From a report by John Rossomando at Newsmax:

The White House declined to comment on a letter that an Illinois Republican sent to President Obama demanding that he cancel funding for two $200,000 State Department grants to groups belonging to Libyan dictator Moammar Gadhafi’s children.

Rep. Mark Kirk wrote the letter after the State Department notified the House Appropriations Committee on Sept. 15 of its intent to provide the foundation belonging to the Libyan dictator’s son, Saif, with a $200,000 and an additional $200,000 to Wa’ettasmeno UNDP Foundation run by his daughter, Aisha.

“Last month, when Scotland freed Abel Baset al-Megrahi, the only man convicted in the bombing of Pan Am Flight 103, Gadhafi greeted him with a hero’s welcome,” Kirk wrote in his Sept. 23 letter to President Obama. “As you know, Megrahi was accompanied back to Libya by Gadhafi’s son, Saif, who was involved with negotiations for Megrahi’s release. Just weeks after the Gadhafi family celebrated the return of a terrorist for the murders of 189 Americans, the U.S. taxpayer should not be asked to reward them with $400,000. For the sake of the victims’ families who have endured so much pain these last few weeks, I ask you to withdraw your Administration’s request.”

The State Department told Newsmax the grants were part of a larger $2.5 million economic support program intended to promote democracy and women’s economic opportunities in Libya, which Congress appropriated for fiscal year 2009.

Ah, that democracy, and all those opportunities for women in Libya! How proud we American tax-payers can be that we support them. If  only we’d known about them sooner!

Giving away two and half million to the needy in an economic crisis is being really, really nice. Michelle Obama used to think America was ‘downright mean’, but now that her husband is showering Ghadhafi’s family with largesse, she too can at last be proud of her country.

As he indicated in his United Nations speech (co-written, rumor has it, by the Teletubbies), Obama wants to bring about the disarmament of all nuclear-armed and potentially nuclear-armed nations. He will disarm America first to set an example to the rest.

It’s a charming idea. Kim Jong-il and Ahmadinejad, who are acquiring nuclear weapons only to defend themselves against the fearsomely threatening United States,  will go all misty eyed when they see what Obama is doing, and hasten to do the same. The consequent scene of world-wide peace, love, caring, and big hugs will be such as to  soften and warm the hardest hearts.

From Ben Johnson at Front Page Magazine we learn who it is that the President relies on for advice to preach and set about realizing this sweet dream:

He and his advisers, most notably Undersecretary of State for Arms Control Ellen Tauscher, share the view that the United States must demonstrate sincerity by exposing itself to increased danger.

What qualifications does this Ellen Tauscher have, what experience that proves she may be trusted in matters of defense, in what circumstances did she find opportunity to look deep into the minds of dictators, tyrants, religious fanatics,  torturers, mass murderers, war lords, and holy warriors and see the teddy bear inside their rough exteriors, such that the President of the United States feels he may confidently rely on her advice?

Why, she has a degree in Early Childhood Education. She is qualified to be a pre-school teacher.

If this information doesn’t make you feel safe, you must be insane.

Here are passages from the speech Sarah Palin delivered in  Hong Kong on September 23 at the CLSA [Credit Lyonnais Securities Asia] Pacific Markets Conference, taken from excerpts published by the Wall Street Journal. More of the speech can be found here:

We got into this [economic] mess because of government interference in the first place. The mortgage crisis that led to the collapse of the financial market, it was rooted in a good-natured, but wrongheaded, desire to increase home ownership among those who couldn’t yet afford to own a home. In so many cases, politicians on the right and the left, they wanted to take credit for an increase in home ownership among those with lower incomes. But the rules of the marketplace are not adaptable to the mere whims of politicians…

Lack of government wasn’t the problem. Government policies were the problem. The marketplace didn’t fail. It became exactly as common sense would expect it to. The government ordered the loosening of lending standards. The Federal Reserve kept interest rates low. The government forced lending institutions to give loans to people who, as I say, couldn’t afford them. Speculators spotted new investment vehicles, jumped on board and rating agencies underestimated risks…

If you want real job growth, you cut taxes! And you reduce marginal tax rates on all Americans. Cut payroll taxes, eliminate capital gain taxes and slay the death tax, once and for all. Get federal spending under control, and then you step back and you watch the U.S. economy roar back to life. But it takes more courage for a politician to step back and let the free market correct itself than it does to push through panicky solutions or quick fixes…

I can’t wait until we get that Reaganomics sense supplied again because we are going to survive, and we’re going to thrive and expand and roar back to life. And as the world sees this, the world will be a healthier, more secure, safer and more prosperous place when this happens…

Right now we have the highest unemployment rate in 25 years, and it’s still rising. And yet some in D.C. are pushing a cap-and-tax bill that could cripple our energy industry or energy market and dramatically increase the rates of the unemployed, and that’s not just in the energy sector. American jobs in every industry will be threatened by the rising cost of doing business under this cap-and-tax plan. The cost of farming will certainly increase. That’s going to drive up the cost of groceries and drive down farm incomes. The cost of manufacturing, warehousing and transportation will also rise. We are all going to feel the effects. The Americans hardest hit will be those who are already struggling to make ends meet today, much less with this new tax every month…

With most of this we agree. We only don’t believe that people like Nancy Pelosi, Harry Reid, Barney Frank, and Chris Dodd  wanted to increase house ownership among those who couldn’t afford it out of good nature. We judge them less generously. We think they wanted to redistribute wealth and increase the power of government.

At present Palin seems to us to be not only the most charismatic of the Republicans who might be in the 2012 presidential race, but also, to judge by these remarks, one who might rescue the economy.

Unlike, apparently, most of the rest of the universe, we were all for the war on Saddam Hussein. We rejoiced in his defeat and capture and hanging. We wish that all tyrants could be punished in the same way. We believe that America won the war, though we don’t believe that Iraq has been transformed into a democracy or is likely to be. We would be happy to see Libya, Saudi Arabia, Yemen, Sudan, Somalia, Syria, North Korea and above all Iran overcome by American might. We believe such victories are perfectly possible militarily, but impossible under the leadership of an Islam-loving, America-hating, radical left administration. We are of course for the pursuit and destruction of  al-Qaeda and the Taliban. If war in Afghanistan would achieve their destruction, we would be  for its continuance. But we don’t believe in the possibility of any sort of victory in that benighted country; not even if the war was being prosecuted as ruthlessly as war should be. Since it  is to an absurd extent being ‘fought’ as a form of community service – not even as ‘an overseas contingency operation’, to use the Obama official euphemism for fighting terrorism – we recognize that there is zero chance of achieving anything there at all. The onslaught was started in order to destroy al-Qaeda, rightly blamed for 9/11, but it hasn’t and it won’t. It has long since become an exercise in community outreach. The feebly-named International Security Assistance Force (American and British troops – who are really fighting bravely –  plus some German snoozers and a few not very vigorous others) is  there primarily, according to General McChrystal, to ‘provide for the needs of the Afghan people’. (As we have opined in our post of September 21 below, The stupidest reason for a war – ever?, this is the stupidest reason for a war, ever.) The use, by a  Commander-in-Chief and his generals, of soldiers as social workers is an extremely expensive, idiotic, and ruinous exercise in national self-abasement.

The fact is that the appalling method of terrorism has won huge victories in this century, in which almost all terrorism has been committed in the name of Islam. The West has let its practitioners win. The jihadists have won all over Europe,  by using and all too credibly threatening violence, as in their protests over the Danish cartoons of Muhammad. All west European nations have already been reduced by their own fear and moral weakness – aka political correctness  – to dhimmi status. Islam goes from triumph to triumph in Europe, and is being allowed steadily to gain power in the United States. The Islamic jihadists are plotting against us in our cities, in Europe and America. They have murdered thousands of Europeans and Americans. Daily, they carry out acts of torture and murder in Asia and Africa. At the time of this writing, there have been more than 14,000 Islamic terrorist attacks since 9/11 (see our margin where we quote the tally being kept by The Religion of Peace). No wonder the greater part of the world has become Islamophobic in the true meaning of the word: it is afraid of Islam. Why do Muslims object to that? Isn’t it precisely what Islam has always intended to achieve? It is the barbaric enemy of our civilization.

Nothing that is done in Afghanistan or Pakistan or Iraq, not even total military victory – however that could be reckoned – will defeat Islamic jihadist terrorism. The one and only use now of military force that might score a victory against it, would be the physical destruction of Iran’s nuclear capability. Iran is a  terrorist state, spreading terrorism in the Middle East through its proxies in Lebanon, Gaza, and Iraq, so that is where force is needed and would be truly effective. Such a strike would not only disarm the mullahs, it would also send a shock-wave throughout the Islamic world.

That will not be done. But other than for that, what is the use of vast nuclear and conventional arsenals, huge armies, great navies, fighter aircraft that can elude radar-detection, if the enemy is standing beside you and has only to utter a threat to make you fall on your knees and give him whatever he asks?

Jillian Becker    September  25, 2009

Yesterday at the UN (Hell’s headquarters), Colonel Qaddafi of Libya praised President Obama:

“We Africans are happy, proud, that a son of Africans governs the United States of America,” the Libyan leader said. “This is a historic event. … This is a great thing.” “Obama is a glimpse in the darkness after four or eight years,” said Qadhafi, who referred to Obama as “my son.” “We are content and happy if Obama can stay forever as president of the United States.”

And Fidel Castro thinks he is pretty good stuff:

The former Cuban leader on Wednesday called the American president’s speech at the United Nations “brave” and said no other American head of state would have had the courage to make similar remarks…

Admission of America’s past errors “was without a doubt a brave gesture,” Castro wrote in comments published by Cuban state-media Wednesday. “It would only be fair to recognize that no other United States president would have had the courage to say what he said,” the former Cuban leader continued…

And Vladimir Putin likes what he’s done:

Obama also was praised by Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin earlier this month for canceling parts of a missile defense system that Moscow had viewed as a threat to its security. Putin called the move a “right and brave decision.”

At Power Line they think differently. Paul Mirengoff writes:

Conservative commentary on President Obama’s U.N. speech has correctly taken note of the extent to which Obama once again has apologized for America. What struck me as new, though, was the extent to which he begged his audience to award the U.S. brownie points for his good acts. The one form of supplication follows from the other. Obama isn’t just saying that the U.S. has been a bad boy in the past; he’s also saying that we’re a good boy now …

Obama then listed a series of decisions that he hoped might placate the assembled thugs, dictators, and hypcrites — a crowd from which he feels compelled to seek approval on behalf of the United States. Obama noted that he has banned torture, closed Gitmo, moved to end the war in Iraq, moved towards disarmament, attempted to advance the ball on creating a Palestinian state, “re-engaged the United Nations, paid our bills, joined the Human Rights Council.”

So here was the president of the United States doing everything but getting down on his hands and knees before the representatives of every wretched regime in the world to plead that the U.S. has turned over a new leaf and, in effect, become harmless.

Does Obama believe that anything positive will come of this stomach-turning spectacle. Or does he just like to bask in the glow of applause for the proposition that the U.S. was a pretty rotten place until he assumed control, without worrying about who it is that’s applauding?

Our guess is that the Russians, the Arabs, the Taliban, al-Qaeda, the mullahs of Iran, and all the despots of the Third World are secretly sniggering.

Here‘s a link to the AP report on Obama’s speech at the UN today.  It links to videos of him making the speech.

We interpret the speech as one promoting a new world order through an increase of powers of the UN, and a demotion of America as the world’s watchdog and policeman (but no change in its being the world’s community chest, unless to become even more of a global sugar-daddy).  His usual hectoring tone gave the impression that he was ticking off the rest of the world for expecting America to be a superpower, while he was actually ticking off America for being one. Cunning, that!

Here‘s Abe Greenwald’s take on the speech:

Barack Obama’s address to the UN General Assembly was much more than some feel-good, can’t-we-all-get-along pep rally for the multi-culti set. It was a straightforward explication of a worldview that seeks to redefine international relations along frighteningly utopian lines. It is a glimpse into the ideological stew that has produced the dangerous real-world policies toward our one-time allies that we now see unfolding everywhere, from Israel to Poland and the Czech Republic to Honduras…

“In an era when our destiny is shared, power is no longer a zero sum game.” Ideally, there is to be no more competition among nations.

“No one nation can or should try to dominate another nation.” It follows that there is to be no hierarchy among nations.

“No world order that elevates one nation or group of people over another will succeed.” There is no exceptionalism, American or otherwise. And no nations are to play favorites. That means, among other things, the U.S. will not extend special privileges to democracies or other free societies.

“No balance of power among nations will hold.” With no competition, no hierarchy, and no favored-nation status, states that have found themselves in a fortunate position as the result of dated rivalries and alliances can no longer be relied upon to impose balance on a region from the outside. (Like all utopian fantasies, this is propped up by a contradiction: balance will exist, but any attempt to maintain or impose that balance will, by definition, constitute a violation of that balance.)

“The traditional division between nations of the south and north makes no sense in an interconnected world.” There will be no distinctions between developing and developed nations.

“Nor do alignments of nations rooted in the cleavages of a long gone Cold War.” An incontrovertible renunciation of our long-held alliances.

The next time some democratic leader is woken up in the middle of the night with a phone call from the U.S. State Department telling him that he’s on his own, he would do well to refer back to today’s speech as he scratches his head and tries to figure out what happened to his friends, the Americans.

He signals a pacifist frame of mind to aggressive Russians, Iranians, and North Koreans. He threatens the CIA and protects captured  terrorists. He packs his administration with radical revolutionaries and scofflaws. He’s failed to turn Congress into his echo-chamber. Even in his media hooray-chorus some are choking on the songs he wants them to sing.

When the devoutly left Guardian newspaper admits to being disappointed in him and finds that he is failing at everything, his weakness must be too obvious to be spun into anything else.

But the relief we feel that he has not – or at least not yet – turned America into a collectivist state, does not mitigate our fear of the danger he has put the country into, by loading it with an unimaginable burden of debt, and, in dereliction of his highest duty,  rendering it vulnerable to its foreign enemies.

From Redstate:

If “weak” doesn’t suit your fancy, how about “impotent”? That’s where the left-leaning UK Guardian goes with Steven Hill’s piece, Obama the impotent. Mr. Hill notes that Obama is not accomplishing very much.

A sinking feeling is arising among many that President Obama may not be up to the task, that he may not possess the artful skills needed to accomplish even his own goals.

The Guardian of course worries that Obama will be unable to socialize our health care system, or cripple the U.S. economy with “green” measures, or otherwise bring the U.S. in line with the more enlightened European Left. While we on the right might be pleasantly relieved to find that Obama is incompetent at accomplishing his agenda, the day will come when we wish we did not have an incompetent president. But as is becoming clear to both friends and enemies, foreign and domestic, that’s what we have.

David Horowitz endorses our warning in the post below about the Left’s intentions for the UN, writing on his website FrontPage magazine:

Neo-communism is a view whose members consider themselves “citizens of the world,” not of America, and who therefore agitate for open borders and want the morally repulsive collection of autocracies, slaveocracies and kleptocracies called “the United Nations” to reign over us and the world.

A neo-communist is someone who believes that America is ruled by corporations who put “profit over people” — and thereby show that they don’t understand either profit or people. A neo-communist is someone who is convinced that race, class, and gender hierarchies make it not only legitimate but necessary to describe America as a “white supremacist” society. Neo-communists believe that a revolution is necessary (if not opportune at the moment), that the Consitution is a disposable document, and that America’s communist and Islamo-fascist enemies (Iran, Venezuela, Cuba, Nicaragua, Hizbollah, the PLO and Hamas), are freedom fighters or at least on the right side of the armageddon that faces us.

These are views shared by The Nation magazine, by Commonsense.org, by the Indymedia crowd, by the social justice movement, by the majority of the Black Caucus and the Progressive Caucus on the Democratic side in Congress, and by tens of thousands of university professors who indoctrinate their students in these pernicious ideologies every day. They are the views held by the leaders of ACORN, the SEIU, AFCSME and other leftwing unions, by radical feminists, by organizations like MALDEF and La Raza, by the ACLU and the Center for Constitutional Rights who are working to support the Islamo-fascist agenda in America, by the major Muslim organizations including the Muslim Students Association, CAIR, and the Islamic Circle of North America…

He lists many more in his book Unholy Alliance.

The UN must be destroyed!

The Roman Senator, Cato the Elder, repeated and repeated, in every speech he made, no matter what his subject was, and however irrelevant the iteration:

‘Carthago delenda est!’ –  ‘Carthage must be destroyed’  – until it eventually was destroyed  by Rome in 146 B.C.

He set an example for us. We must repeat and repeat:

The United Nations must be destroyed!

It should be shouted at every protest rally;  written on placards and carried high;   printed on T-shirts; emblazoned on billboards.

The UN must be destroyed!

It is a den of despots, a coven of conspiracy, the engine of evil.

Watch this week as Qaddafi of Libya, Ahmadinejad of Iran and all the other monstrous tyrants gather at the UN to spew their poison.

The International Socialists want to develop the UN into a World Government. They are proposing a universal currency to be issued by the United Nations. They propose United Nations regulation of financial institutions world-wide. They propose that the United Nations enforce controls over the lives of people in all countries to ‘protect the planet’. They propose, in other words, global totalitarianism.

And if the United Nations should became the Kremlin of the whole planet, who might be craving to be its supremo, its Stalin?

Can we think of his name?  Yes, we can.

And we must not let this happen.

UN DELENDA EST!

THE UN MUST BE DESTROYED!

A fascinating article by Nick Cohen on the horrific oppression of women in the Middle East.

“If this sounds harsh, consider that Sharia adultery laws state that
a raped woman must face the next-to-impossible task of providing four
male witnesses to substantiate her allegation or be convicted of
adultery. When rapists leave Pakistani women pregnant, the court takes
the bulge in their bellies as evidence against them. In Nigeria, Sharia
courts not only punish raped women for adultery, but order an extra
punishment of a whipping for making false accusations against
“innocent” men. In Israel, ultra-Orthodox gangs in Jerusalem beat up
women seen in the company of married men. In the United States, the
Fundamentalist Latter Day Saints give teenagers to old men in arranged
marriages and tell them they must completely submit to their wishes.
In Saudi Arabia, women live in a theocratic state that stops them
walking unaccompanied in the street, driving a car and speaking to men
outside the family. After unwisely taking a sprig of the bin Laden
family to be her husband, Carmen Dufour described the consequences.

‘At first, I wasn’t even aware of what seemed so strange about this
country, but then it hit me: half the population of Saudi Arabia is
kept behind walls, all the time. It was hard to fathom, a city with
almost no women. I felt like a ghost. Women didn’t exist in this world
of men.’

To move from ghosts to corpses, if the Taliban
retake power in Afghanistan, they will once again ban women from public
spaces, thus depriving them of employment, and thus closing the health
and education services. Any teacher who presumes to teach them to read
and write will be executed. Meanwhile the Islamic Republic of Iran has
almost certainly renewed its terror tactic of raping women prisoners
before killing them. Because religious law declares it illegal to
execute a virgin, the guards arrange a “wedding” ceremony and rape the
prisoner once it is over.”

There was an appalling case in Israel recently of an Orthodox women who was cruelly starving her child. When the police intervened, there was a strong and horrifying backlash from the Orthodox community. The Jerusalem Post correspondent Alisa Ungar-Sargon speaks of the divide between some of the orthodox Jewish community and the secular majority.

“With the haredi woman suspected of starving her three-year-old son,
the evidence from doctors, social workers, and police appears to leave
little room for doubt regarding the severity of the situation. The
woman was allegedly a danger to her child, and thus measures were taken
to protect him from further harm.

The facts are presented; the evidence is concrete. Yet there
are people rallying to her defense who are convinced of her innocence.
They call the whole situation a blood libel, a condition of malicious
slander and a vengeful nature. Whether or not her actions were
intentional does not change the effects, yet the haredim purport to be
certain. How can a community be so confident that she is not guilty
when everyone else is resisting their every claim?

…

The general animosity between the haredi and secular communities is
rooted in the State of Israel itself. While none of the haredim support
the state, the mainstream sects at least cooperate with it and agree to
participate in the elections.

…

Dr. Yehuda Goodman, a lecturer and anthropologist at Hebrew University,
explains that the tendency to riot is a part of the haredi identity.
“They feel it’s invading and corrupting and fighting to break down
their way of life,” he says. The haredi community is not just a ghetto,
set up to keep out those who would threaten their way of life, Goodman
says, it must also fight and maintain the superior stand they feel that
they have over the secular world. He explains that the haredim need
these fights as a part of the formation of their identity, in finding a
symbolic place to fight the social other.

…

Whether or not the haredim actually believe in the woman’s
condemnation is irrelevant at this point. They can testify for her
character and they can portray her doctor as evil incarnate, but it is
immaterial since their loyalties would not allow them to operate any
other way. They will argue for her since to them, she represents their
community to the outside world.”

There is a perilous inclination in the Western World to tolerate immorality on the part of others on the grounds that there is a cultural divide that cannot be infringed upon. Although this case in the more liberal and democratic Israel is of less notoriety than the more systematic problem of ‘gender apartheid’ of Saudi Arabia and the countless numbers of unpunished rape in Iran, it is just as horrifying.

The definition of tolerance in the West, Israel included, now seems to include turning a blind eye to depravity, in an attempt to avoid being seen as interfering and imperialistic.

The plight of women in the Middle East is just the tip of the iceberg, but where is the condemnation from the West? And as Nick Cohen concludes in his Standpoint article: ‘I accept that this may seem an odd thing to wish for, but what the
world needs now is an uncompromisingly militant feminist movement.’

Further reading:

Clive James on honour killing

Asad Abu Khalil on US policy and the suffering of Arab women

Some exercepts from female Saudi writers on the subjugation of women (Provided by MEMRI)