Founded in 1985, Reporters Sans Frontières (RSF), also known as Reporters Without Borders, professes to be motivated by a profound devotion to freedom of expression.  The organization has apparently done good work on behalf of journalists in countries like Cuba and China, where press freedom simply doesn’t exist.  But RSF also issues an annual Press Freedom Index – the latest was released just the other day – in which it purports to rank countries according to the degree of freedom their journalists enjoy.  Let’s just say that the list doesn’t represent RSF at its finest.

As someone who frequently slams the New York Times, I’m glad to be able to say that Times reporter Andrew Rosenthal, writing about RSF’s new list last week, summoned precisely the right word to describe it: “ridiculous.” As Rosenthal put it: “Like US News & World Report with colleges, they freshen the list each year based on new developments, and – again like US News – they sometimes end up with a pecking-order that doesn’t quite mesh with reality.”

For example, on the new list, the United States comes in at #47, falling from #20 last year, purportedly because police officers have beaten and arrested journalists reporting on the Occupy Wall Street movement.  One suspects that at least some of those whom RSF counts as mistreated journalists are bloggers who were taking active, and violent, part in them.  Be that as it may, it turns out that Hungary was given a better ranking this year than the U.S., even though its news media are under government control.  Rosenthal issues a challenge to RSF: “Can you find me a journalist who thinks he’d have a freer hand in Hungary than in the United States? I don’t think so.”

But it’s not just Hungary’s position relative to the U.S. that is ludicrous.  To judge by RSF’s rankings, you’d think some of the most troubling recent assaults by Western governments on the freedom of expression never took place at all.

Take one of two countries tied for tenth place – Canada, where a few years back both Mark Steyn and Ezra Levant were hauled before Human Rights Commissions for writing critically about Islam.  Although the Ontario Human Rights Commission declared that the offending article by Steyn – which had appeared in the new magazine Macleans – was beyond its jurisdiction, it condemned the article anyway, rendering, in effect, a guilty verdict without a trial on a matter that it acknowledged was none of its business.

Steyn’s article appeared in 2006, and his cases before the Ontario and Canadian Human Rights Commissions were wound up in 2008; so were two cases against Levant before the Alberta Human Rights Commission.  But there’s no indication that anything has changed in Canada to render critics of Islam less vulnerable to government harassment in 2011 than Steyn and Levant were in 2008.  In any event, it’s worth noting that Canada’s Press Freedom ranking in 2008 was #13, while the U.S. was tied with several other countries for 36^th place.

Tied with Canada at #10 this year is Denmark, where author and journalist Lars Hedegaard has been put on trial for criticizing Islam in a conversation held in his own home.  Hedegaard – who is the founder and director of Denmark’s Free Press Society as well as of the International Free Press Society – was found not guilty of racism in 2011, but the case was retried, and later in the year he was found guilty and fined 5,000 kroner ($884).  It was an outrageous travesty of Western justice and a chilling betrayal of the freedom of expression for which Hedegaard’s own organization stands – and which the RSF, too, purportedly exists to defend.  But does RSF even know about the case?  From 2010 to 2011, Denmark actually went up a slot on its Press Freedom list, from #11 to #10.

At #5 on RSF’s new list is Austria.  Elizabeth Sabaditsch-Wolff, anyone?  In February 2011, an Austrian court convicted her of “denigration of religious beliefs of a legally recognized religion” – guess which one? – and fined her up to €480; in December, Austria’s Supreme Court affirmed the verdict.  Despite this scandalous precedent, Austria’s new RSF ranking, too, represents a step up from 2010, when it was at #7.

Articles on FrontPagemag.com and other sites have picked apart President Obama’s latest State of the Union address, both in terms of substance and tone. The speech dragged on and on, with language recycled from his previous State of the Union addresses. The rhetoric was highly partisan. The economic proposals consisted of a laundry list of progressive, anti-private enterprise, big government ideas and so on. However, beyond the specific deficiencies in Obama’s speech, his address was more of an exercise of a state of denial than an honest accounting of the State of the Union.

The most glaring example of Obama’s state of denial was his self-righteous chastisement of others for what he has done himself:

[A]nyone who tells you that America is in decline or that our influence has waned, doesn’t know what they’re talking about.

Remember, Obama’s barbs at others is coming from the same man who felt that America had to be fundamentally transformed from the kind of political and economic system that has come down to us from the Founding Fathers.

Moreover, Obama himself has put down America on several occasions while representing the United States abroad. Perhaps it is time for him to admit that he didn’t know what he was talking about when he leveled all his criticisms of the United States in front of foreign audiences. For example, on his very first trip overseas, in Strasbourg, France, Obama said the United States had “failed to appreciate Europe’s leading role in the world” and that “there have been times where America has shown arrogance and been dismissive, even derisive.”

In addition to his apologies and put-downs of America, Obama has downplayed the idea of American exceptionalism. When asked in France what he thought of America’s claim to an exceptional position among nations, he quipped that “I believe in American exceptionalism, just as I suspect that the Brits believe in British exceptionalism and the Greeks believe in Greek exceptionalism.”

By extension of Obama’s logic, since every country would most likely think of itself as exceptional, the idea that America truly is a unique example of freedom, economic dynamism, and goodness to the rest of the world has no meaning. This is moral relativism at its worst, compounded by Obama’s embarrassing habit of bowing to world leaders.

Moreover, as a result of some of his own policies, Obama is helping to bring about a decline of American power and influence, if they are not soon reversed. He is planning to hollow out our military with drastic budget cuts. He is ceding economic power to China. His so-called reset policies with Russia have played into Russia’s hands. Iran is ever closer to developing a nuclear bomb while Obama’s engagement policy has cost us crucial time. The list goes on and on.

A second example of Obama’s state of denial in his State of the Union address involved energy. He still believes the sun and wind gods, with a big dose of government funding, are the answer to our nation’s energy problem.

Because of federal investments, renewable energy use has nearly doubled. And thousands of Americans have jobs because of it.

Somehow, the Solyndra fiasco didn’t make it into Obama’s speech. American taxpayers were the losers to the tune of $500 million. So were the Solyndra employees when the company went belly-up. The only winners in the case of Solyndra were Obama’s campaign contribution bundlers who were lobbying for the Solyndra government loan guarantees.

Obama’s inexplicable decision to block the Keystone pipeline for crass political reasons didn’t make it into his speech either. Obama is inexcusably playing political games to hold on to his environmental base through the election, with good jobs for Americans and increased energy independence cast aside as the sacrificial lambs. Even Obama’s own jobs council has recommended building more pipelines. But then again, Obama rarely listens to the critical recommendations of his own councils and commissions such as his bipartisan deficit reduction commission.

The panel discussion below recently took place at David Horowitz’s Restoration Weekend in West Palm Beach, Florida (Nov. 17-20, 2011). The transcript follows. To view the question and answer session, click here.

Part I

Part II

Michael Wienir: We have a lot of things to talk about.  And in particular, we want to have enough time so you can ask questions of the panelists and interact with them, and they can interact with each other.  So, I still see stragglers back there.  It’s like herding cats trying to do this job.  It is not an easy job, for those of you that think it’s an easy job.

Come on, stragglers, pull up a chair.  Sit down, the doors are closing.  You don’t want to be outside anyway, the weather is not particularly good.

My name is Dr. Michael Wienir.  And it is my pleasure as chairman of the Board of Directors of the David Horowitz Freedom Center to welcome you to the 2011 Restoration Weekend.  And let me take this moment to simply thank all of you for your support in the past, in the present and, I know, in the future.

As David Horowitz has said, we are an effective battle tank, we’re not just a think tank.  And we have a general on the panel.  And the key is that the ammunition that this battle tank uses is generated by David and other members of the Center.  But the fuel to make this tank go is provided by your generosity and the generosity of over 90,000 people who across the country are contributors large and small to the David Horowitz Freedom Center.  We can’t wage this battle — we cannot fight, this tank will not run — without your support and without your help.

The mission of the David Horowitz Freedom Center is quite simply the defense of free society, whose moral and ethical and cultural foundations are under attack by enemies at home and abroad, both secular and religious.  And that’s what our mission is.  That’s what we do.  And we’re a unique organization.

David has defined the values of the Center, and there are a number of them — very similar to what Herman Cain had to say this morning — individual freedom, limited government, the rule of law, capitalism, free markets, and equal opportunity.  Not radical egalitarianism; equal opportunity at the starting line, not equal outcome at the finish line.  Not redistribution of wealth, but creation of wealth for all our citizens.  We work to create these opportunities in the private sector, and we support strong defense to preserve and protect these values.  And we reject surrender, appeasement, retreat and defeat.

Dennis Prager, who is not here this weekend but is a friend of the Center, points out what America really is, the trilogy — liberty — not what the Left wants, which is equality, and not individual freedom — E Pluribus Unum — out of many, one — not multiculturalism — and In God We Trust — not secularism.

This panel, then, is defined as the decline of the West — meaning these Western values — and the rise of the rest — secular socialism, Marxism, Islamofascism, and this Chinese model of — I didn’t know how to actually title it, but I guess it’s totalitarian mercantilism.

(Laughter)

So the questions for the panel that I’ve asked them all to address is — one, is the West really in decline?  Do you accept the premise of the title of the panel?  If the West is not in decline, I’ve asked them to defend their position and answer your questions.  Number two, if you agree that the West is in decline, what is the specific cause of that decline?  And if you agree that the West is in decline, what can be done to reverse the trend?  And finally, are you optimistic, or are you pessimistic?  Four simple questions.

Now, each panelist gets 10 minutes to do this.  It’s better than 30 seconds on that Presidential debate.  And then we should have about 20 or 25 minutes for the panelists to interact with each other and for you to ask your questions, which they will answer.

First panelist is Bruce Bawer, who I just had the pleasure of meeting — I’ve read his books.  Bruce is an American literary critic and writer and poet.  He received his undergraduate and graduate degrees, including a PhD in English from the State University of New York at Stony Brook.  He’s taught courses in literature and composition, in search of a tolerant society.  He moved to Amsterdam from New York in 1998, and then to Oslo, Norway — I believe it’s 1999 — only to confront the intolerance of Islam and their tolerance — European tolerance of intolerance.

Among his many books and writings are “While Europe Slept: How Radical Islam is Destroying the West from Within,” and, in 2009, “Surrender: Appeasing Islam, Sacrificing Freedom.”  Bruce is now a Shillman Fellow — and you’ll hear more about Bob Shillman’s generosity and the Shillman Fellowships later on during this weekend — and as such is a regular contributor to our website, which I hope you’re on every day, FrontPageMag.com.

Bruce?

(Applause)

Bruce Bawer: Thank you, Michael.  Thank you, everybody for being here.  Thank you to the David Horowitz Center for having me at this wonderful place.

First, I think it’s useful to step back and ask exactly what we mean when we speak of the decline of the West.  Do we mean a decline in raw military power, in freedom, in prosperity, standard of living, quality of life; in security,  in character, in civic virtue, in art and culture?  And when we speak of decline, are we speaking of decline relative to a decade ago, a generation, a century?  And if we are in decline, who is rising, and in what ways, and why?  And what does their rise say about the West?

For example, the rise of China as an economic power, and India as both an economic power and a fledgling democracy — maybe less a reflection of the innate qualities of Chinese or Indian civilization than of the powerful influence of Western ideas and values in those countries.  Indeed, Western civilization has become, in a very real way, world civilization.  And Western values have come to be recognized very widely as universal values.

Maybe it’s also useful to remind ourselves that people have been talking about the decline of the West for a long time.  Europe, which reached its zenith of power, [self-competence] and much else in the latter part of the 19th century, was traumatized by the First World War and, in a way, never really recovered.

During the Depression, a lot of supposedly smart people in both America and Europe thought democratic capitalism was finished and that they were faced with a choice between communism and fascism.  For awhile during World War II, things didn’t look good.  And for quite awhile afterwards, many people were betting on the USSR.

I was born into a prosperous, stable, self-confident America.  But by the time I was a teenager, the US seemed to be coming apart at the seams, frazzled by a new culture of protest that transformed American cultural values, mocked the idea of America as the arsenal of democracy and undermined American social stability.  Similar developments, of course, were going on all over Western Europe.

Then came Watergate, and we were told that American democracy was on the rocks.  President Ford reassured us, only to be replaced by Carter, who told us we were afflicted with a deadly malaise that was taking us down the tubes.  Reagan brought us Morning in America, though, at the same time, we were warned that Japan was about to leave us in the dust.

The fall of communism in Europe felt at first like a great triumph for the West.  But for many, it led to a crisis of identity.  We had to find ourselves in opposition to communism — what were we now?

Then came 9/11.  And after the initial and very brief feeling of Western unity, confusion and division set in.  And that’s something worth puzzling over.  After all, 9/11 was followed by attacks elsewhere in the West — Madrid, London.  We were all in it together.  The West should never have been more united in resolve.  But it wasn’t.  Why?  Because we’d been poisoned by a decadent thing called multiculturalism that made it impossible for many of us — especially our cultural elites — to even name our enemy.

Fear played a part too, of course.  Many European countries were already so heavily populated with Muslims, who they knew were sympathetic to jihadists, that the leaders of those countries didn’t dare talk honestly about the subject.  Our leaders sent soldiers off to fight but weren’t always honest with them about what they were fighting.

Meanwhile, Europe became increasingly accustomed to Muslim youth crime, so-called no-go zones, and fiery jihadist preachers.  But who was put on trial in Europe, in Canada and in Australia?  The few people who dared to speak bluntly and honestly about Islam.

No wonder, then, that we were plunged into confusion and division.  Not just division among Americans, but division between America and our Western allies.  During the Bush years, anti-Americanism in Europe swelled to unprecedented proportions.  Respected intellectuals equated Bush with Saddam and [Osama].  Then suddenly, China loomed as the world’s next great power, and the West became gripped by economic crises.

Today, the welfare states of Western Europe face demographic disaster.  The EU is a question mark.  And America consists increasingly — to quote Charles Murray — of two classes that don’t talk to each other.  The Tea Party grasps the importance of freedom to the West’s survival, while Occupy This-That-and-the-Other is ready to sacrifice freedom for an illusion of equality.

But what about the great majority of Americans who belong to neither movement?  To what extent do they exhibit what used to be known as civic virtues, and understand and respect the Constitutional values on which this country and the entire free West was built?  To what extent, on the other hand, are they the products of a relativist multiculturalism which has taught them that the West’s history is nothing but a litany of evils, colonialism, imperialism, exploitive capitalism; thereby twisting one of the world’s great strengths, constructive self-criticism, into a destructive self-hatred?

Instead of preparing to build on the West’s great heritage, young people are too often taught today to apologize for it.  This is no atmosphere in which to hatch new Dantes and Shakespeares, new Beethovens and Mozarts, new Rembrandts and Michelangelos.  Europe’s great cities are museums.

And speaking of culture, what about American popular culture?  I grew up in a great age of middlebrow culture which was a force for social unity that prepared young and undereducated people for the higher glories of high culture.  In the first half of the last century, American films and popular [song], at their best, were not only aesthetically meritorious but embodied admirable, even noble, values.

One of the much-discussed cultural topics in the last couple of weeks has been the disappearing taboo against the F-word in the titles of plays, movies and songs.  I don’t really care that much about the F-word.  Anybody who’s read Chaucer knows that vulgarity has been a part of English literature from the beginning.  But the kind of cultural products that have the F-word in their titles today might well have been created in order to demonstrate definitively that the West is indeed undergoing a profound decline.

Then again, these things may turn around.  We’ve faced economic and cultural setbacks before.  Plus the fact we must admit that there have been remarkable developments in our own lifetimes that we shouldn’t overlook.  Economic crisis or not, most of us are living better than ever.  We live longer than ever.  In America, many of the prejudices I grew up around have faded to a degree I never imagined possible, although the rise of anti-Semitism in Europe and its appearance among the Occupy This-and-That crowd is not too heartening.

But thanks to Western science and technology, we live in a world of marvels.  Whenever I’m bored and taking for granted the everyday wonders of contemporary Western life, I look around me and ask what Benjamin Franklin would make of television, cell phones, e-mail, YouTube, Spotify and Skype.

At this point, however, I suppose I should remind you all of the subtitles of my last two books.  The subtitle of “While Europe Slept” is “How Radical Islam is Destroying the West from Within.”  The subtitle of “Surrender” is “Appeasing Islam, Sacrificing Freedom.”

These subtitles describe not only decline but destruction — the destruction first of the first freedom, freedom of speech, at least speech about Islam — a widespread submission to the tenet that Muslims have a right to see their religion treated with respect, even deference; a tendency for the cultural and intellectual world, the media establishment, political leaders at every level, the police and military, and society at large, to give in to the demands of Sharia law in a variety of ways big and small; a deep-seated reluctance on the part of authorities to face up to social problems caused by Islamization, a readiness to surrender Muslim enclaves to autocratic government by local patriarchs who follow the dictates of Sharia law.

These developments worry me deeply.  A house divided against itself cannot stand.  And a native culture that doesn’t believe very much in itself and in its own values cannot survive for long against an imported culture whose members believe in their own cultural values so passionately that now a few of them are prepared to commit suicide or murder their own children in the name of those values.

To put it bluntly, I’ve seen what Islamization has done to Europe, and I’ve seen how Europe is responding, and I’ve started to see the same things happening here.  And I’m worried.

To answer the four questions with which we began directly, then — is the West in decline?  Well, I wouldn’t have written my last couple of books if I weren’t sincerely worried that it is.  At the same time, I couldn’t have written them if I didn’t think that there was hope, if we stop responding to Islam with deference and apology and appeasement.

What can be done to reverse the trend?  Educate our next generation to know Western history, to cherish Western liberty and appreciate the sacrifices of those who bequeathed it to us to practice Western values of discipline, hard work, economic responsibility, sacrifice, tolerance and intelligent self-criticism; to recognize that they are mere stewards of the treasure that is Western civilization, and to be prepared to defend it with their lives.

Finally, the last question — are you optimistic, or pessimistic?  Well, as I think I’ve made it clear, that varies.  When I’m attending a political debate in Europe, where everybody sounds as if they’re living on another planet than I am, I’m overcome with despair.  When I’m in a place like this, which is itself a reminder of the glories that America and the West are capable of, and where I’m in the company of people who obviously get it, I feel a spark of optimism.  So thank you for that.

(Applause)

Michael Wienir: Thank you very much.  The worst job trying to moderate is trying to keep people to 10 minutes.  But everybody has so many wonderful things to say, and [yeah, that stinks].  Have your questions ready for all these panelists.

Next panelist is Paul Vallely.  Paul is a retired United States major-general, a graduate of West Point.  His training includes — and you can look at his lapel, because he’s got a whole bunch of these buttons on there — infantry, Rangers, Airborne, jumpmaster, command, general staff schools — he’s been to all those.  He’s got experience at the Industrial College of the Armed Forces and the Army War College.  He was deputy commanding general of the Pacific Command when he retired in 1993.

In 2004, with our friend, retired Lieutenant General Tom McInerney, he wrote a book called “The End Game” — which he presented at one of our sessions — “A Blueprint for Victory in the War on Terror.”  He has served as a senior military analyst for Fox News, Military Committee Chairman of the Center for Security Policy — Frank Gaffney is around here someplace to say hello to — he has supported Veteran Defenders of America.  And he founded a wonderful organization called Stand Up America, supporting the First and Second Amendments, strong national defense, secure borders, personal responsibility, individual liberty and limited government.

He’s been a contributor to FrontPageMag.com and has been a long-term friend of mine and a long-term friend of the David Horowitz Freedom Center.

Paul?

(Applause)

Paul Vallely: Thank you very much, Michael.  Good morning, everybody.  We came from Montana two days ago, it was nine degrees.

(Laughter)

So even if it’s raining outside, it’s wonderful.  And I’ve got my nurse’s assistant here, Muffin, who you’ll get to meet.

(Applause)

Michael Ledeen and I won’t cover with you all of our medical problems last year, but it really put us out of action for a while.  But we’re standing, Michael, and we’re here with all of you.  Wonderful friends, you know, we’ve known you for so long now.  Years.  And it’s always a pleasure, and appreciate when Michael and David invite us to be a part of this each and every year.

Stand Up America, just to tell you a little bit — we have 16 research intelligence analysts that work for us around the United States.  And that’s what’s the basis of us being able to produce and publish a lot of articles that are pertinent to the subjects that we’ll be discussing this weekend.

But specifically, let me try to address the decline of the West and answer the questions, Michael, as best I can.  But certainly, we really want to have a heavy question-and-answer period, where we can get more into the Middle East and more specificity of some of the major issues that we’re looking at today.

But you know, when you look historically back — and I learned as a cadet at West Point, when we studied all the great battles — all the revolutions that had taken place, the tactics and the strategies that were used to restore a society or a culture — we certainly have to look at what were the root causes of the decline.  And if you typically look back at revolutions and the demise of empires, the fall of empires over the centuries, you will see it comes back basically — something has happened in that culture with those people, from tyrannical governments, dictatorial governments.  And it comes down a lot to the economics, and what kind of pain that is placed on any kind of society.

So when we look at what’s happening around the world — and I’ll talk more specifically about it, and what I call a chessboard, the international global chessboard, to lay out exactly how we see things as the world exists today.  But examining the past again, and reflecting — yes, we have been in a decline.

If you track back culturally in America, I can track it back to the ’60s.  And then, when we look at the financial — the stability of our markets over a period of time.  But mixed in with that was the innovation of America, and the high-technology developments.  So as a decline occurred in certain parts of our structure, even the political decline of effective leadership over the years, effective government.

So you tie all of those things in together while you’re trying out there in the private sector, and those that do have common sense and are innovative, to be creating products, activities, corporations and organizations — really still today, that’s the glue that’s holding us together.

We did a strategic study — we completed it two months ago.  I’ll be happy to provide you a copy of it.  But guess what the four or five major threats to America are, when we look at this decline?  Number one, the greatest threat to America is an inept and a dysfunctional government.  Okay, think about that.  The second major threat in the decline — as we’ve seen, and we’re experiencing right now — is the financial collapse of the United States and the Western countries.  Third, the greatest threat was our southern borders and our borders.  The fourth was Iran and what’s happening in the Middle East.  And fifth was Afghanistan and Pakistan.  So when you analyze that, and you talk about the decline politically, when you look at a dysfunctional government that we have so bureaucratized, and we’ve so over legislated, then our hands are almost tied.

So the question is, as we come back — what are the solutions?  And I call it the restoration.  As we’ve seen a decline now with still a strengthening of the glue within the American society, still with many of us having what I call the warrior spirit, the ability to restore the Constitution, the ability to restore the republic, and get back to the basic values and traditions — that’s how you get after the root cause.

But let me tell you a little bit of difference. As you restore, and as countries, as societies, restore themselves after tremendous upheaval and tremendous pain, it all comes back to superb leadership.  But above that — I define it even further — is the warrior.  And the difference between warriors and leaders — warriors will fall on their sword.  I will die for you, I will die for your children, to restore this country and to make it what it should be today to deal with today and tomorrow.

So we all need to have that warrior spirit.  Because, as Herman Cain pointed out, we are in the battle for America.  It’s not business as usual.  This is a different situation in 2011, going into 2012.  And your neighbors, your local communities, have to realize they’ve got to get out of their bubble.

I talked to 60 corporate leaders yesterday.  Honest to goodness, I couldn’t believe it.  It’s like they’re all in their corporate bubble, except for a few.  And I find that amongst many intelligent, educated individuals.  So in this restoration, to go from the decline that we’ve seen across the board to restoration now, and coming back up — and Michael Ledeen and I talked earlier this morning — we want to be on a positive note.

Yes, we have to look at the threats out there.  We have to understand that we’ve got to have a government, we’ve got to have an organization within this country, that can meet those threats.  Because listen, you can talk about unemployment, you can talk about economics, you can talk about all those other issues out there.  They mean nothing, unless we can secure you and your families.  The security of you and your families is the utmost important thing we can do.  Because once we have the security of America, we have strong leadership and we have strong warriors leading our country, we can do anything.  And that’s the key to it all.

So within my 10 minutes, that’s it.  And very happy to address the Middle East and some other things.

(Applause)

Michael Wienir: That was exciting.  That’s less than 10 minutes.  So lots of questions.

I’m looking at my introduction to Michael Ledeen, which has just been edited, which is a good thing.

(Laughter)

Michael is a noted political analyst.  He was Freedom Scholar chair at the American Enterprise Institute, where he worked for over 20 years.  He’s now the Freedom Scholar chair at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies.  He was a founding member of the Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs.  He is a frequent contributor to the Wall Street Journal, National Review, Fox News; and was a consultant to the National Security Council, Department of Defense and Department of State.

His books include “Grave New World,” “Tocqueville on American Character,” “Machiavelli on Modern Leadership,” and, in 2007, “The Iranian Time Bomb: The Mullah Zealots’ Quest for Destruction.”

Michael Ledeen.

(Applause)

Michael Ledeen: Thank you, Michael.  It’s great to be on a panel with another Michael and two Bruces.

(Laughter)

When I was a teenager, the Bruce was one of my heroes.  There was a radio show in New York that was run by a DJ called Bruce, and I thought it was great.

Good morning. Happy Friday to all of you.

I’m a historian.  I have a doctorate in history from the University of Wisconsin, about which you’ve all heard.  And it was great to get a doctorate from the University of Wisconsin because there was real debate.  We fought with each other every day about almost everything.  And I think everybody who came out of that program in those years came out toughened by it.

But I stress to you that I’m a historian, not a prophet.  So I will say to you what I say to the young kids that I work with at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies — that we don’t know.  We don’t know if America is in decline or on the rise.  Nobody knows.  Most things that people talk about — that we talk about, that pundits write about, and on which they pronounce all the time — are unknowable.  We won’t know for quite awhile whether we’re rising or falling, how our enemies are doing, and so forth.

There have been — if you go back and read cultural history, the conviction that America has been in decline starts the day after Plymouth Rock.  Europeans said about Americans from the beginning that America was created by failed people and biological rejects –

(Laughter)

– that America — no, really.  Scientific essays on how Americans were shorter than Europeans and weaker than Europeans, and more prone to disease than Europeans, and so forth — we’ve always been written off.  And there’s a whole strain in American intellectual history that of course rewards this point of view.  And intellectuals in particular love it.  Because the real secret about American intellectuals is that they’re miserably unhappy because they’re not Europeans.

(Laughter)

And European intellectuals are on top of the status heap.  They get good salaries, they get high prestige, they’re on television all the time.  People bow to them, people respect them, pretty women run after them — or pretty men, depending.

(Laughter)

And it’s a great life.  And over here, you know, Americans by and large really don’t give a damn about intellectuals.  And the way the — the adjectives we applied to them, as in pointy-headed, et cetera –

(Laughter)

– show all of this.  And when I was in college, there was a very famous book emerge by Professor Hofstadter at Columbia University, called “The Anti-Intellectual Tradition in American Life,” which went through all of this stuff.  And that book was obviously intended to show us how terrible all of this was.  And it’s only later in life that I came to realize that it was a very good thing, this anti-intellectual tradition.

So I say all this in order to stress — we don’t know.  We don’t know how it’s all going to turn out.  However, if you look at it from the standpoint of global conflict — us against them — there’s every reason to be not only optimistic, but even wildly optimistic.

The first important point is the basic fact of American history in the world.  We have always been [saved] by our enemies.  We have never intervened in a global matter because we figured it out, because we thought we were at risk, and we acted to save us, our values, our allies, et cetera.  Never.

We were torpedoed into the First World War in the North Atlantic by the Germans.  We were providentially bombed into World War II just in the nick of time by the Japanese.  We were dragged kicking and screaming into the Cold War by Stalin, who just couldn’t wait to get his fangs into Greece and Turkey at the end of the war, and to gobble up all the satellites in Central and Eastern Europe, at which point we had to do something.  So the Cold War — we were a reluctant, very reluctant, participant.  And the so-called war against terror — the evil phrase we are not even permitted to pronounce anymore — was famously something that we didn’t choose; they chose us on 11th of September, 2001.

So we rely on our enemies.  And on this you can be prophetically sound.  Because our enemies will attack us, they have to attack us, they will continue to attack us.  And so eventually, some American President will get up one day and say — you know, we really have to do something.

And I will say only one line about that.  We are — Barbara and I have three children, all of whom have served in this war, two of whom are male marine officers, one of whom is in Afghanistan today.  And on the subject of Iran, where the entire debate involves around nukes — should we let them have nukes, can they be permitted to have nukes, is it acceptable, tolerable, et cetera — the fact of the matter is that the Iranians kill Americans every day.  Let me say it again — Iranians kill Americans every day.  Nobody cares.  Only the military guys care.  And for the most part, they’re muzzled by the politicians.  So I just want to put that out there.

So what are we facing, and what is the threat to us?  We’re facing a corrupt elite here at home, both political and intellectual.  The theme of universities, as Bruce Bawer said, is absolutely central to the success of the United States.  And success of universities means — the word they use but don’t mean, which is “diversity” — intellectual diversity.

The really great thing about David Horowitz, who I’ve known for very long time — but I mean, the greatest thing about David Horowitz is that he has gone onto university campuses and fought for intellectual diversity.  That is to say you have to have debates on campus.  Our children have to hear every issue argued out.  They have to hear why people believe things that we don’t, and why people believe things that we do.  They have to hear the full range of debate.  They’re not getting it.

College campuses are boring today.  Their monolithic, they’re heteronomic, and they [hand to] the left.  And so they don’t hear the range of discussion.  That’s stultifying.  That’s bad for what America needs most of all, which is creativity, energy, self confidence and so forth.

I have an answer to — was it Paul’s remark — what is China?  Totalitarian mercantilism, which is a great phrase that I’m going to steal and plagiarize and use often in the future.  I never heard it before, but I love it.

(Laughter)

China is the world’s first mature fascist dictatorship.  It’s what happens when the ideology burns out, and you’re left with this kind of structure, with the remnants of a kind of traditional racism.  That’s what China is today.  China now has legitimized private property, certain amount of private business, a lot of what we would call crony capitalism.  But China certainly no longer has any vestige of communist state, nor do they talk about revolution anymore, communist or otherwise.  It’s now an imperial power trying to expand its outreach.

And I will tell you, without taking any particular pleasure in it, that that system, as all [subsystems], are in a terrible crisis.  Because as Machiavelli said, quite rightly — almost everything accurately said was quite right — but one of his central themes is that tyranny is the most unstable of all forms of government.  Tyranny is the least likely to last a long time.  The most likely to last a long time is what we’ve got — a mixed system, a mixed Constitution.

There is no question that anti-Semitism in Europe has been on the rise during the last few years.  The European left, for a range of reasons, has gotten into the habit of viewing Israel, and by extension all Jews, as the foremost challenge to peace on earth and goodwill toward men.  As Europe’s Islamic communities have expanded, moreover, and their members grown less and less shy about expressing – and acting upon – their opinions, the articulation of anti-Semitic sentiments and the commission of anti-Semitic acts by young Muslim men has increased accordingly.

While all this has been going on, a number of European governments have chosen to look the other way.  Many political leaders in Europe, indeed, have fueled anti-Semitism by word and deed.  The Italian government, however, has been an exception.

It was in October 2009 that two committees of the Italian Parliament voted to commission an in-depth study of anti-Semitism in Italy and elsewhere in Europe.  They established a sub-committee to perform the inquiry, and put the Jewish writer and parliamentarian Fiamma Nirenstein (whom I profiled here recently) in charge.  Now the sub-committee’s report has been released, and its findings are well worth attending to.

The report acknowledges “a strong resurgence of anti-Semitism in European societies” in recent years – a new kind of anti-Semitism that is “less overtly racist, and therefore more subtle and insidious,” than previous varieties, and that is being spread especially through online social networks.  As a consequence of this new brand of anti-Semitism, “Jewish communities in various Western countries have had to deal for the first time with a new atmosphere of insecurity” and “a new cultural climate.”  Though Italy is nowhere near as severely plagued with anti-Semitism as many other European countries, recent years have nonetheless seen a rise in anti-Semitism on the Italian far left, which, like its counterparts elsewhere in the West, has come to view Israel as “a state based on apartheid against the Palestinians,” takes the view that “the victims of the past have become today’s executioners,” and relativizes the Shoah by essentially equating it to what is routinely, and absurdly, depicted as a “Palestinian Holocaust.”

The report offers its share of sobering statistics.  It references a 2010 study showing a steady rise in Italian anti-Semitism between 2001 and 2009, and another study indicating that “44 percent of Italians express attitudes and opinions in some way hostile to Jews and 12 percent are fully-fledged anti-Semites.”  Fully 22% of Italians between the ages of 18 and 29 were hostile to Jews, and the figure was even higher among males in northern Italy.  One-fourth of Italians surveyed agreed with the statement: “Considering Israel’s policy, I can understand why people do not like Jews.”  (In other European countries the figure was even higher: 35% in Germany and Britain, 41% in the Netherlands, 48% in Portugal, and no less than 55% in Poland.)  One-third of Italians regard Jews as “not very nice,” and one-fourth don’t consider them “fully Italian.”  Among Italians between the ages of 18 and 34, 22% were anti-Semitic, even though 71% of them “had never had any direct contact with Jews.”  Of Italians in this age group, 51% balked at the idea of their daughter being in a relationship with a Jew, 38% didn’t want a Jewish boss, and 25% didn’t care for the idea of having Jewish neighbors.

On July 22, a crazed loner named Anders Behring Breivik set off a massive explosion that rocked central Oslo, taking eight lives, and then, in an action which proved the explosion to be a mere diversionary tactic, gunned down sixty-nine people, mostly teenagers, in cold blood, on an isolated island, Utøya, an hour or so west of that city.  It was the darkest day in Norwegian history since World War II, and it set off a wave of nationwide mourning like nothing the country, or most Western countries in modern times, had ever seen.

It also had profound political repercussions.  For while the explosion in Oslo had initially been assumed by all and sundry to be the work of Islamic terrorists, it turned out that the perpetrator was a young man fiercely opposed to the Islamization of Europe.  It was clear why he singled out that particular island for attack.  It is owned by the Workers’ Youth League, the junior division of the Norwegian Labor Party, which at the time of the massacre was holding its annual summer youth camp.  Amid more ordinary camp-like activities, the aspiring Labor Party politicians were spending their days on the island delivering political speeches to one another, listening to speeches by Labor Party leaders, being propagandized by Labor Party functionaries about the glories of socialism, and, generally, being groomed for power in the Norwegian government in years to come.

As it happens, it is the Labor Party which, far more than any other, has shaped the course of modern Norwegian history, designing its elaborate social-democratic economic system and, over the last generation or two, following a multicultural philosophy that has transformed the face of Norway, introducing into its borders, without ever consulting the electorate, an ever-growing minority of Muslims.  Some of these Muslims have assimilated magnificently, making clear that they are grateful to live in the free West and to become productive and loyal members of society.  All too many, however, have exhibited a contempt for democratic values that renders them utterly unassimilable and that identifies them, indeed, as looming threats to Norway and to Western liberty.  Breivik could not forgive the Labor Party for having put his country in this perilous position.  He shared this concern with many sane people; but he himself proved insane, choosing to react to this dilemma with mass murder.

In the wake of the atrocity, Prime Minister Jens Stoltenberg, who is a member of the Labor Party and who had been scheduled to give an address to the campgoers, called for greater openness and democracy in response to a mass murderer who, he said, had clearly despised openness and democracy.  Yet while Stoltenberg was airing these lofty sentiments, many of his most prominent ideological allies were singing a different – and very dark – tune.  Breivik, they warned, was only the public face of a large and dangerous movement which over recent years had been gaining a disturbing respectability in the Western world.  Serious critics of Islam, such as Robert Spencer, Daniel Pipes, Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Bat Ye’or, and the late Oriana Fallaci – and myself – were slammed day after day in the Norwegian media by left-wing multiculturalists eager to associate our views with Breivik’s crimes.  We were not spreaders of truth, they argued, but sowers of hate – namely, that ugly and irrational hatred for Muslims and their religion known as Islamophobia.  It was not Islam that represented a menace to Europe; it was our writings.  One after another of these multiculturalists insisted stridently that, in order to prevent future Breiviks, limitations on freedom of speech must be imposed on the critics of Islam who, they insisted, had created Breivik.

Now this appalling line of argument – though the mot juste is actually not argument but invective – is having palpable, and thoroughly predictable, results.  On October 6 the Norwegian national budget for 2012 was unveiled.  Among the changes from last year was a cut by more than half in the already very modest allocation for a tiny but vitally important think tank called Human Rights Service (HRS).

“In the process of fighting for freedom, I lost my own freedom,” Dutch politician Geert Wilders explained.

Our weekly Canadian program, “On the Front Line,” was one of the media outlets carefully selected to interview Wilders during his first visit to Canada last week. For several years, public and private discourse has centered around the sensationalism of Wilders’ epic battle against the Islamization of the West. But this interview (still to be aired) revealed some of Wilders’ less publicized views on moderate Islam and the personal cost of his quest.

Wilders, who remains under explicit death threats from Muslims, is dismissed by leftists as a scary, anti-Muslim radical.  While one may disagree with his views and methodologies, his struggle against radicalism is nothing short of a Western obligation. The principal point of contention on Wilder’s approach is that he does not readily make a distinction between moderate and radical Islam.   He referred to the famous Belgian Professor of Islamic Studies—Urbain Vermeulen—describing Islam as 95 percent ideology and 5 percent religion.  Islam, like communism and fascism, is totalitarian and seeks to rule every aspect of individual and state life.

Wilders pointed out that “there are more mosques than windmills in Holland today.”  His answer is to stop building new mosques and madrassas that teach violence and hate, and to stop immigration from Muslim countries to stem the Islamization of the West. He does not advocate deporting Muslims, except those that have crossed the “red line” which refers to any Muslim acting according to Shariah and against our values (for example, practicing FGM and honour killings). Such Muslims, says Wilders, should be stripped of their western nationality and sent back to their countries of origin.

Yet on further probing about the moderate Muslims who face death threats fighting for the same anti-Islamist cause, Wilders did recognize the existence of moderates and makes a key distinction between the Muslim individual and the ideologies of Islam. The more moderates the better, he said, and we should support them in any way possible.  He also made the point that the Koran regards such Muslims as apostates worthy of death, yet if they see themselves as Muslims, we must support them.

The final question we posed to Wilders concerned  the personal toll on his life, even before the release of his short film “Fitna.” His neutral look gave way to his humanity with a brief sadness as he replied:

Since World War II, Europeans have been understandably skittish about doing anything that could lead to armed conflict. Europe, and later the EU,  has generally stuck to using negotiations and (in extreme cases) sanctions as the only tools in their arsenal to cajole dictators and despots to get in line.

Not surprisingly, this strategy often fails.

Nevertheless, one can understand the European fear of conflict. Europe was devastated by WWII and the collective memory of the horrors of that war are still raw. Medium-sized towns in Europe lost more people in the war than America lost on 9/11.

All of this makes the recent flurry of stories about European countries being eager to recognize a Palestinian state all the more puzzling.

British Prime Minister David Cameron has said that Britain is prepared to formally recognize an independent Palestinian state in September unless Israel opens peace talks with the Palestinians. (He somehow didn’t seem to notice that it has been “moderate” Mahmoud Abbas who has resisted negotiations, not Israel.)

French President Sarkozy has made a similar statement. So has Norway’s foreign minister. Spain doesn’t look too far behind.

Such a unilateral move is a recipe for disaster.

Negotiations are meant to solve the biggest issues between Israel and the Palestinian Arabs: Israeli towns and villages in Judea and Samaria, Arab prisoners in Israeli jails, water resources, Palestinian Arabs who live in other countries wanting to “return” to Israel, incitement to terrorism in the Palestinian Arab media and schoolbooks, Israel’s security, and Jerusalem. By recognizing a state, Europe would not be solving a single one of these issues. On the contrary, they will be exacerbating them.

Today, despite these outstanding issues, there is relative peace. Palestinian Arabs in the West Bank are doing well economically, they are not worried about Israeli army actions, their travel restrictions have been consistently diminishing, and they have more autonomy than they have ever had in their history. Even in Gaza, under the autocratic rule of Hamas, as long as Hamas is stopping rocket fire the Gazans can start to gain a semblance of normal lives.

If “Palestine” is unilaterally declared, all of the gains over the past two decades would disappear in an instant.

Israel’s Oslo obligations would no longer exist. Security cooperation between Israel and the new “Palestine” would disappear. The Palestinian state would consider Israel to be its enemy (this language is used daily in mainstream Palestinian Arab media). The peace treaty that the PLO signed with Israel would be null and void because the PLO would no longer exist. Israel would no longer provide electricity to Gaza – part of an enemy state. Tax revenue collected by Israel that make up 70% of the PA budget would disappear.

Most importantly, it would solve none of the issues that are outstanding in the conflict. On the contrary, it will encourage Israel to make its own unilateral moves concerning land, water, Jerusalem and so forth.

“Palestine” would not want to naturalize millions of Arabs of Palestinian descent who now live in Jordan, Syria and Lebanon, and their problem of being forced to remain stateless by the Arab League will remain. In fact, the Palestinian entity would continue to insist that they move to Israel, destroying the Jewish state demographically–a negotiating position that they have never wavered on, and a problem that is kept artificially alive by the Arab states.

Any of these issues–”refugees,” land, water, Jerusalem–is enough to spark a regional conflict. Together, such a conflict is inevitable.

Only Israel has made real, concrete concessions during the long Oslo process. The PLO has not only not budged–they have bragged about their own intransigence. If the Europeans decide to recognize a Palestinian Arab state, they would be rewarding intransigence. And if that state includes Hamas, then the EU will also be explicitly rewarding terror.

One thing is certain: if a Palestinian Arab state becomes generally recognized by the world community in September 2011, then the Palestinian Arabs who such a state is supposedly meant to help will be in a much worse situation for years, if not decades, afterwards. Terrorism–which has been successfully fought by Israel over the past eight years–will return, as the Palestinian Arab security forces would abandon all cooperation with Israel. Hezbollah and Hamas would be emboldened to increase rocket fire and other terror attacks.

More likely than not, European recognition of a Palestinian Arab state will culminate in another major Middle East war–and possibly a series of them.

Is this what the EU really wants?

This story is cross-posted from LisaGraas.com

At Two Circles, a popular site in India for Muslims, comes a curious article by Rehan Ansari.

According to the site’s “About” page:

We will not publish articles that is racist, sexist or makes baseless allegation against a person or community.

Well, that’s nice of them, but let’s just see about that, shall we?

Ansari writes: Happy Birthday to Catholic State of France!

The article claims that because “approximately 80%” of French citizens are “at least nominally” Catholic, then the recent burqa ban must mean that France is now a “Catholic state”, ostensibly imposing Church law on Muslim women. (Like Sharia?)

The question which arises then, is the France truly a secular democratic country? Or a Majoritarian state that ascribes to the Catholic religion and where the majority has a right to crush tiny minority because only 1800 to 2000 women observe veil as reported in the media.

And…

The French counsel did not forget to mention the strict rules in Saudi Arabia and said that when French women visits in Saudi Arabia they follow the rules and lives according to the Saudi culture. But I am sure he will not be able to answer that Saudi Arabia is a declared Islamic state and France proclaims to be a Secular Democracy.

Since Ansari is Muslim, I cannot expect him to understand what Catholicism teaches, nor can I expect him to understand the difference between a secular democracy that gives Christians and Muslims an equal vote, and Sharia Law….but I will try to explain for him where his attempt at logic fails.

A week ago, with little attention from the Trump-obsessed American media, one of the most important stories in the last years of Western Civilization happened in a small town outside of Athens, Greece. After months of rioting and mayhem, Keratea residents agreed to a “truce” with authorities wherein riot police would withdraw from Keratea and cede control of the city to the violent mobs.

The Greek state has ceded control of an entire city to rioters. If this isn’t newsworthy, nothing is.

But the American media has barely covered this story which is surprising since it is about “the people” rising up against the government in a Wisconsin (or Egyptian) style protest. The conflict began when residents of Keratea were told that a new landfill would be built in their area. In the volatile country, already rocked by civil unrest caused by their economic near collapse, this sparked rebellion almost immediately:

As unemployment rises and austerity bites ever harder, tempers seem to fray faster in Greece, with citizens of all stripes thumbing their noses at authority. Some refuse to pay increased highway tolls and public transport tickets. There has been a rise in politicians being heckled and even assaulted. Yesterday, in Thessalonika, scores of activists were arrested after violent clashes with police.

The anger is most palpable in Keratea, a town of 15,000 people 30 miles south of Athens which appears to have spun out of control. The state’s attempt to start work on a planned landfill site on a nearby hillside in December caused locals to set fire to construction vehicles and erect massive roadblocks on a road that bypasses the town and runs to the capital. It’s a fight that has galvanised the town, from the mayor and the local priest to shopkeepers, farmers, schoolteachers and teenagers.

Over the past four months, locals have developed increasingly inventive roadblocks to stop contractors from getting to the site. They have parked trucks across the street and built piles of rubble and dirt. Apparently in it for the long haul, they have erected a wooden hut by the side of the road to serve as protest headquarters, complete with campaign posters, news clippings and children’s drawings of the riots. Their latest move was a nocturnal expedition to dig a shoulder-deep trench across both lanes of the road. That was one step too far for the authorities, who, on Thursday, sent in workers – protected by police – to repair the damage.

Within hours, the confrontation degenerated. Masked youths hurled firebombs and rocks at riot police, who responded with rubber batons and repeated volleys of tear gas. A police helicopter circled overhead. “The town is out of control. Business activity has stopped,” said Yannis Adamis, a resident and mechanical engineer. “The stores are closed. The sirens are blaring, the [church] bells are ringing, people are on the streets. This cannot continue.”

In nearby streets, gaggles of teenage girls, cut lemons held to their noses to ward off tear gas, mingled with young men in balaclavas, stocking up on rocks to throw at police. An elderly man wielding a shepherd’s staff stormed past. “We’ve learned at the age of 60 about Molotov cocktails,” he thundered through his gas mask – an accessory sported by young and old alike. He would give only his first name, Panagiotis. By the end of the night, more than 20 people – including three riot policemen – had been treated in hospital. Just after midnight, a police officer’s home was attacked with firebombs, leaving three cars destroyed. The officer and his wife, who is also in the police force, and their four children were home at the time but unharmed, police said.

The state has lost its monopoly on force in Greece, but more importantly, the state is no longer considered a legitimate authority. The people of Keratea stopped the state from moving forward in its business of keeping the Greek infrastructure updated. Think about this for a second: the people of Keratea were willing to burn families alive to keep a landfill from being built. And after 129 days of anarchy the state capitulated to their demands and more. They ceded control of an entire city to a disorganized mob of people who tried to set fire to a family because the parents were police officers.

Next: why the media isn’t giving this story the coverage it deserves —>

A week ago, with little attention from the Trump-obsessed American media, one of the most important stories in the last years of Western Civilization happened in a small town outside of Athens, Greece. After months of rioting and mayhem, Keratea residents agreed to a “truce” with authorities wherein riot police would withdraw from Keratea and cede control of the city to the violent mobs.

The Greek state has ceded control of an entire city to rioters. If this isn’t newsworthy, nothing is.

But the American media has barely covered this story which is surprising since it is about “the people” rising up against the government in a Wisconsin (or Egyptian) style protest. The conflict began when residents of Keratea were told that a new landfill would be built in their area. In the volatile country, already rocked by civil unrest caused by their economic near collapse, this sparked rebellion almost immediately:

As unemployment rises and austerity bites ever harder, tempers seem to fray faster in Greece, with citizens of all stripes thumbing their noses at authority. Some refuse to pay increased highway tolls and public transport tickets. There has been a rise in politicians being heckled and even assaulted. Yesterday, in Thessalonika, scores of activists were arrested after violent clashes with police.

The anger is most palpable in Keratea, a town of 15,000 people 30 miles south of Athens which appears to have spun out of control. The state’s attempt to start work on a planned landfill site on a nearby hillside in December caused locals to set fire to construction vehicles and erect massive roadblocks on a road that bypasses the town and runs to the capital. It’s a fight that has galvanised the town, from the mayor and the local priest to shopkeepers, farmers, schoolteachers and teenagers.

Over the past four months, locals have developed increasingly inventive roadblocks to stop contractors from getting to the site. They have parked trucks across the street and built piles of rubble and dirt. Apparently in it for the long haul, they have erected a wooden hut by the side of the road to serve as protest headquarters, complete with campaign posters, news clippings and children’s drawings of the riots. Their latest move was a nocturnal expedition to dig a shoulder-deep trench across both lanes of the road. That was one step too far for the authorities, who, on Thursday, sent in workers – protected by police – to repair the damage.

Within hours, the confrontation degenerated. Masked youths hurled firebombs and rocks at riot police, who responded with rubber batons and repeated volleys of tear gas. A police helicopter circled overhead. “The town is out of control. Business activity has stopped,” said Yannis Adamis, a resident and mechanical engineer. “The stores are closed. The sirens are blaring, the [church] bells are ringing, people are on the streets. This cannot continue.”

In nearby streets, gaggles of teenage girls, cut lemons held to their noses to ward off tear gas, mingled with young men in balaclavas, stocking up on rocks to throw at police. An elderly man wielding a shepherd’s staff stormed past. “We’ve learned at the age of 60 about Molotov cocktails,” he thundered through his gas mask – an accessory sported by young and old alike. He would give only his first name, Panagiotis. By the end of the night, more than 20 people – including three riot policemen – had been treated in hospital. Just after midnight, a police officer’s home was attacked with firebombs, leaving three cars destroyed. The officer and his wife, who is also in the police force, and their four children were home at the time but unharmed, police said.

The state has lost its monopoly on force in Greece, but more importantly, the state is no longer considered a legitimate authority. The people of Keratea stopped the state from moving forward in its business of keeping the Greek infrastructure updated. Think about this for a second: the people of Keratea were willing to burn families alive to keep a landfill from being built. And after 129 days of anarchy the state capitulated to their demands and more. They ceded control of an entire city to a disorganized mob of people who tried to set fire to a family because the parents were police officers.

Next: why the media isn’t giving this story the coverage it deserves —>

Fred Branfman, author, blogger and early contributor to the current California economic miracle under Governor Jerry Brown, has written a very long apologetic about Noam Chomsky, or more accurately a standard screed against US imperialism and capitalism using Chomsky as a prop. Presumably he thought that invoking the grand old man’s name would somehow spur the faithful to actually read through this door stopper, but I’m not sure the unearthed memoirs of Lenin could have done that. This is very much a “throw everything at the wall and see what sticks” kind of piece and Branfman clearly hopes that if nothing sticks at least his readers will succumb to exhaustion and boredom before realizing it.

He needn’t have gone to so much trouble. The basic theme can be summarized in two sentences (spoiler alert for those of you actually thinking of navigating this tome):

• America is really, really bad.
• Communism will fix it.

In fairness, Branfman’s innovative variation is “I think America is very, very bad and Communism will fix it, and look Chomsky agrees with me!” but the basic approach remains the same. This is a patented two-step and Branfman pays close attention to the painted feet on the floor.

On the first point, demonizing America is reasonably straightforward as long as you remember to cherrypick the facts you don’t actually make up, and frame your questions with careful dishonesty. Branfman appears to have this down. Consider:

Which nation’s leaders since 1945 have murdered, maimed, made homeless, tortured, assassinated and impoverished the largest number of civilians who were not its own citizens?

I have asked this question of Americans in every walk of life since I discovered the bombing of Laos in 1969. It’s a simple matter of fact, not involving judgments of right and wrong, and I remain astonished at how most answer “the Russians,” “the Chinese,” or just have no idea that their leaders have killed more noncitizen civilians than the rest of the world’s leaders combined since 1945.

They have no idea because it isn’t true. Apart from the dearth of evidence to support such a claim the sophistry here is so obvious it’s like watching a third rate magician not quite able to get that red hanky into his sleeve. The qualifier “not its own citizens” conveniently excludes “the Russians” and “the Chinese” (proving conclusively that the Americans he talked to were smarter than he was), to say nothing of Pol Pot, Castro, Kim Jong Il and any other half-dozen dictators you could pull at random from the Communist Who’s Who. Among them, these “agrarian reformers” have killed more people on an off-day than the US would contemplate in a decade, but never mind; it’s just their own citizens.

By thus ignoring the Tiananmen Squares and killing fields of history, Branfman takes the apples and oranges fallacy one step further by denying the existence of the orange altogether.

Not that he understands the apples any better. Words like “murdered”, “maimed” and “tortured” are designed to evoke images of the Sopranos, not the unavoidable, if obviously tragic, consequences of war he is actually talking about. The US has, for all practical purposes, undertaken the defense of the free world since World War II.  It is therefore not surprising that it would inflict more civilian casualties in wars and police actions than, say, France—which like the rest of Europe reserves the right to be self-righteous about US military power while at the same time relying on it for protection.

Rendered of its fat, that’s all he’s got, which among any rational audience should provoke a vigorous “And so …?”

To which Branfman might then reply, “Wait guys, don’t go, you haven’t given me a chance to inflate the numbers yet!”

These would include the huge proportion of civilians among the 3.4 million Vietnamese that Robert McNamara estimated were killed in Vietnam (over 90 percent by U.S. firepower), Laotian and Cambodian civilians felled by the largest per capita and most indiscriminate bombing of civilian targets in history, the 1 million to 1.5 million Iraqis estimated by the U.N.‘s Denis Halliday to have died from Clinton’s sanctions “designed,” in Halliday’s words, “to kill civilians, particularly children,” and the hundreds of thousands killed as a result of the Bush invasion. The total number of civilians killed, wounded, made homeless and impoverished by U.S. leaders or local regimes owing their power to U.S. guns and aid—in not only Indochina and Iraq but Mexico, El Salvador, Israel/Palestine, the Dominican Republic, Panama, Nicaragua, Guatemala, Egypt, Iran, South Africa, Chile, East Timor, Haiti, Argentina, Ecuador, Brazil, Bolivia, Venezuela, Cuba, Jamaica, the Philippines and Indonesia—is in the tens of millions.

Credible estimates put Vietnamese war dead at 3.8 million, over a span of 43 years (which for you history buffs includes the French and other combatants)—2.3 million if you exclude those who died by assassination, forced relocation, labor camps and various civil uprisings in that period. (For an example of someone who’s actually done his homework see R.J. Rummel: Statistics of Democide, Chapter 6.)

So I stand corrected, the French will occasionally shoot somebody if sufficiently provoked.

A greater canard is the Iraq number.

How Branfman’s can present Denis Halliday (anti-Israel flotilla activist and former head of the UN’s wildly successful Oil for Food program) as a credible source, without kicking the dirt and avoiding eye-contact, is a testament to his chutzpa. As Reason Magazine’s Matt Welch points out the sanctions were administered by the UN, not the US, and the civilian numbers were grossly exaggerated. What interest Halliday could possibly have had in ginning up the numbers–beyond providing poster children for his program and an exit strategy when he needed it—is anyone’s guess.

I don’t know about you, but even if we throw in Canada and the Virgin Islands (the only two countries he doesn’t seem to think we’ve decimated) I don’t know how he gets to “tens of millions.” But then again, he’s not expecting  anyone over at TruthDig to check. Just keep nodding and smiling boys.

Branfman then goes on—and on, and on—in this fashion, trying through sheer volume of prose to make the case that America is the source of all evil in the world.

His solution is a shocker.

Chomsky thus argues that human survival requires changing the system, not merely periodically replacing those running it.

[…]

The real choice, Chomsky makes clear, is not free enterprise versus statism, but state capitalism for (A) the few or (B) the many. The latter would include breaking up the banks, a focus on job creation and safety net expansion where needed, single-payer health insurance, higher taxes on the wealthy, far lower military spending, public members on corporate boards, greater employee workplace control and, above all, a new public-private partnership to see America become a leader in a clean energy economic revolution.

Got it. Apologies to Branfman and Chomsky for incorrectly believing they were dragging us down the road to serfdom once again. If it’s got the word “capitalism” in it, it must be good, right? Just like the word “democratic.” Since I know for a fact that Communists have never appropriated words to conceal their true intentions I know I’ll rest easy.

One wonders if Newsweek will soon come out with a “We’re All State Capitalists Now” issue.

“Columnist Helen Thomas, a trailblazer for women journalists and one of the few in the White House press corps who courageously questioned President Bush and other officials in his administration on war, torture and U.S. policy toward Israel…It is a sad ending to a legendary career…”

“the greatest White House correspondent of all time,” insisting “One must view Helen Thomas’ comment in…context…She is of Lebanese heritage and understands well the Palestinian perspective on Israel.”

“Is the aging process…a rationale for what she said…she will turn 90 on August 4…One of the common symptoms of aging is a loss of cognitive ability that [makes people say] socially inappropriate [things].”

Scanning news reports this week, I was surprised to learn that according to much of the press, Turkey had been Israel’s “staunchest ally in the Muslim world,” until the Gaza aid flotilla debacle. According to the Associated Press, the UK’s Daily Mail and other media, the Gaza aid flotilla crisis has irreparably damaged the “close” relationship between Israel and Turkey.

The fact is such reports are simply untrue and misleading. It was not the Gaza aid flotilla that irreparably damaged relations between Turkey and Israel. The relationship had already been under severe strain for the past seven years, since the now ultra-conservative Islamist AK Party led by Turkish Prime Minister Erodgan took power in 2002.

Indeed friendly relations between Turkey and Israel prior to the flotilla incident had already, for the most part, been over.

Turkey, the country that led the flotilla initiative, has shown absolutely no interest in continuing peaceful relations with Israel in the past year, resorting to hostile rhetoric and policies against the Jewish state. Turkish Prime Minister Erdogan barred Israel from annual military exercises on Turkey’s soil last year, while signing a military contract with Syria. At the World Economic Forum in Davos last year, the Turkish PM Erdogan verbally attacked Israeli president Shimon Peres about Gaza and stormed off the stage. In October 2009, Turkish national television aired a drama casting Israeli soldiers as sadists set to kill Palestinian children.

Not that Turkey’s human rights’ record is so squeaky clean. In 1974, Turkey invaded northern Cyprus, creating 160,000 Greek Cypriot refugees. Turkey still denies these refugees’ rights to return to their homes, as well as access and use of their property. Since the Turkish invasion, a large number of Turks have been brought to occupy the homes of the Greek Cypriot refugees, in violation of Article 49 of the Geneva Convention.

In 2009, the Orthodox Church of Cyprus launched legal action against Turkey for destroying 522 churches during the invasion. The Cyprus Church states that Turkey continues to destroy those remaining churches, converting them into “morgues, stables, night clubs, and chicken coops.”

But in addition to human rights abuses, it is those who Turkey counts as its friends, not its enemies, that should truly worry the West.

Turkey has announced that it would not join any sanctions aimed at preventing Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons and has warmly welcomed Iranian president Ahmadinejad to its capital city. But in May, Turkey went a step further and actually attempted to forestall UN economic sanctions against Iran much to the chagrin of the United States.

Back in February, the Turkish daily, Today’s Zaman wrote that the Turkish State Minister, Cedvet Yilmaz stated that his government was committed to working on improving relations with its neighbor Iran. The driving force behind this commitment, indicated Yilmaz, were the mutual gas transfer projects, which both Yilmaz and Iranian Foreign Minister, Manoucheher Mottaki agreed will bring both countries to a “historical era.”

Turkey and Iran have signed a number of deals to facilitate the flow of gas through Turkey to Europe, including agreements to allocate some Iran’s South Pars gas field to the Turkish Petroleum Corporation, where Iranian gas will be trasported across Turkey.

The Turkey-Iran pipeline transfers natural gas worth around $2 billion every year. “We believe that the projects for the tansfer of Iranian natural gas to Europe via Turkey will give a momentum to relations between the two largest economies in the world,” Yilmaz has stated. Another Turkish government official, Zafer Caglayan, stated that bilateral trade with Iran has grown to $10 billion in the past eight years.

But its not only economic ambitions or a record of human rights abuses that Turkey shares with Iran. Turkey’s government has grown more and more totalitarian in recent years, seeking not only to control economic and political matters but also attitudes, values and beliefs of its population. According to a recent article in Forbes, Melik Kaylan reports that the ruling pro-Islamic AK party has over 100,000 Turks wiretapped, thousands arrested and questioned, and over 200 reporters, intellectuals, academics and military officers jailed, all accused of a military coup.

“If you try to talk over the phone to people in Turkey about their current government, they will likely refuse to do so. The ruling pro-Islamic AK Party is now tapping phones so liberally that everyone is paranoid,” writes Kaylan.

A Washington Post blogger writes about similar observations of the Turkish government regime. Professor Susan Brook Thistelwaite reports that “far more Turkish women are wearing headscarves and religious dress than a decade ago. As one Turkish businessman observed about his university-age daughter, ‘They want to put a headscarf on her mind.’ He is thinking about sending his daughter to the United States to complete her education.”

“Erdogan’s administration has severely undermined the independence of the media, of the judiciary, of the banking system and has abolished long-standing rules prohibiting religious dress on university campuses. It is now moving on to re-write school textbooks to revise the country’s secular history,” writes Thistelwaite.

Indeed, Saudi Arabia’s King Abdullah presented the Turkish Prime Minister with one of the country’s most prestigious prizes, the King Faisal International Prize, also known as the ‘Arab Nobel Prize,’ in March.  The prize was given to Erdogan for “rendering outstanding service to Islam by defending the causes of the Islamic nation, particularly the Palestinian cause.” He received $200,000 in prize money.

The Palestinian cause has become a rallying banner for the Muslim world, serving as a means to distract the rest of the world from the human rights abuses that continue in countries like Turkey, Iran and Saudia Arabia, as well as from their growing economic power.

Indeed the humanitarian goods, among the weapons and arms, on the Gaza-bound flotilla should have gone to refugees elsewhere in the Middle East who have been displaced by Muslim powers. But then the incitement and hatred against Israel which unifies Muslims worldwide would have been lost.

Anav Silverman is a columnist and educator whose work has been published widely online and in print, both in Israel and internationally. She has appeared on Al Jazeera, BBC Radio, and CBS 2 and has contributed to BBC News, The Philadelphia Bulletin, Sderot Media Center, Front Page Magazine, Bangor Daily News, Maariv, The Jerusalem Post, Ynet News, and other publications.

[Editor's note: This article was translated from Spanish into English by Mario from the website Portal of Ideas.]

Why don’t we see demonstrations in London, Paris and Barcelona against Islamic dictatorships? Or demonstrations against the Burmese dictatorship?

Why aren’t there demonstrations against the enslavement of millions of women who live without any legal protection?

Why aren’t there demonstrations against the use of children as human bombs where there is conflict with Islam?

Why has there been no leadership in support of the victims of the Islamic dictatorship in Sudan?

Why is there never any outrage against the acts of terrorism committed against Israel?

Why is there no outcry by the European Left against Islamic fanaticism? Why doesn’t it defend Israel’s right to exist?

Why confuse support of the Palestinian cause with the defense of Palestinian terrorism?

Finally, the million dollar question: Why is the Left in Europe and around the world obsessed with the two most solid democracies, the United States and Israel, and not with the worst dictatorships on the planet? The two most solid democracies, who have suffered the bloodiest attacks of terrorism, and the Left doesn’t care.

And then, to the concept of freedom. In every pro-Palestinian European forum I hear the Left yelling with fervor: “We want freedom for the people!” Not true. They are never concerned with freedom for the people of Syria or Yemen or Iran or Sudan, or other such nations. And they are never preoccupied when Hamas destroys freedom for the Palestinians. They are only concerned with using the concept of Palestinian freedom as a weapon against Israeli freedom. The resulting consequence of these ideological pathologies is the manipulation of the press.

The international press does major damage when reporting on the question of the Israeli-Palestinian issue. On this topic they don’t inform, they propagandize. When reporting about Israel, the majority of journalists forget the reporter code of ethics. And so, any Israeli act of self-defense becomes a massacre, and any confrontation, genocide. So many stupid things have been written about Israel, that there aren’t any accusations left to level against her. At the same time, this press never discusses Syrian and Iranian interference in propagating violence against Israel; the indoctrination of children and the corruption of the Palestinians. And when reporting about victims, every Palestinian casualty is reported as tragedy and every Israeli victim is camouflaged, hidden or reported about with disdain.

And let me add on the topic of the Spanish Left. Many are the examples that illustrate the anti-Americanism and anti-Israeli sentiments that define the Spanish left. For example, one of the leftist parties in Spain has just expelled one of its members for creating a pro-Israel website. I quote from the expulsion document: “Our friends are the people of Iran, Libya and Venezuela, oppressed by imperialism, and not a Nazi state like Israel.”

In another example, the socialist mayor of Campozuelos changed Shoah Day, commemorating the victims of the Holocaust, with Palestinian Nabka Day, which mourns the establishment of the State of Israel, thus showing contempt for the six million European Jews murdered in the Holocaust. Or in my native city of Barcelona, the city council decided to commemorate the 60th anniversary of the creation of the State of Israel, by having a week of solidarity with the Palestinian people. Thus, they invited Leila Khaled, a noted terrorist from the 70’s and current leader of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, a terrorist organization so described by the European Union, which promotes the use of bombs against Israel. And so on and so on.

This politically correct way of thinking has even polluted the speeches of president Zapatero. His foreign policy falls within the lunatic Left, and on issues of the Middle East, he is unequivocally pro-Arab. I can assure you that in private, Zapatero places on Israel the blame for the conflict in the Middle East, and the policies of foreign minister Moratinos reflect this. The fact that Zapatero chose to wear a kafiah in the midst of the Lebanon conflict is no coincidence; it’s a symbol.

Spain has suffered the worst terrorist attack in Europe and it is in the crosshairs of every Islamic terrorist organization. As I wrote before, they kill us will cell phones hooked to satellites connected to the Middle Ages. And yet the Spanish Left is the most anti-Israeli in the world.

And then it says it is anti-Israeli because of solidarity. This is the madness I want to denounce.

Conclusion:

I am not Jewish. Ideologically I am Left and by profession a journalist. Why am I not as anti-Israeli as my colleagues? Because as a non-Jew I have the historical responsibility to fight against Jewish hatred and currently against the hatred for their historic homeland, Israel. To fight against anti-Semitism is not the duty of the Jews, it is the duty of the non-Jews.

As a journalist it is my duty to search for the truth beyond prejudice, lies and manipulations. The truth about Israel is not told. As a person from the Left who loves progress, I am obligated to defend liberty, culture, civic education for children, coexistence and the laws that the Tablets of the Covenant made into universal principles. Principles that Islamic fundamentalism systematically destroys. That is to say that as a non-Jew, journalist and lefty I have a triple moral duty with Israel, because if Israel is destroyed, liberty, modernity and culture will be destroyed too.

The struggle of Israel, even if the world doesn’t want to accept it, is the struggle of the world.

Pilar Rahola is a Spanish politician, journalist and activist. She is a passionate defender of the United States and Israel and an indefatigable fighter against anti-Semitism. All of this despite being ideologically from the left. Her articles are published in Spain and throughout some of the most important newspapers in Latin America. She is the recipient of major awards by Jewish organizations.

Printing money, spending heavily and buying debt may be the prevalent fiscal policy of the current administration (or the past few, to be fair), but it isn’t especially solvent. One need only look at the situation in Greece for evidence. But as American concerns grow over rising debt and deficits, the question becomes: what to tax and what to cut?

For 30 years, the United States has been figuratively drinking Starbucks and Chardonnay on credit. During the Regan years, we spent more than we had and grew the deficit. This made for historic economic growth, as well as victory in the Cold War, but it also spoiled a populace into thinking we could spend as much as we want, have an abundance of social programs on every conceivable level – as well as a first-rate military – without having to worry about public debt. Those days are over. It’s time to cut back, and judging by the reaction of lawmakers recently, the military is in the sights of more of those in Washington.

According to a recent reports, a group of four lawmakers – Ron Paul (R-Texas), Barney Frank (D-Mass), Walter B. Jones (R-N.C.) and Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) — called for deep reductions in defense spending. The call came on the heels of Defense Secretary Robert Gates, who two weeks ago called for dramatic cuts in the military budget during a speech at the ever-appropriate Eisenhower Library in Kansas.

Some cuts have already come, the long-awaited F-22 Raptor fighter plane for instance, but more could be on the way. The question then becomes can the U.S. afford two wars, growing domestic obligations and remain a strong deterrent against our enemies?

Reagan’s booming economy drove the Russians to bankruptcy. It wasn’t tanks, but IOUs that the Soviets issued in place of bullets that cleared the way for victory in the Cold War. Twenty years later, the American military is fighting two fronts overseas, maintaining security for a good portion of the globe and doing so with a shrinking manufacturing base and economy to support it. In other words, we’re heading in the same direction that ended in disaster for Russia and the Eastern Bloc 20 years ago.

Security costs a lot, especially when one country is providing so much of it. But Washington is going to measure political costs before security costs. Government employees, bureaucrats, unions – all of whom are in bed with the Democratic Party – have been hostile to the any notion of slowing domestic spending. The slightest mention of the word “cut” sends mobs of angry SEIU protesters to rally at homes and parking garages.

Not that military spending shouldn’t come under scrutiny. Currently, military spending averages about $700 billion a year. To put it another way, it costs the same to protect your rights, life and livelihood as it does to bailout a few banks. But that cost is higher on average then it was during the Gulf War. As in all parts of government, there is never too little fat to trim.

With domestic spending exploding, and every incumbent under increased scrutiny, the politically safe option would be to cut the military, for soldiers don’t generally tear up your front yard, and generals don’t have sit-ins outside your office.

The question then becomes how much do you cut and what do you cut from. There is a troop surge currently underway in Afghanistan. There is a fledgling democracy and a quieting of the insurgency in Iraq. But, even as war Iraq grinds to an end, there is Iran and Pakistan to consider, as well as the deteriorating situation in Yemen. Frank has proposed bringing troops home from overseas bases and he has mentioned Okinawa by name, but is that a reasonable course of action with a hostile (and possibly nuclear-capable) North Korea slamming torpedoes into South Korean ships?

The administration, through Gates, is expected to battle Congress, which will likely fight to keep a new engine program alive for the F-35 fighter, as well as the C-17 cargo plane. This fight will take place in the summer months, between budget hawks and those wanting to keep jobs and programs alive in their districts afloat in the midst of a sagging economy. Whether those programs survive the near-term, the big question remains: how does America fund a world-based military in a rapidly-changing global economic environment?

Maybe it’s time to start sharing the load, but Europe is years away from doing so, even if it was politically willing to. While Greece has gone bankrupt because of early retirements and months of vacations, American’s debt has exploded because of “too-big-to-fail” corporations and financial institutions; guaranteed pensions; out of control entitlement programs and our role as world cop. The democratic socialists in Europe detest our military might, while they simultaneously cling to their compassionate approach to domestic spending. But, it’s far easier to run a nanny-state when the global hegemon is keeping thugs out of your backyard.

Gutting the military now wouldn’t be realistic on several levels, but the day is coming. It’s hard to imagine China continuing to buy our debt if we’re increasingly involved in its sphere, especially with North Korea and other terror-outlets in Southeast Asia. It’s also harder to justify military operations when Medicare is eating away 35-percent of the GDP. Though America is far from being an also-ran on the world scene, there isn’t another post-war economic boom on the horizon, maybe not even a run like the country enjoyed during the 80s and 90s. Harder times will make for harder decisions.

With such days on the horizon, let’s hope our military has the chance to accomplish all it can before the time comes when it will be able to do little more than defend America’s shores.

B.J. Bethel is a journalist living in Ohio. He has worked at various daily newspapers as a sports writer, news reporter and editor.

Tripoli - Firas Press: urged the Libyan leader Colonel Muammar Gaddafi of Muslims in the European Union to unite and join the People's Leadership of the Islamic World, which he chaired, to counter what he considered a threat to the Muslims there, pointing out that God - the Almighty - created the earth for all people and not for sex particular, in reference to the Europeans.

Gaddafi said at the meeting, on Thursday evening, in the Libyan capital Tripoli, the heads of delegations of leaders of the Social Popular Islamic Forum Muammar friendship and networking in the Balkans, and the Association of Gaddafi to young people of Bosnia and Herzegovina, who were visiting Libya, «You are a rarity in Europe, you get the large number of willing God in the day, you will have the upper hand and higher levels, you will be imams and Oarthyn of the European continent ».

He added: «If Turkey joined the European Union, and the presence of both states the Balkans in the European Union and Albania in the European Union, the meaning of this is that the European continent is no longer a crusade or a Christian as it was, but Islam has become a strong partner in the European continent to the ground and human beings and actually».

«We await the day when Turkey joins the European Union to serve as a Trojan horse, which tells the history».

And reduced-Qadhafi, who holds the rotating presidency of the Arab summit, of the importance of statistics that declare the number of Muslims in Europe, said it was not true, because it is tendentious statistics show that Muslims are a minority. However, he added: «Muslims more than the number declared by the official statistics».

He added, saying: «Fortunately, the Muslims started to multiply and multiply more than the rest of the other religions, maybe this is a sign of God. Thus the will of God, made Muslims multiply times higher than other breeds. Perhaps this is proof that God wants to be more Muslims than anyone else in the end »....

He said: «We must unite in Europe, and to be an Islamic state and one under the banner of the World Islamic People's Leadership», pointing out that God created the earth for all people....

Iskenderun (AsiaNews) - Today at 4pm local time the funeral will take place of Msgr. Padovese, killed by his driver, Murat Altun, strangely "crazed" last June 3. Meanwhile, new details have emerged on the dynamics and motives of the killing that has prostrated the Turkish Church.

The funeral ceremony will be held in the Church of the Annunciation, with the participation of the apostolic nuncio, Mgr. Antonio Lucibello, the Latin bishops of Istanbul and Izmir, the Armenian Catholic Bishop of Istanbul, as well as the priests in Turkey and representatives of international embassies.

There will also be a delegate of the Conference of Bishops of Europe present. The presence of bishops from other countries, particularly Italy, are not expected: After the funeral, in Iskenderun, the body of Mgr. Padovese will be brought to Milan, Italy, where he will receive other funeral. The funeral in Italy is likely to take place on Monday, June 14. The delay is due to the fact that the Italian courts have asked to do an autopsy on the body of the martyred bishop.

As the days pass, new details emerge on the story of murder and the alleged "insanity" of the assassin.

The doctors who performed the autopsy reveal that Mgr. Padovese had knife wounds all over his body, but especially in the heart (at least 8). His head was almost completely detached from his neck, attached to his body by only the skin of the back of the neck.

Even the dynamics of the killing is clearer: the Bishop was stabbed in his house. He had the strength to go out the door of the house, bleeding and crying for help and there he was killed. Perhaps only when he fell to the ground, was his head cut off.

Witnesses said they heard the bishop cry out for help. But more importantly, is that they heard screams of Murat immediately after the murder. According to these sources, he climbed on the roof of the house shouted: "I killed the great Satan! Allah Akbar! ".

This call coincides perfectly with the idea of beheading, making sense that it is like a ritual sacrifice against evil. This correlates with the murders of ultranationalist groups and Islamic fundamentalists who apparently want to eliminate Christians from Turkey.

Moreover, according to a Turkish newspaper, Milliyet on June 4, the murderer had told police that he his actions were the result of a " divine revelation."...

Muhammad had one of those, too, interestingly: "Therefore, when ye meet the Unbelievers (in fight), smite at their necks..." (Qur'an 47:4). Does Muhammad get an insanity defense?

Can Islamic jihad be resisted simply on the basis of Western secular values? Some readers of my posts on the role of Christianity in resisting Islam have objected that bringing Christianity into the debate only muddies the water. As one reader wrote, “the anti-jihad movement can better be served if blatant theocons stay away.”

A number of important individuals in what might loosely be called the resistance movement do seem to believe that secular values are sufficient to rally citizens to a defense of Western civilization. A good example of this belief is the 2006 manifesto, “Together, facing the new totalitarianism,” which was signed by Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Ibn Warraq, Salman Rushdie, and others. The manifesto calls for “resistance to religious totalitarianism and for the promotion of freedom, equal opportunity, and secular values for all.” The document also speaks of “universal values,” “universal rights,” and “Enlightenment” with a capital “E.”

But how sturdy are Enlightenment values once they are cut off from their Christian roots? Ayaan Hirsi Ali’s own experience provides some perspective. In her autobiography, Infidel, she tells how, after escaping Somalia to the Netherlands, she fell in love with the thinkers of the Enlightenment. At the same time she became an atheist—rejecting not just Islam, but all religions (although she willingly admits that Jews and Christians have a more humane concept of God). Of Holland she wrote, “Society worked without reference to God, and it seemed to function perfectly.”

But the problem with substituting Enlightenment humanism for religion jumps out, if not from every page of Infidel, at least from many pages. On the one hand, Holland is “the peak of civilization,” and “no nation in the world is more deeply attached to freedom of expression than the Dutch.” On the other hand, her colleagues keep warning her to keep her thoughts to herself, and in the end, enlightened Holland forces her out of the Netherlands precisely for freely expressing her opinions about Muslim treatment of women. Ironically, Hirsi Ali’s next port of refuge was the American Enterprise Institute, a conservative think tank which numbers quite a few traditionalist Christians among its scholars.

Others, such as Oriana Fallaci, Geert Wilders, and Elisabeth Sabaditsch-Wolff have discovered that “enlightened” but post-Christian Europe is not nearly as friendly to freedom of expression as one might expect to be the case in the birthplace of the Enlightenment. The Enlightenment was an important civilizational advance, but of late it seems to have gone a bit wobbly. Why is that?

One possible answer is that the core Enlightenment values are inextricably tied to Christian values. This view has been put forward most forcefully on the Continent in recent years by Marcello Pera (former President of the Italian Senate, and an agnostic) and by Benedict XVI (not an agnostic). They have argued that the Enlightenment grew out of Christianity organically, as a tree grows from its roots. Cut off from its roots the tree dies.

In this view the rights of man are based on a belief in the importance of man. The belief that ordinary individuals have a value and dignity of their own apart from their membership in a tribe or a society has its origin in the Judeo-Christian declaration that man is made in the image of God. Thus, if you take away God, you take away the foundation of human importance. As Thomas Jefferson undoubtedly discovered while composing the Declaration of Independence, it’s a bit difficult to establish the case for human rights without reference to the Creator.  Purely secular societies can only assume human dignity and human rights as a given. We tend to forget that these concepts are now a given because they were given to the world by Christians. Before Christianity, the idea that all human beings are endowed with intrinsic value was not considered “self-evident,” it was considered ludicrous. Espousing human equality was a good way to get yourself laughed out of polite pagan society. Human dignity may seem self-evident to us now, but that is because the Christian moral view became internalized over the centuries. Gladiatorial combats and slavery didn’t go out of fashion because societies evolved but because people began to see one another in the light of the Christian revelation.

Of course, not everyone sees it that way. Some seem to think that Enlightenment humanism came out of nowhere, thanks to spontaneous advances in science, reason, and ethics. In this view, Enlightenment values can get along fine on their own without reference to God. But then you’re still faced with explaining how it is that these values have fallen on hard times precisely in those places that might legitimately be called post-Christian. Freedom of speech and expression, freedom of the press, and freedom of religion are defended much more vigorously in still-Christian America than in post-Christian France or Holland. For that matter, there’s more freedom of speech in Bible-belt America than in your average American university. With their speech codes and “hate speech” rules and their habit of disinviting “controversial” speakers, universities are among the least free institutions in society. And it’s no coincidence that most of them can be described as post-Christian, and in some cases, anti-Christian. There is also, of course, an increasingly anti-Semitic climate on American campuses.

What happened in the universities is essentially what happened in Europe. Both suffered a loss of faith (recall that many prestigious universities began as seminaries or denominational colleges), and in the process of losing their religion both became increasingly uninterested in cultivating or protecting genuine freedoms. Moreover, like post-Christian Europe, the post-Christian university has shown little ability to resist Islamization. Thanks to Saudi money and well-organized Muslim student associations, many universities are beginning to act like apologists for the Wahabbi faith.

Judging by the sorry records of the highly secularized European state and the highly secularized American university, it might not be a good idea to place all your bets on “secular values for all” as the main point of resistance to totalitarian Islam. Ayaan Hirsi Ali deserves the gratitude of all for calling attention to the abuse of Muslim women, but she’s wrong to think that a rootless Enlightenment is going to bring them liberation. Likewise, we owe a lot to Ibn Warraq for his penetrating critique of Islam, but he’s mistaken to think that the universal values enshrined in the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights would survive in the thoroughly secularized type of society he seems to favor. If these values are universal and self-evident, why is it that half the world doesn’t subscribe to them? Warraq seems not to have noticed that the Universal Declaration of Human Rights was composed for the most part by individuals who had grown up in Christian cultures, and had inherited a social conscience that had been formed by the Judeo-Christian tradition.

Two of the chief framers, Rene Cassin and Dr. Charles Malik, made no secret of the influence Christian and Jewish beliefs had on their thinking.  In a 1969 speech to the Decalogue Lawyer’s Society, Cassin, a Jew, outlined in detail how Jewish and Christian thought had paved the way for the Declaration.  It’s also telling that while drafting the final version of the Declaration he received advice and encouragement from Cardinal Roncalli (later Pope John XXIII), then the Apostolic Nuncio in Paris. Malik, who later served as President of the UN General Assembly, was a Greek Orthodox philosopher and theologian from Lebanon and the author of numerous commentaries on the Bible and on the early Church Fathers. While making his arguments to the drafting committee he was in the habit of quoting from Thomas Aquinas, the medieval theologian. Jacques Maritain, the eminent Catholic philosopher was also actively involved in the work of the committee, as well as the UNESCO committee which laid the groundwork for the Declaration. Eleanor Roosevelt, the Chairperson of the drafting committee later observed that the Declaration reflected “the true spirit of Christianity.” In short, although the Declaration of Human Rights makes no mention of God, the fingerprints of a certain religious tradition are all over it.

Western culture—indeed the whole world—owes a lot to the Enlightenment, but it’s important to remember that at crucial historical junctures it was Christian activists working on Christian principles who did most of the heavy lifting. Christian Evangelicals were at the forefront of the movement to abolish the slave trade; the Civil Rights movement was galvanized by the Reverend Martin Luther King and other Christian leaders; the end of Communism in Eastern Europe was brought about in large part by the work of the Catholic Solidarity Movement, of Pope John Paul II, and of numerous priests and pastors in Poland, Czechoslovakia, East Germany, and other countries who kept alive the spirit of resistance.

At the risk of oversimplifying things, it might be useful to think in terms of two Enlightenments: the Enlightenment which remained nourished by the Judeo-Christian tradition, and the Enlightenment which cut itself off from God. The former led to the American Revolution, the Declaration of Independence, the abolition of slavery, and the Civil Rights movement. The latter led to the French Revolution, to the Reign of Terror, to the suppression of church by state, to Marx and Nietzsche, to Socialism, and Communism, and more recently to the Alice-in-Wonderland world of cultural relativism where human rights are looked upon as relative rather than universal.

It’s unlikely that a pure secularism—even a humanistic, enlightened secularism—can be the foundation for resisting an aggressive Islam. It’s precisely “enlightened” secularism that produced the spiritual and population vacuum in Europe which is now being filled by Islam. John Lennon invited us to imagine “no religion”… “nothing to kill or die for.” In Europe they don’t have to imagine anymore. Having lost their religion, many are discovering that post-Christian values may not, after all, be worth fighting and dying for—all the more so for those who are getting on in years, and are hoping the really bad things won’t happen in their lifetimes. The new motto for many middle –aged Europeans seems to be “Apres moi le dhimmitude.”

Which culture is more likely to protect human rights and freedoms against totalitarian movements? A thoroughly secular culture which has cut itself off from a transcendent reference point? Or a culture imbued with the Judeo-Christian belief that human beings possess an inalienable, God-given dignity? It’s one of those non-academic questions to which the wrong answer might prove fatal. And final exam time is fast approaching.

William Kilpatrick’s articles have appeared in Front Page Magazine, First Things, Catholic World Report, the National Catholic Register, Jihad Watch, World, and Investor’s Business Daily.