545 people vs. 300,000,000 Concerned Americans
 
EVERY CONCERNED AMERICAN CITIZEN NEEDS TO READ THIS AND THINK ABOUT WHAT THIS JOURNALIST HAS SCRIPTED IN THIS MESSAGE. READ IT  AND THEN REALLY THINK ABOUT OUR CURRENT POLITICAL DEBACLE.??

Charley Reese has been a journalist for 49 years.

545  PEOPLE?
By Charlie Reese??

Politicians are the only people in the world  who create problems and then campaign against them.??Have you ever  wondered, if both the Democrats and the Republicans are against deficits, WHY do we have deficits???Have you ever wondered, if  all the politicians are against inflation and high taxes, WHY do we have  inflation and high taxes???You and I don’t propose a federal budget.  The president does.??You and I don’t have the  Constitutional authority to vote on appropriations. The House of  Representatives does.??You and I don’t write the tax code, Congress  does.??You and I don’t set fiscal policy, Congress does.??You  and I don’t control monetary policy, the Federal Reserve  Bank does.??One hundred senators, 435 congressmen, one  president, and nine Supreme Court justices equates to 545 human  beings out of the 300 million are directly, legally, morally,  and individually responsible for the domestic problems that plague  this country.??I excluded the members of the Federal Reserve  Board because that problem was created by the  Congress.   In 1913, Congress delegated its Constitutional duty  to provide a sound currency to a federally chartered, but private, central bank.??I excluded all the special interests and lobbyists for a  sound reason.. They have no legal authority.  They have no ability to coerce a senator, a congressman, or a president to do one cotton-picking thing.   I don’t care if they offer a politician $1 million dollars in cash.  The  politician has the power to accept or reject it. No matter what  the lobbyist promises, it is the legislator’s responsibility  to determine  how he votes.??Those 545 human beings spend much of their energy  convincing you that what they did is not their fault.    They cooperate in this common con regardless of party.?What  separates a politician from a normal human being is an  excessive amount of gall.   No normal  human being would have the gall of a  Speaker, who stood up and criticized the President for creating  deficits..   The president can only propose a budget.    He cannot force the Congress to accept  it.??The Constitution, which is the supreme law of the  land, gives sole responsibility to the House of  Representatives for originating and approving appropriations and taxes.   Who is the speaker of the House?    Nancy Pelosi. She is  the leader of the majority party. She and  fellow House members, not the president, can approve any budget they want.  If the president vetoes it, they can pass it over his veto if  they agree  to.??It seems inconceivable to me that a nation of 300 million cannot replace 545 people who stand convicted — by present facts — of  incompetence and irresponsibility.   I can’t think of a  single domestic problem  that is not traceable directly to those 545 people.  When you fully  grasp the plain truth that 545 people exercise the power of the federal government, then it must follow that what exists is what they want to  exist.? ?If the tax code is unfair, it’s because they want it  unfair.??If the budget is in the red, it’s because they want it in  the red ..??If the Army & Marines are in   IRAQ ,  it’s because they want them in IRAQ ??If they do not  receive social security but are on an elite retirement plan not available  to the people, it’s because they want it that way.??There are no  insoluble government problems.??Do not let these 545 people shift  the blame to bureaucrats, whom they hire and whose jobs they can  abolish; to lobbyists, whose gifts and advice they can reject; to  regulators, to whom they give the power to regulate and from whom they can  take this power.   Above all, do not let them con you into  the belief that there exists disembodied mystical forces like “the  economy,” “inflation,” or “politics” that prevent them from doing  what they take an oath to do.? ?Those 545 people, and they  alone, are responsible.? ?They, and they alone, have the  power.??They, and they alone, should be held accountable by the  people who are their bosses.??Provided the voters have the  gumption to manage their own employees.??We should VOTE THEM OUT of office and clean up their mess!? ?Charlie Reese is a former columnist of the Orlando Sentinel  Newspaper.? 
 
 

I would agree that some groups of Muslims do indeed act like flocks of sheep and follow their particular shepard unquestioningly.

You must agree that it is self-evidently not possible for the somewhat fractionated and ideologically estranged Islamic leadership to exert effective control on each and every Muslim in the world 24/7, especially one that has inculcated into himself the very jihadic duty that I say was instrumental in the attack in the middle of Ft Hood.

However, all that said, the whole purpose of Shari’a is to control the actions of every Muslim down to the most intimate aspects of a Muslim’s life.

A jihadic act is one of doing grief unto infidels in both small and large ways. In Islam, under Shari’a Law it is perfectly ok for a Muslim to lie, cheat, steal from, and even kill an infidel. All of their kindness and humanity is completely reserved for their brother Muslims, but they recognize that such behavior is out of bounds in the West and would get themselves imprisoned, so they blend in until and unless they are either commanded to take part in a jihadic operation, or, as in the case of Hasan, they perceive it their duty to act immediately against the hated infidel, possibly because of the conflict going on in their heads over the wildly divergent tenets they are trying to live with in the US.

Major declarations of jihad, such as the one in za fatwa from the Whahabbi Sunni cleric against the US, are, as I said before, a declaration of war, but it still takes much further direction, training, financing, and logistics to implement more specific and serious jihadic acts involving multiple actors.

But, for a single actor, working alone and without effective supervision, all of this is not necessary. He decides to act, and then does so. After all, he is in the middle of a huge US Army base, and is surrounded with “the enemy Muslim-killing infidels” all day, so supervision is sketchy at best.

You should go to the WAPO site and pull up the 50 slide presentation Hasan gave at Walter Reed, and then read the comments there. Jim Anderson has a great piece there.

“There is no sentence of mine that says Muslims are passive sheep, either, merely that they are in general under some constraints from their leadership, or we would have far more jihadic actions going off all around.”

comment #55:
“I suppose this passivity of the flock is encouraged by their leadership in order for them to retain the power to declare jihad and other actions and not to be undercut by a multitude of lone operators.”

Am I not reading that sentence in #55 correctly? There may be a distinction between those two statements . . . but honestly I fail to see it. I believe that (unlike many commenters here) you maintain clear and coherent ideas from post to post, so I’m very agreeable to the idea that what you meant isn’t getting through to me. If I’m just failing to comprehend what you are trying to express, then that’s my error — but I have to go with what I see, and what I see is contradictory.

“It is obvious that a single individual, isolated to a large degree from his kin and leadership, and being subjected to the serious internal stress I spoke of (the Islamic command to accept and perform jihad . . .”

Again, if he is cut off from his “leadership” then who gave him the command to commit jihad? He regularly attended services in Texas — wasn’t that his leadership?
It seems you are working backwards. He was a Muslim jihadi terrorist worrior, and therefore he was cut off from foreign religious leaders that were advicating he perform jihad since he certainly wasn’t getting those commands from his local religious authorities. You’ve presupposed the jihad, than used the lack of jihad authority to create the tension that made him commit jihad.

Let me ask this — can a Muslim go postal WITHOUT it being a jihad? If so, what factors should we look for to distinguish the two?

There is no doubt that Hasan allegedly held extreme viewpoints in regards to being Muslim. There is the very real possiblity that these viewpoints “justified” his actions in his mind. No argument. But these attitudes are abnormal as evidenced by the lack of mass jihad among Muslims. Not the concept of jihad itself, but the fact that he was ENGAGED AND COMMANDED to commit jihad.

Look at the abortion snipers and bombers. The vast majority of them do so believing that they are compelled to do so by their Christian faith (Eric Rudolph, for example). The actions they take are not a problem with Christianity — its a problem with being an unstable loon. Their faith gives them a mental justification, but it isn’t the genesis of the action.

That Hasan may have believed he was religiously compelled to do this may well turn out to be true (we’ll find out after the investigators have a nice long talk with him). But would he have not done this if he was a Christian? Your analysis implies that but for the existence of the concept of jihad in the Muslim faith, there would have been no shooting . . . and I don’t see that the facts support that yet. Again, would Eric Rudolph have bombed the Olympics but for being a Christian? Maybe not — but it was his zealotry that perverted his theology, not the theology that perverted the man. The fault doesn’t lie with the religion, but with the man. A man sinking down into insanity will inherently drift toward extreme thinking. A man who believes that a genocide against the unborn is occuring will seek out beliefs and spiritual leaders that tell him “you’re right”. A man who thinks homosexuals are causing a plague of divine retribution against America will see Phelps at Westboro and say “see? It’s in the Bible!”. But those are crazy people looking retroactively fo a justification for their crazy. That ain’t the Bible’s fault . . . nor is Ft. Hood the fault of the Koran.

At least not yet it isn’t. If we find the jihad order, if we find the jihad confession of Hasan, things may be different. But I believe that if the vast, overwhelmong majorities of Muslims were told to commit jihad, the vast overwhelming majority of them would not do so. It takes a person looking for a reason to go ballistic. The happy and comfortable family man isn’t going to come home and say “sorry honey, looks like I’ve got to go and massacre women and children today. Don’t worry about dinner. Kiss Abdul for me, and make sure Sami does her homework. Now where’s my C-4 . . .”. There’s a reason most jihadis are drawn from either the ranks of the extreme zealots, or from the desperate and destitute. There’s a reason the most fertile recruiting grounds are decrepid refugee camps. They are looking for an excuse to rage against the machine, and “jihad” is a moral justification. They wern’t commanded — they wanted to do it.

I think that distiction is vital.

These quintessential goals of jihad were reiterated by the mass murdering jihadist psychiatrist Nidal Hasan as part of an erstwhile “medical grand rounds” given on June 27, 2007. Although Hasan merely reiterates salient aspects of classical jihad theory (i.e., see slides 35, 39, 42, 43, 44, 45, and 49), this reality is understandably “shocking” to our willfully uninformed elites in the media, military, and government. Nidal Hasan’s presentation concludes, in full accord with classical Islamic doctrine regarding jihad war, (slide 49), “Fighting to establish an Islamic State to please Allah, even by force is condoned by (sic) Islam.”

Unapologetic observations from 1950 by a great 20th century “Islamist” scholar of the Shari’a, G.H. Bousquet, contextualize these ominous trends. Bousquet described Islam itself as “as a doubly totalitarian system,” which, “claimed to impose itself on the whole world and it claimed also, by the divinely appointed Muhammadan law…to regulate down to the smallest details the whole life of the Islamic community and of every individual believer.”

Blockquote>These quintessential goals of jihad were reiterated by the mass murdering jihadist psychiatrist Nidal Hasan as part of an erstwhile “medical grand rounds” given on June 27, 2007. Although Hasan merely reiterates salient aspects of classical jihad theory (i.e., see slides 35, 39, 42, 43, 44, 45, and 49), this reality is understandably “shocking” to our willfully uninformed elites in the media, military, and government. Nidal Hasan’s presentation concludes, in full accord with classical Islamic doctrine regarding jihad war, (slide 49), “Fighting to establish an Islamic State to please Allah, even by force is condoned by (sic) Islam.”

Unapologetic observations from 1950 by a great 20th century “Islamist” scholar of the Shari’a, G.H. Bousquet, contextualize these ominous trends. Bousquet described Islam itself as “as a doubly totalitarian system,” which, “claimed to impose itself on the whole world and it claimed also, by the divinely appointed Muhammadan law…to regulate down to the smallest details the whole life of the Islamic community and of every individual believer.”

Oh, and you do not connect the dots on that score either, busboy. For a devout Muslim, the general fatwa would be equivalent to a declaration of war against the US, and it would be a direct, long-term amplifier to the apparently evolving Islamic stresses on Hasan to do something…something jihadic!

Someone has to explain to me why this so-called “snapped” person elected to assuage his demons by performing a jihadic act, as opposed to any of a million or so other possible “snapped” reactions available to him…including suicide. The simplest answer is that he wished to fulfill his Islamic teachings in the most direct way.

You are bending yourself into a convoluted pretzel to try to avoid calling Hasan’s actions those of a jihadist, which he quite obviously is. And to exaggerate the fact of jihadist organization and management down to each individual at all times is a big leap from what I wrote. Pretselization! There is no sentence of mine that says Muslims are passive sheep, either, merely that they are in general under some constraints from their leadership, or we would have far more jihadic actions going off all around.

It is obvious that a single individual, isolated to a large degree from his kin and leadership, and being subjected to the serious internal stress I spoke of (the Islamic command to accept and perform jihad versus US law, military law and custom, and surrounded by infidels)might well elect to perform a jihadic act with little external input of command except Email or verbal contacts with imams and other Muslims (whose full extent is not yet known for Hasan and his imam, but the possibility of his imam exerting a influence on Hasan’s mental state and the idea of a jihadist action is not to be taken lightly). So this jihadist “snapped”, you say. Right! He snapped exactly in the way that a jihadist would. With all deliberate speed he got rid of his possessions early in the week, bought his guns and ammo, then took them home to load them, slept on it for some time, perhaps days, and them marched to his selected shooting gallery and killed and killed while shouting AA! We will drown in PC yet!

You bend my words again to your ideas of jihad or non-jihad in that I was addressing the general fact that jihad is a controlled–planned and executed– action in most cases but certainly not all of them. Did you pick up on the word MOST in my previous post, or not? It would not have suited your ideas to do so! It should not trouble your mind so to consider HASAN to be following the inner teachings of Islam to kill infidels, to perform a jihadic action, when he “snapped” and shot US soldiers with all deliberation.

It is noteworthy that the incidents of jihadists making a TV display of beheadings and torture, which were small group actions probably not under control of a higher authority, have been largely suppressed by the Islamic powers of late, because they recognize their negative impact on other major Muslim activities in the West, especially in Europe. That is a clear instance of control being applied from “higher authorities” in Islam to suppress jihadic actions of small groups.

Your reference to Christianity is totally misplaced unless you are an apologist for Islam. Do you not understand the imperatives of ANY organization to control their members by one means or another, direct or indirect?
That comment of yours is a misdirection.

You desperately need to read up on Islam if you think that every act of jihad requires a fatwa. It doesn’t. But, that is coverd anyway by the general fatwas against the US–the Greast Satan.

“I suppose this passivity of the flock is encouraged by their leadership in order for them to retain the power to declare jihad and other actions and not to be undercut by a multitude of lone operators.”

a) and this is a Muslim thing? As opposed to another organized theology like Christianity, which encourages its members to think for themselves?
b) People in power probably DO encourage those under them to passively accept orders . . . but to think that they do this specifically to wield the jihad hammer, and not out of the far more likely simple human desire to retain their power, is uncredible to me.

“The tension I spoke of was a continuing one for the life of Hasan. For that matter, it is present in every Muslim all the time. I suspect that a looming event, such as being assigned to a combat zone just may have been the final trigger…”

Now I’m thorughly confused. Something you describe as a “lomming event” that may have ben “the final trigger” is indicative of a person who snapped. That has ABSOLUTELY NOTHING to do with being Muslim.
As you’ve stated, Muslims are passive sheep that blindly march out of the mosque in a murderous rage when the iman says “kill”. Your posts are concerned with jihad. But (as you’ve described) jihad requires an order to commit it. There is no such order in the Hasan case that I’m aware of — did his iman in Texas give the order? If so, why was he the only one to go postal?
You’ve taken great pains to detail the hierarchical authority that the imans use to order the blind sheep around, and how they must murder when commanded. If that was a remotely relevant issue in this sad case, then of necessity there would have to be that top-down instruction, that fatwa from the iman. Yet, it isn’t here.
Now, you can say that SOME iman SOMEWHERE has issued a fatwa, and that Hasan decided to follow that. However, if you do you’ve just destroyed your entire “Muslim sheep sub-divided into strictly controlled tribal and regional groups” analysis. Now we’re back to dangerous nutjob who went over the edge, who may have felt motivated to act by his nutjob interpretation of his religion and his world. That may be the case . . . but it’s not indicative of the Muslim religion.

You’ve taken what appears to be a person going crazy and laid the blame on a tenet of their faith . . . and described how that tenet was NOT in play during this circumstance. So because jihad had nothing to do with Ft. Hood that we know so far . . . you’re concerned about the Muslim ideas of jihad?

That doesn’t sound like a conclusion drawn from a situation, but a pre-existing fear looking for a fact pattern. A Muslim went postal? Must be the Muslim death squad command.

By the way, a fatwah and/or a jihad declaration must be publicly expressed. It’s not something you whisper in someone’s ear.