On Not Forgetting...Ever

Just this morning, I ran across this bit of "direction" for today:

On 9/11/2013 if you run an Internet site you go dark.

If you use the Internet, you go dark.

And whatever you were going to buy, whatever you were going to do on 9/11/2013, you do not do on 9/10, 9/12, or at any other time.

You get your friends to do it, or you decide they’re not your friends any more.

You get your business associates to it, or they’re not your business associates any more.

If just 10% of the people in this nation will demand and enforce these changes, they will happen. They will happen because if they don’t and we demand and enforce that demand via peaceful, non-violent economic means we will destroy the businesses that have over-levered themselves under the premise that we are sheep and will not act in such a fashion.

There are many grievances you can choose from. Mine is the outrageously-lawless behavior of governments at a local, state and federal level, including but not limited to NSA spying (an agency that is supposed to be limited to operations outside of the United States) and the apparently-increasing jackbooted behavior — outright militarization and violation of rights committed by our various so-called “peace officers.”

I am putting my foot down and saying “this far, no further.”

And as the clock strikes midnight The Market Ticker and Tickerforum will go offline for 24 hours and be replaced by a blacked-out screen with a rather appropriate logo and descriptive text.

During that 24 hour period I will not:

- Engage in any electronic transaction.

or

- Commit commerce.

I have encouraged others to engage in this lawful and peaceful act of civil disobedience and others are doing so as well. There are efforts being undertaken to encourage others to participate, which I applaud…

The arrogance of this demand is equaled only by its stupidity. To silence oneself is not an act of civil disobedience by any imaginable standard. It's solely a limitation upon oneself -- and to what end? To demonstrate that we can? Isn't that already perfectly obvious?

I trust I don't need to explain the "arrogance" aspect.

But this is September 11, isn't it? On that date each year since Black Tuesday, I've "celebrated" a Day of Cleansing Rage. That's not something one can do every day of the year, but this particular anniversary both invites it and justifies it.

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On September 11, 2006, I posted the following at Eternity Road:

The alarm rings at 4:00 AM. I sit up in bed; the darkness is perfect. I get out of bed carefully, mindful of the dogs sleeping alongside it. Another Monday morning has arrived, and work beckons.

I shower, shave, dress, quaff a couple of cups of coffee, kiss my wife, trundle the garbage cans to the curb, and set off for work. It's still absolutely dark when I leave. The roads, though busy, are quiet. That's an unusual thing for Long Island during commuting hours, which, in case you don't know, stretch from about 4:30 AM to about 9:30 PM, with no breaks.

I pray the Rosary as I negotiate the web of feeder roads that drain into the Long Island Expressway. On Mondays it's the five Joyful Mysteries: the Annunciation, the Visitation, the Nativity, the Presentation, and the Finding in the Temple, which commemorate the earliest miracles and prophecies of the Christian mythos. Rosary-at-the-wheel is one of my better habits. Among other things, it keeps me from bombarding unconscious and inconsiderate drivers with profanities they wouldn't hear anyway. But there's no occasion for that this morning; all is smooth and swift from my doorstep to the parking lot outside my office.

The hall is dark. It seems I'm first in the building again. I flick light switches as I trot down the long hallway to my office / lab.

I extract my glasses from my briefcase and perch before my computer. Ordinarily, the first order of business would be the making of coffee, but today it can wait. There are things I must do first.

Most Monday mornings find me a little sleepy and a little irritable. Not today. Today I am filled with a fierce energy, for which this essay is only the last and least of my outlets.

My trade is electronic warfare. I collaborate in the making of devices designed to suppress enemy communications and early-warning systems. I lead a small team of engineers in such efforts. They're among the best people in this trade, and I am honored to work alongside them. But I don't expect them to greet this late-summer Monday morning in a frame of mind quite like mine.

---

Five years ago today, I was unemployed. Three years before, I'd decided to take a risk: I left an old, established company to take a high position at a brand new one, whose management had offered me an equity position. When that upstart company was bought out and broken up, the software engineering trade was at a low ebb. Over the succeeding four months, I received only one job interview.

The interview was quite successful. The vice-president for information technology told me that she would hire me on the spot, except for a temporary hiring freeze imposed on her by management above her head. She asked if I could wait a few weeks for an offer, or at least notify her of any competing offers I might receive. I was flattered, especially given the position I was being considered for and the company's record of success. I said yes, of course I could wait, and I would.

The offer was approved, formalized, and mailed to me in early September. I was reveling in its generosity, and relishing the prospect of new challenges and responsibilities, when my elder stepdaughter burst into my office and screamed that a plane had just hit the World Trade Center.

I would never begin the job I'd just been offered. It was at Cantor Fitzgerald.

---

I spent the rest of the day in a state that blended equal parts of incredulity and murderous fury. It was clear from the first moments that the Twin Towers had been the targets of a terrorist attack. Given the events of the previous ten years, there could be only one responsible agency: Islamic fanatics, enraged that the United States had dared to send troops to Saudi Arabia for Operation Desert Shield. They'd tried once before to bring down the Towers, and had failed. On Black Tuesday, September 11, 2001, they succeeded, albeit at the cost of nineteen of their own.

The network newscasts showed several clips of Middle Eastern Muslims celebrating, passing out candy, firing AK-47s into the air, and generally dancing for joy over the destruction. One nattily attired young Iraqi said, in crisp, barely accented English that dripped with satisfaction, that "It should have been worse."

That day, had the power been mine to wield, I would have bathed the entire Muslim Middle East in a rain of nuclear fire. I spent the day in the company of hysterical women: women whose husbands, brothers, and sons worked in lower Manhattan, some in the Towers themselves. They could not reach their loved ones by any means; communications with the stricken island was all but impossible. I did my poor best to calm them, but it was of no use; I was too aware that, had the job offer arrived a few days earlier, I would have been among the dead.

Those women were of a single mind. All of them thought my prescription for the treatment of the Islamic madness was far too gentle. They wanted to see the Islamic world incinerated, its savage denizens roasted slowly to death, as the innocents in the Towers had been.

The passage of the five years since then has dulled our memories of the agony and rage of that day. This is probably as it must be. Man's body and psyche are not built to sustain emotions that sharp, that strong, for more than a few minutes without incurring damage. But I can still recreate the mindset, with an effort of will. I can still remember my outrage that our kindness, our willingness to share our strength and our bounty with less developed societies, had been repaid with blood and terror. I can still remember thinking that the countries that sent the perpetrators forth had forfeited all claim to membership in the family of Man.

I wanted to slay and spare not. I wanted the armed forces of the United States to streak forth and avenge the dead beneath the rubble of the Towers with all the weapons at their command. I wanted to visit such wholesale punishment on the Islamic world that the survivors would complete the extirpation of Islam as their first order of business, burning the last of their Qur'ans in propitiation of us.

I still do.

Little has changed since that Monday seven years ago.

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Today there will be some events of significance in Washington, D.C. The first of those has been styled the "Million Muslim March." I understand the city has granted its organizers certain permits that have been denied to the second event, the "Two Million Bikers Ride." That won't impede the bikers, and somehow I doubt that the D.C. police will interfere with them.

It boggles my mind to think that Muslims resident in America -- it's a mistake to call them American Muslims, as Islam absolutely forbids any allegiance to a power other than Islam -- would have the gall to protest anything. Since Black Tuesday, our governments have treated them as the most delicate of all protected species. Anyone who so much as insults a Muslim on a public street is immediately hauled off and gaoled. "Hate crime," don't y'know.

Yet these...persons are open about their hatred for America and its ways. They openly call for the chattelization of women and the execution of homosexuals. They boast that one day Islam will be the only accepted creed in America, that "the black flag of Islam" will fly over the White House. As for their behavior toward us who, ah, publicly disagree, little need be said to the intelligent and attentive readers of Liberty's Torch.

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Have a quick reminder of some other things that were said in 2006, by "Naseem" in a comment at Jihad Watch::

Assalamau aLaikum all,

[Congressman Virgil Goode (R-VA)] probably thinks he is speaking for the good of the Amerikie...and in some ways he may be right...in others wrong.

That there will be more muslims in congress ....I have NO doubts. Infact I am waiting for the 1st burka + veil clad muslima becoming a member of congress. The president will hail this as a victory for freedom and a giant leap for "muslima-kind". He expects that she will bring about a paradigm shift...she will...but not of the type that the president expects.

Let's give this ficticious muslima a name for now...Fatima.

Fatima ofcourse will not want to employ men on her staff ...only other muslima..everyone wearing a burka and the freedom of a veil. As usual you peoples may have a laugh for a bit...but the Kafur just cannot imagine the changes...so let me enlighten you:

1) New security procedures will be required...men security officers will not be allowed to see their faces...only other kafur womens.

Wouldn't that be surprising....muslimas coming and going to congress for months...and the men security offices not even knowing what they look like.

2) Rooms for prayer.

3) All meat served in the canteen must be halal, cannot afford to make mistakes here...hell to pay otherwise.

4) New rules for female accompaniment...the husbands must be involved, they will leave their taxi jobs and chauffeur their womens around instead...ofcourse at 3 times thier old salary.

5) Most of all and far more importantly, I think it will the nature of new laws that Fatima and her supporters will try to pass that will fundamentally change America ....forever.

They will be thrown out to start with ...but as more and more Wuslims come on board...the pressure will start to tell....and smaller changes will become bigger ones.....you can see examples of this in other parts of the world.

The richer must pay more tax to fund the poorer muslim...who has 8 childrens...he cannot afford to feed, clothe and school them...so the state must help to stop them starving.

6) Another law that maybe tried is INCREASE immigration from muslim countries (rather than limit it) as a way to "makeup" for all the wrongs that the Amerike has done in the middle east.

7) Creeping Sharia will perhaps lead to allowing muslims to marry more than one woman.

8) Any shootings of innocent muslims will prompt Fatima and her congress supporters to pass new gun laws...to take away guns from the common folks....I can certainly see this happening....innocents muslims cannot be shot ....not in America, it's as simple as that.

9) Help shape foreign policy away from the Israel in order to secure peace in the ME...with all the implications that this carries.

In short Fatima will start an American revolution as no other....she will cut down the kufur at his knees where he stands with the power of the pen.

On the home front the kafur will lose further power over his wild slutty womens as more start to don the burka for fear of being branded a loser.

It is my opinion that the Mahdi will be wuslim in the Amerike congress ...and he will do his best to take the world from Kafur to Wuslim and possibly through to Muslim.

2007 will see this scenario a step closer, the old America is surely doomed.

Oh and before I forget Happy new year.

And then there's this interview:

Rod Dreher: Do you believe that homosexuals convicted in a sharia court should be killed, or otherwise punished physically?

Mohamed Elmougy: I don’t condone homosexuality. I have a lot of friends, a lot of people who work for me, just so you know. I don’t go kill them. But, you know, I don’t condone what they do outside of work, so long as it’s something not in front of me. So do I condone the sharia? We don’t apologize for our religion. If that is what our religion says, we certainly accept it open-heartedly.

Rod Dreher: But what do you think *should* be the authority. That’s what I’m asking. In an ideal situation, would you like to see sharia law be the basis for law in this country, and how would you reconcile that –

Tod Robberson: Or put it another way. In this country, the law of man takes precedence over the law of God. In your opinion, is that the way it should be?

[garbled answer by heavily accented man, saying something to effect that the law is flexible from country to country, but there are some things that we don’t have the authority to change.]

[Ghassan – did not get his last name]: President George Bush feels that he is inspired by God, and based on that he makes his policies. He made that known to us. [crosstalk] President Bush told us that law made by man is not good enough law, that we should be following God’s law.

Rod Dreher: Just describe to me your view, the Islamic view, of sharia. What role should sharia play in this society?

Mohamed Elmougy: [garbled] I don’t sit up all night thinking what the role of sharia needs to be. All I can tell you is that we as American Muslims, living in a non-Muslim country, are ordered to follow the rules of the country that we live in, no matter how much we agree or disagree with. So do I go after you if you’re homosexual, to try to kill you today? No. We haven’t seen that.

So I think to go focus on that and to leave all the other good things that American Muslims are part of, and that the religion is talking about, and only focus on things that to you sound or feel strange is just not the correct approach. Forget paranoid, it’s just not the correct approach. And it does nothing, as I said, but alienate our children from the society that they’re going to be living in, and die in.

Is there more than one way to interpret the evasions and dissimulations above? Do you think the Muslim spokesmen interviewed by the Dallas Morning News would improve on any of them today?

But the Muslims are "marching." In Washington, D.C. Good! Let's hope they all come, every creature in America who calls himself a Muslim. A concentrated target is the easiest kind to "service."

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The hour is dark, for many reasons. A dark hour emboldens the forces of darkness; it's their favored milieu. Several dark forces are on the march as we speak: some imported, some domestic.

This is no time to be pusillanimous.
No time to hide our faces or restrain our words and anger.
No time to imagine that self-silencing constitutes "civil disobedience."
No time to forget the insults and injuries we've received.
No time to "pass the buck" to posterity.

This is a time of imperative action.

Never forget.