Tuesday, September 14, 2010

Couple of things to start the day: first, the man investigating the CRU e-mails & mess

brings up a big problem:
Summary: This is a long post, but the bottom line is worth the time to read it. Under oath, in front of the House of Commons Committee on Science and Technology, Lord Oxburgh testified that it is impossible to reconstruct an accurate global temperature record over the past 1,000 years. Especially one that could claim modern climate is significantly different from that seen over the last 1000 years.
It's long, and it drives the stake further through the heart of AGW.


Second, well, it's hard to summarize this bit of history.
...For several thousand years the Jewish people have been celebrating the Rosh Hashanah Holiday, which starts tonight at sundown, by blowing the Shofar. At the conclusion of Yom Kippur, the day of atonement, the Shofar is blown one last time to signal the end of the fast. Several years ago Elder of Ziyon discovered that during the British mandate Jews were forbidden to blow the Shofar. The British reasoning should be familiar to anyone paying attention to our conflict with Islam today; Elder uses contemporary newspaper accounts to document a dynamic that continues:

Ah, now it becomes clear.

A Jew does something that is a religious requirement, that takes a couple of seconds, that disturbs nobody - and Arabs rioted in 1929.

Not just rioted, but they murdered 135 Jews, expelling Jews from communities (like Hebron) that they had lived in for centuries.

And the British blamed the Jews. Because one of the riots started in 1929 after a Jew blowed a Shofar at the Kotel.

In the bizarre logic of genteel anti-semitism, Jews must be punished for the murderous actions of Arabs. And the ironic flip-side of such an attitude is that Arabs are treated like savages who cannot be expected to control themselves.

(Christians have (re)learned that such a dynamic is not exclusive to Jewish-Muslim relations; Hindus have known this for a long time as well.)
...
This is a role that we have seen time and time again the Arabs take advantage of - they themselves have now brought up generations that believe that the Arab world has no responsibility for their actions. The gullible West, wracked with guilt over crimes of colonialism and liberal angst that favors the underdog no matter how deadly they are, do not hold them accountable for their actions.

So we have riots in 1929 that were the fault of a Jewish shofar blower, we have an intifada in 2001 that is the fault of a politician taking a walk on a Jewish holy site nearby, we have deadly demonstrations for the supposed desecration of a printed book.

And who can blame Arabs for acting this way? It has been shown to be a successful strategy! The Western fear of the mythical Arab street has fueled brain-dead decisions like the British made in the 1930s. Arabs daily threaten the West with the "power" of their people who can be whipped up into a frenzy with a single word from a sheikh. And the West slavishly decides, whoa, we cannot risk the wrath of a billion Arabs, we'd better force the Jews do make more concessions instead, because Jews are intelligent and can see reason, unlike the Arab savages whom we are scared of.

It is a winning formula. The 1921 riots, the 1929 riots, the 1936 strike and violence, the 1989 intifada, the 2001 intifada - all are cases where violence by Arabs are rewarded by the West rather than punished. And as long as terror and violence is rewarded and the victims perversely blamed, it is a formula that is guaranteed to be repeated far into the future.

And now we have everyone from the President to the general commanding in Afghanistan telling a guy in the US that he can't do something because it'll be so upsetting to muslims. Who, before he'd actually DONE anything, started rioting and burning US and Israeli flags(the Jewish state having not a damn thing to do with this, but they are Jews, after all) and the usual crap. Which does bring up another point:
One thing to say "Sir, the action you propose is crude and we don't think it's right"; another to say "You can't exercise your right to do something disturbing because the muslims will riot; we can't expect them to act like civilized human beings and respect free speech, so YOU have to not do or say what you wish."

And we have the Hamasque imam telling us "If I don't build the mosque/religious center THERE, muslims the world over will see it as an attack and(you knew it was coming) riot and attack the US and commit terrorist acts." Translation: Give us what we want or else, you foul unbelievers.

Someone put it nicely: the proper response to all those people in other countries would have beeen "This is not an act of the US government, it's an act by a private citizen which he has the right to do; stop threatening us for not bowing to your wishes, because we consider that 'freedom of speech' thing to be very important, and we're not giving it up, even when something said or done is offensive."

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