Nashi (“Ours”) is a government-funded youth movement in Russia. It is to Putin what the Hitler Youth was to Hitler and the Young Pioneers to Stalin. It claims to have 10,000 active members and 200,000 participants in its events.

It adulates Anders Breivik, the mass murderer. See the video in the post immediately below, Putin Youth.

In summer Nashi members go to procreation camps where they procreate for Russia, in a desperate effort to preserve their nation, which is halving with each new generation.

Edward Lucas writes:

Couples move to a special section of dormitory tents arranged in a heart-shape and called the Love Oasis, where they can start procreating for the motherland.  …

This organisation – known as “Nashi”, meaning “Ours” – is a youth movement run by Vladimir Putin’s Kremlin that has become a central part of Russian political life.

Nashi’s annual camp, 200 miles outside Moscow, is attended by 10,000 uniformed youngsters and involves two weeks of lectures and physical fitness.

Attendance is monitored via compulsory electronic badges and anyone who misses three events is expelled. So are drinkers; alcohol is banned. But sex is encouraged, and condoms are nowhere on sale.

Bizarrely, young women are encouraged to hand in thongs and other skimpy underwear – supposedly a cause of sterility – and given more wholesome and substantial undergarments.

Twenty-five couples marry at the start of the camp’s first week and ten more at the start of the second. These mass weddings, the ultimate expression of devotion to the motherland, are legal and conducted by a civil official.

Attempting to raise Russia’s dismally low birthrate even by eccentric-seeming means might be understandable. Certainly, the country’s demographic outlook is dire. The hard-drinking, hardsmoking and disease-ridden population is set to plunge by a million a year in the next decade.

Summer sex might be the best part of belonging to Nashi, but the organization’s chief purpose has less to do with embracing in dutiful pleasure  and more to do with tightening the grip of the state.

But the real aim of the youth camp – and the 100,000-strong movement behind it – is not to improve Russia’s demographic profile, but to attack democracy.

Under Mr Putin, Russia is sliding into fascism, with state control of the economy, media, politics and society becoming increasingly heavy-handed. And Nashi, along with other similar youth movements, such as ‘Young Guard’, and ‘Young Russia’, is in the forefront of the charge. …

Like the Hitler Youth and the Soviet Union’s Young Pioneers, Nashi and its allied movements offer not just excitement, friendship and a sense of purpose – but a leg up in life, too.

Nashi’s senior officials – known, in an eerie echo of the Soviet era, as “Commissars” – get free places at top universities. Thereafter, they can expect good jobs in politics or business …

Nashi and similar outfits are the Kremlin’s first line of defence against its greatest fear: real democracy. … Nashi supporters drown out protests by Russia’s feeble and divided democratic opposition and use violence to drive them off the streets.

In July 2006, the British ambassador, Sir Anthony Brenton, infuriated the Kremlin by attending an opposition meeting. For months afterwards, he was noisily harassed by groups of Nashi supporters demanding that he “apologise”. With uncanny accuracy, the hooligans knew his movements in advance – a sign of official tip-offs.

Even when Nashi flagrantly breaks the law, the authorities do not intervene. After Estonia enraged Russia by moving a Soviet-era war memorial in April, Nashi led the blockade of Estonia’s Moscow embassy. It daubed the building with graffiti, blasted it with Stalin-era military music, ripped down the Estonian flag and attacked a visiting ambassador’s car. The Moscow police, who normally stamp ruthlessly on public protest, stood by.

Nashi fits perfectly into the Kremlin’s newly-minted ideology of “Sovereign democracy”. This is not the mind-numbing jargon of Marxism-Leninism, but a lightweight collection of cliches and slogans promoting Russia’s supposed unique political and spiritual culture. …

The Kremlin sees no role for a democratic opposition, denouncing its leaders as stooges and traitors. Sadly, most Russians agree: a recent poll showed that a majority believed that opposition parties should not be allowed to take power.

Just as the Nazis in 1930s rewrote Germany’s history, the Putin Kremlin is rewriting Russia’s. It has rehabilitated Stalin …  And it is demonising Boris Yeltsin, Russia’s first democratically-elected president. That he destroyed totalitarianism is ignored. Instead, he is denounced for his “weak” pro-Western policies. …

Edward Lucas speaks of “a new cold war”.

It does seem that Russian leaders are waging a new cold war, but American leaders are – or choose to behave as if they are – blissfully unaware of it.

As the new cold war deepens, Mr Putin echoes, consciously or unconsciously, the favourite weapon of Soviet propagandists in the last one. …

For the east European countries with first-hand experience of Stalinist terror, the Kremlin’s rewriting of history could hardly be more scary. Not only does Russia see no reason to apologise for their suffering under Kremlin rule, it now sees the collapse of communism not as a time of liberation, but as an era of pitiable weakness.

Russia barely commemorates even the damage it did to itself, let alone the appalling suffering inflicted on other people. Nashi is both a symptom of the way Russia is going – and a means of entrenching the drift to fascism.

If tens of thousands of uniformed German youngsters were marching across Germany in support of an authoritarian Führer, baiting foreigners and praising Hitler, alarm bells would be jangling all across Europe. So why aren’t they ringing about Nashi?

As this is an Al Jazeera video, the reporter stresses the “nationalist” – ie anti-Muslim – aspect of Nashi, and suggests that it is “extreme Right”, by which he means to imply Nazi-like. In fact, of course, Nazism and Communism are alike in all important respects. Both are collectivist ideologies – as is Islam.

A leader of the Workers Youth League, the organization that was targeted in the Utoya attack, was himself a trained terrorist.

Here’s the story.

On May 15, 1974, three terrorists belonging to the Popular Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PDFLP) broke into an apartment at Ma’alot in Israel, and killed three members of the family who occupied it, the father, the pregnant mother, and their four-year-old child, and severely wounded another child. The terrorists then went on to a local school, where they found 100 teenagers and their teachers staying overnight on an outing from Safed. The terrorists held them hostage, using them as sandbags at the windows. Explosives were wired to the walls of the school. At one point the terrorists started singing songs of the Palmach, the commando force of the pre-1948 Jewish Defense Army. After sixteen hours the Israeli security forces stormed the building. The terrorists killed 22 of their hostages and one rescuing soldier, and wounded 56 others before they themselves were shot and killed.

Under the leadership of a Christian from Jordan, Nayef Hawatmeh, the PDFLP had broken away from the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine. Both were self-declared Marxist groups. They  both joined the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) when it was reconstituted in 1968 under the leadership of Yasser Arafat, chief of Fatah.

Two years after the Ma’alot atrocities, the PDFLP [also known as the DFLP] acquired a Norwegian member, Lars Gule, who served as the head of the Workers Youth League – the organization that was running the youth camp on Utoya Island when Anders Breivik perpetrated his massacre.

Daniel Greenfield writes at Front Page that two years after the Ma’alot Massacre –

Lars Gule was trained by the DFLP and dispatched to Israel via Norway with explosives hidden in the covers of his books. …

None of this impeded Gule’s career in any way. He went on to the University of Bergen and served as the head of the Workers Youth League, the organization that was targeted in the Utoya attack. Today he is a prominent figure on the left.

How can we make sense of this? Glenn Beck compared the Workers Youth League camp to a Hitler Youth camp. He was close, but not entirely right. The roots of the Workers Youth League are actually Communist.

A very fine difference if any at all!

Norway’s Labour Party was a member of the Communist International. The Workers Youth League was formed by the merger of the Left Communist Youth League and the Socialist Youth League of Norway. We often use “Communist” as a pejorative– but in this case the Utoya camp, literally was a Communist youth camp.

The day before the massacre, Norwegian Foreign Minister Gahre-Store visited the camp and was greeted with banners calling for a boycott of Israel, and Gahre-Store responded with an Anti-Israel speech to cheers from the campers. …

There are few children of workers at the Workers Youth League camp. They are for the most part the children of the party, the sons and daughters of bureaucrats and party leaders, training the next generation to perpetuate the Labour Party state.

Breivik came from that same background. The son of the left wing elite. And if his parents’ marriage had not collapsed, with the young boy allotting a share of the blame to the Labour Party, he would likely have a comfortable spot in the socialist state. Breivik may have turned against his roots, but the idea that terroristic violence is a legitimate solution is one that he could have easily picked up on the left.

Gahre-Store may have been greeted with a banner calling for the boycott of Israel, but he would never have been greeted with one calling for a boycott of terrorists. And indeed if there is an Islamist terrorist group that Gahre-Store doesn’t support, it’s hard to find. Gahre-Store had called for negotiating with Al-Shahaab in Somalia, an Al-Qaeda offshoot, he spoke with Hamas leader Khaled Mashal and called for a reconciliation with the Taliban.

Nor is the Workers Youth League call for the destruction of Israel a recent one. In the 70′s … the man who led the organization [Johan Jurgen Holst] then went on to become the country’s Foreign Minister playing a key role in the Oslo Accords that turned Israel into a free fire zone for the terrorist allies of the League and the Labour Party.

Media commentators have made a great deal of Breivik’s radicalization, but despite his death toll, his radicalization seems to be an isolated event in comparison to the magnitude of radicalization at Utoya. If Breivik’s violence and bigotry is to be condemned – shouldn’t the species of violence and bigotry at Utoya be condemned as well?

The left can hold up Utoya as an example, but there are a legion of counter-examples. Not the least of which is Lars Gule, traveling with explosives in his backpack, on a journey that took him from DFLP terrorist to Workers Youth League leader.

And behind that is the larger string of DFLP and Fatah atrocities. And that of other terrorist groups around the world. The Utoya attack cannot be viewed as an isolated event. It must be seen within the context of support for terrorism as a valid tactic. An idea that goes back to the Marxist roots of the Labour Party and which is embodied in its political support for terrorism. …

Breivik and Lars Gule had their common origins in a country dominated by a political left which sees violence as a legitimate tool of political change, while dehumanizing its victims. Norway’s ambassador to Israel carefully distinguished between the Utoya attack and the terrorist attacks on Israelis. The latter would go away if Israel just followed Gahre-Store’s example and negotiated with Hamas.

But what Norway’s political elite failed to grasp is that the genie of terrorism cannot be kept in a lamp, to emerge only at your command. Once you legitimize terrorism as a tool of political change, you lose the ability to determine who will make use of it. Breivik followed the example of Lars Gule, that of the Marxist terrorists, whose intellectual legacy is the black tar that seeps through the painted walls of Norwegian foreign policy.

Some theorize that  Islam is strengthening in Europe because Europe is abandoning Christianity. The reasoning goes like this: a religion-vacuum is created, so another religion is “sucked in” to fill the empty space.

Another theory is that the Left actually wants to discard the civilized achievements of the West and return to a primitive way of life, the life of the savage.

Thomas Hobbes described such a life – accurately, we think – as “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short.”

Daniel Greenfield argues that the Left is pining for a return to the primitive; and he sees that the longing of the Left to be disburdened of Western civilization makes it all too easy for Islam to destroy it.

We don’t agree with everything he says in his essay, but we think he’s right about the Left’s perverse wish, and that it coincides with Islam’s ardor to restore the age of its prophet. There does seem to be a suicidal self-hatred among the most privileged class that exists in the world and that ever has existed in all history, which harmonizes with Islam’s hatred of human achievement; an insane nostalgia for the simplicity of poverty which sympathizes with a terrible nostalgia for the dust of the desert soaked with the blood of infidels.

He writes at Sultan Knish:

The clash of civilizations is also a clash of histories. The Western view of history is progressive. A march upward from barbarism to greater phases of enlightenment. … In progressive history, human techniques from the technological to the social can be used to improve life and make the world a better place.

The Islamic view of history is regressive. A lost golden age followed by unbelief and heresy, culminating in a struggle by the believers to restore Islamic dominance. Everything that humans do independently of Islam makes the world a worse place. The perfect touchstone of history was Mohammed. And the only way that history can be set right is by restoring the lost and corrupted caliphates. …

The intellectual elites of the West have begun to make the switch to a regressive model of history. The environmental movement and the postmodern left have become the champions of a regressive history which demands that we turn back the clock and learn to imitate the slums of the Third World in order to become a better society.

That the people doing this are some of the best and the brightest [we’d take issue with that – JB], the graduates of elite institutions and the thinkers and philosophers of the West, who have followed the dark road of social revolution into oblivion and have come away with no reason for their cultures and nations to go on living— testifies to the peril that the West finds itself in.

The progressive model of history is on life support. In its pure form, it hardly exists outside of scientific circles, rationalist atheists and patriotic Americans. And the former two often incorporate it into a global admixture that depends on a … world-state through the United Nations. …

Not real scientists, as opposed to global warmists. And not us rational atheists.

Imagine what Europe would be like if some 90 percent of the population wanted to restore feudalism, theocracy … There’s no need to imagine it. It’s called the Muslim world. And a rising percentage of the European population consists of Muslims who are implementing Sharia, Burqas and Jihad in its major cities.

But the Muslim Jihad is not irrational, it’s arational. Muslims don’t believe in reason as a solution to human problems. They believe in no human solution at all, only the abnegation of humanity to Allah through a clerical guardianship. This is their means of creating a perfect society.

Progressive history accepts human imperfection and builds on it. Regressive history rejects it as a force of evil. Instead it holds up a beacon of a golden past… The daily submission of Muslims arises out of a contempt for the individual as a moral actor, and replaces him with the collective Ummah, the receptacle for their transcendence under the guidance of the clerics. The Jihad abandons individual morality for collective bloodshed in the name of creating a perfect society through world domination. …

Islam … may use modern tools, but it never values them, let alone the gifts and sciences that brought them into being. Its gaze is hopelessly dingy, rimmed with disgust for anything that is less than [their idea of] perfect. The tools are inferior copies of what the Koran makes possible. The societies are corrupted and decadent. …

Everyone is practiced at manipulating everyone else and accordingly there is no real trust outside the family. And little trust even inside it. And all of this only goes to reinforce the essential Islamic message of human worthlessness. …

European expectations of Muslim integration were flawed from the start… Their pessimistic worldview was never compatible with Western democracy. …

Rather than identifying with their new countries, Muslim immigrants instead decided to replace them. To remake them into the same Caliphate mirage under the guardianship of quarreling clerics and greedy uniformed thugs. And no amount of visits to mosques and Ramadan dinners thrown by Western leaders will change that. It only accelerates the process. …

Islam’s aim is unity. The absolute collectivism of the Ummah standing over the diminishing number of Dhimmis who have not yet been convinced to take the plunge into the Sharia pool. It views a society that is based on division as corrupt and confused. Multiculturalism is alien to its ideological DNA. It cannot accept the equality of those who are different. The very idea of it is blasphemous. …

If the West still believed in progress as a moral imperative, it would have no trouble holding the gates. And understanding why the gates need to be held. But the worldview that made that possible is in decline.

The left rejected commercial progress as capitalist, but continued to embrace technological progress and cultural development. Then it rejected technological progress as destructive, culture as perspective and stated that the highest moral principle was for the West to save the world by destroying itself. And under their leadership that is the way it has been ever since…

The left’s regressive history is not national, cultural, religion or even specific. Instead it is primitivism itself that it seeks out. The backward and the barbaric, the poor and the lacking, that is their new compass. …

The sizable number of Muslim immigrants and the Islamic world is more than happy to step into this vacuum created by the willing abandonment of Western civilization. To take another shot at restoring their glory days in gory ways.

Barbarism … undoes civilization, but only once the civilization has undone itself.

We are not so pessimistic. Our civilization is under threat, but it can survive if America comes to its senses and rids itself of its disastrous Left leadership.

*

Post Script: Of course the lefty academics, politicians, writers, trade-union leaders, community organizers, and others of that kidney do not want poverty for themselves. They want the rest of us to live in dim cold rooms, grow our own food, give up our cars, never fly, and gratefully accept whatever cheap medical treatment some bureaucrat allows us to have if any at all. But for themselves they want tenure, guaranteed high pensions, lavish research grants, fast cars, frequent free flights with all possible perks, unstinted health care, and restaurants that never skimp on the salt, all at our expense, because they believe that is their due. (Don’t Nancy Pelosi and Al Gore spring immediately to mind?)

Terrorism is a method. It is not an ideology, or a movement, or a disembodied force on which war can somehow be waged (as per President Bush’s “war on terror”). It is a means, a tactic to achieve objectives which can be of various kinds.

What is the method of terrorism? The use of systematic violence in order to create public fear.

It has been mainly used to attain political objectives (eg. Fatah, Hamas, IRA), religious objectives (eg. the Inquisition, the Salem witch-hunters), commercial objectives (the Mafia), and in modern times the personal objective of self-expression with idealistic pretexts (eg. Ulrike Meinhof, Che Guevara, Bernadine Dohrn, Anders Breivik).

The victims are usually targeted randomly. The deaths and injuries are as atrocious as the terrorist can make them. Randomly chosen victims, whoever and whatever they are, are always innocent in the context of the attack.

There is no actual or conceivable justification for the use of terrorism. It is evil, no matter why it is used and even if it achieves a desirable end.

Acts of terrorism are distinguishable from acts of war. It can be used within the context of war (eg. executions carried out on civilians by invaders as a warning to the invaded).

Communist regimes are terroristic by nature. Stalin, Mao and Pol Pot were terrorists, Castro and Kim Jong Il are terrorists.

All autocracies, such as those of Gaddafi of Libya and Assad of Syria, are terroristic. So are the mullahs who rule Iran.

Is there a test which can be applied to an act of violence (outside of war or democratic law enforcement) to determine whether it is terroristic? Not always, but broadly, yes. If the act makes most people feel less afraid – as when a tyrant is assassinated – then it is not. But , admittedly, examples can be thought of where the distinction is hard to make.

*

Here is an opinion of the Breivik massacre that is worth thinking about, bearing in mind that the use of terrorism is never justifiable.

Debbie Schlussel writes:

The Norwegian newspaper pictures from the “political youth camp” at Utoya Island, Norway – the day before terrorist Anders Behring Breivik attacked it – say it all. The boycott sign is obvious, and the other pic is a game, re-enacting of the HAMAS flotilla in which terrorists tried to murder Israeli soldiers (complete with Palestinian flags and Norwegian kids’ smiles). These kids who were killed by a terrorist . . . well, they sided with Islamic terrorists.  … The man in the pic happily encountering the boycott sign is Norway’s Foreign Minister Gahre-Store, who went on to praise Palestinian terrorists and condemn Israel.

“Victims” or Perpetrators?: Norwegian HAMASniks Join Norway Foreign Minister @ Utoya Island Camp

Funny how Glenn Beck has come under attack for comparing the camp to a Hitler Youth camp. Based on these pics, seems like he’s spot on, though he should have added, HAMAS Youth camp, too. As we all know, Nazis boycotted Jews and were Jew-killers. And these hateful, privileged brats at the camp boycotted Jews and sided with Jew-killers. I don’t condone violent massacres on innocent civilians, and I condemn what Breivik did. He is a terrorist just like the 9/11 hijackers, Hezbollah, HAMAS, and Nidal Malik Hasan. But what goes around comes around. You support terrorists against innocent civilians in Israel, then you get attacked by terrorists who are upset with your support.

For me, this is like Alien v. Predator. I’m not sad for either side. And I make no apologies for it. Now these kids’ families know what it feels like to be victims of the Islamic terrorists whose Judenrein boycotts and terrorist flotillas against Israel they support. We don’t live in a vacuum. I can’t feel sorry for those who support my would-be assassins. And I don’t get too upset when they face the karma that is their fate. HAMAS isn’t just against Israel, it’s against all Jews . . . and all Christians. Just ask the Christians who’ve had to flee Gaza for their lives. And read the HAMAS charter. I’ll bet that’s something these spoiled airheaded kids with their Boycott Israel signs and HAMAS flotilla re-enactment games never did.

Frankly, the HAMAS charter and HAMAS’ behavior, all of which these kids at the Norwegian HAMAS youth camp cheered on, is a lot more scary than the screed and deeds of Breivik.

My late grandfather, a Holocaust survivor, never shed a tear for dead Nazis. My late father, a Vietnam era Army veteran, never shed a tear for those who supported the killing of Americans and Jews. And I shed no tears for these HAMASnik campers with a Scandinavian dialect. Perpetrators are not victims. Sorry. HAMAS collaborators don’t get my pity. They never will.

The Norwegian ambassador to Israel fails to understand that the method of terrorism is wrong whenever, wherever, and by whomever it is used. He opined that it was good when used by Hamas on Israelis, bad when used by Breivik on Norwegians. Debbie Schlussel is not making the same mistake in reverse by condemning Hamas and excusing Breivik. She condemns Breivik’s act. But the act of terrorism in this case does not appall her as it appalls us. Most of the victims on Utoya Island were young. Their opinions were hand-me-downs from their parents and teachers, not arrived at through experience and reason. Some of them would probably have come to a better understanding of political issues as they matured.

However, our sense of justice is outraged – and our sense of irony overwhelmed – by this statement on the massacre issued by Fatah, the other major Palestinian terrorist group:

It is with consternation that we have received the dramatic news of an awful terrorist attack against a summer camp ran by our comrades of Norwegian Labor Youth, AUF.

Fatah Youth declares its consternation about the terror attack. There are no words to describe an attack against people that have been our comrades in our struggle for freedom and independence. Very few people have stood by our side as much as the Norwegian people, and particularly our AUF comrades.

We know those who have been cowardly assassinated. Those are people that have stood for the human and national rights of the Palestinian people both in Europe and while visiting Palestine.

Fatah Youth has participated for almost 15 years in the same summer camp and our youth has benefited by learning and sharing experiences on democracy and advocacy for peace and justice.

We hope that those responsible for this criminal terror attack will be brought to justice. Such sick minds should not have a place in any society.

As a people that has been victim of state terror for the last 64 years, the Palestinian people and particularly Fatah Youth presents its condolences to the families of those killed and sends a strong message of support to our comrades from the Norwegian AUF as well as from other sister parties that were participating in this summer camp.

 

You have seen them at street corners in towns all over America, men and women with clipboards, always smiling, asking you in a  friendly tone to sign something that promotes the objectives of the environmental movement. They often set out stalls, or wear T-shirts, with signs announcing that they serve Greenpeace. That smile of theirs is the smug smirk of those who believe they have seen the light and feel nothing but pity for the rest of us who haven’t. Christians of all stripes wear it; as does the Dalai Lama and a multitude of others who manage to combine God-bothering with Marxism; and Democratic Party spokesmen on television news; and Al Gore.

We have posted many articles about the harm that the environmental movement does. See, for instance, The evil that Greenpeace does, January16, 2010; The vast left-wing conspiracy, January 18, 2010; The blind cruelty of Greenpeace, January 20, 2010; and Green roots: the origins of ecology, January 22, 2010.

It is a message that needs repeating.

Daniel Greenfield writes, at his website Sultan Knish, on How Environmentalists Cause War and Repression. Here’s part of what he says:

No other group has done as much to keep America dependent on foreign oil as the environmentalists have. After leading successful campaigns against nuclear power and domestic drilling, the green movement may lecture on “oil wars”, but it is responsible for most of them.

The math of it is very simple. Resource shortages are a major cause of conflict. And environmentalists have dedicated themselves to creating resource shortages in prosperous nations. Their campaigns against nuclear, domestic oil and coal production have been big on self-righteousness and short on consequences. And the consequences are that their scaremongering has not only cost millions of American jobs, it has forced us to keep sending money to Muslim oil states who use that money for domestic repression and international terrorism.

The environmentalists have done the same thing in Europe and Asia, turning formerly moribund Communist powers, Russia and China, into energy and manufacturing superpowers. By making it more expensive and in some cases impossible to conduct manufacturing and energy production at home, they exported Western industries to the East, and enabled the transformation of struggling tyrannies into international superpowers. …

When the question arises, who killed the pro-democracy movement in China– it wasn’t the tanks, but their enablers, the liberals whose regulation and exploitation had made America into an uncomfortable place to do business. Those companies went elsewhere and the money they brought, propped up the Chinese Communist party. …

In Germany, the Greens have succeeded in their campaign against the domestic nuclear industry. What is the net result of this? It further degrades Europe’s energy capabilities and moves it into Putin’s orbit. That empowers Russia to begin another campaign of conquest aimed at its former republics. That is what a “Green” victory really looks like. People freezing in their homes while a dictatorship sends its tanks and infantry on a new campaign of terror. …

The environmental movement is not interested in cheap energy. If solar power provided energy cheaply, the greens would be marching against it. Any technology that provides cheap power is their enemy.

The mandate of the environmental movement is artificial scarcity. But artificial scarcity doesn’t exist in a global economy. If you raise the price of energy production, resource mining or manufacturing, it will move abroad to less regulated countries. The price will still go up and there will be other long term consequences, but people will still find a way to get what they need. Like the rest of the left, the green movement has never learned that people will act in their own interests, rather than in thrall to their dogma. That if they can’t get it legally, they will get it illegally. …

The left has created … the slave labor that makes the products which they deplore. It is responsible for all of it and it should take ownership of it. …

The environmental movement’s manifest hypocrisy is that it causes the very things that it deplores. Its campaign against the nuclear industry has sent billions overseas to countries which are developing their own nuclear weapons and intend to use them. By shutting down nuclear plants in America, [the movement]  has made it much more likely that nuclear bombs will be detonated in America.

It destroyed American industry in the name of worker protection and pollution, and sent the factories to countries where workers have no rights and the pollution looks like something out of a post-apocalyptic movie. And reduced those former workers to the point where they have no choice but to buy those same slave labor products at a non-union store with the profits going to China’s war machine. …

These are all victories for the environmental movements and defeats for anyone with any sanity or sense. But the environmental movement refuses to acknowledge the consequences of its actions. Instead it champions further domestic and international repression. Like every tyrannical ideology it knows only one solution to every problem, more laws, more chains, more investigations and prison cells for anyone who disobeys.

Repression and propaganda is the environmental movement’s solution to everything. Its imperative is to destroy, impoverish, oppress and intimidate. It spreads hopeless misery around the world, with a smile. The countless victims of Rachel Carson’s malaria [hers because she got DDT banned – JB] or the prisoners of the EPA [Environmental Protection Agency] go unnoticed as the latest children’s propaganda cartoon is rolled out. Its implicit message is always that there is a war on between the environmentalists and the people who just want to live their own lives.

Now he’s wooing the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt.

The Muslim Brotherhood is one of the chief Islamic organizations driving the jihad against America and the rest of the non-Muslim world. It is not “moderate” or “secular” as Obama and his henchmen say it is. It’s agenda is to destroy the United States, establish a world-ruling caliphate, impose sharia law, force Christians to pay for being allowed to live, wipe out the Jews, and keep women subservient to men.

Islam is the active enemy of the United States. And the president of the United States is on its side.

His heart is with Islam.

But, you might protest, he allowed the execution of Osama bin Laden. Yes, he did – reluctantly, we believe – because he had to seem to be against the most obvious and violent enemy who had plotted the 9/11 massacre of Americans. The order he gave to the Navy SEALs to kill bin Laden provides Obama with cover for his continuing support of the enemy and undermining of the country he was disastrously elected to lead.

An analogy would be if the British had elected Oswald Mosley, the Nazi-sympathizer and friend of Hitler and Goebbels, to lead them through World War Two.

Here is a timeline, from Investor’s Business Daily, which traces  the steps Obama has taken towards pleasing and finally embracing the Muslim Brotherhood:

2009: The White House invites [the Islamic Society of North America] ISNA’s president to President Obama’s inauguration ceremonies, even though the Justice Department just two years earlier had blacklisted the Brotherhood affiliate as an unindicted co-conspirator in the Holy Land trial — the largest terror-finance case in U.S. history.

2009: Obama delivers his Cairo speech to Muslims, infuriating the Mubarak regime by inviting Brotherhood leaders to attend.

2009: The White House dispatches top presidential adviser Valerie Jarrett to give the keynote speech at ISNA’s annual convention.

2009: Obama appoints a Brotherhood-tied Islamist — Rashad Hussain — as U.S. envoy to the Organization of the Islamic Conference, which strongly supports the Brotherhood. [Its name was changed in June this year to The Organization of Islamic Co-operation – JB]

2010: Hussain meets with the Brotherhood’s grand mufti in Egypt.

2010: Obama meets one on one with Egypt’s foreign minister, Ahmed Aboul Gheit, who later remarks on Nile TV: “The American president told me in confidence that he is a Muslim.”

2011: Riots erupt in Cairo’s Tahrir Square. Crowds organized by the Brotherhood demand Mubarak’s ouster, storm government buildings. The White House fails to back longtime U.S. ally Mubarak, who flees Cairo.

2011: White House sends intelligence czar James Clapper to Capitol Hill to whitewash the Brotherhood’s extremism. Clapper testifies the group is a moderate, “largely secular” organization.

2011: The Brotherhood’s spiritual leader — Sheikh Yusuf Qaradawi — is given a hero’s welcome in Tahrir Square, where he raises the banner of jihad. Qaradawi, exiled from Egypt for 30 years, had been calling for “days of rage” before the rioting in Egypt. Before Obama’s Cairo speech, he wrote an open letter to the president arguing terrorism is a direct response to U.S. foreign policy.

2011: The Brotherhood vows to tear up Egypt’s 30-year peace treaty with Israel. Since Mubarak’s fall, it has worked to formally reestablish Cairo’s ties with Hamas and Hezbollah.

2011: Obama gives Mideast speech demanding Israel relinquish land to Palestinians.

2011: White House security adviser gives friendly speech to Washington-area mosque headed by ISNA’s new president. 2011: Justice Department pulls plug on further prosecution of Muslim Brotherhood front groups identified as collaborators in conspiracy to funnel millions to Hamas. …

Frank Gaffney reports and comments at the Center for Security Policy:

Muslim Brotherhood fronts are routinely cultivated by federal, state and local officials. Representatives of homeland security, Pentagon, intelligence and law enforcement agencies frequently meet with and attend functions sponsored by such groups. … Individuals with family and other ties to the Muslim Brotherhood have actually been given senior government positions. The most recent of these to come to light is Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s Deputy Chief of Staff, Huma Abedin [wife of the former Congressman Anthony Weiner]. …

The Obama administration’s efforts to “engage” the Muslim Brotherhood are not just reckless. They are wholly incompatible with the President’s oath to “preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States” and the similar commitment made by his subordinates.

In Gaffney’s view, it’s a step too far:

These officials’ now-open embrace of the Muslim Brotherhood constitutes a geo-strategic tipping point … Instead of relying upon – let alone hiring – Muslim Brotherhood operatives and associates, the United States government should be shutting down their fronts, shariah-adherent, jihad-incubating “community centers” and insidious influence operations in America. By recognizing these enterprises for what they are, namely vehicles for fulfilling the seditious goals of the MB’s civilization jihad, they can and must be treated as prosecutable subversive enterprises, not protected religious ones under the U.S. Constitution. …

The policy toward the MB in Egypt will, Gaffney explains, strengthen and encourage the organization in America:

By engaging the Ikhwan [Arabic for the Brotherhood] in its native land, the Obama administration is effectively eliminating any lingering impediment to the operations of its myriad front groups in this country. Even before Secretary Clinton’s announcement, many of them have already been accorded unprecedented access to and influence in the U.S. government. …

The EU is following Obama’s lead in embracing the MB.

Robert Spencer writes at Front Page:

Following quickly after the revelation that the Obama administration had resolved to establish contact with the Muslim Brotherhood, the European Union has announced that it, too, is interested in talking with the group. …

So why is the Western world rushing to talk to this malignant group? Why the determination to ignore and deny what it stands for and says it will do?

If the Western world is to survive the Islamic jihad onslaught, it will only manage to do so by decisively rejecting this fantasy-based policymaking. …

Even commentators like Spencer and Gaffney who see clearly what is happening and what must follow, do not confront the most obvious explanation for Obama’s acting as he does towards this powerful spearhead of Islam, setting an example for others to follow, perhaps because it is  “too dreadful to contemplate”  as used to be said of nuclear war breaking out between the West and the Soviet Union.

The too-dreadful-to-contemplate answer is that this is not “fantasy-based policymaking”, but policymaking with a view to achieving the very results that are being achieved: the slow but steady, step-by step conquest of the West by Islam.

We’re saying that Obama wants Islam to succeed.

Melanie Phillips sees Obama’s cozying up to the MB as capitulation. She writes:

The abject capitulation of the Obama administration to the forces waging war on the western world was laid bare a few days ago when US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton announced that the US now wanted to open a dialogue with the Muslim Brotherhood.

And she asks in bewilderment:

Why does supposedly arch-feminist Hillary want to ‘engage’ with a movement that would promote the mutilation of Egyptian women?

Whether Hillary Clinton and the EU foreign policy chief Catherine Ashton understand what it will mean if Islam achieves its aim of  world domination – the universal imposition of sharia law, dhimmification of Christians, annihilation of the Jews, the subjugation of women, a descent into another age of darkness – we don’t know; but we suspect they simply don’t allow themselves to think that those horrors could, let alone will, ensue. For them they would be too dreadful to contemplate.

As, perhaps, would be – for most Americans – the idea that a victorious Islam is the change Obama hopes for.

Should the United States refrain from any intervention in the world beyond its borders except in its own incontrovertible interest?

Or should it act as the world’s policeman? Does it have a “responsibility to protect”- if so, whom from what? Populations from their rulers? Vulnerable groups from any and all attackers?

To bring the debate to the moment and the actual, should the US keep its forces in Afghanistan after 10 years of fighting savage peasants and failing to crush them? Should there still be a US military presence in Iraq? In Germany? In South Korea? Should the US be fighting – as it is –  in Libya, Pakistan, and Yemen?

Should it not be using force to stop Iran becoming a nuclear power? And immediately against Iran’s ally, Bashar Assad, the bloody tyrant of Syria?

Should it not be outspending China on defense?

Should it not be helping Georgia liberate two of its provinces from Russia?

Should it be protecting South Sudan from its northern neighbors and their Ugandan proxies? Or the Nigerian Christians from their Muslim persecutors? Or the ethnic African Muslims of Dafur from the Arab Muslims who are raping, robbing, hounding and massacring them? Or destroying the pirates of Somalia? Or putting an end to the Arab/African slave trade?

Can those who answer yes to the first question fairly be called “isolationists”?

David Harsanyi considers, in a column at Townhall, whether the label is apt when applied to those who want America to withdraw from Afghanistan and refrain from any further participation in the NATO intervention in Libya:

There’s been a lot of talk about an alleged turn in American public opinion — particularly among Republicans — toward “isolationism.”

In a recent debate among GOP presidential hopefuls, there was some discussion about ending the United States’ commitment to the tribal warlords and medieval shamans of the Afghan wilderness. This induced John McCain to complain about the rise of a new “strain of isolationism” … McCain sidekick Lindsey Graham went on to notify Congress that it “should sort of shut up and not empower Gadhafi” when the topic of the House’s potentially defunding the military — er, kinetic, non-warlike bombing activity over Libya — came up. It would be a mistake, he vented, for Republican candidates to sit “to the left” of President Barack Obama on national security.

So if you don’t shut up and stop carping about this non-war war of ours, you are abetting North African strongmen. Makes sense. It’s the return of Teddy Roosevelt-style Republicanism, in which arbitrary power (and John McCain’s singular wisdom) matters a lot more than any democratic institution.

Sure, some on the far right and swaths of the protectionist, union-driven left oppose international trade agreements and [are] endlessly freaking us out about foreign influences.

Our interpolation: Is this protectionist section of the left aware of the left-elite’s longing for world government?

But isolationists? Judging from our conduct in the real world of economy, we’re anything but insular. So perhaps McCain simply meant noninterventionists — as in folks who have an unwavering ideological aversion to any and all overseas entanglement.

That can’t be it, either. Maybe, like many Americans, some in the GOP are simply grappling with wars that never end and a war that never started.

And with plenty of troubles here at home, it’s not surprising that Americans have turned their attention inward.

We can’t be in a constant state of war. Then again, Afghanistan is not a war per se, but a precarious social engineering project that asks our best and bravest (or, as our ally Hamid Karzai calls them, “occupiers”) to die for the Afghan Constitution, which is roundly ignored — except for the parts codifying Islamic law, that is. But all these conflicts come with the price of endless involvement. We almost always win.

When and where? Since World War Two, where has America won a hot war? Oh yes – against Granada.

But we never really go home. …

Did sometimes. From Granada after victory. From Vietnam after defeat.

This week, we learned that Obama rejected the advice of lawyers at the Pentagon and the Justice Department who questioned his legal authority to continue this nonmilitary military involvement in Libya without congressional authorization. Instead, the administration offered a string of euphemisms concocted to bypass the Constitution.

Without any tangible evidence that this conflict furthers our national interests or any real proof that we are preventing a wide-scale humanitarian crisis, it’s not a surprise that Defense Secretary Robert Gates says we’re “leading from behind” — which is, in fact, as stupid and deceptive as the case it doesn’t make.

Are you an isolationist for questioning those who continue to weaken the Constitution? … Are you an isolationist for questioning this brand of obfuscation? Are you an isolationist for wanting American forces to win and leave the battlefield rather than hang around for decades of baby-sitting duty?

And Tony Blankley writes, also  at Townhall:

I was one of the first GOP internationalist-oriented commentators or politicians to conclude that the Afghanistan War effort had served its initial purpose and that it was time to phase out the war. As a punitive raid against the regime that gave succor to Osama bin Laden, we had removed the Taliban government and killed as many al-Qaida and Taliban fighters as possible. …

But as the purpose of that war turned into nation building, even GOP internationalists had a duty to reassess whether, given the resources and strategy being brought to the new purpose, such policy was likely to be effective.

Now many others in the GOP and in the non-isolationist wing of the Democratic Party are likewise judging failure in Afghanistan to be almost inevitable. That is not a judgment driven by isolationism. Neither are we isolationist in our judgment (along with the opinion of Defense Secretary Robert Gates and almost the entire uniformed chain of command) that we see no national interest in Libya.

This is not isolationism; it is a rational effort at judging how best to advance American values and interests in an ever-more witheringly dangerous world.

Both Harsanyi’s and Blankley ‘s opinions are apt as far as they go.

But  the problem is deeper, the questions that need to be raised about foreign policy harder than those they are answering.

Can America have a coherent foreign policy that America itself and the other states of the world can depend upon for any useful length of time? The two political parties are now so divided ideologically that foreign policy will depend on whether the president is a Republican or a Democrat. It will necessarily chop and change. Or if relations with some states stay more or less the same for a while, they will do so unreliably.

Could the very uncertainty characterize foreign policy usefully? No foreign state being secure in its relations with the US, each would have to be vigilant, tack according to the US wind, adjust to the changes. A case could be made that a Machiavellian preference to be feared by other nations rather than loved might serve America well.

But there are other developments to be considered. In countries throughout the world – led in this by Europe –  there is an ideological tendency towards world government. The nation state is not liked: new political alignments, such as the European Union, are trying to phase it out. Democrats, for the most part, are in sympathy with the movement; Republicans are not. Democrats – like most leftists everywhere – have a vision of the UN turning into a world government; Republicans – many of them at least – would be happy to see the monstrous institution disbanded. It cannot continue long as it is: being a house of lies, it must fall down.

NATO is weakening. Letting Turkey into it was fatal. No longer secular, Turkey is now in the camp of Islam, inimical to the West.

The world as it was conceived to be after World War Two is changing kaleidoscopically under our eyes.

In relation to the rest of the world, what are American interests? How should they be pursued?

Should America concentrate on preserving itself as a fenced-in area of freedom on an otherwise unfree planet?  That would be isolationism. Should it form a union with other as-yet-free nation-states: Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Israel? India perhaps? Honduras? Papau? …

What would such a union do, what would be in its joint interest – “spreading democracy”, “protecting civilians”, “building nations”? The questions troubling America now would trouble it jointly, and the answers remain as hard to find.

Syrian soldiers plant weapons on protestors they have killed.

From Hot Air:

Syria claims that a number of its security forces have been murdered by “terrorists” in the last few weeks, as uprisings in the country against the Bashar Assad regime may have claimed more than 1200 lives … New video from Syria calls into question the reliability of claims by Assad’s regime of “terrorism,” as CNN reports in this video …

Videos newly posted on YouTube show what Syrian opposition activists say is the gruesome slaughter of civilians in the besieged city of Daraa who had tried to feed people during a recent uprising. …

Throughout the uprising in Syria, the Syrian government has described protesters as “armed criminals” and “terrorists,” at times saying photos prove that the “criminals” were armed when security forces shot them.

[In the video] one gets [an] idea of the attempt to plant weapons on the corpses, which all appear to have been shot at close range on the rooftop. Note that no soldiers are among the dead, nor do any appear to be wounded; it looks as though the men were crowded together and then executed. This video contains extremely graphic and disturbing images…

This massacre happened in Daraa last month. In the clip, a number of civilians are shot to death while they were trying to get some food to the people Daraa, a city which has been besieged by the regime since the beginning of the revolution. Bashar al-Assad’s Forces cold-bloodedly killed them and then put weapons on the victims to fool the media by giving the impression that the victims were terrorists.

But of course they would never try to fool the media – and the media would never be fooled – by  staged scenes of “unprovoked” Israelis shooting Palestinian protestors trying to cross the border between Syria and Israel.*

The soldiers stop the videographer while they continue to place weapons on the corpses. After the video resumes, the same soldiers then encourage the videographer to film the weapons placed on the bodies. It’s obviously a crude attempt to transform an execution into a defensive engagement. …

So much for Assad the reformer [as Hillary Clinton says he is – JB].

* Go here to read a report that Assad had Palestinians paid to do this.

From Creeping Sharia