15 May 2006
AMSTERDAM — Liberal party MP Ayaan Hirsi Ali is leaving the Dutch parliament in September and moving to the United States.
Insiders confirmed a report on the website of Dutch newspaper 'De Volkskrant' on Monday about the move. Hirsi Ali has been on a speaking tour in the US and is due to make an official announcement on Tuesday.
She is going to work for the American Enterprise Institute (AEI), a conservative Washington think tank. The institute was founded in 1943 and is seen as one of the most important advisors to the government of George Bush.
Somali-born Hirsi Ali has been an outspoken critic of aspects of Islam and she became a campaigner for freedom of speech after the murder of film director Theo van Gogh in November 2004.
Hirsi Ali and Van Gogh collaborated on the short film ‘Submission’ which featured women in see-through veils discussing ill-treatment of women in Muslim societies. Hirsi Ali’s life has been threatened several times and she is under armed guard.
She is currently embroiled in a controversy about lies she told the immigration service in 1992 to get asylum in the Netherlands. She became a naturalised Dutch citizen five years later.
The film's title is a direct translation of the word "Islam". The film suggests the mistreatment of women born to Muslim families. The film was shown on the Dutch public broadcasting network (VPRO) on August 29, 2004. It portrays a Muslim woman (dressed with a transparent black clothing) as having been beaten and raped by a relative. The bodies are used in the film as a canvas for verses from the Qur'an.
The other day I hoped aloud that the US would, once again, act as that beacon for freedom, and send a message to the rest of the world: we shall not, as a nation, cave to the demands of the Islamists (even if our “tolerant” press and academic elite argue that it is our multicultural duty to do so if our offense is to give offense—a message that became evident during the Mohammed cartoon controversy, when the Boston Globe took the unusual position that the lesson of the Enlightenment is that everyone’s opinion is equal).
And we have not.
Today is a good day for America. Unless, that is, Congress—catching wind of this—rises up and demands that the President keep Ms Ali away from our ports.
The Cassini spacecraft delivers this stunning vista showing small, battered Epimetheus and smog-enshrouded Titan, with Saturn's A and F rings stretching across the scene.
The prominent dark region visible in the A ring is the Encke Gap, in which the moon Pan and several narrow ringlets reside. Moon-driven features that mark the A ring are easily seen to the left and right of the Encke Gap. The Encke Gap is 325 kilometers (200 miles) wide. Pan is 26 kilometers (16 miles) across.
In an optical illusion, the narrow F ring, outside the A ring, appears to fade across the disk of Titan. A couple of bright clumps can be seen in the F ring.
Epimetheus is 116 kilometers (72 miles) across and giant Titan is 5,150 kilometers (3,200 miles) across.
The image was taken in visible light with the Cassini spacecraft narrow-angle camera on April 28, 2006, at a distance of approximately 667,000 kilometers (415,000 miles) from Epimetheus and 1.8 million kilometers (1.1 million miles) from Titan. The image captures the illuminated side of the rings. The image scale is 4 kilometers (2 miles) per pixel on Epimetheus and 11 kilometers (7 miles) per pixel on Titan.
For those not familiar with the issue let me simply state the entry assumptions for this talk which, should they seem questionable to you, I invite you to speak with me about afterward.
The givens are that 1) the Earth is infrequently hit by asteroids which cross our orbit while circling the Sun, 2) the consequence of such impacts ranges from the equivalent of a 15 megaton (TNT) explosion to a civilization ending gigaton event, and 3) for the first time in the history of humankind we have the technology which, if we are properly prepared, we can use to prevent such occurrences from happening in the future.
Given those three assumptions I am going to give an update on the development status of the key elements which will enable us to avoid these devastating cosmic collisions.
The three prerequisite capabilities which will enable us to avoid the fate of the dinosaurs, and many smaller disasters as well, are 1) early warning, 2) a demonstrated deflection capability, and 3) an established international decision making process. I’ll address each of these three elements in turn giving a status report on each and pointing out some of the implications of current trends.
for the first time in the history of humankind we have the technology which, if we are properly prepared, we can use to prevent such occurrences from happening in the future.
to:The French Consulate
re: Your request to have Moussaoui sent home to serve out his prison sentence.
Dear France,
Recently we received your offer to take back this lovely fellow Zacarias Moussaoui. Apparently it is your contention that since we decided he should not be executed, but instead serve a life sentence, that he should be allowed to return to France to serve out his punishment. This has something to do with the consular protection you say he deserves as a French national.
Allow us to respond to you in the clearest, most unambiguous terms possible.
Ahem.
Suck it.
Sincerely
The US of A.
Which is not to say that the country as a whole is not prepared to execute terrorists: it’s just that, well, not everybody can be as white as Timothy McVeigh. He apparently should have know better.
“I would have preferred to see the death penalty, but I kind of stand in awe of how our legal system works that it can come to a result like this,” Giuliani told “Hardball” minutes after the verdict was announced outside the federal courthouse in Alexandria, Va.
“It has to say something about us to the rest of the world.”
I sympathize with those who believe that it would have been enormously satisfying to put this man to death. But I think we have to have some sympathy for the jurors as well. Talk about executing a human being is cheap. Unless it is actually your responsibility, I daresay one’s outlook on the death penalty then would become very personal. Whether the jurors were looking for an “out” in order to avoid mandating another person’s death is beside the point. They followed the law, their consciences, and in the end, common sense. As our representatives, we couldn’t have asked for anything more from them.
One aspect that was not brought out in the verdict but which very well may have played a role in the jury’s deliberations was their decision to deny martyrdom to someone who so obviously wanted it. From a practical standpoint, Moussaoui will now fade into history even among those who admire what he stands for. His incarceration in a very deep and very black hole (it’s almost a guarantee he will not be placed into the general prison population and instead will be kept in solitary confinement) will mean that his name will eventually die even if he himself remains alive. That is a victory against our enemies of sorts.
A close call, but a correct one. And I don’t think that even those among us who support the death penalty but agree with this decision would have been terribly upset if the verdict had gone the other way. As it is, I’m glad that justice triumphed over revenge.
Go preds!
Playoffs bitches!!!
Germans: U.S. More Dangerous than Iran
According to this poll, more Germans consider the U.S. to be a danger for world peace than Iran.
45 % of Germans call the U.S. a "greater threat to world peace" than Iran. 28 % think that Iran is a greater threat. For 16 %, the U.S. and Iran pose identical threats.
The results don't surprise me at all.
I mean, Iran is economically extremly promising for Germany. And Iran has made it clear what it expects in return for economic favours: "The international deputy of Iran's Chamber of Commerce, Dr. Fereidoun Entezari, believes that business relations will surely improve if the Europeans do not pollute the economic issues with the political ones."
Germany got the message...
Islam’s Nazi Connections
By Serge Trifkovic
FrontPageMagazine.com | December 5, 2002
An essay adapted by Robert Locke from Dr. Serge Trifkovic’s new book The Sword of the Prophet: A Politically-Incorrect Guide to Islam.
One of the good things one can truthfully say about Islam is that there has never been any love lost between Moslems and Marxists. Sadly, the opposite end of the totalitarian political spectrum is quite another matter. SS chief Heinrich Himmler was known to remark that he regretted that Germany had adopted Christianity, rather than "warlike" Islam, as its religion, and there is a disturbing amount of twisted but very real logic in his remark. Beyond the obvious dislike of a certain other religion, we have the plain fact that both Nazism and Islam both openly aim at world conquest. Both demand the total subordination of the free will of the individual – the very word "Islam" means submission in Arabic. Both are explicitly anti-nationalist and believe in the liquidation of the nation-state in favor of a "higher" community: in Islam the umma or community of all believers; in Nazism the herrenvolk or master race. Both believe in undemocratic leadership by a privileged knower of an absolute, eternal, and ultimately mystical truth: the caliph or führer respectively. To be fair, in strict Nazism Arabs are racial Semites and thus subhumans, but as Robert Locke has written, the Nazis did not really believe in their racial mythology when they found it inconvenient, and they exploited their commonalities with Islam for all they were worth. If the British army had not stopped Rommel in the sands of El Alamein in 1942, preventing him from conquering the Middle East, the consequences for world history might have been dramatic. What did happen was quite ugly enough.
Updated: April 4, 2006, 4:51 PM ET
Titans tell Steve McNair not to work out at their headquarters
Associated Press
National Football League News Wire
NASHVILLE, Tenn. - The Tennessee Titans told Steve McNair they don't want him working out in their building until his contract is reworked, the quarterback's agent said Tuesday.
McNair was told to go home Monday when he showed up at the team's headquarters for the start of the third week in the Titans' offseason conditioning program. The team's general counsel had called agent Bus Cook earlier Monday and informed him McNair would be told to leave.
A team trainer told the 11-year veteran to leave, Cook said.
"You tell the guy who's the mainstay of the organization, the leader, to get out, that he's not wanted, that's pretty rough," Cook said. "I don't know what Steve will do or won't do. I imagine he would have a hard time going back over there."
McNair, the NFL's 2003 co-MVP, is due $9 million in salary in 2006 - but his salary cap number is $23.46 million. The Titans declined last month to pick up a $50 million option to stretch the deal through 2009, leaving McNair with nearly a quarter of their cap space.
"We have no choice but to protect the club and its future from the possibility of having a significant amount of our salary cap at risk in a single player should he sustain a major injury," the team said in a statement. "This is entirely a risk management problem."
Cook said the Titans' general counsel told him the team doesn't want McNair working out on team property until his contract is reworked.
General manager Floyd Reese and coach Jeff Fisher were in Los Angeles following a private workout of Southern California quarterback Matt Leinart. The Titans said in a statement that they look forward to McNair returning once his contract is resolved.
A Better Idea
By FRANCIS FUKUYAMA and ADAM GARFINKLE
March 27, 2006; Page A16
As an editorial on this page recently asked: "Anyone out there have a better idea" than the Bush administration's policy of high-profile democracy promotion in the Arab and Muslim worlds as a means to fight terrorism? Well, yes, there is one. That better idea consists of separating the struggle against radical Islamism from promoting democracy in the Middle East, focusing on the first struggle, and dramatically changing our tone and tactics on the democracy promotion front, at least for now.
The essential problem with the administration's approach is that it conflates two issues that are separate. The first has to do with violent, antimodern radical Islamism (on display both in the reaction to the Danish cartoons and in the mosque bombing in Samarra); the second concerns the dysfunctionality of political and social institutions in much of the Arab world.
It is, of course, the administration's thesis that the latter condition causes the former.
-it is also its contention that U.S. Cold War policies of support for Arab "friendly tyrants" are mainly to blame for Arab authoritarianism. Thus did the president say in November 2003 -- since repeated several times by Condoleezza Rice -- that we sacrificed freedom for stability in the Middle East for 60 years, and got neither.
It follows from this view that if the U.S. stops supporting authoritarian regimes and instead does all it prudently can to bring about democratic ones, our terrorist problem will be dramatically reduced if not altogether solved.
Authoritarian political cultures do function as enablers of radical Islamism, but the essential cause of the latter -- today as before, in dozens of historical cases concerning violent millenarian movements -- is the difficulty that some societies and individuals have in coming to terms with social change. That is why rapid modernization is likely to produce more short-term radicalism, not less. Muslims in democratic Europe are as much a part of this problem as those in the Middle East. This is not a trivial point; it is a central one that directly challenges a key tenet of the administration's view.
What the administration sees as one problem ought to be seen as two. Radical Islamism needs to be dealt with separately from democracy promotion. This involves doing everything we can to ensure the political success of the governments in Afghanistan and Iraq. It also involves killing, capturing or otherwise neutralizing hard-core terrorists in many parts of the world, and keeping dangerous materials out of their hands, in what will look less like a war than like police and intelligence operations.
But the threat above all lies on the level of ideas. Just as it proved possible to stigmatize and eventually eliminate slavery from mainstream global norms without having first to wait for the mass advent of liberal democracy,"
"it should be possible to effectively stigmatize jihadi terrorism without having first to midwife democracies from Morocco to Bangladesh.
The United States and its Western allies should be helping genuine, traditional and pious Muslims to reassert their dominance over a beautiful and capacious religious civilization in the face of a well-financed assault by extremist thugs. (This, of course, is not a new idea, but we have barely begun to take its implementation seriously.) We should also be vigorously supporting the Danes and genuine European liberals when they are attacked by illiberal and violent Islamists.
Promoting liberal and democratic institutions in the Middle East should be decoupled from this fight, since it is a much more long-term project -- and a project in need of significant redesign. The Bush administration has not admitted to itself the degree to which it has been knocked off its own timetable by the chaotic situation in Iraq.
Its Broader Middle East and North Africa initiative to promote democracy in the Middle East through high-profile rhetorical support for democracy and funding for local democratic organizations was originally conceived as a way of capitalizing on the momentum gained from a successful Iraqi transition to democracy. But there is no such momentum right now, only backlash. Many would-be democratic opponents of regimes in places like Syria or Iran now say they'd prefer the status quo to the situation the Iraqis are in.
This does not paint a rosy picture for the Bush administration's new initiative to promote democratic regime change in Iran; it will be hard to find any takers for the $75 million in new funding for this purpose.
To put it mildly, the Iraq war has not increased the prestige of the U.S. and American ideas like liberal democracy in the Middle East. The U.S. does not have abundant moral authority for promoting the rule of law, since the first thing people in the region associate with America today is prisoner abuse at Guantanamo, Bagram and Abu Ghraib.
Many Americans have explained these events to themselves by saying that the abuse was an aberration that has been hyped by enemies of the U.S., and that in any event such things just happen during wartime. Perhaps; but the fact remains that Guantanamo is still open, and nobody except for a couple of lowly enlisted soldiers have been prosecuted for prisoner abuse by the Bush administration. Fair or not, American insistence on rule of law and human rights looks simply hypocritical.
The Bush administration has indeed opened up new space for debate and political participation in the Arab and Muslim worlds.
But recent elections in Iran, Egypt, Palestine, and Iraq have either brought to power or increased the prestige of profoundly illiberal groups like Hamas and the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood; even our putative friends in the Shiite alliance that did well in last December's Iraqi elections have been busy institutionalizing an intolerant Islamist order in the parts of Iraq they control.
Administration principals speak of creating public space for dissent and debate lest it all be driven into the mosque, with the risk that this "might" bring illiberal groups into power. The tide of public opinion today is not running in favor of pro-Western secular liberals, however, but rather the Islamists. In many Arab countries this means that premature democratic elections will most definitely and predictably bring the mosque into the public square while driving out all other forms of expression. The tolerant are making democratic way for the intolerant, who in turn are very likely to block the possibility of any reverse flow of authority. How such dynamics promote liberal democracy in the longer run is hard to see. More likely, U.S. policies that foster pro-Islamist outcomes will delay political liberalization, help the wrong parties in the great debates ongoing in Muslim societies and, quite possibly therefore, make our terrorist problem worse.
We need to change tactics in the way we go about supporting Middle Eastern democracy. The administration's highly visible embrace of democracy promotion as a component of its national security strategy (as outlined in last week's official document on the subject), and its telegraphing ahead of time of intentions to bring about regime change in places like Iran, only hurt the cause of real democrats in the region.
The effort to push countries toward early national elections, given the rising Islamist tide today, will invariably force us into the appearance of further hypocrisy when they produce results we don't like. There are many other democratic institutions we can help foster, such as local elections or non-extremist civil society groups. Moves afoot in Congress to channel democracy support through the State Department are well-intentioned but counterproductive: The last thing that democracy activists need right now is more American fingerprints on outside funding. Private foundations and groups with some distance from the administration like the NED or private NGOs will have better luck disbursing money than U.S. agencies. There are many quiet ways we can and should support democratic groups in the region, by working, for example, with other countries that have recently undergone democratic transitions that may have greater credibility than Washington.
In a weird twist, despite its emphasis on democracy in Iraq, the administration would have let funding for long-term democracy promotion through groups like the National Democratic Institute and the International Republican Institute lapse but for a last minute congressional earmark. We are pushing too hard in the wrong places, and not hard enough in the one place where it matters most.
We should not even think about wanting to roll back recent election results; rather, the emphasis should be on pressuring newly empowered groups to govern responsibly. Islamist parties in Egypt and Palestine have gained popularity in large measure not because of their foreign policy views, but because of their stress on domestic social welfare issues like education, health, and jobs, and their stand against corruption. Fine, let them deliver; and if they don't or turn out to be corrupt themselves, they will face vulnerabilities of their own not far down the road.
Democracy promotion should remain an integral part of American foreign policy, but it should not be seen as a principal means of fighting terrorism. We should stigmatize and fight radical Islamism as if the social and political dysfunction of the Arab world did not exist,
and we should shrewdly, quietly, patiently and with as many allies as possible promote the amelioration of that dysfunction as if the terrorist problem did not exist. It is when we mix these two issues together that we muddle our understanding of both, with the result that we neither defeat terrorism nor promote democracy but rather the reverse.
Doctor..