Truth on trial

The Netherlands is littered with the graves of thousands of Canadian soldiers and airman who gave their lives to liberate Holland from the tyranny of the Nazis.

I wonder what those men would think of the Dutch today if they could see the country that was reborn from the ashes of German occupation. Would they think their sacrifice was wasted?

In Amsterdam, in 1944, if you strode into the public square, stood on a bench, and denounced Nazism, you would likely have been murdered on the spot, if any Nazis were present. If they weren’t, chances are, a fellow countryman, likely a government functionary, wishing to appease and curry favour with the occupiers, would have turned you in.

In 2010, if you were to stand in the same spot and say the same things about Islam, you have a pretty good chance of being shot or knifed to death by Islamists, considering the fates of Pim Fortuyn and Theo Van Gogh. You have an equally good chance of being turned on by the government functionaries and driven from the country, as was Ayaan Hirsi Ali. Or put on trial by those same people, as is the fate of our friend, the popular nationalist politician, Geert Wilders.

Wilders goes on trial today for saying rude things about Islam and for wanting to preserve Dutch and European culture in the face of another tyrannical “ism”, Islamism.

Unlike the situation of the last generation when the country was occupied by a foreign invader promulgating a nasty, brutal religion of its own making, this new “ism” is a hostile religion that was invited in by the Dutch and made as comfortable as possible and appeased at every turn in the road, no matter how suicidal its demands are to the historic nature and character of the Dutch nation.

Many commentators talk about how this is a battle over free speech.

In part, it is.

Free speech doesn’t exist in Europe, or in Canada for that matter, and hasn’t for some time. It resulted from a unilateral surrender in an undeclared war long ago.

All the members of the EU have passed anti-speech legislation intended to prevent people from spreading the evil doctrines perpetrated by the Nazis, but these laws have now been used to prevent citizens from discussing another doctrine they find evil; namely, Islam.

In Canada, we can trace the exact date free speech died. It perished in the Supreme Court of Canada on December 13, 1990 when the high court upheld legislated speech-limiting laws, giving the government of Canada the license to prosecute people for speaking their minds even when what they speak is the truth and even when that discourse is of a political and public nature.

But at least we have not yet descended to the scurrilous level of using the court to try to penalize and destroy a legitimate leader of a political party with seats in the legislatures of the Netherlands and the EU for expressing his constituents’ viewpoints, as the Dutch are doing.

This is nothing less than an attack on democracy.

For some time, I have been reading his website, listening to his speeches and watching his interviews, and I have concluded that Wilders is a very principled person. I have not observed that he has said or written one word on this subject that is not truthful

It is truth that is on trial.

New York trial pushes Pentagon agenda

In a race against time the Pentagon has shifted some of its vast resources to step up the program to develop the H2O Follicle Enhancer and bring it to market early in the New Year, in an effort to roll it out six months earlier than originally scheduled.

“At least 200 additional specialists have been reassigned to this work in the past week as well as an additional $10 million dollars injected into its budget”, said a Pentagon spokesperson, who requested anonymity.

The HFE has been a “hush-hush” project in the basement labs at the “Pent” for the past year, administered by PROFITS, the acronym for the Program Research Office for Investigating Technology Spinoffs.

PROFITS was initially set up under the Eisenhower administration in the mid-1950s because the U.S. government was embarrassed by the amount of money it was devoting to scientific research for military and warfare purposes.

“Eisenhower, who always had a concern about the industrial – military hegemony in the economy, believed if some of the research could be turned to useful consumer use there would be a morally defensible way of supporting such expenditures and that it would have the added benefit of recouping some of the taxpayers dollars through volume sales of the spinoffs”, said the source.

It is the announcement by the Obama administration that Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the alleged mastermind of the 9/11 attack, will be brought to New York and put on trial that has the Pentagon in such a dither. The defence will discredit evidence of information obtained from waterboarding and attempt to have that evidence thrown out.

The Pentagon is concerned that public disclosure of its waterboarding techniques will harm its commercial opportunities.

“One of the exciting things we learned at Guantanamo”, said the source, “is that waterboarding can produce prodigious hair growth. You only have to look at the before and after pictures of Khalid (shown above) to see the results. In the first photo, taken at the time of his capture, you see a depressed man, losing his hair, and in the after shot is the same person -- no really -- sporting a luxuriant beard.”

“Also note the bright-eyed twinkle in the second photograph. This man has been fully restored to health and he owes it all to waterboarding.”

“You know", said the spokesperson, "We got all the 9/11 information from this guy in the first waterboarding session, within about three minutes, but the next day the guards noticed that his face fuzz had grown more than inch overnight. When that news got back to Washington, it was decided to continue the waterboarding to see if more growth would be stimulated. That was what accounted for the other 79 dunkings Khalid received. The outcome was both stunning and undeniable. The PROFITS folks at the Pentagon were very excited.”

When asked about the market possibilities for the H2O Follicle Enhancer, the source said it would likely be an export market that would drive sales, particularly in the Middle East and South Asia amongst Muslim men, and in India amongst Sikhs.

“The market for a beard growing product is just so-so in the Western Hemisphere, but face beavers are all the rage in the Islamic world. The women like them too, for obvious reasons I need not go into right now and that will not be a direct selling point in the marketing campaign, but will be understood nonetheless”, said the spokesperson. "The demographics favor strong market demand, as well, with so many of the potential buyers being under the age of 24 and unattractive to women because of difficulties in growing full beards."

Pentagon researchers have been working overtime to find the right ratio of uric acid to water that they believe is one of the keys to the stimulation of hair follicles. Uric acid is produced by human urine. They are also interested in knowing whether the cultural/racial make-up of the soldiers who emptied their bladders into the water used on Khalid is important.

“It could be a diet thing. If the soldier was Hispanic and had just consumed a burrito within the hour before he appeared at the waterboarding site the density or purity of the acid may be different from a Caucasian soldier who had a tuna sandwich.”

PROFITS has also engaged a highly-respected boutique New York marketing consulting agency to assist it in developing a marketing program, but has not made the agreement public as yet. However, it has been confirmed that the Ron Jon Surf Shop has been contracted to develop a commercially appealing waterboard.

“Something colorful and comfortable that conveys more laid back Beach Boys and less Torquemada is the goal”, said the spokesperson. "After all, who would want to be uncomfortable while they are choking?"

We "celebrate" 9/11

Tomorrow, at Ryerson University, in the heart of Toronto, a weekend lecture series will kick off under the auspices of the Al-Fauz Institute of Islamic Thought. The AFIIT is a new player in the game of educating young Muslims in Toronto. The series is called, From Caliphs to Kings, the rise and fall of the Muslim ummah.

Its guest lecturer for this series is a British-based, Palestinian-born academic, Dr. Azzam Timimi, who, according to writer Terry Glavin, in The National Post, is an unabashed supporter of suicide bombing, Hamas, the Taliban, etc. Glavin spoke to the folks at AFIIT, who disavowed knowledge of Timimi's political views. You can read Glavin’s columns here and here.

I looked at the AFIIT site and it contained two videos of Dr. Timimi lecturing in Britain in September of last year. He didn’t engage in any of the pro-violence stuff that Glavin writes about, but he still had some disturbing messages – disturbing to this Canadian.

In the first video he gives a very white-washed view of how Islam spread from Arabia. I shouldn’t be too critical of this, since President Obama gave his misdirected Cairo speech and did very much same thing. However, Dr. Timimi is here to guide young Canadian Muslims, so I will critique him.

In reference to Palestine, for example, which he acknowledged was part of the Christian Byzantine Empire, he talked about how Islam was welcomed by the people because it brought justice – something he claims they didn’t have.

I don’t know enough about that place and that time under the Byzantine Empire to be able to confirm or deny what Timimi says about the level of justice enjoyed by the non-Arabs, but after the Arabs arrived there are definitely some things they didn’t have. Wives no longer had husbands because they were slaughtered. Husbands who escaped no longer had wives or children because they were carted back to Arabia and sold as slaves. Property that was once owned by Christians and Jews (the majority of the residents) then became the property of the Muslims who supplanted them. Much of the early spread of Islam had to do with Arabs carrying out commerce in the old style – stealing and killing.

He talks about the spread of Islam to India in the most benign language. He left out of the description the fact that Muslim invaders butchered more than one million Hindus and Buddhists and razed thousands of temples.

He starts his lecture by referring to the word minority as being a bad thing. Later he admits that minorities are well protected by laws in liberal democracies.

He pretends that minorities under Islam were protected and treated with respect, and that there were no problems with them continuing worship in the religion of their choice. In fact, they were protected only in so far as they paid a protection tax to the Muslim rulers, and they weren’t permitted to build new houses of worship or openly worship outside of those houses. There were a number of other restrictions that made it clear that in Islamic societies non-Muslims were clearly second-class citizens. And people with no religion, or no religion recognized by Islam, did not have even that status.

I hope some less than bedazzled young Muslim attending these lectures this weekend asks the good doctor why it is that millions of Muslims can live on equal terms and openly practice their religion in predominately Christian-based, secular western societies, but there are very few Christians and even fewer Jews to be found in Muslim countries, and those numbers are rapidly declining?

Timimi made it quite clear in the second video that he does not see Muslims integrating with western secular societies. He claims Muslims are principally disliked because they are part of a global ummah and this transcends geographical and national boundaries. He depicts western society as if it has a Gestapo-complex regarding Muslims – referring to the knock on the door in the middle of the night.

His lecture must have been given before the trial of the airline plotters, because he claimed that everyone of them was innocent. In fact, three of them were convicted, but not for conspiracy to destroy airplanes over the Atlantic.

Finally, the dead giveaway for me was a reference he made to “celebrating” the anniversary of 9/11.

Only a jihad supporter would use a term like that.

The one really honest thing Timimi said was that there was a war going on with Islam. Not that there is a war going on with people who claim to be Islamic but are not really representative of Islam, as the U.S. and British governments try to pretend, but with Islam -- period, full-stop, no qualifications, no obfuscations.