An ardent supporter of the Wahhabi fundamentalists who rule Saudi Arabia, John Duke Anthony, has been appointed by the Obama administration as an adviser to the State Department. He has been zealous in promoting Arab and Islamic propaganda in American colleges, in some of which the Saudis have invested millions to pursue such programs. What advice is Anthony giving to Hillary Clinton’s department? If he urges a US ‘dialogue’ with Hamas, which he has already called for, he  is unlikely to arouse outrage. Hillary Clinton has provided billions indirectly to the terrorist organization that rules Gaza, while insisting that the money would never reach its coffers.

From Campus Watch:

Most Americans, even many of those concerned with the problems of academic Middle East Studies, have probably never heard of the Model Arab League (MAL), an American exercise similar to the better-known Model United Nations. The stated aim of such efforts is to expand awareness of world affairs among high school and college students. Participants compete in regional role-playing sessions as representatives of constituent countries in the corresponding world bodies and receive awards for their performance. They are then sent to contend at “nationals” held in Washington, D.C. and similar to matches sponsored by many other student societies and sports associations.

But the Model Arab League could be described better as a propaganda network for Arab nationalism, including promotion of the Arab states’ hostile postures toward Israel, than as a contributor to excellence in international studies or debate.

The Model Arab League was created in 1983 at Georgetown University by the National Council on U.S.-Arab Relations (NCUSAR), which came into existence that same year, and the website of which prominently features MAL activities. NCUSAR’s president and chief executive officer is an indefatigable Saudi apologist named John Duke Anthony. In May 2009, Anthony was appointed by the Obama administration to the U.S. State Department’s Advisory Committee on International Economic Policy. He has been an adjunct professor at the Georgetown Center for Contemporary Arab Studies (CCAS) since 2006.

Saudi prince Turki al-Faisal, the former head of the Saudi General Intelligence Directorate who served briefly as Saudi ambassador to the U.S. in 2005-06, joined Anthony at CCAS in fall 2008. Al-Faisal has admitted dealing with Osama bin Laden in Afghanistan, allegedly in the 1980s during the anti-Soviet resistance war, and in the 1990s with Mullah Omar, leader of the Taliban.

The original Arab League, known formally as the League of Arab States, was conceived in 1944 and comprises 22 Arab and African nations, [and includes] the Palestinian Authority (P.A.). The following year, the League promulgated a pan-Arab boycott on the purchase of products from “Zionist” enterprises in Palestine. This was followed by a full embargo against commercial relations with Israel after the latter proclaimed its independence in 1948. The League has extended the embargo to a secondary ban on any individual, enterprise, or agency operating in any of the Arab League member countries that does business in Israel. Individuals, companies, or public institutions maintaining relations with Israelis are placed on the League’s boycott blacklist. A tertiary boycott prohibits dealings with companies from America and elsewhere that have been blacklisted.

Yet the anti-Israel embargo is not the only topic on which the Arab League finds itself in conflict with U.S. policies and laws. In late 2009, Secretary-General [Amr] Moussa held a joint press conference in Cairo with Iranian parliamentary speaker Ali Larijani at which Moussa announced the League’s support for Iran’s nuclear program.

Back in America, the Model Arab League will hold its college “nationals” at Georgetown in March. High school “regionals” are pending, with local sessions at Marist High School in Atlanta later this month and in Boston, where students will meet at Northeastern University in April. Separate high school “nationals” will take place at Georgetown on April 16-17.

College-level MALs are held at 10 campuses around the U.S. These include, aside from Georgetown: Converse College in Spartanburg, South Carolina; Texas A&M, Miami University of Ohio; the University of San Francisco; the University of Montana-Missoula; and several others.

Students and faculty at Montana-Missoula got a taste of who and what the NCUSAR, the MAL, and John Duke Anthony represent when the latter keynoted a seminar on “New Avenues for U.S. Middle East Policy” on March 4, 2009 at the University of Montana … Anthony called on the Obama administration to begin a dialogue immediately with the Palestinian terrorist movement Hamas and otherwise spent his time on the Montana campus, according to student sources, assailing Israel as the sole perpetrator of problems in the Middle East.

While U.S. policy condemns the Arab League embargo against Israel and questions the goals of Iranian nuclear development, the Model Arab League indoctrinates American high school and college students into a radical Arab-Muslim paradigm. This is unsurprising in that the MAL is a creation of Anthony, one of Washington’s veteran servants of the Saudis, and has its focus at Georgetown, already well-known for its Saudi endowments, including the Prince Alwaleed bin Talal Center for Muslim-Christian Understanding, financed by a $20-million donation from the Saudi prince after whom it is named. …

The Model Arab League is offered to the educational establishment — including high schools — as a teaching device for the betterment of young Americans’ knowledge of essential contemporary issues. In reality, its origins and content reveal it to be an intrusion of Saudi-financed ideology into American academic life, the appropriateness of which should be questioned … In addition, the appointment of John Duke Anthony to an advisory economic position in the State Department, given his advocacy for Saudi interests (which do not coincide with U.S. economic needs) should be subject to public scrutiny.

The Governor of Arizona, Jan Brewer, has decided not to let her state become impoverished in order to save the earth from getting a mite warmer. Or cooler. Or  whatever it is the environmentalists are currently panicking about.

The Grand Canyon State avoids a big economic hole by suspending its participation in a multistate initiative to fight climate change. As climate fraud is exposed, economic reality sets in. Will California follow?

Not since King Canute have government officials engaged in an exercise as futile as in 2007, when seven U.S. states and four Canadian provinces got together to form something called the Western Regional Climate Action Initiative to reduce regional greenhouse gas emissions starting in 2012.

Leading the charge for the pact was California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, who insisted, “We cannot wait for the United States government to get its act together on the environment.” At the time he said the regional agreement “sets the stage for a regional cap-and-trade program which will provide a powerful framework for developing a national cap-and-trade program.”

Since then, the nation has slid into a recession, and the only thing man-made about climate change has been the manipulated and manufactured claims that we are doomed if we don’t act to fight it.

Arizona Gov. Jan Brewer, seeing which way the snow is blowing, has issued an executive order saying her state will suspend its participation in the emission-control plan or any program that could raise costs for businesses and consumers.

Arizona joined the climate initiative under its previous governor, Janet Napolitano, now secretary of homeland security in the Obama administration.

All 50 states agreed to the cap-and-trade pact, but left implementation up to each state. Only California is ready to start its program in 2012.

Brewer also ordered Arizona’s Environmental Quality Department to take another look at stricter vehicle emission rules, based on California’s standards, set to take effect in 2012, fearing they would significantly raise new car costs. Slowly but surely, economic reality is trumping climate fantasy.

Rumblings of discontent are also being heard in California. Assemblyman Dan Logue is sponsoring an initiative for the November ballot that would halt implementation of the state’s global-warming law, Assembly Bill 32, until the state unemployment rate drops to 5.5% from the current 12.4%.

“The state’s greenhouse reduction program is not a freebie,” Gino DiCaro, a spokesman for the California Manufacturers & Technology Association, said last month. “Large costs foisted on an unemployment-riddled state economy and increased electricity rates … are not affordable at this time, if ever.”

A 2009 study by economists at California State University, Sacramento, and commissioned by the California Small Business Roundtable found implementation costs … “could easily exceed $100 billion” and that by 2020 the program would raise the cost of living by $7,857 per household per year.

Even the most optimistic assessments of global pacts such as Copenhagen and Kyoto would have moderated at great cost the earth’s temperature by an amount too small to measure. The impact of a regional pact by a handful of states would be futile, especially when they are downwind from the world’s biggest polluter, the “developing” nation of China, which is exempt from such global pacts. … The pact also envisions strict emission limits on American cars at a time China has passed the U.S. as the world’s largest auto market. …  But the political climate is about to change.

– So says Investor’s Business Daily, who published this report. We think and hope it’s right. Economic necessity is a fairly reliable antidote to irrational belief.

The Ethiopian plane that crashed shortly after taking off from Beirut on January 25 was blown up. It’s mid-air destruction was planned and carried out by al-Qaeda, according to this report:

This was an al-Qaeda operation timed for one month to the day after its failed attempt to destroy an American Northwest airliner bound for Detroit.

It is becoming clear that either a bomb was planted on the Ethiopian flight with a timer or a passenger acted as suicide bomber.

Western security agencies in the Middle East involved in combating al Qaeda believe that its planners picked on the Ethiopian flight for more than one reason apart from the date: they had been tipped off that a group of French undercover agents, including Maria Sanchez Pietton, wife of the French ambassador to Beirut, and top Hizballah operatives, including secretary general Hassan Nasrallah, would be aboard.

Mme Pietton lost her life in the crash, while the Hizballah travelers were saved by switching to another flight at the last minute.

The first bodies recovered from the Mediterranean off the Lebanese town of Naama showed all the hallmarks of explosion victims: They were found strapped to their seats with their heads, hands and feet blown off and scattered, typical effects of an explosive blast.

Eye-witnesses at the time heard a loud explosion and saw the plane enveloped in a ball of fire as it gained altitude after takeoff from Beirut international airport.

Both France and Hizballah have denied they were targets.

Lebanese officials, led by prime minister Saad Hariri, have spent two weeks trying to hide the fact that the Ethiopian airline disaster was caused by terror. But Lebanese health minister Jawad Khalifeh gave the game away by a slip of the tongue Tuesday, Feb. 9: “The plane exploded during flight and the cabin, as well as the bodies of those on board, were dispersed into the sea, in different locations,” he said, trying to explain why some of the corpses were found dismembered.

He then tried to correct himself by saying he “didn’t mean a military explosion.”

More confirmation of a terrorist hand behind the attack is found in the deep involvement of US intelligence, including the FBI, in the investigation of the disaster from the first moment. The US survey ship Ocean Alert was dispatched to the area of the crash and dropped a miniature submarine into the depths to retrieve fragments of the airliner from the seabed.

A US intelligence and naval headquarters was set up at Beirut harbor to coordinate the salvage of the plane from the sea. Treating the crash as terror-related, Washington ordered the plane to be reconstructed from recovered fragments to establish the site of the explosion and its cause.

US officials are also shy of discussing the case in public and admitting the crash was caused by an act of terror. It took place on January 25, shortly after President Barack Obama said “Al-Qaeda has been weakened“, in an address to the American people to calm their anxieties after the Nigerian would-be bomber Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab had failed to detonate explosives carried in his underwear.

Al Qaeda’s success in blowing a civilian airliner out of the sky over the Middle East proved the opposite. It therefore became the subject of a comprehensive cover-up, joined by France. Before the black box, recovered Tuesday, had even been examined, French sources announced that human error by the pilot was the cause of the Ethiopian airliner crash. …

Six years ago, on January 8, 2004, an Egyptian charter blew up after takeoff at Sharm al-Sheikh for Cairo, killing all 148 French citizens aboard on their way back to Paris from a Red Sea vacation. Neither Cairo nor Paris ever admitted that the disaster was caused by terrorists

While it is true that all the signs point to a deliberate blowing up of the aircraft, the explanations as to why this particular flight was targeted give rise to more questions than they answer.

French undercover agents may be a threat to al-Qaeda, but are Hizballah ‘operatives’ and their leader? Iran, the state patron of Hizballah, has not been inimical to al-Qaeda, despite the everlasting antagonism between Shia and Sunni. The report implies that the presence of Hizballah personnel on the plane was a reason to blow it up: but they switched flights, so were they tipped off? Were they targeted or were they saved?

Was the wife of the French ambassador really an ‘undercover agent’? How does the reporter know? How many French agents were there on the plane? What had they found out in Lebanon that was so damaging to al-Qaeda?

Isn’t the evidence on which ‘Western security agencies in the Middle East’ are said to be basing their assumption that the act of terrorism was carried out by al-Qaeda rather thin? That the act was carried out ‘one month to the day’ after the failure  of the attempted blowing up of an American plane over Detroit by an al-Qaeda jihadist isn’t in itself a convincing proof.

President Obama’s saying that al-Qaeda has been weakened may have prompted al-Qaeda to blow up a plane to show that he’s wrong, but why that particular plane? And what if it wasn’t an al-Qaeda action?

Why does France insist that it was not a target? How can it be sure?

Why is the Lebanese government anxious to deny that this was an act of terrorism?

The plane was blown up. Among  the possible perpetrators is al-Qaeda. Among the possible reasons is that the plane was carrying French intelligence agents and the French ambassador’s wife. Little more than that seems sure. Much remains to be disclosed. But perhaps never will be.

There is another interesting question. Why, up to this hour, have there been no mainstream media reports that the plane was deliberately blown up?

Here is an account of how and why twenty million Muslims were imported into Europe, and to what effect.

The information is condensed from Eurabia: The Euro-Arab Axis by Bat Ye’or. (The wording is largely hers, with some added notes and comments of my own – JB.)

1969 France sells 110 Mirage jets to new Libyan dictator, Muammar Qaddafi. Explores with him the concept of a Euro-Arab dialogue. Becomes in the following years a major supplier of arms to many Arab states.

1973 May: London. Conference of Islamic Cultural Centers.  Islamic leaders decide to create, fund and support cultural centres in Europe as ‘a great need was felt [in Europe] for the tenets of Islam’ and such centres would help Muslim communities in Europe play this role [of teaching the tenets of Islam] effectively and fruitfully.’ The Conference also ‘decided to establish the Islamic Council of Europe to serve as an organ of co-ordination among all Islamic institutions and centres.’ It was to ‘propagate the true teachings of Islam throughout Europe.’ Thus there was to be a ‘stepping up of the activities of the Islamic Da’awa [proselytism]’.  To this end, an International Islamic News Agency was to be established, also a Jihad Fund open to subscription ‘with no restrictions’.

The ‘rights’ of immigrants to preserve their beliefs, traditions and national cultures were to be guaranteed by the Europeans. Facilities for the teaching of Arabic were to be ‘improved’. The establishment of a Euro-Arab University was proposed (and initial steps to do so were taken in subsequent years including the founding of the Euro-Arab Business Management School in Granada in 1994).

October 16-17: Kuwait. Mortified by the defeat of Egypt, Syria and Jordan in their war against Israel, the Arab oil-producing countries meet and decide to quadruple the price of oil and to reduce their production of crude oil by 5% each month until Israel withdraws from the territories those three countries lost to Israel in 1967 and failed to recover in 1973. Impose an oil embargo on the US, Denmark, the Netherlands as states friendly to Israel. Sheikh Yamani of Saudi Arabia threatens that the oil states could ‘reduce production by 80%’ and asks the West ‘How could you survive with that?’ In response the US stands firm, France and Germany panic.

November 6: Brussels. Meeting of the EEC nine members. Ignoring objections from Washington, the meeting insists on starting an appeasing approach to the Arab oil states. They issue a joint Resolution based on their dependence on Arab oil, in which they pledge themselves to support the Arabs diplomatically in their conflict with Israel. This was sufficient to induce the Arab states to increase oil supplies and ‘open a dialogue’ (as already conceived in discussions between France and Libya). Thus began a Euro-Arab political solidarity pact that was hostile not only to Israel but also to America.

November 26-27: Georges Pompidou, President of France, and Willy Brandt, Chancellor of West Germany meet. Reaffirm intention to ‘engage in a dialogue with the Arabs’.

November 28: Algiers. Sixth Summit of the Arab Conference. Arab heads of state address a Declaration to the EEC,  noting with interest ‘the first manifestations of a better understanding of the Arab cause by the states of Western Europe’, and setting out Arab political preconditions for the projected dialogue.  The Declaration stresses that the political and economic aspects are interdependent and non-negotiable – ie the supply of oil depends on EEC acceptance of Arab political conditions concerning Israel.

December 15:   Copenhagen. An EEC summit,  called by President Pompidou of France, considers the planning for co-operation between the EEC countries and the Arab League. Four Arab foreign ministers, delegated by the Algiers Arab summit, are invited  to monitor the project. They suggest various strategies in the context of the conditions that the Arab states place on any accord with the EEC.

1974 February 24: Lahore. The Second Islamic Conference, organized by the recently created Organization of the Islamic Conference (OIC) confirms and elaborates the conditions for co-operation with the EEC.

June 10: Bonn. Britain (which had joined the EEC in 1973, as had Ireland and Denmark), had vetoed the Euro-Arab Dialogue in protest against Holland being under an Arab embargo ‘for being pro-Israeli’, but  the embargo was lifted against Holland, so now  the foreign ministers of the EEC states meet to discuss ‘the Dialogue’.  Areas of co-operation  between Europe and the Arab states include industry and agriculture, science and technology, finance, education, and ‘civil infrastructure’. The Arab states, in other words, are being promised massive transfers of money and know-how with programmes to industrialise and modernise their countries.

Note:  All this was desperately desired by the Arab states, and the provision of it could have been used by Europe as a counter-lever to the oil blackmail which the Arabs had brought to bear on Europe. Furthermore, the Arab oil states needed to sell their oil to Europe, and needed to invest in a thriving European economy. The European governments could have dictated terms. But the EEC, under insistent French leadership, preferred to appease rather than negotiate. The motivation for France was not only commercial. It was a desire to re-acquire a large sphere of influence in the Arab world, in pursuit of an intense ambition to achieve super-power status and so to rival the United States.

July 31: Paris. The first official meeting at ministerial level between the Europeans and the Arabs to discuss the organization of the Dialogue.  An institutionalized structure is created to harmonize and unify the trade and co-operation policies of each of the  EEC countries with the member states of the Arab League.

The EEC founds The European Parliamentary Association for Euro-Arab Cooperation ‘to improve political, cultural, and economic cooperation between Europe and the Arab world’.   Its Executive Committee set to meet regularly every six months.  All the  political parties and groupings of Europe are members of it.  It is to keep in regular contact with European governments, the Presidency of the European Council of Ministers, and the EEC Commission.

September 14-17: Damascus. To meet Arab demands in preparation for the next summit of the Arab Conference, the Association convenes representatives of all the parliamentary parties of the EEC member states except Denmark and resolves, inter alia, to permit the participation of the PLO and its leader, Yasser Arafat, into all negotiations, and  to bring pressure to bear on the United States to shift its Middle East policy in favour of the Arabs. Also to permit Arab countries to export millions of their populations into all the EEC countries, along with their culture and their customs.

October: Rabat. The Seventh Summit of the Arab Conference confirms that the indispensable political preconditions for the Euro-Arab Dialogue have been met by the EEC. The Arabs stress that the interdependence of the political and economic aspects of European-Arab cooperation is not negotiable, ie European oil supplies are dependent on European support for Arab political demands.

A permanent Euro-Arab Dialogue (EAD) secretariat of 350 members is created, with its seat in Paris,  for the purpose of promoting economic and political cooperation. The EAD is organized into various committees charged with planning ‘joint industrial, commercial, political, scientific, technical, cultural, and social projects’.  European members are for the most part persons with vested interests in the Arab and Islamic world, whether commercial or in relation to their academic jobs as Arabists and Islamists.

Note: The EEC had been conceived of as an economic institution, dealing with markets, finance, and trade. The Arab states’ pressure for a unified European policy to meet  their political demands were a vital factor in the development of the EEC  from an economic to a political union.

1975 June 10: Cairo. First meeting of The Euro-Arab Dialogue. EEC delegates meet with those of 20 Arab states and the PLO.  The basis of the agreement with Europe is emphasised:  economic deals with Europe in exchange for European alignment with Arab policy on Israel.

With that locked in place, other agreements could follow.

July 24: Rome, and November 27: Abu Dhabi.  EAD meetings. Co-operation extends and deepens.

1976 May 18-20: Luxembourg.  EAD organization and procedures are defined. ‘The Dialogue’ is composed of three organs:

A General Committee – presidency jointly held by heads of Arab and European delegations.  All delegates on both sides are of ministerial and ambassadorial rank.  Purpose, to keep the Dialogue on track. (No wavering on Europe’s part from the founding commitments.) Meetings secret.  No recorded minutes. Can publish summaries of decisions and issue press releases.

A Working Committee. Made up of business experts, economists, oil specialists along with Arab League and EC representatives.  Again, joint Arab League/EC presidency.

A Coordinating Committee.  To co-ordinate the work of various working parties set up by the other committees.

Further EAD meetings (several in Brussels, then in Tunis in February 1977) establish the conditions for an intertwining of Arab and European policies: the establishment of a Palestinian state with Yasser Arafat as its leader; a campaign to bring worldwide political and economic pressure on Israel to force its withdrawal to its 1949 armistice border [as a step in a policy of ‘stages’ with the ultimate aim of extinguishing the State of Israel]; an international boycott of Israel and opposition to any separate peace treaties; promotion of Anti-Israel media propaganda.

Note: The Arabs at this point had not got all they wanted from Europe. They had to accept some significant failures – attested to by the fact that Israel continued to exist, which is nothing short of astonishing in the light of the jihad campaign working so persistently and in most respects triumphantly against it – but they contented themselves temporarily with partial success.

Meetings of the EAD committees continue into 1978.  Then the Camp David agreement between Egypt and Israel acts as a brake on EAD activity.

1980 The EAD meets again when the Europeans are worried about declining oil production in Iran, and the Arabs want to complain to Europe about the Israeli-Egyptian treaty.

1981 January 25-28: Mecca and Taif. The Third Islamic Summit Conference issues a Declaration of Holy Jihad ‘as the duty of every Muslim, man or woman, ordained by the Shariah and the glorious traditions of Islam; to call upon all Muslims, living inside or outside Islamic countries, to discharge this duty by contributing each according to his capacity in the cause of Allah Almighty, Islamic brotherhood, and righteousness.’

One of the chief aims the declaration specifies is ‘to save Al-Quds’ – ie to take Jerusalem into Arab possession. To this aim, through the EAD, Europe accedes, co-operating with the Arab campaign to isolate and vilify Israel and  helping to deliver the United Nations as an  instrument of Arab jihadic purpose.

Note: The EC/EU’s moral commitment to connive at the Palestinian jihad compromised the very foundations of freedom and Western culture, and did not make Europe safer.

Europe is also a designated target of jihad. The national governments are not unaware of the threat that hangs over them, and from early on fear has been one of the motivating causes of the European policy of appeasement:-

1998 Damascus:  Three years before ‘Islamikazes’ carried out the 9/11 mass murder of Americans in New York, six years before the massacres of commuter-train passengers in Madrid, seven years before the underground and bus bombing atrocities in London, a conference of the Euro-Arab Parliamentary Dialogue is held in Syria, under the auspices of the murderous dictator Hafiz al-Assad. Members of fourteen national European parliaments and the European Parliament attend, also representatives of the European Commission. Arab members of sixteen non-democratic parliaments and representatives of the Arab League bring a heavy threat to bear openly on the Europeans: they stress that ‘peace and stability in Europe’ is ‘closely connected’ to Europe’s compliance with Arab Middle East policy. The official reports of the Dialogue constantly reiterate this point. It could not have been impressed more firmly on European parliamentarians and the EU Commission that jihad could be unleashed against Europe itself if Arab conditions were not met.

Throughout the 1980s and 1990s the EAD continued to serve as a vehicle for policy decided at Islamic Conferences. It was the principle instrument for implementing the resolutions of the Arab conferences. It advanced the Arab mission of implanting millions of Muslims into Europe who come with no intention of integrating into European culture and society, but arrive with the desire and the legal right, granted by the EEC/EU, to impose their own culture upon the host country – a culture fired by a fundamentalist mission of violent jihad.

It facilitated the creation of those fundamentalist trends. It introduced the educational and cultural programs of the European Islamic Centres into European schools – programs enthusiastically accepted and applied by European political leaders, intellectuals, and activists. EAD facilitated the creation of fundamentalist trends.

2000 The European Commission provides  funds to revive a dormant organisation called the European Institute for Research on Mediterranean and Euro-Arab Cooperation, known as MEDEA. (The Euro-Arab political partnership was increasingly called ‘Mediterranean’, the Arab states being referred to as ‘the South’ and the EU states as ‘the North’.)  MEDEA is now chaired by a  Belgian minister for foreign affairs who reorganises MEDEA’s European Parliament section of over 100 members. There are also MEDEA sections in individual national parliaments. Subsequently the organisation issues regular press releases to opinion- makers, intellectuals and pressure groups, and plays a major role in spreading Arab influence in Europe.

2001 September 11: New York and Washington. ‘Islamikaze’ terrorists fly hijacked planes into the World Trade Centre in New York and the Pentagon in Washington, killing close on 3000 people. Another hijacked plane is forced down by its passengers near Shanksville in Pennsylvania. President Bush declares ‘War on Terror’.

October: The US, its military assisted by seven other countries, the UK primarily, also Canada, Australia, New Zealand, France, Germany and Italy, invades Taliban-ruled Afghanistan to overthrow  that fundamentalist Islamic government. The Taliban had equipped al-Qaeda, the  organization, led by Osama bin Laden, which had despatched the terrorist attackers of America. The Taliban is (temporarily) overthrown.

2002 June 20. Brussels:  The Arabs ask for special privileges for Arab immigrants into the EU to put them ‘on an equal basis with Europeans’. The host countries are exhorted to provide Arab immigrants with vocational training, freedom of movement, suitable living conditions, and financial aid if they should choose to return to their homelands.

2003 March 20: The US and Britain invade Iraq to overthrow the dictator Saddam Hussein. Other countries, including Spain, lend various degrees of military assistance.  France and Russia emphatically oppose the invasion. Anti-war demonstrations, intensely anti-American, are staged throughout Europe.

In this year the French Institute for International Relations (IFRI) reports to the European Commission that the economic outlook for Europe is  gloomy but would be brightened if there were to be increased Arab immigration.  In Britain, however, the Home Secretary, David Blunkett, warns that the imposing of mass immigration on a populace that did not want it, threatened the social fabric of Britain because of “the disintegration of community relations and social cohesion”.

December 2-3. Naples:  At a Euro-Mediterranean Conference of ministers of foreign affairs, EU officials reaffirm Europe’s ‘solidarity’ with its ‘Mediterranean partners’. At this conference even more foundations, committees and subcommittees are proposed.  The European Bank  – an institution funded entirely by Europe’s tax-payers – will open a subsidiary to serve Arab (sharia conforming) requirements. The absence of democracy in the Arab states, their economic stagnation, continuing terrorism carried out in many parts of the world in the name of Islam, are not matters on which the Europeans choose to lay stress.

2004 March 11.  Madrid: Terrorist bombs are exploded by Muslim residents of Spain on commuter trains. Nearly 200 people killed, nearly 2000 injured. The response of the Spanish electorate a few days later is to vote Prime Minister Jose Maria Aznar, who supported President Bush in his war on Iraq, out of power, and vote in Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero who has opposed Spain’s participation in the Iraq war. The change favours the Islamic terrorists. The result amounts to a national capitulation to terrorism.

November 2.  Amsterdam: Theo van Gogh, Dutch film maker, is shot, stabbed and has his throat slit by a Dutch-born Muslim. The victim had made a film about the abuse of Muslim women.

In this year Eastern European countries are admitted into the EU. Arab leaders fear that their immigrants will no longer be welcome in Western Europe. They ask for and are granted assurances that Europe’s chief sources of immigration will continue to be ‘above all the Mediterranean Arab countries.’  So EU policy in this regard is (yet again) shaped to conform to Arab demands. It will ‘balance’ its expansion into Eastern Europe with an increase in Arab immigration.

2005 July 7: London. Terrorist bombs explode on three underground trains and a bus in central London.  56 killed, about 700 injured. The killers are identified as British born Muslims.

Violent jihad had been unleashed against Europe from within.

Increasingly the continent is being made to feel the tragic consequences of its policies. In the light of the demographic facts on the ground – a drastic shrinking of indigenous populations and an exponential rise in the numbers of  Muslims – it seems it may now be too late for it to save itself.

Jillian Becker February 11, 2010

Melanie Phillips reveals in her column in the Spectator that Britain’s leftist Labour government plotted to bring huge numbers of Muslim immigrants into the country in order to transform its ethnic composition.

Here is what she writes:

Last October, I wrote about how Andrew Neather, a former speechwriter for various Labour Cabinet ministers, had blurted out the fact that the Labour government had engaged on a covert act of national sabotage by loosening immigration controls in order to change the ethnic makeup of the country and rub the right’s nose in diversity and render their arguments out of date. Neather subsequently tried to deny that this is what he had said, claiming he had been misrepresented by ‘excitable right-wing newspaper columnists’ by presenting his views in such a way that they were ‘twisted out of all recognition…into being a ‘plot’ to make Britain multicultural. There was no plot.’

Well, now we know there was indeed precisely such a plot. Neather had originally written that drafts of a government policy document were handed out in summer 2000 only with extreme reluctance: there was a paranoia about it reaching the media. Eventually published in January 2001, the innocuously labelled ‘RDS Occasional Paper no. 67’, ‘Migration: an economic and social analysis’ focused heavily on the labour market case. But the earlier drafts I saw also included a driving political purpose: that mass immigration was the way that the Government was going to make the UK truly multicultural.

The pressure group Migrationwatch has now obtained an early draft of that policy document. The chairman of Migrationwatch, Sir Andrew Green, writes in the Daily Mail, which carried the story, that this document shows there was indeed a conspiracy to change the make-up of the country. … The social objective of greatly increased diversity was entirely suppressed for fear of public reaction – especially from the white working class. These are the very people who are now paying the price for a decade of Labour deception.

A covert policy to subvert the makeup of the country and change its national identity, an abuse of democracy, a stupendous swindle of the British people — more, an act of collective treachery to the nation: an enormous story, you might think? You would be wrong. Other than in the Daily Mail, I cannot find any reference to this anywhere else. I wonder why.

While we fully accept and agree that the Labour Party dreamt of turning Britain into a multicultural utopia and took active steps to realize their terrible dream, we will follow this post with another (see above) to show that such a plot was hatched and implemented by all the West European states, under both leftist and conservative governments, in compliance with the demands of the Arab states.

We mean a sow, a pig, a female pig …

such as these fattening at the state trough …

whom Phyllis Schlafly writes about in Investor’s Business Daily:

When Obama presented his multitrillion-dollar budget, he declared with great fanfare that he was calling for a freeze in discretionary spending. Feminists immediately had a tantrum to complain that the freeze exempted funding for the military, intelligence and homeland security. Now we learn that all feminist programs and organizations will also be exempted from the freeze. Instead, they will get what White House spokeswoman Kate Bedingfield admits are “significant funding increases.”

A White House document titled “Opportunity and Progress for Women and Girls” describes 15 federal programs that will receive increased funding to appease the feminists. Chief among them is the Violence Against Women project, which is targeted for a 22% increase, an extra $117 million more than current funding, which is already close to $1 billion a year.

That earmark is a Joe Biden project known as FEMINIST PORK because the money goes right into the hands of radical feminist centers where they teach their anti-male, anti-marriage ideology, counsel women to get divorces and urge criminal prosecution against a man no matter how slight or unverified the alleged offense. 

The “Women and Girls” document reveals that Obama’s budget would appropriate $50 million to give grants to incentivize the states to adopt paid family leave. That longtime feminist goal would be very costly to small business and result in a loss of jobs.

To please the feminists, other spending that will be exempted from Obama’s freeze includes an additional $400 million for the discretionary nutrition program for low-income women and an increase of $10 million for family planning.

Of course, Obama’s budget will increase funding for day care, one of the most favorite feminist objectives. Head Start, which already receives $9 billion a year, is scheduled for additional funding of nearly $1 billion, despite the fact that recent studies show that Head Start provides little or no beneficial results toward the stated goal of helping disadvantaged children catch up with other children.

Obama’s budget also provides an additional $1.6 billion for the Child Care and Development Fund as part of the reauthorization of government spending for day care. The feminists believe that child care should be taken over by government in order to overcome society’s expectation that mothers care for their own babies…

The budget also increases funding for a special program to give women (instead of men) more jobs in academic science and engineering careers.

Obama’s State of the Union speech continued his pandering to the feminists. He said, “We are going to crack down on violations of equal-pay laws so that women get equal pay for an equal day’s work.” Equal pay for equal work has been U.S. law since 1963, so there’s nothing new about the law or its enforcement. Isn’t his Equal Employment Opportunity (EEOC) agency already cracking down against violations — and if not, why not?

Obama’s statement was just a throw-away line to feed the feminist myth that women are victims of employment discrimination. It was also designed to try to validate the false feminist slogan that women are paid only 77 cents for work that earns a dollar for men. That’s not true because equal pay ought to be paid for equal work, and most women don’t work as many hours or in as dangerous or unpleasant jobs as men. Women prefer inside work in air-conditioned offices.

Obama hasn’t yet gone as far as Norway, which passed a law requiring that women must constitute 40% of all companies’ corporate boards. U.S. feminists would probably like that rule — they pretend to see no hypocrisy in touting gender-neutrality while demanding affirmative action for females. …

Half of American women are in the work force today, while male unemployment is setting new records.

Dr. M. Zuhdi Jasser is a former lieutenant commander in the United States Navy where he served as a medical officer. He is the President and Founder of the American Islamic Forum for Democracy, a nonprofit charitable organization ‘dedicated to preserving the founding principles of the United States Constitution, liberty and freedom, through the separation of mosque and state’.

Here he makes a sensible – ie non-politically correct – comment on the Fort Hood massacre, and the Pentagon’s report of it:

“On November 5, 2009, the United States Army was viciously attacked from within by an ideologue bent on pursuing an agenda of Islamist extremism. This ideologue fell under the separatist influence of political Islam while serving as an officer. It is incumbent upon our force to begin to understand this theo-political ideology that threatens our soldiers internally and externally.”

These critical lines are completely missing from the Pentagon’s 84-page report reviewing the massacre of 13 U.S. soldiers and contractors at Fort Hood. Yet this is only one of many omissions that the Pentagon should pursue from this incident.

Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan opened fire on Nov. 5 because his adherence to extreme Islamism overrode his allegiance to his country and his sworn oath to protect it against all enemies. … Hasan’s defense is not the job of the Pentagon. The Pentagon has a duty to honestly assess the root of the attack and to ensure that the military is adequately protecting our forces from the threat from within and without.

As a former lieutenant commander in the U.S. Navy, I know the culture of the U.S. military. While I served my 11 years pre-9/11, the culture of political correctness was pervasive. This travesty of a report is front and center evidence of that paralyzing culture.

As a Naval physician and former chief resident at Bethesda Naval Hospital, I can also speak to the inadequacies in the counterterrorism, counter-radicalism and insurgency training of commanders like those being held to blame for Hasan’s promotion and movement up the chain of command… His commanders were seriously concerned about his actions and the role his faith played in his everyday interactions with patients. Had they brought those concerns to his review process, they would have been vilified as Islamaphobes. Even had Hasan’s superiors appropriately identified his behaviors, a military discharge is light years down the path of administrative counseling and punishment he would have received. Which begs the question, would a demoted Hasan have been any less of a threat?

As a Muslim, I am most fearful that our entrenched mindset of victimization and political correctness is precluding a vitally necessary open discussion of faith-based issues both inside and outside of the military. The current military and governmental culture precluded Hasan’s superiors from questioning anything relating to his faith.

At a Jan. 15, 2010, press conference Secretary Robert Gates himself confirmed this state of affairs: “Current policies on prohibited activities provide neither the authority nor the tools for commanders and supervisors to intervene when DOD personnel {are} at risk of personal radicalization.”

Yet the secretary has recommended Secretary of the Army John McHugh “take appropriate action” with regards to the report’s recommendations for “personnel responsible for supervising Major Hasan.” Those recommendations include career-ending reprimands for several of his superiors.

How can we hold these soldiers responsible for not preventing Hasan’s actions if we aren’t giving them the environment and the tools they need to confront Islamist radicalization? The military cannot allow the mantra of victimization of Muslims to dominate how it handles force protection. Islamist radicalization is real and it cannot be confronted unless we are honest about the threat it represents. Hasan is not the first soldier to be radicalized and he won’t be the last if we do not address the real issues.

I recently had a conversation with a friend who is a colonel in the U.S. Army and does quite a bit of force training. He had an interaction with one of the active-duty military imams, which concerned him, but because of political correctness he had nowhere to go with those concerns. … . He asked an active duty imam what he would say to a soldier who came to him asking if it was against “our faith” to fight against Muslims. … The Imam replied that he would refer the soldier to the Islamic Society of North America who is the outsourced certifying agency of Muslim Chaplains in the U.S. military. Unfortunately, ISNA is also a political Islamist organization that has been overly critical of the United States wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.

ISNA glorified Imam Zaid Shakir’s response to the Fort Hood massacre as an example for their entire membership. As an American Muslim, I was frankly offended by his first paragraph demonstrating his and thus ISNA’s disdain for our military [which was]:

“There is no legitimate reason for their deaths, just as I firmly believe there is no legitimate reason for the deaths of the hundreds of thousands of Iraqi and Afghani civilians who have perished as a result of those two conflicts. Even though I disagree with the continued prosecution of those wars, and even though I believe that the US war machine is the single greatest threat to world peace, I must commend the top military brass at Fort Hood, and President Obama for encouraging restraint and for refusing to attribute the crime allegedly perpetrated by Major Nidal Malik Hasan to Islam.”

This is the organization that an active-duty imam uses for guidance? …

It is insane that they would utilize ISNA when they are part and parcel of the problem. ISNA’s roots are in the global project of the Muslim Brotherhood. They were listed as an unindicted co-conspirator in the successful Holy Land Foundation terror financing trial of 2008…

So far, so good. We do, however, have a difference of opinion with Dr Jasser when he writes:

As to the answer the imam should have given. He should have told the Colonel that he would counsel the Muslim military member that not only does his oath to this country and the military take precedence over any other oath, but the concept of the ummah (as Islamic nation) is dead and no longer relevant or competing for his allegiance from a spiritual perspective. There have been many wars fought between Muslims and this war is not a war against Muslims or Islam, but rather one to free the Iraqi and Afghani populations from their despots. If our active duty Muslim imams cannot confer such advice upon our Muslim soldiers they are a significant liability to our force protection. …

We see the war, whether it is fought in Iraq or Afghanistan or anywhere else, including the US itself, as Islam’s religiously motivated jihad against non-Muslims. If a Muslim such as Nidal Malik Hasan sees it as that, he must surely feel his allegiance to the US and its army is in competition with his allegiance to the ummah.

We agree with Dr Jasser’s recommendations:

The Pentagon’s review should be revised to look at the broader picture of Hasan’s path to radicalization through political Islam. They should analyze the warning signs that were visible and determine how the military could have better protected its soldiers. They should look at the threat that political Islam and its forms of radicalization have upon American Muslims and contractors that we employ abroad, like the informant who killed seven CIA officers last December.

The protection of our forces requires a better understanding of the enemy we face. An honest assessment of the Fort Hood massacre would not limit the scope of the review. It would also not allow the scapegoating of soldiers instead of fighting the root theo-political problems. Hasan’s victims deserve a full revision of how the United States military handles Islamist radicalization within its ranks. …

Trying to justify Obama’s foreign policy towards North Korea and Iran, the Secretary of State salvages small successes out of a morass of failure. The unimpressive exhibits she holds up for admiration only serve to prove how poor a catch she has netted, how very little she has achieved.

From Commentary’s ‘Contentions’, by Jennifer Rubin:

In a rather devastating interview with Candy Crowley on CNN, Hillary Clinton reveals the misguided premise at the heart of [Obama’s] Iran engagement policy and the disastrous results that have flowed from it. This sequence sums up the failure of engagement:

CROWLEY: I want to bring your attention to something that President Obama said in his inaugural a little more than a year ago.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

OBAMA: “We will extend a hand if you are willing to unclench your fist.”

(END VIDEO CLIP)

CROWLEY: Has Iran unclenched its fist?

CLINTON: No. But…

CROWLEY: How about North Korea?

CLINTON: No. Not to the extent we would like to see them. But I think that’s — that is not all — all to the story. Engagement has brought us a lot in the last year. Let’s take North Korea first, and then we’ll go to Iran. In North Korea when we said that we were willing to work with North Korea if they were serious about returning to the six party talks, and about denuclearizing in an irreversible way, they basically did not respond in the first instance. But because we were willing to engage, we ended up getting a very strong sanctions regime against North Korea that China signed on to and Russia signed on to. And right now is being enforced around the world.

The effectiveness, however, of the sanctions remains to be seen.

CROWLEY: Did the extended hand of the U.S. help in any way that you point to?

CLINTON: It did, because — because we extended it a neighbor like China knew we were going the extra mile. And all of a sudden said, “You know, you’re not just standing there hurling insults at them. You’ve said, ‘All right. Fine. We’re — we’re willing to work with them.’ They haven’t responded. So we’re going to sign on to these very tough measures.” Similarly in Iran — I don’t know what the outcome would have been if the Iranian government hadn’t made the decision it made following the elections to become so repressive.

So China awarded full marks to the US for effort. Or was it for humility? Anyway, Hillary Clinton gives the impression that the US is on trial for good conduct, and China is the judge. The merits of sanctions against North Korea, the desirability of the ends they are intended to achieve, are not by her account what concerns, or ought to concern, China and Russia. What matters to them is, did America go about it in a manner they approved of? It did, and its Secretary of State is proud to have earned their approval.

CLINTON: But the fact is because we engaged, the rest of the world has really begun to see Iran the way we see it. When we started last year talking about the threats that Iran’s nuclear programs posed, Russia and other countries said, “Well we don’t see it that way.” But through very slow and steady diplomacy plus the fact that we had a two track process. Yes we reached out on engagement to Iran, but we always had the second track which is that we would have to try to get the world community to take stronger measures if they didn’t respond on the engagement front.

So let’s unpack that. For starters, even Clinton admits that the policy has failed. No unclenched hands in North Korea and Iran. And her justification — that our Iran policy was justified because “the world has really begun to see Iran the way we see it” — is simply preposterous. She would have us believe the world would not have seen the nature of the regime by its own actions (constructing the Qom enrichment site in violation of international agreements, stealing an election, and brutalizing its own people), but only now has begun to understand the nature of the regime because we have engaged in a futile Kabuki dance with the mullahs? It boggles the mind. And where is the evidence that Russia and China see it our way? When last we heard from them, the Russians were supplying missiles to Tehran, and the Chinese were rejecting sanctions.

There is no flicker of recognition that the president might have used his vaunted charisma and eloquence to get the world to “see Iran the way we see it” — that is, as an illegitimate and tyrannical regime. Indeed, she doesn’t even mention the democracy protestors other than to observe that she doesn’t know ”what the outcome would have been if the Iranian government hadn’t made the decision it made following the elections to become so repressive.” Not even a rhetorical bouquet to throw their way. Perhaps we are not even “bearing witness” these days. She seems oblivious to the notion that world opinion might be rallied to the cause of displacing, rather than soliciting the attention of, the despotic regime. And she gives no indication that the engagement policy has bestowed legitimacy upon the regime at the very time its citizens are seeking to overthrow it.

She also makes the bizarre claim that Iran really is not the greatest threat we face:

CLINTON: But I think that most of us believe the greater threats are the trans-national non-state networks. Primarily the extremists — the fundamentalist Islamic extremists who are connected Al Qaeda in the Arab Peninsula. Al Qaeda in — in Pakistan, and Afghanistan. Al Qaida in the Maghreb. I mean the — the kind of connectivity that exists. And they continue to try to increase the sophistication of their capacity. The attacks that they’re going to make. And the, you know, the biggest nightmare that any of us have is that one of these terrorist member organizations within this syndicate of terror will get their hands on a weapon of mass destruction. So that’s really the — the most threatening prospect we see.

Where to begin? She seems to suggest that we shouldn’t be so concerned about an Iranian regime with a full-blown nuclear-weapons program because there are also non-state terrorists (some of whom are supported by none other than Iran) who pose a similar threat. But wait. Isn’t this further reason to do what is necessary to prevent the Iranians from acquiring nuclear weapons? After all, they might be supplying those very same groups with nuclear materials.

In one short interview, Clinton has pulled back the curtain on the intellectual and moral hollowness and abject confusion at he heart of Obama’s engagement policy.

In this article, at Pajamas Media, Jamie Glazov does five things that we applaud:

He reminds all of us who are free – and trying to remain free under a government that prefers collectivism to liberty – how terrible it is to live under collectivist totalitarian oppression. Specifically he writes about how it was in the Soviet Union.

He exposes the feminists for what they are – indulged, self-absorbed, ignorant, silly, and petty.

He condemns the leftists, who are blind to the value of the freedom they have and strive to destroy it.

He accuses Islam of threatening us with totalitarianism now.

He praises Glenn Beck and his outstandingly excellent film The Revolutionary Holocaust, that conveys, entirely adequately in a very shot space of time, an enormously important lesson to an American generation who are not taught it in their schools, their universities, or by the mass media.

The tortures included laying a man naked on a freezing cement floor, forcing his legs apart, and then an interrogator stepping on his testicles, applying increasing pressure until the confession surfaced. Imagine the consequences of no surfacing confession. Indeed, many people refused to confess to a crime they did not commit. Daughters and sons were raped in front of their fathers and mothers — for the sake of extracting “confessions.”

These are just some of the delicacies that the Stalinist machinery inflicted on its citizenry in the hope of bringing socialism into earthly incarnation. …

Both of my grandfathers were exterminated by Stalinist terror. Both of my parents, Yuri and Marina Glazov, were dissidents in the former Soviet Union. They risked their lives for freedom; they stood up against Soviet totalitarianism. They barely escaped the gulag, a fortune many of our friends and relatives did not share. I come from a system where a myriad of the closest people to my family simply disappeared, where relatives and family friends died under interrogation and torture for their beliefs — or for simply nothing at all.

Now try to imagine me sitting in the company of left-wing “intellectuals” in the West who think they are oppressed. This is my lifelong experience. I remember one radical feminist, whom I sat next to in a graduate student lounge, lecturing me sternly about how women in the West are oppressed because they wear bikinis on beaches; with a reprimanding tone, she explained to me that this represented the way capitalism objectifies women, marginalizes them from spheres of power, and metaphorically decapitates them as human beings. I remember asking her what she thought of female genital mutilation and honor killings in the Muslim world. To this I received a stone-cold silence and a frightening hateful stare, a stare with which I have become accustomed: I would be confined to a gulag or a psychiatric hospital if this particular individual had the power to place me there. This would be done for the good of society of course. My question was heresy: she could not, naturally, admit that evil adversarial cultures and ideologies existed — under which women truly suffer real oppression — for if she did, then she would have to sacrifice her entire worldview and personal identity. …

My family’s nightmarish experience in the Soviet Union was followed by a providential escape from totalitarian hell. We were among the lucky ones, the ones who got away. The United States gave us a safe and protected home — a home of unbelievable material well-being (in comparison to Soviet starvation) and human liberty. I will never forget the awe I felt experiencing my first taste of freedom, even as a young five-year-old boy who wasn’t completely sure what it was. My parents could now, for the first time, speak out without fear of brutal repercussions in defense of Soviet citizens who were being persecuted for their political and/or religious beliefs. For the first time, we lived without the dread to which I had been accustomed throughout my young life.

I remember while we were cherishing our newfound freedom, we encountered a strange species: intellectuals in the universities who reviled my parents for the story they had to tell. For the first time in their lives, my father and mother confronted an intelligentsia that was hostile to them. Back in Russia, dissident intellectuals risked their lives when they pronounced one word of truth about the horrible history (and reality) of their country under communist rule. In America, most of the intellectuals who surrounded us scoffed at the importance of real intellectual freedom and dismissed my parents’ experience; they demonized their own society, wished for its defeat, and supported the communist enemy that muzzled free speech and tortured millions of human beings.

As a very young boy, I learned that these intellectuals were “leftists.”… While my family agonized about the relatives and friends we had left behind, and as we kept the memory of their suffering alive in our hearts, our leftist acquaintances reprimanded us for our views, instructing us to see America — our personal liberator — as the most evil entity not only in the Cold War, but in all of human history. They wanted us to dedicate our lives — as they had done — to the victory of the West’s totalitarian adversaries.

But … today we have a best friend in the West … We aren’t orphans anymore. There is a certain individual in this land, by the name of Glenn Beck, who has a television show on the Fox News Channel with a mass following; he is masterfully exposing this phenomenon that we experienced — and are still experiencing. He is telling the truth about the Soviet regime and about communism and he is beaming a light on leftists and liberals for their long romance, which continues till this day, with communist systems and the ideologies that brought them into place. Just recently, Beck’s program featured his profound documentary, The Revolutionary Holocaust, which powerfully illustrates the evil of communism and the leftist ideals that brought its horrors into existence. Beck’s documentary exposes the crimes against humanity perpetrated by mass murderers such as Che Guevara and Mao Zedong, who, till this day, enjoy great idolization in leftist milieus and, as we know, in the Obama White House itself. …

Mr. Beck, thank you for having the courage and integrity to tell the truth about communism, despite the price you have had to pay for doing so. …

Because of people like you, the millions of victims of communism will not be pushed into the invisible sphere of historical amnesia — where the liberal left has perpetually tried to confine them. Mr. Beck, by producing documentaries like your recent The Revolutionary Holocaust, you are bringing personal affirmation to myriads of families like my own — and to all victims and survivors of communism — by validating our experiences and by telling the whole world that, despite the left’s attempt to impose gulag denial on our culture, we did live what we lived, we did endure what we endured, and we did see what we saw. And you are crystallizing the pernicious socialist idea that comes in the form of humanitarianism, but culminates in mass terror.

Glenn Beck, you are leading the crucial fight of the 21st century. In battling on the front lines for moral clarity on the issue of communism, you are setting a firm terrain on which free men and women will be able to fight the new jihadi totalitarians who seek to destroy our freedom and lives… Thank you.

The surest successes that the US has achieved lately in the war against the Taliban in Afghanistan and Pakistan have been by the use of drones. Questions have been raised about the morality of their use, by the American Civil Liberties Union for instance, on the grounds that they incidentally cause civilian deaths.

A new documentary examines the morality of incidentally or deliberately killing civilians in war.

From Commentary, by Jonathan S. Tobin:

Monday night, PBS’s American Experience series will broadcast a new documentary titled The Bombing of Germany, about the strategic-bombing campaign carried out against the Nazis by American forces in World War II. Coming from the liberal-leaning PBS and in an era where denunciations of American military actions — even in the “good war” against Nazi Germany — have become commonplace, it would have been no surprise if this film was yet another revisionist attempt to decry Allied tactics as immoral. This impression is reinforced by the introduction to the film on PBS’s website, which highlights the number of German civilian casualties incurred by Allied bombing and the “defining moments that led the U.S. across a moral divide” that would make it easier to drop a nuclear bomb on Japan. Indeed, the narration heard during the opening moments of The Bombing of Germany goes straight to this conclusion when it says that by the time the war ended, the bombing left “both German cities and America’s lofty ideals in ruins.”

But, fortunately, there is more to this documentary than the facile conclusion that the bombing of Germany was so immoral that it cannot be defended even in a war in which the future of civilization was at stake. By the time the 50-minute film is over, liberals expecting another trashing of America are left with some conclusions that not only reinforce the morality of American tactics during that war but also might affect the way we think about contemporary conflicts.

The story of the bombing offensive is complex. During the war, Britain’s Royal Air Force believed that the key to knocking German war industries was to burn down the cities where the factories existed. From their frame of reference, there was no moral distinction between the factories themselves and the homes of the defense workers who created the material that enabled the Nazi regime to commit the crimes against humanity that made the war a matter of life or death for the free world.

But the United States Army Air Corps, equipped with more sophisticated planes and bombsights, as well as a more romantic notion about the distinction between government and civilian targets in a totalitarian state, disagreed. The Americans believed that by flying during the day when visibility was obviously better (the British flew at night), their planes could knock out strategic targets without having to attack entire cities. The results produced by this theory were not that good. Much damage was caused to the German war effort, but the losses of American planes (especially before the introduction of a long-range fighter plane in 1944 that would make it safer for U.S. bombers to fly over Germany) made it too expensive to continue. By contrast, the British weeklong raid on Hamburg in 1943, in which the entire city was hit, was a major blow to the German war effort. At the time, Nazi armaments minister Albert Speer told Hitler that a few more raids like Hamburg would bring the German war effort to a halt. …

What the filmmakers and some of their consultants see as the moral turning point of the war for America [was] the bombings of Berlin and Dresden in February 1945 in which there was no pretense that the attack was anything but an attempt to destroy the city. The Dresden raid, immortalized in Kurt Vonnegut’s novel Slaughterhouse Five, has been widely represented by many American, English, and German historians as immoral because the beautiful medieval city was not considered a military target and heretofore had been spared the devastation that rained down on other German cities. It is here that author Don Miller, one of the prominent voices heard in the film, describes the raid as the crossing of “a moral threshold … that we will not deliberately bomb civilians … once we crossed the moral divide in Berlin, it made everything else, including the atomic bomb, a little bit easier.”

But Miller is not the only voice heard about the raids against Berlin and Dresden. The film goes on to credit these devastating attacks for helping to make the Soviet assault on Eastern Germany, including the conquest of Berlin, easier. Moreover, the film points out that in a total war against a ruthless foe, half measures are of no use. After all, the ordinary Germans who served in Adolf Hitler’s army and worked in the factories that produced the weapons and other material that made his crimes possible never wavered in their loyalty to the Nazi regime, even as the Reich was reduced to ruins around them. This fact undermines the notion that Allied air-war theorists fervently believed in: that bombing could break the will of a nation. But Allied bombing attacks that literally destroyed the physical structures of the enemy’s war effort did work and, in fact, helped shorten the length of the bloodiest war in history.

The most devastating line of the film is its last, in which historian Conrad C. Crane, director of the U.S. Army Military History Institute, confronts the moral dilemma of killing civilians in a righteous war against an immoral opponent. While the question of the deaths of civilians is one we must ponder, Conrad insists, “The most unethical act for the Allies in World War II would have been allowing themselves to lose.”

This is a concept that applies not only to the war against Hitler but also to the one that America is currently fighting against Islamo-fascists. We have heard a great deal in the past few years about unethical tactics both in terms of attacking terrorist strongholds and as in dealing with prisoners who possess information about future threats. As the Obama administration tries to avoid further debacles like its reaction to the Christmas Day bombing attempt over Detroit and to maintain pressure on the Taliban in Afghanistan and Pakistan, the conclusion of The Bombing of Germany should haunt them. It is all well and good to try to earn applause for being more moral than our opponents. But when facing an enemy whose goal is the destruction of our society and the murder of countless innocents, the prime objective must remain the same as it was in World War II. Allowing ourselves to lose such a war is the most unethical act imaginable.