Aaron Hanscom

Wednesday, September 20, 2006

Shari’a law in Europe

"Allah's Socialists," my latest article, was published today in FrontPage Magazine.

For those people who think I'm exaggerating the worrisome situation in Europe, I'd remind them that the examples of appeasement that I cite do not come from your average Juan on the streets of Barcelona. The Dutch Justice Minister and Spanish Foreign Minister are pretty important people. Plus, I've been to Spain (among other European countries) about a dozen times since 1998. The majority of the people I talk to there couldn't agree more with Donner and Moratinos. Come to think of it, maybe I should have included a Juan or two in the piece.

Update: There are plenty more examples of politicans like Donner and Moratinos. Mark Steyn writes:

Kinky as this is, it has nothing on Fallaci’s next circle of cultural diversity – the weirdly masochistic pleasure European leaders get out of talking themselves down and talking Islam up. Beginning with the German Foreign Minister Hans-Dietrich Genscher at the 1983 “Hamburg Symposium for the Euro-Arab Dialogue”, Signora Fallaci rounds up a quarter-century’s worth of westerners who’ve insisted that everything you know was invented by Islam: Paper, medicine, sherbet, artichokes, on and on and on…

"Always clever, the Muslims. Always at the top. Always ingenious. In philosophy, in mathematics, in gastronomy, in literature, in architecture, in medicine, in music, in law, in hydraulics, in cooking. And always stupid, we westerners. Always inadequate, always inferior. Therefore obliged to thank some son of Allah who preceded us. Who enlightened us. Who acted as a schoolteacher guiding dimwitted pupils."

This, it seems to me, is the most valuable contribution of Oriana Fallaci’s work. I enjoy the don’t-eat-your-sexual-partner stuff as much as the next infidel, but the challenge presented by Islam is not that the cities of the western world will be filling up with sheep-shaggers. If I had to choose, I’d rather Mohammed Atta was down river in Egypt hitting on the livestock than flying through the window of Manhattan skyscrapers. But he’s not. And one reason why westernized Muslims seem so confident is that Europeans like Herr Genscher, in positing a choice between a generalized “Islam” and “the west”, have inadvertently promoted a globalized pan-Islamism that’s become a self-fulfilling prophesy.

Monday, September 18, 2006

VDH

Victor Davis Hanson at his absolute best:

In matters of the present war, I have given up on most of the neoconservatives, many of whom, following the perceived pulse of the battlefield, have either renounced their decade-long, pre-September11 rants to remove Saddam (despite the 140,000 brave souls still on the field of battle who took them at their word), or turned on the President on grounds that he is not waging the perfect fight and thus is not pursuing the good war. The Paleo-right is as frightening as is the lunatic Left. My old Democratic party is long dead, their jackals trying to tear apart the solitary and stumbling noble stag Joe Liebermann, the old center taken over by the Kerry and Soros billionaires, and the guilt-ridden academic, celebrity and media cadres.

So we really are left with very little in these pivotal times—the will of George Bush, of course, the Old Breed unchanged since Okinawa and the Bulge that still anchors the US military, the courage and skill of a very few brave writers like a Hitchens, Krauthammer, and the tireless and brilliant Mark Steyn, but very, very few others. No, this is an age in which we in the West make smug snuff movies about killing an American President, while the Taliban and the Islamists boast of assassinating the Pope.

So long may you run, Ms. Fallaci, you who by now have learned that, yes, there is a soul, and, yes, yours was indeed saved for eternity if only for its singular courage and honesty alone. And dear Pope: clarify, contextualize, express sorrow over the wrong interpretation of your remarks, but please don’t apologize for the Truth—not now, not ever

Friday, September 15, 2006

Abducted Israeli Soldiers

This is good news.

I wrote about the three soldiers in FrontPage Magazine last week.

Monday, September 04, 2006

Gustavo de Aristegui

Please don't miss my interview with the brave Spaniard. His website is here.