The law is the house of our safety. We live in it with confidence. But is it being surreptitiously undermined?

Aspects of Islamic law are  being enforced in Britain and other European countries as a parallel system with the law of the land, although its is fundamentally incompatible with the ethical principles on which both British and European systems of law have been developed. This is happening at the same time as the undemocratic EU is imposing its ever more tyrannical will over the continent.

Serious and persistent attempts are being made by Muslim groups to establish sharia law similarly in America.

And it seems sharia is not the only ‘other’ system of law that may gain a foothold in the US.

This article by Barry Napier warns that an attempt is being made to remove the protection of federal and state law from individuals who enter American-Indian tribal territory. We don’t know if he’s right about the intentions behind these moves, but we think what he has to say is worth hearing.

Idaho pro-Obama bosses are trying to muscle-through ‘Custer Legislation’ … The idea is to give Indians total legal control over any non-Indian who even passes through their territory. They would be tried under separate tribal laws, and even if the accused comes from outside the reservation, they cannot call in outside help or legal counsel! And only Indians would be allowed to sit on the jury. …

The bright-sparks who are trying to bring this in are Idaho Attorney General Wasden and US Attorney Thomas Moss. They have been working out the details for the past six months… and everyone in the USA should ask “Why?” What is the point of making parts of the USA free from state and national laws?

The EU, that monolith no-one voted for and which has now taken control over every aspect of life in all member states without the authority of the people, has drawn up a new map of Europe. Literally. In it, the country of England simply does not exist. [This is true – JB.] Other smaller countries have also disappeared. It is a future map of what the EU wants Europe to be like in the very near future. At the same time, the EU encourages each member country to devolve power to smaller regional Assemblies, each making its own laws… but at least each law must be consistent with whatever the EU demands.

At first each country picked and chose which laws to implement even though they opposed national laws (just like the Idaho situation). Then, they were all harmonized, again without consent of the people. …

Why do it? That’s simple. By devolving power to smaller regional units, the EU can get rid of ‘countries’ and get on with creating a massive European state consisting only of regions, each answerable to their own ‘countries’, but each country, if it still exists, will be a rubber-stamper of whatever the EU wants. In other words, smaller units without country affiliations are controlled directly by the EU, and are much easier to bring into line than whole countries. It also means that when the EU is fully operational, regions have no power. …

Why should a state create a law-region within itself, unlinked to the greater laws? Is this the start of an EU-style take-over of power? At one end we have Obama’s promise to hand over the USA to the UN, and the UN’s decision to work in harmony with Interpol, who has immunity (for no good reason) from US laws. At the other end, we have this seemingly small ‘concession’ to create laws within laws.

Now join the dots! In between will come more states offering more similar powers to their own reservations and then even to conglomerates and others. There will then be pockets of laws-within-laws within states, each incompatible and fracturing the legal system wide open. What is the result of this? Confusion and uproar! …

Look closely at the idea of creating pockets of law within states, that are not controlled by that state. It is chaotic. And that’s what Marxists love, because making chaos is necessary for them to impose their draconian requirements on the people. Can you now see the dots joining? It is a breaking-up of power, just as in Europe. Without this notion of breaking-up state power, there is no reason at all to bring in such a foolish piece of devolution!

The Idaho Sheriff’s Association does not want this kind of devolution. But, how many laws has Obama ridden rough-shod over to get his own way? How many laws does he ignore in his mindless rush to make the USA Red?

County Sheriff Doug Giddings said he invited a lobbyist to speak to him about the idea. Then, he presented it to the Sheriff’s Association in December. They “voted unanimously to NOT back the legislation”. And, as Giddings adds, “We’ve discussed it every way but Sunday, and it doesn’t do any of us any good. The Feds and the tribe are the only ones to gain power and authority over non-tribal on the reservation…. I vote ‘No’.”

Exactly – there is no sense in it, because it makes things worse, not better! The only sense is that it is part of a far greater plan from outside. I have already outlined what that plan is. I believe my response is an ‘educated guess’, because it is based on knowledge of how Marxists work out their strategies, and by knowing the history of communism and Obama. …

Benewah County Prosecuting Attorney, Douglas Paul Payne …  implies a deeper agenda in his own email to fellow Attorneys: “This issue may seem unimportant to counties that are not concurrent with a reservation, but it involves issues beyond county/tribal relations.” …

The tribe wants the legislation (of course they do!) but the Sheriffs oppose it, for real practical and ethical reasons.

The proposed bill is the State and Indian Tribal Cooperative Law Enforcement Act. One tribe has framed and pushed this proposed law, but another two have not. That a smaller unit within a state can be free of state laws is amazing, because there is no accountability … If passed, the law would “violate Art IV sec. 20 of the Idaho Constitution…”

There are numerous other violations. So, to create a separate legal entity within the state, one has to violate any laws pertaining to it. The idea also violates the national Constitution…

It would mean that any non-tribal person should be warned never to enter the tribal lands for any reason, because they could be liable to arbitrary arrest and sentencing by those not appointed by the state!

Payne goes on to say: “It is important to all Idahoans not to establish a precedent of delegating state law enforcement power to anyone not answerable to the people subjected to that power.”

He says “Counties have been enforcing state law on reservations for 120 years and there appears no immediate emergency. Curiously, this bill is being rushed to the floor.” Just like many other Obama moves! There is no reason to implement the bill… so there has to be an external prompt with an hidden national agenda. …

If the bill passes through it will create another precedent, one so huge as to threaten national security and society. …

The Central Idaho Post is bravely opposing the proposed bill and is asking for all state citizens to write in opposition to the AG of the state. I believe the issue is far bigger, as Attorney Payne tells us, and should involve everyone in the USA. …

Today an heroic defender of freedom, Geert Wilders, goes on trial in the Netherlands for ‘hate-speech’.

It is Europe that will be on trial.

At the International Press Society a symposium discusses the trial and the issues it raises. Here are some extracts. The statements deserve to be read in full.

Bat Ye’or:

The Free World is watching and listening. …History will record that Wilder’s trial will either condemn freedom of speech, or support this most precious right of Mankind against intellectual terror and cultural totalitarianism.

Clare M. Lopez:

When Dutch parliamentarian Geert Wilders goes on trial this week in the Netherlands, he will stand alone before a Dutch court. But make no mistake: it is the very principle of free speech which hangs in the balance there. Brought up on charges of inciting hatred, Wilders is one of the few leaders anywhere in the Western world who dares to denounce a supremacist Islamic doctrine that commands its faithful to jihad and terror against non-believers. …  Geert Wilders is Everyman—every man and woman who believes in the freedom to speak one’s mind, to express truth as he sees it without fear of repression or prosecution.

Daniel Pipes:

Who is the most important European alive today? I nominate the Dutch politician Geert Wilders. I do so because he is best placed to deal with the Islamic challenge facing the continent. He has the potential to emerge as a world-historical figure.

Wilders today represents all those Westerners who cherish their civilization. The outcome of his trial has implications for us all.

David B. Harris

Wilders is an international voice of resistance against the supremacist, totalitarian impulses, demands and incursions of radical Islam – “Islamism”.

David Yerushalmi:

The case demonstrates in classic terms the convergence between the Left and tyranny … Western Elites in the guise of Progressive governance seek to destroy their own national existence and to impose an iron-fisted control over thought and speech.

Diana West

I cannot overestimate the epochal importance of the court proceeding taking place next Wednesday the 20th in the Netherlands where Dutch parliamentarian Geert Wilders goes on trial for an array of charges that arises from his courageous and increasingly successful efforts to lead his countrymen against the Islamization of their country and the wider West. … It is a political trial, then, in the worst sense, that we are about to witness. And it is about more than the future of freedom of speech. The trial of Geert Wilders is about the future of freedom.

Mark Steyn

Behind this disgraceful prosecution lies a simple truth that the Dutch establishment cannot tell its people – that, unless something changes, their nation will become more and more Muslim and, very soon, slip past the point of no return. …  In fact, all they are doing is hastening the rate at which their society will be delivered into the hands of the avowedly intolerant and unicultural. In its death throes, Eutopia has decided to smash the lights of liberty.

Great Britain, as we’ve said before, is slowly and steadily committing suicide. John Hinderaker notices, with some surprise it seems, that maybe it is (self-) doomed. He puts together two recent stories from Britain which together tell a third – of that once great country’s sickness unto death.

From PowerLine:

An Islamist fanatic plotted to snatch a British Muslim soldier from the streets and film him being beheaded “like a pig” in a lock-up garage, a court heard.

Parviz Khan, 37, built up a terrorist cell in Birmingham and planned to kidnap the soldier before filming his “ghastly” death for release to the media. The attack was designed to cause “panic and fear” amongst the Army and the wider British public. …

“He decided to kidnap such a soldier with the help of drug dealers in Birmingham. The soldier would be approached in the Broad Street nightlife area, lured into a car and taken to a lock-up garage and murdered with his head cut off – ‘like a pig’.

“This atrocity would be filmed. They would have the soldier’s military card to prove who he was.”

The court heard that the film would be released through Khan’s terrorist network to the Al Jazeera TV station.

That’s the threat, or part of it, anyway. Then we have this story, on the same day:

Myleene Klass, the broadcaster and model, brandished a knife at youths who broke into her garden – but has been warned by police that she may have acted illegally.

Miss Klass, a model for Marks & Spencer and a former singer with the pop group Hear’Say, was in her kitchen in the early hours of Friday when she saw two teenagers behaving suspiciously in her garden. The youths approached the kitchen window, before attempting to break into her garden shed, prompting Miss Klass to wave a kitchen knife to scare them away.

Miss Klass, 31, who was alone in her house in Potters Bar, Herts, with her two-year-old daughter, Ava, called the police. When they arrived at her house they informed her that she should not have used a knife to scare off the youths because carrying an “offensive weapon” – even in her own home – was illegal.

This is just one of many similar recent stories, some involving criminal charges that have been brought against homeowners who tried to defend themselves against murderous thugs who invaded their homes. In England, astonishing as it may seem, self-defense is illegal.

Am I missing something, or is Great Britain doomed?

Would you like to have free health care and a pension? Here’s a way to get them simply by sitting for three years in a secure environment. Oh – and by hurting some Norwegians.

They’ll pay you to do it.

That’s right. Go to Norway and commit a serious crime. The rest is gravy.

The story by Rita Karlsen comes from FrontPageMag:

Criminal foreigners who serve more than a year in jail will henceforth automatically qualify for welfare. After three years in prison, they will have a right to a government pension and to health coverage. This will be the case even if they have come to Norway illegally. In other words, it pays for foreigners to come to Norway and commit serious crimes – and the more serious the crime, the greater the reward.

The word ”shocking” is hardly sufficient. Indeed, some news is so shocking that one hardly believes what one is hearing. This new development falls under the category of things that you just can’t imagine a country’s leaders ever coming up with. But I am not making this up. You can read all about it on the website of the newspaper Aftenposten: in order to qualify for welfare, foreign criminals will have to commit crimes that are serious enough to put them behind bars for a year or more. But if they are found guilty of even more serious offenses, so that they are sentenced to at least three years, they will also have the right to a basic government pension starting at age 67.

According to Aftenposten, a person who has spent three years in the can will receive a so-called 3/40 basic pension, which amounts to 455 kroner ($80) a month. I assume this means that somebody who has served seven years will get a 7/40 basic pension, and so forth. It is impossible to imagine a policy that would more clearly reward people for breaking the law. And unfortunately, this isn’t all. Because if the same criminal foreigners are citizens of countries belonging to the EU or the European Economic Area, such as Lithuania, Poland, or Bulgaria, they will also have a right to Norwegian pensions even if they have moved out of Norway. We can thus expect that in the years to come, the Norwegian welfare system will find itself paying out considerable amounts in health and pension benefits to felons living abroad.

We can also expect that the Norwegian “goodness industry,” as I like to call it, will soon be telling us that this new policy is discriminatory: why shouldn’t criminals from countries outside the EU or EEA have the same rights as criminals from Europe? For under Norwegian law, citizenship is not predicated on one’s land of birth: if a man is a Norwegian citizen, all of his children have the right to Norwegian citizenship as well, regardless of whether they are born in Norway, Lithuania, Pakistan, or Somalia, and regardless of whether their mother is wife #1 or wife #33. As Human Rights Service has noted repeatedly, if this is called equality under the law, there is something wrong with the law.

There is also something wrong with a law that encourages people to pursue lives of crime, and that in fact amounts to a gilt-edged invitation to come to Norway to commit serious crime. …  As of January 2010, 1,001 foreign citizens are in Norwegian prisons….

Don’t be surprised, Norway, if before long there are millions. Better start building more prisons. You may soon be recognized as the most attractive little country in the world. And the least safe. And one of the poorest.

We do so enjoy the idiocy of the left. Can’t help laughing as we cry.

Because who comes to power in the US and with what policies inevitably affects the rest of the world, we’re posting this article on the Republican Party – whose prospects at present look good for the 2010 elections – without apology to our much valued readers in other countries.

Some ruminations in the dark of the year.

The Democrats are doing badly. It must be good for the GOP. What should the GOP do to take maximum advantage of Obama’s steep fall in popularity and public revulsion against the (misnamed) stimulus and the deplorable health-care legislation?

One opinion is that Republicans will rise without having to do anything: ‘They have Obama’, as Charles Krauthammer said on Bret Baier’s ‘Special Report’ on Fox News, disagreeing with Mort Kondracke’s view that they need to offer positive ideas.

Newt Gingrich opined to Sean Hannity that the GOP needs to be ‘the alternative party, not the opposition party’, and announced that he’ll soon present another ‘contract with America’, the first one having worked well for him and the Party.

So who’s right? Just let the Democrats fail and the GOP will have an easy ride back into power? Or make promises, set out a program, announce policies?

Some say a change of leadership is needed; that Michael Steele is lackluster and bereft of ideas.

That may be the case, but ideas are not what Republicans need. They’ve always had the right ideas and only lack the resolution to stand by them and implement them. A reminder of what they are: small government, individual freedom, strong defense, a free market economy, low taxation, strict constitutionalism, rule of law.

Perhaps the less innovative and exciting the Republican Party looks and sounds, the better.

Am I murmuring into the ear of the GOP, ‘Be passive, be negative’? Yes, I am.

Conservatism is, at its best, the politics of inertia. Change is not good, rarely a necessity. Stability is liberating. People should not have to think much or often about the res publica, but be enabled by the state to go about their business freely, without fear of having to adjust to new circumstances; confident that they, their families and possessions are protected by laws reliably enforced, and distant inconspicuous military might. Conservative rule should ensure such ease for them, keeping itself unobtrusive, so the citizens may expect peace-and-order to be as natural a condition of their lives as the air they breathe.

The only active step that the GOP should energetically take as soon as it’s back in power is to undo the wrong that the Democratic regime has done. Shrink government. Repeal socialist legislation, such as the health-care act if it is passed.

It’s a very hard task. Once an entitlement has been granted it’s almost impossible to take away. Governments of West European welfare states have known for at least three decades that maintaining state pensions is actuarially impossible now that people live longer and have fewer children, but what are they doing about it? Nothing. Helplessly they go on borrowing or printing money, and getting poorer.

It’s too late for Europe to save itself. But here in America, imagine if brilliant new leaders were to arise who had the nerve to say to the people: ‘Stand on your own two feet. Don’t look to government to provide you with anything, not health care, not food stamps, not “affordable housing”, not even education.’ We’d be on the road back to full employment and prosperity. But – nah! These are just figments of fireside dreams.

Jillian Becker   January 8, 2010

Invention depends on individuals, even if they work in teams, having new ideas and incentive to develop them.

Socialized medicine takes away incentive for innovators to advance medical research.

This is from Investor’s Business Daily:

There are many problems on the health care road the country is being forced to take. But one not getting as much attention as it should is the harm done to a critically important sector: medical innovation.

The high costs, restricted choices and eventual rationing that will result from the Democrats’ health care plan are being discussed to varying degrees by those who are uncomfortable with what’s being rushed through Congress. But the final legislation’s effect on medical innovation has been somewhat lost with so much attention focused elsewhere. So let us clarify:

The Democrats’ plan will slow innovation of pharmaceuticals and medical devices. …

If the profit motive is removed or weakened by legislation increasing Washington’s control of health care, drug companies and medical device makers will lose the incentive to bring lifesaving and life-enhancing products to market. For now, the rest of the world follows America because the socialist health care systems abroad discourage innovation. But the U.S. will fall back to the pack under a health care regime designed by the Democrats.

Roger Scruton sets out the opposing ethical-political views of conservatives and liberals in his article Totalitarian Sentimentality in The American Spectator. It is well worth reading in full.

In part he writes:

The USA has descended from its special position as the principled guardian of Western civilization and joined the club of sentimentalists who have until now depended on American power. In the administration of President Obama we see the very same totalitarian sentimentality that has been at work in Europe, and which has replaced civil society with the state, the family with the adoption agency, work with welfare, and patriotic duty with universal “rights”. The lesson of postwar Europe is that it is easy to flaunt compassion, but harder to bear the cost of it. Far preferable to the hard life in which disciplined teaching, costly charity, and responsible attachment are the ruling principles is the life of sentimental display, in which others are encouraged to admire you for virtues you do not possess. This life of phony compassion is a life of transferred costs. Liberals who wax lyrical on the sufferings of the poor do not, on the whole, give their time and money to helping those less fortunate than themselves. On the contrary, they campaign for the state to assume the burden. The inevitable result of their sentimental approach to suffering is the expansion of the state and the increase in its power both to tax us and to control our lives.

As the state takes charge of our needs, and relieves people of the burdens that should rightly be theirs — the burdens that come from charity and neighborliness — serious feeling retreats. In place of it comes an aggressive sentimentality that seeks to dominate the public square. I call this sentimentality “totalitarian” since — like totalitarian government — it seeks out opposition and carefully extinguishes it, in all the places where opposition might form. Its goal is to “solve” our social problems, by imposing burdens on responsible citizens, and lifting burdens from the “victims,” who have a “right” to state support. The result is to replace old social problems, which might have been relieved by private charity, with the new and intransigent problems fostered by the state: for example, mass illegitimacy, the decline of the indigenous birthrate, and the emergence of the gang culture among the fatherless youth. We have seen this everywhere in Europe, whose situation is made worse by the pressure of mass immigration, subsidized by the state. The citizens whose taxes pay for the flood of incoming “victims” cannot protest, since the sentimentalists have succeeded in passing “hate speech” laws and in inventing crimes like “Islamophobia” which place their actions beyond discussion. This is just one example of a legislative tendency that can be observed in every area of social life: family, school, sexual relations, social initiatives, even the military — all are being deprived of their authority and brought under the control of the “soft power” that rules from above.

This is how we should understand the award of the Nobel Peace Prize to President Obama. … The prize is an endorsement from the European elite, a sigh of collective relief that America has at last taken the decisive step toward the modern consensus, by exchanging real for fake emotion, hard power for soft power, and truth for lies. What matters in Europe is the great fiction that things will stay in place forever, that peace will be permanent and society stable, just so long as everybody is “nice.” Under President Bush … America maintained its old image, of national self-confidence and belligerent assertion of the right to be successful. Bush was the voice of a property-owning democracy, in which hard work and family values still achieved a public endorsement. As a result he was hated by the European elites, and hated all the more because Europe needs America and knows that, without America, it will die. Obama is welcomed as a savior: the American president for whom the Europeans have been hoping — the one who will rescue them from the truth.

What persuaded us to believe that socialism, having begun everywhere so badly, should possess the power to reform itself into something better? To be something other than it has been? To pass through the inferno of its Stalinist tragedies to become the paradiso of our imaginations? – from a letter by David Horowitz

Why, this is Hell, nor am I out of it – from ‘Dr. Faustus’, by Christopher Marlowe

Hell is other people – from ‘No Exit’, by Jean-Paul Sartre

*

In the late 1960s and early 1970s, the years of the New Left, there was a commune of young revolutionaries in Vienna, housed in a beautiful old building with wide curving stairways and grand halls, monuments to the skills of architects and builders, and to the achievements of owners who had won fortunes in manufacturing, commerce, and the professions round the turn of the twentieth century, in the belle époque.

When the communards moved into one of the spacious apartments – as squatters, not rent-paying tenants – its walls were richly clad with glowing, dark, polished wood paneling. They tore it off. They considered it ‘too bourgeois’. Holes remained where the panels had been pinned into the brick. The communards – every one of them born of bourgeois parents who indulged and supported their idleness, along with the welfare state that the affluent young revolutionaries ached to overthrow – said they liked the damaged look because it ‘proletarianized’ the apartment.

One wall only they had repaired: the holes filled in, the surface plastered smoothly. There they planned to paint a mural. One of them drew a vertical line down the middle. On the left they would depict Hell, and on the right, Heaven.

They started (‘There’s an artist in all of us’, they opined) painting their vision of Hell, but soon became disappointed with the way it was shaping up and decided to hire a professional artist to realize their vision.

The artist, an American, was found, agreed to terms, and arrived on the appointed day with brushes and paints ready to carry out their instructions.

The communards were unanimous on what Hell looked like. It was Vienna; its streets, traffic, monuments, palaces, art galleries, houses, theatres, open-air market, department stores, banks, schools, sports grounds, factories, a prison. There were shoppers, children, prisoners, police brutally breaking up a protest rally, fat men in big shiny cars smoking cigars (‘capitalists’), and so on. Everything had a dingy look, the colors predominantly ‘’like mud, excrement and vomit’, as per the communards’ orders.

It took the painter about a month to finish Hell to their satisfaction.

‘Now,’ he said, moving to the other side of the line, ‘describe your Heaven to me. ‘

‘Um,’ they said. ‘Take a few days break while we think about it.’

They never did come up with a vision of Heaven. It wasn’t that they couldn’t agree among themselves on what it should look like; the trouble was none of them had any idea of it at all.

They paid off the artist with their parents’ money, and the right side of the wall remained permanently blank.

Jillian Becker   December 16, 2009

Robert Spencer writes about a forthcoming trial – a trial, in effect, of the willingness of the West to uphold its values and defend freedom:

Free speech goes on trial in the Netherlands on January 20, when Dutch politician Geert Wilders appears before the Amsterdam District Court on charges of having “intentionally offended a group of people, i.e. Muslims, based on their religion,” as well as having incited to hatred and discrimination.

What did Wilders do to warrant such charges? He told the truth about the global jihad and Islamic supremacism, and their roots in Islamic texts and teachings, in his film Fitna and elsewhere. But nowadays truth-telling is at such a premium that those who still dare to engage in it are threatened, harassed and prosecuted.

But Wilders is defiant: “On the 20th of January 2010, a political trial will start. I am being prosecuted for my political convictions. The freedom of speech is on the verge of collapsing. If a politician is not allowed to criticise an ideology anymore, this means that we are lost, and it will lead to the end of our freedom. However I remain combative: I am convinced that I will be acquitted.”

The very idea of trying someone for offending someone else is absurd – especially when the offended group is known to traffic in the PC multiculturalist coin of wounded feelings, so as to gain the political power that comes from victim status. That the Amsterdam District Court would aid and abet this absurdity and obvious manipulation unmasks the Wilders trial – even before it starts – as what it really is: an attempt by the nation’s political elites to silence one of their most formidable critics. The one who has the power to decide what is an actionable offensive statement or prosecutable incitement has the power to control the discourse – and that’s what the prosecution of Wilders is all about. If offending someone is a crime, can those who find hate speech laws offensive bring suit against their framers?

The action against Wilders is taking place, moreover, against the backdrop of the 57-government Organization of the Islamic Conference’s ongoing efforts at the United Nations to silence speech that they deem critical of Islam — including “defamation of Islam” that goes under the “pretext” of “freedom of expression, counter terrorism or national security.”

If they succeed in doing this, Europeans and Americans will be rendered mute, and thus defenseless, in the face of the advancing jihad and attempt to impose Sharia on the West …

The stakes are so high in the Wilders case also because the OIC has a new, powerful ally as it moves against the freedom of speech. In October the Obama Administration actually co-sponsored an anti-free speech resolution at the United Nations. Approved by the U.N. Human Rights Council, the resolution, cosponsored by the U.S. and Egypt, calls on states to condemn and criminalize “any advocacy of national, racial or religious hatred that constitutes incitement to discrimination, hostility or violence.” …

But Geert Wilders, and all those who stand with him, have a responsibility … to bear witness to the world that the freedom of speech is a cornerstone of any free society, and that once it is gone, there is no defense against tyranny, no safeguard against the encroaching power of a protected class against whom there is no appeal, and from whose rulings there is no dissent. If Geert Wilders is found guilty, tyranny and authoritarianism will have won a huge victory in Europe, and in the world in general.

The stakes are as high as they can possibly be. Geert Wilders must prevail. If he does not, Europe, and America, and the world, are in for a long, dark night.

We took this map from Dry Bones, the Israeli cartoonist. The Islamic states colored yellow all passionately desire the elimination of Israel. Turkey is warming its diplomatic relations with Iran. Iran is not only actively building up its own military power, including a nuclear capability, but also arming proxy forces on Israel’s borders in Lebanon and Gaza. Two more neighboring Islamic states, ostensibly less aggressive towards Israel but in fact no less desirous of its destruction, are Jordan and Egypt. Beyond Jordan lies ruthlessly jihadist Saudi Arabia. Now imagine the whole of Europe as equally hostile Muslim territory, as it almost certainly will be in just a few decades from now. Bear in mind that the present decider-in-chief of US foreign policy is the son of a Muslim, emotionally pro-Islam, and reluctant to take any action to prevent Iran becoming a nuclear-armed power. What are the odds that the tiny sliver of a state called Israel will survive to the end of this century, do you think?