At a time when our foreign policy is in the hands of the feckless, delusional, and incompetent, it is bracing to have Peter Collier’s fascinating biography of Jeane Kirkpatrick, Ronald Reagan’s smart, no-nonsense, straight-talking ambassador to the U.N. Collier, along with his sometime co-author David Horowitz, is the Plutarch of American political biography, having authored earlier books on the Kennedys, Fords, Rockefellers, and Roosevelts. Himself a convert from left-wing dogma and delusion, he brings to Kirkpatrick’s life both flawless story-telling skills and a shrewd eye for the psychological, intellectual, and social detail that tracks Kirkpatrick’s development from a reflexive liberal Democrat to a formidable opponent of appeasement and the staunch defender of political freedom who became, in William Safire’s phrase, “the courage of Ronald Reagan’s convictions.”

Kirkpatrick’s life is a paean to the American heartland and its clear-eyed realism about human nature and the limits of the politically possible. She was born in 1926 in Duncan, Oklahoma to a New Deal, Yellow-Dog Democrat oil driller named Welcher “Fat” Jordan. In 1940 the family followed the oil boom to Mount Vernon, Illinois, where Jeane’s keen intellect and restless curiosity fomented dissatisfaction with the small-town limits on both her mind and gender. Her first stop was at Stephens College, a two-year girls’ school in Columbia, Missouri. A visit to New York City convinced her that her intellectual ambitions needed larger scope, so she enrolled at Barnard, “where women could take themselves seriously,” she would write later. On weekends she hung out in the Village, and knew James Baldwin well enough to call him “Jimmy.” Yet a trajectory that seemingly pointed to becoming a conventional left-wing New York intellectual was deflected by her critical mind, which was not satisfied with the received opinions of her milieu. Contrary to her professors and classmates, for example, a reading of the Alger Hiss trial transcripts convinced her of Hiss’s guilt. Likewise she supported Truman in the 1948 elections while the “romantic leftists,” as Collier calls them, voted for Henry Wallace.

Her independent intellectual development continued at Columbia University, where she studied political science. Her mentor was Franz Neumann, a German Jew who had been a lawyer in the Weimer government. Neumann was an independent Marxist who lacked the starry-eyed admiration for Stalin that afflicted many American leftists. Her study of the inner workings of Nazi governance, which taught her, as she said later, “the human capacity for evil,” changed her life. So too did meeting Evron Kirkpatrick in Washington D.C. in 1951, who hired her as his research assistant. “Kirk,” as he was called, worked in the State Department and was a close friend of Hubert Humphrey as well as an anti-communist New Deal Democrat. Fourteen years Jeane’s senior, he became “the Pygmalion who would intellectually sculpt her in a way that brought her fully to life,” Collier writes. Her first assignment was to edit some papers detailing daily life in the prewar Soviet Union. The experience of learning what Kirkpatrick called “a hell purposefully created by government” was another critical stage in her development as a warrior against totalitarianism and its appeasers.

Kirkpatrick’s next stop was Paris, where she traveled to escape a serious illness and a burgeoning romance with Kirk. Once more, a path that would have led a less critical intelligence into leftist orthodoxy was blocked by Kirkpatrick’s reaction to the famous quarrel between one-time comrades Albert Camus and Jean-Paul Sartre over support for the Soviet Union and its permanent revolution. Reading Camus’ The Rebel and listening to his lectures convinced Kirkpatrick that Camus had both the facts on his side and the moral high ground. She was particularly impressed by what she called “his suspicion of abstract theory and its friendship with totalitarianism; his elevation of the human dimension over the political one; his focus on the impact of ideas and the personal consequences of ideologies.” As Collier describes this transformative experience, one begins to see emerging the champion of freedom and human dignity who three decades later would give moral and intellectual force to Ronald Reagan’s foreign policy.

Back from France, Kirkpatrick eventually married Kirk and settled in Georgetown, where she connected with others like herself, heartland refugees, “very American, yet slightly alien among the elites” of postwar Washington, Collier describes them, bright people from modest backgrounds who “made their way by sheer intellectual force rather than by networks,” “pragmatic ‘show me’ people, and unapologetic in a patriotism that would not be shaken even during the turbulence of the Vietnam era.” She met other recovering leftists, like onetime Trotskyite James Burnham, and former communist Sidney Hook, both of whom later would become some of flabby liberalism’s most trenchant critics. As the sixties spiraled downward into left-wing thuggish intolerance, knee-jerk anti-Americanism, and apologetics for communist tyranny, she began to see the same conditions she had studied in other countries that had degenerated into totalitarianism from a lofty, abstract utopianism. The New Left’s assault on centrist liberalism––institutionalized in the 1972 highjacking of the Democratic party and its marginalization of lower-middle and working-class constituents in favor of a “new elite” of lawyers and other professionals––was to Jeane another sign that the old anti-communist, socially compassionate but pragmatic liberal Democrat no longer had a place in a party increasingly dominated by the sectarian left. Like many of those liberals who would get mugged by reality, Kirkpatrick had to find a more independent path.

The timing of this paltry “agreement” announced by the IAEA suggests that the Iranians are once again rope-a-doping the U.N. and the West, playing for time by exploiting both Obama’s fear of an Israeli attack before the elections, and the Europeans’ usual preference for using diplomatic words to avoid military deeds. Thus this latest “breakthrough” is nothing more than another Iranian tactic in its long-term strategy for acquiring nuclear weapons. As Israeli defense minister Ehud Barak responded to the announcement, “The Iranians appear to be trying to reach a technical deal that will create an appearance as if there is progress in the talks to remove some of the pressure ahead of the talks in Baghdad and to postpone an escalation in sanctions.” Indeed, using the talks to ease sanctions is clearly what the Iranians are up to. Parliament Chairman Ali Larijani ordered the West to “stop the shell game they have played on Iran,” since it would be “improper” for the P5+1 powers to negotiate while imposing tighter sanctions. The implication is that relaxing sanctions is a precondition for any agreement.

But even if the Iranians sign the deal with the IAEA, and even if some more definitive agreement is reached in Baghdad, the problem of a nuclear Iran will not be solved, but merely delayed. The history of North Korea’s acquisition of nuclear weapons suggests the playbook Iran is following. In 1994, North Korea signed an agreement that called for the North to shut down its plutonium-based Yongbyon nuclear reactor in exchange for help in building two nuclear reactors for producing electricity. Eight years later, the Koreans admitted to a U.S. delegation that all along it had been enriching uranium. The next year, the North withdrew from the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, and began the “six-nation” negotiations over its nuclear program. That gabfest masked the ongoing development of nuclear weapons, which Korea announced it possessed a year later. Subsequent years saw more promises of cooperation and action by the Koreans when food-aid or other economic help was needed, followed by further provocations and threats, followed in turn by more Western concessions, starting the cycle all over again. Meanwhile the North has continued testing and developing missiles, threatening its neighbors, and providing rogue regimes like Iran and Syria with nuclear technology and know-how.

Given the success of the North Koreans, the Iranians are following the same strategy for becoming a nuclear power, combining diplomatic engagement, threatening bluster, meaningless “agreements,” and duplicitous evasion in order to keep the West off balance. Thus it’s no coincidence that on the same day talks begin in Baghdad the Iranians are launching a satellite on a missile that could be adapted for delivering a nuclear warhead. Meanwhile as the diplomatic dance proceeds, the centrifuges are spinning and nuclear facilities are being buried deep underground, activities that will continue until it’s too late or too costly for the West to do anything about Iran’s nukes.

Yet we didn’t need the past three years to learn the truth about Obama. The evidence was all there from the start. What allowed the fantasy Obama to gain the White House was the collusion of a corrupt mainstream media that failed to ask the hard questions or follow through on stories that had managed to get the nation’s attention. The recent revelation from the Breitbart outfit that a publisher’s promotional booklet in 1991 bragged that Obama had been “born in Kenya” is just the latest evidence of how stubbornly and willfully indifferent the media have been to asking the penetrating questions of the sort that have dogged every president, especially those since Lyndon Johnson. The media’s dereliction of duty has allowed Obama to construct ad hoc identities that suit his political agenda and obscure his unsavory past and ideology.

For example, the continuing questions about Obama’s birth-country renewed by the Breitbart discovery are significant for exposing his long history of fabricating an identity to suit his careerist needs. The Hawaii prep-schooled, white-raised Barry Dunham discovered on getting to college that the exotic name Barack Hussein Obama, like the Indonesian childhood, was more useful for sending a diversity thrill down the leg of liberal white professors and admissions committees. So too with publishers, eager to display their multi-culti bona fides by promoting a Third-World author “born in Kenya,” who would chronicle his struggles against neo-colonial racism. Like many other hustlers “of color,” Obama was no doubt happy to oblige and collude in the deception––until national political ambitions required that he tone down the “other” vibe, at least until after the election.

So too with the unasked questions about Obama’s radical past. The media saw nothing to report about Obama starting his political career in the living room of ex-terrorists Bill Ayers and Bernadine Dohrn. You remember Ayers, the ex-Weatherman who bragged in his memoirs about getting away with his terrorist violence and being “free as a bird.” Obama assured us that Ayers was “just a guy who lives in my neighborhood,” despite serving on two foundation boards and appearing at conferences with him. As is the media’s wont, perfunctory “investigations” revealed that there was nothing to the stories, taking on faith Obama’s incredible assertion that there was no significance to the fact that one of America’s most notorious terrorists was a part of his life and political development. The same media that ran with a hit-piece on George Bush supported only by an obviously fabricated letter, and that currently is intensely picking over the past history of Bain Capital, Romney’s treatment of the family dog, and his alleged high-school bullying––that same media four years ago didn’t think there was anything newsworthy in the Democratic candidate for president having ties with an unrepentant left-wing terrorist. Instead, they helped construct Obama’s new identity as a pragmatic centrist beyond partisan politics.

Obama’s presidency and reelection campaign have already produced an abundance of examples. Take the looming fiscal crisis of unfunded social welfare entitlements, run-away federal spending, and accelerating debt and deficits. Even with the monitory example of a rapidly disintegrating Europe before our eyes, the Democrats still can’t do the math. The “Buffett rule” taxes on the “rich” that the president has been touting amount to the equivalent of couch-cushion change compared to our debt and unfunded liabilities. Indeed, confiscating outright all the wealth of the richest 400 Americans would barely cover one year of Obama deficits.  The economic history of the past half-century backs up the math: only by reducing spending can we get our fiscal house in order, and raising taxes on the productive stifles economic growth and reduces tax revenues, thus hastening the downward spiral. The fundamental wisdom known by every village explainer––spend more than you earn and you’ll go broke, give people something for nothing and they will expect something for nothing forever, there is no free lunch, if something can’t go on forever it won’t––doesn’t seem to penetrate the minds of the self-styled “genius” party.

Yet despite this crisis, all the liberals can do is recycle old class-warfare bromides. Repeating the juvenile slogans of the Occupy Wall Street movement, the Democrats decry the “1%”  and the President shrieks about the rich “paying their fair share.” The fact that among advanced economies the U.S. already has the most progressive income taxes and the highest corporate taxes––even as nearly half of taxpayers pay nothing while an equal number receive some sort of government largesse––can’t penetrate the fog of clichés befuddling the liberal brain. No, stale Hollywood scripts about “Wall Street” pirates and evil oil corporations are recycled into government policy, and jeremiads against “greed” and “materialism” abound. The President even invokes Jesus Christ in support of his redistributionist schemes, his liberal supporters conveniently forgoing their usual hysteria about the theocratic camel’s nose poking into the political tent.

Nothing in any of this has anything to do with the reality of our economic sickness or its cures. Worse yet, we’ve heard it all before over a century ago. In the late 19^th century, increasing immigration from Russia, Poland, southern Italy, and other non-Teutonic countries, along with the growing wealth, social mobility, and economic opportunity created by industrial capitalism, agitated the well-born and well-educated elites worried about racial “degeneration” and the weakening of the American order. Impressed by Karl Marx, they saw industrial capitalism and corporations, and the increasing materialism, amoral greed, civic corruption, and crass competition these fostered, as the force that would destroy the American moral order and empower the lesser breeds who thought of nothing but greed and selfish gain, no matter the future costs to society. The reformers’ answer was to turn over government rule to a “natural aristocracy” created by breeding and education, the denizens of the “best class” who could restore order to a disintegrating society and rein in the “incorporated power and greed,” as Brooks Adams put it, of “robber barons” like the Rockefellers and Morgans and the other “malefactors of great wealth” criticized by T.R. Roosevelt.

This latest about-face, then, clearly shows that Obama’s 2008 opposition to gay marriage was devised to make him appear a centrist during the presidential election, and that now he believes he can speak honestly and shore up his progressive base.

That Obama would say one thing while believing another is well established by his long track record of shifting his policy positions depending on whether he is pandering to the center or the left––consider extraordinary renditions, military tribunals, Guantanamo, or the surge in Iraq, all of which he vociferously opposed until he supported them. Some might think that he is a rank opportunist who believes in none of these positions, his public statements based on tactical calculations reflecting polls and political necessity. Remember his principled opposition to the evil Bush tax cuts, which he then extended a month after the 2010 electoral “shellacking,” as he called it?

But consideration of the world from which Obama emerged points us to what he really thinks. It beggars belief to think someone who has spent his whole adult life in the progressive purlieus of academe and community activism, where gay marriage, like abortion, is a sacrament, could sincerely be opposed to it. Like taxing the greedy rich, America’s foreign policy sins, endemic white racism, redistributionist economics, global warming, the evils of carbon-based energy, deficit spending, conservative misogynism, and all the other scriptures in the progressive psalter, the rightness and justness of gay marriage are revealed truths that require obedience, not justification.

Indeed, gay marriage is particularly expressive of the progressive gospel, for this issue concentrates all that sect’s fundamentalist doctrines. First, it exemplifies the progressive idea that the traditional wisdom and beliefs of the masses are benighted remnants of their ignorant, superstitious past from which we should be evolving. The collective wisdom of the human race developed over centuries is automatically suspect and to be rejected as irrational justifications for oppression, exclusion, and the defense of unfair privilege. Progressive moderns, supposedly armed with advances in knowledge discovered by the “human sciences,” are better able to arrange society and human relations so that they reflect the reality hidden to our religion-addled ancestors, and thus can ensure justice and equality. So the belief based on faith, tradition, and natural law that marriage is an institution joining a man and woman is to be rejected, and society to be reshaped according to the truths possessed by enlightened progressives.

The phoniness of such “diversity” is evident on multiple levels. Warren’s ploy is not that much more egregious than the thousands of Caucasians with Hispanic surnames who pass as minorities in American universities. White Chileans, Argentines, and Mexicans come to American colleges and are transformed into “Chicanos,” a category that has little reality outside a college campus. Hiring Basques or Spaniards counts as increasing “diversity,” even though they have nothing culturally in common with the mestizo or Indian children of farm-workers. So too with African or Caribbean blacks, who are hired not because they bring the unique perspective of their homelands to their intellectual work or teaching, but because they count as “black,” and thus are assumed to have some mystical connection with American black students and their cultural identity, which owes much more to American culture and history than to African.

Of course, socio-economic differences among American minorities are also ignored in the rush to promote diversity. A Mexican-American dentist’s or schoolteacher’s daughter who never cut a grape or washed a dish supposedly has some special insight into poor or working-class Mexicans. A light-skinned black son of college-educated parents who grew up in the suburbs gets to campus and suddenly has a rapport with the “brothers” and their experiences. An upper class Chinese is thought to be better able to relate to anyone designated by the meaningless category “Asian-American,” which obscures the fundamental differences and histories of Chinese, Japanese, Koreans, Thais, Laos, Vietnamese, Cambodians, and Hmong. The social capital that comes from education and wealth and that is used to define “white-skin privilege” suddenly has no value when it comes to the equally privileged ethnic “other.”

And don’t forget, no matter how poor or underprivileged, no white people have anything to bring to the campus diversity table in the eyes of diversity-mongers. Indeed, not even all the non-white ethnic groups get the same privileges given to those anointed as contributors to “diversity,” no matter how much their people have suffered. Punjabis darker than most black Americans don’t add “diversity” to campus. Armenians whose ancestors were slaughtered in the Turkish genocide, and who faced legal discrimination like real-estate covenants barring them from certain neighborhoods, don’t count either. Other groups like Italians or Poles faced discrimination and racist slurs in at the turn of 20^th century, when General Francis Amasa Walker, president of M.I.T., wrote in the Atlantic Monthly that such dusky immigrants were “beaten men from beaten races; representing the worst failures in the struggle for existence,” possessing “none of the ideas and aptitudes which fit men to take up readily and easily the problem of self-care and self-government.” So pervasive were these prejudices that the 1924 immigration law effectively stopped such “unfit” people from coming to America. And obviously, despite their long subjection to anti-Semitism, exclusion, and mass-murder, Jews don’t add diversity either. Indeed, they’re fair game for campus prejudice and ethnic slurs. To the university, all these victims of historical oppression and exclusion based on their cultural differences are officially “white” with nothing to offer to campus diversity.

The mirage that has blinded the E.U.’s creators and champions is not hard to explain. For two centuries many Europeans have been deluded by the notion that nationalist loyalties and identity could be subordinated to a transnational institution run by elites with superior knowledge and technical skills. Loyalty to and affection for one’s own people, land, customs, governments, and mores were seen as primitive holdovers from a less enlightened age. Like religious faith, these exclusionary, divisive values were barbaric instigators of war and civil strife, predicated as they were on ignorance and superstition. Sweep those loyalties and beliefs away, and the human race could progress to peace and prosperity by relying instead on science, technology, and the elites who possessed the knowledge of both.

And why not? History offered evidence of such progress. In the 19^th century, communication and transport technologies like the telegraph, railroad, and steamship shrank the world, making possible a global trade and exchange of ideas that seemingly bound people into a “solidarity which unites the members of the society of civilized nations,” as the Preamble to the First Hague Convention put it in 1899. For many internationalist idealists, what Immanuel Kant a century earlier had called the “progress of the human mind” was creating a global community of shared values and aims, a “harmony of interests” that could be codified in international laws and institutions superior to the parochial cultures, irrational customs, and retrograde values of any individual country or people. An imagined consequence of this increasing unification of peoples was Kant’s imagined “federation of free states” that could create global peace and prosperity by transcending the zero-sum and often irrational, destructive interests of individual states and peoples.

World War I should have put paid to the illusion that humans could progress beyond the local and particular cultures in which most people lived and found their identities. From 1914-1918 millions of Europeans slaughtered each other on behalf of those national loyalties, even the universalist, transnational socialists fighting and dying in the trenches under their nations’ banners. In 1918, G. K. Chesterton explained why: “Nobody has any such ecstatic regard for the mere relations of different people to each other, as one would gather from the rhetoric of idealistic internationalism . . . Now, too much cosmopolitan culture is mere praise of machinery. It turns ultimately upon the point that a telegram can be sent from one end of the earth to the other, irrespective of what is in the telegram.” In the end, Chesterton says, “Men care more for the rag that is called a flag than for the rag that is called a newspaper. Men care more for Rome, Paris, Prague, Warsaw than for the international railways connecting these towns.”

One of the jihadists’ most potent psychological weapons is the double standard Muslims have imposed on the West. Temples and churches are destroyed and vandalized, Christians murdered and driven from the lands of Christianity’s birth, anti-Semitic lunacy propagated by high-ranking Muslim clerics, and Christian territory like northern Cyprus ethnically cleansed and occupied by Muslims. Yet the West ignores these depredations all the while it agonizes over trivial “insults” to Islam and Mohammed, and decries the thought-crime of “Islamophobia” whenever even factual statements are made about Islamic history and theology. This groveling behavior confirms the traditional Islamic chauvinism that sees Muslims as the “best of nations” destined by Allah to rule the world through violent jihad.

Even in the rarefied world of academic scholarship, this fear of offense has protected Islam from the sort of critical scrutiny every other world religion has undergone for centuries. Some modern scholars who do exercise their intellectual freedom and investigate these issues, like Christoph Luxenberg or Ibn Warraq, must work incognito to avoid the wrath of the adherents of the “Religion of Peace.” Now Robert Spencer, the fearless director of Jihad Watch and author of several books telling the truths about Islam obscured by a frightened academy and media, in his new book Did Muhammad Exist? challenges this conspiracy of fear and silence by surveying the scholarship and historical evidence for the life and deeds of Islam’s founder.

As Spencer traces the story of Muhammed through ancient sources and archaeology, the evidence for the Prophet’s life becomes more and more evanescent. The name Muhammad, for example, appears only 4 times in the Qur’an, as compared to the 136 mentions of Moses in the Qur’an. And those references to Muhammad say nothing specific about his life. The first biography of Muhammad, written by Ibn Ishaq 125 years after the Prophet’s death, is the primary source of biographical detail, yet it “comes down to us only in the quite lengthy fragments reproduced by an even later chronicler, Ibn Hisham, who wrote in the first quarter of the ninth century, and by other historians who reproduced and thereby preserved additional sections.”

Nor are ancient sources outside Islam any more forthcoming. An early document from around 635, by a Jewish writer converting to Christianity, merely mentions a generic “prophet” who comes “armed with a sword.” But in this document the “prophet” is still alive 3 years after Muhammad’s death. And this prophet was notable for proclaiming the imminent arrival of the Jewish messiah. “At the height of the Arabian conquests,” Spencer writes, “the non Muslim sources are as silent as the Muslim ones are about the prophet and holy book that were supposed to have inspired those conquests.” This uncertainty in the ancient sources is a consistent feature of Spencer’s succinct survey of them. Indeed, these sources call into question the notion that Islam itself was recognized as a new, coherent religion. In 651, when Muawiya called on the Byzantine emperor Constantine to reject Christianity, he evoked the “God of our father Abraham,” not Islam per se. One hundred years after the death of Muhammad, “the image of the prophet of Islam remained fuzzy.”

Non-literary sources from the late 7^th century are equally vague. Dedicatory inscriptions on dams and bridges make no mention of Islam, the Qur’an, or Mohammad. Coins bear the words “in the name of Allah,” the generic word for God used by Christians and Jews, but say nothing about Muhammad as Allah’s prophet or anything about Islam. Particularly noteworthy is the absence of Islam’s foundational statement “Muhammad is the messenger of Allah.” Later coins referring specifically to Muhammad depict him with a cross, contradicting the Qur’anic rejection of Christ’s crucifixion and later prohibitions against displaying crucifixes. Given that other evidence suggests that the word “muhammad” is an honorific meaning “praised one,” it is possible that these coins do not refer to the historical Muhammad at all.

One lesson from the Thirties is that appeasing an aggressor encourages not just that one, but also another. The key act of appeasement of that decade’s many took place in March 1936, when Hitler remilitarized the Rhineland with 22,000 unseasoned troops and 14,000 policemen, violating both the Versailles and Locarno treaties. Facing them were nearly 100 French and Belgian divisions. Of course they did nothing, even though, as Hitler later confessed, “If the French had then marched into the Rhineland we would have had to withdraw with our tails between our legs.” With that daring move, Hitler had taken a huge step toward protecting Germany from Allied counterattacks when he invaded Czechoslovakia and then Poland, and acquiring Germany’s traditional launching pad for his invasion of France and air attacks on England.

But what emboldened Hitler to gamble on French passivity? A few months earlier, in October 1935 Mussolini had invaded Ethiopia in violation of the League of Nations. Like today’s U.N., the League blustered, threatened, and imposed useless sanctions, but in the end did nothing, even though the British Mediterranean fleet could have closed down the Suez Canal and stopped Italy cold. Historian T.P. Cornwall-Evans drew the obvious conclusion of this failure: Hitler “scorns the attitude of England, whose fine phrases contributed nothing to [Ethiopia]. If England hesitated to tackle the Italians . . . how much more would the English hesitate to grapple with the Germans.” Winston Churchill agreed: “Mussolini, like Hitler, regarded Britannia as a frightened, flabby old woman, who at the worst would only bluster, and was anyhow incapable of making war.” Thus appeasement begat appeasement until the horrific denouement came in 1939.

Now consider our decades-long appeasement of North Korea and the way it has emboldened the Iranians to follow the Kim family playbook for acquiring nuclear weapons. Just last week, newly minted North Korean dictator Kim Jong-un defied U.N. resolutions and American threats by launching a missile that could deliver a nuclear payload to the West Coast. Satellite intelligence shows that the North is also preparing for more nuclear tests, indicating they have no intention of stopping their development of more nuclear weapons. This provocation came a few weeks after Obama struck a deal offering 240,000 metric tons of food in exchange for promises to freeze the weapons program. This pattern of offering carrots to North Korea, only to get smacked with sticks in return, has been going on for decades now, under both Republican and Democratic administrations. That is how the North got the bomb in the first place, engaging in “negotiations” and dangling promises of cooperation in exchange for aid and time.

On April 3, Obama went after Representative Paul Ryan and his budget, which Obama linked explicitly to Romney. Ryan’s budget actually addresses the key problems of out of control government spending and rapidly metastasizing entitlement costs, the looming fiscal train-wreck that Obama and the Democrats have avoided dealing with for over 3 years. Masking this dereliction of duty, Obama in his speech instead piled up lie after lie about Ryan’s budget, spicing the whole with question-begging rhetoric. Financial aid cut for 10 million college students, 1,600 fewer grants for Alzheimer’s and AIDS research, clean energy technology cut by a fifth, 200,000 pre-schoolers banished from Head Start, 2 million mothers and children denied healthy food, cuts to the Department of Justice and the FBI, national parks closed, air, food, and water safety compromised, less accurate weather forecasts, more flight cancellations at airports––this whole catalogue of apocalyptic disasters is a patent lie, one worsened by the charge that Ryan’s budget is “thinly veiled social Darwinism” designed to further enrich the already bloated 1% by ruthlessly cutting government programs. In fact, the Ryan budget increases spending from $3.6 trillion this year to almost $4.9 trillion in 2022.

A week later, in Boca Raton Florida Obama was at it again, beating the drum of tax “fairness” as he proposed imposing the “Buffet Rule” on those earning more than $1 million to force them to “pay their fair share,” which Obama puts at 30%. This idea that rich Americans are tax deadbeats was given traction by billionaire Warren Buffet, the tax-shelter king who popularized the myth that millionaires pay taxes at a lower rate than ordinary Americans because the rich pay most of their taxes at the capital-gains rate of 15%. In actual fact, as NRO points out, Americans in the $40-$50 thousand income bracket pay an effective rate of 3.2% in federal income tax, 80% of U.S. households are taxed at a rate less than 15%, and half pay nothing at all. As for those dastardly millionaires, the rate for most of them is already 30%, while 10% pay less and another 10% pay more, according to the Congressional Research Service.

Worse yet, the amount of revenue the Buffet Rule would raise is $5 billion a year––“or less than 0.5% of the $1.2 trillion fiscal 2012 budget deficit and over the next decade a mere 0.1% of the $45.43 trillion the federal government will spend,” the Wall Street Journal reports. Obviously, this is not enough revenue to “stabilize our debt and deficits for the next decade,” as Obama has claimed. In fact, to close the deficit in 2035, when entitlement spending will blow up the budget, tax revenues would require a surreal rate of 223% on the highest tax bracket. Nor will this Buffet Rule pittance do anything to rein in federal spending, projected to reach 50% of GDP by 2060 because of runaway entitlement costs destined to expand even further if Obamacare survives. Finally, the idea that the extra revenues generated by the Buffet Rule would be used to lower the deficit flies in the face of history, which shows that every dollar of increased revenues leads to at least $1.17 of government spending. As Milton Friedman once said, “Politicians will always spend every penny of tax raised and whatever else they can get away with.”

Derbyshire got in trouble over a piece he posted on the webzine Taki’s Magazine called “The Talk: Nonblack Version. “The talk” is what many professional blacks call the coming-of-age conversation they have with their kids, the main theme of which seems to be the persistence of racism in American society. Derbyshire’s version focuses on some matters of fact, such as the disproportionate numbers of black criminals, and others of speculation, such as black intelligence inferiority. It was the latter, of course, that got Derbyshire fired by National Review, which called such ideas “nasty and indefensible.”

Surely, our main concern should be whether the notion that blacks aren’t as smart as whites is wrong, and what evidence demonstrates its errors. Putting this speculation out of bounds precludes the airing of the evidence and arguments that explode it. Indeed, this eagerness to demonize and forbid any discussion at all reminds me of the climate change fundamentalists, who simply assert that there is a “consensus” and that anyone who doubts it is anti-science, a “denier,” or in thrall to big oil.

Personally, I have doubts about the whole intelligence and race debate for many reasons. First, I’m not sure that “race” is a useful way to talk about people. The genetic differences accounting for variations in hair texture or skin pigment strike me as trivial compared to the fundamental reality of human beings, which resides not in the material world but in the spiritual, that immortal, free soul created in the likeness of God. More practically, the notion that there are pure “races” seems with some few exceptions to be empirically false. There’s been a lot genetic mixing and blending going on over the millennia, and we don’t yet understand how genes work, or how they interact over time with each other and various physical and cultural environments, to pinpoint a genetic cause for much of anything. Race, in short, is a pseudo-scientific idea reflecting the fundamentalist materialism that arose in the late 18^thcentury and that attempted to reduce all human reality and behavior to matter and the laws of nature. That’s why the first progressives took to racism so eagerly: it was just another example of how “science” could provide reliable knowledge about people that in turn could be used by experts to arrange society more efficiently.

For decades now too many Western politicians, diplomats, and pundits have played Charlie Brown to the Palestinians’ Lucy. No matter how many times the Arabs have invited Westerners to kick the football of “land for peace,” only to jerk the ball away at the last minute, there remains no end of Westerners eager to line up and take another try no matter how many times they land flat on their backs.

Thomas Friedman might hold the record for falling for this trick. Just recently he endorsed a call by jailed terrorist murderer Marwan Barghouti for a “non-violent” uprising against Israel “with civil disobedience or boycotts of Israel, Israeli settlements or Israeli products.” Friedman does have one condition for his support: that the Palestinians present “a detailed map of the final two-state settlement they are seeking.” In the same column, Friedman also endorsed the view that creating a Palestinian state can create peace and stability by providing an alternative “model” to the Islamist states coming into being as a result of the “Arab Spring” uprisings: “the rise of Islamists in Tunisia, Libya, Egypt and Syria, Israelis and Palestinians” create “a greater incentive than ever to create an alternative model in the West Bank — a Singapore — to show that they [Israelis and Arabs], together, can give birth to a Palestinian state where Arab Muslims and Christians, men and women, can thrive in a secular, but religiously respectful, free-market, democratic context, next to a Jewish state.”

No better example of the persistent hold of received wisdom and unexamined assumptions can be found than Friedman’s column. The biggest assumption, of course, is that a critical mass of ordinary Palestinian Arabs––as opposed to the duplicitous or Westernized elites Friedman talks to––want a state more than they want to destroy Israel. If we attend to deeds rather than deceitful words, the evidence that the destruction of Israel trumps acquiring a state is overwhelming. For starters, Palestinians have squandered every opportunity to create their own state, beginning with the U.N.’s 1947 partition plan. As Efraim Karsh writes of the rise of the Palestinian Liberation Organization, “Had Arafat set the PLO from the start on the path to peace and reconciliation, instead of turning it into one of the most murderous terrorist organizations in modern times, a Palestinian state could have been established in the late 1960s or the early 1970s; in 1979 as a corollary to the Egyptian-Israeli peace treaty; by May 1999 as part of the Oslo Process; or at the very latest with the Camp David summit of July 2000.”

And why have the Palestinians consistently rejected these opportunities for a state? One simple reason: an absolute rejection of the legitimacy of Israel and its right to exist. This rejection of Israel is obvious in the non-negotiable demand of a “right of return” for the ever-growing number of “refugees,” a demand that if granted would create a demographic WMD that would destroy Israel as a Jewish state. Nor is this rejection of Israel a consequence of Arafat’s failures as a leader, as compared to the “moderate” Mahmoud Abbas: “For all their drastically different personalities and political styles,” Karsh writes, “Arafat and Abbas are warp and woof of the same fabric: dogmatic PLO veterans who have never eschewed their commitment to Israel’s destruction and who have viewed the ‘peace process’ as the continuation by other means of their lifelong war.”

Thus in the 2007 Annapolis Conference, when Israeli president Ehud Olmert offered a Palestinian state on 97% of the West Bank on the condition of Palestinian recognition of Israel as a Jewish state, Abbas turned him down, demanding again the “right of return,” the euphemism for the slow-motion demographic destruction of Israel. So too in 2009, when Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu demanded recognition of Israel as a condition for negotiations, Abbas responded, “A Jewish state, what does that suppose to mean? You can call yourselves as you like, but I don’t accept it and I say so publicly.” Netanyahu’s repeat offer a few months later was scorned throughout the Arab world. American “ally” Hosni Mubarak said that “no one will support this appeal in Egypt or elsewhere.” Chief Palestinian “peace negotiator” Saeb Erekat said that Netanyahu “will have to wait 1,000 years before he finds one Palestinian who will go along with him.” In August of that year, as Karsh concludes this history of rejection, Fatah’s general congress “reaffirmed its long-standing commitment to the ‘armed struggle’ as ‘a strategy, not tactic . . . in the battle for liberation and for the elimination of the Zionist presence. This struggle will not stop until the Zionist entity is eliminated and Palestine is liberated.’” Given this six-decade-long irredentist history, what sort of “detailed map of the final two-state settlement” does Friedman think the Palestinians will offer to earn his endorsement of their protests?

What makes Obama tick? Is it psychological conflict and neuroses created by an absent father, a Muslim stepfather, and a flighty mother addled by Third-Worldism? Is he a Manchurian president, nursing socialist or Islamist agendas? A secret Muslim practicing taqqiya, or a progressive disciple of Saul Alinksy who has finished the Gramscian “long march through the institutions” by occupying the country’s most powerful political post? For me, while all these speculations could explain Obama’s personality and behavior, the answer is simpler: he is the perfect embodiment of the politicized, corrupt university.

That the university is politicized will surprise no reader of FrontPage, but more evidence has just been presented in a report by the California Association of Scholars called A Crisis of Competence. This study of the University of California system confirms what national studies of faculty political preferences have previously learned–– that liberal professors outnumber conservative ones 8 to 1. At the flagship Berkeley campus, ratios are scarier: 10:1 in the hard sciences, 17:1 in the humanities, and 21:1 in the social sciences. And across the system, individual academic departments reveal more lopsided ratios: 29:1 in the Berkeley English department, 31:1 in the Berkeley history department, 29:2 in the UCLA English department, and 53:3 in UCLA history. Are we surprised that the University of California was one of the biggest donors to Barack Obama’s 2008 campaign, giving more money than even Goldman Sachs?

Given this political bias, it is equally unsurprising that, according to a study by the UCLA Higher Education Research Institute, a majority of professors now believe their task should be teaching not basic skills, critical thinking, and foundational information, but how to “become agents of social change.” For example, the “mission statement” of the Berkeley Department of Social Work states that students must be committed to advancing “social justice,” code for redistributionist policies predicated on grievance. Or consider the UC Santa Cruz Sociology Department’s mission statement, which proclaims the need to consider “how society is organized in relationship to a vision of a just, free, and equal society – a vision that may require fundamental social change.” You can bet that “equal” does not mean equality of opportunity but equality of result achieved by the coercive power of the government. And “fundamental social change” is redolent of Obama’s promise five days before the 2008 election that “we will fundamentally change America,” a promise he has unfortunately kept.

Before he was killed by French police, the jihadist murderer of three French-Algerian soldiers and four Jews, including three children, said that he was driven to killing by the “murder” of Palestinian children by Israelis. Of course, when all else fails blame the Jews. But this excuse is a mere pretext, a propaganda tactic for finding Western moral support by exploiting the unsavory anti-Jewish prejudices still lurking in too many Westerners.

The narrative that the Israeli “brutal occupation”  of the “Palestinian homeland” is the cause of jihadist violence is a hoary cliché, a jihadist pretext for terror enabled by Western anti-Semitism and pop psychology. Examples of this received wisdom are easy to collect. French foreign minister Hubert Védrine in 2002 explained increasing anti-Semitic attacks and car-burnings in France by saying, “One shouldn’t necessarily be surprised that young French people from immigrant families feel compassion for the Palestinians and get agitated when they see what is happening. The historian Tony Judt in his history of post-war Europe concurred, agreeing that the attacks were “a direct outcome of the festering crisis in the Middle East.” Repeating this received wisdom, General David Petraeus, in his 2010 Congressional testimony, said that the Arab-Israeli “conflict foments anti-Americanism sentiment, due to a perception of U.S favoritism for Israel. Anger over the Palestinian question limits the strength and depth of U.S. partnerships with governments and peoples” in Iraq and Afghanistan. “Meanwhile, al-Qaeda and other militant groups exploit that anger to mobilize support.” No doubt cognizant of the Western penchant for blaming Jews, Osama bin-Laden added Palestine to his ever-growing list of pretexts for attacking America: “The creation and continuation of Israel,” he lectured us in 2002, “is one of the greatest crimes, and you are the leaders of its criminals.”

Of course, bin Laden was never short of pretexts for rationalizing murder. First it was the American troops stationed in Saudi Arabia during the Gulf War. Then in 2004, he said American involvement in Lebanon in 1983 made him hate America. Elsewhere, he claimed that the U.S. had waged “a war against Muslims” since 1945. Yet in his statements after 9/11, bin Laden mentioned the real reason: the “humiliation and disgrace” inflicted on Muslims by the dissolution of the caliphate in 1924. That, not the creation of Israel, is the real “catastrophe” for Islamists, the culmination of three centuries of Western encroachment into the House of Islam. For theorists of jihad like Muslim Brothers Hassan al Banna and Sayyid Qutb, the existence of Israel was merely a symptom of a larger corruption of Islam by Western ideas that opened the door to the Western dominance that made Israel possible in the first place.

Moreover, it is hard to credit Arab or Muslim concern for Palestinian suffering, given the contempt most Arabs have shown for the people who ran away in 1948 rather than fight, or the way Arab countries herded Palestinian refugees into squalid camps existing on international welfare, or the body-count of Palestinians killed by their fellow Arabs, a number that dwarfs those killed by Israel while defending herself from terrorist attacks. Just the toll of Palestinians killed in the 1970 Black September massacre in Jordan, for example, around 5000, is over half the 8000 killed by Israel during the whole six-decade conflict. Clearly, the issue isn’t the number of dead, tortured, imprisoned or oppressed, but rather the identity of the enemy––infidels whose fate is to be subjected to Muslims, whom Allah called the “best of nations” destined to dominate the world.

New Jersey jury on Friday convicted a Rutgers freshman of “bias intimidation,” among several other charges. Dharum Ravi had set up a webcam in the dorm room he shared with Tyler Clementi, and then posted footage online of Clementi being intimate with another man. Three days later Clementi jumped to his death from the George Washington Bridge. Ravi faces up to ten years in prison or deportation to India.

This verdict promises to have malign effects beyond the problems of hate-speech laws already long recognized. Most important, it will make it easier for Muslim organizations to achieve in the United States what they have in Europe: criminalizing legitimate and fact-based criticism of Islam by disguising it as “hate speech,” thus enlisting our criminal justice system in the enforcement of shari’a-based blasphemy laws.

Ravi’s conviction has dangerously expanded the already over-broad and subjective statutes against “hate crimes,” which are for the most part based on words and attitudes. Such laws are an attempt to criminalize preferences disapproved of by some political ideologies, and they are based on dubious social psychology theories about how “hate speech” creates a “climate of fear” that legitimizes and hence increases physical violence or harassment against protected groups. The problem with such laws, however, is that in practice they are selective, protecting politically favored constituencies while excluding other groups such as Christians, Jews, straight white males, or conservatives. Worse yet, what constitutes “hate speech” is highly subjective and reductive, ignoring the specific contexts and intentions that contribute to any speech act. Finally, under the Constitution, we are free to dislike whomever we wish for whatever reason we wish, no matter how much such dislike disturbs others. And subject to strict “fighting words” constraints, under the First Amendment we have the right to express that dislike in speech, including speech others may find offensive.

In short, “hate crime” laws represent another dangerous government intrusion into social and political life at the expense of freedom, all in an attempt to create some utopian world in which nobody ever feels bad, and social relations are without strife and conflict. Yet this goal is impossible given human nature and the great variety of people and their beliefs, some of which they passionately hold and consider foundational to their identities and the meaning of their lives. In a free society that by law gives people the right to express these beliefs and preferences, there inevitably will be clashes, and these disagreements won’t always be conducted with the decorum of a Jane Austen novel. Thus freedom of speech necessarily entails accepting that occasionally one will be insulted or offended. But that’s the price we pay for that freedom, for the alternative is the creation of legal limitations that inhibit speech by using the coercive power of the state to threaten or silence disagreeable political views.

The more dangerous consequence of such legislation, the illegitimate expansion of the scope of hate crime offenses, is what has taken place in the Ravi case. What Ravi did could be considered mean or boorish, but given he was a freshman in college at the time, such behavior is to be expected of a callow youth. There was no evidence presented that Ravi personally was homophobic, no past record of harassing or intimidating homosexuals. In fact, there was not any “hate speech” at all, just a subjective interpretation of his actions as the fuzzy crime “bias intimidation.” As a result, this verdict has broadened the categories “hate” and “bias” to criminalize immaturity––as long as the victim is a member of a protected group. If the roles were reversed, and Clementi had posted videos of Ravi having sex with a woman, nobody would have cared how humiliated or shamed Ravi became, even if he committed suicide.

As a result of this expansion, this verdict contributes to that “chilling” effect on free speech that the ACLU selectively complains about. People who disagree about the legitimacy of same-sex marriage, for example, or resist the attempt to normalize homosexuality, now face the possibility that their opinions, if expressed in ways subjectively interpreted as “hurtful,” could be construed as “bias intimidation” or a “hate crime” or “bullying,” and hence subject to legal sanctions. After all, if normal freshman boorishness can be criminalized, anything can. Already the threat of such prosecution lurks behind every charge of “sexism” or “racism” or “homophobia.” We saw this tactic in the recent uproar over Rush Limbaugh’s comments about Sandra Fluke, which a Washington Post blogger called “hate speech” that “crossed into the realm of sexual harassment.” That is, as something that the power of the government can punish. Such threats can lead to self-censorship and an environment that is hostile to free speech.

As the clock ticks closer to a nuclear-armed Iran, the Western powers are girding their loins for––more talks. Actually, they’re getting ready to talk to Iran about the conditions for talking some more. EU foreign policy head Catherine Ashton announced that the “P5 + 1” powers (the permanent Security Council members plus Germany) hoped to persuade “Iran to move away from its nuclear program,” and expected “from the contacts we’ve had that this process can now move forward swiftly and seriously.” Ashton didn’t produce any evidence why the Iranians would voluntarily give up the bomb, or how yet one more round of negotiations, like the so-called “crippling sanctions,” will produce anything other than giving Iran more time to “swiftly and seriously” achieve nuclear-weapons capability.

Meanwhile, the Obama administration keeps shifting the conditions under which the U.S. would take military action. Secretary of State Clinton on February 29 three times told the House Foreign Affairs committee that “it’s absolutely clear that the president’s policy is to prevent Iran from having nuclear weapons capability.” A few days later anonymous “administration officials” said Clinton had “misspoken,” which Obama confirmed in his speech to AIPAC where he several times asserted that “obtaining a nuclear weapon,” not capability, would be the casus belli, even though he has no clue exactly how we’d know the mullahs had nuclear weapons before they announced it to the world, the same way we found out Pakistan and North Korea had them. The purpose of this shift is obvious: it provides more time for “diplomacy” and “sanctions” to work their magic, and puts more pressure on Israel not to do anything that might make unpleasant headlines compromising Obama’s reelection. However, the history of Pakistan and North Korea’s acquisition of nuclear weapons shows that the consequence of this delay will be a nuclear-armed Iran.

But that contingency doesn’t seem to bother Obama’s academic allies like Bruce Ackerman, who recently provided a specious justification for inaction in the Los Angeles Times. The Yale law professor asserted that American support for a preemptive strike on Iran “would be a violation of both international law and the U.S. Constitution.” The Hoover Institution’s Peter Berkowitz dismantled Ackerman’s tendentious and erroneous interpretation, which Berkowitz shows is an attempt “to bend the precedents and provisions of international law and twist the facts of American politics to conform to their policy preferences.” The left’s hysterics about the illegality and immorality of “preemption,” of course, has always been an ideological pretext for demonizing and hence discouraging U.S. military action, which to the left is almost never justified, given America’s neo-colonial crimes and oppression.

But preemption has for millennia been an obvious common-sense response to an aggressor. The 4^th century B.C. orator Demosthenes used a memorable metaphor for preemption when he was trying to rouse the indolent Athenians to use force to resist Philip II of Macedon’s aggression: “To manage war properly, you must not follow the trend of events but must forestall them . . . But you Athenians, possessing unsurpassed resources––fleet, infantry, cavalry, revenues–– have never to this very day employed them aright, and yet you carry on war with Philip exactly as a barbarian boxes. The barbarian, when struck, always clutches the place; hit him on the other side and there go his hands. He neither knows nor cares how to parry a blow or how to watch his adversary.” In other words, anticipate the aggressor’s actions, and, as Nathan Bedford Forrest supposedly put it, “ Get there firstest with the mostest.”

So much is mere common sense, but common sense is woefully lacking in the West’s response to a regime of religious fanatics in pursuit of nuclear weapons. Unwilling to act, whether because of fear, ideology, or political self-interest, Western leaders continue to camouflage their inaction with sanctions and diplomatic palaver. Yet the historical record of both in deterring a committed aggressor is one not just of failing to stop aggression, but of enabling it. The Thirties, of course, provide numerous examples, starting with the League of Nations’ toothless response to Japanese aggression in China, moving on to the flaccid reaction to Mussolini’s invasion of Ethiopia, and culminating with the Munich conference that delivered Czechoslovakia to Hitler and paved the way for World War II. In each case, sanctions and talk led to more aggression, because the aggressors correctly interpreted that sanctions and words were the face-saving excuses of nations afraid to act.

Progressive dudgeon hit the stratosphere. Democrat Representative Louise Slaughter wrote a letter that decried Limbaugh’s “sexually charged, patently offensive, and obscene language” and “atrocious and hurtful words.” MSNB’s Jonathan Capehart called the comments “hateful” and “rude,” and said they were “low” even for Limbaugh. Democrat “strategist” Krystal Ball (sic) called Limbaugh “despicable,” “disgusting,” and a “loathsome individual.” The Washington Post’s Jamila Bey called the remarks “hate speech” and claimed they “crossed into the realm of sexual harassment.” The president of Georgetown said the remarks were “misogynistic, vitriolic, and a misrepresentation of the position of our student.”

And in the midst of crisis in the Middle East and the ticking entitlement time bomb, President Obama found time personally to call Fluke and deplore Limbaugh’s “inappropriate personal attacks.” Following the loss of some advertisers, Limbaugh apologized for what he called his “attempt to be humorous.”

I’m not interested in Limbaugh’s comments or whether or not they are “appropriate.” When you enter the political kitchen, as Fluke did, you should be ready to get scorched. As always, more interesting is the reaction to the comments. And that reaction once again reveals the monstrous hypocrisy of progressives. The folks who proclaim their sensitivity, nuanced thinking, therapeutic concern for the tender sensibilities of others, and open-mindedness have always been the most vicious, bigoted, narrow-minded, crude, dogmatic, conformist people on the planet. Take everybody’s exhibit number one, the HBO blowhard Bill Maher, who’s on record calling Sarah Palin a “c—t” and inviting Jon Huntsman to “suck my d—k.” I don’t remember the President calling Palin or Hunstman to regret “that our political discourse has become debased,” as his flack Jay Carney put it. Nor is anyone demanding that Obama-supporting superpac Priorities USA Action should return the million bucks Maher gave it. Why should they? Remember when Obama called the Tea Party folks “tea-baggers,” a vulgar sexual term? “Appropriate” and “debased” are in the eye of the progressive beholder, and depend on the ideology of whoever is being attacked.

Of course, in the progressive hysteria we are also subjected to the “chilling free speech” charge, as when Fluke on the Today Show Friday said that Limbaugh’s comments were an “attempt to silence me.” She apparently doesn’t think that her threat to sue Limbaugh––the left’s favorite WMD when it comes to destroying free speech–– might be an attempt to silence him. In fact, rather than “silencing” her, Limbaugh’s comments have given an obscure law student the biggest platform on the planet, at the same time Limbaugh’s apology suggests that it is his free speech that’s been “chilled.” And are the media so dumb that they don’t see the absurdity of a guest on the Today Show claiming to its 5.6 million viewers that someone tried to “silence” her?

More important than occasioning a display of progressive hypocrisy is Fluke’s claim that law students at a prestigious private school can’t afford birth control. If Fluke could produce one of her colleagues who doesn’t have an I-phone, an I-pad, an I-pod, a high-speed internet connection, or cable television; who doesn’t spend $20 a week at Starbucks, or has to eat ramen every night, or never takes a vacation, never eats out, never goes to bars or concerts; or who has parents on welfare who can’t contribute to her education, or works part-time at a burger joint, or has any other characteristics of someone so poor she can’t budget for birth control pills, then maybe she’d have a point. But even then, condoms are available for free at numerous clinics and even at some retail stores. And God forbid we should suggest that the young lady just say no.

The cost of birth control, though, is just a smokescreen. More pernicious is the assumption that, as Fluke puts it, “This is about women’s health.” In other words, unplanned pregnancy is a disease, something that like breast cancer just sort of happens to a woman, and for which she bears no responsibility. That’s how House minority leader Nancy Pelosi sees it. Speaking of the failed Senate amendment to allow religious organizations not to fund contraception, Pelosi said that the measure was “part of the Republican agenda of disrespecting women’s health issues [by] allowing employers to cut … basic health services for women, like contraception, mammograms, prenatal and cervical-cancer screenings.”

The riots and violence in Afghanistan over some accidentally burned Qur’ans are following a script that by now is all too drearily familiar. As we have seen over the years with the riots over the Mohammed cartoons, Pope Benedict’s comments about violence in Islam, or false rumors of Qur’ans flushed down toilets, violent Muslim overreactions to slights are immediately followed by anxious apologies from American leaders. Rather than defusing the anger, however, such groveling merely encourages more contempt and violence.

So too with the current riots, which have killed 30 people, including 4 U.S. soldiers, two of them in the high-security Interior Ministry. Another seven Sunday were wounded in a grenade attack by demonstrators. This violence, moreover, has been encouraged by mullahs in mosques, teachers in madrassas, and members of parliament. Predictably, the Taliban––with whom our government is eager to talk peace––has encouraged people to “turn their guns on the foreign infidel invaders.” President Obama has responded to this incitement and violence by offering his personal “sincere apologies,” professing his “deep regret,” and vowing to hold those responsible accountable. Defense Secretary Panetta and NATO commander John Allen also apologized.

But no reciprocal apology has been demanded from President Hamid Karzai for the incitement to violence on the part of government and religious leaders, or for the deaths of two of our troops at the hands of an Afghan soldier we trained and armed, and another two inside a government ministry. Newt Gingrich had the best response to this sorry spectacle: “There seems to be nothing that radical Islamists can do to get Barack Obama’s attention in a negative way and he is consistently apologizing to people who do not deserve the apology of the President of the United States period,” Gingrich said in Washington D.C. “It is Hamid Karzai who owes the American people an apology, not the other way around. This destructive double standard whereby the United States and its democratic allies refuse to hold accountable leaders who tolerate systematic violence and oppression in their borders must come to an end.”

The administration and the military, of course, rationalize their indulgence of this double standard as motivated by “the safety of American men and women in Afghanistan, of our military and civilian personnel there,” as Obama spokesman Jay Carney put it. But as one demonstrator in Kabul said, “We don’t care about Obama’s apology. We have to protest to be responsible to our god. They are burning our Qur’an. An apology is not enough.” Most Afghans obviously agree, since rioting and killing have intensified despite apologies from our highest government and military officials. Indeed, over the past few decades, no amount of apologies for alleged “insults” to Muslims has stopped Islamists form attacking us. Nor have the good deeds benefitting Muslims, from rescuing Bosnians from genocide to liberating Libyans from Gaddafi, stopped jihadists from wanting to kill Americans for an endless list of reasons. The past decades of such incidents have shown instead that apologies are useless, and merely confirm the impression among Muslims that we are spiritually inferior, and so endorse the perverse logic that accidentally burning a book is worse than murdering our soldiers and citizens. Why else would we publicly flagellate ourselves over such “insults” even as we say nothing about the Muslim murders of Christians in Egypt and Nigeria, or the Muslim laws prescribing capital punishment for converts to Christianity, or the Muslim vandalizing and destruction of 300 churches in Cyprus, or the Muslim slow-motion extermination of Christians in lands that worshipped Christ for 6 centuries before Islam even existed?

Iran announced Sunday that it was cutting off crude oil sales to France and England, a mostly symbolic act given that Iran provides England less than 1% of its crude, and France claims that it “practically stopped importing Iranian oil,”  according to the head of the Union of Petroleum Industries. A few days later, the head of Iran’s armed forces threatened to attack Israel preemptively through its terrorist proxies in Lebanon and Gaza. The Iranians are once again using bluster to counter the E.U. ban on Iranian oil slated to begin on July 1, and the threat of Belgium-based SWIFT to ban Iran from its system for facilitating transfers of payments among nations through its international network of banks. As a further provocation, the Iranians sent two warships through the Suez Canal in a show of support for global pariah Syria. This follows the Iranian-engineered terrorist attacks on Israeli targets in India, Georgia, and Thailand.

At the same time they threaten and foment terrorist attacks, the Iranians have told the “P5+1” nations (Permanent U.N. Security Council members and Germany) of its “readiness for dialogue” and its “new initiatives” concerning its nuclear program, and has allowed U.N. inspectors back in the country, even though President Ahmadinejad said last week that “Our nuclear program is not a subject for negotiations.” Consistent with this position, inspectors were denied access to military installations believed to house nuclear testing equipment. Validating Iran’s lie that its nuclear program is for domestic energy, Army General Martin Dempsey, the chairman of the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff, announced that “we believe we know that the Iranian regime has not decided” to make a nuclear weapon, and that “it would be premature to exclusively decide that the time for a military option is upon us.” The ominous background to all this diplomatic chatter is the continuing speculation about when or if Israel will take military action, or whether Israel has the capacity to degrade Iran’s nuclear facilities enough to make an attack worth the risk and blowback.

It’s not hard to figure out what’s going on in this diplomatic two-step we’ve been dancing with Iran for years. We know that Iran is dead set on acquiring nuclear weapons, or at least “nuclear latency,” the ability quickly to create a weapon. Since its creation in 1979, the Iranian regime has been about more than Iran. As one ayatollah said at the time, the revolution was just “the start of the story. An Islamic and divine government, much like Iran and better, will be created” in other Muslim nations. And more recently, an editorial in the newspaper Kayhan, published by “Supreme Guide” Ali Khamenei, proclaimed Iran’s “fixed strategic goal”: “Our late Imam [Khomeini] openly spoke of raising the flag of Islam on top of the palaces of arrogant power, notably the White House . . . as the goal and purpose of the Islamic Revolution.” Seeing itself as a world-transformative power, Iran has been the foremost inspiration and supporter of jihadist violence, its prestige enhanced by its serial humiliations of the U.S., and by its genocidal aggression against Israel, the “little Satan” to America’s “great Satan.” Given its massive oil reserves, which mean it will always have a source of revenue, an Iran with nuclear arms will be virtually untouchable, and thus able to dominate the Middle East and damage our interests, whether by holding oil exports hostage, sparking a larger arms race in the region, attacking our ally Israel, or handing off nukes to one of its numerous terrorist proxies.

Equally obvious is the feckless response of the West to this threat, which seems to have followed a Micawberesque policy of hoping “something will turn up.” Unwilling to act, for years now we have substituted inspections, “talks,” and sanctions as toothless substitutes for action. At least we are consistent, for this is precisely how the West handled the embassy hostage crisis in 1979. Then too we tried sanctions, secret offers to negotiate, and trade embargoes in order to change Iranian behavior. But political, national, and economic self-interest rendered them all ineffectual. For example, the NATO countries were begged to impose a trade embargo, but threats by President Bani-Sadr to cut off oil to Europe––sound familiar?–– led to a weakened and hence ineffectual policy. As the Economist pointed out at the time, “The denial of material things is unlikely to have much effect on minds suffused with immaterial things.” The Iranians never have acted by the materialist calculus we have used in our dealings with them.

Moreover, today’s Iran has North Korea as the model for dealing with the West by using diplomatic and inspections processes to create time for achieving nuclear capability. And North Korea is an economic basket case that can’t even feed its own people, unlike Iran, whose oil somebody will figure out a way to buy no matter how many allegedly “crippling” sanctions the West imposes. Yet despite this history, Western leaders continue to assert that “sanctions are working” and that a bit more time will bring Iran to its knees, as Dennis Ross, who was Obama’s Middle East advisor, recently asserted. Meanwhile, Iran’s thousands of recently announced new-generation centrifuges will soon start spinning out even more enriched fuel necessary for weapons.

Thirty years ago, after Jimmy Carter’s disastrous attempt to rescue the embassy hostages in Iran, the Ayatollah Khomeini warned, “Carter still has not comprehended what kind of people he is facing and what school of thought he is playing with. Our people is the people of blood and our school is the school of Jihad.” Despite the graphic proof of Khomeini’s words in the carnage of 9/11, many in the media, politics, and foreign policy establishment still refuse to comprehend the enemy we are facing.

Even as Islamists have come to power in the countries hastily celebrated last year as cradles of democracy, “Arab Spring” fever continues to addle the thinking of many. New York Times correspondent Anthony Shadid (who died suddenly of an asthma attack last week in Syria) had his final article published last Saturday. It is a puff-piece on Tunisian Islamist Said Ferjani, who has returned to Tunisia from exile to “build a democracy, led by Islamists.” Said’s mentor is Rachid al-Ghannouchi, whose Ennahda party won over a third of the seats in Tunisia’s National Constituent Assembly. “His own thoughts evolving in exile,” Shahid writes, “Gannouchi became an early proponent of a more inclusive and tolerant Islamism, arguing a generation ago that notions of elections and majority rule were universal and did not contradict Islam.”

This statement is riddled with conceptual incoherence and obfuscation, and cries out for critical scrutiny. Elections and majority rule have nothing to do with being “more inclusive and tolerance,” which is the consequence of foundational principles such as human rights and equality before the law. Majorities can vote in democratic elections for exclusion and intolerance, as shown by the calls for intolerant shari’a law, and increased assaults on Christians and Jews in countries recently taken over by Islamists. And a shrewd reporter would have asked how this alleged “inclusion and tolerance” squares with Gannouchi’s campaign statement that “God wants you to vote for the party that will protect your faith,” a faith that prescribes subordinate status for women and non-Muslims; or whether Muslim Brothers offshoot Ennahda has repudiated the Brothers’ motto: “God is our objective; the Quran is our constitution, the Prophet is our leader; jihad is our way; and death for the sake of God is the highest of our aspirations.” Like many liberal reporters, Shadid simply accepts at face value the tactical deceptions of media-savvy Islamists adept at telling Westerners what they want to hear.

In fact, Shadid passes up numerous opportunities to do some good reporting and give his readers the whole story. For example, Shadid quotes approvingly Sheik Yusuf al-Qaradawi, the Brothers’ Grand Mufiti, but doesn’t inform his readers that Qaradawi is on record advocating shari’a law, terrorism, and genocide against the Jews. Shadid also quotes another “reformer,” Tariq Ramadan. Ramadan is the Swiss born grandson of Muslim Brothers founder Hassan al-Banna, whose desire was to see “the Islamic banner . . . wave supreme over the human race,” and about whose Islamist ideology Ramadan has said, “there is nothing in this heritage that I reject.” Of course, Shahid says nothing of Ramadan’s documented tactical duplicity, illiberal ideas, and connections to terrorists, all documented in Caroline Fourest’s Brother Tariq, which reveals that beneath his soothing rhetoric Ramadan is pursuing the jihadist program of global Islamization through propaganda and recruitment rather than through violence. But Shadid is simply following the pattern of most “reporting” on Islam and Muslims over the last decade. As Bruce Bawer wrote in Surrender about another Times puff-piece, this one about a Brooklyn Imam, such articles “emphasize personal and superficial details that are likely to generate sympathy while sidestepping or whitewashing core beliefs, domestic arrangements, cultural practices, social rules, and long-term political goals that might actually inform, enlighten––and therefore alarm––readers.”