Treasury to Shut Down State . . . Right?

Even Canada and the EU are queasy about funding Hamas -- but not the rogue tranzis cheerleading for Allah at the US State Department, oh no.

The United States will continue sending jizya humanitarian aid to the Palestinian people even after a Hamas government is formed, a senior U.S. envoy told Palestinian leaders during the first high-level meeting between the two sides since Hamas' election victory.

State Department envoy David Welch said the U.S. continues "to be devoted to the humanitarian needs of the Palestinian people and we shall remain so."

How interesting. Here's an excerpt from the Treasury Department's profile of Hamas:

The U.S. designated HAMAS as a terrorist organization pursuant to Executive Order 12947 in 1995 and as a foreign terrorist organization in 1997. HAMAS was also designated a “specially designated global terrorist” under E.O. 13224 in 2001. HAMAS is a terrorist organization that has intentionally killed hundreds of innocent civilians and continues to kill and maim with the aim of terrorizing a civilian population.

During 2002, more than 370 persons – including 10 US citizens – were killed in Israel, the West Bank and the Gaza Strip by acts of terrorism. HAMAS was responsible for carrying out more than 50 of these attacks, including shootings, suicide bombings, and standoff mortar-and-rocket attacks against civilian and military targets.

Three months after 9/11, a "charity" called the Holy Land Foundation for Relief and Development (HLF) was designated as a terrorist fundraising organization and shut down for funneling money to Hamas.

The Holy Land Foundation for Relief and Development (HLF) was designated under Executive Orders 13224 and 12947 as a charity that provided millions of dollars of material and logistical support to HAMAS. HLF, originally known as the Occupied Land Fund, was established in California in 1989 as a tax-exempt charity. In 1992, HLF relocated to Richardson, Texas. It had offices in California, New Jersey, and Illinois, and individual representatives scattered throughout the United States, the West Bank, and Gaza. In the year 2000 alone, HLF raised over $13 million. HLF supported HAMAS activities through direct fund transfers to its offices in the West Bank and Gaza that are affiliated with HAMAS and transfers of funds to Islamic charity committees ("zakat committees") and other charitable organizations that are part of HAMAS or controlled by HAMAS members.

So it must follow that the Treasury Department will have to designate the State Department as a terrorist financing organization under Executive Orders 13224 and 12947, and shut it down.

Right?

Will Europe Fight?

A friend e-mailed, asking if I agreed with Victor Davis Hanson's assessment that Europeans will eventually recover their fighting spirit. Hanson's column of last week, What Will Europe Really Do?, actually leaves it up to the reader to make a prediction:

Once threatened, it will either react with a newly acquired Churchillian maturity to protect its civilization, or cave, in hopes that even more Chamberlain-type appeasement will satisfy the Islamists.

He writes this as though Europe is a cohesive whole, which, on many levels, is not exactly true. The most important division in Europe is between ordinary people, and the utopian elites who govern them. Because of the this yawning gap, both weakness and strength can be expected -- in that order. For what it's worth, here's my prediction.

News out of Europe consists almost exclusively of what the legions of delusional bureaucrats are saying and doing. But when you go around and talk to ordinary Germans, Dutch, Danes, and so on, they are wonderfully unencumbered with all the multicultural, politically correct baggage their rulers -- and Americans -- carry around. Most know damn well what the problem is, and don't feel any shame in clearly stating it: Islam. However, Europeans also seem conditioned to just accept their fate, so most are worried or angry, but passive. Unfortunately, the only people who are worried and angry, and ready to take action, are all the neo-Nazi National Fronts.

If I had to guess at how it would go down, I'd say that some huge riot or bombing will be followed by demands the Eurocrats can't refuse (Tony Blankley touches on a similar scenario in the first chapter of The West's Last Chance). But once Islamist demands get enacted and start interfering with people's lives, I don't think ordinary Europeans will stand for it. That's when the tide of rebellion is likely to wash in.

Guns useful for anything beyond hunting quail are universally illegal in Europe. So if the nationalists aren't already plugging into the black market and setting up arms smuggling networks (from eastern Europe), they will. And then the Eurocrats will have a perpetual low-intensity conflict on their hands. Jos Schmo & pals shoot some Muslims or burn down a mosque, then Mo Schmo & pals retaliate, until parts of Europe look more like Iraq.

Modern Europeans fight every war the same way: they appease and back down and wait too damn long, so by the time they realize that action must be taken, they're forced to employ repulsively extreme measures. So if Islamists are dumb enough to start suicide-bombing cafes and shopping centers as in Israel, I think there's a good chance they'd start being massacred in large numbers. Men, women, and children alike -- all because the utopian elites are too "tolerant" and "enlightened" to adopt restrictive, but non-military, measures now.

One way it could spiral into all-out civil war is if the Eurocrats brought in the military to crush all violence equally, which they probably would. European forces are small and composed almost entirely of conscripts, so it's likely they would experience numerous desertions. Many of the soldiers who stay would be likely to look the other way rather than fire on their own countrymen, and some could be expected to actively assist a native resistance. By that time, nationalists would start winning elections like crazy, and eventually, Europeans would take back the continent.

Europe will remain European, I'm quite sure, but not without another bloodbath. It's too soon to predict whether US forces would wind up assisting, but one thing is certain: Islamists and nationalists both hate Jews, who need to get out now.

Hanson's column ends: "It should be a fascinating spring ahead." Agreed.

Oh, This is Gonna Be Fun

Securing her place in history alongside Tokyo Rose and Hanoi Jane, Moonbat-in-Chief Cindy Sheehan will be agitating for the enemy headlining a protest at Landstuhl Army Medical Center in Germany on March 11 and 12.

Driven to psychosis by the death of her son in Iraq, apparently she objects to medical care for wounded soldiers and wants everyone else's son to die too. Let's hope a Landstuhl psychiatrist can find her a padded room and some decent meds. As for her supporters, I don't know what their excuse is.

Priceless quotes from Thursday's front-page Stars & Stripes story:

[Elsa Rassbach, an event organizer with American Voices Abroad, which is supporting Sheehan’s trip] said, "We’re here to just democratically talk about U.S. policy."

That's "democratic" as in the "German Democratic Republic" and the "Democratic People's Republic of Korea."

Sheehan’s goals are to bring the troops home and have peace on earth, she said in an e-mail to Stars and Stripes. . . . Rassbach said, “we just want less wounded troops and for this to go away."

How old is she? Six-and-a-half? Seven? Ah, but I've just insulted seven-year-olds, many of whom can speak with greater depth about war. That would not include Jimmy Carter's daughter.

With the Kaiserslautern military community home to more than 50,000 Americans with military ties, Sheehan could face a rough welcome. When asked for comment Wednesday on Sheehan’s upcoming visit, several soldiers in Kaiserslautern asked if they could be quoted anonymously.

One soldier, who recently returned from Iraq, did give his name but didn’t have much to say about Sheehan. "Anything I would have to say about her, you couldn’t print," Army Staff Sgt. Mark Genthner said.

Officials at Landstuhl Regional Medical Center have received no requests for the group to visit the hospital or make donations, said Marie Shaw, hospital spokeswoman.

Rassbach said she did not know what response servicemembers would have to Sheehan’s appearance outside Ramstein Air Base.

Heh. Bet she's gonna find out. Be sure to see Soldier's Angels Germany for more reax & info on the counterprotest.

Now That's an Apology

As I wrote this morning, I believe we're now past the point where even our most strident words have the power to derail the oncoming freight train. But I also wrote that we should continue to use them with all possible vigor for as long as we can. It's a matter of principle. And this is exactly what I mean:

The Official Apology, From Denmark to the Muslim World, simply called "We´re Sorry!

We´re sorry we gave you shelter when war drove you from your home country....
We´re sorry we took you in when others rejected you.....
We´re sorry we gave you the opportunity to get a good education.....
We´re sorry we gave you food and a home when you had none.....
We´re sorry we let you re-unite with your family when your homeland was no longer safe...
We´re sorry we never forced you to work while WE paid all your bills.....
We´re sorry we gave you almost FREE rent, phone, internet, car and school for your 10 kids...
We´re sorry we build you Mosques so you could worship your religion in our Christian land...
We´re sorry we never forced you to learn our language after staying 30 years!....

And so....from all Danes to the entire Muslim world,we just wanna say . . .

Well, I do try to avoid using the word that comes next, so you'll have to click the link!

The Downward Spiral

As Muslim fury peaked over the Muhammad cartoons, this picture was taken at a "protest" in London three weeks ago.

Now, a court in Nordrhein-Westfalen has sentenced a 61-year-old German man to one year in jail and 300 hours of community service for marketing toilet paper with the word "Koran" printed on it, and pledging to donate the proceeds to victims of Islamic terrorism.

Outside Paris, a 23-year-old Jewish man was tortured for three weeks and left for dead by Muslims who lured him with female bait. Ilan Halimi, who sensed which way the winds are blowing and was saving up to move to Israel, died on the way to the hospital. French authorities, naturally, have been working overtime to bury the religion/ethnicity of both the victim and the perpetrators.

In the wake of the Cartoon Intifada, EU officials and national governments are scrambling to decide how best to restrict free speech -- that of the blasphemers, mind you, not of the pro-genocide Muslim "protesters." Presently, I'll compile the long, sordid list of eager Eurodhimmis and what they're proposing. But first, I'd like to explain why I've been MIA for the last two weeks.

Reason number one is simply a huge workload and not enough hours in the day. Reason number two, however, is what I want to discuss. Every single day, I browse the news with my morning cup of coffee, and feel an increasing sense of futility and inevitability.

Multiple times daily, Islamists murder an innocent, burn down an embassy, destroy a church, suicide-bomb an unsuspecting crowd, burn a flag, issue a death threat, put a bounty on an infidel's head, publish sick blood-libel propaganda, blame the US and/or Israel for everything, hold a "peace" rally demanding the extermination of non-Muslims, credibly threaten to finish what Hitler started, and insist on shari'a in the West.

And multiple times daily, Western dhimmis issue apologies, gloss over the violence out of "respect" for Islam, hold conferences to work out how best to accede to Muslim demands, defend unchecked Muslim immigration, turn a blind eye to the atrocious treatment of non-Muslims in Islamic countries, and refuse to even arrest "protesters" who would as soon kill us all.

At the same time, the Cartoon Jihad has awakened a segment of the West that for whatever reason was not roused by 9/11, 3/11, or 7/7. Nevermind the thousands of lives those events claimed; now that 12 Danish cartoonists are living in secrecy and fear under 24-hour police protection, even comatose pacifist liberals are starting to grasp that the Green Peril is no phantom bogeyman. Good. Better late than never.

But here's my problem. Regardless of what I say -- or Robert Spencer, or Ali Sina, or Daniel Pipes, or Michelle Malkin, or Charles Johnson, or Andrew Bostom, or Nidra Poller, or Mark Steyn, or Oriana Fallaci, or Victor Davis Hanson, or Bat Ye'or, or Ibn Warraq, or any number of other writers far more eminent than I -- our words are so much ephemeral fluff in the face of the oncoming freight train. Within living memory, we've been through this before: Europe watched the Nazi juggernaut gather steam for nearly a full decade, finding the resolve to do something only after it was too late. Here we are once again -- but the consequences of acting "too late" will be far worse.

Imagine how much more difficult it would have been to defeat Nazism if it'd had official immunity as a respected world religion. If large populations of committed Nazis had lived in allied territories, under the protection of laws discouraging, prohibiting, or criminalizing Naziphobia. If our cultural climate had been so dysfunctional that we accepted genocidal thugocracy as merely a diverse alternative to democratic freedoms. If we'd been admonished not to criticize Mein Kampf by people who'd never read it, and threatened with death by people who'd read it very carefully indeed. If we'd been so unsure of ourselves, and so eager to surrender, that mocking Nazis provoked widespread official opprobrium.

We wouldn't have defeated Nazism. We would be speaking German, packing our eight kids off to Hitler Jugend rallies, and hunting down every last Jew, gypsy, and misfit. And we would have done it with attitudes ranging from tired indifference to enthusiastic piety. It would have been a world, as Nietzsche put it, beyond good and evil.

Maybe I'm being melodramatic here. The point is, I'm increasingly convinced that nothing I or any other resister says will change what is coming. While we must use our power to speak with all possible vigor while we still have it -- Europeans especially -- it's also time to think about what we will do when our efforts fail to slow or reverse the inevitable. Western governments occasionally shovel shit against the tide, but overall, we cannot count on their protection, at least not until too many have lost too much. I suppose I'd say it feels as if we're running out of time.

So, these last two silent weeks, I've been contemplating how much I appreciate the things we have, and the unfathomable things we, as individuals, might have to do to protect them.

Carpe diem!

Death To Valentine's Day

Some group of perpetually outraged, puritanical church ladies is always out there competing for the Biggest Buzzkill award. Alas, the time-honored tradition of mocking uptight Baptists and nuns with rulers is becoming a cherished relic of a bygone era, now that non-Muslims everywhere face rather more than a scolding from the Lionesses of Islam^TM and their heavily-armed men.

An Islamic separatist women's group, known for its fierce opposition to Western-style romance, vowed to prevent couples celebrating Valentine's Day in revolt-hit Indian Kashmir.

"Revolt-hit"? Surely there's a less awkward circumlocution for "jihad."

"We will not allow anyone to observe Valentine's Day as it does nothing but spread immorality among youth," said Aasiya Andrabi, firebrand leader of the separatist Dukhtaran-e-Millat or Daughters of Faith.

The group, which supports a 16-year-old separatist insurgency against New Delhi's rule in Indian Kashmir, is also engaged in a crusade to stamp out immorality in the Muslim-majority region.

Valentine's Day, which is celebrated February 14, is "against our culture and Islamic teachings," Andrabi said in a statement reported by Current News, a local news agency.

The anti-Valentine's Day protest Andrabi's return to moral policing after her release from jail where she spent four months for harassing a couple.

The group kicked off its campaign Friday against "Lover's Day" in Srinagar, the state's summer capital, by raiding half a dozen shops, confiscating Valentine's Day cards and making a bonfire out of them.

Gee, they ought to get together with unshaven Berkeley feminazis, who often rage against Valentine's Day because they can never get a date. But somehow I don't think The Lionesses would appreciate The Vagina Monologues.

Technical Difficulties?

For the last 3-4 days, we've been unable to access certain websites through German ISPs. LGF, Jihad Watch, and other "radioactive" sites come up just fine, but others, like Drudge, Malkin, as well as a variety of non-political sites, return only an error message. Same results using Firefox and IE, and attempts through different ISPs within Germany.

German courts have ruled that the government may block foreign Nazi sites, and I wouldn't be surprised if some overzealous tranzi put Drudge and Malkin in this category. Alternatively, an undersea cable gets cut from time to time, drastically restricting access to US servers. But neither of these possibilities explain why we can access some US and UK sites but not others, such as bicycle parts or gravesites of famous scientists. Any info on what the story is would be much appreciated.

Just Because We Can

Oh lordy. The cartoon jihad has unleashed some of the best humor the civilized world has produced in eons. Don't miss:

Muzzie rave party feat. DJ Iman Hussein. Ecstasy, glow sticks, and pacifiers would not add much to the weirdness.

Wisconsin Lutherans riot over caricatures of Vince Lombardi: "Those who sow the curds of blasphemy will reap the cheddar wheel of destruction."

Today's Tidbits

The Face of Muhammad has mapped the Cartoon War, marking countries belonging to the Dar al-Harb (house of war, that's us infidels), the Dar al-Sulh (the house of truce, i.e., neutrals and compliant dhimmis), and the Dar al-Islam (the house of Islam). The lines of the global war are being drawn.

It's sobering, but we mustn't forget to mock the enemy: The Anonymous Muslim Complaint Box.

Sublime Taqqiya from the FMC

The Free Muslims Coaltion Against Terrorism (FMC) is supposed to be different from all those other CAIR-clone purveyors of double-talk and hogwash, but really, they differ only in their level of sophistication. Buried in their alleged condemnation of Muslims' reactions to the Danish Muhammad cartoons is this choice tidbit:

The response by Muslims to the cartoons is absolutely pathetic and depressing but revealing. The reason Muslims are responding with anger and threats of violence is because most Muslims live in countries where democracy and freedom of speech are alien concepts. Moreover, the Muslim world suffers from a lack of visionary leadership.

No. Muslims are responding with threats and violence because this is what the Qur'an, the hadith, and Islamic leaders, clerics, and scholars teach. Depictions of Muhammad are idols, and idolatry is punishable by death. The end. Many non-Muslims live in places where democracy and freedom of speech are alien concepts, and none of them react to cartoons by burning down embassies and vowing to exterminate the infidels. Fanaticism is an inherent feature of Islam.

. . . the stupid reaction by Muslims has caused many more news papers to publish insulting images of the Prophet Mohammed. When will Muslims wake up and realize that their intolerance of opposing opinions is making the kafirs resistant to Islam keeping them in the dark ages?

You can read the whole thing here, as well as comment on FMC's blog.

Weekend Warrior

Regrettably, my workload has suddenly skyrocketed, with no particular lull in sight. The paycheck is nice, but for a while at least, it means I'll probably be limited to posting on the weekends.

The big story this week is, of course, the rapidly degenerating Muhammad cartoon situation. A profusion of other blogs are covering it in extensive detail, so I see no need to duplicate their efforts.

Die Welt, the German paper that published the Danish cartoons, said it best: freedom of speech includes the right to blaspheme. I emphatically agree, so here's a link to some of my favorite collateral blasphemy (such as the ones below). Enjoy!

Merkel Likens Iran to Nazi Era

Bravo.

German Chancellor Angela Merkel likened Iran's nuclear plans on Saturday to the threat posed by the Nazis in their early days, as top U.S. officials urged a tough line to stop Tehran from making an atomic bomb.

Addressing the annual Munich security conference, Merkel said countries around the world had underestimated the Nazi threat as Adolf Hitler rose to power.

"Looking back to German history in the early 1930s when National Socialism (Nazism) was on the rise, there were many outside Germany who said 'It's only rhetoric -- don't get excited'," she told the assembled world defense policy makers.

"There were times when people could have reacted differently and, in my view, Germany is obliged to do something at the early stages ... We want to, we must prevent Iran from developing its nuclear program."