The Independent says “Anti-Ground Zero Mosque campaigners Pamela Geller and Robert Spencer [have been] barred from entering Britain to speak at an EDL rally … Theresa May said activists’ presence in the UK would ‘not be conducive to the public good'”.
Meanwhile “President Obama’s top national security advisers have just hosted Sheikh Abdulla bin Bayyah at the White House. As vice president of the International Union of Muslim Scholars (IUMS) in 2004, bin Bayyah endorsed a fatwa calling for the killing of American troops and other personnel serving in Iraq.”
Why is banning Geller and Spencer contrary to the ‘public good’ while entertaining the Sheik is apparently beneficial. Sometimes the ‘public good’ is hard to understand. It’s mystifying to think why the Taliban are ‘good’ even while they attacked Kabul while ostensibly starting negotiations with the Obama administration.
But it all becomes clear when we recall the gangster movies. Who said ‘Keep your friends close and your enemies closer’? “Some believe it was Sun-tzu Chinese general & military strategist however there is no documented history of this. Was actually first said by “Michael Corleone” in The Godfather Part II.”
Maybe it was neither. I believe it the first politician uttered those words, whoever it may have been.
He must have realized it never pays for politicians to talk to the good guy since the good guys are never really going to hurt them. All they can get from a good guy is a crummy vote. And you can always manufacture those. Not even Theresa May believes that either Robert Spencer or Pamela Geller will behead anyone in London, so there’s no trouble from that direction. There is however, a very really possibility that Sheikh Abdulla bin Bayyah’s followers may decide to shorten someone by a foot or two.
There’s lots of potential trouble from that quarter.
Recently Haaretz reported that rockets were fired into Israel a “the result of an internal conflict that broke out between Hamas and Islamic Jihad”. When two Jihadi organizations fall out they settle scores by killing the Jew. Why do they do this? Because the Jews have got the money. What does Islamic Jihad have that Hamas doesn’t have?
The reason it makes sense to rocket Israel is they are both actually vying for the right to extort money from the Jewish state and are trying to outdo each other in malevolence.
“Pay me! Pay me!”
Of course they never quite put it that way. They say words like “we are struggling for the right to represent the legitimate interests of the Palestinian people.” But it’s dollars to donuts that the last people to ever see a plugged nickel will be the Palestinians.
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The way you win friends and influence politicians is not by being a nice, law-abiding, taxpaying person. You make friends by becoming such a nuisance and public menace that they have to buy you off.
Terrorism is a business. In particular, it is in the insurance business.
The UK government and the Obama administration probably think they can purchase the ‘public good’ of no beheadings by buying off the Taliban and the Sheiks. Or maybe there’s another way to think about it. Charlie Sheen, speaking of his dealings with prostitutes once said, “I don’t pay them for sex. I pay them to leave.”
But that’s where Charlie is wrong. They’ll be back and they’ll keep coming back. Once they know the way it works better than old Charlie ever did, they’ll be back. It never was about what danger Spencer or Geller posed to the British public. If they were actually bad for the public good they’d get the red carpet into Downing Street.
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