Two British voices – Nigel Farage and Godfrey Bloom – cry out against the undemocratic EU’s destruction of Greece and a repeat of the subprime conspiracy of politicians against people.

Who’s listening? Hardly anyone in the joke of a “European parliament”. But millions on the Internet.

The map shows the spread of Islam round the tiny state of Israel – which President Obama wants to make even smaller – as it is now.

In the latter half of this century the greater part of Europe, if present demographic trends continue, will also be predominantly Muslim and governed by sharia law.

Think of it: a vast expanse of Asia from Bangladesh to Turkey, from Turkey across Europe to Britain, from north Africa to the top of Norway, all Islamic lands, all governed by sharia.

And no, it is not likely to be a “milder form” of Islam in Europe than in Afghanistan, Iran, or Saudi Arabia. There is only one Islam and it’s only name is Islam.

We take these extracts from an article, which needs to be read in full, by Andrew C. McCarthy at Family Security Matters. It is titled Islam is Islam:

Islam … is an entirely different way of looking at the world. We struggle with this truth, which defies our end-of-history smugness. …

So we set about remaking Islam in our own progressive image … We miniaturize the elements of the ummah (the notional global Muslim community) that refuse to go along with the program: They are assigned labels … Islamist, fundamentalist, Salafist, Wahhabist, radical, jihadist, extremist, militant, or, of course, “conservative” Muslims adhering to “political Islam.”

There is a “real Islam” – McCarthy’s “we” pretend – which is  a “religion of peace”. “The vast majority of Muslims,” it is said ad nauseam, “are peaceful and law-abiding”. Abiding by what law given a choice? It’s a question “we”  don’t want answered.

We consequently pretend that Muslims who accurately invoke Islamic scripture in the course of forcibly imposing the dictates of classical sharia — the Islamic legal and political system — are engaged in “anti-Islamic activity,” as Britain’s former home secretary Jacqui Smith memorably put it. When the ongoing Islamization campaign is advanced by violence, as inevitably happens, we absurdly insist that this aggression cannot have been ideologically driven, that surely some American policy or Israeli act of self-defense is to blame, as if these could possibly provide rationales for the murderous jihad waged by Boko Haram Muslims against Nigerian Christians and by Egyptian Muslims against the Copts, the persecution of the Ahmadi sect by Indonesian and Pakistani Muslims, or the internecine killing in Iraq of Sunnis by Shiites and vice versa — a tradition nearly as old as Islam itself — which has been predictably renewed upon the recent departure of American troops.

The main lesson of the Arab Spring ought to be that this remaking of Islam has happened only in our own minds, for our own consumption. The Muslims of the Middle East take no note of our reimagining of Islam, being, in the main, either hostile toward or oblivious to Western overtures. Muslims do not measure themselves against Western perceptions, although the shrewdest among them take note of our eagerly accommodating attitude when determining what tactics will best advance the cause.

That cause is nothing less than Islamic dominance.

‘The underlying problem for the West is not Islamic fundamentalism,” wrote Samuel Huntington. “It is Islam, a different civilization whose people are convinced of the superiority of their culture.”

Samuel Huntington famously called the conflict between the West and Islam “a clash of civilizations”. But it’s better described as a clash of Western civilization with Islamic barbarism.

Not convinced merely in the passive sense of assuming that they will triumph in the end, Muslim leaders are galvanized by what they take to be a divinely ordained mission of proselytism — and proselytism not limited to spiritual principles, but encompassing an all-purpose societal code prescribing rules for everything from warfare and finance to social interaction and personal hygiene. …

An all-purpose societal code. That is what sharia is.

Most Americans still do not know that hurriya, Arabic for “freedom,” connotes “perfect slavery” or absolute submission to Allah, very nearly the opposite of the Western concept. Even if we grant for argument’s sake the dubious proposition that all people crave freedom, Islam and the West have never agreed about what freedom means. …

The Muslim Brotherhood is the ummah’s most important organization, unabashedly proclaiming for nearly 90 years that “the Koran is our law and jihad is our way.”

Hamas, a terrorist organization, is its Palestinian branch, and leading Brotherhood figures do little to disguise their abhorrence of Israel and Western culture. …

[Yet] the Obama administration, European governments, and the Western media tirelessly repeated the mantra that the Brothers had been relegated to the sidelines. …  Surely the Tahrir throngs wanted self-determination, not sharia. Never you mind the fanatical chants of Allahu akbar! as the dictator fell. Never mind that Sheikh Qaradawi was promptly ushered into the square to deliver a fiery Friday sermon to a congregation of nearly a million Egyptians.

The Arab Spring is an unshackling of Islam, not an outbreak of fervor for freedom in the Western sense. Turkey’s third-term prime minister Recep Erdogan, a staunchBrotherhood ally who rejects the notion that there is a “moderate Islam” (“Islam is Islam, and that’s it,” he says), once declared that “democracy is a train where you can get off when you reach your destination.” The destination for Muslim supremacists is the implementation of sharia — the foundation of any Islamized society, and, eventually, of the reestablished caliphate. …

Led by the Muslim Brotherhood, Islamic parties have become expert at presenting themselves as moderates and telling the West what it wants to hear while they gradually ensnare societies in the sharia web, as slowly or quickly as conditions on the ground permit. They know that when the West says “democracy,” it means popular elections, not Western democratic culture. They know the West has so glorified these elections that the victors can steal them (Iran), refuse to relinquish power when later they lose (Iraq), or decline to hold further elections (Gaza) without forfeiting their legitimacy. …

Once in power, they are sure to make virulent anti-Americanism their official policy and to contribute materially to the pan-Islamic goal of destroying Israel. …

We should not be under any illusions about why things are shaking out this way. The Arab Spring has not been hijacked any more than Islam was hijacked by the suicide terrorists of 9/11. Islam is ascendant because that is the way Muslims of the Middle East want it.

This is from Front Page, by Bruce Bawer:

Anti-Americanism is, of course, as European as Apfelstrudel. But over the last few years it’s rollercoastered like the stock market. The invasion of Iraq sent it skyrocketing. It was muted somewhat by the election of a black man as President of the United States. (That Americans, whom Europeans are taught to think of as incurable racists, had done such a thing rendered some veteran America-bashers temporarily mute.) But European anti-Americanism has never entirely gone away, and the troubles America has been through of late have been the occasion for much Schadenfreude, especially given that they’ve provided a pleasant distraction from Europe’s own even more formidable problems.

In our estimation, European anti-Americanism has never abated for a moment but only spread more widely and grown more intense every year since the end of World War II.

Still, it wasn’t until I ran across an article the other day in the Norwegian newspaper Dagbladet that I realized European anti-Americanism, thanks to Urinegate [see our post Takingthe Piss, January 14, 2011], is once again in full bloom. The article, written by somebody named Asbjørn Svarstad, begins by noting that the American soldiers who filmed themselves urinating on dead Taliban members may not be the first GIs to have behaved in such a manner. “American commandos who were dropped over Snåsa [in northern Norway] toward the end of World War II,” writes Asbjørn Svarstad, “are suspected of having displayed the same kind of contempt for their enemies.”

The main character in Svarstad’s story is none other than William Colby, who would later become head of the CIA but who back in 1945 was a 24-year-old major in charge of the Norwegian Special Operation Group (NORSO) under the command of the OSS. NORSO … consisted of Norwegian-Americans and Norwegians who were operating behind enemy lines on a mission called Operation RYPE. On May 2, 1945, Colby’s men, who were stationed at a farm called Gjevsjøen, were discovered by five German soldiers, whom they quickly dispatched. According to Svarstad, local Norwegians – and here’s the meat of the story – later claimed that they were then invited by the Americans to urinate on the Germans’ corpses.

One of Svarstad’s sources is Norwegian journalist Ola Flyum, whom he describes as an authority on how northern Norway experienced World War II. Flyum’s verdict on the NORSO episode is as follows: “This kind of behavior says a great deal about the way in which the Americans conducted themselves. The Norwegians were shaken. Such a culture was unknown to them. I see many reasons to examine whether this was a war crime.”

Yes, you read that right. The local Norwegians had lived for five years under the Nazis, who had come to subdue and tyrannize them, to execute troublemakers and cart Jews off to their deaths. But, if Flyum is to be believed, the real trauma for these folks was being invited by their American liberators to relieve themselves on the bodies of their oppressors.

It should be remembered that the Norwegians – unlike the Danes – co-operated officially and enthusiastically with their Nazi occupiers. 

Interesting. And even more interesting are the reader comments on Svarstad’s article, which the last time I checked totaled no fewer than 645. Let me emphasize that several readers, to their credit, sought to provide a degree of perspective by bringing up such small details as, ahem, the Nazi death camps. But the overall tone of the comments was set by those who agreed heartily with the implicit message of the article: namely, that Americans are by nature more uncouth – and more prone to violence, war crimes, torture, and abuse of civilians – than anybody else, including the Nazis.

“Most of the Germans,” insisted one reader, “followed the rules and fought a civilized war.” Another agreed, saying that America “is way worse then Nazi Germany ever was.” A third asserted that during the Vietnam War, the US, that “sanctimonious and arrogant s*** country,” had outdone Hitler. A couple of readers cited the Allied bombing of Dresden as proof that America and the western Allies were at least as bad as the Nazis; one recalled having “seen videos from WWII of P51 planes mowing down German farmers in May 1945.” Several readers insisted that it wasn’t the Western Allies that whupped the Nazis and freed Norway, but the Soviets: “America would have been a**-f***ed in a one-on-one against Nazi Germany.”

A number of readers gleefully savaged the American soldiers who urinated on the Taliban. “How many women and children have these brave soldiers killed?” asked one. A running theme was that American soldiers are, as one reader put it, “typical American white trash.” Indeed, the words “white trash” recurred frequently. Left-wing readers who undoubtedly pride themselves on their purported respect for people (especially the underprivileged) of all races and religions, and who fret about the human rights of even the most loathsome members of the species (such as Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden), were quick to deride American GIs as poor, dumb – and, indeed, barely human – hicks: “There’s no doubt that white trash from the US…have lukewarm attitudes toward morality. Without the local minister and sheriff they fumble around, unwashed and drunk, and rape, kill, and film their crimes. They’re garbage.”

Readers who would surely never breathe a critical word about Islam sneered about the nauseating religiosity of American Christians. Several proffered social analyses founded on familiar stereotypes: “This [urinating on the enemy] probably has something to do with American sexual morality. This reminds them of a sexual act, and that’s a no-no in America. But violence and murder are totally OK.” Two or three readers even took the opportunity to attack the Marshall Plan, the purpose of which, they had apparently been taught, was not to help but to exploit.

The Marshall Plan was an act, fully implemented, of immense generosity on the part of the United States which rescued Europe from poverty, hunger, and hopelessness in the aftermath of the war.

The following reader comment was representative of many in its pure, unhinged enmity:

“USA! Degenerate land that steadily gets worse and worse! The world’s misery springs out of that country. Soon it will be Iran’s turn [because Americans are] horny for war. [Kill who you want, women, children, it doesn’t matter to America] as long as the money rolls in. Evil, perfectly set in system!”

Ah, well.

Why bother with Mr. Svarstad’s silly article and with his readers’ even sillier comments? Partly because the whole thing is a sobering lesson in the power of disinformation. Back in the 1940s, when Americans soldiers were putting their lives on the line to free Europe, could even the most cynical of them have imagined that within a couple of generations, thanks to an army of determined European journalists and schoolteachers, their sacrifice would have been turned into exploitation, their heroism into villainy, in the minds of countless Europeans? Could they ever have conceived that one day the grandchildren of the people they freed from totalitarianism would be maligning them in the most condescending terms and denying that they had done anything worthwhile? …

But this story is not just about disinformation but about moral sickness. For some of the people who posted comments on Mr. Svarstad’s article are not, in fact, ignorant. They know better. They know history. Yet something perverse in their souls drives them to spit on people who have protected them and bow to those who would destroy them. It is an aspect of human nature that is nothing less than chilling.

One thing that certainly comes through clearly in the comments on Svarstad’s article is that in the minds of many Europeans, the Holocaust is barely a footnote. They know that the Nazi occupying forces in Norway rounded up Jews and sent them to their deaths, but, to put it bluntly, they don’t really care.

The Norwegian government did nothing to try and save its Jewish citizens. The very absence of any such effort, of any official protest, of any widespread mood of objection positively assisted the Nazis to carry out their “final solution”.

One conclusion to be drawn from all this, perhaps, is that if you want to free people from some monstrous despot, go ahead. They may indeed cheer you in the streets when you’re done. But be prepared for their grandchildren to spit on your grave.

This is a story of injustice in the name of compassion. It is one of thousands with the same plot and message. It is the European story of the age – along with the tale of the collapsing welfare states.

The following article by Philip Johnston, and the picture of Abu Qatada, are from the Telegraph:

Three years ago this week, a British man, Edwin Dyer, was kidnapped by nomads in north-west Africa, where he was working, and handed over to al-Qaeda militants based in Mali. They threatened to kill him if the British government refused to release the radical Muslim cleric Abu Qatada from prison, where he was awaiting deportation.

A few months later, Mr Dyer was murdered … We cannot be sure that releasing Qatada would have spared Mr Dyer, since the extremists were also demanding a ransom. In any case, it is the British government’s long-stated policy not to deal with terrorists.

But the question that arose then, and still applies, is this: why was Abu Qatada even in the country to be included in a potential bargain with extremists? Since he was identified as Osama bin Laden’s “ambassador in Europe” after the 9/11 attacks on America, British authorities have been trying to deport him to his native Jordan.

Yet for more than 10 years, every effort to do so has been thwarted by human rights laws. In 2009, it looked as though he would be sent packing when the highest court in the land ruled that his deportation would be lawful, the government having gone to considerable efforts to extract a guarantee from Jordan that Qatada would not be ill‑treated if he was returned. But he appealed to the European Court of Human Rights, whose judges yesterday said that in their opinion he could still face an unfair trial, since evidence against him might have been extracted under torture. He could not, therefore, be removed.

In doing this, the European Court moved the legal goalposts: it accepted that he would not be tortured personally – which would prevent his deportation under Article 3 of the convention – but ruled instead that his removal would be a breach of Article 6, the right to a fair trial. At every turn, Britain has found itself hamstrung trying to get rid of a foreign national considered to be a risk to public safety. How has this come about?

Principally, it is to do with the warped application of the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR), which was drawn up after the Second World War as a response to the atrocities in Europe. The Abu Qatada saga is an affront to the enlightened attitudes that inspired the convention; it was never envisaged by its architects, many of them British, that it would end up making it impossible for democracies to defend themselves from those who would wish them harm.

We’ve always thought the “human rights” idea was a bad one. It arose out of the fairly common human need among a lot of nice people to feel good. But it is a sentimental idea, and sentimentality is the enemy of reason and commonsense. Furthermore, European politicians drew the wrong lesson from the Holocaust, so the Jews, who were its victims, are not the beneficiaries of Europe’s shame – Muslim Jew-haters like Abu Qatada are.

This story began in 1993 when Abu Qatada, a Palestinian wanted for terrorist crimes in Jordan, arrived in Britain on a forged United Arab Emirates passport.

Of course he should have been refused entry. But sentimentality won the day.

He was allowed to settle in Britain as a political refugee precisely because this country has a record of offering sanctuary to the persecuted. This generosity also turned London in the 1990s into a haven for Islamists who had no love for the West, nor for what they regarded as its decadent politics.

By the time the threat was catastrophically apparent in 2001, the capital was derisively being referred to as “Londonistan”, with Abu Qatada as fundamentalist-in-chief. According to security documents, he was responsible for “facilitating the recruitment of young Muslims for jihad”. One file stated: “He has been linked to support of terrorist and extremist activity, including support for anti-US terrorist planning in Jordan during the millennium [celebrations]. He has been a focal point for extremist fund-raising, recruitment and propaganda.”

Another added: “As soon as Abu Qatada had arrived in London and had applied for asylum, he started supporting jihad by recruiting for al-Qaeda. Abu Qatada was considered a major figure for al-Qaeda.”

He went on the run after 9/11 but was arrested in 2002 and held in Belmarsh top-security prison, along with other Islamists the Government wanted to remove but who could not be tried in this country, not least because the security service feared jeopardising its intelligence sources. In any case, Britain did not want to try them but to get rid of them.

There then began an extraordinary legal and political battle that has tied our courts in knots and undermined the rights of Parliament to decide who should be allowed to stay in the country.

Qatada’s detention was ruled unlawful on the grounds that since his deportation was blocked under Article 3 of the ECHR, he faced indefinite incarceration. He was even awarded £2,500 compensation for unlawful imprisonment.

In response, the last Labour government introduced a system of control orders to keep Qatada and other Islamists under house arrest. However, this was ruled unlawful by the courts here; it amounted to imprisonment without trial, so the restrictions had to be loosened.

Undaunted, the Home Office tried another tack. Officials opened talks with Jordan to obtain assurances that he would not be tortured if sent back. When these were forthcoming, the Law Lords in 2009 agreed his deportation should proceed.

Yet, three years on, that judgment has now been overturned by the European Court. The Government has three months to appeal but the chances of success are fanciful. In the meantime, Qatada will remain in jail.

And here is the most bizarre aspect of this affair. The reason he is in prison is because he breached the conditions of his control order. His offence was that he was suspected of trying to leave the country – the very thing we have wanted him to do for 10 years.

So sentimentality brought its ever more ludicrous consequences.

This, then, is the topsy-turvy world that the ECHR has produced – and the latest ruling goes much further than before, when the ban on deportation was effected under Article 3, where someone might face “inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment”. …

The judgments of our courts are trumped by a 47-member body set up under the Council of Europe (not the EU), whose president, Sir Nicolas Bratza, is a British lawyer who has never held a senior judge’s job in this country. …

What began as an attempt to limit the power of the state in relationship to the individual by drawing upon British concepts of liberty has been transformed into a corpus of immutable rights that defy rational expectation. Even the 1951 Refugee Convention, under which Qatada was allowed into Britain in the first place, specifically states that asylum “cannot be claimed by a refugee whom there are reasonable grounds for regarding as a danger to the security of the country in which he is”.

To add insult to injury, Philip Johnston points out, al-Qatada and his large family live on benefits paid for by the British tax-payer. Free house, free education, free medical treatment, and loads of cash in hand.

So this Muslim terrorist parasite will live not too unhappily ever after. Or at least until the British welfare state finally collapses.

The Greeks’ last stand: abandon the children, feed the pedophiles.

What is happening in Greece as the welfare state collapses perfectly illustrates the logic of politically correct policies – or in one word, socialism.

This is from the MailOnline:

Children are being abandoned on Greece’s streets by their poverty-stricken families who cannot afford to look after them any more.

Youngsters are being dumped by their parents who are struggling to make ends meet in what is fast becoming the most tragic human consequence of the Euro crisis.

Athens’ Ark of the World youth centre said four children, including a newborn baby, had been left on its doorstep in recent months. One mother, it said, ran away after handing over her two-year-old daughter Natasha. Four-year-old Anna was found by a teacher clutching a note that read: “I will not be coming to pick up Anna today because I cannot afford to look after her. Please take good care of her. Sorry.”

And another desperate mother, Maria, was forced to give up her eight-year-old daughter Anastasia after losing her job. She looked for work for more than a year, having to leave her child at home for hours at a time, and lived off food handouts from the local church. She said: “Every night I cry alone at home, but what can I do? It hurt my heart, but I didn’t have a choice.” She now works in a cafe but only make £16 [$25] per day and so cannot afford to take her daughter back.

Centre founder Fr Antonios Papanikolaou [said]: “Over the last year we’ve had hundreds of parents who want to leave their children with us… They say they do not have any money or shelter or food for their kids, so they hope we might be able to provide them with what they need.”

There are, however, some deserving citizens who will go on being supported by the state to the bitter end. While children are left on doorsteps to live or die, their molesters will start getting welfare checks.  

This is by StevenPlaut, from Front Page:

The government of Greece [decided] a few days ago to start funding pedophiles. No, that is not a spoof and not a misprint. … The Greek government has just recognized pedophiles as a population of the “disabled,” entitled under law to governmental disability compensation and added to the country’s welfare roll. The children who are the victims of those pedophiles evidently are not.

Pedophiles are not the only folks being added to the growing lists of those who may enjoy free handouts and disability income from the Greek government. (Notice I did not say benefits “paid for by the Greek taxpayer,” since so much of the Greek national budget is not covered by them these days.) Exhibitionists and kleptomaniacs were also just added to the welfare roll list that already includes pyromaniacs, compulsive gamblers, fetishists and sadomasochists. Under the new Greek “disability” rules and categories, pedophiles will get larger welfare checks than people who have undergone organ transplants. Peeping Toms will enjoy a higher level of support than diabetics.

Now we know – as if we didn’t always know! – for whom the Left’s heart bleeds.

It is our contention that Christianity brought a thousand years of darkness down on Europe. It extinguished the bright light of classical culture, of which Socratean doubt, the need to examine all ideas critically, was the enlightening principle. Christianity claimed a monopoly of truth, and the  totalitarian-minded Catholic Church did its utmost to suppress dissent by the cruelest means imaginable. So did Protestant churches as far as they could reach. Like Communism and all ideological orthodoxies, Christianity feared open criticism, recognizing that it’s power could not survive argument. The Enlightenment proved that to be the case; a great upwelling of doubt, criticism, exploration and discovery, it loosened the grip of theocratic tyranny, dispersed the darkness of superstition, and let Europe flower again after a long and terrible night. Science flourished once more, achieving an immense extension of knowledge and giving birth to new technologies. The might of the West is rooted in the Greco-Roman culture revived in the Enlightenment, not in a “Judeo-Christian tradition”.

Now darkness is descending again on the West. Islam, a tyranny of the mind as cruel as Christianity and even more intolerant, an ideology from the Dark Ages that forbids criticism and kills critics, is spreading rapidly through Europe and America, zealously assisted by Western governments and passionately defended by the intelligentsia of the political left – which on principle favors ideological conformity and its totalitarian enforcement.

This is from the Stonegate Institute, by Soeren Kern:

The European Union has offered to host the next meeting of the so-called Istanbul Process, an aggressive effort by Muslim countries to make it an international crime to criticize Islam.

The announcement comes less than one month after the United States hosted its own Istanbul Process conference in Washington, DC.

The Istanbul Process – its explicit aim is to enshrine in international law a global ban on all critical scrutiny of Islam and/or Islamic Sharia law – is being spearheaded by the Organization of Islamic Cooperation (OIC), a bloc of 57 Muslim countries.

Based in Saudi Arabia, the OIC has long pressed the European Union and the United States to impose limits on free speech and expression about Islam.

But the OIC has now redoubled its efforts and is engaged in a determined diplomatic offensive to persuade Western democracies to implement United Nations Human Rights Council (HRC) Resolution 16/18, which calls on all countries to combat “intolerance, negative stereotyping and stigmatization of … religion and belief.” (Analysis of the OIC’s war on free speech can be found here and here.)

Resolution 16/18, which was adopted at HRC headquarters in Geneva in March 2011, is widely viewed as a significant step forward in OIC efforts to advance the international legal concept of defaming Islam.

However, the HRC resolution – as well as the OIC-sponsored Resolution 66/167, which was quietly approved by the 193-member UN General Assembly on December 19, 2011 – remains ineffectual as long as it lacks strong support in the West.

The OIC therefore scored a diplomatic coup when the Obama Administration agreed to host a three-day Istanbul Process conference in Washington, DC on December 12-14, 2011. In doing so, the United States gave the OIC the political legitimacy it has been seeking to globalize its initiative to ban criticism of Islam.

Following the Obama Administration’s lead, the European Union now wants to get in on the action by hosting the next Istanbul Process summit, tentatively scheduled for July 2012.

Up until now, the European Union has kept the OIC initiative at arms-length. But Ekmeleddin Ihsanoglu, Secretary-General of the OIC, says the EU’s offer to host the meeting represents a “qualitative shift in action against the phenomenon of Islamophobia,” according to the International Islamic News Agency (IINA), the OIC’s official news/propaganda organ.

According to the IINA, “The phenomenon of Islamophobia is found in the West in general, but is growing in European countries in particular and in a manner different than that in the US, which had contributed to drafting Resolution 16/18. The new European position represents the beginning of the shift from their previous reserve over the years over the attempts by the OIC to counter ‘defamation of religions’ in the Human Rights Council and the General Assembly of the United Nations. …

Europe is retreating from the Enlightenment. But not without  protest.

The OIC is especially angry over its inability to silence a growing number of democratically elected politicians in Europe who have voiced concerns over the refusal of Muslim immigrants to integrate into their host countries and the consequent establishment of parallel Islamic societies in many parts of Europe.

According to the IINA, “Ihsanoglu said that the growing role of the extreme right in politics in several European countries has become stronger than the capacity of the Organization [OIC], explaining that the extreme right, who [sic] hates Muslims, became leverage in the hands of politicians. He added that the rise of the extreme right through elections has become an issue that cannot be countered, considering the democratic way in which these extremists reach their positions. He pointed out to the referendum held in Switzerland, as an example, which resulted in suspending the construction of minarets there following a vote by the Swiss people.”

In other words, the OIC is now seeking the support of non-elected bureaucrats at the headquarters of the European Union in Brussels to enact pan-European hate speech legislation to limit by fiat what 500 million European citizens – including democratically elected politicians – can and cannot say about Islam.

To be sure, many individual European countries that lack First Amendment protections like those in the United States have already enacted hate speech laws that effectively serve as proxies for the all-encompassing blasphemy legislation the OIC is seeking to impose on the European Union as a whole.

The author lists a dozen examples of Europeans who have dared to raise their voices to criticize the barbarous ideology of Islam and defend their own culture, only to be prosecuted and punished for it under recently enacted, bad and stupid laws. Among them, Elisabeth Sabaditsch-Wolff and Geert Wilders, whose cases we have discussed in our posts: The West on trial (December 16, 2009); Freedom versus Islam (January 20, 2010); Civilization on trial (October 11,2010); An honest confession of hypocrisy (October 23, 2010);The new heresy (January 11, 2011); Darkness descending – again (February 7, 2011); Sharia is the law in Austria (December 25, 2011); Only the gagged may speak freely (December 26/11).

Almost everywhere in Europe now, “speaking the truth about Islam is subject to swift and hefty legal penalties” as the author says.

Why should any religion be exempt from criticism? Religious ideas above all need to be criticized, being the most irrational and the most oppressive. And even more than other religions, Islam needs to be dragged into the sunlight. It is the only intolerant religion of our time –  and it is asking to be protected from intolerance!

Right now, when Islam is intent on conquering the West by all possible means including terrorism, it is especially necessary to be Islamophobic.

Americans must resist the Obama administration’s efforts to help the OIC drive our world back into darkness. At least in the United States – the great product and political embodiment of the Enlightenment – the light of liberty must be kept burning.

Obama has brought America to abject defeat.

He is entreating a vicious Muslim cleric, acclaimed as a spokesman for Islam, Yusuf al-Qaradawi, to negotiate with the Taliban for the United States’ terms of surrender.  

In choosing such an envoy, he is begging the savage Taliban to let the United States of America save face in a pretense of mutually desired peace-making.  

Andrew McCarthy writes at the National Review Online:

Al-Qaradawi is the most influential Sunni Islamist in the world, thanks to such ventures as his al-Jazeera TV program (Sharia and Life) …

In 2003, he issued a fatwa calling for the killing of American troops in Iraq. …[He champions] Hamas, mass-murder attacks, and suicide bombings… [urges]  the destruction of Israel, rebuking clerics who dare counsel against killing civilians. …

After thousands of young Americans have laid down their lives to protect the United States from jihadist terror, President Obama apparently seeks to end the war by asking Qaradawi, a jihad-stoking enemy of the United States, to help him strike a deal that will install our Taliban enemies as part of the sharia state we have been building in Afghanistan. …

The price tag will include the release of Taliban prisoners from Gitmo …

The administration will also agree to the lifting of U.N. sanctions against the Taliban, and recognition of the Taliban as a legitimate political party (yes, just like the Muslim Brotherhood!).

In return, the Taliban will pretend to forswear violence, to sever ties with al-Qaeda, and to cooperate with the rival Karzai regime.

It would mark one of the most shameful chapters in American history.

Correction: What the President of the United States has done and is doing to advance the Islamic jihad is the most shameful chapter in American history.

Daniel Greenfield writes at Canada Free Press:

The news that the Obama Administration has brought in genocidal Muslim Brotherhood honcho Yusuf Al-Qaradawi to discuss terms of surrender for the transfer of Afghanistan to the Taliban caps a year in which the Brotherhood and the Salafists are looking up carve up Egypt, the Islamists won Tunisia’s elections, Turkey’s Islamist AKP Party purged the last bastions of the secular opposition and Libya’s future as an Islamist state was secured by American, British and French jets and special forces. …

In 2010, the Taliban were still hiding in caves. In 2012 they are set to be in power from Tunisia to Afghanistan and from Egypt to Yemen. …

2011 will be remembered [as] a pivotal year in the rise of the next Caliphate. …

If [Obama] really had no interest in winning Afghanistan … why did we stay for so long and lose so many lives fighting a war that the White House had no intention of winning? The ugly conclusion that must be drawn from the timing of the Iraq and Afghanistan withdrawals is that the wars were being played out to draw down around the time of the next election.

We don’t believe that any sort of victory is now possible in Afghanistan. We argue that the US should have pulled out of Afghanistan after it whacked the Taliban out of power. Staying “to build democracy” was a stupid mistake. Withdrawal now should be carried out with serious warnings that if the Taliban come back to power they will be whacked again. But we agree with the writer’s point about the timing of withdrawal.

What that means is Obama sacrificed the thousands of Americans killed and wounded in the conflict as an election strategy. The idea that American soldiers were fighting and dying for no reason until the time when maximum political advantage could be gained from pulling them out is horrifying, it’s a crime beyond redemption, an act worse than treason — and yet there is no other rational conclusion to be drawn from the timetable.

Isn’t it treason itself? And what could be worse than that the leader of the United States should commit treason against his country?

If the Taliban were not our enemy …

– as unintelligent and ill-informed Vice-President Joe Biden recently said was the case –

… then the war should have ended shortly after the election. Instead Obama threw more soldiers into the mix while tying their hands with Rules of Engagement that prevented them from defending themselves or aggressively going after the Taliban. Casualties among US soldiers and Afghan civilians increased. … Now … we are negotiating a withdrawal.

There are only two possible explanations. Either we lost the war or Obama never intended to win it and was allowing the Taliban to murder American soldiers until the next election. If so we’re not just looking at a bad man at the teleprompter, we are looking into the face of an evil so amoral [immoral, we’d say – JB] that it defies description. …

But wait, there is more.

Iraq will likely fall to Iran in a bloody civil war, whether it will be parts of the country or the whole country depend on how much support we provide to the Kurds. Under the Obama Administration the level of support is likely to be none.

Once the Islamists firmly take power across North Africa they will begin squeezing the last states that have still not fallen. Last month the leader of the murderous Enhada Islamists who have taken power in Tunisia stopped by Algeria. Morocco has not yet come down, but at this rate it’s only a matter of time.

Syria remains an open question. The Muslim Brotherhood is in a successor position there and would welcome our intervention against the Assad regime. The Assads are no prize and they’re Iranian puppets, but shoving them out would give the Brotherhood yet another country and its sizable collection of weaponry.

All that is bound to make 2012 an ugly year in its own right, especially if the Obama Administration continues allowing the Muslim Brotherhood to control its foreign policy. … The region has become an indisputably worse place this year with the majority of moderate governments overthrown and replaced, or in the process of being replaced by Islamist thugs. …

Yemen too may be taken over by jihadists according to the Washington Post:

With pro-democracy demonstrators now in the 11th month of a populist uprising that has forced President Ali Abdullah Saleh to agree to step down, al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula and its sympathizers have taken full advantage of the turbulence.

In May, they overran large swaths of Abyan province, including this regional capital. Today, they rule over significant territory in this strategic region, near important oil shipping lanes.

[Their] stated goal is to create an Islamic emirate in Yemen, which American officials fear could be used as a base to plan more attacks against the United States.

The Iranian regime closed the Straits of Hormuz for five hours yesterday to demonstrate how easily they could do it. Obama shows no inclination to force that bellicose Islamic state to stop building a nuclear arsenal.

While in Europe Islam is steadily achieving power by demanding  and being granted the establishment of sharia law, inside the United States it has advanced its influence by leaps and bounds under the protection and with the active encouragement of the Obama administration.

Worse than that. There is plainly a fixed intention by Obama personally to give victory to Islam. His support of the Muslim Brotherhood is an indication of it. His surrender to the Taliban is proof of it. 

Elisabeth Sabaditsch-Wolff has been found guilty of saying that Muhammad was a pedophile. Which he was.

However, she didn’t actually say what she is being penalized for saying.

This is by Ned May from Andrew Breitbart’s Big Peace:

On February 15, 2011, the Austrian anti-jihad activist Elisabeth Sabaditsch-Wolff was convicted of hate speech in a Vienna courtroom. The original charge against her was “incitement to hatred”. On the second day of her trial, the judge decided to added a second charge, “denigration of religious beliefs of a legally recognized religion.” The latter count is the one on which Elisabeth was convicted. …

The prosecution and the judge in Elisabeth’s case apparently settled on the sentence long before considering a verdict. …

The judge in the case, Bettina Neubauer, convicted Elisabeth for saying that Mohammed was a pedophile. There’s only one problem: Elisabeth never said any such thing. As the transcript of her seminar demonstrates, Elisabeth in fact said that “Mohammed had a thing for little kids”, the plain facts of which even the judge was forced to accept.

In other words, the judge in Elisabeth’s trial, acting on her own initiative, put words into Elisabeth’s mouth and then convicted her for saying them.

We have unqualified sympathy with Elisabeth Sabaditsch-Wolff, but have to say that we cannot see any significant difference between the alleged and the actual statement. She should have been free to say it either way, to make her point as she chose.   

Here is the story behind the prosecution from Front Page, also by Ned May:

Elisabeth Sabaditsch-Wolff is the daughter of a retired diplomat in the Austrian foreign service. During her childhood and young adulthood she experienced Islam up close and personal, in places such as Libya, Kuwait, Iraq, and Iran. She was in Tehran with her parents during the Islamic Revolution of 1979. As a student, she was working during her summer break in Kuwait when Saddam Hussein invaded the country. On September 11, 2001, Elisabeth was working in the Austrian embassy in Tripoli. She saw the Libyan people celebrate the destruction of the World Trade Center and the deaths of nearly 3,000 Americans. All of these experiences were lessons she took to heart, but 9-11 motivated her to examine Islam more closely over the next few years.

In October 2007 Elisabeth attended the Counterjihad Brussels conference and delivered the country report on the state of Islamization in Austria. In early 2008 she began a series of seminars on Islam in Vienna, explaining to interested parties what the Qur’an and the hadith actually teach, along with the basic tenets of Islamic law.

For the next year and a half the interest in her seminars grew, and attendance increased. The success of her lectures drew the interest of Austrian leftists, who are as determined as leftists in other Western countries to discredit and destroy the work of those they view as “racists”, “fascists”, and “Islamophobes”. Unbeknownst to Elisabeth, the left-wing magazine NEWS sent a reporter to one of her seminars to make a surreptitious recording of it. …

The complainant in the case against Elisabeth was not the state, but NEWS magazine itself, the publication whose reporter had infiltrated the seminar. For the next ten months the possibility of a formal charge was left hanging over Elisabeth’s head, but she received no official word about what might happen to her. All she could do was retain legal counsel and wait.

In February 2010 she gave a deposition to the Office for the Protection of the Constitution and Prevention of Terrorism. After that there was nothing from the prosecutor’s office. Finally, on September 15, Elisabeth learned that a formal charge would be filed against her. Ironically enough, she didn’t find out through a court document, an official summons, or her lawyer. Instead she learned of the charge by reading about it in the press — in NEWS, the very same magazine that had published the undercover report and filed the complaint against her. … A few days later she received official notice from the court [setting] her trial date …

Now the verdict has been given. She has been notified of it by her lawyers, who wrote in part:

You were found, however, to have committed the offense of denigration of a religion because of your statements in the seminars of October 15, 2009 and November 12, 2009 about Mohammed and his sexual intercourse with nine year-old Aisha. The judge’s basis for that focused on the circumstance that the offense of § 188 StGB is an abstract criminal threat, and therefore the mere aptness to cause offense was sufficient to qualify as the crime. What was incomprehensible was the judge’s conclusion that Mohammed’s sexual contact with nine-year-old Aisha was not pedophilia, because Mohammed continued his marriage to Aisha until his death.

Punishment was set at 120 per diem payments of €4, in total €480 or an alternative sentence of 60 days imprisonment.

Further, the costs of the trial must be paid.

Ned May comments:

Take a deep breath, everyone, and think about the implications of the above material.

Elisabeth Sabaditsch-Wolff was convicted for stating the plain facts: the prophet Mohammed had sex with a nine-year-old-girl. She never used the word pedophilia; she simply described in everyday language the prophet’s … tastes.

The statements she made are not considered false by [observing] Muslims. They are written down in Islamic scripture, and are considered correct and authoritative by virtually every Islamic scholar and theologian.

These scriptural passages are not considered offensive to Muslims when they are recited in a mosque or a madrassa. Mohammed was the perfect man, so by definition his actions cannot be offensive. They are in fact exemplary. That is why Muslim men continue to marry little girls to this day.

Elisabeth’s statements are offensive because they were made by a non-Muslim in public, and brought discredit upon Islam in the eyes of other non-believers.

This offense is referred to as “Islamic slander”, and is a grave violation of Islamic law. Under sharia, the penalty is death.

But it is only illegal under sharia.

Monday’s verdict had nothing to do with Austrian law, or European law. It was based solely on the unwritten laws of politically correct Multiculturalism, which absolutely forbids the offending of Muslims.

This entire judicial farce was necessary in order to establish a sharia-based precedent in Austria.

– and so in Europe.

Europe is retreating from the Enlightenment. Going back into the darkness that reigned before it in the European mind. The thinkers who brought the new morning after the long night when Christian churches of one sort or another had tyrannized over the nations of the continent and beyond, took the great leap forward by denigrating religious belief. Hume, Spinoza, Diderot, Voltaire …… dared to criticize religious belief both specifically and generally. Their intellectual victory made  the scientific discoveries of the last three hundred years possible. But the ruling class of Europe cares nothing for its heritage.

If Austria wants to save itself, every decent Austrian should now go into the streets and shout “Muhammad was a pedophile!” If Europe wants to save itself, every European should do it.

They should write it on walls, print it on the front page of every newspaper, on bumper-stickers, on T-shirts, on billboards, on banners trailed in the sky; announce it on the stage of every theatre, in movies, in television ads, at sports events, on radio, in parliament, in songs; write it in emails, on facebook, on twitter, in cartoons, jokes, books ……

The fact that Arab culture generally was what we might justifiably call “pedophilic”  when Muhammad lived, in that little girls, even pre-pubescent little girls, were forcibly married to men any number of years older than themselves, and still are, can only make such a campaign the more vital at any time. But the really important thing right now is that a non-Muslim is not allowed to say that Muhammad was a pedophile in Austria (or anywhere else in Europe it is safe to guess), because Muhammad and his nasty religion Islam are protected from criticism.

It is good and right to criticize Muhammad and Islam. More, it is an absolute necessity if we are to win the war Islam is waging against us; and if we are to preserve the legacy of the Enlightenment, free and open enquiry into everything and anything, not only in the natural world but also in history and the world of ideas. That is what Islam must fear the most.

This is the essence of what the 2012 election is all about. Either we’re going to have a Constitutional republic run by the people we elect to run it, or we’ll continue to be subjected to the whims of an international cartel which privatizes profits and socializes losses, even as they threaten the autonomy of every democracy in the world in the process.

We quote from an article by Arnold Ahlert. He writes at Canada Free Press:

Americans, whether they know or not, are in for the fight of their lives. It’s been one week since the biggest story of the last three years was published by Bloomberg News, and maybe the only thing more fascinating than the story itself is the level of indifference it’s gotten from our so-called mainstream media. Remember the $700 billion in TARP funds used to bail out the banks? Chump change. Or more to the point, collateral for the $7.77 trillion made available by the Federal Reserve to bail out financial institutions all over the world.

That’s right, all over the world. Back in August, the facade was partially pierced when the number on the bailout went from $700 billion up to $1.2 trillion. That’s when it was revealed that almost half of the Fed’s top 30 borrowers were European firms, including Royal Bank of Scotland, Zurich-based UBS, Belgium-based Dexia SA and France’s Societe Generale SA.

Now we discover that even the $1.2 trillion was a crock. Or rather Bloomberg News discovered it, after filing a Freedom of Information Act petition that took more than two years to wend its way through the courts. Bloomberg got the information after the Supreme Court rejected an appeal last March by the Clearing House Association LLC, a group comprised of the nation’s largest commercial banks. They, along with Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke, tried to prevent the details from becoming public. If it were up to them, Americans still wouldn’t know a thing.

Its a scheme in which the Feds made available an amount of money equal to half of America’s Gross National Product for an entire year. Furthermore, on a single day, December 5, 2008, the banks were in such dire straits they needed a combined $1.2 trillion to remain solvent. How duplicitous were the bankers themselves? A little more than a week before this level of borrowing occurred, former Bank of America CEO Kenneth D. Lewis, informed shareholders that B of A was “one of the strongest and most stable major banks in the world,” despite owing the Federal Reserve $86 billion at the time. In a March 26 letter to shareholders, JP Morgan Chase & Co. CEO Jamie Dimon claimed his firm used the Fed’s Term Auction Facility (TAF) “at the request of the Federal Reserve to help motivate others to use the system”—even though his bank’s total borrowings were nearly twice its cash holdings. …

Last week it was also announced that several central banks are making “cheaper” dollars available to bailout the socialist basket cases in the EU. Cheap money for Europe means higher prices for Americans, as once again Bernanke and Company are debasing the currency and holding Americans hostage to the ransom demands of bankers, who once again are telling us systemic failure awaits if we refuse to kowtow to their demands.

So let me tell you what’s at stake here. It’s something that transcends Democrat and Republican, left and right, conservative and liberal. The real dividing line is between those who stillbelieve in … national sovereignty, and the New World Order supra-nationalists, for whom countries are little more than an annoying impediment getting in the way of their one world government schemes.

Even now Europeans are being told that the only way out from under the current crisis is to grant the European Commission the power to approve national budgets—before each country’s parliament gets to vote on them. If that sounds like the “making you an offer you can’t refuse” schtick from the Godfather, that’s because it is. No more Greeks or Italians deciding what’s best for Greece or Italy, flawed as those decisions might be. It’s take it or leave it from … bureaucrats in Brussels … whose unbridled arrogance gave the world an EU that was doomed to failure from the start. …

And where is Congress, who ought to be making it crystal clear that the United States Federal Reserve has no business bailing out an EU that steadfastly refuses to put its own house in order?

Germany’s Angela Merkel and France’s Nicolas Sarkozy want to start the EU all over again with a new treaty that binds the individual nations more tightly together – in other words to make Europe, with all its different languages, cultures, histories, interests, strengths and weaknesses, into a single state.

The EU is failing precisely because the attempt to bind the nations into a “United States of Europe” has proved impossible. Merkel and Sarkozy are prescribing a more intense dose of the killing disease as a cure for it.

If a tighter union were agreed to by the member states of the present EU, what it would mean in practice is the Germanization of all Europe. Germany as the strongest economic power would dominate the continent. It would be the realization of a long-standing German ambition. Germany would achieve through the power of economic success what it twice failed to achieve in the last century with military might. It would be a dictatorial domination. How else could Greeks and Italians be brought to work like Germans? And Europe – aka Greater Germany – will not, cannot, be a welfare state; the dream of socialism, which became ever more of a nightmare, is over.  

The EU was established  in the first place to satisfy the need of Germany to dissolve its guilt  – for the Second World War and the Holocaust – in the big pond of Europe; and the (paradoxically) nationalistic desire  of France to put on more muscle  – a vaster population, a zone of freely moving capital and labor – so it could rival the United States as a power in the world.  Yet France will not mind being dominated by Germany. It collaborated all too willingly with the Third Reich. (The French “resistance” is largely a myth, such resistance as there was being small, bitterly divided, and mainly Communist.)

The best hope for Europe would be a dissolution of the EU. Britain should withdraw from it as soon as possible. The EU idea was never popular in Britain, and if a referendum on continued membership were held now, the votes against it would almost certainly be in the majority – which is precisely why the Conservative government, which promised to hold such a referendum if it came to power, now won’t take the risk. Almost all the politicians of Europe love the (non-democratic) EU because it provides them with a bigger stage to strut on.

Our view, cold and hard, is that it would be a good thing if the Euro collapsed and the European Union broke into its constituent national pieces. The United States should be doing everything it can to disentangle itself from the banks of Europe, and refrain from helping any continuation of its ruinous welfare socialism. And Americans must save themselves from the fate Europe brought upon itself by voting to strengthen national sovereignty and  keep their Republic.