In her column in the Jerusalem Post, Caroline Glick discusses the new US President’s prompt outreach to the Islamic world, as described in our post below, and finds that it portends an ominous change in US policy. Unlike other commentators who indulgently regard Obama’s interview with al-Arabiya as merely naive, she reads it as a distinct signal of that change. ‘We are ready to initiate a new partnership,’ with the Muslim world, he said, and she believes he means it. She points out:

Obama implied that the US may be willing to overlook Teheran’s support for terrorism when he referred to Iran’s "past" support for terrorist organizations. Obama placed a past tense modifier on Iranian sponsorship of terrorism even through just last week a US Navy ship intercepted an Iranian vessel smuggling arms to Hamas in Gaza in the Red Sea. Due to an absence of political authorization to seize the Iranian ship, the US Navy was compelled to permit it to sail on to Syria.

Ahmadinejad has made his preconditions for negotiations with the US explicit. They are: one, that the US must abandon its alliance with Israel; and two, that the US must accept a nuclear armed Iran.

 She writes: 

It is apparent that Obama remains convinced that the US is indeed to blame for the supposed crisis of confidence that the Islamic world suffers from in its dealings with America. By this reasoning, it is for the US, not for Teheran, to show its sincerity, because the US, rather than Teheran, is to blame for the dismal state of relations prevailing between the two countries.  

If in fact Obama truly intends to move ahead with his plan to engage the mullahs, then he will effectively legitimize – if not adopt – Teheran’s preconditions that the US end its alliance with Israel, which Iran seeks to destroy, and accept a nuclear-armed Iran.

In other words, Obama may well be willing to pay the price Iran, the Arabs, and the whole of the Islamic world demand for peace with America. If America pays that price, no more ‘war on terror’;  no more need to protect America from Islamic terrorist attacks, so no more Gitmos, no more wire-taps. No more burning of the American flag by protestors in Muslim lands (including Europe). America – and its President – will be universally loved. And what is that price? Only the abandonment of Israel. A small price to pay for such gains. 

All that America has done for Muslims, listed by Charles Krauthammer (see the post below), weigh nothing against the US’s biggest insult to Islam: its alliance with Israel. That is what Ahmadinejad was referring to when he said in the letter he wrote to Obama on November 6: ‘The expectation is that the unjust actions of the past 60 years will give way to a policy encouraging the full rights of all nations.’ 

What now can Israel rely on to save it from annihilation? Only what it has always had since it’s founding 60 years ago: the strength of its own right arm. If it fails to use it, there is nothing else. 

 Before he did anything else, newly elected President Barack Hussein Obama reached out to Islam.

His first phone call as President of the United States to a foreign leader was to Ahmoud Abbas, head of the impotent and kleptocratic ‘Palestinian Authority’ (and of the terrorist organization Fatah).

His first executive order was to close the prison at Guantanamo Bay where Islamic terrorists are held.

His first dispatch of a diplomatic mission was the sending of George Mitchell to the Middle East to reprise his tired old act of trying to broker peace between Israel and its Arab attackers while the fighting rages. What can Mitchell possibly say to Hamas that will stop that gang of murderous criminals trying to kill as many civilians as possible on both sides of the Gazan border, or induce them to abandon their aim of annihilating the State of Israel? What can be said to the Israelis that would persuade them to give up defending themselves?    

His first TV interview was with Dubai’s al-Arabiya. He offered it to them as the medium of his choice. In it he announced to the Muslim world that he was going to ‘restore’ the ‘respect’ and ‘partnership’ that America had with the Muslim world ‘20 0r 30 years ago’ – displaying not just abysmal ignorance, but surely also a breathtaking lack of loyalty to the country of which he is now supreme leader.    

Charles Krauthammer comments justly:    

‘Astonishing. In these most recent 20 years – the alleged winter of our disrespect of the Islamic world – America did not just respect Muslims, it bled for them. It engaged in five military campaigns, every one of which involved – and resulted in – the liberation of a Muslim people: Bosnia, Kosovo, Kuwait, Afghanistan and Iraq.

The two Balkan interventions – as well as the failed 1992-93 Somali intervention to feed starving African Muslims (43 Americans were killed) – were humanitarian exercises of the highest order, there being no significant U.S. strategic interest at stake. In these 20 years, this nation has done more for suffering and oppressed Muslims than any nation, Muslim or non-Muslim, anywhere on earth. Why are we apologizing?

And what of that happy U.S.-Muslim relationship that Obama imagines existed "as recently as 20 or 30 years ago" that he has now come to restore? Thirty years ago, 1979, saw the greatest U.S.-Muslim rupture in our 233-year history: Iran’s radical Islamic revolution, the seizure of the U.S. embassy, the 14 months of America held hostage.

Which came just a few years after the Arab oil embargo that sent the United States into a long and punishing recession. Which, in turn, was preceded by the kidnapping and cold-blooded execution by Arab terrorists of the U.S. ambassador in Sudan and his charge d’affaires. This is to say nothing of the Marine barracks massacre of 1983, and the innumerable  attacks on U.S. embassies and installations around the world during what Obama now characterizes as the halcyon days of U.S.-Islamic relations.

Look. If Barack Obama wants to say, as he said to al-Arabiya, I have Muslim roots, Muslim family members, have lived in a Muslim country – implying a special affinity that uniquely positions him to establish good relations – that’s fine. But it is both false and deeply injurious to this country to draw a historical line dividing America under Obama from a benighted past when Islam was supposedly disrespected and demonized… Every president has the right to portray himself as ushering in a new era of this or that. Obama wants to pursue new ties with Muslim nations, drawing on his own identity and associations. Good. But when his self-inflation as redeemer of U.S.- Muslim relations leads him to suggest that pre-Obama America was disrespectful or insensitive or uncaring of Muslims, he is engaging not just in fiction but in gratuitous disparagement of the country he  is now privileged to lead.’

Just as astonishing is his saying on al-Arabiya that his job as President of the United States is ‘to communicate the fact that the United States has a stake in the well-being of the Muslim world, that the language has to be the language of respect’; and ‘to communicate that the Americans [notice he does not say ‘we’] are not your enemy.’

ISN’T IT HIS JOB TO ‘PRESERVE, PROTECT, AND DEFEND THE CONSTITUTION OF THE UNITED STATES’?

It was also his job, he said, ‘to promote the interests of the Arab world’ as well as the interests of the United States. Interests that are mostly in opposition to each other? How? And above all, why?

And was he not positively denigrating the country of which he is president when he said in the interview that ‘all too often’ the United States ‘starts by dictating’? 

A few hours after Obama made these remarks, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the half-mad and altogether evil President of Iran, demanded a formal apology for ‘US crimes’ against Iran and the Islamic world.

Obama never mentioned the oppression in Iran and other Islamic regimes; the imprisonment, torture, stoning, hanging of women, homosexuals, dissidents, converts, Christians and other non-Muslims. He had no word for the Lebanese being crushed between Iran’s Hizbullah and Syrian expansion; no word for the African Muslims of Darfur being systematically murdered by the Arab Muslims. 

Twenty or thirty years ago? In addition to the horrors being enacted in the Muslim world that Krauthammer lists, Iran was training Hizbullah; the Muslim Brotherhood was founding Hamas; Saudi Arabia was (and still is) financing institutions all over the Western world that train rising generations to spread Islam and its fearsome sharia law; Libya was murdering American soldiers in Europe and bombing American commercial aircraft; Iraq and Iran were waging a war in which millions died, including young children who were sent walking through minefields to explode the mines and clear the way for the armies; Saddam Hussein gassed Iraqi Kurds, and invaded Kuwait;  Syria was taking over Lebanon; President Sadat of Egypt was  assassinated; Islamists were slaughtering Algerian civilians; military rule was imposed in Pakistan; a CIA chief was kidnapped in Beirut and tortured to death in Iran. Where is cause for respect in all this?     

In the period that Obama apparently regards as shameful for his country, Bush senior liberated Kuwait from Saddam Hussein. Bush junior freed the whole Iraqi nation from his tyranny, lifted the cruel hand of the Taliban from the necks of Afghans and gave them schools that even their downtrodden women could attend. As a result of his policies and actions, a number of Arab states began to introduce democratic practices. Libya disarmed and abandoned its nuclear program. Were these negligible achievements? Should George W Bush’s successor apologize for them to the Muslims?  

It is the American people who are owed apologies and gratitude by the Muslims. As they are never likely to get either, one may ask:  was America right, politically or morally, to have expended blood and treasure for the Muslims?

With what have they actually been repaid? It looks very much as if the more Americans give to Islam, the more Islam hates and attacks them. Is there no connection between America’s benevolence and the rise of jihad violence? Did the Muslims interpret American compassion as weakness? If so, isn’t it clear that weakness is provocative to Islam? Isn’t the closing of the prison at Guantanamo Bay also likely to be interpreted by the Islamic terrorists as weakness? Is it not probable that this will invite more terrorist violence against America?

What, we must wonder, does all this immediate and urgent wooing of Islam by President Obama mean?

It would be too farfetched, wouldn’t it, to suspect that Obama wants to promote the ambitions of militant Islam? That deep in the part of him that is proud to be Muslim he wants the jihad to succeed? Wants Islam to realize its goal of world conquest?  Wants an Islamic world ruled by a Caliph? Wants – how absurd! – to be that Caliph?

No, no. Perish the thought! It’s bad enough that at present he has cast himself in the role of  broker between the country he has been elected to lead and its worst enemy.  

Yes, that is what the President of the United States has said he is. A broker. A go-between. A pander! 

 The House of Lords submits; buckles under Muslim threat: 

It appears that a member of the House of Lords had invited the Dutch politician,Geert Wilders, to a private meeting in the Palace of Westminster. She had intended to invite her colleagues in the Lords to a private viewing of his ‘documentary’ Fitna, followed by discussion and debate in true parliamentary fashion. This is, after all, a liberal democracy, and their lordships enjoy the rights of freedom of expression and freedom of association, not to mention certain parliamentary privileges for the protection of their function in the legislature. 

But no sooner had the unsuspecting baroness sent out her invitations, Lord Ahmed raised hell. It is reported that he ‘threatened to mobilise 10,000 Muslims to prevent Mr Wilders from entering the House and threatened to take the colleague who was organising the event to court’.

And so Fitna has been cancelled: it shall not now be screened in the House of Lords on 29th January. 

The Pakistani Press is jubilant, and Lord Ahmed is praising Allah for delivering ‘a victory for the Muslim community’.

Read more here.

Jerry A Coyne, professor in the Department of Ecology and Evolution at the University of Chicago, reviews two books – Saving Darwinism: How to be a Christian and Believe in Evolution, by Karl W Giberson; and Only a Theory: Evolution and the Battle for America’s Soul, by Kenneth R Miller – which try to reconcile science and religion, and fail of course. 

Read the whole review in The New Republic.

An extract:

The most common way to harmonize science and religion is to contend that they are different but complementary ways of understanding the world. That is, there are different "truths" offered by science and by religion that, taken together, answer every question about ourselves and the universe. Giberson explains:

 

I worry that scientific progress has bewitched us into thinking that there is nothing more to the world than what we can understand…. Science has perhaps gotten as much from the materialistic paradigm as it is going to get. Matter in motion, so elegantly described by Newton and those who followed him, may not be the best way to understand the world…. I think there are ways, though, that we can begin to look at the creation and understand that the scientific view is not all-encompassing. Science provides a partial set of insights that, though powerful, don’t answer all the questions.

 

Usually the questions said to fall outside science include those of meaning, purpose, and morality. In one of his last books, Rocks of Ages: Science and Religion in the Fullness of Life, Stephen Jay Gould called this reconciliation NOMA, for "non-overlapping magisteria": "Science tries to document the factual character of the natural world, and to develop theories that coordinate and explain these facts. Religion, on the other hand, operates in the equally important, but utterly different, realm of human purposes, meanings and values–subjects that the factual domain of science might illuminate, but can never resolve." Gould offered this not as a utopian vision, but as an actual description of why the realms of science and religion do not overlap. As a solution to our perplexity, this is no good. In a spirit of pluralism it ignores the obvious conflicts between them. Gould salvaged his idea by redefining his terms–the old trick, again–writing off creationism as "improper religion" and defining secular sources of ethics, meanings and values as being "fundamentally religious."

The NOMA solution falls apart for other reasons. Despite Gould’s claims to the contrary, supernatural phenomena are not completely beyond the realm of science. All scientists can think of certain observations that would convince them of the existence of God or supernatural forces. In a letter to the American biologist Asa Gray, Darwin noted:

 

Your question what would convince me of Design is a poser. If I saw an angel come down to teach us good, and I was convinced from others seeing him that I was not mad, I should believe in design. If I could be convinced thoroughly that life and mind was in an unknown way a function of other imponderable force, I should be convinced. If man was made of brass or iron and no way connected with any other organism which had ever lived, I should perhaps be convinced. But this is childish writing.

 Walter Williams writes:

In stimulus package language, if Congress taxes to hand out money, one person is stimulated at the expense of another, who pays the tax, who is unstimulated.

A visual representation of the stimulus package is: Imagine you see a person at work taking buckets of water from the deep end of a swimming pool and dumping them into the shallow end in an attempt to make it deeper. You would deem him stupid. That scenario is equivalent to what Congress and the new president proposes for the economy.

A far more important measure that Congress can take toward a healthy economy is to ensure that the 2003 tax cuts don’t expire in 2010 as scheduled. If not, there are 15 separate taxes scheduled to rise in 2010, costing Americans $200 billion a year in increased taxes. In the face of a recession, we don’t need that.

Read the whole column here.

 From The Times, London:

PARTS of the United Kingdom have become so heavily dependent on government spending that the private sector is generating less than a third of the regional economy, a new analysis has found.

The study of “Soviet Britain” has found the government’s share of output and expenditure has now surged to more than 60% in some areas of England and over 70% elsewhere.

Experts believe the recession will tighten the state’s grip still further as benefit handouts soar and Labour directs public sector organisations to create jobs to soak up unemployment.

In the northeast of England the state is expected to be responsible for 66.4% of the economy this year, up from 58.7% when a similar study was carried out four years ago. When Labour came to power, the figure was 53.8%.

Thomas Sowell writes that the way the government is setting about using the vast sums of taxpayers’ money it has appropriated is so slow a process that it can be compared to ‘mailing a letter to the fire department to let them know that your house is on fire.’

That is because the aim of the Democrats in power is not to put more money in circulation, or create more jobs, or in any other way help the country out of recession, but to increase their own power. 

One important clue may be a recent statement by President Obama’s chief of staff, Rahm Emanuel, that "A crisis is a terrible thing to waste."

This is the kind of cynical revelation that sometimes slips out, despite all the political pieties and spin. Crises have long been seen as great opportunities to expand the federal government’s power while the people are too scared to object and before any opposition can get organized.

That is why there is such haste to do things that will take effect slowly.

What are the Beltway politicians buying with all the hundreds of billions of dollars they are spending? They are buying what politicians are most interested in– power.

In the name of protecting the taxpayers’ investment, they are buying the power to tell General Motors how to make cars, banks how to bank and, before it is all over with, all sorts of other people how to do the work they specialize in, and for which members of Congress have no competence, much less expertise.

This administration and Congress are now in a position to do what Franklin D. Roosevelt did during the Great Depression of the 1930s– use a crisis of the times to create new institutions that will last for generations.

To this day, we are still subsidizing millionaires in agriculture because farmers were having a tough time in the 1930s. We have the Federal National Mortgage Association ("Fannie Mae") taking reckless chances in the housing market that have blown up in our faces today, because FDR decided to create a new federal housing agency in 1938.

Who knows what bright ideas this administration will turn into permanent institutions for our children and grandchildren to try to cope with?

 

             Read the whole column here.

 Watch this video of a peaceful pro-Israel rally in Sweden, held with a permit, being broken up by the police because violent Muslims and pro-Muslims demonstrate against them, with no permit.

 Watch this video of the British police being chased by Muslim and pro-Muslim rioters in London. Abuse is hurled at them. They are called ‘f***ing cowards’ – and the sad thing is, they are. 

From Little Green Footballs: