Silflay Hraka

Rock of Ages, Falling Free…

Okay, so the Temple Mount is going to collapse, and Daniel thinks Israel should do something about it but isn’t, apparently. (Link via In Context)

And yet successive Israeli governments, both Labor and Likud, have abdicated their role, turning a deaf ear to the increasingly anxious predictions.

Second, it is a well-established tradition that the governing authority in Jerusalem - Ottoman, British, Jordanian, Israeli - endorses the status quo, permits precedent to have sway and stays out of the city’s many and hugely intractable religious disputes.

It also seems that the Palestinian Authority will do nothing about it.

“This bulge is under our monitoring since the ’70s and has neither grown nor shifted in 30 years,” says Adnan Husseini, director of the Islamic religious authority (the waqf) that oversees the Temple Mount. “It is stable, we don’t feel that there is any dangerous situation.”

So Israel is convinced that at least a substantial portion of the area will collapse, but won’t do anything about it, and the Palestinians aren’t convinced that the a collapse in imminent, and so shan’t do anything about it. Excellent. Now all we have to do is hope that the collapse actually is imminent.

Why? Because one of the reasons Muslims are so ho-hum about the situation is that, when you get right down to it, they believe Allah will not allow it to happen. Consider this verse from the Koran.

They want to extinguish Allah?s Light with their mouths, but Allah will not allow except that His Light should be perfected even though the disbelievers hate it.

Boiled down, it means that Allah will not allow the heathen to triumph over the faithful. Remember, Islam is still a relatively young religion. It’s not been around long enough to develop the wisdom inherent in a phrase like “Thou shalt not tempt the Lord thy God.” Islam still has at its base the idea that Allah will reach down into the world and arrange events to his liking. There are surely Muslims sophisticated enough to understand that he will not, but they don’t have much sway in the Arab world.

Arabs also possess an incredible faith in the power of symbols. Symbols are important in Islam, it’s one reason why the Jerusalem minarets were built so tall, so that they would be higher than the heathen worship sites around them. This is the religion that produced Osama, and he thought he could defeat us by destroying the Twin Towers. The idea is nuts to us because the West has turned away from the power of symbols. But if we accept that symbols are extremely important to radical Islam, then we should realize that the destruction of symbols important to them will have a great effect upon them.

If that portion of the Temple Mount collapses, it could take all or part of the Al-Aqsa Mosque and the Dome of the Rock with it. That’s the third holiest site in all of Islam, containing the point from which Mohammed ascended bodily into heaven. What happens when Allah allows it to be destroyed? When it is pointed out that, but for the negligence of brother Muslims it could have been prevented? That will not compute. It’s a body blow to the Arab belief in Islamic inevitability. And this is the point where some much needed moderation can be introduced.

Let’s skip that for as sec and assume that the Jews get blamed for the collapse, which is after all not unlikely. Allah allowed the Jews to destroy the Temple Mount? Surely that’s even more horrid to contemplate than Allah simply allowing it to collapse. Daniel Pipes thinks so, and has an idea about what will happen.

Judging by prior incidents in Jerusalem - the arson at Al-Aqsa Mosque in 1969, the opening of a tunnel in 1996 - this disaster would lead at least to wide-scale fighting in Jerusalem and a heated international crisis. If things really went wrong, it could precipitate a wave of violence in Europe and a full-blown Arab-Israeli war.

It could also complicate the war on Iraq, obstruct the war on terrorism and jump the price of oil and gas. At worst, it could unleash an end-of-days messianism in three monotheistic religions, with unforeseeable consequences.

Well, both of those causal events were pretty obviously from the hand of man, rather than God, and Israel is ringing the alarm bell pretty loudly, even if they do think that it is up to the waqf to deal with the problem. It could also unleash a wave of liberalism across the face of Islam. The loss of the Second Temple affected Judaism in a similar way. Yes, there will be mullahs arguing that the Arab failure to destroy Israel caused Allah to withdraw his favor, but you’ll also have mullahs arguing the opposite.

Islam is a very brittle religion, forced to the breaking point by its confrontation with the West. It’s going to shatter anyway. Here’s an idea; Let’s find a scholarly, apostate Muslim and pay him to alter Islam to our liking. One a major disaster occurs in the Islamic world, like this collapse or something else, we pay clerics to spread our version, to claim that it is the actual word of Allah, that the disaster was caused by those who refused to hear it.. That’s essentially what the Saudis do now. We can do the same, even if it is a bit more stealthy in practice.

And yes, once the Temple Mount is gone, the Jews can rebuild the temple. I’ve got no problems with that. It is a significant part of the illiterate Christian interpretation of the Book of Revelations, so we’ll have to deal with Pat and Jerry and all their ilk in full-blown hard-on mode. We can deal with them, their precursors have flamed and burned out many times, and they will too. And for a little while, at least, Islam will be receptive to new “interpretations.”

And if they aren’t, there’s always Mecca.

Vaginas don’t screw people, women with vaginas screw people.

This in my email:

Marine Corps General Reinwald was interviewed on the radio the other
day and you have to read his reply to the lady who interviewed him
concerning guns and children. Regardless of how you feel about gun
laws you gotta love this!!!! This is one of the best comeback lines
of all time. It is a portion of National Public Radio (NPR)
interview between a female broadcaster and US Marine Corps General Reinwald
who was about to sponsor a Boy Scout Troop visiting his military
installation.

The radio went silent and the interview ended.

The Latest Porn

Another one from “Bill.”

Hairy Twatter

I’m about to pee in my pants just writing that one down.

No need to shake hands, really.

A hearty welcome to our vistitor from the Chambersburg Gazette, who visited us while diligently searching the web for “sex stories with horses and dogs having sexual intercourse with the human female“, proving that while journalists may have time on their hands, it’s certainly not the only substance found there.

Ick

In an ABC report scheduled for Wednesday night, Barbara Walters visits a therapy group of widows and their adolescent children.

Son of Join the Dark Side

Blogging continues its relentless creep into the NYT’s editorial page. First Safire, then Friedman. Now it’s Paul’s turn.

He quotes other blogs:
ABC’s weblog The Note described it as a “chocolate- is-vanilla” claim, admitting that “The Bush team has always had a credibility problem with some reporters because of their insistence on saying ‘up is down’ and ‘black is white.’ ”
……….
As Joshua Marshall put it at talkingpointsmemo.com, the goal is to “mau-mau reporters out of using the word ‘privatization’ in this context.”

The links are mine, not his. But admit it, just for a second there you thought he’d gone whole hog, didn’t you?

and directs readers to other sites. (still no links, though)

You can read all about Cato’s role on the special Web site the institute set up, socialsecurity.org.

He also does a little punditry now and then.

Opened The Flood Gates

Since posting the porn titles we would like to see, my email has been flooded with more suggestions, mostly from a friend whom we will refer to from this point forward as “Bill.” Here are some of his ideas, I apologize in advance.

1. Joe Squirt
2. A Tale of Two Titties
3. A Mid-Summer Night’s Cream and the sequel,
A Mid-Summer Night’s Ream
4. Men In Back

Obviously Bill is familiar with gay porn as well.

Saigon 2002

Afghan President Escapes Bullets; 25 Killed by Car Bomb in Kabul

Afghanistan’s halting progress toward stability under its American-backed government was jolted severely today when a uniformed gunman on the streets of Kandahar narrowly failed in an assassination attempt on President Hamid Karzai and a huge car bomb in the heart of Kabul killed at least 25 people and critically wounded dozens of others.

Hamid Karzai is a dead man walking. Sooner or later somebody is going to get him, because we don’t control enough of the country. We could have, but George is not into nation-building. We still could, if we weren’t massing the troops for some future action in Iraq. Kabul is Saigon, updated for a new century and a new enemy. Same old dumbass government. We control the city, barely, but wolves roam the countryside. We make the correct noises, yes

Deputy Defense Secretary Paul D. Wolfowitz said in a speech at the Brookings Institution in Washington that expanding the international force would benefit Afghanistan, but that other countries would have to shoulder the burden.

but we make it obvious that when it comes down to it, it’s not a job we’re interested in. We punish, we don’t rehabilitate.

Killing the bad guys is an important part of the WoT. It’s not the most important part. Taking out rogue states is an important part of the WoT. It’s not the most important part. The most important part is giving the residents of the nations we fight cover while they develop a stable democratic society. It’s not the fun part, or the easy part and it’s not the part that makes for great video, so the government tries to do as little as possible to save face, and the media ignore it until things start blowing up. Afghanistan is not getting better. The Taliban have re-grouped and are starting to strike back. I won’t be surprised if Karzai dies on the 9th, a year to the day after Osama’s goons killed the last leader that threatened them. If history is any guide, we should realize one thing right now. The Bush family knows how to win battles, but they suck at winning wars. George’s dad betrayed the Kurds of Northern Iraq when they rose up against Saddam, and his boy George looks to be treading that same road in regard to the Afghanis.

If, ten years hence, the women of Afghanistan are back to burkas and summary executions at the hands of religious fanatics, it will be because of the inaction of this administration today, and they will curse our names, and tell their children that Americans are feckless cowards.

And they’ll be right.