Mike Lee, who made this video, sent us the link.

It’s not surprising, but it’s fun to watch. It shows how dimwitted God-botherers can be.

Or, surely, must be?

To continue our series of articles on obscure and lost religions, and because this day is called Valentine’s Day, here is an account of Valentinianism. (Though it has no connection as far as we know with [Saint] Valentine’s Day apart from the coincidence of the names.)

Lost religions, which seem to us no more than intricate fantasies, claimed the credulity and devotion of thousands of people through hundreds or even thousands of years. Similarly absurd beliefs claim the devotion and credulity of millions in our own day. In all likelihood they too will pass away – only to be replaced by new ones?

Valentinus was born in the year 100 CE in Phenobia, Egypt, went to live in Rome when he was 36, and died in 160 on the island of Cyprus. He was educated in the Egyptian city of Alexandria, where he must have become acquainted with Judaism, Christianity, and many a pagan cult and school of philosophy including the grandest of them, Platonism and Neopythagoreanism. He was ordained a Christian priest but while in Rome broke away from the church and founded a new religion, perhaps because (as some chroniclers gossip) he wasn’t made bishop of Rome, a rival being preferred.

Valentinianism was a Gnostic creed. Valentinians believed that salvation from the miseries of earthly existence is attainable by an elite among humankind through the Gnosis (knowledge) with which they are spiritually gifted.

Valentinus proclaimed that what he taught was the real, secret teaching of St. Paul which Theudas, St. Paul’s companion, had imparted to him. It may have been. There are whole Gnostic passages in the known teaching of St. Paul; so much in fact that an argument can be made that Pauline Christianity could be classed as a Gnostic doctrine. Certainly most of the Gnostic cults which arose in the second century CE could be classed as Christianities. Both the Gnostic and the Pauline-Christian theologies owe more to Greek philosophy than to Judaism.

The typical Gnostic divine schema, or theogony, was a hierarchy of heavens and of the beings that dwell in them. Valentinus’s was one of the most elaborate. (His cosmic myth differed from that of most Gnostic cults of his time in two main respects, footnoted below.)

In summary, this is what Valentinus taught:

The Pro-Father (Propator), also called the Abyss or the Deep (Bythos), both male and female, and the source of all that exists, emanated a first pair (syzygy): the First Thought (Ennoia), female, and Mind (Nous), male.

From the First Thought descended Truth (Alithea), female, and from Mind descended The Word (Logos), male.

These parallel descents continued through 12 more phases to The Church (Ecclesia) and Primordial Man (Adam Kadmon), from each of whom descended 13 more pairs (a female and a male in each).

These are the Aeons of the highest heaven called the Fullness (Pleroma).

Then came the last of the Aeons, Wisdom (Sophia), who tried to imitate the Pro-Father by giving birth out of herself and all by herself, but being far inferior to the Pro-Father could produce only base substance which filled her with disgust and remorse.

Her first Intention (Enthymesis) became Sophia-Akhamoth, who whirled about in empty space and longed to be admitted to the higher heaven.

Sophia begged the Aeons to pray to the Pro-Father to redeem her creation, but he commanded Mind and Truth to engender Christ (male) and the Holy Spirit (female), and he himself the Pro-Father emanated a new pair, the Cross and the Limit. Together they make the symbol T, which strengthened the Pleroma, and excluded from it forever the imperfect creation which Sophia had produced.

When this was done, all the Aeons burst out singing hymns of praise to the Pro-Father, and all together, as the reinforced Pleroma, they emanated The Perfect Fruit, which was the Savior. He took pity on Sophia-Akhamoth, reached down and gave her a form. Then she was called the Holy Spirit of Earth and of the Heavenly Jerusalem, and the Mother.

After which the Savior withdrew into the Pleroma.

Having been given a form, the fallen Sophia became conscious of her suffering and searched for the light which had touched her and departed, but the Limit prevented her from reaching the Pleroma.

Most dolefully she pleaded to the Highest who had abandoned her. Her dread and woe and despair composed the Matter of which our world is formed.

Again in pity for her the Aeons decreed that Christ would be her spouse at the end of time.

Meanwhile they sent the Gnosis to allay her passions and console her suffering.

The fallen Sophia engendered her own Archons, and from them proceeded 3 Principles: The Pneumatic (the spiritual); The Psychic (the mental); The Hylic (the material), for each of which there is a corresponding plane –

• The Ogdoad for the Spiritual, highest and nearest to the Pleroma, where dwells the Mother (the heavenly Sophia).
• The Hebdomad for the Psychic, the plane of the Seven Heavens, formed for his own dwelling place by the Chief of the Archons, The Demiurge* (the craftsman)[the Jewish God, creator of this world], also called the Metropator. He believes himself to be the only God.
• This base World for the Hylic, the dwelling place of the Devil, who is also called the Cosmocrator. It is also the dwelling-place of terrestrial Man, Adam, into whose base substance the Devil breathed the psychic element.

But the Mother endowed Man with a spiritual element of which the Demiurge and the Devil know nothing, and which Man can discover in himself only by the Gnosis.

In all human beings there is a mixture of the hylic, which is ‘of the Left’ and will perish; the psychic, which is ‘of the Right’ and not perishable or corruptible, but cannot rise into into the Highest Plane; the pneumatic, which is perfectible and redeemable in individual persons, in this life, through the Gnosis. Every spark of it will be gathered up and restored to the source at the Consummation of the Universe.

The mixture is in different proportions in different people. So there are three classes of human beings: the mostly Hylic – the Pagans who are dense, irredeemable matter; the mostly Psychic – the Christians who are half-leavened by their dim understanding of the teaching of Jesus; the mostly Pneumatic – the Gnostics who are incapable of sinning. They can do anything without impairing their moral purity. Indeed it is their positive duty, their mission, to commit every kind of “sin” and “abomination” called such by the Psychics, the half-ignorant Christians who do not know that this world is evil. Whatever they call good must be treated as bad, and whatever they call bad must be treated as good. In this cause, acts of extreme licentiousness are to be carried out as “spiritual exercises”. Evil must be consumed. While the Christians believed in redemption from sin, the Gnostics believed in redemption by sin. That is how they must play their part in the ultimate destruction of this base world.

The Consummation of the Universe is the end and purpose of the cosmic story. It will happen when the spiritual seed dispersed among all beings will have been gathered up, which will come about when Evil has been overcome by the Gnosis-enlightened Pneumatics fulfilling their mission.

Then Sophia will at last be allowed to enter the Pleroma and it shall be as a bridal chamber for her, where she will espouse Christ the Savior – the Bride joined to the Bridegroom.

And then the Pneumatics, male and female, cleansed not only of the hylic but also of the psychic, which is forever cut off from the Pleroma by the Limit, will mount – invisible to the Archons – through the Lower Heavens, needing no password to break the seals**, and will rise to the Pleroma to become the spouses of the Aeons who surround the Savior.

And the Demiurge (who is not irredeemable because on hearing of The Savior he hastened joyfully to him with all his Archons), will rise to the Ogdoad, and there with him the Psychic elements will find rest.

Last of all, at the will of the Aeons with which the pneumatics are united, the fire which is in all things will flame forth, destroy everything here below, and all matter will pass into nothingness.

*The Demiurge. Gnosticism endeavored to answer the question how, since the source of everything is good, did evil come into existence? The Gnostic answer was that lower divine entities became, as they proliferated, ever further removed in their descent from the source of goodness, and the lower they were the less good they were, until one or more was positively bad; and though they were able to exercise divine powers and create a material world and the first human beings, they could not make their creation good. This world was made by the lower bad god named Ialdabaoth, identified with the Creator God of Judaism and often with the Devil. In most Gnostic systems he is all bad, and his creation, this world, is all bad: every single thing in it is evil. Human beings are bad and the best thing they can do is allow themselves to die out: cast off their carnal forms, their bodies, because it is their materiality that is evil. Deep within their immaterial souls, however, is a minute spark of the divine spirit granted to them by the remote high god. He took pity on Man when the low god made him out of mud as a botched and nasty thing, and so sent him the spark by which he might redeem himself from filth and extinction. Only a few human beings, however, will be thus redeemed, because only an elite few will know they have the spark of the divine within them and know the secrets by which they might rise to the high heaven when they’ve shuffled off their mortal coil. This knowledge is the Gnosis. Valentinus differed from most other Gnostics in teaching that the creator-god of this world is not evil, not good, but is just. He exists midway between good on high and evil below, ignorant that there is another god above him.

** Passwords and seals. In many Gnostic systems, the spirits of the redeemable, once released from their bodies by death, had to know passwords to say to the Aeons and Archons as they rose through the layers of heavens towards the highest. The passwords might be the secret names of the intervening powers. Sometimes whole speeches had to be recited to them before they’d let the ascending spirit continue its upward journey. These powers were called Aeons (heavenly beings, also ages in time) and Archons (principalities). According to some sources (but contradicted by others), Valentinus specifically denied that pneumatics in their final ascent would need passwords “to break the seals”. The seals are obscure. There’s a Gnostic hymn in which Jesus descends to rescue a fallen soul (possibly Sophia) and says to the Father: “Send me, Father. Bearing Seals I shall descend; I shall pass through all the Aeons; I shall reveal all the mysteries and I shall deliver the secrets of the holy way.”

Other posts in this series: Thus, more or less, spake Zarathustra, May 26, 2009 (on Zoroastrianism); Yezidis and Mandeans, April 4, 2010; Mani and Manicheism, May 9, 2010; How a rich shipowner affected Christianity, January 2, 2010 (on Marcion); Erotic religion, January 24, 2010 (on Carpocrates and Epiphanes); The father of all heresy, February 23, 2010 (on Simon Magus); Hot in the land of Hum, October 14, 2010 (on the Bugomils).

This is the part of Iranium, a new documentary about the threat that Iran poses to the world, that we found most interesting.

All of it can be found here, but only for a limited time.

As this video is no longer viewable, go here for information about the documentary.

How goes the stealth jihad in Europe?

Here’s a look at it from a Muslim’s point of view.

Notice this keen analyst’s claim that Europe deliberately provokes Muslims to carry out bombings.

Can the Arab states be democratized? Not just hold elections but firmly establish institutions for government of the people, by the people, for the people ?

Charles Krauthammer thinks it is possible.

He writes (in part) at Investor’s Business Daily:

As the states of the Arab Middle East throw off decades of dictatorship, their democratic future faces a major threat from the new totalitarianism: Islamism. As in Soviet days, the threat is both internal and external.

Iran, a mini version of the old Soviet Union, has its own allies and satellites — Syria, Lebanon and Gaza — and its own Comintern, with agents operating throughout the region to extend Islamist influence and undermine pro-Western secular states. That’s precisely why in this revolutionary moment, Iran boasts of an Islamist wave sweeping the Arab world.

We need a foreign policy that not only supports freedom in the abstract but is guided by long-range practical principles to achieve it — a Freedom Doctrine composed of the following elements:

(1) The U.S. supports democracy throughout the Middle East. It will use its influence to help democrats everywhere throw off dictatorial rule.

(2) Democracy is more than just elections. It requires a free press, the rule of law, the freedom to organize, the establishment of independent political parties and the peaceful transfer of power. Therefore, the transition to democracy and initial elections must allow time for these institutions, most notably political parties, to establish themselves.

(3) The only U.S. interest in the internal governance of these new democracies is to help protect them against totalitarians, foreign and domestic. The recent Hezbollah coup in Lebanon and the Hamas dictatorship in Gaza dramatically demonstrate how anti-democratic elements that achieve power democratically can destroy the very democracy that empowered them.

(4) Therefore, just as during the Cold War the U.S. helped keep European communist parties out of power (to see them ultimately wither away), it will be U.S. policy to oppose the inclusion of totalitarian parties — the Muslim Brotherhood or, for that matter, communists — in any government, whether provisional or elected, in newly liberated Arab states.

We may not have the power to prevent this. So be it. The Brotherhood may today be so relatively strong in Egypt, for example, that a seat at the table is inevitable. But under no circumstances should a presidential spokesman say, as did Robert Gibbs [the bumbling and fumbling White House press secretary – JB], that the new order “has to include a whole host of important nonsecular actors.”

Why gratuitously legitimize Islamists? Instead, Americans should be urgently supporting secular democratic parties in Egypt and elsewhere with training, resources and diplomacy.

We are, unwillingly again, parties to a long twilight struggle, this time with Islamism — most notably Iran, its proxies and its potential allies, Sunni and Shiite. We should be clear-eyed about our preferred outcome — real democracies governed by committed democrats — and develop policies to see this through.

And then the Arab states would become tolerant, pacific, industrious, productive, and prosperous?

We don’t think so. We don’t think they can be democratic as long as they remain – not “Islamist” but – Islamic.

Why? Because Islam and democracy, Islam and liberty, are essentially incompatible. Islam and Western civilization are totally antithetical to each other.

Islam is a dogmatism that forbids doubt – and doubt is the very DNA of our civilization. Doubt alone guarantees the tolerance which makes democracy possible. Doubt starts scientific enquiry, demands experiment and exploration.

Islam cannot be “reformed” to become its opposite.

It ought not to be surprising that a Muslim should write what Salim Mansur has written in this letter; or that the friend it is addressed to is Jewish; or that a professor in an American university should write it; but it is surprising on all these counts, especially the last.

Here is part of what he writes:

Just ponder how a third-rate community organizer — from the most incestuously corrupt political region in the U.S.; with a record of participation in the most vulgar gathering of Jeremiah Wright posing as a reverend, spouting Fanonian rhetoric and bigotry; with mentors such as the unrepentant terrorist Bill Ayers; channelling the teachings of Saul Alinsky and Rashid Khalidi of the Chomsky school of self-loathing and sophistry — could advance through the ranks of American politics at an astounding speed, with little or no record of experience in government, to become the 44th president. …

There is not a very long arc connecting the joyful news of Soviet disintegration with the painfully distressing slide of American politics framed for posterity in the election of Obama. … [T]he presence of the Soviet Union placed upon liberal democracies, led by the U.S., a discipline and a check upon the excesses and follies of democracy. But once this discipline was removed it [led] to a bacchanalia in the West, the near instant raising of the slogan “end of history” even as the dust from the tearing down of the Berlin Wall had not settled, and this lack of discipline combined with the “flower children” of the sixties coming of age and grasping for power, [brought] about a situation that would do more damage than the old men of the Communist plutocracy could ever deliver without committing suicide …

[A]fter 1992 we have been in the state of enjoying our unrestrained appetite for endless orgy, the zeal that comes to declining bodies from the artificiality of induced eroticism by pills which give to narcissists of the “sixties” generation the pathetic sense of immortality. These are the folks the people have elected to run their lives, protect their cultural legacy, hold back the enemies of freedom, maintain balance of power in strategic and vulnerable regions of the world and … maintain the promise of the present and inheritance of the past as trustees for the unborn generations of the future.

Ten years after 9/11, we, the broad public of liberal democracies, still have not fully grasped the meaning of that horror-filled morning, or understood without any apologetics or polemics the evil nature and ideology of the men who planned and executed the deed. We remain more or less preoccupied with re-litigating the debate over the decision by the Bush administration to take the war declared upon the West into the heartland of the enemy and expunge them; and instead of faulting Bush for not going far enough at home and abroad in defeating the Islamist jihadi assault on the West, for reasons that have everything to do with the nature of our corrupted polity, we have contorted ourselves to find the right mix of appeasement. …

The fault, as Cassius reminds Brutus, is in ourselves, a decaying civilization that will be saved (if it will be) not by the snobs in Washington and New York, London and Paris, Rome and Berlin, but by our version of the unsophisticated children of truckers who are now waking up from the drug-induced stupor of their parents’ and grandparents’ generation. I have hope, the eternal hope of a fearful heart, that the West will survive and yet again gather speed, but how sad are the losses and tears that have piled up — with more to come. They could have been avoided if we, as a people, were not so irresponsible or unfaithful to our history as to place at the head of our societies leaders so unworthy and clueless as the one who so unfittingly occupies the seat of Washington and Lincoln, at the head of this great republic.

Salim Mansur is a professor of political science at the University of Western Ontario.

The poor and oppressed of the world are rising and moving in ever greater numbers.

If there is no hope of their getting opportunity for bettering their lives in their own countries – though they might demand it as now in Egypt – they go where they believe opportunity already exists: to the prosperous Western democracies.

At the same time, the borders of the prosperous Western democracies are becoming ever more porous.

Last year 36,000 migrants walked into the EU through its Western frontier, the Greek-Turkish border, ten times the number who had slipped through in the year before. That’s 90% of all the illegal immigrants entering Europe.

Mark Steyn writes about it. Not for the first time (see his book America Alone on the ominous demographic decline of the indigenous European populations) he draws attention to a trend that will bring about historic change.

The influx has shattered the rhythm of life in one of Greece’s most isolated regions. Farmers in the main, the locals speak of the fear they have felt at suddenly encountering thousands of bedraggled men, women and children from the likes of Afghanistan and Iraq, Algeria and Morocco, India, Palestine, Congo and Somalia.

“It’s been an unbelievable caravan of humanity. I must have seen at least 10,000 of them pass,” said Giorgos Liakides, who runs a little mini-market in Nea Vissa, the first village after the border. “You wake up and find them on your doorstep, and at night when you go to water the fields you find them hiding in the bushes. We understand their plight, we are human as well. But we’re afraid. None of us ever used to lock our doors before; now we worry all the time.”

Mostly economic migrants, those who do get in readily hand themselves over to Greek police, eager to elicit the documents that will allow them to stay for up to 30 days in the EU member state.

In theory, they are meant to be deported after that, but in practice many just blend into the back streets of Athens before attempting to sneak into another European country by train, boat or bus. …

Global population is supposed to peak at about nine billion in 2050, then level off and start to decline. If you’re one of those eco-fetishists who think of humanity as a species, then that nine billion is the number to watch, up from six billion at the turn of the century. But, if you don’t think of the world as one unified global parking lot, you’re less interested in the big number and more in its constituent parts: On the road to that nine billion, almost all the increase in global population will come from Islam and sub-Saharan Africa – ie, “the likes of Afghanistan and Iraq, Algeria and Morocco, [the Muslim minority of] India, Palestine, Congo and Somalia”.

Between 2010 and 2030, the worldwide Muslim community  is predicted to increase from somewhere between a fifth and a quarter of the global population to one third of humanity. … They’ll be “citizens” of countries which have done a cracking job of killing almost all human progress of the modern age. In the first decade of the 21st century, Niger, which is over 90 per cent Muslim, increased its population by almost half – from just over ten million to just over 15 million. In 2000, half a million of its children were estimated to be starving, but hey, that’s no reason not to add a few million more. Its population is predicted to hit just under 100 million by the end of this century – in a country that can’t feed a people one-tenth that size. Is it likely that an extra 90 million people will choose to stay within Niger?

Sub-Saharan Africa will double its population between now and 2030. They’re poor and getting poorer. Excepting South Africa, the Dark Continent’s per capita income averaged $355 in 2004, but is expected to fall by almost 20 per cent to $290 by 2030. … It would be asking an awful lot for untold millions of them to remain in the teeming, disease-ridden shanty megalopolises into which Africa’s population is consolidating – rather than to, say, head for the lusher fields of Giorgos Liakides’ village.

If any citizens of the EU fancy themselves safe from a colossal invasion by destitute hordes from the Third World, they are living in a fool’s paradise.

What’s to stop that vast “caravan of humanity” just walking in and taking it the way Robert Mugabe’s thugs took any Zimbabwean farm that tickled their fancy?

Nothing. Nothing at all.

The hands of Europeans raised in horror will not be seen as a stop signal by the desperate multitudes who have nothing to lose and everything to gain by pressing on to where democratic law and order, freedom, education, and the ideas and work of millions of  individuals have brought prosperity.

The dreadful irony of it is, their coming to share in that prosperity will almost certainly destroy it: not because there is not enough opportunity for millions more to make their contributions in freedom, but because freedom itself, the necessary condition for prosperity, is slipping away.

Freedom depends on law and order. You think you are secure in your own property because you have a title-deed?  What if that title-deed ceases to be recognized as proof of anything? A piece of paper is all it will be.

A ragged army of the wretched comes along your street and some turn and walk into your house and settle in it. What are you going to do?

In most Western European countries it’s already hard to find a police force that would come to your aid.

In America there is an administration in power that is happily defying the law right now.

It could be argued that the weakening of the United States by its present leadership has expedited the chaos spreading through the world.

That clamor we hear in Egypt, that sound of many feet marching towards Athens, are harbingers of what’s coming to all of us. We had better look to our defenses; arm ourselves; and as soon as we can in America, empower a new government which will re-enforce the strongest protector of civilization: the law.

Obama wants the Muslim Brotherhood to participate in the government of Egypt, the country where it was founded but in which it is officially banned.

Obama may or may not be a Muslim, but it’s plain enough that he holds Islam in high esteem. He has steadily extended its reach and influence inside the United States, strengthened Islamic regimes, and facilitated the spread of sharia. We see him as a man with a mission – to aid the advance of Islamic power.

Here, in selected quotations from two articles at FrontPage Magazine, are facts and informed opinion that support our contention.

By Ryan Mauro:

The [Obama] administration has extensive relations with groups and leaders tied to the Muslim Brotherhood. … [It has] opened its doors to Muslim Brotherhood legacy groups such as the Council on American-Islamic Relations, the Muslim Public Affairs Council, the Islamic Society of North America and other Islamic leaders who come from Muslim Brotherhood backgrounds …

Even before Obama came into office, he was choosing advisers with relationships to Brotherhood front groups. … In the first month of becoming President, Obama selected Ingrid Mattson, the president of the Islamic Society of North America (ISNA), to take part in the inaugural prayer services. The federal government has designated ISNA as an “unindicted co-conspirator” in the Holy Land Foundation trial, and the Brotherhood’s internal documents identify it as one of its fronts. …

President Obama chose Rashad Hussain to be his special envoy to the Organization of the Islamic Conference. He has long been a featured speaker at conferences by Brotherhood-tied groups in the U.S., …  has spoken for ISNA since being appointed, and has shared the stage with officials from the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), another Brotherhood-tied group that has been listed as an “unindicted co-conspirator” in the Holy Land Foundation trial.

One of the members of the President’s Advisory Council on Faith-Based and Neighborhood Partnerships is Dalia Mogahed. She has been described as the “most influential person” in crafting Obama’s speech in Cairo to the Muslim world. She is a close colleague of John Esposito, perhaps the Brotherhood’s most prestigious apologist in the U.S. He gave expert testimony on behalf of the Holy Land Foundation during its trial and is a vocal defender of CAIR, ISNA and the other organizations tied to the Brotherhood. …

In June 2009, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton invited Esam Omeish, who describes the Brotherhood as “moderate,” to take part in a conference call following President Obama’s speech to the Muslim world in Cairo. Omeish sits on the board of directors of the extremist Dar al-Hijrah mosque, which is closely connected to the Muslim Brotherhood and Hamas. …

Officials have met with the Muslim Public Affairs Council (MPAC) on at least two dozen occasions, including Attorney General Eric Holder, the assistant director in charge of the FBI, and Secretary of Homeland Security Janet Napolitano. From January 27 to 28, 2010, leaders from ISNA, the Muslim American Society and MPAC met with Napolitano and other officials to be briefed on the agency’s counter-radicalization and counter-terrorism efforts. …

The influence of Brotherhood groups in the government even extends to the FBI and military. An official from ISNA was asked to lecture U.S. troops at Fort Hood about Islam after the terrorist shooting took place. The FBI has also held meetings with top ISNA officials and is engaging the organization as part of its outreach to the Muslim community. Shockingly, the decision to use the ISNA came after the FBI decided to end its relationship with CAIR because of concerns over the organization’s ties to Hamas and designation as an “unindicted co-conspirator”—the same label applied to ISNA from the same trial.

A known member of the Muslim Brotherhood, Kifah Mustapha, was even given a six-week tour last year of FBI facilities including the National Counterterrorism Center and a training compound. Documents from the Holy Land trial show that he is a member of the Brotherhood’s secret “Palestine Committee” that set up organizations in the U.S. to support Hamas. …

By Nonie Darwish:

The Muslim Brotherhood has long been a major political force in the Muslim world. … [It] has been a major force in bringing down regimes and installing new governments, and whether we like it or not [it] will play a significant role in any administration, whether it is openly Islamic or nominally secular. …

Now the Brotherhood is operating in the U.S. under pretty names, and influencing our politicians from the lowest to the highest levels. …

Obama has empowered the Islamists not only in the Muslim world, but also inside in the U.S. Could anyone have imagined the U.S. president [would] support the building of a mosque on Ground Zero against the wishes of his own people and the families of the victims? Could anyone have imagined that Islamists are being hired in our homeland security apparatus and in the White House? Could anyone have imagined an American president bowing before the Arabian despot King whose countrymen were behind 9/11? …  Who could have imagined that the first US president elected after 9/11 would declare  … that America is … a Muslim nation?

How can these actions and policies of Obama’s be explained if not by his being devoted to Islam?

Islam is waging war on America, and America’s head of state is devoted to Islam?

Can it be true?

Why do journalists believe they are or ought to be exempt from the violence they report?

Last Saturday (February 5, 2011), the reporter Greg Palkot and cameraman Olaf Wiig appeared on Fox News , for which they work, describing how they were attacked by the revolutionary mob in Cairo as they were doing their job. They were obviously badly beaten. Their wounds looked painful. They claimed plausibly that they had feared for their lives.

They deserve sympathy, and they did not suggest that they should have special treatment as newsmen.

But the media in general have taken the wrong side of the conflict between Western civilization and Arab barbarism for at least the last 44 years since the 1967 Arab-Israeli war. If sometimes the nature of barbarism is brought home to newsmen in the field with a body-blow, they have no moral standing to justify complaint. There are exceptions, no doubt, and Polkot and Wiig may well be among them. But none should imagine that they have a right to some special immunity that all the world should respect. Barbarians, they should understand, are by nature and definition no respecters of persons.

If journalists from strong societies insert themselves into places where weaker order prevails, they should not expect to be safe. Non-combatant though they are, objective though they may claim to be, their presence has an effect on the events they describe. They’re part of what happens whether they like it or not. They dance with the throng.

If they want to be treated in a civilized fashion, they should promote civilized values. Being anti-American, as so many Western newsmen are, does not wrap them in a sort of moral armor. It approves and encourages belligerence, sometimes extremely savage, of which anyone can be the victim.