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 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.

This is from Front Page, by Raymond Ibrahim:

The New Year’s resolution for “Sunnis for Da’wa [Islamization] and Jihad” — also known as Boko Haram, that is, “Western education is forbidden” — is to create a Christian-free Nigeria, beginning, naturally, with the north, where Muslims outnumber Christians.

Right at the start of 2012, Boko Haram issued an ultimatum giving Christians living in northern Nigeria three days to evacuate or die — an ultimatum the group has been living up to, so much so that Nigeria’s President Jonathan recently declared a state of emergency. …

Boko Haram and other Muslims have been terrorizing Nigerian Christians for years, killing thousands of them, and destroying hundreds of their churches. Just last November, hundreds of armed Muslims, many from the group, invaded Christian villages, “like a swarm of bees,” killing, looting, and destroying. At the end of their four-hour rampage, at least 130 Christians were killed. Forty-five other Christians in another village were slaughtered by another set of “Allahu Akbar!” screaming Muslims. …

Beginning with Boko Haram’s church attacks of December 25, where over 40 people celebrating Christmas were killed, the group has definitely upped both the frequency and savagery of jihadi attacks on Christians and their churches. Most recently, armed Muslims stormed a church … killing six Christians, including the pastor’s wife, and wounding many.

Then, when friends and relatives gathered to mourn the deaths of some of those slain in this most recent church attack, Boko Haram Muslims appeared and opened fire again, killing another 20 Christians, all while screaming “Allahu Akbar!”—Islam’s ancient war cry, which at root simply means “my god is greater than your god!” …

Ayo Oritsejafor, head of the Christian Association of Nigeria has accurately characterized this spate of attacks on Christians as “religious cleansing,” citing that some 120 Christians have been killed since the Christmas day church attacks.

Worse, but not unexpectedly, President Jonathan recently declared that “some of them [Boko Haram] are in the executive arm of government, some of them are in the parliamentary/legislative arm of government, while some of them are even in the judiciary. Some are also in the armed forces, the police and other security agencies.”

Persons elected or appointed to maintain law and order are the disrupters of law and order – a state of affairs typical of many Third World “democracies”.

In any case, Muslims in power obey the commands of their religion rather than conform to Western notions of the rule of law, and the Koran commands the slaying of Christians.

For more on Muslims killing Christians in Nigeria, with more pictures of atrocities, 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

Islamic “justice” and the development of  Islamic power advance in North Africa.

USA Today reports:

The victory of an Islamist Party in Morocco’s parliamentary elections appears to be one more sign that religious-based parties are benefiting the most from the new freedoms brought by the Arab Spring.

The phrase “new freedoms” means an election, nothing more.

Across the Middle East, parties referencing Islam have made great strides, offering an alternative to corrupt, long serving dictators, who have often ruled with close Western support.

Are they less likely to be corrupt or dictatorial? And if the new bosses should turn out to be much like the old bosses, will they fail to secure Western support?

The Justice and Development Party dominated Morocco’s elections through a combination of good organization, an outsider status and not being too much of a threat to Morocco’s all-powerful king.

By taking 107 seats out of the 395 seats, almost twice as many as the second place finisher, the party ensured that King Mohammed VI must pick the next prime minister from its ranks and [it will] form the next government out of the dozen parties in Morocco’s parliament.

It is the first time the PJD will be part of the government and its outsider status could be just what Morocco, wracked by pro-democracy protests, needs.

Needs?

Although it didn’t bring down the government, the North African kingdom of 32 million, just across the water from Spain, was still touched by the waves of unrest that swept the Arab world following the revolution in Tunisia, with tens of thousands marching in the streets calling for greater freedoms and less corruption.

The king responded by modifying the constitution to give the next parliament and prime minister more powers, and held early elections.

But there was still a vigorous movement to boycott the elections. There was only a 45 percent turnout in Friday’s polls, and many of those who went to vote turned in blank ballots or crossed out every party listed to show their dissatisfaction with the system. …

But now they’re getting what USA Today thinks they need?

In the face of such widespread distrust of politics, historian and political analyst Maati Monjib said a government led by a new political force could be the answer.

If the abstainers had thought PJD was the answer, wouldn’t they have voted for it?

“If the PJD forms a coalition in a free and independent way and not with a party of the Makhzen,” he said referring to the catch-all phrase for the entrenched establishment around the king, “this will be a big step forward for Morocco.”

In Tunisia, Morocco, and on Monday most likely also Egypt, newly enfranchised populations are choosing religious parties as a rebuke to the old systems, which often espoused liberal or left-wing ideologies.

“The people link Islam and political dignity,” said Monjib, who describes himself as coming from the left end of the political spectrum. “There is a big problem of dignity in the Arab world and the people see the Islamists as a way of getting out of the sense of subjugation and inferiority towards the West.”

They were subjugated by their own tyrants, not the West. But if they feel inferior to the West they are only being – for once – realistic.

Like the Ennahda Party in Tunisia, the PJD is also from the more moderate end of the Islamist spectrum.

The term “Islamist” was coined by Western appeasers to designate Islamic extremism, so that “Islam” could be exonerated from charges of aggressively waging jihad. But now we have moderate Islamism.

The party doesn’t describe itself as “Islamist” but rather as having an Islamic “reference,” meaning that its policies follow the moral dictates of the religion. …

Only the moral dictates? Beating wives, stoning adulterers, amputating the limbs of thieves, executing apostates and homosexuals, keeping slaves, waging aggressive jihad? That’s the good side?

Egypt, where there is an election in progress, will end up getting a more religious government too, and as Professor Ephraim Karsh of King’s College, London, said at a recent conference:

Islam remains the strongest identity framework in Egyptian society in particular, and in Arab society generally. The Arab national dictatorships that were layered over this basic Islamic identity for the past 80 years were but a thin veneer of repression. With the fall of these dictatorships, what remains is the core Islamic underpinnings of society, and these will now come to the fore. Consequently, no democratic structures, processes or values are likely to emerge in the Arab world for many generations.”

We think he’s right.

But for an alternative view – for the sake of balance – see what Wadah Khanfar, writing in the leftist Islam-sympathetic Guardian has to say. Here’s a bit of it:

The uproar that has accompanied the Islamists’ gains is unhelpful; a calm and well-informed debate about the rise of political Islam is long overdue. …

We must understand the history of the region. In western discourse Islamists are seen as newcomers to politics, gullible zealots who are motivated by a radical ideology and lack experience.

Sure we suspect, on very good evidence, that they’re zealots motivated by a radical ideology. But do we say they’re gullible newcomers lacking in experience? Not in any discourse we’ve heard in our corner of the West.

In fact, they have played a major role in the Arab political scene since the 1920s. Islamic movements have often been in opposition, but since the 1940s they have participated in parliamentary elections, entered alliances with secular, nationalist and socialist groups, and participated in several governments – in Sudan, Jordan, Yemen and Algeria. …

A number of other events have had an impact on the collective Muslim mind, and have led to the maturation of political Islam: the much-debated Islamic Revolution in Iran in 1979; the military coup in Sudan in 1989; the success of the Algerian Islamic Salvation Front in the 1991 elections and the army’s subsequent denial of its right to govern; the conquest of much of Afghan territory by the Taliban in 1996 leading to the establishment of its Islamic emirate; and the success in 2006 of Hamas in the Palestinian Legislative Council elections. The Hamas win was not recognised, nor was the national unity government formed. Instead, a siege was imposed on Gaza to suffocate the movement. …

What lessons were learnt from such examples? He doesn’t say.

He makes it plain as he goes on, however, that he has great hopes of desirable outcomes from Islamist rule in North Africa:

The region has suffered a lot as a result of attempts to exclude Islamists and deny them a role in the public sphere. … Islamists should be careful not to fall into the trap of feeling overconfident: they must accommodate other trends, even if it means making painful concessions. Our societies need political consensus, and the participation of all political groups, regardless of their electoral weight. It is this interplay between Islamists and others that will both guarantee the maturation of the Arab democratic transition and lead to an Arab political consensus and stability that has been missing for decades.

And maybe that is what the Arab world needs. But what will the rest of the world get? The end of jihad? Skeptics that we are, we doubt it.

This is how the interim government  of Egypt, which is receiving aid and diplomatic support from the Obama administration, deals with peaceful Copt protestors.

For more about this event, and a horrifying picture of a victim with a crushed skull, see our post More acts of religion, October 15, 2011.  On US aid to the murdering military government see our post Spreading darkness, November 19, 2011.

The UN’s R2P, the responsibility to protect civilians, on the pretext of which the US and NATO intervened in Libya, for some undisclosed reason is not applicable to Egypt. See our post The danger of R2P, March 23, 2011.

Barack Obama is intensely, emotionally, fervently pro-Islam. Under his leadership, the whole executive branch of the government works to advance and empower Islam in North Africa and the Middle East, and/or in the US.

In North Africa and the Middle East:

William Taylor, the State Department’s Special Coordinator for  Middle East Transitions, is overseeing US aid to Egypt, Tunisia, and Libya, and advising political parties on how to prepare for elections.

According to a report  by Ryan Mauro –

When asked how the U.S. would feel if the Muslim Brotherhood won Egypt’s elections, [Taylor] said, “I think we will be satisfied, if it is a free and fair election. What we need to do is judge people and parties and movements on what they do, not what they’re called.” The answer seemed to infer that critics of the Brotherhood are needlessly alarmed by the name of the group.

It gets worse. Taylor compared the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood to Tunisia’s Ennahda Party, as if that is a positive example to follow. “As long as parties, entities do not espouse or conduct violence, we’ll work with them.” He said there is undue fear of the Islamists. “This is something that we are used to, and should not be afraid of. We should deal with them.”

It is hard to imagine a statement more frightening and naïve coming from a senior official.

The Muslim Brotherhood’s Palestinian affiliate is Hamas, which the Brotherhood still stands by and has never condemned. … The leader of the Ennahda Party, Rachid Ghannouchi, likewise supports Hamas, terrorism and the killing of Israeli children. This certainly qualifies as espousing violence, to use the words of Taylor.

A look at Taylor’s background shows he is a long associate of individuals tied to the Muslim Brotherhood and apologists of the Islamist group. Before taking his State Department post, he was the vice president of the U.S. Institute for Peace (UIP). It has a close working relationship with John Esposito, arguably the most prominent non-Muslim apologist for the Muslim Brotherhood, foreign and domestic.

Esposito defends the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), the Islamic Society of North America (ISNA) and Sami al-Arian. He served as an expert witness for the defense in the trial of the Holy Land Foundation, which was found guilty of being a front for Hamas set up by the Brotherhood.

A trial in which Cair and ISNA were found to be “unindicted co-conspirators” with the Holy Land Foundation. Why, we wonder, do they remained forever “unindicted”?

[Esposito is also] the vice chair of the Center for the Study of Islam and Democracy (CSID), the board of which has strong associations with the International Institute for Islamic Thought, another Brotherhood front. On April 28, 2010, Taylor’s UIP sponsored a CSID conference that the Global Muslim Brotherhood Daily Report calls “perhaps the largest public gathering of global Muslim Brotherhood leaders and U.S. government officials to date.” Tariq Ramadan, the grandson of Hassan al-Banna, the original founder of the Muslim Brotherhood, was there, as was Brotherhood members from Bahrain and Jordan. In May 2011, CSID held an event with a senior leader of Ennahda.

Taylor joins several other Obama administration officials who take a benign view of the Muslim Brotherhood or are linked to its American fronts.

The best example is the Director of National Intelligence, James Clapper, who … during testimony to Congress in February, [said] that the “term ‘Muslim Brotherhood’ is an umbrella term for a variety of movements, in the case of Egypt, a very heterogeneous group, largely secular, which has eschewed violence and has described Al-Qaeda as a perversion of Islam.”

There’s Rashad Hussain, the [US] envoy to the Organization of the Islamic Conference,  who attended the aforementioned CSID event featuring Brotherhood leaders.

For the low-down on Rashad Hussain, see our post The trusted envoy, February 20, 2010. The Organization of the Islamic Conference, recently renamed the Organization of Islamic Co-operation is the body chiefly responsible for launching the “soft jihad” invasion of Western Europe. For more about it see our post Europe betrayed, February 11, 2010.  

Then there’s Dalia Mogahed, one of the members of President Obama’s Advisory Council on Faith-Based and Neighborhood Partnership. She is a close associate of John Esposito and is said to have been the “most influential person” advising President Obama on his speech to the Muslim world in Cairo. …

The State Department has teamed up with CAIR to host an event with the Syrian opposition. In January 2010, members of ISNA, the Muslim Public Affairs Council and Muslim American Society, all tied to the Muslim Brotherhood, were given briefings by the Department of Homeland Security including Secretary Janet Napolitano. A member of the Department of Homeland Security’s Advisory Council, Mohamed Elibiary, has Brotherhood associations and is a defender of the Holy Land Foundation. …

For more on Mohamed Elibiary, who leaked secret intelligence to which the DHS had given him privileged access [!], see our post National Insecurity, November 16, 2011.

Obama’s chief terrorism advisor, John Brennan, speaks alongside the president of ISNA. Another senior advisor to the President, Valerie Jarrett, was the keynote speaker at ISNA’s 2009 convention. It has been reported that the Justice Department even blocked the prosecutions of at least two Brotherhood figures tied to Hamas. …

In the US:

This report comes from Creeping Sharia:

If you are a student of Islam, then you might have gathered that Islam has a doctrine of eternal hatred of Kafirs and their civilization. A student of Islam might also gather that after a 1400 year history of hostilities, murder, rape and enslavement that Islam was at war with us. But the White House, the Department of Justice, Homeland Security, FBI and CIA have informed us that this is not the case.

It started when Steve Emerson [expert on terrorism] and Steve Coughlin [expert on Islamic law] were going to give talks about political Islam to the FBI and Homeland Security . Then the White House informed them that not only were they not going to talk about the Islamic doctrine and history of jihad, but that henceforth, no Kafir could talk to any Federal agencies, unless they were vetted by the Muslim Brotherhood.

Now, Eric Holder, the Attorney General, has ordered a purge of all Department of Justice manuals and training of all material that will “offend” Muslims. …

U.S. Attorney Dwight Holton explained that FBI training materials that even remotely link Islam to violence will be banned.

“I want to be perfectly clear about this: Training materials that portray Islam as a religion of violence or with a tendency towards violence are wrong, they are offensive and they are contrary to everything this president, this attorney general and Department of Justice stands for,” he told Muslim activists gathered at the George Washington University law school. “They will not be tolerated.”

The president and the Department of Justice do not stand for critical thought, an examination of all sides of a problem. The White House wants to see that Muslims are never offended. Notice that the White House does not say that the Kafir analysts are wrong in their facts and data. Instead, they say that facts have no place at the table. Our government no longer stands for logical thought, but only wants to insure that Muslims are not offended by Kafirs. The way for Muslims to not be offended is for the Kafirs to keep silent. This is pure Islamic doctrine, Sharia law. …

Kafirs must not have knowledge of Islamic doctrine. Kafirs must not make their civilization attractive to Muslims. Kafirs must submit to Islam … This is why we are changing how our textbooks explain America because Muslims will read them. Islam must be praised and the West denigrated. 

You might wonder why they would not want Kafirs to read the Koran. After all wouldn’t they want the Kafir to read the wonderful Koran and become a Muslim? No, Islam wants for you to listen to a Muslim explain the Koran. A Koran reading Kafir might apply critical thought to the text and that would be a disaster. Only Muslims are allowed to know Mohammed and Allah under Sharia law. …

Now they deny truth. Next they will criminalize truth that offends Islam.

*

The mass media are helping the administration to lie about the nature of Islam.

How pro-Islam for instance, is ABC?

Here’s David Wood to tell us:

On October 14, 2011, President Barack Obama announced that 100 U.S. troops, acting as advisors to the Uganda military, will help in military action against the Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA) — a rebel force roaming northwest Uganda, recruiting child soldiers, committing atrocities, and taking hostages (including slave “wives”) for more than fifteen years.

Information on the origin and nature of the appalling Lord’s Resistance Army is provided here at PJ Media by Harvey Glickman, Professor Emeritus of Political Science at Haverford College, who also speculates on the reasons for the recent stepped-up US involvement against it in Uganda. (For more on the LRA see our post The Lord’s army of child slave cannibals, June 14, 2011.)

The LRA’s main goal is to live off the terror it creates. Northwest Uganda, northeast Congo, and southeast Sudan (now divided by the new border with South Sudan) have all seen decades of bloody disorder as the LRA traversed international borders to elude Ugandan troops. At times, the LRA has also attacked in Rwanda, Republic of Congo, Republic of Sudan, and Uganda, committing atrocities in those countries.

The LRA emerged as an atrocity-anarchy mechanism in the mid-1980s. It arose among the long-neglected Acholi people in northern Uganda, whose brief period of ascendancy during the brutal Idi Amin regime was overthrown by the National Resistance Army, led by Yoweri Museveni, in 1986. Museveni parlayed his military success into the presidency and remains there today.

Joseph Kony, a member of the Acholi people originally from Gulu in northern Uganda, founded the LRA, and instigated a rebellion against the Ugandan government in 1986. His ostensible purpose was to establish a theocracy based on orders from God communicated to him via spirits. His method to spread the “Word” encompassed unspeakable atrocities and child abduction, eventually displacing two million people in his rampages through northern Uganda, Congo, and Sudan.

After the September 11 attacks on the United States, the Ugandan military reinterpreted its own measures against the LRA rebellion as part of the global war against terrorism. In 2002 the Uganda parliament passed a Suppression of Terrorism Act. The United States rewarded Uganda’s support for the war in Iraq by restarting a military training and assistance program in 2003. The agreement provided for electronic technology and some direct military assistance, but not weapons. Part of the program was to “win the hearts and minds” of the Acholi people, whose territory within Uganda has been most ravaged by LRA depredations.

By 2003 it was estimated the LRA had 3,000 fighters under arms and 2,000 camp followers, many involuntary. In October 2005, the International Criminal Court issued arrest warrants for five leaders of the LRA, including Kony.

Early in 2010, however, the Ugandan military stated that the LRA was at its weakest point in the past fifteen years. More recently, it claims there are only 200 to 400 soldiers still in the field for the LRA.

So why does the U.S. government pick this moment to get involved?

It turns out that the United States has been involved with this issue for some time. As early as 2003, the United States contributed aid to the Uganda defense budget as part of the expanded struggle against global terrorism. And President Obama has disclosed that since 2008 the United States has helped efforts in the region to protect local people by pursuing the LRA.

U.S. Public Law 111-172 — the “Lord’s Resistance Army Disarmament and Northern Uganda Recovery Act of 2009” — was passed by the U.S. Congress on May 24, 2010. The bill, combining national security and humanitarian goals, was sponsored by Senators McCain and Feingold to provide financial and material assistance to Uganda’s counterinsurgency efforts.

But U.S. support for the anti-LRA war has not been an unmitigated success. The National Security Council authorized training and financial support for the December 2008 Operation Lightning Thunder, a joint Uganda-Congolese-South Sudan campaign. This resulted, however, in major casualties among Congolese civilians, with 200,000 people displaced and the LRA escaping to fight another day.

Again the US is invoking R2P – the Responsibility to Protect – as its reason for intervention in a foreign war. It was the reason given for US military intervention in Libya. But if the intention really was to protect civilians, that intervention must be counted as a failure. (See our posts The danger of R2P, March 23, 2011; A siren song from hell, April 1, 2011; NATO bombards civilians in Libya, October 5, 2011.)

There were other reasons for the US and NATO to go to war in Libya, among them the need for European NATO member-states to ensure their access to that country’s oil. And there are surely other reasons for the US to go to war in Uganda.

Somewhat puzzling about the new U.S. deployment “to protect civilians” — as stated by the U.S. Embassy in Kampala on October 17, 2011 — is the fact that the Ugandan army announced that the Kony/LRA problem is no longer a threat in Uganda, but a regional problem. So, apparently the UPDF is joining the U.S. in an African regional conflict. Uganda has been a leader in the African Union’s battle against the al-Shabaab terrorists in Somalia, and suffered a retaliatory bombing in Kampala by them in July 2010.

So does this new operation mean a wider U.S. regional military action in East Africa in support, however reluctant, of Kenya’s incursion into Somalia against al-Shabaab? Is this part of an expanded role for AFRICOM, the U.S. military command in Africa? …

Among the possible motives that Glickman considers for more military action by the US in the region, one makes more sense than most:

There is one other possible factor inspiring this new U.S. effort. The geographic areas in which the LRA operates are in the middle of recent discoveries of oilfields. The finds are substantial. Three companies have bought the drilling rights. Heritage sold its interests to Tullow, Tullow sold 30% of its interests to Total and CNOOC (China National Offshore Oil Corporation, which is state-run). …

The Obama administration’s motives are still not clear. Given this list of possibilities, the way the campaign develops should provide some answers.

We think oil is a very good reason to go to war. It would be an added benefit, greatly to be welcomed, if in the course of such a war the Lord’s Resistance Army were to be destroyed.

This article by Leo Igwe is from the secularist paper, the Daily Times of Nigeria:

There are concerns that the Arab Spring could be hijacked by parties with islamic agenda, and politicians who want to impose sharia law on the states.

There are clear indications that politicians in the region are campaigning and mobilising on the basis of Islam. They are playing the islamic religious political card to gain power. They have mistaken the secular wind of  Arab Spring to an Islamic revolution. Many parties and politicians are seeking to win votes by promising to implement sharia law and enthrone islamic theocracy in furtherance of ‘the revolution’.

For instance, many secularists, feminists and human rights campaigners were shocked by the pronouncements of the leader of the National Transitional Council in Libya, Mustapha Abdul Jalil. Shortly after the death of Col Gaddaffi, Jalil declared that sharia would be the basic source of the laws in ‘Free Libya’. That all laws that were not consistent with the teachings of Islam would be repealed. He voided the law against polygamy and lifted restrictions imposed by the Gaddaffi regime on the number of women that men could marry.

In Tunisia, where it all started, the country’s main Islamic party has emerged victorious in the Arab Spring’s first elections, taking 90 of 217 seats in the new assembly. There are fears that this party could use its position to roll back the gains the country had made in steering the state away from religion and in protecting the rights of women. The party leader, Rachid Ghannouchi, has pledged that the rights of every Tunisian would be protected by the new authorities.

“We will continue this revolution to realise its aims of a Tunisia that is free, independent, developing and prosperous; in which the rights of God, the Prophet, women, men, the religious and the non-religious are assured because Tunisia is for everyone,” he was quoted to have recently told party supporters at a press conference.

An emulsion of  incompatibles!

Personally I tried to understand what he meant by the ‘rights of God’. Afterall, God is not a human being. Or the rights of ‘the Prophet’ – obviously referring to Mohammad. And Mohammad died centuries ago. Anyway, that is a clear sign of the enormous influence religion, particularly Islam, wields in the country’s politics. That is a clear sign of the struggles ahead of all lovers of freedom, democracy and human rights in the region in the years ahead.

Also in Egypt, the islamist party is expected to emerge victorious whenever the country holds elections. The party of the influential Islamist group – the Muslim Brotherhood  [calling itself] the Freedom and Justice Party – is the party to beat in the parliamentary elections coming up soon.

Throughout the Middle East and North Africa, the spectre of political Islam and its opposition to universal human rights and progressive values is haunting and threatening to undo the Arab Spring.

While we are not at ease  with the concept of “human rights” or “natural rights”, and prefer to say that  people “should be free to …” rather than “have a right to …”, we understand that freedom is what the  secularists of the “Arab Spring” desire. And Islam is freedom’s opposite: an ideology of subjugation and enslavement.

Secularists and human rights campaigners are calling for –

Complete separation of religion from the state;

Abolition of religious laws in the family, civil and criminal codes;

A separation of religion from the educational system;

Freedom of religion and atheism as private beliefs;

Prohibition of sex apartheid and compulsory veiling.

And he ends by saying:

Politicians should strive and uphold the ideals of freedom, secularism, democracy and human rights in contemporary Middle East and North Africa. These are the values people fought and died for. These are the values at the heart of the Arab Spring.

We accept that these are the ideals some people are striving for in the Arab revolutions, and some people have fought and died for. We applaud those brave idealists. We agree that their values should be the values at the heart of the Arab Spring, and the politicians and parties that uphold them should form the post-revolution governments.

But, as the writer observes, Islam is in the ascendancy. The vast and ignorant army of the dead Muhammad is intent on imposing sharia law.

The people of Tunisia, Egypt, and Libya are more than likely to find themselves even worse off than they were before the revolutions.

Western sages coined the word “Islamist” to mean someone who took Islamic ideology too far; religious duty to pursue jihad to the point of mass killing, perhaps by suicide bombing, too seriously. In other words, an extremist. This allowed the sages, whose heads were more full of pride in their own tolerance than of little grey cells, to intone ad nauseam, “the vast majority of Muslims are peace-loving people who wouldn’t hurt a fly”. After which some of them would urge unknown spokesmen for that “vast majority” to come forward and denounce the “Islamist'” violence loud and clear.

They wait patiently, year in year out, for the silence to be broken.

The idea was that there are two Islams: a “moderate” one that does not take the commandments of the Koran – such as “kill the infidel” (Sura 9:5) – to be instructions to action, and another Islam that does.

The term “Islamist” has passed into common use to mean fanatical pursuers of Islamic jihad.

Now comes a new division: “moderate Islamists” – in other, equally oxymoronic, words: moderate fanatics, moderate extremists.

The idea crops up in this report about the elections in Tunisia:

A moderate Islamist group [Ennahdha] that was brutally repressed for decades was poised Monday to become Tunisia’s dominant political faction after a landmark election to choose a council that will draft the country’s new constitution and appoint an interim government. …

“The best way to deal with the Islamists is to include them in the process,” said Marwan Muasher, vice president for studies at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and an election observer with the National Democratic Institute. “There’s no excuse for keeping them out.”

In stark contrast to the Islamists’ success was the apparent poor performance of the secular Progressive Democratic Party …  The PDP ran a campaign that cast its leaders as the protectors of secular and modern values. … The PDP conceded its loss and pledged to work in the opposition rather than with Ennahdha.

In “the opposition”? How long will an opposition be allowed, we wonder.

The same idea of “moderate Islamism” was implied by the US Director of National Intelligence, James Clapper, when, in February, 2011, he told a House Intelligence Committee hearing that the Muslim Brotherhood was ” largely secular” and “eschewed violence .”

The Muslim Brotherhood, however, does not agree with him. Its motto is:  “Allah is our objective. The Prophet is our leader. Qur’an is our law. Jihad is our way. Dying in the way of Allah is our highest hope.”

The probable coming to power of “Islamist” parties in Tunisia, Egypt, and Libya is in fact a most ominous development.

Frank Gaffney, President Reagan’s assistant secretary of defense, warns:

War is on its way in the Middle East as Muslim countries are determined to force a showdown over the future of Israel …

“I’m afraid there’s a war coming, a very serious, perhaps cataclysmic regional war,” he said. “It will be presumably over, at least in part, the future existence of the state of Israel. It may involve all of its neighbors, as they have in the past, attacking Israel to try, as they say, to drive the Jews into the sea.

“It may involve the use of nuclear weapons … But whatever form it takes and whenever it occurs, it is unlikely to be contained to that region, and we must do everything we can to prevent freedom’s enemies from thinking they have an opportunity to engage in that kind of warfare.”

That means standing “absolutely, unmistakably” as one with Israel and doing everything to prevent Iran getting its hands on nuclear weapons.

Gaffney …  was speaking on the day that the “moderate” Islamist party Ennahda claimed victory at the ballot box in Tunisia and the day after Libya’s new rulers declared that country will be run on Islamic principles and under Sharia law. Gaffney does not believe Ennahda is really a moderating force. “I don’t believe there is such a thing as a moderate Islamist party,” he said. “The challenge with Islamists is that they seek to impose what they call Sharia on everybody, Muslim and non-Muslim alike. …

“They may, as a matter of tactical expediency, choose to do so in incremental ways, often nonviolently, at least initially.

“The problem is that, because ultimately they must — according to Sharia, according to what they believe is God’s will — make everyone feel subdued in order to achieve their God-mandated direction, they will not remain moderate. They will not be satisfied with anything less than the ultimate supremacy of Sharia and they certainly will not resist the use of violence when it becomes expedient to get their way.”

Gaffney … foresees a rising tide of Islamist governments growing throughout Middle East and North Africa and spreading even further.

“We’re witnessing not just the violent kind of jihad that these Islamists believe God compels them to engage in, but also, where they must for tactical reasons, a more stealthy kind, or civilizational jihad as the Muslim Brotherhood calls it. We’re witnessing that playing out, not only in places in the Middle East but also in Europe, in Australia, in Canada and here in the United States as well,” he said.

The spread of Sharia, which Gaffney said is often referred to as “Communism with a god,” is “the most urgent and grievous challenge we face as a free people.

“Those who follow this program of Sharia believe that God is directing them to engage in jihad or whatever form of warfare is necessary to accomplish their goals . . . .Through stealth, they have successfully penetrated important parts of the free world including our own government and civil society institutions.”

The Obama administration has to stop “embracing” the Muslim Brotherhood, Gaffney said.

“This is legitimating our enemies … It is facilitating their influence operations and their penetration and it greatly increases the prospect that they will be successful at what the Muslim Brotherhood’s own documents indicate is their desire, which is to destroy western civilization from within.”

Gaffney noted that Ennahda had won what appears to be a clean election in Tunisia, but that doesn’t mean there ever will be another vote there.

“The problem is not simply democracy. People are pointing to Tunisia as a perfect example of democracy at work. …  fine if all you want is one-man-one-vote one-time. That is precisely what the Muslim Brotherhood and its like-minded Islamist friends want.” …

“What we are likely to wind up with, not just in Tunisia, not just in Libya, not just in Egypt, but probably in due course in Syria — as we have in Lebanon, as we have in Gaza and probably will have down the road in Yemen, Bahrain, maybe Saudi Arabia — is the takeover, the unmistakable takeover, perhaps through the ballot box, of people who will not seek or allow others freedom, who will impose Sharia and who will use whatever resources they amass as a result, not only to suppress their own people, but to endanger us.”

We think Frank Gaffney is right about the Arabs wanting to make war again on Israel. They ache to make war on Israel. He’s also right that “Islamist” leaders are the most likely to try it.

But could they do it? Perhaps not in the near future. Egypt is desperately poor, on the verge of bankruptcy and mass starvation. Libya is rich enough to make war, but for all the pretense that the rebels were an army, it was only a collection of ad hoc militias, and the Libyan nation is a mass of quarreling tribes and factions vying to get their hands on the money Gaddafi stacked up round the world. True, a war against Israel would unite them, but could they fight it? Not on their own.

Yet sooner or later the war that Gaffney predicts will come. It may not come until the middle of the century, when Europe will be predominantly Muslim. Or it may be initiated soon by Iran, with nuclear bombs.

And when the war comes, the sages of the West who have helped to put “moderate Islamist” parties in power throughout the Arab world, will have gone a long way to promote the victory of “Communism with a god” and the fall of our civilization.

The pretense continues that “the rebels’ – a crowd of untrained Libyans dangerously armed – achieved the conquest of Tripoli and now the defeat of Gaddafi’s last defenders in Sirte and his capture.

Here is a report from the Telegraph in which the writer tries to uphold the internationally agreed lie, while yet supplying the information that a US drone guided from the Nevada desert, and French bombers, and British “advisers” – actually strategists and leaders and, probably, effective fighters in sufficient number – ended Gaddafi’s forces’ last stand and flushed out the man.

Deep in the lunar landscape of the Nevada desert, American specialists trained to their computer screens spotted unusual activity at around 7.30am in District Two. From their windowless bunker, lit by constantly flickering computer screens, the analysts directed their unmanned Predator drones to zoom in on the convoy [of trucks] as it picked up speed and headed west. Nato’s eyes were suddenly trained on Gaddafi’s convoy. …

Around 40 miles off the Libyan coast a Nato AWAC early-warning surveillance aircraft, flying over the Mediterranean, took control of the battle and warned two French jets that a loyalist convoy was attempting to leave Sirte.

As the convoy sped west, a Hellfire missile was fired from the Predator and destroyed the first vehicle in the convoy.

By now, the NTC troops had realised that the loyalists were escaping and a small number of lightly armed rebels began to give chase.

To me it seemed like a wild, chaotic situation. But we now know that it had, in fact, been foreseen by the British SAS and their special forces allies, who were advising the NTC forces.

British military sources have told The Sunday Telegraph that small teams of SAS soldiers on the ground in Sirte, armed but under strict orders not to get involved, had warned them throughout the siege to be alert to the fleeing of loyalists.

Assisted by other special forces – in particular the Qataris [put in because they’re Arabs which makes it okay if they have “boots on the ground”? – JB]  with whom the SAS have a long relationship dating back 20 years – the SAS tried to impress on the Libyans the need to cover all escape routes.

But despite the advice, the breakout seems to have taken the rebels on the Zafran front completely by surprise.

In the previous two weeks I had repeatedly seen the militiamen fail to hold forward positions at night as they fell back to their encampments. Again and again loyalists had used cover of darkness to surprise the militiamen and manoeuvre into new firing positions.

Once more their surveillance was lax, and one rebel fighter confessed to me that in the early hours of Thursday they had failed to keep proper watch on the western front and they were surprised by the convoy. …

At this point the SAS urged the NTC [National Transitional Council] leaders to move their troops to exits points across the city and close their stranglehold.

After the Hellfire missile struck its target, the convoy changed direction, possibly hoping to avoid a further strike, before heading west again. It had begun to fracture into several different groups of vehicles.

The French jets were also given permission to join the attack.

By now a group of 20 vehicles in the convoy had reached a point around three miles west of the city. The shattered streets had been left behind, and the convoy had halted next to a walled electricity sub station, in arid farmland dotted with breeze block compounds and trees.

Just then, the French pilot began his bombing run, seconds later releasing two 500lb GBU-12 laser-guided bombs, into the centre of the convoy.

The bombs unleashed massive force. Arriving at the site, a few hours later, their devastating power was clear to see: at least a dozen vehicles were shredded and burned out, while I counted more than 25 bodies, some lying twisted and charred inside the vehicles and others lying in clumps nearby.

The air strike marked the end of any attempt at an ordered retreat and the convoy’s remnants scattered. …

Col Gaddafi had survived the air strike, but was apparently wounded in the legs. With his companions dead or dispersed, he now had few options.

He and a handful of men … appeared to have made their way 300 yards north from the devastation and taken shelter in a drainage culvert running under a dual carriageway. …

Members of the Al Watan revolutionary brigade who had been following the convoy at a distance witnessed the explosion, but at that point still had no idea who was in the vehicles.

Saleem Bakeer, a rebel fighter who said he was among those who came across Gaddafi hiding in the pipes said they had approached on foot.

“One of Gaddafi’s men came out waving his rifle in the air and shouting surrender, but as soon as he saw my face he started shooting at me,” he said.

“Then I think Gaddafi must have told them to stop. ‘My master is here, my master is here’, he said, ‘Muammar Gaddafi is here and he is wounded’.”

“We went in and brought Gaddafi out. He was saying: ‘What’s wrong? What’s wrong? What’s going on?'”

The initial astonishment [on the part of the rebels] appears to have quickly switched to jubilation, and then rage.

“I don’t think that anyone thought he would be there, we all thought that he would be in the south, or maybe across in Niger or Algeria. We were as shocked as he was at first,” said Abdullah Hakim Husseini, one of the band of men who found him. “We were so happy when we knew it was him. I thought, ‘at last, it’s all over’.”

Mobile phone footage shows Col Gaddafi alive but weak and bloodied, with blows raining down on him from frenzied fighters. At one point he was hauled onto the bonnet of a pickup truck, then pulled down by his hair. His weighty golden gun, intricately engraved and decorated with the words “The sun will never set on the Al Fattah revolution”, was snatched by one of the revolutionaries. His satellite phone was seized, and it was later discovered that he had made one last call to Syria.

Omran el Oweyb, the commander who captured Gaddafi, said that he only managed to stagger ten steps before he fell to the ground. …

One rebel was heard screaming in his face: “This is for Misurata, you dog.”

Gaddafi – confused, bloodied, stumbling – can be heard to reply, in what could be his last, laughably philosophical words: “Do you know right from wrong?”

What happened in the next minutes is the subject of intense controversy. Sometime in the next hours or minutes he died of a bullet wound to the left temple. The official NTC account says he was caught in crossfire as he was being driven to hospital. …

However the ambulance driver who ferried him said Col Gaddafi was already dead when he was loaded into the ambulance, around 500 yards from his point of capture.

One NTC member, who did not want to be named, admitted that this version of events was likely. “They beat him very harshly and then they killed him,” he said. “This is a war.”

So British SAS soldiers directed the last battle on the ground.

A Hellfire missile and bombs released from French planes hit the truck-convoy in which Gaddafi was trying to flee from Sirte. Gaddafi and at least one of his men sought shelter in a large drainpipe. And only then the Libyan savages moved in for the kill.

This is also from the Telegraph:

In Benghazi, on the main square where it all started, they were slaughtering camels in celebration. … They daubed their hands in the camel-blood, and gave the V-for-victory sign with dripping fingers. …

In the cafes, people were watching TV pictures – more graphic than any shown in Britain – of a bloodied Gaddafi dragged along and beaten, feebly protesting, before a gun was put to his head.

The picture then cut to the dead ex-leader being rolled onto the pavement, blood pooling from the back of his skull. …

Gaddafi’s death is already showing up some of the weaknesses of Libya’s new rulers.

The claim by the interim prime minister, Mahmoud Jibril, that he was killed in “crossfire” looks ever more false with every new piece of video.

Both he and his son Mutassim were alive when captured, and dead soon after. A statement by an anonymous NTC source that “they beat [Gaddafi] and they killed him” seems closer to the mark.

But Mr Jibril angrily rejected demands by the United Nations and some in the West for a proper investigation into the circumstances of Gaddafi’s death.

“People in the West don’t understand the agony and pain that the people went through during the past 42 years,” he said.

The dictator’s treatment – before and after death – underlines that Libya does not have a government, or a state with functioning standards, only a collection of militias.

After he was killed, his [torn and bloodied] body was taken by the Misurata militia and put on display in a shopping centre, where yesterday the corpses of his slain son Mutassim and Gaddafi’s army chief, Abu Bakr, were placed alongside.

Libyans from hundreds of miles away came to queue up and, some wearing gloves and masks, view the three bodies. …

The various militias are quarreling over who should take possession of the corpses. It is a harbinger of fiercer quarrels to come. Trouble looms.

Most of the militias are based on a particular town, financed and commanded largely autonomously. Gaddafi’s death means that the main thing which united them – the war against him – is over. Now, the many rivalries and disputes between them, and between them and the NTC, may come to the fore. …

The NTC is indeed going to vanish: Mr Jibril, along with the rest of the council, have already said they will serve only until elections in eight months’ time, and he repeated that yesterday. Eight months is quite enough time for political disputes to fester and harden into something more serious.

Such as more civil war?

This comes from DebkaFile:

[National Transitional Council leader] Mustafa Abdul-Jalil will be little more than a figurehead. Even now, he is confined in Benghazi by three strongmen, who control most parts of the capital, and have not given him permission to move the seat of the interim government to Tripoli. …

The regime taking shape could not be further from the Western ideal of a free democracy.

Behind the grisly images of Muammar Qaddafi’s last moments spilling out since Thursday, Oct. 20, a quiet contest is afoot between the US and at least two NATO allies, France and Germany, over who deserves the credit for his termination and therefore for ending the alliance’s military role in Libya.

American sources are willing to admit that US drones operated by pilots from Las Vegas pinpointed the fugitive ruler’s hideout in Sirte and kept the building under surveillance for two weeks, surrounded by US and British forces.

Both therefore had boots on the ground in breach of the UN mandate which limited NATO military intervention in Libya to air strikes. …

According to the London Daily Telegraph, his presence in the convoy was first picked up by the USAF River Joint RC-135V/W intelligence signals plane, which passed the information to French warplanes overhead who then carried out the strike on Qaddafi’s vehicle.

The German Der Spiegel reported Monday, Oct. 24, that the tip revealing Qaddafi’s last hiding place came from German BND intelligence agents. Although Chancellor Angela Merkel was dead against German participation in the NATO operation in Libya, the BND nonetheless played an important role in intelligence-gathering.

It is increasingly obvious now that without the active intervention of the US, Britain, France and Germany, the anti-Qaddafi rebels on their own would never have beaten Qaddafi or been able to end his life.

As usual, however, the foreign offices of all the NATO countries involved in the operation will follow a long established custom of the Western powers and allow the Arabs to lie.

The lie will be that the people of Libya overthrew a tyrant. The truth will be that they’ll instate an Islamic regime in his stead; and the West, for all its talk of helping Libya become a free democracy, will not raise a finger to prevent that from happening.