Civil Commotion

Apparently, the Obama administration is considering, once again, moving the 100 or so detainees still at Gitmo to an American prison. Michelle Malkin, you may not be surprised to learn, is having a fit.

In 2009, the White House first floated the idea of using the Thomson Correctional Center, a high-security prison in Illinois, to house Gitmo denizens. Family members of 9/11 victims, God bless them, raised a national uproar. Debra Burlingame, sister of American Airlines Flight 77 pilot Chic Burlingame, blasted the feckless president’s assertion that no one would be put in danger by his Gitmo relocation program.

Citing convicted shoe bomber Richard Reid’s successful push (backed by liberal ACLU lawyers) to proselytize about Islam at the supermax facility here in Colorado, where I live, Burlingame cut through the bullcrap. “Mr. Obama has repeatedly suggested that the security challenge of bringing more than 100 trained and dangerous terrorists onto U.S. soil can be solved by simply installing them in an impenetrable fortress. This view is either disingenuous or naive,” she wrote.

What expertise has Ms. Burlingame? Malkin doesn’t say, meaning … probably none.

There is nothing one might say about contemporary jihadis that may not be said of the German and Italian troops America faced in World War II — They are ideologues! They are highly trained killers! They eat babies! They’re on a first-name basis with Satan! — and we imprisoned roughly 500,000 of them as POWs right here in the United States; they did farm labor, logging, mining — all the work that our soldiers weren’t here to do.

Many of them formed lifelong friendships with the Americans they met, and no few of them got girls in ‘trouble’ and ended-up rejecting repatriation at the end of the war, became American citizens, and lived fruitful and happy lives.

Are we really not up to doing the same job our grandparents did? I’ll grant that Malkin’s excitable readers may not be, but I’ve no doubt whatever that the rest of us are.

The red-faced blowhard who operates the Catholic League goes after the Washington Post and, improbably, tops even himself with one of the most comically dishonest claims I have ever read. Get ready:

Though there is no institution in the nation—secular or sectarian—that has a better record of combating the sexual abuse of minors than the Catholic Church, one would never know this by reading Boorstein’s article.

Nobody would ever know that, Bill, because it is a grotesque falsehood. Seriously: You are as bad as the Baptists, and need to learn something about your religion.

The GOP as it exists today is the legacy of decisions made 50 years ago in the wake of white Southern reaction to the civil rights movement. To make itself attractive to the millions of voters suddenly unmoored from their century-long allegiance to the Democratic Party, Republicans adopted a darker, harsher version of conservative politics. They would no longer combine a pragmatic acceptance of the modern state with a cautious, realistic assessment of its limitations and delusions. The state engineered by progressive Republicans such as Theodore Roosevelt and New Deal Democrats such as his cousin, Franklin, was not a compromise with history to be carefully managed: it was an abomination to be destroyed. It did not represent a prudent adjustment to the new realities of industrial capitalism, urbanization, and aspirational democracy; it constituted a secular-minded reversal of a traditional order anchored in divinely decreed hierarchy.

Kim Messick, Salon

This is an ancient argument hereabouts so, naturally, I’m pleased to see the point dawning on others: The Republicans are at war with the whole of modernity — with reality. The sickness on the Right has its locus in mourning for a world that never was.

Book Two: A Criticism of the Highest Values That Have Prevailed Hitherto
V: Concerning the Slander of the so-called Evil Qualities

§383   Religious morality — Passion, great desire; the passions of power, love, revenge and property: the moralists wish to uproot and exterminate all these things and “purify” the soul by driving them out of it.

The argument is: the passions often lead to disaster — therefore, they are evil and ought to be condemned. Man must free himself from them, otherwise he cannot be a good man —

This is of the same nature as: “If thine eye offend thee, pluck it out”. In this particular case when, with that “bucolic simplicity”, the founder of Christianity recommended a certain practice to his disciples, in the event of sexual excitement, the result would not be only the loss of a particular member, but the actual castration of the whole of the man’s character — And the same applies to the moral mania, which, instead of insisting upon the control of the passions, sues for their extirpation. Its conclusion always is: only the emasculated man is a good man.

Instead of making use of and economising the great sources of passion, those torrents of the soul which are often so dangerous, overwhelming and impetuous, morality this most short-sighted and most corrupted of mental attitudes would want to make them dry up.

ISIS’ theology of rape is — What do you know? — reminiscent of the Old Testament story of the Midianite genocide.

Survivors say that men and women were separated within the first hour of their capture. Adolescent boys were told to lift up their shirts, and if they had armpit hair, they were directed to join their older brothers and fathers. In village after village, the men and older boys were driven or marched to nearby fields, where they were forced to lie down in the dirt and sprayed with automatic fire.

The women, girls and children, however, were hauled off in open-bed trucks.

[ … ]

They would be held in confinement, some for days, some for months. Then, inevitably, they were loaded into the same fleet of buses again before being sent in smaller groups to Syria or to other locations inside Iraq, where they were bought and sold for sex.

Numbers 31:7-18.

⁷ And they warred against the Midianites, as the Lord commanded Moses; and they slew all the males.

⁸ And they slew the kings of Midian, beside the rest of them that were slain; namely, Evi, and Rekem, and Zur, and Hur, and Reba, five kings of Midian: Balaam also the son of Beor they slew with the sword.

⁹ And the children of Israel took all the women of Midian captives, and their little ones, and took the spoil of all their cattle, and all their flocks, and all their goods.

¹⁰ And they burnt all their cities wherein they dwelt, and all their goodly castles, with fire.

¹¹ And they took all the spoil, and all the prey, both of men and of beasts.

¹² And they brought the captives, and the prey, and the spoil, unto Moses, and Eleazar the priest, and unto the congregation of the children of Israel, unto the camp at the plains of Moab, which are by Jordan near Jericho.

¹³ And Moses, and Eleazar the priest, and all the princes of the congregation, went forth to meet them without the camp.

¹⁴ And Moses was wroth with the officers of the host, with the captains over thousands, and captains over hundreds, which came from the battle.

¹⁵ And Moses said unto them, Have ye saved all the women alive?

¹⁶ Behold, these caused the children of Israel, through the counsel of Balaam, to commit trespass against the Lord in the matter of Peor, and there was a plague among the congregation of the Lord.

¹⁷ Now therefore kill every male among the little ones, and kill every woman that hath known man by lying with him.

¹⁸ But all the women children, that have not known a man by lying with him, keep alive for yourselves.

Could we please get over the ridiculous and sentimental propaganda about a ‘chosen’ people? The Old Testament Jews were merely the most savage, and anybody who holds them up as exemplars of a moral ideal is a grievously deformed human being.