Gadaffi: Lybia’s political system is superior to Western democracies (UPDATED)

Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi lectured an American audience on democracy via a videoconference link to a New York university on Thursday, stating that Libya was the only real democracy in the world. Gaddafi was addressing an unprecedented gathering of U.S. and Libyan academics prompted by a thaw in relations since the former Pariah State decided in 2003 to abandon nuclear weapons and took responsibility for the 1988 Lockerbie bombing.

Gaddafi used the rare interaction with Westerners to tout Libya's political system as superior to parliamentary and representative democracies in the West which he said were farcical and fake. Gaddafi also said that nations should not involve themselves with the internal affairs of other nations.

HT: Conservative Blog Therapy.

The question is: superior for who?

UPDATE:  Well, what he said was even worse, from BBC:

In the Middle East, the opposition is quite different
than the opposition in advanced countries. In our countries, the
opposition takes the form of explosions, assassinations, killings

And acknowledging that kind of opposition, he still thinks his system is superior? I'm astonished. 

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La historia interminable…

… De las caricaturas.

HT: Polemiken.net.

Mark Steyn: “We may lose this fight easier than I thought”

"We may have to change the name of this column to ‘Unhappy Warrior’, or ‘Reluctant Conscript’, or ‘Impending Deserter’. The last few weeks have made me consider not the possibility that we might lose this thing (which I’ve always weighed) but that we might lose it more easily than even the gloomiest of us thought.

[…] By contrast, Europe is getting there from here in the one-way express lane, and it’s not going to like where it ends up. About six months after 9/11, I went on a grand tour of the Continent’s Muslim ghettoes, and then flew on to the Middle East. The Muslims I met in Europe were, almost to a man, more alienated and angrier than the ones back in Araby. Don’t take my word for it. It was a Hamburg cell that pulled off 9/11, a British subject who was the shoebomber, a Montreal welfare recipient who tried to blow up LAX, a London School of Economics graduate who had Daniel Pearl executed… At one level, that’s just plain operational sense: al-Qa’eda obviously has no shortage of crazy Waziristani goatherds it can recruit but they tend to stand out at the check-in counter at United. A western-educated engineering graduate doesn’t.

But that in itself doesn’t explain why quite so many European Muslims are hot for jihad. In the Muslim ghettoes of the Continent east meets west in a particularly malign form that fuses the worst aspects of both. You can see it in the tattoed pierced Pakistani skinhead gangs swaggering through the streets of northern England: into rap and drugs and all the rest, they’re observant Muslims mainly in their attitude to women and infidels. The college-educated jihadi who could be pulling down six-figure salaries instead of Manhattan skyscrapers are in some senses merely the middle-class variation on this phenomenon.

[…] "Whatever the virtues of multiculturalism, bicultural societies are the most unstable in the world, whether relatively benignly so (Fiji) or genocidally (Rwanda). The problem Europe faces is that Bosnia’s demographic profile is now the model for the entire continent. All those Bush Doctrine naysayers who argue that Iraq is an artificial entity that can never be a functioning state ought to take a look at the Netherlands. You think Kurds and Arabs, Sunni and Shia are incompatible? What do you call a jurisdiction split between post-Christian secular gay potheads and anti-whoring anti-sodomites Islamists? If Kurdistan’s an awkward fit in Iraq, how well does Pornostan fit in the Islamic Republic of Holland? Europe’s problems don’t nullify the Bush Doctrine so much as present a more urgent case for it. Indeed, given that the Palestinian Authority is funding-wise the largest EU welfare slum, even the Hamas victory can be seen as more typical of Euro-Muslim alienation than Arab psychoses."

Mark Steyn (HT: Relapsed Catholic)

Tags: Eurabia, Mark Steyn

Vatican change of heart over barbaric Crusades

From TIMESONLINE:

THE Vatican has begun moves to rehabilitate the Crusaders by sponsoring a conference at the weekend that portrays the Crusades as wars fought with the noble aim of regaining the Holy Land for Christianity. The Crusades are seen by many Muslims as acts of violence that have underpinned Western aggression towards the Arab world ever since. Followers of Osama bin Laden claim to be taking part in a latter-day jihad against the Jews and Crusaders. The late Pope John Paul II sought to achieve Muslim-Christian reconciliation by asking pardon for the Crusades during the 2000 Millennium celebrations. But John Pauls apologies for the past errors of the Church including the Inquisition and anti-Semitism irritated some Vatican conservatives. According to Vatican insiders, the dissenters included Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, now Pope Benedict XVI. Pope Benedict reached out to Muslims and Jews after his election and called for dialogue. However, the Pope, who is due to visit Turkey in November, has in the past suggested that Turkeys Muslim culture is at variance with Europes Christian roots. At the conference, held at the Regina Apostolorum Pontifical University, Roberto De Mattei, an Italian historian, recalled that the Crusades were a response to the Muslim invasion of Christian lands and the Muslim devastation of the Holy Places. The debate has been reopened, La Stampa said. Professor De Mattei noted that the desecration of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem by Muslim forces in 1009 had helped to provoke the First Crusade at the end of the 11th century, called by Pope Urban II.

HT: LGF.

Shalman Rushdie about the Islamism

The islamism is a totalitarian doctrine?

“Politically, of course. It is a totalitarian ideology that uses the figure of a charismatic super-leader. The Western public opinion is near to render herself with all this. I see her doubting, very worried to offend the religious sentiment of people that uses God as a excuse for terror. We have arrived to consider the cartoons of Mohammed and the intimidation and the menace just the same. It’s absurd to say: “Well, we menace you, but you have provoked it yourself”. We are mistaking the captif with the violent”.

Shalman Rushdie: in an interview at Liberale per Israele.

Information: the strongest weapon

Founded in: France-Echos: le blog in English.

Cardinal Ruini: Teaching Islam in schools could be dangerous

If the other say, Cardinal Martino said that Islam should be taught in public schools, today we have better news:

Rome, Mar. 20 (CWNews.com) – Teaching Islam in Italian public schools could be dangerous, Cardinal Camillo Ruini (bio – news)has argued, unless it is accompanied by an energetic campaign to introduce students to the fundamental principles of Italian social policy.
Speaking in his capacity as president of the Italian bishops’ conference, Cardinal Ruini took a stand different from that of Cardinal Renato Martino (bio – news), who had argued last week that teaching Islam to Muslim students could be a welcome sign of respect for religious pluralism. Cardinal Martino, the president of the Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace, saw the teaching of Islam in Italy as a gesture of the “reciprocity” that Church leaders have sought, in which European countries show their respect for Islam and demand the same sort of respect for Christianity in Muslim societies.