Bashar al-Assad continues to slaughter his own people — nearly 10,000 over the past year — and the Muslim Brotherhood leaders of the Syrian opposition undoubtedly would slaughter Assad’s Alawite coreligionists were they to take power. There are at least 2,000 dead and 22,000 injured in little Yemen during the past two years. All of this pales next to what is likely to come in Egypt, as the military and the Islamists fight for power.

These are quotations from an enlightening article on the “Arab Spring”  by David Goldman, aka Spengler. Read all of it here.

The Muslim Brotherhood is in the position of the Bolsheviks in October 1917, taking power at street level by creating popular committees to “combat speculators,” that is, ration food and fuel. No one should underestimate the Muslim Brotherhood. It withstood sixty years of persecution by successive military regimes. And it understands Egypt’s predicament far better than the Western conservatives who saw the Arab Spring as the harbinger of democracy in the region. The Brotherhood, on the contrary, knows that Islam is fragile, that the Muslim world is fighting a desperate rearguard battle for its existence against the encroachment of Western culture and economic globalization, and that time is running out.

An extremely interesting and important point. We too have observed that Islam is fighting for its survival in a world that long since outstripped its Dark Age ideology, but we had not thought of it as fragile.

He substantiates his assertions, and marks how Obama fails to understand the nature of what he’s supporting with his pro-Islam policies:

Why am I so sure of this? Apart from the fact that its leaders have been saying so since Sayyid Qutb in the 1950s, the Muslim Brotherhood’s English-language website has posted two of my essays on the topic, one on the impending demographic and economic collapse of Muslim countries, and another on the Obama administration’s stupidity, concluding (in June 2009): “For his trouble, Obama will get more bloodshed in Pakistan, more megalomania from Iran, more triumphalism from the Palestinians, and less control over Iraq and Afghanistan. Of all the available bad choices, Obama has taken the worst. It is hard to imagine any consequence except a steep diminution of American influence.” You can read my work on the Brothers’ website (but not at the Weekly Standard, Commentary, or Fox News, where promoting Muslim democracy remains the mantra). From this I conclude that the Muslim Brotherhood is better informed than the Weekly Standard, et. al.

The most miserable people in the world, though, are the liberals.

He means, surely, the most misery-causing; liberals are all too pleased with themselves.

Liberalism boils down to the assertion that clever governments can save people from themselves. Palestine was supposed to have been the test case, where enlightened liberals would save people from their proclivity towards tribal hatred. Not only has it turned out badly for the Palestinians as such, but for the Arab world that has collapsed around them.

Then he declares what US policy towards the Arab world should be, and his idea gives us that frisson of pleasure which comes with hearing a statement that is entirely unexpected but instantly recognizable as right:

What should the United States do about it? The answer is: Make things worse.

If the Brothers are taking power in Egypt because the military can’t rule, we should undertake to make it impossible for the Brothers to rule. The human cost of such a policy will be horrific, and I use the word advisedly. It was a catastrophic mistake to help overthrow Mubarak. The consequences of that mistake are that no Egyptian officer will stand up against the Islamists for very long, because the U.S. cannot be trusted as an ally. That applies elsewhere. Two years ago, America might have thrown its weight behind pro-democracy forces in Iran. Now it is simply too dangerous to bet on regime change. The most prudent course of action is to disable the regime, even though the human consequences for the Iranians will be horrific.

We are not particularly good at this kind of stance. It does not square with the inherent benevolence and naivete of our national character. But we are being pushed into this kind of policy, like it or not, just as the Muslim Brotherhood is being pushed into a Leninist dual power exercise by the collapse of the Egyptian economy. The consequences will be tragic, to be sure; our job is to make sure that the tragedy happens to somebody else.

Shocking? Maybe – but that is the way leaders of free nations ought to think.

What may be virtues  in individuals – generosity, compassion, charitableness, self-denial – are, unequivocally, vices in a government. A government that is generous and charitable with the money that is not its own is cheating the people who’ve made it. A government cannot feel compassion, it has no conscience. A government has no “self” to deny. The government of a free people is an agency trusted by the people to protect their liberty, not to protect other peoples from their own rotten governments.

We vehemently agree with every point Mark Steyn makes in his latest column, on how America’s longest war will have effected nothing in Afghanistan, but may have weakened America.

It really must be read in full. Perhaps more than once, both for what it says and also for how it is said. Dreadful as the truths are that it tells, the way they’re told is a pleasure.

Here are parts of it:

U.S. Air Force Lt. Col. John Loftis, 44, and Army Maj. Robert Marchanti II, 48, lost their lives not on some mission out on the far horizon in wild tribal lands in the dead of night but in the offices of the Afghan Interior Ministry. In a “secure room” that required a numerical code to access. Gunned down by an Afghan “intelligence officer.” Who then departed the scene of the crime unimpeded by any of his colleagues.

Some news outlets reported the event as a “security breach.” But what exactly was breached? The murderer was by all accounts an employee of the Afghan government, with legitimate rights of access to the building and its secure room, and “liaising” with his U.S. advisers and “mentors” was part of the job. In Afghanistan, foreigners are dying at the hands of the locals who know them best. The Afghans trained by Westerners, paid by Westerners and befriended by Westerners are the ones who have the easiest opportunity to kill them. It is sufficiently non-unusual that the Pentagon, as is the wont with bureaucracies, already has a term for it: “green-on-blue incidents,” in which a uniformed Afghan turns his gun on his Western “allies.”

So we have a convenient label for what’s happening; what we don’t have is a strategy to stop it – other than more money, more “hearts and minds” for people who seem notably lacking in both, and more bulk orders of the bestselling book “Three Cups Of Tea,” an Oprahfied heap of drivel extensively exposed as an utter fraud but which a delusional Washington insists on sticking in the kit bag of its Afghan-bound officer class. …

In the past couple of months, two prominent politicians of different nations visiting their troops on the ground have used the same image to me for Western military bases: crusader forts. Behind the fortifications, a mini-West has been built in a cheerless land: There are Coke machines and Krispy Kreme doughnuts. Safely back within the gates, a man can climb out of the full RoboCop and stop pretending he enjoys three cups of tea with the duplicitous warlords, drug barons and pederasts who pass for Afghanistan’s ruling class. …

The last crusader fort I visited was Kerak Castle in Jordan a few years ago. It was built in the 1140s, and still impresses today. I doubt there will be any remains of our latter-day fortresses a millennium hence. Six weeks after the last NATO soldier leaves Afghanistan, it will be as if we were never there. Before the election in 2010, the New York Post carried a picture of women registering to vote in Herat, all in identical top-to-toe bright blue burkas, just as they would have looked on Sept. 10, 2001. We came, we saw, we left no trace. America’s longest war will leave nothing behind.

They can breach our security, but we cannot breach theirs – the vast impregnable psychological fortress in which what passes for the Pushtun mind resides. Someone accidentally burned a Quran your pals had already defaced with covert messages? Die, die, foreigners! The president of the United States issues a groveling and characteristically cluelessapology for it? Die, die, foreigners! The American friend who has trained you and hired you and paid you has arrived for a meeting? Die, die, foreigners! And those are the Afghans who know us best. …

The Rumsfeld strategy that toppled the Taliban over a decade ago was brilliant and innovative: special forces on horseback using GPS to call in unmanned drones. They will analyze it in staff colleges around the world for decades.

Rumsfeld’s strategy worked, and that at least is a cause for American pride. It’s what came afterwards, the turning of the war into pointless social work, that is cause for American regret.

But what we ought to be analyzing instead is the sad, aimless, bloated, arthritic, transnationalized folly of what followed.

The United States is an historical anomaly: the nonimperial superpower. Colonialism is not in its DNA, and in some ways that speaks well for it, and in other ways, in a hostile and fast-changing world of predators and opportunists, it does not. …

The Hindu Kush is not worth the bones of a single Pennsylvanian grenadier, or “training officer.” [But] too much about the Afghan campaign is too emblematic. As much as any bailed-out corporation, the U.S. is “too big to fail”: In Afghanistan as in the stimulus, it was money no object. The combined Western military/aid presence accounts for 98 percent of that benighted land’s GDP.

We carpet-bomb with dollar bills; we have the most advanced technology known to man; we have everything except strategic purpose.

That “crusader fort” image has a broader symbolism. The post-American world is arising before our eyes. According to the IMF, China will become the dominant economic power by 2016. Putin is on course to return to the Kremlin corner office. In Tehran, the mullahs nuclearize with impunity. New spheres of influence are being established in North Africa, in Central Europe, in the once-reliably “American lake” of the Pacific.

Can America itself be a crusader fort? A fortress secure behind the interminable checkpoints of Code Orange TSA bureaucratic torpor while beyond the moat the mob jeers “Die, die, foreigners”? Or, in the end, will it prove as effortlessly penetrable as the “secure room” of the Afghan Interior Ministry?

A victory over jihadists is scored in Britain by  StandforPeace, the anti-terrorist organization of Muslims and Jews which studies and supplies information on the Middle East.

When they heard that Human Appeal International (HAI), a self-styled “charity” which they knew to have links to terrorist groups, was planning to use the Parrs Wood state school in Manchester as a venue for fundraising, they determined not to let it happen.

They knew that in February 2005 Hamas’s website had openly announced the receipt of funds from HAI.

HAI advertises its activity as  “The relief of poverty and sickness and the protection of good health and the advancement of education of those in need or from impoverished countries overseas and in particular Sudan, Mauritania, Ethiopia, Lebanon and Afghanistan.” For this they asked to be granted the use of Parrs Wood. The school authorities believed them, and took no trouble to find out anything more. (What world do educators live in?) At first they were unresponsive when StandforPeace contacted them.

But then StandforPeace also contacted the Department of Education and suggested they check their list of terrorist organizations. HAI was on the list because the US government had found it has links to Hamas and the Saudi-based Muwafaq, an Al-Qaeda front group. In a 1996 CIA report it was named as one of a number of Islamic “charities” funding terrorist organizations. The FBI in 2003 outlined a “close relationship between Human Appeal International and Hamas;” and the FBI further reported that HAI was a major recipient of funding from the convicted Specially Designated Global Terrorist (SDGT) Entity, the Holy Land Foundation.

So the  Department of Education persuaded Parrs Wood to “do further research” – ie to use the information the department was sending them. The result is that HAI has been banned from using the Manchester school.

Preventing Violent Extremism (PVE) officers at the Department of Education concluded: “Since the concerns about HAI have come to light, Parrs Wood has performed further research… As a result they have decided not to allow HAI or other charities which appear to have links to political organisations to use the school in future.”

Hasan Afzal, Director of StandforPeace, commented, “We are pleased to see the Department of Education take action over Human Appeal International. Schools are ripe targets for organisations such as HAI, and it is imperative that all educational institutions are vigilant about the company they keep.”

He continued, “Organisations such as Human Appeal have no business being on a school campus. Elsewhere, HAI have no shame in running events with the hate speaker Haitham al-Haddad, who openly preaches hatred against Jews, Christians and homosexuals. Such activity is only a web-search away. One would have thought the school would have practised better due diligence.”

StandforPeace can and will use this case as a precedent for stopping Human Appeal International using other state schools as fundraising venues in the future.

Post Script: HAI is supported by the Palestinian Forum of Britain (PFB) which has fund-raised for them. PFB is one of the organizations involved in the “Global March to Jerusalem’” planned to take place on March 30th, 2012. Various other Muslim Brotherhood fronts will also be participating.

In August, I went on a dismounted patrol with troops in the Panjwai district of Kandahar province. Several troops from the unit had recently been killed in action, one of whom was a very popular and experienced soldier. One of the unit’s senior officers rhetorically asked me, “How do I look these men in the eye and ask them to go out day after day on these missions? What’s harder: How do I look [my soldier’s] wife in the eye when I get back and tell her that her husband died for something meaningful? How do I do that?”

One of the senior enlisted leaders added, “Guys are saying, ‘I hope I live so I can at least get home to R&R leave before I get it,’ or ‘I hope I only lose a foot.’ Sometimes they even say which limb it might be: ‘Maybe it’ll only be my left foot.’ They don’t have a lot of confidence that the leadership two levels up really understands what they’re living here, what the situation really is.”

These are extracts from an important article in the Armed Forces Journal by Lt. Col. Daniel L. Davis.

I spent last year in Afghanistan, visiting and talking with U.S. troops and their Afghan partners. My duties with the Army’s Rapid Equipping Force took me into every significant area where our soldiers engage the enemy. …

What I saw bore no resemblance to rosy official statements by U.S. military leaders about conditions on the ground. …

I saw the incredible difficulties any military force would have to pacify even a single area of any of those provinces; I heard many stories of how insurgents controlled virtually every piece of land beyond eyeshot of a U.S. or International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) base.

I saw little to no evidence the local governments were able to provide for the basic needs of the people….

Much of what I saw during my deployment, let alone read or wrote in official reports, I can’t talk about; the information remains classified. But I can say that such reports — mine and others’ — serve to illuminate the gulf between conditions on the ground and official statements of progress. …

Afghans ostensibly in alliance with the international military forces against the Taliban are not just failing to win their putative war, but failing even to fight it.

From time to time, I observed Afghan Security forces collude with the insurgency. …

On a patrol to the northernmost U.S. position in eastern Afghanistan, we arrived at an Afghan National Police (ANP) station that had reported being attacked by the Taliban 2½ hours earlier. …

I asked the police captain where the attack had originated, and he pointed to the side of a nearby mountain.

“What are your normal procedures in situations like these?” I asked. “Do you form up a squad and go after them? Do you periodically send out harassing patrols? What do you do?”

As the interpreter conveyed my questions, the captain’s head wheeled around, looking first at the interpreter and turning to me with an incredulous expression. Then he laughed.

“No! We don’t go after them,” he said. “That would be dangerous!”

According to the cavalry troopers, the Afghan policemen rarely leave the cover of the checkpoints. In that part of the province, the Taliban literally run free.

The Afghan forces generally are hopelessly unreliable and incompetent.

To a man, the U.S. officers [in  a unit stationed in the Zharay district] told me they had nothing but contempt for the Afghan troops in their area …

Some of the information about how the war is being conducted seems not just senseless but crazily counter-productive, making a mockery of the entire war.

When a Taliban member is arrested, he is soon released with no action taken against him. …

In all of the places I visited, the tactical situation was bad to abysmal. If the events I have described — and many, many more I could mention — had been in the first year of war, or even the third or fourth, one might be willing to believe that Afghanistan was just a hard fight, and we should stick it out. Yet these incidents all happened in the 10th year of war.

As the numbers depicting casualties and enemy violence indicate the absence of progress, so too did my observations of the tactical situation all over Afghanistan.

He stresses that the US military command has a policy of deliberately misleading the American public.

I’m hardly the only one who has noted the discrepancy between official statements and the truth on the ground. A January 2011 report by the Afghan NGO Security Office noted that public statements made by U.S. and ISAF leaders at the end of 2010 were “sharply divergent from IMF, [international military forces, NGO-speak for ISAF] ‘strategic communication’ messages suggesting improvements. We encourage [nongovernment organization personnel] to recognize that no matter how authoritative the source of any such claim, messages of this nature are solely intended to influence American and European public opinion ahead of the withdrawal, and are not intended to offer an accurate portrayal of the situation for those who live and work here.”

The following month, Anthony Cordesman, on behalf of the Center for Strategic and International Studies, wrote that ISAF and the U.S. leadership failed to report accurately on the reality of the situation in Afghanistan.

“Since June 2010, the unclassified reporting the U.S. does provide has steadily shrunk in content, effectively ‘spinning’ the road to victory by eliminating content that illustrates the full scale of the challenges ahead,” Cordesman wrote. “They also, however, were driven by political decisions to ignore or understate Taliban and insurgent gains from 2002 to 2009, to ignore the problems caused by weak and corrupt Afghan governance, to understate the risks posed by sanctuaries in Pakistan, and to ‘spin’ the value of tactical ISAF victories while ignoring the steady growth of Taliban influence and control.”

These are lies that kill.

How many more men must die in support of a mission that is not succeeding and behind an array of more than seven years of optimistic statements by U.S. senior leaders in Afghanistan? …

If Americans were able to compare the public statements many of our leaders have made with classified data, this credibility gulf would be immediately observable. …  I am legally able to share [classified ,aterial] with members of Congress. I have accordingly provided a much fuller accounting in a classified report to several members of Congress, both Democrats and Republicans, senators and House members. …

When it comes to deciding what matters are worth plunging our nation into war and which are not, our senior leaders owe it to the nation and to the uniformed members to be candid … in telling them what’s at stake and how expensive potential success is likely to be. U.S. citizens and their elected representatives can decide if the risk to blood and treasure is worth it.

Likewise when having to decide whether to continue a war, alter its aims or to close off a campaign that cannot be won at an acceptable price …

Or won at all, ever, at any price, as in Afghanistan –

… our senior leaders have an obligation to tell Congress and American people the unvarnished truth and let the people decide what course of action to choose. That is the very essence of civilian control of the military. The American people deserve better than what they’ve gotten from their senior uniformed leaders over the last number of years. Simply telling the truth would be a good start.

Adolf Hitler did not seize power in Germany; he was given power by democratic process, and then he established his dictatorship.

Hamas came to power in the Gaza strip through democratic election. It is unlikely to allow another election.

In Tunisia and Egypt, democratic elections have brought parties to power which intend to bring their countries under sharia law.

Elections in Iraq and Afghanistan will not give Iraqis or Afghans freedom under the rule of law. The majority of Iraqi and Afghan voters do not want freedom under the rule of law.  To call either country a democracy in the Western meaning of the word is to affect deliberate blindness.

Daniel Greenfield writes at Front Page:

The advocates of democracy have been unable to admit that Hamas, Al-Nahda, the Brotherhood and the Salafis are the people’s choice because they represent their values and ideals. The Salafist victory in Egypt … was not based on any external factor or political cunning, but on their core message of hate for non-Muslims, repression for women and …  tyranny for Egypt.

Democracy is not in itself a prescription for good government. The very fact that it expresses the will of the majority of a nation is precisely why it is dangerous.

The trouble with democracy is that it is representative. It is representative in Egypt, in Tunisia, in the West Bank, in Iraq and beyond. …

Democracy has not worked all that well throughout the rest of the world either.

After all the efforts made to keep the Sandanistas out of power, El Salvador’s supreme leftist pedophile Daniel Ortega is back in the Presidential Palace in Nicaragua. …

Twenty years after the fall of the Soviet Union, the second largest party in the Russian Duma is the Communist Party. Its actual vote totals are probably higher due to the fraudulent nature of the elections under the control of Putin’s United Russia Party. This roster is rounded out by the Liberal Democratic Party, which is run by a career lunatic who has proposed conquering Alaska, dumping nuclear waste on nearby nations and rounding up the Jews into camps. If Putin’s power base finally collapses, then the party best positioned to pick up the pieces is the Communist Party. It’s not at all inconceivable that within the decade we will see the return of a Communist Russia. …

Democracy is not a universal solvent. It is not a guarantor of human rights or the road to a free and enlightened society. …

A strong showing at the ballot box eliminates the need to gather a mob. …

In Turkey the electoral victories of the AKP gave [it] the power to radically transform the country. Given another decade the elections in Turkey will be as much of a formality as they are in Iran. The Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt will follow the same program, bringing down the military leadership as soon as they can to the applause of the European Union and the United States who care more about the appearance of democracy than the reality of the totalitarian state they are endorsing.

When Western powers facilitate – in Iraq and Afghanistan compel  – democratic elections, they only encourage a charade; they play along with the pretense that universal suffrage will guarantee freedom. But most Russians and Nicaraguans don’t want freedom. The men of Iraq and Afghanistan, Egypt, Tunisia, Libya, do not want freedom; their religion negates freedom, commands submission to an ancient set of oppressive laws.

Democratic elections are only as good as the people who take part in them. When the people want the Koran or Das Kapital, then they will get it.

Such elections measure the character of a people …  The Egyptians failed their election test [of character] … As did the Tunisians and the Arabs in the West Bank and Gaza.

To the advocates of universal democracy such failures are only a temporary manifestation that can be reversed with enough funding for social NGO’s and political outreach. But the reality is that they represent a deeper moral and spiritual crisis that we ignore at our own risk.

Democracy worked for the West, as the least bad system of government yet devised, because the West wanted freedom under the rule of law. Nations get the government they deserve. Or, as Daniel Greenfield puts it, “Governments reflect the character of the people they rule over.”

The “democratic” elections that have taken place in Islamic states prove it.

Democracy is allowing the Muslim world to express its truest and deepest self. … By helping to liberate them we have set their worst selves free.

The video of this Afghan’s head being sawn off can be seen here.

Steel yourself to watch it.

Bearing that lurid demonstration in mind, now read this from a report about beheadings in Somalia last July:

Islamic extremists have beheaded two young boys in Somalia because their Christian father refused to divulge information about a church leader, and the killers are searching Kenya’s refugee camps to do the same to the boys’ father. …

Militants from the Islamic extremist group al Shabaab entered Yonday village on Feb. 20, went to Yusuf’s house and interrogated him on his relationship with Mberwa, leader of a fellowship of 66 Somali Christians who meet at his home at an undisclosed city. Yusuf told them he knew nothing of Mberwa and had no connection with him. The Islamic extremists left but said they would return the next day.

“Immediately when they left, I decided to flee my house for Kismayo, for I knew for sure they were determined to come back,” Yusuf said.

At noon the next day, as his wife was making lunch for their children in Yonday, the al Shabaab militants showed up. Batula Ali Arbow, Yusuf’s wife, recalled that their youngest son, Innocent, told the group that their father had left the house the previous day.

The Islamic extremists ordered her to stop what she was doing and took hold of three of her sons – 11-year-old Abdi Rahaman Musa Yusuf, 12-year-old Hussein Musa Yusuf and Abdulahi Musa Yusuf, 7. Some neighbors came and pleaded with the militants not to harm the three boys. Their pleas landed on deaf ears.

“I watched my three boys dragged away helplessly as my youngest boy was crying,” Arbow said. “I knew they were going to be slaughtered. Just after some few minutes I heard a wailing cry from Abdulahi running towards the house. I could not hold my breath. I only woke up with all my clothes wet. I knew I had fainted due to the shock.”

With the help of neighbors, Arbow said, she buried the bodies of her two children the following day.

And now another report from Somalia, dated yesterday:

According to the residents, al Shabaab fighters on Friday beheaded the three Somali teenagers in southern Somalia town of Masagway located in between Galgudud and Lower Shabelle region for suspicion of being spying for the Transitional Federal Government.

The map shows the spread of Islam round the tiny state of Israel – which President Obama wants to make even smaller – as it is now.

In the latter half of this century the greater part of Europe, if present demographic trends continue, will also be predominantly Muslim and governed by sharia law.

Think of it: a vast expanse of Asia from Bangladesh to Turkey, from Turkey across Europe to Britain, from north Africa to the top of Norway, all Islamic lands, all governed by sharia.

And no, it is not likely to be a “milder form” of Islam in Europe than in Afghanistan, Iran, or Saudi Arabia. There is only one Islam and it’s only name is Islam.

We take these extracts from an article, which needs to be read in full, by Andrew C. McCarthy at Family Security Matters. It is titled Islam is Islam:

Islam … is an entirely different way of looking at the world. We struggle with this truth, which defies our end-of-history smugness. …

So we set about remaking Islam in our own progressive image … We miniaturize the elements of the ummah (the notional global Muslim community) that refuse to go along with the program: They are assigned labels … Islamist, fundamentalist, Salafist, Wahhabist, radical, jihadist, extremist, militant, or, of course, “conservative” Muslims adhering to “political Islam.”

There is a “real Islam” – McCarthy’s “we” pretend – which is  a “religion of peace”. “The vast majority of Muslims,” it is said ad nauseam, “are peaceful and law-abiding”. Abiding by what law given a choice? It’s a question “we”  don’t want answered.

We consequently pretend that Muslims who accurately invoke Islamic scripture in the course of forcibly imposing the dictates of classical sharia — the Islamic legal and political system — are engaged in “anti-Islamic activity,” as Britain’s former home secretary Jacqui Smith memorably put it. When the ongoing Islamization campaign is advanced by violence, as inevitably happens, we absurdly insist that this aggression cannot have been ideologically driven, that surely some American policy or Israeli act of self-defense is to blame, as if these could possibly provide rationales for the murderous jihad waged by Boko Haram Muslims against Nigerian Christians and by Egyptian Muslims against the Copts, the persecution of the Ahmadi sect by Indonesian and Pakistani Muslims, or the internecine killing in Iraq of Sunnis by Shiites and vice versa — a tradition nearly as old as Islam itself — which has been predictably renewed upon the recent departure of American troops.

The main lesson of the Arab Spring ought to be that this remaking of Islam has happened only in our own minds, for our own consumption. The Muslims of the Middle East take no note of our reimagining of Islam, being, in the main, either hostile toward or oblivious to Western overtures. Muslims do not measure themselves against Western perceptions, although the shrewdest among them take note of our eagerly accommodating attitude when determining what tactics will best advance the cause.

That cause is nothing less than Islamic dominance.

‘The underlying problem for the West is not Islamic fundamentalism,” wrote Samuel Huntington. “It is Islam, a different civilization whose people are convinced of the superiority of their culture.”

Samuel Huntington famously called the conflict between the West and Islam “a clash of civilizations”. But it’s better described as a clash of Western civilization with Islamic barbarism.

Not convinced merely in the passive sense of assuming that they will triumph in the end, Muslim leaders are galvanized by what they take to be a divinely ordained mission of proselytism — and proselytism not limited to spiritual principles, but encompassing an all-purpose societal code prescribing rules for everything from warfare and finance to social interaction and personal hygiene. …

An all-purpose societal code. That is what sharia is.

Most Americans still do not know that hurriya, Arabic for “freedom,” connotes “perfect slavery” or absolute submission to Allah, very nearly the opposite of the Western concept. Even if we grant for argument’s sake the dubious proposition that all people crave freedom, Islam and the West have never agreed about what freedom means. …

The Muslim Brotherhood is the ummah’s most important organization, unabashedly proclaiming for nearly 90 years that “the Koran is our law and jihad is our way.”

Hamas, a terrorist organization, is its Palestinian branch, and leading Brotherhood figures do little to disguise their abhorrence of Israel and Western culture. …

[Yet] the Obama administration, European governments, and the Western media tirelessly repeated the mantra that the Brothers had been relegated to the sidelines. …  Surely the Tahrir throngs wanted self-determination, not sharia. Never you mind the fanatical chants of Allahu akbar! as the dictator fell. Never mind that Sheikh Qaradawi was promptly ushered into the square to deliver a fiery Friday sermon to a congregation of nearly a million Egyptians.

The Arab Spring is an unshackling of Islam, not an outbreak of fervor for freedom in the Western sense. Turkey’s third-term prime minister Recep Erdogan, a staunchBrotherhood ally who rejects the notion that there is a “moderate Islam” (“Islam is Islam, and that’s it,” he says), once declared that “democracy is a train where you can get off when you reach your destination.” The destination for Muslim supremacists is the implementation of sharia — the foundation of any Islamized society, and, eventually, of the reestablished caliphate. …

Led by the Muslim Brotherhood, Islamic parties have become expert at presenting themselves as moderates and telling the West what it wants to hear while they gradually ensnare societies in the sharia web, as slowly or quickly as conditions on the ground permit. They know that when the West says “democracy,” it means popular elections, not Western democratic culture. They know the West has so glorified these elections that the victors can steal them (Iran), refuse to relinquish power when later they lose (Iraq), or decline to hold further elections (Gaza) without forfeiting their legitimacy. …

Once in power, they are sure to make virulent anti-Americanism their official policy and to contribute materially to the pan-Islamic goal of destroying Israel. …

We should not be under any illusions about why things are shaking out this way. The Arab Spring has not been hijacked any more than Islam was hijacked by the suicide terrorists of 9/11. Islam is ascendant because that is the way Muslims of the Middle East want it.

We are of course against the deliberate infliction of physical pain. But the infliction of humiliation, especially on enemies who hold what they call honor as their highest value, seems to us a very good way of punishing them or, used as a threat, of eliciting information from them. Which is why we do not condemn the humiliating treatment some Muslim terrorists famously received at the hands of American soldiers at Abu Ghraib.

Now the International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) – and the bien pensant throughout the West –  are claiming to be shocked by a video of some marines pissing on Afghan corpses. Comparisons are being made with Abu Ghraib. A criminal investigation is underway.

Since the Afghans are dead, they are not even being humiliated. The pissing merely relieved the feelings as well as the bladders of American soldiers. But by publicizing the picture, condemning the soldiers, launching criminal enquiries, the ISAF are choosing to feed propaganda fuel to the enemy.

President Karzai, he who wears literally the mantle of power in his hell-hole of a country, purses his mouth and blusters – frankly taking the piss out of the US and its allies:

“The government of Afghanistan is deeply disturbed by a video that shows American soldiers desecrating dead bodies of three Afghans. This act by American soldiers is simply inhuman and condemnable in the strongest possible terms. We expressly ask the U.S. government to urgently investigate the video and apply the most severe punishment to anyone found guilty in this crime.”

The enemy will only see self-castigation by the Western allies as proof of weakness. For them, war has to be ruthless. Muhammad and his followers slaughtered all the men of a tribe and enslaved the women and children, setting the god-authorized pattern for Muslims to follow forever. The desecration of enemy corpses is routine for jihadis.

And what else do they do? What do Afghans themselves do to their own people?

This is from the Telegraph:

“You must become so notorious for bad things that when you come into an area people will tremble in their sandals. Anyone can do beatings and starve people. I want your unit to find new ways of torture so terrible that the screams will frighten even crows from their nests and if the person survives he will never again have a night’s sleep.”

These were the instructions of the commandant of the Afghan secret police to his new recruits. For more than three years one of those recruits, Hafiz Sadiqulla Hassani, ruthlessly carried out his orders. But sickened by the atrocities that he was forced to commit, last week he defected to Pakistan, joining a growing number of Taliban officials who are escaping across the border.

In an exclusive interview with The Telegraph, he reveals for the first time the full horror of what has been happening in the name of religion in Afghanistan. …

He became a Taliban “volunteer”, assigned to the secret police. Many of his friends also joined up as land owners in Kandahar were threatened that they must either ally themselves with the Taliban or lose their property. Others were bribed to join with money given to the Taliban by drug smugglers, as Afghanistan became the world’s largest producer of heroin.

At first, Mr Hassani’s job was to patrol the streets at night looking for thieves and signs of subversion. However, as the Taliban leadership began issuing more and more extreme edicts, his duties changed.

Instead of just searching for criminals, the night patrols were instructed to seek out people watching videos, playing cards or, bizarrely, keeping caged birds. Men without long enough beards were to be arrested, as was any woman who dared venture outside her house. Even owning a kite became a criminal offence.

The state of terror spread by the Taliban was so pervasive that it began to seem as if the whole country was spying on each other. “As we drove around at night with our guns, local people would come to us and say there’s someone watching a video in this house or some men playing cards in that house,” he said.

“Basically any form of pleasure was outlawed,” Mr Hassani said, “and if we found people doing any of these things we would beat them with staves soaked in water – like a knife cutting through meat – until the room ran with their blood or their spines snapped. Then we would leave them with no food or water in rooms filled with insects until they died.

“We always tried to do different things: we would put some of them standing on their heads to sleep, hang others upside down with their legs tied together. We would stretch the arms out of others and nail them to posts like crucifixions.

“Sometimes we would throw bread to them to make them crawl. Then I would write the report to our commanding officer so he could see how innovative we had been.” …

After Kandahar, he was put in charge of secret police cells in the towns of Ghazni and then Herat, a beautiful Persian city in western Afghanistan that had suffered greatly during the Soviet occupation and had been one of the last places to fall to the Taliban.

Herat had always been a relatively liberal place where women would dance at weddings and many girls went to school – but the Taliban were determined to put an end to all that. Mr Hassani and his men were told to be particularly cruel to Heratis.

It was his experience of that cruelty that made Mr Hassani determined to let the world know what was happening in Afghanistan. “Maybe the worst thing I saw,” he said, “was a man beaten so much, such a pulp of skin and blood, that it was impossible to tell whether he had clothes on or not. Every time he fell unconscious, we rubbed salt into his wounds to make him scream.

“Nowhere else in the world [is there] such barbarity and cruelty as in Afghanistan. At that time I swore an oath that I will devote myself to the Afghan people and telling the world what is happening.”

Before he could escape, however, because he comes from the same tribe, he spent time as a bodyguard for Mullah Omar, the reclusive spiritual leader of the Taliban.

“He’s medium height, slightly fat, with an artificial green eye which doesn’t move, and he would sit on a bed issuing instructions and giving people dollars from a tin trunk,” said Mr Hassani. “He doesn’t say much, which is just as well as he’s a very stupid man. He knows only how to write his name “Omar” and sign it.

“It is the first time in Afghanistan’s history that the lower classes are governing and by force. There are no educated people in this administration – they are all totally backward and illiterate. … I think many in the Taliban would like to escape. The country is starving and joining is the only way to get food and keep your land.”

This Hafiz Sadiqulla Hassani should not be let off his crimes simply because he piously promised himself to tell the world about them and has done so. Why isn’t he being tried, condemned, executed – and pissed on?

The Washington Post usefully informs us:

U.S. military law and the Geneva Conventions prohibit desecration, mishandling or exploitation of bodies of people killed in war.

Prohibit do they? To our own certain knowledge their prohibition has been about as useful as the Pope’s pudenda. (In Lebanon in 1982-1983, the corpses of men killed by the PLO had their genitals cut off and stuffed into their mouths, and no cry of “Foul!” went up from Geneva or anywhere else – JB.)

The human capacity for indignation is inadequate to react commensurately to the savagery of the murdering, torturing Afghans.

The best thing our soldiers can do is kill them. They should also, if they feel like it, piss on their corpses.

P.S. Seems the four marines didn’t actually piss at all.  (Hat-tip Indigo Red)

Obama has brought America to abject defeat.

He is entreating a vicious Muslim cleric, acclaimed as a spokesman for Islam, Yusuf al-Qaradawi, to negotiate with the Taliban for the United States’ terms of surrender.  

In choosing such an envoy, he is begging the savage Taliban to let the United States of America save face in a pretense of mutually desired peace-making.  

Andrew McCarthy writes at the National Review Online:

Al-Qaradawi is the most influential Sunni Islamist in the world, thanks to such ventures as his al-Jazeera TV program (Sharia and Life) …

In 2003, he issued a fatwa calling for the killing of American troops in Iraq. …[He champions] Hamas, mass-murder attacks, and suicide bombings… [urges]  the destruction of Israel, rebuking clerics who dare counsel against killing civilians. …

After thousands of young Americans have laid down their lives to protect the United States from jihadist terror, President Obama apparently seeks to end the war by asking Qaradawi, a jihad-stoking enemy of the United States, to help him strike a deal that will install our Taliban enemies as part of the sharia state we have been building in Afghanistan. …

The price tag will include the release of Taliban prisoners from Gitmo …

The administration will also agree to the lifting of U.N. sanctions against the Taliban, and recognition of the Taliban as a legitimate political party (yes, just like the Muslim Brotherhood!).

In return, the Taliban will pretend to forswear violence, to sever ties with al-Qaeda, and to cooperate with the rival Karzai regime.

It would mark one of the most shameful chapters in American history.

Correction: What the President of the United States has done and is doing to advance the Islamic jihad is the most shameful chapter in American history.

Daniel Greenfield writes at Canada Free Press:

The news that the Obama Administration has brought in genocidal Muslim Brotherhood honcho Yusuf Al-Qaradawi to discuss terms of surrender for the transfer of Afghanistan to the Taliban caps a year in which the Brotherhood and the Salafists are looking up carve up Egypt, the Islamists won Tunisia’s elections, Turkey’s Islamist AKP Party purged the last bastions of the secular opposition and Libya’s future as an Islamist state was secured by American, British and French jets and special forces. …

In 2010, the Taliban were still hiding in caves. In 2012 they are set to be in power from Tunisia to Afghanistan and from Egypt to Yemen. …

2011 will be remembered [as] a pivotal year in the rise of the next Caliphate. …

If [Obama] really had no interest in winning Afghanistan … why did we stay for so long and lose so many lives fighting a war that the White House had no intention of winning? The ugly conclusion that must be drawn from the timing of the Iraq and Afghanistan withdrawals is that the wars were being played out to draw down around the time of the next election.

We don’t believe that any sort of victory is now possible in Afghanistan. We argue that the US should have pulled out of Afghanistan after it whacked the Taliban out of power. Staying “to build democracy” was a stupid mistake. Withdrawal now should be carried out with serious warnings that if the Taliban come back to power they will be whacked again. But we agree with the writer’s point about the timing of withdrawal.

What that means is Obama sacrificed the thousands of Americans killed and wounded in the conflict as an election strategy. The idea that American soldiers were fighting and dying for no reason until the time when maximum political advantage could be gained from pulling them out is horrifying, it’s a crime beyond redemption, an act worse than treason — and yet there is no other rational conclusion to be drawn from the timetable.

Isn’t it treason itself? And what could be worse than that the leader of the United States should commit treason against his country?

If the Taliban were not our enemy …

– as unintelligent and ill-informed Vice-President Joe Biden recently said was the case –

… then the war should have ended shortly after the election. Instead Obama threw more soldiers into the mix while tying their hands with Rules of Engagement that prevented them from defending themselves or aggressively going after the Taliban. Casualties among US soldiers and Afghan civilians increased. … Now … we are negotiating a withdrawal.

There are only two possible explanations. Either we lost the war or Obama never intended to win it and was allowing the Taliban to murder American soldiers until the next election. If so we’re not just looking at a bad man at the teleprompter, we are looking into the face of an evil so amoral [immoral, we’d say – JB] that it defies description. …

But wait, there is more.

Iraq will likely fall to Iran in a bloody civil war, whether it will be parts of the country or the whole country depend on how much support we provide to the Kurds. Under the Obama Administration the level of support is likely to be none.

Once the Islamists firmly take power across North Africa they will begin squeezing the last states that have still not fallen. Last month the leader of the murderous Enhada Islamists who have taken power in Tunisia stopped by Algeria. Morocco has not yet come down, but at this rate it’s only a matter of time.

Syria remains an open question. The Muslim Brotherhood is in a successor position there and would welcome our intervention against the Assad regime. The Assads are no prize and they’re Iranian puppets, but shoving them out would give the Brotherhood yet another country and its sizable collection of weaponry.

All that is bound to make 2012 an ugly year in its own right, especially if the Obama Administration continues allowing the Muslim Brotherhood to control its foreign policy. … The region has become an indisputably worse place this year with the majority of moderate governments overthrown and replaced, or in the process of being replaced by Islamist thugs. …

Yemen too may be taken over by jihadists according to the Washington Post:

With pro-democracy demonstrators now in the 11th month of a populist uprising that has forced President Ali Abdullah Saleh to agree to step down, al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula and its sympathizers have taken full advantage of the turbulence.

In May, they overran large swaths of Abyan province, including this regional capital. Today, they rule over significant territory in this strategic region, near important oil shipping lanes.

[Their] stated goal is to create an Islamic emirate in Yemen, which American officials fear could be used as a base to plan more attacks against the United States.

The Iranian regime closed the Straits of Hormuz for five hours yesterday to demonstrate how easily they could do it. Obama shows no inclination to force that bellicose Islamic state to stop building a nuclear arsenal.

While in Europe Islam is steadily achieving power by demanding  and being granted the establishment of sharia law, inside the United States it has advanced its influence by leaps and bounds under the protection and with the active encouragement of the Obama administration.

Worse than that. There is plainly a fixed intention by Obama personally to give victory to Islam. His support of the Muslim Brotherhood is an indication of it. His surrender to the Taliban is proof of it.