So those 72 virgins that heaven provides for good Muslim men when they “pass on” are nine years old?

Frank Crimi writes at Front Page:

As Iranian lawmakers now seek to lower the legal age of marriage for girls to nine-years-old, the number of Iranian brides already under 10 years of age is sharply rising.

The Iranian decision to allow nine-year-old girls the legal opportunity to be married to fully grown men was announced by Mohammad Ali Isfenani, chairman of the Iranian Parliament’s Legal Affairs Committee.

Isfenani called Iran’s current civil legislation, which sets the minimum legal age of marriage for girls at 13-years-old, “un-Islamic and illegal,” saying, “We must regard nine as being the appropriate age for a girl to have reached puberty and qualified to get married. To do otherwise would be to contradict and challenge Islamic Sharia law.”

Isenfani’s clarion call for prepubescent marriage comes at the same moment a new report from the Union for the Protection of Children’s Rights (UPCR) found 75 Iranian girls less than 10-years-old were forced to marry in the past two months, part of a sharp rise in the overall number of Iranian child brides under the age of 10.

According to UPCR, of the 342,000 Iranian marriages among girls under 18-years-old registered in 2010, at least 713 marriages involved girls under 10-years-old, more than twice as many as were registered in the prior three years. Moreover, of these underage marriages, 42,000 involved girls between the ages of 10 to 14.

There are now more than 50 million child brides, a number that is growing by 10 million each year and which is expected to reach 100 million young victims over the next decade. …

These unfortunate children are married off for a bevy of cultural and religious reasons, ranging from ensuring familial alliances to economic necessities, such as settling debts or overcoming natural disasters to ensure a family’s survival. …

Drought-stricken Africa has witnessed the emergence of so-called “drought brides” who are being sold for as little as $170. …

While the reasons behind these human transactions may vary, the one commonality is that the younger the girl, the better the deal. Specifically, it is important that these girls be sold off at a young enough age to better ensure their virginity, thus increasing their economic value and protecting the honor of their families.

Not surprisingly, once handed-off, these child brides are then consigned to a terrifyingly nasty, brutish and short-lived existence … The life expectancy of their frightful existence is likely to be cut exceedingly short given the multitude of health risks inherent in being a child bride, not the least of which is the high mortality rate from childbirth injuries, where an estimated 70,000 girls under 15 die each year from complications during pregnancy or childbirth. …

Most of these child marriages take place in predominantly Islamic countries spread throughout the Middle East, South Asia and Africa.

The deeply rooted Islamic attachment to prepubescent marriage finds religious justification in the [fictitious*] Prophet Muhammad’s marriage to a six-year-old child bride, a marriage consummated when she was nine-years-old …

While most would find it hard to believe that a 15-year-old-girl, let alone a nine-year-old girl, is physically or emotionally ready to start engaging in sexual activity and carrying a child, others think that girls barely removed from the womb are more than fully capable of handling those activities. That enlightened attitude was on display in January when one of Saudi Arabia’s most influential clerics, Sheik Saleh al-Fawzan, issued a fatwa allowing fathers to arrange marriages for their daughters “even if they are in the cradle.”

However, lest anyone think a man would actually engage in sex with such a young infant, al-Fawzan was quick to add that it wasn’t “permissible for their husbands to have sex with them unless they are capable of being placed beneath and bearing the weight of the men.”

You don’t want to crush your baby bride, do you? Not when you’ve paid for her?

Given that, it’s not surprising that many believe that underage marriage is little more than legally permissible and religiously sanctioned pedophilia. Yet, some defenders of the horrid practice argue that critics have no moral or ethical qualms about child marriage but are instead driven by less than pure concerns.  One such person is Yemeni Sheik Mohammed Hamzi, an imam and official of the Islamist Yemeni opposition party, Islaah. Hamzi had been asked his opinion in reaction to international complaints to the death of a 13-year-old Yemeni child bride who bled to death after being tied down and forced to have sex with her 23-year-old husband.

Should we still call it “making love”?

Hamzi simply ascribed their dissatisfaction to the fact [sic] that “No one wants to marry these women’s-rights activists anyway. They’re just depressed and jealous that they are not married.”

We are surprised to learn that there are any “women’s-rights activists”, married or single, who are trying to save little girls from being legally raped to death in accordance with Islamic law.

We listened hard and long for the voices of Western feminists raised en bloc against the plight of Muslim women and girls, but have given up hope of ever hearing them.

* See also our post “The Prophet Muhammad” did not exist, August 26, 2012.

… of Christians now, the cause for which they must suffer martydom, is – Political Correctness.  

This is from American Thinker, by Bill Warner:

If you are even slightly awake about the world news today, it is no surprise that Christians are being killed, raped, and brutalized throughout the Islamic world. However, there is a place where you can go to escape the dreadful and relentless details of Christian annihilation by Islam. You can go to church.

Never mind the details; for the most part, Christians in the First World won’t mention the persecution and massacre of Christians in the Third World at all. In our experience, if they ever raise the subject it is to revel mawkishly in the patient endurance of their martyrs, never to accuse the persecutors and killers, never to pour out righteous anger against them. That’s the Christian way. “Resist not evil'” commanded the authors of the “Sermon on the Mount”. But we say, not to resist evil is to permit it; to permit it is to connive at it; and to connive at it is to co-author it. Christians cannot see that. Their indignation is reserved for their own heretics – and the Jews, of course.  In fact, they manage to find ingenious ways of blaming Jews for the Muslim persecution of Christians when they’re absolutely forced to admit that it’s happening. But at present they’re obstinately ignoring it. (See our post, Speaking of persecution: Christians as victims and victimizers, July 28, 2012.)

For example, Christians were killed this week in Nigeria. Nothing out of the ordinary – indeed, in the world of Christian persecution, this is routine.

And so the response found in nearly every church to the murder of Christians is…wait for it…complete silence. Not a mention or reference to it, or to the brutality against Christians that happens almost every day in the Islamic world.

This is not a passive silence, because if you try to change it, you will fail. The silence is an active, working conspiracy that goes throughout nearly all of Christendom.

Take a simple example: prayer for the persecuted. From a Christian perspective, this falls under the heading of obvious. Try taking the idea of prayer for the routinely murdered Christians in Nigeria or Egypt to ministers, boards, and any part of the structure of the church, and see how far you will get. You will get rejection with a myriad of lame and evasive excuses, since the people in power fear to recognize the suffering of Christians around the world.

If you acknowledge the suffering, you might wind up asking the question: why are these Christians suffering? Ah, there is the rub. The suffering is caused by Muslim jihadists who are following the Islamic doctrine of jihad against the Christian as found in Koran, Sira, and Hadith. Islam is the cause of suffering of Christians, as well as of Jews, Hindus, Buddhists, and atheists.

But stop! We cannot say those things! Facts are the new hate speech, so we cannot speak about the jihad against Christians. Therefore, we get no prayers for the persecuted, because it would lead to talk about why the murder of Christians keeps happening. And that truth would lead to being called an Islamophobe, so we are not going there. Result: silence. …

Absurd as it is to believe that prayer – ie. talking to nothing – will have any effect, the point is they do believe it; so their withholding prayer means that they observe political correctness more conscientiously than their religion. Political Correctness is now their highest cause.     

In reality we all have pulpits. Are we using the suffering of Christians, Jews, Buddhists, Hindus, women, gays, and intellectuals caused by Islam as a topic of conversation with those around us? Who is comfortable with bringing up anything negative about Islam? To tell those facts about Islam is a social crime, and you will be accused of being a hater/Islamophobe. So most of us remain silent about the evils of political Islam, and we are just like the ministers – silent in our own pulpits. Christians and non-Christians share the fear of being insulted as bigots and Islamophobes.

We don’t understand why. The “Islamophobe” label should be worn as a badge of honor.

It turns out that all of those who oppose any social evil will be hated. Think about it. It takes a massive amount of power to put into place any societal doctrine, such as multiculturalism and political correctness. The government, universities, many churches, synagogues, and the media have become enforcers of multiculturalism and political correctness. They are very powerful and believe that their dogma rules all peoples.

They are also full-throated apologists for Islam. Now it turns out that their actual knowledge about the doctrine and history of political Islam is close to zero and Muslim Brotherhood-approved, but that is no problem. The Establishment just says that those who find fault with Islam are bigots and that they hate us.

The silence of the pulpits is the greatest aider and abettor of Islam in the U.S. No one serves and advances Islam better than the silent ministers. They have abandoned their duty of courage in the face of persecution, but the rest of the flock still looks for moral leadership from them. Islam triumphs when Christian leaders do not condemn the murderous evil of political Islam.

Even worse than the silent ministers are those who go to “interfaith dialogs” and smile while the Muslims assert religious and political dominance over them. The nice, oh so nice Christians and Jews show up to tie, while the Muslims are there to win, and they do.

Oh yes. The Muslims are winning. Every time a new mosque is built in the West, they win. Every time an employer agrees to let them have time off to pray, they win. Every time a Muslim woman is allowed to keep on her hijab by an organization that allows no variance of uniform to any other member, they win. And so on.

The pulpits must become a source of courage and knowledge and stand up for Christians, Jews, Hindus, Buddhists, and all others who suffer under Islam’s persecution today and who have suffered for the last 1,400 years.

It isn’t just about religion; it is about the survival of our civilization.

Religion itself is the disease that makes Western civilization vulnerable. But we agree that the cowardice of the churches faced with the rise of Islam is despicable.

A report by Naijaurban (Nigeria):

Security agents said they discovered the bodies of at least 50 people, mostly women and children, who were burnt to death in the house of a pastor of the Church of Christ in Nigeria in Matse village.

Family members of the victims said the people burnt at the pastor’s home were people who ran into the home for safety after fulani herdsmen invaded their village on Saturday morning, killing over 20 people.

“Fulani herdsmen” is a phrase reporters in Nigeria like to use to refer to Muslim murderers. But Muslim murderers they are. They kill Christians not because they are herdsmen but because they are Muslims.

The killers followed these people to the church house, set the house ablaze and prevented people from leaving by standing at the exit and shooting at people who came out through the door.

For more on such acts of religion in Nigeria see our posts:

Christians murdered by Muslims, March 9, 2010

Muhammad’s command, March 30, 2010

Suffering children, May 11, 2011

Victims of religion, October 16, 2011

Acts of religion in Nigeria revisited, October  16, 2011

Christians slaughtered by Muslims in Nigeria, October 17, 2011

Boko Haram, the Muslim terrorists of Nigeria, November 10, 2011

More acts of religion in Nigeria, January 19, 2012

Niall Ferguson, the historian, is interviewed on MSNBC on the Egyptian revolution, before the recent elections brought the Muslim Brotherhood to power in Egypt. Ferguson predicts that very outcome, and criticizes Obama’s policy towards the Middle East. He sums up Obama’s  foreign policy as “I’m not George W. Bush – love me”. Obama’s “touchy-feely speeches”, he says, are no substitute for a vision and a plan. The interviewers disagree with him, even seem quite shocked at Ferguson’s very well informed opinion. They say they think the Egyptian revolution is “going really well”.

We agree with Ferguson’s analysis. Our only point of disagreement with him is this: he says that what is happening in Egypt and elsewhere shows Obama’s policy to be a failure.

We think the rise of the Muslim Brotherhood in the Middle East, Iran’s progress towards nuclear capacity, and the greatly accelerated advance of Islam in the world as a whole since Obama was absurdly elected to the presidency of the United States, does not reflect a failure of his, but a success. These developments are bad for America, but they are victories for Islam; and Barack Obama wants Islam to triumph. 

We have several times posted reports of the killing of Christians by Muslims in Nigeria. Some of them have aroused much interest. A probably mistaken illustration of one such massacre (see Acts of religion, November 6, 2010) brought more than 23,000 visitors to our site, and a few complaints (some very abusive) about our inaccurate attribution.The fact remains that Muslims have been, and still are, murdering Christians in Nigeria, as all our other pictures of the atrocities undoubtedly demonstrate. (See our posts: Christians murdered by Muslims, March 9, 2010; Muhammad’s command, March 30, 2010; Suffering children, May 11, 2011; Victims of religion, October 16, 2011;  Acts of religion in Nigeria revisited, October  16, 2011; Christians slaughtered by Muslims in Nigeria, October 17, 2011; Boko Haram, the Muslim terrorists of Nigeria, November 10, 2011; More acts of religion, January 19, 2012.)

Here we post a recent report of the  killing of Muslims by Christians in revenge. It comes from Reuters Africa.

First, Muslims attacked churches and killed Christians.

[Muslim] suicide car bombers attacked three churches in northern Nigeria on Sunday, killing at least 19 people, wounding dozens and triggering retaliatory attacks by Christian youths who dragged Muslims from cars and killed them …

The Christian Association of Kano, northern Nigeria’s main city, called the bombings “a clear invitation to religious war”. …

[The Muslim terrrorist group] Boko Haram …  attacked two churches in Nigeria, spraying the congregation of one with bullets, killing at least one person, and blowing up a car in a suicide bombing at the other, wounding 41. …  In Kaduna state, close to the Middle Belt, two blasts rocked churches in the town of Zaria within minutes of each other. … [Another] suicide car bombing was at Kings Catholic Church, killing 10 people. … Suicide bombers in a Toyota saloon then hit Shalom Church in the state’s main city of Kaduna, killing six people. The military said the dead included an army sergeant. … [A] police spokesman … put the death toll from the three bombs at 16.

Why were the Christians killed?

Boko Haram says it is fighting to reinstate an ancient Islamic caliphate that would adhere to strict sharia law.

Then Christians killed Muslims.

After the bombings, Christian youths blocked the highway leading south out of Kaduna to the capital Abuja, pulling Muslims out of cars and killing them …

Unlike Christians, we do not preach that revenge is wrong. Revenge can be justice. But your revenge should be taken against whomever perpetrated the crime against you.

In Nigeria, Muslims – in obedience to the Koran – have been killing Christians, any Christians, because they are Christians; and now Christians – against their own doctrinal teaching – are revenge-killing Muslims, any Muslims, because they are Muslims.

What is wrong here, the deep cause of the savage cruelty, is religion. The acts are impersonal. They are motivated by difference of superstition between two sets of nonsensical beliefs.

The acts themselves are deplorable. The cause of them, religion, is a perpetual source of great suffering, a relic of ages past, and wholly indefensible.

The UN must be destroyed because (to put it very mildly, coolly, and objectively):

• It does no good to anyone
• It does much harm to many
• It is unreformable
• It was a colossal mistake of wishful thinking from its beginning
• It is kept going only because it is a gravy train for its bureaucrats and diplomats at enormous expense to tax-payers, especially Americans

A documentary film made recently by Ami Horowitz and Matt Groff, UN Me, exposes the worst incidences of its uselessness and corruption, violent and cruel actions, and refusals to do what it purportedly came into existence to do.

The following extracts are from an excellent article on the film by Bruce Bawer at Front Page. (It is well worth reading in full.)

UN Me begins by according us a few brief glimpses of the sheer sloth that characterizes the whole shebang. Old UN hands describe the short working days, long lunches, and frequent midday naps that characterize the everyday life of many of its functionaries. Wandering the halls of UN headquarters in New York shortly after 5 PM on a weekday, Horowitz … encounters a virtual ghost town: almost everybody has long since cleared out for the day. This institutional torpor is, he makes clear, emblematic of the whole worldwide enterprise. …

Horowitz reminds us that countries like Libya, Sudan, Zimbabwe, and China have sat on the UN Human Rights Commission – and, later, on the Human Rights Council that was meant to be an improvement on that comically corrupt agency.

In 2010, Iran was elected to the UN Commission on the Status of Women.

At one point in the film, Horowitz asks Navi Pillay, UN High Commissioner for Human Rights and director of the UN’s 2009 anti-racism conference in Geneva, why Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, of all people, was named keynote speaker at that event. That question, she replies in a small voice, is “not for me to answer.” (No, you don’t get far at the UN by providing honest answers to reasonable questions like that one.)

Horowitz informs us that Article 6 of the UN Charter actually “calls for the expulsion of any nation that consistently violates the principles of the charter.” Yet no member country has ever been expelled under Article 6. Shashi Tharoor, UN information chief, cheerfully explains that it’s best to have everybody “under the same tent.” …

The  film covers some of the more egregious scandals involving UN peacekeeping …  anecdotes about peacekeepers in various countries who, in their interactions with the people they were there to protect, acted like thugs, got rich trafficking drugs, spent their time whoring, and sexually abused minors. Peacekeepers in the Congo committed literally thousands of rapes. At least one ran a pedophilia ring.

We’re shown video of UN bureaucrats solemnly vowing that errant peacekeepers will be caught and punished. But in fact almost no UN peacekeeper has ever been held accountable for anything.

In Côte d’Ivoire, peacekeepers actually fired on peaceful, unarmed protestors.

They were standing together, men women and children, singing happily when UN sharp shooters fired on them. One of the few times the “peacekeepers”  have actually used their arms.

But was anyone punished? No; that’s just not the UN way. When Horowitz, in a sit-down interview with Abou Moussa, head of the UN mission in Côte d’Ivoire, asks about the episode, Moussa gets up and leaves.

The film moves on to the absurdity that is the International Atomic Energy Agency – which, tasked with preventing nuclear-arms proliferation, has actually helped North Korea, Iran, India, and Pakistan to acquire nuclear technology, purportedly for peaceful purposes. Since, as the film notes, the IAEA can only perform inspections in countries that invite it to do so, it spends more than 80% of its $380 million annual budget inspecting facilities in – believe it or not – Germany, Japan, and Canada. …

Iran carries on towards making nuclear weapons. The UN and its agencies can do nothing about it, nor would if they could. Iran’s President Ahmadinejad is one of the most honored, ecstatically applauded gasbags in the UN General Assembly, he who has homosexuals hanged and women stoned to death. Ahmadinejad is the perfect personification of the spirit of the United Nations Organization.  

Then there’s terrorism. After 9/11, the UN passed Resolution 1373, which was supposedly designed to fight terrorism. It would appear to be as toothless a measure as was ever ratified by a deliberative body. Horowitz interviews Javier Ruperez, whose title is – get this – Executive Director of the Counter-Terrorism Executive Directorate of the Counter-Terrorism Committee of the Security Council. Asked what the committee actually does to fight terrorism, Ruperez speaks blandly of the production of reports. Member countries, you see, are asked to file reports indicating whether or not they’re aiding terrorists. The directorate, or committee, or whatever it is also sends inspectors for, oh, a week or so to various countries to find out whether anything fishy is going on there. None of this, of course, actually accomplishes anything. Asked whether the UN has official lists of terrorist groups and of countries that support terror, Ruperez says no: “This is not the practice of the UN.” …

Another question: how does the UN define terrorism? This, Ruperez declares, is still a “pending matter.” …

The UN will not define terrorism because the General Assembly is dominated by terrorism-sponsoring states.

Next up: the Oil for Food scandal – which, as Claudia Rosett, the top-notch UN expert and eloquent UN critic, tells Horowitz, was absolutely “designed to produce corruption.” Allegedly, the objective of the program was to provide food, medical supplies, and so forth to the Iraqi people in exchange for oil; in reality, a bunch of UN big shots, up to and including Security Council representatives … lined their pockets with kickbacks. But, again, the UN did nothing – it was, as Rosett says, “the biggest scam in the history of human relief,” but nobody was fired or jailed. As always, the UN proved that nothing could be more alien to its institutional culture than the idea of accountability.

The Rwanda genocide gets its own sad chapter in UN Me. The head of the UN peacekeepers in that country, General Romeo Dallaire, actually wanted to do the right thing. But when he asked Kofi Annan, then in charge of all UN peacekeeping forces, for authority to take relatively modest action to prevent a looming genocide, Annan said no. Why? Because it was more important to protect the UN’s “image of impartiality” than to protect people from genocide. UN forces were even ordered to withdraw from a school where they were the only thing standing between Tutsi refugees – many of them children and old people – and Hutus with machetes. Result: a brutal massacre for which – yet again – no UN personnel were punished.

Live footage of what happened there is one of the most heart-rending scenes in the film.

While this nightmare was unfolding in Rwanda, Boutros-Boutros Ghali, then secretary-general of the UN, was on a European tour, which he refused to cancel in order to deal with Rwanda.

He had urgently to attend a string of universities bestowing honorary degrees on him for being such a benefactor of mankind.

When he did return to New York, he denied that Tutsi were being exterminated. …  Horowitz and Groff even got Jean-Marie Guéhenno, former Under-Secretary-General for Peacekeeping Operations, on camera smoothly asserting that in the wake of the Rwanda genocide, it’s best not to “allocate the blame to one actor or the other.”

Horowitz also interviews Jody Williams, a Nobel Peace Prize winner who was invited by the UN to examine the situation in Darfur and who ended up livid at the UN’s palpable discomfort with her undiplomatic conclusions and its failure to act on her urgent recommendations. …

At film’s end, Horowitz and Graff pose a simple question: what, given all these unpleasant facts, does the UN stand for? The answer, alas, is clear. It stands for itself – period. Like many other pointless bureaucracies, it is about perpetuating its own existence and enhancing its own image – and about seeking to squelch the truth about its fecklessness, incompetence, and absolute lack of a moral compass. It’s also … about providing hack politicians from around the world with yet another career steppingstone, once they’ve risen to the top of the ladder in their own crummy little countries and finished emptying their own citizens’ pockets.

Please watch the film!

The way to keep the poor poor, is to keep them dependent on government.

The compassioneers of the Left need to keep the poor poor, or they’d lose not only their pretext for empowering the state to control our lives, and all those voters whom they make dependent on big government, but more dreadfully for them the cause in the name of which they claim moral superiority.

The name of their ideology of forced dependence is Socialism. It’s imposition on a nation is the tried and tested way to create poverty and keep the poor poor.

Capitalism, or what Adam Smith called “the natural order of liberty”, is the tried and tested way to create prosperity and bring people out of poverty.

Whenever socialist states and other tyrannies relent to free markets, their per capita income rises. This has been happening steadily over the last thirty years or so, despite the fervid efforts of Environmentalists and world government fanatics to establish a global socialist economy. The Third World has measurably benefitted.

This is from Townhall by Steve Chapman:

[According to] a new World Bank report, “the data indicate a decline in both the poverty rate and the number of poor in all six regions of the developing world.”

In 1981, 70 percent of those in the developing world subsisted on the equivalent of less than $2 a day, and 42 percent had to manage with less than $1 a day. Today, 43 percent are below $2 a day and 14 percent below $1.

“Poverty reduction of this magnitude is unparalleled in history: Never before have so many people been lifted out of poverty over such a brief period of time,” write Brookings Institution researchers Laurence Chandy and Geoffrey Gertz.

Just as important as the extent of the improvement is the location: everywhere. In the past there has been improvement in a few countries or a continent. Not this time.

China has continued the rapid upward climb it began three decades ago. India, long a laggard, has shaken off its torpor. Latin America has made sharp inroads against poverty. “For the first time since 1981,” says the World Bank, “we have seen less than half the population of sub-Saharan Africa living below $1.25 a day.”

The start of most global trends is hard to pinpoint. This one, however, had its big bang in the early 1970s, in Chile. After a socialist government brought on economic chaos, the military seized power in a bloody coup and soon embarked on a program of drastic reform – privatizing state enterprises, fighting inflation, opening up foreign trade and investment and unshackling markets.

It was the formula offered by economists associated with the University of Chicago, notably Milton Friedman, and it turned Chile into a rare Latin American success. In time, it also facilitated a return to democracy.

Chile was proof that freeing markets and curbing state control could generate broad-based prosperity, which socialist policies could only promise.

If that experiment weren’t sufficient, it got another try on a much bigger scale when China’s Deng Xiaoping abandoned the disastrous policies of Mao Zedong and veered onto the capitalist road. The result was an economic miracle yielding growth rates that averaged 10 percent per year.

The formula was too effective to be ignored. Over the past two decades, poorer nations have dismantled command-and-control methods and given markets greater latitude. Economic growth, not redistribution, has been the surest cure for poverty, and economic freedom has been the key that unlocked the riddle of economic growth.

Over the past 30 years, notes the libertarian Cato Institute in the latest edition of its “Economic Freedom of the World,” the average country’s economic freedom score has risen from 5.53 (on a 10 scale) to 6.64 — a significant improvement that has paid off in higher growth and earnings. The evidence indicates a reliable pattern: the freer the economy the faster the growth. …

The latest cover story in The Economist magazine is: “Cuba hurtles toward capitalism.” Cuba! Even communists eventually have to make peace with reality.

But as they do, the country that has grown to be the richest ever because of its freedom – the USA – is being turned into a socialist welfare state by a leader raised and trained as a communist.

President Obama calls capitalism, the magic formula for prosperity, “You’re-on-your-own economics”, and insists that it doesn’t work.

This is from Investor’s Business Daily:

“You’re-on-your-own economics” doesn’t work, President Obama asserted Friday, just as the World Bank reported a halving of world poverty due mainly to — you guessed it — you’re-on-your-own economics. …

Perhaps he didn’t try free-market economics himself in the past decade, but all six global regions observed by the World Bank did try it — and the stunning result is that global poverty has been slashed in half … It started with the advent of free markets in Chile in 1975, gained speed with the Reagan and Thatcher revolutions, took off with the Asian Tiger states and has been crescendo-ing around the globe ever since. …

Anyone who travels to countries like Peru, Poland, Indonesia, Colombia, Thailand, Hungary, South Africa, Chile, Tanzania and India knows very well that things aren’t what they used to be. Vast middle classes have formed, education is booming, business is up and many of their cities no longer resemble the Third World.

More to the point, people have growing access to jobs, education and a future. Mexico’s rate of illegal immigration has plunged since 2009 as average incomes there approach $7,000 — the threshold that makes staying in Mexico more attractive than living abroad illegally.

Technology has helped; they all have Facebook, cellphones and ATMs to make living more efficient.

The World Bank cites generally stronger political institutions — the kind that enforce one set of laws for all, respect property rights and don’t reward crony capitalists or stacked courts — something Obama might learn from. …

The big Goliath of this revolution is the embrace of free markets. Against the president’s claims that free markets don’t work, note that all six regions of the world are making big progress by embracing markets. …

President Obama’s ambition to keep the poor poor is not limited to turning America into an economically depressed, heavily indebted socialist state; he takes whatever active steps he can to establish a globally centralized control-and-command economy.

He has appointment a new head of the World Bank,  Jim Yong Kim, who will no doubt try to prevent such a report as Steve Chapman sums up ever coming out again: a man in whose dogma such truths need to be suppressed.

This is by Jacob Laksin at Front Page:

Imagine if President Obama appointed radical Noam Chomsky, who has denounced capitalism as a “murderously destructive catastrophe,” to head up a committee on economic growth. That’s less of a stretch than it may seem, considering Obama’s nominee to head the World Bank, current Dartmouth College President Jim Yong Kim.

Kim’s expertise is in health policy, so little is known about his views on economic development, the World Bank’s primary purpose. What is on the public record, however, is deeply troubling. A case in point is a collection of studies that Kim co-edited in 2000, Dying for Growth: Global Inequality and the Health of the Poor. The grim title accurately reflects the book’s radical central premise, namely that capitalism and economic growth is bad for the poor across the world. The introduction, which Kim co-authored with several other academics, states the point bluntly: “The studies in this book present evidence that the quest for growth in GDP and corporate profits has in fact worsened the lives of millions of women and men.”

A barefaced lie, as the statistics in the World Bank’s report demonstrate.

In this vein, the authors go on to dismiss “neoliberalism” – the preferred left-wing academic pejorative for free trade and free markets – as a failure, particularly for the world’s poor. “Even where neoliberal policy measures have succeeded in stimulating economic growth, growth’s benefits have not gone to those living in ‘dire poverty,’ one-fourth of the world’s population,” the authors assert.

If economic growth hurts the poor, especially in the Third World, what helps their cause? The book answers that question with a chapter touting what it considers a true success: communist Cuba’s health-care system. As the chapter’s author tells it, Cuba’s health care is supposedly on par with that of the United States, an achievement made “possible because of a govern­mental commitment not only to health in the narrow sense but to social equality and social justice.” Relying on bogus statistics from the Cuban government and distorting the extreme inequities of Cuban health care, where few of Cuba’s poor can either afford or obtain either medicine or doctors’ treatment, the study is revealing mostly of the ideological extremism of its author. Indeed, it might well have been written by Chomsky, which in fact it was: the author is Aviva Chomsky, Noam Chomsky’s eldest daughter. Noam Chomsky himself is quoted in the book’s conclusion, which cites his dismissal of economic growth as “efforts to make people feel helpless.” The book’s authors, including Jim Yong Kim, seem to agree.

They could hardly be more wrong.

(For confirmation of how they could hardly be more wrong, see our post Any old pills?, October 29, 2010.)

In fact, there is overwhelming evidence that economic growth raises income levels, which in turn reduces poverty and improves the lot of the global poor. Much of that evidence has been documented by the World Bank, the very institution that Kim has been tapped to lead. Earlier this month, for instance, the World Bank released a report documenting a decline in the poverty rate of the poor in all the regions of the developing world. The finding is especially striking because it comes amidst a global downturn. Economic growth accounts for much of this astounding progress.

He too quotes statistics:

And that progress is truly impressive. In 1990, 52 percent of the population in the developing world lived below the poverty rate of $1.25 a day. That number was halved by 2008, when 22 percent lived below the poverty rate. Progress has been most dramatic in East Asia, particularly China, which has seen the greatest surge in economic growth. In the 1980s, according to the World Bank report, East Asia had the world’s highest poverty rate, with 77 percent of the population living below the poverty rate as recently as 1981. By 2008, that number had plunged to 14 percent. The report points out that in China alone, 662 million people are no longer living poverty. Not only is no one “dying” due to economic growth, but literally millions of lives have been bettered thanks to economic gains.

China may be the most spectacular example of economic growth’s unmatched capacity to improve the lives of the poor, but it is not an exception. Africa, so long associated with extreme poverty, is also making strides on poverty reduction thanks to economic growth. … As a result of sustained economic growth over the past 15 years …

Africa’s success is especially noteworthy because it has not been limited to countries with natural resources, such as South Africa’s diamonds or Nigerian oil. On the contrary, the authors note that poverty has fallen “for both landlocked and coastal countries, for mineral-rich and mineral-poor countries, for countries with favorable and unfavorable agriculture, for countries with different colonizers, and for countries with varying degrees of exposure to the African slave trade. The benefits of growth were so widely distributed that African inequality actually fell substantially.”

Poverty reduction through economic growth is thus one of the great success stories of recent decades. And that work is not done. …  Achieving sustained reduction in poverty will remain the great cause of the 21st century.

Yet it’s hard to see how the World Bank will help that cause if led by an open critic of economic growth like Jim Yong Kim. … It’s hard to see how its reputation will be redeemed by a World Bank president who seems to believe that the greatest danger to the global poor comes from the only proven strategy to improve the quality of their lives.

American diplomats are repeatedly apologizing to Muslims in Europe for a multitude of real or imagined slights against Islam, and the U.S. State Department is now spending millions of dollars each year actively promoting Islam — including Islamic Sharia law — on the continent.

This is from the Stonegate Institute, by Soeren Kern.

The United States ambassador to Spain recently met with a group of Muslim immigrants in one of the most Islamized neighborhoods of Barcelona to apologize for American foreign policymaking in the Middle East.

U.S. Ambassador Alan Solomont told Muslims assembled at the town hall-like meeting in the heart of Barcelona’s old city that the United States is not an “enemy of Islam” and that U.S. President Barack Obama wants to improve America’s image in the Middle East as quickly as possible by closing the “dark chapters” of the U.S. invasion of Iraq and the war in Afghanistan.

“There are things that the United States has done badly,” Solomont said at the February 28 gathering organized by a non-profit organization called the Cultural, Educational and Social Association of Pakistani Women. “But now the Obama government wants to improve relations with Muslims,” he promised. …

The Barcelona meeting, which was held in a Muslim ghetto called Raval (a.k.a. Ravalistan because Muslim immigrants now make up 45% of the barrio’s total population), is an example of the Obama administration’s so-called Muslim Outreach.

The U.S. State Department – working through American embassies and consulates in Europe – has been stepping-up its efforts to establish direct contacts with largely unassimilated Muslim immigrant communities in towns and cities across Europe. …

Obama ideologues are crisscrossing Europe on U.S. taxpayer funded trips to “export” failed American approaches to multiculturalism, affirmative action, cultural diversity and special rights for minorities. …

In Ireland, for example, the U.S. Embassy in Dublin recently sponsored a seminar ostensibly designed to help Muslim immigrants increase their influence within the Irish business and financial communities.

The opening speech at the event was delivered by Imam Hussein Halawa of the Islamic Cultural Center of Ireland, despite the fact that leaked U.S. State Department cables show that the U.S. government has known for many years that Halawi is a member of the Muslim Brotherhood and serves as the right-hand man of the radical Egyptian cleric Yusuf al-Qaradawi.

Halawa, an Egyptian immigrant who has dedicated his life to the cause of introducing Islamic Sharia law in Europe, told those in attendance that the main purpose of the conference was to bring the Irish banking system into conformity with Islamic legal principles. U.S. Ambassador Dan Rooney, a lifelong Republican turned Obama acolyte, said at the same conference that the United States was a “solid partner” behind Halawa’s venture.

In Austria, the U.S. Embassy in Vienna sponsored a film contest in February on the theme of “Diversity and Tolerance” aimed at teaching wayward Austrians that they should show respect for Muslim immigrants who refuse to integrate into their society.

Ambassador William Eacho, an Obama campaign fundraiser turned political appointee, awarded the first prize to a group of students in the northern Austrian town of Steyr who produced a one-minute silent film promoting tolerance for Muslim women who wear Islamic face-covering veils such as burkas in public spaces.

Tolerance for Muslim women by non-Muslims, that is. Muslim women are not treated tolerantly by Muslim men – sharia law insists on the subjugation of women.

Obama and his team may think they know what is best for Europeans, but according to recent polls, more than 70% of Austrians are in favor of a law that would ban the burka.

In Belgium, U.S. Ambassador Howard Gutman, another Obama fundraiser turned diplomat, told lawyers attending a conference in Brussels in November 2011 that Israel is to blame for Muslim anti-Semitism in Europe.

According to the Israeli newspaper Yedioth Ahronot, Gutman, who is Jewish, showed conference attendees a video of himself receiving a warm welcome at a Muslim school in Brussels, which he said proved that Muslims are not anti-Semitic. Following a barrage of criticism for rationalizing the growing problem of anti-Semitism in Europe, the U.S. Embassy in Belgium removed the evidence by uploading an amended transcript of Gutman’s remarks on its website.

In France, the U.S. Embassy in Paris co-sponsored a seminar to teach Muslims in France how they can politically organize themselves. Operatives from the Democratic Party coached 70 Muslim “diversity leaders” from disaffected Muslim-majority suburban slums known as banlieues on how to develop a communications strategy, raise funds and build a political base.

The French government – which has been trying to reverse the pernicious effects of decades of state-sponsored multiculturalism – expressed dismay at what it called “meddling.” …

In Norway, where Muslim immigrants already have more rights than native Norwegians, the U.S. Embassy in Oslo organized a “dialogue meeting” designed to “empower” Muslim immigrant women in the country.

According to the Norwegian newspaper Aftenposten, Obama’s special envoy to the Muslim world, Farah Pandith, castigated the Norwegian government’s integration policies as being insufficiently fair to Muslim immigrants. She also told Norwegians that Muslims are “more free to practice Islam in the United States than in any other country in the world.”  …

In Britain, U.S. embassy employees in London frequently conduct outreach to help “empower” the Muslims across the country. According to a leaked U.S. diplomatic cable, for example, Ambassador Louis Susman “engages with U.K. Muslim communities regularly … he has spoken to Muslim groups in Wales and Scotland, visited the London Central Mosque, and hosted an interfaith breakfast at his residence, among other activities.”

Susman has come under fire for visiting another London mosque, namely the East London Mosque, which is one of the most extreme Islamic institutions in Britain. Built with money from Saudi Arabia to propagate Wahhabi Islam, the sprawling facility is home to the London Muslim Center, which the U.S. government has long known is a haven for Islamic extremists. During his visit, Susman spoke of his “great admiration” for the mosque and his enthusiasm for meeting its staff.

And then there’s this:

The cruelly oppressive apartheid regime in South Africa came to an end when elections, open at last to non-white voters, brought the African National Congress (ANC) to power in 1994.

A South African academic who lives in Johannesburg has sent us, at our request, this view of what everyday life is like in South Africa now:

South Africa really is such a peculiar place in which to live. Johannesburg, at the moment, is looking glorious: at least, its suburbs are. We have had wonderful rains (Wagnerian storms in fact!), and the gardens of the Northern suburbs are positively lush. The inner city is a curate’s egg: some parts have been reclaimed; others are lost forever, drug-lord-dominated, filthy slums, heartbreaking to see, if one ever dares to venture near them. In the part I live, we are pretty comfortable, but one always has to be cautious.You never stroll anywhere at night, and do not place a handbag beside your chair in a restaurant. Theft is rife, and one still hears of dreadful rapes and armed attacks on homes in affluent Johannesburg. Crimes are always vicious, and car thefts continue.

Motorists have to be very alert. Traffic is mind-boggling, and the roads are anarchic, a hellish cacophony of hooting and a blur of careering, lethal vehicles, dominated by the so-called “black taxis”: mini-vans crammed with passengers, and driven by desperate, unlicensed youths, who frequently kill their helpless passengers by causing horrendous collisions. Over the December vacation, over 1000 people were killed in road accidents, most of them involving taxis.

Yet, there are still stylish restaurants in which to wine and dine; local cinemas get the transmitted operas from the Met and the dramas from London’s National Theatre – so, although our live theatre is moribund except for revived “protest works” and musicals, we are not quite theatrically starved. So much for the good news.

The bad is pretty dire. Poverty and unemployment are appalling: there are tattered beggars on every street corner. The wealthy “Black diamonds” [the new elite] care even less for the poor than did the Nats [the Nationalist Party which ruled in the apartheid era], and the ANC’s corruption puts that of the Nats to shame. In what is known as North West Province (North Western Transvaal), every ANC-run municipality is being investigated for corruption, and, in Limpopo Province, there is complete bankruptcy owing to ANC corruption. A doctor friend of mine put it aptly: under the Nats, bureaucrats repaired the roads and then kept the left-over money; ANC bureaucrats keep all the money and never bother to repair the roads.  That is very accurate. Oh, and, as The London Times put it, South Africa must be the only country in which there is Affirmative Action for a vast majority, and an over-taxed minority supports the mass populace. Talk of “nationalization” [ie full socialism] idiotically continues, but I think that the greed of the ANC will prevent any attempts at complete nationalization, for President Zuma does not wish to slaughter the golden-egg-laying goose.

In short, we live in a kleptocracy, under a regime voted in by the majority. I shall never regret the overthrow of the vile Nats or the enfranchisement of the unenfranchised, but I hoped for ‘different’, not more of ‘similar’. One’s only hope is that one might live to see a truly democratic government in power in South Africa.

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.