Eleanor Duckwall's Spotlight

Slip-Sliding and Sloshing Into Dhimmitude

Religious accommodation in the form of footbaths is in the news. These refer to the particular washing stations found and installed in pubic restrooms at airports, universities and businesses for the five-times-daily ablutions required for prayer, although some Muslims don't consider this a requirement. In the UK, businesses are installing footbaths even though they have no Muslim employees.

Not talked about as much are prayer rooms for exclusive use of Muslims, separating men from women to protect "safety and dignity."

Imagine praying a prostrate position with bottom in the air. Wouldn't you feel safer and more dignified if men and women were separated? But separation for safety and dignity in prayer after 9/11 has other reasons. Nevertheless, no one ever talks about preserving the safety and dignity of Christians and Jews, or Hindus, or anyone else in their prayer environment. Don't you wonder why?

The New Privatization

In the early days of our country, some roads and canals were privately owned, and the owners could get a pretty penny to allow travelers the use of "their" roads. Could we see this happen again as more and more public roads and bridges fall into private hands? Say a toll of $180 to use the Holland Tunnel? Foreigners are buying up American infrastructure for profitl

The New Privatization by Steve Malanga

I’ve got a bridge to sell you” sounds like a sleazy salesman’s pitch. But if Indiana governor Mitch Daniels offers you one, maybe you should believe him. Daniels has already auctioned the rights to operate the Indiana Toll Road—a 157-mile road linking the Chicago Skyway in the west to the Ohio Turnpike in the east—to a private group for $3.8 billion. He’s got other state assets he’d like to sell, too, if he can just get the Indiana legislature to go along. Meantime, Chicago mayor Richard Daley has harvested $1.8 billion auctioning the Skyway itself to a private group, and another half-billion or so turning city-owned garages over to private operators. Now he’s trying to sell Midway Airport; it could fetch $3 billion.

A Propaganda Coup Indeed!

Columbia University gave Mahmoud Ahmadinejad exactly what he wanted: the chance to speak from a prestigious forum to the world, in particular the Muslim world, for his speech made little sense very few in the West who would not think of mixing theology with pure science or investigating the Holocaust as if it were a physics exercise. But to the Muslim world, where the Koran is ultimate word and Sharia is law, the message came loud and clear: he had arrived to instruct and chastise the West from a prestigious university in "the right path," or the path of Allah as laid out by the Prophet. He didn't understand that his message could not be understood by the millions of Westerners who were listening. To them he seemed ill informed and nonsensical.

Presto, Chango, Shazam! Secret Changes in the Works!

You don't have to be a member of the "tin-foil-hat brigade" or a rocket scientist to connect the dots:

The Carlyle Group, a private equity or mutual fund for the very wealthy, is based in Washington D.C. where it can be a revolving door for retiring or out-of-office politicians and bureaucrats that are sent out ahead to pave the way for the group's dealmakers. This fund now has thousands of official employees in every corner of the world and unofficial employees that are paid creatively so they legally can claim no conflict of interest when confronted or if they chose to enter again into government service.

Specializing in "regulated" industries and bureaucracies the world over, the group has purchased similar interests the world over and is now the most powerful group you have never heard of.

Secret confab teaches officials to sell foreigners U.S. assets - Carlyle executive among moderators of conference ..."

The Operative Word is "Secret"

The operative word is "secret" because the political, social, and business elite know that ordinary people would not stand for what is being done to them in secret because those groups "know what's best." The same thing happened in secret to Europeans who had a totalitarian bureaucracy based in Brussels foisted upon them against their consent.

Could the same thing happen here? You bet! The Secret North American Sellout by Joseph Farah

I have to admit, I was a little annoyed when WND staff writer Jerome Corsi told me a European company holding conferences on seling out America's infrastructure to foreign private concerns refused to allow him to cover its latest meeting in New York as an official member of the press.

EuroMoney PLC explained to Corsi that only the "business and financial press" would be permitted access to the meeting. WND, it was explained to us, was known more its general news coverage.

Let's face it. WND is known for something else, too. It is known as the only major news source poking its curious nose into the business of the international elite would like nothing better than to end our quaint notions of nationa sovereignty and lead us blissfully into the era of the new global village.

Patriots Arrested in Islamic-Occupied Brussels

More on this story posted at Vdare by Marcus Epstein.

The dismissal of the Rusian Prime Minister Mikhail Fradkov by Vladimir Putin was unsuprisingly front page news and subject of many editorials in the mainstream media. Conservaites also added their concern that it was a step back for democracy in Europe. David Pryce-Jones harrumphed on NRO: "If all this isn't annoying and teasing, then it's real trouble ahead."

Do We Want to Survive or Not?

From: Survival instinct slippage by Mark Steyn, The Washington Times:

This year I marked the anniversary of September 11 by driving through Massachusetts. It wasn't exactly planned that way, just how things panned out. So, heading toward Boston, I tuned to Bay State radio colossus Howie Carr and heard him reading out portions from the official address to the September 11 commemoration ceremony by Deval Patrick, apparently Massachusetts' governor. September 11, said Mr. Patrick, "was a mean and nasty and bitter attack on the United States."

"Mean and nasty"? He sounds like an oversensitive waiter complaining that John Kerry sent back the aubergine coulis again. Evidently that passes for tough talk in Massachusetts these days — the shot heard around the world, and so forth. Mr. Patrick didn't want to leave the crowd with all that macho cowboy rhetoric ringing in their ears, so he moved on to the nub of his speech: September 11 "was also a failure of human beings to understand each other, to learn to love each other." [...]

We should beware of anyone who seeks to explain September 11 by using the words "each other": They posit a grubby equivalence between the perpetrator and the victim — that the "failure to understand" derives from the culpability of both parties. The September 11 killers were treated very well in the United States: They were ushered into the country on the high-speed visa express program the State Department felt was appropriate for young Saudi males. They were treated cordially everywhere they went. The lapdancers at the clubs they frequented in the weeks before the Big Day gave them a good time — or good enough, considering what lousy tippers they were. September 11 didn't happen because our love for Mohamed Atta was insufficient.

This isn't a theoretical proposition. At some point in the future, some of us will find ourselves on a flight with a chap like Richard Reid, the thwarted shoebomber. On that day we had better hope the guy sitting next to him isn't Gov. Patrick, who sees him bending down to light his sock and responds with a chorus of "All You Need Is Love," but rather a fellow who "understands" enough to wallop the dickens out of him before he can strike the match. It was the failure of one group of humans to understand that the second group was determined to kill them that led the crew and passengers of those Boston flights to stick with obsolescent 1970s hijack procedures until it was too late.

Unfortunately the obsolescent 1970s multicultural love-groove inclinations of society at large are harder to dislodge. If you'll forgive such judgmental categorizations, this isn't about "them," it's about "us." The long-term survival of any society depends on what proportion of its citizens thinks as Mr. Patrick does. Islamism is an opportunist enemy but you can't blame them for seeing the opportunity: On that sense, they understand us far more clearly than Gov. Patrick understands them.

The other day, you may recall, some larky lads were arrested in Germany. Another terrorist plot. Would have killed more people than Madrid and London combined. But it was nipped in the bud, so it's just another yawneroo: Nobody cares. Who were the terrorists? Mohammed? Muhammad? Mahmoud? No. Their names were "Fritz" and "Daniel." "Fritz," huh? That's a pretty unusual way to spell Mohammed.

Indeed. Fritz Gelowicz is as German as lederhosen. He's from Ulm, Albert Einstein's birthplace, on the blue Danube, which, last time I was in Ulm, was actually a murky shade of green. And, in an excellent jest on Western illusions, Fritz was converted to Islam while attending the Multi-Kultur-Haus — the Multicultural House. It was, in fact, avowedly unicultural — an Islamic center run by a jihadist imam. At least three of its alumni — including another native German convert — have been killed fighting the Russians in Chechnya.

Fritz hoped to kill Americans. But that's one of the benefits of a multicultural world: There are so many fascinating diverse cultures, and most look best reduced to rubble strewn with body parts. Fritz and a pal, Atilla Selek, had been arrested in 2004 with a car full of pro-Osama propaganda praising the September 11 attacks. That sounds like a pilot for a wacky jihadist sitcom: "Atilla And The Hun."

Fritz Gelowicz. Richard Reid. The Australian factory worker Jack Roche. The Toronto jihadists plotting to behead the prime minister. The son of the British Conservative Party official with the splendidly Wodehousian double-barreled name. All over the world young men are raised in the "Multi-Kultur Haus" of the West who decide their highest ambition is to convert to Islam, become a jihadist and self-detonate.

Why do radical imams seek to convert young Canadian, British and even American men and women in their late teens and 20s? Because they understand that when you raise a generation in the great wobbling blancmange of Deval Patrick cultural relativism nothing is any better or any worse than anything else. If people are "mean and nasty" to us, it's only because we didn't sing enough Barney the Dinosaur songs at them. In such a world a certain percentage of the youth will have a great gaping hole where their sense of identity should be. And into that hole you can pour something fierce and primal and implacable. [...]

Al Qaeda's ad hoc air force left a huge crater of Massachusetts corpses in the middle of Manhattan, and Gov. Patrick goes looking for love in all the wrong places.

How many people in any society think like Deval Patrick? That's the calculation to make if you want to figure out its long-term survival prospects.

If we want to survive we need to have a common culture that has sound values that have nothing to do with cultural relativism.

Washinton Continues to Ignore Enemies Among Us

"Immigration is the new way or war" is not exactly accurate. Invading migrations have been used to topple empires and kingdoms from the beginning. Every school child knows about the sacking of Rome by Alaric and his tribe, and who hasn't heard of the Saxon invasion of England at the end of Roman Britain, which was also an invasion...

Image: Cox & Forkum

Contemporary unlimited immigration over prorous borders in short period of time isn't see by Washington and other elites as an invasion because their comfortable lives are greatly enhanced by the influx of cheap labor and amenable persons used to living under dictators and oligarchies, obviously easier to control than than spirited Americans who cut their teeth or rights and freedoms rather than obligation and submission.

You would think that the lessons of history seem to be lost on the powerful who appear to be educated morons.

The same thing is happening in Europe where the process is proceeding rapidly. Terrified of another European war, ordinary people allowed their politicians and business classes to form the EU, form an alliance with the Arab League, admit unlimited numbers of unassimilable Muslims, and subscribe to the institution of multiculturalism so that dissent is seen as racism, criminal, and a prosecutable offense.

Invasion of the United States is being made easier by criminals who have made a business of selling high-tech security visas on the black market. Home-grown cells "who belong here" are popping up left and right.

The media and Washington elite focus only on Jihadists, but in reality there are many groups intent on either destroying or altering the United States to their advantage. The theory of multiculturalism tells them that they are at least as important as the mainstream culture that built and sustained this country, and thus are deserving of all the political and economic power that can grab.

Believe it or not, amnesty for illegals is back. Assistant Majority Leader Dick Durbin, D-Ill. has re-introduced another version of his "Dream Act," this time as an amendment (SA 2237) to the DOD funding bill.

The Dream Act would grant citizenship status to certain illegal aliens under 16 years of age who are pursuing college degrees and would allow them to receive in-state college tuition rates on an equal basis with U.S. citizens.

Steve Elliot, president of Grassfire.org, told WND his group plans to launch next week a nationwide awareness campaign to voice opposition to the Durbin amendment.

According to Numbers USA, the Dream Act amendment allows an illegal alien to remain in the U.S. on a track headed for citizenship, provided:

1. the illegal alien can demonstrate continuous presence in the U.S. for five years and was not yet 16 years old upon initial entry;

2. the illegal alien is of "good moral character" and is not inadmissible on criminal grounds or because the illegal alien is a national security risk; an

3. the illegal alien has been admitted to an institution of higher education, has attained a high school diploma, or has obtained a GED in the U.S.

Critics charge the Dream Act is a free pass to millions of illegal aliens, especially given the rampant documentation and identity theft fraud accompanying illegal immigration for decades.

We are in a cultural war that will reduce all groups to the status of tribes within the borders of the United States or, if some have their way, the NAU or even a confederation of American states. One must think of the consequences of actions. Perhaps these are unintended by the authors. If so, it is obvious that they are morons!!

A Terrible Indifference and Blindness...

Referring to the ordeal of Europeans who are objecting to the rapid change of their countries and lives because of Islamization and the policies of the E.U., Diana West comments in The Washington Times:

The story of the week wasn't Gen. David Petraeus' testimony on Iraq, although it dominated the headlines. The story of the week wasn't the sixth return of September 11 since the jihad atrocity of 2001, although it inspired many public statements and ceremonies. The week's biggest story garnered little press and few comments. But, in a significant way, this overlooked story — an outrageous display of police force in Brussels on September 11, 2007 — symbolizes the missing link in our flawed comprehension of both Iraq and September 11.

Chaos in the Making: Huntington Nails It

From: The Clash of Civilization and the Remaking of the World Order

In this new world the most pervasive, important, and dangerous conflicts will not be between social classes, rich and poor, or other economically defined groups, but between peoples belonging to different cultural entities. Tribal wars and ethnic conflicts will occur within civilizations. Violence between states and groups from different civilizations, however, carries with it the potential for escalation as other states and groups from these civilizations rally to the support of their "kin countries." The bloody clash of clans in Somalia poses no threat of broader conflict. The bloody clash of tribes in Rwanda has consequences for Uganda, Zaire, and Burundi but not much further. The bloody clashes of civilizations in Bosnia, the Caucasus, Central Asia, or Kashmir could become bigger wars. In the Yugoslav conflicts, Russia provided diplomatic support to the Serbs, and Saudi Arabia, Turkey, Iran, and Libya provided funds and arms to the Bosnians, not for reasons of ideology or power politics or economic interest but because of cultural kinship. "Cultural conflicts," Vaclav Havel has observed, "are increasing and are more dangerous today than at any time in history," and Jacques Delors agreed that "future conflicts will be sparked by cultural factors rather than economics or ideology." And the most dangerous cultural conflicts are those along the fault lines between civilizations.

In the post--Cold War world, culture is both a divisive and a unifying force. People separated by ideology but united by culture come together, as the two Germanys did and as the two Koreas and the several Chinas are beginning to. Societies united by ideology or historical circumstance but divided by civilization either come apart, as did the Soviet Union, Yugoslavia, and Bosnia, or are subjected to intense strain, as is the case with Ukraine, Nigeria, Sudan, India, Sri Lanka, and many others. Countries with cultural affinities cooperate economically and politically. [...]

The can deny it all they want:

See also:The Security and Prosperity Partnership: Its Immigration Implications ; Ferocious Differences by Jorge Castañeda in The Atlantic; 2007 Index of Economic Freedom; George W. Bush: Campaign speech on Latin America, Miami, FL, July 2007; Jones Report: North American Union Would Be a Terrible Mistake; North American Borders: Why They Matter; Call It Treason: Flake - Gutierrez Bill Immigration Insanity And Merger With Mexico; Jorge C. Casteñeda North America in the 21st Century; Thinking North America; North American Competitiveness Council (NACC).