Madrid Bombing: 6 years later

This is an interesting article from www.jihadwatch.org about something to read on the anniversary of the Madrid bombing which occured on March 11, 2004 go ahead and click through and get some of the recommended books. This follows this post about current events in Iran and follows the importance of domestic offshore oil drilling to dry up funding to terrorist rogue states. For more posts like this click here.


Fitzgerald: Obama needs book-learning, not real-life experience
A commenter at Jihad Watch has written of Barack Obama’s "utter lack of real life experience as most of us know it in every facet of life..."
He's had plenty of "real life experience." What he hasn't had is plenty of book-learning, of hours in the library, familiarizing himself with the texts and tenets of Islam, so much so, so repeatedly, that he thoroughly understands and assimilates the Total Belief-System, understands the politics and geopolitics of it, and comes to understand the inculcated division between Believer and Infidel.
And even more book learning is necessary: the kind of learning you can acquire from Bat Ye'or's "The Dhimmi: Jews & Christians Under Islam " and "The Decline of Eastern Christianity Under Islam: From Jihad to Dhimmitude" and from a dozen other books. Unless he had spent years in a Muslim country, he has to do this. And even that would not be a guarantee of anything were he not able to sink below the surface of life, knowing the local language, able to penetrate the barriers to mental entry -- not merely the obvious deliberate deceptions practiced on all foreign non-Muslims, the taqiyya and kitman, but also the everyday deceptions practiced, each upon each, in societies suffused with Islam.

I'll settle for book-learning, so that he can know about Islam, and know something of the history of Islamic conquests and subjugation of many different kinds of non-Muslims, over 1350 years, from Spain to the East Indies. That would be fine by me. That would be enough.
And then because he is intelligent, he could begin to make sense of the observable behavior of Muslims, begin to grasp the reasons -- to be sought in Islam itself -- for the difficulty of developing a democratic ethos in Muslim countries, or the difficulty of encouraging industry and entrepreneurship among those held in thrall to inshallah-fatalism, or the intellectual problems of a society where the Believer is encouraged to be a "slave to Allah" and discouraged from exercising independent moral choice (for "Allah Knows Best" and one must follow what the ulema tell you) and free and skeptical inquiry. All of this inhibits the development of human freedom and the enterprise of science.
Obama is a naif, but he's intelligent, and if he set his mind to it, he could find all this out, and he could make it his. And then he could, or would, agree that the squandering of this nation's wealth in Pakistan and Afghanistan, or for other Muslim states or polities, makes no sense, and that instead the two goals of American policy should be to 1) make sure that no Muslim state or group or groupuscule acquires the means -- the weaponry -- to inflict catastrophic damage on any Infidel nation-state or people and 2) make sure that the instruments of Jihad that do not receive enough attention -- the Money Weapon, campaigns of Da'wa, and demographic conquest -- are recognized, and greatly constrained or even halted, especially in the countries of Western Europe. There, the large-scale presence of Muslims has created a situation that is far more expensive, unpleasant, and physically insecure, than it would be without such a large-scale presence.
I hope he will start to educate himself on this, and promote those younger officers who have, in Iraq and Afghanistan, begun themselves to ponder what Islam teaches and what makes Islamic societies tick, or fail to. The Yesterday's Men (Robert Gates comes to mind) whose mental set leads them to endorse appeasing Arab and Muslim leaders, and to continue with the wasteful policies in Pakistan and Afghanistan instead of focusing on the potential danger to the European members of NATO, need to be replaced by those with an understanding of Islam, and of all the instruments of Jihad, and a recognition that since the war of self-defense against Jihad has no end, since it is not a "Long War" but a war that goes on as long as the texts of Islam inspire and guide more than a billion people, a husbanding of resources by the Infidel powers is necessary. No more throwing trillions away on such a vain and vainglorious effort as that in Iraq, which cannot conceivably, if the goals sought are the goals somehow attained, help the Camp of Infidels, or damage the Camp of Islam.
In Iraq that can only be achieved if, upon an American withdrawal, the sectarian and ethnic fissures not only simmer, but widen, and result in some kind of unpatchable-up hostilities -- not necessarily full-scale war, but just a steady drip-drip-drip of attack and counterattack.
Posted by Hugh