The following paper was written on October 9, 2004. It’s republished here for the readers of this blog hoping they will find it to be of some interest. 

By Con George-Kotzabasis 

A deadly Trojan horse has been placed in the midst of the metropolises of Western civilization and, like Troy, is threatening its destruction. Throughout Europe, North America, and Australia, the belly of this deadly Horse is already bursting open delivering and unleashing a horde of fanatic barbarians on the cities of the civilized world, whose holy agenda decrees the wiping -out of Western institutions and their open, tolerant and free societies, and the genocide of their peoples by the fire of Allah’s hell. This is the nightmare scenario that countries of the economically developed and free world are facing as a result of their humanitarian and generous, but replete with folly, immigration policies that allowed such vast numbers of mostly unassimilable Muslim immigrants with ‘exponential’ birth rates, to become permanent residents and citizens of their countries. (In the Netherlands almost one third of children under the age of thirteen are Muslim. No wonder that the great Islamic scholar Bernard Lewis argues, that “Europe will be Islamic by the end of the century”.) As inexorably, not an insubstantial number of these Muslims of the diaspora will become terrorist – fodder for the likes of bin Laden, as Mohammed Atta, the Western educated ringleader, as well as so many other terrorists who have been also been educated in Western universities, of the murderous group of 9/11 has shown, whose terrorist cell was hatched in Hamburg Germany. This is especially so for many young unemployed Muslims in the West, who have been brought up within the strict confines of their rigid religion and who are therefore psychologically more susceptible to the calls of their fundamentalist imams for a Jihad against the infidels, making them therefore prone to become martyrs in this holy war against them. Hence the terrorist barbarians are not at the gates of civilization but inside its gates.

September 11 was a wake up call to all governments of the democratic world to the mortal threat that Muslim fundamentalists posed to their peoples. However, despite the exploding sound of this call, only a few governments are willing to recognize this great danger -whose gathering dark clouds teeming with lightning bolts are hovering over the cities of the world threatening their peoples with total annihilation -and stand-up against it. Apparently, only a handful of them have the intellectual capacity, imagination, and historical insight to perceive this great danger, and the resolve and moral mettle to take the necessary relentless measures and actions to prevent this catastrophe of biblical proportions from happening. America, Britain, Australia, Italy, Poland and the thirty other countries who have deployed their armed forces to fight global terror in Iraq under their politically and morally strong and historically savvy leaderships, will be acknowledged and renowned by history as the countries that saved Western civilization from this lethal attack by this horde of fanatically necrophilous barbarians. The no quarter given, relentless retaliation of these governments to this existential challenge of global terrorism to the civilized peoples of the world, will be totally justified by future historians, as has been the stand of those nations who fought against Nazi and Communist totalitarianism and who made the necessary and stupendous sacrifices to save the world from these two regimes of evil in the Twentieth century.

DESPITE US ERRORS AN WITHDRAWAL IS UNTENABLE

Even if one concedes that serious mistakes have been made by the Americans post March 2003 after the defeat of Saddam, which was part and parcel of the war against global terror, such as indiscriminately disbanding all Iraqi military units, and not dealing with the incipient insurgency of urban terrorists last April by using overwhelming force against it and nipping it in the bud, instead of ceasing their military offensive, as they did in Fallujah, and passing the control of that city to a former Iraqi general, who proved to be completely inept in disarming the insurgents. The strategic goal of the military planners against the insurgency, should have been the prompt and devastating defeat of the insurgents in this city, either by their mass capture or mass annihilation, which would serve as a deadly example to all other insurgents in other hot-bed provinces in Iraq, with the high probability that this would have led to their complete demoralization and surrender, as I had suggested in a previous paper of mine last April, which was sent to the U.S. Embassy in Canberra. (It seems now that the Pentagon is using exactly this strategy, as the capture of Samarra by American and Iraqi forces and the elimination of the insurgents, has shown.) As the outcome of this erratic implementation of the Pentagon’s military plan, by starting an offensive against the insurgents and then stopping it halfway before achieving its goals, Iraq has now become “the crucible of global terror”, to quote Tony Blair. This is the glaring fact that all governments who have committed themselves to fight global terror are presently confronting.

To turn tail and run now from Iraq would not be merely foolish, it would be the greatest military error against the war on terror, as it would deliver a tremendous victory to the terrorists on a global scale. It would reinforce in the minds of the terrorists, as the withdrawal of US forces from Beirut and Mogadishu had done, as a result of the casualties Americans had suffered in these two cities, by presidents Reagan and Clinton respectively, that America and other Western nations lack the resolve to stand-up to them and fight, and will induce them to be even more lethally aggressive against the ‘cowardly’ West. Hence the critics and opponents of the war, who blame the Bush administration for exacerbating terrorism in Iraq and call for the US withdrawal from Iraq, are purblind and cannot see that such action would be the greatest error that one could commit against the war on global terror. It would surpass by a great order of magnitude all the mistakes that the Pentagon committed in Iraq. If indeed the opponents of the war are right, that the US incursion of the country and the overthrow of Saddam has strengthened and intensified terror in Iraq, then the reasonable course for nations who believe that there is no other alternative but to fight and defeat this global menace, would be for these nations to deploy their armed forces in Iraq and inflict a deadly blow on global terrorism, by defeating the insurgents decisively. Or if they are unwilling to spill the blood of their own soldiers, they should at the least support morally and politically the soldiers of the nations, i.e., the American – led coalition, who are brave enough to sacrifice their own lives in the cause of global security and freedom.

This would be the wise course to follow, to correct the mistakes of the Americans, instead of aggravating and compounding these mistakes, by running away from Iraq, and in spite of these errors (in all wars errors are made ), to unflinchingly support America in this historic and deadly confrontation with these medieval barbarians, whom only America’s military might can defeat comprehensively, among all other nations in the world.

THE ENEMY WITHIN

But the war against global terror and Muslim fanaticism will not be won, unless the governments who have pledged themselves to fight global terror also deal with and tackle the cunning and deceitful enemy that lies within their borders. To carry out this far from easy task, these governments have to realize that they can no longer be tolerant, on the basis of laws of non-discrimination on religious grounds, to the breeding grounds of terrorism that entangle, ivy-like, the edifices of Western cities, i.e., the mosques and Islamic schools, of whom a minority of, but highly influential, imams and teachers, preach hate against the mores of Western civilization and of their peoples, inciting young Muslims to enlist in a holy war against the Great Satan, America, and on all other nations that embody the cosmopolitan values of Judeo-Greco-Roman civilization.

The cardinal question therefore is, how to sterilize and make barren the breeding grounds of terrorism that are ensconced in the cities of the West whose deadly offspring are the enemy within. Since the idea of repatriation and resettlement by means of a monetary incentive for millions of Muslims, who have now made their home in Western countries, is no longer feasible – fathered by that prophet of British politics Enoch Powell, who in his Birmingham “Rivers of Blood” speech on April 20 1968, clearly and ominously predicted the deadly conflicts that would arise between Britons and British citizens of colonial background who had settled in England, and who with prescience had opposed the so called humanitarian immigration policies of both Labor and Conservative governments – one has to consider other lines of action. One of them would be the immediate cessation of funding these mosques and schools by governments, unless the former adopt in their curricula a primary undiluted course of ‘no leaks’ assimilation for their students to the mainstream culture of the nation that they have chosen freely to live in, and put an end to all ‘traffickers’ of the disastrous policy of multiculturalism, which with mathematical precision divides a nation. Another one would be the swift passing of special, indeed emergency, legislation that would make it easier for the police and for the relevant government officials to jail or deport, radical imams and teachers who propagate, either openly or cunningly and insidiously, a holy war against the West. Furthermore, to attenuate and diminish the high birth rate of Muslim families, governments should introduce a policy of negative incentives, which could stop this high birth rate such as paying to all families of the nation, children’s allowances up to the number of four children. Any children born beyond that number would not be entitled to any allowances. Nor would any allowances be paid to children born from a second marriage, whose fathers or mothers already have four children from their previous marriages. This measure would bring the birth rate as close as it is possible to the common standard of Western societies and to the ethos and aspirations of motivated modern nuclear families. It would also stop the ‘racketeering’ of phony separations and single motherhoods, whose deliberate purpose is to abuse and defraud the system of family payments, and whose side – effect is, the perennial continuation of voluntary unemployment among this group of men and women.  

Undoubtedly, these harsh measures will raise a hurricane of protests from Muslim organizations of the diaspora and from Muslim states. This will be followed by a chorus of international lawyers and of the liberal intelligentzia from the well-heeled countries of the West, who will denounce these measures as brutal and heartless to poor families, viciously racist, and chauvinistic, striking a terrible blow to democracy and opening the way to an authoritarian state and even worse. But this soft potpourri of legal and intelligence gnomes are unwilling to recognize, and it might be beyond their depth, that the grossly mistaken immigration policies of the nations of the West are now coming to haunt them with their destruction. And the only way to prevent this destruction is for the governments of these nations to take tragically severe measures to correct this gross mistake of past governments that now threatens their peoples with extinction, either by weapons of mass destruction or by the upshot of demographics.

DEFEAT OF TERROR LIES IN ITS LACK OF SUCCESS

One must recognize that the terrorists are technically educated barbarians, with PC’s in one hand and with the distorted fragments of the Koran in the other – who consider it to be the only fountain of knowledge – lacking the open- mind of a universal education; unread in the great writings and literature of all peoples and of all ages; mentally untouched by their rich Arab culture, literature and philosophy; unread in the great philosophical writings of Al-Farabi, who placed rationality above the revealed truth of the Sharia nor in the equally brilliant writings of Ibn-Sina (Avicenna ) and of Ibn-Rushid (Averroes ), who both placed human reason above religion, and of Omar Khayyam, who never believed in Providence or in any other World but this one, valuing the sensual pleasures of this world as the fill to the brim of life. Being ignorant of the existence of this great Arab intellectual treasure, that was an essential element of the cornerstone of Western civilization and of the Italian Renaissance, their minds locked in the fanaticism of fundamentalist Islam and its death-cult, they have no respect for any other peoples’ religions except their own. Instead they zealously believe that the followers of all other religions are destined to go to hell and only Muslims will enter the gates of infinite paradise, especially if they are anointed by martyrdom. It is of such stuff that these implacable enemies of Western civilization are made.

Confronting such suicidal fanatics, who fervently believe that the West and its Great Satan, America, are responsible and culpable for all the ills that have befallen upon Muslim countries; determined to destroy this source of evil by chemical, biological and nuclear weapons, as soon as they are in their possession, the political leaders of the West, and especially of America, are deprived of any soft options and are forced to take on the hard option of the “unsheathed sword”.

The art of diplomacy, the laudable deliberations of the United Nations for peace making, which could be effective when one deals with a rational foe, are totally ineffective when one confronts an irrational enemy, whose only ‘rational’ communication, in his hearing, is with God. That is why the academics who teach their students the ‘management’ of terrorism by a diplomatic demarche as the only rational way to counter and thwart it, rather than war, which is so costly in human and economic terms and without making certain its defeat, are not only starry-eyed, but also debar themselves from the disciplines of politics and of war strategy. Management presupposes and involves rational processes, which to the terrorists is terra incognita, and therefore with algorithmic precision is bound to fail.

But wherein lies the answer to this conundrum of how to defeat global terror and its state sponsors? History’s edict provides the clear and indefeasible answer to this intricate issue. When a nation fights a swarm of religious fanatics, depriving these fanatics of the ability to launch successful operations against their enemies is the most effective way to defeat them, as the terrorists, being no longer successful in their attacks against the West and in their attacks against the American-led coalition in Iraq, will find the “mouse of doubt” implanted in their hearts (a doubt whose epiphany will reveal to them, that after all they might not be in God’s favor) gnawing, slowly but surely, at their belief that they are the instruments of Allah. This, in itself, will compel them to abandon their cause.

This is why the successful outcome of the war in Iraq for the U.S. – led coalition and the introduction of democracy to its ravaged people, is of such vital importance. The decisive defeat of the terrorist insurgents will unfold a dawn of a bright future for the people of Iraq, and also commence the beginning of the quick end of global terror.

What is your opinion…

Люблю жизнь, люблю Стокгольм, и кофе в МакДональдс сегодня был по-особенному вкусным!
Конец ноября – как же я счастлива!

Prepositions of Place:

Exemplos contextualizados são sempre a melhor maneira de se estudar palavras soltas em Inglês, independente da classe gramatical em que ela se encaixe. Quando associamos uma frase contendo a palavra em quetão à uma imagem, a aplicação desta palavra acontece mais naturalmente. Observe os exemplos abaixo, eles contextualizam preposições de lugar.

   The lamp is above/over the table.

                               The meat is on the table

                               The cat is under the table

      The truck is in front of the car.

                                              The car is behind the truck.

    The bird is in/inside the cage.

  The temperature is below zero.

     The cat is between the two black dogs.

     The man is standing among the pigeons

    People sit opposite/across from one another on the trains in London.

    This guy is leaning against the wall.

Вот дошли руки написать о том, как я move my ass to Europe, а точнее, в Швецию. Практически сразу от друзей и не-друзей-а-так-знакомых посыпались письма, в которых была одна и та же повторяющаяся фраза: “Поздравляю, сбылась твоя мечта! Ты, наверное, сейчас так частлива в Европе!”

“Елки-палки,- прочитав в который раз это восклицательное утверждение, подумала я, – откуда вам знать, счастлива я или нет? Откуда вам знать, исполнилась мечта или нет, и вообще, была ли она?” А еще почему-то многие подумали, что я вдруг, сойдя с трапа самолета, стала миллионером. Вот это меня искренне удивило! Как-будто каждому, кто прилетел в ЕС, вместо багажа в аэропорту выдают чемодан с деньгами, устраивают на работу, дают квартиру и личного водителя. Так вот теперь у меня вопрос, товарищи, кто дает-то??? Ну, или предположительно, кто может дать? А то я бы пошла, взяла. Как ни странно, уважаемые други, человек в ЕС с украинским, бля, паспортом (прости, Господи) – то же, что кусок дерьма (ну, прям как в Москве), но только здесь даже тому, кого считают дерьмом, принято улыбаться (а вот тут существенное отличие от Москвы, хотя от этих улыбок только хуже). Чтобы украинцам было не так грустно, скажу, что русских не любят еще больше. Кому-то легче стало? Так вот, уехать заграницу не было моей мечтой. Ну уехала, и что? Виза на год, чемодан с деньгами мне не вручили, и хорошую работу не предложили. Автоматом к билету на самолет не прилагается перевязанный лентами конвертик – путевка в счастливую и беззаботную жизнь. Везде и всегда всего надо добиваться. Самому, или с чьей-то помощью – это уж у кого как. Я пока добилась очередной цели – приоткрыть для себя занавес. А мечта… она впереди.

Ladies, how fantastic would this be above your next holiday gathering? I love it! Genuine pearls, gold-plated vintage beads and chain, and an authentic vintage Chanel silk scarf wrapped shade make this gold-plated three-armed chandelier glow with modern and regal opulence. I just might beat out a nice hanging swag of mistletoe.

Chanel Silk Scarf Chandelier, $9,200 | Vivre.com

See my blog at RED ROOM:

www.redroom.com/blog/divajc/gratitude-vs-appreciation

I Appreciate Life to learn lessons
My soul yearns to experience
I Appreciate Love that leads me in Divine Spirit
I Appreciate Joy of a new day
I Appreciate eyes to see beauty
I Appreciate ears to hear birds
I Appreciate Others who follow and lead
I Appreciate Work and Strength
I Appreciate Knowledge
I Appreciate a seeking Heart
I Appreciate Rage. It makes me think
It makes me act, react and ponder
I Appreciate technology that lets me say
I AM the Appreciative Goddess!

Ice creeping inside
Inch by inch from the wall.
The cold is coming,
I can feel it in my bones,
Slowly taking me over.

In Mexico, the outside doesn’t stay there. In New York, the outside is pretty much like the inside—manmade. Unless you go to Central Park. But that’s manmade, too. And very well-behaved. We do get the odd mosquito, and a fly or two may invade our apartments. Even, on occasion, a tiny spider. Roaches don’t count. They’re inside creatures. So, really, are rats and mice. Central Park has plenty of those, too.

Mexico is different. Even a gringo-ridden town like San Miguel. The other night a friend was leaving, about to go through the doorway from the courtyard to the yard. There’s a light there, and he said, casually, flicking his head toward the upper-right corner of the door frame, “Is that a black widow? Looks like it.” I hadn’t noticed. There were a pair of them, and they’d already covered the corner with a 3-D web. They scurried for cover as we scrutinized them. I couldn’t see the belly, but the body shape fit. “I’ll ask the gardener to kill them,” I said. The next day, I swept off the visible web and what looked like a piece of yellow pollen, small and round, maybe an egg pouch. The spiders were hiding inside the door frame, where there’s a space—it’s old.

I draw the line at black widows, but otherwise my arachnid tolerance has increased remarkably here. Spiders come into the house. So do scorpions, beetles of all kinds, lizards, caterpillars, the odd grasshopper, other bugs and the occasional bird. The other day, I was sitting on the couch, reading. The screen door was slightly ajar.  A house wren flew in and headed straight for the big window over the couch, where it attempted to beat its brains out—or, at least, to break its bill—against the glass. Here was a living example of the dangers of birds and glass—except in this case the bird was trying to fly through to the actual outside, as opposed to being fooled by a reflection.

I finally caught the wren with the aid of my trusty critter-catcher, a clean yogurt container. I held the bird in my hand, feeling its heart beat. I took it outside and set it onto the horizontal section of an ancient Mesquite tree that leans out of the terraced garden on one side of the courtyard, is propped by an iron pole with a cradle, and then angles its way up and across the courtyard.

The wren keeled forward to rest on its lower mandible; its beak was wide open, but its eyes were shut. I could see that its heart was beating. I stood next to it, and it opened the eye on my side. So I moved back, out of range. Gradually it raised its head and almost shut its beak. I could see, from the doorway where I stood with binoculars, a piece of dirt or wood in the space between the mandibles.

Finally it stood erect, eyes open, and looked around. Its beak was closed. It took a step, then scampered up the sloping trunk. I was filled with joy and relief. I hope it was the same wren I saw and heard a couple of days later, grazing on the Mesquite, pulling caterpillars and bugs out of the chinks in the bark and devouring them. It was scolding away as it grazed, but obviously oblivious to me.

The wren, I suppose, could have happened in suburbia USA, but not so much the scorpions. I don’t like scorpions, but I don’t always kill them. Something about this place makes me less prone to kill small intruders. The scorpions are not huge—all the ones I’ve found in the house so far have been only about 3-4 inches long, a shiny bronze in color. A little evil-looking, in truth.

When I first came down here, last February, I found a succession of them—fortunately, always right out in the open, and mostly in the bathroom. The first one was on the window screen one night when I went to close the curtain. I went downstairs, got a yogurt container (I save them—they beat Tupperware for all-purpose food storage, and they’re free) and managed to get the scorpion to drop into it by nudging it with the lid. I slapped the lid on, went outside, across the yard, down the stairs to the door that opens onto the callejon, and down the block to the vacant lot that serves as an estacionamento and occasional stone quarry. I shook the scorpion out into a pile of rocks near one wall—well away from my person—and went home to bed.

After that, I found two or three more in fairly quick succession—one on top of a pile of towels, one on the bathroom door frame. Those I killed, although I don’t really like stepping on them. One I partially squashed and then, coward that I am, got it into the yogurt container I now keep in the batheroom. I put the lid on and took it out to the rubbish bin in the corner of the courtyard. When the gardener looked inside a couple of days later, it was dead.

On the morning of the June day on which I was flying to New York for a month, I watched from bed as the cat stretched languidly up to a dark shape in the corner of the wall next to the door from the outside stair landing (it has a space under it that a mouse could probably stroll through). I didn’t want the cat to kill and eat the scorpion, so I killed it instead, dropping it to the floor and stepping on it (one reason I always wear flip-flops in the house). After I’d disposed of it, I saw the cat licking the floor where I’d killed it. I reflected that the cat had very likely killed and eaten scorpions before. Maybe the stinger isn’t so poisonous when ingested.

The cat belongs to my friend and landlady, Sue, who lives in the main house on the property (she also employs the gardener). When Sue’s away I feed the cat, and she includes me on her daily rounds even when Sue’s home, dropping by for a little water or milk and sometimes a quick cuddle. She has the run of the grounds and all the buildings, and turns up on my roof or anywhere. She stalks, kills and sometimes eats anything she finds. Once I watched her lurking in the Oleander bed. A lizard started up the wall of Sue’s water tank, about 15 feet away. The cat was across the yard in a flash, the lizard in its mouth

At first I tried to rescue the lizards, but a/ there is really no place to put them in the sun that the cat can’t get to, and b/ even if she didn’t get to them I’d invariably find them the next day, dead. So now I generally let nature take its course. We’ve had an invasion of caterpillars in the last couple of weeks. I’ve taken a number outside and released them in the yard. Tonight, the cat came in for dinner and, on her way across the floor, stopped to eat a couple of new arrivals. Lagniappe.

I draw the line at butterflies and birds, though. Once the cat brought a bird into the house. I was up here in the 2^nd floor loft office that overlooks the living room, so I saw her come in. When she has prey, she gives a peculiar low howl, very different from her usual squeaky miaow. I rushed down the stairs and rescued the bird. It was small and gray, and its wings were so askew I feared one was broken. I picked it up and smoothed its wings. I could find nothing that looked like a serious injury. I put it in a paper bag, as I’d learned to do in Central Park from my friend Deb Allen, a birder and professional bird photographer who is as knowledgeable about birds as anyone I’ve ever met. She always carries a paper bag with her in case she happens on a bird that needs rescuing. Once she snatched a Robin from the jaws of a large bullfrog in the Ramble.

The bird was obviously a fledgling, but such a mess I couldn’t quite tell what it was, perhaps a dove. I put it on top of a bureau in the 3^rd-floor bedroom. The bag permits it to breathe but calms it. I clipped the opening shut with a clothes pin. After a few hours, the bird was cheeping. I opened the bag slightly and saw that it was indeed an Inca Dove. It had come to itself enough to assume its proper shape. I carried the bag out to the balcony-terrace, thinking to leave the bag open on the floor, but something made me look up to see the cat peering from the roof. I took the bag back inside.

A couple of hours later the bag was rustling. I stupidly opened it up and the dove flew out and crashed into the wall. I rescued it again, carried it out to the wide balcony railing, and set it down. The cat was nowhere to be seen. After a few seconds, it took off. Again, relief.

The cat is, yes, a killer. I have no doubt that she could make her own way as a feral cat if she had to. Yet she also likes to drop suddenly to the ground, floor, bed or couch and roll over on her back to have her tummy rubbed. In the mornings she likes to get under the covers. Thus the dual nature of us all.

I can’t blame the cat for being a cat. When she brings her prey into the house, she’s part of the outside coming in. When she wants to sleep warmly on a chilly morning, she allies herself with the manmade inside. She has the best of both worlds, and passes back and forth between them with ease. Whereas I, and most other people, venture into the outside with care, with proper equipment, with sunblock and water and hat. Even in New York City, entirely manmade, we dress to protect ourselves from the weather and whatever lies underfoot. If we, too, are killers, we disguise our natures. We’re civilized.

When love is dead

Как я уже писала, занесла меня судьба в Швецию. Может быть, я как-нибудь и напишу подробнее о своем здесь пребывании, но не сегодня (в виду отсутствия русской клавиатуры, пользуюсь транслитом, что просто действует мне на нервы).
А вот о том, каков ноябрь в Швеции, я расскажу. Точнее, покажу свою реакцию на отсутствие солнца, ежедневные дожди и холод.

Handel House, originally uploaded by fionajay.

In the Handel Museum in Germany. I love the blue tone of the light in this shot!

Enjoy today’s photo! If you like the photo, please drop a comment to the original photographer at Flickr.

This version is edited, and has boring bits removed.

I love my green and blue Frazier Fir christmas tree. Every year, I search for only this variety of evergreen – 6 feet tall and perfect on all sides. I’ve found beautiful ones at Eastern Market, Measdows Farms, and the local Boy Scouts stand on Wilson Boulevard in Arlington, VA. I typically wait until after the first week of December in hopes that the freshness remains until the New Year. =) I know many of you run out on Black Friday and pick up your soon-to-be-dripping-with-tinsel-and-lights-christmas-tree from your local garden shop or charity road side stand. Good for you. But if you feel a little less excited to lug it home – sap, needles, and all – try to find your precious online at Green Valley Christmas Trees. They will personally hand select a fresh fir for you and deliver it to your door. Ring a ling a ling is all you need to wait for until the decorating frenzy begins. Thanks for the idea Daily Candy! Oh Christmas Tree Oh Christmas Tree!