What Do Muslims Really Think?

President Bush has implemented a policy of bringing democracy to the Middle East. But, even if his policy succeeds in its immediate aim, what will be the outcome? What will the Muslim peoples choose, and who will they choose to lead them?

Two articles bring an interesting answer to this question. Amir Taheri identifies the Islamists as descended from the Salafi movement, which he describes as a faux-religious movement, Neo-Islam, that is not religious but political and totalitarian. It was all started in the 19th century by

the Persian adventurer Jamaleddin Assadabadi, who disguised himself as an Afghan to hide his Shiite origin and set out to build a career in the mostly Sunni land of Egypt. Although a Freemason, Jamal (who dubbed himself Sayyed Gamal) concluded that the only way to win power among Muslims was by appealing to their religious sentiments. So he transformed himself into an Islamic scholar, grew an impressive beard and donned a huge black turban to underline his claim of being a descendant of the Prophet...

[His partner Mirza Malkam Khan] had a slogan of unrivaled cynicism: "Tell the Muslims something is in the Koran, and they will die for you."

Their direct political descendents are the Muslim Brotherhood, the “semi-literate mullah named Ruhallah Khomeini,” and the Afghan Taliban. To Taheri, this movement is first and foremost political, and uses religious imagery purely as a way to get support and grab power.

Suppose President Bush achieves regime change in Iran. What would the Iranian people do? Jason Lee Steorts conducts an interview with Iranian dissident Amir Abbas Fakhravar, author of the “anti-regime book This Place Is Not a Ditch,” to find out. The key question is whether sanctions or military action would strengthen the Iranian regime. Says Fakhravar:

Please don’t ever say that the people of Iran are going to have resentment or anger in their hearts toward America or Western countries for doing this. [On] Saturday [February 4]... the people here found out that Iran was going before the [U.N.] Security Council, and there was celebration all over Tehran. I heard from my own family, the families of my friends, that it was one of the busiest days of the year for the pastry shops — that people were buying pastries and cookies and candies in the streets of Tehran and going to each other to celebrate.

Well, he’s a dissident. He would say that. What about support from the US government?

I cannot mention who, but I’m definitely communicating with some people in the U.S. government and have established contacts with people in the Bush administration.

So the War on Terror, the war against the Islamists, the contest for the future, continues.

A Moderate Muslim Speaks. And How

Have you been waiting for a moderate Muslim to speak out on the Cartoon Wars? Look no further. She has spoken and she is, appropriately, the daughter of a “martyr.”

Writer Nonie Darwish is daughter of a man who was

sent by Egypt’s President, Gamal Abdel Nasser, to head the Egyptian military intelligence in Gaza and the Sinai where he founded the Palestinian Fedayeen, or "armed resistance". They made cross-border attacks into Israel, killing 400 Israelis and wounding more than 900 others.

In the London Daily Telegraph she writes that her father was killed in Fedayeen operations and “was hailed by Nasser as a national hero and was considered a shaheed, or martyr.”

In school in Gaza, I learned hate, vengeance and retaliation. Peace was never an option, as it was considered a sign of defeat and weakness. At school we sang songs with verses calling Jews "dogs" (in Arab culture, dogs are considered unclean)...
Sadly, the way I was raised was not unique. Hundreds of millions of other Muslims also have been raised with the same hatred of the West and Israel as a way to distract from the failings of their leaders. Things have not changed since I was a little girl in the 1950s.

But here is the kicker, the insight that explains the whole Cartoon War kerfuffle.

Indeed, with Denmark set to assume the rotating presidency of the UN Security Council, the flames of the cartoon controversy have been fanned by Iran and Syria. This is critical since the International Atomic Energy Agency is expected to refer Iran to the Security Council and demand sanctions. At the same time, Syria is under scrutiny for its actions in Lebanon. Both Iran and Syria cynically want to embarrass the Danes to achieve their dangerous goals.

No kidding. Thanks, MSM, for the wall-to-wall coverage on this interesting concept.

Go ahead. Read the whole thing.

Can Compassionate Conservatism Win in Britain?

George W. Bush ran for president in 2000 as a “compassionate conservative.” Annoying to conservatives, his campaign was an attempt to tackle the reality that most people do not think of the welfare state as a bureaucratic government monopoly but as society’s compassionate attempt to help the less fortunate.

Now David Cameron, new leader of Britain’s Conservative Party, is trying the same approach. He is dealing with the reality that, however clumsy and bureaucratic and monopolistic Britain’s government health service and government schools may be, people still think of them as “their” schools and “their” National Health Service.

In a speech to the British think tank Demos Cameron has laid out his strategy in broad terms. He calls for the revival of “civil society” between the two extremes of government and the individual. And so he and his colleagues are working out policy

to establish clear borders of responsibility, by working out what is best done by the state, what is best done by civil society and what is best done by the individual.
But, in seeking that balance, we start with an instinctive desire to put more trust in civil society and in the individual, rather than in the bureaucratic apparatus of the state.

So he is clearly attempting to define the Labour Party as the party of clunking and insensitive bureaucratic apparatus.

In the London Spectator Matthew Parris is trying to think forward from Cameron’s speech to the actual battle for the hearts and minds of the British people. What will happen when the Labour Party starts to talk about “Tory cuts” in welfare state provision? Civil society is all very well when there is no alternative. In Ethiopia there is no welfare state. That means that civil society in the form of

family and village are all a needy Ethiopian has to turn to, and family and village know it.

That is why Brownites [supporters of Labour leader Gordon Brown] suspect that a Tory party which argues for a bigger role for civil society may secretly contemplate cutting state welfare. This is what Labour will argue. The Conservatives need an answer.

The answer probably is that conservatives need to make a new argument, an argument they have up to now been afraid to make, that state welfare is not compassionate and kind, but cruel and oppressive. We need to argue, and convince the voters throughout the Anglosphere, that the government welfare state is not a nice cuddly thing, but the proximate cause of all the wrongs of society, from angry young gangbangers to healthy middle-aged people drawing government disability benefits and to senior citizens cruelly dependent upon the state for their welfare in their old age.

Until we can make that argument, and persuade the political center of our argument (and let us be frank here, “political center” means non-political middle-class mothers), then the “cuts” argument will continue to work for the parties of the left.

Maybe David Cameron is the conservative who will figure out how to cut this Gordian Knot.

Low Fat is Out -- Government Study

In the largest study ever conducted into the efficacy of low-fat
dieting the result is finally out. No difference. As Gina Kolata writes in The New York Times:

The largest study ever to ask whether a low-fat diet reduces the risk of getting cancer or heart disease has found that the diet has no effect.

The Washington Post agrees.

Low-fat diets do not protect women against heart attacks, strokes, breast cancer or colon cancer, a major study has found, contradicting what had once been promoted as one of the cornerstones of a healthy lifestyle.

OK. So now what? Do we shut down the whole government enterprise that advises us about our eating? Do we stop the legal assault on fast food?
The biggest question of all is, do women now obsess about something else? For over a generation we have encouraged women to think that they can control their weight (i.e., attractiveness) by fiddling with the foods that they eat. Now we learn that the big deal, the low-fat diet, does not have any effect on health. Not really. Not so it would make a significant difference to a woman’s life.

In fact, the likelihood is that low-fat dieting actually has a negative effect on a woman’s life and her family’s life.

Women obsess about health issues for a very good reason. Health is related to survival and women are interested in anything that improves survival for their loved ones. That is why, if you listen to the conversation of two women friends out for a walk, the chances are that they are talking about health issues.

But if women have been putting energy into low-fat dieting and low-fat dieting has no effect on health then they have been wasting their energy. They have been doing the familial equivalent of leaf raking.

The New York Times is not yet ready to throw in the towel on dieting.

The results, the study investigators agreed, do not justify recommending low-fat diets to the public to reduce their heart disease and cancer risk. Given the lack of benefit found in the study, many medical researchers said that the best dietary advice, for now, was to follow federal guidelines for healthy eating, with less saturated and trans fats, more grains, and more fruits and vegetables.

And the editorialists at the Times agree:

Meanwhile, experts in nutrition and chronic diseases have moved on to a new consensus: it is not the total fat but the kind of fat you eat that is important. Many groups recommend that people cut their intake of "bad" fats, like saturated fats and trans fats, and increase their intake of "good" fats, like those found in vegetable and fish oils.

But before we give such unsubstantiated advice, and encourage women to put enormous energy into feeding their families “less saturated and trans fats, more grains, and more fruits and vegetables,” shouldn’t we do a study?

Could it be that food is food and that, if we just relax and enjoy it, we’ll live just as long as the obsessive dieter next door? As the Times says, by the time any long-term study on “good” and “bad” fats gets done, the “nutrition experts might have moved on to yet another approach.”

Go Ahead Democrats. Insult the President Why Don't You

Here’s how the Washington Post covered the insults to President Bush at the Coretta Scott King funeral.

At one point, the Rev. Joseph E. Lowery, a former head of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), the group Martin Luther King Jr. helped found, made a reference to not finding weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. The well-heeled, mostly black crowd erupted in a standing ovation.

But at the conservative Washington Times things looked a little different. Of President Carter, not mentioned in the Washington Post article, reporter Joseph Curl wrote:

Halfway through the service, former President Jimmy Carter scolded Mr. Bush for his terror-surveillance program... Mr. Carter later said Hurricane Katrina was a clear sign that racism is still alive in America. Several black leaders have blamed the president for what they consider an insufficient federal response.

And about Joseph Lowery, he wrote:

The Rev. Joseph Lowery, co-founder of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference and an outspoken civil rights leader, during his speech about Mrs. King ripped into Mr. Bush... “We know now that there were no weapons of mass destruction over there... [T]here are weapons of misdirection right down here.”

Real nice, isn’t it, to insult the President of the United States right to his face.

And you wonder: Did the Washington Post’s light touch on the insults issue from embarrassment over the graceless behavior of Democratic speakers, or did they not even notice the outrage?

This sort of behavior puts the lie to the gospel of political correctness, the doctrine that we should not use speech that hurts, that we should be sanctioned for using “hate speech.”

If we didn’t already know, we ought to know by now. It’s all a political ploy, a trick to deny conservatives their constitutional right to speech. It is all about licensing left-wing speech, however racist, however sexist, however it plays the class warfare card.

What Democrats don’t seem to understand, living as they do in their liberal bubble, is just how clear a message this sort of thing sends to people who aren’t fully committed liberal blue-state Democrats.

The first rule of politics is: Don’t make unnecessary enemies. Especially don’t make enemies of decent middle-class Americans.

Global Cooling on the Way

Russian scientist Khabibullo Abdusamatov says forget about global warming. He predicts global cooling by the middle of the 21st century.

Khabibullo Abdusamatov of the Pulkovo Astronomic Observatory said temperatures would begin falling six or seven years from now, when global warming caused by increased solar activity in the 20th century reached its peak, and that the coldest period would occur 15-20 years after a major solar output decline in 2035-2045.

Yes, I know. You young pups who have been raised on global warming scares feel like you just took a blow to the solar plexus.

But before the global warming fad it was generally accepted that the “Little Ice Age” at the middle of the last millennium may have had something to do with very low sunspot activity.

Abdusamatov said dramatic changes in the earth’s surface temperatures were an ordinary phenomenon, not an anomaly, and resulted from variations in the Sun’s energy output and ultraviolet radiation.


The Northern Hemisphere’s most recent cool-down period of 1645-1705, known as the Little Ice Age, left canals in Holland frozen solid and forced people in Greenland to abandon their houses to glaciers, the scientist said.

The mid-millennium decline in sunspot activity was called the Maunder Minimum. Of course, up until recently we had no way of reliably measuring fluctuations in “insolation,” the solar energy reaching the earth. But now we do, and scientists generally accept that the sun emits more radiation when it has a lot of sunspots and emits less radiation when it has few sunspots.

But what about the “hockey stick,” the graph in the UN’s report on global warming that shows surface temperatures pretty well flat during the last millennium up until the sudden increase in temperatures starting in 1850?

I’m glad you asked that. The hockey stick assumption seems odd, considering that in Britain, for instance, it was warm enough in the year 1000 to grow grapes, yet by the seventeenth century the River Thames regularly froze over in winter. How could global temperatures have been flat when reports so clearly indicate significant fluctuation? For a discussion of problems with the hockey stick graph, disussed here.

Maybe there is nothing to it. Maybe there won’t be any global cooling, and we can keep religiously worrying about global warming and spending big research bucks to study it. After all, the Russians would naturally prefer continued global warming to reduce the chill of those notorious Siberian winters. Maybe their forecast of global cooling is just wishful thinking.

Ask a Tough Question of a Senator...

As we all know, it is the objective news journalists who ask the tough questions. We know that because the journalists keep telling us that the whole point of the First Amendment and the special position given to the press is to allow them to ask the tough questions that others may not have the courage to put to powerful politicians and officeholders.

So when blogger Paul Mirengoff asked Senator Dick Durbin a searching question about the constitutionality of the president’s electronics surveillance operations the Senator responded with... a question about who Mirengoff represented. Oh really. Now that tells us a lot about the media business. Ask a politician a tough question and he asks: Who is your boss?

But here is the “dog that didn’t bark” moment, from Mark Tapscott, quoting an unnamed “veteran Senate GOP staffer:”

"The mainstream news media that covers Congress is tightly controlled by the House and Senate press galleries and they would never be so aggressive in pressing a Member of Congress. So this was big, it was unprecedented to have a blogger asking such questions. We need more bloggers up here asking questions because they aren’t controlled by the galleries."

Oh really. Do you mean to say, as veteran CBS 60 Minutes talent Mike Wallace used to say, that our tough questioning MSM reporters really aren’t? Never have been? Never will be?

So what’s the point? What’s the point of the First Amendment? What’s the point of these sacred “shield” laws to protect journalists from retribution?

We always wondered why the MSM is so gentle with the Democrats. Apparently it is not just that they are all liberals together. There is an unseen doggie leash restraining the reporters, the doggie leash held by their own colleagues in the press gallery, the ones that control the press credentials, the essential access to Congress.

If you want corroboration about the power of the press gallery and its credentialing of reporters to the US Congress, you could start with Joseph Farah’s fight to get WorldNetDaily.com accredited to report on our public servants on Capitol Hill.