Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher was hosted by President Ronald Reagan at a state banquet in 1980.

Documents of the occasion were released last year by the Margaret Thatcher Foundation after the required 30-year delay.

Here are excerpts from the toasts (as selected by Commentary-Contentions):

[The Prime Minister]: Mr. President, an earlier visitor to the United States, Charles Dickens, described our American friends as by nature frank, brave, cordial, hospitable, and affectionate. That seems to me, Mr. President, to be a perfect description of the man who has been my host for the last 48 hours. (Applause.) …

Charles Dickens, like me, also visited Capitol Hill. He described the congressmen he met there as “striking to look at, hard to deceive, prompt to act, lions in energy, Americans in strong and general impulse.” Having been there and agreeing with Dickens as I do, I’m delighted to see so many Members of Congress here this evening. And if Dickens was right, relations between the legislative and executive branches should be smooth indeed over the next four years. After all, “prompt to act and lions in energy” should mean, Mr. President, you’ll get that expenditure cutting program through very easily indeed. (Laughter. Applause.) …

California, of course, has always meant a great deal to my countrymen from the time, almost exactly 400 years ago, when one of our greatest national heroes, Sir Francis Drake, proclaimed it New Albion in keeping with the bravado of the Elizabethan Age. This feeling of community and curiosity that we have about California exists in the present age when another of our household names made his career there, one of the greatest careers in show business. I refer to Mr. Bob Hope, who is here this evening, and whom we like to claim is partly ours because he was born in the United Kingdom, though he decided to leave when he was only four years old. (Laughter.) …

I hope you didn’t feel ill at ease as you came up the stairs and passed under the gaze of George III. (Laughter.) I can assure you that we British have long since come to see that George was wrong and that Thomas Jefferson was right when he wrote to James Madison that “a little rebellion now and then is a good thing.” (Laughter.) …

It’s not the time, Mr. President, for me to talk at any length about the relations between our two countries except to say that they are profoundly and deeply right. And beyond that, we perhaps don’t have to define them in detail. …

There will, of course, be times, Mr. President, when yours perhaps is the loneliest job in the world, times when you need what one of my great friends in politics once called “two o’clock in the morning courage.” There will be times when you go through rough water. There will be times when the unexpected happens. There will be times when only you can make a certain decision. It is at that time when you need the two o’clock in the morning courage. … And what it requires is a knowledge on your part that whatever decision you make you have to stick with the consequences and see it through until it be well and truly finished. …

I want to say this to you, Mr. President, that when those moments come, we here in this room, on both sides of the Atlantic, have in you total faith that you will make the decision which is right for protecting the liberty of common humanity in the future. You will make that decision that we as partners in the English-speaking world know that, as Wordsworth wrote, “We must be free or die who speak the tongue that Shakespeare spake.”

[The President]: Bob Hope will know what I mean when I speak in the language of my previous occupation and say you are a hard act to follow. (Laughter. Applause.) … And may I say that I do know something about that “two o’clock courage,” but I also know that you have already shown that two o’clock courage on too many occasions to name. (Applause.) …

[Y]ou know, Prime Minister, that we have a habit of quoting Winston Churchill. Tell me, is it possible to get through a public address today in Britain without making reference to him? It is increasingly difficult to do so here, not just because we Americans share some pride in his ancestry, but because there’s so much to learn from him, his fearlessness, and I don’t just mean physical courage. I mean he was, for instance, unafraid to laugh. I can remember words attributed to Churchill about one somber, straight-laced colleague in Parliament. Churchill said, “He has all the virtues I dislike and none of the vices I admire.” (Laughter.) …

When he addressed Parliament in the darkest moments after Dunkirk, Churchill dared to promise the British their finest hour and even reminded them that they would someday enjoy, quote, “the bright, sunlit uplands,” unquote, from which the struggle against Hitler would be seen as only a bad memory. Well, Madam Prime Minister, you and I have heard our share of somber assessments and dire predictions in recent months. I do not refer here to the painful business of ending our economic difficulties. We know that with regard to the economies of both our countries we will be home safe and soon enough.

I do refer, however, to those adversaries who preach the supremacy of the state. We’ve all heard the slogans, the end of the class struggle, the vanguard of the proletariat, the wave of the future, the inevitable triumph of socialism. Indeed, if there’s anything the Marxist-Leninists might not be forgiven for it is their willingness to bog the world down in tiresome cliches, cliches that rapidly are being recognized for what they are, a gaggle of bogus prophecies and petty superstitions. … I wonder if you and I and other leaders of the West should not now be looking toward bright, sunlit uplands and begin planning for a world where our adversaries are remembered only for their role in a sad and rather bizarre chapter in human history.

The British people, who nourish the great civilized ideas, know the forces of good ultimately rally and triumph over evil. That, after all, is the legend of the Knights of the Round Table, the legend of the man who lived on Baker Street, the story of London in the Blitz, the meaning of the Union Jack snapping briskly in the wind. Madam Prime Minister, I’ll make one further prediction, that the British people are once again about to pay homage to their beloved Sir Winston by doing him the honor of proving him wrong and showing the world that their finest hour is yet to come, and how he would have loved the irony of that. How proud it would have made him.

Sadly, in this prediction, Reagan and not Churchill was wrong. Britain has been steadily declining since the end of World War II, and it would take an incurably irrational optimist to deny that it is now beyond hope of recovery.

The Reagan-Thatcher era was an all-too-brief silver age.

Politically, and in international relations, the whole world has greatly changed for the worse since they, together, won the Cold War against the Soviet Union.

*

For contrast, go here for an account of what Prime Minister David Cameron said when toasting President Obama at the White House state banquet on March 15, 2012.

And squirm.

The method of terrorism will continue to be used by Muslim jihadis (and others) because it works.

The West, out of cowardice, stupidity, sentimentality, and  apathy, has allowed it to work.

How? The BBC provides an example :

The MailOnline reports that the director-general  of the BBC, Mark Thompson, defends the notorious pro-Islam bias of his publicly-funded institution on the grounds that if it wasn’t obedient to Muslim demands it would be subjected to terrorist violence. 

Mr Thompson said: ‘Without question, “I complain in the strongest possible terms”, is different from, “I complain in the strongest possible terms and I am loading my AK47 as I write”. This definitely raises the stakes.’

He said the BBC  would never air a satirical show about Muhammad because for Muslims it could have the same impact as a piece of ‘grotesque child pornography’.

Mr Thompson said the fatwa against Salman Rushdie over his novel The Satanic Verses, the September 11 terror attacks, and the murder in Holland in 2004 of film-maker Theo van Gogh, who had criticised Islam, had made broadcasters realise that religious controversies could lead to murder or serious criminal acts.

That is, if the “religious controversies” concern Islam. Only Islam, the terrorist religion.

Commenting on this, Bruce Bawer writes:

When the most powerful media organization in the U.K. is run by someone whose readiness to admit his utter lack of courage would seem, from all the evidence, to reflect the fact that the concept of courage isn’t even on his radar, it doesn’t bode well for the future of British freedom.

British freedom? Ah yes, we remember it well.

Another point that was important to Thompson was that, as he put it, “for a Muslim, a depiction…of the Prophet Mohammed might have the emotional force of a piece of grotesque child pornography.” He added that “secularists” fail “to understand…what blasphemy feels like to someone who is a realist in their religious belief.” I would humbly submit that Thompson himself fails to understand something rather important – namely, that when the head of an outfit like the BBC starts thinking and talking in such terms, he has become nothing more or less than a sharia puppet.

Another thing Thompson apparently fails to understand is this: when it becomes the duty of citizens in a secular democracy to edit what they say or write in order to avoid committing what the adherents of some religion or other might consider blasphemy, then secular democracy, individual liberty, and freedom of expression are, in practice, no more. I wonder if it has occurred to Thompson at all that for more than a few freedom-loving people in his own country and elsewhere, the fact that a man in his position could follow such an outrageously pusillanimous policy might well, to coin a phrase, “have the emotional force of a piece of grotesque child pornography”?

He cites an instance of how the BBC pr0-Islam bias routinely manifests itself:

The Beeb’s Stacey Dooley is visiting her hometown, Luton, to discover if the situation with extreme Islam is really as bad there as some people say. Upon arriving in town, she stumbles upon a Muslim march whose participants are chanting “To hell with the U.K.” and carrying signs calling for sharia law. There are plenty of women in niqab, one of whom tells Dooley to put on some clothes. For a while you think that Dooley is actually going to wake up and smell the coffee. But in the end, ignoring everything she’s witnessed, the little ditz closes with the standard, canned, de rigueur, mainstream-media conclusion – namely, that both sides need to listen to each other with respect, for the only reason for all this intercultural friction is “ignorance.”

Given the deliberate, depressing refusal of so many members of the British media to face up to the advent of sharia in the land of Magna Carta and Winston Churchill, it was at least a bit cheering the other day to see Brendan O’Neill, in the Telegraph, spelling out the dramatic, and telling, difference between the way in which the framers of the U.S. Constitution understood the concept of rights and the way today’s European leaders think about the same subject.

While the makers of the American revolution “emphasized individuals’ capacity to make judgments…free from state interference,” explained O’Neill, Europe today is plagued by a “paternalistic” notion of human rights “in which the individual is treated as an at-risk creature who must be protected from harm and bullying by…human-rights lawyers.” While the U.S. Bill of Rights concisely sets limits on state power, the European Convention on Human Rights “spends thousands of words telling the state what it should be doing…and how it must go about protecting individuals from abuse and mental distress.” And while the U.S. Bill of Rights makes it clear that free speech is sacrosanct, the European document is awash in weasel words, saying that “freedom of expression” is “subject to such formalities, conditions, restrictions or penalties as are prescribed by law and are necessary in a democratic society, in the interests of national security, territorial integrity or public safety,” and on and on.

Which is, of course, simply a very long and legalistic way of saying that in Europe today, even (alas) in Britain, freedom of speech is severely endangered – just as Mark Thompson (whether he realizes it or not) has essentially admitted, and … as the BBC’s own Stacey Dooley, despite having seen reality close-up in her hometown of Luton, still refuses to grasp.

But in Obama’s America freedom of speech is severely endangered in the same way for the same reason. It’s good that a Telegraph journalist has pointed out the difference in theory between the way the American revolutionaries and the US Bill of Rights “emphasized individuals’ capacity to make judgments free from state interference,” and the European “paternalistic notion of human rights in which the individual is treated as an at-risk creature who must be protected from harm and bullying by human-rights lawyers …  in the interests of public safety”; but the Obama administration does not feel bound by the US Bill of Rights, and is trying pertinaciously to follow the European model.

The more chilling difference between the European cringe in the face of the Islamic threat and the Obama submission to it, is that Obama and his henchmen are not motivated by fear. Despite the Islamic act of destruction on 9/11, and the exposure of many a jihadi plot in the US since then, it is not Muslim violence that has them eager to submit to Islam, but their own sympathy with it.

The British Conservative James Delingpole, with whom we usually agree, writes at the Telegraph about the dismal view he takes of the Republican Party candidates in this year’s presidential election.

His assessment of them is so dismal that he thinks that letting Obama, “the POTUS from hell”,  wreck the country for another four years would be a better choice than electing any of them.

We cannot wholly agree with him this time because we think no one on the political horizon could be worse for America than Obama, but we like his article and see his point:

Let’s get one thing clear: Obama unquestionably ranks among the bottom five presidents in US history. In terms of sublime awfulness he’s right up there with our late and extremely unlamented ex-PM Gordon Brown – which is quite some doing, given that Brown singlehandedly wrought more destruction on his country than the Luftwaffe, Dutch Elm Disease, the South Sea Bubble, the Fire of London and the Black Death combined.

Agreed: the damage President Obama has done to the US economy with everything from Ben Bernanke’s insane money-printing programme, to his cancellation of the Keystone XL pipeline, to his ban on deep-water drilling to his crony capitalism hand-outs to disaster zones like Solyndra to his persecution of companies like Gibson is incalculable. And, of course, if he gets a second term the damage he and his rag-bag of Marxist cronies at organisations like the Environmental Protection Agency manage to inflict on the US small businessman trying to make an honest buck will make his first term look like Calvin Coolidge on steroids.

So why do I think this would be preferable to a presidency under Mitt Romney? Simple. Because I’ve seen what happens, America, when you elect yet another spineless, yet ruthless, principle-free blow-with-the-wind, big government, crony-capitalist RINO squish. His name is Dave Cameron – and trust me, the cure is far worse than the disease.

Of course it may not seem that way at first. You’ll be so busy dancing round in circles singing “Ding Dong the witch is dead!” that euphoria and relief will completely overwhelm your intellect and your powers of observation. You’ll read endless articles by David L Brooks, the New York Times’s pet pretend-conservative, telling you how Romney is just the kind of uniting, post-partisan, pragmatic POTUS America needed. And you’ll believe it because you’ll want to believe it. This may last for some considerable length of time. In Britain, many Cameroon conservatives … continue to perform this auto-lobotomisation even now.

But then, little by little, something rather unpleasant will begin to dawn on you. The label on the can may have changed but the contents taste remarkably similar. Similarly emetic, that is.

Yes, I know from the other side of the pond David Cameron may look just the kind of stand-up conservative you’d like running the US. But that’s only because the stories you hear about him are extremely selective. For example, I’m constantly surprised by US talk show hosts telling me how tough on militant Islam Cameron is because of some speech they heard Dave give once about the problems of multiculturalism.

But surely we should judge our political leaders by what they actually achieve rather than (Tony Blair-style) by what they tell us they are achieving.

Here are some of David Cameron’s achievements so far:

He has prolonged the economic crisis …

He has urged quotas for women in the boardroom, apparently in the belief that the State has either the knowledge or the right to decide how business conducts its affairs.

He has presided over a massive wind-farm building programme which, besides destroying the British countryside and enriching his father-in-law, is causing energy bills to soar to the point where old people are dying of hypothermia.

He has surrendered at almost every turn to the Carthaginian terms offered to Britain by the European Socialist Superstate.

He has proved himself incapable of expelling the Islamist hate-preacher Abu Qatada. [See our post The tale of a Muslim terrorist parasite, January 18, 2012.]

The list is by no means exhaustive. I would go on but, actually, this was never meant to be a “collected examples of the unutterable crapness of David Cameron” blog. Rather, it’s supposed to be a more generalised warning about the dangers of short-termist thinking.

Yes, of course, conservative/libertarian America, I fully understand how desperate you are to rid yourself of the POTUS from hell. But what you need to ask yourselves – and I don’t believe many of you are: you’re a bit like an hysterical woman who’s just had a tarantula drop on top of her in the bath, you just want to GET RID OF IT NOW! – is what ultimately you’re trying to achieve.

I’m presuming what you really want is stuff like: smaller government; a genuine – as opposed to an illusory, QE-driven – economic recovery; sensible environmentalism (ie conservation but not eco-fascism); liberty; an end of crony capitalism; a diminution of the power of Wall Street; a resurgence of American greatness; a renewed sense of confidence and purpose.

You’re not going to get any of that from a Romney administration.

But you will, provided you’ve got the patience, get it in 2016 from President West or President Rand Paul or President Palin or President Ryan.

Only it might be TOO LATE.

(Hat-tip Andrew M)

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.

This is from an article by Jack Doyle at the MailOnline:

The number of Muslim converts in Britain has passed 100,000 …

The figure has almost doubled in ten years – with the average convert now a 27-year-old white woman fed up with British consumerism and immorality.

Whose “consumerism and immorality”? Their own?

Or maybe it’s not so much consumerism and immorality that drives them into the arms of Islam, as an attraction to young Muslim men. If they marry them, maybe they’ll learn in time to speak of “subjugation”, and know all too well what it means.

The numbers, revealed in a study by multi-faith group Faith Matters, have led to claims that the country is undergoing a process of ‘Islamification’.

The survey of converts revealed nearly two thirds were women, more than 70 per cent were white and the average age at conversion was just 27.

But the organisation’s report argued that most converts saw their religion as ‘perfectly compatible’ with living in Britain.

It said: ‘Converts do not represent a devious fifth column determined to undermine the Western way of life – this is a group of normal people united in their adherence to a religion which they, for the most part, see as perfectly compatible with Western life.’

They’re real thinkers, you see. Done their research, understand the ideology of Islam through and through. Found not a trace of immorality in it.

And their schools never taught them that there is anything wrong with Islam, did they? Said nothing about it being incompatible with Britain’s democracy, it’s equal treatment of men and women, its traditional tolerance and freedom?

The report estimated around 5,200 men and women have adopted Islam over the past 12 months, including 1,400 in London. …

The survey … asked converts for their views on the negative aspects of British culture.

They identified alcohol and drunkenness, a ‘lack of morality and sexual permissiveness’, and ‘unrestrained consumerism’.

What’s slavery compared to the evils of alcohol, sex and shopping?

Fiyaz Mughal, director of Faith Matters, said: ‘Conversion to Islam has been stigmatised by the media and wrongly associated with extremist ideologies and discriminatory cultural practices.’

Conversion to Islam stigmatised by the media? We haven’t noticed much of that.

Islam wrongly associated with extremism and discrimination?

In 2001, there were an estimated 60,000 Muslim converts in Britain. Since then, the country has seen the spread of violent Islamist extremism and terror plots, including the July 7 bombings.

Converts who have turned to terror include Nicky Reilly, who tried to blow up a restaurant in Bristol with a nail bomb, shoe bomber Richard Reid and July 7 bomber Germaine Lindsay.

Those were reported by the media. But maybe the converts didn’t research that deeply.

(Hat tip George)

The Occupy movement is turning against and horrifying its supporters on the religious left.

This is from an article by Mark Tapson at Front Page:

Initially, the Los Angeles Times pronounced the Occupy movement “a predominantly secular undertaking,” although it did note that “some left-leaning religious groups see a golden opportunity in the Occupy movement, whose central message of greater economic equality resonates deeply among faith-based progressives.”

Sure enough, religious progressives did rush to anoint the movement as it began to swell. [Some] religious left icons … rhapsodized about the Occupiers standing with Jesus in their defense of the poor, even resembling St. Francis of Assisi….

St. Francis of Assisi, it is worth noting, was very much like the average Occupier: a rebel against his bourgeois parents who had made their ample fortune in trade.

By the beginning of December The Huffington Post asserted that “more than 1,400 faith leaders from around the country [had] signed a pledge of solidarity with Occupy protesters.” They conducted services and provided counseling, and their churches hosted Occupy meetings. Religious communities of all stripes rushed to offer the Occupiers shelter and solidarity:

In addition to spiritual ministry and space to assemble and sleep, religious communities have provided the Occupy movement with material support such as food, clothing, tents, blankets and heaters.

Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams wrote that Jesus would be among the Occupiers of St. Paul’s Cathedral, and that the movement had prompted people to examine themselves and ask, “What would Jesus do?” …

If the Occupiers did ask themselves “What would Jesus do?” then they apparently came to the conclusion that Jesus would expose himself, rape, urinate and defecate in public, endanger children, steal, trespass, trash public and private property, harass and denounce Jews, assault non-protesters and police, block traffic, take drugs, hurl Molotov cocktails and blood and vinegar, and more. … To date, arrests at Occupy events number over 6,000, including over 400 in Oakland alone last weekend.

By contrast, the Tea Party movement doesn’t even litter.

So it was only a matter of time before the Occupiers began misbehaving in the very churches that had given them sanctuary and assistance …

Members of the movement urinated on a cross inside a Brooklyn church recently and have been accused of desecrating New York’s West Park Presbyterian Church. The pastor ordered sixty protesters to leave the sanctuary after one of them stole a bronze lid from the $12,500 baptismal font. Initially a supporter of the Occupy movement, the pastor now is outraged by their behavior …

Some leftists begin to see sense when they’re hit on the head or robbed by fellow leftists. But we don’t suppose that any number of hits on the head will wake up Archbishop Rowan Williams. He’s probably still expecting a polite Thank-you note from leaders of the Occupy movement.

Occupiers also began wreaking havoc in London’s St Paul’s Cathedral, the very one where Archbishop Williams claimed Jesus would be showing His solidarity.

The registrar of St Paul’s, Nicholas Cottam, described the disruptions:

Desecration: graffiti have been scratched and painted on to the great west doors of the cathedral, the chapter house door and most notably a sacrilegious message painted on the restored pillars of the west portico.

Human defecation has occurred in the west portico entrance and inside the cathedral on several occasions.

We like the idea of human defecation “occurring”. No actual crapper to be blamed for crapping intentionally in the sacred precincts. It recalls the old Christian conundrum about “hating the sin but loving the sinner”.

He also noted noisy interruptions during services, foul language directed at staff, and the use of alcohol and other stimulants that appeared to “fuel the noise levels day and night.” Litter has piled up and dogs roam freely on the site. This led to more than half of the schools scheduled to visit the cathedral cancelling since the occupation began there in October. Visitor numbers were also down by half, leaving the cathedral’s cafe, shop and restaurant “faltering.”

A little trade on the side? What would St. Francis have said about that?  And isn’t there a story about Jesus chasing money-changers out of the Temple? Okay, not money-makers, but still …

The cathedral’s director of community and children’s services expressed concern about people who were exhibiting behaviour that was indicative of poor mental health …

Only some people? And we’d assumed that all members of the Occupy movement were in poor mental health!

… people who were exhibiting signs of drug use including stumbling and compulsive behaviour, people who had body odor arising from significant periods without washing or change of clothing and a number of people who were clearly under the influence of drugs and alcohol.

The only surprising thing about all this being that the director was surprised.

Occupiers recently threw Bibles at police officers from an abandoned San Francisco hotel, and disrupted a Right to Life rally inside the Rhode Island state capitol, shouting down a priest’s prayer and tossing condoms on Catholic school girls.

Well, boys will be boys.

And sentimental idealism whether of the church or a political movement invites a dousing with the cold water of actuality.

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.

In our time and the foreseeable future, the war between intellectual light and darkness will, we envision, increasingly be fought out by secularists, rationalists, atheists against the religious of all denominations, but most necessarily and urgently against Islam.

This is by Daniel Greenfield, from Front Page:

Alexander Aan was just another bureaucrat holding down a desk at the [Indonesian] Department of Planning until his Facebook Atheism page came to the notice of Indonesian authorities in Obama’s old stomping grounds. Now Aan is facing a five year jail sentence for using social media to spread the message that Allah does not exist. 

Alexander is being charged with “defiling” Islam by using passages from the Koran to challenge the Islamic religion. And while the State Department and the media routinely go on the attack against any manifestation of what they call “Islamophobia,” it isn’t likely that they will be rushing to Aan’s defense. This isn’t exactly the first time that atheists have run afoul of the Islamic codes under which the Muslim world operates.

Two years ago, the Palestinian Authority arrested Waleed Hasayin on similar charges of blaspheming against Islam on Facebook. Waleed Hasayin had written that, “Muhammad was no different than barbaric thugs who slaughtered, robbed and raped women” and that “Islam has legitimized slavery, reinforced the gap between social classes and allowed stealing from the infidels, taking women in captivity during wars and sexual abuse of women slaves.” 

For these and other truthful statements, he was arrested and his family demanded that he be sentenced to life in prison. He has since written a letter of apology in hopes of being released.

The regimes imprisoning Aan and Hasayin are funded by the United States. Indonesia is on the list of the top twenty countries benefiting from USAID funding and the Palestinian Authority, including its security forces and prisons, is mostly subsidized by American taxpayers. The arrests were accompanied by mob protests and violence reflecting populist Muslim hostility toward non-Muslims.

Underlying these individual incidents is a legal code that goes to the very definition of what it means to be a citizen of a Muslim country. Muslim countries recognize a limited set of legal religions. Non-Muslims who are members of legal religions have fewer rights and run the usual risks that come with being a minority group. Non-Muslims who are not members of official religions do not. This includes Muslim sects that the Islamic system does not recognize as legitimate. It includes Muslims who wish to convert to another religion, and it includes atheists who are not a recognized religious group. 

Religious identity is linked to civic participation in public life in a way that most Americans are not aware of. It appears on identity cards, it is a basic requirement for doing anything from attending a university to getting married. Without membership in an officially recognized religious group, the atheist is a non-person.

Well, that’s in the Islamic world. We know how it is there. We know that in some Islamic countries – Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, Iran, Sudan, Afghanistan – the punishment for “blasphemy”, which of course includes atheism, is death.

But in our Western world, where freedom is a high value, and freedom of speech a right enshrined in a constitution (as in the US) or established by tradition (as in the UK), such tyrannous bigotry is not tolerated.

Or is it?

Atheists no longer have to live in the Muslim world in order to be subject to Islamic rules. At Queen Mary, University of London, a public research university with roots going back nearly a thousand years, the Atheism, Secularism and Humanism Society attempted to hold a discussion on “Sharia Lw and Human Rights.” The discussion came to an abrupt end when a man entered the room and warned that they would be murdered if they said anything critical about Mohammed. 

The return of blasphemy laws to the United Kingdom has been slow, but not all that stealthy. At the University College London, the president of the Atheist, Secularist and Humanist Society resigned after the college student union backed a Muslim student association’s complaints about a cartoon strip of Mohammed having a drink that was posted on Facebook.

The steady flow of Muslim immigrants into London has turned it into Londonistan with nearly a tenth of the city answering the Call of the Mosque. In two decades their numbers will double and with 40 percent of British Muslims polling for Sharia, it’s not difficult to see that the trajectory for atheists in London is not a very promising one.

Atheists are a minority with legal protections in the West. Which is why the majority of the signatories on the Manifesto for a Secular Middle East and North Africa were activists who had left the Muslim world and were living in Europe or the United States. The impossibility of signing a similar manifesto while living full time in Iran or Pakistan went without saying.

But as the Muslim populations of Western countries continue to grow, they are becoming dangerous places for non-Muslims, including atheists. If a dialogue on the consequences of Islamic law can be shut down with threats of violence at University College London, then it’s hard to think of any place that it cannot be shut down. 

We like to think of our cities as fundamentally different places than Tehran or Islamabad, but it’s the population that shapes the character and values of a city. Demographic change means cultural and religious change and as the norms of Tehran and Islamabad become the norms of London and Paris, religious minorities and irreligious minorities will both find themselves silenced. …

Muslim persecution of a hated minority group increases proportionally in relation to their numerical advantage. Atheists are a larger percentage of the population in Europe, but demographics are still catching up to them. In the United States the demographic race may already be done, as far as atheists are concerned.

In the United States approximately 0.7 percent of the population identifies as atheist and 0.8 percent of the population as Muslim. If these surveys are correct then the number of Muslims in the United States has already exceeded the number of atheists. While not a single member of Congress identifies as an atheist, two identify as Muslims.

We may accept Daniel Greenfield’s finding that 0.7 percent of Americans “identifies as atheist”, but we doubt that only 0.7 Americans are atheist. We suspect that tens of millions of Americans do not believe in the supernatural.

We think it more than likely that many members of Congress and the Senate are atheists but are aware that saying so publicly would end their political careers.

We suspect – and ardently hope – that with each generation more and more adult, sane, educated, intelligent people realize that the supernatural is superfluous to requirement; that gods do not exist; and that religion is a major cause of conflict.

Whether this intellectual evolution will dominate forcefully enough to save the world from the growing and spreading counter-movement of Islam – the darkest, most ignorant, most stupid, and in our day the cruelest of all superstitions and all systems of totalitarian tyranny – remains to be seen.

This is a story of injustice in the name of compassion. It is one of thousands with the same plot and message. It is the European story of the age – along with the tale of the collapsing welfare states.

The following article by Philip Johnston, and the picture of Abu Qatada, are from the Telegraph:

Three years ago this week, a British man, Edwin Dyer, was kidnapped by nomads in north-west Africa, where he was working, and handed over to al-Qaeda militants based in Mali. They threatened to kill him if the British government refused to release the radical Muslim cleric Abu Qatada from prison, where he was awaiting deportation.

A few months later, Mr Dyer was murdered … We cannot be sure that releasing Qatada would have spared Mr Dyer, since the extremists were also demanding a ransom. In any case, it is the British government’s long-stated policy not to deal with terrorists.

But the question that arose then, and still applies, is this: why was Abu Qatada even in the country to be included in a potential bargain with extremists? Since he was identified as Osama bin Laden’s “ambassador in Europe” after the 9/11 attacks on America, British authorities have been trying to deport him to his native Jordan.

Yet for more than 10 years, every effort to do so has been thwarted by human rights laws. In 2009, it looked as though he would be sent packing when the highest court in the land ruled that his deportation would be lawful, the government having gone to considerable efforts to extract a guarantee from Jordan that Qatada would not be ill‑treated if he was returned. But he appealed to the European Court of Human Rights, whose judges yesterday said that in their opinion he could still face an unfair trial, since evidence against him might have been extracted under torture. He could not, therefore, be removed.

In doing this, the European Court moved the legal goalposts: it accepted that he would not be tortured personally – which would prevent his deportation under Article 3 of the convention – but ruled instead that his removal would be a breach of Article 6, the right to a fair trial. At every turn, Britain has found itself hamstrung trying to get rid of a foreign national considered to be a risk to public safety. How has this come about?

Principally, it is to do with the warped application of the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR), which was drawn up after the Second World War as a response to the atrocities in Europe. The Abu Qatada saga is an affront to the enlightened attitudes that inspired the convention; it was never envisaged by its architects, many of them British, that it would end up making it impossible for democracies to defend themselves from those who would wish them harm.

We’ve always thought the “human rights” idea was a bad one. It arose out of the fairly common human need among a lot of nice people to feel good. But it is a sentimental idea, and sentimentality is the enemy of reason and commonsense. Furthermore, European politicians drew the wrong lesson from the Holocaust, so the Jews, who were its victims, are not the beneficiaries of Europe’s shame – Muslim Jew-haters like Abu Qatada are.

This story began in 1993 when Abu Qatada, a Palestinian wanted for terrorist crimes in Jordan, arrived in Britain on a forged United Arab Emirates passport.

Of course he should have been refused entry. But sentimentality won the day.

He was allowed to settle in Britain as a political refugee precisely because this country has a record of offering sanctuary to the persecuted. This generosity also turned London in the 1990s into a haven for Islamists who had no love for the West, nor for what they regarded as its decadent politics.

By the time the threat was catastrophically apparent in 2001, the capital was derisively being referred to as “Londonistan”, with Abu Qatada as fundamentalist-in-chief. According to security documents, he was responsible for “facilitating the recruitment of young Muslims for jihad”. One file stated: “He has been linked to support of terrorist and extremist activity, including support for anti-US terrorist planning in Jordan during the millennium [celebrations]. He has been a focal point for extremist fund-raising, recruitment and propaganda.”

Another added: “As soon as Abu Qatada had arrived in London and had applied for asylum, he started supporting jihad by recruiting for al-Qaeda. Abu Qatada was considered a major figure for al-Qaeda.”

He went on the run after 9/11 but was arrested in 2002 and held in Belmarsh top-security prison, along with other Islamists the Government wanted to remove but who could not be tried in this country, not least because the security service feared jeopardising its intelligence sources. In any case, Britain did not want to try them but to get rid of them.

There then began an extraordinary legal and political battle that has tied our courts in knots and undermined the rights of Parliament to decide who should be allowed to stay in the country.

Qatada’s detention was ruled unlawful on the grounds that since his deportation was blocked under Article 3 of the ECHR, he faced indefinite incarceration. He was even awarded £2,500 compensation for unlawful imprisonment.

In response, the last Labour government introduced a system of control orders to keep Qatada and other Islamists under house arrest. However, this was ruled unlawful by the courts here; it amounted to imprisonment without trial, so the restrictions had to be loosened.

Undaunted, the Home Office tried another tack. Officials opened talks with Jordan to obtain assurances that he would not be tortured if sent back. When these were forthcoming, the Law Lords in 2009 agreed his deportation should proceed.

Yet, three years on, that judgment has now been overturned by the European Court. The Government has three months to appeal but the chances of success are fanciful. In the meantime, Qatada will remain in jail.

And here is the most bizarre aspect of this affair. The reason he is in prison is because he breached the conditions of his control order. His offence was that he was suspected of trying to leave the country – the very thing we have wanted him to do for 10 years.

So sentimentality brought its ever more ludicrous consequences.

This, then, is the topsy-turvy world that the ECHR has produced – and the latest ruling goes much further than before, when the ban on deportation was effected under Article 3, where someone might face “inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment”. …

The judgments of our courts are trumped by a 47-member body set up under the Council of Europe (not the EU), whose president, Sir Nicolas Bratza, is a British lawyer who has never held a senior judge’s job in this country. …

What began as an attempt to limit the power of the state in relationship to the individual by drawing upon British concepts of liberty has been transformed into a corpus of immutable rights that defy rational expectation. Even the 1951 Refugee Convention, under which Qatada was allowed into Britain in the first place, specifically states that asylum “cannot be claimed by a refugee whom there are reasonable grounds for regarding as a danger to the security of the country in which he is”.

To add insult to injury, Philip Johnston points out, al-Qatada and his large family live on benefits paid for by the British tax-payer. Free house, free education, free medical treatment, and loads of cash in hand.

So this Muslim terrorist parasite will live not too unhappily ever after. Or at least until the British welfare state finally collapses.

Richard Dawkins speaks at a “Protest the Pope” rally in September 2010.

We particularly like what he said about the absurd and sadistic doctrine of “original sin”.