Jinn of Current Events

Dhimmi Watch: With Islamization comes Arabization. Since Arabic is the language of Allah and of his Qur'an, and the last and greatest Prophet was an Arab, Arab culture tends to spread with the spread of Islam. Islam then teaches that the pre-Islamic culture of any [subjugated] Islamic people is worthless: jahiliya, the pre-Islamic period of ignorance. This has led Muslims in Egypt, Iran, Pakistan, Afghanistan and elsewhere to denigrate and ignore what the rest of the world regards as immense cultural treasures. But among the North African Berbers today, there is a counter-movement. ... 

Gas costs EUR 0.92/L in Ireland (most of it being taxes). That's about USD 4.20 per gallon, much more than what Americans pay. No wonder a vast majority of the Irish drive in such tiny cars — their government makes sure they can't afford fueling large cars. 

David Frum: The greatest scholar of the Islamic world, Bernard Lewis, has brilliantly explained the roots of Muslim rage. He traces that rage to the failure of Muslim societies to adapt to the modern world. The people of these societies remember that they were once rich and powerful and important. Now they lag far behind — and they do not understand why. Rather than look inward at their own faults and failings, they have sought scapegoats in the world beyond their borders.

Can't one see something similar at work in the mind of [NYT writer] Michiko Kakutani? The brand of liberalism championed by her newspaper was once all-powerful in American cultural life. Over the past decade, that power has ebbed away — and since 9/11, the ebb has become a flood. The New York Times no longer decides what Americans will read and what Americans will think about what they read. Rather than look inward, they blame talk radio and the Internet and Fox TV. And when this ferocious reservoir of accumulated resentment encounters a new and contradictory idea — well it just boils over. 

Robert Spencer: Day after day, all around the world, evidence mounts that Islamic radicalism is a cleric-driven phenomenon. The radical Islam that inspired the destruction of the World Trade Center and innumerable other terrorist attacks around the world is born in the theological arguments used by Islamic teachers in mosques and madrassas. All this is yet more evidence of the hollowness of the still-prevailing view that Islamic radicals are a tiny minority that has hijacked the religion.