Recently in Terror Category

Though the link to this piece appeared over at Instapundit a few days ago, I hadn't read it until yesterday. If nothing else it proves that Robert Heinlein was right when he wrote:

Throughout history, poverty is the normal condition of man. Advances which permit this norm to be exceeded -- here and there, now and then -- are the work of an extremely small minority, frequently despised, often condemned, and almost always opposed by all right-thinking people. Whenever this tiny minority is kept from creating, or (as sometimes happens) is driven out of a society, the people then slip back into abject poverty.

This is known as "bad luck."

All we need to do is look at Pakistan to see how Heinlein's observation is true.

As Anglo-Indians were driven out of Pakistan, its society and economy started to deteriorate. Those actually producing the wealth, running the bureaucracies, the courts, the hospitals, the police, the railroads, the schools were driven out and bad things started happening. As Masood Hasan writes in the Pakistan's international edition of The News:

It is hard to believe that Pakistan was once a gentle country. It is even harder to believe that some of the most wonderful people lived here. All that seems like a misty memory which has little relevance as you face the day's first rude slaps. A friend passed me an interesting short article about the Anglo-Indians who lived and worked in what is now India and Pakistan. The Anglos are long gone swallowed up by the mists of time, driven out from here to fend for themselves. But in their extinction lies a bigger tragedy.

The Anglo Indians were fun people. But more than the singular expertise they brought to the jobs that became traditionally their forte, they added a swing, vibrancy and a sheer joy of living spirit to our society that in many ways epitomised the new, fresh spirit that was Pakistan. That was then. Now it's a fading sepia tone picture. Those of us who grew up with them, watched with considerable sadness as family after family left this country to go and live in alien climes. There was nothing left for them. They were wise in retrospect. Look at our bestiality towards our minorities. But while the Anglo Indians were here, they gave us a unique gift. The joy of living and of being alive.

Pakistan is a shadow if its former self. Where once everyone could walk the streets safely, one now puts one's life in jeopardy, particularly if you aren't Pakistani. The government is corrupt, the military is rife with religious fundamentalists who see Wahabbi-perverted jihad as a good thing, and it's once thriving economy and society is a shambles.

The 1972 laws enforced by ZAB to please the fundos broke the spirit of all of us, particularly the Anglo Indians. Bars, discos, clubs all shut down in fear. Suddenly hosts of musicians and other artists had no livelihood. 'Tolerance went up in smoke,' recalls one sad person. Came 1979 and the evil Zia and the coup de grace forced the Anglos to escape, migrate anywhere they could go. They left by the droves, never to come back. The clubs died, the dance floors uprooted, the many services they offered fell by the wayside. In driving out this small community, we dug our own graves. We rapidly became soulless, grey, hypocritical and boring. With them gone, an integral part of decent civilian life was snuffed out. Guns replaced guitars. The scorched landscape that we inherited, now mocks us. Laughter has changed to anguish. Pakistan may be a 'hard country', but it is also a barren and desolate land. One gentleman of the fabled 60s sums it all up in one line: 'Those days are gone. They will not come back.' Quite an epitaph wouldn't you agree?

What's telling are the comments from those who remember the days before everything started coming apart and their lament at what their home country has become.

It was reported today in the Berlin, NH Berlin Daily Sun that the new Federal Prison just completed near that city will be housing the detainees from Guantanamo Bay as that detention facility is phased out.

Word has it some of the detainees were dismayed to learn they would be moved to the new prison in northern New Hampshire in light of the much colder climate and the miles and miles of dense forests and the sparsely populated countryside. Supposedly one detainee was heard to say something about their new home being an "Allah-forsaken wilderness filled with bears, lions, and wolves."

The full story is below the fold.

Jonathan Adler links to this:

A lunatic tries to blow up an airplane, so now my two-year-old daughter can't sleep on her pillow. If this is how we respond as a nation to terror threats, then maybe the terrorists really are winning.

HT: Instapundit

Gerard Posner, whose book on the JFK assassination convinced me that there was no conspiracy, takes aim at the Nigerian jihadist who attempted to bring down the plane by igniting the explosive.

Apparently, his sources say the failure is not systemic; rather, it's the result of intelligence officials at the Lagos, Nigeria, US embassy to precisely describe the threat rather than use vague expressions that didn't cause any action. As a result,

all international fliers to the U.S. will instead be inconvenienced by this communications snafu. Airline rules announced Saturday instituted extra baggage screening, additional personal inspections, and a stricter enforcement of an existing rule that permits passengers to only bring one carry-on bag. In addition, all passengers on U.S.-bound international flights will not be able to move about the cabin during the last hour of the flight.

My younger brother is a wet-behind-the-ears diplomat for the State Dept in South America. I hope he never makes a mistake like this.

The terrorists win even when they lose. So how can they lose? Richard Reid has caused much trouble. I hate having to take off my shoes because of him.

HT: Classical Values

I'm extremely troubled by it. It's one of those news stories that gets you, grabs your attention, and forces you to stay up watching Fox News way past one's bedtime. I admit slubbering at the coverage, how liberal everyone is--And this Fox is supposed to be conservative!--in not "jumping to any conclusions."

Since when did tolerance become the chief of the virtues?

The truth was staring at us all along, right beneath our noses.

In a profound blog entry, which is nearly an oxymoron, Lawrence Auster brings us the disaster that is liberalism:

Would Charles Martel, who drove an invading Muslim army back from France, have commissioned Muslim officers in his army? Would King Jan Sobieski, who defeated the Muslim Turks at Vienna and gave Europe 300 years of safety and freedom from Islam, have allowed Muslim doctors to enter his headquarters and move about at liberty among his men on the eve of deployment for battle against Muslims? Of course not.

Read the rest. Of course, if multiculturalism teaches us that taking a particular interest in the West's history, even though we are part of the West, is to be frowned upon if not actively discouraged, names and incidents such as this are doomed to be meaningless. As John Derbyshire writes in his new book, We Are Doomed.

HT: What's wrong with the world. One of the commentators writes, "If Islam is the religion of peace, then the Ku Klux Klan is a fraternity."

UPDATE: The Left loves to mock World Net Daily, probably because it's one of the few online newspapers that knows how to make a profit. And they break stories, such as this one, that go against what liberalism tries to control. I'm not going to wait with bated breath for co-religionists to condemn this one imam's statement, as did a broad swath of Christians in the wake of the despicable Timothy McVeigh's bombing. Nonetheless, the Left still attempted linkage, even in the absence of evidence.

Lawrence Auster makes another excellent point how liberalism presents a false dichotomy, not realizing how the ideology of jihad--which I have learned from Andrew Bostom is traditionally understood in Islam as attack against nonbelievers, not the struggle within against one's own sinful inclination, the other meaning of the word which in Arabic means "struggle"--may invite actors to act as they do, not in a vacuum:

"Either he's a member of a terrorist group, or he's a lone, troubled man. This is the standard liberal false choice with which we are presented. An act is designated as a terrorist act only if the perpetrator was part of a formal terrorist organization. The idea that a Muslim individual may pursue a jihad operation is precluded."

UPDATE II: Diana West, whom I called on the Granite Grok radio program a couple of weeks ago, is totally brilliant. I can't refrain from linking to her blog on the US Army and political correctness. Where's Douglas MacArthur when we need him?