Brave, beautiful, magnificent, Ayaan Hirsi Ali answers a Muslim professor who talks through her hat.

On the anniversary of its establishment, Israel has been attacked on four fronts: Gaza, the Golan Heights, Lebanon, and Jerusalem.

To the Arabs, it is “Nakba (catastrophe) Day”, which they regularly mark with violence against Israeli targets. Yet Israel was strangely unprepared for the attacks, or at least for the intensity of them. Did the Israeli government not expect that Arab leaders and rulers, threatened with overthrow, might try to divert the anger of their maltreated masses on to Israel?

DebkaFile reports:

The coalition organizing the exceptionally violent events of the Palestinian Nakba (Catastrophe) Day Sunday, marking the founding of Israeli in 1948, first tested the water in the morning: An Israeli Arab drove his truck at high speed through a Tel Aviv thoroughfare, slamming into more than a dozen vehicles and running over pedestrians. He had killed one civilian and injured 17 over a 2-kilometer stretch of road before he was overpowered and apprehended.

When Israel’s police chiefs declined to designate the attack an act of terror and insisted it could have been a traffic accident, Damascus, Hizballah and Hamas felt they were safe in letting their master plan go forward: There was no risk of a tough Israeli response. And indeed, Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu later admitted that local commanders and police chiefs were directed to deal with all fronts “with maximum restraint while defending Israel’s borders and sovereignty.” …

Because of this directive, Israelis were shocked to discover at 13:30 that hundreds of Syrians, Palestinians and a Hizballah group had crossed the border and hoisted Syrian and Palestinian flags in the main square of the Israel Golan village of Majd al Shams. They had already been there for four hours and no one was stopping them crossing the border back and forth during that time. Throughout the day, only a small squad of soldiers had been left to guard this border because nothing untoward had been expected there.

It was only at 17:00 hours that tanks and reinforcements arrived.

The invaders had every reason to march around the village declaring they had recaptured the territory Syria had lost 44 years ago while attacking Israel.

By then, military spokesmen had got their act together. It was fortunate that we undermanned the Syrian border, they said, otherwise the incident would have ended with hundreds of dead. …

The Syrian interlopers were finally driven back across the border – not by Israeli troops – but by local Druze chiefs. Israel still does not know how many left and if any remained.

It is to be regretted that the IDF did not meet its fundamental duty to defend Israel’s Golan border by bringing up large reinforcements to surround Majdal Shams, seal the Syrian border and shoot trespassers. The Syrians should not have been released but held until Damascus forced the Hamas to free the Israeli soldier Gilead Shalit.

Former Shin Bet director Israel Hasson … commented later Sunday that Israel must make it crystal clear to Damascus, Hizballah and Hamas that they will not be allowed to toss their internal problems into the Israeli court or violate Israeli sovereignty. …

Israel will pay a heavy price for its flaccid response and misplaced “maximum restraint.” Syrian President Bashar Assad can be counted on not to miss the chance of sending over to the Golan the Syrian and Palestinian terrorist teams he has held in reserve for more than a year for the right opportunity. That opportunity is clearly now at hand.

The Majd al-Shams invasion followed by violence by masked Palestinians in Jerusalem and a terrorist attack in Tel Aviv. It was synchronized with mass incursions from Lebanon and the Gaza Strip. This round is not over. It will not be stopped by military restraint.

Are these comparatively small waves, partly caused by Arab unrest washing against Israel’s shores, and will they soon subside?

Or are they the first signs of a political tsunami?

Post Script: According to Ynet News, some of the Palestinians who crossed the Golan border from Syria into Majd al-Shams on the Israeli side, were seeking asylum.

An apparent appetite among Arab peoples, especially the young, for cell phones, iPods, lap-top computers, and all that Facebook and Google could do for them – including organizing a revolution – encouraged the hope in the West (we were tempted by it ourselves) that they wanted to enter the 21st century and leave the 7th century, which gave birth to Islam, behind them forever. This was the way the thinking went: If  they understand the political conditions that produce the technological marvels – democracy, freedom, secularism, tolerance, universal literacy and the emancipation of women – they will strive to make them the conditions of their own countries; form parties that stand for them as principles; vote those parties into power; and so transform their backward polities to match the American model. Perhaps in the very long term that might happen, but it is not happening now. The “revolutions” in the North African Muslim states are likely to bring puritan Islamic parties into power. There will be no democracy, no freedom, no secularism, no tolerance, women will remain subjugated and predominantly illliterate. The 7th century is where the revolutionaries feel comfortable. They are still keenly pursuing the old Islamic mission, “kill the infidel”, kill every Christian, every Jew, with even greater passion and ever swelling clamor.

What then of the marvelous electronic gadgets and their apps that come from America? What of Facebook and Google?

Well, they’re using Facebook to organize massive demonstrations at which they’re renewing their commitment to the old barbaric 7th century aims, first and foremost to kill the infidel, every Christian, every Jew.

Barry Rubin writes:

Repeatedly we were told about the alleged absence of anti-Israel rhetoric and signs in Tahrir square during the revolution. I don’t think it was true then. I certainly don’t think it is true now.

So check out the massive anti-Israel demonstrations in Cairo today. …

Supposedly the rally was to protest sectarian violence within Egypt but it turned into one favoring more sectarian violence next door. The main focus became supporting the Hamas-Fatah coalition agreement and calling for Israel’s extinction…

Remember all of those articles and statements about how the revolution was good for Israel if only those silly Israelis woke up and understand reality as understood in Berkeley and the Upper West Side of Manhattan?

Oh, and guess how the demonstration was largely organized. Ready? On Facebook! Hahaha. Those youthful hip twittering moderate young people!

Also notice how this is all happening before elections install a radical, nationalist, anti-Israel, anti-American president and a parliament dominated by revolutionary Islamist anti-American antisemites.

If the 21st century – aka the United States – would seriously engage 7th century Islam with all the intellectual, economic, and military strength it has, the menace could easily be defeated. But the US will not do it. Not now, anyway, because the present US government, shockingly led by Barack Obama, likes Islam and wants to it to triumph. The pretense is that Islam is a force for good. Muslims that are too obviously indefensible – such as Osama bin Laden – can be sacrificed to American public opinion since they’re “not truly representative of Islam”.

So when Obama is replaced by a leader who is pro-America, will the necessary action be taken?

The alarming reply must be “probably not”.

Post Script: On the theme of 7th century barbarians using 21st century technology, see this article titled Taliban Uses Social Media to Usher In a New Era of Jihad.

Our reader and commenter George draws our attention to an article titled “Why do Americans still dislike atheists?”

It is written by an ” an independent researcher in sociology and evolution”, Gregory Paul, and  “a professor of sociology at Pitzer College”, Phil Zuckerman, who wrote a book called  “Society Without God.”

The very idea of Sociology is Leftist. It considers human beings collectively. Sociologists can be assumed to be leftists – exceptions are very rare. So it is not surprising that Paul the researcher in Sociology, and Zuckerman the professor of Sociology, have written an article for the left-biased Washington Post, which demonstrates their collectivist mind-set.

Some of their information, however, is interesting.

Here are extracts:

Long after blacks and Jews have made great strides, and even as homosexuals gain respect, acceptance and new rights, there is still a group that lots of Americans just don’t like much: atheists. Those who don’t believe in God are widely considered to be immoral, wicked and angry.

No evidence for that “widely considered” is given. But the examples of discrimination against atheists that come next are worth knowing:

They can’t join the Boy Scouts.

You have to believe in the supernatural to be a Boy Scout?

Atheist soldiers are rated potentially deficient when they do not score as sufficiently “spiritual” in military psychological evaluations.

What does the word “spiritual” mean? A claim to believe in the supernatural?

Surveys find that most Americans refuse or are reluctant to marry or vote for nontheists; nonbelievers are one minority still commonly denied in practical terms the right to assume office despite the constitutional ban on religious tests.

The first part of that sentence is not provable or even plausible. The second part is important and points to a disgraceful state of affairs. It means that governing authorities are discriminating against people who hold a particular opinion with regard to religion, in defiance of the Constitution.

Rarely denounced by the mainstream, this stunning anti-atheist discrimination is egged on by Christian conservatives who stridently — and uncivilly — declare that the lack of godly faith is detrimental to society, rendering nonbelievers intrinsically suspect and second-class citizens.

Is this knee-jerk dislike of atheists warranted? Not even close.

Then comes a typical sociological passage with sweeping generalizations:

A growing body of social science research reveals that atheists, and non-religious people in general, are far from the unsavory beings many assume them to be. On basic questions of morality and human decency — issues such as governmental use of torture, the death penalty, punitive hitting of children, racism, sexism, homophobia, anti-Semitism, environmental degradation or human rights — the irreligious tend to be more ethical than their religious peers, particularly compared with those who describe themselves as very religious.

Notice the assumption that to be against the death penalty, bothered about “environmental degradation”, and uncritically accepting of the doctrine of “human rights’, is to be “more ethical”.

A series of “facts” come next, no sources given, reflecting more of the writers’ personal prejudices, but likely to be pleasing to at least some atheists:

Consider that at the societal level, murder rates are far lower in secularized nations such as Japan or Sweden than they are in the much more religious United States, which also has a much greater portion of its population in prison. Even within this country, those states with the highest levels of church attendance, such as Louisiana and Mississippi, have significantly higher murder rates than far less religious states such as Vermont and Oregon.

The statistics, not given, may be correct, but the authors make no attempt  to show a direct connection between religious views and crime rates.

What follows is, we think, true. Though again no evidence is shown, and we don’t look for “scores” on “measures”, we obviously consider superstition to be unintelligent.

As individuals, atheists tend to score high on measures of intelligence, especially verbal ability and scientific literacy. They tend to raise their children to solve problems rationally, to make up their own minds when it comes to existential questions … They value freedom of thought.

Yes. But those prejudices pop out again:

They are … less likely to be nationalistic or ethnocentric.

Leftists call patriots “nationalistic” as a pejorative. They have asserted that atheists are intelligent, yet cannot conceive of intelligent people being patriots.

Then they say that being atheist could be a symptom of mental illness, and not believing in the supernatural makes for unhappiness – though this connection is “complex” and some empirical evidence casts doubt on it.

While many studies show that secular Americans don’t fare as well as the religious when it comes to certain indicators of mental health or subjective well-being, new scholarship is showing that the relationships among atheism, theism, and mental health and well-being are complex. After all, Denmark, which is among the least religious countries in the history of the world, consistently rates as the happiest of nations. And studies of apostates — people who were religious but later rejected their religion — report feeling happier, better and liberated in their post-religious lives.

We like that, and would appreciate a link to those “studies” (even if they are written in pompous Sociologese).

The rest is a stew of diverse ingredients: suicide rates among atheists higher but not certainly so. And “on numerous respected measures of societal success — rates of poverty, teenage pregnancy, abortion, sexually transmitted diseases, obesity, drug use and crime, as well as economics — high levels of secularity are consistently correlated with positive outcomes in first-world nations. None of the secular advanced democracies suffers from the combined social ills seen here in Christian America.”

To translate what they’re saying: poverty, AIDS, etcetera in America are at least partly the result of religion. Some religions can cause poverty – notably Catholicism by forbidding birth control. But for the rest, causal connections need to be traced.

The next claim, if true, is good news:

Atheism is enjoying rapid growth. … Younger generations’ tolerance for the endless disputes of religion is waning fast. Surveys designed to overcome the understandable reluctance to admit atheism have found that as many as 60 million Americans — a fifth of the population — are not believers.

How bleak and sad life is for the religious, especially for Muslims, and most miserably for their women and children.

Osama bin Laden was a rich man. Phyllis Chesler tells how he kept his wives and children in want, hunger, discomfort, and deliberate joylessness.

While he still lived in Saudi Arabia, before he had to flee to Sudan and thereafter to Afghanistan, [Osama bin Laden] condemned his wives and children to lives of physical, medical, and psychological hardship. …

He insisted on an increasingly spartan existence as a matter of ideology …

Here is what Omar bin Laden has written about his life with his father Osama:

“There were absurd rules regarding our conduct. ..  We were told that we must not become excited at any situation. We should be serious about everything. We were not allowed to tell jokes. We were ordered not to express joy over anything. He did say that he would allow us to smile so long as we did not laugh. If we were to lose control of our emotions and bark a laugh, we must be careful not to expose our eyeteeth. I have been in situations where my father actually counted the exposed teeth, reprimanding his sons on the number their merriment had revealed.”

According to Omar, his father … “caned” him and his brothers “for the slightest infraction.” Osama… deprived his sons of their much needed asthma medication … He force marched them without water for hours and in the desert. In addition, he allowed his sons to be brutalized by sadistic teachers. He refused to give his sons “pocket money” for “school snacks.” He told them, Omar writes:

“‘No. You need to suffer. Hunger pangs will not hurt you.’ … Our father appeared to relish seeing us suffer, reminding us that it was good for us to know what it felt like to be hungry or thirsty, to do without while others had plenty. Why? He said that we would end up being the stronger. Those with plenty would grow up weak men, unable to defend themselves.” …

Omar and his brothers all learned that they would have to endure paternal cruelty and humiliation and that their tender and sympathetic mothers would not and could not intercede on their behalf. Osama bin Laden’s wives, especially Najwa, Omar’s mother, are portrayed as … submissive, uncomplaining, very religious, quite passive. Najwa gave up her desire to decorate her home, which was, essentially, her prison. … She never uttered a single complaint—not even when she was deprived of most conveniences and normal amenities. Omar writes:

“Although we lived in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, which is one of the hottest and most humid cities in a country that is known for its hot climate, my father would not allow my mother to turn on the air-conditioning that the contractor had built into the apartment building. Neither would he allow her to use the refrigerator that was standing in the kitchen. My father announced, ‘Islamic beliefs are corrupted by modernization.’”

Yet “he himself had fast cars, fast planes … weaponry too.”

Although he has every reason to hate his father, Omar bin Laden is complaining that the cruel old man did not receive justice.

What would be justice for a man who has killed thousands of people? He has only two eyes to give for thousands of eyes, only one mouthful of teeth for thousands of teeth. He cannot be made to choose between death by fire or leaping from a height, or to choke in smoke, or to crash to the ground in a plane, thousands of times over.

Besides, justice has no place in war. War happens when law and all civil norms have broken down. Osama bin Laden made war on the United States, so American warriors hunted him down and shot him dead. He deserved worse.

Christians teach their children lies and force them to lie (see our post immediately below, A loathsome Jesus). They make them afraid of everlasting “hell”. That’s bad enough. But what Islam does to its children is worse.

Frank Crimi writes about thousands of child suicide bombers being trained in Afghanistan:

Despite the Taliban’s denial that it uses children as human explosives, its spring offensive began with a suicide bombing by a 12-year-old boy. The attack is just one more sign that the militant group and its terrorist allies are increasing their efforts to recruit, train and utilize child suicide bombers. …

It was one of two such suicide attacks carried out by child bombers in eastern Afghanistan over the past several weeks, attacks that killed over 15 people. Soon after those assaults, Afghan authorities showed off five captured would-be suicide bombers –all under the age of 13 — trained by Taliban and al Qaeda terrorists in Pakistan.

As one Afghan intelligence official said, “They have been told that infidels are in Afghanistan … and they have been encouraged to go for Jihad.” In a disturbing twist, one of the captured bombers thought he would survive the attack when he was told by his instructors that “the (infidels) will be killed and you will live.” …

The Taliban denied using children as human explosives …[But that] contradicts its past claims to have trained anywhere from a few hundred to several thousand juveniles as suicide bombers. In fact, the Afghan government places the figure of trained child suicide terrorists closer to 5,000. …

Most suicide bombers are under the age of 18… The recruitment and training of these children is not only extensive and well organized, but growing.

To that end, suicide training factories have sprouted up all over the Afghan-Pakistan border, with most located in the Pakistani province of Waziristan. There, it’s been estimated that the Fedayeen-e-Islam have trained over 1,000 suicide bombers at three facilities. More disturbingly, many suicide training centers have been designated into junior and senior camps.

The Pakistani army found one such junior camp, equipped with computers, video equipment and literature, where children as young as age 10, according to one army officer, “knew about the planting of explosives, making and wearing and detonating suicide jackets.”

The increased demand for child bombers comes as the Taliban have focused its efforts on attacking an expanding list of civilian targets, sites which include schools, mosques, markets, government offices and other public places.

In Saudi Arabia, where women are stoned to death as punishment for being the victims of rape, girls as young as 5 are sold to “wealthy men” as sex slaves. Read about it here.

It’s common practice among Muslims to use children as shields in war – and then wail to the UN, the New York Times, the Guardian, and all their other reliable sympathizers when the children are hurt or killed, accusing American, or Israeli, or NATO  forces, of deliberately targeting them.

At the same time they themselves, without a trace of conscience, deliberately murder the children of “infidels” in the cruelest ways they can devise.

In Thailand, Muslims beheaded a 9 year old boy. (There is a “graphic” video of this atrocity, but it has been removed from the linked site, and we cannot find it anywhere else.)

In Nigeria Muslims have been throwing children on fires, and cutting them up.

This report is full of sentimental Christian nonsense about the dead being saved by Jesus and meeting again never to be parted, but we think it gives a true – and certainly a believable – account of what Muslims did to a 13 year old girl, the daughter of a Christian pastor:

Muslim extremists … attacked Kurum village, in the Bogoro local government area of Nigeria’s Bauchi state …  in a rampage that began Wednesday (May 4) at midnight. [James Musa] Rike, pastor of a Church of Christ in Nigeria (COCIN) congregation in Kurum, .. heard the cries of his 13-year-old daughter, Sum James Rike …“I rushed to my daughter, only to discover that she … was cut with a machete on her stomach, and her intestines were all around her,” he said.

Graphic enough without pictures.

Thanks to our commenter Frank for sending us the link to this video. (Not new, but a document worth preserving and displaying frequently.)

The adults in it should have been charged with child abuse.

In the second video, a little boy, obviously gifted with a mind of his own and intelligence undetectable anywhere else in the disgusting company around him, confesses that, try as he might – and he does try so hard it’s agony to watch him  – he cannot bring himself to believe in “God”. He is being mentally tortured.

Religion is the sickness of the world. It is a destructive force, profoundly evil.

If there was an excuse for dogmatic superstition in ages past – say, as an explanation by which people tried to understand and influence the forces of nature – there is none now. Irrational belief can only be harmful.

History is hugely about the clash of religions. And in our time millions of people are experiencing an eruption of religious strife as widespread and catastrophic as any that has ever occurred, possibly the worst ever considering the numbers involved. Right now religion is the major cause of wars, massacres, and vast movements of desperate refugees.

Islam, the most belligerent of the world’s religions, is waging war fiercely on the rest of the world. Its methods are savage and cowardly. Wherever the faithful of other religions are weakest and most at their mercy, Muslims are torturing, burning, dismembering, raping, and slaughtering them.

Most of their victims (other than fellow Muslims of a different sect) are Christians. In Arab lands, Christians are being forced to flee or die.

In particular the Coptic Christians of Egypt are victims of the Muslim revolutionaries who rose demanding “freedom” for themselves, but are unwilling to grant it to the Copts.

Barry Rubin writes at PajamasMedia:

Christians in most of the Arabic-speaking world may be on the edge of flight or extinction. All of the Christians have left the Hamas-ruled Gaza Strip which is, in effect, an Islamist republic. They are leaving the West Bank. Half have departed from an increasingly Islamist-oriented Iraq where they are under terrorist attack. …

In Lebanon while the Christians are holding their own there is a steady emigration. …

Egypt has more Christians than Israel’s entire population. There have been numerous attacks, with the latest in Cairo leaving 12 dead, 220 wounded, and two churches burned. …

We of this website do not mourn for the buildings, only the people. To us, every church, every mosque, every temple is a monument to intolerance, oppression, persecution, and massacre.

The Christians cannot depend on any support from Western churches or governments. Will there be a massive flight of tens or even hundreds of thousands of Christians from Egypt in the next few years? …

Very likely – but where will they go? What country will grant them asylum?

Up until now, the strength of the Muslim Brotherhood has been badly underestimated in the West. But increasingly it is also apparent that the strength of anti-Islamist forces has been overestimated.

Like most Western commentators, Professor Rubin nervously makes a distinction between Muslims and “Islamists” – by which he can only mean more actively jihadist Muslims, such as the Muslim Brotherhood.

I have noted that even Amr Moussa, likely to be Egypt’s next president and a radical nationalist, has predicted an Islamist majority in parliament. That should be a huge story yet has been largely ignored.

He is not creating his own party, meaning that a President Moussa will be dependent on the Muslim Brotherhood in parliament. Rather than the radical nationalists battling the Islamists these two forces might well work together.

And who will they be working against? …

Christians certainly. Christians everywhere in the Muslim world. But not only Christians. No non-Muslim is exempt from Muslim animosity.

So what does the Western world, where the children of the Enlightenment have a civilization ordered by reason, try to do about it? How do Western leaders diagnose the problem? If they will not consider that religion itself might be the cause, what do they prescribe for a cure?

First they hold a discussion.

That could be a good start, if opinion would eventually agree on the real cause of the disease.

We confidently predict that will not happen.

At Front Page, Faith J.H.McDonnell writes:

On April 29, 2011, the State Department’s Office of International Religious Freedom (IRF) co-sponsored a 2011 Hours Against Hate event. Hosted by George Washington University, the event was billed as a “Town Hall Discussion on U.S. efforts to combat discrimination and hatred against Jews, Muslims, and others.” Hopefully, the 100 million-plus Christians experiencing persecution around the world today, along with Hindus, Sikhs, Baha’i, etc., are included in “and others.” The IRF office should be reminded that advocates for persecuted Christians played a major role in its creation, along with the creation of the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom (USCIRF). Both were mandates of the 1998 International Religious Freedom Act (IRFA).

Though outspoken in their denouncement of hurtful language, the folks at Foggy Bottom have been silent about the massacre of hundreds of Christians in Kaduna State, and several other states in northern Nigeria that took place after Nigeria’s federal elections last month. Angry that Christian President Goodluck Jonathan defeated Muslim candidate Muhammadu Buhari, Islamists in the Shariah-ruled north began rioting on Monday, April 18, 2011, after preliminary results of the April 16 election were announced. Soon newspapers featured grisly photos of charred bodies lining the streets.* Hundreds of churches were burned and thousands of Christian-owned businesses destroyed, according to the Christian human rights group, Open Doors. And International Christian Concern reported that the Kaduna-based Civil Rights Congress was still “discovering more details of massacres that have been carried out in the hinterland.” Upwards of 40,000 Christians have been displaced in the past few weeks.

In its comments about the situation in Nigeria, the U.S. State Department disregarded the religious aspect of the post-election mayhem. Secretary of State Clinton’s April 19 statement on the elections (available in Arabic as well as English) “deplored violence,” but ignored the targeting of Christians. …

Although some, including U.S. State Department officials, would paint the post-election violence as purely political, the head of the advocacy group Justice for Jos, attorney Emmanuel Ogebe, refutes this claim. … [He]  says that for the Islamists in northern Nigeria, “anything is used as an excuse to kill Christians — beauty pageants, lunar eclipses, school exams, political elections….” These are the sundry reasons in the last dozen years alone that have sparked violent, deadly attacks against Christians. …

Strikes on Christians took place simultaneously in rural districts of a dozen Nigerian states … Some initial attacks took place in the middle of the night, when the Christians were least able to defend themselves. And anti-Christian sentiment was inflamed in many of northern Nigeria’s mosques … Victims were made to quote the Quran, not identify for whom they had voted. …

Pastor Emmanuel Nuhu Kure … demanded, “How would you explain a spontaneous call to prayer on most of the loudspeakers of the mosques across the city at the same time, at 9 p.m. or thereabout in the night, with a shout of ‘Allah Akbar’ as Muslims began to troop towards the mosques and designated areas, to be followed at 10 p.m. with another call on loudspeakers – this time with a spontaneous shout of “Allah Akbar” from the mosques and most of the streets occupied by Muslims and the burst of gunfire sound that shook the whole city?” Kure said that these actions were repeated a few times, and then “the killings and burnings began.” And … Bishop Jonas Katung, national vice president of the North Central Zone of the Pentecostal Fellowship of Nigeria, stated that the post-election attacks “were ‘a descent into barbarism’ in which northern Christians were targeted and subjected to horrendous and relentless acts.”

After performing the obligatory “deploring” of “the violence” in an April 28 press briefing, Assistant Secretary of State for Africa Johnnie Carson assured the media that “the president and the main opposition candidates both called on their supporters to not support violent activities and to work to restore peace as quickly as possible.” Yet the media has reported in the past that Buhari told his supporters “never again allow an infidel to rule over you” …

The US State Department, and the governments of the Western world generally, are propitiating Islam. That’s like treating the plague with soothing syrops. Islam is a symptom. The sickness is religion itself.

*For a picture of the lined up bodies of Christians burnt to death in Nigeria, see our post Acts of religion, November 6, 2010.

Here is Ayn Rand speaking in 1979 on the Arab-Israel conflict.

What did the Pakistani government, military, and intelligence service know in advance about the American plan to get Osama bin Laden?

In a speculative article, N.M.Guariglia at PajamasMedia raises many pertinent questions, and makes an impressively plausible case that they all knew such a raid was to happen. He suggests why one or two of the three powerful parties, on certain conditions, agreed to let it be carried out without interference.

Did Pakistan know about the raid that killed Osama bin Laden? …

While American politicians wonder whether the Pakistanis were aware of OBL’s hideout — of course they were — al-Qaeda is currently wondering whether the Pakistanis were aware that SEAL Team 6 was on its way to kill their leader. If destroying the rest of al-Qaeda’s hierarchy is the goal, perhaps that is the more immediate question. Perhaps some in Pakistan knew of the hideout, some knew of the operation, and some knew of both. …

What happened from the time we located OBL’s courier and the Abbottabad compound in August 2010 to the night of the raid? Did we not once share this intelligence with someone in Pakistan during these nine months? During the 2008 presidential campaign, Obama stated he would intervene in Pakistan to catch OBL if the Pakistanis did not act. Such a policy required waiting to see whether or not the Pakistanis would act.

We knew Abbottabad was a military town. Pakistan’s prestigious military academy is located just yards away from OBL’s compound. In fact, U.S. forces were stationed there in October 2008 (and possibly another time or two). This remarkable WikiLeaks revelation has been lost on most of the American media. One can only imagine OBL smirking from his balcony, sipping tea while observing joint U.S.-Pakistani military training. He was right under our nose — or, more precisely, we were right under his.

Why would we unnecessarily jeopardize the mission and risk a firefight with the Pakistanis without knowing for certain that we might not have to? What if the Pakistanis thought they were under attack from India? That could have sparked a nuclear exchange between the two rivals. …

Some other questions linger. Does this year’s arrest of Bali bomber Umar Patek, also caught in Abbottabad, have anything to do with anything? What about Pakistan’s arrest and eventual release of CIA agent Raymond Davis in March? For months prior to the raid, CIA operatives had a safe house in Abbottabad to spy on OBL. Who knew of this? And why are we revealing the nature of the intelligence we collected at the compound? As for the raid, what was the nature of the firefight? We were first told it was a 40-minute battle and OBL was the last to be killed. Now we are told the only resistance came from the courier living in the guest house, not OBL’s villa. We were first told OBL had a gun in hand. Now we are told he was “reaching” for a weapon. How does it take that long to reach for a weapon? What happened during the 20-25 minute blackout on the operation’s video stream? Why didn’t we take OBL’s wife with us? Why do at least two of the other three men killed during the raid seem to have been shot in the back of the head?

This suggests an execution. The two men that were shot in the back of the head were OBL’s son and another chap, and the guy shot regular-style was the courier in the guest house who engaged the SEALs with gunfire. Was it that we captured these two men but didn’t have enough room to take them with us due to the downed stealth chopper — so we killed them? Does this mean OBL was executed, as well — as his wife claims? … Wouldn’t we prefer to take OBL alive, if we could? That is, of course, unless an arrangement had been made prior to the operation whereby OBL’s death was mandatory.

In many ways, Pakistan is three countries in one. There is the civilian government, the military, and the mysterious intelligence service, the ISI. Each party is suspicious of the other, has divided loyalties within, and collaborates with one against the other … By all accounts, the two most powerful men in the country are Gen. Ashfaq Kayani, head of the Pakistani Army, and Lt. Gen. Ahmed Pasha, head of the ISI. President Zardari is subordinate to the men with the guns.

It stands to reason that at least one of these men, probably two, knew of OBL’s hideout. And at least one, probably two, knew of the U.S. operation to kill OBL. …

Lt. Gen. Pasha met with CIA Director Panetta on April 11 and Gen. David Petraeus, who is set to take over the CIA, met with Gen. Kayani on April 25.

One piece of information, if true, makes it obvious that the military expected the raid to take place:

Abbottabad residents are saying the Pakistani military secured and cordoned off the site on the night of the raid, visiting the homes of civilians and asking them to turn their lights off. …

And, almost certainly, it would have been “impossible for U.S. helicopters to fly to the compound without the knowledge of the Pakistani military”.

So, assuming the military facilitated the raid – why?

Yes, Pakistan was protecting OBL – as they have been, in some capacity, since the 1990s. But when we discovered OBL’s location — thank you Guantanamo, rendition, black sites, waterboarding, and wiretapping – we probably, and wisely, confronted the Pakistanis about it in secret …

We caught the Pakistanis red-handed. And that’s when a deal was made. They said: “Okay, you got us. We will give you an hour of peace and quiet to get your man. But he must be killed.” … The Pakistanis did not want an interrogation or trial of OBL to expose their goings-on with the rest of al-Qaeda, Lashkar-e-Taiba, the Taliban, the Haqqani network, and so forth. Also, this way the Saudis, the Syrians, the Iranians, and the financier network from the Gulf sheikhdoms would all be protected.

What’s in it for Pakistan? They would rather have the American people angry at them for ostensibly sheltering OBL than their own people angry at them for handing him over. We probably accept that logic. We want their nuclear weapons in secure enough hands. Had the Pakistanis openly captured OBL and handed him over to us, or had they openly participated in the raid, the rest of their jihadist clientele would have turned on them — which would have required Pakistan turning on all of them first. And Pakistan would not want that. Why not? India, India, India.

So Panetta goes on television to say if we tipped off Pakistan about the raid, they’d have tipped off OBL to escape. And walah, Pakistan’s street-cred with the jihadists is covered.

What’s in it for us? Well, we kill Osama and dump him in the ocean. That’s pretty damn good. President Obama gets his “gutsy call,” a Hollywood-style takedown of Public Enemy Number 1. He also avoids an expensive, multi-year political circus about how to interrogate, try, and execute the terrorist mastermind. Additionally, we don’t put our fist in the Pakistani hornet’s nest. …

Intriguing questions follow:

If this theory has a grain of truth to it, the remaining questions are obvious. What else did the U.S. and Pakistan agree upon? Foreign aid, “bribe billions,” was no doubt part of it. Was the release of Raymond Davis part of an agreement? Was the nature of a post-U.S. withdrawal Afghanistan part of the discussion? Was the rest of al-Qaeda’s leadership part of the deal, or was the Egyptian-wing of al-Qaeda compliant with the elimination of OBL as the foreign press is speculating? Is this the beginning of a consensus within Pakistan or the beginning of a power struggle? …

Did we kill OBL when we could have captured him? Did we want to capture him but killed him amidst the chaos of the raid? Would we truly execute a man merely to uphold our end of a bargain that brought him to us? I doubt it. And in the event of such a bargain, why wouldn’t we first agree to the terms of condition, but then instead capture OBL if we could, so as to learn everything about his support structure within Pakistan — all the while having the Pakistanis think he was dead? If we’re fooling al-Qaeda with Pakistan, why not also fool Pakistan to learn about al-Qaeda? Perhaps that is why we left OBL’s wife there — so that the Pakistanis could confirm, through her testimony, that her husband was in fact killed?

If so, that’s not a good enough reason to leave her behind – especially as she is saying that her husband was “executed”. (Rightly if he was, but Obama would fear being accused of it.) She would surely have been more useful as a source of information.

It may be that bad bargains were struck.

One thing seems certain: the military knew for years where bin Laden was living and chose not to tell the American government.

How many more “bribe millions”  – in fact, bribe billions – will go to a country that has been paid too much for too long in return for too little?