"I bet they're asleep in New York -- I bet they're asleep all over America."
Maybe we won't always have Paris Update: "Spy chiefs uncover Islamic terror plot to blow up the Eiffel Tower," from the Daily Mail (thanks to Twostellas):
Spy chiefs have uncovered a plot by Islamic terrorists to blow up the Eiffel Tower.A scrambled short-wave radio conversation exposing the planned attack on the world's most visited monument was picked up by Portuguese air traffic controller and passed on to French intelligence services.
The 1,060ft high tower, built in 1889, has more than six million visitors a year - an average of more than 16,000 people a day.
A French police source close to France's DST intelligance agency said last night: "The conversation was picked up on Thursday this week in Portugal and French authorities were immediately alerted.
"It was a muffled conversation in Arabic that was passed on to us as a matter of course, by our analysts clearly identified the threat.
"The sheer number of visitors going up the tower every day means a bomb blowing up there could cause the most massive loss of life.
"Security at the tower is already tight, but is now being stepped up."
The threat to the tower comes after other threats on Islamic websites hinting at attacks on busy Paris shopping streets and banks....
A protest of French presence in Iraq? I guess not.
The West should send a bill ($3 trillion??) to Saudi Arabia to cover security costs worldwide. Tis is ridiculous.
BTW - there was a failed hijack a few years back out of Chad I think and the idea was to fly into the Eiffel Tower. One lesson of 9/11 is that these guys won't quit.
My first thought is: "Who cares?" My second thought: "Not I."
...ok world, proof that remaining timid and trying to appease Muslims will not save you...wake up...
Well, that's one way not to "assimilate" into French society.
"The sheer number of visitors going up the tower every day means a bomb blowing up there could cause the most massive loss of life."
So what are they going to do, wait until the next attempt is successful? There might not be any short-wave radio conversation exposing the next planned attack. The next attack might not be the Eiffel Tower tower. It could be the Louvre, or Notre Dame cathedral.
What tragic loss of art or history are they willing to suffer before facing up to the threat seriously.
We suffered the loss of the world trade center, and the loss of thousands of innocent lives, and we're still pretending we don't have a Muslim problem, and, like the French, we're still importing Muslims into this country, we're still ridiculing and firing those voices in the wilderness who try to warn us of the danger.
We, the French, all Western nations, are in greater danger from our own willfully ignorant leaders, than from the terrorists.
This is hard to believe. The intelligence agent - at which law school did he matriculate (1st, 2nd, 3rd - tier)? And what were his grades like in pre-school?
Clearly, there is no threat here. (It is rumored that the agent golfs at a public course.)
"The sheer number of visitors going up the tower every day means a bomb blowing up there could cause the most massive loss of life."
Those who think the US "overreacted" to 9/11 are suddenly worried about "massive loss of life". Unfortunately, a successful attack on a European landmark is what it will take for them to decide that maybe they don't want to "live with" terrorism.
Scratch that. More than likely they'll simply turn around and blame the US presence in Iraq.
One can only conclude that the message was unscrambled improperly; the Eiffel Tower is in no danger from the jihadists; it's intended to become the chief minaret after the take-over.
I wonder if it actually happens, there will be no Jews on it at the time. Just as some claim on 9/11.
...just like the twin towers. if at first you don't succeed,..try try again...and they will
US intelligence would have us believe that the 9/11 jihadis were all native Arabic-speaking Saudis. It now appears that would be Eiffel Tower jihadis speak muffled Arabic - which is only subtley different from Arabic. Since the Intelligentsia - as opposed to US intelligence - know that the twin towers were actually destroyed by a team of Jew.. , oops, sorry I meant Zionists, in the pay of the Protocols of CIA, shouldn't the French uthorities come down heavily on you know who, and have their four million loyal French Muslim citoyens help them?
Notre Dame.
The Madeleine church in Montmartre.
The Louvre. Versailles.
The Paris Opera, with its stunning ceiling painted by Marc Chagall.
Paris, the city, in its older parts, is just one vast collective work of art, each period adding to the beauties of the one before; and hospitable, too, to the beauties of other cultures (one of the most splendid standing exhibitions of indigenous Australian Aboriginal art, is now housed in a specially designed building in Paris).
The devout Muslim, in Paris, sees Jahiliyya at its worst, everywhere he turns. So much to destroy, to smash, to burn, to explode, to turn to dust and ashes..he hardly knows where to start.
Citoyens, Infidel Citizens of Paris, and of la belle France. The moment that a Muslim smashes even *one* of your irreplaceable treasures - a single Rodin statue, a single Poussin pastorale or Renoir portrait, just one gargoyle of Notre Dame, a bridge over the Seine, the Moulin Rouge, or, God forbid, the chapel of St Denis- should be the signal - the signal for all non-Muslim Parisians, all non-Muslim French, to burn down the mosques. Every mosque in Paris. Every mosque in France. Not one of them is worth as much as, say, the Chagall painting on the ceiling of the Paris Opera, or the glory of the great Rose Window of Our Lady of Paris, or even one finger on one statue of the Madonna.
Where are the Maquis? Where is the Resistance?
Where is Joan of Arc?
Many of the mosques in India were built on top of or out of the ruins of Hindu temples and universities.
Hate to see it happen in Europe. But it could.
Most of the damage to the Parthenon in Athens occurred when the Turks were there.................Oh, no, I just misunderstood jihad!
"A protest of French presence in Iraq? I guess not."
Posted by: CTYankee
ya, kinda, it's because France is near the Mediterranean, which is near the middle east, which borders Iraq. See.
these crazy ass arabs muslim bastards, they got nothing else better to do with their time but to plan and cause massive damage and destruction anywhere they see where they are not wanted owed to their nutty thought process. who wants these bastards? no one really but all are too scared to fight them also
Wow. Jihadists are so dumb. I know a bunch of Muslim guys who are engineers but I must admit, I've never met a Muslim economist. The article above states:
"The 1,060ft high tower, built in 1889, has more than six million visitors a year - an average of more than 16,000 people a day."
So the Muslim terrorists want to establish a world wide Caliphate, starting with Paris. Do they understand that tourism provides A LOT OF MONEY to run the country of France? So let's get rid of one of the biggest tourist attractions that brings six million worth of restaurant eatin', hotel sleepin', taxi travelin', croissant buyin' people with their pocketbooks full of cash for a fun vacation. Then I guess Abdullah and Hussein and Yaser will all have to get off their lazy asses and go to work for a change, because I ain't doin' it for them.
Muslims don't deserve to rule the world. They are, simply put, not very bright.
i defy anyone to tell me anything of value these crazy ass arab muslims have done to contribute to the world in recent times? nothing i have looked up and can find no serious valuable contribtuions made by these poeple, all htey do is cause havoc and harm poeple all over the world. they are useless takers.
Fitzgerald: Baghdad: the sequel
You must remember this.
-- Old Popular Song
The most celebrated movie in American history is Casablanca. That 1942 film stars Humphrey Bogart as Rick, an American living in the once-exotic city which, like the rest of Morocco, was still under French rule. He owns a nightclub, Rick’s Café Américain, where gambling and drinking and smoking take place, and where the band, at one point, will defiantly play La Marseillaise, and Sam, the band’s black American piano-player, at another point, will be asked by someone to play something again. Habitués include anti-Vichy French and refugees who have fled Occupied Europe. These desperate people exchange money and favors for passports and transit visas and tickets to Lisbon where they will go on to the safe haven of America. The commander of the local French police, Captain Renault, appears to have made a permanent accommodation with every side, including a contingent of German troops under Major Strasser. Renault stops in frequently to talk to Rick, whom he regards as a fellow recruit in the sauve-qui-peut brigade. He also comes to collect his prescribed payoff, in the form of winnings from rigged roulette games (“I’m only a poor corrupt official,” he explains), and it is understood that he will turn a blind eye to what goes on at Rick’s Café.
One day in walks Victor Laszlo, the legendary Resistance hero, accompanied by his wife, Ilsa (played by Ingrid Bergman). He, too, seeks to escape from the Germans, but only so that he might return to the Continent to continue the fight. Ilsa, as it happens, had a brief but unforgettable love affair with Rick in Paris. It ended when he left at 5 p.m. on June 11, 1940, on the last train out, just three days before the Germans came goosestepping through the Arc de Triomphe. In the 1930s, Rick had run guns, first to the Ethiopians fighting Mussolini, and then to the Loyalists fighting Fascists in Spain. He now claims that he had been doing it only for the money. At this point he is determined to avoid involvement in anything beyond his own immediate survival. “I stick my neck out for nobody,” he tells Renault. And the Frenchman replies: “A wise foreign policy.”
Captain Renault does not much care for Major Strasser: “I told my men to be especially destructive,” he tells Rick. “You know how that impresses Germans.” Major Strasser reserves his special contempt for the American. He admonishes Captain Renault: “You give him credit for too much cleverness…he is just another blundering American.” Renault replies: “But we mustn’t underestimate American blundering. I was with them when they blundered into Berlin in 1918.”
What happens to Rick is the story of what happened to the United States. One tends to forget that in the 1930s its army ranked, in size, eighteenth in the world; well into 1941 many Americans still averted their eyes from what was happening elsewhere. Casablanca takes place in late 1941, just before Pearl Harbor. Great Britain and France, having first tried appeasement, had been at war with Nazi Germany since September 1939. Great Britain and the Free French were still fighting. Only when attacked by Japan did the United States finally become a combatant, but still it took time for Americans to fully understand the nature and aims of both Nazis and Japanese militarists. Those seemingly disparate enemies, whatever their putative differences, shared an implacable hatred of Western democracy and Western civilization. Their ideologies were remarkably similar and mutually reinforcing, and offered no quarter to those who refused to be subjugated.
More than sixty years have passed since the original Casablanca, and many in the film world have dreamed of a remake. A few tried, but none has succeeded in attracting audiences quite like the made-for-television mini-series, a Franco-German co-production, with its mise-en-scène transferred from North Africa to New York City, that was broadcast to audiences worldwide during the winter of 2003 from studios overlooking the East River. Though many deemed the series utterly forgettable, there are those who will recall some of its details. The producers decided they could best evoke the exotic flavor of the original film by giving it an even more exotic, Thousand-and-One-Nights title: Baghdad. Purists will argue that in important ways the made-for-television film did not always remain true either to the letter or spirit of Casablanca, but it certainly managed to capture the atmosphere of the original, its suspense, its passion, its pain.
Both film and mini-series were shot largely at a single locale (with Rick's Café replaced by Kofi's in the remake), though in the latter there were occasional shots of city streets, and one at an airport. Both contained references to earlier events: flashbacks are employed, old conversations recalled. The set of the mini-series was more spacious, less smoky, but otherwise essentially the same: a single room full of people of various nationalities, sitting at tables. More than a few have trouble with English. In the film, there were silent fez-wearing Arab waiters; in the mini-series, Arabs also circulated, but not as waiters and, instead of tarbooshes, they were wearing military caps and keffiyehs, and this time they were talkative. The people at the tables in the mini-series engaged in sometimes furtive and even, at times, unseemly negotiations, only some of which we, the audience, could overhear. In both cases, lives were at stake.
As in the film, the television version had a Swedish actor playing a major role. Instead of the ravishing Ingrid Bergman, this Swede, a colorless functionary, directed a brigade of Keystone Kops who were told, just like the police in Casablanca, to “round up the usual suspects.” At times, they were ordered, as in the film, to look more effective by “rounding up twice the usual number of suspects.” And in both cases the result was farcical.
Viewers of film and mini-series became aware of a menace waiting in the wings: a megalomaniacal and murderous dictator, armed to the teeth, who had tortured and killed and attacked at will, and who was prepared to attack and torture and kill some more, directly or through others like him, whenever he felt the need. And in the East River mini-series there were also rumors of war and resistance; the fog of indecision; defeatism and delay; appeasement camouflaged as prudent statecraft; and fear.
In both versions, the Swedish actor disappeared from view just before the denouement. Those who remained then revealed their true characters. Casablanca derived its dramatic force from the initial irresolution, and then, after a certain delay, the final resolution, in which Rick demonstrated moral clarity and invited it in others. By the end of the film, he and Renault have chosen sides – the same side. It is the beginning, Rick predicts, “of a beautiful friendship.” In the mini-series, made more than a half-century after the movie, the Frenchman shoots the American in the back -- fatally, he assumes -- and walks off, arm in arm, with a smiling Strasser.
Thoughtful critics who found Baghdad unsatisfying were initially gratified by the just-released Baghdad: The Sequel, shot on location in the Middle East. This, like the original, is a made-for-television series. The American, who had seemingly been put out of action at the end of Baghdad, had in fact only been grazed, and reappears on center stage. Even props from the past show up again: the decks of cards that kept being shuffled and dealt at Rick's Café reappear, with a face-lift, and with a different game in mind: Fifty-Two Pick-Up. There are mysteries aplenty. Intense searches are conducted, especially for the villains who are disposed of, one by one -- including the biggest villain of them all, uncovered in a lair from which he is dragged in humiliating circumstances. He is turned over to the local sheriff so that justice may be done. For many of those being sought, the suspense is killing.
The sequel began with some spectacular special effects. And it only manages to get more riveting, with unexpected twists and turns that fill virtually every episode: night-time acts of derring-do, cross-border raids, spectacular thefts, hot-pursuit chases, revenge killings, bounty hunters reaping huge rewards, deep-delvèd bunkers, incriminating files stumbled across, treasure troves lost, and found, and lost, and found again when serendipitously stumbled across. The tension comes from the determination of the heroes, so often hindered by their own scruples, so often dealt with not only ungratefully but treacherously by the very people they have managed to free when no one else in the world would help them. That lawman-who-all-alone-rescues-the-ungrateful-townsfolk is right out of High Noon, and like High Noon, it would be a mistake to call this merely an action film. The ultimate outcome is something I won’t reveal. Some say that the townsfolk settle down to a life of peace and prosperity. Still others say that, as in more than one famous Western, the sheriff finally becomes sick and tired of all their squabbling and whining and even shooting at him, and just like Gary Cooper, throws down his badge and walks out of town, leaving the unworthy cattlemen and sheepmen to fight with each other as they have always done. Perhaps the real story turns out not to be one of innocent victims being rescued, but something darker and deeper, with some of the victims insisting they were never threatened in the first place, and now claiming, outrageously, that the sheriff himself was a greater threat all along. And the sheriff knows he can’t stop to argue, he has to be moving on, because he has plenty to do outside this impossible town, in places closer to his own home town that are now being menaced by some of the same forces to be found in this town, and all over the neighborhood of this hopelessly wild east.
Baghdad: The Sequel, like Baghdad, like Casablanca itself, becomes a kind of Bildungskino. A Western Everyman acquires slowly, and at great cost, knowledge he did not possess at the beginning. In Casablanca he learns to distinguish clearly, unambiguously, Good from Evil, and chooses Good. In Baghdad: the Sequel, he learns that on the same planet there exist a plurality of worlds, and that one of those worlds poses a permanent threat to all the others. He comes to understand that the gulf separating those worlds is not to be bridged by pontoons, physical or spiritual, thrown up by any corps of army engineers working in the Land of the Two Rivers. He abandons the effort to win, whether by constant accommodation that grades into appeasement, or by the distribution of Cargo-Cult largesse, those hearts and minds that turn out to be unwinnable. His bleak recognition of reality proves bracing. Finally coming to understand what is dearest to him and what is most vulnerable, he abandons his course of innocent blundering and squandering and instead becomes a different kind of lawman, intent on countering every instrument of the menace that he had for so long failed, almost willfully, to understand. And then Baghdad: The Sequel takes an entirely different turn, and the tone becomes resolute, unswerving, intelligently ruthless.
Would that this were not a review of a non-existent sequel. Would that this were true.
[Posted by Hugh at November 8, 2006]
A scrambled short-wave radio conversation exposing the planned attack on the world's most visited monument was picked up by Portuguese air traffic controller and passed on to French intelligence services.
Hey! Portugal is *my nation*! I didn't know we were so anti-dhimitude.
Hurrah for us.
dumbledoresarmy,
Very well said. I cringe at the thought that Notre Dame, the Louvre, or any other part of our great Western heritage in art or architecture can be reduced to ashes at the hands of these Islamic monsters, but I cringe even more at the thought that Western leaders seem willing to put these things at risk, rather than abandon their illusion that Islam is no real threat to Western culture and civilization, and that Muslims can learn to accept and appreciate the beauty and majesty of our culture.
There is nothing beautiful or majestic about Islam. It is an ugly religion, and the Muslim spirit is in its ugly grip.
To Muslims, smashing the stained glass windows of Notre Dame cathedral or Westerminister Abbey would be an act of piety, worth at least a dozen extra virgins in paradise.
Analyze This:
Why do tall, phallic-like structures tend to be targeted by jihadis? Now, I know they're a bunch of pricks, but I'd like a deeper explanation. Yours, Dr. Sigmoid Fraud.
But damage has already been done. What honeymooners, what eager students on a Junior Year Abroad, what tourists hoping to soak up everything Paris has to offer, will now rise high in the Eiffel Tower, with pleasure not anxiety, and how many will now decide they'd rather not go up at all, not at the Eiffel Tower, and possibly, once a plot is discovered to have been aimed at a bomb right there, to cross the Pont Neuf, or visit Notre-Dame (that "Crusader" center), or St. Sulpice, or the Place des Vosges in the "Jewish" Marais, or Trocadero, with its sinful cinematheque, or any of those museums, beginning with the Louvre, which shamefully insults the Muslims of France by showing all that statuary (Muhammad would not enter a house that had "dogs and statues") including the shameless Venus de Milo, who may be, for Infidel songwriters, "noted for her charms" but repels good Muslims, as do so all those other statues, and the Louvre is in Paris, a city that now has a million or so Muslims, and by what right to the Infidels continue to show these statues and offend those Muslims? And by what right do they display those paintings that depict humans -- genre paintings, historical paintings, portraits -- which is another affront to Islam? That Mona Lisa or Monna Lisa, for example, who apparently means so much to all those Infidels (just look at how she becomes the cynosure of all eyes), or that self-portrait by Rembrandt, or that Velazquez, or that Giorgione, or that Titian -- my god, one insult after another to Islam.
Muslims have every right, possessing as they do the Truth, to blow that miserable structure and its miserable contents sky-high, and their reward will be in that Muslim Heaven of dark-eyed houris and pearl-like boys, a reward far beyond anyting to be found in this sublunar world.
Not likely? Why not? What's illogical, what's not according to the texts and tenets of Islam, in what I have just written?
Nothing is wrong. It all makes sense. Is the Deuxieme Bureau, or whatever it is called, taking this in?
Crusader:
Check out the Portuguese flag:
The five shields represent the five Muslim commanders King Alphonse I captured and killed reclaiming Portugal.
The castles (11 originally) now 7 represent the castles recaptured from the Muslim invaders by Alphonse with the help of Flemish, French and English Crusaders.
The most famous castle, St. Georges, was captured with the tremendous courage of Portuguese crusader,
Martin Moniz, who wedged his body between the closing gates allowing the Crusaders to gain entrance. It was said that though Moniz body was badly crushed, he managed to kill 3 Muslim occupiers before he died.
There is a square in Lisbon named after him. The Portuguese flag is the most anti-dhimmi symbol of any nation commemorating the courage and Christian spirit that reclaimed Portugal from the Islamists. I, too, am proud to be part of the heritage.
My first thought was "Team America! F*** Yea!"
Still one of my favorites.
No, they can't do that. If it happens, Bush did it.
Because fire doesn't melt steel, right?
Who said that again?
http://hotair.com/archives/2007/03/29/video-rosie-melts-down-on-the-view/
Briars
Oh my gosh, you are right! I live here and I never noticed it before. The Portuguese flag sure is an anti-dhimmi flag. I wonder if the eurabians will one day demand that flags that can hurt the sensible muslim feelings be changed to accomodate "multiculturalism".
All those places and events you mentioned are so apart of our culture that it is hard to think of POrtugal and Lisbon without thinking in how hard it was to recapture this 1000 year old nation from the hands of islamo-nazis.
Briars,
If you know portuguese, check out the link:
http://www.tuvalkin.web.pt/terravista/Guincho/1421/bandeira/pt_hist.htm
Paris...who cares...If I have an irresistible urge to visit a Muslim ghetto I'll stay home and go to Detroit. But Paris does seem to be the best place in the world to go watch car burnings. How inept...lets plan to blow something up ON THE PUBLIC AIR WAVES. Yea, that'll work. Don't worry about the art...as soon as there's a large enough Muslim presence in Paris it will all be destroyed regardless.
a lil' o.t. but, do any of you think we should be concerned about 1- 11- 09? a play on numbers but, who knows w/ these cats. ya know what I'm sayin?
Any date can be fatidic, if you want it to be.
Well, I'm in America, and I happen to also be in New York, and I am not asleep.
As a matter of fact, I am fully awake.
Thank you, Robert.
I = Inflicts
S = Slavery
L = Lying
A = And
M = Mass Murder
rational,
you're right that our leaders are willing to put our heritage at risk rather than confront Islam, but we live in democracies. What about the French people? Do THEY care about their heritage or are buildings like Notre Dame expendable because they're religious in nature?
What are the French people willing to do? They have no trouble building nuclear plants for Muslim despots. Are they willing to make the sacrifices that might be necessary to fight this menace? Will they give up on their political correctness and admit the danger we all face?
Sarkozy is still relatively new to the job but his reaction to this attempt to destroy a French landmark that survived the second world war will say a lot about the future of France.
We know the French care about their language. Do they care about their history? Is it something they wish to preserve?
"Hey! Portugal is *my nation*! I didn't know we were so anti-dhimitude."
The people is mostly anti-bullshit, most politicians aren't. In fact, Portuguese foreign policy has become a synonyme of spineless honourless begging from the worst kind of dictators (Qaddafi, Eduardo dos Santos, Chavez, Castro, Mugabe, the list is endless). It is my country too.
"The castles (11 originally) now 7 represent the castles recaptured from the Muslim invaders by Alphonse with the help of Flemish, French and English Crusaders."
That is a folk tale. The castles represent nothing more than the Castillian contribution to the Portuguese national flag. The first national flag - a blue cross - was the crest of the House of Burgundy. That cross had five "shields" (quinas) which were no other than the metal reinforcement of the shield. When our second king inherited the shield, it was woren to the point that the blue cross was gone everywhere except in the metal, and thus the new flag was just the "quinas". The dinasty of Avis introduced the fleur de lys, symbol of the Order of Avis and produced the most beautiful flag ever (IMO). History is one thing, a folk tale is another... The adding of the castles was nothing more than a following of the ordinary "laws" of heraldry introduced by the marriage of a "Burgundian" with a Castillian (hence the castles).
Briars and Crusader, you might want to know that we host an annual Islamic festival in Alentejo, to remind us of our "islamic past". It happens in Mértola.
There are also many Muslims living in the south side of the Tagus. Ocasionally one gets a glimpse of their presence and of that of their wives, dressed in full "ninja" regalia. The only thing that saved us from a massive immigration from Muslim countries is our economic situation. They end up in Spain instead.
A further note. Some time last year a good friend of mine, knowledgeable about art and history, visited Paris and other parts of France with her young son (13).
When I sent her a Christmas card in November 07 I mentioned the books I had been reading, about Islam.
She rang me, and we had a long conversation, because during her time in France she had had Islam, and Muslims, forcibly brought to her attention.
From what she told me, I gained the impression that virtually every French 'sacred site', every place of artistic and spiritual and historical significance in Paris, for example, the statue that commemorates the death of Jeanne d'Arc, or the Chapel of St Denis, has been 'staked out' by the Muslims.
Everywhere she went, every significant site she wanted to look at, she had to run the gauntlet of arrogant, aggressive, verbally insulting Muslim 'youths', lounging and loitering 'with intent' (as the police put it), sometimes right next to, or in front of, the statue, or the entry to the building. If one tried to take a photograph, one would be insulted; if one politely asked the obstructing person to move, one felt endangered. As a lone woman tourist she experienced many unpleasant moments.
It reminded me of Oriana Fallaci's description of the behaviour of the Muslims in Florence.
It sounds as though they already believe they own the place, and are swaggering about it like bullies, sneering and snarling at the Infidel inhabitants and visitors alike.
I have yet to cross-check with my brother and sister-in-law who also spent a good deal of time in Paris last year; or another relative, who has been living in France for three years now.
Is there anyone reading here - French, Parisian, or someone who has recently visited Paris or anywhere else in France - who can add their own impressions to those of my friend?
Mr. Fitzgerald:
Your 'friend' & 'brother' Tariq sends his regards:
In the January 6 issue of the New York Times Book Review, Tariq Ramadan has an essay that argues, in its essence, that non-believers cannot really read or understand the Koran-because it speaks exclusively to believers.
One's heart, Ramadan argues, is one's guide for understanding the Koran, and the heart can only lead you once "the heart has made the message of Islam its own."
So, in essence, an outsider (infidel) cannot understand the text, therefore an outsider really cannot have a valid opinion about the text because an outsider does not understand what he or she is talking about, because it is not on a rational plane.
This is an argument that, of course, means looking at the historial record of Islam, the more explicit verses on killing Jews and infidels, and waging _jihad_, as well as the true meaning of _jihad_, cannot be debated by infidels.
Islamists themselves will define the texts and their meaning for us, on their terms exclusively. We need not bother even trying.
That is akin to saying that, if one is not a born again Christian one should not attempt biblical scholarship, and perhaps some argue that. In reality, the historical texts can be read, examined, looked at for internal consistencies and inconsistencies, debated and dissected.
That is the rational response to the endeavor to understand history. One can have a different interpretation of texts one believes to be divine, but that does not negate the validity of scholarship.
This leads directly to the issue raised by the decision of the Joint Chiefs to not allow attorney and US Army intelligence reserve Major Stephen Coughlin to continue with his work on Islamic law in the Pentagon.
The main problem for the Islamists such as Hasham Islam, and their fellow travelers, such as ISNA, MPAC, Fiqh Council and AMCE, inside and around the Pentagon who worked to get rid of him, is that Coughlin, as a non-Muslim, and a legal scholar, with decade of experience in legal texts working for Westlaw and LexisNexis, as well as in military intelligence, often knew the Islamic texts better than the Islamists themselves. Coughlin's MA thesis is in Islamic law.
Here's the link:
http://counterterrorismblog.org/2008/01/the_islamist_argument_on_the_k.php
Most of what is has been described about Paris tourist sites is pretty much spot on. I have even seen a muslim guy in prayer on the Champ de Mars.
One place relatively free of 'youth' troubles is the recently opened Musée du Quai Branly, Chirac's showpiece museum with primitive african art. Just like the Islamic 'arts' gallery in the Louvre, it only attracts the bourgeois bohème crowd. I have never seen a single african stand in line for the musée du Quai Branly.
Bogie as Rick---"I bet they're asleep all over America".
Yeah, especially Washington D.C.
Do we have a modern day 'Rick' somewhere about to help citizens get out of Europe because of a IslamoNAZI occupation of France. History surely repeats, does it not? Is there a modern day Captain Renault who appeases a Major Muhammad with his contingent of Muslim goose-steppers? Would Renault say he instructs his men to be especially destructive because "you know how it impresses Jihadists? Would he say "I was with them when they blundered into Baghdad"?
Hmmm,
Cruzado,
Thank God that we [Portugal] are not rich enough to welcome the islamo-nazis. But in the end, it won't matter, since they are going to central europe, where all the important dhimmi decisionms are made.
I fear for all the important and beautiful art, sculpture and architecture, in every European country. The islamists would have no problem destroying any or all of it.
Imagine them toppling the great pillars at Stonehenge, that ancient and pre-Christian holy site. To them it is just a pagan rock collection. Oh wait...they have a pagan rock of their own, don't they? Maybe they'll just claim that Mohammed built Stonehenge, then.
"Do they understand that tourism provides A LOT OF MONEY to run the country of France?"
....Radical Muslims could care less about tourist money...just see tourism in Muslim Countries...they prefer money from foreign aid programs in which they do not have to please customers....
Glad to hear that someone over there is "listening in" and sending out a warning. Give them credit for that, since on 9/11 the US government seemed to be caught by surprise.
No surprise though, that the radical muslims would like to bring down the historical buildings in Paris (or anywhere). Their motto seems to be destroy, destroy, destroy. Their Islamic Globalization has a better chance if the world is bombed back into the stone age.
But Exsgtbrown, my point is, Muslims will expect us to provide slave labor for them so they can live the good life and we can feel subdued, and if one of the ways westerners make money is through tourism, then what is going to replace it? Shooting the goose that laid the golden egg is just dumb-de-dumb-dumb. I resent these knuckle-draggers coming into our countries, messing up the works and then telling us what to do while they prod us with the point of a sword. It's getting old and they are not worthy to do it in the first place.
Haha, "inner spiritual struggle"!
In my opinion the only way France and Europe can save themselves is by closing the door to ALL further Muslim immigration, deporting those Muslims here illegally and by insisting those here legally abide by our laws and not accommodate their savagery. Let the Muslims submit themselves to Allah if they wish, let them pray five times a day to Mecca, let them abstain from pork and alcohol but don't let them import a Pakistani wife who knows nothing of European life, don't let them force their daughters into marriages, don't let them preach hatred and conquest, don't let them commit animal abuse for their religion or moddly coddle them by excusing these things.
If we did that I'm sure a lot of these Muslims would go home to Pakistan or Bangladesh or Algeria etc (after all, at least in Britain they maintain close family ties to their homelands for marriages etc) and those that remained wouldn't have the confidence our molly coddling has goven them to attack us.
I don't think meddling in the Middle East helps at all. In fact it has produced the worst of all worlds: open borders to Muslim immigration along with inflaming Muslims against the west and the destruction of the Iraqi Christian community.