This popular post was originally published May 2.

Last week, you couldn’t turn on the television or get on the web without being subjected to some sort of coverage of the royal wedding. It was truly a global phenomenon, and the American fascination with it was remarkable. What other event would prompt 22.8 million viewers across the country to wake up at an ungodly hour to witness an event taking place thousands of miles away? (Worldwide viewership is estimated at a staggering 2 billion, reportedly making the ceremony the most-watched event in history.)

In addition to the media frenzy, there was much consternation and speculation about the deliberate omission of Barack and Michelle Obama from the guest list for the wedding. Explanations for the snub ranged from the fact that the wedding was not a state occasion to possible security concerns. But I can’t help but wonder if the reason for not inviting the Obamas runs much deeper than those reasons. After all, Barack Obama has presided over a stunning and shameful deterioration of the “special relationship” between the United States and the United Kingdom.

“Special relationship” is the term often used to describe American-British relations. Winston Churchill used it frequently, though the term itself goes back to the 19th century. The phrase is a tip of the hat to our nations’ shared heritage and intertwined history, as well as a nod to the unique military, diplomatic, and economic alliance between the two countries. From the World Wars to the Reagan-Thatcher friendship, to Britain’s support of the War on Terror, the “special relationship” has been an obvious one.

Unfortunately, President Obama has done severe damage to the “special relationship.” A series of gaffes in diplomacy and protocol on the part of both Barack and Michelle Obama have strained the bond between the US and Britain:

Obama has been criticized by some for not embracing the ‘special relationship’ that has existed between the U.S. and Britain since the Second World War. Shortly after he arrived in the White House, the president presented Queen Elizabeth with an iPod and then-Prime Minister Gordon Brown with a bundle of American DVDs that would not work on British players. He also returned a bust of Winston Churchill that had stood in President George W. Bush’s Oval Office.

Last year, Mrs. Obama also touched the back of Queen Elizabeth’s back which, as White House watcher Keith Koffler notes, is considered a major breach of protocol when dealing with the royals.

The Obama administration has strained the US-British friendship with a series of political moves as well. In 2010, the administration, led by Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, refused to acknowledge British sovereignty over the Falkland Islands, a territory that has been a source of tension between the UK and Argentina for years.

During the oil spill crisis in the Gulf of Mexico last summer, many Britons were offended by the Obama’s continual references to “British Petroleum,” in spite of the fact that BP is a truly international corporation that hasn’t called itself “British Petroleum” in ages. And this year, those upstanding folks at Wikileaks released evidence that the United States shared with Russia secrets about Britain’s nuclear capability.

Last week, you couldn’t turn on the television or get on the web without being subjected to some sort of coverage of the royal wedding. It was truly a global phenomenon, and the American fascination with it was remarkable. What other event would prompt 22.8 million viewers across the country to wake up at an ungodly hour to witness an event taking place thousands of miles away? (Worldwide viewership is estimated at a staggering 2 billion, reportedly making the ceremony the most-watched event in history.)

In addition to the media frenzy, there was much consternation and speculation about the deliberate omission of Barack and Michelle Obama from the guest list for the wedding. Explanations for the snub ranged from the fact that the wedding was not a state occasion to possible security concerns. But I can’t help but wonder if the reason for not inviting the Obamas runs much deeper than those reasons. After all, Barack Obama has presided over a stunning and shameful deterioration of the “special relationship” between the United States and the United Kingdom.

“Special relationship” is the term often used to describe American-British relations. Winston Churchill used it frequently, though the term itself goes back to the 19th century. The phrase is a tip of the hat to our nations’ shared heritage and intertwined history, as well as a nod to the unique military, diplomatic, and economic alliance between the two countries. From the World Wars to the Reagan-Thatcher friendship, to Britain’s support of the War on Terror, the “special relationship” has been an obvious one.

Unfortunately, President Obama has done severe damage to the “special relationship.” A series of gaffes in diplomacy and protocol on the part of both Barack and Michelle Obama have strained the bond between the US and Britain:

Obama has been criticized by some for not embracing the ‘special relationship’ that has existed between the U.S. and Britain since the Second World War. Shortly after he arrived in the White House, the president presented Queen Elizabeth with an iPod and then-Prime Minister Gordon Brown with a bundle of American DVDs that would not work on British players. He also returned a bust of Winston Churchill that had stood in President George W. Bush’s Oval Office.

Last year, Mrs. Obama also touched the back of Queen Elizabeth’s back which, as White House watcher Keith Koffler notes, is considered a major breach of protocol when dealing with the royals.

The Obama administration has strained the US-British friendship with a series of political moves as well. In 2010, the administration, led by Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, refused to acknowledge British sovereignty over the Falkland Islands, a territory that has been a source of tension between the UK and Argentina for years.

During the oil spill crisis in the Gulf of Mexico last summer, many Britons were offended by the Obama’s continual references to “British Petroleum,” in spite of the fact that BP is a truly international corporation that hasn’t called itself “British Petroleum” in ages. And this year, those upstanding folks at Wikileaks released evidence that the United States shared with Russia secrets about Britain’s nuclear capability.

The UN Security Council approved a resolution yesterday (Wednesday, June 9th) imposing a fourth round of sanctions on Iran in response to its continued nuclear enrichment program, which is in violation of prior Security Council resolutions.  The vote was 12 in favor, 2 against (Brazil and Turkey) and 1 abstention (Lebanon).  The new resolution imposes new financial restrictions on Iran, expands an existing arms embargo, and authorizes a greater capacity to stop and search Iranian cargo ships. Targeted sanctions on specific individuals and entities were expanded. The resolution also includes measures directed against Iran’s Revolutionary Guard.

While the United States, Great Britain, and France were the resolution’s strongest sponsors, China and Russia also expressed their verbal support along with their votes — although the Russian ambassador added a major caveat in his response to a reporter’s question about Russia’s prospective sale of a sophisticated anti-aircraft system to Iran.

Lebanon’s decision to abstain was a pleasant surprise, considering the influence of Iran-backed Hezbollah in the Lebanese government. Brazil and Turkey, as expected, opposed the new resolution on the grounds that it could undermine a proposed nuclear fuel swap between Iran and the two countries. They seemed to forget that the European Union has been trying to negotiate with Iran since 2005 and the Obama administration waited 18 months while trying to engage Iran before seeking passage of this resolution.  Only when new sanctions became a real possibility did Iran come around to the fuel swap concept that it had first agreed upon and then promptly reneged on last fall.

U.S. Ambassador Susan Rice told reporters after the vote that the “resolution is strong, it’s tough and it’s comprehensive. And it is something that Iran fought very hard to prevent passage today. The effort, the time, the money, and the poise that they employed to try to prevent this resolution’s passage only underscores their understanding, that this is a major blow.”

Despite the ineffectiveness of the three prior resolutions, Ambassador Rice expressed confidence that the cumulative effect on Iran of all the resolutions is “harmful and hurtful.”

Iran remains unbowed. Its representative told the Security Council after the vote that it had no intention of changing its present course. He accused the United States and Great Britain in particular of continuing a long pattern of interference in Iran’s affairs and displaying a double standard vis-a-vis Israel. Ambassador Rice told reporters that these comments were “reprehensible, offensive, and inaccurate.”

On paper at least, the new resolution does appear to represent a significant move forward from the prior three. More specifically, the resolution prohibits Iran from investing in sensitive nuclear activities abroad, like uranium enrichment and reprocessing activities, as well as activities involving ballistic missiles capable of delivering nuclear weapons. The ban also applies to investment in uranium mining.

States are prohibited from selling or in any way transferring to Iran various categories of heavy weapons (battle tanks, armored combat vehicles, large caliber artillery systems, combat aircraft, attack helicopters, warships, and certain missiles or missile systems). States are similarly prohibited from providing technical or financial assistance for such systems, or spare parts.

The resolution also sets up a new cargo inspection framework. States are expected to inspect any vessel on their territory suspected of carrying prohibited cargo, including banned conventional arms or sensitive nuclear or missile items. States are also expected to cooperate in such inspections on the high seas.

States are called upon to prevent any financial service and to freeze any asset that could contribute to Iran’s proliferation.

Most significantly, the resolution targets the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) for its role in proliferation and requires states to mandate that businesses exercise vigilance over all transactions involving the IRGC. Fifteen IRGC-related companies linked to proliferation will have their assets frozen. The IRGC is the major power center in Iran’s economic and military spheres as well as one of the government’s primary instruments for suppressing political dissent. Impairing the IRGC’s freedom of operations will be a significant accomplishment, if successful.

UN Security Council sanctions resolutions against pre-liberation Iraq, North Korea, and Iran have had a bad track record in actual practice. The resolutions have been easy for the sanctioned countries to evade through the use of multiple front entities, money laundering and trading partners unwilling to give up short term advantage for longer term peace and security.

Also, enforcement of the cargo inspection at sea will be a challenge if Iran, as expected, refuses to cooperate. When the French UN ambassador, for example, was asked what measures France would be willing to take in such a scenario, he refused to answer what he called a “hypothetical question.”

Most ominously, the Russian UN ambassador told reporters that Russia did not consider the sale of its sophisticated S-300 anti-aircraft system to Iran to be within the resolution’s scope. The S-300 missile defense system would no doubt be used by Iran to shield its nuclear sites against a potential air strike, should military force become necessary to stop Iran from producing nuclear bombs. The Russian ambassador is technically correct because the resolution’s ban on the transfer to Iran of certain missile systems is written in such a way that it creates a big loophole for Russia to walk through in delivering to Iran its ground-to-air missiles, including its S-300 anti-aircraft missiles and anti-missile interceptors.

The Obama administration will spin the latest sanctions resolution against Iran as a major diplomatic triumph and a significant obstacle in the way of Iran’s progress towards achieving nuclear arms capability.  But  until the S-300 loophole is closed, until the U.S. and its allies figure out a way to effectively stop evasions of the sanctions, and until enough countries show that they are willing to enforce the cargo inspections, the Obama administration might want to wait before it celebrates.

The State Department's update of its annual list of official terrorist groups is imminent, but the group that just attacked Moscow won't be on the list.

The Caucasus Emirate, which has been waging a jihad against the Russian government, is led by Doku Umarov, who calls himself the "emir of the North Caucasus." He was previously President of the Chechen Republic of Ichkeria, but dissolved that Republic and established the Emirate in its place in 2007 in order to impose sharia law in his territory.

Umarov declared all the way back in 2007 that his group was expanding its struggle to wage war against the United States, Great Britain, and Israel. Last month, he released a video claiming credit for the suicide attacks in Moscow in March that resulted in the deaths of 39 people.

But apparently, the State Department chose not to include Caucasus Emirate in the newest update to its list of foreign terrorist organizations, according to Rep. Alcee Hastings, D-FL, who is calling on the State Department to add the group for the sake of national security and U.S. -Russia relations.

"This is a low profile organization that has continued to carry out high profile acts of terrorism, including the twin bombings in Moscow recently," Hastings told The Cable in an exclusive interview, "They've got a jihad against Russia and the United States. If that ain't a terrorist organization, I don't know what is."

Hastings is introducing a new Congressional resolution Thursday detailing the crimes committed by Caucasus Emirate and urging the State Department to add them to the list of foreign terrorist organizations.

Hastings, who is a member of the Parliamentary Assembly of the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE), got involved in the issue after hearing about the group from scores of Russian lawmakers. He said listing the group would be an easy win for U.S.-Russian relations.

"President Obama has pressed the reset button, but too often we find ourselves not trying to do things with the Russians," said Hastings, "The State Department has the opportunity to amend the report to include this organization."

Some experts note that there is internal debate within the Chechen rebel community about whether the group's declarations of jihad against the West is really such a good idea.

"It seems that the Caucasian rebels themselves are frightened by their own 'war declaration' against the West," Andrei Smirnov wrote in an article for the Jamestown Foundation, "The absurdity of the rebels' declarations lies in the fact that they declare war against the West, and at the same time beg for aid in their anti-Russian struggle."

"Whatever the Caucasian rebels say, it is clear that they do not have much in common with the interests of the international Jihadi movement," Smirnov went on, "This movement has no smaller plans than the Jihadi movement worldwide, but it nonetheless limits itself to activities inside Russia's borders and has no ambitions to grow into an international problem."...

They are already a facet of a major "international problem,", and "regional" jihadist groups, united by the intention to impose Sharia law, have a funny way of forming broad alliances, and sharing resources and personnel -- see, for example, al-Shabaab in Somalia, and the former Salafist Group for Call and Combat in northern Africa.

The darling of the leftist British media, Lib-Dem leader Nick Clegg, is in trouble

Surprising developments in Great Britain: although many expected the conservative Tories to win the upcoming elections for Parliament, the traditional third party of the country, the Liberal Democrats, are now leading in the polls. The party’s leader Nick Clegg did a wonderful job during the first ever nationally televised debate in England; it gave him a boost of plus / minus 10%.

Although that caught most of us by surprise, the Daily Mail now reports that Clegg may be in trouble. Yes, he has risen in the polls and, yes, he did a marvelous job in the aforementioned debate, but he is now facing “potentially damaging questions over donations paid directly into his personal bank account.”

Before he became the Lib-Dems’ leader, Clegg received monthly contributions from three wealthy donors. Normally, these contributions would be paid to his party’s account, but not in Clegg’s case. 

Clegg’s donations were registered with the Electoral Commission and the Parliamentary Register of Members Interest, but appear to be “irregular” nonetheless.

The controversy comes at the perfect moment for Clegg’s main rival, David Cameron. The leader of the Tories only trails Clegg by 1% in the polls. One or two controversies involving his opponent could very well push Cameron over the top.

Many conservatives undoubtedly hope it will. The Lib-Dem party is center-left. It was founded in 1988 by a merger between the Liberal Party and the Social Democratic Party. That’s right, the Lib-Dems are social democrats; they may be less far left than Labor, but they too are all about Big Government.

It always fascinates me that those who are most in favor of an authoritarian, big government are also the ones who are least likely to obey the rules everyone else has to obey, as seems to be the case with Clegg. More on this later: it’s unlikely that this controversy will go away anytime soon.

Africa has been a heart-felt concern of U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations, Susan Rice for years.

Rice joined the Clinton administration’s National Security Council in 1995 as a special assistant to the President and senior director for African Affairs. In 1997, Rice moved into the high-profile role of Assistant Secretary of State for African Affairs.  During the years of the Bush administration, she joined the Brookings Institution and wrote about Africa.

Before taking up her present position at the UN, Rice advocated using American military power to directly intervene in African conflicts, including in the Darfur region of Sudan, as part of a large well-funded UN peacekeeping force.

Rice’s Afro-centric agenda may well stem in part from the horrors she saw in the aftermath of the Rwandan massacre. After her visit to Rwanda in 1994, she said:

“I saw hundreds, if not thousands, of decomposing corpses outside and inside a church. Corpses that had been hacked up. It was the most horrible thing I’ve ever seen. It makes you mad. It makes you determined. It makes you know that even if you’re the last lone voice and you believe you’re right, it is worth every bit of energy you can throw into it.”

Yet despite all of her concern with African issues, she has decided not to take part in an upcoming Security Council visit to the Democratic Republic of Congo.  According to Mr. Gerard Araud, Permanent Representative of France to the United Nations who will be going on the trip, its purpose is to hold “discussions with the Congolese authorities and all the concerned actors in the Democratic Republic of Congo to prepare the reconfiguration of the mandate of the MONUC [United Nations Organization Mission in the Democratic Republic of the Congo] and to discuss the future of the United Nations presence in Congo.”

Remarking on the fact that France and Great Britain were the only permanent members of the Security Council sending ambassador level representatives on the trip, Ambassador Araud said: “Of course we would have preferred to have more Permanent Representatives for this visit.”

Why is Susan Rice staying home rather than joining the Security Council contingent visiting an African country where, in Ambassador Araud’s words, there “is still sexual violence against women, there are still humanitarian problems, an outburst of violence between displaced persons coming back and the population.”

To put things into some perspective, the so-called Second Congo War, which began in 1998 and supposedly ended officially in 2003 (but has in reality continued), is the world’s deadliest conflict since World War II, killing 5.4 million people. Two hundred thousand Congolese girls and women have been raped, some by the UN’s own peacekeepers and civilians who had been sent to the Congo nation to help its people.

In her testimony before the Subcommittee on Africa, House International Relations Committee in 1998, Susan Rice (who was then the Assistant Secretary for African Affairs) said:

“The Congolese war–an unprecedented regionalized war that has drawn at least six armies onto Congolese soil–is potentially among the most dangerous conflicts on the globe. Credible reports of inter-ethnic violence, communal massacres, and attacks against non-combatants because of their ethnicity echo the tragedies of the 1994 Rwandan genocide and the subsequent alleged massacres inside Zaire in late 1996 and 1997…The United States, for our part, must continue to work with the Congo and other fragile African nations and governments, especially during the most volatile and vulnerable stages of their development. Africa’s progress will not be linear, nor is it assured. Yet, our own national security is tied too closely to the continent’s economic and political success for the United States to be a passive bystander at such a critical stage in Africa’s history.”

Conditions have improved somewhat since then, but the situation remains “fragile” according to French Ambassador Araud. The violence continues. The BBC and Human Rights Watch have uncovered evidence of a massacre in the Democratic Republic of Congo just last December in which more than 300 people were killed. It was carried out by rebels of the Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA), a shadowy group that has committed numerous atrocities in Sudan, Uganda, Rwanda as well as the Democratic Republic of Congo.

Yet Ambassador Rice – who was so moved by what happened in Rwanda – is shirking her responsibility to help lead the UN’s effort to stabilize the Democratic Republic of Congo by failing to join the Security Council visit for a first-hand examination of present conditions and talks with the country’s leaders.  Had she decided to go and raise the profile of the trip by her presence, more could perhaps be accomplished including a visit to the area of Congo outside of the capital city of Kinshasa, where the LRA’s most recent slaughter of 300 civilians took place.

I have contacted the press office of the U.S. Mission to the United Nations to inquire why Ambassador Rice is staying behind. No one has returned my calls.

One possible reason for Rice’s decision, according to Russell Lee Matthews of the Inner City Press who also was unsuccessful in getting a straight answer from the U.S. Mission, is that she wants to be present during the beginnings of negotiations on a resolution to impose additional sanctions on Iran.  Given the fact that the trip will last just four days, it does not appear that she would miss any substantive negotiations.  And the final decisions on the sanctions, which are weeks if not months away, will be made above her pay grade in any event.

Another possible reason is that Ambassador Rice was so personally affected by the suffering she observed on a prior trip to the East Congo, particularly the plight of women and children, that she did not want to experience such emotions again.  However, it is precisely those women and children who continue to need her moral support and the spotlight that she can bring to their plight.

Ambassador Rice owes the people of the Democratic Republic of Congo an explanation for her no-show.

British churches, suffering from shrinking attendance, membership and influence, want to further diminish their nation’s influence by urging its nuclear disarmament.

The pathway to international peace is for Great Britain first to place all its nukes under international control and then to abolish nukes altogether, according to “Now Is  the Time,” an anti-nuke campaign by the Churches of England, Scotland and Wales, plus the British Methodists, Quakers, Baptists, and Reformed, along with parts of the Catholic Bishops’ conferences of England, Wales and Scotland.

“The Church of Scotland has long held the conviction that nuclear weapons serve no useful purpose for humanity,” the Moderator of the once formidable Church of Scotland recently disclaimed.  “We and others in the Christian family have led the way in challenging the morality of nuclear weapons. Our human calling is to choose life over death and the alleviation of poverty over nuclear weapons.”

In verbiage straight out of the 1980’s era nuclear freeze campaigns, the Scottish church moderator posits that dollars funding nukes equals dollars taken from starving children.  In fact, then as now, nuclear weapons are generally less expensive than their conventional alternatives.   The American nuclear umbrella protected Western Europe from Soviet aggression partly because the U.S. and NATO were unwilling to sustain conventional forces equal to the mammoth Red Army’s.

Religious Left anti-nuclear slogans pretend that all military expenditures further impoverish the already destitute. But the total military expenditures of all Western democracies, even at the Cold War’s height, were a fraction of total wealth, and never came close to equaling the equivalent expenditures of the Soviet Union and other totalitarian adversaries.  The pose that military defense harms the poor ignores that a sufficient military posture helps to ensure peace and freedom for all.  How can the value of such a gift be minimized?

Oddly, the Religious Left, despite its claimed spiritual interests, tends to focus exclusively on material benefits.  An unrestricted welfare state is for it always more important than more ethereal goals such as liberty.  “The time to scrap nuclear arsenals is now,” the Scottish church moderator insisted.  “At a time when voters are asking difficult questions about the best use of tax revenues for the benefit of the maximum number of citizens we have to consider the financial implications as well as the moral. The Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty is an opportunity to make that difference and to save lives for generations to come.”

“Now Is the Time” from the British churches, along with similar disarmament campaigns from the international Religious Left, is focused on the Non-Proliferation Treaty Review Conference next month in New York.   Although purportedly concerned about non-proliferation, the Religious Left naturally is never very concerned about rogue regimes like Iran’s or North Korea’s procuring nukes.  Instead, its focus is always on disarming the United States or Great Britain.  Ostensibly, disarmed Western democracies will serve as irresistible moral examples to radical Islamist clerics and North Korean apparatchiks, along with other tyrannies that believe nukes, justifiably, will expand their sinister global influence.

Of course, the Religious Left fails to distinguish morally between Western democracies seeking to defend their people and deter war and tyrannical rogue regimes focused exclusively on perpetuating their villainy.  If anything, the Religious Left believes the democratic West is morally inferior to its adversaries.  But more profoundly, the Religious Left neglects the traditions of its own professed faith by pretending that human nature is perfectible and that justice can be achieved through simple good will.   The Religious Left is not interested that nuclear armed Western democracies have in fact deterred countless wars while upholding the freedoms of their own peoples and spreading those freedoms internationally.  And the Religious Left will never understand that a disarmed West, particularly a pacifist United States, would only open a cavernous power vacuum that far more sinister powers would lustily attempt to fill, creating ever greater dangers to peace and liberty for all.

In short, the Religious Left and its well intentioned fellow travelers focus on the world as they wish rather than a world as it is.  “We believe that the use or threat of use of weapons of mass destruction is immoral,” proclaimed Welsh church prelates last month.  “We owe it to our children and our grandchildren to seize the opportunity to put in place a new legally binding verifiable and universal agreement to eliminate all nuclear weapons.”

The Welsh churchmen acknowledged the “spread and increasing accessibility of nuclear technology and the threat that this poses to our security.”  But naturally, they did not name any rogue states or describe why “our security” should even be a Christian concern, since the Religious Left prefers to denigrate “security” as an idol that true people of faith renounce in favor of trust and harmony.   These churchmen said they were “encouraged” by reductions in the American and Russian nuclear arsenals.  But how did the U.S. and the old Soviet Union move away from nuclear confrontation?  Was it by following the Religious Left’s demand for American unilateral disarmament or was it instead by American resolution until the Soviet Union collapsed and neither nation had any major strategic interest in overwhelming the other?  The Religious Left prefers not to answer this question.

“Most Christians believe that economic, social and political action is the best way to build positive relationships with countries that are perceived as a threat, in a world where peace, justice and security go hand in hand,” enthuses the Archbishop of Wales.  But the Cold War would not have ended so relatively peacefully had the United States relied strictly on “economic, social and political action.”  The Welsh Archbishop concludes:  “We cannot continue to threaten other countries by our possession of nuclear weapons, and at the same time denounce theirs.”

Who in the world today loses sleep because Great Britain has nukes, besides the Welsh Archbishop and a few other similarly wooly minded British clerics?  Spiritually and politically mature church prelates theoretically might offer helpful moral counsel on nuclear weapons. But more often than not, the more outspoken clerics in Britain and elsewhere merely echo the morally numb Religious Left in treating all nations as morally indistinguishable from naughty children in a sand box.

Barack Obama's unrelenting pressure on Israel and appeasement of the Palestinian jihadists is not unique: There are signs this week that he is about to start behaving the same way toward Pakistan and India.

The Wall Street Journal revealed Monday that Obama penned a secret directive last December, stating that India had to work harder to resolve its issues with Pakistan. Meanwhile, Pakistan is growing more demanding that the United States intervene in its disputes with India, and both American and Indian officials have acknowledged that the Pentagon wants the U.S. to put more pressure upon India.

All this comes in the context of a new $7.5 billion aid package to Pakistan and a solicitude toward the Pakistanis from the Obama Administration that borders on obsequiousness. Pakistani officials recently visiting the U.S. were enraged when they were subjected to extra airport scrutiny, in line with a new program that mandated additional screening for entrants into the U.S. from 13 jihadist-heavy Muslim countries (including Pakistan), as well as Cuba. They cut short their visit and returned to Pakistan, where they were widely hailed as heroes.

In response, Obama did not point to the high level of jihadist activity in Pakistan, or to the Pakistani connections of the July 7, 2005, London bombers or the New York bomb plotters who were arrested several months ago. Instead, when Pakistani Foreign Minister Shah Mahmood Qureshi flew into Manchester, England, on his way to the United States, the American Ambassador to Great Britain, Louis B. Susman, hurried from London to Manchester (a four-hour drive) to make sure that American airline security personnel didn't subject Qureshi to extra screening before he boarded his flight to the U.S.

According to the Washington Post, Susman hastened to Manchester in order to "avoid any unpleasantness-including the possibility that British-based U.S. airline security might insist on body-scanning Qureshi that might start the U.S.-Pakistan strategic dialogue in Washington off on the wrong foot."

In general, the Obama Administration is working hard to overcome what it calls a "trust deficit" with Pakistan--meaning that the United States needs to rebuild Pakistan's trust in it. And what has the U.S. done to shake Pakistan's trust in the first place? Why, ask that the Pakistanis honor their repeated commitments to fight against the Taliban and al Qaeda. The Post reported that Obama was courting Pakistan so assiduously in the hope of gaining "Pakistan's cooperation in shutting down Taliban and al Qaeda havens in that country."

We have been down this road before. In late February 2009, Qureshi declared that "Pakistan is willing to work with the American administration to fight extremism and terrorism. We are determined to defeat terrorism in all its forms and manifestations." This came five months after Pakistan's president, Asif Ali Zardari, declared: "I will work to defeat the domestic Taliban insurgency and to ensure that Pakistani territory is not used to launch terrorist attacks on our neighbors or on NATO forces in Afghanistan."

None of that was new, either. In August 2005, then-Prime Minister Shaukat Aziz thundered against terrorism: "We will fight a war against this danger to protect our independence and we will defeat it at every level." In August 2004, then-President Parvez Musharraf vowed that he would not let jihadists from Pakistan cross into Afghanistan and attempt to disrupt the elections there-a vow that Western officials met with extreme skepticism, given the sympathy for the jihad that was manifest even then at high levels in Pakistan.

Asked if the Taliban's days were numbered, Musharraf said, "It appears so," on Oct. 1, 2001. And now eight years later, Obama is making concessions to the Pakistanis and pressuring India in order to induce Pakistan to fight against the Taliban.

The Pakistani government has proven itself again and again to be an untrustworthy ally, full of sympathizers of the Taliban and al Qaeda, and unable or unwilling or both to do anything effective to counter their power. Instead of pressuring India, Obama should be strengthening our alliance with India and pressuring Pakistan. How many more American billions is the State Department going to spend for Pakistan's deception and broken promises?

Speaker Nancy Pelosi was careful to thank the Religious Left for its ardent support of Obamacare before the fateful vote in the U.S. House of Representatives.

“That is why we’re proud and also humbled today to act with the support of millions of Americans who recognize the urgency of passing health care reform,” she declared from the House floor.  “And more than 350 organizations, representing Americans of every age, every background, every part of the country, who have endorsed this legislation.”  She specifically cited the Catholic Health Association and the United Methodist Church for having lobbied Congress to “Say yes to health care reform.”

Pelosi’s website lists all the major pro-Obamacare groups to which special thanks are due.  It’s mostly labor unions but also lists the National Council of Churches, the United Methodist Board of Church and Society, and a coalition called Faithful Reform in Health Care that included Mainline Protestant agencies plus Jim Wallis’ Sojourners and the Islamic Society of North America.

A government take-over of America’s health care system is a long sought, messianic dream of many decades for the Religious Left.  But the version of Obamacare that Congress approved is still somewhat of a disappointment to the true believers, who still insist that direct federal control through a single payer system is God’s plan for medical justice.   “We are not finished,” aptly explained a cautiously pleased Jim Winkler of  the United Methodist lobby office.  “There is more work to be done in the weeks, months and years ahead to fulfill the need for health care around the globe.”  As Winkler explained divine sanction for Obamacare:  “Jesus’ ministry serves as an example and a call to serve the least and the last among us. He asked us to love our neighbor as we love ourselves — setting forth a faith grounded in God’s abundance, generosity and a capacity for love that knows no bounds.”

The Religious Left version of Jesus’ love is an unceasingly expanding federal welfare state that coercively seizes assets from one segment of society for redistribution to other segments, according to coarse political calculations, and with all the efficiency and compassion for which mammoth state bureaucracies are renowned.   Traditionally, Christianity and Judaism have understood charity as voluntary expressions of love channeled primarily through families, religious institutions and private philanthropies, with the government called to do only what other equally important social institutions cannot do for themselves.  But for the Religious Left, the state is God’s primary mediating institution.

According to the United Methodist Church’s official Social Principles:  “We believe it is a governmental responsibility to provide al citizens with health care.”  With all the theological and economic wisdom characteristic of the Religious Left, the United Methodists further declare:  “Like police and fire protection, health care is best funded through the government’s ability tax each person equitably and directly fund the provider entities.”  Apparently God endorsed government controlled health care in Ezekiel 34:4 when he told ancient Israel:  “You have not strengthened the weak, you have not healed the sick, you have not bound up the injured.”

Of course, this divine admonishment could just as well be aimed at modern Communist Cuba’s government health care, where hospital patients commonly languish without food or proper medicine or even clean sheets, absent special bribes for officials or intense attention from their families.  And it could also apply towards more democratic forms of socialized medicine in places like Great Britain, where patients must await approval for advanced medical techniques from rationing government regulatory agencies, sometimes too late.   The  Religious Left generally is not as interested in quality of result as in equality of result.  Though even the latter proves elusive in socialized medicine, which creates its own new variations of inequalities and favoritisms, as politically determined by governments rather than private forces.

Naturally, Evangelical Left icon Jim Wallis of Sojourners was much relieved by Obamacare’s passage, although he also still dreams of more direct socialized medicine. “From the very beginning, more than a year ago, the faith community called on the president and Congress to follow three principles in health-care reform:  that it be framed as a moral issue; that it provide coverage to all who need health care, and that the sanctity of life be respected with no federal funding for abortion.”  Wallis claimed that Obamacare achieved all three goals, although his third claim is especially disingenuous.

Wallis is still distressed by many Americans’ continued resistance to government-controlled health care, which evinces America’s supposedly “poisonous political atmosphere.” Inevitably, he rehashed accusations that “anti-health care ‘tea party’ demonstrators” hurled racial epithets at pro-Obamacare congressmen.  After all, what else could explain opposition to Big Government than racism as part of a larger “massive campaign of distortion and fear?”   Wallis ominously opined that Obamacare will be “improved over time” and one “step” towards fixing a “broken system.”

Professional Religious Left activists like Wallis primarily see religion as an organizing tool for extinguishing private alternatives to state control of health care and virtually every other facet of human life.  Obamacare, with its frustrating maintenance of private insurance, is an insufficient but a hoped for first step towards the eradication of private medicine and, the Religious Left inwardly hopes, ultimately of the private economy and private charity.   After all, there is no salvation outside Big Government.

We are now ready to continue with our discussion of The Michael Coren show, Part 2. Please take the time, once again, to watch both segments.

Part 1 is here. Part 2 is above. And my discussion of Part 1 is here.

Returning from the station break, this segment begins with Tarek Fatah in apparent medias res explaining that the West's perception of Islam is flawed because it sees everything through the prism of Arab Islam, while the Islam practiced in the subcontinent, Tarek Fatah's neck of the woods, is so very very different.

There's Bangladesh, for example, with 150 million people, and yet in Bangladesh, he says, "whenever they get a chance they vote out the extremists." And neither Michael Coren, nor anyone in the audience, is likely to know what this means, to know who are "extremists" and who the good guys, relatively speaking. I presume that Tarek Fatah means the first head of an independent Bangladesh, back in 1971, Mujibur Rahman, and also Mujibur Rahman's daughter, the head of the "secular" Awami League, where "secular" means, as almost always in such cases, less fanatically a follower of the Shari'a rules, less fervently a Muslim, than those who oppose them. In his passing allusion to Bangladesh, Tarek Fatah makes no mention -- why not? -- of the many current examples of popular Muslim intolerance. He is content to limit himself to the misleading statement that when given a chance, Bangladeshis "throw out the despots." Is that quite enough? He fails to mention, for example, that Taslima Nasrin, the celebrated apostate, had to flee from Bangladesh to India in fear of her life, because of threats by Muslims eager to kill her, and a government unwilling to protect her. Is it the position of Tarek Fatah that if the Awami League were running things, Taslima Nasrin could live safely in Bangladesh?

And he does not mention, either, that astonishingly brave editor and journalist, Mr. Salah Choudhury, who dared to write words of sympathy and support for Israel, and for Hindus and Christians too. Choudhury has been under almost constant pressure - death threats, physical attacks, charges of treason, and finally, arrest and formal charges laid, all because he is a true and brave version of what we in the West would dearly wish all "moderate Muslims" to be. Shouldn't Tarek Fatah have done more than pretend that Islam somehow changes its spots, and so do Muslims, when we move from the Arab countries to Pakistan and Bangladesh?

In fact, it is not only Taslima Nasrin and Salah Choudhury and their persecutors and would-be murderers whom Tarek Fatah gives not a hint about, as he attempts to convince the audience that there is some great difference between "Arab Islam" and the Islam to be found in Pakistan and Bangladesh. He knows this isn't true, and he knows, furthermore, that Pakistanis not only try to emulate the Arabs, but many of them have created a false Arab lineage for themselves - look at all the Pakistani Sayeeds.

He could have taken a different tack. He could have deplored the persecution of Hindus, Christians, Buddhists, Sikhs. He could have described the attacks on those Hindus. He could have compared the percentage of the population that was non-Muslim in Pakistan at Partition, in 1947, and today, and pointedly wondered why that was, when the percentage of Muslims in the Indian population has in the same period gone steadily up. He could have even have told of the Hindus who have been beaten to death by Muslims, inflamed by the khutbas at Friday Prayers, for the sole crime of being in the neighborhood of the mosque when the Muslim worshippers existed.

And if even Awami League members - the non-despots in Tarek Fatah's version of events - lead the attacks on Salah Choudury, just how "moderate" is this Awami League?

For Tarek Fatah, Bangladesh is simply the place where "every time they hold an election, they throw out the despots." To which one wishes to ask a few more questions: how do the despots who are being thrown out get in in the first place? And just how often are there elections in Bangladesh to throw out "the despots"? And what difference, in the end, has it made to the lives of Hindus, Christians, and Buddhists living in Bangladesh, or to those brave souls, such as Taslima Nasrin and Mr. Choudhury, if it's the Muslim despots or the Muslim non-despots in power who persecute them? Wasn't it Awami League members who repeatedly threatened and then attacked Salah Choudury? Who in Bangladesh among the "non-despots" stood up for Taslima Nasrin? Of what relevance is what he maintains to the fate of non-Muslims, or of those who are apostates, or of those who would like policies that are not quite so rabidly anti-Infidel?

Then Michael Coren says: Well, what about Pakistan, the country you are from? Isn't that a country with religious extremists, with "radical fundamentalist Islam" in the saddle? Not at all, answers Tarek Fatah.

Pakistan, too, seems just like Bangladesh in the view of Tarek Fatah. If, in Bangladesh, whenever they have elections the despots, and the religious parties, are voted out, it's the same rosy picture in Pakistan, where "the Islamists were defeated in elections." In passing, we might note that if we had to award a LEAST FANATICAL MUSLIM prize - Tarek Fatah could award it - and the two contestants were Pakistan (formerly West Pakistan) and Bangladesh (formerly East Pakistan), we might indeed award the prize to Bangladesh. Why? Well, during the 1971 war, in which the Pakistani Army, largely officered by people from West Pakistan, attempted to crush the people of what was then East Pakistan, part of their effort consisted of trying to convince the people in East Pakistan that they simply had to remain within Pakistan, because, so the argument went, if Pakistan became two countries, that would damage Pakistan, Land of the Pure, and thus damage Islam. And nothing should be allowed to damage Islam.

And then, too, the people in East Pakistan who were most fanatically Muslim, most willing to fight to keep Pakistan together, the razakars, were distinguished by their fanatical Muslim faith. And so, when an independent Bangladesh came into being, under its first president, Mujibur Rahman, the most fanatical Muslims, those former collaborators with the Pakistani army, were in bad odor. And that has had its subsequent effect. It is of note, however, that Bangladeshis in the West do not appear to be less fanatically Muslim than Pakistanis, but in the West, of course, the differences exhibited within Dar al-Islam become so much less significant, because the Infidels are right there, just waiting to be hated.

But that war took place way back in 1971, in practically antediluvian days. You don't really expect Tarek Fatah to talk about, or even remember, any of that, do you? Why, that would be like expecting people in the American government dealing with Nigeria today to remember the Biafra War, that lasted from 1967 to 1969, and of course they don't. The motto of those "taking a leadership role" in the media and in politics consists of two words, uttered proudly: Born Yesterday.

And while Tarek Fatah had insisted that in Pakistan, "the Islamists were defeated in elections," it is clear that his definition of "Islamists" does not include those such as Western-educated, daughter-of-zamindar, Pinky Bhutto, she of Briggs Hall, Radcliffe (where she loved the freedom of walking to Harvard Square, without a bodyguard in tow, and buying newspapers at Nini's Corner), and who in the West is thought of as our sort, because of Harvard, because of Oxford, because of her Anglophone plausibility. But you can see Prime Minister Bhutto on YouTube, screaming about "Jihad" against the Indians over Kashmir. And you can see others whom Tarek Fatah would no doubt consider to be practically "secular" behaving the same way - well, compared to General Zia ul-Haq I suppose they are secular, but is that really a consolation to Infidels around the world?

Michael Coren introduces a discordant note: what about the treatment of Christians in Pakistan? What about those blasphemy laws which have allowed the prosecution, and even death sentences, passed against Christians accused of "blasphemy" of Islam? Coren did not mention the beating to death of 10-year-old Christian maids, nor the burning alive of Christian families in their houses by Muslim mobs. And what does Tarek Fatah say about this? Oh, he admits that there have been problems with the Christians, though he does not repeat the word Coren uses, "killed" or "murdered" when he is in the very act, the seeming act, of volunteering even more: "oh yes, whole villages have been attacked." And so, according to Tarek Fatah, the secularists in the government of course want to change "those blasphemy laws," but unfortunately their hands are tied. Oh why? Well, because of the very large religious groups, the Jamaat-i-Islami, and the Muslim Brotherhood too, and also the Intelligence Services, and they are all "threatening to overthrow that government if there is a change in the blasphemy laws."

Well, what about it? What Tarek Fatah is saying is that one of the largest religio-political groups in Pakistan, with millions of members, the powerful Jamaat-e-Islami, and the powerful Muslim Brotherhood, and the single most powerful group within the military, the shadowy I.S.I., friend and promoter and now protector of A. Q. Khan, won't allow for a change in the blasphemy laws. But if no civilian government dares to undo the blasphemy laws - gee, I wonder why Tarek Fatah failed to mention Bishop John Joseph, who to protest the endless cruelty of Pakistani Muslims toward the Christians made himself a martyr, some years ago, to bring attention to the plight of Pakistan's Christians. But no one heard, and no one hears now, certainly not in the banana-peel-strewn corridors of power in Washington or London.

So let's get this straight. You are being asked to believe that Pakistan is a place where both the civilian leadership (i.e., the Anglophone zamindars, who own whatever the military doesn't own) and the military are secular, moderate, and so on, and would happily do away with those blasphemy laws. But it's just that pesky I.S.I. (apparently separate from the military) and just that pesky Jamaat-e-Islami getting in the way.

Of course Tarek Fatah will not allude to what's wrong with Pakistan. But he doesn't have to, at least on this program, explain or explain away why Pakistan's national heroine is someone now in an American jail for terrorism, Aafia Siddiqui, or why the national hero of Pakistan is the ferociously anti-American and anti-Infidel A. Q. Khan, a metallurgist who stole Western nuclear secrets and managed to bring them back to Pakistan, where American taxpayers unwittingly footed the bill for the development of Pakistan's nuclear project and what it calls its "Islamic bomb," and then went on to offer nuclear secrets to, inter alia, North Korea, Iran, and Libya. No, he doesn't have time to go into any details about Bangladesh and Pakistan.

And then, just to establish his credentials as a "moderate" by offering a criticism of something Muslim, Tarek Fatah lights into the "despotic" regimes of the Middle East. But he has something else in view. He wants us to understand that it these "despotisms" that explain Muslim terrorism - and not, not, not what Islam inculcates. Perhaps, in Tarek Fatah's view, Mr. Al-Zahawiri and Mr. Bin Laden were in their youths deeply impressed with that famous line of George Bernard Shaw, describing a country that possessed a "despotism tempered by dynamite." Except that the "dynamite" in question turns out to be terrorist attacks in Amsterdam, Madrid, and London, by Muslims living in the Netherlands, Spain, and Great Britain, not one of them a despotism, and other attacks that have been made on Christians by Muslims in Nigeria (if a despotism, one run by Muslims), in Indonesia and in the Sudan and in Iraq and in Egypt (all of them countries run by Muslims, all of them with elections) and in many other places too, while other non-Muslims, Hindus and Buddhists and Confucians, have been subject to attacks by Muslim terrorists in India, in Pakistan, in Bangladesh, in Thailand, in Indonesia.

Tarek Fatah never explains why his charge - that "in the West" we talk of Islam "essentially in Arab terms" - makes any sense. There is not one Islam for the Arabs and another for the non-Arabs. The texts are identical. The tenets are identical. It would be true to say that some among the 80% of the world's Muslims who are not Arabs find that their non-Arab identity can help cool the natural fanaticism that Islam commands, because they have another identity, something other than Islam to look to - think of the Kurds, the Berbers, even the Iranians - something which the Arabs do not possess, for the Arab self-consciousness about Arab identity, 'Uruba, reinforces rather than weakens the hold of Islam, as "the gift of the Arabs." But of all the non-Arab Muslims, it is probably the Pakistanis who have the most problem finding an alternate identity. Few of them wish to consider the circumstances under which their Hindu (or Buddhist, or Jain) ancestors converted to Islam in order to escape the anguish of being non-Muslims who were not even entitled to the status of dhimmis. (Eventually that changed, when Muslim rulers realized it made sense not to kill or forcibly convert all Hindus, for that would destroy the Jizyah-tax base.)

Pakistanis are not interested in Bharat, and the Wonder That Was India. They are not even interested in the ruins at Mohenjo-Daro. For them, the world begins and ends with Islam. Why doesn't Tarek Fatah even hint at any of this? He's not unintelligent. He knows perfectly well what I am talking about here. It is because he has chosen to stick with Islam, rather than to become an apostate. And that means, perforce, he will always at some level remain an apologist - not as sinister as some, but still, not someone to be relied on, not someone to be trusted. And his outburst against Wafa Sultan is the last nail in the coffin of his trustworthiness.

But let's come back to that "Arab Islam" business having no relevance to Pakistan, to Bangladesh. He still has said not one word about how the ideology of Islam might differ, and we know that his claims about "the despots" being tossed out in Bangladesh and the "Islamists losing" at the polls in Pakistan are false, or meaningless, or both. Everyone in Pakistan is rooting for Aafia Siddiqui - everyone, including the handful of Anglophone families who own most of the country and who have lived in the West, and experienced the mental freedom of the West. What does that tell us that should give us cause for hope? And now Michael Coren chooses to turn to a guest not in the studio, but presumably, being beamed in from the windswept high oil-falutin' plains of Alberta, for that guest is a former journalist with the Calgary Herald, Joan Crockatt.

She's bright-faced, she's cheery. She doesn't stop to think, even for a minute, before speaking, because, you see, she doesn't have to, and if, later on, she utters a complete fatuity, her very obliviousness to her own fatuousness pulls her - smiling - through. There are no shadows, no doubts, no complexities, in the mind of Joan Crockatt; she understands things and doesn't understand why other people have such trouble understanding them, especially when everything is so...so obvious. Not a shadow of a doubt about this or anything, her radiant face seems to say, even before her voice does.

Michael Coren brings her into the discussion about Muslim extremism and violence, and who and what explains it. Is it, he asks her, only "radical fundamentalist Islam"? He says also that "there are those who say it is Islam itself." He is careful to add that "I believe that to be wrong."

Joan Crockatt is amazed that anyone would even ask that question:

"Of course it's radical Islam, and when we start painting [sic] all Muslims with the same brush, this hysteria is the kind of thing that fomets [sic] fear among people. The basic thing that Sun Tzu says is know thy enemy. Okay, we know our enemy it's radical Islam...but get your allies on-side and allies are the moderate Muslims who are living everyday lives in Canada, who want the same thing for their kinds, to do well in school, to go to university, to get a nice job as a pharmacist or doctor or whatever." And then Joan Crockatt starts babbling about one "Kim Bohlen who used to cover Sikhist extremism and is one of the foremost experts in the media" And those Sikh terrorists "used to allow the Tamil Tigers to come in and do their fundraising," but then they - those Sikhs - "they decided no, this is giving all Sikhs a band name" and "that was when we actually started got to the bottom of the Tamil Tigers problem."

Coren, aghast: "Tamil Tigers. Did you mean the Tamil Tigers?"

Crockatt: "Tamil Tigers." Pause. More pause. Trying to think, trying and not really succeeding. "Ah, maybe not, but the Tamil Tigers were raising money, and the ethnic communities which I guess is my point were seeking to cull themselves of the problem..." Well, it doesn't matter, thinks Joan Crockatt, if she got a little thing wrong like confusing the Tamil Tigers, down there in Sri Lanka, with the Sikhs way up there in the Punjab. Who cares - it's all about India, isn't it? Why nit-pick? She is the type who might ask: Does anyone think there's a difference between one kind of "African" and another? Joan Crockatt knows just how silly it is to focus on these little details.

"The point is, Michael, the point is...The ethnic communities which I guess is my point..." (2.55)

And then a hint, just a hint, that she might be confused, and that she should try, on national television, to start making sense: Joan says, at 2.53, well, "I might have to check my...my things there." Her "things."

Michael Coren asks about those Christian schoolgirls who were beheaded by Muslims while "on the way to class in Indonesia." And then about the Muslim terror attacks in Europe where, Coren notes, 30-40% of the Muslims in the countries involved, when asked if they approved of such attacks, said "Possibly, possibly." In fact, Coren is wrong. I think he knows it. They did not answer "possibly, possibly." They answered that they approved of those attacks. There were surely many other Muslims who approved but did not think it wise to say it openly to those taking a poll that would be read by their non-Muslim neighbors, acquaintances, restaurant clients, employers.

Joan Crockatt at this point surprises, for she does not deny, as we might expect, these poll results from Muslims. In fact, she even volunteers that in the Middle East there were people celebrating the 9/11/2001 attacks, but quickly adds her own explanation as to why people engaged in such celebrations:

"In certain countries we are all homers [Apparently a "homer" is someone who roots for the home team. Is that it? Canadian readers, please help out] and we feel that if our team is winning that's a good thing." (3.54-3.55)

Let me repeat that line, to make sure you take that in. In Part 2, at 3.54, of this Michael Coren Show, Joan Crockatt, a journalist formerly with the Calgary Herald, explaining to a nationwide audience in Canada why it is that many Muslims who live in Europe support terrorism, and why many Muslims in the Middle East expressed their delight over the 9/11/2001 attacks in New York and Washington, says this:

"In certain countries we are all homers and we feel that if our team is winning that's a good thing."

"If our team is winning" is Joan Crockatt's way of describing acts of Muslim terrorism against Infidels. To her it is perfectly reasonable to rally round the home team, for we all feel, don't we, that "if our team is winning that 's a good thing."

Sophie Scholl and her brother Hans and others in the White Rose anti-Nazi network in Munich, did not feel that they should be rooting for the home team - Nazi Germany - but instead did everything they could to work for a defeat of their "home team." So did Oleg Penkovsky, for his Soviet "home team." And so have many others, thank god, including Mus'ab Hassan Yousuf, when he refused to bat for his "home team" of Hamas.

But the Scholls, brother and sister, lived in an age before there was televised sports, and perhaps that is why they didn't exhibit the natural human tendency to "root for the home team." Perhaps they would react differently now. I don't know. Ask Joan Crockatt.

And according to Joan Crockatt, Muslims may once have cheered for the home team, they were cheering in the streets, they were thinking that all this terrorism "was a good thing" (4:05), but now they are coming around - that is, coming around to the view that terrorism is not such a great thing even if it's committed by the home team. For, she says at 4.12, that "now people are understanding that this puts all of our human rights at risk." And that is "a global issue and a global problem."

This statement mystifies. What does it mean? Does it mean that Muslim terrorism causes Western governments to put more stringent laws into place, to install security cameras, and conduct searches, and monitor mosques? Is that what she means when she says that "this" (I assume she means Muslim terrorism) is no longer supported by Muslims, not because it's bad to blow up Infidel office workers or people on subways and busses and planes, but because it is the Western reaction to this terrorism that "puts all of our human rights at risk"?

Bye for now to Joan Crockatt, as we wipe the tears of laughter from our eyes, and try to ignore the despair that is in our hearts.

And now it is time for another station break.

The complaints leveled against Israel by European countries and Australia, regarding the alleged misuse of passports by the Mossad in the assassination of Mahmoud al-Mabhouh, ring hollow and smack of blatant hypocrisy.  Whoever did kill Mahmoud al-Mabhouh—whether it was the Israeli Mossad or someone else—clearly did have their agents use stolen or forged passports.  Big deal.

Every good intelligence agency uses stolen and forged passports.  The British have been especially adept at this means of spycraft.  No country that uses fake passports in their intelligence operations has the moral authority to complain about the alleged misuse of passports in this case.  The only ones that have a legitimate grievance are those individuals whose passports may have been misused without their knowledge.

I guess it’s the job of foreign ministries to complain publicly when other nations do what they themselves do secretly.  Hypocrisy is, after all, the homage that vice pays to virtue.  I’m reminded of the famous scene in Casablanca, when officer Renault declares, “I’m shocked, shocked to find that gambling is going on in here!” A croupier then approaches Renault, and hands him a roll of currency: “Your winnings, sir.”

The hypocrisy in this case seems even more blatant than usual.  Is it because Israel is the alleged offender, and the world has gotten accustomed to singling out Israel for double standard condemnation?

Shortly after the terrorist attacks in Bali, which killed a large number of Australian tourists, I had the opportunity to meet with the Australian Prime Minister.  I was writing a book at the time on preemption, and I asked him whether he would have authorized a preemptive attack on the terrorist who killed Australian citizens, if such an attack would have saved their lives.  His response was that Australia would have done anything it could, to prevent these terrorist attacks.  Anything, I guess, except misusing passports!  Is there anybody who believes that Australia would not have used forged or stolen passports to prevent the Bali massacres?  If Great Britain could have stopped the London subway attack by misusing passports, would M6 have allowed the terrorism to go forward in the name of preserving passport integrity?  Of course not.  The same is true of Spain with regard to the Madrid bombing and to every other country in the world that seeks to prevent terrorism.  Well, if the Mossad did in fact kill al-Mabhouh, they too did it to prevent the killing of their innocent civilians.

The Israelis are always accused by their enemies, and sometimes even by their friends, of taking “disproportionate” action to stop terrorists.  But what could be more proportionate than a carefully planned and specifically targeted attack on an admitted terrorist who boasted of being an active combatant?  Whoops! I guess I forgot about those darn passports. That must be the disproportionate action complained about.  Saving innocent lives, on the one hand—misusing passports on the other.  I guess the right moral resolution, according to some foreign ministries, is to let innocent victims die—at least as long as its only Israeli victims.

It’s interesting, and disturbing, that more criticism is being directed against Israel for allegedly using stolen passports than for allegedly killing a terrorist.  That’s because no western country wants to appear to be sympathetic to a terrorist.  The “victims” of passport fraud are innocent civilians, but the injury they have suffered pales in comparison to the injuries—deaths—prevented by the well-deserved death of Mahmoud al-Mabhouh.

If the deaths of a small number of innocent civilians is deemed “proportional” to the killing of a terrorist combatant, than surely the discomfort of a small number of innocent victims of passport fraud is proportional.

The high dudgeon expressed by foreign ministries over stolen passports is worse than hypocritical.  It undercuts the war against terrorism.

There ought to be concern, among western democracies, about how easy it is to use forged or stolen passports.  Dubai should be conducting an investigation, but the focus should be on how simple it was for those carrying these phony passports to get into their country.  The misuse of passports is, after all, a primary tool used by terrorists to smuggle themselves into western countries, from which they can engage in worldwide terrorism.  There are thousands of forged and fraudulent British passports circulating around the world today.  Many are in the hands of terrorists.  That should be the focus of any investigation, not the occasional and controlled misuse of passports by western intelligence agencies to combat terrorism.

Whoever snuck into Dubai using fake passports may have done that country a service in warning them to tighten up their passport procedures.  Next time it may be a terrorist who tries to enter the country.  Wait!  Isn’t that exactly what happened when al-Mabhouh walked through security using a real passport with his real name?  I guess in Dubai you don’t have to use a fake passport if you’re a terrorist, but you do if you’re trying to stop terrorists—at least if the terrorism is directed only against Israel.  I guess Dubai is less concerned about letting terrorists into their country with real passports than in letting those who would stop terrorism into their country with fake passports.  It’s a topsy-turvy world out there.

I don’t know whether Israel did or did not assassinate the leader of the Hamas military wing, Mahmoud al-Mabhouh.  But assuming for argument’s sake that the Mossad made the hit, did it have the right to engage in this “extrajudicial assassination?”

Not all extrajudicial killings are unlawful.  Every soldier who kills an enemy combatant engages in an extrajudicial killing, as does every policeman who shoots a fleeing felon.  There are several complex legal questions involved in assessing these situations.

First, was the person who was killed a combatant, in relation to those killed him?  If Israel killed Mabhouh, there can be absolutely no doubt that he was a combatant.  He was actively participating in an ongoing war by Hamas against Israeli civilians.  Indeed, it is likely that he was killed while on a military mission to Iran in order to secure unlawful, anti-personnel rockets that target Israeli civilians.  Both the United States and Great Britain routinely killed such combatants during the Second World War, whether they were in uniform or not.  Moreover, Hamas combatants deliberately remove their uniforms while engaged in combat.

So if the Israeli Air Force had killed Mabhouh while he was in Gaza, there would be absolutely no doubt that their action would be lawful.  It does not violate international law to kill a combatant, regardless of where the combatant is found, whether he is awake or asleep and whether or not he is engaged in active combat at the moment of his demise.

But Mabhouh was not killed in Gaza.  He was killed in Dubai.  It is against the law of Dubai for an Israeli agent to kill a combatant against Israel while he is in Dubai.  So the people who engaged in the killing presumptively violated the domestic law of Dubai, unless there is a defense to such a killing based on international principles regarding enemy combatants.  It is unlikely that any defense would be available to an Israeli or someone working on behalf of Israel, since Dubai does not recognize Israel’s right to kill enemy combatants on its territory.

If it could be proved that Israel was responsible for the hit—an extremely unlikely situation—then only Dubai could lawfully bring Israelis to trial.  They would not be properly subjected to prosecution before an international tribunal.  But what if a suspect was arrested in England, the United States or some other western country and Dubai sought his extradition?  That would pose an interesting legal, diplomatic, political and moral dilemma.  Traditional extradition treaties do not explicitly cover situations of this kind.  This was not an ordinary murder.  It was carried out as a matter of state policy as part of an ongoing war.  A western democracy would certainly have the right and the power to refuse to extradite.  But they might decide, for political or diplomatic reasons, to turn the person over to Dubai.

Turning now to the moral considerations, which might influence a decision whether to extradite, the situation is even murkier.  The Goldstone report suggests that Israel cannot lawfully fight Hamas rockets by wholesale air attacks.  Richard Goldstone, in his interviews, has suggested that Israel should protect itself from these unlawful attacks by more proportionate retail measures, such as commando raids and targeted killing of terrorists engaged in the firing of rockets.  Well, there could be no better example of a proportionate, retail and focused attack on a combatant who was deeply involved in the rocket attacks on Israel, than the killing of Mahmoud al-Mabhouh.  Not only was Mabhouh the commander in charge of Hamas’ unlawful military actions at the time of his death, he was also personally responsible for the kidnapping and coldblooded murder of two Israeli soldiers several years earlier.

Obviously it would have been better if he could have been captured and subjected to judicial justice.  But it was impossible to capture him, especially when he was in Dubai.  If Israel was responsible for the killing, it had only two options: to let him go on his way and continue to endanger Israeli civilian lives by transferring unlawful anti-personnel weapons from Iran to Gaza, or to kill him.  There was no third alternative.  Given those two options, killing seems like the least tragic choice available.

Here's a fresh report from the frontlines of Eurabia: Erick Stakelbeck interviews jihadists in London. "London's Islamic Radicals Speak Out," by Erick Stakelbeck for CBN News, February 9:

Great Britain recently raised its terror alert to "severe" following reports that al Qaeda was plotting new attacks.

But Britain may be facing an even greater threat from within -- one the British government helped to create.

CBN News recently traveled to London to interview a number of leading Islamic radicals who have settled there with the full knowledge of the British government.

All Eyes on London

Just one year before attempting to blow up an airliner over Detroit, Christmas Day bombing suspect Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab studied engineering at University College London.

During his stay there, he networked with known Islamic radicals. Security sources believe he may have linked up with al Qaeda.

Abdulmutallab is just one of many Islamic terrorists with ties to London. Some live there with help from the state.

One example is Yasser al-Sirri, who faces a death sentence in Egypt.

Then there is Anjem Choudary. To date, he has not been charged with terrorism, but his pro-jihad views have led some to call him Great Britain's most hated man.

"Many people love the idea of jihad, you know?" Choudary told CBN News. "And they want to engage in it."

A radical Islamist can find a little bit of everything in London. Ex-jihadists, current jihadists, "wannabe" jihadists: they're all there. So how did this happen?

During the 1980s and 1990s, British authorities granted asylum to a number of Islamic terrorists wanted in their home countries.

"All of this happened under the assumption that if you allowed these people to operate in London, if you allowed them to do whatever they wanted to do, they would not be attacking Britain," terrorism expert Peter Neumann explained....

And that assumption, of course, comes from the pandemic willful ignorance regarding the jihad doctrine within Islam.

Robert Spencer's "Islamic Nazis" is a very welcome reminder of what's on the horizon for us all.

In his recent idiocies at a ceremony held for a book titled Civilizations, Nomadic Migrations, Empires and The Trail of Islam at the Islamic Arts Museum in Kuala Lumpur, former Prime Minister Mahathir bin Muhammad seriously referred to the 9/11 Jihadist horror jokingly, with the following comments :

"The way the tower came crashing down was also funny (...) I have great respect for the Arabs but for them to hijack four planes is not very Arab. Just imagine the amount of planning that would be involved." Rejecting any claims that he was being insensitive to the victims, Mahathir stressed that he was "being more sensitive to the victims" as he was simply saying the attacks were carried out "deliberately." He also said that his views about how 9/11/2001 attacks were carried out would not affect Malaysia's chances of attracting foreign investment. "I have said this many times even when I was the prime minister. But we still have the foreign direct investment. However, we cannot rely on foreign direct investments alone. We must build on our own system," he said.

On several occasions I have denounced, at the UNCHR, the crass lunacies of Mahathir bin Muhammad - but no condemnation emanated from the 'international community's conscience of the world'. Below is an extract from WUPJ's Appeal to Acting High Commissioner for Human Rights Bertrand Ramcharan, which I drafted 6½ years ago, having raised the matter earlier in an oral statement at the UN Commission on Human Rights. Rabbi François Garaï and I signed it and The National Review reprinted it in Oct. 21, 2003.

URGENT APPEAL
To Acting High Commissioner for Human Rights Bertrand Ramcharan  
on Prime Minister Mahathir bin Muhammad's Madding Judeophobia

(...) In fact, Prime Minister Mahathir Muhammad was simply true to form. Already in October 1986, a day after PLO-dissident Abu Nidal's killers massacred 23 Jews at worship in Istanbul's "Gates of Peace" synagogue (Neve Shalom), he told the 101-Member Movement of the Non-Aligned countries (Harare, Zimbabwe): "The expulsion of Jews from the Holy Land some two thousand years ago and the Nazi oppression have taught them nothing. If at all, it has transformed the Jews into the very monsters that they condemn so roundly in their propaganda material. They are apt pupils of Dr Goebbels." (New York Times / IHT - October 8, 1986).

On that occasion also, not one 'Non-Aligned' delegation reacted. Two months later Malaysia inaugurated an "Anti-Jews Day" (New York Times, Dec. 8, 1986), and during his State visit to Great Britain in July 1987 he again affirmed: "The Jews have been apt pupils of Dr. Goebbels." In March 1994 Schindler's List was banned in Malaysia - on the grounds that it was "Jewish propaganda." In 1997 he blamed the Asian financial crisis on the "Jews," explaining his views: "We are Muslims, and the Jews are not happy to see Muslims progress."

Yes, it was those colonels who were made so much of, because in Anbar, so the story goes, the American army after many false starts was at long last in Iraq "getting it right. " And what they were "getting right" was, above all, an understanding of the subtleties of Iraqi society, and particularly of its tribes. In so doing, they had hit, it was said, on the "key" to understanding Iraqis, and dealing with its many competing groups successfully.

Yes, for quite some time, you will remember, we were treated to stories about the brilliant and "unorthodox" colonels who were thinking outside the box, that sort of thing. They included mediagenic personalities, such as Colonel Kilcullen, seconded from the Australian army, who impressed for a number of reasons - his language, clearly strine, his expertise (he was said to have studied the sociology of Indonesia and helped thereby to put down rebellions there), and - who knows? - possibly even his rakish Australian hat, if he was allowed to wear it, brim up on one side, all Breaker-Morant and Crocodile-Dundee. What, however, his training in sociology in Indonesia could contribute to the situation in Iraq is unclear. That training was a far cry, I suspect, from what C. Snouck Hurgronje studied, and felt was important, as an advisor to the government of the Dutch East Indies, to bring to the attention of those trying to keep local Muslims under control. Nonetheless, read the recent crop of books on Iraq - such as those by Thomas Ricks - and see what a prominent role is given to these people, the advisers who plucked victory from what looked like certain defeat.

Now let's get back to David Galula. Certainly Galula, who was a Jew born in Tunisia, and who later joined the French army, knew Arabic and knew the psychology of those with whom the French Army had to deal. But the French Army in Algeria was also dealing with a situation in which there were more than a million non-Muslims (French, along with Spanish, Italians, even Maltese) in Algeria, whose support could be called on. In Iraq, there was no such non-Muslim local presence (the terrified Assyrians and Chaldeans hardly count), and the "insurgency" was not easily identified (as in Algeria), because there were many different groups in Iraq -- Sunni Arabs, Shi'a Arabs, Kurds -- all of whom had their own interests. And all of these groups, at various times, could find it advantageous to make temporary common cause with the Infidel Americans - not in order to promote American or Infidel interests, but to promote their own sectarian or ethnic interests inside Iraq.

I wrote about those I dubbed the "Galula-ites" several times. Here's one of those times, in a fleeting comment on a thread in May 2007 (here edited a bit for clarity):

The Galula-ites will make much of this [the killing of an Al-Qaeda-in-Iraq leader by other Jihadists]. They think that the fact that Sunni tribes, or some of them, have turned against, and are prepared to act against, Al-Qaeda, is a sign of some great change. It isn't. There was always a division between the local Sunnis and the outsiders who came to join Al-Qaeda in Iraq. And if there is now a clash between them, that clash is to be welcomed but not given exaggerated importance (as one intelligent Iraqi blogger -- possibly one of the Fadhil brothers at Iraq the Model -- noted a month or two ago).

The American "counter-insurgency" experts around Petraeus, and Petraeus himself, need to focus on Islam. They need to see the worldwide problem and ask themselves how the outcome in Iraq can or can not contribute to weakening the Camp of Islam internally, through the sectarian and ethnic fissures that it offers. They need to see how that outcome would help to encourage, elsewhere in Dar al-Islam, the spectacle of intra-Muslim aggression that would offer Infidels a Demonstration Project (akin to that going on in Gaza) of the behaviors of Muslims, in societies thoroughly suffused with Islam, and not held in check by a despot or a collection of despots (as the Al-Saud in Saudi Arabia).

If they do so, they will stop making jejune pronouncements about the "laws of counter-insurgency" of the "on average, insurgencies last ten years" variety, and come to comprehend that Islam here is the key, Islam that explains why there is not one but many insurgencies. Islam is the only thing that is held in common by the various insurgents: Al-Qaeda, the much larger population of Sunnis (including the Sunni tribesmen now being killed, and killing, Al Qaeda members), the Shi'a groups from those of Dawa and SCIRI to the lower-depths troglodyte Moqtada al-Sadr and his Jaish al-Mahdi, and the Kurds, with their own quite distinct interests. All of the Arabs (not the Kurds) share a common hostility, a permanent hostility, to the Americans -- a hostility that is rooted in Islam. At the moment, 98% of the Sunnis polled support attacks on Americans, whereas "only" 70-95% of the Shi'a do so. Great.

When will Petraeus and those who apparently think the "strategy" of David Galula in Algeria would have worked, "if only" the French government and people had allowed it to do so, see this? (And that too must be factored in, must be understood -- the American people, though not its semi-demented government, do not wish to pour another few hundred billion dollars into Iraq. They do not wish to see first the civilian army, and then the regular army, become ever more shredded and demoralized and relieved of its best potential recruits and its younger officers, who are now leaving in noticeable and disturbing, but quite understandable, numbers.)

Petraeus and those experts need to ask themselves some hard questions when they read something as shallow as Arthur Herman's attempt to liken the insurgency situation in Algeria faced by the French with that faced by the Americans in Iraq. They should not be delighted with such a piece, but should ask themselves how an intelligent man could write something so oblivious to the very deep differences between the two cases, beginning with the fact that France had a million civilian French in Algeria and had ruled the country for 132 years, and its aim was to stay, and there was no larger context for it to consider, whereas in Iraq, the context is a worldwide Jihad, whose instruments are not, pace Bush, only terror, but rather the money weapon (the ten trillion dollars received by Muslim nations from oil and gas sales since 1973), campaigns of Da'wa (carefully-targeted and well-financed, all over the Western world), and demographic conquest (which is finally being noticed, but with shrugs of despair, or pollyannish determination to ignore grim Islam-based realities).

Those who blithely assign, and blithely invoke, Galula or any other supposed magical guide or solution are jejune in their understanding of Islam, of Iraq, of what in Iraq can be turned to our advantage, and what goals are attainable and make sense, and what goals are unattainable, and were they to be attained, would make no sense.

We need such people as these to be in charge in Iraq, and to start telling the truth to what appears to be a hallucinating, obstinate, semi-demented leadership: Bush, Cheney, and those who insist upon doing their bidding, and repeating their every word of miscomprehension and terminal confusion.

But until a few days ago, I was unaware that those colonels working under or for General Petraeus had also consulted not only an unknown officer in the French army - David Galula - but also someone else. And that someone turned out to be quite well known. He is someone whose baleful influence, whose mythomanic and pseudo-poetic memoirs, have done such damage to British (and Western) policy toward the Arabs (and, by extension, toward other Muslims). That guide to dealing with the Arabs, apparently much consulted by those Leavenworth colonels, turns out to be T. E. Lawrence, known to many - and especially to young Americans who first encounter him on the silver screen, in David Lean's entertaining fantasy, and then grow up to be officers in the American military - as "Lawrence of Arabia."

A new article, by Bertram Wyatt-Brown, recently published in The Journal of the Historical Society, titled "Lawrence of Arabia: Image and Reality" and brought to my attention in a piece by Daniel Pipes, maintains - according to Pipes' synopsis -- that T. E. Lawrence was the figure most consulted by some of the colonels who formed General Petraeus' celebrated brain trust. Wyatt-Brown maintains that Lawrence has served as a talismanic guide for these American strategists. In particular, they saw him as an expert who could provide them with the knowledge they would need, based on the vast wisdom he had presumably accumulated in organizing Arab (Bedouin) tribesman for that famous "Arab Revolt" we have all heard so much about, the one that some think really inflicted great damage on the Turks, and was - they think -- of such importance in the Allied war effort in the Middle East. They have been particularly impressed, Wyatt-Brown maintains, with a piece he wrote based on his dealings with the Arab sheikhs and tribesmen, called "Twenty-Seven Articles."

But before we get to those "Twenty-Seven Articles," let's remember Lawrence, the myth, and the man. T. E. Lawrence was an indifferent junior archaeologist at the Ashmolean, who arrived in the Middle East. There he managed to engage in activities whose military importance we shall discuss below, but who in the main spent his time creating a myth about himself, and his significance. That myth, tiny at first, grew and grew, when back in England, in a country hungry for heroes, and the more exotic their locale, the further away from the stench of the bloodsoaked trenches of World War I, the better. And here was T. E. Lawrence, with his stirring tales of Arabs riding their camels and fighting the Turks in the cause of their own liberation. And who organized them, who made them a fighting force of such importance? A slight Englishman, an intellectual, a writer, with a pseudo-poetic style that some found so winning - T. E. Lawrence, himself seemingly a learned man (he was to translate Homer), who "understood" the essence of that admirable thing, "The Arab," or rather, "The Bedu," the noble version of the Arab, the desert warrior, leather faced, hawk on hand, able to ride for days without stop or sustenance, and so on.

In England some well-known people welcomed the myth of Lawrence. George Bernard Shaw and Robert Graves were among them; Churchill was for a while taken in. But the "cool and skeptical" men who knew the Middle East, and knew Lawrence personally, never fell for this stuff.

Here, from a review of "The Selected Letters of T. E. Lawrence" by the celebrated scholar of modern Arabia (particularly in relation to Great Britain), J. B. Kelly, are some telling observations:

...when I was taking my own first unsteady steps in the study of Arabian history and politics, the head of my institute at Oxford, who had a had a lengthy career as a diplomat in the Middle East before he became an academic, happened one day to mention that he had worked with Lawrence for a time in the early 1920s in the Middle East Department of the old Colonial Office in London. When I asked him what kind of impression he had formed of the man, he replied tersely, "A butterfly, Ornamental but useless."

The intervening years have only confirmed to me the accuracy of that judgment, which is why I have watched with wonder the growth and continuing fertility of the sprawling Lawrence industry...The vast edifice of Lawrenciana has been erected upon his adventures during World War I, more specifically upon the part he played in the Arab Revolt of 1916-18. Without those exploits he would have acquired no public reputation, there would have been nothing from which to create the Lawrence myth; for his achievements after the war were not of an order to earn him even the slightest measure of repute or fame.

The war, then, the Arab Revolt, and his role in it, are crucial to the Lawrentian production line; and yet - and this is perhaps the most curious aspect of the whole enterprise - not one of his biographers, editors or publicists has possessed the requisite degree of knowledge of the political and military events of the war in the Middle East to evaluate properly the importance of Lawrence's exploits or the worth of the Arab Revolt itself.

Kelly then goes on to quote the editor of The Letters, Malcolm Brown, as describing the sharif of Mecca's four sons as "his [Lawrence's] field commanders in the Arabs' armed struggle against Turkey, which was now being conducted with the support of Britain and France." Brown then claims that the capture of the port of Aqaba from the Turks "brought about a major shift in the Arab war and in Lawrence's career. The Arabs would thenceforth conduct their campaign in close alliance with the British...as the right wing of an advancing army."

Now Kelly comments on what Brown has written:

To say the least, this is a most peculiar interpretation of the relative importance of the British Expeditionary Force in Egypt and Palestine, and the forces of Sharif Husain. It also gives a misleading impression of the origins of the Arab Revolt. The truth is that for nearly two years after the outbreak of war with Turkey, Sharif Husain sat on the fence, craftily assessing which way the war was going. He was only lured down from it onto the British side by means of large political gains and even larger bags of gold.

His subsequent revolt was never more than a sideshow, and of debatable military significance. He was unable, for example, to take Medina, the southern terminus of the Hijaz railway, where the Turkish garrison held on until the war was well and truly over.

In his assessment of Lawrence's importance to the Arab Revolt, Mr. Brown [Malcolm Brown, editor of "The Letters of T. E. Lawrence" under review] takes his hero at his own valuation, averring that official documents in the British archives (of which he quotes a bare score) support his submissions about 'the central importance' of Lawrence's role. A more thorough examination of the official records, I believe, would lead to a contrary conclusion.

Mr. Brown also accepts at face value Lawrence's occasional description of himself ("in a throwaway line," Mr. Brown notes admiringly) as being accepted by the Arabs as "an Emir of sorts." Is this really credible? Why should the Emir Faisal and his brothers, Sharifian nobles and descendants of the Prophet, consider an infidel of junior military rank worthy to be accorded the dignity of the title which they themselves held? Is it not more likely that they looked upon Lawrence as a somewhat gullible paymaster, the provider of lavish supplies of arms, ammunition, high explosives and, best of all, gold sovereigns - "the light cavalry of St. George"? As time went by, Lawrence gradually came to realize the awful truth of his situation; he then started to go to pieces.

It is impossible in so limited a space as this to examine the many claims that Lawrence made about his exploits between 1916 and 1918 and which Mr. Brown, as editor of his letters [Malcolm Brown also wrote a biography of Lawrence tellingly titled "A Touch of Genius"], seems to accept unquestioningly. One instance will have to suffice to test Lawrence's veracity, but a highly important one - the capture of Damascus in October, 1918.

Although the fall of the city represented the high point of the Arab Revolt, and of Lawrence's career, Mr. Brown gives only a meager account of the event. He prints only one document, a report by Lawrence dated October 1, 1918, the import of which is that Damascus had fallen earlier that day to the Sharifian forces. Mr. Brown does nothing to correct this impression. The truth of the matter, however, is that Damascus was taken, not by the Sharifian army but, almost inadvertently, by the 3rd Australian Light Horse Brigade of the Desert Mounted Corps.

The final battle of the Palestine campaign, which broke the back of the Turkish army's resistance, was fought at Megiddo in the third week of September. The 3rd Australian Light Horse Brigade was subsequently ordered to cut the Turkish retreat northwards to Hama but without entering Damascus, the honor of whose capture had, for political reasons and by order of Sir Edmund Allenby, the general officer commander of Palestine, been reserved for the Sharifian army under Emir Faisal.

The Turks evacuated Damascus on the night of Sept. 30. The next morning the commander of the 3rd Australian Light Horse, finding that the quickest way to reach the Hama road was through the northern quarter of Damascus, entered the city at first light, to be met by a delegation of Damascene notables who formally surrendered the city to him. The Australian commander did not tarry long over the formalities (report has it that he did not even dismount), but within a short time had ridden out with his brigade through the Hama gate in pursuit of the retreating Turks.

Later that morning the Sharifian army, Lawrence prominent in the forefront of the cavalcade, rode into Damascus from the east.

Almost immediately the Bedouin ran wild, looting, killing, destroying. Alec Kirkbride [who later worked with Glubb Pasha in the Arab Legion in Jordan, and wrote a memoir, "A Crackling of Thorns"], another British officer with the Sharifian forces, later recounted how he had come across Lawrence leaning against a wall outside the Turkish military hospital, vacantly giggling, while inside the hospital the Bedouin were ripping the bandages from the Turkish wounded and putting them to the sword. Kirkbride drew his revolver on Lawrence and told him that if he didn't call off his jackals, he, Kirkbride, would attend to them himself.

A day later Allenby ordered the 4th Australian Light Horse Brigade into Damascus to restore order and protect the civilian population from the Bedouin. None of this is to be found in Lawrence's writings, or in Mr. Brown's editorial remarks. Instead, one finds in the "Seven Pillars" a disgraceful attempt by Lawrence, albeit couched in his usual ambiguous and evasive style, to smear the Australians by implying that it was they who had been killing and looting, and that it was his Bedouin who had to be called into impose order!

When Allenby arrived a couple of days later he told Lawrence to leave Damascus immediately, out of compassion, so Lawrence insinuates, for his broken state of heath. Mr. Brown evidently accepts this explanation, though one would have thought that here, surely, was ground worth exploring. Why, if Allenby thought so highly of Lawrence, as Mr. Brown claims elsewhere, did he have virtually nothing to do with him after 1918?

The answer, as it happens, may well lie in a letter Mr. Brown prints from Lawrence to Mrs. Shaw in March 1927. Despite the self-exculpatory gloss put upon it by Lawrence, it may be the most truthful thing he ever wrote about the war and his part in it.

"You see," he explained to Mrs. Shaw, "my campaign and fighting efforts were entirely negligible in [General Allenby's] eyes. All he required of us was a turnover of native opinion from the Turk to the British, and I took advantage of that need of his, to make him the stepfather of the Arab national movement: a movement which he did not understand, and for whose success his instinct had little sympathy. He is a very large, downright and splendid person, and being publicly yoked with a counter-jumping opportunist must often gall him deeply."

And Kelly ends with a one-word comment: "Exactly."

Now if I have quoted at such great length from J. B. Kelly, it is because he, and Elie Kedourie, are the two greatest experts on British diplomatic history having to do with the Arabs; Kelly's "Britain and the Persian Gulf, 1795-1880" is a historical masterpiece. Kelly spent nearly a half-century, intermittently, in the Arab states; he was the great expert on the "Frontier Question" in Eastern Arabia. And when Sheikh Zayed of Abu Dhabi needed to hire a foreign expert to help prepare the case against the territorial encroachments of Saudi Arabia, that expert was J. B. Kelly. No one was more familiar with the archives in the Records Office than J. B. Kelly. It was more important to quote him exactly, on the subject of Lawrence, than to attempt to paraphrase them.

What we learn from Kelly, and Kedourie, and from Richard Aldington, whose biography of Lawrence in 1956 blew up, one would have thought for all time, the myths created by, and around, T. E. Lawrence, is that Lawrence was a serial liar. What the few hundred troops that his Arab sheikhs commanded [the Arabs wildly claimed to have "tens of thousands" or even, at one point, a "hundred thousand" troops] accomplished was of little military value. They could not even remove the Turkish garrisons. Their famed "Revolt" consisted in the main of harrying the Hejaz Railway here and there. General Allenby himself understood exactly how minimal was the contribution of Lawrence and his Arabs - whose loyalty was bought-and-paid-for, mainly a matter of gold and military supplies furnished by the British - to the war effort.

Why does this matter? Why should we care? Well, if Colonel Nagl, and Colonel Kilcullen, and other unnamed colonels, if even General Petraeus himself, took - as Wyatt-Brown says they did -- the myth of Lawrence of Arabia seriously, if they did not know that that myth was exploded long ago, then they may have been deluded into thinking that Lawrence had something important to offer them, and that they, these modern day followers of Lawrence, could indeed do as he did, and "win over the Arab tribes" (he never did) and accomplish with them something of "great and lasting military significance" (he, and the Arabs whose loyalty and temporary cooperation he bought, never did). In their Anbar venture they might still think that they had somehow made a permanent difference, when all they did is rent, for a short time, the temporary loyalty of some Sunni tribes who had their own good and sufficient reasons for opposing Al Qaeda in Iraq. But that temporary overlapping of interests did not mean that the Sunnis, or any of the other Arab Muslims, could be, or should be thought of as being, true allies of the American Infidels.

And not for one second should those colonels, or General Petraeus, have believed that reading what turn out to be more-or-less obvious bromides - the "Twenty-Seven Articles" that Lawrence wrote - in dealing with Arab tribes, somehow offered an open-sesame into the permanently-sealed hearts of Arab Muslim tribesmen.

Like Lawrence, the Americans too supplied weapons and money, money, money, to the local Arabs. Those local Arabs, for their own reasons, took on Al Qaeda. But there was never any intention, by those Sunni Arabs, to acquiesce in the New Iraq, the Iraq where power had been transferred from Sunni Arabs to Shi'a Arabs. The money and weapons the Anbar tribesmen, and above all some of their remarkably corrupt leaders, obtained, were to be kept as useful in the future campaign, should a campaign prove necessary, against the Shi'a Arabs. Did General Petraeus, did Colonels Nagl and Kilcullen, not realize that the Anbar "surge" meant, in the greater scheme of things, very little? Do they know even now that what happens in Iraq, in the worldwide Jihad, means far less than, say, the response in Europe to the trial, beginning today, of Geert Wilders in The Netherlands? Do they realize, do they allow themselves to realize (how could they, really?), that the men, money, materiel spent in Iraq were largely squandered? Do they realize that the outcome in Iraq is almost certain to be a place of permanent unsettlement, for the Arabs and the Kurds will not make peace, and the Sunnis will never acquiesce in their loss of power, and the Shi'a Arabs have no intention of ever giving up the power they now possess? And could they further come to the conclusion that the very goals that they tried to achieve, of a stable and unified Iraq, are not only unattainable but, from the long-term perspective of Infidel and American interests, exactly the wrong goals?

That would require a kind of willingness to admit that one had misspent one's time, that one had not sufficiently grasped the nature of a conflict that, by and large, will remain unaffected by what happens in Iraq. It would have made better sense to get out far earlier, to forget about the "lessons" offered by David Galula, lessons not relevant to the American situation in Iraq because Galula was describing a single insurgence, the war in Algeria against the French. The goal of the French was not to get out, but to remain, while in Iraq the "insurgencies" are many, and are directed at other groups within Iraq as well as against the Infidel Americans for being Infidels. The Americans had no desire to stay. They wanted only to bring peace and tranquility and prosperity - crazily unattainable goals -- to Iraq.

But worse, by far, than the business with David Galula is the business, if Wyatt-Brown has it right, of American colonels and other officers taking seriously, as a guide to anything, the life and career of that self-promoting mythomane, whose military value was almost nil, T. E. Lawrence. It is a pity that those who took Lawrence seriously in the American army were unfamiliar with Richard Aldington's biography, or the meticulous work of J. B. Kelly and Elie Kedourie, and of many others. Apparently, young boys who then grew up to join the American military took David Lean's movie seriously, and they never checked to find out what the current reputation, among real scholars, of Lawrence is. General Allenby took the measure of Lawrence, and those who take a cool and skeptical view of things, not the naïve enthusiasts, should have prevailed.

One more time, from Lawrence's own summing-up in a letter:

You see, my campaign and fighting efforts were entirely negligible in [General Allenby's] eyes. All he required of us was a turnover of native opinion from the Turk to the British, and I took advantage of that need of his, to make him the stepfather of the Arab national movement: a movement which he did not understand, and for whose success his instinct had little sympathy. He [General Allenby] is a very large, downright and splendid person, and being publicly yoked with a counter-jumping opportunist must often gall him deeply.

That was Lawrence on Lawrence: " a counter-jumping opportunist." A pity that at West Point, where they surely now must say a word or two about Lawrence, they don't get him straight, not even as straight as he, in a rare moment of candor, once got himself.

As for the "Twenty-Seven Articles" - in the main, the most obvious bromides, worthy of Polonius - they will be examined in the second part of "Arabia Petraea, or General Petraeus' Middle East." Meanwhile, however, have a preliminary look yourself - you can find Lawrence's "wisdom" right here.

See what I mean, about "obvious bromides" and Polonius?

Reza Pankhurst, a senior figure in the hardline group Hizb ut-Tahrir, gathered a group of male members of the London School of Economics (LSE) Islamic Society for private talks.

Mr Pankhurst, whose party advocates the creation of an Islamic state governed by Sharia, is a research student employed as a teacher in the LSE's government department.

He is due to teach undergraduate classes this term in three topics covering nationalism and revolution in the Arab world.

Mr Pankhurst retained his position in the Islamic Society and the college despite a number of students raising concerns last year about the overt political content of his sermons at Friday prayers.

The Students' Union confirmed that it had reported those concerns to the Islamic Society and raised them "informally" with academics.

Hizb ut-Tahrir is banned in Germany for anti-Semitism and covered by the National Union of Students' policy of "no platform" for racist and fascist views...." - from a story in the Times of London, January 16, 2010, here

There's a well-known poem by Philip Larkin that takes to mocking task the "anti-war activists" who apparently thought that the Soviet threat could be fended off without military force. At the University of Essex, Chancellor Albert Sloman presiding, and at the London School of Economics, the student protests were particularly virulent:

When the Russian tanks roll westward, What defence for you and me? Colonel Sloman's Essex Rifles? The Light Horse of L.S.E.?

Larkin was rightly contemptuous of those who would put their faith not in the West's maintaining its military strength, but rather in "Colonel Sloman's Essex Rifles/And the Light Horse of L.S.E." They infuriated Larkin, the commonsensical realist when it came to politics (he was a friend of Robert Conquest). When he dismissed the "Light Horse of L.S.E.," he was referring only to the students. For those were the glory days for the L.S.E., when control was still held by the sensible -- to wit, Donald Watt and Kenneth Minogue and Elie Kedourie, before its takeover and makeover by a tiers-mondisant (himself third-world -- doing the subcontinental -- in origin) head determined to make the school safe for the unscholarly leftist likes of Fred Halliday, and so it was. Fred Halliday himself was plucked from some Trotskyite think-tank in Amsterdam (had it been the Herzen Foundation of Karel van het Reve, that would have been quite another matter). It is amusing that nowadays this Marxist still prefers Marxism to Islam, and at least has had the wit to worry about the latter.

Larkin did not live to see that when he wrote, in 1971, of the "Light Horse of L.S.E." At least those "Light Horse" would have been charging, however ineffectually (and Watt, Minogue, and Kedourie were worth their weight in well-armed brigades), against the enemy, and not against England itself. The transformation of the LSE has been not the only declension of an academic institution in recent years, but it has been one of the most spectacular in its speed.

LSE is where Donald Watt, Elie Kedourie, Kenneth Minogue, all once taught, wrote their books, and guided the students. They kept things sane. Even before they retired, or died, things had started to degenerate, standards to be lowered, the representatives of mass madness allowed in on the wings of attacks on "hegemonic postcolonial discourse." And now comes the final act in the general degringolade at LSE, with a member of Hizb ut-Tahrir being allowed to teach courses on the Arabs and Islam.

And it is not just the LSE. The SOAS (School of Oriental and African Studies) is a hotbed of anti-Israel (antisemitic) activity. At Oxford, it was bad enough that for years at the Middle East part of St. Antony's (a graduate college), the late Albert Hourani turned the place into a diploma mill (the diploma in question being the D.Phil.) for Arabs young and old, many of whom specialized in such fascinating topics as "The Construction of Palestinian Identity." The former propagandist for the PLO, Rashid Khalidi, got his D.Phil. under Hourani at St. Antony's, and today he is that appetizing thing, a full professor at Columbia, where he continues to act as the propagandist he was back in Beirut, or for that matter, in southside Chicago.

But, though he was a lowly lecturer for a while at St. Antony's (while billing himself as a professor), Tariq Ramadan could never have imagined - who could have? - that he, a sinister propagandist for Islam, holding out for the gullible Infidels hope of the development of a "European Islam" (that will somehow be based, one must assume, on a different Qur'an, different Hadith, different Sira, from that read by Muslims everywhere in present-day Dar al-Islam), really has had a professorship bought and paid for, with the promise (perhaps some already delivered) made to Oxford of Arab financial favors. This happened not long after Tariq Ramadan's appointment to a Professorship at the University of Leiden (paid for by an Arab government) had been announced. Apparently Ramadan realized that the University of Leiden would not be the place for him - Afshin Ellian, the brilliant apostate, teaches law there, and Professor Hans Jansen, though recently retired still carries weight in Dutch academic circles - and besides, Great Britain is the prize, the place that the Muslims want first to undermine from within, sensing its weakness. When his appointment was announced, the most disgusting part of the whole mercenary affair was the reaction of a professor at Oxford, who delightedly hailed the arrival of his new colleague, Frere Tariq, Tariq Ramadan.

At the time of the announcement of Ramadan's appointment, Melanie Phillips gave some useful information about the source of funding:

Tariq Ramadan, the darling of the British political and security establishment which foolishly and ignorantly believes his aim is to modernise Islam whereas his actual agenda is to Islamise modernity, has for some years been referred to as an Oxford professor. This was not actually true; he was not a professor at Oxford University but a mere research fellow of St Anthony's College, Oxford. But now the wish has become father to the deed. In the depths of the long vacation, the Oxford University Gazette announced that Ramadan had been appointed His Highness Sheikh Hamad Bin Khalifa Al Thani Professor of Contemporary Islamic Studies in the Faculty of Oriental Studies with effect from 1 October 2009.

Gratified as I'm sure everyone will be to hear that Tariq Ramadan (who was barred from the USA in 2004 and again in 2006 for allegedly giving money to a charity supporting Hamas, a ruling revoked by a federal court in July) can now really call himself an Oxford professor, there are disturbing implications for academic integrity when an Oxford University chair can be purchased in this fashion by an interest group - the Islamic world - which does not share the western understanding of academic objectivity. The chair is funded by a benefaction from Qatar, of which the Sheikh is the Emir. (The Sheikh is also one of the Arab associates of the "Oxford College for Research and PhD Studies" -- which, since it poses with heraldry and Oxford blue logo, might be thought by the unwary to be a real Oxford University college when it is not.)

The Al-Thani of Qatar have distinguished themselves for a few things.

First, a member of the Al Thani ruling family alerted a known Al Qaeda operative that the F.B.I. was about to arrest him, and that warning allowed the wanted terrorist to escape.

Second, Qatar is the home of the Muslim cleric who has been ranting against the West, and providing a justification for suicide bombers, Yousef Al- Qaradawi.

Third, Qatar allows the propaganda outlet Al-Jazeera to keep its headquarters in Doha, and supports through generous subventions a television channel that the American government and military claim has broadcast falsehoods that resulted in attacks on, and the deaths of, American soldiers in Iraq.

Fourth, Qatar has repeatedly made overtures to the Islamic Republic of Iran, and has been attacked in the London Arab paper Al-Asharq Al-Awsat, financed by the Saudis, for doing so.

At Cambridge, there is the man formerly known as Tim Winter , a convert (or as he would have it, revert) to Islam, who shows up now and again under his Muslim name. He was, for example, one of the twenty-four Muslims who wrote an angry letter to Pope Benedict after the Pope did not show the deep respect they believe he should show, to Islam:

In response to the anger prompted by the Pope's Regensburg address, 138 Muslim scholars and religious leaders last year wrote him a letter warning that the future of the planet depended on Muslims and Christians making peace with each other.

The delegation of 24 Muslim leaders is led by the Grand Mufti of Bosnia, Mustafa Ceric, and includes an Iranian ayatollah and an American woman academic specialising in Islamic studies.

British members of the delegation include Dr Anas Al-Shaikh-Ali, chairman of the UK Association of Muslim Social Scientists, and Sheikh Dr Abdal Hakim Murad Winter, lecturer in Islamic studies at Cambridge University.

That last one - "Sheikh Dr. Abdal Hakim Murad Winter," a "lecturer in Islamic studies at Cambridge University," turns out to be none other than plain old Tim Winter, the name he carefully uses when he writes reviews in the TLS or articles in the British press. He wants to be a true-blue Englishman for the purposes of deceiving his audiences, but on the other hand, among Muslims, doing Muslim things, he of course wants to be known by the name that really means something to him, "Dr. Abdal [Abdul?] Hakim Murad Winter." One wonders who else he has managed to get hired, or promoted, at Cambridge, while the non-Muslim (and non-collaborating faculty members) chose not to make or take a stand, or were otherwise distracted.

And then there are the places where Saudi money has bought, has indeed paid for, whole centers for the study of Islam. Centers, for example, set up by the Saudis at the Universities of Exeter and Durham. At such places, those who prove unwilling to meet the ideological requirements of the Saudis are let go. For more on this, see the case, and the testimony, of Denis MacEoin.

Melanie Phillips, in the same article from which I took the information above about the naming of, and funding for, Tariq Ramadan's all-expenses-paid-by-Qatar chair at Oxford, also quotes Robin Simcox, a researcher for the Centre for Social Cohesion, on the influence of Arab money on its academic recipients:

...an academic chairing a public event on terrorist networks in Europe at St Antony's College, Oxford, stifled discussion on the sources of funding for these networks after a fellow academic raised the subject. The Brunei Gallery at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) was also forced to take down a photograph taken by a Saudi artist at their gallery after it was deemed to be insulting to Muslims and Islam...

The way in which universities are being run has been altered to match the wishes of donors. For example, the management committee at Islamic Studies centres at the universities of Cambridge and Edinburgh contain appointees picked by Prince Alwaleed, their principal donors. Furthermore, a variety of universities have altered their fields of study in line with the interests and wishes of donors.

Specialist teaching and research centres have been set up with a specific political agenda. For example, the Al-Maktoum Institute, an independent institution which has its degrees validated by the University of Aberdeen, was established in order to disseminate the "vision" of its primary donor and namesake. Furthermore, when British universities establish Confucius Institutes, an arm of the Chinese government, the curriculum and teaching standard is decided by the regime, with the university required to accept "operational guidance" from this regime....

The MEC [Oxford University's Middle East Centre at St Anthony's College] has received substantial sums of money from sources in the Middle East. The way in which this money has been used means there is a clear risk that donors will seek to influence the output and activities of the MEC. In addition, many large donations to the MEC have been anonymous, creating a lack of transparency. In many cases Oxford has knowingly accepted money from undemocratic states with poor human rights records...Several agreements made between the MEC and donors appear to indicate that funders have sought to influence the centre's output and activities.

But it's not just the capture of British academic centers, and departments, and individual chairs (well-upholstered with Arab money), that should alarm. It is also the fact that the terminally naïve or craven in the British government now pay for, and rely on, those in phony "moderate Muslim" think tanks, such as the Quilliam Foundation, who remain apologists for Islam even as they ostentatiously attack the most outrageous carriers of Islam, such as Anjem Choudary. Don't be fooled by such denunciations; the test is whether those who are labeled as "moderate Muslims," at such places as the Quilliam Foundation, are willing to tell the unhappy truth about the texts and tenets of Islam, the attitudes and atmospherics of Islam - not a "fanatical few," not the "handful of violent extremists," but of perfectly mainstream Muslims, who share the same goal as Al Qaeda or any other Muslim terrorist group, but differ only on the efficacy and wisdom, at this point, of the terrorist groups' timing and tactics. No, if the test is truth-telling, it's a test these government-paid "Muslim moderates" consistently fail.

The problem is far more, alas, then this or that identifiable and discrete agent of Islam preaching the Islamic gospel according to Hizb ut-Tahrir. It's the agents of Islam, bought and paid for, all over the academic archipelago that exists in Great Britain. Come to think of it, all over the academic archipelago that exists all over the Western world. Some departments of history or Islamic studies have managed to resist; some are even fighting back. But there has to be greater awareness, by university administrators, by alumni, by students (the hapless victims, in many cases, of these Muslim propagandists, both of the crude and, as in the case of Tariq Ramadan, the slithering hissing colubrine variety), and by faculty in other fields, who should not be hesitant to identify, and seek to undo, those who seek to undo us, intellectually as in all other ways.

For Muslims the war against any Infidels who resist the spread and dominance of Islam is a religious duty. It is also guerre à outrance, a war without end and without any scruples. For the goal justifies all means.

That is something that needs to be explained to their intended victims; in other words, taught to poor naïve innocent unwary Infidel us.

But he, Eric Holder, presumes to make pronouncements about Islam, and to tell us that those Muslims who are involved in acts or attempted acts or planned acts of terrorism are misinterpreting Islam. He ignores the fact that all of them have always had, or recently or not so recently acquired, a deep faith in Islam. That faith is not modified by calculations of self-interest (as with many Muslims now living in the West who must act one way until such time as they feel their numbers and power have increased sufficiently). Nor is it modified by custom or nuance, or a prudential choice to support Jihad through other methods that at this point will be less likely to attract the attention and the alarm of unwary or lazy Infidels, such as deployment of the Money Weapon, campaigns of Da'wa (targeting in particular the psychically and economically marginal) and, especially in Western Europe, demographic conquest.

Could Eric Holder, or for that matter his own boss, Barack Obama, who would also no doubt be appalled if someone were to teach, to presume to teach, American Constitutional Law without that knowledge of Dred Scott, Loving v. Virginia, Shelley v. Kraemer, Brown v. Bd. of Education, and another two dozen important cases, tell us exactly in what ways -- quoting from the texts of Islam - the jihadis are misinterpreting Islam? How is Mr. Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab misinterpreting Islam? How, for that matter, is Nasrallah of Hizballah, or Meshaal of Hamas, or the leaders or members of Lashkar-e-Toiba, or Jaish-e-Muhammad, or Al Qaeda (merely the most ambitious and most attention-getting of Muslim terrorist groups, of which there are hundreds, along with thousands of groupouscules and millions of individuals, all of whom take what Islam teaches very much to heart) all "misinterpreting Islam"?

We are told this over and over. We are never given a single bit of proof, not a single interpolated or apocryphal passage, attributed to the Qur'an, Hadith, Sira. We are never told even of a single Hadith, upon which reliance has been put by Muslim terrorists, that they have improperly assigned a higher rank of authenticity (according to the most respected muhaddithin) than it deserves. We are given not a single shred of evidence, textual or otherwise, to support the idea that there has been a "misinterpretation" of Islam.

Eric Holder can keep repeating this stuff, and so can others, so can Barack Obama, for example, until the cows come home. But the more those who presume to protect and instruct us show that they expect us to be satisfied, and that they themselves are apparently satisfied, with soothing banalities and assertions that are easily shown to be baseless, they lose our trust. The very people they claim to lead and to protect stop trusting them. And when we stand in line for hours for new security measures, and when we see, with our own eyes, the absurdity of all the obvious non-Muslims, including the very young and the very old, who are called out of line for extra checks, that are tiresome for everyone but nevertheless performed, using up valuable man hours of the security services, only in order to prove...well, to prove what? That non-Muslims should be checked, too, though we all know what we are looking for is Muslim terrorists, committing acts of terrorism because of what Islam inculcates -- the duty of Jihad to remove all barriers to the spread and then the dominance of Islam. They differ from other Muslims only in that they have decided to both participate in Jihad directly rather than indirectly, through financial, diplomatic, propagandistic, or moral support. They have chosen to use violence as their instrument of Jihad, for they see terrorism not as we do, but as acceptable qitaal, military combat, their modus operandi justified by the fact that given Infidel superiority in weapons technology, the odds have to be evened through terrorism.

No one is asking Eric Holder, or anyone else in the Administration, to take off a few months to study at Leiden, or Aix-en-Provence (two of the universities that Arab money and Muslim personnel have not yet managed to take over and transform in the Islamic and Middle Eastern areas). No one expects him to have read deeply in Ignaz Goldziher, Snouck Hurgronje, Joseph Schacht, Henri Lammens, or several dozen other great Western scholars of Islam whose works do not date, for Islam has not changed. But we do expect from him a justified diffidence, a hesitation to make pronouncements about Islam that are palpably absurd, and worrisome to all those who do know something, when he states that the problem are those who "misunderstand Islam."

Among Muslims, the problem for Infidels is not those who "misinterpret Islam" but those who do not, who understand its letter and spirit all too well and, what is most important, are willing to act directly on what Islam inculcates, and not to be timid, not to be distracted, not to allow calculations of self-interest to interfere (as when one does not wish to endanger one's position in the world and, especially, in the Infidel world where one may be living). In that Infidel world, of course, one may also have calculated that there are far cleverer ways to conduct Jihad below the current radar systems of the Infidels. For what are the sinister tariq-ramadans doing if not conducting Jihad, in a much more dangerous fashion, one might think, as they try to confuse Infidels, and whip up indignation against those who, like Geert Wilders, merely try to tell some unvarnished and disturbing truths. Yet more and more people in Western Europe, despite the propaganda campaigns conducted on behalf of Islam not only by Muslims but by their own political and media elites, have come to conclusions about Islam. They have come to them slowly, reluctantly, often unwillingly. And these conclusions then result in such measures as the Swiss referendum that expressed an overwhelming desire by people to ban minarets, but also, one can be sure, to limit the presence and power of Islam in a dozen other ways. And that Swiss ban is supported, public opinion polls tell us, overwhelmingly by people in France, Great Britain, and elsewhere.

Eric Holder can utter all the falsehoods he wishes. He will merely become someone who loses the trust of those whose trust he needs. That does not refer to those in political life who continue to ignore or misstate the matter, and who lack the wit to figure out ways to discuss the matter, if not head on, at least with the kind of semaphoring language of metonymy that some mastered long ago, possibly by sitting still in class -- which at this point Eric Holder might learn to do. Or if not, then to at least he should remember the too-quoted line that nonetheless will have to do: "Whereof we do not know, thereof we should not speak." As my music teacher used to say in a different context: Listen to Ludwig.

And there is a larger lesson, not for Holder alone, but for all those who talk about the "public trust." Let's talk about something else: the public mistrust. When the public, on issues of life and death, begins to recognize that it is not being talked to straight by those who govern, and who claim that they govern because they know best how to protect and how to instruct the citizenry, they lose faith in the government. When the public sees that members of the governing class are not telling the truth, but still worse, are actively misrepresenting the nature of the threat and acting as apologists for Islam, the ideology whose promptings explain Muslim terrorism and terrorists, they lose faith in the government. They become worried, fearful, disheartened. A few may seek other explanations, conspiracy theories that they would not succumb to if they could still have, or thought they could have, faith in the intelligence and knowledge of the governing classes. Eric Holder is one example.

But there are many others. We wonder why the words "Islam" and "Muslim" are still not to be used, and why phrases - self-evidently unhelpful, such as "violent extremists," are used instead. "Extremists" about what? Tell us. Stop making us try to guess or still worse, trying to make us not guess, but to be satisfied with such empty formulations that tell us nothing, that help us understand nothing.

And then there are other things. Most of the people in this country fly, or have close relatives who fly, and so most of the country has a direct experience of airports today. And those who fly, and those who may not themselves fly but see off those who do, or hear their stories of airport waiting and woe, are well aware of this nonsense of patting-down nuns and great-grandmothers in wheelchairs and subjecting, even ostentatiously subjecting, non-Muslims to intensive searches when we all know that, since resources are limited, the time spent in such searches of non-Muslims is time not spent in searching Muslim passengers. And it is they, to the extent that they can be identified (and there was no doubt about Farouk Abdulwhatshisname), who should be the object of intensive searching. For we all know that it is Muslim terrorism, terrorism committed by Muslims and by no one else, that is the worry.

When we go to the airport, we endure the needless searches that are conducted, one assumes, only to avoid accusations from Muslim groups and Muslim individuals that they have been selected for special treatment. We share our fury and our ridicule with others. For all sensible people know that of course Muslim travelers should be selected for special searches. For it makes sense to allocate the resource of searching - a finite, even a scarce resource - to the searching of Muslims, and anyone who claims to be offended is a fool, or a danger to us, or both.

Such a policy can continue. We can even have security guards wearing hijabs, which does nothing but make most of us even more alarmed, for we take or mistake those hijab-wearing guards not as a heartwarming display of trust, a public demonstration of the "very values that we hold dear" blah blah that "the enemy hates us for" (nonsense, of course). Not at all. Most of us find the spectacle depressing and worrisome as all get out, for we believe - wrongly or rightly - that this is an outward and visible sign of an inward, crazed, nearly suicidal, and stupid attachment to the idea that one cannot distinguish, or that any intelligent distinguishing constitutes inadmissible discrimination.

Eric Holder can keep telling us, if he wishes, that the people we must worry about are those who "misinterpret Islam' - even though he offers not a shred of evidence, not a single passage, to prove such "misinterpretation." The TSA can continue to pat down non-Muslims and, as a consequence, have fewer resources devoted to two tasks: figuring out who is likely a Muslim (based on name, country or place of origin, previous travel - trips to Yemen, say, or Saudi Arabia or Sudan or Pakistan, should raise eyebrows sky-high), and then making sure that all those who are Muslims quite sensibly are given much greater scrutiny than non-Muslims. Barack Obama can keep prating of "violent extremists" but never telling us more about what those "violent extremists" are "extremists" of. But when we hear these words, when we listen to these solemn speeches, when we endure these misplaced security searches, what happens is that our trust, our faith in our own government, goes down, and down, and down.

And that is not something that people in a mass democracy can, or should, be expected to endure or, as quite a few in the current administration, appropriating lincolnian phrases whenever they can, long endure. Those who whose most important tasks include those of protecting and instructing us have to stop thinking they can mislead their own citizens, 99% of whom are non-Muslim, in order to avoid offending the 1% who are Muslim, or out of some ill-thought-out Machiavellianism, to avoid offending Muslims in Dar al-Islam. So we tiptoe timidly around so much, we avoid recognizing, much less discussing or still less confronting, the Muslim threat to Europe, the historic heart of the West, and we continue to allow ourselves to describe as "staunch allies" such meretricious and sinister places as Saudi Arabia, fearful of giving offense to those who night and day spend feverishly to spread Islam and ensure its dominance even in our lands.

We have to stop describing as part of "our values" what is merely a cripplingly inhibiting fear of offending Muslims. We must let them think we know what Islam inculcates and are now prepared to construct policies designed not to deal not merely with this or that terrorist group, but with the Camp of Islam, with all those who by identifying themselves as Muslims can reasonably be treated as adherents of an ideology that we have every right to be alarmed about - the ideology of Islam. Public trust in the capacity of those who claim to protect us adequately, once lost, is hard to regain. We are not quite there, but almost.

"Was Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab radicalized in London?," by Robert Marquand and Ben Quinn in the Christian Science Monitor, December 28 (thanks to James):

For young Muslims especially, London is a city like no other. It is a mecca for jobs and education and provides freedom from the prying eyes of family back home. The grand metropolis also beckons as a bastion of religious freedom and as a refuge from corrupt home country politics....

That was the world that Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab - the young Nigerian accused of seeking to blow up Northwest Airlines Flight 253 on Christmas -immersed himself in as a student between 2005 and 2008, when the petri dish of political Islam in London was stirring strongly.

For at least a decade sub-cultures of radical thought that promote borderless Islam and an uncompromising return to Sharia law have flourished in Great Britain's capital - despite some reportedly effective efforts to tamp down extremist views, and despite worries among moderate London Muslims about the trend.

"There are basically two meccas," argues Egyptian-born Mamoun Fandy of the International Institute for Strategic Studies in London. "There's a Mecca that Muslims should visit, and the mecca of jihad that is London."...

The availability of every kind of message Islam has to offer is part of the London scene. Most mosques have easy byways for students to meet and learn a more intense Koranic view; groups like Hizb ut-Tahrir, which seeks a return to early Islam with all Muslim states under one ruler, post members around mosques on Friday. They offer cards with phone numbers and invitations to study groups that discuss jihad. One of their common Friday hangouts is an East London mosque that Abdulmutallab allegedly attended.

"I've felt for a long time that if radical Sharia law comes to the rest of the world it will start on the streets of London," says a Pakistani expert on militant Islam who asked not to be identified. "Too many clerics today, even moderate ones, don't talk on Muslim life in a secular state. Young Muslims are smart, raised as British citizens. If they come from abroad, many have great hope and are often disillusioned. They live between worlds, in the cracks. When they go home to their families they are often more radical than their friends."...

Agence France-Presse cited family members' claims that Abdulmutallab was a quiet individual who was "radicalized" during his stint in London. The London daily Independent quoted a school friend: "He always did the bare minimum of work and would just show up to classes" and "he always would go off to pray," said Fabrizio Cavallo Marincola. "He was pretty quiet and didn't socialise much or have a girlfriend that I knew of. (...) You would never imagine him pulling off something like this."

Critics of lax border security in the UK point out that more than 42,000 British student visas were issued to Pakistani students between 2004 and 2007 but it was only in 2009 that applications have been checked against an expanded set of terrorist watch lists. A concern is that student visas are being secured to study at educational institutions which don't exist.

The Pakistani analyst, who has close ties to London mosques, argues that nearly every Pakistani radical he knows in London has gone through a "night club" phase. They try out a "clubbing life" that is ultimately unsatisfying. "They try to experience something like a dream of life in the west. About a year later they show up in the mosque, grow beards and are 'good Muslims,'" he says.

And the peaceful Muslims whose peaceful religion has putatively been hijacked have no effective rejoinder to their claim to be "good Muslims" when they turn to jihad violence and Islamic supremacism.

Many Muslims in the UK complain of the "double standards" of Western policies, particularly as regards the Middle East. British Palestinian Muslims have complained, for example, that when British Jews go to Israel and fight for the Israeli army, they come home as praiseworthy heroes; but when Palestinians go to fight or aid the local struggle, they come home and are considered terrorists.

Uh, yeah. Maybe if the British Jews had been blowing people up on buses or in restaurants, this might be different.

In July, a determination in London that Al Qaeda threats have diminished lowered the terrorist threat level from severe to substantial, and relaxed measures such as 'stop and search' powers. Britain has spent heavily on reconciliation projects - sponsoring 'moderate' preachers - aimed at stemming the influence of Islamist messages over young British Muslims. UK campuses remain in the frontline of struggle to prevent the radicalization of students although the British government continues to resist calls to ban Hizb ut-Tahrir, accused of attempting to infiltrate Muslim student societies.

Leftists keep arguing during the healthcare debate that healthcare is a “right.” The problem with this un-American line of thinking is that if there is a right, there is also a corresponding duty falling on someone else to provide it. (Cop arrests you, cop must Mirandize you. You have a right to vote so government must give you a means of voting, and so on.)

A right to healthcare imposes a duty to provide it on someone else and so a right to healthcare is a claim on the property of others. I get sick and you or someone else must pay to make me well. No ifs, ands, or buts.  Hand over your wallet or else.

Where did these poor misguided souls get this preposterous idea from?

Maybe from one of America’s worst presidents, Franklin Roosevelt, who said in a famous speech that Americans had all sorts of “rights” that really aren’t rights at all:

We have accepted, so to speak, a Second Bill of Rights … the right to a useful and remunerative job in the industry … the right to earn enough to provide adequate food and clothing and recreation; the right of farmers to raise and sell their products at a return which will give them and their families a decent living; the right of every businessman, large and small, to trade in an atmosphere of freedom from unfair competition and domination by monopolies … the right of every family to a decent home; the right to adequate medical care … the right to adequate protection from the economic fears … and finally, the right to a good education.

These arguments are being echoed not only by advocates in the healthcare battle, but also by President Obama’s regulatory czar Cass Sunstein.

The radical legal theorist argues that the “Second Bill of Rights” FDR rhapsodized about is alive and well in socialist Europe, which under normal circumstances is economically sclerotic compared to the U.S. This imagined charter is “one of the best American exports,” he says. “ So in Europe, and even in Iraq now, the constitutional understandings often include a right to a decent chance at economic well being.”

Glenn Beck said on his TV show that he can’t understand leftists’ “love affair with socialist Europe.” (Come to think of it, the alleged conservative Bruce Bartlett thinks highly of socialist Europe too, according to a dingbat column he wrote earlier this year. We can take up a collection to buy you a one-way ticket to Europe if you want, Bruce.)

Europe sucks, Beck argues: France suffered a record economic downturn this year, which has led to strikes and riots. Ireland has a 24.6% chance of going bankrupt within five years. Greece got downgraded to a lousy triple-B credit rating.

Beck said America, unlike Europe, has been a model of stability:

In more than 200 years since ratification, we’ve had one Constitution and one government in the United States. France has had fifteen. Russia had six constitutions in the last 100 years. Spain, Great Britain [sic], Poland, Italy — does anyone remember Yugoslavia? I think we all envy those accomplishments. Need we even mention, Germany?

All of Europe has undergone massive and repeated upheavals in their forms of government. Why do progressives so dearly covet the European example of chaos, tyranny and instability? America is the only nation on Earth with the kind of stability, longevity, prosperity and freedom we’ve enjoyed for over two centuries. And we’ve accomplished it all with just the original Bill of Rights in our original Constitution.

He’s right. We don’t need a new Bill of Rights. Maybe it’s time we started discovering the one we already have.

Incidentally, Sunstein has many other strange ideas. He has argued that:

• your money doesn’t really belong to you because the government laid the foundations for your success;
• Internet censorship is a good idea;
• animals should be allowed to sue people;
• the names of carbon dioxide emitters should be compiled as part of a “greenhouse gas inventory” and publicized to shame those emitters into changing their behavior; and
• Americans’ support for property rights and freedom of contract is an “incoherent” form “of so-called individualism.”

Sunstein sucks too.

Related posts:

1. Radical Cass Sunstein on Verge of Great Power
2. Cass Sunstein Believes Your Internal Organs Are Government Property
3. Stopping the Radical Cass Sunstein

So was this merely the latest manifestation of the same fruitless maneuvering that has gone on every year since the struggle over Iran’s nuclear weapons began in 2003? Not at all. It was not the ploys of the Iranians that provoked astonishment at the most recent negotiations in Geneva and Vienna, but rather the attitude of the United States.

Whereas in the past Washington sought to increase pressure on Iran, and Europe stepped on the brakes, today it is Obama who is stepping on the brakes while France and Great Britain push for sanctions. Whereas George W. Bush denounced the Islamism of the Iranian regime, his successor attempts to ingratiate himself by offering compliments and apologies. Whereas before it was the Europeans who packaged their failures as successful “dialogue,” now it is Washington that does so.

via Obama’s Search for Peace in Our Time.