BuzzMachine

War be with you
: Muslim Pundit has a remarkable post about the recruiters who stand outside British mosques and feed on the anger and hatred like bacteria heating up a compost heap:

I have always heard that prayer is to a man’s turbulent mind what water is to fire. Prayer is supposed to encourage the aura of tranquillity, and the feeling of inner peace. It is supposed to calm down and subdue the seething waves of anger, the fiery discontent that simmer in one’s heart. For a person to engage in prayer is to seek refuge in an uncertain world. After coming out of a temple or a church, I have observed people to be relatively silent, smiling; slowly making their way out to their parked vehicles, talking in low muffled voices. The calmness and the serenity of places of worship commune with our minds to create an environment of peace all around it. Indeed, it is also not surprising then that more people wait for alms at such places than anywhere else.

Except, at least, at the numerous mosques I have visited in Britain. Come Friday, and the aftermath of the Friday congregation is anything but serene. The increasingly usual programme is troubling: Emit hot air, even if at the expense of non-Muslims, and pray. I am surrounded by idiots. Secular Muslims understandably choose not to reveal themselves in this environment. And yet this is not the face of Muslim extremism. That is waiting patiently outside mosque entrances instead, in the form of certain groups using Friday to market the call for destruction, violence and mayhem around the world, under the pretext of so-called freedom-fighting. As hundreds of people file out neither content nor smiling, but seething with anger at their non-Muslim compatriots, they are ripe for the taking, as they go straight into the open arms of these wannabe macho-men. These extremists righteously hold their banners in one hand, and the Qur’an in the other, propagating their message through hate-filled leaflets and magazines, their screaming mouths distorting their faces, howling for indiscriminate retaliation against all Muslim and Western rulers under the belief that Godís justice is on their side. The entire corpus of their ideology is contained within their slogans….

Golf the Jihad Way
: Tony Hendra, a great humorist, had a great piece on NPR the other night, noting that among the hot words that sell book titles — golf, dog, cat, ‘the end of.’ Hitler — now add the hot word du jour: Jihad. Inspired. Put in your Amazon orders now for Hitler’s Jihad.

Today’s inappropriate Olympic observation
: This year’s women skaters are unusually gorgeous.

Wearing our hearts on our lapels
: William Quick sends us to a San Fran Chron column by John Carman that wonders how long Letterman and Leno will keep wearing their flag pins.

The pins have to come off sometime, if only because in another year or two, they will reclaim their original meaning: I am a conservative Republican, and more American than you.

Quick makes fun of this, for some good reason. But I have to admit I’ve been wondering the same thing. I’m still wearing my pin (I gave up the ribbon motif for a plain flag, but a straight one in an artsy silver frame, none of this waving). My attitude is still: I was almost killed by these sons-of-bitches just because I’m American and so I’m wearing the flag in some small defiance.

But I do wonder how long this will last. I’m just about the only person wearing a flag. I don’t know when and whether it will become a bit embarrassing.

Meanwhile, the paper flags I see on car and house and office windows are fading from red-white-and-blue to pink-tan-and-aqua and the flags flying from cars are getting more threadbare by the week. The flags are all fading, from windows and cars and lapels.

I hope it won’t take another attack to bring them back.

I hate opening ceremonies
: That’s all I wanted to say.

Me and my rat
: The NY Times reports today on the lingering doubts and fears about health problems at Ground Zero, on 9.11 and since. People simply don’t know what the dangers are. It also reports:

At a federal government laboratory in North Carolina, a hundred mice are breathing dust from the trade center collapse. Some have it injected deep into their lungs, while others get intense one-day exposures in a dust-filled chamber, to mimic the dense cloud that people were caught in on Sept. 11. Other researchers are re-examining the health effects of exposure to large dust particles, which have been linked by physicians to the onset of asthma among some people who worked at ground zero in the days after the disaster.

There is a rat that has breathed the same collection of crushed building I did on 9.11 to see what befalls it. I’m rooting for you, beast.

God Bless America
: Lots of links to my call for a little show of shameless patriotism at the Olympics.

Thanks here, here, here, and here. Photodude respectfully dissents.

Welcome home
: London : Loyal readers will know that I am a loyal reader of the Rossi Rant — not a blog, per se (no links to such wonders as this) but an occasional, personal essay with a light touch and a great voice. Today, she writes about her visit to London, part of her pledge to get back to life after 9.11. “I started to feel as though it would be so easy to wake up one day and realize that I’d spent 20 years wallowing in the memory of the World Trade Center.” Her report: “If you ever want to feel love from a stranger, respect, admiration and some kind of brother/sisterhood from a total stranger, go to London and tell everyone that you meet, you’re a New Yorker…. Even if I had tried not to think about September 11th on my trip, London was determined to bring it up every time I opened my mouth and they heard my accent, or lack of accent, however you look at it.”

: San Francisco : Meanwhile, Nick Denton left London and skipped New York (against my advice) and headed straight back to San Francisco, only to be depressed and disgusted by the vagrants and their enablers who have taken over. This yields letters and Ken Layne piling on, too. I lived in San Francisco too many years ago (can it be 20?!) and loved it — I was a 20-odd-year-old columnist and man about town. But much of what Denton skewers was true then, too. There is a continuum from the Gold Rush to the 60s to John The Rat Traitor Superdufus Walker Lindh — there is its tolerance, as a good thing, taken too far; there is its smugness elevated to the level of a political statement; there is its insularity, a pillar of its society. It’s a small town, smaller the longer you’re there. It’s pretty. The food is good. The weather is better than Denton will admit (what, London’s better?). But it is too cute by half and not nearly as important as it wishes. Some days, I think being unimportant sounds OK.

: New York : Meanwhile, I stay in New York because I’m too scared to leave on a jet plane. Like Rossi, though, I fear that every day is marked by 9.11. Just today, I looked up at a dark, low cloud scraping the skyscrapers at Times Square and I thought of the death cloud. Everytime I look at the face of a New York or Port Authority cop or firefighter, I think, “Glad you weren’t there;” they weren’t the faces I saw that morning, the faces I still see in dreams. But I also remember the things I’ve started to forget about life in New York a few months ago: The subways no longer stop for hours with threats or fears, for example. No, we’re not getting back to normal; that will never be. We’re just finding a new water level of different.

Poor Tom Ridge?
: The NY Times today argues that we should not label him Tom “Do Nothing” Ridge but Tom “No Win” Ridge, saying that our head of homeland security has neither the authority nor the capability to get the job done. Ultimately, as in any organization, his authority comes from his boss; it is up to his boss to make this work.

: Ridge gives his solution: Reorganize the government. Easy for him to say. Sounds the a bureacrat fighting bureacrats — the war that will go on longer than the war on terrorism itself.

: Maybe Tom should start by issuing an axe to every cockpit in America (see below).

Unsafe at any altitude
: Just when I think that flying may be OK again… Fox News just reported that a man was restrained on a Miami-Buenos Aires flight trying to crash into the cockpit. The crew hit him with a fire axe.

An Olympic event
: So the Olympics relented and will let us bring our tattered flag from the World Trade Center into the opening ceremonies. How frigging big of them.

Here’s how I want it to play out:

As soon as the flag enters the stadium, the entire audience should rise and sing God Bless America — spontaneously, unanimously, reverently, defiantly.

I’ll be damned if I’m going to hide like some PC mouse just because other countries don’t like us. This is our country. We have been attacked. We are prevailing through it all. We will be united and proud and strong together. We will show it.

We will bring our flag into our stadium.

We should rise as one voice to sing in praise and hope.

Can we spread this meme in two days? Bill O’Reilley could do it.

: The LA Times says the IOC is anti-American.

Absence makes the blog grow… slower
: I confess I’ve been remiss in blogging duties the last few days. The real world intrudes. Money. Life. What bothers.

Let’s roll… the videotape
: Sometime ago, I complained that video taken by French filmmakers inside the World Trade Center was not being released. Now it is. The scenes will be shown on CBS next month and the filmmakers talk to Vanity Fair (quoted in USA Today) now.

Bigger than… what?
: Norman Mailer tells the BBC that “nothing compares in magnitude to the attacks on New York and Washington. This includes the atom bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki which ended the Second World War.”

The facts
: The Council on Foreign Relations is building a good reference site on terrorism with new Q&As on Abu Sayyaf, Iraq, and Somalia. [via Die Zeit]

History
: In the London Review of Books [via Die Zeit, again] comes a fascinating history of Islam from the perspective of Tariq Ali, who was raised a nonbeliever.

There were many advantages in being an unbeliever. Threatened with divine sanctions by family retainers, cousins or elderly relatives – ‘If you do that Allah will be angry’ or ‘If you don’t do this Allah will punish you’ – I was unmoved. Let him do his worst, I used to tell myself, but he never did, and that reinforced my belief in his non-existence.

Even after thwarting every attempt to give him a religious education, Ali went on to learn the history of Islam from a political perspective and he begins his history:

Judaism, Christianity and Islam all began as versions of what we would today describe as political movements. They were credible belief-systems which aimed to make it easier to resist imperial oppression, to unite a disparate people, or both. If we look at early Islam in this light, it becomes apparent that its Prophet was a visionary political leader and its triumphs a vindication of his action programme. Bertrand Russell once compared early Islam to Bolshevism, arguing that both were ‘practical, social, unspiritual, concerned to win the empire of this world’. By contrast, he saw Christianity as ‘personal’ and ‘contemplative’. Whether or not the comparison is apt, Russell had grasped that the first two decades of Islam had a distinctly Jacobin feel. Sections of the Koran have the vigour of a political manifesto, and at times the tone in which it addresses its Jewish and Christian rivals is as factional as that of any left-wing organisation. The speed with which it took off was phenomenal….