A very interesting post from www.Vdare.com about the pilgrimage to Mecca. This follows this post about CAIR. This follows this article about American energy independence and preventing money from going to hostile countries such as Iran. For more about what you can do to get more involved click here and you can read two very interesting books HERE.

2013 Hajj: And They're OFF! Diseases For All!

http://www.vdare.com/posts/and-theyre-off

By John Derbyshire on October 13, 2013 at 9:40pm

The 2013 Hajj is officially under way. Last year 3,161,572 people congregated in and around Mecca for the annual Muslim pilgrimage, a 55 percent increase over the number for ten years previously. (Click to enlarge the infographic below, from Alarabiya.net.)

In land area, Mecca at 500 sq. miles is slightly smaller than Nashville, Tennessee. Speaking as a deeply un-gregarious person, I find the thought of being in a town that size together with three million other visitors to be nightmarish, but of course devout Muslims have a different point of view.
Personal preferences and religious obligations aside, there are excellent reasons to avoid Mecca in Hajj season, as Rebecca Kreston points out on a Discover blog:

The Hajj is a powerfully holy and social event for Muslims. But it’s also unique from an epidemiological and public health standpoint: two to three million people from 70 countries meeting in one tiny place is the siren call for respiratory, water-borne and blood-borne microbial diseases.

Blood-borne? Yes: At one of the stations of the Hajj, male pilgrims get their hair shaved off.

Saudi officials require all barbers to be licensed though makeshift barbers still abound, waiting on roads for eager pilgrims with razors in hand. Pilgrims may also buddy up to shave each other’s scalps. These unlicensed barbers and pilgrims can often be found reusing unsterilized blades to communally head-shave Hajjees, a fabulous technique for transmitting blood-borne diseases.

Presumably some unknown number of pilgrims go home carrying AIDS along with their purified souls.
A greater threat is the genus of coronaviruses, one variant of which quite likely caused your last bad cold.

Also of great concern is the latest pathogen to emerge from seemingly nowhere, Middle East Respiratory Syndrome Coronavirus (MERS-CoV). Since 2012, this novel virus has been smoldering in hospitals throughout the Arabian Peninsula and Europe despite the best efforts of many physicians and health officials to extinguish its insidious spread.

(My italics.)
Hajj Mubarak, everybody!

What’s Wrong with Going into Syria?

A very interesting post from www.Jihadwatch.org about some of the dangers about the U.S. being involved in Syria. This follows this post about the detrimental policy of Lindsey Graham and Barack Obama towards Egypt. This follows this article about American energy independence and preventing money from going to hostile countries such as Iran . For more about what you can do to get more involved click here and you can read two very interesting books HERE.

Robert Spencer in FrontPageMag: What’s Wrong with Going into Syria

In FrontPage this morning I explain that what is wrong with going into Syria is just about everything.

American military intervention in Syria is likely to begin this week, and one thing we know amid the general confusion is that the objective is not to oust Bashar Assad: White House spokesman Jay Carney said Tuesday: “I want to make clear that the options that we are considering are not about regime change. They are about responding to a clear violation of international standard that prohibits the use of chemical weapons.” How the Obama Administration plans to deal with Assad’s alleged use of chemical weapons without challenging his grip on power is unclear, but then again, so is everything else about this misadventure.
Epitomizing the muddle surrounding the likely attack on Syria was former British Prime Minister Tony Blair. In endorsing his country’s likely participation in a strike on Syria, Blair said that it was necessary to prevent the country from becoming a “breeding ground for extremism.”
Blair is several months too late. Syria is already a breeding ground for “extremism.” The New York Times reported no less than four months ago, on April 28, that “nowhere in rebel-controlled Syria is there a secular fighting force to speak of.” And a month ago, Israeli Major General Aviv Kochavi said that Syria now “attracts thousands of global jihad activists and Muslim extremists from the region and around the world, who base themselves in the country, not only to bring down Assad, but to promote the vision of a state based on Islamic law.”
Kochavi added that “before our very eyes, at our doorstep, a large-scale center of the global jihad is developing, which may affect not only Syria and not just the borders of Israel, but Lebanon, Jordan, Sinai, and can radiate onto the entire region.”
And this week, the United States and Great Britain are about to intervene militarily on the same side as those “global jihad activists and Muslim extremists.” They’re poised to do so because they assume that Bashar Assad used chemical weapons against his own people, although there is no proof that it was actually Assad, and not the jihadi rebels we are going to aid, who unleashed the chemical attacks. And UN inspectors in Syria have no mandate to determine exactly who used the chemical weapons, but only the fact that they were used – despite the fact that the key question is who used them, and no one has a clear or definite answer, least of all Barack Obama.
Then again, Barack Obama has aided jihadists and Islamic supremacists before, in Libya and Egypt – and that is exactly what he is about to do again. Bill Roggio reported in the Long War Journal on June 29 that the Al Nusrah Front for the People of the Levant, which is “al Qaeda’s affiliate in Syria,” is “willing to work with Syrian rebel groups such as the Free Syrian Army, and in its official statements has admitted to doing so.” What’s more, “the Al Nusrah Front has also cooperated with Free Syrian Army units to establish sharia, or Islamic law, in Aleppo and in eastern Syria.” Nonetheless, “the US government is backing the Free Syrian Army despite the group’s known ties to the Al Nusrah Front.”
Blair complained that Syria is “mired in carnage between the brutality of Assad and various affiliates of al Qaida.” That is indeed true. But he did not explain how American and British intervention would change that fact, or aid in the establishment of a secular fighting force that after Assad’s fall might establish a secular, pluralistic republic that guaranteed equality of rights for all its citizens.
Given the fact that both the American and the British governments are dedicated to denying the reality of Islamic jihad and ignoring how Islamic jihadis use core texts and teachings of Islam to justify violence and supremacism, it’s extraordinarily unlikely that U.S. or British forces will be able to tell the difference between Sharia supremacists and secularists, or act effectively in favor of the latter, if indeed there are any significant secularist forces left in Syria.

There is more.