It is by now a familiar scenario for German police. The lifeless body of a teenaged Middle Eastern girl, missing since November. Discovered in a hidden spot with signs of a violent death. A suspected honor murder at the hand’s of the family, some of whose members were already in custody.

But this time the script is slightly different.

While most honor murders in Germany originate within the country’s four million strong Muslim community, the latest victim, Arzu O. from Remminghausen (German law does not allow for the release of the last name), 18, whose corpse was found last week, belonged to a little known Middle Eastern religious sect called Yazidism. And it is this sect’s adherents who are becoming better known recently for their part in the nightmarish phenomenon of honor killings in Germany. Already in 2003, the German news magazine, Der Spiegel, wrote:

More and more often, police must protect young women from the Yasidi faith community from their own relatives – and help them flee.

The Yazidis are Kurds who inhabit primarily northern Iraq but are also found in Syria and Turkey. Many Yazidis have immigrated to Germany where they form the second largest Yazidi community in the world, numbering an estimated 30,000 to 80,000, outside their home countries. Over the centuries, their religious beliefs have often put them at odds with their Muslim neighbours, who have at times cruelly discriminated against them, forcing them to convert on pain of death or sometimes just outright massacring them. Since Yazidis are not ‘People of the Book’ in the Koran, like the Jews and Christians, they were afforded no protection in Islamic lands.

Yazidi religious beliefs, like those of other religions, are complex. The Yazidis believe in one God, who created the world and left it under the care of seven angels. They don’t believe in the devil, since that would limit God’s power. Nevertheless, they have often mistakenly been called devil worshipers. Yazidism is described as being “syncretic,” influenced by Sufism and Iran’s pre-Islamic religion, Zoroastrianism. One also cannot convert to Yazidism; one is born into it.

But the problem Yazidism poses for young Yazidi women (and a few men) living in a modern Western state like Germany where freedom of choice and development of the individual are regarded as virtues is that they are not allowed to marry outside their religion. They are also not supposed to marry outside the three castes that make up their culture and usually wind up taking a cousin as a spouse. And like their Muslim neighbors, women are expected to be virgins when they marry.

“When a girl tries to marry outside the community, that is perceived not only as a dirtying of the family honor, but a break with the religion and the community,” wrote one German reporter.

Another reason Yazidis probably do not want their daughters to marry outside their religion is money. According to one report, the bride price for a Yazidi girl can cost a prospective groom and his family up to $ 80,000, “although the highest Yazidi spiritual leader…wants to limit the bride money to $5,000.” A woman marrying a non-Yazidi would probably add nothing to the family’s coffers.

Police believe Arzu’s breaking of these age-old religious restrictions is probably behind their gruesome discovery last week. Arzu, a high school student, had developed a forbidden love last summer with a 23-year-old apprentice baker, a non-Yazidi, at a bakery where she worked weekends. Her mother and older sister had also once worked there. But for wanting to determine her own life path, which includes selecting her own boyfriends like most normal teenagers do, this vibrant, young woman had to pay with her life.

Although the family, which originally came from Turkey, was described as “a shining example” of successful integration, they still acted out their archaic religious and cultural customs behind closed doors. Last August, Arzu’s family members tried to put a halt to her blossoming romance by giving her a beating, which got police attention. The assault only resulted, though, in Arzu’s fleeing the home for a women’s shelter, which alone is often reason enough for an honor killing. Once away from family control and observation, even for one night, it is suspected the girl may have lost her virginity.

“Every woman who flees the home is the object of an honor murder,” noted one German social worker. The Federal Crime Office (Germany’s FBI) registered 48 such homicides between 1996 and 2006 with a further 22 people surviving attempted honor killings.

Other reasons for honor killings, besides a loss of virginity, range from the female victim living too Western (re: independent) a lifestyle, to wanting a divorce, to fleeing either an abusive or an upcoming forced marriage. Conversion to another religion is sometimes punished by death as well as marrying or having a boyfriend outside one’s religion, race or ethnic group. Only with the blood sacrifice of a fellow human being do the murderers believe their family honor can be cleansed and restored.

German police remove Israeli flags posted in defiance to a Palestinian hate rally in Berlin:

As German Chancellor Angela Merkel and French president Nicolas Sarkozy do their best to put on a public face of cooperation in resolving Europe’s escalating sovereign debt crisis, behind the scenes both leaders are seething.

They are angry with each other, angry with each other’s policy choices, angry with each other’s friends and allies.

It’s well-known that German taxpayers are fed up with footing the bill for Greeks who take longer vacations than they do and retire on full government pensions many years earlier than they can. Less known is that the German government is actively considering allowing Greece – and possibly Portugal and even Italy and Ireland – to drop out of the Euro-zone.

“If the Euro fails, it will be Merkel’s fault,” a senior advisor to French president Sarkozy told me recently. “Germany has been resisting efforts to prop up the Euro. If the Euro collapses, it will be as much Germany’s fault as it will be that of the over-indebted Euro-zone members.”

Europeans are used to duplicity. That’s why they weren’t surprised to hear President Obama sharing derogatory personal remarks about Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu to French president Sarkozy when both leaders apparently thought the microphones were off.

But the duplicity of German Chancellor Merkel – smiling at Sarkozy in public, while throwing daggers at him in private – takes the cake.

The European media often talks of the Paris-Berlin axis, a code phrase meant to signify a marriage of reason between Europe’s two biggest economies.

But the extent of the falling out between Merkel and Sarkozy goes way beyond a marital spat. It is verging on divorce.

As the French rely increasingly on Britain and the United States, Germany is leering to the east. “What we are seeing is the emergency of a new Berlin-Moscow-Tehran axis,” the Sarkozy advisor warned.

There are many signs of trouble just beneath the surface.

First, there is Germany’s ongoing trade with Iran. Despite strong European Union sanctions on Iran, top German firms continue to do a booming business with Tehran.

Even worse: German trade associations are actively promoting exports to Iran, even as the EU calls for halting trade entirely.  Here are a few of these trade promotion events from just the past two months:

-          On October 10, 2011, a delegation from southwest Iran visited Dresden seeking to expand Iran’s purchase of oil and gas field technology from German firms. (The organizers of this event have no sense of irony, as their website slogan shows: “European-Iranian ventures, Your Economic Success”)

-          On October 26, the German Foreign Policy Association hosted Iran’s Vice Minister of Economics and Finance, Dr. Mohammad Reza Farzin, to a public forum to promote cooperation with Iran and oppose sanctions.

-          On November 8, the German Business Association hosted a German-Iranian Business Congress in Berlin, spotlighting “Iranian Business Women Power.”

-          On November 22, the Bavarian Ministry for Economics held its annual Export Promotion Day, with a special emphasis on exploring “better market chances in Iran, possibilities to invest, finding business partners in Iran.”

(Hat tip to the enterprising group known as Stop the Bomb for keeping close tabs on German exports to Iran).

We’ve been through this song and dance before with Libya and Iraq in the 1980s, where the Germans were building poison gas factories and ballistic missile plants. It became known as trade über alles.

At the same time, Merkel’s government has been pressing hard behind the scenes to block EU sanctions against the Iranian Central Bank, an initiative being promoted by French president Sarkozy.

So what’s going on? At a closed door meeting among European intelligence czars recently, top officials at Germany’s BND (their equivalent of the CIA) shocked their counterparts with the virulence of their ant-American remarks.

There’s a 1930’s style resurgence of nationalism in Germany that has caught the attention of many Europeans, the top Sarkozy advisor told me. “It’s Germany first, and to hell with Europe,” he said.

At the same time Germany is eager to protect its business ties to Tehran, Chancellor Merkel has been forging a closer political and economic relationship with Russia.

Some observers see the covert hand of Russia’s SVR intelligence service in the recent anti-nuclear campaign that led to Merkel’s surprise announcement on May 30 that Germany will close all of its 17 nuclear power plants by 2022.

The French, of course, are particularly sensitive to such things since they rely on nuclear power to produce around 80% of their electricity and are the world’s foremost exporter of nuclear power technology.

Germany’s leftist school teachers are breathing a tremendous sigh of relief – at least for the moment – due to a court ruling last week that forbids a Muslim student from praying in his Berlin school. German leftists, who used multiculturalism to get Christianity out of the public schools, were relieved Leipzig’s federal administrative court prevented Islam from filling the vacuum they created when it decreed the school had a right to prevent students from performing the Muslim mid-day prayer ritual, since it could disturb school peace.

“This is not a verdict against Islam,” stated Der Spiegel, Germany’s largest news publication, in hailing the decision. “It is a verdict for the sensible separation of state and religion.”

The ruling’s only drawback, however, was that the court stressed its decision applied only to this one school and not to the whole country.

The events leading to the anti-prayer legal ruling actually began in November, 2007, when a Muslim student, Yunus Mitschele, who was then 14, knelt down in a school corridor during a school break along with seven other Muslim students and began to pray towards Mecca, while several other “astonished” students looked on. A teacher fetched the school’s principal, Brigitte Burchardt, who waited until the prayer was finished to speak to the students, telling them, as one German newspaper reported, that “it is perhaps not a good idea what they are doing there…that church and state are largely separate…and about how it would affect other students.” Burchardt also forbid a repetition.

Afterwards, the principal spoke with the students’ parents, since she feared such a demonstrative prayer display could endanger the peace in the multicultural school. The school in question, the Diesterweg Gymnasium, an academic high school for students going on to post-secondary studies, contains students representing 29 different nationalities and five major world religions, including different strains of Islam. The German newspaper Die Welt reports that in the past this religious diversity “has lead to conflicts, and therefore the school administration had to intervene” in this case.

Burchardt came to an understanding with seven of the Muslim students and their parents; but Mitschele’s father, a German convert to Islam, would not accept her prayer prohibition and took the matter to court. In 2008, he obtained a temporary order from a lower Berlin court that would allow his son to perform his prayers once a day at school but only during a break.

“He (Yunus) was the first student in Germany to demand the right to conduct his prayers at school,” Spiegel stated.

Mitschele returned to court in 2009 to have his right to pray in school confirmed, basing his claim on the fact religious freedom is guaranteed in the German constitution. Since observant Muslims pray five times a day, he would have to pray during school hours, it was argued. In September of that year, the court agreed Mitschele did have this constitutional right and therefore should be allowed to pray in school. After the ruling, the Diesterweg Gymnasium allotted Mitschele a prayer room, although the court “did not demand it.”

But one German journalist, writing in May, 2010, wondered how important praying really was to Mitschele, since, in the eight months after the ruling, he had used this prayer room a grand total of only 14 times. In his defense, Mitschele says he couldn’t always find a teacher with a key to the room, which appears rather odd. After all, why would the school take the trouble to provide him with a prayer room, especially after this case had received so much media attention, and then not ensure access? It also appears neither the court nor the German media received a complaint from him or his father regarding his inablity to perform this supposedly all-important mid-day prayer, especially after they had gone to so much trouble to obtain this right.

This leads one to wonder whether the whole Diesterweg Gymnasium affair was simply a provocation, taking after the movement in Europe to bring Islam out of the mosques and into the public sphere. Public spaces, including whole streets, have been taken over in European cities for prayer by kneeling Muslims. These public demonstrations are not so much about piety, but rather more about establishing a dominant position for Islam in European societies by visibly occupying their public areas.

Public schools would be a tempting, and important, target in this drive, since in schools it would also be about the hearts and minds of children. But in Mitschele’s case, once the value gained by the visibility of his praying in the school’s public space, the hallway, was lost by the assignment of a prayer room, his interest in the mid-day prayer may have waned correspondingly.

Last week, a parade of events have set the stage for what may become one of the most volatile economic periods of the 21st century. On Wednesday, Germany, the linchpin nation of the European Union, had a disastrous bond auction, raising only $5.2 billion of the $8.1 billion it expected to raise. On Thursday, Portugal’s debt was reduced to junk status. On Friday, Italy’s borrowing costs soared again, reaching their highest levels since joining the EU. Belgium, which has been unable to form a government for 18 months, had its credit rating lowered from AA+ to AA. Spain, where the People’s Party will be forming a government in the coming weeks, may apply for international aid to maintain its solvency. In short, the EU is going to hell in a socialist hand basket.

Yet it is precisely the denial of that odious reality that prevents any real progress from taking place. It is a denial born of ideologically-inspired hubris, economic illiteracy, and an entitlement mentality that afflicts everyone from the top of the so-called economic food chain to the bottom. It began with the fantasy that nations with completely different cultural values could be yoked to a common currency, primarily for the purpose of preventing another World War. It was viewed as a way to prevent Germany from ever again becoming the dominant force in Europe.

It hasn’t worked. It is Germany that has blocked the European Central Bank’s (ECB) effort to make massive “eurobond” purchases from Europe’s debtor nations. Last Thursday, Chancellor Angela Merkel reiterated that the ECB was only responsible for monetary policy. This stance sets her apart from the rest of the EU leaders. They want the ECB to do what Ben Bernanke and the U.S. Federal Reserve have been doing: “quantitatively ease” their way out from under, by financing debt with more debt. This is the socialist-inspired “too big to fail” scheme that keeps the banks and markets afloat while they look for a soft landing. A soft landing that ostensibly gives debtor nations time to get their acts together, lower their debt-to-GDP ratios, and regain some measure of solvency.

Such a scheme brings us to the other end of the fiscal food chain. This is the end, in countries like Portugal, Ireland, Italy, Greece and Spain, affectionately known as the PIIGS of Europe, where the bottom end of the chain, aka the “little people,” will be forced to endure years of austerity in order to realize such a transformation.

It’s a transformation that has engendered chaos. In Italy, riots broke out earlier this month when the new government, led by technocrat Mario Monte, outlined reforms to dig that country out from under $2.6 trillion of national debt. In Greece, the latest of many riots occurred last Thursday when workers at the country’s largest power company, PPC, clashed with police. They don’t want to be tasked with collecting property taxes via electricity bills, in a country notorious for tax evasion. Yet Greece needs $10.7 billion by Christmas, or the country will run out of money. Furthermore, their newly-formed government has yet to agree on terms for a far larger bailout of $174 billion, necessary to maintain national solvency.

On the same day in Portugal, a major strike engineered by the nation’s two largest trade unions took place, due to public outrage over austerity measures there. Portugal needs $104 billion of bailout funds. In Spain on Saturday, thousands of demonstrators massed in Barcelona to participate in a planned anti-globalization rally. As a result, border controls made unnecessary by integration into the EU were reinstated to prevent outside agitators from entering the country. And in Britain, a public sector union strike is also scheduled for this coming Thursday, because the government is proposing to raise the retirement age and increase employee contributions to their pensions.

While the peoples’ anger seems justifiable, there is something missing. It is their inability to recognize that they are every bit as responsible for the current crisis as those they seek to blame for it. Ironically, both ends of the fiscal food chain have enabled each other’s demise. It was the massive amounts of credit issued by lending institutions at the top, who made billions of dollars by making easy credit available to the bottom end of the chain. It was the easy credit that enabled the socialist government spending sprees that quickly, but artificially, raised the living standards of people who were more than happy to live the good life, even if it was built on a mountain of accumulating debt. It is that debt that has now become unsustainable, putting both ends of the food chain on the brink of insolvency in the process.

Editor’s note: Visit Frank Kitman’s site at kitmantv.blogspot.com.

I edited and translated a most heartbreaking testimony by Sister Hatune of the Syrian-Orthodox monastery in Warburg, Germany. She makes an amazing effort to help and  protect the ruthlessly persecuted Christians in Iraq.

In recent years, a horrifying number of kidnappings, rapes and mutilations of Iraqi Christian girls has been perpetrated by Muslim gangs. Some 700,000 Christians are fleeing this terror, but often find themselves exposed to similar dangers when they arrive in neighboring Muslim countries. With no rights and no help from authorities, they are surely in the most desperate of situations.

Please take the time to contemplate why this is not being reported more often.

And visit Sister Hatune’s foundation for more information about her great work.

See the testimony of Sister Hatune below:

Palestinian Authority Chairman Mahmoud Abbas was not being honest when he said to President Obama this week that the PA was not continuing its incitement against Israel.

Responding to President Obama's demand that the PA make more progress "on incitement issues," Abbas said:

"I say in front of you, Mr. President, that we have nothing to do with incitement against Israel, and we're not doing that," Abbas said. "What we care about is to live in coexistence with Israel in order to bring about the independent Palestinian state that will live side by side with Israel..."
[AP, June 9, 2010]

In direct contradiction to Abbas's claim, Palestinian Media Watch documented in a report released this week that PA incitement to hatred and violence and non-recognition of Israel has continued unabated in the month since the start of the proximity talks.

For example, whereas Abbas said to President Obama that he supports "living side by side with Israel," just a few weeks ago official PA TV called for Israelis to leave Israel and "return" to Germany and Poland:

"Where are you [Israelis] from? Of course, you're from Ukraine; of course, you're from Germany, from Poland, from Russia, from Ethiopia... I ask of you, return to your original homeland!"
[PA TV (Fatah), May 4 and 7, 2010]

PA TV is owned by the Palestinian Authority and under direct control of the office of Abbas.

In addition, the PA this past month has continued to honor terrorists who have killed Israeli civilians by naming sporting events after them, a practice repeatedly condemned by the Obama administration.

These are just two examples among many in the new PMW report documenting that every condition, principle and expectation set by the US for accepting the Palestinian Authority as a partner in the peace process continues to be violated by the PA.

The full report follows, with many examples of incitement. Be sure to read it all.

To understand the people of Gaza, who now lay claim to the passions of humanitarians-without-a-cause, one might begin by considering Gazans’ freely elected leadership: the Hamas terror network.  And to understand Hamas, one might begin by looking closely at the Hamas logo. The logo’s center features swords and a golden-domed structure, but the squiggle at the top-center of the logo is most descriptive. One squiggle is worth a thousand words. That squiggle is not an Arabic symbol but the map of Israel.

Look even more carefully: the squiggle – the map of Israel depicted on the Hamas logo – primarily is pre-1967 Israel.  It is Israel without the Gaza Strip.  Hamas has no designs on the Gaza Strip it controls.  Rather, leveraging Gaza as a springboard for its actual aspiration, Hamas illustratively has designs on the only Palestine it ever has coveted:  the Palestine that now is called “the State of Israel.”  As Jew-hating journalist Helen Thomas recently said about Israelis, “Tell them to get the hell out of Palestine. Remember, these [Arab] people are occupied, and it’s their land.”  The Jews, Thomas added, can go back where they come from – “Poland.  Germany. . . . And America and everywhere else.”  (Reflecting ignorance all too common among the White House press corps, Thomas is unaware that the majority of Israelis are children of the Middle East, descendants of the 850,000 Jews exiled by Northern African Arab dictatorships during the years Israel was being founded.)

The only “Palestine” that ever existed was always synonymous with the Jewish homeland that later was renamed “Israel” in 1948. Rent a copy of the 1960 movie “Exodus.”  Listen dispassionately to the dialogue. Don’t take sides.  Just listen for definitions. The British, fairly or unfairly, are depicted as the bad guys in the movie, trying to keep the Jews out of “Palestine.” Paul Newman is trying to get the Jews into “Palestine.” Everyone watching the movie perceives that “Palestine” is a name that refers synonymously with “Israel.” Thus, what we seem to have had here is a failure to communicate. It could not be simpler: For the past two thousand years, since the Romans renamed the land of Israel after they expelled and exiled the Jews, “Israel” always was synonymous with “Palestine,” and “Palestine” always was “Israel.”

There never ever was an Arab Palestine entity. Who, after all, ever was its leader? Try to name any leader who ever in history led a sovereign “Palestinian Arab” people of “Arab Palestine.” What year was that entity founded? What was the name of its capital city — any capital city? Where is the drawing or photograph of its seat of government, or the place where its governmental leader lived? What was the name of its currency? Whose face, what slogan was on that currency? When did it fall? In which Olympic Games did it compete? Which issue of Encyclopedia Britannica had an entry for its government?

Consider this way:  The American city of Palestine, Texas was founded in 1846.  It was so named in honor of an early settler there, Daniel Parker, who hailed from Palestine, Illinois.  That Palestine was chartered in 1811.  It drew its name in 1678 from the French explorer, Jean LaMotte, who looked at the land and named it “Palestine” because it reminded him of the Biblical Promised Land of the Jews, flowing with milk and honey.  No one associated “Palestine” with the Arab community, not even the French in the 1600s.  Rather, the name was associated with the Jews and their Biblical Promised Land. The same with Palestine, Arkansas (pop. 741) and East Palestine, Ohio.

Before the Jewish country was named “Israel” in 1948, even the most ardent Jews identified the Jewish homeland as “Palestine.” Today’s Jerusalem Post, the English-language daily newspaper of Israel, originally was called the Palestine Post.  The pre-government institution that laid Israel’s political foundation was the Jewish Agency for Palestine, headed by Dr. Chaim Weitzmann, who became Israel’s first head of state.

It is this “Palestine” – namely, the State of Israel – that Hamas forthrightly is determined to seize.  The squiggle tells all.  To attain the power to pursue its dream of eradicating Israel from the map, Hamas first engaged in more than a decade of bloody terror, killing some 500 people in the course of more than 350 terror attacks since 1993.  Hamas popularized suicide bombing.  Then, during the January 2006 general elections held freely and with minimal intimidation within the areas of Gaza and the segments of Judea and Samaria (the “West Bank”) controlled by the Palestine Authority, the Palestinian Arab electorate voted Hamas into power.  Hamas won 74 seats, compared to 45 for runner-up Fatah. Former President Jimmy Carter monitored the vote and declared the election of Hamas “fair and square,” deeming them free, fair, just, and transparent.  That is, the Palestinian Arab voters freely chose to be led by a group of terrorists and suicide-bomb architects outlawed throughout the world.  After winning parliamentary elections, Hamas terrorists in Gaza proceeded to launch a bloody internecine war against their political competition, Fatah terrorists loyal to Palestine Authority President Mahmoud Abbas. More than 600 Arab terrorists killed each other during the next eighteen months.  Ultimately, Hamas won and seized the reins of power in Gaza.  By virtue of the freely expressed will of the people of Gaza, Hamas now enjoys popular support to lead Gazans with the Hamas vision.

On March 5, 1933, the German people cast their ballots, resulting in Adolf Hitler’s ascent to power as chancellor of Germany.  The voters knew Hitler’s agenda, and he prosecuted the agenda he promised them.  Mass terror followed, and the world was submerged into a war that brought death to tens of millions.  By the end, America and England gained an upper hand and had enough.  In one midnight hour, the Allies dropped more than 2,300 tons of aerial bombs on Hamburg. During the bombing of Dresden, the allies dropped more than 3,900 tons of bombs in two days, killing some 25,000 Germans.  As the debate raged over whether these aerial bombings had been overkill, an underlying justification always lay in the recognition that the German civilian population had elected the Nazis and, by the power of their ballots, willingly brought the war and destruction on others – and, by the end, onto themselves.

So it is with Gazans and the Hamas terror vision for which they voted “fair and square.”  In a world that has seen Iranian civilians rise up and, like Neda Soltani, give their very lives trying to liberate themselves from the yoke of an Islamofascist regime led by Ayatollahs and Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the stark contrast from the people of Gaza is striking.  Gazans celebrate death.  They celebrate terror.  Given a free choice, they have opted for a vision of terror aimed at wiping out innocent Western lives and eradicating Israel off the face of the earth.  In the face of such contemporary persecutions as the Sudanese terror in Darfur and the Turkish oppression of the Kurd minority that now numbers more than two million refugees, can anyone truly make a “fair and square” argument that the people of Gaza are victims of anything other than their own tragically violent predilection to support terror over coexistence and war over peace?

Dov Fischer is a legal affairs consultant and adjunct professor of the law of civil procedure and advanced torts. He was formerly Chief Articles Editor of UCLA Law Review and writes extensively on political, cultural, and religious issues.  He is author of General Sharon’s War Against Time Magazine and blogs at www.rabbidov.com

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On January 27, 1998, Yehuda Bauer, Director of Research at Yad Vashem, concluded his Holocaust commemoration address at the Bundestag in Germany with the following:

“Thou shalt not be a perpetrator.”

“Thou shalt not be a victim.”

“And Thou shalt never, but never be a bystander.”

It is remarkable that Bauer saved the strongest admonition for bystanders.

On Friday May 27, at the White House Jewish Heritage Celebration, Helen Thomas, the “dean” of the White House Press Corps, answered a journalist’s request for an opinion on Israel:

“Tell them to get the hell out of Palestine. Remember, these people are occupied and it’s their land…not German and not Poland.”

“So, where should they go?”

“Go home. Poland, Germany.”

“So, you think the Jews should go back to Poland and Germany?”

“And America and everywhere else.”

Helen Thomas is a perpetrator.  Perpetrator, because the most important aspect of the War Against Israel is the war to erode American support for Israel, the war for public opinion.  As in Vietnam, the press in America will bring about the fall of Israel and the annihilation of her people long before and more surely than those seeking the physical destruction of the Gaza blockade.

In spite of this, Helen does not fully explain the “why” of the Holocaust.  Within hours of Thomas’ Reichstag-worthy revelation, the video evidence circled the globe.  It is safe to assume that the people who come in daily contact with Helen knew what she said.

These journalists and reporters, as every educated American, have seen pictures of the Holocaust; they have probably looked in horror at images of the selection at Auschwitz, the mass-shootings in Ukraine, the portraits of Eichmann and Mengele.  This contemplation probably led to self-reassuring oaths that, “Had I been there, I would have resisted.  I would have spoken out.  The Nazis were evil monsters. How could this have happened?”

Certainly, the White House Press Corps is full of those who have thus reacted to the Nazi Holocaust.  And yet, they will sit down to dinner with Helen Thomas.  They will continue to say, “Good Morning” to her and will treat her like an icon worthy of respect.  She will stoop in her throne in the Press Corps galley.  She will not be shunned in the halls of the White House, and senators and representatives will still curry her favor or, at the very worst, attribute her rant to notorious spunk.

This is why the Holocaust happened.  A dozen average men and women weighed their careers against the consequence of protest and permitted the penetration of respectable society by anti-Semitism. The looming destruction of Israel is not to be attributed to hate-filled sectarian ideologues like Thomas, but to the reporters and journalists who will avoid nasty personal consequences, and refuse to treat her with the utter contempt she merits.  If ever Eichmann and Mengele and Goebbels deserved to be shunned as enemies of civilization, then likewise, a woman pretending to exemplify investigative excellence while suppressing the truth of the Jews’ tri-millennial claim to a homeland in the Holy Land, ought to be ostracized by anyone with a conscience.

The path to the first Holocaust was that of politically justified anti-Semitism.  Hitler began his crusade against the Jews under the pretext that they had caused, through self-interest, the defeat of Germany in the First World War.  We, fleeing precipitously towards a Second “Final Solution,” witness a similar attempt to disguise racial hatred of the Jews as dissenting political opinion.  We hear words such as “occupation, apartheid, human rights violations,” only because they camouflage an embarrassing, crass hatred.  Penetration of respectable society by this “classy, political” anti-Semitism is the first step to genocide.

The choice to become a bystander faces each member of the White House Press Corps.  Together, they should demand Helen Thomas’ expulsion from their midst, if they wish to retain their integrity and honor.

Should authorities refuse, for the obvious reason that anti-Semitism has been given the green light (no pun intended) by the example of the administration, then it is the personal responsibility of each member to treat the “Queen” and her supporters as they claim they would have treated the last batch of selectors who favored deporting the Jews to their “homeland” in the ovens of Poland.

The National Security Strategy (NSS) released by the Barack Obama administration on May 27 is not so much a look forward as a look back. It is an attempt to return to the optimistic days following the end of the Cold War when it seemed a peaceful new world order was possible. In 1999, President Bill Clinton claimed “perhaps for the first time in history, the world’s leading nations are not engaged in a struggle with each other for security or territory. The world clearly is coming together.” President Obama says essentially the same thing in the opening paragraph of his cover letter to the NSS when he notes that “globalization”—the buzz word of the post-Cold War era — has “made peace possible among the major powers.” The dangers that remain are of a different sort, “from international terrorism and the spread of deadly technologies, to economic upheaval and a changing climate.”

That the world looked like the classical liberal model expounded by Clinton in 1999 was doubtful even then. A decade later, the cracks are even larger. Five months before the terrorist attacks on New York and the Pentagon on September 11, 2001, a Chinese fighter rammed a U.S. Navy EP-3 reconnaissance plane over the South China Sea, an area Beijing has been trying to claim as sovereign territory. The rise of China and the emergence of other ambitious powers herald not a new world but a new cycle in the old world of international rivalry. The NSS explicitly rejects the “world as it is” in its attempt to fashion “the world we seek.” But the NSS does not lay out a path between worlds; it simply assumes the new world already exists.

There are still a few odds and ends to be cleaned up from the Bush administration, such as the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. The NSS pledges “a focus on defeating al-Qa’ida and its affiliates in Afghanistan, Pakistan, and around the globe” but sees no real dangers after that which would require a military effort. Though the NSS identifies the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction (nuclear and biological) as problems, the two most menacing rogue states, North Korea and Iran, are to be dealt with through diplomacy. As the NSS states on page 23, “If North Korea eliminates its nuclear weapons program, and Iran meets its international obligations on its nuclear program, they will be able to proceed on a path to greater political and economic integration with the international community. If they ignore their international obligations, we will pursue multiple means to increase their isolation and bring them into compliance with international nonproliferation norms.” This is at best a containment policy.

But how can Pyongyang or Tehran be contained, let alone “isolated” when they have friends among the other major powers? The NSS depends on there being a consensus among the powers on issues like non-proliferation within a general spirit of cooperation. That is not how world politics is evolving.

According to the NSS, “The European Union has deepened its integration. Russia has reemerged in the international arena as a strong voice. China and India—the world’s two most populous nations—are becoming more engaged globally. From Latin America to Africa to the Pacific, new and emerging powers hold out opportunities for partnership, even as a handful of states endanger regional and global security by flouting international norms.” Under the Obama policy, “We are working to build deeper and more effective partnerships with other key centers of influence—including China, India, and Russia, as well as increasingly influential nations such as Brazil, South Africa, and Indonesia—so that we can cooperate on issues of bilateral and global concern, with the recognition that power, in an interconnected world, is no longer a zero sum game.”

The integration of the EU is being called into question by the sovereign debt crisis that has ripped through Greece and has threatened to spread to Spain, Portugal, and Ireland. The single euro currency, once thought to be an alternative to the dollar as the world’s reserve currency, is in free fall. Euro skeptics in England, France, Holland and Germany are balking at “saving” the Mediterranean and Eastern members of the bloc.

The NSS singles out Brazil for special praise saying, “We welcome Brazil’s leadership and seek to move beyond dated North-South divisions to pursue progress on bilateral, hemispheric, and global issues.” Yet, Brazil just brokered a deal with Iran over its nuclear enrichment program meant to shield it from a new round of UN sanctions being pushed by the U.S. Brazilian President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva had told President Obama personally at the Nuclear Security Summit that he would not back additional sanctions on Iran, and repeated this stance when meeting with Chinese President Hu Jintao in Brasilia immediately after the two leaders left Washington. The Hu-Lula meeting took place within the larger context of a BRIC (Brazil, Russia, India, and China) summit where the emerging powers coordinate policies formulated primarily against the positions of the United States and EU.

South Africa joins the mix in BASIC (Brazil, South Africa, India, China), a coalition at the UN that opposes the American and European demand for mandated limits on green house gas emissions to fight alleged global warming. Supported by Russia and the group of 77 developing nations, BASIC represents the world’s rejection of President Obama’s obsession about climate change that appears repeatedly in the NSS as a priority global threat.

The core value of BASIC and its allies is unrestricted economic growth, which means intensified competition in domestic and world markets. For some time, American officials have made it clear that unless China, India and Brazil provide substantial market access to U.S. exports commensurate with their high economic growth rates, there can be no conclusion to the Doha Round of trade talks. These negotiations have been stalled virtually from their inception in 2001 due to a fundamental clash of national interests.

The Obama administration has hailed China and Russia for supporting a draft sanctions proposal against Iran at the UN. Yet, Beijing and Moscow watered down the resolution to prevent it from crippling the Tehran regime. Most importantly, Russia and China will be allowed to continue investing in Iran’s energy sector, which will boost the country’s revenues which the mullah’s use to finance their aggressive foreign policy as well as nuclear development. To improve relations, the Obama administration dropped sanctions against Moscow’s state arms export agency and three Russian entities previously found to have transferred technology or weapons to Iran. The UN sanctions proposal would also allow the Russians to sell S-300 air defense missiles (which have an anti-missile capability) to Tehran. So even if the UN Security Council adopts the resolution, it will not “isolate” Iran from its main international backers.

Nor is international rivalry confined to economics and rogue states. China’s massive military modernization program, led by new weapon systems designed to attack U.S. and allied forces across Asia, is not mentioned in the NSS. To do so would have undermined the fanciful vision of a peaceful, cooperative world. It would also have called into question why the Obama Pentagon is cutting back on the high-end conventional forces, from armored units and air superiority fighters to missile defense and naval shipbuilding, that would be needed to not only counter rising “peer” competitors like China but to defeat major regional powers like North Korea and Iran.

The NSS attempts to conjure up a world in which an NSS is not needed, but the Obama administration does not have the power to change the true, dangerous nature of global politics. What the NSS reveals is the unwillingness of President Obama to deal with the world as it is. Thus, America will remain vulnerable, as its leaders are continually blindsided by the strategies of adversaries they cannot bring themselves to think about.

Jerusalem ---- May 31, 2010 .... The Israel Navy this morning blocked the Hamas backed "Gaza Freedom Flotilla", a group of ships carrying up to 800 people from entering the Gaza Strip.

Israel was well aware that this was not a humanitarian love boat trek but rather an exercise in Islamic digital PR.

The organizers of the Palestine Flotilla to Gaza consisted of some of the worst global terror groups including Hamas, Islamic Jihad, al-Qaeda and their fund raisers the Turkish Humanitarian Relief Foundation.

What made this Palestine PR stunt or electronic Jihad exercise even more barbaric was the blatant use of volunteers on the ship who had good and true humanitarian intentions.

Some of these humanitarian volunteers were unaware that they were being used by the terror group Hamas as Hamas, Islamic Jihad and the Turkish Humanitarian Relief Foundation used both diplomats and volunteers from the UK, the US, Sweden, France, Germany and other countries as human shields as Hamas attacked a peaceful IDF boarding force with guns, knives and clubs.

Just before sunrise the IDF Navy intercepted six ships that were attempting to break the maritime closure of the Gaza Strip. Israel and the Israel Navy provided numerous warnings issued prior to the incident. The Israel Navy requested that the Hamas backed ships to redirect themselves towards Ashdod where they would be able to unload their aid supplies which would then be transferred to Gaza after undergoing security inspections.

Israel provides tons of food, water, medical supplies and fuel to Gaza on a daily basis. Israeli officials repeated that if this was a true humanitarian event, not a PR exercise, Hamas would have used the existing channels - the UN, the EU and Israel to transfer whatever cargo they had.

During the boarding of the Gaza flotilla ships, protesters onboard demonstrated that this was not a non violent event as they attacked IDF Naval personnel with live fire and light weaponry including knives and clubs.

"The Palestinian Gaza demonstrators had clearly prepared their weapons in advance for this specific purpose," the IDF told the Israel News Agency....

Read it all.

Speaking at a Democrat fundraiser in San Francisco on June 28, 2004, Senator Hillary Clinton bluntly warned her well-heeled supporters – some of whom had paid $10,000 to attend – that, when and if Democrats regained power, they meant to revoke Bush’s tax cuts. She said, “Many of you are well enough off that … the tax cuts may have helped you. We’re saying that for America to get back on track, we’re probably going to cut that short and not give it to you. We’re going to take things away from you on behalf of the common good.” [emphasis added] No sentence better encapsulates the Shadow Party agenda, nor better illustrates why Soros and Hillary have joined forces in the political arena. Their views on “social justice” could not be more perfectly aligned.

“The richest 1 percent of the world’s population receive as much as the poorest 57 percent,” Soros laments in his 2002 book George Soros on Globalization. Resolving this inequity will “require some resource transfers from the rich countries to the poor.” As the richest nation on earth, the United States of America would, of course, pay the lion’s share of the money required to support Soros’s new “global open society,” as he calls it. “The United States bears a special responsibility for the world because of its dominant position,” Soros explains.

Closing the gap between rich and poor nations will require putting curbs on what Soros calls “global capitalism.” Particularly egregious, in Soros’s view, is the effect of global capitalism on social security. The free flow of capital across borders reduces “the ability of the state to provide social security to its citizens,” he argues. In one respect, Soros is correct. Tax-based, pay-as-you-go social security systems of the sort that Otto von Bismarck introduced in Germany in 1889 and Franklin Delano Roosevelt brought to the USA in 1935 require massive taxation of working people in order to support those who are not working. In a high-tech, global marketplace, people in the upper tax brackets quickly learn to shelter their earnings from the tax collector through such expediencies as investing in offshore derivatives markets. Self-serving actions of this sort threaten the entire concept of a pay-as-you-go social safety net. As long as taxpayers can hide their assets from the government, no country can possibly collect enough taxes to provide cradle-to-grave security for its underclass. As Soros puts it, “The globalization of financial markets has rendered the welfare state that came into existence after World War II obsolete because the people who require a social safety net cannot leave the country, but the capital the welfare state used to tax can.”

The solution to this problem, according to Soros, is to turn the entire planet into a giant welfare state. In order to squeeze the necessary taxes from today’s globalized investor class, we need global institutions with the authority to track down and confiscate capital from anyone, anywhere on the planet. To this end, Soros recommends the formation of what he calls an Open Society Alliance, a global network of likeminded nations, corporations and NGOs which would operate first within the framework of the United Nations, but would later replace the UN, taking on all its current functions and more. According to Soros, this Open Society Alliance would employ various sorts of “carrots and sticks” to keep its members in line. “It would offer incentives where possible but would not shy away from enforcement where necessary,” he writes.

– The Shadow Party: How George Soros, Hillary Clinton, and Sixties Radicals Seized Control of the Democratic Party

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CANBERRA, Australia - Australia ordered the expulsion of an Israeli diplomat Monday after investigators concluded Israel was responsible for forging four Australian passports that were used in the slaying of a Hamas operative in Dubai.

Australia's reaction echoes that of the United Kingdom, which in March expelled a diplomat in retaliation for the use of 12 fake British passports in the plot to kill Hamas official Mahmoud al-Mabhouh. Dubai authorities blame Israel's Mossad intelligence service for the January slaying.

The governments of Ireland, Germany and France have yet to state how they will react to similar cases of alleged identity fraud against its citizens, as revealed in the investigation.

Australia had not expelled a foreign diplomat since 2004.

Foreign Minister Stephen Smith told Parliament that the operation to kill Hamas official Mahmoud al-Mabhouh in a Dubai hotel room was not the first time Israel had forged Australian travel documents. He did not elaborate on previous incidents, but said the latest transgression breached "confidential undertakings" between the two countries that have stood for several years.

"These are not the actions of a friend," he said. "This is not what we expect from a nation with whom we have had such a close, friendly and supportive relationship."...

You might think that being a Supreme Court justice would be the top of the line job for someone in the legal profession. But, many Supreme Court decisions suggest that too many justices are not satisfied with their role, and seek more sweeping powers as supreme policy-makers, grand second-guessers or philosopher-kings.

The latest example of this is the recent Supreme Court decision in the case of Graham versus Florida. The issue was whether the Constitution permitted a state to impose a sentence of life without the possibility of parole when the criminal was a youthful offender. The Supreme Court voted 6 to 3 that this was a violation of the Constitution.

If your copy of the Constitution doesn’t say anything about youthful offenders, do not worry that you have a defective copy. There is no such statement in the Constitution. What the justices cited as the alleged basis for their decision was the Eighth Amendment’s prohibition against “cruel and unusual punishments.”

Since 37 out of the 50 states permit sentences of life without the possibility of parole, such a sentence is not unusual. How about cruel? If it is cruel, then why is it OK to impose that sentence on people who are not youthful?

The case of Graham versus Florida involved a 16-year-old repeat offender, who was convicted of a home invasion robbery while on probation from a previous felony. He was sentenced to life imprisonment without the possibility of parole. The Supreme Court then over-ruled that decision.

The role of an appellate court is not to simply second-guess the decision of the trial judge and jury, much less usurp the responsibility of legislatures to make social policy. But the pretense of applying the Constitution gives appellate judges the power to do both.

The bolder justices go further, citing practices in other countries as supporting their decisions that are supposedly based on the Constitution of the United States. If justices can pick and choose which legal principles and practices they will follow, from the many widely varying principles and practices in countries around the world, then they can find a basis for doing just about anything they feel like doing.

This too goes counter to the very basis of American government, as a system in which “We the people” ultimately govern ourselves through representatives of our own choosing and the officials appointed by them.

Once appellate judges are free to base their rulings on what people do in India, Egypt or Germany, Americans are no longer a self-governing people.

As if to add a touch of farce to lighten the tragedy of the dismantling of the Constitution, Supreme Court justices on opposing sides of the case of Graham versus Florida cited statistics seeking to show that there was national consensus for or against life sentences without the possibility of parole.

Appellate courts, including the Supreme Court, are not institutions equipped to make policy judgments like that. Legislatures exist to make policy judgments— and to be voted out of office if these policy judgments turn out to produce results that the electorate do not want. But there are no such corrective mechanisms in place if Supreme Court justices misjudge.

Finally, there is the old, moth-eaten argument cited by Justice John Paul Stevens, that the society is evolving and therefore the interpretation of the Constitution must evolve with it.

Nobody— from the moment that the Constitution was adopted in the 18th century to the present— has ever denied that societies evolve, and that their laws must evolve to meet changing circumstances. But, unless Justice Stevens is either stupid or dishonest, he cannot leap from a need for laws to change to the conclusion that it is judges who must be the ones to make those changes.

Just saying the magic word “change” does not justify judges grabbing the power to make whatever changes they please in the law. There are, after all, two other branches of the federal government, specifically charged with legislative and executive responsibilities and powers, not to mention the Constitutional Amendment process.

Thomas Sowell is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University, Stanford, CA 94305. His Web site is www.tsowell.com.

In the beginning of October, the United States began air strikes against the Taliban regime. The goal was to destroy ability of the al-Qaeda forces based there to strike again. Such considerations were irrelevant to leftists opposing the strikes like Berkeley Congresswoman Barbara Lee. In voting against the President’s request for an authorization to use force, Lee declared, “As we act, let us not become the evil that we deplore.” The implication was that if Americans used force to defend themselves, they would be no better than the terrorists who attacked them. Lee was returned to Congress by her Democratic constituents the following year.

Protesters echoed Lee’s sentiments in campus demonstrations across the country, making them even more explicit. At the University of North Carolina, teach-ins featured professors attacking America as a “rogue state” and a greater terrorist threat than al-Qaeda; at the City University of New York, professors condemned “American imperialism;” at Brown University, students and professors went on strike chanting, “One, two, three, four, we don’t want a racist war.” Within weeks of the most heinous attack on America in its history, radicals had turned their own country into the villain.

The refusal to concede that Americans had a right to defend themselves was difficult to understand. Equally incomprehensible was the left’s willingness to defend a fundamentalist theocracy, that oppressed women, homosexuals and non-Muslims, and that consequently should have been repellent to its own values. From both angles, the protesters’ decision to oppose the war in Afghanistan was a defining moment for the American left, analogous to its response to the signing of the Nazi-Soviet Pact in 1939.

At the time the Nazi-Soviet Pact was consummated, American Communists and progressive “fellow-travelers” had considered themselves anti-fascists and anti-imperialists. But when Moscow signed the “Non-aggression Pact” with the Nazi state, they embraced it. For the next two years – until Germany attacked Soviet Russia in June 1941— the Communists opposed the defense policies of the democracies and denounced what they referred to as an “inter-imperialist war.” When it came to choosing between the interests of the Soviet state and their “progressive agendas” – even their opposition to fascism – American Communists and their progressive allies did not hesitate to choose the former. The subtext of their reaction to the Nazi-Soviet entente was clear: their loyalty to the Soviet state overrode their loyalty to any other principle, however progressive it might seem. This kind of calculus led Stalin’s great antagonist, Leon Trotsky, to condemn the parties of the Communist International and their progressive fellow-travelers as “frontier guards for the Soviet Union.”

– Unholy Alliance: Radical Islam and the American Left 

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MONTREAL - A Montreal man has collected Quebec government welfare cheques for almost 20 years, even as he criss-crossed Europe to meet six other men who've since been either killed, convicted or linked to global terrorism, lawyers for the RCMP and CSIS allege.

In recently filed court documents, government lawyers claim that while Mohamed Omary has been jobless and on the dole in Montreal since he arrived from Morocco.

Yet he still somehow found cash to repeatedly visit Europe between 1993 and 1999.

While overseas and in Montreal in the 1990s, Omary hob-nobbed with six men who've since become a who's who of Islamic terrorists, the federal security agencies claim.

Omary, a father of four, denies any involvement in terrorism and has never been charged, though his brother-in-law has been kicked out of Canada on national security grounds.

Omary's Montreal home was searched by police in 1999 at the request of French law enforcement and his telephone was also tapped for months in 2000, court records show.

Thierry Audin, a spokesman for Quebec's Ministère de l'Emploi et de la Solidarité sociale, declined comment on Omary's case or status as a welfare recipient.

"This is personal information. We cannot make any comment whatsoever about this subject," Audin told QMI Agency.

Omary visited France, Germany, Holland, Bosnia, Croatia, Slovenia and made several trips to Morocco and Turkey staying abroad a month at a time, including stays in at least one four star hotel, the RCMP and CSIS lawyers say in the court documents.

Omary also joined a shooting club in the Montreal suburb of Longueuil and learned to handle guns. In Bosnia, Omary even learned to fire an AK 47, while purportedly there as a humanitarian worker, the government claims.

Omary's lawyer, Johanne Doyon, did not return telephone messages seeking comment for this story. A second lawyer, Alain Arsenault, referred calls to Doyon.

Last year, Omary sued the Canadian government for $1 million in Quebec Superior Court.

He claims that Canadian security officials tipped Moroccan authorities about a trip he was planning home to Morocco in January 2002 - just months after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks.

Omary, a citizen of Canada and Morocco, was arrested and detained by Moroccan authorities at the Casablanca airport. His Canadian passport was confiscated.

Omary also says he was prevented from returning to Montreal for two years as CSIS and Moroccan intelligence agents pressured him to become a confidential informant when he returned to Montreal. CSIS agents he identified as "Claude and Christian" visited him in Morocco, scaring him and contributing to heart troubles, he added.

He wants damages from the Justice Department, the Royal Canadian Mounted Police and the Canadian Security Intelligence Service for what he claimed were lost wages as well as loss of liberty, stress, and family separation.

Omary's lawsuit described him as "an IT worker by profession and a self-employed worker in Canada for several years."

In their reply, federal lawyers said neither RCMP nor CSIS officers knew Omary had left Canada for Morocco in January 2002, so they couldn't have tipped off the Moroccan authorities.

They also said he failed to ask consular officials for a replacement Canadian passport for months, a move that could have allowed him to leave Morocco much sooner.

Omary's claim for damages and lost wages is bogus, the federal lawyers said, noting that Omary lost little if anything financially, because he's been on welfare since coming to Canada....

Security authorities in Germany believe that another member of a group of German Islamist insurgents in Pakistan has been killed. Officials wonder whether the deaths will be a deterrent for copycats or whether it will inspire others to sign up for jihad.

A second homegrown Islamist from Germany appears to have been killed in fighting in Pakistan, SPIEGEL has reported. Danny R., a 21-year-old from Berlin, first traveled to Pakistan via Istanbul on Sept. 2, 2009 together with another Islamist. There, he joined a group of insurgents in the porous border region between Pakistan and Afghanistan that has been a hotbed of Taliban and terrorist activity.

German security officials have obtained information suggesting that the man was killed several days ago in Waziristan. The news comes just days after word of the death of Eric Breininger, a German-born convert to Islam who had been wanted by German police on suspicion of belonging to a terrorist cell.

Danny R., who would have turned 22 on May 1, was born in Berlin but had Dutch citizenship. He renamed himself "Elias" after his conversion to Islam and belonged to a group of radical Muslims in Berlin who claimed they wanted to wage jihad, according to officials.

From Footballer to Jihadist

Danny R. had played for a while for the soccer team BFC Alemannia 1890 in the German capital before suddenly disappearing. Authorities are currently investigating whether Danny R. died at the end of April together with Breininger, who was from the western state of Saarland, and a man born in Salzgitter near Hanover named Ahmet M. According to statements made by associates of the men, four jihadists had been traveling in a car near the city of Mir Ali in Pakistan, when they were stopped and then killed during an exchange of gunfire with soldiers.

Only a few days later, Breininger's alleged memoirs were posted on the Internet. In them, he describes his conversion and his transformation into a fervent Islamist. German security officials believe the work to be authentic and are now monitoring the impact of the latest developments on the Islamist scene in Germany. Will the deaths dissuade other German converts considering making the journey to Pakistan? Or will the war reports merely serve to attract other volunteers fascinated by the stories?

In Berlin alone last September, in addition to Danny R. and his wife, two other young couples made their way to Waziristan. And in recent years, at least six militant Islamists from Germany are known to have died in the Hindu Kush mountains of Pakistan and Afghanistan.

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I put this question to my investor friend, whom I’ll call Angel Ware, about the situation in Europe:

Any insights into the ramifications of the Greek crisis?

Here is his answer:

“Well, it depends. The first question is whether or not the EU (i.e.   Germany) will successfully be able to bail out the Greeks. There are  some significant forces conspiring to screw this up. 1. The Greek people  and their massive sense of entitlement. Even the threat of an austerity program has caused deadly riots and crippling strikes (including the  internal revenue department going on strike). 2. The German people and their sense of fairness. The retirement age in Greece (as subsidized by  the government) is 54. The retirement age in Germany is 67. You can imagine that bailing out the Greeks, so that they can preserve their retirement plan is not something that sits well with the German people. So, the EU & the IMF have temporarily stopped the bleeding, but will they be able to save Greece? Most people seem to be betting against that. Given that the Republicans have made major hay railing against the contagion stopping bailouts in the US (despite the fact that most were initiated by a Republican president), it’s hard to imagine that any politician will be able to sell contagion stopping bailouts of foreign countries.

The problem with Greece failing isn’t Greece (they are actually a very small economy). The problem is, as I alluded to above, contagion. It  turns out that Greece is hardly the only socialist country in Europe who has been funding massive social programs via massive debt. Specifically, if the bond market learns that the EU does not have the political will to bail out tiny Greece, then it follows that the EU will not have the political will to bail out the larger Countries (Spain being the scariest). As a result, the world may stop buying Spanish bonds. If the Spanish can’t sell massive amounts of new debt, they too will default. If Spain defaults, it’s virtually guaranteed that Portugal, Italy, and Ireland will default in short order. If that happens, all of these countries are the primary lenders to Eastern Europe, so look for a rash of defaults there too. If that happens, the UK is in deep trouble. If that happens, the US may be in serious trouble — if you thought the Lehman failure sucked, just wait for the Barclay’s and the Royal Bank of Scotland to fail as a result of the UK failing.

Now, the good news is that there is plenty of time between here and there for governments to get their acts together and keep the game alive (the game being that people buy bonds from countries with bad balance sheets due to the implication that they will be bailed out by larger governments with bad, but larger and better balance sheets). However, it could get considerably uglier. The other thing to keep in mind is that the last time that large European countries defaulted and couldn’t pay for their social programs, Hitler rose to power and we had WWII.”

Well, there’s a happy thought. It may turn out that the greatest tragedy of the 21st Century is that people failed to learn the lessons of the 20th. But then what else is new?

London, May 9 (ANI): With his children settled in Britain, an al Qaeda terror suspect has won the right to stay on in the country because of a case against him that dragged on for too long.

According to News of The World, a judge ruled that the unnamed Algerian jihadist - who trained at the same terrorist camp as shoe bombers Richard Reid and Saajid Badat - can simply keep on appealing against his deportation even though the Home Office has been trying to kick him out for five years.

Suspect T - who arrived here on a false passport and has also admitted lying to the security services and committing fraud - has claimed it's not safe for him to go back to Algeria.

Trained in Afghanistan to handle Kalashnikovs and explosives, the dad-of-four tried to get into France and Germany in 1993 and 1997, but those countries kicked him out.

The UK has proved to be his savior.

Mr. Justice Mitting insisted that European Human Rights laws, and guidance titled Every Child Matters means a "fine balance must be struck" between the potential risk to the UK population and the interests of T's family. (ANI)

Frontpage Interview’s guest today is Nicolai Sennels, a Danish psychologist who worked for several years with young criminal Muslims in a Copenhagen prison. He is the author of Among Criminal Muslims. A Psychologist’s Experience from the Copenhagen Municipality. The book will be out in English later this year. He can be contact at: nicolaisennels@gmail.com.

FP: Nicolai Sennels, welcome to Frontpage Interview.

I would like to talk to you today about your experience working with young criminal Muslims in a Copenhagen prison. Let’s begin by talking about how you got into your line of work.

Sennels: Thank Jamie.

Well., many people think that I took the prison job because I wanted to get a closer look at Muslim mentality, failed integration and Islam. But I did not. I was just looking for a job and having worked as a social worker taking care of teenagers for several years part time while studying at Copenhagen University to become a psychologist, it was natural for me to apply for a job involving juvenile offenders. I had no idea that seven out of ten teenagers in the average Danish youth prisons have a Muslim background. Since I was the first psychologist at the institution I was very free to develop my position as psychologist.

The main job was to find out the young peoples’ pedagogical and therapeutic needs and develop therapeutic methods fitted for those needs. And this I did and this is what my book is about. The unusual thing about my work is that I found out that my Muslim clients had certain psychological characteristics that my non-Muslim – mostly Danish – clients did not have. They were all between 15 and 17 years old, most of them showed antisocial behaviour and a big part of both groups came from homes with a certain lack of emotional support. I guess nine out of  ten were boys and though the main part came from less well functioning homes I also had many Muslim and Danish clients who’s parents and elder siblings were well educated, had normal jobs and so on.

I worked in the prison for a bit less than three years and had around 150 Muslim clients and 100 Danish clients. I conducted group therapies and individual therapies and with such a large amount of both Muslim and non-Muslim clients I had a relatively large background material for understanding and comparing their psychological development and the underlying conditions influencing this development. Normal “real” research projects of this kind – consisting of long and several qualitative interviews – most often only have 20-30 subjects as background material.

FP: Ok, so some of your conclusions?

Sennels: Well, one significant conclusion was that having been raised in a Muslim environment – with Muslim parents and traditions – includes the risk of developing certain antisocial patterns.

About two thirds of all teenagers accused for criminal actions in Copenhagen have a Muslim background. For years the explanation for this phenomenon has been that Muslims are discriminated against by Danish employers and are thus unable to find a job. The consequence is that Muslims are poor – and this poverty then gets the blame for the high crime rate among young Muslim men.

As a humanist and psychologist I have to expose and oppose this faulty explanation. Explaining psychological development and complicated human mental and behavioural patterns by pointing on the amount of kroner, Euros or dollars rolling in to a person’s bank account every first bank day of the month is a very materialistic and two-dimensional view on the human being. What is first of all deciding our actions is our own free will and motivation – which are first of all influenced by the emotional, cultural and in some cases religious frame that we grew up in.

It is easy to establish a statistical connection between poverty and criminal behaviour – but what comes first? I saw a lot of young teenagers sowing the seeds for their own future unemployment by not going to school, staining their criminal records and developing unattractive social habits such as aggressiveness, insecurity and lack of respect for authorities.

FP: Did you find any real differences between Muslims coming from different parts of the Muslim world?

Sennels: My experience from working with Muslims is that the culture developed under Islamic influence supports the development of certain psychological characteristics. I had Muslim clients from most of the Muslim world: most of the Middle East, Muslim countries in Africa, Pakistan and ex-Yugoslavia. I did not register any major differences between the mentalities between these countries. The only real importance deciding the impact of Muslim mentality was whether the client himself identified himself strongly as belonging to the Muslim society or not. There was a quantitative difference from the often less Islamic Muslims from e.g. ex-Yugoslavia and the clients from the Middle East who mostly identified themselves strongly as being Muslims.

By far the most of my 150 Muslim clients expressed strong loyalty to their God, Allah,  and their prophet but less than half was actively practising Islam by doing their prayers, Quran studies etc. But there did not seem to be any difference between the actively practising group and the group that could be called loyal but passive believers. Seen from the therapy room, the mentality stemming from Islamic influence on the societies where it is the dominating value system is so strongly rooted in the culture that Muslims are influenced by its dogmas and values no matter if they pray five times a day and can recite the Quran or not.

FP: Draw for us a psychological profile of Muslim culture. How does it shape a human being’s mind and behaviour to grow up in such a culture?

Sennels: The most important characteristics that I found concerns aggression, self-confidence, individual responsibility and identity.

Concerning anger, it quickly becomes clear that Muslims in general have a different view on aggression, anger and threatening behaviour than Danes and probably most of our Western world.

For most Westerners, it is an embarrassing sign of weakness if people become angry. This view on anger is probably consolidated already in early childhood. I have been working as a school psychologist for several years and bullying is a continuous problem at the schools that I work in. The interesting thing is that the children who are most likely to be the target of being bullied are the children that get angry the easiest. If people get angry we have a tendency to lose respect for them and in many cases we try to tease them to provoke them even more – with the pedagogical aim of helping the person to realize the childishness of his or her behaviour. Trying to get one’s will by acting aggressively or using threats is seen as immature and our reaction is often to ridicule or simply ignore them. Thus, the shortest way to lose face in our Western culture is to show anger.

It is completely opposite in the Muslim culture. While most of my Danish clients who had problems with anger felt embarrassed about it, none of my Muslim clients ever seemed to understand our view on anger. I spent countless hours doing Anger Management therapy with both Danish and Muslim clients and hence I had very good opportunities to experience the cultural differences concerning this specific emotion, ways of handling it and reacting to it.

In Muslim culture, it is expected that one should show anger and threatening behaviour if one is criticized or teased. If a Muslim does not react aggressively when criticized he is seen as weak, not worth trusting and he thus loses social status immediately.

This cocktail of cultural differences has sparked the ongoing debate on free speech all over the world. The free world’s criticism and jokes about Islam is met with anger and threats of terror. When a Danish cartoonist shows the Muslims’ prophet with a bomb in his turban to illustrate the fact that Mohammed conducted dozens of massacres and called for global violent jihad against non-Muslims, the reaction of Muslim leaders and their followers was exactly to confirm Westergaard’s drawing: They responded with jihad on all possible levels – threats of genocide, terror, economical boycott, lawsuits and using democratic systems in our countries, EU and the UN to challenge and destroy our laws on free speech.

The wisdom and bravery of any child in any school yard to people using aggression to hide their own insecurity because of a simple drawing would lead to more jokes and logic as a mean to pedagogically point out obvious human weaknesses. Unfortunately most of our politicians are not as wise and brave as the average school child.

FP: Expand a bit on the differences between Muslim and Western cultures in terms of self-confidence.

Sennels: The concept of honor in the Muslim culture is – just like in the case with anger – opposite of our Western view. It is common in the Muslim culture to be exceedingly aware of one’s status in the group, other peoples’ view of oneself and any signs of any kind of criticism. The aggressive response to anything that can make one insecure is seen as an expression of honorable behaviour. But what is honorable about that? What kind of honor needs to be defended by all means necessary – including the abolishment of women’s human rights, such as the right to pick their own sexual partners, clothes, husband and life style? What is honorable about anger and the lack of ability to ignore provocations and handle criticism constructively?

After listening to more than a hundred Muslim teenagers telling their stories about their feelings, thoughts, reactions, families, religion, culture, the life in their Muslim ghettos and their home countries, it became clear to me that to a Muslim such behavior is the very core of keeping one’s honor. But seen through the eyes of Western psychology, it is all an expression of a lack of self-confidence. According to our view, the base of being authentic and honorable is to know one’s strengths and weakness – and accepting them. The ability to think “your opinion about me, not mine – and mine counts to me” when provoked and being mature enough to handle criticism constructively is a source of social status in the Western world.

Unfortunately, the Muslim concept of honor transforms especially their men into fragile glass-like personalities that need to protect themselves by scaring their surroundings with their aggressive attitude. The show of so-called narcissistic rage is very common among Muslims. The fear of criticism is in many cases not far from paranoia. It is not without reason that self-irony and self-criticism is completely absent in the Muslim societies. Seen from a psychological perspective – whose aim is to produce self-confident, happy, free, loving and productive individuals; and not to please a hateful God or culture traditions – Muslim culture is in many ways psychologically unhealthy to grow up in.

FP: Ok and how does individual responsibility fit into all of this?

Sennels: To discuss individual responsibility, I need to first introduce the readers to the psychological term “locus of control.” Locus of control concerns if people see their life mainly influenced by inner or outer factors. In our Western culture, we see inner factors as more important than outer ones. Our point of view, our way of handling our emotions, our way of thinking, our way of reflecting, our way of reacting is all seen as ways that we decide our own lives. We may not always be aware of the way we think etc. and a whole industry has appeared because of that fact. Indeed, psychologists, therapists, psychiatrists, coaches plus countless self-help books and magazines are overflowing in our societies and are all aiming at helping us to become aware of how we decide our own lives.

None of these things exists in the Muslim world. The few psychiatrists they have are often educated in the West and whatever psychology and pedagogy that exists in Muslim countries does not have root in the Muslim culture but are ideas imported from the West.

Thus, when a Westerner experiences problems he asks himself: “What can I change in myself/my life to become happier?” This mentality showed it self clearly among my Danish clients. It was deeply rooted in them that talking about oneself can be a way of finding better ways of handling one’s own life. When having Muslim clients on my couch it was in most cases like having someone from another planet visiting me. Under normal conditions, Westerners and Muslims can communicate relatively easy – as long as it does not involve criticism. But in a setting where the whole concept is centred about that the Muslim client has to talk about his own feelings and thoughts because the psychologist thinks that it will help him to become more happy and able to live constructively, the “chain falls of the bike” as we say in Denmark. They shake their heads: in which way can they become happier if they expose the weaknesses that they have been taught since birth to hide in order to retain their honor? No way, José. I finally managed to develop a therapeutic method that to a certain extent could address these cultural difficulties, but therapy and Muslim mentality will probably never become real friends.

An important aspect of this difference concerning locus of control is that people who see their own lives mainly guided by outer factors – a fearsome God, a powerful father, influential imams, ancient but strong cultural traditions – very easily develop a victim mentality. It is thus not without reason that conspiracies and blaming the non-Muslims are so central in Muslim leaders’ rhetoric and politics. This victim mentality also dominates the mentality of Muslim immigrants, who often have a long row of demands for economic support and Islamization of our societies to satisfy their personal needs.

FP: Well it becomes pretty obvious why Muslims cannot integrate into our Western society. Crystallize the reasons for us.

Sennels: My experience is that you need three things to be able to integrate. You need to want it, you need to be allowed and you need to have the surplus. Very few Muslim immigrants fulfil these three criteria.

First we have to ask ourselves: why should Muslim immigrants want to integrate? They can live their culture, receive enough money, and have a full functioning social life with their Muslim friends without even learning our language — or even working. There is not really anything that makes it necessary to integrate. Of course there exist immigrant Muslims who want to adapt to the lifestyle and mentality in their new country but they are very few. In France only 14 percent of the millions of Muslim immigrants see themselves as “more French than Muslim.”  In Germany only 12 percent of Muslims identify themselves as more German than Muslim.

A survey in Denmark showed that only 14 percent of the Muslims living here can identify themselves as being Danish and democratic minded. My experience from my Muslim clients is that they do not see their Muslim identity as compatible with leading a Western life style. Being a Muslim also means that you see yourself as very different and actually as a better person than non-Muslims. This mentality easily leads to apartheid and racism. This is probably the reason that even though Muslim immigrants are more than five times as violent as ethnic Danes – according to crime statistics - three out of four victims of violence are Danish.

The second criteria – being allowed to integrate – is also not very common. There is an exceedingly strong social control in the Muslim society. Everybody is keeping an eye on everybody and if someone does not follow the cultural or religious codex they are met with strong criticism and risk to be excluded from their society – often even from their own family. In worst case – and there are many of those – especially Muslim women live under a constant death threat that keeps them from entering our Western life style that includes such human rights as to pick one’s own sexual partners, clothing style, friends, religion and life style overall. Most of my Muslim clients saw their religious and cultural background as the height of civilization and morality – leaving it would be seen as a kind of cultural and religious apostasy by their kinsmen. Such acts often have severe consequences in not only gangs like Hells Angels and other tribal communities but also – and especially – among Muslims.

Finally, it takes a lot of personal surplus to integrate into another culture. It involves changing a part of one’s identity from belonging to one group into belonging to a group with completely other cultural values and traditions. It is not just like changing a bad habit such as quitting smoking – integration goes much deeper concerning the individual’s psychology. I met a few Muslim girls who as part of Western inspired teenage rebelling wanted to integrate and did not care that they were not allowed. Those girls did not posses the personal surplus and ended up in complete identity crises, going too wild, doing drugs and having random sex with all kinds of strange men etc.

For these reasons I am completely convinced that Muslim integration will never happen to the necessary extent.

FP: What is your view of the future of Europe in terms of the skyrocketing Muslim population?

Sennels: We are in the historical embarrassing situation that we have invited millions of people to our continent that do not want to integrate and are also not able to. Since the integration of Muslims will never happen – a fact I think that has already been proven years ago – we will end up with a significant part of our population that are actively working to Islamize our societies. There exist both Muslims and non-Muslims that see this Islamization as Islamic jihad – but it is more than that: it is human nature. People who do not feel at home where they live will naturally strive to change their surroundings. Muslims attempts to Islamize our societies have just begun — as they are feeling stronger and stronger in power and numbers. This process is pushed forward by Muslim leaders inside and outside Europe and helped on its way by a kind of collective cowardice called Political Correctness.

The World Economic Forum published a huge survey in 12 Muslim and 12 non-Muslim countries in their report “Islam and the West: Annual Report on the State of Dialogue, January 2008.” The report in general shows a great amount of distrust between the two groups of countries and discloses strong feelings of enmity. The last question in the survey is: “Do you think violent conflict between the Muslim and Western worlds can be avoided or not?” The report shows that a majority of the populations in all 24 countries believed that such a conflict can be avoided. But at the same time a majority of the 22 countries think that “the interaction between the Muslim and Western world is getting worse.” The majority of people still haven’t lost their hope but at the same time a majority see this hope getting smaller and smaller.

As Muslim immigrants push for Islamization and the original Europeans increasingly feel being exploited and threatened by growing and still more violent Muslim communities, a continent wide civil war might become unavoidable. We are already on our way to get our own European Islamic Gaza Stripes where non-Islamic authorities are met with flying stones and angry crowds while Islamic authorities such as imams, groups of elderly men and home made Sharia courts, are free to exercise their power. Such developments are very alarming and should be confronted with large amounts of police, strict laws, and cuts on economic support for families having more children than the country’s average and demands that Muslim organizations and leaders reform their version of Islam.

My guess is we will see more dead police men and kidnappings as a mean to negotiate the release of imprisoned Muslim religious or gang leaders, terror bombs, economical and practical support from Muslim countries to Muslim communities here in the West. Economic and police resources are already being drained by the many consequences of Muslim immigration and the need for profound reforming of our welfare system and for involving the army is inevitable in the long run. The feeling of safety and social coherence is already long gone in many parts in hundreds of European cities as a result of Muslims’ antisocial behaviour and enmity towards non-Muslims.

As I see it, the greatest danger is that the common European will fall into strong negative feelings and that the population and our authorities will feel pressed to compromise our own humanistic values in order to overcome the catastrophe. The sooner we handle the problems the greater the chance is that we can keep our important and unique human values.

FP: It’s all pretty depressing what political correctness and the Left has achieved in engendering and overseeing this Muslim infiltration of our society. The Left wanted to destroy its host society and it shrewdly figured out how to do so through the weapon of “multiculturalism.” Talk a bit about where this might not all be hopeless, how those of us who care about or society’s values can fight back. What can we do to avoid the surrender that the West is engaged in as we speak?

Sennels: Well Jamie, first let me stress that our “surrender” so to speak would not be enough. Only mass conversion would satisfy the rules of the Quran and its preachers. And even though Muslim leaders continuously claim that the only way to ensure global peace and morality is for all of mankind to become followers of their prophet, I am not so sure: Muslim countries are definitely less peaceful and morality concerning free speech, human rights and respect for human life is clearly less existent under Islamic rule than anywhere else.

Besides my suggestions mentioned above, the Western world has to put a complete halt to Muslim immigration and non-Western immigrants who did not already receive a citizenship. They should either fulfil a long row of criteria concerning integration or leave the country. Permanent citizenships to Muslim refugees should not be possible. I would like to mention that the average price for having an asylum seeker living in Denmark is 33.000 Euros (45.000 US dollars) a year. According to UNHCR the price for helping a refugee in a refugee camp close to his own country is 33 Euros (45 US dollars).

We should in general make it so unpleasant and the economic disadvantage so big that the consequences of non-integration would motivate resident Muslims to emigrate – preferably to a Muslim country where they can live in a culture where they already know the language, culture and religion and do not live under the pressure to integrate and do not feel stigmatized by anti-immigration organisations and Islam critics.

Responsible lovers and protectors of our Western culture should make an effort to write letters to the editors, and internet bloggers have to make sure that the information that our main stream medias consciously avoid to publish gets known. We need to create a UN exclusively for democratic countries and the EU’s power to force immigration onto its member states should be taken away. Oil should only be used for transport, while heating should be replaced by green energy and nuclear power – to avoid dependency on Arab oil.

FP: Nicolai Sennels, thank you for joining us. You have shared some dark realities and warnings with us. I pray the West will eventually gain the will and capacity to defend itself.

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Editor’s note: To get the whole story behind why the Left aids and abets the Muslim infiltration of the West, get Jamie Glazov’s new book, United in Hate: The Left’s Romance With Tyranny and Terror.