The Lonely Goatherd Blog And before him shall be gathered all nations: and he shall separate them one from another, as a shepherd divideth his sheep from the goats - Matthew 25:32
Up to the minute notes on the current state of free thinking and free living: Kentucky moonshine - original analysis and reporting from MoreThings, and all round pop culture museum of sight and sound - photo galleries, mp3 and video downloads.
Al Barger and MoreThings - getting people's goats since 1998.
Live free or die!
----
I wouldn't want to ask people to just give me money cause they like my website, but do please take a quick look at Barger's Boutique. You might find yourself a little something-something for 2 or 3 bucks that you just can't resist! Any of the round images you find around MoreThings will get you to an Amazon page to buy my stuff and help ol' Al keep the lights on.
Links
To explicitly state the obvious, these external links go to interesting and provocative websites, but they speak for themselves. I don't necessarily agree with anything they say - especially that no-goodnik Richard Marcus.
*************
All original content on MoreThings.com copyright 2008 Albert Barger or the respective authors
August 12, 2006
British Muslims Wrong Answer A year ago Britain suffered Islamic terrorist bombing. This week, British authorities busted up more Muslim terrorists apparently within days of what might likely have been far worse attacks on passenger airlines.
Given that, one might expect the local Muslim community to be jumping through hoops to separate themselves from any association with this wickedness and depravity. At a minimum, you'd expect circumspection.
Here's the response from the British Muslim community within a few hours of the latest terrorist ring being broken up, from The Independent:
Tony Blair has been warned by leading British Muslims that the Iraq war and the UK's failure to use its influence to end Israeli attacks on civilians are fuelling extremism at home. Their views are set out in a letter as a full-page advertisement in newspapers.
The letter warns: "The debacle of Iraq and now the failure to do more to secure an immediate end to the attacks on civilians in the Middle East not only increases the risk to ordinary people in that region, it is also ammunition to extremists who threaten us all."
It was signed by three of the four Muslim MPs - Sadiq Khan, Shahid Malik and Mohammed Sarwar - as well as three of the four Muslim members of the House of Lords - Lord Patel of Blackburn, Lord Ahmed of Rotherham and Baroness Uddin. It was also backed by 38 Muslim groups, including the Muslim Council of Britain, the Muslim Association of Britain, the British Muslim Forum and the British Muslim Forum.
Mr Khan said the Government's Middle East policy was seen as "unfair and unjust" by many people. "Whether we like it or not, such a sense of injustice plays into the hands of extremists," he said.
Personally, I'm not sure what to think about this. Should I take more offense at the unbelievable damned gall of these Muslims, or at the weakness and cowardice of Westerners who would act as if this was any kind of vaguely acceptable response from the Islamic community?
Muslims throughout the west and especially in England in the last few years have proven themselves to be sponsors of a fifth column- and a sixth and seventh besides. I'm not that big a Michelle Malkin fan, but at this point, these people are lucky they're not being deported wholesale or stuck in detention camps.
Instead, these fools - including MPs - are by moves like this aiding and abetting their terrorist comrades. To say otherwise would be about the same as pretending that Sinn Fein and the IRA aren't the same thing. More precisely, it would be equivalent to saying that Hezbollah in the Lebanese government isn't the same group murdering Israelis.
One hand does the dirty deeds, and the other runs their interference. Lord Patel of Blackburn, Lord Ahmed of Rotherham, Baroness Uddin, Sadiq Khan, Shahid Malik and Mohammed Sarwar et al are by this public action making themselves co-conspirators. They're mafia lawyers and PR flacks.
But it's obvious where their loyalties lie. What is harder to wrap my mind around are their Western appeasers. I'm still sometimes amazed at the lengths to which some Westerners will go to excuse their own cowardice to make the obvious moral judgments. All the multi-cultural feel-good making nice will do nothing but get you dead when the folks you're making nice with are plotting your death. I have trouble understanding how anyone who follows the news at all could miss that very basic point.
Rather than do the kinds of hard but measured things to deal with the problem now, the general soup of world politics has caused us to keep kicking the can down the road. Even Bush has gotten soft, mired down by niceness in Iraq. Otherwise, Muqtada al Sadr would be a grease spot, and the US Marines would in Lebanon right now helping to destroy Hezbollah instead of some ridiculous "honest broker" nonsense like we're trying to play now.
Instead, we're probably going to fool around until something extraordinarily bad happens, and things turn really ugly. Iran does something extra stupid with chemical or nuclear weapons, and we have to make Tehran the new Hiroshima.
Perhaps these CAIR people and these British Muslim MPs think they're clever with their rhetoric negotiating for their terrorist brethren. But about the time their jihadist brethren take out some little American town, Michelle Malkin and Ann Coulter from 2006 are going to sound like flaming liberals. Moral self-doubt and fear of being called "racist" will quickly pale in the face of the fear of actually being killed.
Before it gets that ugly, I'd like to suggest an alternative behavior paradigm for brethren of the religion of peace. Think on this near-miss this week, and how things would be playing out if the authorities hadn't caught it before a dozen or more planes got blown up mid-air. (With thanks to the government of Pakistan for their help in this.) They should consider how far their rhetoric will get them when one of these big plots slips through.
Perhaps if they wish to avoid such awful, but increasingly seemingly likely possibilities, they should take a different tact. Fill this out with the language of the Koran or whatever cultural signifiers you want, but I'd suggest something more like:
Speaking on behalf of the Muslim community, we are totally appalled by all jihadists preaching hatred and carrying death out into the world. We totally repudiate anything to do with them. They're not ours, and we don't claim them. There is no excuse for them, and we will do everything we can everywhere in the world not just to dissociate from such wicked perversions of our faith but to actively help our peace loving brethren of all races, faiths and nationalities root out such evil from our midst.