We keep reading that the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) was an unindicted co-conspirator in the Holy Land Foundation terror finance trial in 2007 and 2008. And we keep wondering why it remains unindicted.

Now we have the answer, scandalous but not surprising. It has been obvious from the start of Obama’s presidency that the present US administration is strongly pro-Islam, despite the fact that Islam is waging war on the US.*

Patrick Poole breaks the story at PajamasMedia:

A number of leaders of Islamic organizations … were about to be indicted on terror finance support charges by the U.S. attorney’s office in Dallas, which had been investigating the case for most of the past decade. But those indictments were scuttled last year at the direction of top-level political appointees within the Department of Justice (DOJ) — and possibly even the White House.

“This was a political decision from the get-go,” [our DOJ] source said.

“It was always the plan to initially go after the [Holy Land Foundation] leaders first and then go after the rest of the accomplices in a second round of prosecutions. From a purely legal point of view, the case was solid. …

But from a political perspective there was absolutely no way that they could move forward. That’s why this decision came from the top down. These individuals who were going to be prosecuted are still the administration’s interfaith allies. … It’s kind of hard to prosecute someone on material support for terrorism when you have pictures of them getting handed awards from DOJ and FBI leaders for their supposed counter-terror efforts. How would Holder explain that when we’re carting off these prominent Islamic leaders in handcuffs for their role in a terror finance conspiracy we’ve been investigating for years? This is how bad the problem is. Why are we continuing to have anything to do with these groups knowing what we know?

“By closing down these prosecutions … the evidence we’ve collected over the past decade that implicates most of the major Islamic organizations will never see the light of day.”

The FBI still has boxes and boxes of stuff that has never even been translated  … But it’s already been made public that they have copies of money transfers sent by NAIT [the North American Islamic Trust] directly to known Hamas entities and Hamas leaders. …

The actions by the DOJ to crush these prosecutions are just another schizophrenic episode in the U.S. government’s ongoing relationship with Islamic organizations, especially CAIR. After CAIR was named unindicted co-conspirator in the Holy Land trial, the FBI was forced to cut ties with the group. … Yet …  CAIR leaders continue to be regularly received by top DOJ and FBI officials despite the official ban …

I asked my DOJ source why they decided to come forward now. The source said:

“This is a national security issue. We know that these Muslim leaders and groups are continuing to raise money for Hamas and other terrorist organizations. Ten years ago we shut down the Holy Land Foundation. It was the right thing to do. Then the money started going to KindHearts. We shut them down too. Now the money is going through groups like Islamic Relief and Viva Palestina. Until we act decisively to cut off the financial pipeline to these terrorist groups by putting more of these people in prison, they are going to continue to raise money that will go into the hands of killers. And until Congress starts grilling the people inside DOJ and the FBI who are giving these groups cover, that is not going to change. … ”

But if the U.S. government publicly acknowledges the terror ties of these groups why do they continue to deal with them?

“We tried to do what we could during the Bush administration. After 9/11, we had to do something and [the Holy Land Foundation] was the biggest target.

To say things are different under Obama and Holder would be an understatement. Many of the people I work with at Justice now see CAIR not just as political allies, but ideological allies. They believe they are fighting the same revolution. It’s scary. And Congress and the American people need to know this is going on.”

The American people need to know that the present leadership of the United States is not just letting Islam wage jihad, not just allowing the funding of Hamas terrorism, but is “fighting the same  revolution”. The Islamic revolution. That is the name of the change Obama and Holder hope for.

But how will they be informed of this when most of the media, being themselves complicit in “the revolution”, are unwilling and unlikely to tell them?

*

*Further to this, from Corruption Chronicles:

In the Obama Administration’s continuing effort to befriend Muslims, the United States will for the first time host an international Islamic forum held annually in the Middle East and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton will headline the three-day event. …

Bringing the Islamic forum to the U.S. is simply the latest of many Muslim outreach efforts for the administration. In the last year alone Napolitano discussed national security matters with a group of extremist Muslim organizations, the nation’s space agency (NASA) was ordered to focus on Muslim diplomacy and Clinton signed a special order to allow the reentry of two radical Islamic academics whose terrorist ties long banned them from the U.S. …

The Justice Department also created a special Arab-American and Muslim Engagement Advisory Group to foster greater communication, collaboration and a new level of respect between law enforcement and Muslim and Arab-American communities.

CNN’s religious blog “belief” carries this report:

The Society of Jesus‘ Pacific Northwest unit and its insurers have agreed to pay a record $166.1 million to about 470 people who were sexually and psychologically abused as children by Jesuit priests from the 1940s to the 1990s, the victims’ attorneys said Friday.

Blaine Tamaki, an attorney in Yakima, Washington, described the payment as “the largest settlement between a religious order and abuse victims in the history of the United States.”

The Oregon Province of the Society of Jesus is now in federal bankruptcy court in Portland, Oregon …

“The $166.1 million is the largest settlement by a religious order in the history of the world,” Tamaki said. “Over 450 Native American children … were sexually abused repeatedly, from rape to sodomy, for decades …

Jesuits are the world’s largest order of Catholic priests and are considered the most educated in the priesthood … [They] number about 19,000 worldwide, according to the Society of Jesus in the United States. …

The abuse primarily took place in Jesuit-operated mission schools and boarding schools on Indian reservations in Washington, Alaska, Idaho, Montana and Oregon …

Most of the abuse occurred in the 1960s, so many of the alleged victims are now in their late 40s and early 50s, Tamaki said.

None of the 57 Jesuit priests accused of sexual abuse by the victims has been charged with any crimes, Tamika said. …

Forty-nine of the almost 100 victims represented by Tamaki were sexually abused when they were 8 years old or younger, he said. The remaining victims were ages 9 to 14 during the abuse, he said.

One of the victims, now dead, “was in third grade when the molestation began allegedly by a priest and a nun who worked with the Jesuit missionaries.”

Before he died, Lawrence provided a statement for Friday’s press conference: “The nun or one of the brothers would send me to the rectory to see (the priest). He would give me candy or call me special – and then he would molest me. They all did at various times,” his statement said.

Asked why he never told anyone outside the order about it, he replied “we were scared that if we uttered even one word, we would go to hell.”

With its doctrine of hell, Christianity is still a cruel religion.

(Thanks to our commenter Macnvettes for the link.)

At the request of our valued reader and  frequent commenter Frank, we have written this article on foreign aid and what would happen if it were stopped. He was prompted to think about it when he watched a news video reporting that in this time of recession and severe unemployment, hundred of millions of US taxpayer dollars are being sent abroad for the refurbishment of mosques in Islamic countries, many of which are known to incite terrorist attacks on US targets.

(Note: Requests are welcome, though we can’t promise always to grant them.)

*

“Foreign aid is the transfer of money from poor people in rich countries to rich people in poor countries.”

There’s disagreement on who first said that, but it doesn’t matter. The question is: is it true?

The first part is not entirely untrue: among the tax–payers whose money goes to foreign aid are many who are poor, or at least not rich, by their own country’s standards.

The second part is almost entirely true. Foreign aid is paid by the donor states to the governments of the recipient states, and very little of it goes any further. The dictators, the kleptocrats, the oligarchs, the once-elected-always-in “democratic” panjandrums, the tribal chiefs who rule weaker tribes by tradition or conquest, pocket the lion’s share of the incoming largesse, distribute some of it to their kinsfolk, chums, influential supporters and selected rivals, and only then, if there’s anything left – which would likely be by oversight for which someone gets fired or shot – it’s flung from the balcony of power, in a little glittering shower, down upon the ravenous masses who scrabble for it in the dust.

Our own sort of government is not like that. Ours is accountable to us, at least in theory. The present government of the US has acted on a different understanding, but even the worst members of the Obama administration cannot – as far as we know – be accused of the venality of, say, African dictators, or even the routine corruption that characterizes the unelected leaders of the European Union.

Now what may be virtuous in an individual can be a fault in government, and vice versa. You, sir/madam, may not kill, but governments must in war. You may not demand money with menaces, but governments must when they tax you. You may not hold someone against their will, but governments must imprison convicts. You may give away your money, but a government is a trustee of others’ money and should spend it only for the benefit of those who earned it. Generosity is a virtue in a person, a vice in a government.

Those who want a government to be a wellspring of cash to pay for all their personal needs, vote for socialism. A socialist government is extortionist, the idea being that those who earn money should be forced to hand it over for the benefit of everybody else. A central agency – which can only be government as it’s the only institution with the legal power of compulsion – must gather it in and deal it out again “fairly”.  Some toil, and all hold their hands out. The system is not just, though it’s devotees call it “social justice”.

Socialists think of an economy as a pie, of which everyone should get an equal slice. They assume there is a fixed amount of wealth in the land, established once and for all long ago by divine grant, so if some are richer than others they must have become so by theft. A few are rich – they imagine – because the many are poor: the many are poor because a few are rich. They cannot grasp, or will not learn, that wealth is created, and where it is created some become rich and many become richer. (A fine example is the “second industrial revolution” that began to the world’s wonder and glory in Silicon Valley about half a century ago. Apple orchards gave way to Apple computers – to sum it up – and where there had been hundreds of poor field workers there are now millions of prosperous industrial workers, and the persons who were free to invest their own money, time, innovative ability as they chose, not only became rich themselves, but have also benefited hundreds of millions of people all over the world. That’s what capitalism and the free market – so dreaded and hated by socialists – can do.)

Foreign aid is a socialist idea. It is redistribution of the “world’s wealth”. That pie idea again, writ very large. Equal slices. A fixed amount that needs to be distributed “fairly”.  (Ideally, to the true believers, by a world government.) Those who advocate it get a warm glowing feeling inside. Puffed up with moral pride, they simply know they are virtuous. They hold compassion to be the highest value, and bestow their compassion, by means of other people’s money, liberally on the wretched of the earth.

But have they actually done any good?

They claim to have “helped” poor countries by bringing plenty where there was  scarcity. The more realistic among them, not entirely persuaded by the pie theory of wealth, see the free grants of cash from the First World as seed money with which  to grow profitable projects that will make many an economic desert bloom.

Has the looked-for transformation ever come about? Has US aid – for instance – ever actually promoted economic success anywhere?

Well, yes. Once. Maybe. European economic recovery after the devastation of World War Two was probably boosted by the aid it received through the Marshall Plan. About $13 billion was distributed in varying amounts to the west European states, including Italy and  Germany  (and even neutral Sweden but not Spain), Britain getting the most. It’s  impossible to know whether Europe would have recovered as well, less well, or better without it. It was given, it was used (much of it to buy goods from the United States), and Europe did recover and prosper, so you could say that the aid wasn’t wasted.

But can as much be said for other hand-outs to foreign lands? If you hunt about you may light upon a successful outcome from a grant being well used here and there on our big round globe. But in general the answer is no. Aid has not proved a successful means to help poor peoples to thrive. And that isn’t all of the bad news. The rest of the story is worse. For the most part aid is squandered.  Worse still, it has often had the effect of making poor countries poorer – a point to which we shall return. And arguably worst of all, it sometimes goes to strengthen the aid-giver’s active enemies. (See our post, Aiding our enemies , March 14, 2011.)

The  redistribution enthusiasts explain, in the patient tones of saints, that the waste of what is given and the hatred directed at the giver are the direct results of the rich countries not giving enough (see for example here, here, and here). They complain that no developed country in the Western world budgets even as much as the .7% of its GDP that they promised once upon a time at some international forum, some field of the cloth of gold. The richest country in the world, the USA, allots barely .2%, and the saints who want to be generous with Americans’ money feel that the US government should hang its head in shame for being so miserly.

But if the money is squandered, what justification is there for giving any at all? If it doesn’t improve living standards, does it at least secure a strategic advantage, a port or an air base? Ensure an ally where one might be needed? Engage a supportive voice in the United Nations? Yes, sometimes, for a while, if nothing comes along to put a strain on the agreement.

Does it matter if the aid money does no good for the recipient and possibly endangers the giver? Conservative governments seem to have answered this question cynically, along such lines as: “Even if a few millions bestowed on this or that Havenotistan is spent on a gold bed for the tyrant’s wife, or a fleet of Mercedes that cannot be moved from the airport where they were landed because no one knew to put oil in them before trying to drive them away (both actual examples), the amounts are too small to fuss about … chump change … and there may be some sort of  dividend coming out of it one sunny day.”

What if consumer goods are sent rather than money? Food, say? Doesn’t that reach the people who need it? Not often. It gets diverted –  to  cartels, army top brass, transport operators, profiteers in influential positions, who will sell what they don’t keep for themselves at inflated prices when famine gets severe enough. For instance, in Somalia, after such slavering packs of wolves have chewed off  their share  –  al-Qaeda linked terrorists among them in that benighted land –  only half the food sent as aid is “distributed to the needy population”. (See our  post,, Out of Africa always something familiar, March 11, 2010.)

But, it might be objected, not all recipients are unpredictable despotisms. The biggest beneficiary of US foreign aid is Israel – $3 billion per annum. Any complaint about that?

Yes. From Israel – because of the strings attached. Israel has to use some of the money to buy American military aircraft and weapons – not the ones it wants, but the sort Israelis say they can make better themselves. Some also say they don’t really need the aid at all, which amounts to under 1% of Israel’s total GDP, but are not allowed to refuse it because tens of thousands of American jobs depend on the Israeli munitions market. If this is true, Israel is not a beneficiary but a victim of aid!

From America’s point of view, however, that’s surely one lump of aid worth giving. Or is it? The economist Peter Bauer, who was Prime Minister Thatcher’s special adviser on foreign aid, pointed out that such an arrangement as that is analogous to your local store owner giving you cash on condition that you spend some of it buying his merchandise.

But let’s return to our assertion that aid often has the effect of making poor countries poorer. Here’s a quotation from an article by Matthew Rees in the Wall Street Journal [first quoted in our post, How to spread poverty, April 4, 2009]:

Dambisa Moyo, a native of Zambia and a former World Bank consultant, believes that it is time to stop proceeding as if foreign aid does the good that it is supposed to do. …  Aid, she writes, is “no longer part of the potential solution, it’s part of the problem – in fact, aid is the problem.” … Ms. Moyo spells out how attempts to help Africa actually hurt it. The aid money pouring into Africa, she says, underwrites brutal and corrupt regimes; it stifles investment; and it leads to higher rates of poverty – all of which, in turn, creates a demand for yet more aid. Africa, Ms. Moyo notes, seems hopelessly trapped in this spiral, and she wants to see it break free. Over the past 30 years, she says, the most aid-dependent countries in Africa have experienced economic contraction averaging 0.2% a year.

In the light of that dismal fact, foreign aid is plainly a bad idea and it should be stopped.

What would happen if it were?

It’s more than likely that the redistribution saints would wax very wrathful indeed. It would soon become plain that their motive was never so much – or at all? – the betterment of life for the hungry masses in poor countries. They, or many of them, have a higher goal in mind: global redistribution of what they call “resources” – meaning the wealth created in and by the capitalist First World.

Matthew Rees explains in his Wall Street Journal article:

The report blends the socialist and Islamic economic perspectives as an alternative to our present capitalistic system.  It has four basic themes.  Western-style free market capitalism is the villain. Redistributive justice is mandatory. New global governance authorities are required. Global taxes are also needed.

The only institution that the UN experts believe has broad enough political legitimacy to serve as the global decision making forum and eliminate the abuses of free market capitalism is, unsurprisingly, the body that gave them the platform to air their views on a global stage in the first place – the United Nations.

Since the United States is usually asked by the UN to put up at least 20% of whatever money it is raising, that would mean U.S. taxpayers would be expected to fork over $200 billion extra over the next two years.

Would we at least be able to impose some reasonable conditions on the massive grants and loans for development and other support (or “conditionalities” as the Commission of Experts calls them)?  The UN experts say absolutely not!

After all, it would be politically incorrect to expect each recipient of our taxpayers’ money to actually have to demonstrate that the money won’t end up in a corrupt dictator’s Swiss bank account because, according to the UN experts’ circular reasoning, such “conditionalities” would “disadvantage developing countries relative to the developed, and undermine incentives for developing countries to seek support funding…

Our sovereignty as a self-governing people to regulate our own economy must give way to global government for the sake of “the broad interest of the international community”.

The bid failed. But the saints never give up. They had another go by claiming that the planet could only be saved from man-made global warming by world government, which would oversee the redistribution of the developed world’s “resources”.

That would be the killing of the goose that lays the golden eggs. There would soon be no more “resources” to redistribute. No one would be rich (except themselves), but there’d be that equality of misery everywhere on earth which, to the socialist conscience, is the non plus ultra of moral good.

We must not let it happen. Our verdict is that if foreign aid were stopped, everyone would benefit, the nations that give and the nations that receive. So what we need now – to save not only ourselves who are thriving on capitalism, but the rest of the world too – are tightfisted governments. America must elect a miser-government, the stingiest ever, refusing so much as a crumb in aid to another country. Then the wretched of the earth can imitate our ways, and prosper.

Jillian Becker   March 21, 2011

We are opposed to all forms and uses of collectivism, including collective bargaining. We are against trade unions as such, and most emphatically against unions of public employees.

Matthew Vadum is of the same opinion, as he explains in this article at Front Page:

Bloated, rapacious, violent public employee unions indifferent to the suffering and social decay to which they contribute have been eating Wisconsin and other states alive for decades.

They’re not giving up their elite status without a massive fight and they don’t care if they take the whole nation down with them into the abyss. …

The backlash against … the unions’ legalized thuggery continues to build. Wisconsinites want their elected officials to balance the books, but the spendthrift unions won’t allow that to happen. Outraged that they may finally be held to account for their many abuses, participants in the labor movement are … using the seductive language of rights to defend the fat cat government worker unions.

Of course, rights have nothing to do with this …

[But] this rhetoric, which masks the fact that these rights are actually privileges, has served the grasping racketeers of organized labor well over the years, even though it is predicated on a fraud.

That fraud is known as group “rights.” It is the idea that when a group of people get together they somehow magically gain rights that supersede the rights they hold as individuals. It is a lethal, misanthropic fallacy that negates the very spirit of 1776.

Contrary to the fairy tales told by leftist professors, the idea of group rights was antithetical to the Enlightenment-era thinking of the Framers. They understood that a collective right is not a right at all … They would never have wanted to extinguish the right of individual workers to walk away from union-negotiated contracts. The Constitution mandated the most exquisite protection of individual rights and treated the right to enter into a contract, in particular, as sacrosanct. …

But this all-American reverence for individual rights gave way to pressure over time. As organized labor became increasingly violent and troublesome, eventually, lawmakers grew weary of the unrest fomented by radical agitators. Worn-down, shell-shocked politicians purchased so-called labor peace by selling out the U.S. Constitution. How exactly did they betray it? They ignored the fact that America’s great national charter protects the right of individuals to freely associate with others. At the same time, it does not protect any purported group rights. …

Legislatures across the country have also gone out of their way to exempt labor unions from antitrust laws, which is one of the reasons they run wild today. It was a mistake, and it was compounded exponentially when policymakers decided to let government employees form unions, since public employee unions can never serve the public interest. … Government workers … merely negotiate for more tax money. When government unions strike, they strike against taxpayers.

Public employee unions, which are always willing to collude with politicians against the common good, inexorably lead the jurisdictions they infest to fiscal ruin and discontent. Look across America. Look at strike-crazed Europe where socialism has never secured labor peace. …

A community organizer and labor agitator is in the White House sending DNC-approved goon squads to Wisconsin to reinforce the dirty hippies and labor activists threatening Republican lawmakers with violence. …

The labor movement is in complete and utter denial, unable to see the freight train of fiscal reality barreling down the tracks toward it, and there’s something really beautiful about that. …

The great Thomas Sowell writes at Townhall on the same subject, and makes the same case:

The most fundamental fact about labor unions is that they do not create any wealth. They are one of a growing number of institutions which specialize in siphoning off wealth created by others, whether those others are businesses or the taxpayers.

There are limits to how long unions can siphon off money from businesses, without facing serious economic repercussions. …

Higher wage rates led coal companies to replace many miners with machines.

The net result was a huge decline in employment in the coal mining industry, leaving many mining towns virtually ghost towns by the 1960s. …

Similar things happened in the unionized steel industry and in the unionized automobile industry. At one time, U.S. Steel was the largest steel producer in the world and General Motors the largest automobile manufacturer. No more. Their unions were riding high in their heyday, but they too discovered that there is no free lunch, as their members lost jobs by the hundreds of thousands.

Workers have … over the years, increasingly voted against being represented by unions in secret ballot elections.

One set of workers, however, remained largely immune to such repercussions. These are government workers represented by public sector unions.

While oil could replace coal, while U.S. Steel dropped from number one in the world to number ten, and Toyota could replace General Motors as the world’s leading producer of cars, government is a monopoly. Nobody is likely to replace the federal or state bureaucracies, no matter how much money the unions drain from the taxpayers.

That is why government unions continue to thrive while private sector unions decline. Taxpayers provide their free lunch.

At PajamasMedia, Peter Ferrara explains why government employees should not be in trade unions:

Government employees … work for democratically elected officials representing the will of the people. This is just one reason why there is no legitimate role for government unions, and there should be no collective bargaining rights for public servants.

Since public servants work for the people, their wages, benefits, and working conditions are set in accordance with the will of the people, as determined by the democratic process. This is why it is not legitimate to ask the people to compromise with public servants in collective bargaining. And this is why the pay, benefits, and working conditions for federal workers are set by acts of Congress, not through collective bargaining.

If public servants do not like the pay, benefits, and working conditions offered to them by the people as determined through the democratic process, nothing requires them to be public servants. …

Since public servants work for the people, any strike by them would be a strike against the people. The government cannot allow the essential public services it provides to be shut down while it negotiates the pay, benefits, and working conditions for public servants through collective bargaining. …

Government unions themselves can choose who negotiates with them on behalf of the people, through their votes and political support. In return for lavish pay and benefits far exceeding private compensation, the unions provide a kickback in campaign contributions and muscle to their political benefactors, financed by the taxpayers. This inherent conflict of interest involved in government unions leads to oppressive political corruption, where there is no political limit as well as no market limit to the plunder of the public by government unions.

He goes on to discuss what is happening in Wisconsin:

What is at stake in Wisconsin is whether public servants work for the American people, or whether the American people work for a “public servant” aristocracy enjoying far greater pay and benefits than the taxpayers who are forced to subsidize them …

What we are witnessing in Wisconsin today is the total breakdown of democracy, and the collapse of the rule of law. The Democrat Party in the state has refused to abide by the results of the election last November, and so has shut down the state legislature. The government unions are breaking the law by going out on strike. The anti-democracy protestors in Madison are breaking the law by continuing to occupy the state capitol. Doctors are breaking the law by writing fraudulent “sick notes.” The remaining Democrat state senators after last fall’s election have fled the state to hide from the law. …

Ferrara approves of the bill that Wisconsin’s Governor Walker is trying to pass. It would, he writes, “greatly benefit state and local workers by terminating government collection and payment of their union dues”, because “this gives power to each worker to voluntarily decide if they want to pay those dues.” And this is a policy, he urges, that “needs to be adopted in every state, as taxpayer money going to government union dues is the root of political corruption in America”.

We ourselves, being theoreticians only, can be far more radical in our prescriptions. We would like to see government unions banned, and the withering away of all others.

From RedState:

From 2008 to 2009, Planned Parenthood received $363 million in government grants and contracts — our tax dollars. …

New footage released just this morning shows a Planned Parenthood manager in New Jersey coaching a man and a woman posing as sex traffickers on how to secure secret abortions and other services for their female underage sex slaves.

The Planned Parenthood manager explains to the “pimp” how to make their operation “look as legit as possible” and how to lie to avoid mandatory reporting laws.

Watch it all through. The worst comes towards the end.

America’s magnificent technology, not its dwindling political power, is helping to set oppressed nations free.

Western governments – in particular the Obama administration, obsessively and weirdly convinced that peace and joy would prevail on earth if it could only stop Israel building houses for its citizens in its capital city – have been so blinded by their own misguided assumptions that they are overtaken with surprise by what is happening in  North Africa and the Arabian Peninsula, and at a loss to know what to do.

The Arab rulers themselves are astonished and shaken. They found it very useful to blame Israel and America for the miseries of those they oppressed, but now the people aren’t buying the excuse, and the rulers fear not just overthrow but the loss of their lives.

It was never true that what happened in and round Israel mattered to the ordinary Arab man and woman (beyond lip-service to the Palestinian cause when they were asked). What matters to them is the struggle to live. A steep rise in the price of food has brought them to furious revolt.

The greater part of the Arab world is in turmoil. The revolution in Tunisia has sent its autocratic ruler scuttling for asylum in Saudi Arabia.

In Egypt, tens (some reports say hundreds) of thousands are out in the streets of Cairo and Alexandria. Hundreds have been arrested, but the protests continue. The son of the president has fled to Britain, having sneaked out of Egypt from a military airfield in West Cairo, with his family and an immense quantity of baggage – which suggests that he has a long stay abroad in mind. President Mubarak, now 82 and ailing, has been in power for 30 years. If he was expecting his son Gamal to succeed him, as was generally supposed, that  hope has now been dashed. In any case there were strong forces opposed to Gamal’s succession, chiefly the military – which is probably why they helped him on his way. (In Tunisia, it was the military switching sides from the government to the people that ensured the success of the revolution.)

In Mauritania, Algeria, Morocco, Jordan crowds are marching, and the monsters of corruption that keep them hungry are afraid.

They had to wonder, how did it come about that so many appeared on the streets at the same time on the same days, with the same banners in their hands, the same slogans on their lips? How were the protests organized?

The answer is: Twitter, Facebook, and cell phones. When the Egyptian authorities realized this, they tried to block both Twitter and Facebook in a feeble gesture against the overwhelming tide of progress that is suddenly transforming the Arab world. They managed to do it for a short time only. Then they issued banning orders which were not obeyed. They used tear gas, water cannon and beatings to try and disperse the demonstrators. Official reports admitted that three people were killed, two demonstrators and a policeman. An unofficial figure is some 150 dead. But still thousands continue to protest.

The Muslim Brotherhood, however, hovers in the wings to seize power if it can. And if it does, Egypt will no longer be a secular state; diplomatic relations with Israel will almost certainly be broken off; and relations with the US will change for the worse.

In Lebanon, Hezbollah is in the process of putting its own choice of prime minister into power. It is a Shia organization and the prime minister of Lebanon must (by the terms of a 1943 unwritten agreement called the National Pact) be a Sunni. The man designated for the office, Najib Miqati, is a Sunni who is sympathetic to Hezbollah’s demand that the government refuse all co-operation with the International Court at the Hague in its efforts to bring the murderers of former Prime Minister Rafiq Hariri to trial. As a result, the Lebanese Christians rioted yesterday in many parts of the country. They know  that under Miqati’s leadership, Lebanon will become a proxy for Iran, which created, finances, and arms Hezbollah. The threat Iran already poses to Israel will be greatly enhanced.

What did the president of the United States say that touched on any of this in his State of the Union address last night? Just two sentences:

And we saw that same desire to be free [as in Southern Sudan, recently seceded from the North] in Tunisia, where the will of the people proved more powerful than the writ of a dictator. And tonight, let us be clear: The United States of America stands with the people of Tunisia, and supports the democratic aspirations of all people.

And Hillary Clinton, US Secretary of State? She declared yesterday that the government of Egypt is “stable”.

Jillian Becker   January 26, 2011

Transparency International publishes an annual “corruption index”.

Apparently in 2010 they found no state in the world to be completely “clean”, but Denmark, New Zealand and Singapore are cleanest, with a score of 9.3 out of 10. The United Kingdom scores 7.6, the United States 7.1, China 3.5, and Russia  2.1. The most corrupt countries in the world are Myanmar (formerly Burma) scoring 1.4, and Somalia 1.1.

What is the United States doing to cleanse itself?

This comes from Newsmax:

Rep. Darrell Issa (R-CA), the House Republicans’ new chief investigator … who has called Obama’s administration “corrupt”, says he will hold hundreds of hearings as chairman of the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform.

He has created two subcommittees to scrutinize policies defining Obama’s first two years in office: the $814 billion economic stimulus plan and the bailouts of banks and automakers. A third panel will oversee Obama’s healthcare overhaul. …

“These will be very fertile grounds to find waste, fraud, and abuse,” said Paoletta. “It will be a gold mine” that “goes to the heart of some of Obama’s signature legislative issues.” …

[He] has dropped one partisan issue. He has said he doesn’t plan to pursue allegations that the White House offered a job last year to then-Pennsylvania Rep. Joe Sestak, a Democrat, in an unsuccessful effort to keep him out of a Senate race. Issa last year requested a Federal Bureau of Investigation probe and referred to the matter as Obama’s “Watergate.”

Issa has announced that he will investigate a list of topics that include a government program for helping homeowners avoid foreclosure, the release of classified diplomatic cables by WikiLeaks, and Food and Drug Administration recalls.

He plans to look into the role of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac in the foreclosure crisis, the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission’s failure to agree on origins of the economic meltdown, and corruption in Afghanistan.

Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac – at last! The very kitchens where the sub-prime economic disaster was cooked. We suspect that those two could make even Myanmar and Somalia hold their noses.

But we’ll wait patiently with wide-eyed trust to see what the moral hygiene inspectors on the Oversight and Government Reform Committee will turn up.

For years now the “unbiased” BBC has been firmly of the opinion that Israel is a racist, apartheid state.

Even when occasionally its own reports indicate the contrary, such as the one we quote from here, they fail to plant the least doubt in the mind of that institution, nor cause it to wonder why, if Israel is a racist, oppressive state, so many black refugees try to reach it for asylum and survival.

Human rights groups say Bedouin smuggling gangs are holding over a hundred African migrants for ransom in the Sinai desert. …

So a BBC reporter, Rupert Wingfield-Hayes, goes to the desert and questions some Bedouin holding such hostages. Notice that the hostages are called “migrants”, not refugees, and that Mr Wingfield-Hayes does not mention what they’re fleeing from.

“Often the Africans do not have any money, but we still have to feed and house them. Out of 30 maybe only 10 can pay. In this situation we lose money.”

As if to prove they do not mistreat their clients the smugglers then produce two young African men from out of the night.

One is barely past childhood. He tells me in broken English that his name is Amar, he is just 15 and from Eritrea.

As we talk, it rapidly becomes apparent that Amar is being held hostage..

He has been waiting with the smugglers for a month to cross to Israel but they will not let him go until his family pays up.

“How much do they want?” I ask.

“Tonight my brother called to say he can send US $2000. They are trying to make a deal,” Amar says. …

If you want to get an idea of the full horror of what can happen out in the desert you have to cross the border to Israel.

Ah, now comes the full horror. In Israel.

No? No. That’s not quite what he means. It’s just that there the refugees can speak freely about their ordeal.

African migrants get medical and legal assistance from Israeli NGOs.

There are over 30,000 African migrants in the country who have entered illegally from Egypt.

At a Tel Aviv clinic run by the group Physicians for Human Rights, there are hundreds of Eritreans, Ethiopians and Sudanese crowded into the waiting room.

One young woman from Ethiopia agrees to talk. …

“We had been told to pay $2,000, but when we got to the Sinai they [the Muslim Bedouin] said the price was $3,000,” Amira recalls. “Those who refused to pay were beaten.”

She says the men were then forced to watch as their wives were raped in front of them. …

Depressed and weakened by the beatings and dehydration, Amira’s husband died in the desert.

Doctors at the clinic are documenting more and more cases of this kind. More than a third of the migrant women they treat have been raped. A quarter of the migrants tell of being tortured.

“It is in order to extort money,” says Dan Cohen, director of Physicians for Human Rights.

“The smugglers use different methods like torturing. The women are raped and men are buried in sand and left for days to put pressure on them and make the families send money.”

More than a thousand Africans are staggering out of the desert to arrive in Israel each month, hoping to start a new life.

Lord Chrisopher Monckton reports in near despair from the UN’s climate conference at Cancun, Mexico:

I usually add some gentle humor when I report. Not today. Read this and weep. Notwithstanding the carefully-orchestrated propaganda to the effect that nothing much will be decided at the UN climate conference here in Cancun, the decisions to be made here this week signal nothing less than the abdication of the West. The governing class in what was once proudly known as the Free World is silently, casually letting go of liberty, prosperity, and even democracy itself. No one in the mainstream media will tell you this, not so much because they do not see as because they do not bloody care.

He goes on to explain how –

the UN Convention’s Secretariat will become a world government directly controlling hundreds of global, supranational, regional, national and sub-national bureaucracies. It will receive the vast sum of taxpayers’ money ostensibly paid by the West to the Third World for adaptation to the supposed adverse consequences of imagined (and imaginary) “global warming”.

Hundreds of these “new interlocking bureaucracies answerable to the world-government Secretariat will vastly extend its power and reach”. (And these will be in addition to multiple new bureaucracies in every one of the 193 states which are parties to the Convention.) Here are some of them:

• a Body to Clarify Assumptions and Conditions in National Greenhouse-Gas Emission Reductions Pledges
• a Negotiating Body for an Overall Level of Ambition for Aggregate Emission Reductions and Individual Targets
• a Body for the Process to Develop Modalities and Guidelines for the Compliance Process
• a Body to Supervise the Process for Understanding Diversity of Mitigation Actions Submitted and Support Needed
• a Body to Develop Modalities for the Registry of Nationally Appropriate Mitigation Actions
• an Office to Conduct a Work Program for Development of Various Modalities and Guidelines
• a Forum on the Impact of the Implementation of Response Measures
• a Work Program Office to Address the Impact of the Implementation of Response Measures
• a Body to Review the Needs of Developing Countries for Financial Resources to Address Climate Change and Identify Options for Mobilization of Those Resources
• a Body to Launch a Process to Further Define the Roles and Functions of the New Body to Assist the Conference of the Parties in Exercising its Functions with respect to the Financial Mechanism
• a Network of National, Regional, Sectoral and International Technology Centers, Networks, Organization and Initiatives
• an Expert Workshop on the Operational Modalities of the Technology Mechanism
• a Work Program Body for Policy Approaches and Positive Incentives on Issues Relating to Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation in Developing Countries
• a Body to Implement a Work Program on the Impact of the Implementation of Response Measures
• a Body to Develop Modalities for the Operationalization of the Work Program on the Impact of the Implementation of Response Measures.

How do you develop a modality? How negotiate a level of ambition? How supervise a process for understanding? What are mitigation actions and how do you diversify them? What does a forum do with an impact? Why do you need a body to define the roles and functions of a body to assist in exercising its functions? A network of networks? A network of initiatives? A work program body for incentives on issues? A body to implement a work program on an impact? What is operationalization, and what might its modalities be, and why does it need a body to develop them?

It’s typical of the gobbledygook that substitutes for thought on the political left.

Somehow, amidst such dense clouds of unknowing, these minds are negotiating a level of ambition to supervise a process to launch another process that will function as a body controlling all the networks of networks to establish a supreme body that will govern the world, operationalize world-wide economic redistribution, and reduce all emissions except those from their own mouths in order to save the earth from the evil depredations that human existence inevitably wreaks on it. And they themselves, the Elect, will sit in the seats of power and command the weather and control every aspect of the lives of every living man woman and child to force them to keep compliant and healthy, if also rather cold and perhaps somewhat hungry, for as long as the Elect allow each of them to pollute the earth with his or her existence.

The Elect of the Elect constitute The Secretariat, which, Lord Monckton says, will have the power to compel nation states to “perform their obligations under the climate-change Convention”.

It may claim that power, but how will it enforce its will? If there plans for an international SS, it is still being kept secret.

Is there no opposition from any countries or groups to this plan for International Communism under a World Government?

Yes, there is some. Lord Monckton reports:

At the insistence of sensible nation states such as the United States [a surprise, considering the collectivist and warmist bent of the present administration], the Czech Republic, Japan, Canada, and Italy, the Cancun outcome acknowledges that The Process is causing, and will cause, considerable economic damage, delicately described in the Chairman’s note as “unintended side-effects of implementing climate-change response measures”. The solution? Consideration of the catastrophic economic consequences of the Secretariat’s heroically lunatic decisions will fall under the control of – yup – the Secretariat.

Some supranational organizations perceive a threat to their interests:

In particular, the World Trade Organization has been getting antsy about the numerous aspects of the Secretariat’s proposals that constitute restrictions on international trade.

This objection is dealt with by the Chairman  of the “Ad-Hoc Working Group on Long-Term Co-operative Action under the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change” by simply recording, in the same “note” that names the new bodies, a “decision” that “the Secretariat’s policies are not restrictive of trade”.

So the Secretariat will decide, and reality will obey.

This note, Lord Monckton writes, “reflects what the Secretariat now confidently expects to get away with.”

He stresses that the agenda spells the doom of democracy.

Forget government of the people, by the people, for the people. Forget the principle of “no taxation without representation” that led to the very foundation of the United States. The provisions for the democratic election of the new, all-powerful, legislating, tax-raising world-government Secretariat by the peoples of the world may be summarized in a single word: None.

While we accept that everything he tells us is true, we feel less alarmed than Lord Monckton. We think the myth of manmade global warming is fading away since the Climategate papers proved the science to be a scam, and with that pretext for world government gone, it will be some time before the sinister Secretariat and its black-winged warmist minions conjure up another.

And the people are on to them now. Or so we hope.

Chorus: The United Nations must be destroyed!