Sunday pictures

Sunday pictures: top - the road to Robin's Wood; bottom - South Africa disa (a terrestrial orchid which likes the cool foggy summer nights along the West Coast.)

Illegal immigrants and white trash on welfare

I used to employ Mexican immigrants in California because they are usually decent family people who work harder and are more serious than most of the spoiled American brat "slackers" that I ever employed. I now have a couple of Mexican tenants in my rentals here and have had fewer problems with them than many of my (soon evicted) white tenants - some of whom are meth-addicts and many of whom are welfare-bums.

I sure wish that we could do two things: close the borders and stop welfare. Without welfare, the lazy spoilt white trash might be forced to collect salal bushes and wash dishes in diners and we wouldn't need illegal Mexicans. Wouldn't that be a nice sensible solution? But of course, in this brave new world of Marxist multiculturalism and Jesse Jackson victimhood which we have created in the USA, that will never happen.

I had never met white Americans on welfare until I came to Oregon. It is very sad. Aren't they ashamed of themselves? It is disheartening to see the USA turned into a Third World country because of the stupidity, irresponsibility and laziness of some white Americans. Illegal immigrants seldom become Americanized because all the bleeding-heart leftist government services are geared to them and in their own languages. They are turning the land of the free - of Jefferson, Washington and Franklin - into the socialist slave-slum of Che Guevara and Cesar Chavez.

Even worse are the white welfare-bums. I once went to tow a trailer back to an RV park that I own and was saddened and disgusted to see the neighborhood where the RV was parked. Mangy unkempt and unleashed dogs roamed around derelict houses and yards filled with garbage; the kids were as hardened and vicious as black ghetto punks and the adults were lying around idle, drunk or stoned. The last time I saw such degradation was in a black township in South Africa where I was born and raised. Blame these socalled Americans and the guilt-ridden cowardly welfare-state "liberals" for illegal immigration.

The County Fair

We just got back from the County Fair smelling of goats and geese.

Apart from a ride on the ferris-wheel (for the view of the surrounding forested hills and hayfields) and a sentimental treat of cotton-candy, we spent most of the time checking out the livestock.

We are going to raise goats for milk (and cheese) so we narrowed down our choice of goats to Saanens (the Holsteins of the goat world) and Nubians (which have the most cream in their milk.) They are both pretty animals but the real beauties are the Boer goats (from my old country, South Africa) which are not good dairy goats and are raised mostly for meat.

Our nearest neighbors (who live within walking distance but their farm is on a steep hill above ours so we usually drive to their farm unless we have time for a leisurely hike) have La Mancha goats. I used to think that they were the ugliest animals I had ever seen. They are sometimes called Elf-eared goats because they have such tiny ears it looks like they have been cut off. Their eyes protrude like chameleon eyes and they have very bony backbones and prominent hip-bones. We have had to take care of them and milk them six times since we moved here while the family was away and I have come to that they are not really ugly just odd-looking and the kids are very pretty up to a certain age. Anyway you get a gallon of milk twice a day from them once the kids have been weaned. Mrs Neighbor makes a lot of cheese.

The choice between Saanens and Nubians is a choice between quantity and quality. Two gallons of milk a day is a lot of milk. So we'll probably get Nubians - less milk but creamier. Also they have long floppy "rabbit" ears like Boer goats but are smaller.

China

I sometimes worry about China but not much. Well, I seldom worry about anything really since I'm a firm believer that "God's in his heaven and all's well on earth."

Living in San Francisco for 25 years I had a chance to watch how immigration works to change not only the USA but the whole world, including China.

America is a "revolution" more than a landmass. 30% of the Californian population is Far East Asian, mostly Chinese. In San Francisco the Asian population is 40%. In my former neighborhood, the Sunset District, it is 53%. The US is no longer just an extension of Europe but an extension of Asia too. Thanks to immigration the US is a microcosm of the world.

Chinese communist party officials all send their kids to Californian universities. While these kids learn IT stuff they are absorbing the atmosphere of INDIVIDUAL rights which no Third World country even conceives of let alone embodies. It is only when westerners travel to third world countries that they begin to understand what individual rights are because suddenly something that they take for granted is not there.

The American Revolution which embodies individual rights is the future. American individual freedom is what drives our engine. Total freedom to be as enterprising as one can be is what fuels our economy, scientific research and artistic creativity. The importance of individual rights embodied in the American revolution cannot be emphasized enough. Of course we inherited this from the Brits.

We are not so much exporting the American revolution as allowing the rest of the world come here to study not only in universities but in the school of everyday life in an atmosphere of individual rights. Once those rights have been tasted you're hooked. Our immigrants all maintain ties to their families in Asia (or elsewhere) and, by osmosis, our revolution is exported.

China may be the future empire but not until it embraces the American Revolution. The center of the empire has shifted many times in history but has always carried the civilization of the former empire with it. The Romans inherited Greek civilization. The US inherited British civilization etc.

Because of immigration to the US, we are the world and the world is slowly becoming Americanized, maybe not totally in our lifetime. China may become the center of the empire sometime this century but I doubt it. Real change always happens generationally. By the time Shanghai is the new capital of the new empire, China will have embraced the American Revolution.

My reply to an Iraqi acquaintance

I know an Iraqi guy from the time when we were both devotees of a Hindu guru in England 30 years ago. (That's a looong story.)

Needless to say, he hates the USA. Here is my reply to his criticism of the USA.

First you must understand that, before I was an American, I was a South African and lived in UK for 8 years. As a result I look at the US in several ways. I revere the ideas on which the nation was founded. The Declaration of Independence is my religion.

I am only too pleased to tell you what I think about the US as long as you realize that I don't see it the same way as someone who was born and raised here.

You said: "The old bad corrupted world gave us Shakespeare, Renoir, Picasso, Michael Angelo, Kafka, Beethoven, literature. Ancient civilizations still make us wonder about the Pyramids and the Greece gods. We also have the British."

You don't have to remind me. Remember I'm the old fogey here who loves Shakespeare and opera. I'm also a western chauvinist and believe that European civilization is better than anything else the world has to offer. And I include Arabs as part of the west especially in your beloved Spain where a great civilization flourished under Muslim rule. That's why it's so disappointing now that there are weird Muslim cultists who want to turn back the clock and introduce sharianism.

You also said: "Your civilisation contributed bad taste mixed with sugar, unhealthy food, Vampires on Mars, be democratic or I shoot you, legal exploitation, cult protectionisim, environmental pollution and International bullying. You talk too much and I can't understand why you pronnounce an 'o' as an 'ah' or a 'Zed' as a 'Zee'."

I also abhore the current pop culture but realize that it is the price that we pay for true democracy and freedom for all. It means that the lowest common denominator will prevail and there's more hoi-polloi in this world than any other class. However in the US, the working class is much wealthier than anywhere else and they are free to spend their money any way they want. But the standards of the hoi-polloi are improving with each generation.

When I first came here to the USA in 1978, the crime rate was very high. I got mugged three times before I realized that I should not walk in the city at night. I bought a car. Lately the crime rate has dropped a lot. (According to one study it is because abortion was made legal in 73 and ghetto blacks could get legal abortions. While it was illegal only the rich could afford secret abortions. Not that I agree with abortion. I don't. I cannot believe that civilized people do it.))

I had always walked at night in Europe and Africa and had never been in danger before. I detested the fact that so much freedom was also given to people who did not realize that the price of freedom is self-control and responsibility. I began to hate that I lived in a classless society unlike South Africa and the UK and that criminals had the same rights as me.

It took me many years to understand the juggling game that we have to play in the US to balance the freedom of the individual against the interests of the community.

You ended by saying: "But hey, you need to understand, that I still like you guys [well some of you], because in general, I think you don't have an idea of how to deal with outsiders. In a sense you are cute."

One hundred million Americans are rich working class people who eat too much pizza and burgers and have no refined tastes and don't know much about other people. There are also another 100 million who are educated and aware of the world. We just don't take too many tribal and national problems very seriously because we can't understand why people don't just move to California if they don't like their own societies or at least why they don't do something about thir own problems. We really don't care much about historical grudges. But this is a whole nother subject. I used to think Americans were arrogant about other nationalities. Now I see that they are practical and can't understand why others aren't.

I was born in South Africa

I was born in South Africa, and was as oblivious to where I was or what my country meant to me, as people born in the USA are of their own country. By my teens I learned where I was and what that meant. South Africa was beautiful, it's people interesting and complex. But it was difficult. I was a very staunch Catholic and apartheid did not seem to me to be compatible with Christianity.

I began meeting people who thought like I did about apartheid. They were intellectuals, artists and dreamers who opened my eyes to a new world. They turned me onto books that I had never heard of let alone read. I began to lose my interest in Catholicism and left the Church.

Because of my anti-apartheid activities and connections I was under surveillance (followed and phone-tapped) for 2 years and finally held for questioning/intimidation. By this time I had decided that I did not like the other anti-apartheid activists and did not much like their vision of a future communist/socialist South Africa. It sounded too much like "1984" or "Brave New World" (two of the most important books for me) Most of the activists were Marxists - either members of the South African Communist Party (formed in 1918 and the first Communists Party outside of Russia) or people who called themselves "liberals." Years later I would realise that they were what Lenin called "useful idiots" and what nowadays I call wishful-thinking John Lennon/Marxists, the ones who prefer to "Imagine" rather than think.

At that time I did not even know that it was their Marxism that was making me uncomfortable. Many of the real communists were solipsistic, neurotic, dishonest and insecure to the point of being manipulative if not outright power-hungry. The Marxist/Lennonists were divided into true "useful idiots" and those playing Mr Nice Guy. They were the good cops to the hard-nosed commie bad cops. All of the white activists were rich and highly educated and were patronizing to me because I was a pretty naive, simple half-Afrikaner working class white from a poor uneducated family. Very few "poor whites" concerned themselves with the problems of apartheid. They were too busy making a living just like working class people all over the world. The reason that I was one of the few working-class whites to join the anti-apartheid movement was because I had been educated by the Catholics more than most of my peers. I had always loved reading and thought I was an intellectual but the other white activists made me feel stupid - a bumpkin. I wasn't as witty or smart as they were and I felt inferior. I also realized that I could not really live as they did as I had to work for a living and was not a perpetual college student (as most of them were) living on a trust fund.

Being in jail frightened me and I did not believe in the communist revolution enough to go back in again. Also, by this time, I knew enough about the USSR to know that a "workers' paradise" was more like hell. I inherited a small fortune and headed for swinging London. It was 1968, I was 21 and I wanted to try LSD and be in a "love-in" in swinging London. The blossoming hippie phenomenon sounded like my kind of revolution - the kind of "paradise" that I seen in a vision as I listened to "Seargent Pepper" while hallucinating on cannabis.

I lived in the UK for 8 years and always felt like a stranger in a strange land despite the fact that I did not have anything to do with the South African expatriate community in London and lived with a bunch of Brits and American draft-dodgers in a commune in the East End. When the hippie revolution began to look as unworkable and sometimes as downright ugly as the workers' revolution, I left the commune, married a Scots woman whom I had met in London and moved to Glasgow where my son was born.

Then "The Lord of the Universe" arrive in the UK in the form of a 14 year old Hindu guru. I knew it was a cult but I joined because I was desperate for peace of mind. All the horror of my last few years in South Africa, all the crazy people that I had associated with, all the drugs I had taken, all the heartbreaks I had endured had made me miserable and needy. The guru's "Knowledge" was intoxicating. By this time I had studied Hinduism and all the other eastern isms and seen that they all agreed that heaven could be experienced before death. I had seen both heaven and hell on LSD. The Hindu heaven and the guru's "Knowledge" were psychedelic or at least helped me to understand what I had experienced on hashish, LSD, mescaline and mushrooms. "Knowledge" was all about an ecstatic love that seemed like the answer to uniting everyone regardless of color or religion. I went back to South Africa and lived for two years in an Indian ashram. In the UK most of the guru's devotees were former hippies. In South Africa 90% of the devotees were Indians from Gujerat (like Ghandi who lived in South Africa for 22 years.)

It took me a while to realise that "Knowledge" was not going to work either. The Gujeratis barely tolerated other Hindu or Muslim Indians and they were deadset against "spreading the Knowledge" to Africans. It was a little club. I moved to the USA and finally found my true religion and the right revolution to fight for - the American Revolution.

The tragedy of Africa - no navigable rivers

From an article by Thomas Sowell, The tragedy of Africa: Part II

The great French historian Fernand Braudel said, "In understanding Black Africa, geography is more important than history." Much of Africa's history was in fact shaped by its geography.

Almost every great city in the world has arisen on navigable waterways -- and such waterways are more scarce in Africa than in any other continent. An aircraft carrier can dock on the Hudson River in midtown Manhattan but there is not a single river where that is possible on the vast continent of Africa, which is larger than Europe or North America.

Even smaller boats can travel only a limited distance on most African rivers because of cascades and waterfalls. Most of the continent is more than 1,000 feet above sea level and more than half of Africa is more than 2,000 feet above sea level. That means its rivers and stream must plunge down from those heights on their way to the sea.

The Sexual Rage Behind Islamic Terror

The Sexual Rage Behind Islamic Terror
By Jamie Glazov
FrontPageMagazine.com | October 4, 2001

ALL SERIAL KILLERS, almost without exception, are severely sexually abused as children. The kind of people who hijack a plane with innocent people and drive it into a building with thousands of other innocent people are related to this phenomenon.

When sociopaths rape and kill, they do not see their victims as human beings, but only as objects. This is because the sociopaths were themselves, at one time, used as objects – as their bodily integrity was repeatedly violated. The rage that results from sexual abuse is one thing, but when combined with living in a dysfunctional culture of sexual repression and misogyny, where love is reduced to violent domination, it is quite another.

Throughout the Islamic Middle East, men and women are taught to be vehemently opposed to pleasure, especially of the sexual variety. Men are raised not only forbidden to touch women, but to even look at them. Sex before marriage is not just a sin -- but a criminal offence. It is punishable by a severe beating at best, and an execution at worst.

The sexual privileges that are allowed in Islamic cultures are permitted to men. Women’s sexuality and social independence represent major threats to male supremacy and are tightly controlled. Thus, as the Moroccan feminist Fitna Sabbah reveals in her book Woman in the Muslim Unconscious, there is a disturbing conflict in the Middle East between sexual libido and repression. A deep-seated fear of, and hostility to, individuality prevails, and its main expression exists in misogyny.

Socially segregated from women, Arab men succumb to homosexual behavior. But, interestingly enough, there is no word for "homosexual" in their culture in the modern Western sense. That is because having sex with boys, or with effeminate men, is seen as a social norm. Males serve as available substitutes for unavailable women. The male who does the penetrating, meanwhile, is not emasculated any more than if he had sex with a wife. The male who is penetrated is emasculated. The boy, however, is not, since it is rationalized that he is not yet a man.

In this culture, males sexually penetrating males becomes a manifestation of male power, conferring a status of hyper-masculinity. It is considered to have nothing to do with homosexuality. An unmarried man who has sex with boys is simply doing what men do. As the scholar Bruce Dunne has demonstrated, sex in Islamic societies is not about mutuality between partners, but about the adult male's achievement of pleasure through violent domination.

There is silence around this issue. It is the silence that legitimizes sexual violence against women, such as honor crimes and female circumcision. It is also the silence that forces victimized Arab boys into invisibility. Even though the society does not see their sexual exploitation as being humiliating, the psychological and emotional scars that result from their subordination, powerlessness and humiliation is a given. Traumatized by the violation of their dignity and manliness, they spend the rest of their lives trying to get it back.

The problem is that trying to recover from sexual abuse, and to recapture one’s own shattered masculinity, is quite an ordeal in a culture where women are hated and love is interpreted as hegemonic control.

With women out of touch – and out of sight -- until marriage, males experience pre-marital sex only in the confines of being with other males. Their sexual outlet mostly includes victimizing younger males – just the way they were victimized.

In all of these circumstances, the idea of love is removed from men's understanding of sexuality. Like the essence of Arab masculinity, it is reduced to hurting others by violence. A gigantic rupture develops between men and women, where no harmony, affection or equality is allowed to exist. In relationships between men, meanwhile, affection, solidarity and empathy are left out of the picture. They threaten the hyper-masculine order.

It is excruciating to imagine the sexual confusion, humiliation, and repression that evolve in the mindsets of males in this culture. But it is no surprise that many of these males find their only avenue for gratification in the act of humiliating the foreign "enemy," whose masculinity must be violated at all costs – as theirs once was.

Violating the masculinity of the enemy necessitates the dishing out of severe violence against him. In the recent terrorist strikes, therefore, violence against Americans served as a much-needed release of the terrorists’ bottled-up sexual rage. Moreover, it served as a desperate and pathological testament of the re-masculinization of their emasculated selves.

More on Muslim pedophilia and violence

Earlier I wrote about the Muslim penchant for sodomizing little boys. Even worse is their treatment of little girls (not to even mention forced clitorectomies.)

Mohammed's third wife was nine years old. To this day children are still forced into arranged marriages.

The man who called himself the holy Prophet and a "mercy of God for all beings" raped three children, Javiryah, Rayhanah and Safiyah (all little girls captured when he raided the tribes of Banu a1-Mustaliq, Qurayza and Nadir.)

The prophet slaughtered their husbands, fathers and loved ones and slept with their daughters in the same day he captured them.

No, Islam is not a nice religion despite the fact that Mohammed started his cult AFTER Jesus had spread his message of love and forgiveness and despite the fact that he called Jesus a fellow prophet.

5:33 "Indeed, the punishment of those who fight Allah and His Messenger and who go around corrupting the land is to be killed, crucified, have their hands and feet cut off on opposite sides, or to be banished from the land. That is a disgrace for them in this life, and in the life to come theirs will be a terrible punishment. 34 Except for those who repent before you overpower them. Know, then, that Allah is All-Forgiving, Merciful." (Majid Fakhry, An Interpretation of the Quran, New York: NYUP, 2000, 2004)

Robert Spencer in Front Page quotes Ayattollah Khomeini:

"Those who know nothing of Islam pretend that Islam counsels against war. Those [who say this] are witless. Islam says: Kill all the unbelievers just as they would kill you all! Does this mean that Muslims should sit back until they are devoured by [the unbelievers]? Islam says: Kill them, put them to the sword and scatter [their armies.] Islam says: Whatever good there is exists thanks to the sword and in the shadow of the sword! People cannot be made obedient except with the sword! The sword is the key to Paradise, which can be opened only for the Holy Warriors! There are hundreds of other [QurÂanic] psalms and Hadiths [sayings of the Prophet] urging Muslims to value war and to fight. Does all this mean that Islam is a religion that prevents men from waging war? I spit upon those foolish souls who make such a claim."

Quran tells Muslims to kill the disbelievers wherever they find them (Q; 2:191), murder them and treat them harshly (Q; 9:123), slay them (Q; 9:5), fight with them, (Q; 8:65 ). It tells followers to humiliate the Christians and the Jews and impose on them a penalty tax (Q; 9:29). It takes away the freedom of belief from all humanity and tells clearly that no other religion except Islam is acceptable (Q;3:85) and relegates those who disbelieve in it to hell (Q;5:10), calls them najis (filthy, untouchable, impure) (Q;9:28) and orders the Muslims to fight the unbelievers until no other religion except Islam is left (Q;2:193). Quran states that the non-believers will go to hell and will drink boiling water (Q;14:17). It asks the Muslims to "slay or crucify or cut the hands and the feet of the unbelievers, and expel them from the land with disgrace and stresses that they shall have a great punishment in world hereafter" (Q;5:34). It says that for the disbelievers "garments of fire shall be cut and there shall be poured over their heads boiling water whereby whatever is in their bowels and skin shall be dissolved and they will be punished with hooked iron rods"(Q;22:19). Quran prohibits Muslims to befriend their own brothers and fathers if they are non-believers (Q;9:23), (Q;3:28). It asks the Muslims to "strive against the unbelievers with great endeavor" (Q;25:52) and "be stern with them because they belong to hell" (Q;66:9). The holy Prophet demanded his followers to "strike off the heads of the disbelievers"; then after making a "wide slaughter among them, carefully tie up the remaining captives" for ransom (Q;47:4).

As for the women the book of Allah says that they are inferior to men and if found disobedient their husbands have the right to scourge them (Q;4:34). But their punishment for disobeying their husbands does not end there, because after they die they will go to hell (Q;66:10). Quran emphasizes the superiority of men by confirming that men have an advantage over the women (Q;2:228). It not only denies the women's equal right to their inheritance (Q;4:11-12), it also regards them as imbeciles and decrees that their witness is not admissible in the court of law unless it is accompanied with the witness of a man (Q;2:282). This means that a woman who is raped cannot accuse her rapist unless she can produce a male witness. Muhammad allowed the Muslims to marry up to four wives (although he himself had a score of them) and gave them license to enjoy their "right-hand possessions" (women captured in wars) as many as they can capture or afford to buy (Q;4:3), even if she's married before being captured,(Q;4:24).

No, Islam is not a nice religion.

Mix this barbaric religion up with national socialism (Nazism) as did the Egyptian writer Q'tub (who was inspired by the totalitarian regimes of Europe when he lived in France and is the favorite philosopher of Osama bin Laden and the Taliban) and you have the Islamo-fascist enemy with whom we are now at war. Perhaps it's time to round up all Muslims in the West who show any inclination toward this sick totalitarian cult of death and quarantine them until this war is over. Yes, we are at war - perhaps WWWlll - and it may go on for quite a while.

The Sodatic Triangle

Since the London bombings the discussions taking place in the blogosphere have been very similar to those after 9/11.

The comments range from the leftists' making apologies for Muslims ("It's our fault because we made them angry") to the moderates' condemning terrorism but defending Islam such as:

"The terrorists are not real Muslims. Islam is an ancient religion not worthy of being tarnished by the terrorists."

Then there are the strong condemnations such as:

"Islam is not an 'ancient religion', worthy of being 'tarnished,' that is for damn sure. It bases its core beliefs on a book that says it's an honor to hack-off an infidel's head, or die in the process of murdering infidels. There is no such thing as a 'moderate' or honorable Muslim."

And of course the predictable comparisons with Judeo-Christianity:

"Whether we Christians like to acknowledge it or not, the Bible DOES talk about stoning and showing no mercy to infidels."

My two cents: When was the last time you heard about Christians stoning infidels? Yep, they don't do that anymore.

I grew up living among Muslims (or Mohammedans as we called them) in South Africa. Most of them don't take their religion too seriously and are actually fairly secular, materialistic and ambitious. They were known as "black Jews" in South Africa (a back-handed compliment but not an outright insult.)

But the fact is that the religion of Islam stinks. Mohammed was a scheming opportunistic weasel who married a rich old widow to further his ambitions. It is a primitive religion and, unlike Judaism and Christianity, has never had a Reformation.

Our bible-thumpers may not be the most enlightened people in the world but so far they have not bombed anyone. Islam is not a religion of kindness, mercy, forgiveness and love. Has everyone forgotten the video footage of Muslims cheering and celebrating in the streets of the mid-east after 9/11?

The Muslims that I grew up with in South Africa live in a multicultural society and have had to adapt. Same goes for most of those whom I have known in the USA.

In the middle-east, however, they live in practically homogenous societies and are arrogant and medieval. Sadly that applies to many in the UK too (and the rest of Europe) where they are not really ever accepted as British and live in ghettoes.It seems that, if their religion and culture are never challenged, they can happily go about being reactionary dinosaurs.

Last zinger: One of the major causes of dysfunctionality of middle-eastern culture is seldom talked about because it is controversial and distasteful. As much as the Muslims hate gays, they have a dirty little secret - many are pederasts.

Richard Burton (no,not Mr Elizabeth Taylor - I mean the explorer and translator of Thousand and One Nights) called the mid-east and Mediterranean the Sodatic Triangle because of the wide-spread practice of pederasty.

Muslim boys are molested by older males from an early age. Is Islamic culture pathological because of the sexual abuse of its little boys who then grow up to be vicious, sado-masochistic and corrupt?

Excerpt from "Generation Kill," by Rolling Stone journalist Evan Wright is about the Iraqui war. Wright was embedded with the Marines of First Recon.

The other culture shock for the Marines is that several [Arab] men seem to be hitting on them. One asks Garza to lift up his glasses. When he does, the man leans forward and says, "You have pretty eyes."

Another of them asks a Marine if he likes boys or girls. When the Marine says, "Girls," the man makes a face and says, "Girls, bah!" Then he points to a young man standing nearby, makes an obscene gesture with his fingers and says, "You go with my friend, you like."

Islamic Terrorists are Totalitarians (and also Marxists but they may not even know it.)

Western Civilization 101: Ancient Greeks, the Roman Empire, the Catholic Church - no mention or even concept of individual rights.

That takes care of the first 1400 years since the birth of Christ. Then came the Renaissance when Plato, Socrates and Aristotle were rediscovered and challenged the insanity, superstitious claptrap and mental sickness that was the Roman Catholic Church and opened the door to the likes of Luther. He was one of the first men to assert individual sovereignty and challenge papal authority. His most radical proclamation was that even one's concept of God was a personal realization.

He said: "The First Commandment is that you must not have other gods. That is, I must be your only God.

"Question: What does this saying mean? How should we understand it? What does it mean to have a god? What is God?

"Answer: To have a god means this: You expect to receive all good things from it and turn to it in every time of trouble. Yes, to have a god means to trust and to believe in Him with your whole heart. I have often said that only the trust and faith of the heart can make God or an idol. If your faith and trust are true you have the true God, too. On the other hand, where trust is false, is evil, there you will not have the true God either. Faith and God live together. I tell you, whatever you set your heart on and rely on is really your god.

Here, Luther proclaimed that only YOU, as an individual, can define your own god - not some stupid, venal, boy-molesting, corrupt Italian pope, not a priest or a bishop or cardinal selling "Indulgences" to ensure your safe passage to heaven after death - no, not anyone but you. God is whatever you have faith in. If you have faith in evil, then your god will be evil. If you have faith in goodness, then your god is goodness.

Then came Calvin and Knox who inspired Locke and Adam Smith and the others of the Scottish Enlightenment. Without Locke, there would be no Washington, Jefferson, Adams, Madison or Franklin. Without Locke, there would be no Burke to praise the American Revolution and condemn the French Revolution.

And the French Revolution needed to be condemned, not only for the Reign of Terror, but because of the totalitarian, atheistic and hubristic notions that gave rise to that Terror. The American Revolution did not inspire Marx. The French Revolution did. Marx was an idiotic believer in the "Romanticism" of Rousseau and Proudhomme. He was also a liar who fudged facts to suit his theory - in fact Marx was the Michael Moore of his time - he never let the truth get in the way of his misanthropism and mental illness.

From the French Revolution (which was the first "cult of death") we got the counter-Enlightenment and Marx and that great benefactor of mankind, Lenin, and the first blissful proletariat paradise, "Soviet Socialism." This was soon followed by that other wonderful utopia, "National Socialism" aka Nazism. The "collateral damage" of these totalitarian utopias was 56 million slaughtered. These were soon joined by the 120 million people murdered by various insane Asian communists.

From the French Revolution and Marx via all the wonderful European philosophers, like Bertie Russell, we got atheistic secular humanism and all those wonderful little European socialist utopias that would not be able to pay for their socialism if they stopped selling arms to Africa. (Huh? What about the great Nobel Prize? The money for that prize came from selling dynamite.) All of western Europe is socialist albeit not totalitarian. Eastern Europe is still struggling to cure itself of the Marxist disease. Africa is dying not so much of AIDS but of the disease of socialist-inspired "aid" and the Catholic Church with the help of the Jesuits brought the virus of Marxism to Latin America quite a while ago.

And, thanks to great Muslim philosophers such as Qutb, we now have Islamic Totalitarianism. Thousands of semi-educated half-wit ragheads have now been infected by sick and twisted western communists with the Marxist "cult of death." Ba'athism is simply Islamic National Socialism/Nazism. If you haven't realized this yet (Qutb admired the totalitarianism of Hitler and Stalin) then read Paul Berman's "Terror and Liberalism.")

Most of the Muslim terrorists are not (as "liberals" would like you to believe) poor and oppressed. Most come from middle-class families and have had a modicum of education - enough to have been infected with the unspoken Marxism buried in modern education. The latest British terrorists were born and raised in England and educated in government schools. They have absorbed Marxism by osmosis and feel angry and envious - the motivating forces behind Marx's own misanthropy as well as modern Marxists.

Actions speak louder than words

This is a post by my partner, Andy. He has been reading "The Sword of the Prophet" by Serge Trifkovic and has discovered that Islam is a fascist totalitarian religion.

I grew up thinking very simply that - whether Christian, Jew, or Muslim - we all had the same belief: one God be he Yaweh, God or Allah. It was all the same God just different names.

In high school I decided to do my senior English term paper on the PLO. This was back in '83 before the they turned Yasser Arafat into a Jordan Almond (heavy sugar coating) and suicide bombing came into fashion. The PLO just didn't jive with my innocent veiw of Islam. Conclusion was that the PLO was an aberration and that Arafat Was a nasty little Hitler that should be terminated with extreme prejudice. At the time nearly all the terrorist action that made it to our news stations and print seemed to lead back to him and the PLO. Waste the whole bunch of them - problem solved. I will never understand why, when it has always been our national policy to not negotiate with terrorists, every president since the 70's has brought Arafat to the peace negotiations table. Talk about a blind spot.

Speaking of blind spots; the way Americans are taught world history has some very glaring blind spots so much so you would describe it as acute tunnel vision. My entire education concerning Islam and Muslims can be summed up with: "Islam was founded in 630 ad by Mohammed." I think it is time to start teaching the history of Islam and its very bloody history of expansionism.

I have been reading "The Sword of the Prophet" by Serge Trifkovic. He says right up front that he is not a scholar of the Middle East or Islam and that he is not an apologist as many such university scholars are. He simply puts forth the facts, backs them up with diverse research and documentation and leaves you to decide. Needless to say, it doesn't paint a pretty picture of Muslims or Islam: from Mohammad's expulsion (and subsequent slaughter) of the large Jewish and Christian populations of Medina for refusing to acknowledge him as the one true prophet; to the Mogul slaughters in India (I had read and heard a little about the Moghuls but - foolish me - I thought Moguls were from the east not Arabs from the west) and then to the Ottoman Turks in the years following WWI to the present day.

Hitler's final solution was directly inspired by the Turks. When his councillors warned him that Europe and America would not stand idly by as he put into motion his "final solution," Hitler is quoted as saying, "Who remembers the Armenians?"

To give you the information to which this refers: on September the 9th, 1922 the Turks under Attaturk took the thriving port city of Smyrna. The murder of Christians (primarily Armenians) started almost immediately and rapidly escalated to mass slaughter at the instigation of the Turkish military authorities. The slaughter reached a peak with the burning of Smyrna on September the 13th, 1922 when the Turks put the Armenian quarter to the torch. Two hundred thousand Christians - yes, 200,000 - stood at the piers of the city trapped between the bay, the fire, and the Turkish bayonets. All were slaughtered (much to our shame as Americans) while American, English, French and Italian ships and battleships lay anchored in the harbor doing nothing in order to maintain neutrality. Those who swam to the ships to seek refuge were driven off or doused with boiling water by the British. Musicians aboard the American battleships were ordered to play as loud as possible to drowned out the pleas and screams of the swimmers.

When The world turns a blind eye to such as this no wonder Hitler thought he was safe in his "final solution." I always wondered what happened to all those thriving Christian cities and communities in the Middle East that were mentioned in the New Testament - i.e. Corinth, Galatia, Phillipi, Colossae, Thessalonica, and Macedonia. Very simply: Islamic jihad followed by decades of rule under Islamic law.

(My description of the slaughter at Smyrna is a shortened version of Trifkovic's direct quote from "Greek Fire" by Nicholas Gage published by Alfred A. Knopf in 2000.)

When murder, rape and pillage are institutionalized and done in the name of religion there is a very real danger that we ignore at our own peril. Islamic expansion (it is and has been the fastest growing religion for some time) is by willing or forced conversion and gradations in between. Standard procedure, from its very inception, consisted of a raiding party sweeping into a nearby village and slaughtering all who attempted to resist and rounding up any men of fighting age. If you were lucky, you were offered a chance to become Muslim and avow that Allah was God and Mohammad his prophet. If you were unlucky, you had no choice and were put to the sword. The elderly were killed outright. The women and children were marched off into slavery. The women also had the honor of being raped and, if comely, forced to become concubines to their captors.

The Arabs had been doing this for centuries among each other. Their only rule was that you should not do it to your own clan/tribe. Everyone else was fair game. Mohammad codifiedthis tradition, changing the rules slightly. He said that Muslim Arabs could no longer be attacked but that all infidels were fair game and that included shirks (false Muslims.) This concept of shirks is the cause of the ongoing battles between Shi'ite and Sunni. This is probably also the reason why few Muslims of conscience speak out against the terrorist atrocities: for, to disagree with Islamic tradition means that you will be declared shirk and that puts you lower than the infidel and is a death sentence.

Mohammad was canny in that he understood that the Arab tribes' history of raiding and conquering their neighbors. He also promised his followers that, if they died in the cause, they would go to a heaven of the most decadent and sensual of pleasures and, if they lived, that they would be rewarded with all the wealth of anyone whom they killed in battle. Now they were simply doing what they had always done and all with Allah's blessing. To die in battle was great honor AND they would also get a heaven of endless sensual pleasure.

What's the down side? The problem was: how to continue to finance the expansion. If Mohammad forced his warriors to be farmers or merchants, (so that they cvould be taxed) they would have rebelled. Selling the women and children into slavery was a short term fix and would not sustain the expansion. Hence the need to codify the existence of the infidels under sharia (Muslim law) and tax them to finance the expansion. Thus some Christians and Jews would be allowed to live after their regions had been conquered (but only in numbers too small to pose a threat to the conquerors) and be allowed to continue farming and running businesses to provide the tax base to pay for further expansion. They would pay for their lives in jizya (a poll tax which would be collected annually.) These excessive taxes would be paid only by the infidels and would help to finance further conquest. Failure to make full payment would result in your family being sold off into slavery. (The Muslims consider themselves generous so the price paid for your family would be applied to your jizya.)

Under sharia, the infidel is not allowed to vote, hold political office or hold any position where he might even have the possibility of authority over a Muslim. The infidel is not allowed to own or carry any weapon. He is not allowed to testify against a Muslim even if he is a witness to a murder. Should the infidel kill a Muslim, his life (and often the lives of his entire family) is forfeited. He is not allowed to convert a Muslim or even speak of his religion to a Muslim. For a muslim to kill an infidel that pays the jizya, he need only say that the victim was SUSPECTED of violating any one of these requirements and he will be commended for his actions. You could see how it would be of benefit for an infidel to convert if he were living under sharia. You could say it was good for your health and the whole family as well as your wallet. Any infidel child who has the misfortune to be orphaned does not go to members of the extended family. The orphan is forced to become Muslim. With this kind of official policy, it is no wonder that Islam is a growing religion. Don't think this is just ancient history it continues throughout all of north Africa to this day. The Sudan is one of the very worst at the moment. But Egypt is just as bad with their treatment of the Coptic Christians despite the fact that Egypt is one of the more secular Muslim countries.

The Koran states there can be no peace until all the world bows to Allah and all people submit to the laws of Allah (i.e. sharia. Sharia is clearly incompatable with democracy. History shows that Islam is an aggressive expansionist theology that allows for no other religion to exist as its "final solution." It permits no challenge or review of its dogma and has never had and is never likely to have a reformation. The only book is the Koran and hadiths that go with it. The only ones allowed to interprete the meaning of these books are the clerics and ayatollahs; not what I would call a progressive bunch and not likely to share any of the power or authority that goes with it; not when they can declare anyone preaching reform a shirk and declare fatwa which is an instant trip to heaven for Muslims who kill any person or persons named in this Islamic death warrant.

Islam's history, its writings, and the teachings of its scholars all repeat the same thing: expansion, domination, slaughter and crushing of any dissenting ideas. It is a totalitarian ideal masquerading as a religion. With its promise of paradise to anyone who dies in the effort to spread this religion, if this is not a death cult I don't know what is.

If there are any Muslims who think there is something wrong with Islam, then it is time to get up off your lazy asses and get a backbone. Tell your cult-crazed clerics they are insane. Figure it out. If you are in America, England or anywhere in the west, you are free to make your own decisions and you can decide what is best for you and your children. You have to clean your own house and your own community. You either think these Islamofascists are dangerous radicals or not. There is no middle ground on this. If you won't clean your community of these types it is rightly assumed you are part of the problem. When this puts fellow Americans in danger you have lost your standing as Americans in my eyes. If you cannot police your own community, be prepared to take the consequences of your inaction. Americans are "live and let live" by nature but, if you don't start putting your own house in order, we will come in and do it for you. So, if there are moderate Muslims out there, prove it or be tarred with the same brush as your radical counterparts. What you say do or think is your own business but, if you are a threat me or mine, I'll kill you without a second thought just like a rabid dog.

Andy

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