Bali says Hi!

Want to visit a foreign land that welcomes Americans--and not just for our $$$? Visit Bali, which, having had its economy also damaged (far more than ours) by Islamofascist mass murderers, regards Americans as brothers in arms. They also appreciate the fact that, unlike so many Europeans and Chinese, we don't talk down to them.

This was our 6th visit to Bali, and it was wonderful--apart from the nearly empty mosque nearby blaring out its harangues at astonishing volumes from before dawn to late at night. The Balinese Muslims who've been there for a while have been as friendly as the Hindu majority. But the outsiders from Java buying up land, building mosques, then using them to dominate the acoustic landscape at all hours are something else.

And they're typical of Islamic authorities in my experience traveling abroad. It was especially interesting because while there are increasing numbers of Javanese Muslims streaming into Bali in hopes of cashing in on Bali's tourist trade, the local mosque really was an empty shell with giant loudspeakers.

I don't think American mosques are hotbeds of terrorism. Most Muslims who immigrate to America are better educated and we assimilate them more than the Europeans do. But I know all of them would mount the giant loudspeakers given half a chance--a practice not mentioned in the Koran BTW.

That's what we need--strict enforcement of noise ordinances. I'd feel the same way about church bells if they started before dawn and were amplified like the mosques' harangues are. But they don't and they aren't.

So when mosques come up, be sure to raise the noise issue. Anyone who's traveled in Muslim lands will know what I mean.

Talking with Israel-bashers

Every time a newspaper publishes an article that involves Israel--even tangentially--comments pour in from Americans, denouncing Israel, comparing it with Nazi Germany, yada yada. My comment:

Here's a question for all the frenzied commentors on this thread:

Where would you rank Israel's mistreatment of Palestinians on this list of government-sponsored/ordered/tolerated abuses, in no particular order:

* Sudan's Muslim dictatorship's treatment of its Christian blacks in the Darfur region

* Burma's dictatorship's treatment of that country's ethnic minorities--well, and just about everyone outside the junta's family and the military

* Iraq's Muslims' treatment of Iraq's indigenous 750,000 Christians since its "liberation" in 2003

* The Arab world's refusal to grant right of return to the indigenous Jewish populations (around 850,000) whose properties and businesses they expropriated and then expelled in and around 1948--along with their descendants of course

* Turkey's Muslim government's treatment of its indigenous Kurdish population

* Hamas' treatment of Fatah members in the Gaza strip, abuse of women, training of children as suicide bombers, and use of civilians as human shields in military engagements

* Communist China's treatment of Tibet

* Communist China's treatment of all its citizens apart from the 200 million or so urban middle class

* Communist China's treatment of the Uighur Muslim minority

* North Korea's treatment of all its population outside the ruling clique and the military

* Japan's treatment of cetaceans

* Brazil's treatment of its Indian tribes in areas ranchers, miners, or oil drillers want

* Zimbabwe's treatment of all its citizens outside the ruling clique and the military

* Iran's trreatment of half the country by its Islamofascist ruling clique

* Saudi Arabia's treatment of women and minorities (such as its Shiite minority) and anyone who doesn't obey its 7th century social dictates (case in point: a dozen or more girls at a boarding school that caught fire; they died because the religious police forbade the firefighters from rescuing them)

* The treatment of women and dissenters wherever the Taliban rule (today mainly in the Pashtun regions of Pakistan and Afghanistan)

* The torture of most girls throughout the Muslim-dominated regions of sub-Saharan Africa via FGM

* The systematic murder, rape, and mutilation by various militias and governments in mineral-rich territories of Subsaharan Africa (hence the term "blood diamonds")

* The treatment of Chechnya, Georgia and other territories in and adjacent to Russia by its "democratic dictatorship"

* The substantial contribution to the world overpopulation crisis by the Catholic Church, along with the traumatization of countless thousands of boys and girls by pedopriests worldwide

* The brutal treatment of Somalis in the areas controlled by the country's homegrown Islamofascist organization

I could go on. The point is that even if the Israelis mistreat the Palestinians as badly as most of you say--they're small potatoes on this list of horrors, both in sheer numbers and in intensity of mistreatment.

Yet an editorial on any of these topics would garner only a smattering of comments--and probably none from the zealots on this thread.

So--why do so many Americans who are neither Palestinians nor Israelis kick Israel to the top of this list, when by any rational standards they'd be at or near the bottom?

Australian reader "One Salient Oversight" says the fact that Israel is a client state of America moves it to the top.

Israel is certainly an ally. But if it were truly a client state they'd do what we ask, and they often don't. relying on their powerful lobby here to sometimes thumb their collective noses at us. We also shower billions of dollars on Egypt, with comparably mixed results. Though Egyptian lobbying is far less effective--perhaps because there far fewer educated, politically active Arab-Americans compared to Jewish Americans.

So here's my challenge: assume for the sake of argument that I'm correct as far as the actual government-sanction abuse goes, apart from the question of who gave who money or supports such policies from abroad (relative to the abusing country). So we have the Israelis at or near the bottom of the stack I provided here.

Now--should Americans focus obsessively on the lesser abuses of our ally, or on the vastly worse-and vastly larger-scale abuses of countries that aren't allies, or which are, like China, "frenemies?"

And should we overlook the fact that many of the enemies of Israel (Iran, Hamas, Hezbollah especially) are our dedicated enemies as well?

And not just enemies because of our alliance with Israel. If you read Qutb's writings (he was the Moslem Brotherhood's chief thinker), you'll see that on his travels in America before Israel even existed he loathed us in every way. The freedoms of women upset him particularly.

And on that topic, why do those so passionately devoted to the Palestinians' well-being completely overlook Hamas' Taliban-lite treatment of Gazans?

Not to mention the fact that while Israelis have treated many Palestinians harshly and don't accord Arab-Israelis full equality (albeit more freedom that Arab-anything elses in the Arab world), calling Israelis Nazis and their treatment of Palestinians genocide leaves us without any language to describe the other situations on the list of abusive nations included here (see Amesty International for their list as well).

Client state or not, the Palestinians have it good compared to at least one billion other people on Earth--probably a lot more than that, but at least one billion.

And all the arguments given to justify singling out Israel above all these other nations holds water in my book.

I'm not letting Israel off the hook. But the frenzied denunciations I read constantly from American leftists are counterproductive. Calling a pickpocket a rapist insults both the pickpocket and actual rape victims. Calling Israelis Nazis so offends most Americans that it obscures whatever abuses Israelis might actually do.

Pointing the way with headscarves

Thomas Friedman recently visited Turkey, and came away dismayed as the Islamist direction it's taking, writing about it in a NYT column. My comment:

Adding to the general grief are the facts that most Western leftists (in America and Europe) vehemently agree with Erdogan--and that Israel seems to be stumped by the Palestinians' demographic time bomb (also by the intransigence of Israel's own religious fanatics).

I bet you'll be able to gauge the path Turkey takes by the percentage of women who "take the veil" or worse. That's what happened in Egypt. And Afghanistan (well, in Kabul, which was quite western up until the Soviet departure). And Iraq (before we "liberated" it, ironically).

The first ones to pop up are a brave religious statement by conservative women. But after the tipping point, those who don't put one on get more and more pressure, regardless of their own convictions, and finally it becomes physically dangerous (i.e. you're risking your life) to not wear one in public--as is the case in Iraq today, for example.

As go headscarves, so goes the nation.

Is Islam the enemy?

Today's New York Times published a news article about how "an attack on a professor at University of the Punjab highlighted a power struggle between an outward-looking, educated class and those pushing an intolerant vision of Islam."

My comment:

Every major religion has its totalitarian wing.

American Christianists have murdered physicians and intimidated so many others.

Jewish hard liners have murdered Palestinians (remember the guy who gunned down as many worshippers in a mosque as he could before others killed him? Not to mention the one who murdered their prime minister.

Hindu fundamentalists have become increasingly violent in India, while Thai Buddhists have cracked down brutally on Muslims in the south.

But Muslims are in a class by themselves, making the worst features of the Dark Ages come alive today.

Sure, it's only a small minority that does the actual violence. But they're in charge--and a lot of Muslims support the violence of the few, even if they don't actively participate.

Liberal Muslims are on the defensive everywhere. Another current NYT article describes how the supreme court of Indonesia--the world's most moderate Muslim country, probably--just upheld a law treating "blasphemy" as a felony.

I've seen this firsthand after traveling in Indonesia half a dozen times in the past decade. I've met a lot of great Muslims in my travels, but everywhere there you can see the iron fist of Muslim cultural imperialism, promoted and directed by Saudi-trained Wahhabis.

So although there are liberal Muslims and illiberal Christians etc., Islam stands head and shoulders above the rest as a force of repression in the world today.

And Muslims who want this to change must bestir themselves, because the voice of their religion today is antithetical to everything the Western world holds dear, and no amount of feel-good multiculturalism can change this hard fact.

And not only is this true, but the Muslim world has been going backward for decades. In Egypt in the 1960s you wouldn't find one woman in a veil. Now you won't find one woman not in a veil on the street--including Egypt's Coptic Christians, who were there long before Islam came into being.

Christian fundamentalists argue that Islam is incompatible with Western values. I despise Christian fundamentalism--in fact I think it's incompatible with Western values, for that matter.

But what I'm saying here is different. I'm not making any claims about Islam as a religion, one way or another. I'm talking about it as a political/social entity, while the fundies are making a blanket judgment.

In practical terms, I'm not too worried about American Muslims. We got the most educated Muslim immigrants, not the semiliterate peasants thronging European barrios. We should monitor what goes on in American mosques and websites, but allow them the same freedom of religion we allow others.

Still, when the Danish cartoons came out, only two American newspapers--not including the NYTimes--had the courage and integrity to publish them. That alone shows how much the Muslim world has succeeded in intimidating the Western world.

That's the kind of kowtowing to primitives that we must stand against, even as we support Muslim moderates as best we can (though we can't do much, because our help makes them Western puppets to most Muslims).

Muslim fundamentalism is at war with the West, and it considers every Western man, woman, child and fetus a soldier in this war. Their militias would kill the most impassioned Western defender of their multicultural heritage exactly as quickly as they'd kill a Christianist.

And they'd view the most modestly dressed Mormon housewife as looking like a hooker.

Not to mention widespread Muslim support across most of Africa for female genital mutilation, possibly the most heinous cultural practice carried out against large numbers of girls today.

I live in a highly multicultural area--Silicon Valley--and have friends of many faiths (and none) and cultures and races. But Americans who live like me often have trouble imagining the depths of division between us and the average Muslim, much less their extremists, who truly do worship death, just as Bin Ladin said.

So please pay attention to articles like this. We all have to realize what we're up against, and rid ourselves of the illusion that all can be settled by an honest exchange of views.

Hope clouds observation.

Fort Hood mass murder

I keep thinking about something Osama Bin Ladin said a decade ago: that Christianity is a religion of life, while Islam is a religion of death, and that this fact made us weak and them strong.

So here's an American Major and a psychiatrist--and an Islamist. He was willing to die, to be sure. And to murder as many people as he could before going to his fate.

Nobody wants to deal with the possibility that Islam is more likely to produce Major Hassans than are other world views. This thought doesn't conflict with the likelihood that the average Muslim isn't murderous. I'm just asking whether Islam produces a statistically significantly higher percentage of terrorist/murderers than other world views.

And if so, what can we do about it? Every Islamic terrorist stands on the shoulders of Islamist thought leaders. We have to go after them, and do so in Islamic terms--that's the trick, I suspect. Instead of talking about how Islam is bad, we have to talk about how Islamists are bad Muslims.

We have to attack the underlying beliefs directly. Calling murderers like Hassan cowards or nut cases or solitary actors is both ridiculous and counterproductive. He wasn't a coward--given his beliefs, he was actually quite brave. Studies of terrorist murderers have indicated that they aren't insane in the sense that, say, a paranoid schizophrenic or a manic depressive is insane. And he didn't act alone. He was brought to this state of mind by legions of effective propagandists. I bet if you look at the websites he frequented and possibly the individuals he talked to at his local mosque, you'll find the ideological support for his murders.

Hassan was a Muslim terrorist, trying to achieve social change through murder. I'm sure that's how he saw himself (except for the "terrorist" label of course). Our challenge is to get other Muslims to view him as a bad Muslim.

Clash of civilizations?

The American right has been demonizing Islam for years. But there is an element of truth in their rants. The latest came from the New York Times' newish conservative columnist Ross Douthat. Here's my response:

Normally as a centrist Democrat and a devout--so to speak--empiricist, I oppose nearly everything Douthat says.

But I've traveled a fair amount in the world's most populous Muslim-majority country, Indonesia, and I've witnessed the truth of what he says here.

Muslims say "Islam" means submission, and that that means "submission to Allah." And in my wife's and my travels the many Muslims we've encountered personally have lived up to that modest ideal.

But this religion's theological establishment is another matter. Every Mosque in Indonesia--even when it's in majority-Christian or majority-Hindu regions--blares out its calls to prayer and other exhortations hourly from early in the morning to late at night, and does so using PA systems Metallica could use for stadium concerts. The Hindus and Christians subjected to this racket grind their teeth, and they've told us so in no uncertain terms.

An additional irony is that not one Indonesian out of a thousand can understand what's being hollered out through those giant loudspeakers. It's not only in Arabic, a language virtually unrelated to Bahasa Indonesia, but it's an archaic Arabic few Arabs understand either. The interpretation is left up to the local imams, many trained and financed by the rigid fundamentalist Wahhabi sect of Islam, paid for with our petrodollars funneled through Saudi Arabia.

And it's having effect. More and more Indonesian Muslims are being moved rightward, with women taking the veil, so to speak, and even small children being forced to wear stifling, swaddling garments in the hot, humid tropical climate of Indonesia.

We just got back from Bali, and one thing that struck us was a new mosque built on a hillock overlooking a revered Hindu temple set by a lake in Bali's mountains. The symbolism was obvious and inescapable--the mosque was next to the temple grounds and it hung over the Hindu temple complex. The large botanical gardens nearby, where Balinese in love like to go and, if they're daring, even hold hands, is dominated by the calls to prayer blaring out from the adjacent mosque. And Bali is at least 90% Hindu--though Javanase Muslims are pouring across the channel, buying land, building Mosques, and Islamifying more and more of the island. Bali's Hindu majority is complaining to the authorities in Jakarta urgently--to no avail so far.
And this is just a microcosm of the way Islamic officialdom imposes its "new world order" everywhere it can.

Sure, Christians have church bells, and I've heard plenty. But they aren't a fraction of the acoustic dominance the mosques establish wherever they can get away with it.

America hasn't had much problems with Islam within our country because we've gotten the most educated Muslim immigrants, and they're a majority almost nowhere here in communities, except possibly for Detroit--where I hear the Mosque PA systems are doing their very loud thing now.

Islam has plenty of moderates--probably a large majority of their religious community. But they don't control the mosques, by and large, and many don't dare speak up, since Islamists control the moderates through threats, intimidation, and, across the Arab world...murder. Not to mention places like the Netherlands and Denmark and England and Spain, which have all witnessed these things as well. The Islamists stridently insist--very much like Christian fundamentalists--that only they are true Muslims, and you have to knuckle under to their 7th century worldview if you want to be a good Muslim.

And the intimidation has worked, and not just in the mideast and Indonesia. When the Danish cartoons came out, only one large American newspaper dared publish them (the Philadelphia Inquirer). Every other one, including the New York Times, chickened out. And the cartoons were incredibly mild by Western standards.

I don't want to see us pitting ourselves against Islam per se--but we have to stop submitting to it in ways large and small. Visit Bali--a wonderful place to visit, by the way--and you'll see what I mean.

We have to somehow start supporting Muslim moderates. Of course if and when we do the Islamists will call anyone who agrees with us Western stooges. So it will be a very, very tough propaganda war. And of course Bush did so much during his reign to make this job as difficult as possible.

It will take the most astute statesmanship to change the minds of Muslims, a majority of whom, even the moderates, believe the West is out to get them.

But we can't just sit there, silenced by our own liberal convictions (and even American right wingers are liberals by Islamist stndards). They're playing for keeps, and it's time we acknowledge that.