About last night.....

For those that know the song, all the better. For those that don't, ask the guy with the baby blue sweater. For those that don't know what I am talking about, move to a real country.

20 miles west of Raleigh's ditches
There's a place called hell
Where ten thousand son-o-bitches
Call the Chapel Hill

Where the bastards born
And the bastards bred
And when he dies
The bastards dead

Soooooooo
Piss on Carolina-lina
Piss on Carolina-lina
Piss on Carolina-lina

Go to hell Duke

Waaaaakeeeee Forrrresssttt Suuucccckkkksss

I now return you to your regular scheduled ramblings.

Avon Calling!!

Soldiers from Bravo Company 1st Battalion, 155th Infantry Regiment, do a house to house search in an area where a U.S Army convoy received sniper fire from in Al Iskandariyah, Feb. 26, 2005.

The best of the West: Ayaan Hirsi Ali

I can’t believe that this was published by the New York Times. OK, it’s the NYT Magazine, but still. The New York Friggin’ Times.

Christopher Caldwell just knocks this out of the ball park with Daughter of the Enlightenment. He gives you 90% of what you need to know about Ayaan Hirsi Ali (AHA), reviews how children in schools are radicalized, shows you how The Netherlands got to where it is today, and the real danger women from Muslim backgrounds in the West are under. That and all sorts of relevant data you simply have to read the whole thing.

Let’s get to it.

Hirsi Ali, who was born in Somalia and has been a member of the Dutch Parliament since January 2003, had endorsed the view that Islam is a backward religion, condemned the way women live under it and said that by today's standards, the prophet Muhammad would be considered a perverse tyrant. She had also announced that she was no longer a believing Muslim. The punishment for such apostasy is, according to strict interpretations of Islam, death.

That my friends, is courage of your convictions. What consequences are you willing to accept to state your belief and opinion?

…several dozen vocational students were taking up the main restaurant, so she and her guards parked at two tables near the bar. Hirsi Ali had her back to the restaurant when one of the students, apparently a Dutch convert to Islam, tapped her on the shoulder. ''I turned around,'' she recalls in her elegant English, ''and saw this sweet, young Dutch guy, about 24 years old. With freckles! And he was like, 'Madam, I hope the mujahedeen get you and kill you.' '' Hirsi Ali handed him her knife and told him, ''Why don't you do it yourself?''

The power of the free mind, and one at peace with her chosen path in life. This type of moral courage is unique and instrumental to the proper defense of free thought (interesting statement from a guy that anonoblogs, i.e. hides behind a “nom de blog”-gulp). Once again, you do not have to wear a uniform to step into the breach in the fight for the West.

Because her voice is soft, she can seem meek. She is not. Hirsi Ali has a calm and syllogistic way of dropping verbal bombs all over the place, using words European politicians never do: Decadent. Corrupt. Cowardly. Wrong.

Can we clone her? My heart is all a’flutter.

Hirsi Ali was born into Somalia's Darod clan…her father, Hirsi Magan Isse…who now lives in England, was an iconoclastic Somali intellectual and politician who studied in Italy and earned a degree from Columbia University in 1966. He returned to Africa strengthened in his Muslim faith, his daughter says, but also deeply touched by North America. ''If such a young nation as the U.S. could make it to superpower status,'' she recalls him saying, ''we could do it as well.'' An anti-Communist, he agitated against the Marxist dictatorship of Mohammed Siad Barre, who came to power in 1969, the year Hirsi Ali was born. Hirsi Magan spent part of the 1980's as a leader of a guerrilla force in the Democratic Front for the Salvation of Somalia.

Critical background of her greater understanding of the world that I have not seen covered in other articles. Fleshes out where her backbone comes from.

It was Hirsi Ali's grandmother who managed, following regional custom, to have Hirsi Ali and her sister ritually ''circumcised'' at age 5, against the wishes (and without the knowledge) of Hirsi Magan.

This stands on its own. If you are not familiar with this mutilation, go here. It makes me sick and I don’t want to comment further on it. The sky is blue, the grass is green.

A crisis came in 1992, when her father contracted her in marriage to a Somali-Canadian cousin she did not know. After a wedding ceremony in Kenya, she followed him on a flight to Canada. During a layover in Germany, scheduled for the completion of her immigration paperwork, she decided to bolt -- an idea that did not occur to her, she says, until she arrived in Europe. She fled across the border on a train to the Netherlands, fearful that the Somali-German guardian assigned her by her clan would find her if she stayed in Germany.

Canadian and German citizens doing little more than kidnapping. Don’t hold your breath for them to ever do something about it.

In the Netherlands, she … found a job as a cleaning lady (''I would rather clean than beg'') in the Riedel juice factory in Ede, a heavily Moroccan city that has since become notorious in the Netherlands as the place where a television camera caught children and teenagers celebrating the destruction of the World Trade Center.

13 years ago she was a woman on the run for her life with nothing to her name. I don’t see a victim here anywhere, do you?

She also worked as a translator for immigration and social-service agencies. She interviewed Muslim women married off to reprobate cousins because they had lost their honor (virginity) and no one outside the family would have them. She interviewed battered wives and women infected with the AIDS virus who were under the impression that Muslims could not contract it. She came to marvel -- and despair -- at the tenacity of traditional Islam's grip on women who, now living in the West, seemingly had little reason to fear it.

And where were (and are) all those fine, Left organizations in Europe concerned with women’s rights?

In 1995, she entered the University of Leiden. She studied political science and political philosophy, … which she remembers with a desperate gratitude.

Knowledge is freedom. With freedom comes responsibility. She learned that early, and did more than most: she acted.

On Tuesday, Sept. 11, 2001, Hirsi Ali was in her second week of work as a researcher at the think tank of the center-left Labor Party, a job she'd sought after a short corporate stint peddling drugs to doctors for GlaxoSmithKline. Although she now describes herself as an atheist (''I do not believe in God, angels and the hereafter''), she had not at that point wholly lost her faith. The water-cooler talk that week was converging on agreement that it was simplistic to blame the attacks on Islam. Hirsi Ali begged to differ. She had been haunted by the letter left by the hijacker Mohamed Atta, in which he reminded his accomplices to pray for martyrdom. ''If I were a male under the same circumstances,'' she says, ''I could have been there. It was exactly what I used to believe.'' …Soon she had the chance to talk this way in public. Television interviewers were clamoring for immigrant analysts. … Asked her opinion of Pim Fortuyn's characterization of Islam as a ''backward religion,'' Hirsi Ali replied that by certain measures, including the treatment of women, Fortuyn's statement was not an opinion but a fact. Muslim leaders began to threaten her and her employers. ''Every time I went on TV,'' she says, ''I got a threat.'' In London, her father received menacing calls about her from Italy, Sweden and the Netherlands. Not only Muslims but also multiculturalists were outraged. Hirsi Ali wasn't impressed. ''I was like, 'I can't say that?' '' she recalls. '' 'For five long years in Leiden, you taught me to state facts. Now I do.' ''

OK, she needs some Church’n, but we can get to that at the right time. Her directness and transparency is blindingly refreshing. You know where she stands, and she challenges anyone to debate her on the merits.

When you look at what is going on in The Netherlands, a country looked at as one of the most “progressive” and “open” societies, you wonder where it all went wrong. I can’t believe it, but the NYT Mag article puts the blame right where it belongs.

Until recently, the Netherlands adhered to a national policy cumbersomely known as ''integration with maintenance of one's own identity.'' It arose partly out of unspoken guilt over the country's failure to save many Jews under German occupation during World War II and partly out of a modish multiculturalism.

Ahhhh, yessss. The multi-culti nightmare. Chickens are a’roost’n.

But she prefers to describe her legislative achievements in broad terms. ''I confront the European elite's self-image as tolerant,'' she says, ''while under their noses women are living like slaves.''

BING. Right on the 10 ring. Oh, and the hits keep coming!

Disrupting political classifications is explicitly what Hirsi Ali means to do. In her view, consensus-seeking politicians of all parties work hard to keep off the table the issues most Dutch people care about. Sometimes she refers to these people -- from Dijkstal to the Christian Democrat justice minister Piet Hein Donner to Job Cohen, the Labor mayor of Amsterdam -- as ''the Baby Boomers,''

Yep, she is naming names and has the right target set. Baby Boomers. The cancer is everywhere, fouling the nest hither and yon.

Hirsi Ali claims a direct line of intellectual inheritance from the Dutch Enlightenment, and says she is merely laying claim as a Dutch person to freedoms won for her fellow citizens starting in the 17th century. … She calls Spinoza her biggest Western inspiration.

It is hard to argue that fact. At least she is standing up for what made HER country great. Is she too little, too late? Have things gone so bad that there isn’t an easy way out? Will her countrymen rise to her banner in time? Will The Netherlands be burned in order to save it?

The present Dutch crisis looks very different if you believe a tribal principle is at work. It can look apocalyptic, in fact. In late February, sitting in an empty conference room in The Hague, clutching her black woolen wrap, Hirsi Ali speculated on one consequence. ''The Netherlands is an art country,'' she said. ''If the citizens of Amsterdam, 60 percent of whom will soon be of non-Western origin, are not made part of that, all of this will decay and be destroyed. When the municipality has to vote on whether funds go to preserve art or build a mosque, they may ask, 'Why should I pay for this stupid painting?' They may do a host of other things that are undemocratic, illiberal and unfriendly toward women and homosexuals and unbelievers.'' Hirsi Ali fears that inaction will be grist for the mill of an extreme right that is on the rise. ''If we don't take effective measures, now,'' she said, ''the Netherlands could be torn between two extreme rights'': an Islamic one and a non-Islamic one.

Last fall, entering the Dutch Parliament wasn't much different than entering one of the museums nearby. Now it is like entering a military base. You go in through a side entrance, which has been equipped with bulletproof glass, behind which the main hall is piled up with office furniture, crime-scene tape and two-by-fours.

One light hearted note: this is from Chaper 43 of “If I was Single and Living in Amsterdam”,

In mid-February, Hirsi Ali shocked the country by revealing the location at which she was being kept in hiding -- a naval base in Amsterdam. She complained, ''I want a house just like anybody else.'' After days of recriminations in the press, she now has one. Her undisclosed location has become permanent. ''I sleep very little,'' she says. ''I have no real social life. It's like having a body with no bottom,'' she adds, using a Somali expression. Her friends worry that she will not soon find the chance to marry and have children. ''Well, who on earth can I saddle with a relationship?'' she asks. ''It's not off-limits, and technically it can all happen. But is it, as we say in Dutch, verstandig? Sensible? It doesn't seem sensible now.''

There should be a line of men around the corner for this woman. Who wouldn’t want to be a Denis to her Maggie? Sigh.

Hirsi Ali has been dealt a full house of the royal virtues: courage, intelligence, compassion. She has needed them. Hers is a big, heroic life that moves her fellow citizens but now gets lived mostly in locked rooms and bulletproof cars. She leads that life partly above other Dutch people, as a national symbol -- and partly below them, as a prisoner. She is a democracy campaigner for whom the role of an ordinary democratic citizen is off-limits, an egalitarian for whom equal treatment is turning out to be an elusive and maybe impossible thing.

Yep, you read it in the New York Friggin Times Magazine. I ping on the NYT a lot, but it has some good writers that do some great work. Pinch needs to put this on the OP-ED pages.

Just to be clear, AHA is far from perfect, as I am. I don’t agree with everything she believes or doesn’t believe in. I would be worried if I did. What she deserves respect for is the fact that she displays the very best characteristics of those that have stood for freedom. IMHO she, someone that came to the West already an adult, represents and defends Western freedom better than those born to it. A living example that being Western isn’t a geographic or racial construct; is it a concept of how civilization should be run.

Thomas Jefferson would have understood her very well. Now that would be some dinner table conversation! I’ll leave you with some of TJ’s “talking points":

...the mass of mankind has not been born with saddles on their backs, nor a favored few booted and spurred, ready to ride them legitimately, by the grace of God."

Well aware that the opinions and belief of men depend not on their own will, but follow involuntarily the evidence proposed to their minds; that Almighty God hath created the mind free, and manifested his supreme will that free it shall remain by making it altogether insusceptible of restraint; that all attempts to influence it by temporal punishments, or burthens, or by civil incapacitations, tend only to beget habits of hypocrisy and meanness,..

I will leave you with a funny, but I think critical point she made;

The important thing, she insisted, was that people be able to talk about Islam openly, in an atmosphere free of intimidation. In her 2004 book, The Cage of Virgins she wrote, ''When a 'Life of Brian' comes out with Muhammad in the lead role, directed by an Arab equivalent of Theo van Gogh, it will be a huge step forward.''

Hat tip LGF

Start the week off right: Vive la difference

You know us Sailors, when you hear someone named Rachel begging for six-inch wood, you just have to read it all.

Hat tip Argghhh!!!, and BlueEyedInfidel.

Sunday Funnies

Sandy Berger's shame is our own

I do not now, nor have I ever owned or worn an AFDB; that being said, if you needed proof that the self-appointed elite in this country protect each other, the "Sandy Burglar" episode should prove it.

The NYT and WaPo give embarrassingly short stories on this. You know as well as I do that if this was, say, Paul Wolfowitz, this would be front page news every day until he went away for years G. Gordon Liddy like.

Let's review:

The terms of Berger's agreement required him to acknowledge to the Justice Department the circumstances of the episode. Rather than misplacing or unintentionally throwing away three of the five copies he took from the archives, as the former national security adviser earlier maintained, he shredded them with a pair of scissors late one evening at the downtown offices of his international consulting business.

The document, written by former National Security Council terrorism expert Richard A. Clarke, was an "after-action review" prepared in early 2000 detailing the administration's actions to thwart terrorist attacks during the millennium celebration. It contained considerable discussion about the administration's awareness of the rising threat of attacks on U.S. soil. . . .

Berger's archives visit occurred as he was reviewing materials as a designated representative of the Clinton administration to the national commission investigating the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. The question of what Clinton knew and did about the emerging al Qaeda threat before leaving office in January 2001 was acutely sensitive, as suggested by Berger's determination to spend hours poring over the Clarke report before his testimony.

He intentionally took highly sensitive, unique, classified documents out of a secure space. He transported them in an unapproved manner (socks). He destroyed them in an improper, non-secure manner with improper equipment (office scissors). He lied to Federal investigators.

What does this guy get?

Under a plea agreement, he would pay a $10,000 fine, surrender his access to classified government materials for three years and cooperate with investigators.

That, my friends is beyond a slap on the hand. That is an inside joke.

If John, Bubblehead, Eagle1, or I had done this; I don't want to even think what would have happened. At least a lifelong clearance loss and most likely some time in Kansas or other fine locations.

This is a huge issue. An individual given the highest trust of his nation, betrayed that trust to cover his own or his former bosses behind on a subject that has led to the death of tens of thousands of human beings worldwide. If the judge approves this travesty, he should be shunned. The personnel at the Justice Department that approved this plea should resign or be fired. But that's my world.

Oh, before I get fitted for my beanie; if you think he did this on his own, I want to play poker with you.

More Cowbell - Recruiting should be like a dog show

Over the last few weeks, the Cassandras from the “Diversity” Industry have been making all sorts of hay over the fact that “African-Americans” are not enlisting in the Army at higher levels as they once were.

First, everyone should read Thomas Sowell's book, Race and Culture: A World View. ES: there is never a perfect racial balance in any industry (his facts); to expect one is to be a fool or an autocrat (my opinion).

Generation X, Generation Y, and those that follow are/will continue in intermarry at higher rates. THAT IS A GOOD THING. More and more, we are truly a ethnic melting pot. For the sake of argument, lets pretend I have blond hair and blue eyes with the last name Gonzalez (my grandfather came over here from Spain right after he was on the losing side of the Spanish Civil War and the rest of my family is standard issue Anglo-Saxon-German-Scotch-Irish-Adoptedwhoknowswhat); my mother-in-law is from the Philippines and my father-in-law is the grandson of a Black Alabama sharecroppers whose son made good in the Navy and married a Hawaiian-Japanese mix he met at Waikiki in the late 1960s (which makes the wifey a wonderful melt) what do the professional, modern version of Wiener Gesellschaft für Rassenpflege in the Diversity Industry want to call my children? Mmmmm? I’m waiting…..and while I am waiting for an answer, will the Association of Naval Services Officers quit sending me their racist literature?

Enough venting, let’s do a minor Fisk of Robert Burns's little take on this.

Young blacks have grown markedly less willing to join the Army, citing fear of being sent to fight a war in Iraq they don’t believe in…..Fear of combat also is a leading reason fewer young women are choosing the Army…

Soooo, are you implying that blacks and women are cowards and every other “group” is not?

Statistically, the fear factor is about twice as strong among potential recruits as a whole as it was in 2000, the study said.

Duh. A few things happened since 2000 Robert; you may want to Google it.

The Army has suffered more of the 1,500-plus U.S. deaths in Iraq than any other service, and thousands have been wounded. Some soldiers will serve their second tour in Iraq this year. While Army leaders say soldiers have shown a strong interest in re-enlisting, the strains of war seem to have become a barrier to first-time enlistees.

Mmmm. Think to investigate why? Think it might be that those doing the fighting might know something that you are not writing about in the MSM that might change the view of the war?

Blacks make up about 23 percent of today’s active-duty Army, but the share of blacks in the recruit classes of recent years dropped. From 22.7 percent at the time of the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks, the share slid to 19.9 percent in 2002; 16.4 percent in 2003 and 15.9 percent last year, according to figures provided by Army Recruiting Command spokesman Douglas Smith.

The slide has continued, dropping to 13.9 percent as of Feb. 9.

That and other studies, all of which are posted on an obscure Defense Department Web site, cited the Iraq war as a major turnoff for many.

Major pissoff point for me. Robert, give the site address so we can see ourselves you AP snob.

BTW, where is the percentage concern for the NBA? Medical School? What a bunch of BS. Let the best serve, whatever they choose to do; and don’t let the bigots from the Diversity Industry get in their way.

All of this FOD needs to be understood in the context of the ethnic breakout of combat units. Even prior to 911, for a variety of reasons, non-blacks dominated the combat arms areas. This is best explained here. We are at war. We are doing more combat operations and shifting focus to combat units. It would make sense that a group that prefers areas of work outside of combat would not join as much. But the key is that the U.S. population consists of a self-defined population of 12.3% Black. They are now at 13.9% of recruits. Shouldn’t these people be happy? Wait, they can’t be happy. That would end their job. Ahhh-haaaa. "I see!", said the blind man.

Enough of Robert's poor work. A much better article on the subject by Josh White at The Washington Post. He covers the same subject in a more balanced way, and answers some of the questions left hanging by Roberts article.

African Americans still make up nearly a quarter of the overall Army, where, historically, blacks enlisted in strong numbers to take advantage of economic and social opportunities not available elsewhere.
But the drop in new recruits from that ethnic demographic means the Army has to make up ground elsewhere. Hispanics have increased from 10.4 percent of new recruits in 2000 to 13 percent in 2004; whites went from 61 percent in 2000 to 65 percent in 2004; and Asians or Pacific Islanders made up less than 1 percent of new soldiers in 2000 but nearly 5 percent in 2004.

Military scholars said the decline was not all that surprising, in part because African Americans' propensity to join the military has been dropping over the past decade.

Not a surprise when you look at some of the major leaders of the Congressional Black Caucus. You know, I am already tired of this post. Racial politics disgusts me, and the history of Blacks in the military is both varied and exemplary. This exercise in racial divisive politics by those with other motives that dates back to Vietnam and beyond, is old, stale, and insulting. The vultures are already counting the dead by the makeup of their genetic code. We are halfway through the first half of the 21st Century. Why do we have to live under this constant Baby Boomer 1970s fetish?

A focus on multiculturalism and racial/ethnic group never gets a country anywhere. With the increase in multi-racial marriage and children, this whole exercise is becoming an ugly anachronism. The future belongs to a culture of freedom, if you can keep it.