ATTEMPT TO CRIMINALIZE SUSPICION OF MUSLIMS

Kudos to US Airways. Risking fines and a boycott, it did the right thing this week by removing a group of Muslim men from a flight to protect its crew and passengers. By most accounts, the six bearded men were behaving suspiciously at a time when airports were on high alert for sky terror during the holidays. "There were a number of things that gave the flight crew pause," an airline spokesman said. According to witnesses and police reports, the men:

* Made anti-American statements.
* Made a scene of praying and chanting "Allah."
* Asked for seat-belt extensions even though a flight attendant thought they didn't need them.
* Refused requests by the pilot to disembark for more screening.
Also, three of the men had only one-way tickets and no checked baggage.

Police had to forcibly remove the men from the flight, whereupon they were taken into custody. A search found no weapons or explosives, and they were released to continue on their journey.

Within hours, the men enlisted a Muslim-rights group to make a stink in the press, insisting they were merely imams returning home from an Islamic conference in Minneapolis. They say they were "harassed" because of their faith. But were they victims or provocateurs?

All six claim to be Americans, so clearly they were aware of heightened security. Surely they knew that groups of Muslim men flying together while praying to Allah fit the modus operandi of the 9/11 hijackers and would make a pilot nervous. Throw in anti-U.S. remarks and odd demands about seat belts, and they might as well have yelled, "Bomb!"

Yet they chose to make a spectacle. Why? Turns out among those attending their conference was Rep.-elect Keith Ellison, D-Minn., who will be the first Muslim sworn into Congress (with his hand on the Quran). Two days earlier, Ellison, an African-American convert who wants to criminalize Muslim profiling, spoke at a fundraiser for the Council on American-Islamic Relations, the Muslim-rights group that wasted no time condemning US Airways for "prejudice and ignorance."

CAIR wants congressional hearings to investigate other incidents of "flying while Muslim." Incoming Judiciary Chairman John Con-yers, D-Mich., has already drafted a resolution, borrowing from CAIR rhetoric, that gives Muslims special civil-rights protections.

While it's not immediately clear whether the incident was a stunt to help give the new Democratic majority cover to criminalize airport profiling, it wouldn't be the first time Muslim passengers have tried to prove "Islamophobia" -- or test nerves and security.

More here

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MORE LEFTIST SELF-DELUSION

David Frum is commenting on a review of a book about ancient Roman history:

And then I find this , in a Newsweek review by Tara Pepper:

Bryan Ward-Perkins's "The Fall of Rome and the End of Civilization" (256 pages. Oxford University Press) was published in paperback over the summer, and recently won the prestigious Hessell-Tiltman prize for history. In it he casts new light on the end of the Roman Empire, arguing that it was in fact an era of positive cultural transformation rather than decline.

I read Ward-Perkins' book last winter, and it is terrific, really an important new contribution. Well written and powerfully concise. I strongly, strongly recommend it. And it does cast new light on the fall of Rome - more than that, it positively revolutionizes contemporary understanding of the events of the 5th century of the Christian era - by attacking the currently fashionable idea that the fall of Rome "was in fact an era of positive cultural transformation ..." And as a special aid to lazy book reviewers like Pepper, Ward-Perkins even put his main thesis in his title.

Of course, something more than ordinary incompetence is at work here. As Ward-Perkins points out in a very courageous introduction, the idea that decline never happens, that all changes are in fact "positive cultural transformations" holds such a grip on the contemporary liberal mind that even so smashing and universal a catastrophe as the barbarian invasions of Europe gets reinterpreted out of existence. Instead, academics and the journalists who write about them have reinterpreted invasion, the collapse of civil authority, the implosion of Europe's economy, and the destruction of literacy and culture not as "decline," but as evolution toward a more vibrant diversity.

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ELSEWHERE

There is a great video here of a popular female singer who SUPPORTS the troops.

Iran in demographic decline: "Iran's plunging birth rate, I observed in essays past, will burden the country with an elderly population proportionately as large as Western Europe's within a generation, just at the point at which this impoverished country will have ceased to export oil. By 2030, Iranian society will collapse. One does not have to destroy an opponent's military forces to defeat him. Russia collapsed without a single shot fired when Mikhail Gorbachev and his generals understood that they could not compete with Ronald Reagan's United States. The Islamic world also has been defeated, by a globalized economy in which the US dominates the top, and China blocks entry at the bottom. As the most urbane people of Western Asia, the Persians grasped the hopelessness of circumstances quicker than their Arab neighbors. That is why they have ceased to bear children. Iran's population today is concentrated at military age; by mid-century, today's soldiers will be pensioners, and there will be no one to replace them..... In the case of Iran, deracination and cultural despair impel millions of individual women to eschew motherhood. ... Iranians already behave like a defeated people. That is why they are so unstable, and so dangerous. The new Persian Empire masquerading as an Islamic Republic is a wounded beast."

Courts protect illegals instead of sending them home: "A federal judge ruled Monday that a suburban New York village discriminated against Hispanic day laborers when it closed a hiring site and stepped up police patrols on the streets where they looked for work. The ruling against the Village of Mamaroneck could influence the treatment of day laborers elsewhere around the United States, where they have become an increasingly visible part of the immigration debate as they solicit construction and landscaping jobs. The victory is at least the second this year for day laborers in federal court. In May, a federal judge prohibited the city of Redondo Beach, California, from arresting day laborers for violating a local ordinance against soliciting work in public."

For more postings, see TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, GUN WATCH, SOCIALIZED MEDICINE, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS and EYE ON BRITAIN. (Mirror sites here, here, here, here, here, here, here and here).

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"All the worth which the human being possesses, all spiritual reality, he possesses only through the State." -- 19th century German philosopher Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel. Hegel is the most influential philosopher of the Left -- inspiring Karl Marx, the American "Progressives" of the early 20th century and university socialists to this day.

The Big Lie of the late 20th century was that Nazism was Rightist. It was in fact typical of the Leftism of its day. It was only to the Right of Stalin's Communism. The very word "Nazi" is a German abbreviation for "National Socialist" (Nationalsozialistisch)

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