Muslims are instructed by their religion to lie when it suits them. (It’s called taqiyya.) So whatever they say must be tested for credibility against what is known of the subject they’re talking about.

It is common for heads of Muslim states and organizations to declare one thing to a Western audience and the opposite to their fellow Muslims.

Taking this fully into consideration, but bearing in mind Obama’s biography and his record since coming to power, we believe the Foreign Minister of Egypt when he says that Obama told him he “is still a Muslim” and” will show the Muslim world how to deal with Israel”.

Obama told me he is still a Muslim, who supports the Muslim agenda… Egypt Foreign Minister Ahmed Abul Gheit said on Nile-TV in regards to Obama confirming he is a Muslim. …

This is the statement recorded:

Adul Gheit said he had a one-on-one meeting with Obama, where the US President told him that he was still a Muslim, the son of a Muslim father, the step son of Muslim stepfather, that his half brothers in Kenya are Muslims, and that he was sympathetic towards the Muslim agenda.

Adul Gheit claimed Obama told the Arabs to show patience. Obama promised that once he overcame some domestic issues, like the health care reform, he would show the Muslim World how to deal with Israel.

For Obama to tell America he is a Christian and the Foreign Minister of Egypt he is a Muslim, is to do what Islam requires him to do.

Whether he is a Muslim, a Christian, or neither remains uncertain – perhaps even to himself. But he is all too plainly “sympathetic towards the Muslim agenda”, and the way he is dealing with Israel cannot be unpleasing to the Muslim world, though it no doubt expects him to go much further yet towards realizing its objective – the total destruction of the Jewish state.

Saudi Arabia has given Israel permission to fly through its air space to bomb Iran?

So says this report by Hugh Tomlinson in The Times (London):

Saudi Arabia has conducted tests to stand down its air defences to enable Israeli jets to make a bombing raid on Iran’s nuclear facilities, The Times can reveal. …

Defence sources in the Gulf say that Riyadh has agreed to allow Israel to use a narrow corridor of its airspace in the north of the country to shorten the distance for a bombing run on Iran.

To ensure the Israeli bombers pass unmolested, Riyadh has carried out tests to make certain its own jets are not scrambled and missile defence systems not activated. Once the Israelis are through, the kingdom’s air defences will return to full alert.

That may be hard to believe, but the next part is plain incredible:

“The Saudis have given their permission for the Israelis to pass over and they will look the other way,” said a US defence source in the area. “They have already done tests to make sure their own jets aren’t scrambled and no one gets shot down. This has all been done with the agreement of the [US] State Department.”

If this is true, what the heck is Israel waiting for?

Skeptics know that when sources remain unnamed, deniability is maintained.

The story continues:

Sources in Saudi Arabia say it is common knowledge within defence circles in the kingdom that an arrangement is in place if Israel decides to launch the raid. Despite the tension between the two governments, they share a mutual loathing of the regime in Tehran and a common fear of Iran’s nuclear ambitions. “We all know this. We will let them [the Israelis] through and see nothing,” said one.

Which doesn’t mean they will say nothing afterwards. We expect that if Israel were to fly through Saudi space and bomb Iran, Saudi Arabia would vote in the (disgusting) UN to condemn it, along with all the rest.

The report kindly informs Iran in advance exactly what the targets will be:

The four main targets for any raid on Iran would be the uranium enrichment facilities at Natanz and Qom, the gas storage development at Isfahan and the heavy-water reactor at Arak. Secondary targets include the lightwater reactor at Bushehr, which could produce weapons-grade plutonium when complete.

The targets lie as far as 1,400 miles (2,250km) from Israel; the outer limits of their bombers’ range, even with aerial refuelling. An open corridor across northern Saudi Arabia would significantly shorten the distance. An airstrike would involve multiple waves of bombers, possibly crossing Jordan, northern Saudi Arabia and Iraq. Aircraft attacking Bushehr, on the Gulf coast, could swing beneath Kuwait to strike from the southwest.

Now come the suggestions of uncertainty.

Passing over Iraq would require at least tacit agreement to the raid from Washington. So far, the Obama Administration has refused to give its approval as it pursues a diplomatic solution to curbing Iran’s nuclear ambitions. Military analysts say Israel has held back only because of this failure to secure consensus from America and Arab states. Military analysts doubt that an airstrike alone would be sufficient to knock out the key nuclear facilities, which are heavily fortified and deep underground or within mountains. However, if the latest sanctions prove ineffective the pressure from the Israelis on Washington to approve military action will intensify.

Really and truly? Israel will put pressure on Obama?

It would be nice if this story were true, but we think it has been spun out of cobwebs of conjecture and stuck together with the chewing gum of rumour:

Israeli officials refused to comment yesterday on details for a raid on Iran, which the Prime Minister, Binyamin Netanyahu, has refused to rule out. Questioned on the option of a Saudi flight path for Israeli bombers, Aharaon Zeevi Farkash, who headed military intelligence until 2006 and has been involved in war games simulating a strike on Iran, said: “I know that Saudi Arabia is even more afraid than Israel of an Iranian nuclear capacity.”

In 2007 Israel was reported to have used Turkish air space to attack a suspected nuclear reactor being built by Iran’s main regional ally, Syria. Although Turkey publicly protested against the “violation” of its air space, it is thought to have turned a blind eye in what many saw as a dry run for a strike on Iran’s far more substantial — and better-defended — nuclear sites.

Israeli intelligence experts say that Egypt, Saudi Arabia and Jordan are at least as worried as themselves and the West about an Iranian nuclear arsenal. …

Israeli newspapers reported last year that high-ranking officials, including the former Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, have met their Saudi Arabian counterparts to discuss the Iranian issue. It was also reported that Meir Dagan, the head of Mossad, met Saudi intelligence officials last year to gain assurances that Riyadh would turn a blind eye to Israeli jets violating Saudi airspace during the bombing run. Both governments have denied the reports.

It may be that the Saudis used The Times to send an indirect message to Israel that the air corridor would be clear for them, in which case they would have chosen this means so they could later deny having given any official permission, and feel free to condemn Israel’s action after it had been taken.

But more than anything else, it’s that “agreement of the State Department” that makes the tale impossible to swallow whole.

Wouldn’t it be wonderful if somehow, between now and July 2011 when American forces are scheduled to withdraw from Afghanistan, the Afghans could be made over into enlightened, fair-minded, peaceable people, free of old tribal conflicts, filled with a thirst for righteousness, respectful of women, eager to become law-abiding free-marketeers, and enthusiasts for establishing the customs and institutions that embody and support true democracy?

It would be more than wonderful, it would be a miracle.

But if that miracle could be worked, wouldn’t the achievement be worth the cost in blood and treasure of the long war America has been waging against the Taliban?

Some think so.

But what is actually happening among these backward, feuding, misogynistic, deeply ignorant people is a continuation of what has always been happening: feuding, subjugation of women, and savage cruelty – of which this is a very recent example from Afghan sources:

Taliban fighters have hanged a seven-year-old boy, claiming he was passing information to foreign soldiers in the volatile southern province of Helmand. …

(“Volatile” is good. We like “volatile”.)

And of what is about to happen we are being nervously forewarned by US military commanders, according to this report from the Washington Post:

The top U.S. commander in Afghanistan said Thursday that the civilian-military offensive scheduled to begin in the southern city of Kandahar this spring would take months longer than planned. The Afghan government has not produced the civilian leadership and trained security forces it was to contribute to the effort, U.S. officials said, and the support from Kandaharis that the United States was counting on Karzai to deliver has not materialized.

“When you go to protect people, the people have to want you to protect them,” Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal, the top U.S. and NATO commander in Afghanistan, said … in explaining why the Kandahar operation has been pushed back until at least September.

“It’s a deliberative process. It takes time to convince people,” he told reporters at a meeting of NATO leaders in Brussels.

But time is short. Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates said this week that the U.S.-led coalition has until the end of the year to prove to the United States and its allies that their forces have broken a stalemate with the Taliban. …

In Marja, in western Helmand province, where Marines launched a major operation this year, U.S. efforts have been hindered by the absence or incompetence of Afghan officials and security forces and by the Taliban’s enduring resistance. …

Many  officials are despairing behind the scenes.

“Washington is making nice with [the corrupt President of Afghanistan] Karzai, but what good has that done?” a U.S. official in Afghanistan said. … “We need him to step up and take a leadership role, to get his government to support what we’re doing. But he’s either unwilling or unable to do it. …

In Kandahar, U.S. military officials said a complex web of official and unofficial power brokers stands to lose if efficient government and rule of law are imposed. “There are generations of families that have lived off corruption,” said 1st Lt. James Rathmann … who leads a platoon in Kandahar city …

The operational plan drawn up for Kandahar last spring began with U.S. Special Operations forces raids against individual insurgent leaders within the city and in the Taliban-heavy “bands” in surrounding districts. At the same time, U.S. civilians were to help organize shuras, or meetings of local leaders and elders, to offer development aid and encourage them to take political control. By June, more than 10,000 newly deployed U.S. troops were to begin clearing the Taliban from the outlying districts, up to 80 percent of which the military estimates is controlled by insurgents. …

McChrystal  … acknowledged that winning support from local leaders was tougher than expected. Some see the Taliban fighters as their Muslim brothers rather than oppressors; others are afraid of assassination by Taliban hit squads that target government supporters or see no advantage in challenging the existing political power structure.

“There’s no point in clearing an area until you have the capacity to do the hold, to bring governance” that does not now exist, one military official in Afghanistan said. “Without the Afghan government civilian capacity — without a district government that can provide some basic services — you’ll end up with what we’re experiencing in Marja right now.” …

Asked whether the delay leaves time for a decisive outcome by the end of the year, McChrystal was noncommittal. “It will be very clear by the end of the calendar year that the Kandahar operation is progressing,” he said. “I don’t know whether we’ll know whether it’s decisive. Historians will tell us that.”

Decisive? Changing Afghanistan forever? We don’t think so. Even if the Taliban fighters are wiped out in the forthcoming Battle of Kandahar, there will be no lasting change.

The war in Afghanistan is being fought for nothing.

The Taliban were whacked with the first offensive. The US should have withdrawn then, with a warning that if terrorists from Afghanistan attacked American targets again, they’d be whacked harder. The continuing campaign has been tragically pointless.

What American – or “coalition” – forces ought to be fighting is the urgently necessary war against the Iranian regime before it launches its nuclear attack.

Has the United States ever before had a Secretary of State as nasty, embarrassing, feeble, and ruinous as Hillary Clinton?

In harmony with the desires of Obama, she is turning America away from long-standing democratic allies and re-aligning it with barbaric tyrannies and communist dictatorships, prostituting her country to serve the interests of some of the filthiest regimes on earth.

Here’s part of the IBD’s opinion of her latest debauch in Latin America:

Yes, we know U.S. foreign policy in Latin America is to keep our friends close and our enemies closer. But Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s flattery-filled visit to Ecuador’s Rafael Correa took it a bit too far.

The hug she gave Ecuador President Rafael Correa on Tuesday was enough of an eye-opener. Then came the olive branch: “We have reached out and feel very much as though we are forging a new set of relationships,” she said at a press conference. “It’s the 21st century. It’s 2010. We’re not turning the clock back.

“We’re not expecting countries that have their own internal agendas in order to accomplish their own economic and social goals to be exactly as we are. If we ever did, it’s no longer the case. [Interpretation: we’re not Bush.] I think the goals that Ecuador and its government have set are goals that the United States agrees with.”

But Correa’s Ecuador is the last country whose goals the U.S. should be agreeing with on anything. Correa is one of the most anti-American leaders in the hemisphere. He has trashed democracy in his own country, taking over the National Assembly by ousting elected lawmakers on spurious legal grounds. His rubber-stamp legislature now structurally resembles that of communist Cuba.

He’s also corrupted the judicial system, taking over the Supreme Court and making every judge a crony. … Now Correa’s going after the press, jailing even leftist reporters and shuttering 95% of the private media. …

He’s also allied Ecuador with Venezuela as well as Iran — effectively merging his country’s dollar-based central bank with that of the Islamic Republic. …

There’s so much wrong with Ecuador that flattery is likely to be counterproductive.

Correa is motivated by the same things that motivate Chavez and Cuba’s Castros — a quest for absolute and permanent power.

To impress the (unbelieving) world with how hard the Obama administration is working to stop the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico since the explosion of BP’s Deepwater Horizon rig, Interior Secretary Ken Salazar notoriously announced that it would keep its “boot on the throat” of BP.

Obama and the Democrats generally like to pretend that Big Business is a wild destructive beast that has to be brutally tamed by government, as Salazar’s image implies.

But in fact, there is a symbiotic relationship between government and Big Business.

Big Business generally donates far more to the socialist parties of the Western world than to those that ideologically support the free market. Why? Because up to a point – a point that big businessmen are apparently too short-sighted to discern – high-taxing, high-spending big government is profitable for companies like BP.

And big government, while hypocritically heaping blame on them for its own failures, keeps its hand stretched out towards them.  

From the Washington Examiner:

Lobbying records show that BP is … a close friend of big government whenever it serves the company’s bottom line.

While BP has resisted some government interventions, it has lobbied for tax hikes, greenhouse gas restraints, the stimulus bill, the Wall Street bailout, and subsidies for oil pipelines, solar panels, natural gas and biofuels.

Now that BP’s oil rig has caused the biggest environmental disaster in American history, the Left is pulling the same bogus trick it did with Enron and AIG: Whenever a company earns universal ire, declare it the poster boy for the free market.

As Democrats fight to advance climate change policies, they are resorting to the misleading tactics they used in their health care and finance efforts: posing as the scourges of the special interests and tarring “reform” opponents as the stooges of big business.

Expect BP to be public enemy No. 1 in the climate debate.

There’s a problem: BP was a founding member of the U.S. Climate Action Partnership (USCAP), a lobby dedicated to passing a cap-and-trade bill. As the nation’s largest producer of natural gas, BP saw many ways to profit from climate legislation, notably by persuading Congress to provide subsidies to coal-fired power plants that switched to gas.

In February, BP quit USCAP without giving much of a reason beyond saying the company could lobby more effectively on its own than in a coalition that is increasingly dominated by power companies. They made out particularly well in the House’s climate bill, while natural gas producers suffered.

But two months later, BP signed off on Kerry’s Senate climate bill, which was hardly a capitalist concoction. One provision BP explicitly backed, according to Congressional Quarterly and other media reports: a higher gas tax. The money would be earmarked for building more highways, thus inducing more driving and more gasoline consumption.

Elsewhere in the green arena, BP has lobbied for and profited from subsidies for biofuels and solar energy, two products that cannot break even without government support. Lobbying records show the company backing solar subsidies including federal funding for solar research. The U.S. Export-Import Bank, a federal agency, is currently financing a BP solar energy project in Argentina.

Ex-Im has also put up taxpayer cash to finance construction of the 1,094-mile Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan pipeline carrying oil from the Caspian Sea to Ceyhan, Turkey — again, profiting BP.

Lobbying records also show BP lobbying on Obama’s stimulus bill and Bush’s Wall Street bailout. …

BP has more Democratic lobbyists than Republicans.  … There’s no truth to Democratic portrayals of the oil company as an arm of the GOP.

Two patterns have emerged during Obama’s presidency: 1) Big business increasingly seeks profits through more government, and 2) Obama nonetheless paints opponents of his intervention as industry shills. BP is just the latest example of this tawdry sleight of hand.

On the last day of August 1939, Hitler sent Nazi forces in Polish uniforms to attack a German radio station in Gleiwitz, Upper Silesia. His intention was to make it seem as if Poland was an aggressor against Germany, so giving him a pretext to invade Poland – which he then did, in collusion with Soviet Russia.

A similar sort of deception is being plotted now by Iran, in collusion with Turkey.

It will send ships to “break the blockade of Gaza”, and force Israel into armed confrontation, according to a DebkaFile report worth reading in full here.

According to our sources, the Iranian convoy will consist of a cargo ship loaded with food and other essentials, medicines and building materials; the second will carry the “volunteer” marines; and the third will be a floating hospital to be anchored permanently in Egyptian Mediterranean territorial waters opposite the divided Gaza-Egyptian town of Rafah. Small boats will ferry patients between Gaza and the hospital ship.

Iran rightly calculates that Israel will not attack a hospital ship  or small boats carrying the sick.

But ships carrying armed men and cargo will certainly be intercepted and forcefully diverted, with shooting if necessary, by the Israeli navy.

Iran expects this to happen, and will use any Israeli action as a pretext for war.

It will be depending on the Islamic states, the United Nations, and Europe to blame Israel, and on America under Obama’s leadership not to defend Israel.

Of course the world will know that Israel is not the aggressor, but will connive at the pretense that it is.

Israel will fight alone, but it will fight. It has to, for its survival.

Our guess is that Iran will only take this risk if it has nuclear weapons ready for use.

Two events on the high seas tested the judgment of the UN and President Obama: North Korea’s belligerent sinking of a South Korean ship (46 seamen killed), and the Israeli navy’s self-defensive action against a Turkish ship hell-bent on breaking the legal blockade of Gaza (9 terrorists killed).

Both the UN and Obama failed the tests.

Frank Gaffney comments in his column at Townhall:

Consider the starkly contrasting treatment associated with two recent episodes at sea.

In the first, a North Korean submarine engaged in an act of war when it covertly torpedoed a South Korean naval vessel on March 21, resulting in the latter’s sinking with the loss of 46 lives.

The second occurred last week when Israeli commandoes, acting lawfully in enforcing a declared naval blockade, intercepted a Turkish ship determined to violate it. Upon boarding the vessel, they were set upon by a mob comprised, it turns out, of weapon-wielding jihadists – not humanitarian-minded “peace activists.” The commandoes defended themselves, killing nine of the would-be “martyrs.”

To date, there has been no UN resolution denouncing the first. No calls for an international investigation. No talk of retaliation by the so-called “community of nations” if the perpetrator does not recant and make amends.

By contrast, the UN Security Council was immediately “seized” with the second. It adopted in short order a resolution condemning those responsible (read, the Israelis) and demanded an international investigation. Given the predictable hostility of virtually any “international” participants in such an inquiry, the result can only be a new basis for vilifying Israel, and for insisting that it ends the blockade of Gaza – something the Obama administration seems to be preparing to support.

To what can the very different treatment of the two naval incidents by the “international community” be attributed? That’s easy: Principally it reflects the fact that North Korea has as its greatest friend Communist China, while Pyongyang considers the United States to be its main enemy. …

By contrast, Israel has traditionally had but one powerful friend: the United States. This alliance has been all the more important since most of the rest of the world is at least somewhat, if not actually rabidly, hostile towards the Jewish State. Under President Obama, however, Israel seems to have in the U.S. a friend in name only. American diplomacy did nothing to prevent passage of the Security Council’s condemnatory resolution …

As we frequently repeat: the UN must be destroyed.

The Mavi Marmara, the Turkish ship which, among other ships despatched by the Free Gaza Movement, tried to break the Israeli blockade of Gaza, had twelve Malaysians on board.

Turns out the whole ill-conceived and ill-fated project was largely financed by a Malaysian organization, one of whose prominent members is the very same imam driving the Ground Zero Mega-Mosque project.

The New York Post reports:

The imam behind a proposed mosque near Ground Zero is a prominent member of a group that helped sponsor the pro-Palestinian activists who clashed violently with Israeli commandos at sea [last] week.

Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf is a key figure in Malaysian-based Perdana Global Peace Organization, according to its Website.

Perdana is the single biggest donor ($366,000) so far to the Free Gaza Movement, a key organizer of the six-ship flotilla that tried to break Israel’s blockade of the Hamas-run Gaza Strip.

Yesterday, Sunday June 6 2010, families of 9/11 victims along with thousands of others rallied in New York to protest against the building of a mega-mosque at Ground Zero.

Speakers recalled the destruction of the World Trade Center and the terrible deaths of 3000 people murdered by Muslims who flew hijacked planes into it.

For videos and more pictures go here.

This is the picture of the week at the Religion of Peace: starving children in Darfur trying to find miniscule fragments of something edible.

The caption reads:

Not Arab enough? There are no starving Muslims in Gaza,

but there are plenty in Darfur. So, where’s their ‘aid flotilla’?

This is a market in Gaza.

For an account of the humanitarian aid Israel sends daily to Gaza in exchange for its rockets, go here.