In April 2009, Barack Hussein Obama curtsied (some observers called it a “deep bow”) to his royal highness, Abdullah bin Abdulaziz al-Saud, king of Saudi Arabia.  Middle East protocol experts were clear that this was an unnecessary gesture, and that a simple handshake would have sufficed.  The White House denied the curtsy, but videos and photos of the gesture zapped around the Internet telling the truth to anyone interested.   King Abdullah’s only two claims to fame are the two sacred cities of Islam and about 25% of the world’s oil.  One can only wonder which of the Saudi king’s two assets evoked Obama’s obeisance.

It is now beginning to look like this unnecessary, uncalled for, awkward but perhaps telling bit of subservience by the president of the world’s strongest country, the commander-in-chief of the world’s most powerful army, and the leader of the free world, to a jihadist Islamo-fascist, imperialist, supremacist, totalitarian, tyrannical, triumphalist, theocratic, apartheid, misogynistic, terrorist-supporting ruler of a petty sheikhdom, may have been a harbinger of future subservience.

Flash forward two years.  A soon-to-be nuclear Iran threatens the entire world, Muslim and Christian, Occident and Orient, and of course Israel and the United States. Yet, during these past two years, Obama has consistently chosen political theatre over substantive action to prevent Iran’s progress toward WMD capacity; a course of action decidedly contrary to the political and economic and security interests of the USA and the free world.  As is clear from the obvious fact that neither Russia nor China nor North Korea will join other nations in imposing economic sanctions on Iran, the much vaunted UN sanctions will in no way impede Iran’s nuclear program.

As Congresspersons Tom Price (R-GA) and Trent Franks (R-AZ) explained:¹

There is no ban on investment in Iran’s petroleum sector. With one exception, there is no ban on banking with Iran, foreign investment in Iranian bonds, insurance for Iranian shipping, or the provision of trade credits to Iran. In short, the resolution will cause minimal economic hardship for the regime, and, like the preceding three U.N. measures, will do little or nothing to impede the regime’s march toward a nuclear military capability. Those provisions that in some way restrict Iran’s conduct are easily circumvented through the use of front organizations and alternate banking relations.

In order to pass this resolution, the Obama administration, due to long-standing objections from Russia and China, jettisoned every proposal that might actually harm Iran’s economy.

The House version of the decidedly tougher Iran Sanctions Act (ISA, H.R. 2194) would, in contrast to the U.N. resolution, accomplish the following: It would fully implement and enforce the 1996 ISA law to encourage foreign governments to direct that all state-owned and privately-owned entities cease all investment in and support for Iran’s energy sector and all exports of refined petroleum to Iran, and would impose sanctions on the Central Bank of Iran and any other bank in Iran that is engaged in proliferation activities or support of terrorist groups. The House bill would also greatly restrict the use of the President’s waiver authority. For more information on H.R. 2194, click here to review the RSC analysis of the legislation.

Unfortunately, the Obama administration requested that Congress not debate the Iran Sanctions Act until after passage of the U.N. resolution. By putting ISA on the back burner, the Obama administration delayed progress on sanctions with actual substance, opting instead to throw its full support behind the decidedly weaker Security Council resolution, presumably in hopes of obtaining a “public relations victory” following passage of toothless U.N. sanctions (emphasis added).

Did Obama so highly value a PR victory that he would subordinate America’s strategic security needs to his political image?  Back in June 2010, it looked like Obama preferred form over substance, rather than a determined effort to stop Iran’s seemingly inexorable march toward nuclear power: either that or he wanted Iran to win. Today it looks much more like he wants Iran to win.

It is perhaps the most pernicious of evils. The words “child slavery” would cause most people nowadays to recoil in horror, but in the oil-rich countries of the Saudi Arabian Peninsula, it apparently still doesn’t.

The most recent and revolting incident shedding light on the continued existence of this murky and most heinous of crimes involves a thirty-five-year-old Pakistani mother who bravely refused to sell her two boys to a slaver in Dubai, one of the United Arab Emirates. But this heroine, whose name, Azim Mai, deserves to be mentioned, paid a high price for her courageous stand. Her husband, angry at her refusal to condemn her sons to such a cruel fate, threw acid in Mai’s face, seriously disfiguring her.

But there are still many other parents among Pakistan’s large, poverty-stricken population willing to sell their male offspring into the Persian Gulf. Boys as young as three are bought from poor parents, and sometimes simply kidnapped from the street, principally in Pakistan and Bangladesh, and sent as slaves to these oil-rich states for one purpose only: to win camel races for their new Arab masters. The boys are expected to do this after being trained as riders under very brutal conditions for what is a very popular sport in that region.

“As many as 6,000 camel jockeys …languished in hidden slavery on ouzbah farms where their masters beat them and starved them to keep their weight down,” wrote E. Benjamin Skinner in his book, A Crime So Monstrous, before the use of boy camel jockeys was officially banned due to international pressure in 2005. A 2004 documentary about the boys’ plight, shown on HBO, was chiefly responsible for making Americans aware of this modern-day barbarism.

Great fanfare was made at the time about replacing the child jockeys with robots. But humanitarian organizations, like the Ansar Burney Trust, never believed all racing camel owners stopped using slave boy jockeys after abolition. Such a law, they say, would never affect the rich and powerful in the Emirates, especially members of the different Gulf royal families. The races, in which children are still made to ride, simply went underground.

As evidence, the Ansar Burney Trust cites the fact that of the estimated 6,000 camel jockeys at the time of the so-called abolition, one thousand are still missing. And even then, some of the ones repatriated back to their countries were resold and resent to the Persian Gulf to race camels again, while still others wound up in the madrassas of Islamic extremist organizations in their home countries.

The unfortunate boys kept on an “ousbah,” an isolated camel farm, are caught up in a nightmare of hellish proportions. After experiencing the trauma of suddenly being separated from their families, they are made to work 18-hour days. A camel jockey-in-training is also starved, beaten and sometimes sexually abused. Serious injury, even death, is a fate that also awaits many of the child riders, some as young as five, when training or racing over distances between four and 10 kilometres atop of 800-900 pound animals that can run as fast as 40 miles per hour. Even if the rider does not fall, damaged genitals is one of the serious wounds the slave boys often suffer.

“They used to wake us at two or three in the morning. If we didn’t get up or thought we were lazy, they would beat us with sticks,” one former child camel jockey told a British newspaper. “We had to clean up the camel dung with our hands.”

Another boy, Zufiqar, 10, said that race day represented the worst time due to the injuries and deaths he saw the camel jockeys suffer when thrown from their fast-moving mounts. And if the camel was also injured, Zufiqar stated “They always look after the camel first.” The reason for this is that the camel may have cost hundreds of thousands of dollars while the slave boy may only have cost a few hundred. Also for this reason, there are camel hospitals, and a Dubai prince was reported by an American paper to even have a swimming pool for his racing camels.

Along with the boys, young girls from South Asia and other impoverished countries are also trafficked to the Arabian Peninsula but for the sinister purpose of sexual exploitation. In the book Princess Sultana’s Circle, a sensitive and modern-thinking princess of the Saudi royal family gave American authoress Jean Sasson damning testimony concerning this evil.

Catherine Herridge of Fox News reported last week that “despite Saudi Arabia’s promises to clean up textbooks in the kingdom, recent editions continue to raise alarms in the West over jihadist language.” The story of the Saudis’ supposed duplicity has been circulating widely, but what is more surprising than the contents of the Saudi textbooks is that anyone would be surprised by them. The Saudi textbooks teach Islam. What else did anyone expect?

Ali Al-Ahmed, director of the Institute for Gulf Affairs, correctly pointed out that “this is where terrorism starts, in the education system.” He stated, quite rightly, that “if you teach 6 million children in these important years of their lives, if you install that in their brain, no wonder we have so many Saudi suicide bombers.”

But there is nothing in the least unusual about what the Saudis are teaching given the fact that the official religion of the Kingdom is Islam. For example, Al-Ahmed explained that tenth-grade textbooks “show students how to cut [the] hand and the feet of a thief.”

Why not? The Qur’an says: “As for the thief, both male and female, cut off their hands. It is the reward of their own deeds, an exemplary punishment from Allah. Allah is Mighty, Wise” (5:38). Is the problem that tenth graders are too young to learn this sort of thing? But why should anyone be too young to learn the ins and outs of the eternal and perfect law designed by the supreme being for all human societies in all times and places?

Al-Ahmed also noted that a ninth-grade text called on Muslims to kill Jews in order to bring about the hour of judgment: “The hour [of judgment] will not come until the Muslims fight the Jews and kill them. … There is a Jew behind me come and kill him.”

Here again, why is anyone surprised? The hadith collection that Muslims consider most reliable, Sahih Bukhari, quotes Muhammad saying this: “Allah’s Apostle said, The Hour will not be established until you fight with the Jews, and the stone behind which a Jew will be hiding will say. ‘O Muslim! There is a Jew hiding behind me, so kill him’” (4.52.177).

Should Saudi ninth graders not be learning about what they must do in order to bring about the blessed day and hour in which all things will be consummated and the golden age will dawn? Yes, it’s genocidal, anti-Semitic and monstrous, but then again, so is the original statement attributed to Muhammad. To condemn the Saudi textbooks is to condemn Muhammad and Islam. Yet the mainstream media stories that wrung their hands over the Saudi textbooks never pointed out that the noxious elements of those textbooks came straight from the Qur’an and the Islamic prophet.

The West has long feared the advent of the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt, but the first round’s election results released Sunday night show an even worse group of Islamists surging: The Salafists. Nearly one-fourth of Egyptians voted for the group whose puritanism makes the Brotherhood look moderate.

On Sunday night, the Egyptian government released partial results for the first round of elections. Sixty-two percent of eligible Egyptians voted. The Muslim Brotherhood came in first place with 36.6%, followed by the Salafist bloc with 24.4%. The non-Islamists, the Egyptian Bloc and the Wafd Party, came in 13.4 and 7.1 percent respectively. It was a landslide victory for the Islamists, who are now expected to control about two-thirds of the parliament once all rounds of voting are completed.

The Muslim Brotherhood is not a moderate group, but it appears reformist when compared to the Salafists. Whereas the Brotherhood embraces elections, the Salafists are hostile to the very concept of voting. The Brotherhood is pragmatic and aware of political constraints, whereas the Salafists have no qualms about expressing their desire to turn Egypt into another Saudi Arabia. The Brotherhood is “moderate” in comparison to the Salafists like Hamas is “moderate” compared to Al-Qaeda.

The success of the Salafists is particularly terrifying because they are honest about their objectives. Some supporters of the Brotherhood are misled about the group’s ideology. All of the Salafists’ supporters know what they are asking for when voting. The Salafists regularly call for closing movie theaters, gender segregation, creating a morality police, stoning adulterers, severing the hands of thieves and banning alcohol and “fornication.”

“I want to say: Citizenship restricted by Islamic Shariah, freedom restricted by Islamic Shariah, equality restricted by Islamic Shariah…Shariah is obligatory, not just the principles—freedom and justice and all that,” said one top Egyptian Salafist leader, Sheikh Abdel Moneim el-Shahat.

“In the land of Islam, I can’t let people decide what is permissible or what is prohibited,” says another.

One of the parties belonging to the Salafist bloc, al-Gamaa al-Islamiyya, has Aboud al-Zumour, the mastermind of the assassination of Anwar Sadat, as one of its leaders. He still speaks affectionately about his old colleague, Ayman al-Zawahiri, calling him a “very kind and nice man.” He says he disagrees with his killings of civilians and tourists, but supports “resistance” against “occupiers.”

The Muslim Brotherhood, a group that supports terrorism and Shariah-based governance, criticized the Salafists for their inflammatory rhetoric. The Brotherhood favors a more incremental approach. The Deputy Supreme Guide, for example, says “the enforcement of Shariah punishments will need time, and will only come after Islam is planted in every heart and masters the life of people, and then Islamic punishments can be applied.”

The White House has yet to express alarm over the election results. The Israeli Defense Minister, on the other hand, said the results are “very, very disturbing.” Hamas is elated, as expected.

A self-described “scientific” report issued by Muslim scholars has determined that within ten years Saudi Arabia will have “no more virgins” if the ban on Saudi women driving is lifted.

While Saudi Arabia remains the only country in the world where women are prohibited from driving a car — an act punishable by arrest and public whipping — Saudi women have been engaged in a highly publicized effort to overturn the ban.

Those protests, which began in earnest in May 2011, have taken the form of an online campaign in which Saudi women have posted videos of themselves driving in an attempt to encourage other women to defy the ban.

The video protests have generated sufficient adverse domestic and international reaction, which prompted Saudi King Abdullah to entertain suggestions that the driving ban be reviewed.

To that end, King Abdullah commissioned a report from Saudi professor Kamal Subhi, in conjunction with Muslim scholars from Saudi Arabia’s highest religious council, to assess the impact that lifting the driving ban would have on Saudi society.

Apart from the apocalyptic vision of an extinct virgin populace, the scholarly report also claimed women drivers would “provoke a surge in prostitution, pornography, homosexuality and divorce,” as seen in other Muslim countries that had allowed women the right to drive.

Empirical proof of that latter claim was offered by Professor Subhi when he recounted his own personal experience sitting in a coffee shop in another Arab nation. According to the horrified Subhi, “All the women were looking at me. One made a gesture that made it clear she was available… this is what happens when women are allowed to drive.”

While Subhi failed to explain what particular gesture the woman had made to force him to reach for the smelling salts, his findings nevertheless have found a receptive audience among conservative Saudi royals and clerics who are chafing at the prospect of any more reforms being pushed through by King Abdullah.

While exceedingly modest by Western standards, Abdullah has nevertheless enacted several reforms on behalf of women, which include giving Saudi women the right to vote in the 2015 municipal elections and a promise to appoint women to the King’s advisory body, the all-male Shura Council.

However, as one prominent Saudi journalist noted, “It will be odd that women who enjoy parliamentary immunity as members of the Shura Council are unable to drive their cars or travel without permission.”

Of course, having long borne the brunt of Saudi Arabia’s rigid interpretation of Sharia law, Saudi women are quite accustomed to being treated in a highly illogical, discriminatory and abusive way.

That treatment manifests itself most visibly in segregation laws, strictly enforced by the Kingdom’s religious police, which require women in public to avoid all contact with men while draped in attire that conceals their entire body, save hands and eyes.

In fact, even displaying one’s eyes can be a source of trouble for a woman, as demonstrated recently when Saudi Arabia’s Committee for the Promotion of Virtue and the Prevention of Vice (CPVPV) recently announced that it would order women whose eyes seem “tempting” to shield them immediately or face arrest.

Once upon a time a mad Caliph demanded of an old servant of his that he teach a donkey to talk for his amusement. If he refused, he would be put to death. If he failed he would be put to death as well. The old servant shrugged and asked for a year’s time in which to complete the task. When other servants asked him why he had accepted, he answered. “A year is a long time. Either the Caliph will die, the donkey will die, or the donkey will learn to speak.”

It’s been quite a few years and the donkey is on its last legs. Obama has done to half a dozen countries what Carter did to Iran. The Islamists are in ascendance and the Caliphate genie has been let out of the bottle. Down the road they may well implode, but for the moment they are a rising political force in the region. The handful of Muslim countries that could have been accused of having moderate governments are gone now.

The posse of “Islamist Whisperers” in the press, lead among them Thomas Friedman, are busy looking for fallback positions. In his latest column he explains that the Islamist victories only came about because the dictators prevented “independent, secular, democratic parties” from developing. What he fails to understand is that the dictators were the only force maintaining a modicum of secularism, not because they were freethinking atheists, but because many of them had come out of the military and wanted a functioning state, instead of a theocracy.

In Turkey the military was the guarantor of secularism until the European Friedmans decided that it was much better to back the Islamist AKP and its democratic commitment to turning Turkey into an Islamist state. Now the generals are locked up and a sneering imbecile who bankrupted his country to funnel money to his associates and create a temporary economic boom is threatening Europe.

The Shah of Iran, Ben Ali and Mubarak are just a few of the badly flawed rulers who nevertheless maintained some measure of social freedom, rather than democracy, and paid the price when the idiots that we elected decided that the region would be better off if it were in the hands of the Islamists.

Secular and democratic are a contradiction in terms where the majority of the population supports the Islamists. The secular activists that Friedman and the Western media embraced are an out of touch elite that is more familiar with Twitter than with the ordinary Egyptian. They have more in common with the dictators they are campaigning to overthrow, and in many cases have familial connections to the ruling class. Had the West succeeded in shoving El-Baradei into the top spot sans election, then they might have taken power, otherwise they are going to remain in the Islamist shadow.

But never fear, Friedman promises that once the liberal independent secularists get some time to learn how the whole elections thing works, then the Islamists will have to “compete with legitimate secular parties”.

Reading Friedman is like arguing with the proponent of a completely discredited theory who keeps asserting that given time it will finally stand up to the test. But does the mustached wonder of the Times really believe that the Islamists will wait around for the secularists to compete with them? Friedman and the rest of the gang dismissed the idea that Egypt would follow Iran, but now he might want to take a second look at the history of Iran. Islamist democracy begins when the old regime falls and ends when they take power.

In FriedmanLand (TM) if the Islamists rig elections then the people will rise up and overthrow them. But how well did that work out in Iran? The difference between the Islamists and Mubarak is that the jolly bearded boys don’t care how many bodies they stack up and the only people they answer to are even more extreme than they are.

The media is still operating under the delusion that the Islamists will maintain democracy once they have profited from it, and that only shows their basic ignorance. The essence of the Islamist agenda is to deny people the freedom to live the way they want to. And that being so why would they allow  any parties that don’t toe the Koranic line to play in their new sandbox when that would be in violation of their principles?

Financial analysts have popped up to inform us that the Muslim Brotherhood is pro-business, which it true is in the same way that Iran’s leaders are pro-business, and Mubarak was pro-business and Vladimir Putin and the rulers of the People’s Republic of China are pro-business. Meaning that they like money and running an oligarchy which will control much of the country’s industry or solicit bribes from those businesses it doesn’t control. To a financial analyst this is good news, but he might want to take a closer look at what the GDP of Persian might have been today if it wasn’t overrun by black robed parasites and their pet thugs.

Ten years later, there is still much we don’t know about 9/11. There is shocking evidence that Iran and Hezbollah had a role, and the FBI is still looking for three Qataris who escaped the country. Questions remain surrounding a likely Iraqi intelligence operative and a Saudi family who fled the country shortly before the attacks.

Speculation about Iranian and Hezbollah responsibility for 9/11 began to heat up after the 9/11 Commission Report was released in 2004. According to the report, 8 to 10 of the hijackers transited Iran between October 2000 and February 2001 and the Iranian border guards did not stamp their passports. Senior Hezbollah operatives, including the late Imad Mughniyah, were on some of the flights taken by the hijackers during this preparatory stage for the attacks.

Iran and Hezbollah are being sued by a team of eight law firms for their involvement in the attacks. Much of the case rests upon the sworn testimonies of two intelligence defectors. The first is a former Iranian intelligence officer named Abdolghassem Mesbahi who defected in 1996 and whose information proved Iran’s role in a 1994 bombing in Argentina. He says he had first-hand knowledge of a plan drafted by the regime to use proxies to crash hijacked airliners into targets in the U.S., including the World Trade Center and Pentagon. According to Mesbahi, Iran bought a flight simulator for Boeing 757s, 767s and 777s about 18 months before 9/11, even though it owns no such aircraft.

The second eyewitness is an intelligence defector named Hamid Reza Zakeri, who claims to have worked for a top-secret intelligence office set up under Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khamenei’s authority. He says that he was in charge of security arrangements for meetings between top Al-Qaeda and Iranian officials in the months leading up to 9/11, including Ayman al-Zawahiri. He defected in the summer of 2001 and brought with him alleged intelligence documents that discuss an upcoming joint attack on the U.S. by Iran and Al-Qaeda.

Former Florida Senator Bob Graham, a co-chairman of the 9/11 Commission, is making accusations of a cover-up regarding the involvement of certain Saudis in the attacks. It has been revealed that a Saudi family in Sarasota, FL, made a speedy getaway only two weeks before the 9/11 attacks, leaving behind their belongings and a stocked refrigerator. A follow-up investigation by the FBI found that the Saudis at the home, Abdulazzi and Anoud al-Hiijjii, had been in communication with three of the hijackers who lived nearby, including Mohammed Atta. The FBI also connected them to at least 11 other suspected terrorists. They fled the U.S. for Riyadh, where Aboud al-Hiijjii’s father, Essam Ghazzawi, lives. Both Ghazzawi and Abdulazzi’s names were known to the FBI before the attacks for their possible involvement in terrorism financing. The FBI says the case is closed and the couple was exonerated.

Senator Graham says that his commission was never informed of the finding by the FBI. He says that the FBI also did not tell the 9/11 Commission about how an employee of a Saudi government contractor, Omar al-Bayoumi, sponsored the stay of two of the hijackers in the U.S. He moved to San Diego shortly after two of the hijackers arrived. He received a raise and then paid for their apartment, introduced them to other Saudis and even set up their flight lessons. Al-Bayoumi reportedly sponsored them partly from an account connected to the wife of the Saudi ambassador to the U.S.

Far from being absurd aberrations to be dismissed, such accounts, which are becoming better known thanks to the Internet, are stark reminders of the incompatibility between the Western and Muslim worldviews, or, more to the point, the difficulty Western peoples have transcending their own paradigms and understanding the Muslim worldview in its own right—above and beyond the issue of sorcery.

In his 2010 book, The Closing of the Muslim Mind, Robert Reilly, a senior fellow at the American Foreign Policy Council, helps explain the Muslim worldview by thoroughly documenting the historic and doctrinal roots behind it; by refreshingly bypassing the overly dramatized question of “what went wrong,” he explains the more pressing “why it went wrong.”

The book is a reminder of the importance of epistemology: before understanding Muslim acts, one must understand the Muslim mind that initiates them.  We discover that Shakespeare’s dictum “Nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so,” in Islam becomes “nothing good or evil but Allah says so.”

The author sheds light on the struggles of the different schools of Islam, showing how by the 10^th century, the fatalistic, deterministic  schools triumphed, delivering the death blow, not only to the notion of free will, but natural law as well: “a theological deformation … produced a dysfunctional culture.”  From here one can understand the full impact of the popular assertion “the doors of ijtihad [intellectualizing] closed in the 10^th century.”

Reilly chronicles how the giants of Muslim philosophy, such as Ghazali and Ashari, concluded that knowledge was unknowable, that moral truths can only be ascertained through revelation.  Accordingly, all knowledge—the very bounds of reality—came to be limited to the words of the Quran and its pronouncer, Islam’s prophet Muhammad.

The ramifications of such intellectual calcification are immense: “All acts are in themselves morally neutral”; “Allah does not command certain behavior because it is good; it is good because he commands it.  Likewise, he does not forbid murder because it is bad; it is bad because he forbids it.”

Equivocations, such as the following by Ashari, become commonplace: “Lying is evil only because Allah has declared it to be evil….  And if he declared it to be good it would be good; and if he commanded it, no one could gainsay him.”  Of course and as Ashari knew, the Islamic deity and his prophet are on record permitting and even encouraging Muslims to deceive.

Similarly, the spirit of inquiry perishes: “the only thing worth knowing is whether a specific action is, according to Shari ‘a: obligatory, recommended, permitted, discouraged, or forbidden.  The rest is irrelevant.” It is precisely for this reason that in Islam, the law—what is right or wrong, how one should live—trumps “theology,” the latter designated as kalam, that is, mere “words.”  This is also why in the last millennium Spain alone has produced more books than the Arab world in its entirety.

Likewise in the realm of science: Reilly cites a Pakistani physicist—not an uneducated, impoverished “radical”—saying it is un-Islamic to believe that combining hydrogen and water makes water; rather, Muslims are “supposed to say that when you bring hydrogen and oxygen together then by the will of Allah [which need not always be consistent] water was created.”

The Closing of the Muslim Mind explains the singularity of Muslim epistemology and its antithesis to Western sensibilities: it explains why a maid is arrested and charged with sorcery and the dread of bewitched animals; explains why adult “breastfeeding” and habitual lying pose no moral problems; explains why top Muslim clerics insist the world is flat and ingesting the feces and urine of Muhammad is salutary; explains why jihadists believe their terror is pious and a libidinous paradise awaits them.

All these “alternate” ways of thinking make sense when one accepts that, in the purely Muslim mind, intuitive reasoning, the human conscience, and even common sense take a backseat to the literal words of Allah and his prophet, seen as the founts of all truth and reality—or, inevitably from a non-Muslim perspective, the words of a deluded or deceiving 7^th century Arab.

As the White House deals a devastating blow to one Obama conspiracy theory, leave it to leftists to dig up another one to browbeat allegedly-bigoted conservatives with. At the Daily Beast, pseudo-feminist Michelle Goldberg “traces the far-right history of the claim” that something funny’s going on with Barack Obama’s academic background:

Claims about Obama’s educational history date back to September 2008, when The Wall Street Journal attacked him for not releasing his school records, writing in an editorial, “Some think his transcript, if released, would reveal Mr. Obama as a mediocre student who benefited from racial preference.” Since then, Orly Taitz, queen of the birthers, has developed elaborate theories about Obama’s college years. As Taitz argues, Obama himself acknowledged that he was directionless when he started college. How, then, did he get himself accepted into the Ivy League?

Despite purporting to refute the right-wing “fever swamps,” Goldberg won’t actually reference the WSJ piece again, so it’s worth mentioning that it makes substantive points, among them that the ambiguity of Obama’s college days doesn’t square with the prominence of his personal story in his claim to fame. And as Andy McCarthy points out, Obama has a habit of modifying details of his biography for different audiences. (Ace has more solid analysis of Obama’s college days here.)

But not a peep about any of this from Goldberg. Instead of addressing what serious Obama critics have said, she spends the next couple paragraphs shooting down the theories of Orly Taitz, an especially destructive Birther attorney, who speculates that Obama attended Columbia as a foreign exchange student, attended for a mere nine months instead of two years, and even that he got into Harvard Law thanks to the machinations of a Saudi prince.

Whatever the fact-to-crap ratio of Taitz’s allegations may be (the Saudi connection seems outlandish, but the explanation of the National Student Clearinghouse rep, who says Taitz got bad results from submitting queries to NSC’s database incorrectly, doesn’t seem adequate either), it’s ultimately a sideshow. The point is, Goldberg is making clowns like Orly Taitz the face of the opposition rather than McCarthy or the Wall Street Journal editorial board because she wants to delegitimize their argument without addressing it. Why? Why else—race-baiting:

It’s easy enough to see why this particular narrative has endured. Not only does it position the president as a Muslim Manchurian candidate with longtime ties to agents of the caliphate, but it also assures resentful whites that this seemingly brilliant black man isn’t so smart after all. In that sense, it’s of a piece with the right-wing obsession with Obama’s use of a teleprompter, and with the widespread suspicion that he didn’t really write the eloquent Dreams From My Father, a claim Trump recently made at a Tea Party rally. Obama, in this view, is both sinister and stupid, canny enough to perpetrate one of the biggest frauds in American history but still the ultimate affirmative-action baby.

Trump is clearly not as intelligent as Obama, but he’s not an idiot, either. When he blows this particular dog whistle, he knows exactly what the Republican base is hearing.

No, the Right’s desire to knock Obama’s brain down a peg is a reaction to the endless mainstream media narrative that conservatives and Republicans are morons, while Obama is a genius (indeed, look no further than Goldberg’s own unsupported claim that Donald Trump’s intellect “clearly” pales in comparison to The One’s). To demonstrate the absurdity of claiming this is about Obama’s race, let’s perform a little thought experiment.

Imagine for a moment that instead of black Democrat President Barack Obama, we currently have white Democrat President Barry Osborn, who, aside from his racial and ethnic background, is identical to Obama in every way—same handling of the economy, same healthcare plan, same treatment of Israel, and the same positions on abortion, guns, etc. Then take any of the claims listed above—the president isn’t that bright, he didn’t write his book, he’s helpless without a teleprompter. Regardless of their particular merits, simply ask yourself: do you really think we’d be treating Osborn any more favorably than Obama? Do you think we’d pull these punches against a white ideological opponent, or be more open to left-wing ideas just because they came from a white leftist?

Of course not. Leftists understood from the start that Obama’s skin color would make a potent weapon for smearing opponents instead of engaging their ideas, which is exactly what Michelle Goldberg has done here.

In an urgent bid to plug a hole in its budget, Dalhousie University’s medical school will sell 10 vacant first-year seats to students from Saudi Arabia for $75,000 annually.

Dalhousie’s medical dean, Tom Marrie, says a reduction in provincial grants last year left the program underfunded, and that generating money from empty spaces is crucial to balancing the books.

The scheme is a targeted, stopgap solution, and may not be repeated. But most Canadian universities, including Dalhousie, are trumpeting Canadian education and looking to increase their foreign student enrolment as global competition for top talent – including those with deep pockets – heats up....

The Saudi students will pay considerably more than their domestic counterparts, whose tuition and government funding amounts to less than $40,000, but Dr. Marrie said “that’s not unreasonable” when compared with other international fees. The 10 students are expected to return to Saudi Arabia for their residencies.

“We’ve got to find a way to run the place. This is one of those ways,” he said. “We just need this money to function.”...

That said, there is another aspect to this series of grim events, one that bodes ill for the worldwide struggle against Islamic supremacism (and also for our efforts to diminish carbon emissions): the devastating impact the earthquake and subsequent damage to Japan's energy plants will have on the progress of nuclear energy, especially in America. As the New York Times reported:

The official announcement that two reactors at an earthquake-damaged nuclear plant could be suffering meltdowns underscores the Japanese nuclear industry’s troubled history, and years of grass-roots objections from a people uniquely sensitive to the ravages of nuclear destruction.

The unfolding crisis at the two reactors, both at the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Station, feeds into a resurgence of doubts about nuclear energy’s safety — even as it has gained credence as a source of clean energy in a time of mounting concerns about the environmental and public health tolls of fossil fuels.

All of this is a major problem for those of us combating jihad. I've written before that the two greatest competitive advantages that Muslims have in confronting the West are their fertility, and our addiction to Mideast oil. This site has written before—though it hasn't been a central concern—of the importance of developing alternative sources of energy, to starve the jihadist beast of the massive subsidies received by hardline Wahabi mosques and madrasas around the world from Saudi Arabia. I remember Bill Maher's pointed mock-propaganda poster, from his book Political Correctness Kills: "When You Ride Alone, You Ride with Bin Laden."

And Maher is right: Every time we fuel up our cars, or indeed waste any energy that helps raise the price of oil, we are subsidizing the education of young Pakistanis, Indonesians, or Africans in the harshest, most orthodox variety of Islam. This cold fact alone ought to make conservatives more open to reasonable, market-friendly attempts to reduce our oil consumption. Indeed, I think a rational compromise between those alarmed by climate change and those who question whether it correlates with human activity is this:

America should, unilaterally and outside the corrupting authority of international bodies or treaties, impose a carbon tax that primarily targets oil consumption. Crucially, to assuage the concerns of critics who believe that climate change arguments are merely a pretext to grow the government, this tax should be revenue neutral. In other words, for every dollar raised by the carbon tax, a dollar in tax cuts should be offered—aimed primarily at America's poor and working classes, who would otherwise suffer the impact of what would be a regressive tax. By making gas more expensive, we would be encouraging the growth of alternative energy sources—including nuclear plants. By making Ford Fusions and Priuses more competitive and in the long run affordable than gas guzzlers, we'd go a long way toward that consummation devoutly to be wished: to leave our jihadists enemies in the dust, and consign them to eating sand.

So as the heartrending consequences of Japan's natural disaster unfold in the next few months, one more front on which we must fight is this: We must counter those who irrationally oppose nuclear energy, who make the false inference that because some plants are unsafe in earthquake-prone countries, newer and better plants sited far from tectonic faults are equally dangerous. We should pressure conservative candidates who seek our support on the energy issue, and urge them to use the anxiety over global warming as a means to reduce the Western energy subsidy to Muslim regimes. A candidate who candidly made that connection would get my vote.

RIYADH, Saudi Arabia -- A Saudi court has convicted a man and sentenced him to four months in prison and 90 lashes for kissing a woman in a mall.

The government-owned daily Al-Yom reported on Thursday that Saudi religious police arrested the man and two women after they were seen on mall cameras "engaging in immoral movements in front of other shoppers."

The report says the man, who is in his 20s, was seen with a woman "sitting on one of the chairs, exchanging kisses and hugs." It's unclear what the other woman was doing...

Last weekend, the feds popped two more US citizens who yearned to kill their fellow Americans for Allah.  They hoped to join al-Shabab, Somali’s ruthless jihadis, but fantasized about slaughter right here at home.

And, once again, any mention of Islamist extremism was absent from government statements, as if these guys were just angry about parking tickets.

The would-be Times Square car bomber, the guess-what’s-in-my-knickers Christmas Day airline bomber, no end of got-‘em-in-time apprehensions, plus the Ft. Hood butcher, Major Nidal Hasan…and even the media barely hint at what all these fanatics have in common.

Dare to suggest that radical Islam might be to blame, and you’re a bigot.  Just as pointing out that Palestinian terrorism led to Israel’s hard line stand makes you a fascist.  But those who reject radical Islam’s role as the driving force behind today’s terrorism must answer one obvious question:

Where are the Christian terrorists?

The ignored persecution, deprivation and massacres aren’t in Gaza, the global left’s favorite petting zoo.  The cover-up victims are the Middle East’s Christians.

Set aside for now the vast Christian communities that once thrived between Morocco and Mesopotamia.  The multiple holocausts they suffered for over a thousand years at Muslim hands doesn’t fit the White-House-approved narrative.

Let’s concentrate on today—when the only country left in the Middle East in which Christians enjoy complete freedom of worship, freedom from secret police surveillance, forced conversions, pogroms or civil strife, is Israel.

But that won’t do, either.  Can’t make Israel the good guy.  So how about those “suffering Palestinians?”  You know, the folks that chick-lit Che Guevara, Rachel Corrie, sought to rescue from an Israeli bulldozer…

Well, the Palestinians who’ve suffered the most have been Christians. And it hasn’t been the Israelis who’ve been persecuting them.

Take the West Bank city of Bethlehem, the literal cradle (or manger) of Christianity.  A half century ago, its Arab population was 80% Christian.  Today, Christians make up no more than 15% of the locals, and their numbers continue to shrink.

Throughout the Palestinian territories, the once-vibrant Christian population is estimated to have collapsed to a mere 25,000.  Muslim rapes, murders, kidnappings, extortion, death threats and property theft are to blame.

Where are the Christian terrorists?

In neighboring Egypt, Christianity’s intellectual center in its formative centuries, centuries of Islamization reduced, but failed to eliminate the Christian faith.

Coptic Christians, with their ancient traditions, still make up as much as 15% of Egypt’s population, which is nearing 80 million.  But the faith is under siege again.  The Mubarak regime appears to have decided to let its mortal enemy, the Muslim Brotherhood, have some leash in the persecution department.

Copts suffer village pogroms, ghettoization in cities, and kidnappings and forced conversions (often of marriage-age girls).  They’re prevented from constructing new churches and suffer general discrimination.  Killings of Copts go uninvestigated by Egypt’s police.

Where are the Christian terrorists?

Then there’s Iraq, where a tragic unintended consequence of the removal of Saddam Hussein–the region’s worst mass murderer–has been the destruction of ancient Christian communities.

Prior to 2003, there were about a million Christians in Iraq.  Most are now refugees.  Successive Iraqi governments have shown little interest in protecting those who remain.  Leading churchmen have been assassinated, Christian families have been slaughtered, churches have been bombed and burned.  And we’ve done nothing—to avoid irritating Muslims.

Where are the Christian terrorists?

Given the excuses made for Islamist terror, shouldn’t we have seen a violent response by now?

Of course, none of this is an issue in Saudi Arabia, where the Christian (and Jewish) communities that thrived at the dawn of Islam were wiped out centuries ago.  Even Lebanon, long a state where Christians enjoyed religious freedom, suffers from the grim Islamist contagion.

The absence of Christian terrorism in the savagely anti-Christian Middle East goes beyond Christ’s call to “turn the other cheek.”  It further highlights extremist Islam as the source of today’s terror.

But Washington will continue to shut its eyes and bluster about the “legitimate aspirations of the Palestinian people,” etc., etc.  Dead Arab Christians are even less important than dead Jews.

Ralph Peters’ latest book is “Endless War.”

Mahmoud Abbas and his Palestine Authority, we are told, comprise the moderate Palestinian alternative to the Hamas-driven vision of mayhem and terror in Gaza.  This assurance is repeated despite Abbas’s well-established biography as someone antipathetic to Jews as a people.  In his doctoral thesis, written at Moscow’s Institute of Oriental Studies, Abbas presaged Mahmoud Ahmadinejad by denying the Holocaust.  As a top lieutenant to Yasser Arafat – he named a son “Yasser” for his mentor – he was a terrorist leader, even sporting a nom-de-guerre:  Abu Mazen.  In his prominent role within Al-Fatah, Abbas provided the funds that Abu Daoud used to perpetrate the 1972 massacre of eleven Israeli athletes at the Munic Olympic Games. During the period Abbas has headed the Palestine Authority on the land that Arabs call the “West Bank” and Jews call “Judea and Samaria,” he has honored mass murderers by naming town squares for them, has permitted mass media under his control to savage Jews as people, and even has allowed anti-Jewish vituperative to be taught in the curricula of his schools.

Now comes word that his Government – ever on the international prowl with outstretched hand seeking hundreds of millions of dollars and euros to cushion its bankrupt economy – has found $50 million to fund a new initiative.  The Palestinian Authority will pay Arabs not to accept employment in Jewish communities in Judea and Samaria.

Will American tax dollars indirectly be financing this “fund”?  Inexorably so. Only last year we pledged the Palestinian Authority and Gaza $900 million, then rushed them another emergency infusion of $200 million as their economy crumbled.  Yet, while the Palestine Authority may not be wealthy, their sense of irony is rich: If Israelis hesitate to employ Palestinian laborers, sincerely fearing terrorism in their midst, they are berated as “racist” and “apartheid.” Now, in the face of tens of thousands of Palestinians working amicably with Jews, Mahmoud Abbas will pay them to revert to unemployed rather than to accept employment within Judea and Samaria.

More than 20,000 Palestinian Arabs now work at the industrial parks and construction sites that employ them throughout Judea and Samaria.  Despite continual efforts by Mr. Abbas and Israel’s haters throughout the world to slander Israel as an “Apartheid” entity, the reality is that Arabs often earn from their Jewish employers twice the income they command within Mr. Abbas’s polity.  These are good salaries, and those wages support large families. The people whose lives would be affected by the cynicism – the workers in the industrial parks – do not want to give up those jobs.  The Associated Press interviewed Suhail Jaber, who supports his family of eight by working in a picture frame company in the community of Barkan in Samaria, an industrial park employs some 5,000 Arabs. Jaber told the AP that, if forced by Abbas to quit without being assured a new job, he might turn to stealing to feed his family.  Another employee, Samer Awad, “said he would sleep in Barkan’s furniture factory to avoid detection by Palestinian law enforcement, rather than quit.”

This is the season when pockets of Western campus radicals enjoy proclaiming on their respective campuses their annual day or week of anti-Israel hate.  (They mark May 15, 1948 as the “Day of Catastrophe” because Israel was proclaimed into existence as the Middle East’s first democracy on that day.) Curiously, the anti-Zionists actually are half-correct when they bewail the presence of Apartheid segregation and Nazi-like hatred in the Middle East.  There really is “Apartheid in Palestine.” There really is “Nazi-like hate” in the Middle East. The only tweak on those anti-Israel posters, Jew-hating sloganeers, and haters who call Israel-supporters the “new Nazis,” is that the Apartheid and venom of Nazi-like hatred in Palestine is perpetrated by the Palestinian Arabs.  It is their unbridled insistence on demographic separation – complete, utter separation from Jews – and their concomitant dehumanization and demonization of Jews that sees them refuse to coexist permanently with a Jewish state next door or anywhere in the Middle East.  This social pathology mirrors the Apartheid and Nazi-like vitriol that sees the Coptic Christian minority persecuted in Egypt, the Berber minority persecuted in Algeria, the Christian minority persecuted in Saudi Arabia, African Christians persecuted in the Sudan, the Baha’i persecuted in Iran, Kurds mass-murdered in Iraq, and even Shiites persecuted in Sunni Muslim lands and Sunnis persecuted by Shiites. The affinity with Hitler’s Nazi paradigm of mass-murder and Jew-hatred may be traced back to the father of Palestinian nationalism, the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem.

This pathological hatred of Jews transcends the worst images of Hitler’s Mein Kampf. At the core of Scripture, in its chapter five (“The Table”), Surah 5:57-62, the Koran discusses the “People of the Book,” portraying Jews as sub-human, despicable animals: “Believers, do not seek the friendship of the infidels and those who were given the Book before you . . . . Say: ‘People of the Book, do you hate us for any reason other than . . . that most of you are evil-doers?’. . . .You see many of them vie with one another in sin and wickedness . . . . Evil is what they do.”  Thus, Allah will lay his “worst reward” on the Jews, “transforming them into apes and pigs.”   The vicious ape/pig demonization of Jews recurs throughout the Koran (see, e.g., “The Cow,” 2:64-65), and that vicious imagery – a veritable Blood Libel – has been a central message propagated by the Palestine Authority in its mass media for years, even as it is a recurring Friday sermon topic telecast on Palestine Arab television – the literal demonizing of Jews as blood brothers or children of apes and pigs.

For all the hatred, perhaps nowhere in the world is Apartheid in Palestine more pernicious than . . . within the Palestine Authority.  Only within the Arab world do we find civilian populations in their thousands consigned to “refugee camps” for sixty years.  This perpetual consignment – indeed, virtual internment – constitutes one of the worst crimes against humanity we have witnessed in the modern era: the concerted persecution of Palestinian Arabs by cynical Arab regimes who have planted them in “refugee camps.”  Nowhere is the cynicism more manifest than it is within the Palestine Authority, which maintains “refugee camps” in cities like Jenin. Consider: If those denizens indeed are Palestinian Arabs, and if the Palestine Authority oversees the homeland of the Palestinians, then how in the world can people living in their own land, under a government freely elected by their own people, be deemed “refugees”?

Those “refugee camps” are historical anomalies, thoroughly anachronistic. Their residents are dumped onto international welfare rolls, under the rubric of a cynically anti-Jewish United Nations agency, the “United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East” (UNRWA), which runs the camps and their schools.  The UNRWA has a vested interest – namely, preserving their own existence, preserving their own continued employment and pay checks, preserving their jobs –  in perpetuating the historical crime of refusing to let the residents be absorbed into their local environments.

During the last century, the world has seen so many tragically painful “population exchanges” play themselves out on the world stage. Greek ethnics were forced out of Bulgaria and into Greece, while Bulgarian ethnics were forced from Greece into Bulgaria. In 1922, under the League of Nations, 1.25 million Greek Orthodox ethnics were transferred from Turkey, and half a million Moslems were transferred reciprocally to Turkey from Greece. Fridtjof Nansen, who oversaw the population exchange, was awarded the 1922 Nobel Peace Prize for his effort. In 1940, under the Treaty of Craiova, there was a massive population exchange: 80,000 Romanian ethnics were forced into Bulgaria, and 65,000 Bulgarian ethnics forced out of Romania. After World War II, between 14-16 million ethnic Germans were transferred out of Central and Eastern Europe, and into Germany. Poland and the Soviet Union exchanged populations: between 1944 and 1946, some 2 million people, Polish ethnics sent to Poland from the Ukraine and Ukrainians sent out of Poland, were transferred. More than 5 million Hindus and Sikhs were forced to India from the regions that became Pakistan, and more than 6 million Moslems were pushed from India into Pakistan.

Where are the languishing Bulgarian refugee camps? Greek refugee camps? Romanian/ Polish/ German/ Ukrainian/ Hindu/ Sikh refugee camps? Where are the Bosnian Moslem refugee camps?  Why is there no massive international welfare apparatus in the rubric of a United Nations Relief and Works Agency for any of these  refugees? How is it that no one even thinks to ask?

Maybe, as Mr. Abbas directs $50 million to pay Palestinian Arabs to leave their jobs alongside Jews, and to return to the squalor of his homespun “refugee camps,” it is time for Americans to ask that question – before we write him our next billion-dollar check.

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

Vice President Joe Biden, wrong on virtually every major foreign policy issue since his election to the Senate in 1972, nailed this one: He warned that actors on the international stage would test the new, inexperienced President.

He knew that President Barack Obama’s enemies would perceive his strength-through-peace (versus peace-through-strength) approach as weakness. They do and are acting accordingly.

Candidate Obama vowed to hold high-level talks with Iran and North Korea without “preconditions.” Obama promised a “reset” of all things President George W. Bush, with no more talk of “victory” in Iraq and Afghanistan. He reneged on the promised missile shield defense in Poland and the Czech Republic. He waits for countries like China and Russia, both of which have business interests in Iran, to agree to “tough, crippling” sanctions.

The President dropped the term “war on terror” and refuses to call Islamofascists “Islamofascists.” He apologetically says America is vital in maintaining world peace “whether we like it or not.” He sent a videotaped message to Iran telling of our willingness to re-engage the country — if only it would unclench its fist. It unclenched more time for Iran to pursue a nuclear bomb. The administration was painfully slow to acknowledge that the Times Square truck bomb attempt involved foreign Islamic terrorists.

The administration chastised Israel for settlement construction in an area of east Jerusalem that President Bill Clinton, President George W. Bush and even Palestine Liberation Organization leader Yasser Arafat assumed would be part of Israel in any peace agreement. During Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s state visit, Obama treated him worse than a White House dinner gate-crasher.

How’s the hope and change working out?

North Korea, in an act of war, sank a South Korean ship. Iran may now have sufficient materiel and technical knowledge to build a nuclear bomb. The Iranian-backed terrorist group Hezbollah — under the nose of United Nations “peacekeepers” — continues to stock southern Lebanon with weapons that threaten Israel.

Now comes the anti-Israel “humanitarian” flotilla.

After Israel unilaterally withdrew from Gaza, the terror group Hamas seized power. Israel and Egypt began a naval blockade of ships in and out of Gaza. Though Israel had uprooted every Israeli settler from Gaza, Hamas fired thousands of rockets into Israel, a bombardment that continues today.

Israel already sends humanitarian aid into Gaza and allows others to do so.

Israel even agreed to allow the supposed humanitarian flotilla cargo to enter, provided Israeli security could check it for weapons. And never mind that some of the flotilla’s “humanitarian activists” appear to have ties to terror organizations.

The flotilla’s attempt to run the blockade resulted in nine deaths when the Israeli military boarded ships to inspect the cargo. As Israel’s enemies hoped, Israel stands accused of a “disproportionate” response.

But why the flotilla now?

The most significant intervening event is the election of President Obama. Now Israel’s most important ally considers Israeli intransigence the principal obstacle to peace with the Palestinians in particular and in the Middle East in general. The activists got the message: Israel is on the defensive.

Israel, with good reason, feels alone.

Obama, like Bush in his second term, seems willing to accept a nuclear-armed Iran — even as Iran threatens Israel with annihilation. Obama apparently considers a nuclear-armed Iran inevitable, even if it ignites a regional nuclear arms race — since Saudi Arabia, Egypt and Jordan fear Iran more than they do Israel.

Give Obama credit for continuing many of Bush’s policies. Gitmo remains open, the administration finally understanding that the prison exists for a reason. He continued rendition, the terror surveillance program and the increased use of drone predators in Pakistan. He used the same “state secrets” argument to fight courtroom disclosure of sources and methods. He increased troop strength in Afghanistan and continues the Bush “clear and hold” strategy for that country and Iraq.

But Jimmy Carter governed as a strength-through-peace president. He pressured the Shah of Iran to release “political prisoners.” The shah was toppled, only to be followed by the repressive and threatening Islamic Republic of Iran. Carter urged Americans to abandon their “inordinate fear of communism.” Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev considered Carter weak and rewarded him by invading Afghanistan. This triggered a chain reaction from which the world continues to suffer. The Arabs and Muslims who fought to expel the Soviet Union then turned on the United States and the West in a grand plan for an Islamic world.

Israel’s response to the flotilla was an act of self-defense. The Western world’s reaction has been shameful. Western countries once again fail to distinguish the arsonist from the firefighter.

In 1962, the United States imposed a naval blockade — a “quarantine” — on Cuba. What would we have done to a “humanitarian” flotilla determined to help Fidel Castro place Soviet missiles 90 miles from Florida?

Larry Elder is a syndicated radio talk show host and best-selling author. His latest book, “What’s Race Got to Do with It?” is available now. To find out more about Larry Elder, visit his Web page at www.WeveGotACountryToSave.com.

Riyadh, 3 June (AKI) - Leading Muslim scholars and religious leaders in Saudi Arabia have called for jihad against Israel after the deadly raid on the Gaza humanitarian aid flotilla this week. In a statement distributed to Arab media, 70 of the country's prominent religious leaders said Muslims had an "obligation" to take action and to help end the embargo on Gaza aid.

"We have to strike at the heart of Israel to drive them out of Muslim territories in a way that breaks the Gaza embargo," the statement said.

"Dialogue and negotiations only increases violence by the Jews," the statement said. "The only way to save our (Muslim) nation from attacks and humiliation is to return to the way of Allah."

The Saudi scholars, who included the influential preacher Salman al-Awda whose sermons have influenced Islamist political thinkers at home and abroad....

When I think of the proposed mosques at Ground Zero, I think of the above……for starters.

The idea of the Twin Towers towering and overshadowing the icon of Islam is a good way of illustrating that our way of life always has and always will tower above their own.

To those who don’t know, the black box being overshadowed in the above image is called the Kaaba, located in Mecca, Saudi Arabia, and felt by Muslims to be the most sacred site on earth. Ground Zero itself is considered to be “sacred ground” by most Americans, and New Yorkers in particular. Since our elected officials have decided to hold Islam above America in all ways big and small since 9/11, it’s up to the American people to stop the bastards from getting away with yet another attack on New York. Here is Robert Spencer on Why There Should Be No Mosques at Ground Zero.

Saudi Arabia's religious police are investigating three young Saudis who challenged the country's strict laws in a TV programme.

The two men and a woman were featured in a MTV documentary talking about how they wanted to subvert the Islamic laws of the country.

In recent years the rulers of the oil-rich kingdom have said they want to instigate reforms.

But lawyers say the three could face stern penalties.

The Saudi judicial system is based on a strict Islamic code and can hand out jail terms and floggings for people who break them.

Segregation

In the programme - called Resist the Power! Saudi Arabia - a girl named only as Fatimah told how she disguised herself as a boy to ride a bicycle in the streets of Jeddah.

The 20-year-old also railed against the traditional women's dress - a black robe known as an abaya.

She said she made her own abayas in bright colours, which she sold to friends.

A young man, Aziz, talked about his attempts to break the strict segregation of the sexes in Saudi life - to meet his girlfriend for a date.

"We are not free to live as we like," said the 24-year-old.

That's Sharia for you.

The four part documentary, which was screened in the US, also followed a Saudi heavy metal band who struggled to find venues that would allow them to play.

An official at a court in Jeddah said the films were being investigated for the crimes of "openly declaring sin" and a decision would be made on whether to prosecute in the next few days, Reuters reported....

White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel gained notoriety for declaring his credo: “You never want a serious crisis to go to waste.” In other words, when there is tragedy and suffering, intense human pain and disaster, a political expert enjoys a unique opportunity to push the least popular parts of his agenda past a distracted electorate.

No sooner had President Barack Obama entered the White House than the Emanuel Doctrine was put into motion with the 1,073-page $787 billion “stimulus bill” that had to be rushed through Congress, seemingly overnight.  As Rep. Joe Barton (R-TX) said: “We have not had a single hearing on anything in front of us….We’ve been told that even one hearing would be one too many, and that we have a single day to approve these five complex propositions that will affect the lives of millions.”

Faced in January 2009 with a looming national financial catastrophe, as a crash in the residential real estate market prompted a grave Wall Street crisis, the Obama White House detected cover to raid the public till and reward staunch Democrat loyalists under the rubric of a “stimulus bill.”  Beneath the public radar and buried within the bill’s 1,073 pages, the “stimulus” allocated inter alia $50 million to the National Endowment for the Arts, nearly half a billion dollars for people interested in researching “global warming,” even at least $18 million for the website that reports how the “stimulus” funds are allocated.  Overturning a prime achievement of the Clinton Administration, the “stimulus” restored key elements of the welfare practices that America had abandoned. Over time, the “stimulus” has trickled down to fund $233,825 for explaining voting patterns in Africa and $363,760 for two jobs “[d]evelop[ing] ‘real life’ st[or]ies that underscore job and infrastructure related to [the Stimulus Bill] research findings.”

In sum, there was crisis – thus opportunity.  The sweaty-palms sense of crisis that demanded virtually overnight passage before Congressional representatives could read its encyclopedic contents has long since proven exaggerated.  The vast majority of the bill’s funds still have not stimulated anything.  Much of it still has not been infused into the economy.

This is the Emanuel Doctrine:  never let a crisis go to waste.  This doctrine similarly was implemented after the ObamaCare health measure had been all-but-abandoned when Scott Brown surprisingly defeated Attorney-General Martha Coakley in the race for United State Senator from Massachusetts.  Soon after, unexpectedly, a national pseudo-crisis emerged when Anthem Blue Cross, a California health insurer, sought to raise its health premiums by as much as 39 percent.  The crisis was not wasted by Washington.  Within days, ObamaCare was rushed back onto the House calendar.  Forgotten amid the federal legislative carnage that followed – most recently credited with helping bring down Rep. David Obey, Rep. Bart Stupak, and Sen. Arlen Specter – is that Anthem Blue Cross ultimately withdrew their rate-hike request as the California insurance oversight system effectively regulated as intended.

Considered in the light of this prior experience, it becomes understandable why the Obama Administration has opted to curtail oil-exploration, suspending and rescinding permits, in response to the tragic Deepwater Horizon oil rig spill off the Gulf of Mexico.  The story is fresh in the public mind. In raw numbers, eleven have died, and between 18 million and 39 million gallons of oil have gushed along America’s Gulf Coast, already exceeding the Exxon Valdez disaster that spilled nearly 11 million gallons of oil into the waters along Alaska. One of America’s fiercest Democrat partisans, New Orleans resident James Carville, went on an extraordinary tear last week against the Obama Administration:  “The President of the United States could’ve come down here. He could’ve been involved with the families of these 11 people….These people are crying. They’re begging for something down here, and it just looks like he’s not involved in this. Man, you got to get down here and take control of this. Put somebody in charge of this and get this thing moving. We’re about to die down here.” Observing that “[t]he political stupidity of this is just unbelievable,” Carville emphatically repeated his call: “There’s a thousand things that he could do. He just needs to get down here and start doing something, people are dying.”

By last Thursday, the daily Rasmussen tracking poll revealed that 26 percent of Americans strongly approve of the President’s job performance, while 42 percent strongly disapprove, giving Mr. Obama a Presidential Approval rating of minus-16.  A USA Today/Gallup survey found that 53 percent of Americans rate his handling of the crisis as “poor” or “very poor” while only 43 percent still are satisfied.  Nevertheless, Americans continue to support oil exploration. By a significant margin, Texas voters still want more offshore oil drilling.  Similar percentages hold nationally. However, for this White House, proceeding with new drilling would “waste” the crisis.

If Obama’s goal were to evaluate ecologically responsible alternatives to drilling for oil a mile below the gulf’s surface, the White House could reconsider exploring for oil and natural gas in ANWR, the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge in the north Alaskan coast.  Of ANWR’s 19 million acres, there is enormous potential in a small section, the “10-02 Area,” which still would leave 92% of ANWR untouched. Only one-ten-thousandth of ANWR – a section smaller than LAX airport – actually would have surface drilling rigs. ANWR exploration could pump scores of billions of dollars into the national economy, create half a million great-paying jobs, and reduce American fuel-import expenditures by hundreds of billions of dollars.  Moreover, the local caribou population fare better around oil pipelines than environmentalists ever expected.

The Obama White House also could focus its response to the Deepwater Horizon disaster by intensifying federal efforts to clean the environmental catastrophe to Louisiana’s fishing waters, and by moving rapidly to approve Gov. Bobby Jindal’s almost-frantic pleas for federal permission to erect more protective sand berms along the coast.  However, prior crisis behavior by this White House – whether prompted by a devastating Wall Street collapse or an outlier health insurer inordinately applying to raise rates by 39 percent – reflects that President Obama deems moments like these as unique opportunities for “transformative social change.”  Thus, we may well anticipate an intensified effort in the near term to resuscitate the moribund “Cap and Trade” bill which would add between $1,761 and $3,100 in annual energy costs for most American homes.

For the President’s longer-range vision of this crisis, we again encounter his determination to pursue ideological goals that clash with the American people’s concerns.  He is now stopping new oil exploration: suspending plans for exploratory drilling off the Virginia and Alaska coasts; stopping 33 exploratory drilling projects in the Gulf of Mexico, and; continuing a six-month moratorium on all permits for offshore drilling.  Although our Outer Continental Shelf contains as much as 86 billion barrels of oil, with possibly 130 million barrels off the coast of Virginia alone, the President’s response means that we instead will continue importing approximately 13.5 million barrels daily – more than twenty percent of that from the Persian Gulf dictatorships – at prices that now hover around $70 a barrel. We will send Arab Gulf despots some $175 million daily or some $65 billion a year, even as our deficit-driven economy starves for capital, and as our unemployed search for good-paying jobs at home.

Our nation consumes more than 20 million barrels of oil daily, importing nearly sixty percent from foreign countries whose production standards are far less friendly to the polar ice caps than ours.  Saudi Arabia, for example, ranks last as the dirtiest emitter of greenhouse gases among the 57 countries rated on one NGO’s “Climate Change Performance Index.” Moreover, our imported oil necessarily arrives in tankers – the petroleum obviously cannot be delivered any other way – and those tankers pose even more extreme environmental risks.  The 1979 Atlantic Empress tanker spilled 88.3 million gallons of oil.  The ABT Summer tanker spilled 78 million off the Angola Coast in 1991.  The Castillo de Bellver spilled 78.5 million.  The Amoco Cadiz tanker lost 68.7 million gallons off France’s Brittany coast.  The Odyssey spilled 43 million off Nova Scotia. The Haven poured 42 million gallons in the waters outside Italy.  The list goes on. Yet oil-importing tankers have not been suspended from sailing America’s waters.  Nor do we suspend air travel after a tragedy in the sky nor rail transportation after a train wreck.

President Obama has long opposed new oil exploration. In November 2005, he voted against oil and gas leasing in the Alaskan Coastal Plain.  On April 20, 2007, rolling out his “Initiative to Combat Global Warming,” he told students in New Hampshire that “[i]t will take a grassroots effort to make America greener and end the tyranny of oil.”  Weeks later, he told a crowd: “The age of oil must end.” In his second Presidential Debate against John McCain, he stated: “[W]e can’t simply drill our way out of the problem. And we’re not going to be able to deal with the climate crisis if our only solution is to use more fossil fuels that create global warming.”

Now, with a crisis too opportune to waste, the President has chosen not to respond with a comprehensive proactive approach to America’s energy choices.  He could have encouraged safe new exploration by directing his Interior Secretary henceforth to administer and enforce competently the safety regulations already on the books, but which his Minerals Management Service ignored on his watch during the construction of Deepwater Horizon. He could reconsider opening ANWR to drilling, encourage efforts to expand clean-coal technology, and even order a prioritized review aimed at reviving the construction of nuclear power plants in America. (America has not built a new nuclear power plant in more than thirty years, even as France’s sixteen nuclear power plants generate nearly 80 percent of that country’s electricity.) Instead, this Administration, which knows that it can take ten years from licensing exploration until newly discovered oil reaches market, is prepared to risk laying the foundations for a future crisis by presently deterring new exploration and instead tilting disproportionately at windmills.

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

Which is more likely to elicit an irate Muslim response: 1) public cartoons of the Muslim prophet Muhammad, or 2) public proclamations that Muhammad was a bisexual, sometime transvestite and necrophile, who enjoyed sucking on the tongues of children, commanded a woman to "breastfeed" an adult man, and advised believers to drink his urine for salutary health?

Based on the recent South Park fiasco--where an animated episode depicting Muhammad in a bear suit sparked outrage among various Muslim groups, culminating with the usual death threats--the answer is clear: cartoons, once again, have proven to be the Muslim world's premiere provocateur. Indeed, during a university lecture the other day, Swedish artist Lars Vilks, whose life is in jeopardy due to his depiction of Muhammad as a dog, was violently assaulted to ululations of "Allahu Akbar!" (Islam's primordial war cry).

Yet how can cartoons rouse Muslim ire more than public assertions that Muhammad was a bisexual, a transvestite, a necrofile, et al? First, context:

The evangelical Arabic satellite station, al-Haya (Life TV), regularly takes the Muslim prophet to task, especially on two weekly programs: Hiwar al-Haq (Truth Talk), hosted by Coptic priest Fr. Zakaria Botros, and Su'al Jari' (Daring Question), hosted by ex-Muslim Rashid. Both shows revolve around asking uncomfortable questions about Islam and its founder in an effort to prompt Muslims to reconsider the legitimacy of their faith. (It is on these shows that the aforementioned, unflattering assertions of Muhammad originate; see here and here for English summaries.)

These broadcasts are viewed by millions of Arabic-speaking Muslims around the world. That the satellite station strikes a Muslim nerve is evinced by the fact that it is formally banned in several Muslim nations, including Saudi Arabia, and is regularly condemned by Islam's demagogues on mainstream Arabic media, including al Jazeera.

When the programs first began airing, they certainly caused uproar in the Muslim world. Then, Muslims regularly called in cursing the hosts, promising them death and destruction (both here and in the hereafter). Al-Qaeda reportedly put a $60 million bounty on Fr. Zakaria's head; and the priest is on CAIR's radar. (See the father make his famous "ten demands" of Islam here and explain his mission in this rare English interview.)

Far from being cowed by the daily death threats, however, Life TV and its unrepentant hosts have responded by upping the ante and providing even more anecdotes discrediting Muhammad. Rashid recently examined the theological implications of Muhammad's hatred for the gecko lizard, which the prophet accused of being "an infidel and enemy of the believers." Muslims who kill it in the first strike receive 100 "heavenly-points," whereas those who kill it in two strikes receive only 70. More graphically, Fr. Zakaria recently examined canonical hadiths (authenticated Muslim accounts) that record Islam's first believers eating Muhammad's feces, marinating food in his sweat, drinking the water he gargled and spit out, and smearing his phlegm all over their faces--all to his approval....

Read it all, if you have the stomach!