One of the lessons learned from fighting roadside bombs is that that it is often more effective to go after the bomb makers than the bombs. The physics of counteracting IEDS that are already in close proximity work are against the defender. Once the bomb is upon you the scope for action rapidly shrinks. Ten meters standoff and 1 second to go leave very small margins for error. Demanding something that can stop a bomb within those parameters is akin to demanding magic. The same can be said of fighting aerial IEDs, or passenger-carried bombs.
Now it is harder than ever to keep a bomb from getting close.
About 2 months before the Christmas Day bomber struck CBS News produced a video describing the possible use of bombs carried within a body cavity, noting the technique had been used to try and kill “Prince Mohammed Bin Nayef, head of Saudi Arabia’s counter terrorism operations … [using] a trick from the narcotics trade – which has long smuggled drugs in body cavities – Asieri [the assassin] had a pound of high explosives, plus a detonator inserted in his rectum.” Before he was allowed to get close to the prince, Asieri was subjected to a much more arduous screening than that given to ordinary airline passengers.
embedded by Embedded Video
YouTube Direkt
The problem for the internal bomb, as it is sometimes called, continues to be the detonator. The al-Qaeda asssassin sent to get Prince Mohammed Bin Nayef needed a wireless triggering device, implying a receiver which in principle can be detected. However there are now reports that al-Qaeda is working on surgically implanted PETN bombs which can be ignited by injections by persons posing as diabetics. In this case the detonator, as in the case of the Christmas Day bomber, will be a syringe. This remains a weakness for al-Qaeda but eventually they’ll think of something.
Since actual names of the persons boarding a flight are known only shortly before the airplane takes off, the operational problems of defending against an IED and the airline bomb are similar. The defender has too little time and too little space to react even assuming the dots are all connected correctly. The obvious thing to is to apply the same strategy used in combating terrestrial IEDs, which is to go after the network. That is where the real payoff is. Billions of dollars can be spent on armoring vehicles and installing more and more detection devices in airports but they are of limited use.
Ultimately terrorism has to be defeated by offensive action. The physics of the game mean attacks not likely to be defeated once they have been set in motion. Still less effective are measures taken after the fact a strategy which held a strange appeal for Janet Napolitano, who congratulated herself on everything working like clockwork after the Christmas Day attack. Nor is prosecution much good in operational terms, especially when the suspects cannot even be interrogated. “Bringing them to justice” is a good sound bite but it operationally it is a pretty meaningless one. The crime is already committed, the victims are already dead and the perp is already lawyered up. In the fight against the terrorist attacker the defensive strategy is probably a losing one.
Tip Jar or Subscribe for $5
Maybe if they started making airplane seats from pigskin…
The smart thing would be to go on the offensive. Unfortunately, every Muslim knows it’s a war to the death with all non-muslims. We idiots of the west think believe that Muslims are our friends, except for a few bad apples. It wil get incrementally worse until we admit we’re at war with Islam.
Hmmmmmmmm….Wretchard:
The HTML source code for the tocque is showing up in the space between the Tip Jar and the teeny tiny icons. Looks like it might supposed to be in an IFrame, maybe?????? or a hidden div???? It ain’t.
Programmer
Now it’s fixed.
Ultimately our military put in place multiple layers of tactics to thwart the IEDs in Iraq. They were effective enough to kill thousands of IED bombers and find and kill their makers, financiers and leadership. We face similar problems with Al Qaeda suicide bombers and need to make a similar creative response. The problem is that our leadership of homeland security, which Obama put in place are either hacks, ideologically driven, clueless or all of the above.
“we” are not at war with ALL of Islam, nor with EACH and EVERY muslim. that’s the kind of extremist sweeping generalization that we want to avoid. its just as useless an idea that islamic terrorism is ALL the West’s fault. we are at war with militant mafia style islamofascist terrorist thugs, that much is certainly true and concerning enough.
Wretchard said:
“”Bringing them to justice” is a good sound bite but it operationally a pretty meaningless. In the fight against the terrorist attacker the defensive strategy is probably a losing one.”
The moonbat and the Islamic fascist have a symbiotic relationship. This was made even more evident in Osama bin Laden’s latest rant where he mentioned Global Warming and Noam Chomsky. Again this leads to the familiar refrain: Through Gramscian agit-prop, the moonbats were programmed to bring out the white flags as the Soviet Army poured through the Fulda Gap. (Un)fortunately, the Soviet Union imploded before the moonbats could perform their mission, consequently the moonbats have gone ronin. The moonbats are still trying to follow their programming with the Islamic Fascists but it just doesn’t feel the same.
The first step for the West is to remove moonbats from positions of trust and responsibility, e.g. politics, teaching, journalism, etc. Part of this process involves reconfiguring the MSM such that it is supportive towards Western Civilization. While we get our own house in order, our approach towards Islamic Fascism should be utterly uncompromising. We should equate an Islamic Fascist to a Small Pox virus, e.g. you don’t read a Small Pox virus its Miranda Rights before you kill it. Moderate Moslems need to be convinced that Islamic Fascism is more dangerous to them than to the western world. Moderate Moslems need to shut down the radical madressas, eliminate the Islamic Fascists living amongst them and reform their religion to make it compatible with the civilized world. The Islamic world desperately needs a Martin Luther.
Wretchard:
The above text:
“… more effective to after the bomb makers …”
should read:
“… more effective to go after the bomb makers …”
Make everyone eat some bacon before taking their seat?
Jason, we are in fact at war with Muslims. There are no “moderate” Muslims anymore than there were “moderate” Japanese commanders and military men in WWII. This is just a fact. No Muslims have at any time even bothered to condemn these attacks (including the attempted beheading of obscure Danish cartoonist Kurt Westergaard for an even more obscure cartoon of Mohammed), much less try and STOP them.
Muslims, world-wide, from Nigeria to Somalia to Indonesia and Pakistan and beyond DEMAND that we in the West adopt sharia, don’t make fun of Mohammed, don’t listen to or see certain Mozart operas (banned in Germany due to Jihadist threats), and so on. If we don’t do what they demand they plan on killing us. Until we submit. Its as simple as that.
[That 40% of British Born Muslims want Sharia in the UK in recent polls ought to tell you something.]
As a practical matter, I cannot tell which Muslim getting on a plane is planning to blow me up and which one would simply approve of that, provided HE is not on the plane. Which given government abdication of responsibility, is going to lead to several pathways.
First, Muslims WILL succeed in blowing up several planes. As Wretchard notes, this method of bomb delivery cannot really be stopped. In the immediate aftermath air travel will simply collapse, along with every airline, which depends on a mass-market model. Trillions will be spent world-wide to prop up a few national airlines, as Derbyshire predicts.
Second, in a recovery of flying, Westerners will simply REFUSE to allow Muslims (or anyone who looks Muslim and indeed non-Western) on the plane. At first, this will be simply walking off the flight, if Muslim looking people are on it. Eventually, given human nature, it will be forcible prevention of Muslims from boarding, with security looking the other way.
Fundamentally, you cannot have a free and open society if one group, that is protected by special privileges and PC, blows people up all the time. Either the PC goes by government, or it is tossed aside (the government that is) as the people with various new, competing institutions, seek to stop from being blown up.
The governments of the West have a clear choice: either attack the network by going after the most obvious Jihadi targets (including things like bugging Mosques, and so on) or see themselves usurped by the “new feudalism” as various kingpins (mostly organized crime) take over and run things as new Gottis. This is what happened to Italy.
My fearless prediction, is that Obama and other Western leaders will chose to preserve PC and Multiculturalism and thus insure “a New West” based on sort of new feudalism and non-state patronage that characterizes most of Italy.
In the meantime, stick a fork in places like Vegas, Hawaii, and other jet-served tourist spots. People will simply drive to vacations or not go. Air travel as we know it is dying.
Internal bombs, eh?
How about informational internal bombs?
On the GOP retreat thread, in the process of pointing out a news event, I inadvertently posted some misinformation at number 6 that I later corrected at 19.
But the misinformation was repeated several times despite my correcting the record. The incorrect quote was repeated both on that thread and elsewhere on the Internet (using my exact words — DAMN.)
Why? Because the incorrect quotation didn’t surprise anybody and it was very close to reflecting what we who are in the right would expect from the thin-skinned Obama.
However, repeating what we would like to hear is not going to work for us in the long run.
So I wrote the following warning:
Internal bombs indeed.
Pigskin. Now THERE’S a thought. . . . But wait, that would be racist, wouldn’t it? Or, um, culturist? Or something equally imperialist and oppressive?
Incidentally, it’s interesting that Wretchard’s notion of going after the network rather than the particular bomber is a bit analogous to the (pretty successful) Israeli airline security policy of being alert to the potential bomber rather than the bomb, as distinct from the already-foolish TSA practice of looking for the weapon rather than the person who might be carrying, and planning to use, it. This stupid TSA practice seems to assume that terrorists are as random as the searches TSA mounts to hinder them.
For the well-meaning multiculturalists and for anyone who really believes that pig products or dogs, etc. can help us, I recommend:
http://www.meforum.org/2538/taqiyya-islam-rules-of-war
I’m really sorry, Wretchard, but our own incompetence seems to be drawing your Third Conjecture from a conjecture to something rapidly approaching an inevitability….
W: Asieri [the assassin] had a pound of high explosives, plus a detonator inserted in his rectum.”
I’m sure Asieri had plenty of practice in his tent before placing that bomb, it you catch my drift.
Whiskey: Jason, we are in fact at war with Muslims. There are no “moderate” Muslims anymore than there were “moderate” Japanese commanders and military men in WWII. This is just a fact.
That is…not correct. The biggest counterexample is Turkey. And the Iraqi and Afghanistan townspeople (not tribesmen). Plus Indonesia, Malaysia, Jordan, the Gulf emirates, Burnei and Kosovo. And we are decidedly not at war with Muslims who are also Americans, such as Rep. Keith Ellison, Iman (supermodel), and Kareem Abdul-Jabbar.
In the immediate aftermath air travel will simply collapse, along with every airline, which depends on a mass-market model.
No, the response will be to invert the “no-fly list” so that if you are a bearded male, with a stinky left index finger, between the ages of 18-35, come from the Dar al-Islam and have a name like Baraq Mohammad Ashir Hussein Faisal ibn al-Obama, you have to jump through the same sort of hoops you need to do to get a security clearance.
In the meantime, stick a fork in places like Vegas, Hawaii, and other jet-served tourist spots. People will simply drive to vacations or not go. Air travel as we know it is dying.
I don’t think so. The problem doesn’t seem to be with folks flying from Peoria to Orlando. It seems to be folks flying from Yemen to Rome to Amsterdam to Detroit.
I’m really sorry, Wretchard, but our own incompetence seems to be drawing your Third Conjecture from a conjecture to something rapidly approaching an inevitability….
That would be unforgiveable. The lesson that was supposed to have been learned from the second world war was that aggressive tyrants should be faced down by a unified alliance before they got a chance to start a conflagration that would consume 300 million people (the death toll of World War 2). Not every Germany was a Nazi, but due to some weakness and perhaps abetted by the failed policies of the West after World War 1, the German body politic had no resistance to it. And it damn near blew up the world.
Now it is the politically correct West which seems to have no ideological answer to extremism; it half admires it and half fears it, much as many in the interwar years did Bolshevism and Fascism. Some years ago there was a movie entitled “The Remains of the Day” which followed this from a butler’s point of view. It wasn’t that the intellectuals of the period were too stupid to see the danger, but they simply too clever by a half.
The Strong Man very often appeals to the intellectual and artist because he seems a transcendent figure; an ersatz god for a lost culture. Don’t blame bin Laden or Obama or Chavez too much. If they didn’t exist the intelligensia would invent them, as Voltaire observed in the context of God. But the Strong Man often has very little appeal to individuals who are too busy growing, building or inventing things. I think if the truth be told one reason why the great and the good are so ineffectual against Islamic extremism is because they are more widely admired within exalted circles than we would like to admit; the secret vice of those who should know better.
Lee Smith writes that smart Arabs know that a reproducible WMD in the hands of al-Qaeda wouldn’t be an existential threat to the West, but its consequences would create an existential threat to the Middle East. It doesn’t take a genius to see that. And it is still avoidable. but if it comes to pass I should think that a large part of the moral responsibility will rest on those enlightened moderns who were too preciously conflicted to act, even to save the enemy they professed to admire.
We live in parlous times, a time of war, of the clash of civilizations. Militant Islam swept the known world from the gates of Hercules to the Hindu Kush, conquering the Christian cities of North Africa and subduing the Hindoos of northern India, establishing a Caliphate at Baghdad. The first check came in the 8th century, when a Muslim army conquered Spain, or Andalusia, and advanced into France where they were met at Poitiers and defeated by Charles Martel, Charles the Hammer. There followed centuries of warfare, with the Muslims finally being subdued at the gates of Vienna and at the battle of Lepanto, science, technology and the Western way of war gaining the upper hand. But the Muslims have never given up the dream, the command, to conquer the Infidel. Western weakness and self-loathing has given them the chance to renew their dream, and we shall shortly have need once again for the Crusader knight.
The vultures circle overhead
They wait, the man is not yet dead
The banner’d cross is seen to rest
Upon the silent figure’s chest
He stirs, he tries but cannot speak
He knows he must, but is too weak
A groan, a rising to a knee
Another groan his sword is free
A stumbled step towards grinning foe
A parried thrust, the sword held low
No shield, no helm he stood his ground
And glared the glinting saber down
He died that day for you and me
He died for us, so we’d be free
To live our lives in our own way
To live our dreams and have our say
And now the foe has come again
But do we now remember when
Brave men went out to fight and die
For God and country, hearth and sky
Or shall we meekly all submit
To Allah’s shamed unholy writ
Hell no! I hear some voices cry
So very few, just you and I
But more will come, then many fold
Will rise, and when the story’s told
The Mussulmen who ‘leashed this war
Will find what free men have in store
For those who think our courage gone
And make of us their dhimmi pawn
The Arab thinks he is the one
His god the essence of the sun
He thinks that Allah gives him might
He thinks the kafir will not fight
But he should know we have the will
Crusader blood flows in us still
The day will come we’ve had enough
Then we will call old Allah’s bluff
And turn to glass their precious sand
In hopes they’ll finally understand
We want not war, we wish for peace
We wish only the killing cease
But if they push us to the wall
We’ll still for good the muzzein call
The vultures circle overhead
In vain, the West is not yet dead
Ooh, you still have 10 minutes remaining W.
Let offer a suggestion for your missing adjective for you?
Now it is the politically [cowered] West
A word about the number you may see after your name in the Tocque. It represents your rank based on a parse of the total number of comments you’ve made on this site (unfortunately it doesn’t include the two older Belmont Clubs). The person who ranks number 1 among commenters is … (hint: it ain’t me)
It is literally against the law to hire the best and brightest airline security people. Griggs vs. Duke Power remains the law of the land—and it essentially requires the hiring of lesser-qualified minority candidates. There is no legal way to get around these mandates. That is the number one reason why we cannot copy the highly successful Israeli interview methods. Moreover, it is unlawful to even intellectually test these candidates. Their high school diplomas and possible academic degrees are supposed to serve that purpose even though they are often more fraudulent than a three dollar bill.
Its not as good as Walt’s stuff but I like Chesterton.
http://www.bartleby.com/103/91.html
WHITE founts falling in the Courts of the sun,
And the Soldan of Byzantium is smiling as they run;
There is laughter like the fountains in that face of all men feared,
It stirs the forest darkness, the darkness of his beard;
It curls the blood-red crescent, the crescent of his lips; 5
For the inmost sea of all the earth is shaken with his ships.
They have dared the white republics up the capes of Italy,
They have dashed the Adriatic round the Lion of the Sea,
And the Pope has cast his arms abroad for agony and loss,
And called the kings of Christendom for swords about the Cross. 10
The cold queen of England is looking in the glass;
The shadow of the Valois is yawning at the Mass;
From evening isles fantastical rings faint the Spanish gun,
And the Lord upon the Golden Horn is laughing in the sun.
Dim drums throbbing, in the hills half heard, 15
Where only on a nameless throne a crownless prince has stirred,
Where, risen from a doubtful seat and half attainted stall,
The last knight of Europe takes weapons from the wall,
The last and lingering troubadour to whom the bird has sung,
That once went singing southward when all the world was young. 20
In that enormous silence, tiny and unafraid,
Comes up along a winding road the noise of the Crusade.
Strong gongs groaning as the guns boom far,
Don John of Austria is going to the war,
Stiff flags straining in the night-blasts cold 25
In the gloom black-purple, in the glint old-gold,
Torchlight crimson on the copper kettle-drums,
Then the tuckets, then the trumpets, then the cannon, and he comes.
Don John laughing in the brave beard curled,
Spurning of his stirrups like the thrones of all the world, 30
Holding his head up for a flag of all the free.
Love-light of Spain—hurrah!
Death-light of Africa!
Don John of Austria
Is riding to the sea. 35
Mahound is in his paradise above the evening star,
(Don John of Austria is going to the war.)
He moves a mighty turban on the timeless houri’s knees,
His turban that is woven of the sunsets and the seas.
He shakes the peacock gardens as he rises from his ease, 40
And he strides among the tree-tops and is taller than the trees;
And his voice through all the garden is a thunder sent to bring
Black Azrael and Ariel and Ammon on the wing.
Giants and the Genii,
Multiplex of wing and eye, 45
Whose strong obedience broke the sky
When Solomon was king.
They rush in red and purple from the red clouds of the morn,
From the temples where the yellow gods shut up their eyes in scorn;
They rise in green robes roaring from the green hells of the sea 50
Where fallen skies and evil hues and eyeless creatures be,
On them the sea-valves cluster and the grey sea-forests curl,
Splashed with a splendid sickness, the sickness of the pearl;
They swell in sapphire smoke out of the blue cracks of the ground,—
They gather and they wonder and give worship to Mahound. 55
And he saith, “Break up the mountains where the hermit-folk can hide,
And sift the red and silver sands lest bone of saint abide,
And chase the Giaours flying night and day, not giving rest,
For that which was our trouble comes again out of the west.
We have set the seal of Solomon on all things under sun, 60
Of knowledge and of sorrow and endurance of things done.
But a noise is in the mountains, in the mountains, and I know
The voice that shook our palaces—four hundred years ago:
It is he that saith not ‘Kismet’; it is he that knows not Fate;
It is Richard, it is Raymond, it is Godfrey at the gate! 65
It is he whose loss is laughter when he counts the wager worth,
Put down your feet upon him, that our peace be on the earth.”
For he heard drums groaning and he heard guns jar,
(Don John of Austria is going to the war.)
Sudden and still—hurrah! 70
Bolt from Iberia!
Don John of Austria
Is gone by Alcalar.
St. Michaels on his Mountain in the sea-roads of the north
(Don John of Austria is girt and going forth.) 75
Where the grey seas glitter and the sharp tides shift
And the sea-folk labour and the red sails lift.
He shakes his lance of iron and he claps his wings of stone;
The noise is gone through Normandy; the noise is gone alone;
The North is full of tangled things and texts and aching eyes, 80
And dead is all the innocence of anger and surprise,
And Christian killeth Christian in a narrow dusty room,
And Christian dreadeth Christ that hath a newer face of doom,
And Christian hateth Mary that God kissed in Galilee,—
But Don John of Austria is riding to the sea. 85
Don John calling through the blast and the eclipse
Crying with the trumpet, with the trumpet of his lips,
Trumpet that sayeth ha!
Domino gloria!
Don John of Austria 90
Is shouting to the ships.
King Philip’s in his closet with the Fleece about his neck
(Don John of Austria is armed upon the deck.)
The walls are hung with velvet that is black and soft as sin,
And little dwarfs creep out of it and little dwarfs creep in. 95
He holds a crystal phial that has colours like the moon,
He touches, and it tingles, and he trembles very soon,
And his face is as a fungus of a leprous white and grey
Like plants in the high houses that are shuttered from the day,
And death is in the phial and the end of noble work, 100
But Don John of Austria has fired upon the Turk.
Don John’s hunting, and his hounds have bayed—
Booms away past Italy the rumour of his raid.
Gun upon gun, ha! ha!
Gun upon gun, hurrah! 105
Don John of Austria
Has loosed the cannonade.
The Pope was in his chapel before day or battle broke,
(Don John of Austria is hidden in the smoke.)
The hidden room in man’s house where God sits all the year, 110
The secret window whence the world looks small and very dear.
He sees as in a mirror on the monstrous twilight sea
The crescent of his cruel ships whose name is mystery;
They fling great shadows foe-wards, making Cross and Castle dark,
They veil the plumèd lions on the galleys of St. Mark; 115
And above the ships are palaces of brown, black-bearded chiefs,
And below the ships are prisons, where with multitudinous griefs,
Christian captives sick and sunless, all a labouring race repines
Like a race in sunken cities, like a nation in the mines.
They are lost like slaves that sweat, and in the skies of morning hung 120
The stair-ways of the tallest gods when tyranny was young.
They are countless, voiceless, hopeless as those fallen or fleeing on
Before the high Kings’ horses in the granite of Babylon.
And many a one grows witless in his quiet room in hell
Where a yellow face looks inward through the lattice of his cell, 125
And he finds his God forgotten, and he seeks no more a sign—
(But Don John of Austria has burst the battle-line!)
Don John pounding from the slaughter-painted poop,
Purpling all the ocean like a bloody pirate’s sloop,
Scarlet running over on the silvers and the golds, 130
Breaking of the hatches up and bursting of the holds,
Thronging of the thousands up that labour under sea
White for bliss and blind for sun and stunned for liberty.
Vivat Hispania!
Domino Gloria! 135
Don John of Austria
Has set his people free!
Cervantes on his galley sets the sword back in the sheath
(Don John of Austria rides homeward with a wreath.)
And he sees across a weary land a straggling road in Spain, 140
Up which a lean and foolish knight for ever rides in vain,
And he smiles, but not as Sultans smile, and settles back the blade….
(But Don John of Austria rides home from the Crusade.)
The Tocque ranking is distorted by some, I am looking at you Buddy and you Wade and you Pascal, who suffer from multiple nickname disorder. Perhaps if the Tocque was linked to email addresses or ISP numbers rather than names it would avoid that.
But “offensive action” is offensive to those within the counterinsurgent’s polity who oppose the war, who consider “terrorists” to be “freedom fighters”, who themselves share many of the stated goals of the terrorists, and who deprive the counterinsurgent of the will, resolve, moral rectitude, and unity to kill who needs killing, turn who maybe doesn’t need killing, yet, bribe who needs bribing, and otherwise do all those brutal, nasty, unseemly things successful counterterrorists always have to do to break terrorists of their bad habits.
The Bush-era Global War On Terror, which has morphed into Chairman Obamao’s Overseas Contingency Operation, is really just a campaign of the Culture War, much as Korea, all the Arab-Israeli Wars, Vietnam, Rhodesia, Angola, Lebanon, and El Salvador were campaigns of the Cold War.
Win the Culture War at home and the terrorists will quit.
Wretchard @ 15: “The lesson that was supposed to have been learned from the second world war was that aggressive tyrants should be faced down by a unified alliance before they got a chance to start a conflagration …”
Wretchard, have you followed any of the recent British grilling of former Prime Minister Tony Blair over his decision to remove Saddam Hussein by force?
The same Saddam Hussein who had by then invaded Iran, Kuwait, & Saudi Arabia, causing over a million deaths; who had used chemical weapons against the Iraqi people; who had repeatedly defied UN Resolutions and had corrupted the UN’s Oil-for-Food program; who had fired on planes enforcing UN Resolutions; who had built up one of the largest offensive military forces on the planet.
Proper Britain has apparently decided that Blair was a cad for acting against Saddam Hussein before he started his next war. And still wants to give Blair a good kicking for it.
The lesson of World War II has decidedly NOT been learned in Britain, and probably not in most of the rest of the EU either. Nor in sections of the Democrat Party in the US.
At least they’ve discovered a sure-cure for constipation:
Guaranteed to blow the crap out of you.
Aw, quitchyerbitchin, Life. You EARNED that number.
I am #16.
I don’t know whether to be amazed or appalled.
so far Toque didn’t work with my laptop wich is a window vista
and I can’t test it anymore the link is disabled
TSA does have a small core of people who are in a program based on the Israeli model. It is called the SPOT (Screening Passengers by Observational Technique) program. If done properly it can work but it takes a large number of very skilled people. As with everything in government the problem isn’t the concept but the people and the organization.
Here is one example of managerial incompetence at TSA. The Walk Through Metal Detector (WTD) assemblies frequently malfunction. The Siemens contract technicians could easily repair them but are not allowed to because each repair job request has to be released by the same firm that manufactures and sells new units. Some genius signed a contract worthy of Yes Minister and everyone is stuck.
TSA is dysfunctional mostly because the tail wags the dog. Right now it exists for the care and feeding of 40,000 screeners. Every week people are hired who are incapable of doing the job. Often they are pregnant so that they can not perform the lifting that is a basic job requirement. It is illegal to ask them about this or decline to hire them for that reason. So these girls are hired to sit on the exit, when they want to show up, for a few months and then they get to quit. Gross insubordination does not result in termination.
The Bush White House tried to fight it but couldn’t after 9-11. They set it up so that the prior employees would be replaced and the new staff would be rigorously observed. They were called Screeners because all they were expected to do was detect an alarm and refer it to a Supervisor. That ended quickly. Everyone in the old security outfits that was a US citizen was hired and most of them are now Supervisors or even worse Managers. These are usually people with little education who were recent immigrants or otherwise problematic from an aptitude or security viewpoint. Senior Managers were retired federal LEOs interested in an easy retirement bonus. The other initial Managers were often local retired police sergeants who have no Management skills. Much of the other support staff came over from the FAA or other agencies who were only to happy to send their very best. To prevent the usual bureaucratic sloth TSA was set up as an Excepted Service outside of the usual General Service pay grades. That means that pay raises are a fraction of what they are in other government jobs. As a Supervisor in TSA I had responsibilities equivalent to those of a GS-11/12 in most agencies but I was paid like a GS-7 with less opportunity for advancement.
A new evaluation system was introduced a few years ago with a bewildering variety of tests, practicals and grading criteria to determine bonus and pay raise criteria. If the practicals are failed then people are out of a job so the prevailing air becomes one of fatalism in which money is collected now with no expectation of the future. It is easier to be failed as a Supervisor than as a Screener, they are tested on tasks they rarely perform, and almost impossible to be failed and terminated as a Manager. Since pay for Managers was based on high scores for those supervised there was every incentive to pressure the Supervisors to grade the staff falsely. Very few of the current Supervisors have the motivation, education, training, experience or aptitude to write proper evaluations. More important Washington set up endless hurdles on disciplinary efforts and there was constant back-channel politicking that made Supervisors throw up their hands and just go through the motions. Possibly a third of the current screening staff, who God help us now have pseudo LEO badges and get to call themselves Officers, should be removed as incompetent, abusive, or unstable.
What TSA needs is to be placed under the control of CBP, the current Managers should be removed and replaced with GS-13/14/15 CBP officers. Supervisors should be reserve or retired military officers. Screeners with the aptitude to be advanced to positions of greater responsibility should be routed through the SPOT or Trainer ranks and then promoted to Transportation Security Inspectors (TSIs), who are the non-LEO experts in Transportation Security.
Greater use of Explosive Trace Detector (ETD) devices by testing hands would alert on people who had handled prohibited items. It would also produce many false alarms and might not get someone who had explosives placed internally some hours before and had since cleaned thoroughly. One possible solution would be to make everyone pass through an explosive container chamber and subject them to radio signals that would set off any device. That off course would never get past the disabilities advocates. Right now the dog won’t hunt.
Cannoneer No. 4,
Obviously I got this number by not having a Life and spending far to much time here rather than in making money. See the last thread.
“Win the Culture War at home and the terrorists will quit.”
Not necessarily so, but a very important first step. One, alas, I fear we will not willingly take for it will mean aggressively marching against our own neighbors. But they may yet yet force us to take that step, and then the survivors will be far less willing to tolerate the depredations of the Islamic militants. We will have saved ourselves from ourselves at the price of having to again do so in the face of Wretchard’s Third Conjecture. The survivors of that mess will then have to resurrect Western Civilization as it should have been.
Seems to me that we need to be forming both military and monastic orders, much as Europe did after Rome collapsed. The monastics will need to preserve the writings of the Founding Fathers in order to reconstruct their great experiment at a later date while the soldiers simply keep us from being wiped out. As always, the average person will be interested in being neither a monk nor a knight, but without him both would starve. It’s the three-legged stool of Western Civilization, and warts and all it’s better than what any Islamic despot would offer….
Kinuachdrach said:
“Proper Britain has apparently decided that Blair was a cad for acting against Saddam Hussein before he started his next war. And still wants to give Blair a good kicking for it.”
If G.W. Bush were to run again for President, I’d vote for him again mainly because of his correct action against Iraq (I do disagree with how he managed the US economy and the federal deficit). Yes, one can argue about some of the details in how the Iraq War was prosecuted but the original decision to invade Iraq was morally and strategically correct.
#9 Whiskey
i appreciate your thoughts and enjoy reading what you have to say, even if you tend be a bit extreme and all or nothing at times in my view.
from my perspective I think its too simple to lump our war on terror into binary, Manichean, dualistic, all or nothing, categories. I think WE are better than that. WE are more sophisticated and knowledgeable than that. And this is how we are going to win.
Even if we were, let’s say hypothetically, at war with every muslim on earth– a billion folks — it would be totally impractical to take them all on at once or kill them all or nuke them all or any other such thing (after 911, before Iraq, Steven DenBeste elaborated on this).
The terrorists in fact WANT us to fall into the trap of thinking we are at war with EVERY muslim, that is their game. THEY want EVERY muslim to think WE are out to get them and kill them. This is one of the terrorist/guerilla ways of mobilizing people to their cause. The relatively small number of active terrorists use this kind of psych warfare to their advantage.
The truth is that “Muslims” are very tribal and provincial. They do not act as a unified group, at all…ever. this is a weakness that we and others exploit and have exploited for centuries (google an article Why Arabs lose wars).
Our ultimate victory will come from the superiority of our Western culture and values.
Many Many Many Iranian youths over the past 25 years have embraced blue jeans and cell phones.
If we lump them ALL into the enemies/must annihilate category we only ensure our own cultural destruction.
Not every German was a NAZI and in fact after the war many ex NAZIs came over to America to be scientists and teachers. Look at how we embraced Japan and Japanese people after the war. We didn’t even force Hirohito to surrender!
But this islamic terrorism war is not like the good old nation-state wars of the past, where we could (at least during hostilities) lump the entire people into the enemy category. guerilla/terrorist/assymetrical warfare is a different animal.
Even if we said that all muslims were our enemy (which is simply not true) we could not ever be at war with all muslims everywhere. nor would ever want to be.
We are in more of a cultural/psych/political/economic “war” than an armed conflict. This is where we fall down. We are so proud of and reliant on our gigantic techno military machine that we kind of ignore all the other aspects of warfare… and the terrorists/guerillas know this and exploit this. I still don’t think we have had ONE major Cultural or Psychological VICTORY yet! and this is enormously important!
we’ve had some military surges and won some battles, sure. Getting KSM and Saddam weren’t it. Getting Osama and proving it would have helped. We had one against Khadaffi until the backdoor deal was struck to release the Pan-Am terrorist.
(part of the reason we haven’t had ONE major important Cultural or Psychological victory yet is because of our sell out politico-coroporate elites and the dunder head leftists within our own culture. until we address these issues effectively, we will continue to stumble)
TSA should be abolished. It should be the airlines’s responsibility to keep dangerous passengers off their aircraft. The flying public voluntarily gives up their liberty for the convenience of air travel, with part of that contract being the passenger agrees not to be disruptive and obey the flight crew, in return the airline ought to be held responsible for due diligence in preventing potential undie bombers, butt bombers, shoe bombers, hijackers and assorted other dangerous characters from causing death, injury or property damage.
US Air and American Airlines should have been sued into oblivion for 9/11, after which the surviving air carriers would have competed for passengers who had choices about what level of security and inconvenience they wanted to pay for. The Federal Government with the TSA relieved the airlines of responsibility and liability and the consumers of choice.
jason gray,
after the war many ex NAZIs came over to America to be scientists and teachers
Not so. While many Germans came over to America most of those who became scientists and teachers were anti-nazi refugees, often Jews who arrived before the war. Membership in the NSDAP before 1946 remains grounds for denial of a visa to enter the United States and for deportation of anyone who falsely denied such membership.
“If done properly it can work but it takes a large number of very skilled people.”
I am going to burst into tears. It is illegal to only hire “very skilled people.” Griggs vs, Duke Power is the law of the land. Do you have the slightest idea what I am talking about? The best and the brightest cannot be hired to fill these security positions. Griggs vs. Duke Power is the mystery U.S. Supreme Court decision. Most Americans have never heard of it. And yet, it endangers their lives on a daily basis.
whiskey,
You’re losing it, brother. Listen:
The most obvious thing it tells me is that are 60% who say they aren’t in favor. Are some of them dissembling? Certainly that would be the way to bet. But are some of the 40% saying so just because their radical brother/father/husband/imam is there listening to them answer the pollster? That wouldn’t surprise me, either.
So is it that you claim to know every Muslim and what they think and say, or is it that you–Wahhabi-style–will pull a “no true Muslim” regarding any who have bothered to so condemn?
There was a young lady named Alice
who used a dynamite stick for a phallus
they found her vagina
in North Carolina
and bits of her tits in Dallas
***
okay, go ahead and ban me, i deserve it–tho i’m not the author –just a reteller –but I coulda had class. I coulda been a contender. I coulda been somebody, instead of a bum, which is what I am, let’s face it.
buddy larsen,
That was not in questionable taste. No question at all.
Ah the benefits of being raised on the Classics.
Time to watch the Three Stooges on YouTube™.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sZeqHamjyjU
That is…not correct. The biggest counterexample is Turkey.
The Turkey currently ruled by Erdogan’s Islamist party, the same party that’s busy dismantling the secular reforms that constrained Islam and is now calling for a resurgence of the Caliphate? The Turkey that denies the Armenian genocide, the slaughter of thousands of Jews, and continues to occupy Cyprus? That Turkey? Any lack of war on their part is a purely temporary and strategic situation. We are fools for treating them as friends.
We may not be at war with all Muslims, but we always have been, currently are, and always will be at war with all of Islam. That is Islam’s overarching mandate: total war until Islam rules everywhere. All periods of “peace” exist only so long as the Ummah deems it to be to their advantage. War will come, indeed Islam mandates it must come, as soon as that changes.
You may think that Muslims going on a rampage and murdering Christians on the mere rumor somebody disrespected Muhammad, or the Egyptian practice of stealing Copt girls and forcibly marrying them to Muslim men, or Malaysians murdering Christians for using the word “Allah”, or Afghanis destroying Buddhist monuments, has nothing to do with us or the greater war with Islam. You couldn’t be more wrong. They are the canary in the coal mine, reminding us of the fate Muslims have in store for us. That Malaysia isn’t at war with us is an accident of geography, if they could they’d be treating us the same way they treat native Malay Christians.
So is it that you claim to know every Muslim and what they think and say, or is it that you–Wahhabi-style–will pull a “no true Muslim” regarding any who have bothered to so condemn?
Have you ever listened to a Muslim condemnation of terror attacks? They are so loaded with caveats and weasel words that it’s obvious they are insincere.
35. buddy larsen:
No ban for you. You gace us a bit of wicked humor in a depressing discussion.
BTW Wretchard – I somehow missed your email invitation to use Toque, and when I followed the links provided found them expired…
MD
You don’t need an invitation any more Morton, simply view this site in either IE8, Firefox 3.5 or greater or Safari and you’ll see the thing come up between the post section and the comments section.
Langley/20
Loved the Chesterton. Wish I had known of it when I visited the Escorial some years ago and stood with admiration before the crypt containing the body of Don Juan and the revered piece of the large wooden cross Don Juan had hoisted into the tops of his flagship before the battle.
Thank you so much for bringing the Chesterton to us.
Walt
#15 Wretchard, too clever by half *is* stupid. If you have an IQ of 160 and a doctorate in political science from Harvard but believe something that is obviously untrue, you are stupid, regardless of the other indicators.
ol right, tant pis pour vous, j’ai Toque on my old pc
thanks for the splanations les gentils mecs
what’s that ?
TransactionManagementError at /misc/comment_save_hash/
Transaction managed block ended with pending COMMIT/ROLLBACKRequest Method: POST
Request URL: http://tocque.com/misc/comment_save_hash/
Exception Type: TransactionManagementError
Exception Value: Transaction managed block ended with pending COMMIT/ROLLBACK
Exception Location: /var/local/pinax-env/lib/python2.6/site-packages/django/db/transaction.py in leave_transaction_management, line 77
Python Executable: /var/local/pinax-env/bin/python
Python Version: 2.6.4
Python Path: [‘/home/release/tocque/apps’, ‘/var/local/pinax-env/lib/python2.6/site-packages/pinax/apps’, ‘/home/release/tocque’, ‘/var/local/pinax-env/lib/python2.6/site-packages/setuptools-0.6c9-py2.6.egg’, ‘/var/local/pinax-env/lib/python2.6/site-packages/pip-0.4.1devdev-py2.6.egg’, ‘/var/local/pinax-env/lib/python2.6/site-packages/lxml-2.2.2-py2.6-linux-i686.egg’, ‘/home/release/fbif/pyfacebook’, ‘/home/release/tocque’, ‘/var/local/pinax-env/lib/python26.zip’, ‘/var/local/pinax-env/lib/python2.6′, ‘/var/local/pinax-env/lib/python2.6/plat-linux2′
Teresita, you are aware that Turkey is run by Islamists, who are erasing all of Ataturk’s reforms, and are openly allied with Iran? This is not news to you is it? Nor that this policy and the huge anti-Americanism, anti-Western, anti-Semitic feelings are characteristic of about 90% of the Turkish people, who have Mein Kampf as a perennial best-seller?
Indonesia is the home to a growing Jihad movement which the government dare not touch (those who beheaded Catholic schoolgirls or blew up Bali got token punishments). Malaysia is run by 9/11 Truthers (Mahathir). The Gulf is funding central for Jihad, run by despots and filled with willing jihadis.
Keith Ellison X is a strong supporter of Jihad, Hamas, Hezbollah, so yes we are at war with him. Abdul-Jabbar, and Iman as well. This is inevitable. You draw lines and sides. You don’t get to choose “halfsies” or “sorta-notta.”
There is no way that the elites will be willing to relax PC rules. Look at your own comments. Keith Ellison X has been to Hamas rally after Hezbollah rally in the Detroit area, and engaged in what can be called treason by the non-PC, and you don’t view him as an enemy. The likely result of a terrorist attack dropping a few airliners out of the sky onto US cities will be doubling down on PC. Moreover, since there will short-term be no way of knowing if the Muslim guy two rows down came in from Detroit by way of Somalia, or is simply a home-grown Muslim, the short-term will be to simply avoid getting killed by a jihadi. Long-term, it will be excluding Muslims from the West. No Muslims in the West, no problems.
Because this is the inescapable conclusion: if NO Muslims were allowed in the West (and all the ones here kicked out), there would be NO Jihad in America.
Jason — What “victory?” Are we going to make Muslims stop being Muslim? Stop engaging in Polygamy, which makes most Muslim men without any hope of marriage? Stop engaging in Sharia? Muslims are NOT Nazis, or Germans, or Japanese. German, Brazilian, and Italian Catholics do not fly planes into Canary Wharf skyscrapers to protest the Six Counties being ruled by the UK. Meanwhile Nigerians, Pakistanis, Saudis, and so on will willingly kill themselves in the West to protest … the West existing.
What “superiority?” Iranian youths don’t want the Mullahs ruling things, but they are Muslims still. Believing in Polygamy, and Sharia. They just want to rule themselves, they are still the enemy. They believe (not the least of which is sexual frustration among young men) that Muslims world-wide should tell non-Muslims all around the globe what to do, say, watch, see, believe, and so on. Globalization and growing wealth only makes this worse.
The solution is just to make Muslims so poor world-wide that they are focused completely on survival, instead of conquest. Tribalistic, polygamy-driven instability plus technology that equalizes things (nukes, bio, chemical), makes pretty much all Muslims our enemy, because you have guys who are the sons of Nigerian billionaires complaining they cannot find a girl, and so wanting to blow themselves (and their crotches) up. The symbolism should be obvious.
Kirk — Why am I losing it? That native born British Muslims would ADMIT to wanting Sharia (i.e. a rule akin to Iran) at that rate means that things are trending worse not better, particularly when you drill down and find more than 50% of younger Brit Muslims want it. MI-5 estimates that there hundreds of thousands of Muslim jihadis in Britain. So many they cannot keep track of them. And it gets worse every year, as Pakistan exports its Jihad to the Midlands and Britain.
Nor am I “out of the mainstream.” The prosecutor who convicted the “Blind Sheik,” Andrew McCarthy (not the actor) has said in print (“Willful Blindness”) that Jihadis are indeed the true expression of Islam as it is written and practiced. Like McCarthy (and Mark Steyn) I have NOT SEEN:
1. Muslims marching to protest 9/11. ANYWHERE in the world.
2. Muslims raising money for 9/11 victims.
3. Muslims informing on plots (excepting the father of the crotch bomber who did not want him cannon fodder).
4. Muslims running Jihad preachers out of the West.
5. Muslims shutting up Jihad preachers in Muslim nations.
6. Muslims stopping Jihadi types from harrassing or threatening British soldiers in hospitals.
7. Muslims marching to stop celebrations of Jihad and killing British soldiers in England.
8. Muslims condemn the attack on Kurt Westergaard (and his grand-daughter) and offer protection.
9. Muslims condemn the murder of Theo Van Gogh, and offer protection for Ayaan Hirsi Ali.
10. Muslims condemn the death sentence for the Afghan convert to Christianity from Islam, and offer protection.
These are what I have NOT seen with my own eyes. So like McCarthy and Steyn and Derbyshire I draw conclusions based on what Muslims do (kill the infidel) and what they don’t do (stop any of the same).
I will note that we have NOT SEEN: Jihadis from dirt-poor Mauritania, Niger, and Chad. This suggests that the strategic effort of the West should be to impoverish Muslim nations so that they are at a “remove” from the rest of the world. A quarantine caused by poverty. People struggling to survive cannot board planes to blow up folks over Detroit. And conversely, increased wealth among Muslims makes (as we can see by the Jihadis) more jihad.
Teresita,
Turkey may indeed be detectably more “moderate” than other islamic nations, but the country is an unacknowledged outlaw nation. In 1974, Turkey invaded Cyprus, which at the time had a Turkish minority (less than 40 percent) that had mostly co-existed with the Greek majority for generations. Aside from military casualties, there were allegations of rapes and mutilations of Greek women, and the upshot of the invasion is that most of the island is now in the possession of the Turks. I know a number of Greek Cypriots who have been living in the US since immigrating, whose families lost everything – homes, lemon groves, fields, businesses, et cetera. The European Union for a number of years refused to seat Turkey mainly because of the unresolved issues of the invasion.
Turkey is a member of NATO, as is Greece, but while there is much bad feeling between those two, it was CYPRUS that Turkey invaded, NOT the Greek mainland. Elements of the Greek Cypriot population have been agitating and working for political union (Ένωσις) with Athens since the British withdrew in the mid-1960′s.
Mustafa Kemal (“Ataturk”) lead a movement to secularize Turkey in the early 20th Century, and it did so, but you still could not describe Turkey as a secular nation, except relative to the most fanatically Islamist Muslim nations.
Someone mentioned surgically implanting PETN – how about breast implants? Some double D’s would be more than a couple of pounds, and hardly noticed on a chubby woman in a loose, modest muslim dress.
Anyhow, blowing up an airplane might kill 200-300 innocents, but hijacking one gives the terrorists a weapon that can kill thousands. Put a baseball bat in the back seat pocket of every airline seat, and short of a hijacker with a grenade, the baseball bat wielding passengers will own the aircraft in short order.
Preventing hijacking is a Good Thing, and the best thing we’ve done there is reinforced cockpit doors.
Meantime, how long can we be lucky before 300 innocents die from a booby or bloomer bomber if we continue to stay on defense one step behind the bombers? Eventually, we may actually cover all the bases, but also make all passengers so irritated that nobody but the aircrew will fly. Somewhere before that point, the bommbers will see no return on their investment doing airliners and look elsewhere. Why the huge emphasis on preventing a suicide bomber (not a hijacker) from getting on an airplane, when he can go to a college football game or walk into a mall food court with 300 teenagers hanging out? I’m afraid that shoe will drop too soon.
Wretchard is right; we must be on the offensive everywhere, including sealing our borders, and I hate to say, discomfitting Muslims here in the US until they become more pro-active in outing hate preachers and oddball hardliners in their midst.
Buddy – That Limerick was great!
Bob Smith,
I don’t consider listening to what CAIR says as definitive for all Muslims in the US, much less elsewhere. Listen harder.
whiskey,
I know who Andrew McCarthy is (but why would I pay enough attention to Hollywood or TV to know there is an actor with the same name???) I don’t see, though, why his pronouncement on this has any authority. Yes, by all means the Jihadis themselves think that they “are indeed the true expression of Islam as it is written”. But other (non-Jihadi) Muslims may not agree, and they are by no means an empty set.
Let’s assume they do come up with an internal bomb that doesn’t require a syringe. How would that be stopped/detected?
I hope someone has a good idea.
Yes, by all means the Jihadis themselves think that they “are indeed the true expression of Islam as it is written”.
Fortunately, we don’t need to believe the jihadists. We can read the Quran, Hadith, and Sira for ourselves, and jihad is indeed congruent with them, and even more importantly, with how Muhammad actually practiced Islam.
But other (non-Jihadi) Muslims may not agree, and they are by no means an empty set.
I’ve read plenty from “non-jihad Muslims” about how Islam is really peaceful and jihadists are wrong. Just one problem, they aren’t “non-jihad Muslims”. They’re pro-jihad Muslims engaging in propaganda on behalf of their fighting brothers. When they say these things, they’re lying to you. There is no disagreement on the subject of jihad between Islam’s 4 orthodox schools. None.
sfblue – How to stop it? Cut down the money tree that funds global jihad.
The problem is caused by the fact that a tiny number of the most extreme fundamentalist Muslims control an absolutely enormous amount of money. A hundred years ago, the Arabs had habits just as vile – probably worse in fact – as they are now, and it didn’t matter. Why? Because they were impoverished and powerless.
This means that anything tending to drop the price of oil, and the sales of it, help in the fight against jihad. What does this mean? It means going all-out for energy independence – and not by drilling for oil in US territory either, but by developing forms of alternative energy that we know will work (or at least strongly suspect might) and also ceasing development of forms that won’t – wind and ground solar being the most obvious. Focus and Polywell fusion, SPS, OTEC, wave power, biodiesel from algae…
(One of these at least also gives us the option to drop Lucifer’s Hammer on them if they get uppity.)
And once done, confiscate all Muslim assets in the West, blow all the pipelines leading out of the ME, mine the Persian Gulf and let them see whether oil is edible.
That’s the way I would prefer to see it done. The other way could be carried out now – and I would rather we didn’t. Not because of what it would do to the enemy, but because of what it would do to us. What is it? The Third Conjecture.
Bob Smith (#52), it’s not so important what you or I think the Koran means, it’s what the practitioners think. And how precisely did you gain this knowledge of what everyone’s real belief is?
The internal bomb brings to mind the internal monster; both deadly to the host and the bystander – - a whole new double meaning to “Tough Love” – a whole new double meaning to the term “Aliens.”
http://blogs.amctv.com/scifi-scanner/aliens-3.jpg
Bob Smith (#52), it’s not so important what you or I think the Koran means, it’s what the practitioners think.
You miss my point. You seemed to be saying jihadists aren’t “the true expression of Islam as it is written”. I’m saying they are, and that Muslims who say otherwise are lying. How do I know they’re lying? I can read Islam’s foundational texts (Quran, Hadith, Sira), and what Islam’s most revered jurists say about it.
And how precisely did you gain this knowledge of what everyone’s real belief is?
I presume that people who lie believe the opposite of what they’re lying about. Ergo, when a Muslim attempts to mislead me about vital elements of Muslim belief, which act not coincidentally happens to also give cover for jihad, they support jihad. They are following Muhammad’s maxim “war is deceit”, and embodying Allah as a great deceiver (Quran 3:54, 8:30, 10:21).
Not at all, I’m saying although group A (the jihadists) claim they are “the true expression of Islam as it is written”, there is also a non-empty group B, who also claim themselves to be Muslim, who hold that the jihadists aren’t in fact the true expression of Islam. That’s their claim, not something I foisted on them. And it’s the second group B of whom I asked, who elected you to speak for them?
Look, I’m perfectly aware that your typical Wahhabist or Khomeinist does not regard the majority of people in, say, Baku or Priština who self-identify as Muslim to be “real Muslims”.
What I don’t get is why you agree with them. Would you be similarly privilege the intellectual heirs of Richard Butler or Rushdoony with getting to define who a “real Christian” is?
Dick
Wretchard is right; we must be on the offensive everywhere, including sealing our borders, and I hate to say, discomfitting Muslims here in the US until they become more pro-active in outing hate preachers and oddball hardliners in their midst.”
Muslims here in the U.S. have set up training camps to practice attacking Infidels. We do nothing about it. The FBI is aware of these camps and there are hundreds [edit- rumored hundreds, verified dozens] of them.
Kirk
Yes, by all means the Jihadis themselves think that they “are indeed the true expression of Islam as it is written”. But other (non-Jihadi) Muslims may not agree, and they are by no means an empty set.
And how precisely did you gain this knowledge of what everyone’s real belief is?
It doesn’t have to be that the west knows what “everybody’s” belief is on a particular subject like religion. With one exception- ISLAM. That is because Islam is not just a religion it is a complete way of life including the political and the total control of not only the believer but the unbeliever.
So if you are a believer you believe and live by Islam and everything written supporting it for the last several hundred years. If you are a believer then you believe Islam is the only true religion and that all others must subjugate themselves and their false religions to Islam.
Period. End of discussion with any Muslim, unless of course he just decides to lie to you which his religion not only allows but tells them to lie to the infidels.
I copied this to a file some years ago, thinking it was correct totally correct:
Comparing Islam to Christianity (from the Muslim point of view)
There are, however, some very significant areas of difference. We will mention just a few. First, the Muslim perception of God is by no means the same as that revealed in the Bible. Islam portrays God as ultimately unknowable. In fact, in the Koran, Allah reveals His will, but He never reveals Himself. Neither is He ever portrayed as a God of love, nor as a Father to His people, as He is in the Bible.
Second, though Jesus is presented as a miracle working prophet and messiah, and even without sin, Islam denies that He is the Son of God or Savior of the world. Indeed, it is denied that Jesus ever died at all, least of all for the sins of the world.
Third, though mankind is depicted as weak and prone to error, Islam denies that man is a sinner by nature and in need of a Savior, as the Bible so clearly teaches. People are capable of submitting to God’s laws and meriting his ultimate approval. According to Islam, man’s spiritual need is not for a savior but for guidance.
This leads to the fact that since in Islam, acceptance by God is something we must earn by our works, it cannot possibly provide the sense of security that can be found in the grace of God as taught in the Bible.
It leaves a lot out and when it says that in Islam the believer must earn acceptance by Allah and if you read the Qur’an Allah lays out how you must act and what you must do for that acceptance. Some of those qualifications are similar to Christianity, because most of the Qur’an was stolen from early Christianity, although it wasn’t known or practiced as the Christianity that we know today. But the remainder of the qualifications read like a demented warrior chief laying down the rules on how to dispose of the unbelievers, either through killing them, or making slaves out of them.
I have read thousands of pages on Islam since 9/11 and the more I read the more I know that Islam is not and never will be compatible with the rest of the world nor will it be able to exist in the future.
Muslims of course are their own worse enemies. They will be responsible for their own slaughter and subjugation. Us? We have no choice in the matter. If we don’t resist we will be destroyed as Infidels, if we do we must destroy Islam and those followers that resist and continue to be a threat to us.
Oh..the Moderate Muslim doesn’t actually exist. YOU are either a Muslim (a believer) or you are not. If you are not you must convert or be killed or become a slave.
The “moderate” Muslims know this.
That is the main reason you don’t see or hear Muslims objecting to their violent breathern, they are more scared of them and Allah than they are of Infidels.
Papa Ray
Papa Ray
And it’s the second group B of whom I asked, who elected you to speak for them?
Since I’m saying they’re lying, why do you think I’m trying to speak for them?
Look, I’m perfectly aware that your typical Wahhabist or Khomeinist does not regard the majority of people in, say, Baku or Priština who self-identify as Muslim to be “real Muslims”. What I don’t get is why you agree with them.
How is Islamic practice in those places at variance with orthodox Islamic teachings? Remember that one of the reasons a Saudi Wahhabist would call a Nigerian a fake Muslim is because he’s black. Non-Arab Muslims are inferior, and they (the non-Arabs) know it.
you can tell by his scowl
and stiff stroll down the aisle
that he may from Yemen
and he may be a-schemin’
to blow up the bomb in his bowel
RoP precludes “scruples” when dealing with infidels. Ergo, no trust can be establshed bewtween Islam and rest-of-world. Running toward you waving the “white flag,” while pulling the pin on the suicide vest, makes for very short reaction time. Self-aware guided IEDs, protected til the last horrific moments by the Westerners’ suspension of disbelief.
Since the radicals – those Muslims disposed to commit atrocities opportunistically in the name of allah, right now – cannot be distinguished from those who are jihadis-in-waiting, exclusion is the only humane response.
Given the “suddeness” of emotion that can apparently overcome any Muslim of either sex (as we can sadly confirm), thereby driving them into a murderous rage, to commit heinous acts against infidel and muslim alike -everybody- then it needs to be identified as a crime against humanity, and treated as war crime.
The religion of peace must be ostracized out of existence. When your new approved religious text has been distributed to every retrained Imam, come back and see US.
BTW when I fly, I check whether any of the pilots looks Muslim. First things first. The public should have access to this “profiling” when booking a flight, no? We spend ever more time and effort and treasure to defend against Muslim terror, in fact allowing worldwide travel to continue, albeit at evidently ever greater overall peril to the travelers – just not which travelers will become victoms, or when.
Unless we institute Israeli procedures, the best we can ever expect from TSA-type operations is an apology after each and every travel-related catastrophe. Making it a criminal offense like with the crotchbomber means CSI-like process. It’s all about any evidence left behind, after the fact. Beating that horse won’t win the race every time, no matter the force employed. Or, the intrusiveness of technology.
Just think, the jihad needs only one crazy every couple of years, on any int’l airliner, to shout out verses from the Koran to prompt our continuous quest for perfect defense; while disregarding the number one indicator; escalating the anxiety levels of all non-Muslim travelers; and hoping some passenger is brave enough in time, whenever necessary, armed with a pillow.
What’s the safeguard regarding Muslim pilots again?
Life@32 Come on now; aren’t you familiar is the Denazification proceedings?