain indefinitely in Iraq, but remote from the urban carnage. It permits the American-led troops to carry out essential tasks (protecting borders, keeping the oil and gas flowing, ensuring that no Saddam-like monster takes power) while ending their non-essential work (maintaining street-level order, guarding their own barracks).
Beyond these specifics, such a troop redeployment would imply a profound and improved change of course. It means:
The situation in Iraq has become a source of deep domestic antagonism in the coalition countries, especially the United States and Great Britain, but it can be finessed by noting that the stakes there are actually quite minor, then adjusting means and goals on this basis. Do you, dear non-Iraqi reader, have strong feelings about the future of Iraq? I strongly suspect not.
Iraqis want possession of their country; and peoples in countries providing troops serving in Iraq have wearied of the hopeless effort to transform it into something better than it is. Both aspirations can be satisfied by redeploying coalition troops to the desert, where they can focus on the essential tasks of maintaining Iraq’s territorial integrity, keeping the fossil fuels flowing, and preventing humanitarian disasters.
The idea has developed since World War II that when the United States protects its interests by invading a country, it then has a moral obligation to rehabilitate it. This “mouse that roared” or “Pottery Barn rule” assumption is wrong and needs to be re-evaluated. Yes, there are times and places where rehabilitation is appropriate, but this needs to be decided on a case-by-case basis, keeping feasibility and American interests strictly in mind. Iraq – an endemically violent country – fails on both counts.
From http://www.danielpipes.org | Original article available at: http://www.danielpipes.org/article/4066
GO Michelle !!!!!!!!!!
U of Nebraska’s Political Litmus Test
By Dwayne Ball and Gerard Harbison
Daily Nebraskan | October 24, 2006
University of Nebraska-Lincoln faculty members need to read and comment on the proposed UNL Strategic Plan for Diversity [pdf] by Halloween. The timing is utterly appropriate. Here is what should frighten you:
1. From now on, your annual evaluations will include being graded on the extent to which you have contributed (or not) to a climate of “inclusiveness” and the extent to which you have participated in “campus programs to improve climate …”
“Inclusiveness” is not defined in the document, nor is the nature of these programs specified. Thus, these words can mean whatever your department chairperson or others in the administration want them to mean – and can’t we all guess?
Does anyone doubt that all this constitutes a politically based litmus test for continued employment? Simply expressing disagreement with affirmative action, or with UNL’s implementation of it, could easily be cast as contributing to a “non-inclusive climate.” Having the “wrong” book on your bookshelf or the “wrong” cartoon on your office door could be judged “non-inclusive.”
This vague standard violates your rights under the First Amendment and your rights as a public employee. It also violates the spirit and the letter of academic freedom, both as generally understood and as codified in the University of Nebraska Regents’ bylaws, section 4.2. If you think you are immune because you hold the “correct” opinions, you might want to take a close reading of the document and imagine how it could be used against you by a hostile department chairperson.
2. All potential new hires must be grilled on their willingness and ability to “contribute positively” to the “campus climate.”
As a candidate, if you slip up during an interview and reveal that you think the diversity emperor has no clothes, you’ve lost your chance at a UNL job – based on your political opinions.
Let no one think this doesn’t happen. At other institutions, faculty candidates have been asked if they’d read books such as “America in Black in White” (critical of affirmative action) or “The Bell Curve” (deemed racist). Simply admitting to have read such a book has cost them a job.
3. All academic units will have “diversity curricula” and an assessment of their effectiveness. This asserts administrative hegemony over one of the very few areas over which faculty members still maintain some control: curriculum. This is a direct violation of the academic freedom of faculty members.
4. There are to be recruitment “targets” for female and minority faculty. Deans and department chairpersons will be graded on their ability to meet those targets. The administration will thus force lower and mid-level administrators and faculty search committees into illegal reverse discrimination.
If you plan to join a search committee, keep in mind that you may therefore be called upon to display “non-inclusive” behavior. That is, you may be required or “encouraged” to exclude non-Hispanic white male applicants. Thus, you will be in violation of the other parts of the plan that require you to be “inclusive.”
In the High-Orwellian Newspeak of diversity, exclusivity is inclusive! Naturally, the authors of the plan will protest they meant no such thing as unconstitutional hiring and employment practices nor violations of free speech and academic freedom.
If so, why have they left critical terms open to interpretation? Why have they provided no explicit protections for free expression of ideas even if those ideas imply some sort of “non-inclusiveness?” Why have they not explicitly protected faculty members and employees who will say out loud that “diversity” has become a pathetic caricature? Why is “diversity of ideas” unprotected?
Precisely, perhaps, because the authors intend harm to people based on their political viewpoints. For shame.
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Death to the Apostates
By Robert Spencer
FrontPageMagazine.com | October 24, 2006
An Afghan citizen named Abdul Rahman, you may recall, made international news last spring, when his conversion from Islam to Christianity led to his arrest, with the intention of putting him on trial for apostasy. At that time he was spirited away to safety in Italy. Now jihadists in Afghanistan are demanding his return to Afghanistan in exchange for a kidnapped Italian journalist, Gabriele Torsello. “We want this issue resolved before the end of Ramadan,” his captors demanded, but no resolution seemed imminent as the holy month drew to a close. It is safe to say that if Italian authorities agreed to turn over Abdul Rahman to the kidnappers, the convert would almost certainly be killed for his crime of apostasy from Islam. Yet at the time of Abdul Rahman’s arrest, puzzled Western analysts pointed to what they thought were guarantees of freedom of religion and of conscience in the new Afghan Constitution: after all, didn’t the document pledge “respect” for the Universal Declaration of Human Rights? Didn’t it say, “followers of other religions” were “free to exercise their faith and perform their religious rites within the limits of the provisions of law”? Indeed it did, but what were the “limits of the provisions of law”? The Constitution itself made the answer abundantly clear: “In Afghanistan,” it stipulated, “no law can be contrary to the beliefs and provisions of the sacred religion of Islam.” It mandated that the President swear an oath to “obey and safeguard the provisions of the sacred religion of Islam,” and only secondarily “to observe the Constitution and other laws of Afghanistan and supervise their implementation.” What’s more, it stated that “the provisions of adherence to the fundamentals of the sacred religion of Islam and the regime of the Islamic Republic cannot be amended.” Most non-Muslim observers missed the significance of these provisions, and especially the danger they posed to converts like Abdul Rahman and to the freedom of conscience in general. This is understandable, however, since so many Muslims in the West maintained that Islam contained no provision against apostasy. Typical of this was “Leaving Islam is not a capital crime,” a Chicago Tribune article published by M. Cherif Bassiouni, a professor of Law at DePaul University and President of the International Human Rights Law Institute, when Abdul Rahman was arrested. “A Muslim’s conversion to Christianity,” Bassiouni wrote, “is not a crime punishable by death under Islamic law, contrary to the claims in the case of Abdul Rahman in Afghanistan.” Several Muslim spokesmen have insisted the same thing to me in radio debates, excoriating me as “Islamophobic” for pointing out that many Islamic texts do indeed call for apostates to be killed. Yet the idea that the death penalty for apostasy has always been an element of the “fundamentals of the sacred religion of Islam” is something that some Muslims have made no effort to deny or conceal. IslamOnline, a site manned by a team of Islam scholars headed by the internationally influential Sheikh Yusuf al-Qaradawi, explains, “if a sane person who has reached puberty voluntarily apostatizes from Islam, he deserves to be punished. In such a case, it is obligatory for the caliph (or his representative) to ask him to repent and return to Islam. If he does, it is accepted from him, but if he refuses, he is immediately killed.” And if someone doesn’t wait for a caliph to appear and takes matters into his own hands? Although the killer is to be “disciplined” for “arrogating the caliph’s prerogative and encroaching upon his rights,” there is “no blood money for killing an apostate (or any expiation)” – in other words, no significant punishment for the killer.
These laws are rooted in the words and deeds of Islam’s prophet, as I explain in my new book, The Truth About Muhammad. When he “forced his entry” into Mecca, according to his ninth-century biographer Ibn Sa‘d, “the people embraced Islam willingly or unwillingly” (Ibn Sa‘d, II.168). The Prophet of Islam ordered the Muslims to fight only those individuals or groups who resisted their advance into the city – except for a list of people who were to be killed, even if they had sought sanctuary in the Ka‘bah itself. One of those was Abdullah bin Sa‘d, a former Muslim who at one time had been employed by Muhammad to write down the Qur’anic revelations; but he had subsequently apostatized and returned to the Quraysh. He was found and brought to Muhammad along with his brother, and pleaded with the Prophet of Islam for clemency: “Accept the allegiance of Abdullah, Apostle of Allah!” Abdullah repeated this twice, but Muhammad remained impassive. After Abdullah repeated it a third time, Muhammad accepted.
As soon as Abdullah had left, Muhammad turned to the Muslims who were in the room and asked: “Was not there a wise man among you who would stand up to him when he saw that I had withheld my hand from accepting his allegiance, and kill him?”
The companions, aghast, responded: “We did not know what you had in your heart, Apostle of Allah! Why did you not give us a signal with your eye?”
“It is not advisable,” said the Prophet of Islam, “for a Prophet to play deceptive tricks with the eyes.”
Apostasy from Islam had always been for Muhammad a supreme evil. When he was master of Medina, some livestock herders came to the city and accepted Islam. But they disliked Medina’s climate, so Muhammad gave them some camels and a shepherd; once away from Medina, the herders killed the shepherd, released the camels and renounced Islam. Muhammad had them pursued. When they were caught, he ordered that their hands and feet be amputated (in accord with Qur’an 5:33, which directs that those who cause “corruption in the land” be punished by the amputation of their hands and feet on opposite sides) and their eyes put out with heated iron bars, and that they be left in the desert to die. Their pleas for water, he ordered, must be refused.
The traditions are clear that one of the main reasons that the punishment was so severe was because these men had been Muslims but had “turned renegade.” Muhammad legislated for his community that no Muslim could be put to death except for murder, unlawful sexual intercourse, and apostasy. He said flatly: “If somebody (a Muslim) discards his religion, kill him.”
It stains credulity, in light of all this, that Islamic apologists in the West assert that, in the words of one Ibrahim B. Syed, President of the Islamic Research Foundation International of Louisville, Kentucky, “there is no historical record, which indicates that Muhammad (pbuh) or any of his companions ever sentenced anyone to death for apostasy.” This kind of assertion may be comforting to non-Muslims who would prefer to believe that the capital charges levied against Abdul Rahman were some sort of anomaly. Unfortunately, this claim simply does not accord with the facts of Muhammad’s life. That such assertions pass unchallenged only underscores the need for Westerners to become informed about the actual words and deeds of Muhammad – which make the actions of Islamic states and jihad groups much more intelligible than do the words of Islamic apologists in the West.
The kidnappers’ demand that Abdul Rahman be returned to Afghanistan illustrates the hollowness of the arguments we hear all the time – about how we must support self-proclaimed moderate Muslims like Bassiouni by refraining from noting the flimsiness and weakness of their presentations. While we’re being polite to alleged “reformers,” Muslim hardliners are cheerfully implementing the elements of Islamic law that bemused non-Muslims are nodding their heads and agreeing don’t exist. It’s good that the Italian government shows no sign that it is considering returning Abdul Rahman to Afghanistan. It would be better if the United States government, on which the Afghan regime depends for its continued survival, called upon the Afghans to drop the Sharia provisions from the nation’s Constitution, and affirm in unequivocal terms freedom of conscience and freedom of religion. For the kidnappers’ action has placed the Afghan government in a peculiar position. What can Afghan officials say? That they don’t want the kidnappers to get hold of Abdul Rahman, because they want to kill him themselves? The kidnappers’ demand is an unpleasant reminder that United States has deposed one Shari’a regime in Afghanistan, that of the Taliban, only to replace it with another. The State Department should call upon the Afghans to seize on the occasion of this demand to call for a searching reevaluation of the role of Islam in Afghan public life. But this, of course, is even less likely to happen than Abdul Rahman’s return to Afghanistan. One certainty is that people will continue to suffer for freedom of conscience in Afghanistan – under the indifferent eye of the U.S. military.
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From the desk of Fjordman on Mon, 2006-10-16 07:11
Would it not be easier
In that case for the government
To dissolve the people
And elect another?
(Bertold Brecht)
I have warned earlier, especially (in the essay Electing a New People: The Leftist-Islamic Alliance), against Islamic infiltration of Leftist parties in the West, most recently demonstrated in Belgium, and the threat this poses to Western democracy. This is part of the reason why I advocate containment of the Islamic world and an end to Muslim immigration. Pundit Ohmyrus makes some of the same observations. But there is also another way in which Muslim immigration threatens our Western society.
In Policy Review, Lee Harris reviews Andrew G. Bostom’s excellent book The Legacy of Jihad. In his acknowledgments, Bostom expresses the wish that his own children and their children may “thrive in a world where the devastating institution of jihad has been acknowledged, renounced, dismantled, and relegated forever to the dustbin of history by Muslims themselves.”
But, as Harris asks,
“Why should Muslims renounce and dismantle an institution that, while it may have been devastating to those who have been its victims, has nevertheless been the historical agent by which Islamic culture has come to dominate such a vast expanse of our planet? […] Indeed, what is most striking about the collective project of jihad has been its immense and, with few exceptions, permanent success. Once Islamic culture sank in, it became virtually impossible for any foreign cultural influence to make any headway against it.”
He warns against those who dismiss the idea that Jihad constitutes a serious Islamic threat to the West because we are technologically superior to the Islamic world:
“Jihad has demonstrated an astonishing adaptability to different historical and material conditions. Yet the secret of the success of the Arab bands lay less in their own warlike qualities than in the weakness and decadence of the empires they overthrew. […] The jihadists are not interested in winning in our sense of the word. They can succeed simply by making the present world order unworkable, by creating conditions in which politics-as-usual is no longer an option, forcing upon the West the option either of giving in to their demands or descending into anarchy and chaos.
It is tempting to call this approach the crash of civilization.
It does not take a modern, sophisticated army to bring down a fragile and delicately balanced political order. Those who have no interest in preserving order, who are eager to destroy it, will welcome disorder for its own sake.”
Accordingly, says Harris, Muslims
“do not need to achieve the same degree of force that is the monopoly of the established order. In the crash-of-civilization paradigm – contrary to Clausewitzian warfare – the enemy of a particular established order does not need to match it in organizational strength and effectiveness. It needs only to make the established order reluctant to use its great strength out of the understandable fear that by plunging into civil war it will itself be jeopardized. This fear of anarchy – the ultimate fear for those who embrace the politics of reason – can be used to paralyze the political process to the point at which the established order is helpless to control events through normal political channels and power is no longer in the hands of the establishment but lies perilously in the streets. […] The jihadists do not need to ‘win’ in the battle against the West; it is enough if they can force the West to choose between a dreaded plunge back into the Law of the Jungle and acceding to their demands. This is a formula that has worked many times before and may work again.”
Muslims can thus undermine Western democracy in two ways: By massive immigration and infiltration of established, especially Socialist, parties until they can be turned to serve the Islamic agenda, or by simply creating a climate of fear and distrust that gradually makes the democratic system unworkable. In Western Europe right now, they are making significant headway on both accounts.
Thoughts Of A Conservative Christian 
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