Obama’s promotion of algae as a fuel source at a campaign speech in Miami last month caught the nation’s attention. But algae companies have been banking on administration support from Day One. In December 2008, when the White House announced the nomination of Energy Secretary Steven Chu, the CEO of Florida-based biofuels startup Algenol, Paul Woods, exulted to Time magazine: “You see this smile on my face? It’s not going away. Everyone is really excited by this.”

The next year, Woods and Algenol — dubbed “Obama’s favorite algae company” by Forbes magazine — racked up $25 million in federal stimulus grants from Chu. Say cheese.

Yet another algae-based biofuels developer, Sapphire Energy, has absorbed $105 million in stimulus funds and loan guarantees even as doubts about the practicality, efficiency and viability of pond-scum fuels multiply. Sapphire’s CEO, Jason Pyle, has donated exclusively to Democratic campaigns, candidates and committees — and his company’s website reads like a satellite White House communications office:

— “President Obama Announces $14 Million Funding Opportunity To Develop Transportation Fuels from Algae”;

— “President Obama’s Secure Energy Blueprint — Industry Reaction”;

— “Obama Defends Energy Policy, Hitting Back At Presidential Candidates.”

Another prominent DOE recipient in the world of blue-green sludge? San Francisco-based Solazyme.

The manufacturer of algae-based renewable fuels has scooped up more than $21 million in federal stimulus grants and contracts. Solazyme’s ties to the White House and the Democratic establishment in Washington are myriad. As blogger J.E. Dyer at HotAir.com (which I founded in 2006 and sold in 2010) reported in December, Solazyme’s “strategic advisers” include TJ Glauthier — a member of the Obama presidential transition team who just happened to work “on the energy-sector portion of the 2009 stimulus bill.”

Andrew Stiles of the Washington Free Beacon writes that Glauthier:

“serves on the board of EnerNOC Inc., a company that provides demand-response services to electric utility firms. EnerNOC won a $10 million contract with the Department of Energy Resources in 2010 despite being underbid by competitors, the Boston Herald reported. Glauthier also served on the board of SunRun, a solar financing company that received a $6.7 million federal grant in 2010.”

As Jacob Laksin noted, a surprising blog post appeared on Monday that proclaimed “The Death of Global Warming,” in which the author wrote:

“After years in which global warming activists had lectured everyone about the overwhelming nature of the scientific evidence, it turned out that the most prestigious agencies in the global warming movement were breaking laws, hiding data, and making inflated, bogus claims resting on, in some cases, no scientific basis at all.”

What makes that statement rather remarkable was not the fact that it was said, for we’ve heard many similar declarations over the last few months, it’s who said it. The author was not anyone from the Heartland Institute, or Junk Science, or Climate Audit, or any other of the long-time skeptics. The author was foreign policy expert Walter Russell Mead, posting at The American Interest Online.

Mead may be fairly described as a Jacksonian Democrat: a fellow of strong convictions, but those opinions are not so strongly held as to dismiss the collective wisdom of middle-America out of hand. As his post makes clear, he was previously on board with alarmist global-warming theories. Indeed he sits on the board of the Acra Foundation, an organization that funds eco-groups like the Tides Foundation, the Earth Island Institute and the National Resources Defense Council.

While most of Mead’s analysis is accurate, the title of his post is a bit misleading. Global Warming has been dealt a grievous injury over the last few months, but none have been fatal, at least not yet, for too many initiatives are already in place for us to administer last rights.

A national cap-and-trade program won’t pass Congress this year, or – if I had to bet – in 2011, and even if one did, it wouldn’t go into effect for years. The same goes for regulation under the Clean Air Act. That will take years to accomplish. However, several east coast states implemented the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative, a regional cap and trade program, in 2009. Midwestern and western states are planning their own regional cap and trade programs as well: the Midwestern Greenhouse Gas Reduction Accord and the Western Climate Initiative, respectfully. (The latter was originally called the Western Greenhouse Gas Initiative, until somebody figured out that the acronym “WGGI” would inevitably be pronounced “wedgie,” which came a too uncomfortably close to describing the effect that the program would have on the economies of those regulated).

Further, many states have implemented Renewable Portfolio Standards, which require power producers to use less and less fossil fuel each year. Starting this April USEPA will begin requiring large sources of greenhouse gases to incorporate those “pollutants” into their permits. And, as of January 1, 2010, industry had to start keeping track of their greenhouse gas emissions. The latter move is sort of the first step in figuring out who gets the biggest pieces of the national cap and trade pie, should national cap and trade ever come to pass.

The net effect of the various state and regional initiatives to reduce greenhouse gas emissions will be profound. These measures artificially inflate the value of energy produced using low carbon or zero carbon technologies, well beyond the actual cost of production in a competitive, free marketplace. The President addressed the use of two of the lower cost, less greenhouse gas intensive technologies during his State of Union address, advocating more nuclear power and – albeit more tentatively – increased offshore drilling.

On the face of it, such a declaration seems a reasonable, moderate response to a problem that he, if not the majority of the American people, believe is important. But, there’s not much substance behind this exercise in style. Permitting new nuclear plants; negotiating the inevitable legal battles that are sure to follow the issuance of each permit and then, eventually, building those plants will take at least two decades. This is not a practical solution to the problem that the President assures us so imminently endangers the very existence of our planet.

More offshore drilling makes all the sense in the world if the planet is indeed threatened by the evils of coal. Burning natural gas is less greenhouse gas intensive than burning coal. Even better, combined-cycle power plants are far more energy efficient than coal-fired power plants. If one really wants to reduce our national carbon footprint, the cheapest, quickest way to do so would be to increase America’s supply of natural gas and to build the high-efficiency power plants that can utilize this fuel.

Should this administration cheerfully and willingly support offshore drilling, they deserve applause. Unfortunately, the President has heretofore only paid lip-service to offshore drilling, even as his Interior Department has quietly placed obstacles in the way of tapping offshore energy reserves, such as leasing the rights to an important oil/gas field off the coast of Virginia. The President said that he is in favor of “… making tough decisions about opening new offshore areas for oil and gas development.” The salient question would seem to be: is the President actually going to make “tough decisions,” or will he choose to perpetuate a regulatory environment where such decisions are effectively impossible to make?

This administration can provide vocal support for nuclear power and offshore drilling, but – absent actual action – that rhetoric won’t mean a thing. Global warming hysteria has spurred multiple responses at the state and regional level. The states, in turn, are simply reacting to this supposed threat using every unit of government available, save Congress.

There is a good deal of bureaucratic inertia still in play here, in other words. Halting the global warming juggernaut, much less trying to throw it into reverse gear, will take an awful lot of work. Global warming is far from dead, but the fact that someone like Walter Russell Mead recognizes that its vital signs are dropping is good news indeed.

It's 2010 now, and Operation "Don't Just Do Something, Sit There!" continues. "Iran rejects heart of nuclear proposal," by George Jahn for the Associated Press, January 19:

VIENNA - Iran has told the head of the U.N. nuclear agency that it does not accept an international proposal committing it to quickly export most of the material it would need to make a nuclear warhead, diplomats said Tuesday.

For months, Iranian officials have used the media to criticize the plan backed by most of the world's major powers and to offer alternatives to one of its main conditions -- that the Islamic republic ship out most of its stock of enriched uranium and then wait for up to a year for its return in the form of fuel rods for its Tehran research reactor.

While critical of such statements, the United States and its allies noted that Iran had yet to respond to the International Atomic Agency regarding the plan, first drawn up in early October in a landmark meeting in Geneva between Iran and the six world powers, and then refined later that month in Vienna talks among Iran, the U.S., Russia and France.

But Iran now also has told the IAEA -- which chaired the Vienna talks -- that it wants an alternative to the plan. Its version effectively rejects the key demand that it agree to a tight timetable in shipping out most of its enriched uranium supply, said the diplomats.

The talks in Vienna came up with a draft proposal that would take 70 percent of Iran's low-enriched uranium to reduce its stockpile of material that could be enriched to a higher level, and possibly be used to make nuclear weapons.

That uranium would be returned about a year later as refined fuel rods, which can power reactors but cannot be readily turned into weapons-grade material. Iran maintains its nuclear program is only for the peaceful purpose of generating energy.

The Geneva talks grouped the U.S., Russia, China, Britain, France and Germany around the negotiating table with Iran. Diplomats from three of those big powers said Tuesday that Iran's counterproposal to the IAEA was essentially a rehash of an already publicly floated offer that fell far short of the six nations' expectations....

But hey, it bought them more time.

Iran warned on Saturday the West has until the end of the month to accept Teheran's counterproposal to a UN-drafted plan on a nuclear exchange, or the country will start producing nuclear fuel on its own.

The warning was a show of defiance and a hardening in Iran's stance over its controversial nuclear program, which the West fears masks an effort to make nuclear weapons. Teheran insists the program is only for peaceful, electricity production purposes and says it has no intention of making a bomb.

"We have given them an ultimatum. There is one month left and that is by the end of January," Iranian Foreign Minister Manouchehr Mottaki said, speaking on state television.

However, even if Teheran started working on the fuel production immediately, it would likely take years before it can master the technology to turn uranium, enriched to the level of 20 percent, into rods that make the fuel.

... at which point we may still be playing the deadline game with Tehran.

via Op-Ed Contributor – There’s Only One Way to Stop Iran – NYTimes.com.

via Ahmadinejad dismisses US deadline for nuclear deal – Yahoo! News.

A new study released Sunday shows that anti-Semitism is on the rise in Europe. The “German Situation” study, which is conducted by the University of Bielefeld Institute for Interdisciplinary Research on Conflict and Violence, found that across Europe in the last year, “Islamophobia” has declined, while anti-Semitic incidents have increased. True to form for such studies, however, it ignored the persistence and strength of Islamic anti-Semitism.

Anti-Semitism in the Islamic world has often been attributed to the baneful influence of Christianity. Many analysts assert that the Islamic designation of Jews (as well as Christians) as “People of the Book” indicates a higher level of respect for them than was manifested by Christians who derided Jews as bestial “Christ-killers.” Journalist Lawrence Wright asserts in this vein in The Looming Tower: Al-Qaeda and the Road to 9/11:

Until the end of World War II … Jews lived safely—although submissively—under Muslim rule for 1,200 years, enjoying full religious freedom; but in the 1930s, Nazi propaganda on Arabic-language shortwave radio, coupled with slanders by Christian missionaries in the region, infected the area with this ancient Western prejudice [anti-Semitism]. After the war, Cairo became a sanctuary for Nazis, who advised the military and the government. The rise of the Islamist movement coincided with the decline of fascism, but they overlapped in Egypt, and the germ passed into a new carrier.

This is a common view, but in reality there is a strong native strain of anti-Semitism in Islam, which is rooted in the Qur’an. The Muslim holy book contains a great deal of material that forms the foundation for a hatred of Jews that exists independently of the Christian variety. It is also, in many ways, more virulent and harder to eradicate. The Qur’an portrays the Jews as the craftiest, most persistent, and most implacable enemies of the Muslims—and there is no Muslim equivalent of the Second Vatican Council to mitigate against destructive interpretations. The Qur’anic material on the Jews remains the prism through which far too many Muslims see the Israeli-Palestinian conflict—and Jews in general—to this day.

A vivid illustration of this came in 2004 from Islam Online, a website founded by, among others, the internationally influential Sheikh Yusuf al-Qaradawi in 1997. Although al-Qaradawi has won praise from Islamic scholar John Esposito for engaging in a “reformist interpretation of Islam and its relationship to democracy, pluralism, and human rights,” that “reformist” impulse doesn’t seem to carry over to his view of Jews (he has justified suicide bombings against Israeli civilians), or the view of them he has allowed to be published on Islam Online. In 2004 the site posted an article titled “Jews as Depicted in the Qur’an,” in which Sheikh ‘Atiyyah Saqr, the former head of the Fatwa Committee at the most respected institution in Sunni Islam, Al-Azhar University in Cairo, depicts Jews in a chillingly negative light, illustrated with abundant quotations from the Qur’an. Among other charges he levels at the Jews, Saqr says that they “used to fabricate things and falsely ascribe them to Allah”; they “love to listen to lies”; they disobey Allah and ignore his commands; they wish “evil for people” and try to “mislead them”; and they “feel pain to see others in happiness and are gleeful when others are afflicted with a calamity.” He adds that “it is easy for them to slay people and kill innocents,” for “they are merciless and heartless.” And each charge he follows with Qur’anic citations.

Though he offers many examples of the alleged evil traits of the Jews supported by the Qur’an, Saqr doesn’t mention the notorious Qur’anic passages that depict an angry Allah transforming Jews into apes and pigs: 2:63–66; 5:59–60; and 7:166. The first of those passages depicts Allah telling the Jews who “profaned the Sabbath”: “Be as apes despicable!” It goes on to say that these accursed ones serve “as a warning example for their time and for all times to come.” The second has Allah directing Muhammad to remind the “People of the Book” about “those who incurred the curse of Allah and His wrath, those of whom some He transformed into apes and swine, those who worshipped evil.” The third essentially repeats this, saying of the Sabbath-breaking Jews that when “in their insolence they transgressed (all) prohibitions,” Allah said to them, “Be ye apes, despised and rejected.”

In traditional Islamic theology these passages have not been considered to apply to all Jews. The classic Qur’anic commentator Isma’il bin ‘Amr bin Kathir al Dimashqi (Ibn Kathir), whose commentary is widely distributed and respected among Muslims today, quotes earlier authorities saying that “those who violated the sanctity of the Sabbath were turned into monkeys, then they perished without offspring,” and that they “only lived on the earth for three days, for no transformed person ever lives more than three days.” While parts of the Qur’an are hostile to the Jews, Muhammad’s curse, in this case, was limited to these Sabbath-breakers, not to all Jews.

However, that hasn’t stopped contemporary jihadists from frequently referring to Jews as the “descendants of apes and swine.” The implication is that today’s Jews are bestial in character and are the enemies of Allah, just as the Sabbath-breakers were. The grand sheikh of Al-Azhar, Muhammad Sayyid Tantawi, the most respected cleric in the world among Sunni Muslims today, has called Jews “the enemies of Allah, descendants of apes and pigs.” Saudi sheikh Abd al-Rahman al-Sudayyis, imam of the principal mosque in the holiest city in Islam, Mecca, said in a sermon that Jews are “the scum of the human race, the rats of the world, the violators of pacts and agreements, the murderers of the prophets, and the offspring of apes and pigs.”

Another Saudi sheikh, Ba’d bin Abdallah al-Ajameh al-Ghamidi, made the connection explicit: “The current behavior of the brothers of apes and pigs, their treachery, violation of agreements, and defiling of holy places … is connected with the deeds of their forefathers during the early period of Islam—which proves the great similarity between all the Jews living today and the Jews who lived at the dawn of Islam.” A 1996 Hamas publication says that today’s Jews are bestial in spirit, and this is a manifestation of the punishment of their forefathers. In January 2007, Palestinian Authority president Mahmoud Abbas stated, “The sons of Israel are mentioned as those who are corrupting humanity on earth,” referring to Qur’an 5:64.

All this shows that leading Muslim authorities approach the Qur’an not as a document rooted in history, but as a blueprint for understanding the world today. Likewise, Sheikh ‘Atiyyah Saqr describes the Qur’anic teachings that because Jews “revolted against the Divine ordinances … they found no warm reception in all countries where they tried to reside. Rather, they would either be driven out or live in isolation.” Moreover, “Almighty Allah told us that He’d send to them people who’d pour on them rain of severe punishment that would last till the Day of Resurrection.” Then comes a threat: “All this gives us glad tidings of the coming victory of Muslims over them once Muslims stick to strong faith and belief in Allah and adopt the modern means of technology.” The “rain of severe punishment” resulting from adoption of the “modern means of technology” may come to fruition in Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s nuclear ambitions and implacable hostility to Israel. In January 2007 he warned that the “demise” of the “Zionist regime” is “imminent.” Does he plan to bring about that demise with a nuclear “rain of severe punishment”?

In the 1970s Sheikh Tantawi wrote a 700-page treatise, Jews in the Qur’an and the Traditions, in which he concluded:

[The] Qur’an describes the Jews with their own particular degenerate characteristics, i.e. killing the prophets of Allah, corrupting His words by putting them in the wrong places, consuming the people’s wealth frivolously, refusal to distance themselves from the evil they do, and other ugly characteristics caused by their deep-rooted lasciviousness … only a minority of the Jews keep their word. … [A]ll Jews are not the same. The good ones become Muslims, the bad ones do not.

Nor is this just a modern view. The classic Qur’anic commentators not do not mitigate the Qur’an’s words against Jews, but only add fuel to the fire. Ibn Kathir explained Qur’an 2:61 (“They were covered with humiliation and misery; they drew on themselves the wrath of Allah”) this way: “This Ayah [verse] indicates that the Children of Israel were plagued with humiliation, and that this will continue, meaning that it will never cease. They will continue to suffer humiliation at the hands of all who interact with them, along with the disgrace that they feel inwardly.” Another Middle Ages commentator of lingering influence, ‘Abdallah ibn ‘Umar al-Baidawi, explains the same verse this way: “The Jews are mostly humiliated and wretched either of their own accord, or out of coercion of the fear of having their jizya [punitive tax] doubled.”

Ibn Kathir notes Islamic traditions that predict that at the end of the world, “the Jews will support the Dajjal (False Messiah), and the Muslims, along with ‘Isa [Jesus], son of Mary, will kill the Jews.” The idea in Islam that the end times will be marked by Muslims killing Jews comes from the prophet Muhammad himself, who said, “The Hour will not be established until you fight with the Jews, and the stone behind which a Jew will be hiding will say. ‘O Muslim! There is a Jew hiding behind me, so kill him.’” This is, not unexpectedly, a favorite motif among contemporary jihadists. On March 30, 2007, a spokesman for Hamas, Dr. Ismail Radwan, said on Palestinian Authority television:

The Hour [Resurrection] will not take place until the Muslims fight the Jews and the Muslims kill them, and the rock and the tree will say: “Oh, Muslim, servant of Allah, there is a Jew behind me, kill him!”

We must remind our Arab and Muslim nation, its leaders and people, its scholars and students, remind them that Palestine and the Al Aqsa mosque will not be liberated through summits nor by international resolutions, but it will be liberated through the rifle. It will not be liberated through negotiations, but through the rifle, since this occupation knows no language but the language of force.… O Allah, strengthen Islam and Muslims, and bring victory to your Jihad-fighting worshipers, in Palestine and everywhere.… Allah take the oppressor Jews and Americans and their supporters!

The history of Jews who lived under Muslim rule is a more or less unbroken record of theologically sanctioned humiliation and wretchedness. Although, like the Christians, Jews were allowed to practice their religion within restrictions, they were seldom allowed to forget their humiliation. Although the strictness with which the laws of dhimmitude (the subservient status of Jews and Christians) were enforced varied, they were never abolished, and during times of relaxation the subject populations always lived in fear that they would be enforced with new stringency. Muslim rulers did not forget that the Qur’an mandates that both Jews and Christians must “feel themselves subdued.” One notable instance is recounted by the Arab historian Phillip Hitti: “The caliph al-Mutawakkil in 850 and 854 decreed that Christians and Jews should affix wooden images of devils to their houses, level their graves even with the ground, wear outer garments of honey color, i.e. yellow, put two honey-colored patches on the clothes of their slaves, … and ride only on mules and asses with wooden saddles marked by two pomegranate-like balls on the cantle.” A millennium later, in 1888, little had changed. A Tunisian Jew noted:

The Jew is prohibited in this country to wear the same clothes as a Muslim and may not wear a red tarbush. He can be seen to bow down with his whole body to a Muslim child and permit him the traditional privilege of striking him in the face, a gesture that can prove to be of the gravest consequence. Indeed, the present writer has received such blows. In such matters the offenders act with complete impunity, for this has been the custom from time immemorial.

In 1291 Isaac ben Samuel, a noted Kabbalist and Palestinian Jew, sought refuge in a Christian-controlled area of Spain after the collapse of the last Crusader kingdom in the Levant. He explained, “For, in the eyes of the Muslims, the children of Israel are as open to abuse as an unprotected field. Even in their law and statutes they rule that the testimony of a Muslim is always to be believed against that of a Jew. For this reason our rabbis of blessed memory have said, ‘Rather beneath the yoke of Edom [Christendom] than that of Ishmael [Islam]. They [the rabbis] plead for mercy before the Holy One, Blessed be He, saying, ‘Master of the World, either let us live beneath Thy shadow or else beneath that of the children of Edom’ (Talmud, Gittin 17a).”

Ben Samuel’s choice of Christian Spain is paradoxical, as Muslim Spain was supposed to have been a famous exception to the oppression of Jews that prevailed elsewhere among both Muslims and Christians. Islamic apologist Karen Armstrong enunciates the common wisdom when she says that “until 1492, Jews and Christians lived peaceably and productively together in Muslim Spain—a coexistence that was impossible elsewhere in Europe.” Even the U.S. State Department has proclaimed that “during the Islamic period in Spain, Jews, Christians, and Muslims lived together in peace and mutual respect, creating a diverse society in which vibrant exchanges of ideas took place.”

Yet the philosopher Maimonides, a Jew who lived for a time in Muslim Spain and then fled that supposedly tolerant and pluralistic land, remarked, “You know, my brethren, that on account of our sins God has cast us into the midst of this people, the nation of Ishmael, who persecute us severely, and who devise ways to harm us and to debase us.…No nation has ever done more harm to Israel. None has matched it in debasing and humiliating us. None has been able to reduce us as they have.…We have borne their imposed degradation, their lies, and absurdities, which are beyond human power to bear.”

Notably, Maimonides directed that Jews could teach rabbinic law to Christians, but not to Muslims. For Muslims, he said, will interpret what they are taught “according to their erroneous principles and they will oppress us. [F]or this reason … they hate all [non-Muslims] who live among them.” But the Christians, he said, “admit that the text of the Torah, such as we have it, is intact”—as opposed to the Islamic view that the Jews and Christians have corrupted their scriptures. Christians, continued Maimonides, “do not find in their religious law any contradiction with ours.”

Even María Rosa Menocal, in her romantic and fantastic hagiography of Muslim Spain, The Ornament of the World, acknowledges the second-class status to which Jews and Christians were relegated there. “In return for this freedom of religious conscience the Peoples of the Book (pagans had no such privilege) were required to pay a special tax—no Muslims paid taxes—and to observe a number of restrictive regulations: Christians and Jews were prohibited from attempting to proselytize Muslims, from building new places of worship, from displaying crosses or ringing bells. In sum, they were forbidden most public displays of their religious rituals.”

According to historian Richard Fletcher, “Moorish Spain was not a tolerant and enlightened society even in its most cultivated epoch.” On December 30, 1066, about four thousand Jews in Granada were murdered by rioting Muslim mobs—more than would be killed in the Crusaders’ infamous Rhineland pogroms of the mid-twelfth century. What enraged the Granadan Muslims was the political power of the Jewish vizier Samuel ibn Naghrila and his son Joseph: the mob resented the fact that these men had authority over Muslims, which they saw as a “breach of sharia.” The mob was incited to kill the Jews by a poem composed by Muslim jurist Abu Ishaq: “I myself arrived in Granada and saw that these Jews were meddling in its affairs. … So hasten to slaughter them as a good work whereby you will earn God’s favor, and offer them up in sacrifice, a well-fattened ram.” The mob heeded his call. A Muslim chronicler (and later sultan of Granada), ‘Abd Allah, said that “both the common people and the nobles were disgusted by the cunning of the Jews, the notorious changes they had brought in the order of things, and the positions they occupied in violation of their pact [of second-class status].” He recounted that the mob “put every Jew in the city to the sword and took vast quantities of their property.”

In The Legacy of Islamic Antisemitism, Andrew Bostom amasses an enormous amount of documentary evidence establishing the degradations the Jews suffered at the hands of Muslims throughout Islamic history. Bostom notes that jihadist designation of Jews as “apes and pigs,” in accord with the Qur’an, has ample historical precedent. Muhammad himself used it before ordering that every adult male of the Banu Qurayza, a Jewish tribe, be killed, calling the Jews “you brothers of monkeys.” The poem that inspired the Muslims to massacre the Jews in Granada in 1066 included the line, “Many a pious Muslim is in awe of the vilest infidel ape,” (referring to the Jewish vizier). Zaynu’d-Din ‘Ali b. Said, praised the anti-Jewish riots and massacres in Baghdad in 1291 (which spread widely in the region), saying, “These apish Jews are done away and shent [ruined].” Bostom mentions another slaughter:

Referring to the Jews as “brothers of apes,” who repeatedly blasphemed the prophet Muhammad, and whose overall conduct reflected their hatred of Muslims, the Moroccan cleric al-Maghili (d. 1505) fomented, and then personally led, a Muslim pogrom (in ~1490) against the Jews of the southern Moroccan oasis of Touat, plundering and killing Jews en masse, and destroying their synagogue in neighboring Tamantit. Al-Maghili’s virulent Islamic antisemitism was perhaps captured best in a line from a verse diatribe he composed: “Love of the Prophet requires hatred of the Jews.”

Nevertheless, historian Bernard Lewis asserts that overall, Jews had it better in the Islamic world than they did in Catholic Europe. “There is nothing in Islamic history,” he says, “to compare with the Spanish expulsion of Jews and Muslims, the Inquisition, the Auto da fe’s, the wars of religion, not to speak of more recent crimes of commission and acquiescence. There were occasional persecutions, but they were rare, and usually of brief duration, related to local and specific circumstances.” Dinesh D’Souza has made much of this in his recent attempts to portray Islam and Christianity as equally likely to give rise to violent impulses.

However, such judgments betray less about the historical data than they do about Westerners judging Christians more severely than Muslims. This is a venerable tradition, going back, as the Islamic scholar Ibn Warraq points out, to Voltaire and Edward Gibbon:

Gibbon, like Voltaire, painted Islam in as favorable a light as possible to better contrast it with Christianity. The English historian emphasized Muhammad’s humanity as a means of indirectly criticizing the Christian doctrine of the divinity of Christ. Gibbon’s anticlericalism led him to underline Islam’s supposed freedom from that accursed class, the priesthood. Indeed, the familiar pattern is reemerging—Islam is being used as a weapon against Christianity. Gibbon’s deistic view of Islam as a rational, priest-free religion, with Muhammad as a wise and tolerant lawgiver, enormously influenced the way all Europeans perceived their sister religion for years to come. Indeed, it established myths that are still accepted totally uncritically by scholars and laymen alike. Both Voltaire and Gibbon subscribed to the myth of Muslim tolerance, which to them meant Turkish tolerance.

Yet a question that is much more important than the respective awarding of historical points or demerits is whether Christian or Islamic anti-Semitism is likely to recur. Europe has in recent years grown hostile to Jews to an extent not seen since Nazism’s heyday, but the anti-Semites today are principally not native European Christians, but Muslim immigrants (and Muslims, by mid-century, could be the majority population of several European states).

In Britain, there were three times more anti-Semitic incidents in 2007 than there were in 1997. A December 2006 study, according to the Telegraph, determined that “in London and Manchester, where Muslims outnumber Jews by four to one, anti-Semitic offenses exceeded anti-Muslim offenses.” One rabbi was attacked in July 2006 by seven Pakistani Muslim teenagers, who shouted, “We are Pakistani, you are Jewish. We are going to kill you.” In Belgium in November 2006, according to Flanders News, “a group of young Turkish immigrants in the Limburg municipality of Beringen attacked a group of Jewish school children by throwing stones at them, shouting anti-Semitic slogans.” In summer 2006, after a Jewish man was assaulted in Oslo, Norwegian Jews were warned not to wear kippahs on the street, for fear they would be physically attacked.

And these are just a few recent examples of a long and ever lengthening string of such incidents. The European Union commissioned a report about the new rise of anti-Semitism in Europe in 2003, but buried it when its findings showed that anti-Semitic acts were largely the province of young Muslims. After an outcry, the report was released in 2004, but journalist Ambrose Evans-Pritchard noted that the results “had been consistently massaged by the EU watchdog to play down the role of North African youth.”

As time goes by, however, these new realities will be harder and harder to ignore.

The decade-long attempt to prevent Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons may have entered the final round on Sunday when Iran announced to the world it intended to build ten new uranium enrichment sites.

“This is really a statement of defiance,” a former senior Israeli atomic official told The Wall Street Journal, “telling the world we are going to go ahead with our nuclear program.”

The Iranian government’s statement came only two days after the world’s major powers condemned Iran’s nuclear program, which, despite Iranian denials, is believed to be producing nuclear weapons. China and Russia joined the United States, France, Britain and Germany to support an International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) resolution ordering Iran to stop construction on the uranium enrichment plant near Qom, a secret facility whose existence President Obama revealed last September.

Due to the international criticism, Iranians are now threatening to pull out of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty and reduce cooperation with the IAEA, the U.N.’s nuclear watchdog. North Korea is the only other country ever to have pulled out of the treaty.

According to news reports, the Iranian decision to thumb their nose at the U.N. and world opinion and construct new nuclear fuel refinement facilities was made Sunday evening at a cabinet meeting chaired by Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinijad. The Iranians will start work on five of the new sites within two months and at an unspecified future time on the remaining five.

It is believed the reason for the extra facilities is to allow Iran to build more nuclear bombs. One military analyst says U.N. weapons inspectors and the U.S. Department of Defense are of the opinion Iran currently has enough enriched fuel for one nuclear weapon. Iran would like to have several more in order to present itself as a “credible threat.”

The Iranian announcement signals a defeat for President Obama’s ‘soft’ approach towards the Islamic Republic’s leadership. In an interview with Dubai-based Al-Arabiya satellite television network last January, Obama said Iran’s leaders would find the extended hand of diplomacy if they “unclenched” their fists.

“As I said in my inauguration speech, if countries like Iran are willing to unclench their fist, they will find an extended hand from us,” Obama said.

But as early as March there were already signs that Iran was in no mood to unclench and drop the rock it was holding in the form of its nuclear weapons program. That month, President Obama released a video, wishing the Iranians a happy New Year, which, in Iran, falls on the first day of spring. In return for his friendly overture, the American president received from the Iranian government nothing but a demand for apologies for America’s past transgressions, real or imagined, against Iran.

Sunday’s statement simply proves what most have suspected all along: One cannot talk to the Iranian leaders and that they are simply stringing out negotiations to complete their nuclear arms program. And the fact the Iranians still celebrate the 1979 American embassy seizure every November, a flagrant and criminal breach of international law, shows they do not want to talk to the United States in particular and are still willing to flout international norms.

Essentially, Iran’s leaders are religious fanatics who believe they have been chosen by God to establish a Shiite hegemony over the majority Sunni Islamic world and then, hopefully, over the whole planet. Of the world’s one billion Muslims, about 220 million are minority Shiites, of whom the largest number, about 62 million, live in Iran. Pakistan contains the next largest community of Shiites at 33 million, while India is third with 30 million and Iraq fourth with 18 million.

Iran’s mullah regime sees possessing nuclear weapons as instrumental to its plans for world domination. Nuclear arms would also add significant muscle to Iran’s security in a part of the world where any sign of weakness or vulnerability could be dangerous. Iranians have not forgotten how Iraq took advantage of Iran’s revolutionary turmoil to launch a devastating eight-year war against it in 1980. And like Russia with its former Eastern European satellites, Iran would also use nuclear weapons to intimidate weaker neighbors.

The Asia Times columnist, Spengler (a literary pseudonym), gives another reason why Iran is not afraid to seek confrontation over its nuclear weapons program. Iranian demographics have sunk to West German levels of about 1.6 children per woman, which would make waging a war in 20 years impossible. Iran currently has enough young men to embark on a military adventure, whether internally for nuclear weapons acquisition or externally against the Sunni world, while in twenty years it won’t.

Iran’s heavily-subsidized economy is also imploding. Like Argentina with its 1982 Falkland Islands’ invasion and Germany in 1939, economically it is now or never for Iran to make a grab for the ring. In a year’s time it may be too late, especially if oil prices drop dramatically again. Besides, again like Argentina, a military adventure would probably cause those Iranian people actively opposed to the regime to put aside their economic and political grievances and rally around the country’s leadership in nationalistic pride.

But if Iran wants a fight, it will most likely get one. The Islamic regime’s Holocaust-denying leadership has openly stated it wants to erase Israel from the map. Facing such a naked threat to their country’s existence, one military publication states the Israelis are now openly discussing using a missile attack on Iran’s nuclear facilities. While Israel’s Jericho missiles can carry nuclear warheads, they also can be equipped with a conventional warhead. An attack by Israeli warplanes is also a possibility.

The Israelis already have American backing for such a strike if negotiations fail, as they appear to have. American Vice-President Joe Biden said in an ABC interview last July America would not prevent an Israeli strike on Iran’s nuclear facilities. And since the only other option would be a nuclear-armed Iran, the Israelis will now likely ensure this last round ends in a knockout.