TBogg’s phony excuse for the deleted Flight 93 document

Slight language warning, with Clinton-Lewinski analogy (4th section).

TBogg has posted an explanation for how Kevin Jaques’ assessment of the Flight 93 Memorial went missing from one of his comment threads. Sometime following “the Infamous Alec Rawls Comment Thread,” says TBogg:

… after I was done picking up the beer cans, cigarette butts, and the assorted discarded underwear, I switched from Blogspot comments to Haloscan. In the process, all of the previous comment threads were lost…Fortunately through the miracle of intertubes nerdiness the Lost Commentinent has been rediscovered and you can go read them here.

TBogg insinuates that the Holoscan snafu is the reason that the restored comment thread is missing the Jaques comment, but he does not actually say it, and for good reason. The Jaques deletion had nothing to do with any comment system switchover.

A commentator at Alec’s Error Theory blog looked up TBogg’s site on the Wayback Machine. Turns out that Wayback was taking snapshots of Tbogg’s comment threads every week. Only Blogspot comments show up on Wayback, but that is all that is needed to tell the tale.

Throughout the period in question (spring and summer of 2006) all of TBogg’s Blogspot comment threads are stable except for the “infamous” one, which actually exhibits quite a bit of activity. Not only did TBogg hand delete Jaques comment, but he was apparently torn about it, changing his mind a number of times over a period of weeks.

Background, for those who don’t know what Kevin Jaques did

It is not known exactly when Kevin Jaques was asked by the Memorial Project to write an assessment of Alec Rawls’s warnings about Islamic and terrorist memorializing features in the Crescent of Embrace design. Most likely he wrote it in late March of 2006, just before he posted it at the end of TBogg’s January 6, 2006 comment thread.

(If anyone wants to look, go open up the March 31st snapshot of TBogg’s site, then find the January 06 archive page. The Lunacy Abounds post is about a third of the way up from the bottom. Click on the permalink and the comment thread will appear, with the Jaques comment at the bottom. In the previous snapshot, March 28th, the Jaques comment has not yet shown up. Ditto for earlier dates.)

The Jaques comment is important because it shows the blatant dishonesty of the Park Service’s internal investigation. Jaques acknowledged that the giant Mecca-oriented crescent at the center of the design is similar to the Mecca direction indicator (called a mihrab) around which every mosque is built, then he told the Park Service not to worry because no one has ever seen seen a mihrab anywhere near this big before:

Thirdly, most mihrabs are small, rarely larger than the figure of a man, although some of the more ornamental ones can be larger, but nothing as large at the crescent found in the site design. It is unlikely that most Muslims would walk into the area of the circle/crescent and see a mihrab because it is well beyond their limit of experience. Again, just because it is similar does not make it the same.

The Park Service has released excerpts from Jaques’ comment, proving that the TBogg comment comes from Jaques, but it has never released the revealing parts, like where Jaques says not to worry because one has ever seen a mihrab this big before.

How to get rid of the body? TBogg has second, third and fourth thoughts

TBogg is THE source for the full text of Jaques’ analysis, with its blatant excuse-making for the giant mihrab. Having this analysis publicly available was a problem, both for Jaques and for the Park Service. Since TBogg had no way of knowing that on his own, it seems that somebody must have contacted him, because in the July 21, 2006 snapshot of Tbogg’s Lunacy Abounds comment thread, the Jaques comment is missing from the end.

Blogger allows blog administrators to hide and show comment threads, and it allows them to delete individual comments. Blogger also allows people who comment non-anonymously to delete their own comments. Jaques left his comment anonymously, so only a blog administrator could have deleted his comment. Unless TBogg got hacked, that would have been TBogg.

The August 21st snapshot of the Lunacy Abounds post shows shows TBogg having another thought. Here the entire Lunacy Abounds comment thread is hidden, while all the other comment threads on the archive page remain visible. (About half the posts in Wayback’s August 21st snapshot of TBogg’s January 2006 archive page do not have working permalinks, but of the pages that do come up individually, only Lunacy Abounds has the comment thread hidden.)

If “all of the previous comment threads were lost,” that was a separate incident. The archival record shows that a blog administrator went in and turned off the Lunacy Abounds comment thread by hand. Again, unless TBogg got hacked (or the Wayback Machine is wacked), that was TBogg.

Of course TBogg did not say anything about getting hacked. He insinuated that Haloscan is the culprit. Nope. Haloscan is innocent. Does TBogg want to try pointing the finger anywhere else?

On August 28, 2006, the “infamous comment thread” reappears, again without the Jaques comment. Wayback doesn’t have TBogg snapshots for 2007, but for most of this year the comment thread was again turned off (the Haloscan snafu?), until sometime recently TBogg himself retrieved the comment thread (without the Jaques comment) from the wayback machine and linked it to his original Lunacy Abounds post.

Not quite Hamlet. TBogg consistently wants the Jaques comment “not to be.” He just can’t decide how he wants it not to be.

TBogg’s Monica Lewinsky choice

To complete his Clintonian deception, TBogg makes an over the top admission, pretending it is all a joke:

So, yes. I have been busted. I’ve been getting more payoffs than Bill Bennett with a roll of nickels at Circus Circus. Between George Soros and Osama bin Laden I’ve received so many Miatas, that some of them are still sitting around in the blister packs.

At least he makes it amusing, but the joke is on the Bogglings. TBogg actually meant the “I have been busted” part.

Will TBogg’s legions of vitriolic followers take this Clintonian lie kneeling down? What’s it going to be TBoggers: spit or swallow?

TBogg will have to suffer some embarrassment for duping his readers, but so what? The man embarrasses himself every day. The important thing is that he is in a position to actually be of help in exposing the cover up of Islamic and terrorist memorializing features in the Flight 93 memorial.

Who contacted him? What did they say? Did he knuckle to a plea from Jaques alone, or was he actually contacted by the government?

TBogg could well have been duped himself. Maybe someone at the Park Service told him that this was an internal government document that was not supposed to be available to the public and asked if he could please remove it. Now that he knows a) that the Park Service is accused of perpetrating a cover up, and b) how the document that he himself covered up contains clear examples of dishonest excuse making, TBogg is in the same position as his army of Bogglings. He knows that he has been used.

Is he going to swallow it, or spit it out? Spit TBogg. You’ll feel much better in the morning.

Can’t we all just be against planting a terrorist memorial mosque on the Flight 93 crash site?

There is no reason for a left-right divide over the Flight 93 Memorial. It isn’t the critics of the crescent design that politicized the issue, but the defenders of the crescent, starting with newspapers like the Pittsburgh Post Gazette that knew about the Mecca orientation of the giant crescent back in 2005 and decided not to publish it. They were too busy using their editorial page to slam critics of the crescent as right wing bigots. Inconvenient facts could not be allowed to interfere with their chosen story line.

Then there are people like TBogg who politicize everything. Instead of checking the facts, he starts with his presumptions about which side he should be on, then looks for smarmy ways to characterize the opposition. That is not a rational thought process, but he can more than redeem himself if he will just stop deceiving everybody and start helping to expose the facts.

He could also give his moron brigades a chance to redeem themselves by asking them to actually check a couple factual claims about the crescent design:

Is the giant crescent is really oriented almost exactly on Mecca?Is the 9/11 date really inscribed on a separate section of Memorial Wall that is centered on the bisector of the giant crescent, placing it in the exact position of the star on an Islamic crescent and star flag?

Is it true that every particle of the original Crescent of Embrace design remains completely intact in the so-called redesign?

This is what the blogosphere OUGHT to be good for. If TBogg is too busy to check the facts, why not put his minions to work?

For more on who TBogg has been covering up for, see last week’s post on Dr. Jaques 2001 article, where he argued that we should formulate our response to the 9/11 attacks in accordance with sharia law. How did this advocate for Islamic supremacism become the Memorial Project’s sole consultant on the warnings of Islamic symbolism in the crescent design during a crucial period when the Project’s dismissive posture was set in stone?

If TBogg would tell us what he knows, it might help answer that question, or pose others equally important. No more deception. Just tell the damned truth.

Stop the Memorial Blogburst

1389 Blog – Antijihadist Tech
A Defending Crusader
A Fine Line Between Stupid and Clever
And Rightly So
Big Dog’s Weblog
Big Sibling
Cao2’s Weblog
Cao’s Blog
Chaotic Synaptic Activity
Error Theory
Faultline USA
Flanders Fields
Flopping Aces
Four Pointer
Freedom’s Enemies
Ft. Hard Knox
GM’s Corner
Hoosier Army Mom
Ironic Surrealism II
Jack Lewis
Kender’s Musings
My Own Thoughts
Nice Deb
Ogre’s Politics and Views
Part-Time Pundit
Right on the Right
Right Truth
Stix Blog
Stop the ACLU
The Renaissance Biologist
The View From the Turret
The Wide Awakes
Thunder Run

Stumble it!

The death murder honor killing of 16 year-old Aqsa Parvez seems to have brought out the apologists in droves. In looking at the news coverage of this horrible crime, especially the editorials in the media. I’m not including bloggers here, most of the blogs I have seen have been on the correct side of this whole thing. The side that displays disgust for a father who would rather see his daughter dead than running around in public with her head exposed.

No, these people, the columnists of news papers and the like, present this as something that is bad to be sure, but not really a Muslim thing. They point out that western parents have strife and disagreements with their kids about dress and mannerisms. But of course, when was the last time anyone read about a western father killing his daughter because she wanted to wear what he thought might be clothes too revealing? We haven’t read about that, because it doesn’t happen.

No, this idea of women as expendable – this is not a western idea. The thought that women are to be subjugated and considered as second class, less worthy of anything than a man – these are not western values. Lorne Gunter in the Edmonton Journal posits the question "Was the killing of Aqsa a Muslim act?" Gunter goes to great lengths to point out that parents and their kids have had clashes over changing cultures for generations. In his attempts to apologize for the Islamic Supremacists, he points out that the guy who walked into a church in Colorado last week does not mean all Christians are gun-crazy murderers (I hadn’t even read that the guy was Christian?). He also points out that all teens are not homicidal, even though one shot up a mall in Omaha recently. He portrays the honor killing of Aqsa Parvez as a random, isolated incident. Maybe he thinks of it as something like a car-jacking, I don’t know. He wonders at the folks who are outraged that an honor killing has occurred in Canada, that they seem very quick to jump on the bandwagon that Muslims engage in honor killings just because of this one event. What he misses is that it is not this one event. That the stories of honor killings have been reaching the citizens of the west for decades. That in places like Iran women are not allowed to leave their house without a male family member with them. He does point out that Hindus and Sikhs and other religions also engage in this horrific practice of honor killings. As if that somehow makes it not so bad, almost acceptable, sort of kind of. What Gunter refuses to admit in his column, however, is when the last time an honor killing occurred in a Hindu or Sikh or other community besides the Muslim community in any western nation. Maybe it happened yesterday, or last week or two years ago for all I know. But somehow, I believe if there had been an honor killing in one of these communities, Gunter would have mentioned such in his apologist column.

I’ll present that Aqsa died because she did not want to wear the hijab. Her death murder honor killing, by reason of not wearing the hijab, makes this a Muslim issue. To be certain, there are Muslims who decry this type of violence. But let us face the facts, there are more and more Islamic Supremacists arriving in the western countries, wanting the westerners to kow-tow to their ways of thinking. Wanting the westerners to change their lifestyle and habits based on the Muslim view of the world. This is what has people in an uproar.

Stumble it!

In Ayn Rand’s novel “Atlas Shrugged” all of the industrialists, the movers and shakers of the world, went on strike. They just up and quit doing business, and withdrew from the world into a secreted mountain valley. They did not sell their businesses, rather, they simply chained the doors and walked away. They went away until such a time as the world, without rational, logical, thinking people to work in it, simply fell into chaos.

They were driven to this desperate act by the governments. All of which (with the exception of the good ol’ US of A) were referred to as People’s Republics, i.e. “The People’s Republic of Argentina”, “The People’s Republic of Mexico”, “The People’s Republic of France” etc etc etc. The problem occurred because there was so much interference with business by the governments that it was nigh impossible for the industrialists to get anything accomplished. The governments were too worried about competition, about alms for the poor, about making sure that everyone got a piece of everything. And then they were surprised when it all fell apart. They couldn’t understand why a person would not be motivated to produce more and better items when the actions and policies of the government amounted to what was essentially a “success tax” or punishment for achievements.

The EU is heading down that road, and it seems in a hurry. A smallish web-browser company named Opera is suing Microsoft in the EU, under EU anti-trust provisions, because Microsoft has its Internet Explorer browser integrated with its Operating System. Opera doesn’t think this is fair, and believes that the EU should force Microsoft to sell versions of its OS without an integrated browser. This comes on the recent heels of the EU determining that Microsoft, by integrating and bundling its Windows Media Player, with its Windows OS, was giving itself an unfair advantage, and required that Microsoft make available a version of the Windows OS without the media player to residents of the EU.

Microsoft complied and, shockingly, very, very few people are purchasing the version of Windows that does not include the media player. The anti-trust folks in the EU have gone even farther in their recommendations of late. As far as to say that no company should enjoy more than 50% of the market share. As far as to recommend that any computer – desktop or laptop – sold in the EU be completely free of any and all operating systems. Yes, that’s correct, no company would be allowed to sell a computer with an OS pre-installed. I am assuming this includes Apple. Which, if they want to talk unfair choices, the only OS you can get from any manufacturer on an Apple brand computer is the Apple OS. At least with the normal PCs, HP and Dell are now offering a flavor of Linux pre-installed. And when I bought the kinder a new PC several years ago from MicroCenter, it came with Lindows pre-installed. Of course, that was wiped pretty fast as none of their games will run under Linux.

Oddly enough, the EU commission putting forth this recommendation claims that by giving the consumers no operating system on their new computers, they are giving the consumers more choice. The amount of newspeak the EU commission uses, in order to exact some control over how much one company can hold onto, is an anathema to the capitalist way of thinking. “No Options are More Option” ranks right up there with “War is Peace”, “Freedom is Slavery” and “Ignorance is Strength”.

Back in the late 90’s, when Microsoft was being dragged over the coals here in the US, I touched on Rand’s concept of a strike, but didn’t even know it at the time. I hadn’t yet read the book. My thought was; ‘If I were Bill Gates, I’d just say to hell with it all. Buy and island and lock the doors. Then let everyone try to get along with out Microsoft as there whipping boy.’ This is, exactly, what the industrialists did in “Atlas Shrugged”. She wrote from experience having migrated from fled Communist Russia in 1926. She was there as it happened. Watched the country mediocre itself into chaos and abject poverty. The EU, it seems, is hell-bent on doing the same thing to Europe.

I’m back to that same idea I arrived at in the ’90s. If I were Bill Gates, or Michael Dell, or the chairman of HP, I would have the inkling to thumb my nose at the Europeans, and simply not do business with them. I would have to wonder if it was worth being so severely crippled to do business with those type of people.

source

Technorati Tags: EU,Microsoft,EU Competition Committe,Big Brother,Newspeak,Orwellian,Ayn Rand,Atlas Shrugged

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Stumble it!

Yeah, right, some choice: Wear it or die!

What kind of people are these? What kind of person would rather see his daughter dead, then dress the way he wants her to dress? The answer is Muhammad Parvez. Parvez and his family live in Toronto. He wanted his daughter Aqsa to wear the traditional Muslim hijab (that’s the head scarf for those not in the know). But she didn’t want to. She wanted to blend in with society. She wanted the freedom that Canada is supposed to give people. She wanted to look and act like the other kids at school.

But that just wasn’t enough for daddy (and her brother, he was in on the whole thing too). So daddy beat his daughter to death. Beat her so badly that he killed her. This, this is from a strict practitioner of the so-called “Religion of Peace”. This isn’t the first time fathers and brothers have beat a woman to death to uphold their family honor. Of course not in the world, but particularly not in what I would call the civilized world.

Back in July I posted about Banaz Mahmod. She was a 20 year old Muslim woman living in England who brought the terrible shame upon her family of falling in love with a man her father didn’t approve of. In response to this terrible shame, he and other relatives put her through a two and a half hour ordeal where she was brutally beaten and raped before finally being allowed to die.

I don’t know that 16 year old Aqsa was put through such torture; although, it would certainly not surprise me in the bit as these ‘religion of peace’ practitioners seem to be very adept at non-peaceful ways. What I do know is that this girl will not see her 17th birthday. She died, was murdered, because she didn’t like to wear the clothes her father wanted her to wear. To her father, it was more important that his daughter wear that fucking hijab, then to be alive.

Tell me again about that whole “Religion of Peace” thing?

source

Stumble it!

but words will never hurt me.

Johnathan Derbyshire has an excellent article in the New York Sun regarding hate speech, actions and words and the difference between them all in his review of Jerome Neu’s book "Sticks and Stones: The Philosophy of Insults".

One of the things he says really hit the nail on the head for me:

Mr. Neu’s skepticism about hate speech legislation, speech codes, and blasphemy laws is grounded in a very Millian understanding of what is involved in upholding freedom of speech. We should, he argues, see certain kinds of discomfort, offended feelings, and so on as being among the unavoidable costs of free thought, inquiry, and argument. The Muslim protesters who besieged the office of the editor of Jyllands-Posten were entitled to his respect, but not his "submission." Failing to recognize that these are not the same threatens to make free expression itself the "victim."

Stumble it!

Kevin Jaques: U.S. response to 9/11 should conform to sharia law

Dr. Kevin Jaques is one of the Three Mosqueteers. Of the three academics who are helping architect Paul Murdoch to plant a terrorist memorial mosque on the Flight 93 crash site, Jaques was most central to the Park Service’s fraudulent internal investigation.

He has also left a revealing paper trail. Shortly after 9/11, Indiana University School of Law sponsored a forum on the likely legal fallout from the attacks: consequences for immigration law, civil rights, etcetera. As the university’s resident expert on Islamic (sharia) law, Jaques was invited to say something about our looming engagement with the Islamic world and their systems of law.

He chose to write a prescriptive article, urging the United States to frame its response in conformity with traditional sharia requirements:

In formulating an American response to the acts of terror, it is necessary to define them according to the provisions of Islamic law.

Whitewashing sharia

Jaques makes the basic arguments for submission that any anti-war multiculturalist might make. He offers an appeasement pitch:

If the United States wishes to approach the fight against terrorism to limit future revivalist terror groups from forming and attacking American citizens and interests, it will be necessary to craft a response that conforms to the realities of Islamic law.

And he offers a when-in-Rome pitch:

Muslim religious leaders think of the world in legal terms and will react to U.S. policies according to how these policies conflict or adhere to Islamic legal principles.

Of course we should avoid gratuitous offense, when in Rome (just as we should practice it as a pastime at home). But should we really submit to sharia law?

Nowhere does Jaques even acknowledge that world-wide submission to sharia law is the ultimate goal of the 9/11 terrorists. That is a pretty glaring omission for someone who is advocating adherence to sharia law, but Jaques does more than just elide the point. He actively misleads, going to great lengths to pretend that the terrorists reject the whole idea of sharia law:

[R]evivalist movements around the Islamic world are articulating new and exciting systems of legal interpretation that, in real terms, are similar to traditional legal norms. Only the violent fringe—approximately 1 percent to 2 percent of Muslims worldwide—would disparage any discussion of Islamic law as being reflective of the kinds of non-Islamic ideas that they claim have contaminated Islam since the very first centuries of Islamic history.

Talk about a whitewash! To paint sharia as benign, Jaques pretends that the “violent fringe” is opposed to it, and this is no offhand comment. The whole first third of Jaques’ discussion is spent setting up this punch line.

Qutb did you say?

Jaques begins by describing how Islamic jurisprudence has historically proceeded by working out consensus views of the meaning of “texts of revelation”: the Koran and the sunnah (Muhammad’s biography). He then discusses the trend toward “revivalism,” starting in the 14th century, which sought to purify Islamic jurisprudence by purging all influences other than Koran and biography.

The modern phase of this revivalism is the work of Wahhab and Qtub, the sources of today’s bin Ladenist doctrines of maximally aggressive conquest. Wahhab dismissed the requirement for consensus, insisting that anyone can read the Koran for themselves, and Qtub carried this innovation in a particularly violent direction:

Qutb advocated a radicalized form of Wahhabi extremism as the only means of driving foreign (meaning U.S. and Israeli) influences out of the Islamic world. His writings have become the basic texts of contemporary violent fringe movements around the Islamic world.

Jaques identifies the “violent fringe” with Qutb while claiming that the violent fringe “disparage[s] any discussion of Islamic law.” But Qutb did not shun sharia law. Just the opposite. He declared that any Muslim ruler who failed to impose sharia should be killed as an apostate.

This is detailed in Lawrence Wright’s book The Looming Tower. Flopping Aces posted an excerpt last year:

Sayyid Qutb had pointed the way by declaring that a leader who does not impose Sharia on the country must be an apostate. There is a well known saying of the Prophet that the blood of Muslims cannot be shed except in three instances: as punishment for murder, or for marital infidelity, or for turning away from Islam. The pious Anwar Sadat was the first modern victim of the reverse logic of takfir.

Jaques takes the 20th century’s foremost advocate for imposing sharia by violent means across the entire globe and suggests that he and his followers “would disparage any discussion of Islamic law.”

Whitewashing Wahhabism

Pretending that the violent fringe spurns sharia allows Jaques to whitewash, not just sharia, but also the mainstream revivalist movements that, as Jaques acknowledges, fully embrace sharia:

… revivalist movements around the Islamic world are articulating new and exciting systems of legal interpretation that, in real terms, are similar to traditional legal norms.

The mainstream of revivalism is Saudi Wahhabism, the state sponsored doctrine of violent aggressive conquest whose “fringe” elements attacked us on 9/11. As Jaques notes, these revivalists are thoroughly traditional in their interpretations of sharia law. All of them look backwards to the purity of 7th century Islam. Not much “new” there, however “exciting” to a person of Jaques’ evident sympathies.

Doctrinally, there is no gap between the “violent fringe” of bin Ladenists and the larger Wahhabi sect that spawned them. At most there are questions about whether bin Laden has been a good general, whose strategies effectively serve the Wahhabi goal of world domination. Mainstream Wahhabism completely embraces all of bin Laden’s objectives.

Honest about one thing: how sharia limits infidel responses

When he turns to the question of how we could frame a military response that is consistent with sharia law, Jaques takes the subject seriously, and is commendably forthright, acknowledging sharia as the law of Islamic conquest:

The laws of war that developed in the earliest periods divide the world into two halves, dar al-Islam, or the “land of submission” and dar al-harb, the “land of war.” Dar al-Islam refers to any territory that is under the control of Muslims and thus forms an Islamic commonwealth. Legal texts imply that the term is meant to denote a political designation of submission to Muslim political authority. … All areas outside of Muslim political authority are considered to be in a potential state of war with the Muslim state. All relations between the areas of submission and the areas of war are regulated by the concept of jihad … an obligatory “struggle” against non-believers who are not already under Muslim rule.

Any cessation in hostilities is purely strategic, until Muslims can get back to a position of strength from which to continue to fight:

The law outlines, in most cases, rules for the cessation of struggle (hudnah) when it is deemed by the Imam or his surrogates that it is to the advantage of the Muslims to do so, or out of a need due to Muslim weakness. In cases where Muslims simply seek some advantage in the cessation of hostilities, hudnah is limited to a period of four months. If the cessation of hostilities is due to Muslim weakness, hudnah can last for a period of up to 10 years.

Jaques also acknowledges that under Islamic law, infidels have no legal rights to fight back against Muslims at all:

…reaction by the United States becomes problematic since the rebels are still defined as Muslim and the law expressly forbids non-Muslims from attacking Muslims in a Muslim land.

Yes, well, that is the problem with conforming to the law of Islamic supremacism. It’s called “surrender.”

Takfir squared, or Qutbed

So we must submit to Islamic law, says Jaques, yet according to Islamic law, we are not allowed to fight back. What to do? What to do?

Jaques, expert in the nuances of Islamic law, offers us a way out. We can embrace Qutb’s innovation and declare the bin Ladenists apostates! (The strategy of takfir.) Then we would be allowed to kill them. But of course we have to get Muslim jurists to okay this first:

American responses to the attacks will be greatly assisted if Muslim jurists are willing to define the attacks as riddah (apostasy) and not as bughat (rebellion), or simple homicide (qatl). In the latter two categories, the perpetrators remain Muslim and any effort by non-Muslims to punish them will expressly violate provisions in Islamic law that prevents non-Muslims from killing Muslims. Only apostates may be killed by non-Muslims, and in some interpretations, Muslims may ask non-Muslims for assistance in bringing apostates to justice.

The only way Jaques is able to make this Qutbian strategy seem like a real possibility is through his earlier deception, pretending that the “violent fringe” is hostile to sharia law. Since there is not actually any doctrinal divide between the bin Ladenists and the traditional Islam, there is no way for traditional jurists to declare them apostates.

Jaques himself makes clear that the complaint about bin Laden from the point of view of traditional Islam is that he acted without consensus, and that he seems to be a bad general, engaging in acts that weaken rather than strengthen the Muslim position:

Defining the acts as contraventions of ijma would not hinge just on the enormity of the acts (simple murder contravenes ijma but is not defined as apostasy), but also on the idea that they endanger the Muslim community because of what they suggest about structures of legal authority. Encouraging others to commit suicide, claiming the right to declare jihad, to kill thousands (including many Muslims) and destroy billions of dollars of property without proper consent, and to risk the lives of Muslims due to Western military and economic retaliations challenges the authority of the community of jurists and of every principle of law that, by consensus, seeks to promote the welfare of the Muslim community.

But if bin Laden is just a bad general, acting without proper authority, how exactly is he supposed to be declared an apostate? Under sharia, the terror attacks might at most be viewed as rebellion (for which infidels have no recourse), but as Jaques notes, the demise of the caliphate makes it impossible even to establish bin Laden as a rebel. Who is he rebelling against?

Defining the acts as bughat [rebellion] is complicated by the fact that there is no universally recognized Muslim leader in any area of the Muslim world and has not been for more than 700 years. Many jurists argue that since this is the case, rules for bughat are not applicable today.

The bin Ladenists are trying to rectify this lack of a recognized Muslim leader by establishing a new caliphate. That hardly makes them apostates.

First Jaques pretends that the terrorists are hostile to sharia law. Then he pretends that sharia law is hostile to the terrorists. All the while neglecting to mention that the terrorists’ explicit goal is world submission to sharia law. That is quite a concatenation of strategic deception (taqiyya).

Jaques was just as deceptive in his advice to the Memorial Project

That giant Mecca-oriented crescent that forms the centerpiece of the Flight 93 Memorial? Jaques admits that it is similar to the Mecca-direction indicator around which every mosque is built, but so what:

…just because something is ’similar to’ something else does not make it the ’same’.

The half-mile wide crescent is much too big, says Jaques, to be recognized as the central feature of a mosque. After all, that would make it the world’s biggest mosque by a factor of a hundred! What could be sillier? But Taqiyya very much for asking.

Jaques does not name his own religious beliefs, but it seems pretty clear that he must be a Muslim, and probably of the revivalist stripe (which he finds so “new and exciting”). Will he deny it, as Islam allows (Koran, verse 16:106)? Feel free to ask. Please note any response in the comments.

——————————————————–

If you want to join the blogroll/blogburst for the Crescent of Betrayal blogburst, email Cao at caoilfhionn1 at gmail dot com, with your blog’s url address. The blogburst will be sent out once a week to the participants, for simultaneous publication on this issue on Wednesdays.

Crescent of betrayal/surrender Blogburst Blogroll

1389 Blog – Antijihadist Tech
A Defending Crusader
A Fine Line Between Stupid and Clever
And Rightly So
Big Dog’s Weblog
Big Sibling
Cao2’s Weblog
Cao’s Blog
Chaotic Synaptic Activity
Error Theory
Faultline USA
Flanders Fields
Flopping Aces
Four Pointer
Freedom’s Enemies
Ft. Hard Knox
GM’s Corner
Hoosier Army Mom
Ironic Surrealism II
Jack Lewis
Kender’s Musings
My Own Thoughts
Nice Deb
Ogre’s Politics and Views
Part-Time Pundit
Right on the Right
Right Truth
Stix Blog
Stop the ACLU
The Renaissance Biologist
The View From the Turret
The Wide Awakes
Thunder Run

Stumble it!

Artists depiction of the Microsoft Santa 2.0?

The good folks over at Microsoft, last year created a Windows Live account, northpole@live.com. This account was supposedly linked to the main man of Christmas, the Kringleator himself, Santa Claus. Microsoft encouraged kids to IM Santa and talk about what they wanted for Christmas. All worked splendidly last year. Santa chatted with the kiddies and the kiddies loved chatting with Santa.

So, realizing the success of last years program, the good folks at Microsoft dusted off their virtual AI Santa and turned him loose on the kiddies again this year. But this year, Santa came back…with a vengeance (dum-dum-dummmm). Well, okay, maybe not a vengeance, but at least with a potty mouth. It seems if one prodded the AI Santa enough about eating pizza, he would reply “You want me to eat what? It’s fun to talk about oral sex, but I want to chat about something else.” And if one were to insult him, he would reply in-kind calling them a “dirty bastard.”

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Technorati Tags: Santa, Oral Sex, Microsoft, Artificial Intelligence

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In desperately trying to keep up with political correctness, especially now, around Christmas time, there are bound to be instances where people meant well, tried to do the correct, multi-cultural, all-inclusive thing, but still end up doing it all wrong. Take Balducci’s grocers for example. I’m certain they just didn’t want Jews to be left out of this most joyous of seasons. After, all, Chanukah is currently in full swing, so why not advertise to the Jewish community that you are having holiday specials?

Well, that probably wouldn’t be a bad thing in and of itself, but when you are advertising your delicious spiral cut hams as “Delicious for Chanukah”, I can see where a problem might creep up.

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Technorati Tags: Christmas, Chanukah, Hams, Balducci’s

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I swear, I love you Aussies. Really I do. Your women are hot, your beaches are to die for, you have that whole big rock thing going, not to mention Crocodile Dundee, and kangaroos & koala bears (yeah, I know, they aren’t really bears, but who cares?). But I will concede that it seems like I have been posting a few posts lately that could be construed as negative towards our great cousins from down under. Back on 16 November I posted about how department store Santas are not being allowed to say “Ho Ho Ho” and being instructed instead to say “Ha Ha Ha.” Personally, I don’t know why they don’t just make them say “Bah Humbug” but that’s just me.

Now we have the first firing to come from this overly politically correct crapola. Seventy year old John Oakes has been fired from saying the nefarious phrase so closely (and for generations) associated with Father Christmas, Pere Noel, Santa Claus or whatever else you want to call him.

Employment company Westaff, which supplies stores with red-robed, white-bearded Father Christmases, had earlier asked its Santas to say “ha ha ha” because the word “ho,” which is American slang for whore, could offend women, media reported.

In the latest incident, the Cairns Post newspaper said 70-year-old John Oakes was fired on Monday for saying “ho ho ho” and for singing the Christmas song Jingle Bells.

And what gets me even more is that the offending word “ho” is an American slang for prostitute, not an Aussie slang word. Seriously, how many Americans are going to be doing their holiday Christmas shopping in Australia?

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Technorati Tags: Santa, Australia, Ho Ho Ho, prostitute, slang, John Oakes

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TBogg deleted evidence of cover up at the Flight 93 Memorial

TBogg has edited a comment thread to remove an important piece of evidence about the Memorial Project’s cover up of Islamic and terrorist memorializing features in the planned Flight 93 memorial. A historically important comment left by a consultant to the Memorial Project has been deleted. In January 2006, Alec Rawls baited the TBogg leftists for insisting that it is perfectly okay to plant a giant Mecca oriented crescent on the Flight 93 crash site. TBogg’s comment thread swelled to epic proportions and eventually yielded something more than the usual litany of moonbat excuses for not thinking straight. At the end of the thread, posted sometime in March or April of 2006, there appeared an extended comment, about 600 words long, posted anonymously, and written as a semi-formal evaluation of Rawls’ January 2006 report to the Memorial Project. Mr. Rawls would later find out that this anonymous comment was the sole piece of written feedback on which the Memorial Project was basing its denial of Islamic features in the winning design. (Crescent of Betrayal, download 3, pp. 149-50.) The Project only communicated snippets of the TBogg comment, so the fact that the whole thing had been posted online caught them by surprise, undermining their ability to control the story. In particular, the TBogg comment did not deny the Mecca orientation of the giant crescent. On the contrary, it acknowledged that the crescent at the center of the memorial is geometrically similar to a traditional mihrab (the Mecca-direction indicator around which every mosque is built), and offered a variety of excuses for why people should not be concerned about this similarity. (e.g. “[J]ust because something is ’similar to’ something else, does not make it the ’same’.”) Dr. Kevin Jaques Only in the last couple of weeks has the identity of the anonymous scholar who wrote the TBogg comment been learned. Last week’s blogburst about the Park Service’s fraudlent internal investigation discusses a Memorial Project “White Paper” that identifies the TBogg commentator as Dr. Kevin Jaques, an Islamicist (a scholar of Islam), at the University of Indiana. One of Dr. Jaques excuses for not being concerned about the half-mile wide Mecca-oriented crescent is that it is so much bigger than any other mihrab:

Thirdly, most mihrabs are small, rarely larger than the figure of a man, although some of the more ornamental ones can be larger, but nothing as large at the crescent found in the site design. It is unlikely that most Muslims would walk into the area of the circle/crescent and see a mihrab because it is well beyond their limit of experience. Again, just because it is similar does not make it the same.

You might recognize it as a giant crescent from an airplane like Flight 93 flying over head, but from the ground? Pshaw.

It’s too big to recognize! TBogg deleted the Kevin Jaques comment from his comment thread For most of 2007, the original TBogg comment thread has not been available, but TBogg now has it reposted, with one glaring omission: Dr. Jaques comment has been removed.

If you want to see what TBogg is posting now, the url for his 2006 “Lunacy abounds” post is http://tbogg.blogspot.com/2006/01/lunacy-abounds-nuts.html. For posterity, here are copies of the original comment thread, as of 5/29/2006, with Dr. Jaques’ comment intact at the end, and the comment thread repost, as of 12/3/2007, with Dr. Jaques’ comment deleted. A full discussion of what TBogg properly calls “the infamous comment thread” can be found in Chapter Eight of Alec’s Crescent of Betrayal book (download 3, pp 131-).

The question now for Mr. TBogg is why he deleted Kevin Jaques’ comment. Did he do it on his own, or did he do it at someone’s request? Did Dr. Jaques ask him to delete the comment? Did architect Paul Murdoch ask? Did someone in the Park Service ask? Whether TBogg acted on his own or was prompted, it is obvious that he understood that he was deleting an important piece of evidence. Just the fact that he singled it out for deletion shows a conscious act of cover-up. Maybe he did not realize the full import of having the comment remain publicly available via an original source, but he certainly knew he was covering up something important. What kind of blogger deletes a piece of evidence that he knows to be central to a high profile controversy? (Republican presidential candidate Tom Tancredo (R-CO) sent the Park Service a letter last month asking that crescent design be scrapped entirely.) This is very bad behavior. Was TBogg’s comment thread originally removed in order to hide Jaques comment? It was odd enough when the “infamous comment thread” first disappeared from TBogg’s blog. What blogger removes anything famous from their blog? But at that time, there was no publicly available information that could have alerted TBogg to the significance of that last anonymous comment. The most likely explanation for the disappearance of the comment thread seemed to be that TBogg simply had a coding glitch, or maybe he is cheap enough to have been worried about bandwidth. Now that the comment thread has been restored without the Jaques comment, it seems likely that the reason the comment thread came down in the first place was to hide the Jaques comment. The interesting thing about this scenario is that at the time the comment thread was removed (sometime between June 2006 and June 2007) the only way TBogg could have learned the importance of that last anonymous comment would have been through the internal investigation conducted by the Park Service in the spring and summer of 2006. No one else knew that the comment came from an advisor to the Memorial Project until July 2007 when Alec Rawls released the downloadable “Director’s Cut” version of his Crescent of Betrayal book. (Given the urgent public need to know, World Ahead Publishing graciously allowed Alec to make his then final draft available for free download until the print edition—still being updated—comes out in the first quarter of 2008.) The TBogg comment thread was removed before the Director’s Cut release. (Noted in Crescent of Betrayal, download 3, at p. 131.) Chief Ranger Jill Hawk, who was conducting the investigation, would not tell Alec who wrote the anonymous TBogg comment, but Alec warned her to be suspicious. Given the overtly dishonest nature of its excuse making, he urged her to double check its provenance. She answered back that she had been able to get email confirmation of authorship. This email communication with Jaques might well have alerted him to the faux pas he committed by posting his comment on the TBogg thread. Did he then contact TBogg and ask for the comment to be removed? That would seem to be the most likely scenario. Others who were privy to the internal investigation could have also contacted TBogg, but there is no evidence for any other such route of transmission. It is disturbing to think that TBogg would have acceded to any request to remove evidence about a possible enemy plot. He is fully aware of what Rawls is claiming: that an al Qaeda sympathizing architect entered our open design competition with a plan to build a terrorist memorial mosque and won. Kevin Jaques’ TBogg comment is crucial for understanding how such a plot could succeed, revealing the utter fraudulence of the internal investigation that should have detected any such plot. As the lone consultant to the Memorial Project on the crescent design, Jaques engaged in overtly dishonest excuse-making. And TBogg is willing to help him cover it up? If TBogg has some other explanation for his deletions, the rest of us would sure like to hear it. The fraudulent internal investigation For more of Kevin Jaques’ dishonest excuse-making, see last week’s blogburst on the fraudulent internal investigation. Before the Park Service was done, it managed to round up two more academic frauds in addition to Kevin Jaques. There is Dr. Daniel Griffith, who claims there is no such thing as the direction to Mecca, and a third Mosqueteer still to be discussed. (Saving the worst for last.) But Jaques is the central fraud, being the Project’s sole source of feedback during a crucial period when its dismissive posture was set in stone. In addition to being an expert on sharia law, Jaques has also proved to be an expert at taqiyya.

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If you want to join the blogroll/blogburst for the Crescent of Betrayal blogburst, email Cao at caoilfhionn1 at gmail dot com, with your blog’s url address. The blogburst will be sent out once a week to the participants, for simultaneous publication on this issue on Wednesdays. Crescent of betrayal/surrender

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