Crowds of journalists have of late flocked to Cyprus, that storied island nation, and as it happens Cyprus was in the news on this very date — exactly 435 years ago, at the Siege of Famagusta. Cyprus can lay claim to being the first country on earth governed by a Christian sovereign, the Roman proconsul [...]
Archive for the ‘Islam’ Category
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American immigration: who gets in?
December 30th, 2010 
admin Also at SwordsCrossed. “The central conservative truth is that it is culture, not politics, that determines the success of a society. The central liberal truth is that politics can change a culture and save it from itself.” Daniel Patrick Moynihan America prides itself on being a land of immigrants. “Give me your tired, your poor,” [...]
Thoughts on war.
December 30th, 2010 admin Pale Ebenezer thought it wrong to fight But roaring Bill who killed him Thought it right. — Hilaire Belloc What have the last four and a half years taught Conservatives about war? One thing is that a treacherous and spectacular attack against her will make a republic more warlike. This rather platitudinous statement is nonetheless [...]
Acceptable Hatreds, Or: History Repeating Itself as Farce
December 29th, 2010 admin The May issue of that journal of maddeningly -uneven quality in the discussion of religion and the public square, First Things, includes a review of Richard Pipes’ latest foray into the interpretation of Russian history and culture. The gist of the review: Pipes ought not have bothered. Trees were felled needlessly to produce this ream [...]
Auto da fe.
December 29th, 2010 admin The phenomenon of Hispanic converts to Islam is a growing one. The most famous thus far is Jose Padilla, but he is hardly alone: estimates are almost impossible to verify, and the sources are predictably biased. But if we take CAIR’s figures as being more or less reasonable, we can figure on tens of thousands [...]
Africa submissive.
December 29th, 2010 admin I am privileged to have visited Africa three times: twice in late 2003, when on a mission for the HHS Secretary, and once on a junket with Ashley Judd in 2005. The latter was everything a junket should be: pointless, wasteful, and gratifying for the ego of the attendant celebrity. The former two were genuine [...]
The defect of right-Liberalism.
December 29th, 2010 admin There is in that school of thought from which President Bush has drawn his principle of foreign policy a peculiarly debilitating problem that merits our attention. It is superficially a problem of priority, but at base it is a blunder of the intellect. It will be asked that I name the school of thought in [...]
Barbarians in the gates.
December 29th, 2010 admin We care about Europe for the same reason we care for the suicidal: because a chosen fate is not inherently a just one, and we are called to act when an unjust end threatens. We care about Europe because filial piety is still a virtue: we are, in the end, a European nation as surely [...]
The new cross burners.
December 29th, 2010 admin Make no mistake: Islam has no monopoly on blasphemous sensitivities. And it was inevitable that some of the aggrieved Muslims in the Danish cartoon case would seek vengeance in kind — by assaulting the revered symbols of other faiths. Lo, thus here and here, we see the emergent phenomenon of Muslims wielding crosses with, shall [...]
Making Islam an Ally, the Left Invites Its Own Destruction
December 29th, 2010 admin The reason is that the Left sees Islam as a de facto ally—as Marxists would say, an “objective ally”—in the destruction of the vestiges of the traditional society based upon Christianity and its moral code, and traditional cultural patterns. So what they are doing is using Islam as the battering ram and as a would-be [...]
