A little too close to home in my temporary circumstances of being in a country surrounded by murderous savages and religious fanatics whose Venn diagram has a high overlap, and want to drive its inhabitants into the sea by which I’m staying.
[Tuesday-morning Tel Aviv update]
Sorry, here’s the link. Posted that on ~27 hours sans sleep.
Of course Obama won’t be attending the 70th anniversary of the liberation.
Who cares? It was mostly Jews. Anyway, his uncle told him all about it.
I have no problem believing that they plan to kill hundreds of millions of people in the name of Islam. It’s what totalitarians do. As Glenn says, “There are quite a few people in the world who are happy to join a movement that lets them do unspeakable things while being praised for it. The traditional response to such people was to kill them as soon as possible.”
But the Obama administration prefers non-traditional responses.
…has been canceled.
Good.
Kyle Smith liked it.
Its success will really piss off the Hollywood Left, after all their box-office bombs, after which they said Americans “just don’t like movies about the war.” No, they just don’t like anti-American movies.
Box office opening weekends: Valley of Elah $133k Rendition $4mm The Green Zone $14mm Lions for Lambs $6.7mm American Sniper $94mm
— David Burge (@iowahawkblog) January 18, 2015
…like it’s 1939. The parallels are disturbing.
…have to start carrying guns.
Being unarmed didn’t work out well for them the last time.
…is it a sleeper cell?
Just yesterday I theorized the real reason Obama didn’t go is he just couldn’t put the words “Islamic” and “terrorism” together in one sentence even if, forgive the tired image, it hit him in the face. (The exception of course being when insisting that something is NOT Islam.) He just can’t handle it after nearly fifty years of virtually non-stop anti-imperialist programming. His mind would fly apart if he had to utter the words “radical Islamic terrorism,” which French PM Valls, and any honest person, was quite willing to do.
Now I admit that was just a supposition. Just because I’ve never heard him link Islam and terror doesn’t mean in his heart of hearts he doesn’t. Though not a genius, he does have an IQ in triple digits and sees what’s right in front of his nose, I assume. He just interprets it differently. But why?
Is someone whispering in his ear?
My money would be on (born in Iran) Valerie Jarrett.
How do we stop another one? Thoughts from Richard Epstein on religious tolerance:
The hard question then is what should be done with those who refuse to accept the universal truce not to use violence against those who dare to utter statements that they regard as blasphemous.
Here again the libertarian theory offers the first step towards a response. By their refusal, they become outlaws. Those who are prepared to use force should be subject to the full range of criminal and civil sanctions. Individuals and the state may use force to resist force, they may work hard to ferret out threats of the use of force before they materialize, and they may root out conspiracies of individuals for particular acts of violence. Similar hostility is the order of the day against the nations and groups that practice the use of unlawful force or harbor those that do. Once again, it is critical to note that the libertarian vision seeks to preserve a large domain for protest and dispute, but it is relentless against those do not play the game in accordance with those rules. Its basic principle is: you disarm, we disarm, but if you fight, we fight harder.
At this point, the practical program should be clear. It is no longer defensible to try to soft-pedal the enormity of the difficulty by announcing some supposed parity between murderers and the people they murder. Supposed social grievances against those who ridicule and deal in satire must fall on deaf ears. Moral equivocation worsens our ability to maintain an ordered liberty. Force must be met with force. France, the United States, and other nations must conduct massive manhunts against those who commit terrorist actions, properly labeled as such. They must go further and deprive these individuals of the sanctuaries from which these attacks can be brought, which means troops on the ground, as well as planes in the air.
No one has a right to not be offended. And yet, with perfect timing, the largest Islamic organization in the world calls for more anti-speech laws.
[Update a few minutes later]
Popehat has some questions for the New York Times regarding its policy on depicting Mohammed.
It looks like its Twitter account has been hacked by Jihadis.
The country’s in the very best of hands.
[Update a few minutes later]
TWitter has suspended the account. But they took over the Youtube channel, too.