Europe is being slowly, and it seems willingly, crushed to death by the ‘soft’ jihad of Muslim immigration and birth increase. Europeans abase themselves before Muslim threats; fall over themselves to grant Muslim demands however unreasonable; abandon the values their ancestors fought and died for in order to appease the oppressive ideologists of Islam. European governments do anything, however dishonorable, to worm themselves into the good graces of disgusting Muslim tyrannies such as Libya and Saudi Arabia. Hardly  a word of condemnation of the ‘human rights’ record  of Muslim countries ever issues from a European leader’s mouth. Every day terrorists murder  in the name of Islam (see our left margin for the tally).

There are over 50 Muslim-dominated states. There are more than one and a quarter billion Muslims in the world, and growing. There is one tiny Jewish state. It is democratic. Its population, Jews and Arabs alike, enjoy freedom equally under the law. There is a free press, an uncorrupted judiciary. It is a country that has generously given asylum to non-Jews (such as persecuted refugees from North Africa, Muslims among them). When it is forced to defend itself with military action, it takes more trouble than any country in history to avoid civilian casualties. It has fulfilled its promises to yield territory taken in defensive wars in exchange for peace with its neighbors that they never deliver.

Yet it  is this small, beleaguered  state that is reviled, hated, accused, punished by the Europeans as a moral outrage – as if  there is a single European country that has earned the moral right to judge the Jews!

The continent is persistently and profoundly anti-Semitic. In their  blind and irrational obsession with Jew-hatred, Europeans cannot even bring themselves to acknowledge the immense contribution that Jews – a tiny minority in the world – have made to their civilization: their sciences, their philosophy, their arts, their technology, their prosperity, their power and glory. Jews are understandably pouring out of Europe by the tens of thousands, mostly to shelter in Israel – where they are threatened with annihilation by the hostile Islamic state of Iran, fast acquiring nuclear weapons.

It seems that Europeans would be more than content to see Israel annihilated. They will cheer. A last happiness for them before they themselves are overwhelmed by Islam.

And even in America, where a majority want the Jewish state to survive and flourish, there are those who positively wish for its demise – among them, we understand, the present radical left administration.

The brilliant Israeli columnist Caroline Glick paints the picture vividly in this article:

The main fantasy governing Europe’s attitude toward the Middle East is the belief in Israeli militaristic venality, fundamentalist messianism, and territorial greed. It is this fantasy that protects European leaders from the need to account for their six years of failed appeasement toward Iran, during which Iran has made its swiftest progress toward completing its nuclear weapons program.

It is the predominance of anti-Israel attitudes throughout the continent that enables European leaders to make light of the Iranian nuclear threat even as ever growing swathes of the continent fall within the range of the Islamic republic’s ballistic missiles.

A mere glance at the daily Middle East coverage of your standard European newspaper suffices to demonstrate the depths of Europe’s obsession with hating Israel. The absence of peace is always Israel’s fault. The fact that the Arabs have never accepted Israel’s right to exist is either whitewashed or justified. So too, Arab terrorism is explained away while every act – small and large – that in any way asserts Israel’s right to defend itself is pounced upon as proof of Israel’s criminality and brutality…

Israel has for years based its public diplomacy regarding Teheran’s nuclear weapons program on successive governments’ assessments that given Iran’s global reach and the threat it poses to global security, states will be more willing to act to prevent it from acquiring nuclear weapons than they are to acknowledge Palestinian terrorism which is employed almost exclusively against Israel. What Israeli leaders – including Netanyahu – have failed to recognize is that the antipathy of Europeans toward Israel is so great that they are willing to explain away Iran’s nuclear weapons program because it is aimed first of all against Israel. …

Such views inevitably temper any propensity European leaders may have to act against the Islamic republic…

Case in point is the newest Swedish media blood libel against Israel, and the numerous blood libels – most prominently France 2’s [TV] Muhammad al-Dura blood libel from September 2000 – that preceded it. Stories like [the Swedish newspaper] Aftonbladet‘s fiction of IDF theft of Palestinian organs and France 2’s false allegation that the IDF murders Arab children sell newspapers and raise television ratings because the popular animus against Israel is so great that people are willing to buy newspapers and watch television networks that propagate obvious lies that feed this irrational hatred. Indeed, it pays to disseminate such lies.

France 2’s Charles Enderlain, the father of the al-Dura lie, just received France’s Légion d’honneur from President Nicolas Sarkozy. Then, too, anti-Israel activist Felicia Langer just received Germany’s Federal Cross of Honor, and Israel-hater and former Irish president Mary Robinson was just awarded the US Presidential Medal of Freedom.

The lesson of all of this for Israel is clear. Whether Netanyahu is dealing with Obama or European leaders, the game is rigged against us. Any move that Israel makes toward these leaders will simply facilitate their further castigation of the Jewish state and support their clear intentions to do nothing to prevent Iran from acquiring the means to destroy Israel.

As we have been all too often in our history, today Israel stands alone against our enemies. We can either defeat them, or we can be defeated. The choice is ours.

James Carafano writes in the Washington Examiner:

The Pentagon budget the president sent to the Hill would have slashed production and deployment of U.S.-based missile interceptors by about a third. The cuts would have come from missile defenses that are already tested, proven and, for the most part, paid for. So much for the promise of “pragmatic and cost-effective” defenses.

Case in point: The Obama budget included absolutely zero funds to replace “Missile Field One.” This Alaskan missile field, now part of the missile defense shield, includes the first silos built to test the long-range interceptors.

The silos were not built for long-term use. They now need to be replaced. But the Obama budget request zeroed out that funding … even though the budget still retained an already paid-for fleet of interceptors.

Talk about penny-wise and pound-foolish! Those paid-for interceptors can be of no use without silos from which to shoot them. The Obama budget would have left them silo-less.

The White House also started backpedaling from the previous administration’s commitment to field missile defense interceptors in Poland that would protect both our allies and our troops in Europe from the growing Iranian missile threat. The administration tried to justify the delay by saying it wanted to look at “pragmatic and cost-effective” alternatives.

One alternative it says it wants to consider is a mobile, land-based system. Cool, huh? Except that such a system exists nowhere other than on some PowerPoint slides. So much for “pragmatic.”

The other alternative it is considering is a sea-based system. But sea-based defenses are much more expensive to operate than land-based silos. Moreover, our current sea-based system can’t intercept long-range missiles.

A new sea-based interceptor will have to be developed to do the job. Thus, the “pragmatic and cost-effective alternative” the administration says it wants to consider is demonstrably more expensive and totally unproven.

Obama’s defense budget also killed a missile defense research and development program called the Kinetic Energy Interceptor. Defense Secretary Robert Gates said it was “going nowhere,” expensive and unproven. What he did not mention is that, so far, the only part of the KEI program that has actually been built is a “fire-control” system that links the missile-detecting sensors to the interceptors.

The fire-control part of KEI has been fully tested. It is a robust system that could be utilized with any land- or sea-based interceptor (not just the proposed KEI missile). By killing the funding for the entire program, the fire control system (the part American tax dollars have already paid for) will be terminated as well — another violation of the “proven and cost-effective” pledge.

Finally, Obama promised that he’d work to replace today’s tested, proven and paid-for technologies with something even better: A future system that could knock down enemy missiles at their most vulnerable point — the “ascent phase,” right after they’ve been fired.

OK, except the Pentagon’s proposed budget lacks any real funding for such a program. Nor do Pentagon planners have any idea what such a program might look like. In short, today’s real, working weapons systems are being replaced with vague promises.

Noah Pollak writes on the Commentary ‘contentions’ site:

The world’s nuclear weapons watchdog is hiding data on Iran’s drive to obtain nuclear arms … The officials and diplomats said that the International Atomic Energy Agency under Director General Mohamed ElBaradei was refraining from publishing evidence obtained by its inspectors over the past few months that indicate Iran was pursuing information about weaponization efforts and a military nuclear program.

ElBaradei … has said that the agency does not have any evidence that suggests Iran is developing a nuclear weapon.

But … new evidence was submitted to the IAEA in a classified annex written by its inspectors in the Islamic Republic. The report was said to have been signed by the head of the IAEA team in Iran. The classified report, according to the sources, was not incorporated into the agency’s published reports. The details, they said, were censored by senior officials of the IAEA in the organization’s Vienna headquarters.

More on the abasement – and decline – of the United States by former president Clinton’s groveling to Kim Jong Il on behalf of President Obama:

Bruce Thornton writes:

The great powers of history understood the truth of Virgil’s dictum that “they have power because they seem to have power.” As much as soldiers and weapons, prestige and perception are critical for a great power’s ability to pursue and defend its interests. Both allies and adversaries must show by their behavior that they respect and honor a dominant state, and understand that consequences will follow the failure to do so. And to reinforce the perception of its power, a major power must be willing to take actions that demonstrate that is worthy of this respect. To do otherwise is to create a perception of weakness and to invite encroachments on the state’s security and interests. The decline of great empires like that of Rome or of England is in part a consequence of the loss of this respect on the part of enemies and rivals, and the perception that they were weak rather than strong.

Unfortunately, this is a wisdom that the United States has forgotten, as evidenced by former President Bill Clinton’s recent trip to North Korea to rescue two reporters who had been imprisoned for “illegally” entering North Korean territory. Many will no doubt praise Clinton’s “diplomacy” and hope that it may jump-start the languishing efforts to pry loose North Korea’s nuclear arsenal from Kim Jong-il’s dying grip. In fact, the whole episode is another in a series of humiliations, whether petty or serious, that have damaged America’s prestige and convinced its enemies that for all our power, we are weak and vulnerable.

How else can one understand the sorry spectacle of the one-time leader of the world’s most powerful state flying cap in hand to a dysfunctional country ruled by a psychopathic thug? Does anybody think it shows strength for Clinton to apologize to said thug on behalf of two Americans who had been wrongly arrested and jailed? Doesn’t it rather redound to North Korea’s prestige that it has compelled a representative of American power to solicit a favor, pose for photos, and chit-chat with one of the most brutal dictators of recent history? And who knows what other concessions were promised or implied.

Legitimizing rogue regimes and dictators, and creating the perception of equality by summits, conferences, and photo-ops, does not advance our interests. The symbolic elevation of such regimes necessitates the degradation of the United States, for what we think of as a demonstration of strength––that we can resolve disputes just with talk–– our adversaries see as craven weakness…

Some may argue that our strength lies in our principles such as the rule of law and a preference for reasoned discussion over force. Indeed it does––but only when it is clear that our power lies behind our principles, that we believe in them ardently enough to use force not for territory or wealth, but to strengthen our principles and defend our security when we have determined they have been attacked. But to think that those principles and beliefs can stand on their own without being guaranteed by force is delusional, for the simple reason that most of our adversaries do not believe in the same principles. To our enemies, those principles are not self-evidently the best way to live, and so our adversaries must be compelled to respect these principles with deeds rather than words. The prestige of our principles depends on the prestige of our power.

Liberals, however, have a different view of foreign policy. They think that our adversaries are like us and believe in the same goods, such as the resolution of conflict through reasoned discussion, and so liberals take force off the table. They think that our example alone will be sufficient to convince our enemies to change their behavior. We see this approach in the current administration’s overtures to Iran. More discussion, more diplomacy, more offers of various material boons like increased trade supposedly will convince the mullahs to forgo the enormous boost in power and prestige they will enjoy by possessing nuclear arms.

Yet without the credible threat of force, all this diplomacy does not mean a thing to a regime that has nothing but contempt for us. Why else would they imprison three of our citizens? They know they will pay no price for dishonoring us in that way, that instead we will offer concessions, whether material or symbolic, the end result of which will be to further Iran’s prestige as a regime willing to stand up to the Great Satan and expose once again its weakness and corruption.

This decline in America’s prestige started after the debacle of Vietnam, where a military victory was squandered because of a massive failure of nerve on the part of both Congress and the people. Four years later, Iran confirmed the estimation of our weakness by seizing with impunity our citizens and embassy. In 1983, we failed to punish Iran for its part in helping Hezbollah blow up 241 of our soldiers. Ten years later, we ran from Mogadishu after 18 of our soldiers were killed, putting the QED to our enemies’ perception that we were through as a great power…

And now a new administration promises to repeat the same mistakes: avoiding the hard choices and tragic consequences a great power must accept in order to remain a great power, relying instead on words to pursue aims only deeds can achieve. If this policy persists, the perception of our weakness could very well in the end be more powerful than all our armies and weapons.

Read the whole of this good article here.

From Investor’s Business Daily:

Laura Ling and Euna Lee, the journalists … were nabbed by Kim Jong Il’s security forces while on a reporting mission on the China border five months ago, and a government tribunal sentenced them to 12 years of hard labor. In North Korea, hard labor means hard labor. Had the sentences been carried out, one or both might have died in custody…

Make no mistake: They weren’t prisoners; they were hostages… By picking Clinton for this “private, humanitarian mission,” [of going to North Korea to rescue them]… the U.S. seemed to be sending a not-so-subtle signal to Kim that the U.S. is ready to appease him.

For in addition to being a former commander in chief, Clinton is the husband of the current secretary of state. And his own secretary of state, Madeleine Albright, was the first to visit North Korea.

Far from private, this has White House fingerprints all over it. As the AP noted: “State media said Clinton apologized on behalf of the women and relayed President Barack Obama’s gratitude.”

Groveling, anyone? Kim now knows the current U.S. leader can be blackmailed — if he didn’t know it before. That’s what made President Clinton so appropriate for this mission. It was from Clinton that Kim first learned this lesson.

In 1994, recall, Clinton sent former President Carter — see a pattern? — to North Korea to negotiate that country’s denuclearization. Carter returned with a deal similar in its sycophancy and cynicism to the one Neville Chamberlain brought back from Munich.

In exchange for billions of dollars in food aid and even help for its “peaceful” nuclear power effort, North Korea vowed to behave and decommission its nuclear weapons program.

No sooner had the ink dried than North Korea began cheating. During the Clinton years, the U.S. and the U.N. signed three agreements with North Korea. North Korea broke its word each time.

Commander in chief? Clinton acted like appeaser in chief. We never learned. The deal making continued into the 2000s — culminating in the Six-Party Talks, which concluded in 2007.

Again, Pyongyang broke its word and bought more time with its outrageous behavior. Today it has a burgeoning missile program and nuclear weapons, plus has sold that technology to other rogue states, including Iran. Rather than being conciliatory, the U.S. should have been righteously angry. Instead, U.S. weakness with North Korea is tempting others.

In Iran, just this week, President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s security forces arrested three young American journalists for an alleged border violation. Coincidence? Probably not. It follows the arrest earlier this year of U.S. journalist Roxana Saberi, who was released in May — just before Iran’s elections.

Clearly, Iran has learned the same valuable lesson as Kim — threaten captured Americans with harsh punishment, use them as pawns, then watch us grovel for the favor of their release.

Max Boot writes:

The Sydney Morning Herald reports, based on “evidence from key defectors,” that “Burma’s isolated military junta is building a secret nuclear reactor and plutonium extraction facilities with North Korean help, with the aim of acquiring its first nuclear bomb in five years.”

Just what the world needs to go along with the North Korean bomb and the (soon to come) Iranian bomb — the Burmese bomb.

I wonder what would lead the Burmese junta to think it could get away with such a dangerous and destabilizing move? Gee, perhaps Iran and North Korea suffering absolutely no serious repercussions may have had something to do with it?

This development shows just how dangerous the Iranian and North Korean programs are — not just in and of themselves but also for how they encourage nuclear proliferation in other rogue states.

Jennifer Rubin writes at Commentary’s ‘contentions’ website:

Hillary Clinton insists with great bluster that Iran’s pursuit of nuclear weapons is “futile.” What’s missing? Well, a coherent plan for denying Iran nuclear weapons.

One is left with two possible interpretations. One may be that despite denials to the contrary that he is living in a diplomatic fantasyland, Obama is convinced of his own powers of persuasion and believes the Iranian mullahs will fall under his spell and give up their nuclear weapons. After all, we are setting such a good example by proposing all sorts of disarmament agreements; the mullahs would be foolish not to go along, right? This supposes the administration is stocked with fools who are oblivious to the nature of the Iranian regime. Possibly.

The other alternative is that Clinton knows Iran’s pursuit of nuclear weapons is futile because eventually Israel will “take care of it.” This is actually a less charitable explanation than the “they are foolish” option. It supposes a level of timidity, an unwillingness to assume American responsibilities, and a level of deceit. Having bashed Israel for six months and declared that no country has the right to tell another whether it can pursue nuclear power, Obama and his team now are banking on Israel to do their dirty work. They will complain after the fact, of course. Is this possible? Well, unless you think Obama and his team are fools, it is the only explanation.

In our view, the administration is stocked with fools and lying cowards. But there is a third possible explanation: While Obama is against America being nuclear armed, he is not against iran being nuclear armed, nor against Israel being wiped off the map. Nothing he has said or done contradicts these propositions.  

Ralph Peters writes in Front Page Magazine:

Clinton test-marketed the administration’s willingness to accept a nuclear-armed Iran. Instead of trying to prevent Tehran’s acquisition of such weapons, she told our regional allies (real or imagined) that we’d respond by extending a “defense umbrella” to negate the effects of Iranian nukes.

Except that it wouldn’t. What good would such a defense umbrella be to Israel after its destruction?

And one suspects that, with Tel Aviv a wasteland, “cooler heads would prevail” and there would be no response in kind, that we’d all just “deplore” what happened and hold conferences to insure it “never happens again.”

Apart from its bewildering reluctance to try to understand Iran’s leaders on their own terms, this administration clearly doesn’t grasp the dynamics of nuclear proliferation among rogue regimes.

When one more bad actor gets nukes, the increase in the threat of nuclear war isn’t plus-one-more, but exponential. While I doubt that the majority of Iranians want to risk launching nuclear weapons at Israel, wars aren’t unleashed by the masses, but by determined leaders. And for all its other weaknesses, Iran has tough guys at the top: After all, ruthlessness is what’s kept them in power for 30 years.

Our government’s shift from the position that a nuclear-armed Iran is unacceptable to the stance that a nuclear-armed Iran can be handily deterred could prove to be the most dangerous error the United States ever made in the Middle East — a high standard, indeed.

Our president is good at sending signals — not least, when he sends the wrong ones. When he spent several days in Saudi Arabia and Egypt, lavishing praise on Islam and slyly comparing Palestinian misfortunes with the Holocaust, he sent one signal.

When he sent Secretary Gates to calm down those troublesome Israelis, he sent another.

This administration must stop living in a fantasy world in which monstrous fanatics will do what we want because we’re suddenly nice to them. You don’t deter butchers who believe they’re on a mission from their god by complimenting them on their rich history.

The only hope — albeit a slim one — for peace in the Middle East is to make it clear that our support for Israel is steadfast and unwavering, that Israel will endure and its enemies must accept its existence.

The current rift between the Israeli government and the Obama administration isn’t about expanding settlements in the West Bank. It’s about declining courage in the West.

Or is it about Barack Hussein Obama’s visceral hatred of Israel and love of Islam?

David Solway writes:

I will say this bluntly and without equivocation. Obama is a disaster of the first magnitude, bowing to King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia, smiling benignly on Hugo Chavez of Venezuela and cuddling up to Dimitry Medvedev—and by extension Vladimir Putin—of neo-Soviet Russia. He still maintains a flaccid negotiating stance toward an oppressive Iranian regime repudiated by its own people and rapidly closing in on nuclear capability. He would no doubt parley amiably with Hu Jintao of communist China should it launch an invasion of Taiwan, another small democratic nation in approximately the same “straits” as Israeland Honduras.

No less and perhaps even more frightening is Obama’s now undeniable intentions vis à vis his own country, imposing his own brand of demagogic politics upon the people he ostensibly represents. Unimaginable budgetary deficits, fiscally unsustainable policies, redistribution of honestly come by income, severe cutbacks in defence, bills hastily rammed through Congress affecting an entire population, soaring unemployment, opacity rather than transparency in the decision-making process, rule by charisma and fiat, the spectre of restrictions on freedom of expression—these are Obama’s gifts to his country. The new direction which American foreign policy has taken, alienating its democratic allies and mollifying tyrannical and illicit governments, renders the U.S. even more vulnerable to what we might call the expropriation of its destiny. Its enemies will not hesitate to seize the opportunity when it presents itself to undermine American interests and security.

“We are living at the edge of a catastrophe,” warned Newt Gingrich, addressing the Heritage Foundation onJuly 20, 2009. Whatever one may think of Gingrich, he is speaking truth to power, and truth to the powerless as well. Gingrich is concerned about the prospect of a massive terorist attack for which Americais manifestly unprepared, but the attack of its own administration on the nation’s traditional liberties and endangered solvency is equally menacing. This is the calendar of events envisaged by the international Left whose program, however  improbably, has now taken root in the United States, the presumed bastion of freedom in the world. The enemy is within the gates and the outlook for the future is perturbing, to say the least. But there is a certain ironic justice at work. What Israel and Honduras are now discovering, America too will learn in the course of time.

 I do not fear Abbas, Zelaya, Putin, Chavez or the rest of that disreputable bunch. I am alarmed when I consider Ahmadinejad and Khamenei. But I am scared to death of Obama.

How was it possible that some of us could see  clearly that the election of Obama would be disastrous, yet a majority of voters could not see it at all?

Young women who protest against the Iranian regime risk not only death but sharia-required rape. 

From RantRave:

[An Iranian prison guard] said that, at 18, “I was given the ‘honor’ to temporarily marry young girls before they were sentenced to death.” 

In the Islamic Republic it is illegal to execute a young woman, regardless of her crime, if she is a virgin, he explained. Therefore a “wedding” ceremony is conducted the night before the execution: The young girl is forced to have sexual intercourse with a prison guard – essentially [she is] raped by her “husband.” 

“I regret that, even though the marriages were legal,” he said. 

Why the regret, if the marriages were “legal?” 

“Because,” he went on, “I could tell that the girls were more afraid of their ‘wedding’ night than of the execution that awaited them in the morning. And they would always fight back, so we would have to put sleeping pills in their food. By morning the girls would have an empty expression; it seemed like they were ready or wanted to die. 

“I remember hearing them cry and scream after [the rape] was over,” he said. “I will never forget how this one girl clawed at her own face and neck with her finger nails afterwards. She had deep scratches all over her.” 

The individual who spoke with the reporter was himself later arrested. What was his crime? Knowing what was in store for a female detainee, he set her free, rather than subjecting her to a legalised rape and execution. Apparently there is a decency among common folk that seems to elude their spiritual leaders. Even the “professional husband” employed by the Ahmadinejad regime suffered pangs of conscience.