John Boehner will be writing his own political obituary if he capitulates again to Barack Obama and raises the debt ceiling of the US government.

Boehner says he wants to cut spending, but he will be exposed as a liar if he increases the debts currently smothering our economy. This issue is very clear, and Americans understand this crisis because so many of us have faced similar financial difficulties ourselves. We know what it means to have spent more than we can afford.

America cannot continue to feast on an orgy of credit and spending. Easy money given to the political establishment is the cause of the current crisis. George Bush spent more money than was prudent or necessary, and Barack Obama has doubled down. The debts now are greater than 14 trillion. How much debt will be enough?

The scare mongering by the media and power elites should be ignored. If we don’t extend the debt ceiling, America need not default on current debts. Quite the opposite is true. If we continue to increase our debts we are moving minute by minute closer to a future default. No debtor improves his situation by increasing borrowing.

As Senator Pat Toomey(Rep-PA) recently stated: “In fact, if Congress refuses to raise the debt ceiling, the federal government will still have far more than enough money to fully service our debt. Next year, for instance, about 6.5% of all projected federal government expenditures will go to interest on our debt… why would we ever default?”

Boehner repeatedly says he wants to use the debt ceiling crisis to force a cut in spending. The best way to force votes to cut spending is to not add new debt. No passage of the debt ceiling guarantees that the Obama Administration will be forced to actually cut. Priories will come into focus when the limitless flood of money ends. Until then Washington will never change.

The use of words in Washington needs to accurately reflect reality. Spending is greater in 2011, than it was in 2010. Government spending is continuing to grow month by month even with Republicans and Democrats claiming they have cut it.

If a family or a business has a decrease in income they are forced to cut spending to bring the budget back into balance. Washington has ignored the warnings of economists and prudent leaders too long. The word compromise in Congress has actually become a code word for capitulation to the relentless special interests fleecing America.

If we don’t raise the debt ceiling we have an opportunity to engage in an honest discussion about priorities. Maybe bombing Libya isn’t justified if we understand that it will cause a suspension of Social Security payments.

Note how the CNN reporter repeatedly interrupts Pamela with hostile questions, and then coos and fawns over this dishonest Islamic supremacist spokesman, allowing him to engage in the ad hominems so often favored by Islamic apologists when they cannot answer on the basis of the facts.

Left-wing zealots and Ron Paul cultists frequently raise the prospect of dark Jewish conspiracies to bend the free world to Israel’s sinister will, but such conspiracy-mongering is awfully hard to square with the pervasiveness of Jewish support for the anti-Israel Left.  Today’s example is Fania Oz-Salzberger, an Israeli academic who, on The Daily Beast, incredibly enough claims Israelis should hang their heads in shame over their government’s recent skirmish at sea with aspiring Muslim terrorists:

Raiding ships in international waters (bound for Gaza, I know) loaded with food (and a large supply of knives, I know), and shooting a bunch of Israel-haters (who really went for the kill when the soldiers jumped onto the deck, I know), is not a part of my civil contract with my government. Security? No thanks; you have just stretched the concept a few nautical miles too far.

Here’s the thing: Unsavory protesters disguised as humanitarian “peace activists” do not deserve to be shot. If Messrs. Netanyahu and Barak think they can use my taxes and deploy my defense forces in this way, I can only hang my head in genuine embarrassment. The army in which I served, which will soon enlist my children, is only good for one thing: to fight those who are aiming a gun at me. Not those who dislike me, demonize me, or hope to see me dead. Only the gun-wielders.

The author alludes to the not-quite-altruistic motives of the Turkish flotilla crew, but the full extent of their “unsavory” background cannot be understated.  The flotilla had links to known financers of terrorisme, and many of the individuals aboard reportedly had their own jihadist ties.  We know they attacked first, and did so viciously.  Oz-Salzberger can pontificate all she wants about how the character of the “victims” is immaterial, but that’s obviously not true; it speaks directly to whether or not the Israelis have a right to control who brings what into Gaza, and whether or not they’re justified in keeping lethal force (and, er, not-so-lethal force) on the table.  Until the professor supplements the hand-wringing with germane facts, the answer remains a resounding “yes” on both counts.

Elsewhere at the The Daily Beast website, Andrew Roberts counterbalances the hysteria with sanity, pointing out that blockades are entirely legitimate military measures (also legal, by the way) and that the Gaza blockade pales in comparison to the devastation imposed by blockades during World War II, and reiterating the magnitude of the threat Israel faces:

Consider that Israel, at a total population of 7.3 million, is under one-fortieth the size of the USA, at over 300 million. Now consider that Hamas and Hizbollah have fired over 6,000 rockets into Israel since 2007. Now multiply 6,000 by 40, and try to consider what any American President—even Barack Obama—would not have done if Canada were to have fired nearly a quarter of a million rickets at America over the past three years, killing tens of thousands of innocent American citizens and ignoring every warning to stop? Blockade? There’d have been a full-scale invasion years ago, and anybody suggesting that under those circumstances America should start dealing “with both wings of the Canadian national movement without preconditions” would be rightly written off as an appeaser or traitor.

This is not, as Israel-hating smear-blogger Andrew Sullivan asserted, a case of Israelis killing people “because they don’t like them.”  Even if the passengers weren’t bad guys, they still made the decision to respond to a known blockade in a war zone with hostility—signs either of a death wish or grade-A Darwin Award material.  Nobody ignorant of the stakes, the dangers, and the potential consequences had any business there to begin with, and the IDF has too much on the line to coddle every idiot who gives indications they might be a threat, however inadvertent (which, again, these guys most certainly were not).  That the commandos were armed with paintball guns demonstrates the pains to which Israel goes to avoid needless deaths.

Never mind; Oz-Salzberger knows who the real victims are:

The Israeli-Egyptian siege of Gaza was wrong, and must end. All civilian goods should be allowed in, the seriously sick should be rushed to Israeli hospitals, and laborers and students must be searched, airport-style, and let through. Rocket-shooters deserve response by kind. The obnoxious Hamas cannot be pressured into disappearance by making Gaza’s hapless denizens suffer. An honest Israeli should apologize to every innocent Gazan, even if Gaza’s leaders and other Palestinian terrorists will never beg pardon for their numerous Israeli victims. Human decency is not a bargaining chip.

It’s an odd sort of “siege” in which the five ships prior to this one get allowed through without incident. The truth is that there’s no dearth of peaceful goods in Gaza (indeed, “When, earlier today, the IDF brought the cargo from the ships to Rafah to transfer it to Gazans, Hamas … refused the shipment”), but they’ve also got plenty of weapons.  (Dennis Prager has more insight on Jewish concern for Palestinian welfare—and how the Palestinians return the favor— that demands widespread attention.)

If this is what passes for an “Israeli patriot” on the Left, I’d hate to see their idea of an Israeli traitor.

_____

Hailing from Fond du Lac, Wisconsin, Calvin Freiburger is a political science major at Hillsdale College.  He also writes for the Hillsdale Forum and his personal website, Calvin Freiburger Online.

Last September, General David Petraeus, Commander in Chief of the Central Command, signed a seven-page memo authorizing an increase in American special forces operations across his command. Under the order, which was reported by the New York Times last week, American special forces would be able to deploy to countries throughout CENTCOM’s area of responsibility (the Middle East and Africa) to “gather intelligence and build ties with local forces.” They would also gather intelligence “that could pave the way for possible military strikes in Iran.” Notably, the order applies to all countries within the region. Many are at least officially friendly to the United States, but some, notably Syria and the afore-mentioned Iranian regime, are decidedly unfriendly.

The New York Times report makes for fascinating reading and certainly sounds portentous. But it is important to understand exactly what such an order means (to the extent it is possible to understand a classified document that has not been seen by the general public). General Petraeus has not authorized any attacks or disruptive operations by American forces, he lacks the authority to do so; any major operations would require Washington’s approval. But he has made it possible for American military personnel to function as intelligence operatives, infiltrating countries both hostile and friendly, to assess conditions on the ground and work, perhaps in conjunction with local friendly forces, to disrupt terrorist cells and training operations.

These efforts will provide the United States with valuable human intelligence in areas where the CIA and other intelligence agencies lack significant resources, and will provide details that even the most advanced satellite or drone cannot possibly detect. While deploying American troops secretly into any country will always carry risks, General Petraeus will not be freelancing any unsanctioned invasions, despite some of alarmed reaction the memo has generated.

These assignments will be dangerous, both for the personnel involved and for the United States politically, but they should still be applauded. Nine years of warfare in Afghanistan, and now seven years in Iraq, have shown how difficult it is to wage war against diffuse terrorist cells linked only by their ideology, with heavy weapons and mass formations of troops designed to do battle with the Cold War-era Soviet Union. It took a long time after the shocking attacks of September 11^th for the American military, as powerful as it is, to adjust to the new kind of war, waged not by billion-dollar battalions, but the courage and ingenuity of small units.

Given the current weaknesses in the American economy, such a shift away from the massive deployments of the last ten years was inevitable. America cannot afford to keep fighting attempted car bombers with columns of tanks. Once American forces have left Iraq, and after Afghanistan is stable enough to leave (if ever), future battles in the war against Islamist extremism will be waged by these clandestine warriors. By infiltrating extremist hotbeds, they will make possible the same kind of targeted killings of enemy leaders that have of late proven so successful in Pakistan and Yemen.

They will not be enough to defeat militant Islamism, but if kept up at a steady pace, will serve to keep it off balance and offer local governments the chance to develop functional, stable societies of the sort less likely to export fanatical suicide bombers to the West. For that reason, this plan — what we know of it — should be commended. It offers the prospects of tangible benefits to the United States for relatively little risk.

But the risk is real, not just for the soldiers whose lives will be in danger (though we of course must keep them in our thoughts) but due to the temptation to become overly reliant upon these elite teams at the expense of other, more traditional elements of American military strength. Given the enormous financial pressure the United States finds itself under, and given the tendency thus far of the current White House Administration and Congress to favor social spending, cutbacks to some elements of American military readiness are inevitable. Until America’s fiscal house can be put back in order, that is simply the bleak reality.

But the cuts made today to save money tomorrow will have an enormous impact for decades to come. Ballistic missile defense, as originally envisioned by the administration of George W. Bush, has already been scrapped, and the orders for advanced navy destroyers and F-22 stealth fighters have been slashed. Secretary of Defense Robert Gates recently got into a public spat with the Navy over whether or not the United States truly needed 11 aircraft carriers when the rest of the world combined does not have that many. Such debates will undoubtedly become more common in the years ahead, and military leaders and politicians alike must avoid cutting American capabilities too deep on the false assumption that special forces teams can pick up the slack.

To an extent, they can — but only to that extent. Indeed, it is worth noting that the original report on the expanded role for these teams was quite clear that one of their missions is reconnaissance in preparation for a possible American attack against the Iranian nuclear program. That example perfectly illustrates the proper balancing of unconventional special forces and old fashioned heavy firepower. After all, once American special units conducted such preliminary survey missions, it would fall to the Navy and Air Force to blast their way into Iran, destroy their targets, and then deal with the inevitably violent Iranian response.

There is a role for special forces teams in future wars and low-level conflicts, and General Petraeus and the Obama Administration are to be praised for recognizing that. But the best efforts of those brave Americans deployed far from home will be wasted if the United States does not maintain the striking power to make use of their hard-won information and chooses instead of cut the military too deep to reduce deficits or free up funds for social programs of dubious value.

Matt Gurney is an editor at the National Post, a Canadian national newspaper, and writes and speaks on military and geopolitical issues. He can be reached at matt@mattgurney.ca.

BEIRUT: Lebanese President Michel Sleiman said the government cannot ask Hizbullah to give up its arms at a time of heightened Israeli tension and before agreement on a national defense strategy was reached.

Israeli allegations last month that Syria had transferred long-range Scud missiles to Hizbullah fuelled security concerns, although Lebanon and Syria both denied the charge, while Hizbullah's leader Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah has refused to comment.

Hizbullah is on the United States' terrorism blacklist, but it is also part of the Lebanese government.

Syria says it only gives Hizbullah political backing and that Israel may be using the accusation as a pretext for a military strike.

Israel launched a 34-day war against Lebanon in the summer of 2006 during which the powerful group fired thousands of mostly short-range rockets against Israel.

"To demand now, in this regional atmosphere full of dangers and the drumbeats of war that Israel is banging everyday, and before we reach an agreement on a national defense strategy to protect Lebanon, we cannot and must not tell the resistance ... 'Give us your weapons and put it under the state's command,'" Sleiman was quoted as saying in the Ad-Diyar newspaper on Saturday.

The current government, led by Sunni Muslim businessman Saad Hariri, has backed Hizbullah's right to keep its weapons to deter Israeli attacks, an issue that has been at the heart of Lebanon's political crisis over the past five years.

Sleiman has chaired periodic National Dialogue sessions but politicians have been unable to agree on a national defense strategy, in which Hizbullah's weapons would be integrated into the Lebanese Army, to protect Lebanon from Israel.

Israel is worried the Iranian-backed resistance group has replenished its arsenal to attack it on Iran's behalf should Tehran's nuclear sites come under attack.

Resistant to what?

Security Council Resolution 1701, which halted hostilities between Israel and Hizbullah in 2006, calls for a stop to arms smuggling. It bans all unauthorized weapons between the Litani River and the Blue Line, the UN-monitored border between Israel and Lebanon.

The Israeli state has criticized the UN peacekeeping force in southern Lebanon, UNIFIL, for not stopping weapons it says are flowing to Hizbullah. The United Nations says that is the responsibility of the Lebanese authorities.

UN Security Council Resolution 1559, sponsored by the United States and France and adopted in 2004, demanded that all Lebanese militias be disarmed. Hizbullah is the only group to have kept its arms since the 1975-1990 Civil War.

Visit NewsReal

Warning: HBO-level language. Hat tip to Andrew Sullivan.

In this clip from HBO’s recent episode of “Real Time with Bill Maher,” the leftist host and comedian says what so many of his progressive pals cannot:

1. Our American culture is better than the Middle East’s.

2. American Christians who follow their holy book literally are benign.

3. Islamofascism’s bullying to get us to suppress the first amendment cannot be tolerated.

Maher embraces these three controversial political positions. (“Controversial” within the community of the Left, that is.) But he’s unwilling to take the logical next step that these ideas demand: become a conservative.

If you acknowledge that our culture is worth defending, if you realize that individual liberty is not negotiable, and that Christian conservatives are in no way comparable to terrorists then you have no business being part of a movement — the political Left — that is dedicated to the promoting the exact opposite.

I don’t expect Maher to acknowledge that — he’s far too financially dependent on his leftist identity. He’s also unwilling to sacrifice his cool level by embracing political untouchables like Glenn Beck and Sarah Palin even though they share his position on the three points above. The day comes for many of us, though, when we’re willing to stop being cool. Some of us can realize that Freedom is more important.

PARIS - French President Nicolas Sarkozy has ordered legislation that would ban women from wearing Islamic veils that fully cover the face and body in public places, the government said Wednesday.

It is Sarkozy's first political action toward an outright ban, though he has repeatedly said such outfits oppress women and are not welcome in France, home to a firmly secular government.

Government spokesman Luc Chatel said after a Cabinet meeting Wednesday that the president decided the government should submit a bill to parliament in May on an overall ban on such veils "in all public places."

That ups the stakes in Sarkozy's push against veils such as the burqa and niqab and chador. Some in his own party have bristled at a full-out ban, and France's highest administrative body has questioned whether it would be constitutional.

Sarkozy insisted that "everything should be done so that no one feels stigmatized," according to Chatel. Sarkozy said the veils "do not pose a problem in a religious sense, but threaten the dignity of women."

Chatel did not say how the new bill would affect a resolution already slated for discussion in parliament May 11 on ways of limiting the full veils....

The UK Department of Health recently announced that it would loosen hygiene rules for Muslim and Sikh doctors and nurses. From now on, Muslim female staff will not need to wash their hands before procedures as it compromises their modesty. Instead, they will have the admittedly less sanitary option of wearing disposable plastic over-sleeves.

Acknowledging the danger of microbes and death, a Department of Health spokesman said, “The guidance is intended to . . . balance infection control measures with cultural beliefs.” But, believe it or not, from a culturist perspective, the death of some patients is not the main cause for concern that this policy elicits.

The most dangerous problem is that this policy encodes multiculturalism not culturism. Whereas culturism acknowledges that England has a majority culture to protect and promote, this multiculturalist policy implicitly says that England has no core culture. It says that the nation can be whatever pressure groups decide it is. It, therefore, officially ends the dominance of English culture in England.

If you think this is hyperbole, consider the decision’s potential impact on schools. If we are going to implement policies that recognize and give legal standing to balkanize our culture, we must think it through to such a broader societal impact. This legal precedent may require us to set up schools in which Islamic teachings are taught. If that seems extreme, keep in mind that multiculturalism has currently made it nearly a firing offense to criticize Islam in our schools.

When we encode multiculturalist school policy, we have a recursive loop of disaster. When we cannot criticize Islam, we cannot teach that much of Western history has been about fighting Islam. We must erase the concept that our defending Europe against Islamic invasion led the way to the Enlightenment and, ultimately, to our political freedoms. And when our school children are taught not to value our Western culture, they will not feel any sense of pride, have reasons to defend the civic virtues that make England strong, or possess a desire to protect their homeland.

Islam has been at war with the West nearly continuously since its inception. Wherever it takes over it imposes a ruthless theocracy that smothers the freedoms we hold dear. We cannot protect the West with policies that say Islam is equal to our civilization. Culture is not metaphysical. It exists in space and people. Everywhere Islam has legal standing and is practiced is a space where English culture does not exist and is not practiced. It means the territory of defending Western values has shrunk and that believing in Islamic values has grown. The hospitals are now becoming Islamic.

England has a culture. To survive, England must set up culturist policy that affirms that this is English land with Western practices. We must tell people that our schools will teach the glories of the European defense against Islam and the contribution philosophers such as John Locke made to creating the Western concept of rights. Our streets must not become areas where women must conform to Muslim customs. Just as Saudi Arabia has an Islamic culture and protects it, England has a culture and a right to protect it. To survive, England must enact culturist, not multiculturalist policies.

Dr. John Kenneth Press is the author of Culturism: A Word, A Value, Our Future. For more information, visit Culturism.us.

Maureen Dowd, columnist for The New York Times, has finally lost that last tenuous grip she had on her sanity. I thought she was already taking a long walk off the short pier of her sanity when she started hearing non-existent words, such as “boy” after Joe Wilson’s “You Lie” comment. That was nothing compared to her latest idiocy.

In her April 10th Op-Ed piece for the New York Times, that great bastion of inane thought, she equates the suffering of women living under radical Islamic law in Saudi Arabia with being a Catholic woman. In America. No, really.

How could such spirited women, smart and successful on every other level, acquiesce in their own subordination?

I was puzzling over that one when it hit me: As a Catholic woman, I was doing the same thing.

I, too, belonged to an inbred and wealthy men’s club cloistered behind walls and disdaining modernity.

I, too, remained part of an autocratic society that repressed women and ignored their progress in the secular world.

I, too, rationalized as men in dresses allowed our religious kingdom to decay and to cling to outdated misogynistic rituals, blind to the benefits of welcoming women’s brains, talents and hearts into their ancient fraternity.

To circumscribe women, Saudi Arabia took Islam’s moral codes and orthodoxy to extremes not outlined by Muhammad; the Catholic Church took its moral codes and orthodoxy to extremes not outlined by Jesus. In the New Testament, Jesus is surrounded by strong women and never advocates that any woman — whether she’s his mother or a prostitute — be treated as a second-class citizen.

Well aren’t you just precious, honey. Bless your heart. Since you are a yankee, let me be clear – that isn’t sexist, Maureen. But it does mean that you are an imbecile.Cassy Fiano rightly informs Miss Dowd (I use Miss so as to infuriate her further) of the following:

Women are not repressed in the Catholic church. To the contrary, as The Anchoress points out, women are celebrated in the church. There number of women in leadership positions in the Catholic church is comparable to the number of women in leadership positions in the workforce on the whole. There is nothing to stop women from serving in the Catholic church if they feel called to it. Look at Mother Theresa, Catherine of Sienna, Teresa of Avila. When it goes against the liberal meme of “the Catholic church is sexist”, women like these — and the thousands and thousands of nuns around the world — are ignored.

Bingo. But, see, this doesn’t fit the “progressive” meme. Instead, they invent subjugation and misogyny out of whole cloth, all while ignoring the very real – and deadly – subjugation of women under Islamic law. This brings their hypocrisy up to epic levels.

Where women truly are oppressed is Saudi Arabia. Right Wing News has just a short list of things women there cannot do. Ever:

They cannot drive cars

They cannot get too many jobs

They cannot wear their own selection of fashions (forced to war body covering abayas)

They aren’t allowed to speak in public

They have no right to vote

They are not welcome in government

They have no freedom of movement

They have their genitals mutilated as young girls

They are beaten by husbands routinely and have no legal recourse to stop it

They are beaten on the streets by “religion police” if they seem to be violating Sharia “laws”

They have little recourse to prosecute attackers for raping them

They cannot travel abroad without permission

They cannot join the clergy

I’ll add some more. In Saudi Arabia, a woman’s testimony in court is worth only half of what a man’s testimony is worth. Here, women are often put on pedestals. Under Sharia law, they are also put on pedestals, only it’s to be stoned to death or to be used as human bombs.  Since you are a self-avowed Feminist, Maureen, (modern day feminists being anything but actually Feminist) I’m not surprised that you would find that totally comparable to Catholic women in America.

I’m certain that she is partially basing  her arguments on the same tired old card they always play. The “reproductive rights” card. The Catholic church is perceived as not being a fan of birth control. Under Sharia law, that isn’t a problem, Maureen! Just lop it off and get a clitoridectomy! The Catholic church is against abortion.  Well, in Saudi Arabia, if you get pregnant out of wedlock or by rape, you can simply be stoned to death. Problem solved!

Sigh. You know who you may want to ask about true oppression and subjugation, Maureen? Ayaan Hirsi Ali. Ms. Ali, the author of Infidel, came here to America after she had to flee the Netherlands under threats of death by radical Islamists. The reason? She spoke. She spoke about the atrocities committed against women under fanatical Islamic faith. She spoke out against the physical mutilation of women by radical Muslims. She renounced the faith. For that, she lived in constant fear for her life.

You, Maureen, are allowed to speak freely (sans burka, no less), always, even if what you spout is utter nonsense. As is every other woman in this country, Catholic or otherwise.

The same can’t be said for women under Sharia law. Ever.

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Follow Lori  on Twitter and read more of her work at Snark and Boobs, iOwntheWorld , Right Wing News and Red State.

On “Hannity” last night, former Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich excoriated the Obama Administration’s announcement that nuclear retaliation is off the table against rogue states that attack us, as long as those states aren’t themselves nuclear, and that the United States will not develop any new nuclear weapons:

I think this is the most unrealistic diplomacy since the late 1920s. You have to go back to the Kellogg-Briand Pact to end war, the whole series of disarmament conferences.

In the 1920s the democracies, desperate to avoid dealing with reality, kept designing all sorts of paper documents that were going to end war. And they were going to disarm countries.

And the problem they had was that the Japanese, the Italians and Germans, and the Russians, didn’t go along with them. So here you have these diplomats getting together.

And if you notice today, by the way, the Iranians were laughing, literally laughing at the idea of sanctions as they build nuclear weapons.

So you have the president over here in a fantasy. And it’s a fantasy. It sounds good. It would be wonderful. It just doesn’t fit this particular planet.

And over here you have North Korea, Pakistan, Iran, Al Qaeda, and a whole host of other potential enemies who are just methodically doing their thing. And I think the greatest danger is that we will end up confusing words with reality in a way that some day could get a lot of people killed.

This new policy is manifestly absurd, for the simple fact that you cannot expect those inclined to commit genocide against you to be operating under even remotely similar values or conceptions of decency.  Rest assured, the reaction to this news among our enemies will not be “what a principled, kind man; we should do the same”—it will be, “what a tool; he’s making this too easy…”

I suspect the main motivator behind this is the Left’s basic inclination toward appeasement and fundamental inability to comprehend the real world, but Gingrich floats another frightening possibility:

But the other thing that Obama does on a scale that Carter never dreamed of is he — he believes, maybe because he believes in his own rhetoric — he believes that words are a substitute for reality.

The foolishness of the Left coupled with the ego of The One.  Great.

Meanwhile, at the Daily Beast, Yale Law Professor Stephen Carter thinks Obama’s decision not to build any more nukes is the greater cause for concern:

Where does the United States stand in this arms race? At the moment, we lead the pack in developing UAVs, but (unless there is classified research going on) not in developing nuclear warheads to fit them. Instead, we would rely, even in a limited nuclear exchange, on submarine-launched ballistic missiles or, possibly, cruise missiles. These weapons are designed to seek fixed targets over long distances. Their disadvantage is that they cannot remain quietly aloft, searching for targets. That is what drones are for.

[…]

The president’s announcement that he will not use nuclear weapons against non-nuclear nations has been controversial, but is unlikely to do the nation any harm. Falling behind in the race to develop the next generation of nuclear weapons could be infinitely more dangerous. How dangerous? One need only wait for the moment when a drone drops a nuclear warhead somewhere on American soil, and we lack the necessary precision munitions with which to retaliate. Here one is reminded of the dictum of Thomas Schelling, in explaining how the strategy of deterrence works: “There is a difference,” he wrote in his classic work Arms and Influence, “between fending off assault and making someone afraid to assault you.”

Nuclear weapons are scary, but the capacity to instill fear is not inherently evil.  Indeed, the very knowledge that America could utterly destroy whatever country gives her a reason is a powerful deterrent that can prevent war and save millions of lives.  We cannot allow there to be any doubt that, whatever our enemies are capable of dishing out at any given time, we can match it pound for pound.  If our president cannot grasp this elementary concept, then he is manifestly unfit for command.

_____

Hailing from Fond du Lac, Wisconsin, Calvin Freiburger is a political science major at Hillsdale College.  He also blogs at the Hillsdale Forum and his personal website, Calvin Freiburger Online.

This is not only a problem in the United States. It is a problem all over the Western world. How are the people of Western Europe to understand their own reality if they cannot speak truthfully, and openly, about the ideology of Islam? If they have noticed -- and they have at long last noticed -- that Muslim immigrants are particularly aggressive, demanding, hostile, and un-integrable, save always for a small, discrete minority of people who arrive as Muslims but become integrable only to the precise extent that they cease to take Islam to heart, or even, in the best cases, as a result of the mental freedom and physical security that the West offers them, become estranged permanently from Islam (for who knows better what Islam is all about, than Wafa Sultan, and Ayaan Hirsi Ali, and Magdi Allam, and all the other outstanding and brilliant apostates who offer us their articulate testimonies?), should the peoples of Western Europe not allow themselves to employ the only vocabulary that allows them to discuss this matter?

And when they realize, as many of them now do, that this is a problem not in one, or two, or a half-dozen, countries in Western Europe, but in all of the them without exception, and perhaps most noticeably so in the two countries that have elevated Tolerance to the level of State Religions (i.e., Denmark and the Netherlands), are they to be rendered mute through a policy that fills the collective heart of the O.I.C. with satisfaction and deep pleasure?

If they realize that these Muslim immigrants pose a permanent problem that no group of non-Muslim immigrants poses, should they be reduced to whispers? Should their permitted lexicon be lacking such words as "Jihad" and "dhimmi" and "Jizyah" and even, it seems, "Islam" itself? The latter word is always and everywhere, if applied to the case, to be modified fore and aft, with such meretricious verbal tricks as "Islamism" and "Islamists," or sleight of word, as with "violent extremists" who have kidnapped -- in the alternative, hijacked -- "a great religion."

If Israelis wish to begin to grasp their own reality, and to comprehend why "peace-processes" and treaties mean nothing, but are merely part of one unending Treaty of Al Hudaibiyya being used to whittle away at the state of Israel, in order to push it back into conditions of maximum peril and hopeless vulnerability, they will need to use, and to hear others use, such words as "Islam" and "Jihad" and "dhimmi." If the Hindus, Sikhs, and other non-Muslims of India are to grasp the permanent threat to them, one not assuaged by a possible surrender of Kashmir, but that goes on, unassuageable, forever, they will need to use such words as "Jihad" and "dhimmi" and "Dar al-Islam." If the Thais, or the Russians, or the Filipinos, wish to understand what it is that they are dealing with, they must -- they cannot but -- use the words that exist to properly explain this reality. The Christians of the southern Sudan, and the Christians of southern Nigeria, have used such words as "Jihad" before. They understand, perhaps better than those in the West, what Islam is all about, because in black Africa, the Arabs and those whom they have islamized and arabized have been able to treat the black African non-Muslims as roughly, as murderously, as they wish. They have had no need to engage in the kind of stuff we see Muslims engaging in here -- Interfaith-Healing, Outreach Nights at the Mosque, taqiyya masters such as Tariq Ramadan spreading their smiling word in order to charm or confuse the unwary and the ill-prepared, and to keep up this mountebank's patter at such a pace that no one who speaks quietly, logically, and with attention to the evidence can get in a word, or if he can get in a word, can truly and properly be heard by those unwary and those ignorant Infidels over the steady tariq-ramadanian hum.

Those who make policy and construct policies are dealing with a reality that they refuse to learn adequately about. In so refusing, they hobble themselves from thinking sensibly, and at times imaginatively, about what makes the most sense, what would weaken the Camp of Islam and thus the threat to all non-Muslims from Islam and its adherents. They prefer to throw money, and men, and materiel, at the problem. The wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, before we are through, will have cost well over three trillion dollars.

Think of what that could have done, as far as this country goes. We fight over a few hundred million here and there, we fight about health care and social security, and we keep avoiding, in some collective mental paralysis, connecting these budgetary woes with the sums being spent -- futilely, and quite unnecessarily, in the lands of Muslims, in order to bring them (for how long? forever?) prosperity, to bribe them into (most temporarily) being "our friends." This "friendship" consists of their not becoming or giving harbor to those "violent extremists" who, we tell ourselves, are a discrete, isolated group, when in fact any Muslim who now, or in the future, for whatever reason, chooses to take Islam fully to heart, can become one of those "violent extremists." And long before that, Muslims have shown, in thought, word, and deed, that they do take Islam sufficiently seriously to attempt to press its case everywhere, to change our legal and political institutions and our social arrangements, to interfere with our academic teaching and thinking about Islam, to interfere with our freedom of speech, and our ideas of what can or cannot be spoken and written. They do all this unapologetically, with violence or the threat of violence. What's more, they conduct, unhindered, vast campaigns of Da'wa targeted at the most vulnerable and also the potentially most dangerous kinds of people -- the psychically and economically marginal -- who, in converting to Islam, add to the security threat to all the non-Muslims. Those former fellow citizens, now changed utterly, become a threat to us and the political institutions of this country, and the physical security of its citizens.

Because of the ignorance of Islam at the top, we have instead locked ourselves into a Tar Baby policy that requires the expenditure of vast sums on places that cannot, because of Islam, ever embrace advanced Western democracy. They cannot -- because of Islam -- ever be our true allies, or ever be counted on to help suppress the forces of violent Islam. They will, however, do what they can to divert outside their countries, to the Infidels, the fury of those who are working against their own regimes, as the Saudi government's "re-education" efforts of Al-Qaeda supporters consists not in ending their Muslim fanaticism, which the Al-Saud share or promote, but in redirecting their murderous fury away from the Al-Saud themselves to the Western Infidels who deserve whatever those local fanatics wish to inflict on them -- just please leave us, the nice Al-Saud, alone.

Never before has such sustained stupidity, in the face of a decade of what should have led to some obvious conclusions, been exhibited by the Western world. Even with Hitler and the Nazis, there were only six years from his resistible rise in 1933 to the outbreak of war in 1939, when suddenly "everyone" appeared to have "known all along" what Churchill and a few others, and only they, had known. We have had perfectly good information -- for those who do not put their trust in the New York Times but go online -- about the Jihad, in its violent manifestations, and in those that employ non-violent means, for nearly a decade. We have had the vain efforts in Iraq and the vain effort now in Afghanistan, where the actual goals are never clearly stated, because to even attempt to do that would expose the whole enterprise to the quizzical looks, and the criticism, and even the mockery, that the assumptions upon which it rests deserve.

Eventually reality will break in. But when? At what considerable unnecessary future cost? Perhaps there are those in the Obama Administration who have never read "Politics and the English Language" by Orwell, though it is now a staple in freshman composition courses. Perhaps they are unaware of how Hitler and Stalin, refashioned the lexicon, or how such words as, for example, "People's Democracy" came to describe the most despotic of regimes.

The Obama Administration does not strike me as full of people terribly interested in, or impressed by, faith -- in the way that George Bush, a born-again Christian, was so impressed with what religion had done for him that he simply couldn't believe that something -- Islam -- called a "religion" could be other than good.

So what is it that prevents the Obama Administration from learning about, analyzing, studying the history of, Islam and Islamic conquest, as it would, presumably, anything else? What makes it so fearful, in the councils and corridors of power, of people speaking truthfully about such matters, or at least asymptotically coming close to that truth, so that they are now apparently being deliberately told they cannot use the very lexicon they most need, and now most lack?

The self-inflicted intellectual wounds here will have, do already have, fantastic consequences -- not good ones for us, but very good for the Camp of Islam -- in the world we like to call "real." But the Obama Administration is engaged in the political construction of a reality that does not exist, and is leading itself, and those whom it presumes to instruct and protect, astray.

The wars of the social redeemers were as old as Babel and would go on forever. The dreamers would go on building towers to heaven, and just as inexorably they would come crashing to earth. Some would take to heart the lessons of the fall, but most would fail to notice them, or care. Inspired by those who preceded them and innocent of their crimes, an unending cycle of generations would repeat what they had done. The terrible suffering of guilty and innocent alike would continue without end. The prophet Mohammed would beget the disciple Atta; the prophet Marx, my father. Others would follow them, and nothing I could do or say would change it.

The summons I answered was more modest by far than any mission that God might notice. It was to bear witness to what I had learned. Perhaps hearing my story, another, as innocent as I had been would take heed. For myself, I needed to remember what I had learned through pain, and to honor my debt. My mission was as much for myself as for anyone else. It was about wrestling with the most powerful and pernicious of all human follies, which is the desire to stifle truth in the name of hope.

Here is why you cannot change the world: Because we – all six billion of us — create it. We do so individually and relentlessly and in every generation. We shape it as monarchs in our homes and masters beyond, when we cannot even master ourselves. Every breeder of new generations is a stranger to his mate and a mystery to himself. Every offspring is a self-creator who learns through rebellion and contrition, through injury and error, and frequently not at all. This is the root cause that makes us who and what we are – the good, the bad, the demented, the wise, the benevolent and the brute. We are creatures blind and ignorant, stumbling helplessly through a puff of time.

The future is a work of prejudice and malice inextricably bound with generosity and hope. It is carried out now and forever under the terrible anarchy of freedom that God has imposed on his children and will not take back. This world is created every day by us at odds with each other, and over and over. It is irrevocably broken into billions of fragments, bits of human unhappiness and earthly frustration. And no one can fix it.

– The End of Times

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An open letter to Geert Wilders:

Though we have not met, I feel as if I know you well. I have followed your trials—and trial—closely and, like many who are engaged in the same fight against Islamic supremacism and the various forms of jihad that confront us, I endorse your campaign on behalf of the West and its traditional liberties in every way that I can.

Indeed, I wonder if you are aware of the extent of your de facto “support network,” a majority in America who, according to a Pew Research Center survey, are “very concerned” about the rise of Islamic extremism, and certainly a significant minority of the increasingly vocal. The same may now be the case in your own country and in a number of other European nations as well—Switzerland and its minaret affair come immediately to mind—as ordinary people gradually come to realize the threat they are facing.

Of course, we can write off the political and intellectual elites who, through laziness, timidity, adherence to the craven doctrine of political correctness, and no doubt the profiteering impulse, are in bed with the succubus who would guzzle their blood. And this is no blood libel. In addition, you probably strike these presumably more decorous sensibilities as too blunt, aggressive or politically ambitious, which is clearly what prompts their efforts at character assassination against you. But your passionate resistance to the creeping Islamization of Europe prompts me in turn to ask: Does this in Wilders seem ambitious? In any event, pay no attention to these tergiversators. As Andrew Bostom writes, “The transparent agenda in characterizations of Wilders is to demonize Western Europe’s most informed and courageous politician resisting the actual jihadism…But the Swiss minaret referendum, and even more emphatically, burgeoning Dutch support for Wilders and his PVV, indicate that ordinary Europeans reject the capitulation to Islamic supremacism their cultural relativist media and political elites deliberately abet.”

In your fine speech to the British House of Lords on March 5, 2010, you established the principle, as you have many times before, that you and your Freedom Party do not “have a problem with Muslims as such.” You distinguish between law-abiding Muslims and the ideology of Islam based on the Koran. “There are many moderate Muslims,” you declare, “but there is no such thing as a moderate Islam.” The first part of your proposition is a socially appropriate sentiment, but the second part begets a conceptual problem which is decidedly unpleasant to address.

Forgive me for suggesting that you probably had no choice but to make this subtle discrimination between the faithful and the faith, which implies a certain disconnect between the wish and the reality, as you must surely realize. You tread on very delicate ground here, as you are doubtlessly constrained to do in order to avoid alienating both “moderate Muslims” and non-Muslims who regard themselves as unprejudiced.

When you rightly assert that “Islam is not merely a religion [but] a totalitarian ideology,” note that the Koran “commands Muslims to establish shariah law,” claim that “Islam is not compatible with our Western way of life,” and go on to compare the Koran with Mein Kampf, quoting Winston Churchill to reinforce your thesis, the distinction you adduce between individual Muslims and the collective institution of Islam tends to collapse. For what you are really saying is that moderate Muslims cannot be devout Muslims or, in truth, cannot be Muslims at all. What sort of Muslim remains after you have factored out shariah law, effectively compared Muhammed to Hitler, and contended that the Koran should be outlawed, or at least designated as a species of hate literature, as you proposed in your letter to the newspaper De Volkskrant on August 8, 2007?

You now find yourself uncomfortably situated, so to speak, between the devil and the deep Red Sea. Not being a Muslim yourself, you don’t have the option of polemical emphasis that derives from rejecting the faith, becoming an apostate-on-principle or converting to another faith, like Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Ibn Warraq, Wafa Sultan and Nonie Darwish, among others—all of whom took the second part of your logic to its inevitable terminus. They understood that one cannot honestly profess Islam without abiding by the decrees of the religion and its holy book, including the oft-repeated summons to kill or enslave the infidel, the structure of gender apartheid, the imposition of shariah, and a host of other draconian laws.

In other words, a “moderate Muslim” would have to live in a state of contradiction, and perhaps many do—as does, for example, freedom loving Tarek Fatah, Canadian author of Chasing a Mirage: The Tragic Illusion of an Islamic State, who calls himself a “hardened secular Muslim.” What exactly is a secular Muslim, whether hardened or soft? Similarly, what could a “secular Christian” conceivably be other than some sort of mythical chimera? (It is different for Jews, of course; a “secular Jew” remains a Jew because the world persists in regarding him as such. But that is another matter.) Fatah is a good man and an important voice in the ongoing debate concerning Islam, but he cannot extricate himself from a legendary infatuation or acknowledge disagreeable historical and theological facts. One cannot cherry pick the Koran or romanticize Islamic history, as so-called “moderate Muslims” are obliged to do, without falling into incoherence. As a character in Hanif Kureishi’s The Black Album says, “our religion isn’t something you can test out, like trying out a suit to see if it fit! You gotta buy the whole outfit!” There is, to put it another way, no such beverage as Islam Lite. One drinks in the real thing or nothing; there is no substitute.

Bangladeshi author and former Muslim Abul Kasem, in a FrontPage Magazine interview, defines the majority of Muslims as believers “in name only.” Kasem is shockingly direct: the existence of a “moderate Muslim” is contingent upon a moderate Koran “since the life force of Islam is the Qu’ran.” But the Koran happens to be an extreme and violent document, and even if it is selectively ignored by practitioners of the faith, its fissile core can be activated at any time. For Kasem, as for the dissidents mentioned above, the term “moderate Muslim” or “secular Muslim” is an oxymoron. The use of the term “moderate Muslim,” he argues, is “truly misplaced” and muddles Western thinking in the attempt to defeat Islamic terror. I’m presuming this is an argument you too would candidly advance if the sociopolitical context were not so precarious, and if your place in Dutch society and as leader of a respectable political party permitted you to do so.

Still, you were on the money when, in a speech to the Dutch parliament, you compared Islam in Europe to a Trojan Horse. Here you were being perfectly forthright. Your metaphor was both mythologically and historically accurate. In 1529, the armies of Islam were camped before the gates of Vienna. They were beaten back. Today they are camped within the gates of Paris, the gates of Oslo, the gates of Malmo, the gates of Berlin, the gates of London, the gates of Birmingham, the gates of Brussels, the gates of Marseille, the gates of Amsterdam, and counting. In fact, as you and many of the politically aware—Bruce Bawer, Christopher Caldwell, Walter Laqueur, Bernard Lewis, the late Samuel Huntington, Melanie Phillips, Bruce Thornton, Claire Berlinski, Denis MacShane, Bat Ye’or, to name only a few—point out, Islam is now a major demographic force within the gates of Europe in its entirety. Vienna was only a temporary setback, a lost battle in a long and possibly successful war. Our ostensible sophisticates seem to have forgotten that Islamic time is not Western time.

I began this letter by assuring you that you have a far wider community of supporters than you might at times suspect. True, several conservative bien pensants and generally astute observers of the ideological world, such as Bill Kristol, Glenn Beck and Charles Krauthammer, have lately taken you to task on Fox News and elsewhere for your supposed intransigence, your explicitness and your “radical” stance vis à vis Islam, that is, your refusal to differentiate between a peaceable Islam and violent Islamism. The critical perspective adopted by these otherwise excellent writers toward the leftist collaboration with, or appeasement of, militant Islam, their awareness of the demographic menace posed by unchecked immigration, and the weaponized prose they habitually flourish would indicate they should be your allies rather than detractors.

So unfortunate a dereliction is highly problematic and, at first blush, inexplicable—unless, as a commenter to an article by Mark Steyn suggests, “perhaps the recent purchase of a substantial portion of News Corp.’s stock by a wealthy Saudi Arabian might be a factor in Krauthammer’s and Beck’s negative statements about Geert Wilders.” Diana West concurs: “this anti-Geert pundit solidarity will only delight stakeholder Saudi Prince Alwaleed bin Talal.” We have long known that Saudi money has infiltrated the media, the universities, the Hollywood illusion factory and the book publishing industry, with all the predictable consequences. But then, we also know that Kristol, Beck and Krauthammer are honorable men.

Maybe there is another explanation. Roger Simon hazards that Beck “is not particularly versed in European affairs”, which are plainly not his forte, and that Krauthammer may be subconsciously afraid that you are right, a likelihood “too depressing” to contemplate. For, Simon continues, “if Wilders is correct, and the line between Islam and Islamism is as blurred as the Dutchman posits, then we in the West are in very deep trouble indeed.” And this is a conclusion all too few of our intellectuals, “peace” constituencies, opinion shapers and power wielders, addicted to the ostrich syndrome and insulated from the mean streets of the real world, are willing to absorb. They have taken another route and are speeding down the highway to dhimmitude like Toyotas with stuck gas pedals. They would rather allow the approaching immiseration of the West at the hands of a resurgent Islam than stiffen their spines and act as they must if Western civilization is to survive. Which is why they do not want you in the game.

Nevertheless, despite such curious defections and betrayals, I think you may rest confident that you enjoy a stalwart following among those who have come to share both your fears and your salient assumptions. We monitor the court prosecution to which you have been subjected by a camarilla of judges who, as you say, “do not want to hear the truth about Islam.” As David Rusin shows in a compendious summary of “the growing deference to Islam in Europe’s courtrooms,” citing evidence of a most disturbing, if ludicrous, nature, “in the Netherlands, the bar association is leading the way to mollify Islamists.”

But there is a redeeming irony tunneling its way through these proceedings. You are in a win-win situation. A victory in court means you have been vindicated. A negative verdict also works in your favor, for a jail cell would give you an effective podium, though I doubt you would malinger there for long. It would then become glaringly obvious that your accusers are a pack of soi-disant anti-Dreyfusards, Vichy-type sellouts, cowards and hypocrites, and public demonstrations against your captors would be sure to follow. They are the ones in a self-inflicted bind, not you. Moreover, it is already common knowledge that your judges have substantially curtailed the number of expert witnesses you have called and are deliberating behind closed doors. Oddly enough, a bad day in court may translate into a good day at the polls. Indeed, according to some electoral prognostications, you may shortly find yourself the prime minister of your country.

The cake appears ready for the oven. If all goes well, the next election may actually install you in the seat of power or, failing that, position you as a power broker. You have only to keep on being yourself and, of course, you need to stay alive. You have the courage and outspokenness of your murdered fellow Amsterdammers, Pym Fortuyn and Theo van Gogh, but you also have what they did not, 24/7 protection. And, to reiterate, you are not alone. A growing company of the likeminded stand behind you. One way or another, you cannot lose, at least not in the Netherlands.

So in conclusion, as the current idiom enjoins: Go for it!

“Economists: Another Financial Crisis on the Way” read a recent ABC News headline. The headline was occasioned by a report from an elite group of economists, financiers and former federal regulators headed by the Nobel Prize winner Joseph Stiglitz. The report warned that the American economy and the financial system are in danger of descending into another crisis. The fault, according to the authors, lies with “our government leaders,” who “have shown little capacity to fix the flaws in our market system.” This lack, they urged, should be remedied by more regulation.

Even though the recommendation may sound superficially reasonable, the advice is not only badly flawed, but it is a prescription for more trouble. To see why, we only need to ask this question: When have our government leaders managed to fix any problem in the market place? The market may not always produce the kind of results we like, but we have a long history of experience to show that attempts to correct it almost invariably produce more bad than good. Even in those cases where politicians’ intent is pure, the interference tends to produce unforeseen consequences that are nearly always detrimental.

In the real world, however, politicians’ regulatory motives are seldom chaste. The financial-reform bill which was passed by the House of Representatives at the end of 2009 is a case in point. Advertised as a measure that would curb excesses on Wall Street, it was the brainchild of Financial Services Committee Chairman Barney Frank. But there is a problem with Frank’s involvement with this legislation. Since becoming the committee’s chairman in 2006, almost half of his campaign contributions have come from the finance, insurance and real estate industries. In other words, Barney Frank is regulating companies and institutions that bankroll his political career. The money they have invested in him has not gone to waste. Frank’s financial-reform bill includes a provision for $4 trillion in emergency funding for Wall Street the next time things come crashing down.

It’s fruitless to expect politicians to come up with the kind of regulation that would cure our economic and financial systems. After all, they cannot even balance the federal budget, which should not be all that difficult. All they need to do is not to spend more than they take in. For some reason, however, our leaders cannot live up to this very simple principle. Every year they run up large deficits which have produced a national debt that the federal government will never be able to honestly discharge.

Failing to address this troubling concern, the report goes on to note:

[T]he country is now immersed in a doomsday cycle wherein banks use borrowed money to take massive risks in an attempt to pay big dividends to shareholders and big bonuses to management – and when the risks go wrong, the banks receive taxpayer bailouts from the government… Risk-taking at banks will soon be larger than ever.

This is correct. But it should be pointed out that this situation is largely due to government action. Banks take undue risks, because they know they will be bailed out if they fail. We should not be indignant at this, since their behavior is completely rational under the circumstances. The system is set up in such a way that even those who would like to play responsibly cannot do so. If they did, their earnings would lag behind those of their more aggressive competitors and the management would be pilloried for “substandard” performance. Thus the only real choice is to run with the herd and take the risks regardless of how excessive they may be.

But notice what is behind this. It is the government’s implicit guarantee of bailouts, which has given rise to a situation economists refer to as “moral hazard.” Moral hazard occurs when a player – in this case a bank – becomes fully or partially insulated from risk and as a result behaves differently that it would have if it were forced to bear the consequences of its actions. Here is a good description of this phenomenon:

Moral hazard arises because an individual or institution does not take the full consequences and responsibilities of its doings, and therefore has a tendency to act less carefully than it alternately would, leaving another party to hold some responsibility for the consequences of those actions.

With its “too big to fail” approach, the government has infused systemic moral hazard throughout the financial system. The party that now ultimately holds responsibility for the consequences of the banks’ undue risk-taking is, of course, the US taxpayer. What we must never forget is that this state of affairs has been brought about by government intervention. The answer is not more regulation restricting banks’ risky behavior, but the removal of bail out guarantees. Once that happens banks will be far more careful about how they manage their risk portfolios, knowing there will be a real price to pay for reckless choices.

The report’s call for “Congress to enact reforms strong enough to prevent another meltdown” is only to ask for more problems down the line. Whether we are faced with a financial, economic or any other crisis, we would do well to remember Ronald Reagan’s famous dictum: “Government is not the solution to our problem; government is the problem.” The present crisis is no exception.

Denmark is at war. The government tells us that we are in war against terror which actually is only a tactic. We cannot be in war against an tactic, we have to be in war against those who use the tactic. That is what SIOE intends to do.

Quote: Lieutenant Colonel Allen West:-

"Winston Churchill did not lead a war against blitzkrieg, he led a war against the Nazis."

SIOE recognises that islam has declared war on the West and therefore we take the necessary precautions to protect our own population. No other Danish politicians have done that previously. Therefore, SIOE will respond to the declaration of war onthe West. Every time islam is discussed, all parties in the Danish parliament pull the wool over the eyes of the voters. If we really are in war with islam why do we make all these special arrangements for islam?

We have had civil war-like situations both in Copenhagen and in the biggest towns in Denmark and no politicians have dared to act upon it. SIOE has the answer: Every immigrant who has committed any kind of criminality is to be sent home.

Denmark is in a financial crisis and we have to take care of our own citizens first of all. Therefore all immigrants who are not self-supporting will be sent home.

All government subsidised integration initiatives must be stopped and sensible economic policies must be carried out.

Bureaucracy must be cut to a minimum and free initiative must be encouraged instead of being stopped.

The business and manufacturing sectors in Denmark must have far better conditions. We cannot live just by serving one another.

We would never have been caught in this present unhappy situation if the population had been asked whether or not Denmark should be an immigrant country where islam demands special treatment from its host, the Danish population. Therefore SIOE's wish is to implement more democracy. There shall be referendums held about many more things concerning the population.

Many more of those in authority should be elected, not just politicians, as they are in America.

In brief, SIOE is a party where the population is of greater concern than the people from outside.

There is much more. Read it all.

The Iranian regime is morally bankrupt. But it was always morally bankrupt, from its earlier days. What obscured this was the fact that the "advanced" people in Iran, those who for some reason are called "on the left, " had early on decided that the Shah's regime was so corrupt, and its enforcers, the Savak, so brutal, that it had to go. They did not think that they needed to worry about those Muslim reactionaries around the Ayatollah Khomeini. Who could, in advanced Tehran, possibly take such people seriously? Who could possibly believe that such people as Khomeini might triumph? Before he came to power and consolidated his iron grip, Khomeini spoke soothingly about "democracy" and invoked, too, other of the magic phrases that so often cloud the minds of those who hear them.

Over the past five years, as the Americans have been caught in Tarbaby Iraq, and now as they are caught, in a different way, with a slightly lesser Tarbaby Afghanistan, the Islamic Republic of Iran has been allowed to march, steadily, without any interruption except, just possibly, a few months of prudently waiting, right after the invasion of Iraq, to see if the Americans were so much on the warpath that this time they would not stop at the Treaty of Erzrum line, but cross it, bringing the fight beyond Saddam Hussein right to the Islamic Republic itself. It never happened, and instead of Iraq ending in a Light-Unto-the-Muslim-Nations, as some in the Bush Administration naively assumed could or would happen, the Administration found American forces stuck there, and also doing what Ahmad Chalabi and other Shi'a exiles always hoped they would do: assuring that power in Iraq was transferred, and forever, from Sunni Arabs to Shi'a Arabs, never to be relinquished. That meant not that Iran had necessarily become the new power in Iraq, for many of the Iraqi Shi'a are not friendly to Iran, and the sense of being Arab, as opposed to being Persian, is sufficiently powerful for some to overcome any pan-Shi'ist appeal. And so far the appeal has not been made, as the Islamic Republic of Iran still tries to overcome Sunni Arab suspicions, in order to present itself as the plausible leader of the Muslims against the Infidels.

And now the Americans, even as they withdraw, slowly and stickily, from Iraq, have transferred their main military effort to Afghanistan, on the other side of Iran. But with American troops in Iraq and Afghanistan, that does not make the Americans feel more confident of their ability to take on Iran's nuclear project, but less. For they are fearful -- wrongly, I think - of what the Iranians might do to the American troops on either side of Iran. The reason not to be fearful is that in Iraq, the Iranians are not quite as powerful or attractive as some imagine. Ayatollah Sistani is not impressed with them. The Shi'a who are said to be "pro-Iranian" are not really impressed with the Ahmadinejad regime, but are more worried about a possible attempt by Sunni Arabs in Iraq, with the help of Sunnis outside Iraq, to re-take power. Yet this is most implausible, given that the Sunni Arabs constitute less than 20% of the population, and the Sunni population of Baghdad has gone way down, thanks to the Shi'a efforts of the last seven years. And the Sunni heartland, in Anbar and Diyala Provinces, is an area devoid of oil, that is, devoid of money to finance a revanchist movement. In the north, the Kurds, though mostly Sunni, are on the alert to resist any attempts by Sunni Arabs, the ones moved in by Saddam Hussein as part of his arabization of Kurdistan, to retake power in Mosul or Kirkuk.

The Sunni Arabs can make life very unpleasant and uncertain for both the Kurds and the Shi'a Arabs in Iraq, but they cannot again take control of the country. The best they can hope for is the election of a Shi'a Arab - Iyad Allawi, for example - who is not so programmatically anti-Ba'ath. Allawi, with a Shi'a background, is also secular, which is to say that he is unenthusiastic about an Iraq run by those who are too devout in their Islam. Allawi himself was a Ba'ath Party member before he left Iraq in disgust for London, and it was in London that agents of Saddam Hussein tried to kill him. The prospect of Allawi in power gives the Sunnis hope of what they might consider a semi-fair deal, even if they do not regain their old hold on power.

Now the Iraq and Afghanistan ventures of the Americans constitute a squandering of resources - men, money, materiel, morale. And those ventures represent a failure of American foreign policy, or rather a failure of those in power to adequately study the texts and tenets of Islam. For if those in power had studied those texts and tenets, instead of allowing themselves to be unduly impressed by the word "religion" affixed to Islam (as Bush was so impressed), or if they did not allow themselves to be impressed by plausible, smiling, carefully apologetic representatives of Islam in the form of some Muslim advisers, including the Bright Young Reformers who have stood in the way, for many in Washington, of a sober grasping of the ideology of Islam, then another strategy would have been followed. It is interesting that Barack Obama clearly wants out of Iraq and, I suspect, out of Afghanistan too. But he will not be able to do the latter, for obvious political reasons, unless he shows that the reason he wants out of Afghanistan is not because he is soft on Islam (though he has given various signs of that, and the worst was that unbelievable speech he delivered in Cairo, a speech in which almost every phrase about Islam could be held up for inspection, analysis, and ridicule) but because he wishes to undertake an entirely new strategy, one based on a recognition that the presence of Infidels merely helps to unite Muslims, or at least to make less likely that internal conflicts will develop. And it is in the interests of the world's Infidels that the pre-existing fissures, sectarian, ethnic, and economic, within the Camp of Islam, be exploited to the fullest.

That is one part of a two-part strategy. The other part is a campaign of education and self-education, all over the Infidel world, so that many more people come to understand the relation of Islam to the political, economic, social, moral, and intellectual failures of Muslim states, societies, and even families and individuals living in environments - even within the West - that are suffused with Islam. This can be done. And if it is done, it will be hard for the world's Muslims not to have to begin thinking about the matter. And because the case, once you begin to think about it, is so obvious and so convincing, that will further demoralize the Camp of Islam. Among those who might have other reasons for jettisoning the faith, or at least de-emphasizing it (as Iranians, sick at heart from their experience under the Islamic Republic of Iran), such arguments will particularly resonate.

Now we wait to see what the Obama Administration will do about the Islamic Republic of Iran's nuclear project. The nightmares that American policy-makers have about Pakistan's nuclear bombs, and where they are, and who might get them, and who might use them, ought to have forever engraved on the minds of American policymakers that they must never ever allow any other Muslim state or group to acquire such weaponry. But what do we see? We see years of drift, years of not knowing what to do. The Bush Administration huffed and puffed, but in the end was ineffectual. It was ineffectual because it was caught Laocoon-like in the coils of serpents, serpents however of its own making, through its foolish hopes and dreams for Iraq, and bringing "freedom" to "ordinary moms and dads" in the Middle East. It was ineffectual because it was so uncunning and so ignorant not only of Islam but of the fissures within the Camp of Islam and, as well, so seemingly unaware of what is going on in Western Europe, which matters far more for the United States than any outcome in Iraq or Afghanistan. The Obama Administration has turned out to be, in some ways, even worse. It believes in outreach to the Muslim world, and part of that outreach is to make remarks that are flatly untrue - the speech in Cairo was a tissue of nonsense and lies when it came to the description of Islam, and if the speech was in part written, or vetted, by Muslims such as Rashad Hussain, then that explains, but does not justify the outcome, and makes the whole effort even more dismaying and frightening.

So what will happen now in Iran? Will the Americans recognize their responsibility to prevent the Islamic Republic of Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons? Or will it rely on Israel, a country that has been denied even the weapons it knows it would need to be semi-successful in its effort? Or will it, still worse, do everything it can to prevent Israel, now mortally threatened by the possibility of those weapons being acquired by the chiliastic Twelver-Shi'a who run Iran, from acting as it must to protect itself, if the Americans will not do the job?

What happens in Iraq and Afghanistan matters far less than if the Islamic Republic of Iran acquires such weapons, and with those weapons, it will acquire something else: a permanent lease on political life. For the primitives in Iran, who far outnumber the advanced, the same primitives who were bussed in from the countryside recently to flood the streets of Teheran and other cities with demonstrations of loyalty to the regime, will be so happy with the regime that whatever those economic sanctions do will not matter. Iran will be a Nuclear Power. Iran will be, in their eyes, a Great Power. It's the delusions of grandeur, akin to those of the Shah, incidentally, who in his vainglorious way used to talk about how Iran would soon become "the second industrial power in Asia" (after Japan). Of course Iran is not the second industrial power, nor even the fifth, and Islam holds it, and forever will hold it back, despite the oil wealth. And of course we know, in the West, that the attainment of nuclear weapons will not mean much to the lives of Iranians, and if, as should happen, those "crippling sanctions" remain in force until those weapons are surrendered (the Iranians can keep nuclear power plants, as long as those are vigilantly monitored by the West, not the U.N.), things will remain difficult for them. But many of them don't care, and won't care, in the villages where there was never much to start with. For them, Iran will be a Nuclear Power. What else do they need to know?

Yet we see a new theme being developed by those who want, at all costs, to prevent the United States from taking action against the Islamic Republic of Iran. They argue a number of things. Some say: well, no attack can be guaranteed to totally destroy the nuclear project, so it's not worth doing. Quite a non sequitur, of course. Many attacks set back efforts (see that on the Osirak Reactor) for a long time, and the buying of time, so that the dissidents can finally topple the present Iranian regime, would be useful. Flynt and Hillary Leverett have had their own go at this "don't attack Iran" business, in the Op/Ed pages of the New York Times. And the Times recently offered its pages yet again to an effort in the same line, one worth looking at more closely.

This article, "Iran's Two-Edged Bomb," was written by Adam B. Lowther, described as a "defense analyst at the Air Force Research Initiative." The article argued that we should, essentially, see what was to our advantage or how we might take advantage of Iran's acquiring nuclear weapons. It was written by someone of the cheerily defeatist school, that is, the school that thinks that nothing can or should be done to stop Iran ("It's over," as Tariq Ramadan has repeatedly said about the Muslim demographic conquest of Europe, not needing to add, "we're here to stay, and there's nothing you Infidels can do about it").

Here is some of what Adam L. Lowther, defense analyst at the Air Force Research Institute, tried to convince readers. He begins with a brisk confession of hopelessness and seeming helplessness:

"With Iran having notified the United Nations nuclear Watchdog agency on Monday that any day now it will begin enriching its stockpile of uranium n order to power a medical reactor [does Adam L. Lowther believe that that is what Iran will do with that enriched stockpile of uranium? Shouldn't he tell us what he thinks might actually happen?] we should admit that Washington's approach to countering the Islamic Republic is leading nowhere. [True, because two Administrations were unwilling to employ "crippling sanctions" - the kind that you know are "crippling" because they lead to the behavior one wants - or military force, and even now we have the Obama Administration still following far behind Congress on what it is willing to do]."

And then comes the key sentence, the real topic sentence of the piece: "What's needed, however, may be less of a change of plan than a change in how we view the threat of a nuclear-armed Iran."

So, in a phrase, Adam L. Lowther dismisses the possibility, or rather doesn't even think he is obligated to consider, even if later to dismiss, the continued use of sanctions, now becoming "crippling sanctions," or "crippling sanctions" accompanied by military aid and threats of more such aid to the Baluchis in the east, the Azeris in the north, the Kurds in the west, and the Arabs in the southwest (in Khuzistan, where almost all of Iran's oilfields are located). And he dismisses, or rather, doesn't even think he is obligated to discuss, the possibility of military action by the United States, or by immediately imperiled Israel. Strange this Air Force analyst who won't even allow himself to think about the efficacy of the intelligent application of military force. One wonders what the trillions of dollars poured into our military, on weapons systems, have all been about, if in such a case as this the use of military force is not even considered. For here is a monstrous regime, headed by those who have given every sign of a deep belief in a semi-demented ideology (that of the Hidden Imam), at a time when suicide bombings are commonplace, and where a moment's thought might lead some to conclude that those who blow themselves up would, by the same logic, not be afraid to take much larger casualties among Muslims, now seen as involuntary "suicide bombers" - in order to remove a hated Infidel nation-state, Israel, from the face of the earth. Ahmadinejad is not the only Iranian leader who has said Iran "could afford" to lose a few million people in a nuclear exchange with Israel; Iran, after all, has a population of 70 million.

All of this goes by in a second, as Lowther ignores the effort of the past few years - the "sanctions" - and even the effect of the "crippling sanctions" or of military strikes (which one might have expected him, as a defense analyst for the Air Force Research Institute, to at least have thought worth considering), and proceeds to tell us all the good things that can happen, for the United States, if the Islmamic Republic of Iran acquires nuclear weapons.

First, he tells us, "Iran's development of nuclear weapons would give the United States an opportunity to finally defeat violent Sunni-Arab terrorist groups like Al Qaeda." Strange, Lowther knows his readers will first think, but here's just how it would work: "Here's why: a nuclear Iran is primarily a threat to its neighbors, not the United States. Thus Washington could offer regional security - primarily, a Middle East nuclear umbrella - in exchange for economic, political and social reforms in the autocratic Arab regimes responsible for breeding the discontent that led to the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001."

Let's stop right there, and try to get over our amazement and this fantastic misunderstanding, and these utopian goals. What in god's name makes Adam B. Lowther, defense analyst, think that the Saudis or other Arabs would ever do what the Americans ask? Why should they? They know perfectly well that the American "nuclear umbrella" will be extended to them not because we like their regimes, but because we don't want any harm to come to the oilfields. Again and again, over the past several decades, the Americans have tried to get these regimes, especially that in Saudi Arabia, to do something, do anything, to show that they were not simply a thieving family, the Al-Saud, determined to hold onto power and to continue to help themselves to much of the country's oil revenues, as they can. They have never done American bidding. Indeed, when the Saudis "collaborated" with the Americans, it was always the Saudis who ended up getting their way. It was Saudi Arabia that helped to convince the naïve Americans to help the muhajidin, and then to turn away, unalarmed, when the Pakistani and Saudi-supported Taliban came into Afghanistan, and were kept in power through the diplomatic, financial, and other support of Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, and the U.A.E. These regimes are past masters at getting their way in Washington, and certainly at preventing even the most obvious of measures being taken to diminish reliance on oil - that is, a tax on oil at the source, and on gasoline, the latter being sizable enough to make a real dent in demand. And even if the heady days of James Akins, and Fred Dutton, and Raymond Close, and James Baker, and Colin Powell, (who accepted a Jaguar, or rather his wife did, from an appreciative friend, Prince Bandar) are no longer in fashion, Saudi Arabia has never done American bidding, and the Americans have always come away frustrated, and they always will. Would the Al-Saud change their political and economic system for the American threat to take away a "nuclear umbrella" that, the Saudis know, they would never do? Would they change what it is that lends support to the despotism, and to the economic statism, and to the mistreatment of guest-workers, and the use of Saudi money around the world to fund mosques and madrasas, and propaganda on behalf of Islam, and campaigns of Da'wa, and all the rest? Has there been the slightest indication that they would ever cease to do this, ever stop heeding the demands and duties that Islam imposes on them as good Muslims? What remarkable ignorance of the Saudi regime, and of Saudi behavior, not this year or this decade, but for the past half-century.

Adam B. Lowther might take the time to read the work of J. B. Kelly. The best place to begin is with his essay "Of Valuable Oil and Worthless Policies," in which American reliance on the "twin pillars" - Iran and Saudi Arabia -- is shown to have been always based on a misperception of both regimes. But especially in the case of Saudi Arabia, this misperception is based on decades of propaganda put out by ARAMCO. Now ARAMCO has been superceded by a small army of Western hirelings, and by the Saudis themselves, who have become dab hands, when they meet Western leaders, at sincere liquid-brown eyes expressions of hurt and betrayal ("why do you Americans treat us this way, when we are such loyal allies?"). We are to ignore the viciousness and meretriciousness of the regime, at home, and abroad. The enslavement of foreign workers, the cruelties inflicted on those caught reading Bibles or even singing Christmas carols, the torture of Westerners arrested on trumped-up charges, or of captured Yemenis, or of Saudi subjects (not "citizens") themselves, and the hideousness of every aspect of that primitive country, are known to the intelligence services of the Western world, but apparently not to the un-intelligent services, or the un-intelligent members of our various military services.

Lowther's belief that magically, in exchange for that "nuclear umbrella," the Saudis would do our bidding is the stuff of fantasy. The Saudis wrapped us around their little finger in Afghanistan, where we didn't think beyond getting the Russians out, and did not for one minute realize that the dying days of the Soviet Empire might have lasted just a bit longer, if the result was to help stamp out the power of militant Islam (as the Soviets did, with some success, in Central Asia, with the Muslims, many of whom are now Muslim in name only because of Soviet anti-religious implacable ruthlessness). The Saudis will never do our bidding. And they know their oilfields, and the tankers in the Gulf, will always be protected by the Americans.

Lowther's second point is equally naïve, and shows an equal ignorance - this time of the workings of the world oil market, and of OPEC. Here is Lowther's claim:

"Second, becoming the primary provider of regional security in a nuclear Middle East would give the United States a way to break the OPEC cartel. Forcing an end of the sorts of monopolistic practices that are illegal in the United States would be the price o0f that nuclear shield, bringing oil prices down significantly and saving billions of dollars a year at the pump. Or, at a minimum, President Obama could trade security for increased production and a lowering of global petroleum prices."

There is so much here that is wrong, that one hardly knows where to begin. But let's try. First, OPEC is not the power it once was in the setting of prices, because there are not, any longer, large amounts of oil being deliberately kept off the market. The Saudis and others in the Gulf have always priced their oil in such a way as to maximize profits, to the extent that they can make reasonable estimates of future demand, and future supply, and the effect of price increases on worldwide demand. This means they must put into their calculations all sorts of things: the likelihood of alternative sources of energy coming on stream, the elasticity - or inelasticity--of demand in response to increases (or decreases) in prices; the possibility of innovation (as with electric cars) making demand elasticity more of a threat; the political will, absent or present, to do the kinds of things - such as a higher tax on oil - that could take place in response to a hike in the price of oil or, ideally from the oil-consuming nations' point of view, take place even when, or perhaps especially when, prices go down.

Lowther seems to think that OPEC continues to retain the same power today as it had in late 1973. As the oil price rise in 1979 showed, elasticity of demand is considerable. If the Saudis and others overshoot, they can suffer more by a collapse in demand and then in price. Lowther seems to think that we should wish for the price of oil to go down. Not quite. We should wish for the price that the oil-producing states charge to go down. For that to happen, we have it within our power to decrease demand, by taxing oil and gasoline ourselves, and in so doing, to recapture oligopolistic rents. That is, at any Time X, the Saudis will calculate that for them there is an ideal Price Y. But that price is based on a calculation that the American government will continue to be unable to put in place significant taxes on oil (as James Hansen suggests) and on gasoline (taxes large enough to dampen consumption, and on the kinds of cars that are produced). Lowther is flatly wrong. We don't want the price of oil to go down. We want it to go up, but to go up in measured, and predictable increments. That will allow for investments in electric cars, or cars that get high mileage for each gallon of gas, or in mass transit systems within cities, and high-speed railways between cities. And the price of gasoline (and of oil) should go steadily up because the governments of oil-consuming nations do the taxing themselves, and then they can rebate the taxes, or apply them to such projects as subsidies for nuclear reactors (the most important part of any sensible energy possible, however unpalatable this idea may be those who are blind believers in "alternative energy" as the way out), solar and wind power. The notion of "breaking up OPEC" is meaningless, because OPEC right now no longer has any real market power. It cannot prevent oil from other producers from reaching the market, and it cannot enforce any discipline of its own on member states to reduce their production, and it hasn't been able to do so for a long time. Adam B. Lowther is apparently unaware of what OPEC now is, and what the state of the oil market is. One wonders what exactly caused him to make pronouncements on things he knows nothing about.

Lowther's third point has to do with Israel:

"Third, Israel has made clear that it feels threatened by Iran's nuclear program. [Yes, it's good of Lowther to admit that, however grotesquely his understatement]. The Palestinians also have a reason for concern, because a nuclear strike against Israel would devastate them as well [would it? Would bombs on Tel Aviv, Haifa, and the western part of Jerusalem "devastate" the "Palestinians"? Is Adam B. Lowther well-versed in targeting, and wind currents, and so on? And how does he know that many of the "Palestinians" would not welcome an Iranian attack, in the same way that they welcome, and train, and make heroes of, and encourage others to become, suicide bombers?] This shared danger might serve as a catalyst for reconciliation between the two parties, leading to the peace agreement that has eluded the last five presidents. Paradoxically, any final agreement between Israelis and Palestinians would go a long way to undercutting Tehran's animosity toward Israel, and would ease longstanding tensions in the region."

This statement is written by someone who has paid no attention to Islam and has no understanding of the war being waged on Israel. That war is a classic Jihad. It does not stop when Israel makes concessions, even life-threatening concessions. It does not stop because Israel, a state so tiny it is hardly discernible on a map of the word, surrenders territory after territory and gives up gains won in war, as it did when it returned the Sinai to Egypt after 1956 (under Eisenhower's pressure), and then again when it gave up the entire Sinai to Egypt again, for a "cold peace" that is misunderstood in the West, and that could be reversed by the government of Egypt and its population, the Muslims of whom have been raised up to be deeply and permanently anti-Israel. Adam B. Lowther does not understand: the reason "five presidents" could not find a "solution" to what is called, not quite accurately I'm afraid, the "Arab-Israeli dispute" - which, however, is quite a bit better than the tendentious "Israeli-Palestinian dispute" -- is that it isn't a "dispute" at all. It's a permanent war, a war to eliminate the humiliation and offense, as Muslims see it, of an Infidel nation-state, one still more offensive because it has been created and successfully and repeatedly defended from Arab Muslim efforts to destroy it, by Jews, who were always despised by the Muslims. For unlike the Christians, they did not have a powerful Western Christendom somewhere in the background, no co-religionists to possibly protect them or come to their aid, or apply pressure on Muslim states (as was done on the Ottoman government by England and France, to improve the lot of Christians in the Ottoman Empire, beginning with the Tanzimat reforms of 1839, with the pressure repeated at intervals throughout the nineteenth century). Adam B. Lowther simply does not understand that an important part of Islam is triumphalism. The spirit of compromise is not part of Islam. You win, or you lose. You are the victor, or you are the vanquished. You do not compromise with your enemies. Islam teaches, or rather inculcates, the idea that Muslims must be loyal to Islam, and to fellow members of the Umma. The whole world belongs, by right, to Allah and to Muslims, the "best of peoples." Infidels do not have rights to any part of the world, and eventually, through the steady spread of Islam, and its dominance, they will be reduced to the condition of dhimmis, the only condition that permits selected Infidels (formally, the People of the Book, Ahl al-Kitab, that is Christians and Jews as well as Zoroastrians, though informally, for reasons of cold calculation, Hindus began to be allowed to live, so as to provide the Muslim state with the Jizyah, the tax on dhimmis, that was its main source of revenue).

I don't think this "Air Force analyst" understands that the campaign to push Israel back has gone on steadily since the Six-Day War, and it began with a careful renaming of the local Arabs, the shock troops, at least in the propaganda aspect, of the Jihad against Israel. Those Arabs - that is what they were called, before late 1967, by all the Arab leaders, diplomats, and propagandists - suddenly became, metamorphosed into, the "Palestinian people." It was a way to present an alternative narrative to that of the Jihad against the Jewish State that the Arabs had freely discussed among themselves - see Ahmed Shukairy, Arafat's predecessor as the leader of the local Arabs, even though he worked out of Egypt - and that they did not cease, have not ceased, to discuss, as such splendid eavesdropping organizations as www.MEMRI.org offer us fresh evidence of, every week and every day.

The Jihad against that Infidel nation-state did not begin with Israel's victory in the Six-Day War, did not begin with Israel's declaration of statehood on May 15, 1948, but began with the first stirrings of the Jewish settlers who bought land (at greatly-inflated prices) from the absentee Arab and Turkish landlords. The very idea that there were small landholders in Israel who were dispossessed shows a complete misunderstanding of the system of land ownership in the two Ottoman vilayets and one sanjak that constituted the territory that would later be assigned, by the Mandates Commission of the League of Nations, to Mandatory Palestine for the sole purpose of facilitating the creation, through the efforts of the Jews themselves, the Jewish National Home. In fact, the Jihad against Israel is merely a local manifestation of the general, worldwide Jihad, one that depends on a doctrine that does not date, that is central to Islam, and that only for a century or two fell into desuetude, not because the doctrine had at all been modified, but because the Muslims themselves rightly perceived their ability to go up against the much more powerful West would end inexorably in failure.

But things have changed. The OPEC trillions have allowed states that were permanently mired in poverty - Islam discourages economic development, both in its hatred of bid'a (innovation) and in its inshallah-fatalism (why work hard, if Allah giveth, and Allah, on the same whim, taketh away) -- to have the financial wherewithal to buy trillions of dollars worth of weapons. Those trillions have also been used to buy Western hirelings to help with propaganda, and votes at the U.N., and influence in the chanceries of the West, and academic centers or departments of Islamic studies, or endowed chairs, so as to ensure that most or all teaching about Islam remains in vigilantly pro-Islamic hands, and the ability of non-Muslims to educate themselves, in colleges and universities, truthfully about the doctrine, and practice, of Islam remains difficult and often nearly impossible, so that autodidacticism is the only way.

There is no doubt that if Iran acquires nuclear weapons, the increased danger this will mean for Israel will - or should - end forever any further Israeli concessions. For they cannot possibly reduce themselves to a state even tinier than the one they have, precisely because that will make it easier for Iran to go in for the kill. And the smaller and more obviously vulnerable Israel becomes, the less likely it is that leaders of Muslim states, even if they wish, would be able to resist the calls of their hysterical populations for attacks or gang-ups on Israel. Remember how Nasser had to convince King Hussein of Jordan to join the attack against Israel by assuring him that the Egyptians had wiped out much of Israel's air force and was on the road to victory? Those telephone calls were recorded by the Israelis, and you can probably find them, or transcripts of them, online. The only way to prevent open warfare again between Israel and Arabs is for Israel to possess the power of deterrence -the same power that the United States relied on during the Cold War. And Israel cannot possess that deterrence if it becomes so ridiculously small, with a handful of airfields, that Hamas from the south, and Hezbollah (possibly armed by Iran?) in the north can overwhelm it, with help from the east -- and who knows who will be in control of Jordan in twenty years, or ten years, or five years, or one? Peace is, and always will be maintained, between those who will continue to conduct Jihad, and those who are the intended victims of Jihad, only if those conducting Jihad are convinced that they will lose, or lose far more, than will the other side. I have written about the doctrine of "Darura" - Necessity - many times before. I suspect that Adam B. Lowther is as unfamiliar with "Darura" as he is with the texts and tenets of Islam. And because he is unfamiliar with those texts and tenets, he has no business discussing - has not earned the intellectual right to discuss - policy toward Iran or OPEC or the Jihad against Israel.

And then there is the appeal to the interest of the arms merchants. Here is his next reason for thinking it will be just swell if Iran acquires nuclear weapons:

"Fourth, a growth in ex ports of weapons systems, training and advice to our Middle Eastern allies [allies!] would not only strengthen our current partnership efforts but give the American defense industry a needed shot in the arm. With the likelihood of austere Pentagon budgets in the coming years, Boeing has been making noise about shifting out of the defense industry, which would mean lost American jobs and would also put us in a difficult position should we be threatened by a rising military power like China. A nuclear Iran could forestall such a catastrophe."

This is extraordinary. The veriest conspiracy-theorist writing for Counterpunch, or appearing on Al-Jazeera, must be made delirious with joy by such a naked call for increasing business for the American defense industry. One wonders if Adam B. Lowther is angling, once his stint as a "defense analyst at the Air Force Research Institute" ends, for a job at Lockheed, or Boeing, or one of the other firms that he thinks, that he devoutly hopes, will benefit through an increase in business in the Middle East, if Iran gets nuclear weapons.

The piling-up of weapons in the Middle East, the heedless selling of vast quantities of the most advanced arms to the primitive tribes-with-flags in the Middle East, was one of the subjects that nearly drove J. B. Kelly mad with fury. He spent, on-and-off, nearly fifty ears in the Middle East, beginning with his time in Egypt before the coup of Nasser and Naguib, and including his time as a close advisor to Sheik Zayed of Abu Dhabi, back in the 1970s, helping to prepare the legal brief of Abu Dhabi against the land-grabbing Saudis. No one scared the Saudis like J. B. Kelly, for it was he who knew more about the Frontier Question - the frontiers of the Arab states of the Gulf - than they did. And no one was less impressed with Western appeasement and miscomprehension of the Saudis and other Arabs - he retained a slight soft spot for the Omanis - than J. B. Kelly. The piling-up of weapons was certain, he felt, to lead to all kinds of explosions, because such weapons were bound to be used. He predicted their use before the Iran-Iraq War, and before the latest war, proxy or being made into a proxy, war between Iran and Saudi Arabia (even if the Iranians have not been involved as the Saudis claim, or hint) in the Yemen, and before the steady violence, with most of the weapons imported from other Muslim states, in Somalia.

And Lowther is himself a little inconsistent. First, he wants the Americans to offer a "nuclear umbrella" in exchange for promises by the locals to completely change their ways - in effect, to un-islamize their societies. Lowther, however, not knowing what it means to have a society completely suffused with Islam, and expressing Islam in its political and economic and social institutions, does not recognize that that is what he is calling for when he calls for "economic, political, and social reforms." Genuine reforms of such a kind would begin, but not end, with those Saudi textbooks that inculcate hatred against the Infidels, including the millions of Infidel foreign wage-slaves who keep Saudi Arabia going.

But why stop there, in the application of the truly brilliant strategy of Adam B. Lowther, defense analyst at the Air Force Research Institute? If only he had been in charge of our policy in East Asia, we never would have bothered to try to stop North Korea from acquiring nuclear weapons. No, we would instead have secretly welcomed North Korea's acquisition of nuclear weapons. After all, isn't South Korea a great economic competitor? Why, last I looked, Samsung was making portable phones, and those wonderful backlit LED televisions we all hear so much about, and so much else. And then there's Hyundai, and Kia. And then there's Japan too, still eating our electronic lunch. So how to recover some of that money? We can't build those backlit LED televisions, apparently, or the rest of what Korea and Japan produce, so at least let's scare the hell out of them, so that they come running to Boeing. And what better way to scare them then to have North Korea acquire nuclear weapons? Why, think of all the contracts our defense industry could sign with the governments of South Korea, and Japan.

So to keep the manufactures of airplanes happy, to keep Boeing from leaving the defense market, by all means - let Iran get nuclear weapons. But of course. My god, why stop there? Let's try to sell arms, too, to Angola, with its new oil wealth. And while we are at it, have Angolan oil money spent on arms for Mozambique at the same time, and then encourage both parties, oil-funded, to start thinking about pushing inward from east and from west, in order to create one giant lusophone state (doing Camoens proud). Then that state, in turn, might push southward, right through the soft fotanelle of collapsing Zimbabwe and right through to Aids-weakened South Africa, where the goldmines beckon. And once that idea has been set in place, the American defense manufacturers could go to South Africa, and offer to sell them billions in weapons.

So, dear reader, you can make up a half-dozen other examples of places that, were they to become nuclear states, would so frighten other countries around them that those frightened countries would naturally turn to us, to the United States, and quickly become loyal (how loyal? for how long?) customers of the American defense industry. And don't even think that the day might come when such countries would use their weapons on other countries, not necessarily threats to them, countries that they just didn't like, for some reason. Nor should you assume that, say, Saudi Arabia might someday ask not Boeing for help, but a Chinese aircraft company - oh, they are coming along, you know - one that sold things more cheaply. That company furthermore might even supply Chinese pilots to do the bidding of the Al-Saud, and might even agree to handle all the "security for the oilfields" in a way guaranteed to be more reliable than those Americans - well, you see where all of this is, or could be, headed. You see, I see. Only Adam B. Lowther, defense analyst with the Air Force Research Institute, doesn't see.

The final point of Lowther is again economic. Still he has forgotten, and doesn't want to be reminded at this point, the fifth of his points, of the need to keep in mind the frightening effect on the world, and possible use by Iran, or by others (Hezbollah?) of nuclear weapons. That includes all sorts and conditions of nuclear weapons that Iran might manage to produce, and use, or hand off to others, or sell to others. Iran could even sell nuclear weapons to Sunni Arab regimes with which, in a spirit of pan-Islamism, it might reconcile - how does Adam B. Lowther know they won't? This could happen while the Americans are left surprised, astonished, and confused, as has happened with them so many times before, when it comes to dealing with Muslim powers, in and out of the Middle East.

Here's Lowther:

"Last, the United States would be able to stem the flow of dollars to autocratic regimes in the region. It would accomplish this not only by driving down the price of oil and increasing arms exports, but by requiring the beneficiaries of American security to bear a real share of its cost. And in the long run, a victory in the war on terrorism would save taxpayers the tens of billions of dollars a year now spent on overseas counter-insurgency operations."

So these regimes will do what they have given no sign of ever doing before. Did Egypt, without any oil, and dependent on the Americans for $2 billion a year, change in any way, over the past three decades, the stratokleptocracy that runs and more or less owns Egypt? Has Egypt, despite now and again making throat-clearing noises about "democracy" and unspecified "reforms," in any way over those thirty years done a single thing to show it is willing to engage in "economic, political, and social reforms" in order to keep being on the receiving end of vast amounts of entirely unmerited American largesse? Hasn't the regime in Egypt not only mocked the idea of "democracy" in its conduct of elections, but failed to improve, and even has seemed to make the situation worse, for the persecuted and threatened Copts in Egypt? What do Copts tell us about their own situation, when they are in the safety of the West? And what about the other Muslim countries, such as Pakistan? Pakistan has been favored as a recipient of military aid for a half-century, ever since CENTO and the Dulles brothers, with their naïve belief that Islam was "a bulwark against Communism" and so Muslim states deserved American support. And Pakistan was so meretricrious in its dealings, and the executive branch of our government so terminally credulous in dealing with it, that members of Congress who had been following the matter (such as Senator John Glenn) rose up and passed the Pressler Amendment, and then discovered that the Executive Branch continued to make a mockery of the intent of that amendment, letting Pakistan get away with murder. And of course Pakistan managed to create its bomb with money freed up by American aid. We, American taxpayers, paid for that Pakistani nuclear project, and the "Islamic bomb." But perhaps Adam B. Lowther doesn't care, because in his view that, no doubt, simply made it possible - or did it? What did India do? - to sell more defense systems to India.

How exactly does Lowther think that the rich states of the Gulf can be persuaded not only to institute "economic, political, and social reforms," but also to buy more weapons from America? Why would they buy them from America if they could buy them, at lower prices, from China - unless of course America is willing not to set up any barriers to the Saudi efforts to spread Islam within the West, and willing as well not to stand up for non-Muslims, such as Copts, Assyrians, Chaldeans, Maronites, and foreign Christians, being mistreated in Muslim Arab lands, all in order not to offend Saudi Arabia?

He hasn't thought this out.

In fact, he hasn't thought anything out.

If his Op/Ed were passed in to me by a student - say, a freshman full of bright ideas - I'd give it a D plus. Or possibly I'd move it up to a C plus. I'm kind, you see. I wouldn't want to discourage him. I'm indulgent with the young, the confused, the ignorant. But Adam B. Lowther is not a freshman in college. He's a defense analyst, discussing matters of life and mass death. And with him one need not be so indulgent. One should apply appropriate standards, and give him his due. On second thought, I'll change that D plus, but not upwards. Downwards - to an F.

“Euro Area Headed for Break-Up,” warned a recent Bloomberg wire. The shocking headline was prompted by comments of Albert Edwards, a leading strategist at Société Générale, one of the oldest French banks. Speaking about the debt crisis that is currently engulfing Greece as well as a number of other eurozone* countries, Edwards said: “My own view of developments, for what it is worth, is that any help given to Greece merely delays the inevitable break-up of the eurozone.”

Lest you think Edwards is some kind of doomsday crank, he called the 1997 Asian currency meltdown one year ahead of time. A senior figure at one of Europe’s top financial service companies, he was also voted the second best European financial strategist in the prestigious Thomson Extel survey.

Edwards’ prediction will not seem so far-fetched when we consider the eurozone’s skyrocketing debt. This development has caught many observers off guard, since the European Monetary Union lays down strict regulations aimed at preventing such a situation. The so-called Stability and Growth Pact requires each country’s to hold down its annual budget deficit below 3 percent of gross domestic product (GDP). The Pact also stipulates that any member’s public debt is not to exceed 60 percent of GDP.

The exacting regulations notwithstanding, this year only one eurozone country is expected to have a budget deficit that falls within the three percent limit. The rest will go over, most by a large margin. Germany, which was the country that lobbied most rigorously for the strict fiscal requirements, was among the first to break them. Greece is currently the leading offender with a deficit that equals 12.7 percent of its GDP. But the figures are generally abysmal throughout the monetary union. Ireland’s deficit, for example, is 11.5 percent, Spain’s 11.4 percent, Portugal’s 9.3 percent.

As far as public debt is concerned the average European ratio is 88% of GDP, nearly 50 percent above the “allowable” limit. The worst offender is Italy whose public debt stands at an astounding 127 percent GDP. Greece’s debt is 113 percent, Belgium’s 105 percent, Germany’s nearly 80 percent. High as these figures are, the reality is probably worse as EU countries routinely use an assortment of accounting tricks to understate their deficits and obligations.

It is becoming increasingly obvious that if the euro is to continue as a viable currency, eurozone states must take decisive measures bring their finances under control. This, however, appears to be a nearly impossible task. Greece shows us why. Shortly after the government announced a package of budget cuts and tax increases the country’s civil servants took part in a nation-wide strike. Plans are afoot for another one next month. At the same time, Greece’s umbrella private sector union is planning an extensive walk-out for the last week of February. The Associated Press observed that the Greek government “may find that unions and voters push back against cutbacks that will take years to show results. With a potential public backlash, their chance to win approval for such measures remains unclear.”

Memories are still fresh of the protests that took place early last year. Angry at cuts in their subsidies, Greek farmers blocked major roads and paralyzed the country. Parts of the nation were thrown into chaos as lines of vehicles stretched for 12 miles or more. Unable to restore order, the prime minister was forced to beg the farmers to remove the roadblocks. “There is an urgent need to free up the roads. A whole society cannot be held hostage,” he pleaded.

This time around far more substantial steps must be taken in order to put Greece’s fiscal house in order. This is certainly not going to sit well with the Greek public and there is fear that things could deteriorate in dramatic fashion. Albert Edwards of Société Générale puts it this way:

Unlike Japan or the U.S., Europe has an unfortunate tendency towards civil unrest when subjected to extreme economic pain.

The Eurozone thus faces a seemingly unsolvable conundrum. Even though it is steeped deeply in debt, almost every serious effort to curtail spending meets with popular rage. The problem is that they cannot have it both ways. It is impossible to have a large welfare state and a sound fiscal house at the same time. It is either one or the other.

Until recently the euro was considered a possible alternative to the dollar as the world’s reserve currency. It was thought that the Monetary Union’s strict guidelines would safeguard its debasement. But it turns out that the Union’s respect for its founding documents is only paper deep. It is now becoming apparent that the disregard will have dire consequences. It may even bring about the break up of the eurozone and the demise of what once seemed like a solid currency.

Given that the United States is taking the same path of unrestrained spending, we would do well to take heed and learn from Europe’s painful lessons.

*NOTE: The eurozone – also called the euro area – is not the same as the European Union (EU). The European has twenty seven members as of this year. The eurozone is made up of those countries within the European Union that use the euro as their sole currency. The eurozone currently has sixteen member states.

If eternal vigilance is the price of freedom, incessant distractions are the way that politicians take away our freedoms, in order to enhance their own power and longevity in office. Dire alarms and heady crusades are among the many distractions of our attention from the ever increasing ways that government finds to take away more of our money and more of our freedom.

Magicians have long known that distracting an audience is the key to creating the illusion of magic. It is also the key to political magic.

Alarms ranging from “overpopulation” to “global warming” and crusades ranging from “affordable housing” to “universal health care” have been among the distractions of political magicians. But few distractions have had such a long and impressive political track record as getting people to resent and, if necessary, hate other people.

The most politically effective totalitarian systems have gotten people to give up their own freedom in order to vent their resentment or hatred at other people— under Communism, the capitalists; under Nazis, the Jews.

Under extremist Islamic regimes today, hatred is directed at the infidels in general and the “great Satan,” the United States, in particular. There some people have been induced to give up not only their freedom but even their lives, in order to strike a blow against those they have been taught to hate.

We have not yet reached these levels of hostility, but those who are taking away our freedoms, bit by bit, on the installment plan, have been incessantly supplying us with people to resent.

One of the most audacious attempts to take away our freedom to live our lives as we see fit has been the so-called “health care reform” bills that were being rushed through Congress before either the public or the members of Congress themselves had a chance to discover all that was in it.

For this, we were taught to resent doctors, insurance companies and even people with “Cadillac health insurance plans,” who were to be singled out for special taxes. Meanwhile, our freedom to make our own medical decisions— on which life and death can depend— was to be quietly taken from us and transferred to our betters in Washington.

Only the recent Massachusetts election results have put that on hold.

Another dangerous power toward which we are moving, bit by bit, on the installment plan, is the power of politicians to tell people what their incomes can and cannot be. Here the resentment is being directed against “the rich.”

The distracting phrases here include “obscene” wealth and “unconscionable” profits. But, if we stop and think about it— which politicians don’t expect us to— what is obscene about wealth? Wouldn’t we consider it great if every human being on earth had a billion dollars and lived in a place that could rival the Taj Mahal?

Poverty is obscene. It is poverty that needs to be reduced—and increasing a country’s productivity has done that far more widely than redistributing income by targeting “the rich.”

You can see the agenda behind the rhetoric when profits are called “unconscionable” but taxes never are, even when taxes take more than half of what someone has earned, or add much more to the prices we have to pay than profits do.

The assumption that what A pays B is any business of C is an assumption that means a dangerous power being transferred to politicians to tell us all what incomes we can and cannot receive. It will not apply to everyone all at once. Like the income tax, which at first applied only to the truly rich, and then slowly but steadily moved down the income scale to hit the rest of us, the power to say what incomes people can be allowed to make will inevitably move down the income scale to make us all dependents and supplicants of politicians.

The phrase “public servants” is increasingly misleading. They are well on their way to becoming public masters— like aptly named White House “czars.” The more they can get us all to resent those they designate, the more they can distract us from their increasing control of our own lives— but only if we sell our freedom cheap. We can sell our birthright and not even get the mess of pottage.

Remember how President Barack “Darth Vader” Obama asked Republicans to “bring it on” if they had better ideas for America’s future than the ones he and his fellow Democrats have proposed. Writing for FrontPage Magazine, Vasko Kohlmayer reports that one Republican gave Obama what he asked for – and probably more than that.

It comes in the form of the most constructive legislative proposal to emerge from Congress in a long time. Called “A Roadmap for America’s Future,” it is the brainchild of Wisconsin Republican Rep. Paul Ryan. The proposal is unusual by Washington’s standards – it actually offers real solutions to a pressing problem.

Faced with moribund economy and weighted down with astronomical obligations it cannot make good on, our federal government is slouching toward fiscal disaster.

This much is obvious to most observers and politicians alike. The problem is that politicians are loath to do anything about it, because the swamp of federal spending has always been a fertile ground for political fortunes. Paul Ryan’s Roadmap bucks this trend and seeks to reverse our disastrous course with a series of commonsense measures.

Some of the plan’s highlights listed by Vasko:

• Allowing those under 55 to invest over one-third of their current Social Security taxes into personal retirement accounts, similar to the Thrift Savings Plan available to federal employees;
• Eliminating the alternative minimum and the death tax;
• Doing away with taxes on interest, capital gains and dividends;
• Replacing the corporate tax—currently the second highest in the industrialized world—with a business consumption tax of 8.5%;
• Imposing a 10 year discretionary spending freeze.

The Congressional Budget Office (CBO) says that Ryan’s plan would strengthen the U.S. economy “and put the government’s finances on a sustainable track.” It would, the CBO states in a letter issued after they reviewed the Wisconsin Congressman’s plan, “lower budget deficits” and “result in much less federal debt than under the alternative fiscal scenario and thereby a much more favorable macroeconomic outlook.”

Obama himself had to grudgingly admit that Ryan’s plan makes a lot of sense. George F. Will – the moderate conservative columnist for the Washington Post – agreed. Democrats on the Hill were less kind, however. Instead of endorsing the only sensible plan put forth until in years, they ferociously attacked it and its creator.

Sensing the possibility of scoring political points, they wasted no time launching a salvo of vicious attacks. Rep. Chris Van Hollen, who chairs the House Democrats’ reelection committee, had this to say of Ryan’s plan: “Put it this way. For seniors on Medicare, it’s a dead end.” In case you missed it, the pun is not incidental. Van Hollen really meant to imply that Ryan’s plan would be the death sentence for seniors.
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi fired from both barrels when she described the Roadmap as a scheme that “provides tax breaks for the wealthy, it ends Medicare as we know it, and privatizes Social Security. Here they go again. Rehashing the same failed Bush policies.” Pelosi was deftly seconded by House Democratic Caucus Chair John Larson who chimed in with the following: “They are dusting off their old playbook, rehashing the policies that the American people have rejected in the past. They want to privatize Social Security. They want to turn Medicare into a voucher program. And they’re providing tax breaks for the wealthy while they raise taxes on the middle class.” Never one to mince words, Democrat guru and strategist Paul Begala scoffed: “They have ideas, and lots of them. And their ideas ruin the country.”

And Republicans, how did they respond, you ask? Well, they did what they do best: they retreated immediately. Instead of endorsing Ryan’s fiscally conservative vision for America, they distanced themselves from it, out of fear for the Democratic Party’s attack machine.

That is, all Republicans retreated, except one. Despite the attacks on his person, Ryan continues to defend his plan.

Vasco concludes:

And this brings us to the moral bankruptcy of Washington, DC. Overspending and saddled with obligations it cannot pay, our government is quickly approaching fiscal Armageddon. Our politicians, however, refuse to do anything about it, because it would mean that they would have to start behaving responsibly and stop buying votes with money they do not have. Then along comes one man who proposes meaningful, common-sense measures to avert the impending calamity. For this he gets vilified to the point that even the leadership of his own party, the party that claims to stand for fiscal responsibility, runs away from him in fear.

He is right, of course. What’s happening here is absolutely despicable. This plan doesn’t merely make sense, no, it outlines the only logical and feasible path the U.S. can pursue in the coming years. The treasury has been pillaged and the next generations will suffer under an unbelievably heavy burden of debt put upon their shoulders by arrogant, egotistical and small-minded politicians who care less about doing the right thing than about keeping their jobs.

The history of “A Roadmap for America’s Future” really tells us all we need to know about the current state of affairs in Washington, doesn’t it? Those focused on actually improving America, regardless of which party they belong to, are in the minority.

The Stalinist-show-trial aspect of the Geert Wilders “hate speech” trial in the Netherlands was thrown into sharp relief last week when the Amsterdam District Court refused to allow Wilders to call fifteen of the eighteen witnesses he had hoped to bring forward in his defense. Wilders in response was characteristically direct: “This Court is not interested in the truth. This Court doesn’t want me to have a fair trial. I can’t have any respect for this. This Court would not be out of place in a dictatorship.”

The three witnesses the court allowed Wilders are the Dutch Islamic scholars Hans Jansen and Simon Admiraal, along with the Wafa Sultan. Hans Jansen’s work on Islam is superb and groundbreaking, and he will be an excellent witness, as will Admiraal and the exemplary freedom fighter Wafa Sultan.

Nonetheless, this decision indicates the hollowness of Dutch justice and the court’s bias against Wilders. For some who would have been Wilders’s most effective witnesses were disallowed. He had wanted to call Mohammed Bouyeri, the murderer of Theo Van Gogh.

Why Bouyeri? Wilders, in the bizarre inquisition that has replaced justice in the Dutch courts, is accused of offending Muslims by pointing out that Muslims invoke the Qur’an and Muhammad’s example to justify violence. However, Bouyeri quoted the Qur’an in the note threatening Wilders and others that he stabbed into Van Gogh’s body, and invoked the Qur’an repeatedly during his trial as well. “Kill them, and Allah will help you and guide your hand,” he said. “There’s no room there for doubt or interpretation there.”

Bouyeri would have proven Wilders’ point immediately: he is simply telling the truth about how Islamic teachings incite all too many Muslims to violence – and if telling the truth is now illegal in the Netherlands, so much the worse for the Netherlands. By disallowing Wilders from calling Bouyeri and others, the court has hindered Wilders’ ability to make this case – suggesting (and by no means for the first time) that the Dutch authorities are determined to convict Wilders, and are not going to let any inconvenient facts get in the way of their doing so.

It is not exaggerating to say that the Geert Wilders trial is a defining moment in the history of Western civilization. One would have to go back centuries to find a court case with as much significance for the future course of the free world. If the farrago of “hate” charges against Wilders stick, and he is convicted, it will herald the end of the freedom of speech in the West, as a precedent will have been set that other Western nations (urged on by the Organization of the Islamic Conference, which is the organization most responsible for the global assault on free speech) will be certain to follow. The era of enlightenment and the understanding that all human beings are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights will be definitively drawing to a close, and a new darkness will descend over Europe and the free world in general. For once the precedent is established that a man can be jailed and destroyed for offending a privileged class, the idea that every human being has rights that cannot be infringed will be damaged beyond repair.

And even if Wilders prevails, enough damage has been done already. The Dutch law (and there are others like it in other Western countries) that stipulates that someone can actually be tried and jailed for offending another person will remain on the books. Other trials will follow. The law will be used by the governing elites who developed it in order to maintain their power and silence independent and dissenting voices.

For that is, of course, the point of all this. The Dutch authorities stand arrayed on one side, with Wilders standing alone on the other. Yet despite the fact that he has nothing like their numbers, wealth, or resources, he threatens to topple their entire multicultural house of cards – for he has on his side a weapon that all of their power cannot defeat, the weapon of truth. And so they are desperate to silence him, and end forever his truth-telling about jihad and Islamic supremacism.

Yet even if they do silence him, the truth will still be the truth. They will not be able to obliterate it forever. But will they be able to help initiate a long, perhaps centuries long, period of darkness and oppression in Europe and its civilizational children?

Certainly.