NATO dhimmis -- time to go home

The traditional relationship between Muslims, when they controlled a territory, and the non-Muslims, was that the latter could continue to live and go about their business provided they openly acknowledged their dhimmi status (second class citizenship) and they paid protection money to the Muslims for the privilege of being permitted to stay alive.

If you were any doubt about the waste of time that has become the war in Afghanistan it has to be the news that has surfaced that money is being paid to the Taliban not to kill NATO troops. Canada has denied it does this, as do the French and the Italians. But the British are doing it and it appears the Americans may be doing it also. Here and here and here and here.

Paying Muslims so they won’t kill you. How Islamic can it get?

Time to get out.

What's this war for?

In a recent column by Tarek Fatah in The National Post, he says we have lost the war in Afghanistan, we should acknowledge defeat and we should bring home our troops now before any more of them are killed.

I don’t agree with him.

I normally have a lot of time for Fatah. He is one of a handful of Muslims who calls for the reform of the religion. For his efforts, he and his family have been threatened with death by other Muslims.

Fatah is the author of Chasing a Mirage: The Tragic Illusion of an Islamic State, a book that has been reasonably well-received by the public and was a runner-up in the 2009 Donner Prize for the best books on Canadian public policy. The book discredits the notion of a world-wide Caliphate from an historical perspective.

However, this column is the most defeatist I have ever read. If he had written this kind of thing in 1942 about the war with the Axis Powers, he probably would have been locked up for sedition.

Fatah says:

We have lost the war. The Islamist jihadis have won it. We must acknowledge defeat and bring our troops home.

In a war between those who desire death and those who treasure their RRSPs and IRAs, the outcome is predictable. Canadian soldiers are professional, but mission-less armies have never fared well on the battlefield. American soldiers, who enlist primarily with the objective of obtaining a college degree, will never be able to defeat their counterparts, who view their freshman year as starting in paradise on the banks of rivers of milk and honey surrounded by 72 virgins.

This is hyperbole, of course, because there are many Americans who did not enlist for a free ride into college, but to avenge 9/11 and to do what the American military exists to do; i.e., keep the country secure.

We are told that we are involved in an “asymmetrical” war and that different strategies and tactics need to be employed if we are to “win” it. Asymmetrical is just a fancy name for guerrilla warfare and guerilla wars have been won; the British in South Africa, Kenya and Malaya, as examples. The more recent one is the defeat of the Tamil Tigers by the government of Sri Lanka.

However, those conflicts were carried out in confined geographical territories, where the combatants on the other side did not have easy access to outside material support, or had little room to maneuver, and where the victorious party could effectively bottle them up in less and less defendable territory.

The problem with the war against radical Islam is that it recruits its “soldiers” from everywhere, including our own country, and it can supply them from a bottomless armory of small arms and explosives, available mainly through the helpful manufacturing and distribution by the very governments who send their armies to fight these zealots.

So, just as the military needs to think differently about how it combats non-state agents of a death cult, we, the people, need to consider redefining what we mean by defeat and victory. Sometimes a victory is merely keeping somebody at bay.

Did we experience a victory over the Soviet Union like we did over Germany and Japan? Clearly not. But we defeated it just the same. We contained its expansion and it eventually imploded.

That is how we need to think about victory with respect to radical Islam. Keep it off balance, bottle it up, interdict it wherever it appears, and discredit it at all times. As long as Islam lives, the death cult will never go away, but it can be contained and its harmful effects minimized.

I agree with Fatah that we should bring home the troops, but only when our commitment to Afghanistan ends in 2011. The Islamists will crow about it, but we accomplished what we set out to do which was to disrupt al Qaeda and chase away the Taliban government.

In the future, we should not set ourselves lofty goals of bringing democracy to these backwater Islamic states. We should just interfere enough to derail any emerging threats and then let them sort out their own messes. The strategy is containment and successful containment is a victory. Had we identified this goal early on, we would have withdrawn from Afghanistan long ago and not found ourselves in the current quagmire of endless warfare.

Israel employs such a strategy with its neighbours. It fights them when necessary, inflicts a military beating, without complete conquest, and then goes back to the status quo. It is instructive that Lebanon’s belligerent Nasrallah declared war on Israel in 2006 in support of Hamas’s dustup with the Jewish state and got such a bloody nose from that encounter that he stayed well away from its re-run in 2008.

Although I disagree with Fatah about claiming a defeat and running home now, I do agree with this sentiment.

In the U. S., a bumbling President who knows the threat of Islamism and the Muslim Brotherhood ideology very well still bends over backwards and welcomes the bearers of this doctrine into his inner circle.

Imagine fighting the U. S. S. R. without confronting the ideology of Stalinism. Could we have won? Not a chance. Today we are fighting Islamist jihad-ism, yet neither Obama nor the British PM nor Harper or Ignatieff dare utter one word against the ideology that attacked us all on 9/11. So what is this war for?

We have to have a clearer idea of the enemy we are fighting and who our real friends and allies are in the Islamic world.

Canada's hypocrisy at the United Nations

The ridiculously named United Nations’ “Human Rights Council” is in the news again trying to push through a several times re-written resolution criminalizing any criticism of religion. It is sponsored by Pakistan and, although it is couched in the feel good language of pluralism and understanding, its real intent is to the open the door to a worldwide purge of cartoonists who make fun of Mohammed and to students, like Afghani, Pervez Kambaksh, who was sentenced to 20 years in prison for questioning why Islam treated men differently than women.

Canada has taken a correct and principled stance.

"Canada rejects the basic premise that religions have rights; human rights belong to human beings," said a Foreign Affairs spokesperson.

Hmmm.

I wonder how that spokesperson would explain section 296 (1) of the Criminal Code of Canada to the U.N:

(1) Every one who publishes a blasphemous libel is guilty of an
indictable offence and liable to imprisonment for a term not
exceeding two years.

(2) It is a question of fact whether or not any matter that is
published is a blasphemous libel.

(3) No person shall be convicted of an offence under this section
for expressing in good faith and in decent language, or
attempting to establish by argument used in good faith and
conveyed in decent language, an opinion on a religious
subject

This provision has been present in every amended version of the Code since 1892. The last prosecution for blasphemous libel occurred in 1935, but sometimes seemingly moribund laws have a phoenix-like way of reviving themselves in peculiar cases.

And what exactly does this defense mean – “decent language”? What was considered decent language at the height of the Victorian Age is a far cry for what passes for normal speech today. In fact, it is probably true that decency in language in the 21st century had been relegated to just another interesting artifact of history.

Canada would do well to try to lead by example, rather than just mouthing liberal platitudes on the international stage, and abolish section 296 (1).

Then it can tell the Muslim world to “screw off”.

In decent language, of course.

Trooper Marc Diab travels the Highway of Heroes

Yesterday afternoon I had an experience that I will not likely forget for a long time. I was leaving to drive east on the 401 expressway into Toronto to an appointment. As I approached the ramp leading onto the highway I noticed flashing lights, a mob of people and many waving Canadian flags on the eastern side of the bridge over the highway. At the bottom of the ramp were about 6 or 7 Royal Canadian Mounted Police in their splendid scarlet dress uniforms.

I realized right away that this was all in honour of the return of the body of Trooper Marc Diab, who died in Afghanistan last Sunday from a roadside bomb attack. He was the 112th soldier carried in such a miltary procession along this road and it has now been dubbed the Highway of Heroes.

I turned on my radio and heard traffic reports giving regular updates on the progress of the military convoy. I discovered I was perhaps a couple of kilometers ahead of it. As I drove east, every overpass was crowed with people who stood in very chilly weather to show respect for Trooper Diab. Among the flags draped over the railing was a home made one showing an evergreen tree bordered by the red stripes of the Canadian flag. It was supposed to represent the cedars of Lebanon. Trooper Diab is an immigrant from Lebanon who died serving Canada.

I had heard of this ritual but never before witnessed it. You cannot help but be moved by it.

I hope there are no more soldiers coming home this way, but if there are, I will be standing on the overpass at the bottom of my street with my neighbours.

It's always something

What I like about reading the news everyday is the surprises I often find. Things unknown before or a little out of the ordinary.

Today I learned that outgoing President Bush has left a personal note to incoming President Obama in the top drawer of the desk in the Oval Office. This was a practice that started with Ronald Reagan who left one for his successor, and presidents have been doing it ever since. Of, course the mainstream media would have you believe that these are "welcome to the office and good luck" notes.

Don't be fooled for a minute. These notes are to advise the incoming guy that there really are pieces of a crashed alien spaceship and alien remains cryogenically frozen in Area 51, and that the staff on site serves a really good lunch if the President wants to visit.

On another topic, a couple of years ago there was huge flap in Canada over the fact that a Canadian Muslim guy named Maher Arar, who was connecting on a flight through New York was picked up by the Americans and rendered to Syria where he was tortured for a year as a potential terrorist. On returning to Canada, after much ado, we paid this guy $10.5 million for his pain and suffering. However, we could not persuade our American cousins to remove his name from their "no-fly" list, and we couldn't figure out why.

It turns out that our other favourite Canadian terrorist, Omar Khadr, who has been languishing in a jail in Guantanamo, awaiting a trial that should never take place, had identified Arar from a photograph in 2002 as somebody he had seen at an al-Qaida terrorist training camp in Afghanistan. Khadr said he never met Arar in Canada. Arar was living in Ottawa and Khadr was living in Toronto.

All very curious, said the cat.

A British journalist's view of Canada

This has been around for a while, but it was recently sent to me again by acorrespondent and I thought it was worth another blog posting, since we are just past Remembrance Day. It is from the Sunday Telegraph. Since it was written Canada has lost 97 soldiers and one diplomat in the Afghan conflict, safeguarding the Sharia law in that country.

The country the world forgot - again

By Kevin Myers
Last Updated: 12:01am BST 21/04/2002

UNTIL the deaths last week of four Canadian soldiers accidentally killed by a US warplane in Afghanistan, probably almost no one outside their home country had been aware that Canadian troops were deployed in the region. And as always, Canada will now bury its dead, just as the rest of the world as always will forget its sacrifice, just as it always forgets nearly everything Canada ever does.

It seems that Canada's historic mission is to come to the selfless aid both of its friends and of complete strangers, and then, once the crisis is over, to be well and truly ignored. Canada is the perpetual wallflower that stands on the edge of the hall, waiting for someone to come and ask her for a dance. A fire breaks out, she risks life and limb to rescue her fellow dance-goers, and suffers serious injuries. But when the hall is repaired and the dancing resumes, there is Canada, the wallflower still, while those she once helped glamorously cavort across the floor, blithely neglecting her yet again.

That is the price which Canada pays for sharing the North American Continent with the US, and for being a selfless friend of Britain in two global conflicts. For much of the 20th century, Canada was torn in two different directions: it seemed to be a part of the old world, yet had an address in the new one, and that divided identity ensured that it never fully got the gratitude it deserved.

advertisementYet its purely voluntary contribution to the cause of freedom in two world wars was perhaps the greatest of any democracy. Almost 10 per cent of Canada's entire population of seven million people served in the armed forces during the First World War, and nearly 60,000 died. The great Allied victories of 1918 were spearheaded by Canadian troops, perhaps the most capable soldiers in the entire British order of battle.

Canada was repaid for its enormous sacrifice by downright neglect, its unique contribution to victory being absorbed into the popular memory as somehow or other the work of the "British". The Second World War provided a re-run. The Canadian navy began the war with a half dozen vessels, and ended up policing nearly half of the Atlantic against U-boat attack. More than 120 Canadian warships participated in the Normandy landings, during which 15,000 Canadian soldiers went ashore on D-Day alone. Canada finished the war with the third largest navy and the fourth largest air force in the world.

The world thanked Canada with the same sublime indifference as it had the previous time. Canadian participation in the war was acknowledged in film only if it was necessary to give an American actor a part in a campaign which the US had clearly not participated - a touching scrupulousness which, of course, Hollywood has since abandoned, as it has any notion of a separate Canadian identity.

So it is a general rule that actors and film-makers arriving in Hollywood keep their nationality - unless, that is, they are Canadian. Thus Mary Pickford, Walter Huston, Donald Sutherland, Michael J Fox, William Shatner, Norman Jewison, David Cronenberg and Dan Aykroyd have in the popular perception become American, and Christopher Plummer British. It is as if in the very act of becoming famous, a Canadian ceases to be Canadian, unless she is Margaret Atwood, who is as unshakeably Canadian as a moose, or Celine Dion, for whom Canada has proved quite unable to find any takers.

Moreover, Canada is every bit as querulously alert to the achievements of its sons and daughters as the rest of the world is completely unaware of them. The Canadians proudly say of themselves - and are unheard by anyone else - that 1 per cent of the world's population has provided 10 per cent of the world's peace-keeping forces. Canadian soldiers in the past half century have been the greatest peace-keepers on earth - in 39 missions on UN mandates, and six on non-UN peace-keeping duties, from Vietnam to East Timor, from Sinai to Bosnia.

Yet the only foreign engagement which has entered the popular non-Canadian imagination was the sorry affair in Somalia, in which out-of-control paratroopers murdered two Somali infiltrators. Their regiment was then disbanded in disgrace - a uniquely Canadian act of self-abasement for which, naturally, the Canadians received no international credit.

So who today in the US knows about the stoic and selfless friendship its northern neighbour has given it in Afghanistan? Rather like Cyrano de Bergerac, Canada repeatedly does honourable things for honourable motives, but instead of being thanked for it, it remains something of a figure of fun. It is the Canadian way, for which Canadians should be proud, yet such honour comes at a high cost.

This weekend four shrouds, red with blood and maple leaf, head homewards; and four more grieving Canadian families know that cost all too tragically well.

Justice in the new Afghanistan

The following was picked up from the Dhimmi Watch website. This is what happens when religion gets to determine the boundaries of free expression. Apparently, we are committed until 2011 to keep on fighting and dying for this Muslim country.

Kabul, 21 Oct. (AKI) - A journalism student who downloaded and distributed an article on women's rights from the Internet has been sentenced to 20 years in prison in Afghanistan.

Seyyed Parwiz Kambakhsh, arrested a year ago, was sentenced to death by a court in Balkh. But a Kabul appeals court on Tuesday reduced the sentence to 20 years in prison.

"This is an unjust sentence," defence lawyer, Mohammad Afzal Nourestani, told Adnkronos International (AKI).

"We will appeal to the Supreme Court. During the hearing they did not consider that my client is not the author of the article, that it was downloaded from an Iranian site and he had to ask several friends to read it."

During the appeals process, Parwiz Kambakhsh was tortured and mistreated.
"My client says he was tortured in Balkh prison and during interrogation was forced to admit to being the author of the article that appeared to be the work of an Iranian blogger."

On 28 November Seyyed Parwiz Kambakhsh will receive the Information, Safety & Freedom watchdog's Press Freedom award in Siena.

Last year the award was given to Iranian Kurdish journalists, Adnan Hassanpour and Hiwa Boutimar, both of whom have been sentenced to death by an Iranian court.

Save Sayed Pervez Kambakhsh

See full account of this affair at this site.

I am e-mailing this letter to Afghanistan’s Ambassador to Canada, Omar Said, as well as to the Prime Minister of Canada. If you feel the same way I do, I urge you to act quickly and express your views.

This is the address of the Afghanistan Embassy:

Embassy of Afghanistan
240 Argyle Avenue
Ottawa, Ontario K2P 1B9
This is the e-mail address:

contact@afghanemb-canada.net

Your Excellency:

As a Canadian citizen, taxpayer and voter, I wish to advise you that I have concerns about Canada’s continuing military commitment to Afghanistan.

We went into Afghanistan primarily to support our traditional American allies and chase Osama bin Laden and his associates out of your country. That has been accomplished.

Canada is not, and never has been, an imperial power that sends its army into countries for extended military engagements (U.N. sanctioned peacekeeping excepted). We customarily lend a hand and then we leave. We are behaving differently in Afghanistan and we need to understand why we should do so.

When I was told that the Taliban, aside from sheltering bin Laden, was a terrible and cruel government, administering the strictest form of Sharia law, and that Afghanistan had an opportunity to shed this blood-soaked past and become a modern nation, embracing liberal-democratic values, I held my piece about our army being there.

However, it has come to my attention that Sayed Pervez Kambakhsh, a 23-year-old journalism student at Balkh University and reporter for the local daily Jahan-e-Naw (The New World), has been sentenced to death for insulting Islam.

Mr. Kambakhsh was arrested on October 27, 2007, in Mazar-i-Sharif, Balkh province, for allegedly downloading and distributing material from a Farsi website which suggested that the Qur'an and Prophet Muhammad legitimize the oppression of women.

On January 22, 2008, Kambakhsh was brought before an Islamic court, without a lawyer or public oversight. Accused of un-Islamic speech and activity, socialism, rebelliousness, and improper instigation of religious debate, he was convicted of blasphemy by the court and sentenced to death.

You know very well, from your long experience in the west, Mr. Ambassador, that Mr. Kambakhsh would have experienced zero consequences had he performed exactly the same act in Canada or the United States, or any other western liberal-democracy.

Why should I want to put our young people in harm’s way to protect the Afghani government if the result is that, like the government of the Taliban, the Sharia prevails over liberal-democratic human rights to which Afghanistan claims to subscribe? In what respect are the due process of law and the ultimate fate of Mr. Kambakhsh different in the new Afghanistan than they would have been in the old?

And most importantly, why should Canada's soldiers be put in harm’s way and die to preserve this?

I would normally not presume to tell the representative of sovereign nation how his country should be conducting itself. But, equally, if I don't approve of the way it is operating, as I do not in this instance, I don't see why you should expect me to support Canadian politicians who want to keep our military engaged in such a country. You can defend yourselves, without shedding our blood.

I understand the religious authorities are counseling a swift execution of the sentence before the matter becomes political. Too late for that. I urge you, Mr. Ambassador, to press your government to step in and offer Mr. Kambakhsh clemency.

Yours truly,

Canada's ambivalence to 5th columnist Islamism

A couple of days ago, I opened up the on-line version of a mainstream Toronto newspaper and the imagery couldn't have been more jarring.

The top picture showed a Muslim woman all decked out in black with the nijab (head and face covering), exposing only her eyes. She was celebrating, with her 6 children, the release from prison after a 5 year stay, under strict conditions, of her 44 year old husband, Egyptian Mahmoud Jaballah, courtesy of Canada's federal court.

Jaballah is an immigrant who, along with a handful of others who have also been released under conditions, was being held under a "security warrant." This is a draconian legal device to hold somebody deemed dangerous to national security without having to formerly charge them and bring them to trial. Canada's answer to Guantanamo.

The court has already ruled that he cannot stay in Canada, but it is unclear where they will send him, since it is likely if he were deported to Egypt he would be tortured and/or killed (he fled Egypt to Canada in the first place). We don't know the details of the evidence against him because it is still considered a state secret, but I am betting that he wasn't picked up by our authorities for selling Bibles door to door, or that he was chased out of Egypt for the same thing ( a death sentence there). The only thing we do know is that he was associated with Ahmed Saad Khadr, the now deceased -- died in a gun battle with Pakistani troops -- patriarch of the odious and poisonous Khadr clan in Toronto (dubbed by Dr. Daniel Pipes as Canada's first family of terror).

That wasn't so much disturbing to me (disturbing as it was) as the juxtapostion with the picture immediately under that story. It was a picture of the boy next door, the fresh-faced, apple pie eating, 25 year old Nova Scotian, Cpl. Kevin Megeney. He reportedly was killed in his tent in Afghanistan by a single bullet, apparently fired by accident by some fellow soldier. The matter is being investigated and the military is silent on the details.

But this single front page says so much about Canada's ambivalence about Islamism. We are sending our soldiers into battle with Islamists to protect another bunch of Muslims who run their country under the law of the Sharia (but a less strict version -- still allowing the death penalty for converting to Christianity, mind you).

I wonder if Cpl. Megeney was a Christian.

At the same time we have, by polling estimates, about 10% of our domestic Muslim population (that 10% translates into approximately 50,000 in aggregate numbers) who support the supplanting of our liberal democracy with an Islamic state, perhaps run by theocracy like Iran. That poll number, by the way, corresponds to international estimates of Islamists amongst the greater Muslim population, which translates into a staggering 120,000,000 such people.

In World War Two, our fathers and mothers did not have any qualms about quashing 5th columnists. The Japanese were rounded up, along with some Germans and Italians. Of course, it was the worst kind of racial profiling and some very unpleasant things were done to the Japanese in particular. It was possible to do this in Canada because it was about 74% English and 22% French -- there was no ethnic mosaic, no political correctness (they used to openly talk about the yellow peril in Parliamentary debates), no consideration of moral relevancy, no multiculturalism imperatives, and no charter of rights.

We can't do that kind of thing anymore, even if circumstances might suggest it. Nor would I advocate such a thing. But, it is clear to me that Canada is at war with Islamism -- or what the hell is our army doing in Afghanistan -- and that being said, these Islamists in this country are 5th columnists. We need to stop coddling them and start considering what action we can take if they are undermining our war efforts by sapping our political morale.

Or, we need to cease being at war with Islamism in Afghanistan.

Either way, we need to stop sacrificing the Cpl. Megeney's for nothing.