Video med Frank Gaffney og artikel af Robert Spencer

Der foregår flere udvandede høringer om muslimer, islam, terror etc. i USA. Her er noget af det seneste:

More Useful Jihad Idiocy at N.Y. Senate Hearings

by Robert Spencer – April 12, 2011

Influential leftist and Muslim groups in America want to make sure that you remain ignorant and complacent about the real extent and magnitude of the Islamic jihad threat.  To make sure that you do, they brand any honest examination of how jihadists use Islamic texts and teachings to justify violence and Islamic supremacism as “bigoted and hateful.”  The absurdities this leads to were made clear during the New York State Senate’s homeland security committee hearings last week on the Islamic terror threat facing New York, when the proceedings quickly devolved into yet another circus of political correctness and claims of victim status for Muslims—with little, if any, light shed on the terror threat facing New York and the country as a whole.

Reprising his own failed hearings about the jihad threat, U.S. Rep. Peter King (R.-N.Y.) testified that “99%” of Muslims in this country are “outstanding Americans” who abhor terrorism.  King, in other words, said nothing about the comprehensive Muslim Brotherhood initiatives that I wrote about in my 2008 book Stealth Jihad, which documents the multifaceted nonviolent campaign to assert the primacy of elements of Islamic law and custom over American law and custom.  Yet so many Americans have now awakened to this campaign that at least 14 states are considering initiatives to ban Islamic law (sharia).

Mere HER i Human Events.

Frank Gaffney: New York State Senate Testimony

On April 8, Center for Security Policy President Frank Gaffney testified before the New York Senate’s Homeland Security and Military Affairs Committee regarding New York’s readiness for another terrorist attack in the shadow of the World Trade Center site in Manhattan. At the invitation of Sen. Greg Ball, Gaffney delivered a sharp and concise picture of the penetration of Muslim Brotherhood and other Shariah-adherent organizations in the United States, highlighting both the violent Jihad as well as the stealthier “civilization Jihad” these groups are engaged in. U.S. Rep. Peter King and Nonie Darwish of Former Muslims United were among the other experts called to testify. Representing the opposition view were representatives of CAIR and the Arab American Association of New York. Gaffney held up the book “Shariah: the Threat to America” as a comprehensive guide to the threats that Shariah-adherent Islam pose to the state of New York and the nation.

Andre kilder: Politics, Religion, and Family,

Is the Koran compatible with free speech?

Geert Wilders back in court as first political trial in Europe since 1989 resumes in Amsterdam

The trial of Geert Wilders resumes in the Netherlands again raising questions about Islam and freedom of speech

13 April 2011

The trial of Geert Wilders, the Dutch politician accused of insulting Islam, resumes today in Amsterdam with three experts on the Middle East and Islam being called to give testimony.

The Wilders trial in the Netherlands is regarded by many as the first political trial in a European Union country since the end of communism in 1989.

It is also seen as a test case for freedom of speech and the rule of law in a country where Muslims are estimated to represent between seven percent and 10 percent of the population.

Mere HER i The Commentator.

Video: BBC Panorama om Iran

Denne video uploades og slettes i en energisk stillingskrig på YouTube. Lige nu virker denne version. Fra 11. april 2011:

BBC Panorama Special Report 11 April 2011 Living with the Ayatollah

Audio: Phyllis Chesler & flere om indvandrere i Frankrig

Udmærket diskussion her fra KQED Radio. Mest om burka-forbud, men også en del om muslimer i Frankrig:

Burqa Ban in France

Apr 13, 2011

The French ban of the niqab, the face-covering Islamic veil also known as the burqa, took effect earlier this week. And now, in a first enforcement of the ban, French police have fined a woman in a mall parking lot outside Paris for wearing a niqab. We discuss this divisive issue.

• Host: Michael Krasny
  Guests:
  Dr. Merve Kavakci-Islam, international relations lecturer at George Washington University, author of “Headscarf Politics in Turkey: A Postcolonial Reading,” and former member of the Turkish parliament
• Dr. Phyllis Chesler, emerita professor of psychology and women’s studies at City University of New York, and author of 15 books, including “Women and Madness” and “Woman’s Inhumanity to Woman”
• Frank Browning, writer and journalist currently in Paris
• Helene Fouquet, reporter for Bloomberg News’ Paris bureau
• Umm Amina, Berkeley resident who wears a niqab

Startes HER. Åbner Windows Media Player. Varighed 52 minutter. Og endnu en audio fra Chin FM Radio – The Zelda Young Show den 12. april 2011:

Interview on “Jewish Al-Jazeera” and France’s burqa ban

Startes HER – åbner Windows Media Player. Varighed 19½ minut. Desuden link herunder til Phillis Cheslers tre seneste artikler, der omhandler samme emner som audioerne:

• France Is Brave and Right to Ban the Burqa – læs mere hos Fox News
• Vive la Burqa? – læs mere hos FrontPageMagazine eller her hos AINA
• New Hope for Freedom Fighters: “Jewish Al-Jazeera” to Combat Big Lies and Blood Libels – læs på Phyllis Chesler blog eller NewsRealBlog

Andre kilder: The Phyllis Chesler Organization,

Video: David Cameron med ny tale om indvandring

Nu vil England begrænse indvandringen, siger Cameron. Igen. Den nye tale kan læses i fuld udskrift hos BBC. De første 2 minutter er ikke med på videoen – men man kan læse dem her:

In full: David Cameron immigration speech

Here is Prime Minister David Cameron’s speech on the government’s immigration policy which sparked a row with Business Secretary Vince Cable.

14 April 2011

A year ago, we were in the middle of a General Election campaign.

And there was one message I heard loud and clear on the doorstep: we want things to be different.

People said they wanted a government that didn’t just do what was good for the headline or good for their Party but good for the long-term and good for our country.

That’s what we’re engaged in.

Clearly, cutting public spending isn’t popular, but it’s right to bring sense to our public finances.

People said they wanted a government that actually trusted them to use their own common sense.

That’s the kind of government we want to be – giving neighbourhoods and individuals a whole range of new powers…

…scrapping so much of the bureaucracy that drove us mad.

People said they were sick of seeing those who did the right thing get punished and the wrong thing rewarded.

Mere HER hos BBC.

Andre kilder: The Daily Mail, The Daily Mail, The Daily Mail, The Daily Mail, BBC, The Telegraph,

Video: Pat Condell rakker ned på kristendommen

Uploadet for et par timer siden:

The trouble with Christianity

“Ridicule is the only weapon which can be used against unintelligible propositions. Ideas must be distinct before reason can act upon them; and no man ever had a distinct idea of the trinity. It is the mere Abracadabra of the mountebanks calling themselves the priests of Jesus.” – Thomas Jefferson

Jeg har for mange ateister på bloggen lige for tiden…

Sydsudan – verdens yngste land

Sudan kan sætte gang i et afrikansk forår

Af Tore Hamming

Sudan overses, mens verden følger oprørene i Mellemøsten og Nordafrika. Men når Sydsudan om få måneder officielt bliver selvstændigt, kan det sætte gang i en lignende massebevægelse i resten af Afrika. En bevægelse, der en gang for alle kan gøre op med kolonitidens fingeraftryk.

Mere HER i Ræson.

Francis Fukuyama om Samuel P. Huntington & Egypten

Political Order in Egypt

Francis Fukuyama – May – June 2011 Issue

While academic political science has not had much to tell policymakers of late, there is one book that stands out as being singularly relevant to the events currently unfolding in Tunisia, Egypt and other Middle Eastern countries: Samuel Huntington’s Political Order in Changing Societies, first published over forty years ago.1 Huntington was one of the last social scientists to try to understand the linkages between political, economic and social change in a comprehensive way, and the weakness of subsequent efforts to maintain this kind of large perspective is one reason we have such difficulties, intellectually and in policy terms, in keeping up with our contemporary world.

Fukuyama har placeret sig på den forkerte side af historien, som amerikanerne siger. Mere HER i The American Interest.

Opdatering – Judith Miller har levet et resume af, hvad der skete på Tahrir Pladsen. Man ved det hele i forvejen, men resumeet er udmærket. Artiklen kan høres som mp3 her:

Revolution in the Square

Where will Egypt’s urban uprising lead?

Judith Miller – Spring 2011

Revolutions are often born in public squares, and the uprisings that have rewritten Middle Eastern history this year are no exception. “A different Middle East is emerging,” observed Ehud Yaari of the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, “one that may be temporarily called square-ocracy, or the transfer of power from governments to masses of demonstrators in the streets.” [...]

Mere HER i City Journal.

Mere opdatering – en vigtig artikel af Barry Rubin:

The region: The future of Egyptian politics, religion

By Barry Rubin – April 11, 2011

How can Marxists, radical nationalists and Islamists all work together? Well, that’s Egypt for you.

There are currently 20 candidates running for Egypt’s presidency. Most are not serious, but can split the vote for various blocs. I think the winner will be radical nationalist Amr Moussa, which isn’t great but better than an Islamist regime.

Moussa, former Egyptian foreign minister and former secretary-general of the Arab League, has far more name recognition than any opponent. As a veteran of the old regime, he has the votes of Mubarak supporters. As a radical nationalist, he appeals to many Egyptians.

Mere HER i The Jerusalem Post.

Victor Davis Hanson med to ret forskellige artikler

Yes, Libya Is Not Iraq

However each may turn out in the long run, Iraq in 2003 made sense; Libya in 2011 does not.

Victor Davis Hanson – April 13, 2011

The Left is terribly embarrassed about the U.S. intervention in Libya. We have preemptively attacked an Arab Muslim nation that posed little threat to the national-security interests of the United States. President Obama did not have majority support among the American people. Nor did he even attempt to gain approval from Congress — especially egregious because he seems to be the first president since Harry Truman who sought and obtained sanction for military action from the United Nations without gaining formal authorization from his own Congress.

The administration offered no rationale for judging, on humanitarian grounds, that Qaddafi was more egregiously murderous than, say, the killers in the Congo or Ivory Coast. Nor, in terms of national security, did the relatively sparsely populated and isolated Libya pose a threat comparable to those posed by either Iran or Syria — concerning which we carefully steered clear when similar domestic unrest threatened both regimes.

Mere HER i National Review Online. Og en artikel om et helt andet emne:

California lives on fumes of the past

By Victor Davis Hanson – April 12, 2011

We calibrate California’s decline by its myriad of paradoxes. The nation’s highest bundle of gas, sales, and income taxes cannot close the nation’s largest annual deficit at $25 billion. Test scores are at the country’s near bottom; teachers’ salaries at the very top. Scores of the affluent are leaving each week; scores of the indigent are arriving. The nation’s most richly endowed state is also the most regulated; the most liberal of our residents are also the most ready to practice apartheid in their Bel Air or Palo Alto enclaves.

We now see highway patrolmen and city police, in the manner of South American law enforcement, out in force. Everywhere they are monitoring, watching, ticketing — no warnings, no margins of error — desperate to earn traffic fines that might feed the state that feeds them. I could go on. But you get the picture that we are living on the fumes of a rich state that our forefathers brilliantly exploited, and now there is not much energy left in the fading exhaust to keep us going.

Mere HER i Orange County Register.

Opdatering 8. august 2011 . Hele Californien er ligesom resten af Vesten ét stort døende nabolag:

California’s water wars

The west side of the Central Valley supports California’s booming agricultural prosperity. We can’t afford to let it go dry.

By Victor Davis Hanson – August 7, 2011

California’s water wars aren’t about scarcity. Even with 37 million people and the nation’s most irrigation-intensive agriculture, the state usually has enough water for both people and crops, thanks to the brilliant hydrological engineering of past Californians. But now there is a new element in the century-old water calculus: a demand that the state’s inland waters flow as pristinely as they supposedly did before the age of dams, reservoirs and canals. Only that way can California’s rivers, descending from their mountain origins, reach the Sacramento-San Joaquin River Delta year-round. Only that way, environmentalists say, can a 3-inch delta fish be saved and salmon runs from the Pacific to the interior restored.

Mere HER i Los Angeles Times.

Opdatering 3. september 2011 – Bruce S. Thornton har lidt mere om Californien og landbruget. En slags status:

• The Other California

Audio: Sam Harris & Richard Dawkins

Lidt af, hvad Sam Harris indleder med, har vi hørt før her på bloggen, men audioen kommer med alligevel. Harris og Dawkins har jo mange fans – også blandt ikke-ateister. Harris’ sandhedsvidenskab er jeg nu ikke fan af:

Sam Harris & Richard Dawkins talk in Oxford about The Moral Landscape

Recorded on the 12th April 2011 at the Sheldonian Theatre.

Audioen begynder med trommer. Man får et helt chok. Startes HER. Åbner Windows Media Player. Varer 1 time og 32 minutter.

Andre kilder: British Humanist Association, The Pod Delusion, iPadio,