Really, this was just an idle question:

…what would they say at Turtle Bay if Iran offered up “peacekeeping troops” in south Lebanon? Since they don’t formally recognize Iran’s role in the war, how would they refuse? For that matter, why wouldn’t they accept an offer from Syria to help “police” its border with Lebanon?

Well, now we know the answer:

U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan said Friday that Syria has pledged to step up border patrols and work with the Lebanese army to stop the flow of weapons to Hezbollah.

Well. That should sort things out.

Mark Steyn, on a nation that seems willing to fight Islamism everywhere except on its own soil:

But, in a world in which the prospects for the Anglosphere are better than almost anybody else’s, there is one bleak exception. At some point soon, we’re going to be asking: Who lost Britain? In the weeks after last year’s tube bombing, I doubted that the clarion call for a reassertion of “British identity” would last, and so it proved. By the first anniversary, Britain was back in its peculiarly resistant multiculti mush in which the proper reaction to such unfortunate events is to abase oneself ever more abjectly before the gods of cultural relativism. What matters after mass slaughter on the Underground is not the wound to the nation but the potential for hurt feelings of certain minorities. Had the latest disrupted terrorist plot to take down up to ten UK-US airplanes actually succeeded, I’m sure it would have gone much the same–BBC discussion panels on which representatives of Muslim lobby groups warn of outbreaks of Islamophobia. Even as Heathrow and all other British airports were shut down, Shahid Malik, MP for Dewsbury, the neighborhood that produced the July 7th bombers, explained the situation: “The action of Israel and the inaction of the West is contributing to the difficult task of tackling extremism.” Deconstruct that–because it’s the most artful extension of Jew-blaming in centuries: even Hitler never thought to complain that those bloody Jews were provoking Germans into blowing up their fellow Germans. Of course, it’s ludicrous. This plot was well advanced long before the first Israeli strike against Hezbollah–despite the truly contemptible way Reuters, the BBC and other British media outlets inserted reflexively a causal connection.

But suppose Mr. Malik’s words were true–that the actions of the Zionist Entity are so repellent they drive British subjects to plot mass murder against their fellow British subjects. What does that imply? That, well before push comes to shove, the primary identity of those nominal “Britons” is not British and never will be.

…On the broader cultural front, where this war in the end will be won, there’s little evidence of any kind of will. When one considers the impunity with which the country’s incendiary imams incite treason, it requires a perverse genius on the part of Tony Blair to have found the political courage to fight an unpopular war on a distant shore but not the political courage to wage it closer to home where it would have commanded far more support. That’s the sad lesson of the July 7th bombings: the British government has a strategy for southern Iraq but not southern England.

Melanie Phillips writes about the media war against Israel:

The level of anti-Israel, anti-American madness has reached such a pitch in Britain that any similar expression of alarm at the manifestly blatant mendacity in the reporting of the Middle East has simply become unthinkable. Yet thanks to the efforts of the blogosphere

Donald Sensing has an interesting post (with interesting comments) on what the religious status of Steve Centanni and Olaf Wiig is today:

…were the forced confessions of Islam by Centanni and Wiig valid?

I would not count them as valid because there is no reason to believe from the men’s reports that they experienced a religious change of heart. That is, the men’s confession did not spring from faith in Allah, it was a deed done from fear of their lives.

But, let us remember that the basis of Islam, indeed the very meaning of the word, is “submission,” not faith. There is no concept of original sin in Islam as there is in Christianity; indeed, while original sin is the conceptual glue that holds Christian doctrine together, it is entirely rejected in Islam. Christianity teaches that original sin cannot be remitted by any human works, only by the works of God, namely, Christ dying and resurrected. Hence, no deeds human beings can do can bring them to salvation. Thus, wrote St. Paul, “If you believe in your heart that Jesus was raised from the dead and confess with your mouth that Jesus is Lord, you will be saved.” Note the order: confession follows a change of heart, an affirmation of belief. Without the change of heart the confession’s utterance is of no value.

But in Islam, the confession’s utterance is unconnected to a change of heart. In fact, a change of heart is wholly irrelevant. The confession stands alone and its only point is that it is done, not that it is believed. The entire edifice of salvation theory in Islam is built on one thing alone: human submission to perform deeds ordered by Allah. Islam does not teach that Allah desires human beings to love him; they are commanded to obey.

There are a lot of interesting issues here, one of which is that some Christians would consider them insufficiently faithful, in that they valued their life over their faith (this assumes, of course, that both men were/are Christians–it certainly wouldn’t apply to me, since I have no faith other than provisional materialism). They might point out the relatively recent example of the young Christian woman at Columbine who refused to renounce her lord at gunpoint, and died.

As one WoC commenter points out, in the mentality of the enemy, we have once again showed ourselves to be weak and insufficiently devoted to our own beliefs (a microcosm of the larger societal problem of a soft multi-cultural post-modern Europe and much of America, unwilling to defend our own values). It was another demonstration of being, in Osama’s formulation, the “weak horse.” I’m not, of course, saying that the men had some sort of patriotic duty to take a bullet for the team–I certainly wouldn’t have, but it’s a symptom of just how difficult it will be to win this war, and persuade the enemy that they’ve lost.

More practically, in many places in the world, including Gaza and the West Bank, these two men are now apostates and liable to be killed under sharia law (remember the Christian convert in Afghanistan?), because they have since renounced their “conversions.” I wouldn’t go back to the Middle East if I were them. Their statements of encouragement for other reporters to continue to cover Gaza and “tell the story of the Palestinian people” (is that really the job of a so-called objective news reporter?) may sound nice to PC western ears, but it will have little effect in making the region safer for them, or others. Such words will also be interpreted as a sign of weakness by the enemy.

And I should say that I find tedious the argument that, because there were forced Christian conversions in history (e.g., during the Crusades and the Inquisition), Christians are hypocritical in criticizing this. One is history. The other is happening today. The point is that Christianity has largely evolved from a Middle Ages mentality. In the twenty-first century, Islam (or much, too much of Islam) remains firmly within it.

Will the future be like the fifties, in which we have to shop for fallout shelters?

We have stark choices ahead of us. It will be very costly to prevent Iran from getting nukes (and to prevent North Korea from proliferating them). It may be even more costly not to do so. And many on the left seem to have their heads firmly buried in…errr…the sand.

For some weird reason, the previous post on this topic was drawing spammers like flies to Michael Moore before his semi-annual bath. So if you do have any comments on it, post them here.

For some weird reason, the previous post on this topic was drawing spammers like flies to Michael Moore before his semi-annual bath. So if you do have any comments on it, post them here.

For some weird reason, the previous post on this topic was drawing spammers like flies to Michael Moore before his semi-annual bath. So if you do have any comments on it, post them here.

Shelby Steele has an important essay on the false consciousness of the left, and Europe:

The West is stymied by this extremism because it is used to enemies that want to live. In Vietnam, America fought one whose communism was driven by an underlying nationalism, the desire to live free of the West. Whatever one may think of this, here was an enemy that truly wanted to live, that insisted on territory and sovereignty. But Osama bin Laden fights only to achieve a death that will enshrine him as a figure of awe. The gift he wants to leave his people is not freedom or even justice; it is consolation.

White guilt in the West–especially in Europe and on the American left–confuses all this by seeing Islamic extremism as a response to oppression. The West is so terrified of being charged with its old sins of racism, imperialism and colonialism that it makes oppression an automatic prism on the non-Western world, a politeness. But Islamic extremists don’t hate the West because they are oppressed by it. They hate it precisely because the end of oppression and colonialism–not their continuance–forced the Muslim world to compete with the West. Less oppression, not more, opened this world to the sense of defeat that turned into extremism.

But the international left is in its own contest with American exceptionalism. It keeps charging Israel and America with oppression hoping to mute American power. And this works in today’s world because the oppression script is so familiar and because American power cringes when labeled with sins of the white Western past. Yet whenever the left does this, it makes room for extremism by lending legitimacy to its claim of oppression. And Israel can never use its military fire power without being labeled an oppressor–which brings legitimacy to the enemies she fights. Israel roars; much of Europe supports Hezbollah.

Fortunately, at least in England, the left may be finally waking up to reality:

It is amazing how a few by-election shocks and some madmen with explosive backpacks can concentrate the mind. At any rate, British citizens, black and white, can move onwards together

In an interesting analysis, Dan Gordon writes that Hizbollah lost, and Israel won, except in the press:

What they failed to gain militarily they accomplished through the manipulation of the Western Media, which were their willing dupes and through the ineptitude and weakness, if not down right appeasement of the political leadership of the International community. This has all but guaranteed that this war will be but round one.

As a result, it only delayed the ultimate war, it didn’t end it.

[Monday morning update]

I’ve had to close comments on this post. For some weird reason, it was really attracting spam–I got over two hundred yesterday, and they were continuing to hit me this morning. If you want to comment, go here. Hopefully the male enhancement hawkers won’t follow us there.