"Crazy guys holed up in Philippine jungles"

Steyn, like Fjordman a couple of days ago, gets to the heart of the matter. Has the West already surrendered to Islam? Allowing itself to be subjugated to Allah. Caring not a whit about a nuclear Iran, and the concurrent advance of Islam through the very heart and soul of the glorious lives we have been gifted. Free, Western, spirited, and alive.


'Facing Down Iran'

(Edited excerpts).

Crazy guys holed up in Philippine jungles and the tri-border region of Argentina, Brazil, and Paraguay who’d have been “Marxist fantasists” a generation or two back are now Islamists: it’s the ideology du jour. There is no god but Allah, and thus there is no jurisdiction but Allah’s. Ayatollah Khomeini saw himself not as the leader of a geographical polity but as a leader of a communal one: Islam.

At hinge moments of history, there are never good and bad options, only bad and much much worse. Our options today are significantly worse. With the fatwa against Salman Rushdie (a British subject), Tehran claim(ed) jurisdiction over the nationals of foreign states, (and) passing sentence on them. Iran’s supreme leader instructed Muslims around the world to serve as executioners, they did, killing not Rushdie himself but his Japanese translator, stabbing the Italian translator, and shooting the Italian publisher, and killing three dozen persons with no connection to the book (when a mob burned down a hotel because of the presence of the novelist’s Turkish translator).

We now think it perfectly normal for Muslims to demand the tenets of their religion be applied to society at large: the government of Sweden, for example, has been zealously closing down websites that republish those Danish cartoons. As a female Muslim demonstrator in Toronto put it: “We won’t stop the protests until the world obeys Islamic law.”

In 1994, the Argentine Israel Mutual Association was bombed in Buenos Aires. 100 people died and 250 were injured—the worst massacre of Jews since the Holocaust. An Argentine court eventually issued warrants for two Iranian diplomats plus Ali Fallahian, former intel minister, and Ali Akbar Parvaresh, former education minister. Why blow up a Jewish community center in Buenos Aires? Because it’s there. Anyone who spends half an hour looking at Iranian foreign policy over the last 27 years sees five things:

1. contempt for the most basic international conventions;
2. long-reach extraterritoriality;
3. effective promotion of radical Pan-Islamism;
4. a willingness to go the extra mile for Jew-killing;
5. an all-but-total synchronization between rhetoric and action.

The question then arises, what do(es) (Iran) want (nukes) for? Ahmadinejad is a notorious shoot-from-the-lip apocalyptic hothead who believes in the return of the Twelfth Imam and (quite possibly) that he personally is his designated deputy. Rafsanjani, on the other hand, is one of those famous “moderates.” Ahmadinejad has called for Israel to be “wiped off the map,” while the moderate Rafsanjani has declared that Israel is “the most hideous occurrence in history,” which the Muslim(s) “will vomit out from its midst” in one blast, because “a single atomic bomb has the power to completely destroy Israel.

(Yes) nukes have gone freelance, sooner or later we’ll see the consequences—in Vancouver or Rotterdam, Glasgow or Atlanta. But we (still) owe it to ourselves to take the minimal step of ending the one regime whose political establishment is explicitly pledged to ... nuclear annihilation.

That means swift, massive, devastating force that decapitates the regime. The cost of de-nuking Iran will be high now but significantly higher with every year it’s postponed.



No secret how I feel. You'd see me leaning on the loud button, and you'd hear me say: That's a go. We have launch. As in yesterday.