Socialism, Communism – the terms were used interchangeably in Soviet Russia – is an atrocious ideology. Whether in the National (Nazi) form, or the International (Leninist-Stalinist) form, or even in the milder Western European welfare form, its implementation is a ruinous affliction. Whenever and wherever a collectivist ideology, whatever name it goes by – Nazism, Communism, Socialism, Marxism, Islam, Environmentalism, World Government, People’s Democracy – is implemented, ruin and suffering are brought upon the people.

The Democratic Party, whatever it may have been in the past, is now a collectivist party. It’s leader, President Obama, was raised, educated , and employed (by Alinskyites) as a Communist, and under him the country has been moved to the collectivist left.

But not far enough left to please the ill-educated, uninformed, privileged participants in the “Occupy” movement. Encouraged in their protest against capitalism by the President and other Democratic leaders such as Nancy Pelosi, “Occupy” spokesmen call for a communist America.

We have a hunch that these clueless malcontents have absolutely no idea what life under the communist system is like. Our view is shared by Lincoln Brown, who recently visited Cambodia as a member of a Christian mission, and has written a brief description of the suffering of the people when they were under the Communist dictatorship of Pol Pot, and tells how the country has still not recovered from it.

He writes at Townhall:

The legacy of Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge can be best experienced at Tuol Sleng Prison in Phnom Penh.

Now a natinal memorial site and genocide museum Tuol Sleng Prison, or S-21 was originally a high school. The Khmer Rouge transformed it into a secret holding and interrogation facility. Out of approximately 14,000 people that were brought there, only about 12 survived the hell that was S-21.

The rules of life at S-21 are posted on large signs in English and Khmer for visitors to the museum:

You must answer according to my questions. Do not turn them away.

Do not try to hide the facts by making pretexts of this and that. You are strictly prohibited to contest me.

Do not be a fool for you are someone who dares to thwart the revolution.

You must immediately answer my question without wasting time to reflect.

Do not tell me either about your immoralities or the revolution.

While getting lashes or electric shocks you must not cry out at all.

Do nothing. Sit still and wait for my orders. If there are no orders, keep quiet. When I ask you to do something, you must do it right away without protesting.

Do not make pretexts about Kampuchea Krom [the Khmer Krom are the indigenous ethnic Khmer people of southern Vietnam] as to hide your true existence as a traitor.

If you do not follow all of the above rules you shall get many lashes or electric shocks.

If you disobey any point of my regulation you shall get either ten lashes or five electric shocks.

At S-21, dorm rooms and class rooms became prison cells and torture chambers whose floors to this day still bear the bloodstains of the victims. Some rooms still contain the metal bed frames and shackles used to hold prisoners during interrogations. Children’s exercise equipment was turned into racks upon which prisoners were hung head down and were repeatedly raised and lowered until they blacked out. They were revived when their heads were dunked in pots of water laced with excrement. The porches and balconies of the buildings were covered in barbed wire, in order to prevent people from flinging themselves out of the doors in suicide attempts.

Some of the rooms at Tuol Sleng are full of pictures of those who went there to die. Photograph after photograph is on display. …

People have painted pictures from their memories from elsewhere in the county. Memories of people dunked repeatedly under water to extract confessions; and of infants taken from their mothers and tossed into the air to be shot by Khmer Rouge soldiers.

One room defies my mind’s ability to process information. It is the same room in which hangs the picture of the soldier shooting babies. The room consists mostly of cabinets, housing bones and skulls of the victims of S-21. It puts one in mind of an anthropology exhibit: the remains of distant ancestors from the prehistoric past. But these remains are the result of the bloody carnage that occurred from 1975 to 1979, and represent only a tiny fraction of the slaughter that took place in Cambodia. …

Under the Khmer Rogue five thousand women and children were shipped to Women’s Island in the center of the Bassac River to be massacred. There were at one time two trees on the island used by the Khmer Rouge. The soldiers would beat infants and children against these trees until they died …  The trees were cut down, but one of them absorbed so much blood from its victims that their blood began to appear in the tree’s newly bitter fruit. The tree eventually developed a permanent curve from the impact of tiny bodies. The women and children were not shot, as so many of the victims from that time were because the Khmer Rouge decided that these victims were not worth wasting the bullets.

Because the Khmer Rouge executed so many government officials, doctors, lawyers and other educated people, Cambodia developed a phobia of higher education. Pol Pot has cast a long shadow over the years, and education and economic development have been a long time in coming. The present generation of young people is the first in years to even consider continuing their education, and most people in Cambodia exist on less than one dollar a day. The deaths of the community leaders and millions of other people in the 1970’s left a vacuum that has proven hard to fill. The country is trying to find its way out of chaos.

In one benighted section of Phnom Penh, children walk barefoot over broken bricks and rubble. Black water trenches filled with human sewage run under the rickety patched-together shacks raised above the flood level on stilts. These homes, which would be considered slightly larger than a backyard storage shed in America may house up to ten people in some cases. When the rainy season comes, the leaky roofs make sleep impossible. The only thing the residents can do is get up and stand in the rain coming through their roofs until the storm passes, and then try to go back to bed. It is poverty on a scale none of us have ever seen. A man relieves himself in a pit as we walk by and the smell of human waste and rotting garbage is overpowering. I feel the bile rise in my throat and ashamed of my reaction to another’s plight, I fight back the urge to retch. How would I feel if someone were to vomit at my front door? The residents of this alley are squatting on government land. They have no [regular supply of] food and no clean water, and rely on the charity of others for enough food to make it though the month. Children in some cases become prostitutes, child soldiers, beggars or street peddlers.

The United States of America … remains the most successful republic in the history of the world. And … the people here, especially those Occupiers who have the gall to portray themselves as poor and oppressed with their laptops and cell phones, demanding you and I foot the bill for their condoms and their college degrees have fared far better than [their] counterparts in other parts of the world. Perhaps it would behoove these protestors to spend some time in these countries in which the ideas of Lenin, Marx and Alinsky found full flower and reached their inevitable bloody conclusions. Perhaps it would benefit them to live under such regimes before they try to establish such a nation …  for the rest of us.

How did it come about that academia, the media, intelligence agencies, and eventually government became positively supportive of Islam and opposed to the American ideals of individualism and liberty?

The answer has much to do with the baleful influence of two dim “intellectuals”, Noam Chomsky and Edward Said.

Michael Widlanski explains what happened in his book Battle for Our Minds: Western Elites and the Terror Threat, which we confidently recommend.

It is discussed in this video:

Ion Mihai Pacepa was “one of the top members of the Soviet bloc espionage community”. 

He writes:

One of our main assignments was to turn the UN against the United States. We in the Soviet bloc poured millions of dollars and thousands of people into that gigantic project. Virtually all UN employees and representatives from the communist countries — comprising a third of the world’s population — and from our Arab allies were secretly working for our espionage services.

Our strategy was to convert the centuries-old European and Islamic animosity toward the Jews into a rabid and violent hatred for the United States by portraying it as a country run by a rapacious “Council of the Elders of Zion” (the Kremlin’s epithet for the U.S. Congress), which allegedly wanted to transform the rest of the world into a Jewish fiefdom.

Unfortunately, we succeeded. In 2003, the UN expelled the U.S. from the Commission on Human Rights by the overwhelming vote of 33 to 3, and it appointed the tyrannical government of Libya to chair that body. A year later, UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan decided to secretly make the UN even more anti-American.

On December 2, 2004, Annan endorsed the 101 proposals of the “High-Level Panel on Threats, Challenges and Change,” commissioned by him to build a UN “for the twenty-first century.”  The panel recommended that the U.S. be further isolated by establishing the rule that only the UN could authorize preemptive wars against terrorism or any other threats. For that, the panel concluded that the UN’s bureaucracy should be significantly increased (by creating a ”peace-building commission”), its efficiency significantly decreased (by greatly expanding the already inefficient Security Council), and the treasuries of its member countries additionally raided by having them “donate” to the UN an additional 0.7% of their GNP to fight poverty. (On December 7, 2007, Senator Obama introduced into the U.S. Senate the Global Poverty Act of 2007, demanding that 0.7% of the U.S. gross national product, totaling $845 billion over the next 13 years, be spent to fight “global poverty”. 

It is hard to believe, but true, that some of the authors of these proposals for “reforming” the UN were the same communist spies who had originally worked to subvert the UN. One eminent member of Kofi Annan’s blue-ribbon panel was the nouveau riche Yevgeny Primakov, a former KGB general and Soviet intelligence adviser to Saddam Hussein who rose to head Russia’s espionage service for a time — and to sing opera ditties with U.S. Secretary of State Madeleine Albright while secretly running the infamous Aldrich Ames spy case behind her back. Another prominent member was Qian Qichen, a former Red China intelligence officer who worked under diplomatic cover abroad, belonged to the Central Committee of the Communist Party when it ordered the bloody Tiananmen Square repression in 1989, rose afterward to the Politburo, and in 1998 became vice-chairman of China’s State Council. And then there was Amr Moussa, the secretary-general of the Arab League (another KGB puppet), who stated that he missed “the balance of power provided by the Soviet Union.” …

Primakov is an old enemy of the U.S. His espionage service — like my former one — used to spend every single day thinking up new ways to portray the American land of freedom as an “imperial Zionist country” that intended to convert the Islamic world into a Jewish colony. His first major victory was UN Resolution No. 3379 of 1975, which declared Zionism “a form of racism and racial discrimination.” Officially presented as an Arab initiative, that projected resolution had in fact been drafted in Moscow under the supervision of Primakov, turned into the KGB’s main Arabist. The resolution was openly supported by the Arab League and the PLO, two organizations on our payroll. …

On August 31, 2001, Primakov’s boss at the UN, Kofi Annan, organized a UN World Conference on Racism, Racial Discrimination, Xenophobia and Related Intolerance, which opened in Durban, South Africa. Its task was to approve new pre-formulated Arab League declarations asserting that Zionism was a brutal form of racism, and that the United States was its main supporter. Yasser Arafat, Fidel Castro, and the same gaggle of Arab and Third World governments who had supported the UN’s anti-Semitic Resolution No. 3379 in 1975 urged the participants to condemn Israel and the United States as Zionist powers who wanted to conquer the Islamic world. On September 3, 2001, the U.S. withdrew its delegation from Durban, charging that the UN conference had been “converted into a forum against Israel and Jews.” The Israeli government followed suit. On September 4, 2001, Congressman Tom Lantos, a member of the U.S. delegation, told reporters: “This conference will stand self-condemned for yielding to extremists. … I am blaming them for hijacking this conference.”

The September 11, 2001, attacks came seven days later. On that same day the KGB was celebrating 124 years since the birth of its founder. The weapon of choice for that horrific act of terrorism that has changed the face of our world was the hijacked airplane, a concept that had originally been invented by the KGB. …

 Most of the people “working” at the UN are probably still anti-American spies …

The peace and freedom of the world depend on the power of the United States, not of the UN bureaucracy, as was always the case.

This article is of very great importance. Historians should take full and careful note of it.

We agree of course that the UN bureaucracy is useless and worse than useless. We abominate the UN and think it should be destroyed.

Apart from that, his last sentence troubles us. The world has little peace and less freedom. Should the US try to establish peace and freedom wherever they’re lacking?  Should the US police the world? It would have to make laws under which it would act globally. It’s writ would have to run in every state. The US government would then be the world government. But could it enforce it’s laws everywhere, on all peoples? Would Americans, or enough of them, want to do that – a nation that has always resisted acquiring an empire?

Would it not be enough for the US to protect itself and its own interests against its enemies – at present Russia, China and the other communist states, and all 56 Islamic states?

Such a policy would not preclude preemptive strikes against potential enemies, such as those trying to build nuclear arsenals with aggressive intent, or any that kept vital resources from American markets.

It may be hard to accept, but the truth is that the victims of  the Janjaweed, Joseph Kony, Kim Jong-un, Boko Haram, the Taliban cannot be saved by America. It is much easier to do harm on a vast scale, as the KGB and the Arabs have proved so successfully.

An Austrian aboriginal protests furiously against the Turkish Muslim invaders of his country.

(A 2010 video from Creeping Sharia)

Our generation is witnessing the disintegration of the post-medieval world.

Until late in the twentieth century, the USA was a melting pot. The idea, which arose in the cities of ancient Greece, was that people from many origins would live together under law and not as ethnic groups, clans or tribes on ancestral land: “ius” not “rus” as it has been expressed. But no longer is that happening as it once did, not in the United States, not anywhere. “Multiculturalism” has replaced the melting pot.

Even as the State has grown over-powerful in the West, the nation it rules is dissolving – to a large extent because it has grown too powerful. Bureaucrats aspire to ever larger territories and populations to control.

Into their undefended territories swarm migrants from poorer lands – there to establish the very conditions that kept their own countries poor.

With the passing of the Western nation-state the vision of freedom under the rule of law, the ideal on which (among others)  the constitutional kingdom of Britain,  the Republic of France, and the Republic of the United States were founded, is passing too.

The Europeans do not know themselves. They (or enough of them to make the process irreversible) have cast themselves off  from their history, thrown aside their national identity, and helplessly capitulated to the primitive force of Islam, which has no doubts about itself.

Daniel Greenfield sees der Untergang des Abendlandes – the decline of the West – as we do. He writes at Canada Free Press:

In place of the melting pot is the No Go Zone, which is the inverse of integration, it sets up tribal encampments in major cities which run on the laws of the tribe. …

The United States has had its Fenian raids, its assorted wars being waged by immigrants from its soil, and the attitude toward those conflicts has been mixed, depending on whose ox was being gored. But there’s a fundamental shift when those wars are being waged against it. That shift from immigrants using it as a conflict base to becoming the target of their conflicts is a somewhat recent one whose full implications have still not been absorbed.

Across the southern border it faces mass immigration from a country whose history is riddled with old scores to settle and whose politicians use it as a whacking post for their national troubles. And to the east and the west it faces mass migration from the Muslim world, which is operating on its own form of manifest destiny, settling Europe and European colonies, the way that European colonists once settled America.

The news is no better in Canada or Australia, it’s certainly no better in Europe where the EU sees mass migration as a convenient way of completing its project of dissolving national identities. Encouraging separatism at the regional level is one way of doing it, but mass fragmentation of nations gets the job done even more thoroughly and comprehensively. …

If nations are meaningless, then national identities are equally meaningless. All that’s left are clans, religious and ethnic groups in the borderless multicultural globe. A chaos that sorts itself out through the old reliable means of brute force …

Scots, Basques, Catalans, Bretons, Alsatians, Flems, Walloons ….

In a chaotic environment, tribalism and a compelling ideology can combine to carve out an expanding sphere of order. That is how Islam got its start, that is how it is operating now. In a fragmented environment, it has a leg up because it is organized and it has the money and vision to move forward, which is more than the natives or most of the other immigrants have.

To Islam, Europe, America and the rest of the non-Muslim world … are the Dar Al-Harb, the realm of the sword, where the faithful are destined to bring order. Every social problem proves how much the infidel world needs them to bring order, and the violence that they bring raises the stakes and drives everyone toward an inevitable conflict.

Good fences make good neighbors. Or they used to, quite often. At least they marked defensible areas. Now they’re coming down.

Borders are created to keep things out, like invading armies and suicide bombers. The border represents security and ownership, and when you take away the border those are gone and the soft vulnerable territories within are up for grabs to the ruthless and the canny. If the borders are down, then why not go north where there’s wealth and power up for grabs and take some for yourself.

National identity in the Muslim world is already weak, outmatched by religious identity on the one hand and tribal identity on the other. That set of conditions makes it quite difficult for them to build and maintain functional countries of their own, but leaves them quite well adapted to using tribal and religious ties to take over regions in a state of multicultural flux.

Islam is not built for competence, it’s built for conquest. Its effectiveness lies in its ability to create chaos, rather than maintain order. And every suicide bomber, every plot exposed, every riot over a cartoon demonstrates the power of that chaos and how far the local and global authorities who try to maintain order will go to appease the causers of chaos.

[The] West … has thrown away the survival skills necessary to cope with the situation and the survival skills it has are built on adapting to change by submitting to a new state of affairs, whether it’s a new set of ideas, a new set of forms or a new set of laws. … It no longer knows the answer to the question, “Who are we?”. …

Muslims … have an advantage because they understand their role better than the natives. … They are better adapted to the end of the state, because they have never truly internalized the reality of the state, than the Westerner for whom the state has become the fundamental unit of existence.

The Europeans cannot defend themselves. They have lost their countries without moving away from them. They are refugees in their own former homelands.

Westerners have become the ultimate refugees, lost at home, refugees in their own countries, wanderers in their own cities. … And the citizen of the first world often finds that he seems to belong less in his own country than the refugees flooding it. He has become a displaced person, a familiar enough feeling to many of his new neighbors who are also victims of ethnic and religious conflicts. But while the conflicts they have fled are official, his conflict is not. He is the victim of a nameless conflict that cannot be named, of a colonization that cannot be described as such and of the ethnic cleansing of his national identity and the theft of his future.

American diplomats are repeatedly apologizing to Muslims in Europe for a multitude of real or imagined slights against Islam, and the U.S. State Department is now spending millions of dollars each year actively promoting Islam — including Islamic Sharia law — on the continent.

This is from the Stonegate Institute, by Soeren Kern.

The United States ambassador to Spain recently met with a group of Muslim immigrants in one of the most Islamized neighborhoods of Barcelona to apologize for American foreign policymaking in the Middle East.

U.S. Ambassador Alan Solomont told Muslims assembled at the town hall-like meeting in the heart of Barcelona’s old city that the United States is not an “enemy of Islam” and that U.S. President Barack Obama wants to improve America’s image in the Middle East as quickly as possible by closing the “dark chapters” of the U.S. invasion of Iraq and the war in Afghanistan.

“There are things that the United States has done badly,” Solomont said at the February 28 gathering organized by a non-profit organization called the Cultural, Educational and Social Association of Pakistani Women. “But now the Obama government wants to improve relations with Muslims,” he promised. …

The Barcelona meeting, which was held in a Muslim ghetto called Raval (a.k.a. Ravalistan because Muslim immigrants now make up 45% of the barrio’s total population), is an example of the Obama administration’s so-called Muslim Outreach.

The U.S. State Department – working through American embassies and consulates in Europe – has been stepping-up its efforts to establish direct contacts with largely unassimilated Muslim immigrant communities in towns and cities across Europe. …

Obama ideologues are crisscrossing Europe on U.S. taxpayer funded trips to “export” failed American approaches to multiculturalism, affirmative action, cultural diversity and special rights for minorities. …

In Ireland, for example, the U.S. Embassy in Dublin recently sponsored a seminar ostensibly designed to help Muslim immigrants increase their influence within the Irish business and financial communities.

The opening speech at the event was delivered by Imam Hussein Halawa of the Islamic Cultural Center of Ireland, despite the fact that leaked U.S. State Department cables show that the U.S. government has known for many years that Halawi is a member of the Muslim Brotherhood and serves as the right-hand man of the radical Egyptian cleric Yusuf al-Qaradawi.

Halawa, an Egyptian immigrant who has dedicated his life to the cause of introducing Islamic Sharia law in Europe, told those in attendance that the main purpose of the conference was to bring the Irish banking system into conformity with Islamic legal principles. U.S. Ambassador Dan Rooney, a lifelong Republican turned Obama acolyte, said at the same conference that the United States was a “solid partner” behind Halawa’s venture.

In Austria, the U.S. Embassy in Vienna sponsored a film contest in February on the theme of “Diversity and Tolerance” aimed at teaching wayward Austrians that they should show respect for Muslim immigrants who refuse to integrate into their society.

Ambassador William Eacho, an Obama campaign fundraiser turned political appointee, awarded the first prize to a group of students in the northern Austrian town of Steyr who produced a one-minute silent film promoting tolerance for Muslim women who wear Islamic face-covering veils such as burkas in public spaces.

Tolerance for Muslim women by non-Muslims, that is. Muslim women are not treated tolerantly by Muslim men – sharia law insists on the subjugation of women.

Obama and his team may think they know what is best for Europeans, but according to recent polls, more than 70% of Austrians are in favor of a law that would ban the burka.

In Belgium, U.S. Ambassador Howard Gutman, another Obama fundraiser turned diplomat, told lawyers attending a conference in Brussels in November 2011 that Israel is to blame for Muslim anti-Semitism in Europe.

According to the Israeli newspaper Yedioth Ahronot, Gutman, who is Jewish, showed conference attendees a video of himself receiving a warm welcome at a Muslim school in Brussels, which he said proved that Muslims are not anti-Semitic. Following a barrage of criticism for rationalizing the growing problem of anti-Semitism in Europe, the U.S. Embassy in Belgium removed the evidence by uploading an amended transcript of Gutman’s remarks on its website.

In France, the U.S. Embassy in Paris co-sponsored a seminar to teach Muslims in France how they can politically organize themselves. Operatives from the Democratic Party coached 70 Muslim “diversity leaders” from disaffected Muslim-majority suburban slums known as banlieues on how to develop a communications strategy, raise funds and build a political base.

The French government – which has been trying to reverse the pernicious effects of decades of state-sponsored multiculturalism – expressed dismay at what it called “meddling.” …

In Norway, where Muslim immigrants already have more rights than native Norwegians, the U.S. Embassy in Oslo organized a “dialogue meeting” designed to “empower” Muslim immigrant women in the country.

According to the Norwegian newspaper Aftenposten, Obama’s special envoy to the Muslim world, Farah Pandith, castigated the Norwegian government’s integration policies as being insufficiently fair to Muslim immigrants. She also told Norwegians that Muslims are “more free to practice Islam in the United States than in any other country in the world.”  …

In Britain, U.S. embassy employees in London frequently conduct outreach to help “empower” the Muslims across the country. According to a leaked U.S. diplomatic cable, for example, Ambassador Louis Susman “engages with U.K. Muslim communities regularly … he has spoken to Muslim groups in Wales and Scotland, visited the London Central Mosque, and hosted an interfaith breakfast at his residence, among other activities.”

Susman has come under fire for visiting another London mosque, namely the East London Mosque, which is one of the most extreme Islamic institutions in Britain. Built with money from Saudi Arabia to propagate Wahhabi Islam, the sprawling facility is home to the London Muslim Center, which the U.S. government has long known is a haven for Islamic extremists. During his visit, Susman spoke of his “great admiration” for the mosque and his enthusiasm for meeting its staff.

And then there’s this:

This video clip is all over the net. But it’s too important for us to omit just because most of our readers may have seen it.

Secretary of Defense Panetta0 declares that the USA needs the permission of foreign states to mobilize against external enemies.

His statement clearly proves that the Obama administration wants to sell out and subjugate this country to a world government, incubating in the anti-democratic, collectivist, redistributionist, pro-Islam, corrupt, hypocritical – in sum, irredeemably evil – United Nations.

The method of terrorism will continue to be used by Muslim jihadis (and others) because it works.

The West, out of cowardice, stupidity, sentimentality, and  apathy, has allowed it to work.

How? The BBC provides an example :

The MailOnline reports that the director-general  of the BBC, Mark Thompson, defends the notorious pro-Islam bias of his publicly-funded institution on the grounds that if it wasn’t obedient to Muslim demands it would be subjected to terrorist violence. 

Mr Thompson said: ‘Without question, “I complain in the strongest possible terms”, is different from, “I complain in the strongest possible terms and I am loading my AK47 as I write”. This definitely raises the stakes.’

He said the BBC  would never air a satirical show about Muhammad because for Muslims it could have the same impact as a piece of ‘grotesque child pornography’.

Mr Thompson said the fatwa against Salman Rushdie over his novel The Satanic Verses, the September 11 terror attacks, and the murder in Holland in 2004 of film-maker Theo van Gogh, who had criticised Islam, had made broadcasters realise that religious controversies could lead to murder or serious criminal acts.

That is, if the “religious controversies” concern Islam. Only Islam, the terrorist religion.

Commenting on this, Bruce Bawer writes:

When the most powerful media organization in the U.K. is run by someone whose readiness to admit his utter lack of courage would seem, from all the evidence, to reflect the fact that the concept of courage isn’t even on his radar, it doesn’t bode well for the future of British freedom.

British freedom? Ah yes, we remember it well.

Another point that was important to Thompson was that, as he put it, “for a Muslim, a depiction…of the Prophet Mohammed might have the emotional force of a piece of grotesque child pornography.” He added that “secularists” fail “to understand…what blasphemy feels like to someone who is a realist in their religious belief.” I would humbly submit that Thompson himself fails to understand something rather important – namely, that when the head of an outfit like the BBC starts thinking and talking in such terms, he has become nothing more or less than a sharia puppet.

Another thing Thompson apparently fails to understand is this: when it becomes the duty of citizens in a secular democracy to edit what they say or write in order to avoid committing what the adherents of some religion or other might consider blasphemy, then secular democracy, individual liberty, and freedom of expression are, in practice, no more. I wonder if it has occurred to Thompson at all that for more than a few freedom-loving people in his own country and elsewhere, the fact that a man in his position could follow such an outrageously pusillanimous policy might well, to coin a phrase, “have the emotional force of a piece of grotesque child pornography”?

He cites an instance of how the BBC pr0-Islam bias routinely manifests itself:

The Beeb’s Stacey Dooley is visiting her hometown, Luton, to discover if the situation with extreme Islam is really as bad there as some people say. Upon arriving in town, she stumbles upon a Muslim march whose participants are chanting “To hell with the U.K.” and carrying signs calling for sharia law. There are plenty of women in niqab, one of whom tells Dooley to put on some clothes. For a while you think that Dooley is actually going to wake up and smell the coffee. But in the end, ignoring everything she’s witnessed, the little ditz closes with the standard, canned, de rigueur, mainstream-media conclusion – namely, that both sides need to listen to each other with respect, for the only reason for all this intercultural friction is “ignorance.”

Given the deliberate, depressing refusal of so many members of the British media to face up to the advent of sharia in the land of Magna Carta and Winston Churchill, it was at least a bit cheering the other day to see Brendan O’Neill, in the Telegraph, spelling out the dramatic, and telling, difference between the way in which the framers of the U.S. Constitution understood the concept of rights and the way today’s European leaders think about the same subject.

While the makers of the American revolution “emphasized individuals’ capacity to make judgments…free from state interference,” explained O’Neill, Europe today is plagued by a “paternalistic” notion of human rights “in which the individual is treated as an at-risk creature who must be protected from harm and bullying by…human-rights lawyers.” While the U.S. Bill of Rights concisely sets limits on state power, the European Convention on Human Rights “spends thousands of words telling the state what it should be doing…and how it must go about protecting individuals from abuse and mental distress.” And while the U.S. Bill of Rights makes it clear that free speech is sacrosanct, the European document is awash in weasel words, saying that “freedom of expression” is “subject to such formalities, conditions, restrictions or penalties as are prescribed by law and are necessary in a democratic society, in the interests of national security, territorial integrity or public safety,” and on and on.

Which is, of course, simply a very long and legalistic way of saying that in Europe today, even (alas) in Britain, freedom of speech is severely endangered – just as Mark Thompson (whether he realizes it or not) has essentially admitted, and … as the BBC’s own Stacey Dooley, despite having seen reality close-up in her hometown of Luton, still refuses to grasp.

But in Obama’s America freedom of speech is severely endangered in the same way for the same reason. It’s good that a Telegraph journalist has pointed out the difference in theory between the way the American revolutionaries and the US Bill of Rights “emphasized individuals’ capacity to make judgments free from state interference,” and the European “paternalistic notion of human rights in which the individual is treated as an at-risk creature who must be protected from harm and bullying by human-rights lawyers …  in the interests of public safety”; but the Obama administration does not feel bound by the US Bill of Rights, and is trying pertinaciously to follow the European model.

The more chilling difference between the European cringe in the face of the Islamic threat and the Obama submission to it, is that Obama and his henchmen are not motivated by fear. Despite the Islamic act of destruction on 9/11, and the exposure of many a jihadi plot in the US since then, it is not Muslim violence that has them eager to submit to Islam, but their own sympathy with it.

If Dennis Prager is right in the article we quote here, Islam is defeating itself. And not only is it curing some Muslims of their own religion, it’s helping to turn people off all religion.

Religion has been withering since the Enlightenment, and it took an all-but-mortal blow from Darwin. Now, over the last few decades, Islam is revealing so hideous a face that it is perhaps administering the coup de grâce.

Dennis Prager deplores the possible development. We applaud it.

Nothing produces atheists like despicable religious people. They do far more harm to religious faith than all the atheist writers and activists in the world put together.

Hezbollah, Hamas, al-Qaida, the Muslim Brotherhood, the ayatollahs, Jamaat-e-Islami in Pakistan, the Taliban and all the other Islamist organizations actually decrease the number of believers in the world.

Over the course of time, people do not judge religions by their theology. Yes, some people convert to a religion thanks to its convincing theology. And many remain in a religion because of family ties, cultural norms and sheer inertia. But over time, religion – and faith in God itself – is judged by its fruit. Which is how it should be.

And the best known fruit of Islam today – countries calling themselves Muslim, such as Iran, Saudi Arabia, Pakistan and Taliban Afghanistan, not to mention Islamist groups – is so ugly that many millions of people are increasingly repelled by religion and by God. …

When the best-known actions of some of the most religious people in the world are kidnappings, slaughter, torture, mass murder of innocents, suicide bombings, beheadings and treatment of women unknown in recorded history, religion and faith in God suffer everywhere.

So there is an upside to the extra-nasty religion of Islam pursuing its atrocious jihad after all – a widespread disillusionment at last with religion in general?

Seems too good to be true. But we hope Prager is right.

We vehemently agree with every point Mark Steyn makes in his latest column, on how America’s longest war will have effected nothing in Afghanistan, but may have weakened America.

It really must be read in full. Perhaps more than once, both for what it says and also for how it is said. Dreadful as the truths are that it tells, the way they’re told is a pleasure.

Here are parts of it:

U.S. Air Force Lt. Col. John Loftis, 44, and Army Maj. Robert Marchanti II, 48, lost their lives not on some mission out on the far horizon in wild tribal lands in the dead of night but in the offices of the Afghan Interior Ministry. In a “secure room” that required a numerical code to access. Gunned down by an Afghan “intelligence officer.” Who then departed the scene of the crime unimpeded by any of his colleagues.

Some news outlets reported the event as a “security breach.” But what exactly was breached? The murderer was by all accounts an employee of the Afghan government, with legitimate rights of access to the building and its secure room, and “liaising” with his U.S. advisers and “mentors” was part of the job. In Afghanistan, foreigners are dying at the hands of the locals who know them best. The Afghans trained by Westerners, paid by Westerners and befriended by Westerners are the ones who have the easiest opportunity to kill them. It is sufficiently non-unusual that the Pentagon, as is the wont with bureaucracies, already has a term for it: “green-on-blue incidents,” in which a uniformed Afghan turns his gun on his Western “allies.”

So we have a convenient label for what’s happening; what we don’t have is a strategy to stop it – other than more money, more “hearts and minds” for people who seem notably lacking in both, and more bulk orders of the bestselling book “Three Cups Of Tea,” an Oprahfied heap of drivel extensively exposed as an utter fraud but which a delusional Washington insists on sticking in the kit bag of its Afghan-bound officer class. …

In the past couple of months, two prominent politicians of different nations visiting their troops on the ground have used the same image to me for Western military bases: crusader forts. Behind the fortifications, a mini-West has been built in a cheerless land: There are Coke machines and Krispy Kreme doughnuts. Safely back within the gates, a man can climb out of the full RoboCop and stop pretending he enjoys three cups of tea with the duplicitous warlords, drug barons and pederasts who pass for Afghanistan’s ruling class. …

The last crusader fort I visited was Kerak Castle in Jordan a few years ago. It was built in the 1140s, and still impresses today. I doubt there will be any remains of our latter-day fortresses a millennium hence. Six weeks after the last NATO soldier leaves Afghanistan, it will be as if we were never there. Before the election in 2010, the New York Post carried a picture of women registering to vote in Herat, all in identical top-to-toe bright blue burkas, just as they would have looked on Sept. 10, 2001. We came, we saw, we left no trace. America’s longest war will leave nothing behind.

They can breach our security, but we cannot breach theirs – the vast impregnable psychological fortress in which what passes for the Pushtun mind resides. Someone accidentally burned a Quran your pals had already defaced with covert messages? Die, die, foreigners! The president of the United States issues a groveling and characteristically cluelessapology for it? Die, die, foreigners! The American friend who has trained you and hired you and paid you has arrived for a meeting? Die, die, foreigners! And those are the Afghans who know us best. …

The Rumsfeld strategy that toppled the Taliban over a decade ago was brilliant and innovative: special forces on horseback using GPS to call in unmanned drones. They will analyze it in staff colleges around the world for decades.

Rumsfeld’s strategy worked, and that at least is a cause for American pride. It’s what came afterwards, the turning of the war into pointless social work, that is cause for American regret.

But what we ought to be analyzing instead is the sad, aimless, bloated, arthritic, transnationalized folly of what followed.

The United States is an historical anomaly: the nonimperial superpower. Colonialism is not in its DNA, and in some ways that speaks well for it, and in other ways, in a hostile and fast-changing world of predators and opportunists, it does not. …

The Hindu Kush is not worth the bones of a single Pennsylvanian grenadier, or “training officer.” [But] too much about the Afghan campaign is too emblematic. As much as any bailed-out corporation, the U.S. is “too big to fail”: In Afghanistan as in the stimulus, it was money no object. The combined Western military/aid presence accounts for 98 percent of that benighted land’s GDP.

We carpet-bomb with dollar bills; we have the most advanced technology known to man; we have everything except strategic purpose.

That “crusader fort” image has a broader symbolism. The post-American world is arising before our eyes. According to the IMF, China will become the dominant economic power by 2016. Putin is on course to return to the Kremlin corner office. In Tehran, the mullahs nuclearize with impunity. New spheres of influence are being established in North Africa, in Central Europe, in the once-reliably “American lake” of the Pacific.

Can America itself be a crusader fort? A fortress secure behind the interminable checkpoints of Code Orange TSA bureaucratic torpor while beyond the moat the mob jeers “Die, die, foreigners”? Or, in the end, will it prove as effortlessly penetrable as the “secure room” of the Afghan Interior Ministry?