… and kills his hero-worshippers.

“Allahu Akbar!” the bewildered survivors cry as they run up and down amidst the strewn body-parts.

To watch this MUST SEE video – which we cannot move to this site – go here.

Please. Do yourself a favor.

Islam punishes the crime of being raped with death.

This picture and the text are from the Clarion Project.

A 10-year girl in Afghanistan is in danger of being honor-killed by her family after being violently raped by a mullah in a local mosque after her Quran class. After the family openly talked about killing the girl, the mullah offered to marry her, claiming to the authorities that he thought the girl was 17 and that the sex was consensual.

After nearly dying from her injuries sustained during the rape due to a delay in medical care, “Women for Afghan Women”,  a shelter for battered women and children, arranged for the girl to be taken to a hospital. Her injuries included a severing of the wall between her vagina and rectum that caused hemorrhaging.

After her recovery, she was taken to a women’s shelter to protect her from her family.

Pictures taken of the girl to document the case show a small, pre-pubescent child whose weight at the time was about 40 pounds (about 18 kilos), according to the doctor.

Last week, the police were given orders to return the girl to her family, despite the fact that she will most likely be killed. Tuesday, the police entered the shelter and took the girl.

“I went to the hospital when they brought her there. I was sitting next to her bed when I overheard her mother and aunt saying that her father was under tremendous pressure by the villagers to kill the girl because she had brought shame to them,” said Nederah Geyah, who is the head of the women’s affairs office in Kunduz, Afghanistan.

Yes, there is, or has been, a “women’s affairs office” in Kunduz.

Honor killings of girls who have been raped are common in Afghanistan, as family members believe that the raped girl brings shame to the family. Moreover, a girl who has been raped is considered not fit to be married and therefore must be supported by her family.

Dr. Hassina Sarwari, who is head of the shelter and a pediatrician, said when she arrived at the hospital to take the girl to the shelter, she encounter a large group of elders from the girl’s village. The group included male members of the girl’s family – her father, her brothers and an uncle.

Once inside, she met the girl’s aunt, who told the doctor she had been told by her husband to smuggle the girl out of the hospital and deposit her into the hands of the family outside.

“She said they wanted to take her and kill her, and dump her in the river,” Dr. Sarwari said.

The doctor made her way to the girl’s room, where she found the girl and her mother holding hands and crying.

Did the mother wish to save her daughter?  Not at all.

Dr. Sarwari remembers the mother’s words: “My daughter, may dust and soil protect you now,” she said. “We will make you a bed of dust and soil. We will send you to the cemetery where you will be safe.”

With the help of Geyah, the girl was rescued from her family and placed in the shelter. Geyah also helped initiate legal proceedings against the mullah.

But that “women’s affairs office” is not very powerful or even effective.

After publicizing the case, both women[ Sarwari and Geyah] were threatened with death by the mullahs as well as the girl’s family.

A militia commander demanded that the doctor return the girl to her family or face the consequences.

At one point, Dr. Sarwari was forced to go into hiding. Geyah has since resigned her job and moved to a different part of the country. Dr. Sarwari has said she wants to leave the country altogether. …

Locals …  are angry at the shelter – not at the mullahs or the family. The shelter, which is one of seven in Afghanistan, is perceived as a tool of the Americans to destroy traditional Afghani culture.

The traditional culture, which Afghan men want at all costs to preserve, includes the brutal raping and consequent killing of ten-year-old girls.

The shelter  has been receiving American aid, but the funding will stop when the last of the Americans leave. The seven shelters for women and girls in Afghanistan will have to close. Then there will be nothing to impede traditional Islamic Afghan culture from doing its worst.

How corrupt the executive branch of the US federal government has become under the rule of the Democratic Party!  Or let’s say – since it’s unlikely that there was no corruption before that – how much more visible its corruption has become.

Taking only one of the scandals (all of them “phony” according to Obama), you can see the size of the rot in the childishly transparent attempt the Internal Revenue Service is making to cover up its abuse of  power.

We quote from an IBD editorial:

An internationally accredited information-technology asset-management firm says the IRS has some explaining to do as our patience is taxed with tales of even more convenient computer crashes.

Private-sector organizations as vast as the Internal Revenue Service typically have redundancy built into their information technology systems, as secure record keeping is the key to managing their businesses and staying in business. Such records … are often required to be kept by law, and often by the IRS itself.

As we have noted, Lois Lerner’s lost emails from the critical period when the IRS was serving as a political arm of the Obama administration and targeting Tea Party and other conservative groups suggest by themselves a conspiracy to obstruct justice as well as being a violation of the Federal Records Act, which requires paper copies of such critical emails to be printed and stored just in case of computer problems.

This conspiracy to obstruct justice is further suggested by some Lerner emails that she and the Obama administration wished had been lost — especially one sent by Lerner to a Maria Hooke.

“I had a question today about OCS,” Lerner stated in the email. “I was cautioning folks about email, how we have had several occasions where Congress has asked for emails and there has been an electronic search for responsive emails — so we need to be cautious about what we say in emails.”

OCS is the IRS’s Office Communications Server, a form of online chat system that circumvents email.

When she learned that OCS messages were not set to automatically save, Lerner wrote, “Perfect.”

Clearly Lerner had a keen interest in keeping her communications from Congress and the American people.

Lerner’s hard drive allegedly crashed, which cannot be verified because her hard drive has since been destroyed and/or recycled. That questionable hard-drive direction came just 10 days after House Ways and Means Committee Chairman Dave Camp, the Republican from Michigan, first wrote a letter asking if the IRS was targeting nonprofit groups. …

On Monday, the International Association of Information Technology Asset Managers [IAITAM], which deals with such technical questions regarding computer hardware and record retention on a regular basis and which has reacted with the same incredulity as the rest of us, released a list of six basic questions the IRS needs to answer.

1. First, what happened to the IRS’s IT asset managers who seemingly vanished during this critical period? IAITAM , which runs the only worldwide certification program for IT asset managers, says its records show that at least three IRS IT asset managers were moved out of their positions at the time of the May 2013 inspector general’s report that detailed the agency’s targeting practices. What can they tell us?

2. The hard drives in question are federal property and cannot be destroyed or recycled without proper documentation. … Where are these records?

3. IAITAM asks if the drives were destroyed by an outside IT asset destruction unit, a not-unusual practice among federal agencies. If so, it adds an entire second layer of documentation of the destruction of these assets, including who approved it.

4. What are the IRS’ specific policies and procedures on document retention when hard drives are damaged or destroyed? In most large private-sector organizations, hard drives and computers are just not tossed in the dumpster or dropped off at the local recycling center until recovery of the lost data is assured.

5. What is the disaster recovery policy at the IRS, an agency responsible for our most sensitive tax information, particularly in light of its statistically implausible number of hard drive crashes?

6. Where are Lerner’s emails from her BlackBerry device and what is on the enterprise server? Some have even suggested Lerner may have off-loaded her emails to what is known as a USB flash drive and still has them in her possession, another federal offense.

The IRS is counting on the general public’s relative ignorance of computer technology to believe its smoke-and-mirror cover-up.

But in the age of the iPad and iPhone, even a child knows that something does not compute here.

Conspiracies seldom work, because conspirators betray them. This is a huge conspiracy. Surely sooner or later some of those who know about the plot, those shabbily-treated IT asset managers, or the ones who can’t keep a secret, or the ones with a conscience (if they exist), will spill the beans?  Or the ones without a conscience but an ability to perceive and seize a golden opportunity, will sell what they know for a big bag of greenbacks? Hasn’t that idea occurred to any of them? They just might get enough to compensate them for losing their job.

July 23, 2014. The United Nations holds an emergency session on the battle in Gaza as the Israeli Defense Force destroys the invasion-tunnels and rocket bases of the Islamic terrorist organization Hamas.

Delegates from countries that specialize in mass murder, such as Sudan, Syria, Cuba, and Iran, accuse Israel of “war crimes”. Most of the rest of the world’s delegates are on the terrorists’ side too.

A lone voice defends Israel, and accuses its accusers. It is the voice of Hillel Neuer, executive director of UN Watch.

The United Nations must be destroyed.

When all the news is depressing or fearful, it’s great to have a good laugh. Even if the laugh is a trifle hysterical.

We laughed that sort of laugh at this story from the Washington Free Beacon:

The National Science Foundation has committed $10 million to build robots that will act as “personal trainers” for children, in an effort to influence their behavior and eating habits.

The government has spent $2.15 million so far for the five-year project, which is being led by Yale University. The project, “Robots Helping Kids,” will ultimately “deploy” robots into homes and schools to teach English as a second language, and encourage kids to exercise.

The project will develop a “new breed of sophisticated socially assistive’ robots, designed to help children learn to read, appreciate physical fitness, overcome cognitive disabilities, and perform physical exercises”, according to a news release by Yale University …

“Just like a good personal trainer, we want the robots to be able to guide the child toward a behavior that we desire,” said Brian Scassellati, a computer science professor at Yale and principal investigator for the study. “What we want to do is move these robots out of the laboratory and into schools and homes and clinics, places where we can directly help children on a day-to-day basis,” he said. …

“The need for this technology is driven by critical societal problems that require sustained, personalized support that supplements the efforts of educators, parents, and clinicians,” the [NSA providers of] the grant said.  

Scassellati envisions the robots influencing nearly every aspect of children’s lives.

“We want them to help children learn language, we want to help them learn better eating habits, we want them to learn new social or cognitive skills through their interactions with these robots,” he said. …

Social skills with robots. Interaction with robots who must therefore, presumably, also have social skills. This truly is a brave new world!

Of course kids will probably love having a robot as a pet and companion. Better than a doll or a stuffed bear!

But will the robot be sending info back to a mad professor or the state? We guess so. “He didn’t eat his salad today.” “She quarreled with a classmate.”

The kids will be in the constant presence of a spy. Nurturing a serpent in their little bosoms.

The project is seeking to create robots that could be personal companions to children for up to a year. Scassellati said he wants to “build a healthy relationship of trust and respect between the child and the robot.”

Respectful robots! They may spy on you, but they’ll do it respectfully.

“At the end of five years we’d like to have robots that can guide a child toward long-term educational goals, be customized for the particular needs of that child, and basically grow and develop with the child,” he said. “We want the robot to be the equivalent of a good personal trainer.”

The NSF has allotted $10 million for the study through 2017. The grant is one of the highest amounts the agency dispenses.

The University of Southern California, MIT, Stanford, and Tufts University are listed as partners for the project. Willow Garage, a personal robotics company, is also participating in the research. …

We bet they are. Most lucratively.

Scassellati said the robots would “not replace” humans, but provide additional attention and guidance for children. The research is focusing on both “regularly developing children and those with social or cognitive deficits.” Some of Scassellati’s prior research has focused on how robots can help kids with Autism.

Did you think the do-good factor, the “help” because “we care” factor would be missing? The state always exercises totalitarian control only for your own good.

“If we’re successful in this, we think we can make a real difference in the lives of children,” he said.

We don’t doubt it for a moment. The personal robot scheme will serve the government’s indoctrination purposes much better even than compulsory pre-kindergarten schooling could. Now the state will be with you 24/7. You’ll have no secrets from it. It’ll  be in bed with you, at the table with you, in the bathroom with you, at school with you. And it will be fun!  This is how you’ll come to love Big Brother.

“And we think that we can produce some of the most interesting, the most engaging, and the most competent social robots that we’ve ever seen.”

You could make them pretty too, Brian. The things could have the look of this or that Hollywood star, for instance.

Considering the official prurience of the state these days, they will very likely be programmed to teach the kids practical sex. No holds barred, of course. (Sado-masochism is strongly advised by state-supported institutions right now.)

Loads of fun for the next generation coming up! Who said that the age of American vision ended with the close of its space exploration?

And – parents – note that the interesting, engaging, competent companion of your kid will not need feeding. It won’t consume the teeniest bite of the arugula, kale, broccoli, coarse bread and dandelion tea that it will prescribe for you and yours.

Brace yourselves for its constant (respectful) criticism though. It will be there to keep you in line too. Can’t risk your preferences or bad influence of any sort undoing its good work.

“This whole conflict,” the foreign journalist said over coffee, “is a prime time show; the Palestinians provide us with the more romantic story.”

We quote from an article by documentary film-maker Pierre Rehov at Gatestone:

Terrorism is a show; it needs a producer and a distributor.

Without a certain complicity from the international media, terrorism would not be so effective and might even disappear altogether.

While Hamas is raining rockets and missiles on the Israeli civilian population, and in return is suffering a high level of destruction and hundreds of casualties as a result of collateral damage, one might ask: “What is the purpose?” The same question is also true of suicide terrorism. The genuine aim seems to be to gather sympathy while terrorizing the enemy, with an audience on an unlimited number of channels. …

If a rocket succeeds in going through Israel’s anti-missile defense and causing damage to Israel, Hamas is “showing its strength,” by hitting the Jewish state. If a retaliation by Israel sadly results in the death of Arab civilians, Hamas is “showing how inhuman Israel is,” and therefore how much Israel deserves the world’s opprobrium. For Hamas and similar terror groups, therefore, the “show” is always a win-win. …

The media are the real leaders of the free world. …

And to a large extent they are abusing that power.

There should never be a moral equivalence painted between the deliberate killing of civilians, and a retaliation that tragically leads to casualties among civilians. Yet, in the eye of the camera, there is. A dead child covered with blood is the strong moment of the show. [So] Hamas is asking [ordering] the population of Gaza to stay in their homes, while Israel is asking the civilians in Gaza to run away from places it might bomb. I imagine the leaders of Hamas, who are running the show, hiding in the basement of schools, mosques, hospitals, and tunnels, making comments on the latest developments: “More blood. We need more blood.”

The media who are pro-Palestinian, when they do not find enough horrific images from inside Gaza, recycle old pictures, Photoshop them, or use footage from other conflicts, mostly from Iraq and Syria. In the current conflict, they are already doing just that.

Even though YouTube, Facebook and other social media are useful in building a larger audience for the show, reporters and journalists play their role. Sadly, they do not have a choice.

We think this article is good, but just there we have to disagree. They do have a choice: “Report what Hamas wants  you to, or lose your accreditation with us and so possibly your job”. (Almost all of them make the wrong choice.)

– As Rehov goes on to demonstrate:

As the journalist went on to explain, “Palestinians have written the scenario of this prime-time piece. As the editors say, ‘If it bleeds, it leads’.” 

On the field, they are urged to send back a “juicy” story that might even make the front page. 

A reporter is a professional, making a living by writing up what he sees and hears … Reporters risk theirs lives.

In the West Bank, they are taken in hand by Palestinian “translators,” fixers trained to escort journalists the same way that in the Soviet era, sputniks, or “minders,” were trained to promote communism, and to make sure that the tourists and journalists saw only what the government wanted them to see, and, even more, that thy did not see what the government did not want them to see. … In the Middle East, reporters are threatened, except in Israel.

Their choice becomes a simple one: promote the Palestinian point of view (or whichever), or stop working in the West Bank (or wherever).

Rehov himself was offered a lucrative opportunity by a Palestinian to get world attention by filming a dead child whom he would have to say was “killed by an Israeli soldier”.

When making one of my documentaries, the Palestinian who was leading my crew offered me a scoop. As I was French, he trusted me to be on the Palestinians’ side. “You know,” he said, “what pays well? When an Israeli soldier kills a child. Are you interested?” he continued. “We can arrange that. For $10,000, I can organize everything.” Was he talking of a staging, or the real killing of a child? I did not dare to ask. I still nurture hope, despite the facts, that people would not willingly sacrifice children just to promote a show.

Our guess? Had it been some other Western film-maker and the offer had been accepted, a child would have been killed in front of the camera by “an Israeli soldier”; the “Israeli soldier” would have been fake, but the killing of the child would have been real.

Too far-fetched? Beyond any human being’s capacity for evil? Not at all. Hamas is having hundreds of real children killed by real Israeli soldiers right now in order to have them photographed and shown in newspapers and on television and computer screens all over the world. For that and that only they are forcing their children to suffer and die.

Could anything be more immoral, more absolutely evil, than this: to insist, despite advance warnings, that civilians, including as many children as possible, stay in or on the building – a house, a school, a hospital – from which rockets are being launched, so that they will be killed and maimed and dismembered when the rocket base is struck, simply in order to exploit the moral sentiment of the Western world by showing it the wounded and the dead with help from complicit media? Children as theater props, bleeding and dead.

As Rehov says:

Everything in Palestinian society is designed to promote martyrdom.

In fact the Palestinians were created as a separate nation by the Arab states in order to be martyrs. That is their function in Arab and Islamic politics and international relations. That is why rich and powerful Arabs don’t help them. That is why their sympathizers in the UN and wherever else keep them dependent on aid.

The Palestinians have embraced that role. And they will go on martyring themselves as long as the West allows them to. And no longer.

Nelson Mandela’s party, the ANC, has been a front for the South African Communist Party ever since he became its leader and adopted terrorism as its tactic to gain power.

It has just won another election, and feeling secure, it is now planning to go all the way to turning South Africa into a Communist hell.

It will be worse for the majority black population than the old apartheid hell. It will be terrible for everyone except – as always in Communist countries – the ruling elite.

This is from the New American, by Alex Newman:

After another electoral victory in South Africa, the ruling African National Congress (ANC)-South African Communist Party (SACP) regime plans to pursue what it calls the “radical second phase” of its ongoing revolution. Among other elements, the SACP announced in a statement that the plot involves confiscating private property and businesses as part of “the strategic transformation of the ownership and control function of key commanding heights of the economy”. …

While the international and even domestic press has been virtually silent on the dangerous acceleration of “revolution” in South Africa, the Communist Party has been largely open about its scheming. In fact, earlier this month, the party’s Central Committee even published a statement entitled How the radical Second Phase must be pursued. The document outlined the communist agenda for South Africa and celebrated the party’s ongoing success in dismantling the remaining vestiges of South African liberty and markets.

“Long ignored as an irrelevant ‘scare story,’ the ‘Red danger’ [rooi gevaar in Afrikaans] is not just back — it is in control. It never disappeared,” explained Frans Cronje, chief of the [liberal] South African Institute of Race Relations (SAIRR). …The communists “sit quietly behind the throne, with enormous influence on the line of thought in the ANC,” Cronje continued in his Rapport column following the South African election. “Such influence also makes sense from a historical point of view, because the communists have long been serving as the generator of ideas in the ANC. This last year shows how huge this influence has become.”

Numerous examples of the SACP role in policy were cited by the SAIRR chief. Among them: proposals for even more draconian race-driven affirmative action, proposed jail sentences for violations of “Black Economic Empowerment” schemes, the cancelling of investment agreements with 15 Western countries, a plot to allow government to seize any commercial property without compensation, a ploy to force farmers to surrender 50 percent of their land, the proposed expropriation of parts of the private-security sector, the introduction of legislation to expropriate certain oil and gas investments, and more. …

Of course, as top Communist Party and ANC officials have admitted, the ANC — dominated for decades by the SACP and bankrolled by the Soviet Union and Western globalists — is and has been crucial to the whole communist “revolution” …  After the latest election … the SACP and its shadowy operations are becoming increasingly visible. …

The lies surrounding Mandela’s Communist Party affiliation have all crumbled since his death. Both the SACP and the ANC, for example, admitted in official statements after his death that the idolized revolutionary had in fact served on the Soviet-backed Communist Party’s decision-making Central Committee. More recently, the release of Mandela’s original autobiography — before it was sanitized by an operative currently working in the Obama administration — revealed the former president and ANC chief’s affinity for violence[and] communist terror. …

Today, the communists even openly boast of their success in seizing power. “The [Central Committee] noted the election of a significant number of SACP members to national and provincial legislatures, as well as the appointment of Central Committee members as Ministers and Deputy Ministers in national government,” the party bosses said in their public statement. “Other CC members have been appointed as MECs [Members of the Executive Council, or provincial cabinet] in provinces and as premier of the Eastern Cape province.” …

In its statement on the recent elections, where the SACP-dominated ANC again crushed its fractured opposition despite the ongoing implosion of South Africa, the Communist Party Central Committee said the time had come for the revolution to enter its next stage. “Let us now carry forward the momentum — from our election victory to a second radical phase of the national democratic revolution!” the SACP bosses said.

President Zuma, a “former” SACP member who has come under severe fire for corruption, rape, and regularly singing songs about exterminating white South Africans, appears to be fully on board with the communist plot to fundamentally transform the nation. As the SACP statement put it, the reelected South African ruler “unambiguously announced a radical new turn as the key priority of his second presidential term”.

The two-phase “revolutionary theory” in question can be traced back to Soviet thinking, experts point out. In South Africa, the first phase involved forcing the white-led “colonial” regime to surrender power so that communist operatives could be placed in charge of every level of governance. Communist powers and Western globalists played a key role in bringing that about. In the beginning, at least, communist theorists argued that a phase of “bourgeois democracy” had to be tolerated as part of the “national democratic revolution”.

“Democratic” in the Communist meaning of the word – ie. anti-democratic.

The “radical second phase” … calls for the creation of a full-blown socialist dictatorship to erect what the communist conspirators refer to as a “workers’ state”. After allowing elements of the market economy to build up communist might during phase one, the coming segment of the revolution aims to consolidate full control over industry, land, resources, government, capital, credit, and society itself. …

Boasting of its ongoing central planning schemes such as the “New Growth Path policy”, the “Industrial Policy Action Plan”,  and a gargantuan “infrastructure build” program, the SACP called for the acceleration and consolidation of “state-led initiatives”. It also demanded more “long-range planning, now institutionalized more firmly within government”,  a major focus on “skills training” to prepare South Africans for their centrally planned jobs, and the “more effective leveraging” of key state-owned “financial institutions”,  such as the Development Bank of Southern Africa.

Other “critical elements of a radical second phase” of its “National Democratic Revolution” include stepping up the nationalization of private property and non-government assets. The SACP demanded, for example, the “strategic transformation of the ownership and control function of key commanding heights of the economy; and accelerated land reform in both rural and urban areas, focused on food production and safety, sustainable livelihoods and integrated urbanization”. Already-terrorized farmers now literally have a target on their backs.

As they did in Zimbabwe. Once prosperous Southern Rhodesia. Now a miserably unfree and hungry country, reduced to abysmal poverty by the Maoist dictator and mass-murderer Robert Mugabe, who managed to inflate the currency to the second or third highest degree ever attained in any nation in recorded history.

If the SACP-ANC regime succeeds in its plans, South Africa will go the way of every other nation in history that has been enslaved under communist tyranny. Poverty will explode, freedom will vanish …

There has been little sign that the Western world cares very much. It cared (rightly) about apartheid oppression. Communism is no longer considered an evil by Western European governments, or by the present US administration. (Eastern Europeans, not long emerged from under the lash of Soviet Communism, know better.)

But South Africa is mineral rich. Johannesburg since its founding has been The City of Gold. Listen for the outcry from Western investors when all investment and private ownership is ended and wealth confiscated.

Two pictures this time pinched from PowerLine’s The Week in Pictures:

*

Into its socialist democracies, slowly dying out of indigenous populations, Europe has admitted hordes of its worst enemy.

None is yet ruled by them – as we think the United States is at present. (Fortunately the United States is much more robust – we dare to say virile – than decadent Europe. Here it is the ruling that is feeble.)

When all of Europe is governed by sharia law (and all European women ambulant black bags), it will be very bad for America.

We sorrow most for Britain which has long been the sanest, the soberest, the most reasonable of nations. Now the blood of native Britons, citizens of London, members of Her Majesty’s armed forces, stain its streets from time to time and ever more frequently, shed by the barbarian colonists of Islam. And every time distant Israel wages war on its perpetual barbarian attackers, the colonists of Britain turn out in force in the capital to yell hideous, vicious, racist hatred and calumny, in a quiet avenue lined with dignified embassies.

Douglas Murray, who always displays moral clarity, writes at Gatestone:

The barricades are up again outside the Israeli Embassy in London, as they are across many capitals of Europe. Given that even more rockets than “normal” have been raining down on Israel in recent days, any sane country would need further barricades outside the Israeli embassy in order to contain yet another demonstration of support for Israel. But no, another day in London and another Palestinian-ist and Socialist Worker party protest is going on against the Israeli state.

The protestors are not, of course, demonstrating because they especially care about the lives of the people of Gaza. If they cared about the lives of Palestinians – or the people of the region in general – they would have spent night after night outside the Syrian, Iraqi, Jordanian, Turkish, Egyptian and Saudi Arabian embassies, among others. …

I have watched them a bit in recent days, watched the contorted hatred on their faces as they scream at the embassy and then watched their friendly sociability as the headscarfed women are driven away by their menfolk, often with their children in tow – a family day outing in “diverse” modern London. Behind their smiles and the increasingly competent public relations that the pro-Hamas faction is managing in Britain, it is possible for some people to forget that what brings these people out is one simple thing: a hatred of the Jewish state and a desire to see it annihilated by the terrorists of Hamas or anyone else at hand.

There are those who will say this is not a not-sufficiently-nuanced observation, that the motives of those protesting Israeli action are something other than a great hatred of Jews and the Jewish state. But if this were true, why would their posters say, “Stop the Holocaust in Gaza?” There is no “Holocaust” in Gaza. Anybody can see there is no similarity between the organized and systematic murder of 6 million Jews by the Nazis and the precision targeting of some Hamas rocket sites, some of which are deliberately hidden under hospitals, in the Gaza strip. Why do the protestors say “Holocaust” then? They know that this way they will hurt Jews as deeply as possible. By using the term “Holocaust” for this, they will either give the impression that the Holocaust was a small and minimal thing in the history of war – such as the confrontation between Hamas and Israel currently is – or else that the Israelis are, in their view, currently carrying out precisely the same barbarism which made the creation of the state of Israel such an added necessity for Jews in the 1940s, and that by supposedly becoming the Nazis they are meant to abhor, the Jews have forfeited any right to be regarded as part of acceptable humankind.

Either way, these protestors clearly mean to harm, not to help. But their presence – and the growing manner in which they are trying to wake up a far-away country to the actions of Israel, and condemn them as they would condemn Nazism – displays a trend worth dwelling on.

Israel has been through an exchange like this with Gaza every couple of years since Condoleezza Rice had the brilliant idea of pushing for elections in Gaza and allowing Hamas to finish with guns what they had failed to achieve at the ballot box. In the wider world’s response – as well as the facts in the ground in Israel – certain trends can now be spotted. One is that, since the 2006 war in Lebanon, protests against Israel in cities such as London have increased in number and vitriol year on year. This is not because the confrontations between Israel and her enemies during this period are getting larger. On the contrary, no exchange since 2006 has been anything in size like the war which had to be engaged in then. Each time, however, despite the actual conflict diminishing, the protests in London and other capitals in Europe have grown.

So how can one account for this? One reason, simply put, is that you cannot have a country in which the Muslim population doubles each decade (as in Britain) and radical Islamist groups teach young Muslims to make the Israel-Palestine issue their prime concern, and expect the result to have no impact.

The young men and women who pack their banners back in the car after a good day’s shouting at the Israeli embassy may or may not have British citizenship, yet it is hard to say that they are British in any recognizable sense of the term. If they were, they might think that a simple sense of fair play, among other things, ought to dictate that a country being bombarded with missiles on a daily basis should, every now and then, have the right to respond by hitting the sites from which those missiles are fired as well as at the people who order the launchers to let loose.

Israel, one can probably say with some confidence, can very well look after itself. Like everyone else who has spent time in the country, and admires and even loves it, I worry for it, but I can think of no nation on earth that is better equipped or better motivated to look after itself and its people. So when I see these young protestors in London, protesting against Israel, I do not worry for the country they are shouting against. They cannot touch her. But I worry for my country — Britain.

It is a country that is finding it so difficult to integrate the millions of Muslims who have come here that (in a figure that ought to be better known) there are now at least twice as many young British Muslims who have gone to Syria to fight alongside ISIS and other such groups than there are Muslims fighting for Queen and country here in the British armed forces.

By any standards, this is a symptom of a disastrous immigration and integration problem. The people shouting outside the Israeli embassy – the knackered and foolish old minority of Trots aside – can do Israel no harm. But they can do great harm to the country they are in.

Europe’s Israel-haters are no real problem for Israel, but they are the greatest possible problem for Europe.

Now for a look at the thoughts of a leftist intellectual.

Hold your nose. It’s a junk-pile of sentimentality, self-congratulation, pious do-goodery, elitist classical allusion, and heavy emotion.

They are the thoughts of Joe Klein, writing at Time online. He is criticizing President Obama for not doing his job of governing. But would the way Klein thinks that job should be done be any improvement on Obama’s doing nothing?

Klein starts by saying:

It’s time to stop running away from the nation’s troubles.

He means that’s what President Obama should do – stop running away. He doesn’t go so far as to say that Obama had a hand in causing the troubles.

The trouble he turns to is the case of the child immigrants streaming illegally into the US from Central America. He calls them “refugees”. He paints a touching scene of what’s going on at the border.

A woman named Libby Casanova brings her four children to volunteer every day. She is a pathologist in the real world but does intake at the center; she’s the first person the refugees encounter. “Many of them start to cry when they hear the applause,” she says. “They are so grateful.”

What applause? Who are they who applaud Lily Casanova and her four children when they arrive daily to tend to the “refugees”?*

In Klein’s mind – and probably  in the mind of the charitable mother-of-four – the “refugees” are humble petitioners, overflowing with gratitude to their benefactors. It must make Klein feel good by proxy.

Never mind who applauds. Get the picture as Joe Klein sees it and would have his readers see it:

Casanova brought her children on the first day so they could see that not everyone was as fortunate as they are – and the kids insisted on coming back and volunteering every day.

Rosy-faced little Christian saints. Christian? Yes, a nun pops into the picture:

“This place is making the entire community stronger,” Sister Norma says. And there is an infectious spiritual joy in the air. As Sister Norma says, “Jesus did not say, ‘I was hungry and you asked for my papers.’ “

Pause to overcome nausea. Then on:

Barack Obama should see the Catholic Charities mission in McAllen. He should also have a town meeting with the Tea Party nativists who are so angry and threatened by the rush of refugees – 43,933 unaccompanied children alone since October – who began to appear from Honduras, El Salvador and Guatemala.

And here comes more criticism of Obama:

His job, after all, is to rise above the rancor and, well, lead. You don’t do this by making a speech to a favored audience. You do it by taking action, setting a personal example. All sorts of Protestant congregations are sending volunteers to Sacred Heart – perhaps he could encourage a Tea Party group to do the same. The President has gone to the scene of other human tragedies. He has acknowledged the suffering personally in the past.

What scenes of human tragedy has he gone to? Whose suffering has he acknowledged? Not the choking to death of Ambassador Chris Stevens. Osama bin Laden’s perhaps?

But not now, and you have to wonder why.

True political courage is near extinct. I saw the real thing for the first time on the night of April 4, 1968, when riots broke out across the country after the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. Senator Robert Kennedy decided to go into the heart of the Indianapolis ghetto – he was running for President at the time – and talk to the people. His aides and the local police pleaded with him not to do it. He was putting his life in danger, but he believed he had a responsibility to show up. He spoke for only five minutes, without a text – you can watch it on YouTube – and he calmed the crowd by quoting Aeschylus about the experience of excruciating pain that leads to deeper wisdom. Indianapolis was one of the few major cities that remained quiet that night.

There’s a lesson for us all. To calm a seething mob, quote Aeschylus at it. Calms it in minutes. 

Nowadays politicians are swaddled by their media consultants, who determine whether it is “safe” to be “courageous”. But acts of courage don’t come with a money-back guarantee. They are courageous because they’re potentially dangerous or, more likely, embarrassing. Courage’s reward comes subtly, in the form of trust as the public learns that a politician is willing to take risks to tell the truth. Obama is currently wandering about the country, trying to meet average people, but the choreography is more stringent than the Bolshoi’s. He said he didn’t want to go to the border because it would only be a “photo op” … on the same day his office published a photo of the President and Colorado Governor John Hickenlooper shooting pool. Who choreographed that? …

The last bit makes sense. Why is a photo of the President playing pool okay, but one of him looking into smelly warehouses where heaps of diseased teens are awaiting charity from church or state not okay?

These are precisely the sort of things that Obama doesn’t seem to do anymore. There has been a skein of stories indicating he’s thrown in the towel. He’s so tired of head-banging with Republicans that he has taken refuge in late-night dinners with celebrities and intellectuals.

“Refuge in late-night dinners with celebrities and intellectuals”? Refuge from Republicans! Phew! Ya gotta feel for the guy! He’s a refugee too. Perhaps Lily Casanova and her rosy kids could visit him and cast their love-light upon him. And Sister Norma. And delegates from Protestant congregations.

Robert Kennedy did a lot of that too. But Kennedy never gave the impression that politics was distasteful, beneath him, as Obama too frequently does. Kennedy was all about passion; Obama seems all about decorum.

We haven’t noticed the decorum. We think decorum might be quite a good thing in a president. Klein doesn’t. He prefers and recommends passion.

He needs to go to the border – on a lot of issues. If he’s going to accomplish anything in the last two years of his presidency, he’s going to have to change his style, which will be near impossible for a man as entrenched behind his flacks-in-jackets as the President is. He’s right about photo ops. Enough already. But there are other “ops” – study ops, passion ops, conversation ops. He needs to do something dramatic to win back the country.

Oh no! Please not “something dramatic”! No more floodlit speeches among fake temple columns. No more apologizing to Islam from a platform in Cairo. No more healing the planet, calming the seas, walking on water! Let him sleep. Let him play pool. And golf. Let him dine with celebrities and intellectuals deep into the small hours of the morning. Wish only that the remaining two and a half years of his presidency pass without the entire globe going up in flames while he dines and plays.

* Apparently “the entire staff” of the “processing center on the grounds of the Sacred Heart Church” applaud each “family” as it arrives. We missed that in his second paragraph. Because we didn’t read it. It was a tough read and we shirked some parts of it.