This is from the American Thinker:

Most of us still stubbornly refuse to admit what we already know about Islam: that it’s a violent, malevolent religion whose adherents can’t stop themselves from announcing to us their intentions to make war against us until they’ve either killed us or made us slaves. …

Most of us still stubbornly profess our belief in a “true” Islam, peace-loving, egalitarian …

Most of us reflexively channel all blame for the daily bombings, beheadings, murders, mutilations, honor killings, and sundry other savagery committed in the name of Allah away from “true” Islam onto what we’re told is a distorted, hijacked Islam embraced by only a tiny fringe. …

Last Wednesday, the most important public trial against, potentially, the deadliest al-Qaeda jihadist to breach our airspace since 9/11 concluded when the defendant, a highly educated, well-spoken man who is neither crazy nor addled by pain nor drugs nor waterboarding, told us who he was and what he wanted. More important, he told us what Allah and the Qur’an and Islam wanted — namely, that “every able Muslim participate in jihad and fight in the way of Allah, those who fight you, and kill them wherever you find them.” …

Abdulmutallab ended his statement to the court this way: “If you laugh at us now, we will laugh at you.” Not “I,” but “we.” The very first thing to which he pleaded guilty was a criminal conspiracy count. “I had an agreement with at least one person to attack the United States.” I’ll say he did. He was doing only what is demanded of “every able Muslim.”

And for that he says he’s not guilty according to the Qur’an; for attempting to use a weapon of mass destruction, he is “innocent in Muslim law.” …

Even if a bona fide Islamist terrorist … goes to the trouble of announcing to America that “my Islamic religious obligation requires me to carry an explosive device onto an aircraft and attempt to kill those onboard and wreck the aircraft as an act of jihad,” we still act as if Islam had nothing to do with it.

This isn’t innocent until proven guilty. This is innocent regardless of pleading guilty.

The writer’s point is that, as much as the individual perpetrators, Islam itself is guilty of the “bombings, beheadings, murders, mutilations, honor killings, and sundry other savagery committed in the name of Allah”.

Right.

Pat Condell recommends the burka as the perfect costume to represent evil on Halloween.

Back in May [2011] it was reported that every rape assault in the city of Oslo in the last five years had been committed by a person with a “non-Western” background – a Norwegian euphemism for Muslim. Now it turns out that there have already been twice as many rape assaults in Oslo so far this year as there were in all of 2010. At least one member of Parliament, André Oktay Dahl of the Conservative Party, calls the situation “critical” and is brave enough to acknowledge that many of the perpetrators come from cultures “with a reprehensible attitude toward women.”

So writes Bruce Bawer, the conservative columnist who lives in Norway, in an article at Front Page. He goes on:

The scandalous fact is that Norway, for all its wealth, has chosen not to invest overmuch in law and order. The very idea is simply too reactionary-sounding for the ’68-ers and their heirs in the political and bureaucratic corridors of power. As I wrote elsewhere a few months ago, “Norway wastes millions of kroner ever year on ‘development aid’ that ends up largely in the pockets of corrupt African dictators; it pours millions more into the pockets of non-Western immigrants who have become masters at exploiting the welfare system; for heaven’s sake, the Norwegian government even funds anarchists. It’s not entirely misguided for a Norwegian citizen to feel that his tax money is going less to fight the crime that threatens his home, his self, and his business than to support criminals.” …

[But] beefing up the police force wouldn’t even begin to address the problem that’s at the root of the country’s growing rape crisis: the presence in Norway, and especially in Oslo, of ever-growing numbers of people who have nothing but contempt for Western culture, who have absolutely no concept of respect for members of religions other than their own, and who have been brought up on the idea that women who dare to walk the street alone and without veils covering their faces deserve to be violated.

Which is to say again, Muslims.

Not so very many years ago, Oslo was virtually a rape-free city, inhabited by people who had been brought up on civilized notions of mutual respect and tolerance. No longer. Over the years, the incidence of rape has risen steadily. A wildly disproportionate number of the perpetrators are “rejected asylum seekers” – which may sound puzzling unless you are aware of the perverse state of affairs whereby even persons officially rejected for asylum in Norway are still allowed to stay. … The rapists … know very well that they will probably not be caught, and, if caught, will not be severely punished …

The incidence of rapes in Oslo has now eclipsed that in the other two Scandinavian capitals, Stockholm and Copenhagen. This is quite an achievement, given that Oslo has traditionally been the smallest and sleepiest of these three cities – the least cosmopolitan, the one that feels more like a safe small town than a European capital. In fact, it turns out that the incidence of rape in Copenhagen has been on the decline. It is perhaps not entirely coincidental that Denmark, for the last decade, has also been the country with the most sensible immigration and integration policies in Western Europe. (Nor is it coincidental that the other Scandinavian capitals have twice as many police per inhabitant as Oslo does.)

A glimpse of the official mentality that makes this steady rise in rape statistics possible was provided in an article that appeared in the Norwegian daily Dagbladet on October 25. It appears that in the summer of last year, the same paper ran a story about Abdi, a Somali immigrant, then 24 years old, who since coming to Norway as an asylum seeker had committed 14 robberies, been incarcerated, become a narcotic [addict], and lived on welfare. On June 3, 2010, Dagbladet reported, an Oslo court had ruled that Abdi, who is not a Norwegian citizen, should be returned to Somalia. Now, however, that ruling has been overturned by an appeals court. Abdi’s lawyer was jubilant, saying that this decision “is important for many Somalis in this country.” (Of all immigrant groups in Norway, Somalis are among those with the lowest employment and highest crime rates.) The lawyer chided Norway for having shown “an ugly face in this case” by planning to return her client to Somalia, but she expressed hope that given the new decision Norway would “change its practice” – presumably meaning that no amount of unsavory activity would make it possible to kick an immigrant out.

When did they? Was the last time within living memory?

The appeals court’s basis for its decision to let Abdi stay in Norway was that it might be dangerous for him to live in Somalia. Whether letting him stay in Norway might make life dangerous for Norwegians didn’t seem to enter into the court’s calculus. It’s not only the courts, to be sure, that are at fault in this sort of situation. In such cases, the media almost invariably step in and bombard the public with shameless propaganda designed to stir up sympathy for the miscreant in question. So it was with the Dagbladet article the other day, which sought to present Abdi as repentant, reformed, and reflective – indeed, almost sagacious and saintly. He was represented as having claimed that he has turned over a new leaf and that he now wants to help wayward immigrant kids to straighten out. He also supposedly said that he wants to study to be a sociologist (which, the more one thinks about it, sounds potentially even more dangerous than if he decided to persevere in his life of crime).

We say: Go for it, Abdi! It’s a real good career move for you. Your college fees will be paid by the tax payers, and research in the field will provide you with heaps of opportunities to hone your skills as a robber and rapist.

Okay we’re only kidding.

But in the light of this, don’t be surprised if it happens:

Crucifixes hung in a classroom at the Catholic University — a private university in Washington, D.C. — are apparently now considered a violation of Muslim students’ human rights.

It’s also a human right to be Pope.

“Communism with a god”:  the two perversions of the human mind we most abhor and oppose, collectivism and religion, rolled into one in Islam’s sharia law. 

It is spreading more rapidly through the world – through our world – than the most despairing pessimist could hardly have thought possible at the dawn of this century.

To underline our message in the post immediately below titled Communism with a god, we quote from an article by Professor Barry Rubin at PajamasMedia:

First, to describe the Obama Administration’s Middle East policy as a disaster – I cannot think of a bigger, deadlier mess created by any U.S. foreign policy in the last century – is an understatement.

Second, the dominant analysis being used by the media, academia, and the talking heads on television has been proven dangerously wrong. …

It amounts to a retreat for moderates, allies of the West, and American interests coupled with an advance for revolutionary Islamists. …

Egypt, Gaza Strip, Lebanon, Libya, Syria, Tunisia, and Turkey.

Six [actually seven – JB] countries or entities listed above have come—or are likely to come—under Islamist rule. …

We would add Iraq and make it eight.

In all but the case of Turkey — where the Obama Administration … has continually honored and excused an Islamist regime — and the Gaza Strip — where the Obama Administration helped entrench Hamas’s rule by forcing Israel to slash sanctions – they happened almost completely on Obama’s watch. Turkey and the Gaza Strip have become far worse on Obama’s watch. …

Syria, might merely remain under a repressive, pro-Iran, anti-American regime. And while there is a chance for a moderate democratic revolution, the White House is supporting the Islamists. …

There is no way to conceal this situation in October 2011 although it has been largely hidden, lied about, and misunderstood until this moment. Equally ideas must be quickly trashed that revolutionary Islamism doesn’t exist, cannot be talked about, is not a threat, that extreme radicals are really moderates.

Even now, the nonsense continues. The article you are reading at this moment probably could not have been published in a single mass media newspaper. Libya’s new regime calls for Sharia to be “the main” source of law. That is what the Muslim Brotherhood has been seeking in Egypt for decades. Yet we are being told that this isn’t really so bad after all.

The title of the Washington Post’s editorial, “Tunisia again points the way for Arab democracy, ” can be considered merely ironic. It certainly points the way… toward Islamist dictatorship. And then there are the New York Times and BBC headlines on the Tunisian elections telling us it is a victory for “moderate Islamists.”

They aren’t moderate. They’re just pretending to be. And you who fall for it aren’t Middle East experts, competent policymakers, or serious journalists; you’re just pretending to be.

I’m putting those headlines in my file alongside Moderate Islamists Take Power in Iran; Moderate Islamists Take Power in the Gaza Strip, Moderate Islamists Take Power in Lebanon, and Moderate Islamists Take Power in Turkey.

Without taking any position on climate issues, let me put it this way: Why are people frantic about the possibility that the earth’s temperature might rise slightly in 50 years but see no problem in hundreds of millions of people and vast amounts of wealth and resources becoming totally controlled by people who think like those who carried out the September 11 attacks?

We are observers, thinkers, skeptics, critics – not rabble-rousers. But we cannot stress too strongly that Barry Rubin and Frank Gaffney (quoted in our post below) are right to warn that our world is in dire peril.

Western sages coined the word “Islamist” to mean someone who took Islamic ideology too far; religious duty to pursue jihad to the point of mass killing, perhaps by suicide bombing, too seriously. In other words, an extremist. This allowed the sages, whose heads were more full of pride in their own tolerance than of little grey cells, to intone ad nauseam, “the vast majority of Muslims are peace-loving people who wouldn’t hurt a fly”. After which some of them would urge unknown spokesmen for that “vast majority” to come forward and denounce the “Islamist'” violence loud and clear.

They wait patiently, year in year out, for the silence to be broken.

The idea was that there are two Islams: a “moderate” one that does not take the commandments of the Koran – such as “kill the infidel” (Sura 9:5) – to be instructions to action, and another Islam that does.

The term “Islamist” has passed into common use to mean fanatical pursuers of Islamic jihad.

Now comes a new division: “moderate Islamists” – in other, equally oxymoronic, words: moderate fanatics, moderate extremists.

The idea crops up in this report about the elections in Tunisia:

A moderate Islamist group [Ennahdha] that was brutally repressed for decades was poised Monday to become Tunisia’s dominant political faction after a landmark election to choose a council that will draft the country’s new constitution and appoint an interim government. …

“The best way to deal with the Islamists is to include them in the process,” said Marwan Muasher, vice president for studies at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and an election observer with the National Democratic Institute. “There’s no excuse for keeping them out.”

In stark contrast to the Islamists’ success was the apparent poor performance of the secular Progressive Democratic Party …  The PDP ran a campaign that cast its leaders as the protectors of secular and modern values. … The PDP conceded its loss and pledged to work in the opposition rather than with Ennahdha.

In “the opposition”? How long will an opposition be allowed, we wonder.

The same idea of “moderate Islamism” was implied by the US Director of National Intelligence, James Clapper, when, in February, 2011, he told a House Intelligence Committee hearing that the Muslim Brotherhood was ” largely secular” and “eschewed violence .”

The Muslim Brotherhood, however, does not agree with him. Its motto is:  “Allah is our objective. The Prophet is our leader. Qur’an is our law. Jihad is our way. Dying in the way of Allah is our highest hope.”

The probable coming to power of “Islamist” parties in Tunisia, Egypt, and Libya is in fact a most ominous development.

Frank Gaffney, President Reagan’s assistant secretary of defense, warns:

War is on its way in the Middle East as Muslim countries are determined to force a showdown over the future of Israel …

“I’m afraid there’s a war coming, a very serious, perhaps cataclysmic regional war,” he said. “It will be presumably over, at least in part, the future existence of the state of Israel. It may involve all of its neighbors, as they have in the past, attacking Israel to try, as they say, to drive the Jews into the sea.

“It may involve the use of nuclear weapons … But whatever form it takes and whenever it occurs, it is unlikely to be contained to that region, and we must do everything we can to prevent freedom’s enemies from thinking they have an opportunity to engage in that kind of warfare.”

That means standing “absolutely, unmistakably” as one with Israel and doing everything to prevent Iran getting its hands on nuclear weapons.

Gaffney …  was speaking on the day that the “moderate” Islamist party Ennahda claimed victory at the ballot box in Tunisia and the day after Libya’s new rulers declared that country will be run on Islamic principles and under Sharia law. Gaffney does not believe Ennahda is really a moderating force. “I don’t believe there is such a thing as a moderate Islamist party,” he said. “The challenge with Islamists is that they seek to impose what they call Sharia on everybody, Muslim and non-Muslim alike. …

“They may, as a matter of tactical expediency, choose to do so in incremental ways, often nonviolently, at least initially.

“The problem is that, because ultimately they must — according to Sharia, according to what they believe is God’s will — make everyone feel subdued in order to achieve their God-mandated direction, they will not remain moderate. They will not be satisfied with anything less than the ultimate supremacy of Sharia and they certainly will not resist the use of violence when it becomes expedient to get their way.”

Gaffney … foresees a rising tide of Islamist governments growing throughout Middle East and North Africa and spreading even further.

“We’re witnessing not just the violent kind of jihad that these Islamists believe God compels them to engage in, but also, where they must for tactical reasons, a more stealthy kind, or civilizational jihad as the Muslim Brotherhood calls it. We’re witnessing that playing out, not only in places in the Middle East but also in Europe, in Australia, in Canada and here in the United States as well,” he said.

The spread of Sharia, which Gaffney said is often referred to as “Communism with a god,” is “the most urgent and grievous challenge we face as a free people.

“Those who follow this program of Sharia believe that God is directing them to engage in jihad or whatever form of warfare is necessary to accomplish their goals . . . .Through stealth, they have successfully penetrated important parts of the free world including our own government and civil society institutions.”

The Obama administration has to stop “embracing” the Muslim Brotherhood, Gaffney said.

“This is legitimating our enemies … It is facilitating their influence operations and their penetration and it greatly increases the prospect that they will be successful at what the Muslim Brotherhood’s own documents indicate is their desire, which is to destroy western civilization from within.”

Gaffney noted that Ennahda had won what appears to be a clean election in Tunisia, but that doesn’t mean there ever will be another vote there.

“The problem is not simply democracy. People are pointing to Tunisia as a perfect example of democracy at work. …  fine if all you want is one-man-one-vote one-time. That is precisely what the Muslim Brotherhood and its like-minded Islamist friends want.” …

“What we are likely to wind up with, not just in Tunisia, not just in Libya, not just in Egypt, but probably in due course in Syria — as we have in Lebanon, as we have in Gaza and probably will have down the road in Yemen, Bahrain, maybe Saudi Arabia — is the takeover, the unmistakable takeover, perhaps through the ballot box, of people who will not seek or allow others freedom, who will impose Sharia and who will use whatever resources they amass as a result, not only to suppress their own people, but to endanger us.”

We think Frank Gaffney is right about the Arabs wanting to make war again on Israel. They ache to make war on Israel. He’s also right that “Islamist” leaders are the most likely to try it.

But could they do it? Perhaps not in the near future. Egypt is desperately poor, on the verge of bankruptcy and mass starvation. Libya is rich enough to make war, but for all the pretense that the rebels were an army, it was only a collection of ad hoc militias, and the Libyan nation is a mass of quarreling tribes and factions vying to get their hands on the money Gaddafi stacked up round the world. True, a war against Israel would unite them, but could they fight it? Not on their own.

Yet sooner or later the war that Gaffney predicts will come. It may not come until the middle of the century, when Europe will be predominantly Muslim. Or it may be initiated soon by Iran, with nuclear bombs.

And when the war comes, the sages of the West who have helped to put “moderate Islamist” parties in power throughout the Arab world, will have gone a long way to promote the victory of “Communism with a god” and the fall of our civilization.

The pretense continues that “the rebels’ – a crowd of untrained Libyans dangerously armed – achieved the conquest of Tripoli and now the defeat of Gaddafi’s last defenders in Sirte and his capture.

Here is a report from the Telegraph in which the writer tries to uphold the internationally agreed lie, while yet supplying the information that a US drone guided from the Nevada desert, and French bombers, and British “advisers” – actually strategists and leaders and, probably, effective fighters in sufficient number – ended Gaddafi’s forces’ last stand and flushed out the man.

Deep in the lunar landscape of the Nevada desert, American specialists trained to their computer screens spotted unusual activity at around 7.30am in District Two. From their windowless bunker, lit by constantly flickering computer screens, the analysts directed their unmanned Predator drones to zoom in on the convoy [of trucks] as it picked up speed and headed west. Nato’s eyes were suddenly trained on Gaddafi’s convoy. …

Around 40 miles off the Libyan coast a Nato AWAC early-warning surveillance aircraft, flying over the Mediterranean, took control of the battle and warned two French jets that a loyalist convoy was attempting to leave Sirte.

As the convoy sped west, a Hellfire missile was fired from the Predator and destroyed the first vehicle in the convoy.

By now, the NTC troops had realised that the loyalists were escaping and a small number of lightly armed rebels began to give chase.

To me it seemed like a wild, chaotic situation. But we now know that it had, in fact, been foreseen by the British SAS and their special forces allies, who were advising the NTC forces.

British military sources have told The Sunday Telegraph that small teams of SAS soldiers on the ground in Sirte, armed but under strict orders not to get involved, had warned them throughout the siege to be alert to the fleeing of loyalists.

Assisted by other special forces – in particular the Qataris [put in because they’re Arabs which makes it okay if they have “boots on the ground”? – JB]  with whom the SAS have a long relationship dating back 20 years – the SAS tried to impress on the Libyans the need to cover all escape routes.

But despite the advice, the breakout seems to have taken the rebels on the Zafran front completely by surprise.

In the previous two weeks I had repeatedly seen the militiamen fail to hold forward positions at night as they fell back to their encampments. Again and again loyalists had used cover of darkness to surprise the militiamen and manoeuvre into new firing positions.

Once more their surveillance was lax, and one rebel fighter confessed to me that in the early hours of Thursday they had failed to keep proper watch on the western front and they were surprised by the convoy. …

At this point the SAS urged the NTC [National Transitional Council] leaders to move their troops to exits points across the city and close their stranglehold.

After the Hellfire missile struck its target, the convoy changed direction, possibly hoping to avoid a further strike, before heading west again. It had begun to fracture into several different groups of vehicles.

The French jets were also given permission to join the attack.

By now a group of 20 vehicles in the convoy had reached a point around three miles west of the city. The shattered streets had been left behind, and the convoy had halted next to a walled electricity sub station, in arid farmland dotted with breeze block compounds and trees.

Just then, the French pilot began his bombing run, seconds later releasing two 500lb GBU-12 laser-guided bombs, into the centre of the convoy.

The bombs unleashed massive force. Arriving at the site, a few hours later, their devastating power was clear to see: at least a dozen vehicles were shredded and burned out, while I counted more than 25 bodies, some lying twisted and charred inside the vehicles and others lying in clumps nearby.

The air strike marked the end of any attempt at an ordered retreat and the convoy’s remnants scattered. …

Col Gaddafi had survived the air strike, but was apparently wounded in the legs. With his companions dead or dispersed, he now had few options.

He and a handful of men … appeared to have made their way 300 yards north from the devastation and taken shelter in a drainage culvert running under a dual carriageway. …

Members of the Al Watan revolutionary brigade who had been following the convoy at a distance witnessed the explosion, but at that point still had no idea who was in the vehicles.

Saleem Bakeer, a rebel fighter who said he was among those who came across Gaddafi hiding in the pipes said they had approached on foot.

“One of Gaddafi’s men came out waving his rifle in the air and shouting surrender, but as soon as he saw my face he started shooting at me,” he said.

“Then I think Gaddafi must have told them to stop. ‘My master is here, my master is here’, he said, ‘Muammar Gaddafi is here and he is wounded’.”

“We went in and brought Gaddafi out. He was saying: ‘What’s wrong? What’s wrong? What’s going on?'”

The initial astonishment [on the part of the rebels] appears to have quickly switched to jubilation, and then rage.

“I don’t think that anyone thought he would be there, we all thought that he would be in the south, or maybe across in Niger or Algeria. We were as shocked as he was at first,” said Abdullah Hakim Husseini, one of the band of men who found him. “We were so happy when we knew it was him. I thought, ‘at last, it’s all over’.”

Mobile phone footage shows Col Gaddafi alive but weak and bloodied, with blows raining down on him from frenzied fighters. At one point he was hauled onto the bonnet of a pickup truck, then pulled down by his hair. His weighty golden gun, intricately engraved and decorated with the words “The sun will never set on the Al Fattah revolution”, was snatched by one of the revolutionaries. His satellite phone was seized, and it was later discovered that he had made one last call to Syria.

Omran el Oweyb, the commander who captured Gaddafi, said that he only managed to stagger ten steps before he fell to the ground. …

One rebel was heard screaming in his face: “This is for Misurata, you dog.”

Gaddafi – confused, bloodied, stumbling – can be heard to reply, in what could be his last, laughably philosophical words: “Do you know right from wrong?”

What happened in the next minutes is the subject of intense controversy. Sometime in the next hours or minutes he died of a bullet wound to the left temple. The official NTC account says he was caught in crossfire as he was being driven to hospital. …

However the ambulance driver who ferried him said Col Gaddafi was already dead when he was loaded into the ambulance, around 500 yards from his point of capture.

One NTC member, who did not want to be named, admitted that this version of events was likely. “They beat him very harshly and then they killed him,” he said. “This is a war.”

So British SAS soldiers directed the last battle on the ground.

A Hellfire missile and bombs released from French planes hit the truck-convoy in which Gaddafi was trying to flee from Sirte. Gaddafi and at least one of his men sought shelter in a large drainpipe. And only then the Libyan savages moved in for the kill.

This is also from the Telegraph:

In Benghazi, on the main square where it all started, they were slaughtering camels in celebration. … They daubed their hands in the camel-blood, and gave the V-for-victory sign with dripping fingers. …

In the cafes, people were watching TV pictures – more graphic than any shown in Britain – of a bloodied Gaddafi dragged along and beaten, feebly protesting, before a gun was put to his head.

The picture then cut to the dead ex-leader being rolled onto the pavement, blood pooling from the back of his skull. …

Gaddafi’s death is already showing up some of the weaknesses of Libya’s new rulers.

The claim by the interim prime minister, Mahmoud Jibril, that he was killed in “crossfire” looks ever more false with every new piece of video.

Both he and his son Mutassim were alive when captured, and dead soon after. A statement by an anonymous NTC source that “they beat [Gaddafi] and they killed him” seems closer to the mark.

But Mr Jibril angrily rejected demands by the United Nations and some in the West for a proper investigation into the circumstances of Gaddafi’s death.

“People in the West don’t understand the agony and pain that the people went through during the past 42 years,” he said.

The dictator’s treatment – before and after death – underlines that Libya does not have a government, or a state with functioning standards, only a collection of militias.

After he was killed, his [torn and bloodied] body was taken by the Misurata militia and put on display in a shopping centre, where yesterday the corpses of his slain son Mutassim and Gaddafi’s army chief, Abu Bakr, were placed alongside.

Libyans from hundreds of miles away came to queue up and, some wearing gloves and masks, view the three bodies. …

The various militias are quarreling over who should take possession of the corpses. It is a harbinger of fiercer quarrels to come. Trouble looms.

Most of the militias are based on a particular town, financed and commanded largely autonomously. Gaddafi’s death means that the main thing which united them – the war against him – is over. Now, the many rivalries and disputes between them, and between them and the NTC, may come to the fore. …

The NTC is indeed going to vanish: Mr Jibril, along with the rest of the council, have already said they will serve only until elections in eight months’ time, and he repeated that yesterday. Eight months is quite enough time for political disputes to fester and harden into something more serious.

Such as more civil war?

This comes from DebkaFile:

[National Transitional Council leader] Mustafa Abdul-Jalil will be little more than a figurehead. Even now, he is confined in Benghazi by three strongmen, who control most parts of the capital, and have not given him permission to move the seat of the interim government to Tripoli. …

The regime taking shape could not be further from the Western ideal of a free democracy.

Behind the grisly images of Muammar Qaddafi’s last moments spilling out since Thursday, Oct. 20, a quiet contest is afoot between the US and at least two NATO allies, France and Germany, over who deserves the credit for his termination and therefore for ending the alliance’s military role in Libya.

American sources are willing to admit that US drones operated by pilots from Las Vegas pinpointed the fugitive ruler’s hideout in Sirte and kept the building under surveillance for two weeks, surrounded by US and British forces.

Both therefore had boots on the ground in breach of the UN mandate which limited NATO military intervention in Libya to air strikes. …

According to the London Daily Telegraph, his presence in the convoy was first picked up by the USAF River Joint RC-135V/W intelligence signals plane, which passed the information to French warplanes overhead who then carried out the strike on Qaddafi’s vehicle.

The German Der Spiegel reported Monday, Oct. 24, that the tip revealing Qaddafi’s last hiding place came from German BND intelligence agents. Although Chancellor Angela Merkel was dead against German participation in the NATO operation in Libya, the BND nonetheless played an important role in intelligence-gathering.

It is increasingly obvious now that without the active intervention of the US, Britain, France and Germany, the anti-Qaddafi rebels on their own would never have beaten Qaddafi or been able to end his life.

As usual, however, the foreign offices of all the NATO countries involved in the operation will follow a long established custom of the Western powers and allow the Arabs to lie.

The lie will be that the people of Libya overthrew a tyrant. The truth will be that they’ll instate an Islamic regime in his stead; and the West, for all its talk of helping Libya become a free democracy, will not raise a finger to prevent that from happening.

“O ye who believe! Fight those of the disbelievers who are near to you, and let them find harshness in you, and know that Allah is with those who keep their duty (unto Him).” (Koran 9:123)

Bruce Bawer quotes this and other passages from the Koran (there are many) that show plainly enough how Islam is an intolerant religion commanding violence against non-Muslims.

He writes at Front Page:

Muslims have been persecuting Christians ever since the time of Muhammed. But in the wake of the so-called “Arab Spring,” such activity seems to be on the rise throughout much of the Islamic world, now that Muslims in several countries are enjoying greater freedom to do things they felt more restrained from doing before. Christians are being beaten and murdered, churches attacked and destroyed.

Bruce Bawer, a fine conservative and a provider of sound information on Islam, is also a Christian, so we don’t expect him to mention that Christians have beaten and murdered, tortured and persecuted at least as much as the Muslims have, though not as much lately. But it needs to be mentioned.

If there is a positive side of this terrible development, it is this: if there’s more such persecution going on, more attention is finally being paid to it in the mainstream Western media.

Can’t say we’d noticed that.

Yet even as some of the media are daring to report on these events, there remains a strong disinclination to suggest that this pattern of persecution has anything whatsoever to do with Islam. …

But in fact –

Anti-Christian and anti-Jewish passages, and all the other brutal precepts found in the Koran, need to be acknowledged and dealt with – because the people who are burning down churches and tormenting Christians have read their Koran, and they’re doing no more or less than what they think their God wants them to do.

“Dealt with” how?

The Obama administration bluntly denies that Islam teaches and demands slaughter, mass murder, subjugation, or any harm to non-Muslims at all.

This is from an article by Robert Spencer:

It has been a long time coming, but the Obama Administration has now officially banned the truth. Deputy U.S. Attorney General James Cole declared Wednesday at a conference in Washington that he had “recently directed all components of the Department of Justice to re-evaluate their training efforts in a range of areas, from community outreach to national security.” This “reevaluation” will remove all references to Islam in connection with any examination of Islamic jihad terror activity. The Obama Administration has now placed off-limits any investigation of the beliefs, motives and goals of jihad terrorists.

Dwight C. Holton, former U.S. Attorney for the District of Oregon, emphasized that training materials for the FBI would be purged of everything politically incorrect: “I want to be perfectly clear about this: training materials that portray Islam as a religion of violence or with a tendency towards violence are wrong, they are offensive, and they are contrary to everything that this president, this attorney general and Department of Justice stands for. They will not be tolerated.”

Understandable, since this president, this attorney general and Department of Justice stand for lies.

Holton said that he had spoken with Attorney General Eric Holder about FBI training materials that Holton claimed were “egregiously false,” and that Holder “is firmly committed to making sure that this is over….we’re going to fix it.” Holton said that this “fix” was particularly urgent because the rejected training materials “pose a significant threat to national security, because they play into the false narrative propagated by terrorists that the United States is at war with Islam.”

Cole suggested that these training materials had done damage domestically as well … “One of the many, tragic legacies of 9/11 has been an increase in prejudice, discrimination and hatred directed against persons of the Muslim and Sikh faiths …”

Robert Spencer comments:

For years Islamic advocacy groups like MPAC [Muslim Public Affairs Council] and Hamas-linked CAIR [Council on American-Islamic Relation] have asserted loudly and often that telling the truth about Islam’s doctrines of jihad warfare and supremacism constituted “hatred,” and endangered innocent Muslims. Hamas-linked CAIR has trumpeted and even fabricated hate crimes against Muslims in order to exaggerate this perception of Muslim victimhood.

The entire premise of all this, however, is false. The now-banned FBI training materials were not written out of hatred for Muslims. They were put together in order to give agents an accurate picture of the beliefs and perspectives of jihad terrorists. It is unfortunate but true that the Qur’an and Sunnah do contain doctrines of warfare and exhortations to make war against and subjugate infidels (cf. Qur’an 2:191; 4:89; 9:5; 9:29; 47:4, etc.), and it is not an act of “hatred” to point this out, or even to scrutinize the Muslim community in the U.S. in order to try to determine its view of these texts and teachings. The only people who are genuinely threatened by such scrutiny are those who wish jihad terrorism to be able to proceed unhindered.

And there’s the rub: in banning the truth about Islam and jihad, the Obama Administration has opened the door for increased jihad terror activity in the United States. Agents who do not understand the threat they face and are constantly surprised by the places where that threat is coming from will be powerless to stop this jihad activity. And the nation will reap the whirlwind.

It will be a great saga for historians to tell –

How the West helped Islam to victory in state after state of the Arab world.

How, while Islam stealthily and steadily penetrated and gained power in the Western democracies by exploiting their own mores and law, its power base was vastly extended and strengthened with the help of Western military might in North Africa, Iraq, Yemen, Syria, Pakistan and Afghanistan.

How the jihad advanced at a pace that Muhammad himself could hardly have dreamt of.

A contemporary report the historians may study is this from the Washington Post:

The long-awaited declaration of liberation [was] delivered by the head of the National Transitional Council, Mustafa Abdul-Jalil.

He … laid out a vision for a new Libya with an Islamist tint, saying Islamic Sharia law would be the “basic source” of legislation and existing laws that contradict the teachings of Islam would be nullified. …

Using Sharia as the main source of legislation is stipulated in the constitution of neighboring Egypt. …

In Brussels, neither the EU nor NATO wanted to address the issue of Sharia law. A NATO official said it was for the Libyans to decide on the system in their own country.

“We trust the Libyan authorities to build an inclusive Libya, respectful of human rights and the rule of law,” said an official …

Although “the Libyan authorities” – ie the rebel rag-tag army including al-Qaeda operatives – had given no sign that they could be trusted.

And this from the BBC:

Nearly 70% of voters have turned out to cast their ballot in Tunisia’s election, the first free poll of the Arab Spring, officials say.

Tunisians are electing a 217-seat assembly that will draft a constitution and appoint an interim government. …

Islamist party Ennahda is expected to win the most votes …

Ennahda’s leader, Rachid Ghannouchi, was heckled by a handful of secularist protesters as he left the polling station in Tunis where he voted.

The hecklers called him a terrorist and an assassin and shouted at him to return to London, where he spent 22 years in exile before returning to Tunisia in April.

But Mr Ghannouchi praised the electoral process, saying: “This is an historic day. Tunis was born again today; the Arab spring is born again today – not in a negative way of toppling dictators but in a positive way of building democratic systems, a representative system which represents the people.”

Iraqis have decided, with the blessing of coalition administrators, that Islamic law will rule in Iraq.

They reached this decision at about 4:20 a.m. on March 1, when the Iraqi Governing Council, in the presence of top coalition administrators, agreed on the wording of an interim constitution. This document, officially called the Transitional Administrative Law, is expected to remain the ultimate legal authority until a permanent constitution is agreed on, presumably in 2005. The council members focused on whether the interim constitution should name the Sharia as “a source” or “the source” for laws in Iraq. “A source” suggests laws may contravene the Sharia, while “the source” implies that they may not. In the end, they opted for the Sharia being just “a source” of Iraq’s laws.

This appears to be a successful compromise. It means, as council members explained in more detail, that legislation may not contradict either the “universally agreed-upon tenets of Islam” or the quite liberal rights guaranteed in other articles of the interim constitution, including protections for free speech, free press, religious expression, rights of assembly, and due process, plus an independent judiciary and equal treatment under the law.

But there are two reasons to see the interim constitution as a signal victory for militant Islam.

First, the compromise suggests that while all of the Sharia may not be put into place, every law must conform with it. As one pro-Sharia source put it, “We got what we wanted, which is that there should be no laws that are against Islam.” …

Second, the interim constitution appears to be only a way station. Islamists will surely try to gut its liberal provisions, thereby making Sharia effectively “the source” of Iraqi law. Those who want this change — including Mr. al-Sistani and the Governing Council’s current president — will presumably continue to press for their vision. Iraq’s leading militant Islamic figure, Muqtada al-Sadr, has threatened that his constituency will “attack its enemies” if Sharia is not “the source” and the pro-Tehran political party in Iraq has echoed Sadr’s ultimatum.

When the interim constitution does take force, militant Islam will have blossomed in Iraq.

Reuters reports that if there were to be war between the US and Pakistan, Afghanistan would support Pakistan.

So says that precious piece of corruption, President Hamid Karzai.

It is the big f-figurative slap in the face.

Afghanistan would support Pakistan in case of military conflict between Pakistan and the United States, Afghan President Hamid Karzai said in an interview to a private Pakistani TV channel broadcast on Saturday.

The remarks were in sharp contrast to recent tension between the two neighbors over cross-border raids, and Afghan accusations that Pakistan was involved in killing the chief Afghan peace envoy, former Afghan president Burhanuddin Rabbani, by a suicide bomber on September 20.

“God forbid, If ever there is a war between Pakistan and America, Afghanistan will side with Pakistan,” he said in the interview to Geo television.

“If Pakistan is attacked and if the people of Pakistan needs Afghanistan’s help, Afghanistan will be there with you.” …

Pressure on Islamabad has been mounting since U.S. special forces found and killed Osama bin Laden in May in a Pakistani garrison town, where he apparently had been living for years.

God may forbid, but Hillary Clinton must do the ruling out.

In a two-day visit to Islamabad, U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton issued stern warnings [shudder, ye powers!] and asked for more cooperation in winding down the war in Afghanistan, but ruled out “boots on the ground” in North Waziristan, where Washington has been pushing Pakistan to tackle the Haqqani network … a group of militants Washington has blamed for a series of attacks [on US and NATO forces] in Afghanistan, using sanctuaries in the Pakistani tribal region along the Afghan border

“No boots on the ground” should be engraved on Hillary’s gravestone. To her and the rest of the Obama clique, watching the pacifist Democratic fringe out of the corners of their eyes, the phrase is Leftspeak for “look, we are making war so distantly, surgically, and therapeutically, it’s hardly war at all”.

Is an alliance of Afghanistan with Pakistan  in a war against the US – even if only in theory – the reward America deserves for expending blood and treasure to save Afghanistan from the Taliban through ten long years of war? No, it is not.

Is it the just reward successive US governments deserve for sentimetally persisting in trying to transform the Afghans into a decent nation, “winning their hearts and minds”, “building democracy”, raising their standard of living, turning the US military into a mommery of social workers to fuss about their health care and education? Yes, it is.