The following extracts come from an article at Front Page by Raymond Ibrahim. For a full understanding of how the Muslim Brotherhood has managed successfully to infiltrate the American Conservative Union the entire article needs to be read.

The conservative movement appears to be at a crossroads in its approach to the threat of Islamic supremacism — not only abroad but at home.

A few months ago … [an] incident took place at an irregular board meeting of the American Conservative Union, an organization usually intent on keeping wobbly Republicans honest. The rump group in attendance — several key board members … were not even aware the meeting had been called – voted “unanimously” to dismiss long-standing accusations against two ACU board members. The accusations had been made by Center for Security Policy head, Frank Gaffney. Their focus was on the activities of Grover Norquist and Suhail Khan, two prominent ACU board members, whom Gaffney claims are influential agents of Islamist agendas. The ACU’s dismissal of Gaffney’s claims was contained in a memo written by attorney Cleta Mitchell, who called them “reprehensible” …

Frank Gaffney is a former defense official in the Reagan administration and first made these claims public in 2003 in an article, “A Troubling Influence,” which was published on this site. In introducing the article, Frontpage editor David Horowitz … described Gaffney’s claims as “the most disturbing that we have ever published.” He further characterized them as “the most complete documentation extant of Grover Norquist’s activities on behalf of the Islamist Fifth Column.”

The Frontpage article documented Norquist’s links to supporters of Hamas and other Islamist organizations dedicated to “destroying the American civilization from within” … and its Israeli ally. These figures included Abdurahman Alamoudi—who is currently serving a lengthy sentence for his involvement in a terrorist plot —and Sami Al-Arian, who was the finance head of Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ), a terrorist organization responsible for over a hundred suicide bombings in the Middle East. Before Alamoudi and Al-Arian were arrested, Norquist and Khan served as key facilitators between them and the Bush White House. Now that both have been convicted of terrorist activities, there can no longer be any doubt that they were working on behalf of America’s terrorist enemies.

Among the Norquist-sponsored initiatives furthering the Islamist agenda …  was his effort to abolish the use of classified national defense intelligence evidence in terrorism cases. …

In addition … Norquist used his own organization, Americans for Tax Reform, to circulate and promote a letter from Republican Muslims attacking conservatives opposed to the controversial “Ground Zero Mosque.”

He also campaigned to protect the Iranian regime from sanctions, from its domestic opposition, and from military action against its nuclear program – all the while demanding draconian cuts in U.S. defense spending. …

Suhail Khan [is] a Norquist protégé with longstanding personal and professional ties to a variety of Islamist movements. Khan’s father, the late Mahboob Khan, was a prominent member of the Muslim Brotherhood and one of the founders, in the 1960s, of the Muslim Students Association [MSA], the cornerstone of the Brotherhood’s American infrastructure. … The Muslim Students Association has been instrumental in indoctrinating young Muslims in Islamist ideology, and has an alarming legacy of senior members – Anwar Awlaki most prominent among them – graduating to positions of prominence in al Qaeda and other terrorist networks. In the 1980s, Mahboob Khan was instrumental in creating an MSA spinoff, the Islamic Society of North America or ISNA. ISNA became so deeply enmeshed in the funding of Hamas that it was named by federal prosecutors as an unindicted co-conspirator in the trial of the Holy Land Foundation. …

Suhail Khan’s mother, Malika Khan, was a close partner in her late husband’s work, and is a long-time leader of another Brotherhood front, the Council on American Islamic Relations (CAIR), which was created out of the Brotherhood’s Hamas-support network. Its parent organization was also an unindicted co-conspirator in the Holy Land Foundation trial. Malika Khan currently serves on the Executive Committee of CAIR’s San Francisco chapter, which distinguished itself in 2011 by promoting a conference that urged Muslims not to co-operate with FBI investigations.

These familial activities are not incidental because Suhail has publicly embraced his parents’ “legacy” and done so before Brotherhood audiences. Despite this background and thanks to Grover Norquist’s patronage, Suhail was able to gain access to the Bush 2000 campaign, and was then appointed to a position in the Bush administration. .. While working at the White House, Khan helped craft and disseminate deceptive notions such as “Islam means peace,” al Qaeda “hijacked” Islam, and jihad is only a “personal struggle,” never a holy war against infidels.

In 2001, Khan appeared on a platform with about-to-be-convicted terrorist and top Muslim Brotherhood figure, Abdurahman Alamoudi. The setting was an American Muslim Council conference in Washington. Alamoudi is the founder of the Council, and once explained to a Brotherhood audience: “I think, if we are outside this country, we can say ‘O Allah, destroy America’. But once we are here, our mission in this country is to change it … ”

Shortly after 9/11 … [Suhail Khan’s father] Mahboob Khan had played host to Ayman Zawahiri, second in command to Osama bin Laden, who had entered the U.S. in the mid-nineties to obtain funds and recruits for al Qaeda. One of his stops was at the al-Noor Mosque in California, a mosque founded by Mahboob Khan.

After 9/11, Suhail Khan had to give up his role at the White House as a result of the fallout from his Brotherhood associations. Yet with the support of Norquist, he managed to land on his feet and was given a political appointment in the Office of the Secretary of Transportation. …

Despite these disturbing manifestations of Khan’s allegiances, Norquist sponsored Suhail to become a member of the board of the American Conservative Union in 2010. … The Muslim Brotherhood was infiltrating the very heart of the conservative movement.

This information must temper any hope that the election of Mitt Romney as president in November would save America from the pernicious influence of Muslim jihadists on the US government (see our posts: Too dreadful to contemplate, July 9, 2011; The conquest of America by the Marxist-Muslim axis, May 25, 2012; The State-whisperer, August 16, 2012; Whom the President praises, August 16, 2012; How Obama enormously assists the jihad, August 20, 2012.)

It seems that the (misnamed) “War on Terror” is over – not because Islam has been defeated, or Muslims have stopped waging jihad but because the US will no longer resist it.

America’s anti-America president would rather the US military does not fight. Maybe he’d allow it to do a little social work abroad now and then. But the US should have nothing as nasty as a formidable military capability.

This is from the Washington Post:

For most of the past year, Defense Secretary Leon E. Panetta has stressed that the vast military complex over which he presides is at a “strategic turning point.”

A decade of grinding guerrilla war is drawing to a close. Defense budgets are shrinking. The implication is that major changes are coming to the military. …

And what is this civilian with no experience whatsoever of military service doing about it?

The watchword for Panetta’s tenure, senior defense officials said, has been “humble.”

“He’s told the service chiefs to be humble in their predictions of warfare,” one senior official said.

Be humble in their predictions? What does that mean? Humbly predict? Or predict US humbleness?

In an interview describing his defense strategy, Panetta said he has helped craft an approach that hedges bets against a range of potential enemies. “It really does provide maximum flexibility,” he said.

You bet they won’t attack you, and as you’re not committed to any kind of response  (“flexibility”) you won’t have to do anything in particular about it if they do?

“The military is going to be smaller … “

Ah-hah!

“… but it is going to be more agile, more flexible …”

No fixed orders, no fixed plan, no fixed aim?

… and more deployable so that it moves fast and stays on the cutting edge of technology.”

Drones then, mainly?

Panetta’s vision is notable for some of the big questions left unanswered. A highly touted promise to shift the military’s focus to Asia has produced little in the way of major new deployments. Nine months after it was unveiled, there is scant evidence of how it will be implemented.

“This is a time when you would expect an intense focus on where we want to go and what we want to be,” said Andrew Hoehn, a senior vice president at the Rand Corp. and a former Pentagon strategist. Hoehn said such a debate does not appear to be happening inside the Pentagon or in the presidential campaigns, which have largely ignored national security issues.

Although the war in Iraq has ended and troops are being withdrawn from Afghanistan, Panetta has not pressed the ground forces to conduct a tough and detailed examination of their performance in the two long and costly wars, said Eliot Cohen, a military historian at Johns Hopkins University and an adviser to Mitt Romney’s campaign.

In recent years, Army and Marine Corps officers have tended to blame their struggles on the State Department and other federal agencies, which were unable to provide the necessary help to rebuild the war-torn countries’ governments and economies.

Were unable to rebuild the enemies’ economies?  Well then, the news isn’t  all bad. Though the US did waste a vast amount of energy and money trying to do just that.

Cohen said the finger-pointing has prevented the ground services from acknowledging their own shortcomings, such as their inability to produce a core of experts in the culture, politics, history and languages of the two countries where they have spent most of the past decade fighting.

But since when have countries needed to be familiar with the culture, politics, history and languages of their enemies? The only mission has always been to defeat them.

Panetta said he would like to see the military do more in this area. “I think we have to look at the lessons that we draw, particularly from these last 10 years of war,” he said. “I’m not satisfied. I think more needs to be done.”

Good grief! Far too much social work has been done by the US military in Afghanistan. (See our posts Heroic inaction May 19, 2010; No victory or something like that June 15, 2010; No reason at all April 19, 2011.)

The Obama administration’s defense strategy, meanwhile …

So they do have one?

… plays down the likelihood of the military fighting major counterinsurgency wars in the coming years.

Not a likelihood of their having to fight such wars, but just not fighting them in any circumstances.

To that end, Panetta has ordered the Army to shrink to about 490,000 soldiers by 2017, a reduction of about 80,000 that will leave the force slightly larger than it was before Sept. 11, 2001.

A surprise pick to run the CIA in 2009, Panetta had spent most of his career as a congressman from California and … in the Clinton administration, including a stint as White House chief of staff.

Even after two and a half years at the CIA and 14 months at the Pentagon, Panetta’s speeches tend to steer clear of the kinds of detailed policy prescriptions and tough questions that were routine under Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates, his immediate predecessor.

“Do we really need 11 [aircraft] carrier strike groups for another 30 years when no other country has more than one?” Gates asked a Navy audience in 2010. He also challenged the Marines to consider whether, in an era of increasingly precise cruise missiles, they would be called upon again to storm an enemy’s shore — a question that cuts to the core of the Marines’ identity.

Gates’s goal was to encourage lower-ranking officers to challenge military pieties. By contrast, Panetta sometimes sounds more like a congressman representing the “Pentagon district” than the leader of the world’s largest military. …

Contradictorally, he is against the devastating reduction in the defense budget that the Obama administration proposes.

“It’s mindless, and it will . . . do incredible damage to our national defense,” Panetta said last month in a speech in New York.

But then, he is not a man who worries overmuch about depleting public funds:

As he did during his days as a congressman, Panetta spends most weekends in California, commuting home on a military jet at a cost of more than $800,000 as of this spring, the latest figures available. …

Although the Washington Post states that “the current list of crises stretches from growing unrest in Syria and Iran’s nuclear ambitions to a new leader in North Korea and rising tensions between China and its neighbors around the South China Sea”, it blandly reports that Michele Flournoy, “the Pentagon’s top policy official”, declared that –

“For the first time in a decade, the urgent priority mission is not staring us in the face.”

Got that? No urgent priority mission staring the US in the face.

Though Iran is rapidly becoming a nuclear power.

Bill Clinton claims that he feels your pain. Do you believe him? Do you think it possible?

Michelle Obama, self-titled “the mom-in-chief”, wants you to understand that her communist-born-and-bred, Islam-promoting husband – incredibly the president of the USA! – should govern you because he’s a loving sort of a guy, and he cares about you:

I see the concern in his eyes … and I hear the determination in his voice as he tells me, “You won’t believe what these folks are going through, Michelle … it’s not right. We’ve got to keep working to fix this. We’ve got so much more to do.”

Do you believe he cares about each one of you? Like the Christian god is alleged to do? Do you think that even if Obama did, even if it were possible which it is not, it would be a good reason why he should govern you?

Do you think you should be loved by your government, even if it were possible for a government to love, which it is not?

Should a government act as if it were loving? Should citizens be nurtured by their government? Should we all be kept on Social Security, fed by food stamps, cured by a national health service, taught what to know and believe by a government department of education? Do you want to be rocked in the arms of the state?

Do you want to live under Socialism?

Socialism (political pornography!) is secularized Christianity.

Christianity (moral pornography!) commands you to love everybody. Do you think you could? Or should? Would it be just to love bad people? Would behaving towards them lovingly instead of punitively dissuade them from doing harm?

Might you not, perhaps, feel filthied and abased by a politics slimed with such hypocrisy, affectation and sentimentality?

If so, you may appreciate the fable of the Tsoig, which now follows.

*

THE  TSOIG

The Tsoig is unique as a species in that it is both animal and plant, and also sapiens: animal in its beginning, plant in its maturity, and in both conditions able to think and talk much like us.

Tsoigs had been known on the Mainland for centuries, but at last one came to the Island.

It arrived on some raft, it was thought, since though Tsoigs can walk until the age of about one hundred they cannot swim; and had this one merely been cast on the waves, the tides would have carried it in quite a different direction. So from the very beginning, one must assume, this particular Tsoig had a positive intention of coming there – a design on the Island, one might say.

On arrival it walked at once to what it judged to be the center of the Island, and there sent down its roots which were already fairly well grown and needed only to be burrowed in for the Tsoig to attain a firm grip and commence its thenceforward vegetable life, spreading very slowly at first.

Contrary to many a tale now told of it, it never did demand that it be ‘worshipped like a God’. To attribute such an idea to it is to give it at once a totally mistaken character. It never ‘demanded’. It never ordered. It had no peremptoriness, no shortness of tone, no sharpness of expression. It had so much self-confidence that it never needed to resort to a commanding or an oracular manner. It always used a tone of gentle persuasion; it wooed, it soothed, it sympathized. There was a touch of the mournful in it at all times, to the point at last of reproachfulness, but never the least trace of insistence or officiousness.

‘Confide in me,’ it would plead, in a rather bland, not very deep voice. ‘Let me be a comfort to you in your trouble.’ That sort of thing. ‘You can rely on me.’ ‘Come and tell me all about it.’ And when you had told it what you had to tell, when you had confided in it, it would say little but ‘There, there, I am sorry.’ For it was not a solution-giver. It hardly seemed to want troubles to end or ills to be cured. Indeed, some biologists are of the opinion that Tsoigs need human sorrow for survival as they need air, water, light and the salts of the earth: that they thrive on sadness, regret, heartbreak; that human sighs are the food of its spirit. And of course if a Tsoig by its spiritual nature could take in our unhappiness, transmute it, and give out happiness, as by its ordinary vegetable nature it takes in the carbon-dioxide of our breath and changes it daily into the oxygen we need, the species would surely be among the most valuable of earthly creatures. However, they do nothing of the kind.

Still, this particular Tsoig was much valued for its mere willingness to absorb whatever was complained to it. Valued by women, that is. Men did not take to it.

The women liked to sit on its root-humps, leaning up against the rather soft ‘bark’ of its trunk (known in the timber and hide trades as Sorgderm, or, more colloquially, Soigeen), and telling it all sorts of nonsense that women can fortunately seldom find anyone to listen to. What the Tsoig gave them, apart from soothing sounds and plenty of attention, were its flowers – rather small, of a dullish pink, and of a slightly unpleasant scent if any at all. It shed them lavishly on these ladies, who persistently expressed their gratitude and insisted to their indifferent husbands that it was ‘a kind old thing’.

But most of all it was sought by the children. And to confound the theories of biologists it seemed to require nothing of children but their delight. It tossed them in its branches, gently and tirelessly, and set them down again lightly on the ground. ‘Climb me, jump on me, play all over me,’ it invited them, and they did. ‘I love, love, love you, little ones,’ it would say, in a phlegm-thick voice, so that it sounded like ‘I l-huv, l-huv, l-huv you, l-hittle ones’.

And on them it showered its all-the-year-round fruits, luscious things, over-ripe as soon as formed, full of juice (known as Tsoigdrain), thin of skin, so that they always burst, you could never find one whole, and the flavour was sickly-sweet, relished by children – and at first by the women, who soon got tired of it. Certain medicinal properties were attributed to Tsoigdrain, but were never proved. The children would overeat of course, and sometimes get sick on the stuff. And all of them, as they grew up, would begin to find the fruit too cloying, and it was seldom that anyone over the age of fifteen would touch Tsoigsimmon (as the fruits of the Tsoig are called).

And when a boy reached the age of fifteen or thereabouts – a little later if he was backward, a little sooner if he was forward – he would not only stop eating the plenty which the Tsoig provided, but would even start shunning the tree, as he might an aunt who continued to treat him as a child too long: and even perhaps developed some sort of unconfessed fear of the thing – its reaching branches, its spreading roots, its ‘come hither’ tones, its ‘I I-huv you so, why don’t you come close and let me I-huv you, I don’t ask anything of you but that you let me l-huv, l-huv, l-huv you’. It moaned too, and got rather moist round the joins where the branches came out of the bole, and gummy in the ‘eyes’ where lesser branches had dropped off.

But the children continued to play on it, and women to confide in it until the men began to notice that the Tsoig was spreading too far and taking up too much space.

‘You must stop spreading,’ they told it, ‘or you will grow right into and through and over our houses, and take up so much of the land that we shall not be able to use it.’

‘I only want to please you all,’ it replied in a hurt tone, ‘and protect you all, and shelter you all, and feed you all … if you have me to do all this for you, you do not need houses or land.’

‘Stop!’ they begged it. But the Tsoig shed gummy tears, and spread a little further, saying, ‘Why do you retreat from me, and speak to me so roughly? Why do you want to hurt my feelings? I only wish for your good. I do everything for you. I l-huv you. Come near and let me embrace you. Here, here, here are flowers for you. Here is fruit – eat, eat!’

‘Just don’t go too far,’ the men said, who didn’t really want to be hard on the Tsoig. And grumbling a bit they went away and left it to the women and children.

But the Tsoig spread further yet, and went on spreading, until at last the men had to tell it, ‘You must go. Get up if you can, and leave the Island. If you can’t we’ll help you. But you must let go with your roots, and take them up, and let us lift you and put you on a raft and take you to the Mainland. There is not enough room on the Island for you and us. Either you must go or we must go, and as we are many and you are one, we suggest that you go somewhere else, where there is more space for you.’

The tree moaned and wept. But it told the Islanders that it would forgive them their cruelty. And the children were full of compassion for the Tsoig, and sat in its branches, and leant their cheeks against its soggy derm, and stroked the oozy bumps and humps of the good old Tsoig.

So the tree stayed, and spread. And it shed so much fruit on the earth that the rank smell of the Island was detectable far out at sea, and even on the Mainland.

‘The Island has been cursed with a Tsoig,’ the Mainlanders said. ‘They should have killed it before it rooted itself firmly. Once a Tsoig has established itself there’s no way to destroy it. The Islanders will soon be putting out to sea.’

‘Tsoig,’ the people of the Island pleaded – this time the women too, ‘please, please go, or else we must leave our homes, and leave the Island, and leave you here all alone. We know that you like to be where there are people. You love people, don’t you? Well, if you went to the Mainland and took root there, all the people of the Mainland would come and see you, and there are many more people there than here, and plenty of room for all. You could spread and spread for another hundred years. And you would not be lonely. But on the Island there is not enough room for you and us. We are many and you are one. You should go. If we go we shall be scattered, separated from one another. We shall have to go to strange new lands and work hard for years to build new houses and recover what we have lost. And we shall be lonely, and homesick for the Island we were born on.’

But the Tsoig only wept, and spread faster, further and further, and splattered its round wet fruits on them.

Then the women took the children into the houses and shut the doors and drew the curtains and the men fetched axes and saws. Ignoring the sobs and cries of the old tree, they hacked furiously at it. But they soon found there was no way of cutting it down or cutting it back; for as fast as a Tsoig is wounded it heals itself, and as fast as its limbs are cut off it grows more, stronger than before, and it had grown too tough to be poisoned. Whatever was poured on its roots and leaves seemed only to nourish it.

So the people had no choice but to get into boats and put out to sea.

Because of the tides those who left from one side of the Island never again found those who left from the other side. Families were broken, and friends lost each other. And worst of all some of the smaller children were snatched up at the last moment by the Tsoig, swung up high, and held fast and unreachable in the embrace of the tree they had trusted. Their parents could not rescue them, and had to abandon them to the Tsoig.

To these young children, clasped helplessly and desperately weeping in the coils of the wet, fruit-erupting branches of the ever more lovingly, closely holding, the ever growing, ever more tightly tangling tree, the Tsoig expounded the moral of its story: ‘L–huv Conquers All.’

Jillian Becker

You put Israel in

You put Israel out

You put Israel in

And you shake it all about.

Barack Obama said in a speech to AIPAC that Jerusalem must remain the undivided capital of Israel.

But that was back in 2008 when Obama was still taking some trouble to woo Jews and other pro-Israel voters to support him.

The present Democratic National Convention omitted any mention of Jerusalem being the capital of Israel.

It also left out old platform statements about the status of Palestinian refugees, and of Hamas as a terrorist organization not to be dealt with or supported in any way. Obviously the guide to these decisions came from Obama whose State Department, since March this year, refused to call Jerusalem the capital of Israel, and who tried to order Israel to return to its indefensible 1967 borders. He wants to fund UN agencies that accept Palestinians as a member “state”.

Acceptance by Israel of the millions of Palestinians who claim to have been dispossessed when the State of Israel was declared, or a return to its 1967 borders, would be acts of suicide. As Obama must know this, he must desire the consequence. It could hardly be clearer that Obama does not like Israel and likes Islam very much, especially the Muslim Brotherhood (of which Hamas is a calf).

But then something happened on the way to the third day of the DNC. Obama and the Democratic Party as a whole came under fierce criticism for making the changes, presumably from quarters they do not want to antagonize. So, according to the Wall Street Journal, the “language describing Jerusalem as the capital of Israel” was “swiftly reinserted … in an attempt to defuse controversy on the eve of President Barack Obama’s speech accepting his party’s nomination”.

Convention delegates, by a voice vote, approved a resolution restoring language the party had put in its 2008 platform, as well as earlier ones, referring to Jerusalem as the capital of the Jewish state. But the vote was disputed. Three separate voice votes were called, and only after the third was the issue declared decided—and some delegates then booed.

(To our regret, the omission of “God” from the convention, which we praised in a post earlier, was also reversed.)

Far more maliciously and seriously, anti-Israel action is being taken by the Obama administration.

This is from Front Page by David Hornik:

In the same week that 120 “nonaligned” nations of the world were gathered in Tehran to give their blessing to its open genocidal anti-Semitism, the International Atomic Energy Agency reported that Iran had doubled the number of centrifuges at its underground Fordo site since May, while increasing its stockpile of 20%-enriched uranium to within 50 kilograms of a bomb. All this while continuing to block access — as it has been since November — to its Parchin facility for nuclear-explosives testing.

And that wasn’t all. Even though the IAEA’s findings vindicate all the warnings by Israeli leaders that Iran was exploiting the period of sanctions and diplomatic talks to race ahead toward the bomb, the Obama administration reacted — again — by coming down on Israel rather than Iran.

On Thursday the U.S. chief of staff, Gen. Martin Dempsey, told reporters in London that an Israeli attack on Iran would delay but probably not stop its nuclear program, could unravel the “international coalition” supposedly “pressuring” Iran, and that “I don’t want to be complicit if they [Israel] choose to do it.”

“Complicit”? As if such a pre-emptive act of self-defense would be a crime? Yes:

With a few words, then, Dempsey managed to convey that Israel was militarily incapable, a potential spoiler of an effective international strategy, and that it would be somehow criminal or illicit — “complicity” usually referring to illicit activity — if Israel did move to preempt the genocidal threat, something the U.S. would want no part of.

It was further reported by Time magazine that the U.S. was substantially scaling back a planned joint U.S.-Israeli military drill, though so far that account has evoked denials from some of the officials quoted in media reports. But, on the whole, the developments didn’t impart the sense that the Obama administration “has Israel’s back” as it has been ritually claiming.

“… ritually and mendaciously claiming”, that should read.

As for “the U.S. substantially scaling back a planned joint U.S.-Israeli military drill”,  this source gives some concrete details of the reported reductions, leading us to think they are very likely true.

Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu and Defense Minister Ehud Barak are silent in the face of the avalanche of bad news coming in from official Washington.

In accord with the Dempsey  shout, this:

The Patriot anti-missile systems scheduled for what was to have been the biggest joint US-Israel anti-missile drill in October will remain packed in tarpaulin because they come without crews; even one – much less two – Aegis Ballistic Missile Defense warships may not be dispatched to Israeli waters; and the number of US servicemen sent over for the annual exercise is to be cut by more than two-thirds to 1,500.

This downgrade of US participation in an annual war exercise with Israel is more than striking. It adds up to the dismemberment by the Obama administration of the entire intricate strategy US and Israel have built over years for the deterrence – and interception if need be – of any Iranian/Hizballah/Syrian missile assault on Israel.

The inferences are cruel: The US defense or second-strike elements – which had been slotted into place by the military strategists of the two armies – will not be there. Their absence slashes the time available for Israel’s alarm-and-interception systems to spring into action – the moment the engines of Iranian ballistic missiles heading its way are fired – right down from the originally estimated 14 minutes’ notice.

It also means that Barak’s estimate of 500 dead in the worst case of a war with Iran must go by the board.

So Israel is to be punished by Obama because Iran is intransigent. Or would it be more accurate to say that Obama is positively helping Iran advance towards nuclear capability?

A story is going round that he sent messages to Iran through two unnamed European countries that he would “hold back” Israel, but the mullahs must agree not to attack US shipping in the Gulf. The Dempsey insult was perhaps part of this plot.

For instance, The Blaze reports:

The Israeli newspaper Yediot Ahronot published a startling report Monday detailing a message it says was conveyed by the Obama administration – via two European countries – to Iranian officials. The request: if Israel decides to strike Iranian nuclear facilities, the U.S. will not support it and the Islamic Republic should refrain from retaliating on U.S. military installations in the Persian Gulf.

The story has of course been denied  by the White House.

But then it also denies disliking Israel, or wishing it anything but peace, prosperity, security and the continuing warm friendship of the Obama administration and the Democratic Party.

The Democrats believe we all “belong to the government”. Here’s part of the the video clip shown at the Democratic National Convention in which they say so:

The Left really does think that the government is a sort of parent and master to whom we belong and who has a duty to nurture us, direct us, run our lives.

We on the other side think that the government should be our servant. As President Ronald Reagan did.

Here are some of the things he said about government:

Government exists to protect us from each other. Where government has gone beyond its limits is in deciding to protect us from ourselves.

Government’s first duty is to protect the people, not run their lives.

Government does not solve problems; it subsidizes them.

Man is not free unless government is limited.

Government is not the solution to our problems, government is the problem.

It is not my intention to do away with government. It is, rather, to make it work – work with us, not over us; to stand by our side, not ride on our back. Government can and must provide opportunity, not smother it; foster productivity, not stifle it.

A government big enough to give you everything you want is big enough to take it all away.

Government, the people said, was not our master, it is our servant; its only power that which we the people allow it to have.

Obama’s government has taken too much power. The people must take it back again.

We did not expect to like anything about the Democratic National Convention. But as it turns out there is one thing we like:  that the “Dems Scrub ‘God’ References from Party Platform“, as a CBN headline puts it.

However, the report includes this statement: “Democratic officials noted there is a paragraph on the importance of faith in the party platform.”

Faith in what? Obama, perhaps. To have faith in Obama is of course as defiant of reason as having faith in God or Jesus Christ or Allah. Obama is real – to America’s  detriment – but has surely proved that it’s as foolish to trust in him as in God and Jesus Christ and Allah. Still, gullible folk will go on believing in those three fictitious characters, and some will go on believing in Obama.

Yes, we do want to take over the world, this Muslim insists authoritatively.

“You must cater for us, we must conquer you.”

Video via The Religion of Peace.

We don’t agree with all his opinions, but Tony Robbins does make clear how unimaginably big is the national debt.

The article by James Delingpole from which we quote is about property rights and what he rightly calls the “green religion”; matters of concern equally on both sides of the Atlantic:

Property rights are a cornerstone of our liberty, our security, our civilisation. …

Here’s the Virginia Bill of Rights, precursor to the US Declaration of Independence:

“That all men are by nature equally free and independent, and have certain inherent rights, of which, when they enter into a state of society, they cannot, by any compact, deprive or divest their posterity; namely, the enjoyment of life and liberty, with the means of acquiring and possessing property, and pursuing and obtaining happiness and safety.”

Here’s Samuel Adams:

“The Natural Rights of the colonists are these: first, a right to life; second, to liberty; third to property; together with the right to support and defend them in the best manner they can.”

And here, most trenchantly, is the philosopher who inspired them, John Locke:

“Whenever the legislators endeavour to take away and destroy the property of the people, or to reduce them to slavery under arbitrary power, they put themselves into a state of war with the people, who are thereupon absolved from any further obedience …”

Time for a revolution, then, for the theft of our property rights is exactly what is happening to us now under our notionally “Conservative” prime minister and his increasingly desperate and damaging attempts to position his collapsing administration as the “greenest ever.” I’m thinking especially of the ongoing renewables scam.

The wind farm industry is surely the worst offender. Some vexatious twerp complained the other day about my claim that wind farms reduce property values by between 25 per cent and 50 per cent. Actually, if anything, I’m understating the problem here. I know of cases where properties have been rendered unsaleable by wind farms. But whatever the exact figures, I think those of us not in the pay of Big Wind or trotting out propaganda for the preposterous and devious Renewable UK would all agree that the very last thing we’d want on our doorstep would be a wind farm and that we certainly would never dream of buying a property near one. QED.

Since not a single one of the wind farms blighting Britain would have been built without state incentives (in the form of Renewable Obligations Certificates, Feed In Tariffs, and legislation which makes it very hard for communities to prevent wind farms being built in the area) we can reasonably say therefore that wind farms represent a wanton assault by the state on property rights. We expect such confiscatory measures “for the common good” from socialist regimes. But from a Conservative-dominated Coalition it’s a disgrace.

The Coalition itself is a disgrace. How a co-called Conservative Party ever decided to team up with a Liberal Democratic Party that is well to the left of the opposition Labour Party would be beyond comprehension to anyone who didn’t know that the so-called Conservative Party of Great Britain is not remotely conservative. In fact its leader, David Cameron, is an ardent fan of Saul Alinsky, the communist revolutionary who inspired Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama.

But it’s not just the wind farm industry which is complicitous in this scam. … The hydro power industry turns out to be very nearly as damaging, unpleasant, slimy and untrustworthy as its nasty elder brother Big Wind. …  yet another taxpayer-subsidised boondoggle for rent-seeking scuzzballs, which produces next to no electricity and which – just like wind farms – causes immense damage to wildlife (in this case fish rather than birds or bats). …

The hypocrisy of it! Environmentalists going to endless lengths to protect a smelt while they feed other fish and innumerable birds to their terrible engines. Above all, they hurt people. Delingpole gives a particular instance where property rights are harmed:

Nottingham Angling Club … in 1982 forked out £150,000 for the fishing rights to a one and half mile stretch of the river Trent above a weir which is now about to be converted to hydropower. The quality of their fishing will almost certainly diminish. And there are stories like this from all over the country. Whether its wealthy fly fishing enthusiasts who’ve paid a fortune for a prime stretch of river in Hampshire or Dorset, or an ordinary working man’s club like the one in Nottingham, people are going to suffer as a result of this state-sponsored drive for renewables. Again, as with wind power, the only reason these hydropower schemes are going ahead is because of the government subsidies and incentives for those canny or cynical enough to get in on the scam. So again, what we have here is a clear case of the state arbitrarily confiscating people’s property rights because of its desire to be seen paying lip service to the green religion.

But the harm to people caused by governments pursuing the green superstition is far greater than that. It is general, affecting the price everyone has to pay for electricity. Not just property rights but liberty itself is going with the wind.

All over America, city councils, implementing Agenda 21, are trying to increase the amount of energy they provide from “green sources” at ever greater expense. What’s more, they hope to ration it, to keep us colder in winter and hotter in summer.

This is the newest form of religious persecution.

Photo and text are from MEMRI:

On August 27, 2012, a member of the leading jihadi forum Shumoukh Al-Islam posted a YouTube link to a video showing a man accused of spying for the U.S. by placing chips to direct drones targeting terrorists being crucified on an electric pylon in Abyan province in south of Yemen. A sign placed above the man’s head shows the group’s flag and verse 5:33 of the Koran, which reads: “The recompense of those who wage war against Allah and His Messenger and do mischief in the land is only that they shall be killed or crucified or their hands and their feet be cut off from opposite sides, or be exiled from the land. That is their disgrace in this world, and a great torment is theirs in the Hereafter.”

The crucified man is Saleh Ahmed Saleh Al-Jamely who was executed on February 12, 2012 after being convicted by a court managed by Al-Qaeda-affiliated Ansar Al-Shari’a.

And Reuters reports: (We don’t recommend that you read the whole thing. Reuters talks about the Taliban as if they might have actual human motivation instead of just being the wild beasts they are.)

An adolescent boy and a young girl have been beheaded in two separate incidents in Afghanistan …

A 12-year-old boy was kidnapped and killed in southern Kandahar province on Wednesday, his severed head placed near his body to send a warning to police, said provincial governor spokesman Jawid Faisal.

The brother of the boy, neither of whom were named by officials, was a member of the Afghan Local Police (ALP), a U.S.-trained militia charged with making Afghans in Taliban strongholds, like Kandahar, feel more secure …

Separately, a 6-year-old girl was beheaded in eastern Kapisa province on Thursday, said provincial police chief Abdul Hamed.

How would those who believe in a merciful and all-powerful God – as the Taliban do – explain that?

A rhetorical question only. We know the answers. Muslims think doing such things positively qualifies them for an eternity of bliss. Christians would say “it’s His mysterious ways.”

The murders follow the shooting or beheading of 17 young revelers attending a party in southern Helmand province this week …

In Kandahar’s Zhari district, officials also said on Friday that a 16-year-old boy accused by the Taliban of spying for the government was beheaded and skinned in late July.

*

There are many reports of Muslims crucifying Christians, for instance here and here. We cannot be sure that any particular report is true*, but we don’t doubt that atrocities of the kind are commonly committed.

* We are not convinced that the figure crucified in the picture was ever a living man. The head may have belonged to a man, but the whole thing is probably a dummy. The arms, shown in close-up in the video from which the picture is taken, look decidedly artificial. However, as we say in the text, we don’t doubt that Islam uses crucifixion as a punishment. The Koran commands it in the quoted verse.