HIV Death Rates Rising in Muslim Countries & Russia

“[Muslim] People are becoming more sexually active with no proper education or awareness,” said Johnny Tohme, a social worker with Marsa, the only Lebanese clinic that offers free HIV testing. Between 1,500 and 3,500 people are living with HIV in Lebanon today, according to figures from Marsa and UNAIDS.

“And with the growth of new infections, if no proper-follow up is administered, the infection is going to spread faster,” he said.

The Arab-wide picture is just as bleak. The Middle East and North Africa maintain just one percent of the world’s HIV caseload, with approximately 300,000 adults and children living with the virus, according to the United Nations.

But the fatality rate for AIDS patients has increased significantly in recent years, while in most of the rest of the world deaths have either stayed the same or dropped. _Global Post

From North Africa to the Middle East to Central Asia, HIV death rates have risen almost 20% across the traditional Muslim homelands.

...two regions saw significant increases – AIDS-related deaths went up by 17 percent in the Middle East and North Africa, and by more than 20 percent across Eastern Europe and Central Asia...

...New HIV cases in Russia:

The public health office says more than 60,000 people tested positive for HIV in the first 10 months of 2012 – up 12.5 percent on the previous year
Almost 2/3 of those who tested positive were male – the overall sickness rate was highest in the 30-40 age group
The mortality rate in this same period grew by 14 percent _Al Jazeera

The New York Times reveals that the problem in the Muslim world has been growing for some time:

AIDS is on the rise in many Muslim countries, driven by men having sex with other men in secret because of homophobia, religious intolerance and fear of being jailed or executed, according to a new study.

...Accurate statistics on some aspects of health are hard to get from governments in some Middle Eastern countries. For example, international health authorities say that the world’s highest rates of birth defects are in Muslim countries where cousins sometimes marry, but that governments are reluctant to admit it. _NYT

The problem of inaccurate statistics may be even worse -- much worse -- in the sub Saharan African countries, which are supposedly experiencing significant drops in HIV incidence and mortality. But the numbers are only as good as the methods used to acquire them, and in nations such as South Africa and Zimbabwe, the public health apparatus has fallen on hard times.

Wall Street Journal

Another important public health problem knocking on the door for both the Muslim world and the more modern region of Europe, is tuberculosis -- TB.

All along the edges of Western Europe, new and hard-to-defeat strains of tuberculosis are gaining a foothold, often moving beyond traditional victims—alcoholics, drug users, HIV patients—and into the wider population. _WSJ

Iran's Insurgency Begins to Heat Up

The world has been watching the Syrian dictatorship fighting off an insurgency made up of army defectors and disaffected citizens, with Turkey warning Syria to stop murdering its civilians. And now, an insurgency movement inside Iran is apparently beginning to heat up.

Iran's insurgency is likely to have much larger global repercussions, because Iran's mullahcracy has been the center of so much regional discord and killing over the past 32 years -- from Gaza to Lebanon to Iraq to Saudi Arabia. Overthrowing the backward and bloody theocracy of Iran would be a significant step forward to world harmony, and the dismantling of the Russia - Iran - North Korea - Cuba - Venezuela axis of global destabilisation.

What we are beginning to see in Iran, is an upsurge in explosions targeting Iran's energy infrastructure, and its Iranian Revolutionary Guard in-house instrument of terror and murder. If the Iranian insurgency is able to reach into the heart of the Iranian government's terror apparatus, it is apparently serious about changing the established order.

These attacks on the Guards — the symbol of the regime’s intensifying repression and slaughter of the Iranian people — are part of a pattern that includes explosions at refineries and pipelines. At the same time, strikes have been spreading (and no wonder; up to 30,000 retired teachers have been waiting for their pensions for many months). In short, people have lost patience, and the smaller of the two explosions at the RG base was aimed at Major General Hasan Tehrani Moghaddam, one of the most brutal of the country’s military leaders.

Contrary to the inevitable suspicions of the thumb-suckers (the Americans did it! no, the Israelis did it! no, it was an accident!), the operation was planned and carried out by Iranians from the opposition-that-does-not-exist. They intended to demonstrate that no leader is safe from the people’s wrath (if that base can be penetrated, any place can, and if that man can be assassinated, anyone can), and that the opposition knows its gravediggers.

The second, larger, explosion was not planned, nor was the extremely high number of casualties (I am told that hundreds of people, including some “very important foreign dignitaries,” were blown up). That second blast was apparently from a quantity of liquid fuel designed to extend the speed and accuracy of Iran’s Shahab-3 missile, the one the mullahs hope will some day carry a nuclear warhead. My sources claim that the fuel caused the big white plume seen in the photographs. The cloud may well have caused respiratory problems for the survivors.

There is another, fascinating report, that right after the explosions, the two main Green Movement leaders, Mir Hossein Mousavi and Mehdi Karroubi, were taken from house arrest, leaving their wives behind. This bespeaks a high level of anxiety within the regime, suggesting that they feared an all-out assault was under way, and under those circumstances they would take vengeance on the two Green leaders. Whether or not the rumor is true, its existence suggests that Khamenei et. al. take a more serious view of the opposition than some of our own expert analysts.

What this all means is clear enough....it was only a matter of time until the opposition abandoned its commitment to non-violence. We are now in a new phase. A French analyst, Jean-Jacques Guillet, understands the situation very well, and has called for a Western policy to intensify the pressure on the Iranian regime in order to bring it down. “If we press the regime strongly,” he said, “there could be an implosion. The real objective these days should be the regime’s implosion, not more talk.”

Instead, we have leaders [Dumbama etc.] who still believe in the talking cure, and who seem not even to know what the Iranian opposition wants, even when it’s delivered to them in black and white. As it was, at the height of the turmoil in 2009. _PJMedia

War in Iraq, Afghanistan,(and Iran and Syia?)

I was opposed to the war in Iraq for about a year, unconvinced of the basic arguments for the conflict. I still don't buy the rationale that our military members are dying to help the Iraqis have their own modern, prosperous, democratic government. Democracy is over-rated, for one thing. Democracy is rule of the mob, by the mob, for the mob. If the arabs get true democracy, they will get one man, one vote, one time. Not worth dying for at all.

In my mind, there is only one excuse for maintaining a western troop presence in the muslim arab world. Muslim arabs have different brains than westerners. The Koran is qualitatively different than any "book of wisdom" that most westerners now take seriously. Tribal arab traditions are thousands of years away from modern western mores and traditions.

Currently, there is an arab youth bulge (also present in Pakistan, India, Malaysia, Indonesia, and many other muslim nations in Asia, Africa, and the Middle East). Arab and other muslim youth are easily led into jihad by their imams, mullahs, ayatollahs and other clerics. One fanatical suicidal jihadi can do billions, even trillions of dollars of economic destruction, and kill many thousands of lives, if backed up by enough money and weapons expertise. It's not a laughing matter to be brushed aside as if it did not exist.

It's like the Dutch boy with his finger plugging the leaking dike. Temporarily, while this youth bulge lasts, it may very well be necessary to plug a large number "badly leaking holes" in the muslim (esp arab) world. People we care about will probably die in doing this. That's not a matter to be brushed aside either. But death in this inevitable conflict is a given.

How much death will be inevitable? How little death can we get away with and still keep fanatical and collectivist forces at bay? After all, once the next level kicks in, all of forces of collectivism and religious fanaticsm will be ineffectual against the potency of next level humans. But it will take time to midwife the next level, and the muslim youth bulge will continue during that time. In addition, the pressure cooker that is China, and the doomed ship that is Russia will continue to accumulate and improve the accuracy of their nuclear arsenals. Pacifism is not an option for the big kid on the block, the king of the hill.

So how small can we keep the death toll? More later.

An American Mother Turns Counter-Jihadi

A Montana mother and former judge began devoting a lot of off-duty time to conducting her own counter-jihad from home. To do this, she had to learn Arabic in various dialects, and haunt the radical jihadi web sites so vital to coordinating worldwide terrorism.

Before 9-11, I had no experience with the Middle East or the Arabic language. I was a mother of three and a municipal judge in a small town in Montana. But the terrorist attacks affected me deeply. I wondered how it could happen. What kind of people could carry out such an atrocity and why? I began to read vociferously about Islam, terrorism, extremist groups, and Islamist ideology.[1] Some of the books satisfied; many did not.

In November 2001, I saw a news report about how terrorists and their sympathizers communicated on websites and Internet message boards and how limited government agencies were in their ability to monitor these web communications. This news report showed me how extensively Al-Qaeda used the Internet to orchestrate 9-11 and how out of touch our intelligence agencies were regarding this Internet activity. Apparently, there were not procedures in place for tracking communications and activity on the Al-Qaeda websites and Internet forums at the time.

The Internet address named in the news report was "www.alneda.com." I wrote it down and proceeded to see for myself what all the fuss was about. I entered another world when I logged on to that site for the first time. I did not know Arabic, so I clicked away at random, looking at featured pictures depicting such things as dead bodies lying around in the aftermath of a car bombing and other atrocities.

Early in January 2002, I began taking an Arabic language course online for eight weeks from the Cairo-based Arab Academy,[2] which, that autumn, I supplemented with an intensive Arabic course at the State University of New York at Buffalo. As I learned more Arabic, the jihadi websites opened for me. Certain individuals stood out for either their radicalism or the information that they sent. I followed and tracked these individuals and kept notebooks detailing each website and person of interest.

Gradually, as I put to use the knowledge and skills I was developing of the Arabic language, I started posting messages on Internet forums and message boards. However, it was not until I was able to find an Arabic language translator through an online translation service[3] who was willing to assist me with constructing contextually accurate messages that I began to elicit responses from individuals at these Internet sites. As time went on, and through the process of trial and error, I eventually figured out what to say and how to say it to start the process of passing myself off as a jihadist sympathizer.

After the media picked up my identity at Anderson's Article 32 hearing in May 2004, I received numerous threats and, on December 5, 2004, someone stole my car out of my family's garage. It was later found wrecked two counties away from my home, riddled with bullet holes. As a result, I now have permanent security.

I have still continued my online sleuthing. After the Anderson case, I worked to capture members of an Al-Qaeda affiliate in Lebanon seeking to sneak chemical weapons into Iraq. Believing me to be a jihadist banker, group members said that they had already killed twenty-four British troops, wanted to attack U.S. soldiers with weapons of mass destruction, and needed money to buy the materials on the black market. Because of the hard work of a number of investigative bureaus in the United States and abroad, they never got the chance.

Much more at the Source

Rossmiller carried out her activities on her own time and at her own expense--while most of you were sleeping. Perhaps her story will be an inspiration to many who feel there is nothing they can do to combat the tide of terror sweeping the globe.

Support Iran's Progressive Theocracy--Urge Bush's Army to Leave Iraq

There is no government like Iran's holy mullahs. The Iranian government believes that Allah created nuclear weapons to be used--by Allah!! And if Allah chooses to let his servants do the dirty work, then, by Allah! the mullahs of Iran stand ready to do whatever it takes. One thing stands in the way--the pesky Bush and his Army, parked in Iraq. So if you value the progressive theocracy in Iran, and everything it stands for--tell Bush to get the fuck out of Iraq!!!

Al Qaeda is not our only enemy in Iraq, however. Iran has chosen to fight a proxy war against us there, determined to work our defeat for its own purposes. Iranian weapons and even advisers flow into Iraq and assist our enemies, both Sunni and Shia, to kill our soldiers and attempt to establish control over Iraq itself. This Iranian support is not the result of a misunderstanding that could be worked out if only we would talk to the mullahs. It is the continuation of nearly three decades of cold war between Iran and the United States that began in 1979 with an Iranian attack on the sovereign American soil of the U.S. embassy in Tehran. The states of the Arabian Gulf are watching closely to see who will win. If Iran succeeds in driving America from Iraq, Iranian hegemony in the region is likely. If that success is combined with the development of an Iranian nuclear weapon, then Iranian hegemony is even more likely. Dominance of the Middle East by this Iranian regime would be very bad for America. And a nuclear arms race in which Arab states tried to balance against Iranian power would also be very bad for America.

Source

The funny thing is, western leftists, college professors, and feminists are lining up to defend Iran's mullahs and mad dog Ahmadinejad, while foaming in the mouth in hatred at Bush. That shows that the mainstream media has done its job well, because otherwise the popular backlash against these pseudo-intellectual circular jerkulators would be frightening.

But the media--who almost never leave their hotel rooms and hotel barrooms in Iraq, have gotten together and decided to tell a story about Iraq that most of the coalition service members who have actually been to Iraq (not hiding under their beds like the "journalists" do) say is not true.

Gotta love the people who join the popular chorus without understanding who is pulling their strings and waving their baton.

If you love Iranian mullahs, and Iranian power--you've gotta tell Bush to bring the troops home--even if they volunteered to do exactly what they're doing.

The Middle East in Sunni and Shia

Strategy Page blog often provides a useful insight or two into the underlying realities of conflict in various parts of the world.

The Saudis are not happy with the links between terrorists inside Saudi Arabia, and Iraqi Sunni Arabs. The Saudis have told the Iraqi Sunni Arabs that the Sunni Arab nations in the regions will not bail them out, and that they must make peace with the Shia Arab majority. Many Sunni Arabs, throughout the region, do not agree with this. But they are a small minority. Most Sunni Arabs are appalled at the body count the Sunni Arab terrorists have created in Iraq. While most of the dead are Shia Arabs, a growing number are Sunni Arabs, killed either by the suicide bombers, or by Shia Arab death squads looking for revenge. While most Sunni Arabs would like to see Sunni Arabs running Iraq, there was revulsion at Saddam Husseins methods, and even greater distaste for the subsequent mayhem by his followers.

Saudi investigators also discovered that there were also terrorist training camps in northern Yemen, an area controlled by Shia Arab tribes that are hostile to the Sunni Arab Yemeni government. The connection with both Syria and Yemen is Iran, which subsidizes Syria, and supports the Shia tribes in Yemen. Saudi Arabia sees Iran has its primary enemy, not the Shia form of Islam (which most Iranians, who are not Arabs, and most Iraqis, who are, follow). The Iranians take advantage of the fact that al Qaeda has become the place to go if you believe in a very conservative version of Islam, and are certain that the sorry state of the Moslem world is all due to a plot by evil infidels (non-Moslems, especially Christians, Hindus and Jews) to destroy Islam. Even though al Qaeda considers Shia Moslems to be heretics, and worthy of persecution and execution, the Iranians are willing to cooperate if it will lead to problems for the Sunni rulers of Saudi Arabia. Politics, ethnic antagonisms and religious beliefs produce a strange brew in the Middle East.

Source

If the US stays in Iraq--a key middle east location, geostrategically--long enough to prevent outright war between Iran and the Sunni states, it may be possible for the hotbed of violence and terrorism to settle substantially. Many uninformed folks blame George Bush for the violence and terror in the mideast. Sometimes they do this from ignorance, and sometimes from disingenuous animosity. Either way, it makes them superfluous, at best, to the real problems that are occurring.

An Arab Woman Speaks from her Heart About Dysfunctional Arab Culture

Brigitte Gabriel lived through the demographic changes in Lebanon that brought Beirut and the country from being the "Paris of the middle east" to being another one of the hellholes of the middle east.

Follow this link to view a talk given by Ms. Gabriel detailing many events from her own life that led her to her current occupation as a warning voice against encroaching barbarism.

Test yourself to see if you can handle the truth. If you can hear Ms. Gabriel out, perhaps you can.

Hat tip to Gandalf at Infidel Bloggers.

Muslim Death Cult

From the leader of Hezbollah:

“We have discovered how to hit the Jews [the west] where they are the most vulnerable. The Jews [the west] love(s) life, so that is what we shall take away from them. We are going to win, because they love life and we love death.”

From Tunisian intellectual Al-afif Al-akhdar:

“Why do expressions of tolerance, moderation, rationalism, compromise, and negotiation horrify us [Muslims], but [when we hear] fervent cries for vengeance, we all dance the war dance?… Why do other people love life, while we love death and violence, slaughter and suicide, and [even] call it heroism and martyrdom?”

When muslims celebrated the deaths of civilians from New York City, Madrid, London, etc. they were merely behaving according to custom--they are told to celebrate the misery, suffering, and death of infidels.

Unfortunately, Iran, Syria, the Palestinian Authority, and other muslim states are being controlled by people who have the same death cult mind glitch as Nasrallah, Arafat, and Ahmadinejad. It is a mental virus being spread wildly across the middle east, south asia, and some european ghettos.

Understanding the truth about muslims seems too much like dehumanising them, it is repellant to us. Many of us go into denial and refuse to accept the obvious. But the dehumanising is being done in the mosque and the religious schools of indoctrination. It is out of our control, as is so much of the current and future death that comes directly from this dehumanising indoctrination.

The truth is, Islam is very much like most tribal societies were during the dark ages. Islam has buried itself in a time capsule and refused to change, refused to be enlightened into the larger universe. Instead, the islamic cult of death wishes to bury the entire world inside its time capsule of barbaric primitivism.

Hat tip, Augean Stables.

What is Wrong with Arabs?

Arabs are lagging in education, economy, democracy and freedom of expression, and computers. 2003—In Arab countries, with a combined population of 284 million, a “best seller” may have a print run of just 5,000 copies, due to censorship and other constraints on independent publishers. Translations of foreign works into Arabic lag far behind figures in the rest of the world: five times more books are translated yearly into Greek, a language spoken by just 11 million people, than into Arabic. Just 53 newspapers per 1,000 citizens are published daily in the region, compared to 285 papers per 1,000 people in the developed nations, and there are only 18 computers per 1,000 people in the Arab world, as compared to the global average of 78 per 1,000.

The first Arab Human Development Report in 2002 was a bombshell dropped onto the entire arab world. The report notes that while oil income has transformed the landscapes of some Arab countries, the region remains "richer than it is developed." Per capita income growth has shrunk in the last 20 years to a level just above that of sub-Saharan Africa. Productivity is declining. Research and development are weak or nonexistent. Science and technology are dormant.

Intellectuals flee a stultifying -- if not repressive -- political and social environment, it says.

Arab women, the report found, are almost universally denied advancement. Half of them still cannot read or write. The maternal mortality rate is double that of Latin America and four times that of East Asia.

The followup report in 2003 showed the situation to be no better. A group of Arab intellectuals issued a report yesterday that found the Arab world lacking in three areas they deemed fundamental to development: freedom of expression, access to knowledge and women's rights.
The group, criticized by Arab officials for a similar report last year, said the challenges caused by the deficiencies "may have become even graver" since 2002.
After dismal reports in 2002, 2003, and 2004, the UN HDR appears to have given up on the arab world. Who can blame them? Since World War II, the Arab world has lagged the rest of the planet in economic growth. For example, 300 million Arabs, and all that oil, generate less economic activity than Spain, and its population of 40 million. The main problem has been bad government. Too many dictators, and too much government restrictions on the economy. Too much corruption and waste. Even higher oil prices don't help, as it simply provides more money to be wasted on consumption, rather than business investment.

An Economist article, titled "Self-Doomed to Failure," captures the pathetic state of the arab world. The barrier to better Arab performance is not a lack of resources, concludes the report, but the lamentable shortage of three essentials: freedom, knowledge and womanpower. Not having enough of these amounts to what the authors call the region's three “deficits”. It is these deficits, they argue, that hold the frustrated Arabs back from reaching their potential—and allow the rest of the world both to despise and to fear a deadly combination of wealth and backwardness.

•Freedom. This deficit, in the UNDP's interpretation, explains many of the fundamental things that are wrong with the Arab world: the survival of absolute autocracies; the holding of bogus elections; confusion between the executive and the judiciary (the report points out the close linguistic link between the two in Arabic); constraints on the media and on civil society; and a patriarchal, intolerant, sometimes suffocating social environment.

The area is rich in all the outward trappings of democracy. Elections are held and human-rights conventions are signed. But the great wave of democratisation that has opened up so much of the world over the past 15 years seems to have left the Arabs untouched. Democracy is occasionally offered, but as a concession, not as a right.


....•Knowledge. “If God were to humiliate a human being,” wrote Imam Ali bin abi Taleb in the sixth century, “He would deny him knowledge.” Although the Arabs spend a higher percentage of GDP on education than any other developing region, it is not, it seems, well spent. The quality of education has deteriorated pitifully, and there is a severe mismatch between the labour market and the education system. Adult illiteracy rates have declined but are still very high: 65m adults are illiterate, almost two-thirds of them women. Some 10m children still have no schooling at all.

One of the gravest results of their poor education is that the Arabs, who once led the world in science, are dropping ever further behind in scientific research and in information technology. Investment in research and development is less than one-seventh of the world average. Only 0.6% of the population uses the Internet, and 1.2% have personal computers.

....•Women's status. The one thing that every outsider knows about the Arab world is that it does not treat its women as full citizens. The report sees this as an awful waste: how can a society prosper when it stifles half its productive potential? After all, even though women's literacy rates have trebled in the past 30 years, one in every two Arab women still can neither read nor write. Their participation in their countries' political and economic life is the lowest in the world.

Governments and societies (and sometimes, as in Kuwait, societies and parliamentarians are more backward than their governments) vary in the degrees of bad treatment they mete out to women. But in nearly all Arab countries, women suffer from unequal citizenship and legal entitlements. The UNDP has a “gender-empowerment measure” which shows the Arabs near the bottom (according to this measure, sub-Saharan Africa ranks even worse). But the UN was able to measure only 14 of the 22 Arab states, since the necessary data were not available in the others. This, as the report says, speaks for itself, reflecting the general lack of concern in the region for women's desire to be allowed to get on.

...With so many paths closed to them, some are now turning their dangerous anger on the western world.

Meanwhile in an ethnically divided Iraq with sectarian divisions, the first tentative steps have been taken toward democracy, as the rest of the arab world looks on with a wary curiousity. A few cautious voices believe that, in time, the Iraqi elections will put pressure on neighboring countries to democratize.

In Cairo, Hisham Qassem, chairman of a human rights organization and chief executive officer of a new Arab daily newspaper, believes that both the Iraqi and Palestinian elections have given impetus to democratic reform.
"Once people feel there are positive effects from the democratic process, they will want the same. Especially countries like Egypt who felt they were ahead of Iraq but are now lagging behind,” he said. Many arabs must be wondering if it takes an emasculating invasion from abroad and low level civil war to bring democracy to an arab country.

It takes more than democracy to bring the arab world out of the stone age. It will take economic reform. Since Saddam was tossed out in 2003, the economy has been governed by Western rules. As a result, GDP per capita doubled by the end of 2005, and the GDP is expected to grow another 49 percent by 2008. All this despite continued attacks by Sunni Arab rebels on oil facilities and other economic targets. It's much easier to start a business in Iraq now, even though there's still a lot of corruption. The big change is that now the corruption is illegal, and there is even progress in prosecuting the government officials who take bribes or try to shake down businessmen. Lebanon is the only other Arab state to run its economy in a Western fashion, and they have thrived.

It takes education reform and freedom of expression and the press. It will take implementation of full freedoms for women. Finally, it will take religious reform. Stone aged customs, traditions, and religious restrictions virtually guarantee that arabs will remain backward, laggards of the world.

Update: Here is more from a recent World Bank report. Arabs living in the middle east and north africa are oddly resistant to modernisation and transitioning out of the stone age. Very strange, when you see how successful arabs can be when they migrate to a free environment. I suppose blaming the US and Israel will gain them at least another half century of stone age existence.

Europe: Dear Fat Old Girl, Who Can Save You Now?

The following post was "borrowed" from David's Medienkritic blog. It deals with the current state of Europe, and whether in denying this particular crisis, Europe is finally doomed. Or will the cavalry ride over the hill one last time to save the old girl?

Europe – Thy Name is Cowardice

Commentary by Mathias Döpfner

A few days ago Henryk M. Broder wrote in Welt am Sonntag, "Europe – your family name is appeasement." It’s a phrase you can’t get out of your head because it’s so terribly true.

Appeasement cost millions of Jews and non-Jews their lives as England and France, allies at the time, negotiated and hesitated too long before they noticed that Hitler had to be fought, not bound to agreements. Appeasement stabilized communism in the Soviet Union and East Germany in that part of Europe where inhuman, suppressive governments were glorified as the ideologically correct alternative to all other possibilities. Appeasement crippled Europe when genocide ran rampant in Kosovo and we Europeans debated and debated until the Americans came in and did our work for us. Rather than protecting democracy in the Middle East, European appeasement, camouflaged behind the fuzzy word "equidistance," now countenances suicide bombings in Israel by fundamentalist Palestinians. Appeasement generates a mentality that allows Europe to ignore 300,000 victims of Saddam’s torture and murder machinery and, motivated by the self-righteousness of the peace-movement, to issue bad grades to George Bush. A particularly grotesque form of appeasement is reacting to the escalating violence by Islamic fundamentalists in Holland and elsewhere by suggesting that we should really have a Muslim holiday in Germany.

What else has to happen before the European public and its political leadership get it? There is a sort of crusade underway, an especially perfidious crusade consisting of systematic attacks by fanatic Muslims, focused on civilians and directed against our free, open Western societies.
It is a conflict that will most likely last longer than the great military conflicts of the last century—a conflict conducted by an enemy that cannot be tamed by tolerance and accommodation but only spurred on by such gestures, which will be mistaken for signs of weakness.

Two recent American presidents had the courage needed for anti-appeasement: Reagan and Bush. Reagan ended the Cold War and Bush, supported only by the social democrat Blair acting on moral conviction, recognized the danger in the Islamic fight against democracy. His place in history will have to be evaluated after a number of years have passed.

In the meantime, Europe sits back with charismatic self-confidence in the multicultural corner instead of defending liberal society’s values and being an attractive center of power on the same playing field as the true great powers, America and China. On the contrary—we Europeans present ourselves, in contrast to the intolerant, as world champions in tolerance, which even (Germany's Interior Minister) Otto Schily justifiably criticizes. Why? Because we’re so moral? I fear it’s more because we’re so materialistic.

For his policies, Bush risks the fall of the dollar, huge amounts of additional national debt and a massive and persistent burden on the American economy—because everything is at stake.

While the alleged capitalistic robber barons in American know their priorities, we timidly defend our social welfare systems. Stay out of it! It could get expensive. We’d rather discuss the 35-hour workweek or our dental health plan coverage. Or listen to TV pastors preach about "reaching out to murderers." These days, Europe reminds me of an elderly aunt who hides her last pieces of jewelry with shaking hands when she notices a robber has broken into a neighbor’s house. Europe, thy name is cowardice. (emphasis added)

Matthias Döpfner has done it before - criticizing the spineless reaction of the European political elites to the dangers of Islamic terror.

He is by far the most powerful voice in the German media against the reappearance of the rotten European appeasement policies of the 20th century.

November 22, 2004 at 12:59 AM i