This is from Front Page, by Raymond Ibrahim:

The New Year’s resolution for “Sunnis for Da’wa [Islamization] and Jihad” — also known as Boko Haram, that is, “Western education is forbidden” — is to create a Christian-free Nigeria, beginning, naturally, with the north, where Muslims outnumber Christians.

Right at the start of 2012, Boko Haram issued an ultimatum giving Christians living in northern Nigeria three days to evacuate or die — an ultimatum the group has been living up to, so much so that Nigeria’s President Jonathan recently declared a state of emergency. …

Boko Haram and other Muslims have been terrorizing Nigerian Christians for years, killing thousands of them, and destroying hundreds of their churches. Just last November, hundreds of armed Muslims, many from the group, invaded Christian villages, “like a swarm of bees,” killing, looting, and destroying. At the end of their four-hour rampage, at least 130 Christians were killed. Forty-five other Christians in another village were slaughtered by another set of “Allahu Akbar!” screaming Muslims. …

Beginning with Boko Haram’s church attacks of December 25, where over 40 people celebrating Christmas were killed, the group has definitely upped both the frequency and savagery of jihadi attacks on Christians and their churches. Most recently, armed Muslims stormed a church … killing six Christians, including the pastor’s wife, and wounding many.

Then, when friends and relatives gathered to mourn the deaths of some of those slain in this most recent church attack, Boko Haram Muslims appeared and opened fire again, killing another 20 Christians, all while screaming “Allahu Akbar!”—Islam’s ancient war cry, which at root simply means “my god is greater than your god!” …

Ayo Oritsejafor, head of the Christian Association of Nigeria has accurately characterized this spate of attacks on Christians as “religious cleansing,” citing that some 120 Christians have been killed since the Christmas day church attacks.

Worse, but not unexpectedly, President Jonathan recently declared that “some of them [Boko Haram] are in the executive arm of government, some of them are in the parliamentary/legislative arm of government, while some of them are even in the judiciary. Some are also in the armed forces, the police and other security agencies.”

Persons elected or appointed to maintain law and order are the disrupters of law and order – a state of affairs typical of many Third World “democracies”.

In any case, Muslims in power obey the commands of their religion rather than conform to Western notions of the rule of law, and the Koran commands the slaying of Christians.

For more on Muslims killing Christians in Nigeria, with more pictures of atrocities, see our posts –

Christians murdered by Muslims, March 9, 2010

Muhammad’s command, March 30, 2010

Suffering children, May 11, 2011

Victims of religion, October 16, 2011

Acts of religion in Nigeria revisited, October  16, 2011

Christians slaughtered by Muslims in Nigeria, October 17, 2011

Boko Haram, the Muslim terrorists of Nigeria, November 10, 2011

Hah! A setback to Obama’s drive to facilitate Islamization.

Patrick Poole writes at PJ Media:

When Barack Obama signed the continuing resolution this past weekend averting another potential government shutdown, it’s doubtful that he was aware that tucked into the bill, which funds several federal agencies through the fiscal year and extends the continuing resolution for the rest of the government until December 16, is a provision that may dramatically impact what Islamic groups and leaders the FBI and other law enforcement agencies can continue to work with.

Under Division B, Title II of the bill, under the Federal Bureau of Investigation-Salaries and Expenses section, is the following provision:

“Liaison partnerships – The conferees support the FBI’s policy prohibiting any formal non-investigative cooperation with unindicted co-conspirators in terrorism cases. The conferees expect the FBI to insist on full compliance with this policy by FBI field offices and to report to the Committees on Appropriations regarding any violation of the policy.”

The most obvious group that this will impact is the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), which was named unindicted co-conspirator in the Holy Land Foundation case — the largest terrorism-finance trial in American history. During the trial, FBI Dallas Agent Lara Burns testified that CAIR was a front for the terrorist group Hamas. …

Stung by their loss of access to federal law enforcement agencies, some of the Islamic organizations named as unindicted co-conspirators in the case unsuccessfully sued to have their names removed from the list. In a 2009 unsealed decision by federal Judge Jorge Solis, the court found that the government should have submitted the unindicted co-conspirators list under seal, and ordered the list resealed (a hollow victory since the list is readily available), but declined to remove the groups and individuals named.

In fact, in his decision Judge Solis recounted the evidence submitted by the government that justified CAIR’s being named unindicted co-conspirator in the case …

But it wasn’t just CAIR among the unindicted co-conspirators that Solis focused on, but also the Islamic Society of North America (ISNA), which bills itself as the largest Muslim umbrella group in the country, and the North American Islamic Trust (NAIT), which owns the property to more than one-quarter of all mosques in North America. Solis wrote that the government had “produced ample evidence to establish the associations of CAIR, ISNA and NAIT with HLF, the Islamic Association for Palestine (‘IAP’), and with Hamas.” He also wrote: “The Muslim Brotherhood supervised the creation of the ‘Palestine Committee,’ which was put in charge of other organizations, such as HLF, IAP, UASR [the Muslim Brotherhood associated United Association for Studies and Research], and ISNA.” …

What impact this new legislation will have remains to be seen, but it is clearly intended to roll back the Obama administration’s penchant for relying on groups identified by government prosecutors as fronts for designated terrorist organizations as partners for “outreach.” 

This new law will also curtail relations with the administration’s favorite “outreach” partner, ISNA, which, despite being named unindicted co-conspirator in the Holy Land trial, was last month included in a top-level meeting with the Department of Justice where Muslim groups demanded a formal declaration by the DOJ that any criticism of Islam constituted religious and racial discrimination. ISNA’s president, Mohamed Magid, is also a regular at White House functions and has been appointed to several government positions, including advising the Department of Homeland Security.

Congressional sources I spoke with on Monday said that this common-sense legislation was necessitated by the continued practice — in open defiance of the stated FBI policy — of dealing with and legitimizing individuals and groups that federal prosecutors had gone into federal court and identified as assisting terrorist groups.

Perhaps the most notorious case was an instance I reported on last year: Kifah Mustapha, who was personally named in the Holy Land case and who prosecutors had on court evidence videotape singing “I am a member of Hamas,” was included last year in the FBI-Chicago Field Office’s six-week Citizens’ Academy training program and given an escorted tour through the FBI Academy at Quantico and the top-secret National Counterterrorism Center. …

Congressional officials expressed skepticism that the new legislation would permanently stop the schizophrenic government policy of engaging groups and individuals that the government itself has said are tied to terrorist groups, but it puts the Obama administration on notice that the days of the “see no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil” outreach policies are drawing to a close.

But “let Islam do evil” will go on as long as Obama is in office.

Still, this is one victory, cunningly won, for the freedom side of the war.

But then again, consider how far Islam has advanced in America that we have to count the stopping of law enforcement agencies continuing to co-operate with terrorist-linked criminals as a battle won.

“Hate crimes” motivated by religious bias: 1,409 offenses reported by law enforcement agencies in 2010:

65.4 percent were anti-Jewish.

13.2 percent were anti-Islamic.

9.5 percent were anti-other religion, i.e., those not specified. [?]*

4.3 percent were anti-Catholic.

3.8 percent were anti-multiple religions, group. [??]**

3.3 percent were anti-Protestant.

0.5 percent were anti-Atheism/Agnosticism/etc.

Plainly anti-Semitism is a problem in the US, not “Islamophobia”. (But America is not an anti-Semitic nation, as most of the European nations are.)

Published statistics do not show what percentage of anti-Semitic attacks are carried out by Muslims. Our (wild, or prejudiced, or educated, or cynical) guess is: most of them.

We do not know what the “etc.” tacked on to “Atheism/Agnosticism” means. Are there a string of intellectual positions entailed by atheism and doubt that provoke violence?  If so, what are they? How are they identified? Do those who hold them wear uniforms or badges, or hang gilded symbols of execution on chains round their necks – little guillotines or electric chairs?

The two items with our question marks:

* Concerted religion-on-religion violence? Like Muslims on pious Jews?

** What can this mean, what or who were the targets, how was it done?

Back in May [2011] it was reported that every rape assault in the city of Oslo in the last five years had been committed by a person with a “non-Western” background – a Norwegian euphemism for Muslim. Now it turns out that there have already been twice as many rape assaults in Oslo so far this year as there were in all of 2010. At least one member of Parliament, André Oktay Dahl of the Conservative Party, calls the situation “critical” and is brave enough to acknowledge that many of the perpetrators come from cultures “with a reprehensible attitude toward women.”

So writes Bruce Bawer, the conservative columnist who lives in Norway, in an article at Front Page. He goes on:

The scandalous fact is that Norway, for all its wealth, has chosen not to invest overmuch in law and order. The very idea is simply too reactionary-sounding for the ’68-ers and their heirs in the political and bureaucratic corridors of power. As I wrote elsewhere a few months ago, “Norway wastes millions of kroner ever year on ‘development aid’ that ends up largely in the pockets of corrupt African dictators; it pours millions more into the pockets of non-Western immigrants who have become masters at exploiting the welfare system; for heaven’s sake, the Norwegian government even funds anarchists. It’s not entirely misguided for a Norwegian citizen to feel that his tax money is going less to fight the crime that threatens his home, his self, and his business than to support criminals.” …

[But] beefing up the police force wouldn’t even begin to address the problem that’s at the root of the country’s growing rape crisis: the presence in Norway, and especially in Oslo, of ever-growing numbers of people who have nothing but contempt for Western culture, who have absolutely no concept of respect for members of religions other than their own, and who have been brought up on the idea that women who dare to walk the street alone and without veils covering their faces deserve to be violated.

Which is to say again, Muslims.

Not so very many years ago, Oslo was virtually a rape-free city, inhabited by people who had been brought up on civilized notions of mutual respect and tolerance. No longer. Over the years, the incidence of rape has risen steadily. A wildly disproportionate number of the perpetrators are “rejected asylum seekers” – which may sound puzzling unless you are aware of the perverse state of affairs whereby even persons officially rejected for asylum in Norway are still allowed to stay. … The rapists … know very well that they will probably not be caught, and, if caught, will not be severely punished …

The incidence of rapes in Oslo has now eclipsed that in the other two Scandinavian capitals, Stockholm and Copenhagen. This is quite an achievement, given that Oslo has traditionally been the smallest and sleepiest of these three cities – the least cosmopolitan, the one that feels more like a safe small town than a European capital. In fact, it turns out that the incidence of rape in Copenhagen has been on the decline. It is perhaps not entirely coincidental that Denmark, for the last decade, has also been the country with the most sensible immigration and integration policies in Western Europe. (Nor is it coincidental that the other Scandinavian capitals have twice as many police per inhabitant as Oslo does.)

A glimpse of the official mentality that makes this steady rise in rape statistics possible was provided in an article that appeared in the Norwegian daily Dagbladet on October 25. It appears that in the summer of last year, the same paper ran a story about Abdi, a Somali immigrant, then 24 years old, who since coming to Norway as an asylum seeker had committed 14 robberies, been incarcerated, become a narcotic [addict], and lived on welfare. On June 3, 2010, Dagbladet reported, an Oslo court had ruled that Abdi, who is not a Norwegian citizen, should be returned to Somalia. Now, however, that ruling has been overturned by an appeals court. Abdi’s lawyer was jubilant, saying that this decision “is important for many Somalis in this country.” (Of all immigrant groups in Norway, Somalis are among those with the lowest employment and highest crime rates.) The lawyer chided Norway for having shown “an ugly face in this case” by planning to return her client to Somalia, but she expressed hope that given the new decision Norway would “change its practice” – presumably meaning that no amount of unsavory activity would make it possible to kick an immigrant out.

When did they? Was the last time within living memory?

The appeals court’s basis for its decision to let Abdi stay in Norway was that it might be dangerous for him to live in Somalia. Whether letting him stay in Norway might make life dangerous for Norwegians didn’t seem to enter into the court’s calculus. It’s not only the courts, to be sure, that are at fault in this sort of situation. In such cases, the media almost invariably step in and bombard the public with shameless propaganda designed to stir up sympathy for the miscreant in question. So it was with the Dagbladet article the other day, which sought to present Abdi as repentant, reformed, and reflective – indeed, almost sagacious and saintly. He was represented as having claimed that he has turned over a new leaf and that he now wants to help wayward immigrant kids to straighten out. He also supposedly said that he wants to study to be a sociologist (which, the more one thinks about it, sounds potentially even more dangerous than if he decided to persevere in his life of crime).

We say: Go for it, Abdi! It’s a real good career move for you. Your college fees will be paid by the tax payers, and research in the field will provide you with heaps of opportunities to hone your skills as a robber and rapist.

Daniel Greenfield’s 10 Reasons to Abolish the UN is a must-read. Find it here.

These are the 10 reasons summed up in headings:

1. The United Nations Obstructs America’s Defense of the Free World

2. The United Nations is a Force of Global Injustice

3. The UN Obstructs the Prevention of Genocide

4. The UN Distorts Women’s Rights to Promote Violence against Women

5. The UN Cannot Prevent Nuclear Proliferation

6. The UN is an Undemocratic Perversion of Democracy

7. The United Nations is Hopelessly Corrupt

8. The UN is an Economic Drain on America

9. The United Nations Endangers American Civil Liberties

10. The UN Holds Human Rights Hostage to its Double Standards

The booklet is short, but every accusation is fully proved.

In his Conclusion, Greenfield writes:

The UN is a vast global employment agency with no purpose except the perpetuation of its own power and authority. Its lofty buildings and the bustle of its vast armies of employees conceal its underlying corruption and uselessness.

American participation in the United Nations supports the deception that it is an international body capable of fair-minded governance. That deception cruelly betrays the hopes of the weak and the vulnerable and abets genocide, mass rape and terror.

The United Nations has become an organizational assault on its own founding principles. And all the while it undermines the sovereignty and rights of the free member nations who still believe that all men are created equal and that governments derive their authority from the people.

The only way to redeem those principles is to exit its corridors and walk a new path toward an alternative alliance that does more than pay lip service to freedom, democracy and human rights. Only America can be the nucleus of such an alliance. And only when the nation that gave the world freedom leaves the international order that impedes it can a global alliance of free nations truly be born.

*

In an article titled America: The Chief Subsidizer of UN Rapists and Traffickers, chiefly concerned with what happens to whistle-blowers on the UN role in crimes of rape and the trafficking of sex slaves, Phyllis Chesler expresses her disgust with that appalling institution:

The Wilsonian-influenced ideals of the UN are not realistic or realizable.

We agree emphatically. And whenever unrealistic ideals are set, nastiness ensues. (Vide Christianity.)

The UN is predicated on the myth — nay, the lie — that UN diplomats and civil servants are morally upright, fair, decent, rational — and, not the vicious tyrants, bullies, thugs, liars, egomaniacs, cowards, and grifters that they truly are. Nor does the UN have a transparent system in place that would hold their mightily flawed personnel accountable for the crimes they commit. …

Who keeps it going, this Tower of Iniquity, this World Headquarters of Evil? More than any other country, the United States of America!   

If it is clear that the United Nations allows its peacekeeping troops to commit major human rights atrocities, why would we allow such an institution to render decisions that are meant to affect the entire world? Why would we abide by such decisions? More important: Why should the United States fund an international criminal operation? The United States pays the lion’s share of the Secretariat costs at the United Nations. Don’t worry, UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon has assured stressed American taxpayers that the two-year headquarters budget (2010-11) will only amount to a meager $4.92 billion.

According to the UN peacekeeping website, the budget for the fiscal year 1 July 2011-30 June 2012 is approximately seven billion dollars. The United States is responsible for 27 percent of this cost, or about two billion. This is far more than what Japan (1 billion), the UK (591 million), China (285 million), Spain (230 million), or Korea (164 million) pays for peacekeepers. Interestingly, under President Barack Obama’s administration, the United States overpaid its share of the UN peacekeeping budget. In fact, our overpayment of 287 million dollars is more than what most of the world’s supporters — including China — pay for “peacekeeping.”

Why is the United States funding rapists, criminals, pimps, brothels, and sex traffickers? Why are we funding orgies? Why are we funding the most heinous betrayal of the world’s most vulnerable civilians in war zones? Why are we overpaying for UN peacekeeping?

Why is the US paying anything at all to sustain the rotten institution?

THE UN MUST BE DESTROYED.

We enjoyed a lot of what Glenn Beck did in his regular hour on Fox. We found his weeping mawkish, and we switched off when he went on about “God”, which was mostly, and much too fully, on Fridays. He became too much the preacher. But he’s a natural entertainer, and he was right, and informative, and even fascinating a lot of the time.

He has been replaced by “The Five”. The five are made up, usually, by a (varying) couple of beautiful intelligent women and a couple of well-informed and/or amusing guys – and a lugubrious lefty named Bob Beckel whose inclusion puts us off watching.

At this point we request our outside-America readers not to stop reading. We’re coming on to a point of international interest.   

We’ll let Humberto Fontova take over. In an article titled A History Lesson for the Racist Bob Beckel, he writes:

“I still have my Che Guevara poster. Che Guevara was a freedom fighter.” –  Bob Beckel on FoxNews’ “The Five” Sept. 5th.

If Bob Beckel’s “freedom-fighter” had been allowed his fondest bit of “freedom-fighting” Bob Beckel’s incinerated remains would fit in a gin bottle today. “America is the great enemy of mankind! Against those hyenas there is no option but extermination!…If the missiles [on Cuba] had remained, we would have fired them against the very heart of the U.S., including New York City.”

For the record: Ernesto “Che” Guevara was second in command, chief executioner, and chief KGB liaison for a regime that jailed more political prisoners per capita than did Stalin’s during the Great Terror and murdered more people (out of a population of 6.4 million) in its first three years in power than Hitler’s murdered (out of a population of 70 million) in its first six. Many, perhaps most, of those murdered and jailed by the regime Che Guevara co-founded were Batista opponents.

The Stalinist regime Che Guevara imposed on Cuba also stole the savings and property of 6.4 million citizens, made refugees of 20 percent of the population from a nation formerly deluged with immigrants and whose citizens had achieved a higher standard of living than those residing in half of Europe. Many opponents of the regime Che Guevara co-founded qualify as the longest-suffering political prisoners in modern history, having suffered prison camps, forced labor and torture chambers for a period three times as long in Che Guevara’s Gulag as Alexander Solzhenitsyn suffered in Stalin’s Gulag. Most of these had been Batista opponents.

“Don’t put him in a list of fascists. The fascists (Batista) were the ones he was trying to get rid of.” – Bob Beckel on Fox News’ “The Five” Sept. 5th. …

For the record: … The Castro regime – with firing squads, forced-labor camps, torture and drownings at sea – has caused an estimated 102,000 Cuban deaths. … Nazi repression caused 172,260 French civilian deaths during the occupation. France was nation of 42 million in 1940. Cuba was a nation of 6.5 million in 1960. My calculator reveals that Beckel’s freedom-fighter caused an enormously higher percentage of deaths among the people he “freed” than the Nazis caused among the French they enslaved and tortured with the SS and Gestapo.

Beckel tells the “Fox Five” that the CIA killed many more people than Che and implies that in the 50’s the agency was Che’s enemy.

Yes. Bob Beckel, still stuck in his adolescent leftism which involves being forever against the establishment of his own country (“courageously”, such safe and privileged members of America’s progressive elite believe) clings to the opinion that the Castro Brothers were GOOD and the US government was BAD.

And actually, annoyingly, he’s only completely wrong in one of those judgments. The Castro Brothers and Che Guevara were as far from good as any savage tyrants could be, so he’s wrong there. But some parts of the US government were bad, not for reasons Beckel might like to intone, but, to the contrary, because they sided with the Castro Brothers – as Humberto Fontova goes on to explain:

In fact during the late 1950’s the Castro brothers and Che Guevara had no better friends – and Fulgencio Batista few worse enemies – than the CIA.

“Me and my staff were all Fidelistas,” [said] Robert Reynolds, the CIA’s “Caribbean Desk’s specialist on the Cuban Revolution” from 1957-1960.

“Everyone in the CIA and everyone at State was pro-Castro, except (Republican) ambassador Earl Smith,” [said] CIA operative in Santiago Cuba, Robert Weicha.

And those brilliant minds, paid to gather accurate information, insisted that Castro and his cohorts had nothing to do with Communism:

 “Don’t worry. We’ve infiltrated Castro’s guerrilla group in the Sierra Mountains. The Castro brothers and Ernesto“Che” Guevara have no affiliations with any Communists whatsoever,” [said] crackerjack Havana CIA station chief Jim Noel 1958.

Next, Bob brought out this old canard of the Left:

“Listen … when the CIA was complicit in the assassination of Allende [the Commie despot who was ruining Chile – JB], that was killing a head of state.”

Ground control to Major Bob: … The leftist [claim] that [Allende] was assassinated by the CIA was spun and spread only by the hardest of hard-left wackos. Not even Allende’s own family believed it. An investigation including an autopsy by Chilean authorities just last month confirmed that Salvador Allende committed suicide. Surely you read the New York Times, Bob?

Bob could brush that aside. His main business was to go on praising Castro’s revolution and regime for as long as breath was in him or until the alloted hour on Fox came to a close. He said:

“The idea of picking Che Guevara and calling him a mass-murderer is crazy.”

Yet Guevara himself confessed to being just that – with great pride, as Fontova reminds us:

“Certainly we execute!” boasted Che Guevara while addressing the hallowed halls of the U.N. General Assembly Dec. 9, 1964. “And we will continue executing as long as it is necessary!” According to the Black Book of Communism, those firing-squad executions (murders, actually; execution implies a judicial process) had reached 14,000 by the end of the ’60s, the equivalent, given the relative populations, of almost a million executions in the U.S. “I don’t need proof to execute a man,” snapped Che to a judicial toady in 1959. “I only need proof that it’s necessary to execute him.”

The Left cannot hear that. Will not read it. To the Left, the savage Che Guevara is forever a hero. Why? Well, because, among other lies –

“(Che) did help Fidel Castro get rid one of the biggest thugs and murdering bastards there ever was, and that was Batista in Cuba.”

Now watch Fontova stride into the ring with his red muleta, and ready himself to administer, with one fatal thrust of his puntillo, the estocade – the coup de grace.

(And while he advances we must whisper that we are not admirers of Fulgencio Batista nor of labor unions, but  that is not important at this moment of suspense.)

Here he comes – watch, listen:

Batista was a mulatto grandson of slaves born on the dirt floor of a palm roofed shack in the Cuban countryside. As President (via honest elections 1940-44, bloodless coup 1952-58) he always enjoyed the support of Cuba’s labor unions. And under Batista, according to a study by the International Labor Organization, the Cuban workforce was more highly unionized than the U.S. work force, with Cuba’s Industrial laborers earning the 8th highest wages in the world. …

Fontova the Toreador is leaning over the horns, his dagger is in place – now for the downward thrust:

So here’s Bob Beckel bashing a black politician of lowly origin who enjoyed overwhelming unionized labor support – while hailing the lily-white rich-boys, Fidel and Che, who outlawed labor unions and sent such as Richard Trumka and Jimmy Hoffa to the firing squad or prison. … Using liberals’ own standards Beckel sure sounds like an elitist – and a racist to boot.

Later the Toreador, in relaxed mood, tells us this:

No doubt Beckel picked up the leftist proverb about Batista as “one of the biggest murdering bastards there ever was” from a meme hatched in 1957 by a Fidelista Cuban magazine publisher named Miguel Angel Quevedo. The meme asserts that Batista’s police and army “murdered 20,000 Cubans” and is still parroted by the MSM/Academia axis.

For the record: Ten years after he hatched and spread the lie, Quevedo (from exile, he scooted out just ahead of a Fidelista firing squad) confessed to the lie and greatly regretted how the lie helped the propaganda campaign to put Fidel and Che in power. The regret for the calamity he helped bring upon Cuba was such that, right after signing the letter, Miguel Angel Quevedo put a gun to his head and blew his brains out.

*

Here’s Humberto Fontova and Nick Gillespie, the editor of Reason, with Glen Beck on Fox in the good old days before Beckel and the others replaced him, talking about Che Guevara.

And here’s an extract from Glenn Beck’s article, Exposing the Real Che Guevara:

“When you saw the beaming look on Che’s face as the victims were tied to the stake and blasted apart by the firing squad,” said a former Cuban political prisoner, to this writer, “you saw there was something seriously, seriously wrong with Che Guevara.” As commander of this prison/execution yard, Che often shattered the skull of the condemned man by firing the coup de grace himself. When other duties tore him away from his beloved execution yard, he consoled himself by viewing the slaughter. Che’s second-story office in Havana’s La Cabana prison had a section of wall torn out so he could watch his darling firing-squads at work.

An inspector from the Pennsylvania Department of Agriculture raided the fish fry at St. Cecilia’s Catholic Church in Rochester. He had been there for his annual inspection of the church’s kitchen, but … he espied an elderly parishioner unwrapping some pies.  He swooped. Would those by any chance be homemade pies?

They were. Four ladies had made each her favorite pie. They’d brought them to the church to sell at a dollar a slice. The inspector stopped them doing so, telling them that if they did they’d be committing a crime. In Pennsylvania, it is illegal to bake a pie in a home kitchen for sale at a church fundraiser.

The inspector informed the ladies they could continue baking pies [for sale] at home if each paid a $35 dollar fee for him to come round to her home and certify her kitchen as state-compliant.

Mark Steyn tells the story in After America: Get Ready for Armageddon. He also tells this one:

Seven-year-old Julie Murphy was selling lemonade in Portland, Oregon, when two officers demanded to see her “temporary restaurant license” which would have cost her $120. When she failed to produce it, they threatend her with a $500 fine, and also made her cry.

And this one:

For their morning customers the Collins family had been putting a coffee pot and doughnuts on the counter of their hardware store for fifteen years…

But in California that’s an illegal act. The permit mullahs told Randy Collins that he needed to install stainless steel sinks with hot and cold water and a prep kitchen to handle  the doughnuts.

Mr Collins was submissive.

“We want to be in compliance with the law” [he said].

“Why?”  Mark Steyn asks.

When the law says it’s illegal for a storekeeper to offer his customer a cup of coffee, you should be proud to be in non-compliance. Otherwise, what the hell did you guys bother holding a revolution for? …

This is the reality of small business in America today. You don’t make the rules, you don’t get to vote for people who make the rules. But you have to work harder, pay more taxes, buy more permits, fill in more paperwork, contribute to the growth of an ever less favorable business environment, and prostrate yourself before the Commissar of Community Services – all for the privilege of taking home less and less money.

Mark Steyn calls it tyranny. It is.

Another example from a different source:

When California’s elected officials come back from their month-long recess they face a mountain of proposed legislation (almost 900 bills are lined up and waiting), including a new law (SB432) that would require hotels to eliminate flat sheets. Not having fitted sheets on hotel beds would now be a crime in California. This is not a joke.

California, the state trying to deal with a massive $26 BILLION dollar debt, is considering a law that some hospitality industry experts claim would add an estimated $15 to $30 million dollars in costs to an already hurting hotel industry. The low-end estimate of fifteen million is the projected cost to purchase new fitted sheets for the 550,000hotel beds in the state. Of course the hospitality industry is claiming that these added costs will hurt their business and put jobs at risk.

The fitted-sheet bill is the brainchild of State Senator Kevin De Leon (a Democrat from Los Angeles), whose mother suffered back pains while working as a hotel maid. Kevin has been quoted as saying this was “an issue close to my heart.” It is also a bill that has the support of Big Labor. …

We are now going to make it a crime in California not to use a fitted sheet? Really?

The desirability or undesirability of something is not a good reason to legislate for or against it. There should be no more laws than are frugally necessary (administered as rigorously as possible). To make thousands of petty laws that are easy to break through ignorance, incapacity, or bewilderment is to bring the law into contempt.

It’s debatable whether there should be any regulatory laws whatsoever. They are inevitably oppressive. They establish a niggling, nagging, tyranny-of-interference.

Tyranny American-style.

It is communitarian, a sneaky form of collectivization. It is job-killing, impoverishing. Enlarging the reach and power of the state, it is dictatorial.

And it  is Obama’s preferred method of government. He is using the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to implement his dictatorial will. The EPA is continually churning out thousands of regulations to complicate and hamper work in agriculture, animal farming, industry, construction … everything. With this Stasi-like agency, he by-passes Congress.

The only good point made by Jon Huntsman in a recent debate among GOP candidates for the presidency, was that the EPA must be abolished.

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.

Anders Breivik, the Norwegian terrorist, was prepared to co-opt not only neo-Nazi groups and professional criminal to assist his “crusade”, but also Islamic jihadists.

Daniel Greenfield writes:

Breivik viewed Muslims as the enemy, but only domestically. He emphasized that; “Knights Templar do not intend to persecute devout Muslims”.

And he contemplated collaborating with them on terrorist attacks against Europe. “An alliance with the Jihadists might prove beneficial to both parties… We both share one common goal.” The Caliphate was a useful enemy for his cause.

In Breivik’s own words, this is how such an arrangement would play out;

“They are asked to provide a biological compound manufactured by Muslim scientists in the Middle East. Hamas and several Jihadi groups have labs and they have the potential to provide such substances. Their problem is finding suitable martyrs who can pass ‘screenings’ in Western Europe. This is where we come in. We will smuggle it in to the EU and distribute it at a target of our choosing. We must give them assurances that we are not to harm any Muslims etc.” …

There might come a time when we, the PCCTS, the Knights Templar will consider to use or even to work as a proxy for the enemies of our enemies.

Under these circumstances, the PCCTS, Knights Templar will for the future consider working with the enemies of the EU/US hegemony such as Iran (South [sic] Korea is unlikely), al-Qaeda, al-Shabaab or the rest of the devout fractions of the Islamic Ummah with the intention for deployment of small nuclear, radiological, biological or chemical weapons in Western European capitals and other high priority locations.

Justiciar Knights and other European Christian martyrs can avoid the scrutiny normally reserved for individuals of Arab descent and we can ensure successful deployment and detonation in the location of our choice.”  …

He was a deluded man who imagined himself leading a takeover of Europe, even if he had to serve as a Muslim proxy to do it.

Investor’s Business Daily reports and comments:

What emerges from his rantings is less a religious zealot than a fame-seeking loser — a wannabe terrorist.

The motive of fame is probably the most common among all terrorists. If not the world-wide fame  which the young European terrorists of the 1960s and 1970s lusted for, at least acclamation as hero-martyrs in their own societies – as for instance among the Arabs of the Middle East – is a powerful lure.

He even seems enamored of jihadists, talking admiringly of their ability to organize “cells,” while describing his own planned attack as a “martyrdom operation.” …

He’s not the “farmer” first reported, but an effete bachelor who lived with his mother in her Oslo flat, where he spent much of his time playing violent video games. He liked to dress up in fancy uniforms and pretend he’s a Knight. He took steroids to gain muscle.

In short, he’s a loser who fantasizes about leading a “revolution.” Like many psychopaths, he’s desperate for attention. Fame may be his real motive.

He claimed in court (where he was denied wearing a uniform) that others like him were waiting to carry out similar attacks.

But that’s likely a bluff to draw more publicity, since his writings and actions indicate that he acted alone.

“Give the impression that your cell is larger by attempting to forward misinformation on the police band or by other means,” he wrote in his diary.

Though what he did in Oslo is large-scale terrorism of the most heinous and treacherous kind, Breivik appears, like McVeigh, to be a one-off threat.

The primary threat still comes from Islamic extremists, including homegrown jihadists. And statistically, the terrorist profile is still overwhelmingly Islamic.

As far as we can discover from our skimming of his book and our search of reports, Breivik has not given a moment’s thought to his victims as individuals, or to their families.

*

A vicious and mendacious attempt by the Left to use Breivik’s massacre to tar all those who oppose the Islamization of the West, proceeds with the massed drums and bells of media clamor in an ecstasy of Schadenfreude. (See, for example, the New York Times here.)

But with what success?

Here’s a link to a video in which an EDL (English Defence League) leader, Tommy Robinson, interviewed by one of the BBC’s most self-righteous and aggressive interviewers who wants to implicate him and the EDL in Breivik’s crime, condemns the mass murderer and violent action in general. He defends his organization from accusations of neo-Nazism, denying any connection with neo-Nazi individuals or groups.

Tommy Robinson’s English may be a little hard for many listeners to follow at times. But perseverance is rewarded. He speaks for the common man – not only of Britain but, we believe, of Europe and the West. The short drama could not have been better cast had a professional producer staged it. Tommy (the name generally bestowed on the British private soldier) speaking from the heart, versus snooty Jeremy Paxman, a typical BBC man, self-annointed member of the elite intelligentsia, notorious for his sneering manner. But Tommy will not be shouted down, and makes his points simply and fearlessly.

Please watch it.

“The truth is that blood gives gravity even to very stupid thoughts,” our reader Joszaruba writes, commenting on our post Nemesis comes to Europe in which we discuss the atrocious terrorist acts carried out by Anders Breivik in Norway last Friday.

It is an astute observation. But the trouble is, we have to take into account that much of Breivik’s thinking is not stupid to judge by his book, A European Declaration of Independence. (See our post immediately below, A terrorist’s manifesto.)  We agree with his political assessments of the threat of Muslim immigration to European law and civilization. We do not agree with many of his other views, eg against “global capitalism”, for Christianity and the ethos of the Knights Templar. We agree that civil war is likely, but vehemently disagree that it should be preempted (anticipated or even precipitated) by acts of murderous violence.

There is a danger that the blood spilled by Breivik will give the leftist western governments the excuse to put another thought crime on the books: political conservatism with its tributary views against multiculturalism, and for free markets, individual freedom, and even Israel.

Throughout the rightist blogosphere there have been cries of “he is no Christian” – reminiscent of “he is no Muslim” with respect to bin Laden. Can conservative atheists say “he is no conservative?” No. We are put to the hard task of distinguishing between ideologies that do promote war, command fanaticism, desire totalitarianism and those that do not. Or we must look to psychological explanations for individual behavior and why extreme violence – terrorism – is chosen by some as a means of political self-expression. Perhaps this will result in our having to take the awkward position that fanatical conservatives go mad to murder, but fanatical Muslims are acting rationally according to the dictates of Islamic dogma.

If bad ideas are to be vanquished by good ones, how far can the law be used to support the good and inhibit the bad? If Islam is the cause of the violent backlash, should we be demanding laws that proscribe Islam? Is there a way of proscribing the practices of Islam that do not impinge on “religious freedom”: allowing Muslims to pray together, but not to cover females, or engage in polygamy, or carry out the custom of female circumcision and wife-beating, etc.?  That would be tantamount to legislating a reformed Islam – by enforcing the law against practices that would be crimes if not excused by “religion”. Would that be politically more feasible than deporting Muslim immigrants (which may not be possible  as their home countries might not accept them). Certainly Muslim immigration could be stopped, but that would necessitate a national acknowledgement – in fact a positive embracing –  of what is dubbed “racism”, actually nationalism.

If the law is always to allow freedom of expression (of which religion is a sub-category), then we must be very sure of our norms in terms of criminalizing acts, not thoughts. Whether motivated by Islam or anti-Marxism or anything else, mass murder is an individual decision and a crime – not a hate crime, nor a political crime.

When most Western states decided against the death penalty, it placed pre-meditated murder on an equal footing with lesser crime – such as “homicide” as defined in America – and undermined its defenses against fanatical political enemies. It legitimated political “war”. Killing in war is homicide. Insofar as Breivik’s mass murder was an act of war, it was invited by the degeneration of legal norms. Disallowing the death penalty was one step among many taken in the name of “social justice” and “human rights” that contributed to that degeneration.

C. Gee   July 25, 2011