Daniel Hannan writes in the Telegraph:

A fearful blow has been struck against national sovereignty. The International Criminal Court has launched a prosecution against a head of state – a state, moreover, that has not signed the ICC treaty. International human rights apparatchiks are enjoying the warm glow of self-righteousness; but they have just made the world a darker and more dangerous place.

Don’t get me wrong: the man they have arraigned, Omar al-Bashir, is an unutterable swine. Having seized power in a military putsch, he has maintained himself in office by displacing and terrorising millions of his citizens. Some 300,000 Sudanese are estimated to have been killed in his civil wars and, while the government does not bear sole responsibility for each of those deaths, it must be reckoned the worst offender.

How, then, could I possibly object to bringing such a monster to trial? If the defunct Sudanese legal system can’t deal with him, shouldn’t someone else?

Well, maybe: but this will mean conquering Sudan. Bashir is the head of state, the supreme repository and exemplar of Sudanese sovereignty. Indicting him amounts to a declaration of war. Now there may well be an argument for military intervention in Sudan. Quite apart from having presided over the genocidal purges in Darfur, Bashir has given the rest of the world ample cross-border provocation. He turned his country into a base for terrorists of every stripe: the Ugandan child-kidnappers of the Lord’s Resistance Army, Carlos the Jackal, even Osama bin Laden. I’m not a big fan of invading other countries but, if we’re going to pick on one, Sudan is a pretty good candidate.

Except that the international community is emphatically not proposing an invasion. The prosecution is a narcissistic act, intended to make liberal internationalists feel superior and to bolster the ICC’s damaged reputation (its first case, against a Congolese militia leader, has just collapsed) rather than to ameliorate the lot of the Sudanese. Declaring war without meaning to wage it – which is what the indictment means – will simply deter the ghastly Khartoum regime from reaching any kind of accommodation with its opponents. Rather like an insistence on unconditional surrender, the prosecution will serve chiefly to make the autocrats more determined.

That’s the problem with these international law codes. By definition, the only countries on which they have any effect are democracies: tyrants simply ignore them. For the sake of being rude about Bashir – without any practical consequences – the ICC will substantively and genuinely diminish the sovereignty of free nations

 Power Line correctly argues:

OBAMA ON JERUSALEM – DISHONEST, IGNORANT, OR BOTH

 

As with virtually every other issue of consequence, Barack Obama has failed to take a consistent, coherent position with respect to his goal for the city of Jerusalem. A few months ago, when he was pandering to the pro-Israel audience at AIPAC, Obama said that Jerusalem should remain “undivided.” For those with a basic understanding of the discourse on this issue, the meaning of his statement was clear – Jerusalem will remain the Jewish people’s historical capital city and will remain exclusively part of the Jewish state under any future agreement with the Palestinians.

Obama, moreover, had plenty of incentive to convey this position to the AIPAC convention. Indeed, any other descripton of the future of Jerusalem would have played poorly with an audience Obama very much wanted to impress.

However, Obama’s handlers were uncomfortable with Obama’s statement because the call for an undivided city might “prejudice” the “final status” of Jerusalem. The party line among mainstream advocates of the "peace process" is to call on Israel and the Palestinians negotiate without such preconditions, with the "final status" of Jerusalem to be resolved at the end of the process.

With the AIPAC convention behind him, Obama has fallen back to the party line. Attempting to "clarify" his "poorly phrased" remarks to the pro-Israel crowd, Obama now says:

The point we were simply making was that we don’t want barbed wire running through Jerusalem, similar to the way it was prior to the ‘67 war, that it is possible for us to create a Jerusalem that is cohesive and coherent. I was not trying to predetermine what are essentially final-status issues.

But that is an easy point to make. If this is what Obama wanted to convey to AIPAC, it’s difficult to believe he would have used the loaded term "undivided."

But what of Obama’s current vision under which Mr. Yes-We-Can resolves to "create a Jerusalem that is cohesive and coherent" that it is not exclusively part of a Jewish state but requires no barriers? The question answers itself. Here’s how David Hazony, a resident of Jerusalem, puts it:

What could it possibly mean to want a “coherent” city that is the capital of two different countries, one of which has been teaching its entire population to hate the other and commit suicide bombings in its restaurants for 15 years now — and all this without a proper border? I live in Jerusalem. The border between Israel and the Palestinians, wherever it may run, and no matter how long peace reigns, will never be like that between Massachusetts and Connecticut. It is unlikely ever even to be like the one between Arizona and Mexico. If there is ever a division of Jerusalem, there will be more than just barbed wire separating the two halves of the city. We are talking about different worlds entirely, and security arrangements will reflect this.

As Hazony concludes, Obama either understands this or he doesn’t. If he does, he is being dishonest when he claim the city can be undivided in other than the sense in which his AIPAC remarks were construed. If he doesn’t, his ignorance is staggering.

 

 Read here how European states are allowing Islam to conquer them by sedition, and how the US is threatened by the same process. 

 From Little Green Footballs, this example of Obama’s abysmal incomprehension of terrorism:

Eight days after the atrocities of September 11, 2001, Barack Obama wrote a piece for the Hyde Park Herald—and blamed the attacks on “a failure of empathy.”

Even as I hope for some measure of peace and comfort to the bereaved families, I must also hope that we as a nation draw some measure of wisdom from this tragedy. Certain immediate lessons are clear, and we must act upon those lessons decisively. We need to step up security at our airports. We must reexamine the effectiveness of our intelligence networks. And we must be resolute in identifying the perpetrators of these heinous acts and dismantling their organizations of destruction.

We must also engage, however, in the more difficult task of understanding the sources of such madness. The essence of this tragedy, it seems to me, derives from a fundamental absence of empathy on the part of the attackers: an inability to imagine, or connect with, the humanity and suffering of others. Such a failure of empathy, such numbness to the pain of a child or the desperation of a parent, is not innate; nor, history tells us, is it unique to a particular culture, religion, or ethnicity. It may find expression in a particular brand of violence, and may be channeled by particular demagogues or fanatics. Most often, though, it grows out of a climate of poverty and ignorance, helplessness and despair.

We will have to make sure, despite our rage, that any U.S. military action takes into account the lives of innocent civilians abroad. We will have to be unwavering in opposing bigotry or discrimination directed against neighbors and friends of Middle Eastern descent. Finally, we will have to devote far more attention to the monumental task of raising the hopes and prospects of embittered children across the globe—children not just in the Middle East, but also in Africa, Asia, Latin America, Eastern Europe and within our own shores.

Obama’s comments display an appalling disconnect from reality.

Osama bin Laden came from one of the richest families in the world. None of the 9/11 attackers were poor; if anything, they could be considered “middle class.” Ringleader Mohammed Atta was educated as an architect in the West.

Almost everything Obama wrote in this article was proven wrong. And he gave absolutely no consideration at all to the ideology of radical Islam, which is much more to blame than any imaginary “poverty” or “lack of empathy.”

And now he’s within reach of the presidency.

In Britain the Lord Chief Justice approves of the introduction of Shariah law to govern financial transactions. There are those who advocate its introduction into the US. What would the effects be? 

In an article on the fact that Iran has been at war with the US for decades, this statement appears . It is a stark warning.

We must counter the effort being made by the Iranians and other Islamists to use so-called Shariah-Compliant Finance (SCF) as a means to wage “financial jihad” against us. Before SCF instruments proliferate further in our capital markets, in the process legitimating and helping to underwrite the repressive, anti-constitutional and subversive program the Iranian mullahs (among others) call Shariah, that program must be recognized for what it is – sedition – and prosecuted as such. 

‘The dismal truth is that the UN is the principal engine for the perpetuation of chaos, terror, misery and injustice across the world.

It is high time we abolished this obscene institution and created instead a United Democratic Nations to promote freedom and justice.’

 

So writes Melanie Phillips in a must-read article here. 

 go here and see appalling pictures of Muslim savagery .

 Would Obama bring change to the corruption which remains an integral part of the political culture of Chicago and Illinois?

‘His chief advisor, David Axelrod, is working with the Alliance to Protect the Illinois Constitution, a big labor/big business coalition, to defeat this opportunity for change. Barack’s main man is helping the most powerful special interests of his state’s dysfunctional status quo in a multi-million dollar campaign to prevent the chance for change on this November’s statewide ballot.’

Read more about it here.  

 Hugh Hewitt writes that the economic mess the country confronts  can be laid at the door of Barack Obama, Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid.

He asserts:

A vote for any Democrat is a vote for shortages, rising gas prices, rising unemployment, and falling production. A vote for any democrat is a vote for failing airlines and collapsing financial institutions and for the shuttering of car plants and large manufacturing.

A growing, vibrant economy needs energy. The Democrats are anti-energy.

Read the whole article here.

 … says a real weatherman, John Coleman, who: 

tells Gore and the UN’s intergovernmental panel on Climate Change, "Your science is flawed; your hypothesis is wrong; your data is manipulated and may I add your scare tactics are deplorable. The earth does not have a fever. Carbon dioxide does not cause significant global warming." From there Coleman presents the scientific data to prove his case.

It is a remarkable speech. It is posted at www.kusi.com/weather/colemanscorner/19842304.html 

(From an article by Paul Weyrich on the Townhall website)