Good news: Islamist paradise founded in Gaza

Yesterday, driving home from the office i hear on the radio that some two-thirds of Canadians want Canadian troops out of Afghanistan by 2009 even if the mission is not completed. The poll was conducted by Decima Research. Here is an excerpt from the 570 News website:

The vast majority of Canadians want this country's military mission in Afghanistan to end as scheduled in 2009, according to a new poll.

The survey by Decima Research, released Monday to The Canadian Press, found that two-thirds of respondents want Canadian troops to come home when the current mandate from Parliament expires in February 2009. Only 26 per cent of respondents believed the military mission should be extended "if that is necessary to complete our goals there."

What the???? Why not pull the troops out now and save the lives of our soldiers if the point is to show some token committment rather than to remove the Taliban and dampen islamic fundamentalism in the region ? Why wouldn't the Taliban simply go to ground and wait til 2009 to make a comeback if our committment is a political time line? Why stay at all? If we have a purpose in being there, and I for one (or one third) believe we do, then we must see it through. Otherwise, get the troops out now and we can contnue whistling past the graveyard, attempting to green the nation, while the struggle of our time washes us up on whatever shore it may.

CHICKS GET MIDGETS

via Instapundit:

Saudis close Canadian education booths staffed by women A Canadian embassy booth and another for a private Montreal college were shut down at a Saudi Arabia education fair last week because they were being run by women. Organizers for the Canadian contingent say three women staffing the booths were forced to leave the fair by the country's religious police, the Commission for the Promotion of Virtue and the Prevention of Vice, even though they had received permission to be there. George Chrysomilides, president of the Canadian Education Network, said there hasn't been an incident like this in the 10 years Canada has attended the event, and he plans to get to the bottom of it. "From what I hear ... the religious police were very rude. They shouted at them in a way that was disrespectful and they shut down the booth, the Canadian embassy booth as well as the LaSalle College booth," Mr. Chrysomilides said in an interview yesterday.

EXPLOSIVE MOUSE

Via The Toronto Star:

SPIN BOLDAK, Afghanistan – A Taliban video of a 12-year-old boy beheading a man accused of spying has angered many Afghans, drawing condemnation from tribal and religious leaders.

Via Dust My Broom:

A Muslim journalist beaten with a cricket bat outside a Toronto-area home fears for his life after facing repeated death threats apparently because someone has deemed his writing to be anti-Islam.

A cricket bat? In North America the preferred club is the baseball bat... wait a second:

 The CP article doesn’t mention that the attackers were fellow Muslims.

With so much of the news rightly focusing on Virgina Tech, the mass murdering of muslems in Iraq by other muslems continues. CBC reports:At least 164 killed in series of Baghdad blasts

At least 164 people were killed and dozens were wounded Wednesday in four bomb attacks in Baghdad, one of the deadliest waves of violence since the start of a joint U.S.-Iraqi security campaign in the capital two months ago.

In the deadliest of the attacks, a parked car bomb detonated in a crowd of workers at the Sadriyah market in a mostly Shia area of central Baghdad, killing at least 116 people and injuring 145, said Raad Muhsin, an official at Al-Kindi Hospital where the victims were taken.

 Victor David Hanson, as usual offers some perspective:

What is disturbing about the Iranian piracy is that it establishes a warning of what we can come to expect when Iran is nuclear, and how organizations like the UN, the EU, and NATO will react. If a few Iranian terrorists in boats can paralyze an entire nation and the above agencies, think what a half-dozen Iranian nukes will do. This was the hour of Europe to step forward and show the world what it can do with sanctions, embargoes, and boycotts, and how such soft power is as effective as gunboats—and it is passing.

The Geneva Convenience

(Via Instapundit)

Let them eat human rights

(From Mike @ The London Fog. It's worth watching the video to see what diplomacy isn't)

 From the Volokh Conspiracy:

In general, I'm skeptical of the utility of "good government" reforms. However, here's one that I can support:

No congressman should be allowed to join the Intelligence Committee - or any other committee that deals with US Middle East policy - without first scoring a perfect 8 for 8 on this very simple quiz.

I took the test and qualified for joining a committee?

I've spent my life avoiding committees.

Via The Gateway Pundit: 

"Barbers involved in anti-Islamic activities like shaving beards are warned that they would themselves be responsible for any damage to their shops and houses,"...

Read the rest.

 It reminds me of:

There is a simple solution to these "violent" retaliations. Let's keep practising free speech, but eliminate the ignorant insulting of Muslim beliefs. The retaliations will stop. It is pretty hard to clap with just one hand.

Here's my question: I understand the British have a different free speech tradition than ours; they're not bound by our First Amendment jurisprudence; there are indeed some speech restrictions that we forbid but that other democracies can tolerate and still preserve a vibrant marketplace of ideas, and means for democratic self-government.

But can anyone tell me just what European (including English) students, and citizens more broadly, are free to say about Islam without fear of expulsion from college, or even potentially criminal punishment (as has been discussed in other cases of harsh criticism of Islam)? ...

Read the rest.

(also @ The London Fog)

As my faithful reader would know, I am opposed to capital punishment. That opposition comes with qualifications. I am opposed to capital punishment in western civilizations where we have individual rights vs. the state. In a tyranny where the tyrant is playing the real game of power politics, things are a tad different. The tyrant uses whatever means -violence, death, torture, famine -to stay in power because when he is out of power he is going to face the same thing. It is a zero sum kind of game. In power, in exile or dead. Those are the choices. Saddam got his and now crying starts for a man who was not going to cry. He knew the game and he played it well and it ended as he knew it could. Would his death have been more acceptable if he was captured and killed by a mob after the fall of Iraq? Perhaps, but the world is rid of a bad guy. If alive, there was always the possiblity of a return to power.

 UPDATE: Of course Victor David Hansen has a view on this which is worth a read:

In Mark Twain’s Tom Sawyer, a "committee of sappy women" petition the governor to pardon the murderous Injun Joe. "If he had been Satan himself,” Twain snorts, “there would have been plenty of weaklings ready to scribble their names to a pardon petition, and drip a tear on it from their permanently impaired and leaky waterworks."

I thought of this passage as I read with disgust the international reaction to the hanging of Saddam Hussein. People who shrugged at Hussein’s torture, mutilation, murder, and genocide are now shocked, shocked that his victims sent him off to Hell with a few humiliating barbs. What do you expect? These are the people whose fathers and brothers were slaughtered by Hussein and his minions. It strikes me as the epitome of restraint that they just hanged him rather than paying him back in cruel kind.

Guys getting killed is the NDP military policy. Layton et al get to make hay when the sun stops shining over some poor kid who was killed in doing his duty. That the Canadian military is stretched to limit in Afghanistan is not a secret. The Government is looking to put in more money to the effort:

The government is seeking Parliament's approval to spend nearly $1 billion to sustain Canada's military through the rest of this fiscal year, including hundreds of millions of dollars to support the mission in Afghanistan and to buy new equipment.

What is the NDP response? To hell with the soldiers:

NDP Treasury Board critic Paul Dewar said one concern is that it's not clear from the estimates how much of the funding for the Afghanistan mission is going toward redevelopment.

The logic of this is ...well....illogical:

ISLAMABAD, Pakistan -- Pakistani helicopter gunships yesterday destroyed a religious school that the military said was fronting as an al Qaeda training camp, killing 80 persons in the country's deadliest military operation targeting terrorism suspects.
    Islamic leaders and al Qaeda-linked militants blamed the United States for the air strike and called for nationwide demonstrations to condemn the attack that flattened the school -- known as a madrassa -- and ripped apart those inside. Furious villagers and religious leaders said the pre-dawn missile barrage killed innocent students and teachers.
    U.S. and Pakistani military officials denied American involvement.

Pakistani helicopters... admission by Pakistan military officials ... USA to blame. It appears that there is no difference between Islamic leaders and the US left.

A court in Denmark has dismissed a defamation suit against the publishers of the cartoons of Mohammed. A victory for free speech on a continent where such speech is under threat.

Mark Steyn rightly calls Canada a "superwimp pussy -nation", while singing the praises of the Canadian troops:

And that, Mr. Binn, is why Canadian soldiers don't get the credit they deserve. Not because they're nancy boys but because the Canadian state is deeply invested in the idea of Canada as the nancy-boy nation. That's why in April 2002 the politicians, media and large swathes of the public preferred their Princess Pats as victims rather than as killers. Look at the words of almost every prominent "official" Canadian--Chr‚tien, Martin, Axworthy, Ralston Saul--in the first four-and-a-half years after 9/11. The underlying message is: this isn't our fight. Canada, in the peerless formulation of the great Christie Blatchford, mistook the sidelines for the moral high ground, and, in a great civilizational struggle being waged in a media age, it's not enough to have great fighting men when every other force in your society is communicating 24/7 that you're the superwimp pussy-nation.

Victor Davis Hanson is writing on historical islamic imperialism. It is well worth the read. Here is an excerpt:

But unlike the West, where Christianity began as the persecuted victim of the Roman Empire and conceived of its own empire as a spiritual one apart from the political realm, Islam “was inextricably lined with the creation of a world empire and its universalism was inherently imperialist. It did not distinguish between temporal and religious powers.” Muhammad could thus “cloak his political ambitions with a religious aura,” a rationalization of domination that drives the contemporary jihadists like Osama bin-Laden and Ayatollah Khomeini, who just like centuries of warriors before them justify their aggression by quoting Muhammad’s farewell address, in which the Prophet laid down the injunction “to fight all men until they say ‘There is no god but Allah.’”