How did it ever come about that an unelected official has the power to override the verdict of a court and have a convicted prisoner released? Isn’t this against the rule of law? Doesn’t it undermine the rule of law?

Attorney General Eric Holder wanted a terrorist, who’d been sentenced to 80 years imprisonment, to be released after serving 25 years, and released she was in July 2010. Nineteen days later she died of cancer. So it was a case of compassion overruling justice?

She could hardly have expected it. While she was in prison she wrote poems in which she described the United States as a terribly cruel country. “US koncentration kamps” … “The amerikkan nightmare of life“.

J. Christian Adams writes at Big Government:

Attorney General Eric Holder has a peculiar tendency to set loose militant black panthers. Everyone is already familiar with the dismissal of the voter intimidation case I brought as a Justice Department attorney. There, the DOJ dropped claims against Malik Zulu Shabazz, national head of the New Black Panther Party, and Jerry Jackson, a Philadelphia panther and Democratic Party official. But Jackson and Shabazz aren’t the only militants Holder has set loose.

Marilyn Buck was a Marxist terrorist who participated in conspiracies that led to the deaths of multiple police officers. Buck helped the Black Liberation Army, a violent Marxist offshoot of the black panthers, acquire weapons and ammunition. She participated in the robbery of an armored car where a guard was murdered. If that wasn’t enough, Buck was also charged with the bombing of the U.S. Senate, Ft. McNair, the Washington Navy Yard Officer’s Club and a New York City federal building. In many states, Buck’s behavior might have led to a midnight reservation in the electric chair.

Yet Holder’s DOJ unlocked Buck’s jail cell and set her free last summer. … Releasing Buck reflects an alien attitude that has caused the Obama years to be characterized by an ideological disconnect with most Americans.

The letters which persuaded the Justice Department were stuffed with crackpot arguments and have yet to be reported over the last year. They are full of lawlessness and arguments from extreme fringes of political thought. What’s worse, the letters are on the letterhead of government and private institutions, institutions most Americans incorrectly think are worthy of respect.

Consider Jill Elijah. She writes on behalf of Buck’s release that “a warm nurturing living arrangement is available to Ms. Buck in my home located in Brooklyn. . . . I and my family look forward to her joining our home.” The letterhead? Harvard Law School, where Elijah runs the criminal justice institute.

Also on the letterhead in the Elijah letter to the Justice Department is Charles Ogletree, President Obama’s dear friend and mentor. Having Ogletree’s name associated with such a request was like mailing Buck the keys to her jail cell. Ogletree’s daughter Rashida was recently hired into Holder’s Justice Department as a lawyer.

Note the efforts of James Kyung-Jin Lee. He seeks Buck’s release hoping she can visit Southern California: Buck “would benefit from the refreshing environment and welcoming community, she would also, I believe, enhance the community through her example and fortitude in prison.” The letterhead on Lee’s lunacy? University of California at Santa Barbara, Department of Asian Studies. How reassuring that professors at California’s state university admit they would welcome a Marxist terrorist and feel sufficient sympathy on campus to use school letterhead.

Joseph Velasco, a self described “teacher, storyteller and artist” sent a letter to DOJ arguing for Buck’s release saying: “someone like Marilyn is a role model . . . . I welcome the creativity and intellect that she will bring to our community. . . . Marilyn will find a welcoming home here.” The letterhead on Velasco’s letter to DOJ? The official stationary of the Santa Barbara School District, Santa Barbara High School.

A letter from Das Williams states Buck “participated in many educational and cultural activities. . . . Having her serve any more time is pointless and will accomplish nothing more than wasting of government funds.” Williams sends this letter on the letterhead of the City Council of Santa Barbara, where Das served on city council. Williams now serves in California’s State Assembly.

There are many more. Philip Moffitt of the Life Balance Institute argues in a letter Buck’s release “would be a positive step toward healing the past and our society.” Merle Woo, “retired educator,” tells the DOJ “what a shame she cannot be among us, the public, who could benefit so much from her teachings and great human spirit. . . . With her brilliant human insights, she has given us tools to live better, more enlightened, more conscious lives.” Woo was a professor of woman’s studies at San Jose University. No surprise that she “usually used Marilyn’s poetry and essays in my classes.” Other apologists for the murderer Buck include California attorney Robert Bloom (“loving kind person”), retired math professor Elana Levy (Buck’s “caring for others also continually reminds me of how to live in a compassionate manner.”) and Zaveeni Khan-Marcus , the director of the University of California Santa Barbara multicultural center (“I welcome the creativity and intellect she will bring to our community.”) …

Students of history often wonder how civilized countries can devolve into murderous nightmares. These letters provide a homegrown American example of sophisticates excusing murderous behavior because they agree with the murderer’s political philosophy. Simply, they are chilling.

Also chilling is that the militant and destructive ideas that fueled Buck’s murderous campaigns have gained creeping acceptability in American institutions. Teachers, professors, politicians and lawyers all clamored for Buck’s release. 

Theorists like them brought a real nightmare of life upon the people of Russia, China, Cambodia … But these friends of Marilyn Buck safely dream of their Marxist utopias in a “refreshing environment” unaccountably surviving in amerikka.

US taxpayers are lavishly funding jailed Palestinian terrorists.

Fox News reports:

The Palestinian Authority is spending more than $5 million per month in salaries for 5,500 convicted and alleged terrorists imprisoned in Israel — payments that defy congressional rules for U.S. funding to the PA, according to a new report from an Israeli research institute. …

“The U.S. funds the PA’s general budget. Through the PA budget, the U.S. is paying the salaries of terrorist murderers in prison and funding the glorification and role modeling of terrorists,” the report reads.

The average salary of a prisoner is greater than Palestinian civil servants – prisoners on average receive $3,200 a month compared with $2,800 for civil servants. …

[But] under 2010 funding legislation that lays out the rules for supplying money to the West Bank and Gaza, the secretary of state “shall take all appropriate steps to ensure that such assistance is not provided to or through any individual, private or government entity, or educational institution that the secretary knows or has reason to believe advocates, plans, sponsors, engages in, or has engaged in, terrorist activity,” according to the report.

The State Department, which oversees foreign aid, did not return numerous messages seeking comment. …

Recently the House “introduced a foreign aid bill that would restrict President Obama’s authority to provide U.S. funds not only to the Palestinian Authority, but also to Pakistan and Egypt and cuts money for international organizations.”

On this measure the State Department had a comment to make: Secretary of State Hillary Clinton immediately objected to it.

The view from Foggy Bottom, it seems, is that some terrorists are deserving.

Its as bad as the idea, or another way of putting the same idea, that some victims deserve terrorism.

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?

New information about Anders Brievik, the Norwegian terrorist, is being published in erstwhile Soviet satellite countries – that he underwent militant-terrorist training in (post-Soviet but still communist) Belarus.

According to this report he was trained under a former colonel of Belarusian special forces, Valery Lunev.

Eastern European feeds are full of details of Breivik’s multiple trips to Belarus, changes in his behavior and wealth, and the training he underwent in Belarusian militant camps. In fact, Belarus’ tight government regime and active intelligence have served a great purpose this time around. … Belarusian KGB kept precise records on Breivik, who was called “Viking” in the intelligence reports. …

It appears that the Norwegian terrorist underwent the militant-terrorist training under the guidance of 51-year-old Valery Lunev, a former colonel of Belarusian special forces, who now lives in Netherlands but regularly visits Belarus. According to Mikhail Reshetnikov, the Head of the Party of Belarus Patriots who is familiar with the intelligence records, “Breivik visited Belarus three times. Last Spring, while actively preparing for the terrorist attacks, he entered Poland with his own passport, and then travelled to Minsk under a passport of another European country. He recently got a Belarusian girlfriend and obtained access to significant amounts of money.”

Who paid him? To do what?

His targets were members of a Russia-friendly left-wing Norwegian political party. How did his terrorist actions against them serve the interests of communist Belarus?

It is an impoverished state with a “Soviet-style economy”, ruled by a man who, according to the BBC (which is not unfriendly to collectivist tyrannies), is a nasty tyrant:

[Belarus] has been ruled with an increasingly iron fist since 1994 by President Alexander Lukashenko. Opposition figures are subjected to harsh penalties for organising protests.

In early 2005, Belarus was listed by the US as Europe’s only remaining “outpost of tyranny”. In late 2008, there were some signs of a slight easing of tensions with the West, though this proved to be only a temporary thaw. ..

In the Soviet post-war years, Belarus became one of the most prosperous parts of the USSR, but with independence came economic decline. President Lukashenko has steadfastly opposed the privatisation of state enterprises. Private business is virtually non-existent. Foreign investors stay away.

For much of his career, Mr Lukashenko has sought to develop closer ties with Russia. On the political front, there was talk of union but little tangible evidence of progress, and certainly not toward the union of equals envisaged by President Lukashenko.

Belarus remains heavily dependent on Russia to meet its own energy needs and a considerable proportion of Russian oil and gas exports to Europe pass through it.

Seems Master Putin may be choosing another class favorite:

Relations with Russia deteriorated sharply in the summer of 2010, with disputes over energy pricing, customs union terms and the presence in Belarus of ousted Kyrgyz president Bakiyev, prompting speculation that Moscow might switch support from Lukashenko to another leadership candidate.

In Russia and Eastern Europe, it seems, plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose!

There is a mystery here. Does Belarus just train anybody  who applies to become a terrorist, regardless of the use he intends to put his training to, or the objectives he has in mind?  That would mean that Lukashenko (remember nothing official happens in a tyranny  without the tyrant ordaining it) simply wants to promote general chaos.

If not that, what particular Belarusian or Russian interests was Breivik serving? Did Lukashenko want to strike a very indirect blow against Putin by hurting his Norwegian fans?

Perhaps Breivik misled his trainers. Perhaps he told them he intended to bomb the US embassy in Oslo.

With what’s been revealed, there’s plenty of scope for conjecture but little certainty. Rather, uncertainty grows.

And it’s unlikely that explanations will come out of Belarus. None, anyway, that a savvy observer would trust.

Footnote: Of course the whole story of Breivik being trained in Belarus could be “disinformation”, a term coined during the Cold War meaning: false information, spread for mischievous ends through obscure channels on the chance of it’s reaching and deceiving the enemy’s mainstream media and intelligence agencies.

Today Syrian state television showed human bodies and detached limbs floating down the Orontes River.

They are the remains of dead soldiers torn apart by protestors in Hama. Or so the state claims.

A more objective report identifies them differently:

They are the victims of Syrian tank fire and ZU-23 automatic anti-aircraft artillery trained on residential buildings and streets in the last 48 hours as the dead pile up …

Citizens cowering in their homes are throwing the dead out of windows and off roofs into the river. …

The dead are believed to be in the hundreds and rising all the time because the thousands of injured cannot be reached for medical care.

But the numbers of the dead and injured are not known, because the Syrian authorities have “cut off all the city’s ground and cell telephone and Internet links”, and “the satellite phones in the hands of some of the dissident leaders provide the only source of information on the situation in the embattled city.”

Assad has no reason to fear that any power or combination of powers will try to stop him slaughtering his own people by the thousands.

Turkish units had been waiting on the border to enter Syria, and possibly establish a refugee camp on Syrian territory to stop the flow of refugees into Turkey itself. But a few days ago all the chiefs of the Turkish army resigned, and the threat to Assad receded.

The UN will not actively intervene in Syria. Those passionate protectors of “human rights” are not easily distracted from their supreme task of censuring Israel.

The US Congress had exhausted its energies raising the US debt ceiling:

After the Senate … had approved the bill raising the national debt ceiling, the lawmakers were scheduled to turn to the crisis in Syria. However, US Ambassador Robert Ford, on hand to brief the senators, saw them hurrying to leave Capitol Hill.

Only one senator [Sen. Bob Casey (D-PA)] remained for the briefing.

Michael Ledeen writes:

There is no reason to believe that this administration grasps the dimensions of the world war in which we are engaged, like it or not. To look at Syria alone is a failure of strategic vision, because the battle of Syria is part of the larger conflict, involving our current major enemy Iran. Indeed, the Syrian slaughterhouse is a repeat performance of the earlier (and still ongoing) massacre in Iran, and is assisted (perhaps even instructed) from Tehran.

The Iranian Revolutionary Guards have a special force for operations outside Iran called the Al-Quds Force. (Al-Quds is the Arabic name for Jerusalem.) It is assisting Assad in his attempts to crush the popular uprising. Iran has also lent him technicians to help identify and track down activists through their use of the Internet.

The Iranian tyrants tremble at the thought of a free Syria, since, as in Iran itself, the odds favor a successor regime that would devote its energies and depleted resources to the care and feeding of its own people [hmmm- JB] rather than to the support of terrorist proxies like Hezbollah, Islamic Jihad, Hamas, and al-Qaeda. Moreover, the spectacle of the overthrow of Iran’s closest regional ally might well inspire the Iranian people to take to the streets once again against Ahmadinejad and Khamenei.

The Heritage Foundation comments:

The [Obama] Administration has a long way to go to correct its ill-advised efforts to seek better relations with a gangster regime that has murdered more than 1,400 of its own citizens in the last four months; thrown more than 12,000 in jail; served as Iran’s chief ally in the Middle East; supported a wide array of terrorists against the U.S. and its allies; and conspired with North Korea (and probably Iran) to illegally build a nuclear reactor designed to produce fissile material for a nuclear weapon.

The collapse of the Obama Administration’s Syria policy is yet another example of how the Obama Doctrine has undermined U.S. national interests in a naïve effort to engage a despotic regime. Now that the Administration’s timid and weak policy toward Syria has emboldened the Assad regime to attack the U.S. embassy [on July 11], it is time for President Obama … to replace his myopic engagement strategy with meaningful efforts to help the Syrian people oust the predatory Assad regime.

But does he want to? Perhaps Senator Bob Casey could tell us.

This is not the most persuasive speech with the best possible examples of what’s wrong with Islam that the courageous Wafa Sultan has ever made, but we value it because she makes the case that Islam itself is evil, and is not some innocuous ideology to be distinguished from a bad one that the West calls “Islamism”. She wants to change Islam. It needs to be changed – totally.

Obama – or “Bambi” as we hear him called ever more frequently in the data-clouds of the ethereal region where we live – is against war. Being against war is one of the off-the-peg principles that all socialists/collectivists/lefties/Marxists wear on their sleeves. But the small print on the label says it’s okay to got to war if absolutely no interests of your country are served, and it’s even positively noble to spend blood and treasure to protect some class of people you can patronize as underdogs.

So Obama took America to war against Libya to protect “civilians”. Well it wasn’t exactly war. “War” is a nasty word. It was more what you should call a “kinetic operation”. And hardly even that. It was a cheering on of other nations kinetically operating. Supplying them with some equipment and materiel and advice.

And they weren’t exactly  “civilians”. Nobody knows for sure who or what they were or are. Broadly speaking they’re the people who’re against the people whom Bambi and the other nations are against. True, they’re armed. And okay, they include al-Qaeda terrorists. So if you don’t want to call them “civilians”, call them collectively “the rebels”.

Though they’re not not really united except by their shared aim of replacing Muammar Gaddafi as the government of Libya.

In fact, they’re killing each other.

By Frank Crimi at Front Page:

General Abdul Fattah Younes, who had been summoned to the Libyan opposition capital of Benghazi by the ruling Transitional National Council (TNC) for supposed questioning about military operations, was murdered last week along with two other military officials.

Younes, who had assisted Muammar Gaddafi’s rise to power in 1969, was Libya’s interior minister and commander of its powerful Lightning Brigade before he defected to the rebels in February 2011. …

TNC minister Ali Tarhouni said Younes had been killed by rebel fighters who were sent to bring him back from the front lines to Benghazi. Still, despite the apprehension of a suspect, suspicion still remained as to what militia group carried out the assassination.

Some rebel fighters claimed the killers were from the February 17 Martyrs’ Brigade, a rebel group that is part of the larger Union of Revolutionary Forces (URF). However, Tarhouni claimed the killers were from the Obaida Ibn Jarrah Brigade, an Islamist faction in the rebel command.

Despite the lack of clarity surrounding Younes’ assassination … the TNC would replace Younes with Suleiman Mahmud al-Obeidi as well as order all militia factions to disband and come under its control. However, that latter directive may prove particularly difficult to carry out.

None of them will disband easily. Bambi and the other kinetic operators have recently made it very worth their while to continue fighting not only Gaddafi but, with stronger determination, each other.

Specifically, the killing of Younes comes at time when the TNC — having recently been sanctioned as Libya’s legitimate ruling government by 40 nations, including the United States, France and England — now stands to receive over $30 billion of Gadaffi regime funds currently frozen in Western banks.

The sudden influx of such vast sums of money have, according to one Mideast expert, only served to intensify the inner divisions within the TNC, with each faction jockeying for control to “secure the status of being the only legitimate force to lead the country in the future.”

Whoever could have foreseen such a development!

Of course, it should come as little surprise that the Libyan rebels apparently find themselves now locked in a deadly internal struggle. From the onset of the February uprising, it has been well known that the TNC is riddled with a rogue’s gallery of rival factions and alliances that are chock full of duplicitous characters, ranging from former Gaddafi loyalists to criminals to al Qaeda insurgents.

For starters, the Libyan rebel leader, Abdel-Hakim al-Hasidi, has openly said jihadists who fought against US coalition forces in Iraq are well-represented in rebel ranks. While al-Hasidi has insisted his fighters “are patriots and good Muslims, not terrorists.”

But of course it depends what you mean by “terrorists”.

He has also said, “The members of al Qaeda are also good Muslims and are fighting against the invader.”

The invader? Isn’t that the combined forces who are only trying to protect civilians and/or help al-Hasidi’s rebels with a kinetic operation?

Of course, an al Qaeda presence in the TNC shouldn’t come as a complete surprise. According to the US military, Libya, with the exception of Saudi Arabia, contributed more than any other nation to the ranks of those forces fighting against the United States in Iraq. In fact, al-Hasidi has acknowledged that he personally fought against the “foreign invasion” in Afghanistan before being captured in 2002 in Pakistan and sent back to Libya in 2008.

Moreover, the TNC, which has reportedly sold chemical weapons to both Hamas and Hezbollah, has also been linked to supplying arms to Al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM).

In addition to the notorious nature of its membership, the Libyan rebels have been repeatedly accused of committing atrocities on a par with those of Gaddafi’s forces. Those allegations include, according to Human Rights Watch [not always trustworthy but believable in this case – JB], Libyan rebels in the last month “burning homes, abusing women and looting hospitals, homes and shops.” …

The killing of Younes has now created so much distrust within the rivalries, conflicting agendas and alliances of the TNC that stability will be hard to come by, even if it can successfully oust Gaddafi.

And thus far, if any side is winning, it seems to be Gaddafi’s.

However, the prospect that the rebels can overcome Gadaffi on the battlefield looks increasingly bleak. Gaddafi’s regime controls around 20 percent more territory than it did when the uprising began in February despite the recent launching of a rebel offensive in the western mountains near the Tunisian border; more than four months of sustained air strikes by NATO; and the defection of a number of Gaddafi’s senior commanders.

As the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs’ Admiral Mike Mullen said only weeks ago, the war remains a “stalemate,” a status not too surprising when an operation is led without a clear strategy or exit route [or aim]. To that end, it appears that England and France, the two leading nations in the fight against Gaddafi, may also be tiring of the game.

This was evident in a joint press conference last week when British foreign Secretary William Hague said “What happens to Gaddafi is ultimately a question for the Libyans.” Hague’s French counterpart, Alain Juppe, echoed that sentiment by saying that Gaddafi’s fate “is ultimately a question for Libyans to determine.”

So, for now, the fate of Gaddafi, his regime and the future direction of Libya remain as cloudy as ever. However, what is becoming clearer by the day is that even if Gaddafi does go away, all NATO may have done is trade one insane, brutal despot for a far larger and more deadly problem.

And that is not all the bad news.

Not only are the groups within the rebel group fighting each other, they are killing darker-skinned Africans from non-Libyan tribes who have come north to fight as mercenaries for Gaddafi. Or are maybe only passing through from other conflict-torn countries on their way to the safer and happier shores of Europe.

Now they’re underdogs alright but nobody’s protecting them.

Some of them get into boats. Of these, many die harrowing deaths.

From an ABC report:

Italian coast guards have found 25 people dead in the engine room of a tiny boat crammed with 271 African refugees fleeing Libya.

The 15-metre boat landed on the holiday island of Lampedusa on Monday.

It was heavily overcrowded and survivors said they had been at sea for three days.

Prosecutors said the victims, crowded in a space accessible only through a trap door, appeared to have died from asphyxiation.

Refugees cited in Italian news reports said the people in the engine room had tried to get out but were blocked by others because there was not enough space on deck, and probably died of intoxication from the engine fumes. …

Coast guards said the engine room was only accessible through a 50-centimetre wide trap door from the deck.

A fireman who helped pull out the bodies from the boat said: “I will never forget the scene.” …

Thousands of refugees fleeing Libya, mostly migrant workers from other parts of Africa [mainly Ghana, Nigeria, and Somalia], have arrived on Lampedusa in recent weeks.

Hundreds have drowned, often on rickety fishing boats not suitable for choppy seas. In April, 250 refugees drowned off Lampedusa when their boat capsized. …

The Italian authorities are clearing away the refugees as fast as possible. (We don’t know where to.)

Scenes of desperation seen earlier this year have hit the pristine island’s tourism industry but many holidaymakers have started returning to the beaches.

Bambi and Michelle might schedule a vacation there.

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.

“All the dangerous reptiles and insects, and all the lethal bacteria are far less dangerous than the Jews.”

That’s the view from Islam.

A contrary opinion – one which we share – is put forward by George Gilder, author of The Israel Test. He assesses the value of Israel to the world, and points out that America needs Israel as much as Israel needs America:

Israel cruised through the recent global slump with scarcely a down quarter and no deficit or stimulus package. It is steadily increasing its global supremacy, behind only the U.S., in an array of leading-edge technologies. It is the global master of microchip design, network algorithms and medical instruments.

During a period of water crises around the globe, Israel is incontestably the world leader in water recycling and desalinization. During an epoch when all the world’s cities, from Seoul to New York, face a threat of terrorist rockets, Israel’s newly battle-tested “Iron Dome” provides a unique answer based on original inventions in microchips that radically reduce the weight and cost of the interceptors.

Israel is also making major advances in longer-range missile defense, robotic warfare, and unmanned aerial vehicles that can stay aloft for days. In the face of a global campaign to boycott its goods, and an ever-ascendant shekel, it raised its exports 19.9% in 2010’s fourth quarter and 27.3% in the first quarter of 2011.

Israelis supply Intel with many of its advanced microprocessors, from the Pentium and Sandbridge, to the Atom and Centrino. Israeli companies endow Cisco with new core router designs and real-time programmable network processors for its next-generation systems. They supply Apple with robust miniaturized solid state memory systems for its iPhones, iPods and iPads, and Microsoft with critical user interface designs for the OS7 product line and the Kinect gaming motion-sensor interface, the fastest rising consumer electronic product in history.

Vital to the U.S. economy and military capabilities, tiny Israel’s unparalleled achievements in industry and intellect have conjured up the familiar anti-Semitic frenzies among all the economically and morally failed societies of the socialist and Islamist Third World, from Iran to Venezuela. They all imagine that by delegitimizing, demoralizing, defeating or even destroying Israel, they could take a major step toward bringing down the entire capitalist West. …

U.S. policy is crippled by a preoccupation with the claimed grievances of the Palestinians and their supposed right to a state of their own in the West Bank and Gaza. But the Palestinian land could not have supported one-tenth as many Palestinians as it does today without the heroic works of reclamation and agricultural development by Jewish settlers beginning in the 1880s, when Arabs in Palestine numbered a few hundred thousand.

Actions have consequences. When the Palestinian Liberation Organization launched two murderous Intifadas within a little over a decade, responded to withdrawals from southern Lebanon and Gaza by launching thousands of rockets on Israeli towns, spurned every sacrificial offer of “Land for Peace” from Oslo through Camp David, and reversed the huge economic gains fostered in the Palestinian territories between 1967 and 1990, the die was cast.

It’s time to move on.

For the U.S., moving on means a sober recognition that Israel is not too large but too small. It boasts a booming economy still absorbing overseas investment and a substantial net inflow of immigrants. Yet it is cramped in a space the size of New Jersey, hemmed in by enemies on three sides, with 60,000 Hezbollah and Hamas rockets at the ready, and Iran lurking with nuclear ambitions and genocidal intent over the horizon.

Clearly, Israel needs every acre it now controls. Still, despite its huge technological advances, its survival continues to rely on peremptory policing of the West Bank, on an ever-advancing shield of antimissile technology, and on the unswerving commitment of the U.S.

The commitment has been swerving, almost making a U-turn under the Obama administration.

But this is no one-way street. At a time of acute recession, debt overhang, suicidal energy policy and venture capitalists who hope to sustain the U.S. economy and defense with Facebook pages and Twitter feeds, U.S. defense and prosperity increasingly depend on the ever-growing economic and technological power of Israel.

If we stand together we can deter or defeat any foe. Failure, however, will doom the U.S. and its allies to a long war against ascendant jihadist barbarians, with demographics and nuclear weapons on their side, and no assurance of victory. We need Israel as much as it needs us.

*

What the region was like before… and after…

From Planck’s Constant:

Photos

Top:

Mount Tabor in 1912 when the Ottoman Turks were in charge; a desolate, barren, inhospitable desert. However from Biblical times until their arrival, Mount Tabor was entirely covered with vegetation. When the Turks arrived, they began to deforest the land and overgraze the plains with their animals.

Between the Arab on horse and Mount Tabor (in the distance) is Jezreel Valley where the Battle of Megiddo was fought. In Christian Eschatology, this part of the valley is believed to be destined to be the site of a final battle, between good and evil, known as Armageddon..

 

When the Jews regained control of Israel they began to reforest the area. Today, most of Mount Tabor is covered with pine trees.

What the area looks like now:

How did the Gaza Palestinians treat the more than 3,000 greenhouses [left to them in good condition by the Israeli settlers whom the Israeli government forced to leave Gaza]?

Three strikes against the global warmists came in the last days of July.

From Townhall, by Marita Noon:

Most notable is the announcement of an “ongoing internal investigation” into potential scientific misconduct and integrity issues of Charles Monnett — the Anchorage-based scientist with the U.S. Bureau of Ocean Energy Management, Regulation and Enforcement, whose 2004 observation of presumably drowned polar bears in the Arctic helped to galvanize the man-made global warming movement. Monnett’s paper “Observations of mortality associated with extended open-water swimming by polar bears in the Alaskan Beaufort Sea” was released in 2006. … Now, the integrity of the author of this foundational work of the global warming movement is under investigation—bringing into question the integrity of the entire theory.

On July 28, the Globe and Mail, updated a report that indicates that melting ice — which is supposedly causing the polar-bear drownings — is not caused by global warming. Instead, Canadian scientists found that ice is melting more quickly than the predictions and it is melting due to varied salt levels in the older ice versus the younger ice. Simon Boxall of the Catlin Arctic Survey explained that it is a more complicated process than simple warming. “Because fresh meltwater is colder than seawater, that means relatively warm water is being forced upwards. And that may be part of the reason that sea ice is melting so much faster than anyone thought it would.”

In the same week that the misconduct investigation was announced and the sea ice report was updated, the University of Alabama issued a press release heralding new findings from NASA’s Terra satellite. In short, as reported in Forbes, “The study indicates far less future global warming will occur than United Nations computer models have predicted, and supports prior studies indicating increases in atmospheric carbon dioxide trap far less heat than alarmists have claimed.” Another assumption bites the dust. Unfortunately, billions of dollars of taxpayer money have already been spent in questionable projects resulting in a campaign to promote expensive ethanol, wind, and solar energy to fix a problem that doesn’t appear to exist.

But no matter how many facts knock it down, the myth of manmade global warming will not die easily. Too many persons and institutions have too much invested in it. It is highly lucrative for people like Al Gore, and Rajendra Pachauri (Chairman of the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change), and the “scientists” whose invented findings hoaxed governments into imposing ruinous “green” policies on their people.

The myth was also seen by the international Left as a useful political tool. On the grounds that there was an overwhelming crisis that could only be solved by a world central authority regulating “carbon emissions”, they hoped to achieve world socialist government. They have been thwarted, but the campaign continues.