Author Archives: Effendi

Terry Glavin has a word of gentle chastisement for those flabby liberals and soft-Islamists (almost always of the western variety) who insist that the Arab uprisings are Islamist or, worse, ultra-nationalist revolutions in disguise:

For anyone still so possessed by Muzzie-fright as to assert that the Arab uprisings are an Islamist resurgence in disguise (which is to do Ahmadinejad’s propaganda for him in the bargain), listen to what Salman Rushdie says about that. Then take a long hard look in the mirror. The longer the “west” cowers in its delusions and the coziness of neutrality, the longer we put off our moral duty to side with the revolutionaries, and the greater the advantage to the Islamists in their ceaseless efforts to hijack the revolution.

Give your damn heads a shake. Marg Bar Diktator.

“The west talks a great deal about freedom. Here are people trying to get their freedom. They’re not being given it by American tanks. They’re getting it themselves.”

Juan Cole on Ghaddafi’s brutal counter-attack:

The strafing and bombardment in Tripoli of civilian demonstrators by Muammar Qaddafi’s fighter jets on Monday powerfully recalled the tactics of some decades ago of Benito Mussolini, who spoke of imposing a ‘Roman Peace’ on Libya.

In 1930, under Mussolini’s governor of Libya, Rodolfo Graziani, some 80,000 Libyans were removed to concentration camps, where 55% of the inmates perished. In 1933-1940, Italo Balbo championed aerial warfare as the best means to deal with uppity colonial populations. Between 1912 and 1943, half of all Libyans were killed, starved or chased from the country by the Italian colonial regime.

American pundits speak glibly of “Islamofascism,” thus deeply insulting Muslims by tying their religion to a Western political movement. What they do not know is that Libyan Muslims suffered mightily at the hands of the real fascists. The movement of Omar Mukhtar, the school teacher who turned anti-colonialist revolutionary, was repressed by Italian fascism.