The Islamic Olympics

Mark Steyn provides yet another example of how Western liberals imagine doubtful threats while ignoring obvious ones.

Steyn writes:

Tablighi Jamaat, the Islamic missionary group, has announced plans to build a mosque next door to the new Olympic stadium. The London Markaz will be the biggest house of worship in the United Kingdom: it will hold 70,000 people – only 10,000 fewer than the Olympic stadium, and 67,000 more than the largest Christian facility (Liverpool’s Anglican cathedral). Tablighi Jamaat plans to raise the necessary £100 million through donations from Britain and “abroad”.

And I’ll bet they do. I may be a notorious Islamophobic hatemonger, but, watching these two projects go up side by side in Newham, I don’t think there’ll be any doubt which has the tighter grip on fiscal sanity. Another year or two, and Londoners may be wishing they could sub-contract the entire Olympics to Tablighi Jamaat.

I was slightly surprised by the number of e-mails I’ve received in the past 48 hours from Britons aggrieved about the new mega-mosque. To be sure, it would be heartening if the Archbishop of Canterbury announced plans to mark the Olympics by constructing a 70,000-seat state-of-the-art Anglican cathedral, but what would you put in it? Even an all-star double bill comprising a joint Service of Apology to Saddam Hussein followed by Ordination of Multiple Gay Bishops in Long-Term Committed Relationships (Non-Practising or Otherwise, According to Taste) seems unlikely to fill the pews. Whatever one feels about it, the London Markaz will be a more accurate symbol of Britain in 2012 than Her Majesty pulling up next door with the Household Cavalry.

More on Tablighi Jammaat and the credulousness of Western liberals from the Middle East Quarterly.

Iranian Nuance

Democrats feed their “Bush Lied” addiction while Iran threatens Israel and the West with annihilation.

One Non-Partisan Democrat

Joe Lieberman examines why it would be disastrous for America to surrender to 10,000 terrorists in Iraq.

Atta in Prague: A Murky Limbo

We’ve been told again and again by war critics that there was no connection between Iraq and 9/11. And it’s now considered a fact that Muhammed Atta never met with Czech intelligence agents in Prague before 9/11. But is there no connection between Iraq and 9/11? Edward Jay Epstein went to Prague to find out, and what he found was a “murky limbo.”

Suicide Bombing for Dummies

Jack Murtha tells us that 80% of Iraqis want the U.S. military to leave, so how come they’re not in the street demanding it? As Mr. Steyn points out, the only street demonstrators are those in Jordan marching against Zarqawi.

An excerpt:

…no matter how desperate the head-hackers get, the Western defeatists can always top them. A Democrat Congressman, Jack Murtha, has called for immediate US withdrawal from Iraq. He’s a Vietnam veteran, so naturally the media are insisting that his views warrant special deference, military experience in a war America lost being the only military experience the Democrats and the press value these days. Hence, the demand for the President to come up with an “exit strategy.”

In war, there are usually only two exit strategies: victory or defeat. The latter’s easier. Just say, whoa, we’re the world’s pre-eminent power but we can’t handle an unprecedently low level of casualties, so if you don’t mind we’d just as soon get off at the next stop.

Demonstrating the will to lose as clearly as America did in Vietnam wasn’t such a smart move, but since the media can’t seem to get beyond this ancient jungle war it may be worth underlining the principal difference: Osama is not Ho Chi Minh, and al-Qa’eda are not the Viet Cong. If you exit, they’ll follow. And Americans will die – in foreign embassies, barracks, warships, as they did through the Nineties, and eventually on the streets of US cities, too.

As 9/11 fades into the past, that’s an increasingly hard argument to make. Taking your ball and going home is a seductive argument in a paradoxical superpower whose inclinations on the Right have a strong isolationist streak and on the Left a strong transnational streak – which is isolationism with a sappy face and biennial black-tie banquets in EU capitals. Transnationalism means poseur solutions – the Kyotification of foreign policy.

So, just as things are looking up on the distant, eastern front, they’re wobbling badly on the home front. Anti-Bush Continentals who would welcome a perceived American defeat in Iraq ought to remember the third front in this war: Europe is both a home front and a foreign battleground – as the Dutch have learnt, watching the land of the bicycling Queen transformed into 24-hour armed security for even minor municipal officials. In this war, for Europeans the faraway country of which they know little turns out to be their own. Much as the Guardian and Le Monde would enjoy it, an America that turns its back on the world is the last thing you need.

The Default Defence

The default defence against the Bush administration’s claim that the Congressional critics of the war had the same intelligence the administration had is that the president had, as the New York Times asserts today, access to “far more extensive intelligence than Congress did, like the highly classified daily briefing provided…by the Central Intelligence Agency.”

What the Times and the other critics fail to indicate is that the Director of CIA was telling the president in his daily briefing that Saddam’s possession of WMD was a “slam dunk.”

The Times article.

The Senate Quagmire

The real Vietnam quagmire is in Washington, not Iraq.

It's Not Cheney, Stupid!

Seems that Dick Cheney was not Woodward’s source, thus destroying the Democrat’s dreams of a vice presidential indictment.

Now the spotlight goes (or ought to go) to the State Department as Tom Maguire points out.

If it’s true, as it now seems, that the State Department first leaked Wilson’s wife’s name to the press, that’s a nightmare for the Bush-lied-us-into-war crowd who hoped to ride the Wilson affair to impeachment. The State Department, as the Democratic narrative goes, was the one entity not infected by the neocon (Jewish) cabal (except for John Bolton who was not the source) and was considered by the left to be anti-war.

The Real Lessons of Vietnam

John McCain opposes those giving aid-and-comfort to the enemy.

So does Wall Street Journal.

Indict Jay Rockefeller!

What was Senate Intelligence Committee Ranking Member Jay Rockefeller doing when he talked to Syrian president Assad about America’s war plans before the Iraq War?