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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“O ye who believe! Fight those of the disbelievers who are near to you, and let them find harshness in you, and know that Allah is with those who keep their duty (unto Him).” (Koran 9:123)

Bruce Bawer quotes this and other passages from the Koran (there are many) that show plainly enough how Islam is an intolerant religion commanding violence against non-Muslims.

He writes at Front Page:

Muslims have been persecuting Christians ever since the time of Muhammed. But in the wake of the so-called “Arab Spring,” such activity seems to be on the rise throughout much of the Islamic world, now that Muslims in several countries are enjoying greater freedom to do things they felt more restrained from doing before. Christians are being beaten and murdered, churches attacked and destroyed.

Bruce Bawer, a fine conservative and a provider of sound information on Islam, is also a Christian, so we don’t expect him to mention that Christians have beaten and murdered, tortured and persecuted at least as much as the Muslims have, though not as much lately. But it needs to be mentioned.

If there is a positive side of this terrible development, it is this: if there’s more such persecution going on, more attention is finally being paid to it in the mainstream Western media.

Can’t say we’d noticed that.

Yet even as some of the media are daring to report on these events, there remains a strong disinclination to suggest that this pattern of persecution has anything whatsoever to do with Islam. …

But in fact –

Anti-Christian and anti-Jewish passages, and all the other brutal precepts found in the Koran, need to be acknowledged and dealt with – because the people who are burning down churches and tormenting Christians have read their Koran, and they’re doing no more or less than what they think their God wants them to do.

“Dealt with” how?

The Obama administration bluntly denies that Islam teaches and demands slaughter, mass murder, subjugation, or any harm to non-Muslims at all.

This is from an article by Robert Spencer:

It has been a long time coming, but the Obama Administration has now officially banned the truth. Deputy U.S. Attorney General James Cole declared Wednesday at a conference in Washington that he had “recently directed all components of the Department of Justice to re-evaluate their training efforts in a range of areas, from community outreach to national security.” This “reevaluation” will remove all references to Islam in connection with any examination of Islamic jihad terror activity. The Obama Administration has now placed off-limits any investigation of the beliefs, motives and goals of jihad terrorists.

Dwight C. Holton, former U.S. Attorney for the District of Oregon, emphasized that training materials for the FBI would be purged of everything politically incorrect: “I want to be perfectly clear about this: training materials that portray Islam as a religion of violence or with a tendency towards violence are wrong, they are offensive, and they are contrary to everything that this president, this attorney general and Department of Justice stands for. They will not be tolerated.”

Understandable, since this president, this attorney general and Department of Justice stand for lies.

Holton said that he had spoken with Attorney General Eric Holder about FBI training materials that Holton claimed were “egregiously false,” and that Holder “is firmly committed to making sure that this is over….we’re going to fix it.” Holton said that this “fix” was particularly urgent because the rejected training materials “pose a significant threat to national security, because they play into the false narrative propagated by terrorists that the United States is at war with Islam.”

Cole suggested that these training materials had done damage domestically as well … “One of the many, tragic legacies of 9/11 has been an increase in prejudice, discrimination and hatred directed against persons of the Muslim and Sikh faiths …”

Robert Spencer comments:

For years Islamic advocacy groups like MPAC [Muslim Public Affairs Council] and Hamas-linked CAIR [Council on American-Islamic Relation] have asserted loudly and often that telling the truth about Islam’s doctrines of jihad warfare and supremacism constituted “hatred,” and endangered innocent Muslims. Hamas-linked CAIR has trumpeted and even fabricated hate crimes against Muslims in order to exaggerate this perception of Muslim victimhood.

The entire premise of all this, however, is false. The now-banned FBI training materials were not written out of hatred for Muslims. They were put together in order to give agents an accurate picture of the beliefs and perspectives of jihad terrorists. It is unfortunate but true that the Qur’an and Sunnah do contain doctrines of warfare and exhortations to make war against and subjugate infidels (cf. Qur’an 2:191; 4:89; 9:5; 9:29; 47:4, etc.), and it is not an act of “hatred” to point this out, or even to scrutinize the Muslim community in the U.S. in order to try to determine its view of these texts and teachings. The only people who are genuinely threatened by such scrutiny are those who wish jihad terrorism to be able to proceed unhindered.

And there’s the rub: in banning the truth about Islam and jihad, the Obama Administration has opened the door for increased jihad terror activity in the United States. Agents who do not understand the threat they face and are constantly surprised by the places where that threat is coming from will be powerless to stop this jihad activity. And the nation will reap the whirlwind.

It will be a great saga for historians to tell –

How the West helped Islam to victory in state after state of the Arab world.

How, while Islam stealthily and steadily penetrated and gained power in the Western democracies by exploiting their own mores and law, its power base was vastly extended and strengthened with the help of Western military might in North Africa, Iraq, Yemen, Syria, Pakistan and Afghanistan.

How the jihad advanced at a pace that Muhammad himself could hardly have dreamt of.

A contemporary report the historians may study is this from the Washington Post:

The long-awaited declaration of liberation [was] delivered by the head of the National Transitional Council, Mustafa Abdul-Jalil.

He … laid out a vision for a new Libya with an Islamist tint, saying Islamic Sharia law would be the “basic source” of legislation and existing laws that contradict the teachings of Islam would be nullified. …

Using Sharia as the main source of legislation is stipulated in the constitution of neighboring Egypt. …

In Brussels, neither the EU nor NATO wanted to address the issue of Sharia law. A NATO official said it was for the Libyans to decide on the system in their own country.

“We trust the Libyan authorities to build an inclusive Libya, respectful of human rights and the rule of law,” said an official …

Although “the Libyan authorities” – ie the rebel rag-tag army including al-Qaeda operatives – had given no sign that they could be trusted.

And this from the BBC:

Nearly 70% of voters have turned out to cast their ballot in Tunisia’s election, the first free poll of the Arab Spring, officials say.

Tunisians are electing a 217-seat assembly that will draft a constitution and appoint an interim government. …

Islamist party Ennahda is expected to win the most votes …

Ennahda’s leader, Rachid Ghannouchi, was heckled by a handful of secularist protesters as he left the polling station in Tunis where he voted.

The hecklers called him a terrorist and an assassin and shouted at him to return to London, where he spent 22 years in exile before returning to Tunisia in April.

But Mr Ghannouchi praised the electoral process, saying: “This is an historic day. Tunis was born again today; the Arab spring is born again today – not in a negative way of toppling dictators but in a positive way of building democratic systems, a representative system which represents the people.”

Iraqis have decided, with the blessing of coalition administrators, that Islamic law will rule in Iraq.

They reached this decision at about 4:20 a.m. on March 1, when the Iraqi Governing Council, in the presence of top coalition administrators, agreed on the wording of an interim constitution. This document, officially called the Transitional Administrative Law, is expected to remain the ultimate legal authority until a permanent constitution is agreed on, presumably in 2005. The council members focused on whether the interim constitution should name the Sharia as “a source” or “the source” for laws in Iraq. “A source” suggests laws may contravene the Sharia, while “the source” implies that they may not. In the end, they opted for the Sharia being just “a source” of Iraq’s laws.

This appears to be a successful compromise. It means, as council members explained in more detail, that legislation may not contradict either the “universally agreed-upon tenets of Islam” or the quite liberal rights guaranteed in other articles of the interim constitution, including protections for free speech, free press, religious expression, rights of assembly, and due process, plus an independent judiciary and equal treatment under the law.

But there are two reasons to see the interim constitution as a signal victory for militant Islam.

First, the compromise suggests that while all of the Sharia may not be put into place, every law must conform with it. As one pro-Sharia source put it, “We got what we wanted, which is that there should be no laws that are against Islam.” …

Second, the interim constitution appears to be only a way station. Islamists will surely try to gut its liberal provisions, thereby making Sharia effectively “the source” of Iraqi law. Those who want this change — including Mr. al-Sistani and the Governing Council’s current president — will presumably continue to press for their vision. Iraq’s leading militant Islamic figure, Muqtada al-Sadr, has threatened that his constituency will “attack its enemies” if Sharia is not “the source” and the pro-Tehran political party in Iraq has echoed Sadr’s ultimatum.

When the interim constitution does take force, militant Islam will have blossomed in Iraq.

Reuters reports that if there were to be war between the US and Pakistan, Afghanistan would support Pakistan.

So says that precious piece of corruption, President Hamid Karzai.

It is the big f-figurative slap in the face.

Afghanistan would support Pakistan in case of military conflict between Pakistan and the United States, Afghan President Hamid Karzai said in an interview to a private Pakistani TV channel broadcast on Saturday.

The remarks were in sharp contrast to recent tension between the two neighbors over cross-border raids, and Afghan accusations that Pakistan was involved in killing the chief Afghan peace envoy, former Afghan president Burhanuddin Rabbani, by a suicide bomber on September 20.

“God forbid, If ever there is a war between Pakistan and America, Afghanistan will side with Pakistan,” he said in the interview to Geo television.

“If Pakistan is attacked and if the people of Pakistan needs Afghanistan’s help, Afghanistan will be there with you.” …

Pressure on Islamabad has been mounting since U.S. special forces found and killed Osama bin Laden in May in a Pakistani garrison town, where he apparently had been living for years.

God may forbid, but Hillary Clinton must do the ruling out.

In a two-day visit to Islamabad, U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton issued stern warnings [shudder, ye powers!] and asked for more cooperation in winding down the war in Afghanistan, but ruled out “boots on the ground” in North Waziristan, where Washington has been pushing Pakistan to tackle the Haqqani network … a group of militants Washington has blamed for a series of attacks [on US and NATO forces] in Afghanistan, using sanctuaries in the Pakistani tribal region along the Afghan border

“No boots on the ground” should be engraved on Hillary’s gravestone. To her and the rest of the Obama clique, watching the pacifist Democratic fringe out of the corners of their eyes, the phrase is Leftspeak for “look, we are making war so distantly, surgically, and therapeutically, it’s hardly war at all”.

Is an alliance of Afghanistan with Pakistan  in a war against the US – even if only in theory – the reward America deserves for expending blood and treasure to save Afghanistan from the Taliban through ten long years of war? No, it is not.

Is it the just reward successive US governments deserve for sentimetally persisting in trying to transform the Afghans into a decent nation, “winning their hearts and minds”, “building democracy”, raising their standard of living, turning the US military into a mommery of social workers to fuss about their health care and education? Yes, it is.

Yes, the culture of the West is superior to all the rest in every way that affects life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

Here’s part of what Daniel Greenfield writes at his website Sultan Knish, thoroughly endorsing our boast on behalf of a maddeningly diffident and self-deprecating Western world, specifically America:

We are better than them. When all the other arguments for why we can’t fight back have been exhausted this is the one that remains in the background presenting our moral exceptionalism as the reason we shouldn’t fight to protect ourselves.

“Fight back? But then we’d be no better than them?” If we waterboard then we are no better than the headchoppers and mutilators. If we profile then we are no better than the genocidal jihadists. …

But is that really the difference between us, that we treat everyone equally even when they are cutting our throats, and the moment we deviate from the standards of the Trial Lawyers Association then we’re no better than the Taliban or Al-Qaeda? Does our exceptionalism derive from our laws, in which case if we compromise our laws then we [have] given up the only worthwhile thing about us and there is nothing more to fight for – or are our laws the means by which we protect our individual and national exceptionalism?

We are better than they are, is the argument put forward so often by those who do not truly believe that we are, and even when they do they don’t understand why we are. The Bill of Rights did not spring full-grown out of a barbaric culture …

We are not better than they are because we guarantee civil rights to our enemies – we are better than they are because of Michelangelo, the microchip and universal education. We are better than they are because of Shakespeare, the space shuttle and the World Trade Center. We are better for all the reasons around us, the accomplishments, the achievements, the knowledge we have gained and the society we have built.

Our laws were crafted to protect these achievements, the exceptionalism of the individual from the government, and that of the nation from internal and external enemies. The laws have no individual life apart from the culture of the nation that created them and maintains them. It would be possible to transpose the United States Constitution to Indonesia, Libya or Pakistan and it wouldn’t last a single day there. No mere document can safeguard rights and freedoms that a culture does not value, and no culture that does not value them is deserving of their protection if such protection has the cumulative effect of destroying those same rights and freedoms.

Freedom isn’t just defended on the battlefield, by the time things get that bad then the damage will be hard to contain. We defend it every day by defending the culture that makes it possible. Against external enemies there is the war of armed conflict, economic competition and geographic positioning. Against the internal enemy there is the culture war, the war of ideas and institutions. …

Governments are instituted to keep laws and laws are implemented to keep the people. Governments serve the law, but the law serves the people. And the people are not some random mass, they are not defined by passports and identity cards or place of birth – the people are the keepers of the flame of their culture. This need not be a matter of birth, immigrants can be among the greatest heroes and natives among the greatest traitors. But no one who is committed to the destruction of the culture, in concrete or abstract terms, in the immediate present or the indefinite future, can enjoy the protection of legal codes that exist to protect the freedom of the individual within the integrity of a free culture.

The more sophisticated a culture becomes the less it is concerned with survival. Bubbles grow in its centers of government and learning within which philosophies and ideas seem more real than reality. Opposing philosophies struggle to lobotomize the culture with revisionist histories and social philosophies that place their own ideal at the center of all human striving. But ideas are sterile without a culture to carry them forward. Kill the culture and the ideas become orphans that [are] adopted in an altered form by some other culture – if they are lucky.

Tolerance and civil rights are worthless unless the countries and cultures where they are expressed are also defended. Any form of tolerance which leads to its own destruction is not only poisonous to a host culture, but is also literarily self-destructive. All healthy entities whether biological, organizational or intellectual contain the means for their own continuance and self-perpetuation. Any entity which does not is poisonous and must be treated as such, and to defend any idea or code above the survival of the culture that carries it is a homicidal act.

When conflict comes, two questions are asked. Is the threat real and is our culture worth fighting for. The latter question is most often asked by elites whose bubble ideals no real culture can ever measure up to, and by outsiders who have the least invested in the survival of the culture.

“If we do this how are we any better than they are?” is the question of the bubble elite whose abstract ideals exist apart from flesh and blood people, who do not measure their ideals by the culture, but measure the culture by their ideals, and always find it wanting, who think that the culture with its millions of people and centuries of history exist to shepherd their ideals and die for them – and ought to be grateful for the privilege of dying so that no Muslim is ever profiled at an airport.

The bubble elites distrust nationalism and patriotism because they center not around ideas, but the people’s sense of solidarity. The only exceptionalism that they will accept is the exceptionalism of ideals, and if the nation does not represent its ideals then it does not deserve to live.

In the face of such reasoning it is important to remember that we are not better than our enemies because we represent ideals, but because we create ideals along with skyscrapers, paintings, high powered microscopes, novels, better mousetraps, systems of philosophy, muscle cars, musical styles, theorems, charities and sandwiches.

Of course a comprehensive list would be immensely long, but we’d like to add computers and the internet to Greenfield’s samples. How did people endure existence before they came into common use?

We are makers and shapers, movers and thinkers, seers and doers. We reach for the stars and find ways to keep premature babies alive. We are imperfect, dynamic and changing – and the world would be a much poorer place without us in it.

Whatever we do to protect ourselves against outside enemies in thrall to a hostile ideology, regardless of where they were born is fully justified by our accomplishments, our past, our present and our future – and even if all these things were not present by our right to individual, national and cultural survival.

It is not by becoming pacifists that we will be better than them, but by fighting for what we have and who we are. And if we do not stand up for our countries, our peoples and our cultures then we will not inherit the moral high ground, but the low killing pits of the victims of the thousand year spree of terror. There is no moral high ground to be gained in refusing to struggle to your utmost for the things that you hold dear, only through the struggle to protect our individual and national exceptionalism, can we gain the high ground and justify the assertion that we are better than them.

The Europeans are discarding the rich Western culture built and paid for with blood and tears by their forefathers through hundreds of years, as though it were trash. Will Americans, who so enormously augmented and enhanced it, preserve it now that it’s under severe threat? Not if Obama, the Democratic Party, the Occupy Wall Street protestors, academia and the mass media have their way.

If there must be a culture war, dulce et decorum est to become warriors on the side of our inherited, enlightened, culture.

You might consider this post to be a recuiting ad. We want YOU!

Ron Paul must not be elected president because he is dangerously unrealistic in his opinion of what the role of the US should be (effectively none at all) in world affairs.

But his proposals for cutting government spending, and so reducing the power of government, should be seriously considered by whichever Republican candidate is elected.

Here’s an outline of his ideas from an editorial in Investor’s Business Daily:

Paul proposes cutting $1 trillion within a year, including closing down five Cabinet agencies, the departments of Commerce, Education, Energy, Housing and Urban Development and the Interior, and reducing most other federal spending to 2006 levels. …

He would slash the federal workforce by 10% and reform Washington’s fiscally doomed entitlements by letting younger Americans opt out of Social Security and Medicare. Medicaid and other social welfare programs would become block grants for the states, giving flexibility to local government.

The regulatory nightmares of ObamaCare, Sarbanes-Oxley and Dodd-Frank would all be dumped into the ashcan of history, the Bush tax cuts on income and investment would be extended, the corporate tax lowered to 15%, and the estate tax abolished.

That would be a good start – but only a start.

This video was made to give a taste of a forthcoming book, The Last Testament: A Memoir by God with David Javerbaum, which  will be published by Simon & Schuster on November 1, 2011.

We’ll post a review of it on that day.

The article we quote here, by James Heiser at The New American, is about Christian women in Islamic states being raped by Muslim men who all too easily get away with it. The rapists’ motive, in addition to lust, is often (the writer says ) to force the victim to convert to Islam.

We post this information not because we are in the least bit sympathetic to Christianity (though generally these days Christianity is not a violent or persecuting religion like Islam), but because we want to show how harm and misery is caused by the existence of religion as such. 

We do not imagine that if religion died out  there would be no more wars, massacres, oppression, persecution. We do not allege that religion is the cause of evil in human nature, but that historically religion has most persistently given rise to, and used to justify, wars, massacres, oppression, persecution.

It has also been, and continues to be, the cause of blighting unhappiness in the private lives of uncountable millions of individuals.

For Zubaida Bibi, a Christian woman working in a garment factory in the Korangi Industrial Area of Karachi, Pakistan, the workday on October 12 at Crescent Enterprises probably began like most. Her job as a custodian helped make it possible for her to care for her children. But before her shift was over, a Muslim worker at the factory attempted to rape her, and then slit her throat, leaving four orphans without a mother to care for them. And the case of Zubaida Bibi is far from unique: In Pakistan, the phenomena of Islamic men raping Christian women is becoming more common. …

On October 12, 2011, during duty hours, Zubaida Bibi entered to clean factory bathrooms when one Muslim employee named Mohammad Asif followed her and locked door behind him.

When Mohammad Asif attempted to sexually assault Zubaida Bibi, she cried for help [upon] which Mohammad Asif took out a dagger and slit [her] throat.

The factory management called [for] police help and Mohammad Asif was arrested …

One might want to imagine that the case of Zubaida Bibi was isolated, or that the assault and murder of this woman had nothing to do with the religious beliefs of the alleged murderer and his victim. However, the truth is that in Islamic societies such as Pakistan, it is not at all uncommon for Muslims to get away without punishment for raping Christian women. …

Many Christian girls are raped … in Pakistan. … [They] are particularly vulnerable to these types of crimes because Muslim authorities are reluctant to protect them when their rights are violated by Muslims. …

The president of the Pakistan Christian Congress, Dr. Nazir Bhatti, told us, “The incidents of rape and enforced conversion of Christian women to Islam is rising every year. 99.9% of rape cases go unreported in Pakistan… If a Muslim man rapes a Christian girl, then he easily forces her to convert to Islam, marries her and covers up his heinous crime of rape under Islamic law. Some cases of rapes of Christian women are reported, but the majority of such rapes are never reported.” …

There are rising incidents of sexual harassment against Christian women workers on workplaces in Pakistan which go unreported due to cultural and social values. The influential Muslims feel free to kidnap and rape Christian women in Pakistan where Islamic laws protect culprits. In kidnap and rape cases against Christian women, the Muslim culprits walk free from [the] courts …

A report from the Barnabas Fund was released in September, detailing the widespread problem in Pakistani society of Muslim men kidnapping Christian girls and forcing them to marry the very men who abducted them. According to the report, the horrifying tragedy of such a crime is played out hundreds of times every year in Pakistan:

“The abduction and forced conversion to Islam of Christian girls who are then married against their will to their captors is a disturbing and growing trend in Pakistan; it is estimated that there are over 700 cases every year.” …

The forced conversions and marriages are often carried out by influential Muslim families who threaten and severely beat the young girls to frighten them into compliance …

One father was told by police to “forget his daughters” after the two Christian sisters were abducted, raped and forcibly converted in Faisalabad in May.

Even when a captive does manage to escape, it is by no means the end of her suffering. If a woman leaves her new Muslim family and Islam to return to her Christian background, she is considered an apostate — even though she was forcibly converted — and is therefore liable to be killed. …

The horrifying case of the murder of Zubaida Bibi is made all the more terrifying by the commonality of the crime which motivated it. Foreign intervention cannot bring about a change in a society which is so fundamentally influenced by a religion which justifies such crimes; but for those who do not yet live under Islam, Bibi’s death is a powerful reminder that the religion embraced by an individual — or a society — shapes the entire lives of those who adhere to that religion.

Yes, unless the individual walks away from it, which is a very difficult thing to do in countries where the majority and the ruling power are Muslim. We know of a few who have done it. Ayaan Hirsi Ali is one: with extraordinary intellect, courage, and pertinacity she escaped from Islam and became a star in the West. But perhaps she is too exceptional to be an example for many others to follow.

Please read here the amazing story of this great atheist and free marketeer – and then read her books.

Here’s some great news from the Washington Post:

Iran’s nuclear program, which stumbled badly after a reported cyberattack last year, appears beset by poorly performing equipment, shortages of parts and other woes as global sanctions exert a mounting toll, Western diplomats and nuclear experts say. …

They complain of these several “woes”:

Analysts say Iran has become increasingly frustrated and erratic as political change sweeps the region and its nuclear program struggles. …

At Iran’s largest nuclear complex, near the city of Natanz, fast-spinning machines called centrifuges churn out enriched uranium. But the average output is steadily declining as the equipment breaks down …

Iran has vowed to replace the older machines with models that are faster and more efficient. Yet new centrifuges recently introduced at Natanz contain parts made from an inferior type of metal that is weaker and more prone to failure …

Western diplomats and nuclear experts say Iranian officials have been frustrated and angered by the program’s numerous setbacks, including deadly attacks on Iranian nuclear scientists. Four Iranian scientists have been killed by unidentified assailants since 2007, and a fifth narrowly escaped death in an attempted car-bombing. …

But that Stuxnet worm is the damnedest thing:

The studies of Iran’s struggling uranium program draw on data collected by U.N. officials … The inspectors’ report documented a sharp drop in output in 2009 and 2010, providing the first confirmation of a major equipment failure linked to a computer virus dubbed Stuxnet. Western diplomats and nuclear experts say Stuxnet’s designer intended to attack and disable thousands of first-generation centrifuges at Natanz, undercutting Iran’s ability to make a nuclear bomb. Many experts suspect Israel created the virus, perhaps with U.S. help, but neither nation has acknowledged any role.

Iranian scientists replaced more than 1,000 crippled machines. Afterward the Natanz plant appeared to quickly recover, and production rates soared to surpass levels seen before the attack. Yet, the gains have not lasted, according to the analysis by the Institute for Science and International Security. …

The world owes a debt beyond price to Stuxnet’s designer. He has saved it – at least for a time – from nuclear war. But he’s not very likely to be awarded a Nobel Peace Prize. That’s reserved for terrorists and community organizers.

There is an old British saying … “Cometh the hour, cometh the man.” The idea, of course, is that when a crisis arises, a leader will also arise to show the way out of it.

So Andrew Klavan writes at PajamasMedia, in an article titled Mitt Romney versus The End of Western Civilization.

He goes on:

But those of us who feel the upcoming presidential election represents a crossroads of sorts are starting to find this faith in providential leadership somewhat shaken. We’re starting to think that if the man is cometh-ing he better hurry-eth up and geth here already.

Because Mitt Romney ain’t the guy. While he may win the Republican presidential nomination by default — and while he may indeed win the presidency due to desperation — it is clear from every word he says that he understands neither the peril nor the needs of the present moment. …

The professionals and money guys in the Republican establishment don’t seem to mind that. As always, they feel that they are the old pros who take care of the all-important business of electability while we children in the base worry about such nonsense as principle and the preservation of the republic. It’s these establishment types who have traditionally delivered the truly electable choices like Bob Dole and John McCain while staunchly protecting us from extremists like Ronald Reagan. On Fox News’ Journal Editorial Report this weekend, the Wall Street Journal‘s Dorothy Rabinowitz … seemed to give voice to that establishment opinion when she said that “reason is going to have to prevail” among conservatives and that they’ll ultimately have to abandon the likes of Herman Cain and “all of the alternatives that are warming their little hearts, that they’re playing with,” and learn to live with Romney as their guy.

And I fear she — and all those she speaks for — may be right. …  Cain seems like a terrific fellow but he has no foreign policy knowledge and his 9-9-9 plan is a mistake — a new tax that will never go away and will grow bigger than he imagines. Michele Bachman is wonderful on the economy, but her social policy is ill-informed and out-of-date. Perry can’t think on his feet, Huntsman’s a bore, and Ron Paul is a better cult leader than candidate. So far, Romney is, in fact, the best candidate actually in the race. I’m sorry, but there is something to be said for realism when you’re dealing with, you know, reality.

But he’s still not the guy. And just for the record, just to explain, the problem is not that he’s a moderate per se. It’s not that he has changed his mind from time to time. It’s not even his failure to renounce Romneycare, so similar to the disastrous Obamacare. … The problem is that Romney doesn’t understand that we — America — the west — are in crisis: a crisis of debt, a crisis of confidence, a crisis of identity and ignorance wherein journalists, professors, politicians, and priests have become one with the moral idiots occupying Wall Street.

Go on Romney’s website. Look at his proposals. There’s nothing wrong with them, for the most part. They seem intended to repeal the Obama administration and set us back on the path we were on before. That would be fine if Obama were the cause of the crisis, but he’s the symptom of the crisis, its incarnation as it were. Obama and his ideas are the creation of 40 years of moral error and political failure drip-drip-dripped into the consciousness of the country through our schools, news media, and culture. He could never have won our highest office if the electorate had not been bred by that error to foolishness, and then spurred to an act of panicked stupidity by a crisis that had already come.

It’s not Obama’s presidency that needs to be repealed — not just Obama’s presidency — but all the ideas that made Obama’s presidency possible.

To do that, we need a man not just of policies but of vision, not just of proposals but of high ideals. A mere Romney might — might — take us back from the brink to which Obama has sped us, but that would only delay the fatal catastrophe. Worse, it would perforce recreate the exact same set of circumstances that got us into this mess in the first place.

Could Romney be made to understand the nature and depth of the crisis that Western civilization is in? If he could be made to understand it, would he then see how to save it? And if he saw how, would he have the cunning and mettle to do it?

If not – and we agree with Klavan that Romney is “not the guy”, that he doesn’t have it in him  – is there a man or woman anywhere in America who could and would? Who has the depth and completeness of understanding, the power of leadership, the moral strength, the resourcefulness? Is there a potential political giant, greater than has ever existed before, waiting in the wings?

Failing such a genius, it seems we’ll have to make do with a Romney.