We have become sadly used to reading about Muslim men killing their daughters, sisters and wives to restore or preserve the “honor” of their family.

We have posted stories of Muslim girls being buried alive by their fathers, brothers, uncles, tribal elders. (See our posts, In the name of Allah the Merciful, February 4, 2010; Imagine, February 6, 2010; The atrocity that is Islam, September 10, 2010.)* In some cases, their mothers and sisters plead vainly for their lives.

Now we hear of  two Muslim mothers helping each other kill their daughters because they married men of their own choice in defiance of family disapproval and the convention of their “culture”.

Phyllis Chesler writes at Front Page:

Two Muslim mothers, both widows, both living in Uttar Pradesh in India, helped each other murder their grown daughters, Zahida, 19, and Husna, 26, for having committed the crime of marrying Hindu men.

They held their daughters down and slowly strangled them to death. The poor dead darlings actually believed they were entitled to marry non-Muslim men and for “love,” and that ultimately their mothers and Muslim community would accept them back. This is typical of many honor killing victims. While these two young women knew enough to contact the police for help — and the police actually got their mothers to sign an agreement that they would not “harm” their children — it was only a deceptive piece of paper. But the daughters’ longing for reconciliation and naive hopefulness was their undoing. Their mothers agreed not to hurt them and sweet-talked them into returning; once the girls were home, they became prey for the kill.

But life without a family network is unthinkable for someone whose identity is not individual but rather located in a collectivity. Progress and “modernity” may be coming to India, but slowly, very slowly.

Neither mother, Khatun or Subrato, has expressed the slightest remorse. Both feel justified because their daughters brought shame to their families. According to the police, Khatun said: “We killed them because they brought shame to our community. How could they elope with Hindus? They deserved to die. We have no remorse.”

This is cold-hearted, barbaric, almost unbelievable. But such Muslim-on-Muslim crimes and woman-on-woman crimes are typical in many parts of the world. …

We expect women, mothers especially, to be able to defy social custom for the sake of saving their children. The reality is just the opposite. The slightest transgression, especially by women, will upset huge networks and topple all social stability. No one will marry someone from a “shamed” family; that family will be forever ostracized, impoverished, and may also die out genetically. Mothers, fathers, relatives are loyal to their tribal social customs rather than to any one individual, even if that individual is their own child. The system itself demands and allows for such barbarism—but the sacrifice of the individual is seen as in the service of the greater tribal and caste based social structure or “civilization.”

She is right to put the word civilization in quotation marks in that context. She is also right to point out that,  as a feature of Islamic custom, woman-on-woman cruelty goes on in “many parts of the world”, which is to say that Muslim “culture” often has its baleful effect even in countries where Muslims are a minority. “Honor killings” are carried out by Muslims in Western Europe and the United States. Religion is often the ingredient that keeps a culture primitive and cruel. In the case of Khartun and Sobrato, they objected fiercely to the husbands because they were Hindus.

India is a democracy, and rapidly becoming an economic power in the world. The British brought ideas of individual freedom and justice to the sub-continent and put an end to its cultural tradition of “suttee” – the burning alive of a wife on her husband’s funeral pyre. And the process of “modernization” is continuing – meaning that it is continuing to develop into a Western-type law and order state. But democracy and law take time to eradicate ancient traditions and change cultures.

In India .. mothers-in-law routinely assist their sons in burning their daughters-in-law to death. This is known as a “dowry killing” because it is done so that a new bride can bring another dowry into the impoverished and/or greedy family. There is actually a special wing in a prison in New Delhi for such mothers-in-law. … Both women and men steal children in India and sell them to be adopted abroad or, more frequently, to be groomed into sexual slavery either at home or abroad.

The exploitation of children as prostitutes is common in India, and not only as prostitutes. We have written about a child whipped with razor-blades by her beggar-father to arouse pity and solicit alms (see our post, Condemned to dream and bleed, December 23, 2010).

Governments may make laws, and courts may rule, against such practices. Perpetrators may even be punished. But in its struggle with custom, law can take ages to succeed.

The truth, however offensive to liberal opinion, is that most of the world’s cultures are barbarically cruel. And the cruelty is often inseparable from religion. Life for millions of human beings in our time is still essentially tribal, which is to say collective, and haunted by superstition. A vale of tears. Thousands of well-meaning young Peace Corps enthusiasts going to “help” in Africa can change nothing. Whole American armies mis-used to build schools and clinics in Afghanistan can change nothing. Technology alone – the life-improving products of the First World – may, in time, effect a real transformation.

Only the First World, the Western Pan-European culture, its values and system, is worthy as a whole of respect; and if the respectable is to be searched for the best that humankind has achieved, it is the Anglo-Saxon that deserves the laurel wreath. Yes, the birthplace of it, Britain, is in steep decline; and yes, it is  flawed with religion and threatened presently by socialist collectivism in America, the multi-ethnic land of its supreme success. But it is the highest peak of civilization, the Shining City on the Hill.

 

* See also this story from Pakistan (hat tip George).

The West, it seems, has lost interest in the crimes of Communist Russia now that the Cold War is over. But documents from a smuggled Soviet archive throw light not only on the past but also on the present.

Claire Berlinski  has been examining them. She writes in City Journal:

These documents … were available to anyone who wanted to consult them. But nobody did. Publishers were indifferent. Only a fraction of the documents had been translated into English. This was, I argued, a symptom of the world’s dangerous indifference to the enormity of Communist crimes.

One thing that the documents make clear is that the Soviet Union sponsored terrorism in the Middle East. Those who tried to convey this information during the Cold War to governments, politicians, foreign ministries, the media and academics, were met for the most part with a refusal even to entertain the possibility.  (I was one who tried and came up against a wall of denial – JB.]

It is one thing to know abstractly … that the Soviets sponsored terrorism in the Middle East. It is another to read a newly translated memorandum from longtime KGB head Yuri Andropov to Communist Party general secretary Leonid Brezhnev requesting authorization to fund a detailed plan by the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) to kill civilians around the world:

In a confidential conversation at a meeting with the KGB resident in Lebanon in April this year, [PFLP official] Wadia Haddad outlined a prospective program of sabotage and terrorism by the PLFP [sic]. . . . The PLFP is currently preparing a number of special operations, including strikes against large oil storage installations in various countries, . . . the destruction of oil tankers and super-tankers, actions against American and Israeli representatives in Iran, Greece, Ethiopia, Kenya, an attack on the Diamond center in Tel Aviv, etc. . . . We feel it would be feasible, at the next meeting, to give a generally favorable response to Wadia Haddad’s request. …

The documents provide proof that the Russians paid for world-wide anti-US and anti-Israel demonstrations:

Also interesting is a document suggesting the pains taken by the KGB to ensure the eruption of “spontaneous” global demonstrations against Israel. According to the KGB’s estimates, spontaneously outraged Muslims cost approximately a quarter-rupee apiece: “The KGB station in India is capable of organizing a protest demonstration at the U.S. Embassy to India, with up to 20,000 Muslims participating. The expenses for organizing the demonstration would amount to 5,000 Indian rupees and be covered from the funds allocated by the CPSU Central Committee for special measures in India in 1969–1971.”

The Russians were active in stirring up terrorist rebellion and promoting Communist movements in South America:

That there was scarcely a miserable group of miscreants on the planet that the Soviets did not, in some fashion, fund, train, and encourage is vaguely known now by some; it should be widely known by all. … In a 1980 document .. the secretariat of the Central Committee resolves “to grant the request of the leadership of the Communist Party of El Salvador and task the Ministry of Civil Aviation with arranging, in September–October 1980, a shipment of 60–80 tons of small arms and ammunition of Western manufacture from Hanoi to Havana, for the Cuban comrades to transfer it to our Salvadoran friends.”

They sponsored propaganda against the United States to exploit deceptively the issue of racism. The documents show that Soviet support for the Civil Rights movement in America was not provided out of principle but entirely cynically as a Cold War ploy:

Above all, the documents suggest that the most enduringly pernicious fruit of the Soviet Union was its propaganda. The cliché view of the United States as a nation whose foreign policy may best be understood as an expression of racism — an interpretation that continues to hinder American efforts to do the world any good — largely emerged thanks to the Soviet Union’s energetic efforts, as a 1970 document details:

Because the rise of negro protest in the USA will bring definite difficulties to the ruling classes of the USA and will distract the attention of the Nixon administration from pursuing an active foreign policy, we would consider it feasible to implement a number of measures to support this movement and to assist its growth.

Therefore it is recommended to utilize the possibilities of the KGB in African countries to inspire political and public figures, youth, trade union and nationalist organizations to issue petitions, requests and statements to the UN, U.S. embassies in their countries and the U.S. government in defense of the rights of American negroes. To publish articles and letters accusing the U.S. government of genocide in the press of various African countries. Employing the possibilities of the KGB in New York and Washington, to influence the “Black Panthers” to address appeals to the UN and other international bodies for assistance in bringing the U.S. government’s policy of genocide toward American negroes to an end.

The archive has contemporary relevance because they draw “an impressive picture of a world-wide terrorist network, and leave one in no doubt that the Soviet Union deserves all the discredit for the emergence of international terrorism as a major factor in global politics.”

Almost all the terrorist activity throughout the world between the late 1960s and the turn of the century was in the name of left-wing causes, and was promoted in one way or another by the Soviet Union, if not directly by funding and the supply of arms, at the very least by political support in international forums, chiefly the United Nations, and through influence on socialist parties in Europe and “national liberation” movements in the Third World.

Islamic terrorism began with the hijacking of civil aircraft by Palestinians under Arafat’s orders in 1970. He was leader of the PLO, an organization consisting of a number of factions including the PFLP – the Soviet’s foot in the Palestinian door.

In the light of what the documents prove, it would not be an exaggeration to say that Islam’s terrorist war against America and the non-Islamic world in general is an extension of the Cold War. The evil that Communist Russia did lives after it.

Here is a story that should – but won’t – shame Western feminists:

Kainat Soomro should have stayed silent. After being battered and gang raped for four days her traditional, conservative village in rural Pakistan expected the 13-year-old girl to keep her story to herself.

She refused.

That was almost four years ago. Today Kainat is a vocal campaigner for women’s rights as she struggles for justice in her own case and tries to overturn the traditional, conservative culture that expects rape victims to suffer in silence.

It’s a surprising story of extraordinary courage and persistence, worth reading in full.

And here is another:

On Thursday, December 9, 2010, a unique and unbelievable incident took place in Kolkata [Calcutta]. Over 2000 divorced and destitute Muslim women assembled at College Square. … These unfortunate women were either divorced by oral ‘triple talaq’ or simply driven out by their husbands along with their children.

They selected the date 9th December as on this date the Muslim lady Begum Rokeya Shakhawat Hussain… died in 1932. She spent her life for the uplift of the Muslim women and founded the first Muslim Girls’ school, the Shakhawat Memorial School, in Kolkata for educating the Muslim girls. But her activities were highly condemned and bitterly criticized by the Muslim clerics, who wanted to see Muslim women illiterate. It is needless to say that these clerics were in favour of using women as sex objects and as machines for producing children as many as possible. In fact, they practically excommunicated her from the Muslim society. The bitterness went to the extent that when she died on December 9, 1932, the clerics refused to bury her body in Muslim burial ground.

And here’s a sample of what a Western female academic, Professor Jane Smith, has to say about  the subjugation of women in Islam (from the abstract of an article accessible – at a price – through this page):

The Qur’än cites men as the protectors of women, the righteousness of the latter defined in terms of obedience to males. A predominant theme in contemporary Muslim writing, expressed by both sexes, is the naturalness of the circumstance in which women because of their innate qualities and characteristics have clearly defined roles and cannot appropriate functions reserved for men. Their somatic and psychological differences determine the distinct—but complementary—duties prescribed for each. Few Muslim women, even those who may be critical of the restrictions imposed by Islam, are sympathetic to much of what they see as characteristic of Western feminism. In Islam women are freed from many of the problems and concerns that are assumed by men, a situation which they often feel is not easily to be given up.

Tell that to the women who were divorced and left destitute by their husbands, and dared to complain of their plight at the gathering in Calcutta.

So what is feminism all about? This definition comes from an article by a feminist :

Feminism is defined by dictionary.com as: “The doctrine — and the political movement based on it — that women should have the same economic, social, and political rights as men.”  This is a very accurate definition of the word Feminism.

But it’s for Western women only, you see.

Victor Davis Hanson has a good article at PajamaMedia on how socialism – or “statism” – is failing all over the world (as it must: what cannot work will not work), just as America is being led on to the socialist ramp down to poverty and serfdom.

We agree with much that he says – as we often do with this insightful and well-informed writer – but there is one point on which we take issue.

Here’s part of what he writes:

Survey the world’s statist systems of every stripe, from soft to hard. One sees either failure and misery or stasis and lethargy. At the most extreme, a North Korea is turning into a Neanderthal society where subjects eat grass. Castro’s Cuba is imploding, and the Great Leader in his dotage is now renouncing his communist catastrophe. Hugo Chavez’s Venezuela proves that an even an oil-rich exporter can destroy itself with self-imposed socialism.

India progressed only when it adopted free markets. People do not outsource 1-800 numbers to socialist paradises. No need to review the Soviet collapse or the change in China from a peasant to a wealth-building capitalist society. Europe for a while longer works despite (rather than because of) democratic socialism. From Germany to Greece, Europe is moving away from the encroaching public sector that has nearly destroyed the European Union.

So the trend of the world — even after the meltdown of September 2008 — is away from statism, except in the United States. I don’t say that lightly or as a slur, but empirically. The Obama administration has absorbed large sectors of the auto industry and some segments of banking and insurance. The student loan program is federalized. …

The percentage of GDP that is government-run will markedly increase; the trillion-plus annual deficits, in gorge the beast fashion, will force higher taxation to pay for redistributive payouts and entitlements — or inflate the currency to erode saved capital. The UN is worshiped and reported to. Allies are now neutrals, and enemies are courted. We seek to prove that we are not “exceptional,” but simply one among many — a sort of socialist approach to foreign policy where all nations are the same.

Symbolically the president, before and during his tenure, has called for “redistributive change,” “to spread the wealth,” and openly suggested that, at some arbitrary point (known to him alone, but apparently sufficiently high enough to allow Costa del Sol and Martha Vineyard vacations) one need not make (as in, keep one’s earnings) additional income. I could go on, but you get the picture: Obama would like to take us down a path that leads inevitably to a Greece, even as the world is racing away from it.

He goes on to list five dangers of socialism.

One of them is under the heading of Demography. It suggests how socialism may explain shrinking populations.

When one demands cradle to grave care, a classical (now scoffed at) reason for childbearing (to change diapers for those who might one day change your own in gratitude) is destroyed. And if there is no struggle to create income and savings (the state provides all needs; the state ensures against all risks; the state takes away most income; the state gobbles most inheritance), why worry about transcendence or passing anything along to children — or why children at all?

So far, so good. If people are supplied with everything they need to survive, what should they strive for, what do they live for? Some might set themselves their own purposes, but many may be content to lie in the lap of the state and purr. And growl and grumble too, of course.

But Hanson goes on:

Agnosticism leads to a shrinking population and vice versa. If the state is the god, and defines happiness as social justice in the material sense, then the here and now is all that matters. The state defines morality as the greatest good for the greatest number — as it sees it.

Lost is a sense of individual tragedy, self-sacrifice, personal accountability for sin and transgression, and appreciation for a larger world beyond and after this one. A society that does not believe in a hereafter will be sorely disappointed that the state never quite satisfies its appetites. We see that hedonism well enough from Greece to California. “Never enough” (Numquam satis) is the new de facto motto.

No sane person loses a sense of individual tragedy. Everyone is doomed to die. Everyone, from the moment of his birth, suffers. And everyone in the course of his life does harm to other people, strive though he might not to. We are all hurt, and we all inflict hurt. An apt title for a biography of Everyman would be Poor Bastard!

Everyone endures disappointment. No appetite can ever be completely satisfied. Everyone has longings that are not material.

Almost everyone suffers remorse – which is an acceptance of personal accountability for wrong-doing. (Maybe not the Christian torturers and burners of heretics, and other such tyrants defending The Truth, religious or political.)

There is no world beyond or after this one. Death is the end of life. Death defines life. That is the meaning of “mortality”. A being can only be said to be alive if it can die.

The universe is a thing. No mind exists in it except the human mind, which is to say successive multitudes of mortal human minds. Only in each of us, embodied by the same dumb stuff as everything else, is there a self-conscious, reasoning, inventing “mind”. Strictly speaking, mind is a verb; it is an activity of the human brain that emerged at this end of an immensely long process of evolution.

The realm of the mind is infinite. Forever discontented, the uniquely human imagination roams wide. It discovers galaxies and electrons. It tries socialism and regrets it. It invents gods and heavens and hells – but they remain imaginary.

Unless someone can prove otherwise.

Jillian Becker September 15, 2010

The discovery in Afghanistan of vast deposits of iron, copper, cobalt, gold, niobium, and lithium — used in the manufacture of batteries for laptops and BlackBerrys – must change any prognostications made for that benighted country.

At last there’s something there that the world wants other than opium. Afghanistan will surely become richer, and may even be dragged into the 21st century. But will it be less strife-torn, or more?

How will it change American plans to withdraw troops? How will China act? How will Russia? How will Pakistan (part of the find being on its border)? How will India?

American officials fear resource-hungry China will try to dominate the development of Afghanistan’s mineral wealth, which could upset the United States, given its heavy investment in the region. After winning the bid for its Aynak copper mine in Logar Province, China clearly wants more, American officials said.

And who among the Afghans will profit most from it?

Instead of bringing peace, the newfound mineral wealth could lead the Taliban to battle even more fiercely to regain control of the country.

The corruption that is already rampant in the Karzai government could also be amplified by the new wealth, particularly if a handful of well-connected oligarchs, some with personal ties to the president, gain control of the resources. Just last year, Afghanistan’s minister of mines was accused by American officials of accepting a $30 million bribe to award China the rights to develop its copper mine. …

Endless fights could erupt between the central government in Kabul and provincial and tribal leaders in mineral-rich districts.

Russians did the original prospecting that revealed the deposits, but the Soviets withdrew before they had time to assess their size, let alone exploit them. Americans found the Russian documentation and looked further.

In 2004, American geologists, sent to Afghanistan as part of a broader reconstruction effort, stumbled across an intriguing series of old charts and data at the library of the Afghan Geological Survey in Kabul that hinted at major mineral deposits in the country. They soon learned that the data had been collected by Soviet mining experts during the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan in the 1980s, but cast aside when the Soviets withdrew in 1989.

During the chaos of the 1990s, when Afghanistan was mired in civil war and later ruled by the Taliban, a small group of Afghan geologists protected the charts by taking them home, and returned them to the Geological Survey’s library only after the American invasion and the ouster of the Taliban in 2001.

Armed with the old Russian charts, the United States Geological Survey began a series of aerial surveys of Afghanistan’s mineral resources in 2006, using advanced gravity and magnetic measuring equipment attached to an old Navy Orion P-3 aircraft that flew over about 70 percent of the country.

The data from those flights was so promising that in 2007, the geologists returned for an even more sophisticated study, using an old British bomber equipped with instruments that offered a three-dimensional profile of mineral deposits below the earth’s surface. It was the most comprehensive geologic survey of Afghanistan ever conducted. …

But the results gathered dust for two more years, ignored by officials in both the American and Afghan governments. In 2009, a Pentagon task force that had created business development programs in Iraq was transferred to Afghanistan, and came upon the geological data. Until then, no one besides the geologists had bothered to look at the information — and no one had sought to translate the technical data to measure the potential economic value of the mineral deposits.

Soon, the Pentagon business development task force brought in teams of American mining experts to validate the survey’s findings …

Read it all – it’s a dramatic story.

Though probably not an introduction to a period of peace and co-operation.

Jennifer Rubin writes that Obama’s nuclear summit is not serious, since he will not address the truly serious nuclear threat – Iran’s development of nuclear weapons.

The nuclear summit is underway in Washington, D.C. An air of unreality pervades because the greatest nuclear threat of our time goes unaddressed. At times, the degree to which Obama evades the Iranian issue is jaw-dropping. This report explains:

“The central focus of this nuclear summit is the fact that the single biggest threat to U.S. security — both short term, medium term and long term — would be the possibility of a terrorist organization obtaining a nuclear weapon,” Obama said Sunday afternoon. “If there was ever a detonation in New York City, or London, or Johannesburg, the ramifications economically, politically and from a security perspective would be devastating. And we know that organizations like al-Qaeda are in the process of trying to secure a nuclear weapon — a weapon of mass destruction that they have no compunction at using.”

Actually, the single greatest threat — and the most likely means for a terrorist organization to possibly obtain a nuclear weapon — is the mullahs’ nuclear program. About that, the president offers the moral power of example (i.e., our own disarmament) and watered-down sanctions.

She is right, of course.

But this report indicates that material to make “dirty” bombs is already in the hands of terrorists:

Five people suffering serious burns were hospitalized in West New Delhi this week from contact with radioactive material in a Delhi scrap market identified as Cobalt-60 which may be used for making a dirty bomb. Indian police cordoned off the 200 market stores and sealed nearby establishments up to a one-kilometer radius. Scrap dealer Deepak Jain and his helpers lost consciousness when they cut a piece of scrap metal. A white fluid oozed out causing the burns, Jain’s hair fell out and within minutes his skin turned black. His workers suffered and nausea.

All five are battling for their lives in hospital, setting off a security scare in the Indian capital, with prime minister Manmohan Singh briefed on the incident before leaving for Washington to attend the nuclear security summit which opened Monday, April 12.

Nuclear scientists from the Baba Atomic Research Center and Narora Atomic Power Plant identified the material and are working around the clock to investigate its source. …

Cobalt-60 is used in radiotherapy for treating cancer and welding steel. A US report last year recommended monitoring this material along with Caesium-137, Strontium-90 and Plutonium to effectively counter nuclear terrorism. Unlike a nuclear bomb, a dirty bomb does not involve nuclear fission and can be used like a conventional weapon. …

India has been warning that Pakistan’s nuclear facilities are in danger of falling into the hands of the Taliban:

The day before the conference, the Indian prime minister met Obama and tackled him about Pakistan’s inaction against Muslim terrorists and exhorted him to jointly combat terror emanating from Pakistan as the most dangerous source of potential nuclear terror… Indian leaders as well as their military and intelligence advisers have repeatedly warned Washington that al Qaeda and Taliban were moving in on Pakistan’s nuclear facilities through their deep penetration of Pakistan’s intelligence service and may soon be in position to take over. …

As the “posture” Obama is taking with regard to nuclear deterrence is apparently proving more frightening than reassuring to Americans, what does the  State Department and the Pentagon have to say to dispel those fears?

Jennifer Rubin continues:

Neither Obama’s credibility nor America’s deterrent capability was enhanced by either the START treaty or the Nuclear Posture Review. So [Secretary of State} Hillary Clinton and [Defense Secretary] Robert Gates took to the airwaves Sunday to assure us that the Obami really weren’t doing great damage to our national security. Hillary seemed to fudge on the “no nuclear response to a NPT signatory’s attack” when she tried to bluster her way through her interview on Face the Nation:

SCHIEFFER: Are non-nuclear weapons so good now, Madam Secretary, that we don’t have to rely on nuclear weapons anymore?

CLINTON: We rely on both, Bob. And I think that’s the point that Secretary Gates is making. We’ve maintained a strong, robust nuclear deterrent as set forth in the nuclear posture review. But we have also in this administration moved toward a global strike capability to enhance our conventional response.

And we have an enormous amount of firepower conventionally. And it is also clear that this is putting everybody on notice. We don’t want more countries to go down the path that North Korea and Iran are. And some countries might have gotten the wrong idea if they looked at those two over the last years. And so we want to be very clear. We will not use nuclear weapons in retaliation if you do not have nuclear weapons and are in compliance with the NPT.

But we leave ourselves a lot of room for contingencies. If we can prove that a biological attack originated in a country that attacked us, then all bets are off, if these countries have gone to that extent. So we want to deal with the nuclear threat first and foremost, because that’s the one that we face right today.

All bets are off? Well, the nuclear option is, if we believe the Nuclear Posture Review. But maybe it doesn’t say what we mean. Or maybe it’s getting increasingly hard to figure out whether we are serious about deterring rogue states or not. Indeed, the administration is increasingly flighty and obtuse, making it hard to parse the often inconsistent rhetoric. Iran’s nuclear bomb would be unacceptable, but maybe we can’t do anything about it. The greatest threat is a terrorist organization with a nuclear bomb, but we’re increasingly lackadaisical about denying one to the most active state sponsor of Islamic terrorists. We aren’t going to retaliate against an NPT signatory after a devastating chemical or biological attack, but who knows.

If there is any rhyme or reason to this, it no doubt eludes both friends and foes. It does, however, convince many that this president doesn’t really appreciate how to project American strength and keep our adversaries at bay. The summit, therefore, promises not only to be irrelevant but also counterproductive to our national-security interests.

Obama has assured America’s enemies that they don’t have to fear nuclear retaliation if they attack the US, even if they use chemical and biological weapons. He’s pursuing his childish dream – one that his mother probably dreamt  in the late 1960s while she participated in the New Left’s drug-hazy pacifist love-in – of America teaching the world by example to throw away all those nasty nuclear weapons. (See the report of Obama’s new ‘posture’ on nuclear arms use in the New York Times.)

John Hinderaker writes at Power Line:

On its face, that is unbelievably stupid. A country attacks us with biological weapons, and we stay our hand because they are “in compliance with the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty”? That is too dumb even for Barack Obama. The administration hedged its commitment with qualifications suggesting that if there actually were a successful biological or chemical attack, it would rethink its position. The Times puts its finger on what is wrong with the administration’s announcement:

It eliminates much of the ambiguity that has deliberately existed in American nuclear policy since the opening days of the cold war.

That’s exactly right. The cardinal rule, when it comes to nuclear weapons, is keep ’em guessing. We want our enemies to believe that we may well be crazy enough to vaporize them, given sufficient provocation; one just can’t tell. There is a reason why that ambiguity has been the American government’s policy for more than 50 years. Obama cheerfully tosses overboard the strategic consensus of two generations.

Or pretends to, anyway. Does anyone doubt that the administration would use nukes in a heartbeat if it considered such measures necessary? I don’t. The problem is that when the time comes to actually use nuclear weapons, it is too late. The danger here is not that the Obama administration has really gone pacifist. On the contrary, the significance of today’s announcement appears to be entirely symbolic–just one more chance to preen. The problem is that our enemies understand symbolism and maybe take it too seriously. To them, today’s announcement is another sign that our government has gone soft, and one more inducement to undertake aggressive action against the United States. [All emphases are ours]

We are usually in agreement with the good guys at Power Line. And we agree that Obama is offering an inducement to America’s enemies to “undertake aggressive action”  (the part we have emphasized in bold).

But with those parts that we have italicized we disagree. We don’t think Obama is dumb, even though he is not exceptionally intelligent and is capable of acting stupidly and naively. We think he is ignorant and evil. Because we believe he is full of bad intent and deeply anti-American, we do indeed doubt that  his administration would use nukes, no matter what the circumstances. If he has his way there’ll be no American nukes to use. We don’t think he is just preening, preener though he is.

Could it be any more obvious that he is content to see Iran armed with nukes, but not America?

Could the implications of this be any more frightening?

Post Script: It should be noted that he excepts from his promise  of indulgence countries which are not in compliance with the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty. Two countries that have refused to sign it are India and Israel. This means that for as long as America still has nuclear weapons, however few, however old, however degraded, if usable at all they could be used against those two erstwhile allies.

Is the world entering a post-American era? Will the 21st century be dominated by some other power, or several others?

In the splendid speech that John Bolton delivered at the Conservative Political Action Conference in February 2010, he said of Obama, “He is the first post-American president.”

In Obama’s eyes, American superpower status is already over. The decline is happening. There’s no reason to regret it, and it would be pointless and unnecessary to try to halt or reverse it. Obama is content to let America be a nation among the nations, no different in any important respect, and certainly no better. “He sees American decline as a kind of natural phenomenon,” Bolton said.

In Bolton’s own view, however, America is still exceptional and still the one and only superpower. If its status as such is under threat, that threat proceeds from Obama himself, who, almost casually – not caring very much, as John Bolton remarked, about foreign and national security policy – is himself weakening it.

What Obama does care about is domestic policy. To achieve his redistributionist goals he has put America into crushing debt; and being determined, it seems, to turn America into a European-style socialist state, he can only make the debt vaster and heavier. That alone weakens America.

China is America’s chief creditor, but that does not mean China is now a second superpower. A China growing in wealth and confidence, and becoming an increasingly significant world actor, may pose an economic threat to America but is not, or not yet, a rival world power. Militarily it is far from a match. Militarily, America is still far and away the most powerful nation.

But there again, if Obama has his way, it won’t be for much longer. He has, in Bolton’s words, an “incredibly naïve idea” that if the US would get rid of its own nuclear weapons, other countries would give up theirs; those that do not have them but want them – such as Iran and North Korea – would abandon their intense efforts to obtain them; and the world would live at peace forever after. This belief or ambition represents, as John Bolton put it, “a pretty deep-seated strain in the left wing of the Democratic Party.” Obama will soon negotiate an arms control agreement with Russia by which he will undertake substantially to reduce America’s nuclear capability. America will not develop new nuclear weapons, or arms in outer space, or even keep its existing arsenal battle-ready by testing for safety and reliability. It is as if America had no enemies; as if America were not under attack; as if 9/11 had never happened; and as if Iran and North Korea would not drop nuclear bombs on America and its allies if they could do it and get away with it.

Furthermore, with the rest of the dreaming Left both at home and internationally, he aspires to another vision of a new earth: one that is not only sweetly irenic but held forcibly in union by a supreme governing authority. Those proposals for world taxes that we hear of; the intricate business of trading in carbon indulgences in the name of saving the earth from being consumed by fire or ice; international treaty regulations that would result in banning the private ownership of guns – all these are measures to realize the tremendous objective of “world governance”. It would mean the end of American independence, the end of national sovereignty. It would mean that the Revolution was lost, as Bolton said.

In a sense it would be the end of America, because America is an idea of liberty. And it is an idea that the world needs. Its loss would be a colossal disaster, a tragedy for the whole human race.

Can America be saved?

In his book titled The Post-American World, Fareed Zakaria asserts that “America is closing down”, but allows that it “won’t be demoted from its superpower position in the foreseeable future” because “it’s not that the United States has been doing badly over the last two decades. It’s that, all of a sudden, everyone else is playing the game.”

America can “remain a vital, vibrant economy, at the forefront of the next revolutions in science, technology and industry, as long as it can embrace and adjust to the challenges confronting it”.

“The challenges” come from other nations, now rising, which he groups together as “the rest”.

China is the first of them because it is becoming an economic giant. The 21st century, he considers, may be the Chinese century.

What if [China ] quietly positions itself as the alternative to a hectoring and arrogant America? How will America cope with such a scenario – a kind of Cold War, but this time with a vibrant market economy, a nation that is not showing a hopeless model of state socialism, or squandering its power in pointless military interventions? This is a new challenge for the United States, one it has not tackled before, and for which it is largely unprepared.

Next in line is India. Poorer but democratic, India is “the ally”. Then come Brazil and Chile (plausibly); South Africa (less plausibly); and (implausibly) Russia. (Russia is a demographic basket case.)

Ironically, Zakaria says, these nations are rising because they learnt from America:

For sixty years, American politicians and diplomats have traveled around the world pushing countries to open their markets, free up their politics, and embrace trade and technology. … We counseled them to be unafraid of change and learn the secrets of our success. And it worked: the natives have gotten good at capitalism.

America, then, has not been a malign power, or not always. In Roosevelt’s day other countries believed that “America’s mammoth power was not to be feared”. It was after it had won the Cold War, when it became the only superpower, that it began to go to the bad. “Ever since the collapse of the Soviet Union, the United States has walked the world like a colossus, unrivaled and unchecked”, and this “has made Washington arrogant, careless, and lazy.” Furthermore, he tell us, “people round the world worry about living in a world in which one country has so much power.”

To relieve that worry, America “must reduce its weaponry and work towards a non-nuclear world.” It is hypocritical for the US to insist that other countries should not have nuclear weapons while it is hoarding a nuclear arsenal of its own. By giving them up it would “gain credibility”, an end he apparently considers so desirable that it would be worth risking the nation’s very survival to achieve it.

The summer of 2002, Zakaria says, was “the high water-mark of unipolarity”. The world felt sympathy for America after 9/11. America went to war in Afghanistan, which was not good but not too bad. But then it invaded Iraq, which was very bad, and the world’s sympathy dried up. America was being too “unilateral”, too “imperial and imperious”.

George W Bush and “the nefarious neoconservative conspiracy” antagonized the world. He and his conspirators “disdained treaties, multilateral organizations, international public opinion, and anything that suggested a conciliatory approach to world politics.”

So the world’s dislike, contempt, and fear of America were justified, or at least understandable, in the light of the foreign policies of the “arrogant” Bush administration. Zakaria even claims that the animosity filled the Republicans – already full of “chest-thumping machismo” – with pride.

He asks:

Can Washington adjust and adapt to a world in which others have moved up? Can it respond to shift in economic and political power? … Can Washington truly embrace a world with a diversity of voices and viewpoints? Can it thrive in a world it cannot dominate?

The advice he gives to “Washington” for success in adjusting, adapting, responding, embracing, and thriving is to be conciliatory, apologetic. It must listen more; proclaim universal values”, but “phrase its positions carefully”; be like the chair of a board gently guiding a group of independent directors. America must “learn from the rest”. The president must meet more non-government people, have smaller entourages, rely more on diplomacy. Consultation, cooperation, compromise are the key words. He objects to such accomodations being called appeasement. Consult and cooperate, he urges, with Russia, and with “multilateral institutions” such as the UN, NATO, AFRICOM, OAS, and the International Criminal Court. (Even internally, the US legal system “should take note of transnational standards”.)

The federal government has been “too narrow-minded” about terrorism. When bin Laden got America to “come racing out to fight” him (in response to 9/11) this was “over-reaction.”  Zakaria’s advice: “take it on the chin” and “bounce back”. The government must stop thinking of terrorism as a national security issue, and think of it as criminal activity carried out by “small groups of misfits”. Although Democrats were on the whole “more sensible” about terrorism, both parties, he says, spoke “in language entirely designed for a domestic audience with no concern for the poisonous effect it has everywhere else.” His solution is better airport control round the world. The more urgent problem in his view is that American Muslims have become victims of over-reaction to terrorist attacks. Instead of being “questioned, harassed, and detained” they should, he urges, “be enlisted in the effort to understand the appeal of Islamic fundamentalism.”

Zakaria does not consider himself anti-American. He does not even see himself as a man of the left. He reiterates that he is a free marketeer. It is because America became “suspicious of free markets”, he says, that partly explains its “closing down”.

He wrote his book before the economic crisis. He saw a globalized economy bringing about an increasingly prosperous world in which the poorest nations were rising strongly enough for him to declare that “the world is swimming in capital”, and “there really isn’t a Third World any more “. But even then the dollar was sliding, and America was showing signs of being “enfeebled”.

At a military-political level America still dominates the world, but the larger structure of unipolarity – economic, financial, cultural – is weakening… every year it becomes weaker and other nations and actors grow in strength.

For all its military might, its chest-thumping phase is over and now it is “cowering in fear”. It must, he says, “recover its confidence.” ‘It must stop being “a nation consumed by anxiety”, with a tendency to “hunker down”, unreasonably “worried about unreal threats” such as terrorism, and rogue nations like North Korea and Iran. (Iran, he explains, has good reason to fear the United States, with its armies on two of its borders. It’s only to be expected that Iran would try to arm itself with nuclear bombs and missile delivery systems. He does not explain why America should not fear this as a real threat.)

He is certain about what America needs to do to propitiate and serve the world it has alienated. It should ‘‘build broad rules by which the world will be bound’’, rather than pursue “narrow interests”.

What the world really wants from America is … that it affirm its own ideals. That role, as the country that will define universal ideals, remains one that only America can play.

We know Obama has read Zakaria’s book, or at least looked into it, because there is a photograph of him holding it, one finger marking his place. Obama is doing much that Zakaria advises in foreign affairs. But that’s less likely to be because the writer has impressed the president with his arguments than because they have both drunk from the same ideological well.

Obama’s foreign policy lets us see if Zakaria’s theory works. So far it has not.

So is America’s decline beyond all remedy?

It’s a relief to turn from Zakaria’s dull and weakly reasoned book with its uncongenial credo to an article titled The Seductions of Decline (February 2, 2010) by brilliantly witty and insightful Mark Steyn. If America believes it is in decline, he says, it will be. It is a self-fulfilling prophecy. The view that America has been too arrogant a power; that it is not and should not be exceptional; that humility and apology are required of it; that only endlessly patient negotiation in a spirit of compromise will improve foreign relations and dissuade states like North Korea and Iran from acquiring nuclear arms; that Islamic terrorism should be treated as crime and not as the jihad its perpetrators declare it to be; that Russia should be consulted on, say, the deployment of American missile defense; and that the US should reduce its nuclear arsenal and work towards a non-nuclear world – will bring about the decline.

National decline is psychological – and therefore what matters is accepting the psychology of decline.

His answer to the question “is America set for decline?” is yes, because of the policies of Obama and the Democrats, which arise from their acceptance of decline.

Strictly on the numbers, the United States is in the express lane to Declinistan: Unsustainable entitlements, the remorseless governmentalization of the American economy and individual liberty, and a centralization of power that will cripple a nation of this size. Decline is the way to bet.

American decline, he says, “will be steeper, faster and more devastating than Britain’s – and something far closer to Rome’s.” It will not be like France’s, or Austria’s.

Why did decline prove so pleasant in Europe? Because it was cushioned by American power. The United States is such a perversely non-imperial power that it garrisons not ramshackle colonies but its wealthiest “allies”, from Germany to Japan. For most of its members, “the free world” has been a free ride.

And after “Washington’s retreat from la gloire” as hegemon of the world, when America “becomes Europe in its domestic disposition and geopolitical decline, then who will be America?”

Of the many competing schools of declinism, perhaps the most gleeful are those who salivate over the rise of China. For years, Sinophiles have been penning orgasmic fantasies of mid-century when China will bestride the world and America will be consigned to the garbage heap of history. It will never happen: As I’ve been saying for years, China has profound structural problems. It will get old before it gets rich.

Not China then. Russia?

The demographic deformation of Tsar Putin’s new empire is even more severe than Beijing’s. Russia is a global power only to the extent of the mischief it can make on its acceleration into a death spiral.

Not Russia. How about the Caliphate that the terrorist war is being fought to establish?

Even if every dimestore jihadist’s dreams came true, almost by definition an Islamic imperium will be in decline from Day One.

So what might the post-American world look like? Mark Steyn’s answer is deeply depressing:

The most likely future is not a world under a new order but a world with no order – in which pipsqueak states go nuclear while the planet’s wealthiest nations, from New Zealand to Norway, are unable to defend their own borders and are forced to adjust to the post-American era as they can. Yet, in such a geopolitical scene, the United States will still remain the most inviting target – first, because it’s big, and secondly, because, as Britain knows, the durbar moves on but imperial resentments linger long after imperial grandeur.

But nothing is inevitable, and Mark Steyn offers a last hope. Though “decline is the way to bet”, the only thing that will ensure it is “if the American people accept decline as a price worth paying for European social democracy.”

When in 2008 a majority of the American electorate voted for Barack Obama to be president of the United States, it seemed that the deal had been made. But now Obama is failing, the Democratic majority is under threat, and the Tea Party movement is reclaiming the Revolution.

This could be another American century after all.

Jillian Becker   March 1, 2010

Successive British governments have squandered huge sums of tax-payers’ money on nebulous schemes purporting to save the earth from climate change.

That the earth could or should be saved from its climate change is a ‘spiritual, religious, and philosophical view’ of a ‘belief system’, to quote from the following report.

America too has ‘invested’ enormous sums in this thing of spit and cobwebs (see our post of that title, February 3, 2010). For the Western world as a whole the expense is astronomical.

Has there ever been a waste as vast as this?

From the Telegraph, by Christopher Booker:

In all the coverage lately given to the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and its embattled chairman, Dr Rajendra Pachauri [see our post The most powerful magician the world has ever known, December 21, 2009], one rather important part of the story has largely been missed. This is the way in which, in its obsession with climate change, different branches of the UK Government have in recent years been pouring hundreds of millions of pounds of taxpayers’ money into a bewildering array of “climate-related” projects, often throwing a veil of mystery over how much is being paid, to whom and why…

To begin with a small example. Everyone has now heard of “Glaciergate”, the inclusion in the IPCC’s 2007 report of a wild claim it was recently forced to disown, that by 2035 all Himalayan glaciers will have melted. In 2001 the Department for International Development (DfID) spent £315,277 commissioning a team of British scientists to investigate this prediction. After co-opting its Indian originator, Dr Syed Hasnain, they reported in 2004 that his claim was just a scare story…

Three years later, however, when the IPCC produced its 2007 report, it endorsed Dr Hasnain’s claim without any mention of the careful UK-funded study which had shown it to be false. What made this particularly shocking was that in 2008 another British ministry, the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra) announced that it had paid £1,436,000 to fund all the support needed to run the same IPCC working group which, as we now know from a senior IPCC author, had included the bogus claim in its report. …

In 2008 that Dr Hasnain was recruited by Dr Pachauri to work in his Delhi-based The Energy and Resources Institute (Teri), where his spurious claim was used to win Teri a share in two lucrative studies of the effects of the rapid melting of Himalayan glaciers. …

Why was UK taxpayers’ money being used to fund these projects?

Why in 2005, for instance, did Defra pay Teri for a study designed to help the Indian insurance industry make money out of the risks of global warming? Why was the Foreign and Commonwealth Office (FCO) sponsoring a study into how Indian industry could make billions out of “carbon credits“, paid by Western firms under the bizarre UN scheme known as the Clean Development Mechanism?

Typical of this curiously opaque world was a payment by Defra to fund the work of an unnamed “head of unit” on something called the IPCC Synthesis Report, of which Dr Pachauri was co-editor. This money was paid to Cambridge University (department unnamed), to be forwarded to Teri Europe, then sent on to the anonymous recipient in Delhi, whose email address was Teri India… (The IPCC itself meanwhile paid Teri a further £400,000 for its work on the Synthesis Report, although it was only 52 pages.)…

Why  have UK taxpayers shelled out £239,538 to unnamed recipients for a study of “Climate change impacts on Chinese agriculture”? Or £230,895 for a “research programme on climate change impacts in India”? Or £57,500 on the “Brazilian proposal support group”?

The largest single payment on Defra’s list, and almost the only recipient identified, was £13,315,168 given to the Hadley Centre itself for its [fraudulent, as the Climategate emails have shown] Climate Predictions Programme. This is just a tiny part of the money UK taxpayers have been contributing for years to assist the work of the IPCC: the Hadley Centre alone has been handed £179 million. …

Why should DfID have paid £30 million to assist “climate change adaptation in Africa“; or £2.5 million for the same in China?

Why in 2002 should UK taxpayers have given £200,000 to pay for delegates from developing nations to attend a “Rio Earth Summit” conference in Johannesburg, and another £120,000 for green activists to attend the same shindig – let alone £10,000 for a “WORKSHOP ON WOMEN AS SACRED CUSTODIANS OF THE EARTH”, to “explore the spiritual, religious and philosophical views concerning women and ecology and the policy implications of these belief systems”?

Only rarely do the government departments funding all these shadowy activities shout pubicly about how they are spending our money – as when last September DfID’s Douglas Alexander was happy to get publicity for flying to Delhi to give Dr Pachauri £10 million to pay for his institute to examine how India’s poverty could be reduced by “sustainable development”.

Similarly, in 2008, our then energy minister Malcolm Wicks flew to Japan to boast that the UK was “the world’s largest donor” to the Renewable Energy and Energy Efficiency Partnership, pledging another £2.5 million of taxpayers’ money, on top of £9 million Britain had already paid into this scheme since its launch in 2003. More than one ministry is responsible for funding this programme, as when DfID pays for a “research agenda on climate change and development”, while the FCO sponsors yet another study into “clean development mechanisms”.

Contemplating the impenetrable maze of payments made by various ministries to the UN, the EU, banks, research institutes, teams of academics, NGOs, environmental and industrial lobby groups and “charitable foundations” – often through chains of “funding vehicles” which may give only the most nebulous idea of their purpose – we can get little idea what is the total amount of taxpayers’ money flooding out from all our different branches of officialdom. The ministries involved have not seemed exactly keen to help sort out all these mysteries and confusions. What does seem clear is that our Government doesn’t really want us to know all the sums involved, who many of the recipients are or why most of these payments are being made in the first place.

Jerry McConnell’s biographical note in Canada Free Press tells us  says he’s ‘a longtime resident of planet earth’, which seems to us a fair qualification for commenting on what his fellow residents do as they go to and fro on it. We appreciate the righteous indignation he expresses in this article against the evil United Nations. A rant it may be, but we applaud it. There are some things that ought to inspire rage, and the United Nations is one of them.

The Himalayas mountain range is …  famous for being host to some 15,000 glaciers; and that’s where the … Goreacles of un-natural and, a lot of people say fictitious, atmospheric temperatures are zoned in. These wonder wizards of woeful prognostications have been responsible for predicting that these wonderful and majestic mountainous glaciers would be melted away for the year 2035, a mere 25 years from now.

But as most sensible humans have already concluded, those eggheads can now be ignored with the usual amount of guffaws and snorts of derision they so richly deserve. …

According to a January 23, 2010 AP report … “The head of a panel of United Nations climate scientists (Rajendra Pachauri) said Saturday he would not resign despite a recent admission that a panel report warning Himalayan glaciers could be gone by 2035 was hundreds of years off”.

This amazing admission of negligent as well as glaringly faulty information concerning global climate came from the U. N.’s totally unreliable Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) …

These frauds will stop at nothing in their quest to milk the taxpayers of the world, not just the United States, although our country pays well in excess of what would be a fair and equal amount of funds as compared to any other country in the world.

The U. N. IPCC head, R. Pachauri, went on to state he “is now working on the fifth IPCC assessment report dealing with sea level rise and ice sheets, oceans, clouds and carbon accounting. The report is expected by 2014.” And, I would be willing to wager that Mr. Pachauri made that statement with a straight face while thousands of skeptics were rolling in the aisles with howls of derisive laughter.

It is mind-boggling to think that anyone from the U.N. and the IPCC in particular could make any further reports on global warming, climate change and be considered credible or even close after their recent records of futility and falsehoods.

This is just one more example of why the United Nations should be disbanded IMMEDIATELY and if nothing else, the United States should remove our delegation and funding for this rotten, corrupt and unbelievably incompetent organization of fools. …

Why should we continue to pour money down this sewer of scheming and illicit panderers for them to plot more invidious actions against our country? Our usurper in chief and his evil elves in our liberal Congress work in unison with this treacherous organization to promote the fallacious “One World” scheme of wealth redistribution.

Getting rid of the United Nations will effectively remove many sores and wounds from our country and much of the rest of the world. It is like a festering sore that keeps weeping its foul juices all over our fair planet.

Its removal should be a commitment for all future candidates for higher office.

The United Nations must be destroyed!