We dropped my daughter off today at Detroit Metro Airport. She is part of a group that is winging its way to Australia. She'll be gone for two weeks. She's been excited about this trip for months. The group met at the new McNamara Terminal, which is the newest, latest, and greatest of terminals in Detroit. It's modern. It's beautiful. It's full of shops and restaurants. They are currently building an even newer and more modern terminal at the airport, which I'm sure will be full of restaurants and shops. And security.
Standing in the lobby of the McNamara Terminal at Detroit Metro Airport, I couldn't help but remember back to when I was a child and there was much less security at the airport. When we used to drop someone off at the airport we could freely walk right up to the gate and hang out until boarding time. Then we used to go out onto the balcony of the terminal and stand outside, on the balcony to watch the plane take off, giving our final waves as the plane passed by on its way to some far off land.
That final old terminal that we used to be excited to go to way back in the 1960s will be torn down once the newest terminal is completed. Of course, nobody has been allowed to watch planes take off from the balcony in decades. And the only way to get to go to the gate if you are not a passenger is to make arrangements ahead of time. That's what we had to do two years ago when my daughter went to visit her grandparents in Arizona.
I still like going to the airport. Even with all of the extra hassle, it's exciting. It's the beginning of an adventure. It's the freedom of the open road . . . sort of. You're going somewhere else, or sending someone somewhere else, or getting someone from somewhere else. I'm willing to put up with extra hassle if it makes sense. When I see a TSA worker wearing a hijab, it no longer makes sense. No, I'm not saying that all Muslims are terrorists, but I am saying that the reason for all of this extra security is to protect us from people who take the Koran much too literally. None of us are supposed to admit that of course. That would be singling out one group for special attention. And that is only proper when it comes to to Affirmative Action programs.
In the meantime, we must pretend that those who believe in the Koran are exactly the same as those who believe in The Bible or any other holy book. To admit otherwise is to humiliate Muslims and leave them vulnerable to discrimination. That's what we're told by our intellectual elite, and their Islamic handlers.
But isn't the opposite true? Because we can't be honest, and because we are removed from polite company for pointing out the obvious facts of Islamic terrorism, violent jihad around the world, and the moral warping of our society due to the pernicious influence of the Islamic jihadists, aren't we, non-Muslims being inconvenienced, humiliated, and forced to live a lie? And all with a vacant smile on our faces?
In order to not appear to be intolerant of others, we are forcing ourselves to be prey to Islamic supremacists who are out to destroy our freedom and replace it with Sharia. Yes, other minority groups in the United States have been discriminated against, denied their rights, and horribly abused - all because they were of a different skin color or religion. The guilt over those abuses has paralyzed us into accepting the lie that we are prejudiced against Muslims if we refuse to "accommodate" Islam, or if we aren't sensitive to delicate Islamic feelings. In order to prove our tolerance, we are expected to let Muslims run roughshod over rights that our fathers and forefathers fought and died for.
We force ourselves to pretend that the Irish-Catholic grandmother is just as suspect as the young madrassa student. We waste precious resources by not profiling, because to admit the truth would leave us open to charges of the moral hypochondria of Islamophobia.
As Muslims around the world and in the United States have freely admitted, Islam is not here to be equal to any religion, but to reign over them. We can hear stuff like that but we're not supposed to listen to it. It might make prejudiced against the religion of perpetual humiliation.
I will still enjoy flying, whenever I can afford to do it, with rising fuel prices and all (but that's another post) but I will not submit to lying to myself about Islam. It's not like other religions. In the 1400 years of Islamic history, they have a horrible track record when it comes to working and playing with others (of course, it's Islamophobic to examine the historical record) and as the Islamic world expands, the non-Islamic portion of the world, the part where freedom reigns or has a chance of reigning, gets smaller for the rest of us. As much as Muslims are allowed to freely practice their religion in most of the non-Islamic world, just try flashing that Bible in an Islamic country.
Darn, there I go again, pointing out the obvious and opening myself up for accusations of You-know-what-ophobia. It's a good thing I don't care.
I swiped the following post, yep the entire thing, from For Zion's Sake. I'm just in that kind of mood, especially with Israeli (so-called) leadership agreeing to a truce with Hamas, agreeing to a prisoner exchange with Hezbollah, and at the behest of brain dead, back stabbing Condi Rice, putting Sheba Farms on the negotiating table. Has Olmert become suicidal, or is he, in reality, an Iranian agent? It's frustrating defending and believing in the absolute legitimacy of the State of Israel (as if that would even be an issue if Israel were not a majority Jewish nation) when it seems that a lot if Israelis aren't sure if they have a right to their own nation. Olmert is weary of fighting. He'd better understand that as bad as fighting the legions of Jew haters may be, giving up will be a thousand times worse. He'd better wake up and remember that Jews have survived for over 3000 years because we haven't given up. And better men than him fought and died so that he could become so embroiled in scandal that he can't summon the courage or the energy to support the country that he is supposed to be leading. If he were a true leader, he would have stepped down after his 2006 Hezbollah War debacle.
Sorry for the rant. Read the post I lifted.
Dear World,
I see that you're in an uproar again. Israel is building homes in East Jerusalem and you are not happy about it. Its really amazing, given your reputation as being slow-moving and inefficient, at your speed if the Jews are the culprits. Nothing escapes your watchful eyes, does it? And yet, what brings about this newfound rapidity and resolution with regards to Israel? You seemed to sit around on idly while thousands were being slaughtered in Rwanda and as thousands continue to die in Darfur. But no one will ever accuse you of ignoring the situation in Israel.
Dear World, why did you not jump and issue condemnations when Hitler marked the Jewish people for destruction? And where were you when the Jews of Europe were burnt and suffocated? Why did you shut your eyes to the cries and pleas of the oppressed and close your doors to them? When the St. Louis, bearing refugees escaping the Nazis, came to your shores, you could find no place for these Jews and delivered them into the hands of their tormenters, directly to the gas chambers. And when the Jews of Rome were deported right under the Pope's windows, why did you keep quiet? You flew bombers over Auschwitz but destroying the gas chambers in which 12 000 Jews a day were murdered never seemed to be a priority. You closed every avenue of escape and looked on apatheticaly as the Jews were rounded up from every corner and humiliated, tortured and massacred. A conspiracy of silence abandonned the Jews to their fate. But thankfully, 60 years later, you have regained your voice.
Dear World, why did you abandon the inhabitants of the fledgling State of Israel to the Arab onslaught, determined to drive its people into the sea? Could you not find one word of condemnation for their genocidal rhetoric and intentions? And when close to a million Sephardic Jews were expelled from lands in which they had lived for millenia, where were you? Could some of your sympathy focused on the "Palestinian" refugees, displaced by their own accord, have been directed towards the expelled Jews? Or did Jewish suffering not move you? When the Jordanians bombarded and besieged Jerusalem, you had nothing to say. For the first time in thousands of years, Jerusalem's Old City was empty of Jews. Jews were forbidden access to their holiest of sites. As the Jewish Quarter in the Old City was made judenrein, synagogues desecrated and Jewish gravestones used as latrines, you held your tongue. Luckily, you do not make the same mistake today.
Dear World, why, when Stalin and the Soviets, closed off the portals of escape from their Communist prison and tried to suppress Judaism, were you deathly silent? When the Iron Curtain fell, trapping millions of Jews, you did not stand up for their freedoms. You had your own problems and the troubles of a few Jewish dissidents in Siberia did not trouble you. You were unswayed by the cries of "Let My People Go!" coming from the Soviet Union and worldwide Jewry. Why should you care if some Jews were forbidden to go to Jewish school, lay tefillin or keep their holidays? And yet, these things disturb you greatly if performed in Judea and Samaria.
Dear World, when the Arabs tried to annihilate the people of Israel in '67, '73 and all the subsequent wars and terrorist attacks, could you not lend any support to the Jews? Not a helping hand, a smile, a kind word. You were too busy ranting and raving about the "Occupation", "apartheid", "the refugee crisis", "land-for-peace" and all the other code words for the Final Solution. World, you find in yourself the strength to protest whenever Israel's defense accidentally killed an Arab civilian. Strange that your voice seemed to disappear when Israeli teens were blown to smitherenes in a discotheque in Tel-Aviv or when terrorists massacred families celebrating the Passover holiday in a Netanyah hotel. You were sure to denounce Israeli "ethnic cleansing" in Gaza, but said nothing about the constant barrage of rockets falling on homes, schools and businesses in Sderot. When Israeli yeshiva students, aged 14-20, were gunned down in cold blood studying Judaism's sacred texts, there was no solidarity or sympathy. Instead, you issued cold rationalizations and understanding of the terrorist's motives. As Iran's president is publicly vowing to wipe Israel off the face of the Earth, you lull us to sleep and complacency.
Dear World, you have proven too many times in the past not to have the best interests of the Jewish People at heart. In fact, some may say that you are downright hostile to us. It is odd that you perk up every time Israel defends herself, a Jew build a home in Judea and Samaria or wants to pray on the Temple Mount. Millions can be denied civil rights in China or Saudi Arabia, women condemned to death for being raped in Iran, blacks slaughtered in Darfur and crisis in Burma, but you can only blame the Jews. Dear World, we have learnt better than to listen to you. You will not be happy until we are wiped out, dead, destroyed.
Obama and Muslims - More Reasons to Vote Against Him
I was going to talk about how Obama is painting himself into a corner based on this Detroit Free Press article. I'm sure everyone has already weighed in on Obama's campaign not wanting to have women in hijabs on camera with him.
"We don't want to look Muslim, but we do want to continue to pander to them. We want it both ways."
We are also now being forced to listen to every Islamic grievance monger in the world rave about hatred and "Islamophobia". There are also some non-Muslim, nut-case, useful idiots joining the party.
Now, I've come to learn that one of the hijab-encrusted, rejected whiners, Hebba Aref, was an official of the Muslim Students Association (MSA), in charge of proselytizing. The Chicago Tribune identified the MSA as part of the American manifestation of the Sunni terrorist group, Al-Ikhwan Al-Muslimeen--The Muslim Brotherhood. Aref served on the executive board of the University of Michigan-Dearborn's MSA, which demanded and obtained tax-funded Muslim foot bats at that university, a story I broke on this site last year. Two Muslim then-students at U-M Dearborn, Lola Elzein and Mohammed Fouad Abdallah, sent me violent rape and death threats.
and
Shimaa Abdelfadeel, the other woman allegedly excluded by the Obama campaign, was chair of SAFE, a University of Michigan-Ann Arbor group that hosted the 2002 Divestment Conference against Israel at which "Annihilate the Jews!" was chanted and Islamic Jihad founder Sami Al-Arian was keynote speaker. She's the author of vehement anti-Israel vitriol and propaganda.
In the Free Press article, about half way through, we read,
Obama met last month privately in Macomb County with a Muslim leader from Dearborn, Imam Hassan Qazwini.
But Schlussel also wrote about this way back on May 16. She also brought up some politically incorrect questions about Obama's private meeting with Qazwini, a fervent Hezbollah supporter. Then there's Obama's more recent meeting with another Hezbollah supporter, Osama Siblani, also reported by Schlussel. We are not supposed to question the people that Obama associates with, because they are not Obama. Isn't that the way the argument goes?
Well, after his "my best friends are Jews" speech at AIPAC, where he called for an undivided Jerusalem as the capital of Israel, and his quick flip-flop/backtrack, I am absolutely going to watch who he befriends. It's a good thing Schlussel continues to the reporting that American news sources refuse to do.
It was a miraculous night when Obama came to give a sermon in Detroit, according to the many pages of coverage in the Detroit Free Press. He healed a leper. He caused the lame to see and blind to walk. He walked on wine and turned water into carbon-free emissions. He caused the bread to rise. He fed thousands with a few fishy statements. He was blessed in his holy mission by God's other anointed one, Al Gore. They are on a "crusade of hope and faith."
This event was so big that it took multiple writers to cover it all. It will all become part of the canon of the Obamessiah.
Of course, Obama can't do it all for us. We must do our part. We must pay more taxes. We must have faith that His new policies will have different results than when these new policies were tried and failed miserably in the past. In other words, boys and girls, we must have faith. Faith, that this time we can do the same thing and expect different results.
I would like to write that I read all of the articles on this miraculous event, but I didn't. I tried, but the fawning was so overwhelming, I wanted to scream. These were not journalists covering a news event, they were cheerleaders. You can read the Free Press' panegyrics on Obama on your own. And speaking of the insanity of doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results, read this editorial by Stephen Henderson.
Obama's approach is about investment: in education, in the future of energy, in the nation's crumbling infrastructure and in research and development.
He's talking about spending billions of dollars to retool our economy and shift our priorities for the 21st Century.
There are no free rides when it comes to that sort of forward-thinking, transformative public policy. It costs. A lot. And Obama's approach relies heavily on government spending, not private sector activity, to affect change.
So if you're going to be about Obama in this campaign, you've got to be about the money he'll exact from us. Pay now to prosper later. That's the promise.
Thank you Comrade Henderson. I'm sure you will keep us updated on Obama's future five year plans, great leaps forward, etc.
At Comcast's homepage, the headline reads, "Companies get OK to harm polar bears. When you go to the actual story though, they soften the bias a bit. The headline reads, "Companies get OK to annoy polar bears". Then there is this provocative opening,
Less than a month after declaring polar bears a threatened species because of global warming, the Bush administration is giving oil companies permission to annoy and potentially harm them in the pursuit of oil and natural gas.
The Fish and Wildlife Service issued regulations this week providing legal protection to seven oil companies planning to search for oil and gas in the Chukchi Sea off the northwestern coast of Alaska if "small numbers" of polar bears or Pacific walruses are incidentally harmed by their activities over the next five years.
Environmentalists said the new regulations give oil companies a blank check to harass the polar bear.
If you are not an acolyte of Al Gore and you are intelligent enough to keep reading, you get to,
However, the Fish and Wildlife Service said oil and gas exploration will have a negligible effect on the bears' population.
"The oil and gas industry in operating under the kind of rules they have operated under for 15 years has not been a threat to the species," H. Dale Hall, the Fish and Wildlife Service's director, told The Associated Press on Friday. "It was the ice melting and the habitat going away that was a threat to the species over everything else."
and
"Polar bears are already protected under the Marine Mammal Protection Act, which has more stringent protections for polar bears than the Endangered Species Act does,"
and
There is no evidence of a polar bear being killed by oil and gas activities in Alaska since 1993, according to the Fish and Wildlife Service. Since 1960, when the hunt for oil and gas began in Alaska, only two fatalities of polar bears have been linked to oil and gas activities in the state, the service said.
Inbetween, there are some typically stupid statements by environmentalists who don't want us to have any oil or gasoline ever again.
The other stupidly biased headline was in today's Detroit Free Press. It read, "Broad scale of U.S. injustice revealed." It actually comes from the reliably anti-American, anti-Israel, McClatchy Newspapers. According to the article, somehow the United States military picked up the wrong guys on the battlefields of Afghanistan and foolishly imprisoned them in Guatanamo Bay. They're all innocent. They're all victims of circumstance. No mention is made of the "innocent" detainees, who after being released from Gitmo have been recaptured on the battlefields of Afghanistan and Pakistan.
At least 10 detainees released from the Guantanamo Bay prison after U.S. officials concluded they posed little threat have been recaptured or killed fighting U.S. or coalition forces in Pakistan and Afghanistan, according to Pentagon officials.
One of the repatriated prisoners is still at large after taking leadership of a militant faction in Pakistan and aligning himself with al Qaeda, Pakistani officials said. In telephone calls to Pakistani reporters, he has bragged that he tricked his U.S. interrogators into believing he was someone else.
Another returned captive is an Afghan teenager who had spent two years at a special compound for young detainees at the military prison in Cuba, where he learned English, played sports and watched videos, informed sources said. U.S. officials believed they had persuaded him to abandon his life with the Taliban, but recently the young man, now 18, was recaptured with other Taliban fighters near Kandahar, Afghanistan, according to the sources, who asked for anonymity because they were discussing sensitive military information.
The MSM is getting lamer by the day. Not only are they actively working against the interests of Western civilization, they barely even try to hide it.
It's the age-old question that all young Canadian university students have to face as they enjoy their publicly funded years at college pretending to receive an education. How do we guarantee a woman's right to abort a Zionist?
The issue is particularly troubling to Gilary Massa, vice-president external of the York Federation of Students in Toronto. She and her friends have introduced a ban on all student organizations that oppose abortion and believe that life begins at conception.
"You have to recognize that a woman has a choice over her own body", said Comrade Massa, presumably hoping to graduate in Hilarious Cliche Studies. "We think that these pro-life, anti-choice groups, they're sexist in nature. Is this an issue of free speech? No, this is an issue of women's rights."
Idiocy aside, there are some problems here with what used to be known as good old hypocrisy. Just a few months ago the same young lady was one of the leaders of a campaign to allow the term "Israeli apartheid" to be used on Canadian campuses. Jewish students and the mass of their non-Jewish colleagues considered the phrase deeply offensive when applied to a democratic country founded by victims of international racism and genocide.
For the record, I don't think the term "Israeli apartheid" should be censored. Yes, it is offensive, stupid, and factually inaccurate, but it does tell us a lot about the idiot who uses it and tries to pass it off as the truth.
If Canadians (and I know this is not true of allCanadians) want to live in a society where thoughts can be considered criminal, and thereby suppressed they are welcome to it, but they shouldn't be surprised if they end up on the wrong end of a thought crime lawsuit. At the very least, they will lose rights once considered sacred in a free society.
P.S. You can find more liberal fascist mental gymnastics from Gilary Massa here.
The student government at York University yesterday voted unanimously to deny "resources, space, recognition or funding" to student clubs or individuals "whose primary or sole purpose" is to oppose abortion.
"Our summer quorum is eight [members], so we surpassed our quorum," said Gilary Massa, vice-president external of the York Federation of Students, who said she did not know how many people actually voted.
"The York Federation of Students respects and affirms a woman's right to choose," the policy reads. "No YFS resources, space, recognition or funding will be allocated to enhance groups or individuals whose primary or sole purpose is anti-choice activities. Such activities would be defined as any campaign, action, distribution, solicitation, lobbying efforts, etc., that seeks to limit the individual's right to choose what they can or cannot do with one's own body."
However,
She said the student body was outraged in March when a member of the Genocide Awareness Project -- a university -targeted poster campaign of the Center for Bio-Ethical Reform, a privately funded U. S. organization with a Canadian branch in Alberta -- came to campus for a debate hosted by the debating club. The ensuing controversy led to this policy, which Ms. Massa said is not a ban of antiabortion groups, but rather a "limitation of resources."
"They are able to conduct their activity, they just are not able to take advantage of the student union resources," she said. She said the YFS has democratic processes in place to ensure application of the policy will be fair.
The scary part, of course, is that Massa is not and cannot do this alone. She has the support of the student government at York U. in her quest to destroy freedom in order to save it.
"No one can find a safe way out for himself if socety is sweeping towards destruction. Therefore everyone, in his own interests, must thrust himself vigorously into the intellectual battle. None can stand aside with unconcern; the interests of everyone hang on the result." -- Ludwig von Mises
War's legitimate object is more perfect peace. Flavius Vegitius Renatus
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CHALLAH AKBAR
