Today the estimable Lt. Col. Ralph Peters, commenting on the just assassination in Yemen of the American-born al-Qaeda leader Anwar al-Awlaki, said on Fox News that “we are winning” the “War on Terror”.

Great news, if it were true. But the US, the West, the non-Islamic world are not winning.

For one thing, it is not, and never was, a “war on terror”. It is a war of defense against Islam. And Islam is winning. Terrorism is winning. The West is allowing it to win.

Islam’s terrorist tactic is proving hugely powerful and has gained victories that would have been unimaginable a few years ago. It has cowed all the governments of western Europe, and innumerable authorities at all levels in the US. Islam is advancing day by day. Its terrorism is not practiced continually in all target countries, but the threat of it, and the memories of what has been done and could be done again at any moment, are always there. Because authorities are afraid, Islam creeps on.

Day by day, in Western countries into which Muslims migrate in ever-growing numbers, Islam gains its concessions, its privileges: here a mosque; there a partition of a public swimming pool for Muslim women; here a prayer room in a government building; there the removal from a public library of famous children’s books with pictures of pigs in them; here (in Britain for instance) the allowing of sharia courts and the upholding of their rulings by the state; there entitlements tamely paid to multiple Muslim wives by a welfare state with laws against polygamy; and here and here and here the establishment of faculties of Islamic studies, or even whole colleges, with immense grants of money from the Wahhabis of Saudi Arabia. Chunks of history, such as the Holocaust, are omitted from school courses because they might offend Muslim students – let truth be damned. Defense contracting companies in the US fall under the ownership of Muslims, who divert a part of the profits – and what defense secrets? – to the Muslim Brotherhood. In places of hot battle, Iraq is plagued with terrorist attacks day after day; and in Afghanistan the Taliban is undefeated and undefeatable, and ready to re-assume its despotic rule when the coalition soldiers have departed. In Libya an al-Qaeda leader has seized a position of power. And all the while, the mullahs of Iran are preparing to attack the West with nuclear weapons.

True, there have not been any more planes flown into buildings in America, but smaller plots of destruction and mass murder are constantly being laid. True, some of them are foiled, but some are attempted (such as an underwear bomb in a plane over Detroit) and some carried out (such as the massacre at Fort Hood), and the motive behind all of them remains: jihad, the holy war of Islam, perpetually waged one way and another for the conquest of the world by successive generations of Muslims, and coming closer to success now than ever before in history.

If the West does not capitulate totally and abjectly – which it might – the fiercest battles are still to come.

Jillian Becker   September 30, 2011

A report in the Pakistani newspaper The Express Tribune describes how a child in Pakistan was beaten and expelled from school for making a spelling error in writing about a poem that praises Muhammad:

Faryal Bhatti, a student at the Sir Syed Girls High School in Pakistan Ordnance Factories (POF) colony Havelian, erroneously misspelt a word in an Urdu exam while answering a question on a poem written in praise of the Holy Prophet .. The word in question was ‘laanat’ instead of ‘naat’ – an easy error for a child to make, as the written versions of the words are similar.

According to the school administration and religious leaders who took great exception to the hapless student’s mistake, the error is ‘serious’ enough to fall within the realm of blasphemy.

Faryal’s Urdu teacher was collecting the answer sheets from her students when she noticed the apparently offensive word on her pupil’s sheet. The teacher, Fareeda Bibi, reportedly summoned the Christian girl, scolded her and beat her. Her punishment, however, did not end here. When Faryal’s class fellows learnt of the alleged blasphemy, the teacher brought the principal’s notice to the matter, who further informed the school management.

In the meanwhile, the news spread throughout the colony. The next day, male students of the POF colony school as well as certain religious elements took out a rally, demanding the registration of a criminal case against the eighth-grader and her expulsion from the area.

Prayer leaders within the community also condemned the incident in their Friday sermons, asking the colony’s administration to not only take action against Faryal but her entire family. In the wake of the increasing tensions, Managing Director POF Colony Havelian Asif Siddiki called a meeting of colony-based ulemas and school teachers to discuss the situation. The girl and her mother were asked to appear before the meeting, where they explained that it was a mere error, caused by a resemblance between the two words. The two immediately apologised, adding that Faryal had no malicious intentions.

In a move that was apparently meant to pacify the religious elements clamouring for action against the teenage ‘blasphemer’, the POF administration expelled her from the school … Faryal was not the only one who got in trouble for her spelling error, however, as her mother, Sarafeen Bhatti, who was a staff nurse at the POF Hospital Havelian for several years, was immediately transferred to POF Wah Cantonment Hospital.

The reporter asked the opinion of some grand panjandrum who said that although he was unclear about the intentions of the girl, the word she had used was sacrilegious.

It would be true to form if they put the word on trial, and condemned it to some dire punishment, such as total extinction from the language.

All religions are absurd; some are more cruel than others. Since Christianity stopped burning people at the stake, has Islam any rival as the cruellest?

The Times Comprehensive Atlas of the World simply erased hundreds of huge glaciers from their maps, substituting the white of the ice with the green of a mythical unfrozen shoreline.

The once highly respected Times Atlas got it wrong! How did it happen?

Was it  a result of extremely bad research on the part of a whole team of geographers and cartographers?

Or deliberate fraud? And if so why, when the professional reputation of each one of them was at stake?

It seems they dumbly chose to believe the propaganda put out by the unscientific, thoroughly discredited, “report” (actually fiction) of  the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) rather than find out the truth for themselves. If so, they thoroughly deserve to lose their reputations as scientists.

We quote from an article by Jonathan S. Tobin in Commentary-contentions:

A number of researchers are complaining the most recent edition of Britain’s Times Comprehensive Atlas of the World contains misleading information about alleged melting of Greenland’s ice-capped shores. A news release issued by the publishers and echoed in much of the media asserted that the atlas illustrates how Greenland has lost 15 percent of its permanent ice cover. Maps in the atlas show significant portions of the large island’s shores are ice-free. The only problem is, as scientists — who are not warming skeptics– point out, it isn’t true.

The error stems from a 2007 report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change that has since been discredited. As the Times reports, for the claim of a 15 percent ice loss to be true that would have already raised sea levels around the world by three to five feet.

In fact, Greenland has only lost one-tenth of one percent of its ice. …

The publishers of the atlas initially claimed they stood by their data but are now said to be studying the problem and thinking about a revision. But their effort to correct this error seems, as the article pointed out, to be as slow as the actual rate of melting in Greenland.

The problem here is not just that a publisher made an error. There is a strong suspicion every time something like this happens it is the result of a deliberate effort to exaggerate the extent of warming so as to scare the public into backing measures that global warming activists support. That was the lesson of the Climategate e-mails. That story revealed the cynical efforts by some in the scientific community to fudge data in order to come up with results that might exploit the public’s fears about warming. Many researchers now understand the tendency by some to hype this issue with implausible and unsubstantiated claims of imminent catastrophe, such as those put forward in Al Gore’s lamentable film “An Inconvenient Truth,” do more to damage the credibility of climate science than anything else.

The scandals indicate that thousands of scientists are more emotionally and intellectually invested in left-wing activism than they are in science.

And that is a chilling thought.

There is nobody in this country who got rich on his own — nobody. You built a factory out there? Good for you. But I want to be clear. You moved your goods to market on the roads the rest of us paid for. You hired workers the rest of us paid to educate. You were safe in your factory because of police-forces and fire-forces that the rest of us paid for. You didn’t have to worry that marauding bands would come and seize everything at your factory — and hire someone to protect against this — because of the work the rest of us did.

So quoth Elizabeth Warren, attorney, Harvard professor of law, US Senate candidate, communist, and erstwhile Methodist Sunday School teacher, recently appointed Assistant to the President and Special Advisor to the Secretary of the Treasury on the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau.

Ari Armstrong at PajamaMedia argues cogently against her assertions:

To hear Massachusetts Senate candidate Elizabeth Warren tell it, successful business owners get rich off the efforts of taxpayers and contribute nothing in return until they pay a hefty tax bill themselves. Warren gets the story exactly backwards.

Productive business leaders create the wealth that enables us to thrive, seek employment, and on the side pay for governmental services. Such producers typically work long hours, often for years with little pay, risking their own time and money to bring their vision to life. They turn metals, gases, plants, and other natural resources into valuable commodities, and they direct others’ labor to more prosperous ends, expanding our quality of life.

Some say business leaders should “give something back.” But those operating on a free market never took anything from anybody, except in voluntary and mutually beneficial trade. Instead, they produce the goods and services — the computers and cell phones, the health care, the books and movies, the automobiles, the plumbing pipes — than enrich and extend our lives. …

Great producers deserve our gratitude and respect, not the ugly, envious sneers so often directed at them by today’s political left. Above all these business leaders deserve a government that protects their rights, including their right to produce wealth and use the resulting profits as they judge best.

Warren invokes the “social contract,” but if that means anything sensible it is to protect individuals from the violence, fraud, and plunder of others. In seeking to peacefully pursue our own lives and interact with others on a voluntary basis, we agree to respect the equal rights of others. We institute government to protect those rights for everyone.

Warren argues that business owners use the roads and education system, the “police forces and fire forces that the rest of us paid for.” Warren ignores the fact that the most productive already pay the lion’s share of the tax burden. … The 10 percent of households with the highest incomes pay more than half of all federal taxes. They pay more than 70 percent of federal income taxes … The wealthy also pay more in state and local income, sales, and property taxes (where applicable). In other words, the wealthy pay for most of the governmental services that others use.

Business leaders succeed by intelligently working hard to provide the things their customers want. They succeed despite the onerous taxes and controls of government, not because of them.

Notably, the core governmental services that protect people from harm — the military, police, and the courts — constitute a sliver of the budget of federal and state governments. Most political spending goes toward entitlements at the federal level and welfare or union-dominated education at the state level.

Moreover, businesses directly pay for many of the services that Warren mentions. Businesses pay for their road use through gasoline taxes. Any given business faces a miniscule risk of a large fire breaking out, because businesses provide their own sprinkler systems, alarms, and other fire-prevention infrastructure. Private firms hire more security guards than the total number of police officers in the country. Regarding education, not only do many business leaders finance schools and scholarships, but businesses spend large sums training and educating their employees. …

Warren presumes that politicians and bureaucrats in Washington can spend the wealth created by business leaders better than they can manage themselves. … Warren contends “there is nobody in this country who got rich on his own.” In a sense she’s right: people get rich by providing enormously valuable goods and services to others who willingly pay for them. Warren and other politicians should not be able to dictate what “hunk” of the earnings of others they forcibly seize. Any social contract consistent with justice recognizes that legitimate government does not loot “the rich” (or anyone else) but instead protects people’s rights, including their rights to their earnings.

In Pictures of the Socialistic Future, a prophetic novel written by Eugene Richter in 1893* about a state turning socialist and so ruining the people, there is this passage (Chapter XXX):

Socialism … never contemplated giving to each labourer in his special field the full reward of his work in that particular sphere of labour. It promised the nation as a whole the full reward of the labours effected by the whole people. Whatever these mechanics might turn out of their shops and mills, it was quite clear that the things turned out were not the result purely and simply of hand labour. Expensive machines and tools were equally necessary to their production. In a no less degree were large buildings and considerable means indispensable. All these accessories had not been produced by the workmen actually engaged at the time being. Seeing then that the Community finds all these buildings, plans, and means, it was assuredly only just that the Community should appropriate whatever remained after paying a certain wage calculated at one uniform rate for all persons in the country.

In the story, the hungry, angry mechanics refuse to swallow this absurd argument, and they rise in rebellion against the socialist state that has brought the country to poverty and despair.

The novel was written more than twenty years before any country in Europe tried the experiment of socialism/communism. If  the Russian, German, and Hungarian revolutionary leaders, the communist ideologues who brought disaster on their nations with their long-lived or short-lived revolutions after the First World War, had read it, might they have hesitated to do what they did?

It is interesting to play the game of “what if?” with history, because in human affairs nothing – to contradict Karl Marx – is inevitable.

* To be found at the website of our reader and commenter Don L, to whom thanks for bringing the book to our attention.

Cup cakes priced differently for different races (and genders) at Berkeley College, California, to make the point that “affirmative action” is racist and discriminatory.

Photographed by Zombie:

Affirmative action bakesale at Berkeley College, California

Find more pictures and find out how the Left reacted here.

Decisions, decisions!

Even felons have to make them.

This is from Fox News:

Authorities say non-violent offenders in Bay Minette, Alabama, now have a new choice: Go to jail, or go to church every Sunday for a year. …

The city judge will let misdemeanor offenders choose to work off their sentences in jail and pay a fine; or go to church every Sunday for a year.

If offenders select church, they will be allowed to pick the place of worship but must check in weekly with the pastor and the police department.

If the one-year church attendance program is completed successfully, the offender’s case will be dismissed. … So far, 56 churches are participating.

If church is not the lesser of the two punishments, at least it takes less time.

(Thanks to George for the link.)

Occasionally we quote a daily report from The Religion of Peace of deadly attacks made in the name of Islam.

The total number since 9/11, recorded by The Religion of Peace and reflected in our margin, is at the time of this writing 17,792.

Here is to-day’s list of atrocities.

It should be remembered that the Koran commands Muslims to kill non-Muslims, but not other Muslims.

A Holy Warrior enters a Sunday church service in Indonesia wearing a vest packed with explosives and shrapnel that includes nuts and bolts. According to his cleric’s teachings, which are rooted in the Quran, this young martyr is rewarded with an eternity of gluttony and sex while he taunts his Christian victims as they are being tortured by Allah himself.

Islam’s Latest Contributions to Peace “Mohammed is God’s apostle.  Those who follow him are ruthless to the unbelievers but merciful to one another”  Quran 48:29 2011.09.27 (Lashkar Gah, Afghanistan) – A man and boy are torn apart by a Shahid suicide bomber. 2011.09.27 (Shindand, Afghanistan) – Eleven children are among a family of sixteen shredded by Mujahideen bombers. 2011.09.27 (Sumisip, Philippines) – Abu Sayyaf members assault a village, killing six, including several residents. 2011.09.26 (Diwaniya, Iraq) – An imam nearly loses his life to Religion of Peace rivals, who do manage to kill his companion. 2011.09.26 (Kabul, Afghanistan) – An American security analyst is gunned down by a Fedayeen working as a trusted employee. 2011.09.25 (Karbala, Iraq) – al-Qaeda devotees target Shiites with four bomb blasts that leave nearly twenty dead.

Joshua Fattal and Shane Bauer, the Americans held in an Iranian prison for two years for entering the country illegally, were ransomed and released five days ago (September 21). The ransom will ensure that more Americans will be grabbed and held whenever possible, of course.

But that is not the only reason why they should not have been ransomed.

They each made  a speech when they landed in Oman. Fattal said that he and his companions (including Sarah Shourd who was released a year ago for a lower ransom) were innocent of any intention to enter Iran illegally, and Bauer said that they were sympathetic to Iran’s cause [“The irony is Sarah, Josh and I oppose U.S. policies towards Iran which perpetuate this hostility”], as if this were additional reason why they should not have been arrested and imprisoned. What they did not say was whether their sympathies still lie with Iran rather than their own country. Iran is unjust, it subjugates women, it stones apostates to death, it threatens the annihilation of Israel, it hangs homosexuals, it  is building a nuclear arsenal that endangers the world, but these three citizens of the free and tolerant United States were sympathetic to Iran.

They should have been left to whatever fate Iranian justice would have condemned them to. Then they might have served the useful purpose of providing an object lesson to their like-thinkers back home.

Debra J. Saunders reveals more about them. She writes at Townhall:

Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad engineered the release last week of two American hikers serving eight-year prison terms on trumped-up espionage charges. He may have thought the release would make him seem more humane, but the $1 million bail-for-freedom deal makes Tehran look like Somali pirates, grabbing innocent tourists, holding them hostage and then releasing them for ransom.

So why did released hiker Shane Bauer say the following upon his release? “Two years in prison is too long, and we sincerely hope for the freedom of other political prisoners and other unjustly imprisoned people in America (emphasis added) and Iran.”

The moral-equivalent rhetoric may have worked when Bauer was a peace and conflict studies major at the University of California, Berkeley, but one country ginned up phony espionage charges to use him and his companions as political pawns — that’s Iran — and the other country doesn’t imprison critics because of what they say or use violence to quell dissent.

The nightmare began in July 2009 when Bauer, friend Josh Fattal and Bauer’s girlfriend, Sarah Shourd, were hiking in Iraqi Kurdistan.

Hiking in Iraq in 2009? And near the Iranian border? How much tourism has there been in Iraq while war has been raging there?  How did they get there, and why?

Many Americans have wondered how they could be so foolhardy that they mistakenly crossed into Iran. Shourd, a self-described “teacher-activist-writer,” says that there were no signs indicating the Iraq-Iran border near a popular waterfall and that the hikers crossed into Iran after an armed soldier summoned them to walk toward him. …

At the time of their arrest, Bauer and Shourd were living in Damascus, in the bosom of Bashar Assad’s Syria. They have shared a professed love of Middle Eastern culture.

That is to say, Arab culture – the morally lowest in the world.

They also shared some blind spots. Shourd, for example, wrote that in Yemen, interaction between the sexes is minimal, absent marriage, and 99 percent of women never leave the house unveiled. But: “The separation of sexes is widely understood as an attempt to protect women, and I have to admit, the streets do feel safe. Men leave you alone as long as you are covered; in a bizarre way it is less of a hassle being a woman here than anywhere I’ve ever been.”

Newsweek lists Yemen as one of nine countries that are “the worst places to be a woman,” because domestic violence is not illegal and there is no legal recognition of spousal rape.

A year before Shourd wrote about how safe she felt in Yemen, 10-year-old Nujood Ali went to a Sanaa courtroom to ask a judge to release her from an arranged marriage to an older man who beat her. Other girl brides came forward with their horror stories. A Sanaa University study found that more than half of Yemeni girls are married before they turn 18.

Shourd never quite comes out and says that she thinks that as Iraq War-opposing liberals, she and her friends should be treated differently than other people in the Middle East. But surely, she noticed that she was an unmarried 31-year-old woman and traveling with her 27-year-old boyfriend throughout the Arabian Peninsula, among people who would not tolerate the same behavior from their own.

Unjust imprisonment? Bauer should talk to a 10-year-old bride. …

Bauer and Shourd “lived in Syria, enjoying privileged lives,” different from the lives of ordinary Damascenes. Yet instead of criticizing Syria’s brutal dictator, Bauer wrote articles hitting America, and Shourd wrote a piece that criticized not Assad, but Israel.

Diana West says it is her “sincere wish that Bauer, Fattal and Shourd return to the United States and realize what a great country America is. Iran arrested them. Iran framed them. Iran jailed them.”

The United States, in contrast, gave them a university education that trained them to blame America first. Or, after serving time in prison … coequally with Iran.

We are not concerned about their possible enlightenment. We think they have been treated too well by America (the real source of their ransom, whatever lies are told or implied about the obsequiously-thanked Sultan of Oman paying it), and – obviously – not badly enough by Iran.

In our post When innocence is a vice (September 24, 2010), on Sarah Shourd and her ransomed release, we quoted this insightful passage from a short story called The Informer by Joseph Conrad, and it bears repeating here:

She went to a great length. She had acquired all the appropriate gestures of revolutionary convictions – the gestures of pity, of anger, of indignation against the anti-humanitarian vices of the social classes to which she belonged herself. … She was displaying very strikingly the usual signs of severe enthusiasm, and had already written many sentimental articles with ferocious conclusions. … For all their assumption of independence, girls of that class are used to the feeling of being specially protected, as, in fact, they are. This feeling accounts for nine tenths of their audacious gestures.

Boys of that class too, of course.

We hope to hear of Shourd’s and Bauer’s early return to their residences in Bashar Assad’s chaotic flaming blood-soaked Syria, and of Fattal’s joining them there.

(Thanks to Frank for the link)

In Britain the number you dial for emergency services – “police, fire, ambulance” – is 999. In America there is an economic emergency for which help could come from Herman Cain’s 999 plan: 9% tax on business profits, 9% tax on personal income, 9% national sales tax.

We think Herman Cain is impressively rational (although he is a Baptist) and by far the most likable of the Republican candidates for the presidency. The policies he advocates are firmly conservative. Only on foreign affairs he has been weak, obviously under-informed; but he’s doing what he knows he must about that, starting with a recent visit to Israel.

This is from American Thinker:

Generations of career politicians … have bankrupted our country in a slow side toward socialism and the withering of our liberty.

Patriots are clamoring for an individual who, as president, can calmly and confidently reorient this country to the Constitution and fiscal sanity. We the People must nominate the next Republican nominee, even (especially) if it means making an end run around the party establishment to put forth someone who is not of Washington, nor political moderation. We must eliminate candidates who have had a part — large or small — in contributing to the current crisis. That means no Romney, no Huckabee, no Gingrich, no Palin. The boldest statement that can be made is to elect a private citizen president.

Not for Cain is the dialect of programmed candidates controlled by Republican Party hacks or “up-and-coming political stars.” … Cain does not require handlers and consultants. No political consultant would ever tell a candidate to answer a question, to which he cannot truly give an informed answer, as Cain did on a question of national security, “I don’t know all the facts.” … Cain speaks with total self-confidence born of ability and achievement, not the unearned laurels of sycophants.

Cain speaks blunt truths about how far we have fallen from our charters and the necessity to restore them and revere them again. As he recently [said] when refusing to walk back comments about a ban on Muslims in a Cain administration, he only wants “true patriots” around him, committed and dedicated to the Constitution, the Declaration, and the laws of this country. What else matters?

Cain has proven himself again and again as an executive (which, lest anyone forget, is the office he is seeking), willing to begin at ground level and rising to save a company from bankruptcy. He is a scholar, a mathematician (bachelors from Morehouse), and computer scientist (masters from Purdue) who speaks logically and plainly.

We would like to know what our American readers think of Cain as a prospective president; and whether our foreign readers have taken notice of him, and if so what their impressions are.