Some say the world will end in fire,

Some say in ice.

From what I’ve tasted of desire

I hold with those who favor fire.

But if it had to perish twice,

I think I know enough of hate

To say that for destruction ice

Is also great

And would suffice.

– Robert Frost

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This is from Canada Free Press by Robert Felix:

Satellite data show that glaciers in part of the Karakoram range on the China-Pakistan border are putting on mass, defying the general trend toward glacier shrinkage. In an article entitled “Slight mass gain of Karakoram glaciers in the early twenty-first century,” Researchers from the National Centre for Scientific Research and the University of Grenoble admit to “an anomalous gain of mass” for the Karakoram glaciers.

This is in direct contradiction to the 2007 Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report, which claimed that ice from most of the region could disappear by 2035.

Often considered a part of the Himalayas, the Karakoram range, which runs through Pakistan, India and China, is technically a separate chain that includes K2, the world’s second-highest peak. …

We’re talking about the greatest chain of ice-capped peaks in the world — from the Himalayas to Tian Shan on the border of China and Kyrgyzstan — and satellite measurements show that they have lost NO ice in the past 10 years.

Not only have they lost no ice, in a defiant act of political incorrectness, some 230 glaciers in the western Himalayas – including Mount Everest, K2 and Nanga Parbat – are actually growing.

“These are the biggest mid-latitude glaciers in the world,” says John Shroder of the University of Nebraska-Omaha. “And all of them are either holding still, or advancing.”

And get this. Eighty seven of those glaciers have surged forward since the 1960s.

But we don’t need to look to the Himalayas for growing glaciers. Glaciers are also growing in the United States. Yes, in the United States.

Look at California. All seven glaciers on California’s Mount Shasta are growing, including three-mile-long Whitney glacier, the state’s largest.

Farther north in Washington State, the Nisqually Glacier on Mt. Rainier is growing. The Emmons Glacier on Mt. Rainier is growing. Glaciers on Glacier Peak in northern Washington are growing. And Crater Glacier on Mt. Saint Helens is now larger than it was before the 1980 eruption.

Even farther north, the Juneau Icefield, which covers 1,505 square miles (3,900 sq km) and is the fifth-largest ice field in the Western Hemisphere, is also growing.

Are these growing glaciers also just “an anomalous gain of mass”? Well, let’s look at a few other countries.

• Perito Moreno Glacier, the largest glacier in Argentina, is growing.

• Pio XI Glacier, the largest glacier in Chile, is growing.

• Glaciers are growing on Mt. Logan, the tallest mountain in Canada.

• Glaciers are growing on Mt. Blanc, the tallest mountain in France.

• Glaciers are growing in Norway, says the Norwegian Water Resources and Energy Directorate (NVE).

• And the last time I checked, all 50 glaciers in New Zealand were growing. (The Franz Josef glacier is advancing at the rate of 4 to 7 feet per day!)

But these glaciers are babies when you look at our planet’s largest ice mass, namely, the Antarctic ice sheet.

Contrary to what you may have heard, this huge ice sheet is growing.

In 2007, Antarctica set a new record for most ice extent since 1979, says meteorologist Joe D’Aleo.

Antarctic sea ice has also been increasing, on average, since 1980.

Think about that.

The Antarctic Ice Sheet, which is almost twice as big as the contiguous United States, is about 90 times bigger than all of the rest of the world’s glaciers combined.

Close to 90 percent of the world’s glaciers are growing, in other words, and all we hear about are the ones that are shrinking.

Welcome to the new ice age.

Are the warmists embarrassed? Well, yes:

“Our measurements…indicate that the contribution of Karakoram glaciers to sea-level rise was -0.01 mm yr for the period from 1999 to 2008,” write the French researchers [Julie Gardelle, Etienne Berthier, Yves Arnaud].

Huh? What does that mean? “The contribution to sea-level rise was MINUS 0.01 mm per year”? …

“Why this should be is not clear,” writes BBC News environment correspondent Richard Black. “Though it is well known from studies in other parts of the world that climate change can cause extra precipitation into cold regions which, if they are cold enough, gets added to the existing mass of ice.”

Get that? Global warming adds to the existing mass of ice (“climate change” being the replacement phrase for “global warming” since global warming paused in the last ten years).

Uh huh. First we’re told that global warming will melt all of the world’s glaciers and sea levels will rise catastrophically. Now, we’re being told that global warming will make the glaciers grow and contribute – in a minus sort of way – to sea level rise. Does that mean that sea levels will fall?

If it does mean that, you won’t hear the warmists say so. They believe that sea levels will rise, so rise they must.

Seems, one way or another, the earth has only about 5 billion more years before Carl Sagan’s promised “last perfect day” and then …

The authenticity of this horrific video of a man being buried alive in Syria is being questioned.

Sparse as the information surrounding it is, it seems to us extremely unlikely that anyone would voluntarily undergo what we see this man suffering merely to help create a propaganda hoax.

As it is not made clear who the perpetrators are, for whom would the propaganda be useful? They are assumed to be Syrian soldiers, but do Syrian soldiers wear sneakers? And if most of them are soldiers, why is the man in jeans working with them?

What we do know is that such atrocities are carried out in the Arab world. The language spoken here is Arabic. It is generally agreed that the video has come from Syria. It seems certain enough that Arabs are doing it.

Recent events and disclosures at the highest levels of our government demonstrate that our own rulers … have through folly and dishonesty exposed themselves as “useful idiots” or worse, liars and functionaries whose loyalties may well be to other than the United States.

This is from an article by David Meir-Levi at Front Page:

On April 10, Johnnie Carson, Assistant Secretary of State for African Affairs, stated that “religion is not driving extremist violence” in Nigeria. This pronouncement was made one day after Boko Haram, the uber-violent Muslim jihadist Nigerian terrorists, bombed a church killing 39 Christians.

Carson told us an unconscionable and transparent lie …  given the Boko Haram’s overt and unabashed self-definition as a brutally violent Muslim terrorist organization which condemns all things non-Muslim as “Haram” (prohibited) …

What impelled Mr. Carson to lie such that anyone anywhere who does not live under a rock can see that he is lying? …

The Saudi royal family has over the past decades insinuated itself into our State Department by promising State Department officials serving in the Arab world generous sinecures when they have retired from their official duties, as long as they represent Saudi interests to the US government while serving in the State Department. These Saudi long-range bribes render our officials servants of the Saudi government, representing Saudi interests to our government instead of the other way around.

How many Americans ostensibly serving US interests, and paid by American tax-payers to serve US interests, are in fact working for the Saudis? Who could know, since each traitor must try to keep his secret?  It is bad that any are, it is appalling that many probably are.

One thing is apparent, since Johnnie Carson is able openly to tell his blatant lie: the head of the State Department is allowing it to happen.

But the problem runs deeper than one State Department functionary whose integrity may have been compromised by Muslim forces that want him to lie on behalf of Islamic jihadist terrorists. His boss is Madame Secretary Hillary Clinton, our Secretary of State. She has been silent regarding his transparent lie. Is Saudi penetration so deep that even the Secretary of State cannot publicly correct the errors of a State Department employee; and is it only the Saudis?

Both deeper and higher the rot reaches:

Very distressingly, it may be more than the State Department alone that is in question here. President Obama and the State Department have been unwilling to rule out aid to Hamas despite the fact that that very same State Department has classified Hamas as a terrorist organization, and American law prohibits US financial aid to terrorist organizations.

As Trudy Rubin observed last year in a Washington Post article: “The most ominous interpretation of the mush coming from the State Department (regarding aid to Hamas) is that the administration is so rudderless, unprincipled and desperate to avoid a clear defeat in its efforts to foist a “peace agreement” on the parties that it would go so far as to continue to do business with the PA, despite (the PA’s) taking on a partner that has killed Americans, seeks Israel’s destruction and, from behind the skirts of women and the cribs of children, has conducted a missile bombardment of Israel.”

The State Department’s rudderless, unprincipled pronouncements contradict its own policy denying aid to any terrorist organization. …

Obama and Hillary Clinton plainly do not recognize Hamas as a terrorist organization. It’s writ large in their record of the past three years that their sympathies lie strongly with Hamas and strongly  against Israel.

Significant percentages of Gazan Arabs … really want Hamas and other terror groups to just keep on bombing Israel, just keep on killing Jews. Yet the State Department and our President are unclear as to whether or not it is a good idea for the USA to continue to provide Hamas with hundreds of millions of tax-payer dollars …

Then there is Madame Secretary’s comments on TV to a young and activist Tunisian audience on April 17. When asked why American Presidential candidates on both sides support Israel and Zionism, she said:

“Well, first, let me say you will learn as your democracy develops that a lot of things are said in political campaigns that should not bear a lot of attention. There are comments made that certainly don’t reflect the United States, don’t reflect our foreign policy, don’t reflect who we are as a people.”

In plainer words: “We  lie a lot, but the truth is we do not support Israel.” 

Our Secretary of State told her Tunisian audience, in front of international TV, that our Presidential candidates lie to get votes, and they are lying about their support for Israel. Then she went on to say:

“…watch what President Obama says and does. He’s our President. He represents all of the United States, and he will be reelected President, so I think that that will be a very clear signal to the entire world as to what our values are and what our President believes.”

Yes, watch him. He does make clear his aggression towards Israel. He bows to the Saudis. He wants money to go to Hamas. In this, if only in this, Hillary Clinton is right. The whole world should read the clear signals of his beliefs.

In other words, the President is really on your side, Tunisian youth, and Obama’s pro-Israel statements in the previous campaign and during his current tenure are lies, as is the pro-Israel rhetoric of the Republican candidates.

There is no reason at present to doubt that Republican candidate Mitt Romney’s “rhetoric” about being pro-Israel is merely a convenient lie. The left habitually ascribes its own faults and evil plots to its opponents.

Secretary Clinton subordinated U.S. interests to partisan considerations and told her Muslim audience what she figured they wanted to hear, namely that the USA does not really support Israel, that’s just mendacious campaign rhetoric. In addition to calling her own President and most Republican candidates liars, she also unabashedly contradicted 65 years of the Israel-USA relationship. …

And Obama himself, Mr. “knife in Israel’s back,” has pandered to the Persians, curtseyed to the Caliph (king Abdullah of Saudi Arabia), flip-flopped in representing himself on the Arab-Israel issue, and tried his best during the three years of his presidency, to make a shambles of the traditional US-Israel relationship. …

Our leaders at the highest levels … have revealed to us their naked dishonesty. They are not honest stewards of American society, nor honest brokers in the Israel-Arab conflict, nor even stalwart defenders of our own country, their own country, in Western Civilization’s defensive war against Islamofascist, triumphalist, totalitarian, terrorist jihad. They have been compromised by forces at least one of which is Saudi oil money.

– To which forces they have been not just open but positively welcoming, because their prejudices are in favor of Islam and the Arabs, and profoundly against American exceptionalism and the ideal of individual liberty. 

What will it take before we can end the lies, stop the posturing, and call the complicity of our President and his Department of State with Muslim jihadist terrorism what it really is?

We liked these parts of the speech Mitt Romney made after winning five Republican primaries yesterday (full text here):

When it comes to the character of America, President Obama and I have very different visions.

Government is at the center of his vision. It dispenses the benefits, borrows what it cannot take, and consumes a greater and greater share of the economy. With Obamacare fully installed, government will come to control half the economy, and we will have effectively ceased to be a free enterprise society.

This President is putting us on a path where our lives will be ruled by bureaucrats and boards, commissions and czars. He’s asking us to accept that Washington knows best – and can provide all.

We’ve already seen where this path leads. It erodes freedom. It deadens the entrepreneurial spirit. And it hurts the very people it’s supposed to help. Those who promise to spread the wealth around only ever succeed in spreading poverty. Other nations have chosen that path. It leads to chronic high unemployment, crushing debt, and stagnant wages.

I have a very different vision for America, and of our future. It is an America driven by freedom, where free people, pursuing happiness in their own unique ways, create free enterprises that employ more and more Americans. Because there are so many enterprises that are succeeding, the competition for hard-working, educated and skilled employees is intense, and so wages and salaries rise.

I see an America with a growing middle class, with rising standards of living. I see children even more successful than their parents – some successful even beyond their wildest dreams – and others congratulating them for their achievement, not attacking them for it.

He goes on to pre-empt Obama’s “fairness” pitch. By “fair” Obama means equal, in the socialist sense. Romney gave it a different, more acceptable meaning:

This America is fundamentally fair. We will stop the unfairness of urban children being denied access to the good schools of their choice; we will stop the unfairness of politicians giving taxpayer money to their friends’ businesses; we will stop the unfairness of requiring union workers to contribute to politicians not of their choosing; we will stop the unfairness of government workers getting better pay and benefits than the taxpayers they serve; and we will stop the unfairness of one generation passing larger and larger debts on to the next.

In the America I see, character and choices matter. And education, hard work, and living within our means are valued and rewarded. And poverty will be defeated, not with a government check, but with respect and achievement that is taught by parents, learned in school, and practiced in the workplace.

This is the America that was won for us by the nation’s Founders, and earned for us by the Greatest Generation. It is the America that has produced the most innovative, most productive, and the most powerful economy in the world.

As I look around at the millions of Americans without work, the graduates who can’t get a job, the soldiers who return home to an unemployment line, it breaks my heart. This does not have to be. It is the result of failed leadership and of a faulty vision. We will restore the promise of America only if we restore the principles of freedom and opportunity that made America the greatest nation on earth. …

Wisely no doubt at this stage of his campaign, he concentrated on the economy. But near the end of the speech he said:

We’ll stop the days of apologizing for success at home and never again apologize for America abroad.

It was the only sentence that touched on foreign policy. It’s a good resolution to start with.

We wait to hear more than he has said in debates about how he’ll deal with Iran, Russia, China, and North Korea.

Will he treat Britain and Israel as the allies they are, and the Muslim Brotherhood as the enemy it is? Will he call Islamic terrorism by its name? What will he do to stop Iran becoming a nuclear power?

We enjoy Andrew Klavan‘s columns. We often concur with his opinions. And with the column we quote today we come close to agreeing entirely.

What we cannot agree with him about today is that life came to our planet because – he implies – God put it here, and if God had not, it could not and would not have arisen.

The really strange thing about this fine and amusing article is that everything else he says argues well that the mind of man, not God, is the creative faculty in our universe and of our universe.

Here is his article at PJ Media:

Sunday was Earth Day, and in honor of the occasion, I’d like to say that as far as I’m concerned the Earth can go to hell.

The Earth — for those of you who may have fallen behind on your reading — is a piece of rock trapped in a slow death spiral into a cauldron of exploding plasma which, for lack of a better word, we’ll call the sun. Because that’s its name. There is exactly one interesting or worthwhile thing about this hunk of doomed space debris, and that is: it happens to maintain the conditions necessary for supporting life. (The odds against this would be ridiculously impossible, by the way, if there were no God — so impossible that scientists have been forced to invent all kinds of silly multi-universe scenarios solely for the purpose of convincing themselves that there is no God. But that’s their problem, and neither here nor there.)

(Let’s politely overlook that superfluous and self-contradicting interpolation.)

So the earth supports life. Whoopee. And there is exactly one interesting or worthwhile thing about life — only one — and that is the mind of man.

“Holy cannoli, Klavan on the Culture,” you may be saying to yourself, or even out loud — because, let’s face it, you’re kind of an odd person — I mean, just look at you. Anyway, “Holy cannoli or even moley,” you may be saying, “how can you say the mind of man is the only interesting or worthwhile thing about life? What about the beauty of the running gazelle? The nobility of the flying eagle? The awesome awesomeness of the spacious skies above the amber waves running to the purple mountains above the fruited plains? And how about those glazed donuts with the yellow creme inside? I love those!”

First of all, stop talking so much, this is my blog. And b, there is no beauty, no nobility, no awesome awesomeness — not even the taste of a glazed donut — outside the human mind.

Yes, yes,yes. Because there is no other mind. No mind divine beyond nature.

The science is not yet settled, but reality itself may be in part a production of the human mind as there are some aspects of the world that don’t seem to resolve themselves until we observe them. But in any case, the gazelle would be fleet for nothing, the eagle would be a winged eating machine, the skies and the waves and the mountains would be dreams without the dreamer if man were not here to know them.

Once you realize this, everything changes. You no longer worry about the earth running out of energy resources, because you realize there are no energy resources — there never were — there are only various forms of matter that our minds, the mind of man, transformed into energy resources for our pleasure and convenience. These will never run out as long as we’re here because the mind is limitless and will invent more.

You no longer worry about pollution, because you know that once free people become annoyed by it, other free people will fix it with cleaner fuel-burning methods and filters. Where are the pea soups of London? Where are the smogs of Los Angeles? Where are the snows of yesteryear? All right, I was just curious about that last one.

You no longer worry about the earth, because the earth is here for us, not the other way around. The earth is just our living space — for now. We should keep it reasonably clean and pleasant. But a carping obsession with spotless housekeeping turns you into a scolding fishwife — or an environmentalist — and makes life less comfortable for man, not more. …

The earth is not warming catastrophically. Fracking does not cause earthquakes. We should find and use every drop of oil we’ve got — there’s enough there for centuries, by which time we’ll be living on Alpha Centauri powering our flying cars with toilet paper or old pages of Barack Obama’s autobiography… but I repeat myself.

So screw Earth Day. I would like to declare today — and every day — the Mind of Man Day. Celebrate that — nurture that — glorify that — and the earth, believe me, will take care of itself.

Standing ovation.

This video of a Fox News interview with Professor Jack Chambless comes via Casey Research:

It’s no surprise what most students want. Everything, free.

It is a surprise that there is an economics professor in an American university who does not teach them to want and expect all that. (We’ll overlook the “God-given right” bit – we’re pretty sure Hayek never said it.)

They want the government to supply them with everything To redistribute wealth for their benefit. Which is to say, they want socialism.

Socialism has caused the economic collapse of European states, yet about half the voters in America, to judge by current polls, want to emulate them.

In connection with the video and this theme, David Galland writes at Casey Research:

The global trend toward a resurgence in public demand for socialism in response to a worsening crisis is a certainty.

How could it be otherwise when for decades now the schooling of children has been delegated to functionaries of the state? 

– Which is the main reason why there should be no state-provided, state-run education.

For evidence, look no further than the screen swipe here. It is a quote from an essay by a college student in the United States on role the government should play:

There in one sentence are a bundle of beliefs and values that Ayn Rand rightly loathed and despised. They pave the road to ruin.

The writer of those words was a member of a Valencia University economics class. The professor, Jack Chambless, asked the class to write an essay on what the American dream means to them, and what they want the federal government to do to help them achieve that dream. Out of 180 students participating, only about 10% wanted the government to leave them alone and not tax them too much, but a whopping 80% wanted the government to provide pretty much the whole dream thing wrapped in a tidy bow – including free college tuition and health care, jobs, even the down payment on their future homes, money for retirement and hard cash, taken in the form of taxes from rich people.

And that is Obama’s economic policy.

Today, April 22, is Earth Day, the Holy Day of the present-day religion of Gaia.

She is very thirsty for human blood.

Here’s a UK government 2010 video canvassing our sympathy for the environmentalism that Earth Day celebrates:

Earth Day was begun in 1970.

Alan Caruba, writing at Canada Free Press, quotes leading environmentalists of that year:

“Civilization will end within 15 or 30 years unless immediate action is taken against problems facing mankind.” – George Wald, Harvard Biologist

“We are in an environmental crisis which threatens the survival of this nation, and of the world as a suitable place of human habitation.” – Barry Commoner, Washington University biologist

“Man must stop pollution and conserve his resources, not merely to enhance existence but to save the race from intolerable deterioration and possible extinction.” – New York Times editorial, the day after the first Earth Day

“Population will inevitably and completely outstrip whatever small increases in food supplies we make. The death rate will increase until at least 100-200 million people per year will be starving to death during the next ten years.” – Paul Ehrlich, Stanford University biologist

“It is already too late to avoid mass starvation.” – Denis Hayes, chief organizer for Earth Day in 1970.

“What we’ve got to do in energy conservation is try to ride the global warming issue. Even if the theory of global warming is wrong, to have approached global warming as if it is real means energy conservation, so we will be doing the right thing anyway in terms of economic policy and environmental policy.” – Timothy Wirth, former U.S. Senator (D-CO)

“It doesn’t matter what is true, it only matters what people believe is true.” – Paul Watson, co-founder of Greenpeace.

“We have wished, we eco-freaks, for a disaster or for a social change to come and bomb us into Stone Age, where we might live like Indians in our valley, with our localism, our appropriate technology, our gardens, our homemade religion — guilt-free at last!” – Steward Brand, writing in the Earth Catalog.

Now there’s a confession! Affording us proof of a theory we’ve held about eco-freaks these many years.

“Phasing out the human race will solve every problem on earth, social and environmental.” – Dave Forman, founder of Earth First

Indeed it will. No one left to worry about anything.

“I suspect that eradicating smallpox was wrong. It played an important part in balancing ecosystems.” – John Davis, editor of the Earth First Journal

Yeah, pity about modern medicine curing diseases. Much nicer when life was hard, agonizing and short.

“The extinction of the human species may not only be inevitable but a good thing….This is not to say that the rise of human civilization is insignificant, but there is no way of showing that it will be much help to the world in the long run.” – An editorial in The Economist.

All that was way back when Earth Day was begun.

How have the predictions panned out?

Daniel Flynn, a skeptic with a taste for facts, writes at Front Page:

The world’s population on [the forty-second] Earth Day is double the world’s population on the first Earth Day. Rather than ushering in Doomsday, more people have meant a more livable Earth. Life expectancy rates in the U.S. have ballooned by about ten years for men and women since the first Earth Day. Other parts of the world have experienced even greater gains. Revolutions in travel and communications have made the globe a smaller ball. Farming techniques opposed by extreme environmentalists have shifted the conversation from “Will we have enough to eat?” to “Will we eat what’s healthy?” The more, the merrier.

But in the doom-predicting and humanity-hating business, nothing’s changed.

The following comes from an article at Infowars.com by Paul Joseph Watson:

In 2006, an environmental magazine to which Al Gore and Bill Moyers had both granted interviews advocated that climate skeptics who are part of the “denial industry” be arrested and made to face Nuremberg-style war crimes trials.

[In 2010]  “Gaia hypothesis” creator James Lovelock asserted that “democracy must be put on hold” to combat global warming and that “a few people with authority” should be allowed to run the planet because people were too stupid to be allowed to steer their own destinies. 

Writing for Forbes Magazine, climate change alarmist Steve Zwick calls [now] for skeptics of man-made global warming to be tracked, hunted down and have their homes burned to the ground, yet another shocking illustration of how eco-fascism is rife within the environmentalist lobby. … “We know who the active denialists are – not the people who buy the lies, mind you, but the people who create the lies. Let’s start keeping track of them now, and when the famines come, let’s make them pay. Let’s let their houses burn. Let’s swap their safe land for submerged islands. Let’s force them to bear the cost of rising food prices. … They broke the climate. Why should the rest of us have to pay for it?” …

It’s the argument of a demented idiot who’s obviously in the throws of a childish tantrum over the fact that Americans are rejecting the global government/carbon tax agenda for which man-made global warming is a front in greater numbers than ever before.

*

What news for this special day from the Gaian Church of Man-Made Global Warming?

This comes from an article by Daniel Greenfield at Front Page:

A University of Illinois 2009 survey [found] that 97.4% of scientists agree that mankind is responsible for global warming. This is easily debunked when one considers its selection methodology. … The Illinois researchers decided that of the 10,257 respondents, the 10,180 who demurred from the so-called consensus “weren’t qualified to comment on the issue because they were merely solar scientists, space scientists, cosmologists, physicists, meteorologists, astronomers and the like. Of the remaining 77 scientists whose votes were counted, 75 agreed with the proposition that mankind was causing catastrophic changes in the climate. And, since 75 is 97.4% of 77, ‘overwhelming consensus’ was demonstrated once again.” The real percentage of concurring scientists in the survey is less than .008%. That these 75 were … “scientists of unknown qualifications” adds yet another layer to the boondoggle.

Excerpts from a TV documentary about “honor killings”, and other cruelties inflicted on women, by Muslim immigrants adhering to Islamic teaching and tradition in Britain.

(Video from Creeping Sharia)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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