James Lileks has some suitably arch commentary about the moral obtuseness of certain Presbyterian church leaders:

The Presbyterian church – not the members, but the learned elders – has announced it will use the church

I’d like to see this woman try this trick in her homeland, say, protesting Syrian support for the Iraqi “insurgents.”

And I wonder why these nutballs think that watching mental defectives do a strip tease and covering their naked selves with dumb graffitti is somehow going to make us hit ourselves in the forehead, forget all of the logic and facts that got us to our positions, and say “Of course! The war is Iraq is wrong!”

Only in America.

…ago we employed the first nuclear weapon ever used in war on the city of Hiroshima, Japan. A few days later, we dropped another on Nagasaki. Neither we, nor anyone else has done so since. Let’s hope that it remains that way.

Jonah Goldberg writes about the hypocrisy of the morons who are trying to kill us (occasionally, sadly, successfully), and how they’re aided and abetted by the victimologists among us:

… idiots are often very useful in illustrating the appeal of fascistic cults. Intellectuals are too good at covering their real psychological motivations with verbiage. It turns out that the famously “homegrown” terrorists of the London bombings were much more like John Walker Lindh or even the Patty Hearst types of the 1960s and ’70s. Radical chic may be as a big a part of the story as radical Islam.

We’ve always understood this was the case to a certain extent. Osama bin Laden’s prattling about the Crusades, for instance, merely shows how poisoned Islamism is by Western Marxism and anti-imperialism. Muslims used to brag about winning the Crusades. It was only after the West started exporting victimology that Islamic and Arab intellectuals started to whine about how poorly they’d been treated.

To a certain extent, radical Islam in Europe has taken the place of third-world Marxism

Jonah Goldberg writes about the hypocrisy of the morons who are trying to kill us (occasionally, sadly, successfully), and how they’re aided and abetted by the victimologists among us:

… idiots are often very useful in illustrating the appeal of fascistic cults. Intellectuals are too good at covering their real psychological motivations with verbiage. It turns out that the famously “homegrown” terrorists of the London bombings were much more like John Walker Lindh or even the Patty Hearst types of the 1960s and ’70s. Radical chic may be as a big a part of the story as radical Islam.

We’ve always understood this was the case to a certain extent. Osama bin Laden’s prattling about the Crusades, for instance, merely shows how poisoned Islamism is by Western Marxism and anti-imperialism. Muslims used to brag about winning the Crusades. It was only after the West started exporting victimology that Islamic and Arab intellectuals started to whine about how poorly they’d been treated.

To a certain extent, radical Islam in Europe has taken the place of third-world Marxism

Jonah Goldberg writes about the hypocrisy of the morons who are trying to kill us (occasionally, sadly, successfully), and how they’re aided and abetted by the victimologists among us:

… idiots are often very useful in illustrating the appeal of fascistic cults. Intellectuals are too good at covering their real psychological motivations with verbiage. It turns out that the famously “homegrown” terrorists of the London bombings were much more like John Walker Lindh or even the Patty Hearst types of the 1960s and ’70s. Radical chic may be as a big a part of the story as radical Islam.

We’ve always understood this was the case to a certain extent. Osama bin Laden’s prattling about the Crusades, for instance, merely shows how poisoned Islamism is by Western Marxism and anti-imperialism. Muslims used to brag about winning the Crusades. It was only after the West started exporting victimology that Islamic and Arab intellectuals started to whine about how poorly they’d been treated.

To a certain extent, radical Islam in Europe has taken the place of third-world Marxism

I’m working under several deadlines, so posting is likely to remain light for now, but Jonathan Adler points out that Canadian airport security is either more lax, or more rational, than that of TSA:

…if the shoe x-rays were really all that necessary — and I do not believe they are — this would create a security risk. More likely, it’s just another example of TSA irrationality.

Personally, I think that our entire airline security policy is flawed. I’d prefer knowing that my fellow passengers are armed, to ensure that there will never be another successful hijacking, and this would also result in huge productivity increases for travelers by not having our nose-hair trimmers and lighters confiscated. I do worry about bombs, though, so in a sense, Richard Reid did us a favor by being such a moron–if he’d succeeded in lighting his shoes over the Atlantic, there may not have been any evidence of how the aircraft was destroyed. Still, I think that those of us who have to undergo the inconvenience and indignity of padding through the machine in socks or barefoot, should at least have an opportunity to throw darts at a picture of him after we’ve gotten through the gauntlet and reshod ourselves. It could hang just below a picture of Osama.

One of the reasons that our nation, and indeed the world, is so divided on the so-called War on Terror (which, I remind once again, is really a war on a new form of totalitarian fascism wearing the not-that-much-less malign face of Islamic fundamentalism), is that we have major divisions over what motivates the people who make war on us.

In one sense, it’s like the old fable of the blind men and the elephant. If you’re a traditional leftist, you see everything through the lens of capitalist, colonialist oppression, and suicide bombers look like stalwart and admirable fighters against The Man. To people like Michael Moore, they are simply freedom fighters, just like the Minute Men of our own revolution. (Of course, they only use this comparison when they’re trying to make the enemy look appealing to those who disagree with them because, in fact, some of the time they’re actually instead denigrating George Washington and his troops, and comparing them to terrorists, which is apparently only a bad thing when they’re Americans.)

If you’re a multi-culturalist, you see them as misunderstood, their culture under daily siege from an unrelenting barrage of western music, and sexual images, and women with flesh exposed to the world. It’s only understandable that they would want to strike out, and even end their lives when they hear about their holy book being defiled:

He said Tanweer had never mentioned links with any militant group.

Following a link from Instapundit, I’ve been perusing Noah Shachtman’s diary from Iraq. I recommend it–it’s quite fascinating, and not the kind of reporting that you’ll find that much of in the MSM. I found the entry about the Armed Forces Network quite amusing.

So much for help from the British Muslim community. Their supposed leadership has essentially told us to surrender if we want the bombs to stop:

“7/7, 21/7, and God knows what will happen afterwards, our lives are in real danger and it would seem, so long as we are in Iraq and so long as we are contributing to injustices around the world, we will continue to be in real danger.”

It was “contributing to injustices around the world” to remove a brutal dictator who murdered Muslims by the villageload?

“Tony Blair has to come out of his state of denial and listen to what the experts have been saying, that our involvement in Iraq is stupid.” His comments were echoed by the marketing manager for The Muslim Weekly newspaper.

Shahid Butt said he believed the threat to Britain would reduce if it pulled its troops out of Iraq. He said: “At the end of the day, these things [violent incidents] are going to happen if current British foreign policy continues. There’s a lot of rage, there’s a lot of anger in the Muslim community.

“Yes,” said Mr. Hitler, “those German bombers are going to continue to happen. There’s a lot of rage, a lot of anger in Germany. You need to change your foreign policy, and stop supporting efforts to overthrow the legitimate Petain regime in Paris.”

“We have got to get out of Iraq, it is the crux of the matter. I believe if Tony Blair and George Bush left Iraq and stopped propping up dictatorial regimes in the Muslim world, the threat rate to Britain would come down to nearly zero.”

You mean dictatorial regimes like the one in Afghanistan, one of the few democracies in the Muslim world, that became that way only because of British and American arms? Or the new democratic government in Iraq (again a result of British and American “foreign policy”), one that is being undermined by people who apparently love killing Muslims, for whom this man is making apologies and excuses?

Which specific “dictatorial regimes does he have in mind”? Egypt? Saudi Arabia? I’m all ears as to any suggestions he has to reform those places.

But sorry. John Howard had it exactly right. I’d suggest you listen to what he has to say, Dr. Tamimi.

[Update at 1 PM PDT]

It strikes me that this is classic good cop/bad cop, with Dr. Tanimi and his confederates playing good cop, and the thugs being the bad one. “You know, maybe you should listen to us and do what we say, wouldn’t want that other guy to get a hold of you–no telling what he might do.”

[Update at 1:55 PM PDT]

Here’s another one:

Speaking 15 days after bombers killed over 50 people in London and a day after a series of failed attacks on the city’s transport network, Sheikh Omar Bakri Mohammed said the British capital should expect more violence.

“What happened yesterday confirmed that as long as the cause and the root problem is still there … we will see the same effect we saw on July 7,” Bakri said.

“If the cause is still there the effect will happen again and again,” he said, adding he had no information about future attacks or contacts with people planning to carry out attacks.

Yeah, I’ll bet he has no information…

[One more update]

It occurred to me when discussing this on the phone with someone just now that of the three Anglosphere leaders, Bush is a straight (albeit occasionally stumbling over words) talker, Blair is eloquent and articulate (albeit slippery, which really stands out when he appears next to someone like John Howard), but what’s great about John Howard is that he combines these traits–eloquent, articulate, and straightforward. I occasionally wish that we could trade leaders with folks Down Under.