From the transcript of President Obama’s speech on the 10th. anniversary of 9/11 we quote only one sentence:

I’ve made it clear that the United States is not and never will be at war with Islam. 

That is a lie. Islam is waging war on America, and on the whole of the non-Muslim world. In Afghanistan and Iraq, the US military is engaging the enemy. In the US itself, security forces have foiled Muslim terrorist plots. American civilians have saved lives by averting Muslim terrorist strikes on aircraft. The enemy is not just a single terrorist organization called al-Qaeda, as the president pretended in his appalling speech on the 10th anniversary of the 9/11 attack on the United States by Muslim jihadis, but Islam itself.

It should outrage the entire nation that the president of the United States, Barack Obama, made a speech on 9/11 exonerating Islam.

The attack by Muslims on the United States on September 9, 2001, was an act of war. It was an act carried out by the RELIGION OF WAR, which is Islam.

Yesterday we claimed that in the very long run we atheists will win the war with Islam, because in the very long run mankind will outgrow religion.

We have to concede that at present Islam is winning most of the battles.

Diana West explains this well. She writes:

It is something to have gone 10 years without an Islamic attack of similarly gigantic proportions to those of Sept. 11, 2001, but it is not enough. That’s because the decade we look back on is marked by a specifically Islamic brand of security from jihad. It was a security bought by the Bush and Obama administrations’ policies of appeasement based in apology for, and irrational denial of, Islam’s war doctrine, its anti-liberty laws and its non-Western customs. As a result of this policy of appeasement — submission — we now stand poised on the brink of a golden age.

Tragically for freedom of speech, conscience and equality before the law, however, it is an Islamic golden age. It’s not just the post-9/11 rush into Western society of Islamic tenets and traditions on everything from law to finance to diet that has heralded this golden age, although that’s part of it. More important is the fact that our central institutions have actively primed themselves for it, having absorbed and implemented the central codes of Islam in the years since the 9/11 attacks, exactly as the jihadists hoped and schemed.

Take the U.S. military, symbol plus enforcer of American security.

In Afghanistan, our forces are now “trained on the sanctity of the holy book (the Quran) and go to significant steps to protect it,” as the official International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) website reported last year.

Are they similarly trained to take “significant steps” to “protect” other books? Hardly. It’s reckless and irresponsible to demand that troops make the protection of any book a priority in a war zone. But it’s not merely the case that U.S. troops have become protectors of the Quran in the decade following 9/11. “Never talk badly about the Qu’ran or its contents,” ISAF ordered troops earlier this year. Did the Pentagon restrict language about “Mein Kampf” or the “Communist Manifesto”? They, too, were blueprints for world conquest that the United States opposed. Of course not. But the Quran is different. It is protected by Islamic law, and that’s enough for the Pentagon. Not incidentally, ISAF further cautioned troops to direct suspects to remove any Qurans from the vicinity before troops conduct a search — no doubt for the unstated fear that infidel troops might defile the protected book. None may “touch the Qu’ran except in the state of ritual purity,” the Islamic law book Reliance of the Traveller declares. …

Since when did Uncle Sam incorporate Islamic law into military protocols?

Since 9/11.

Now take the State Department, symbol and nerve center of U.S. action on the world stage.

In July, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton announced a collaborative effort between the United States and the OIC, newly repackaged as Organization of the Islamic Cooperation. (It used to be “C” for Conference.) The get-together planned for Washington, D.C., is supposed to implement a non-binding resolution against religious “stereotyping” (read: Islamic “stereotyping”) that passed last March at the U.N. Human Rights Council. Such “stereotyping,” of course, includes everything from honest assessments of the links between Islamic doctrine and Islamic terrorism to political cartoons. This makes this U.S.-led international effort nothing short of a sinister attempt to snuff free speech about Islam. And that sure sounds like a U.S.-co-chaired assault on the First Amendment. Not only is this treachery on the part of the U.S. government, it also happens to be part and parcel of the OIC’s official 10-year-plan.

Since when did Uncle Sam get in the business of doing the bidding of the OIC?

Since 9/11.

This is just a snapshot of what the rush toward Islamization as a goal of national policy looks like, 10 years since the Twin Towers collapsed in a colossal cloud of dust and fire. The air has cleared, but the appeasement and the Islamization go on. Thus, a golden age begins, but unless we throw off this mental yoke of submission, it cannot be our own.

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Palestinians handed out candy to celebrate the Islamic victory of 9/11.

Conservatives are saying, with a touch of restrained triumphalism, that the (badly named) “War on Terror”  is over, and America has won it.  (See for instance here and here.) The idea is that because of the security measures and military actions President Bush initiated and President Obama (however much against his will) has had to continue, there have been no repeat assaults on America on the scale of 9/11. That is true, and it is an important achievement. But it doesn’t mean that the war is over, and certainly not that the war is won. Plots have been laid by would-be terrorists that have been found out and foiled. Individual Muslims have carried out, or almost carried out, mass murder. And in the world at large, there have been to date over 17,700 murderous attacks by Islamic terrorists since September 2001. Some yesterday. Some today. And there will be more tomorrow.

And there are conservative thinkers who understand this. Frank Gaffney writes at Townhall:

So, where are we ten years after 9/11? It is comforting that we have been blessed with a near-unbroken decade without further mass-casualty attacks since those that killed nearly 3,000 Americans on September 11, 2001. Unfortunately, our government is pursuing policies that can only encourage those who aspire to do us harm to redouble their efforts.

Such an assessment was implicit in a critique of President Obama’s new counter-terrorism”strategy” delivered last week by Senate Homeland Security Committee Chairman Joseph Lieberman. The Democrat-turned-Independent from Connecticut described the President’s so-called “Empowering Local Partners to Prevent Violent Extremism in the United States” white paper as “ultimately a big disappointment”:

“The administration’s plan… suffers from several significant weaknesses. The first is that the administration still refuses to call our enemy in this war by its proper name, violent Islamist extremism. We can find names that are comparable to that, but not the one that the administration continues to use which [is] ‘violent extremism.’ It is not just violent extremism. There are many forms of violent extremism. There’s white racist extremism, there’s been some eco-extremism, there’s been animal rights extremism. You can go on and on and on. There’s skinhead extremism, but we’re not in a global war with those. … We’re in a global war that affects our homeland security with Islamist extremists. To call our enemy violent extremism [or “terror” – JB] is so general and vague that it ultimately has no meaning. The other term used sometimes is ‘Al-Qaeda and its allies.’ Now, that’s better, but it still is too narrow. … It is vital to understand that we’re not just fighting an organization Al-Qaida, but we are up against a broader ideology, a politicized theology, quite separate from the religion of Islam that has fueled this war. Success in the war will come consequently not when a single terrorist group or its affiliates are eliminated, but when broader set of ideas associated with it are rejected and discarded. The reluctance to identify our enemy as violent Islamist extremism makes it harder to mobilize effectively to fight this war of ideas.

As it happens, Sen. Lieberman is … right up to a point. If we are properly to recognize the enemy we face, however, we must appreciate two facts the Senator misses, as well: 1) The threat from adherents to the “politicized ideology that has fueled this war” are also using non-violent … techniques to wage it against us. And 2) that ideology is actually not “separate from the religion of Islam.” Rather, this politico-military-legal doctrine known as shariah is derived from the sacred texts, interpretations, rulings and scholarly consensuses of Islam. The reality that many Muslims around the world practice their faith without following the dictates of shariah simply means that some believe this code is separable from Islam. But, it is surely not “separate” from it. …

One the most important dimensions of their cognitive war is to get infidels, even without being conquered, to behave according to the restrictions of Islam. Among the most important impositions we have seen of this phenomenon…is the absolute prohibition on criticizing Allah or his prophet [known as “shariah blasphemy” laws]. …

What the Muslim Brotherhood calls “civilization jihad,” is about creating the conditions under which so-called “non-violent” Islamists can achieve their ultimate objective – which is precisely the same as the one pursued by their violent co-religionists: imposing shariah worldwide and a Caliph to rule according to it.

So where are we ten years after shariah-adherent Islamists sought to destroy the centers of American economic, military and government power? We remain dangerously exposed to similar sorts of violence from an enemy the President declines to name. Worse yet, to the extent we fail to perceive the cognitive war being waged against us against by al-Qaeda’s partners in the Muslim Brotherhood and the Organization of Islamic Cooperation – to say nothing of persisting in the Obama administration’s willingness to give ground in that war, notably by submitting our freedom of speech to shariah blasphemy laws – our Islamist foes will only be emboldened.

The war will be won when the ideology of Islam – or if you will, of sharia – is as universally discredited as is Nazism and Communism. Sure there are still Nazis lurking about, but there’s no significant movement that openly calls itself by that name. And there are still all too many Communists in the West, mainly in the Universities and the Obama administration, but they don’t like being called Communists.

The ideology that commands death for homosexuals and apostates, the stoning of adulterers, the subjugation and beating of women, the amputation of hands and feet as a punishment for petty crime (to give just a few examples), and commands its followers to be at war with the rest of the world until it brings the entire human race into its house, can only ultimately be defeated by words. It must be so shamed by accusation that it cannot hold its head up. And it can be. The Organization of Islamic Co-Operation knows and fears this, which of course is why it is trying to criminalize criticism of Islam.

Let’s assume that this ideology goes the way of Nazism and Communism and is brought to being ashamed of itself. Will it mean that the billion-plus-millions of Muslims in the world or most of them therefore give up their belief in and practice of their religion? Probably not. Terrorism and aggressive proselytizing may be suspended, but as  long as the teachings of Muhammad are believed and followed by many, the danger remains that the war will be resumed.

It must not be forgotten that 9/11 was a profoundly religious act. 

The best hope for the human race to be freed from the threat of Islam lies with the hope of its being freed from religion. It is not a vain hope. With every generation religious belief among the literate and well-informed is fading. As it becomes easier and cheaper for individuals to communicate personally across and within the borders of countries and continents, as ideas and knowledge spread further and faster, institutionalized superstition will come to be despised and the psychological darkness which preserves it dissipated.

See how far the religious have already had to retreat. The philosophers of religion are clinging to a last spar: “Intelligent Design”. They are claiming that the Big Bang proves the universe came into being just the way the Book of Genesis says it did. They have some frail arguments for those positions. But you don’t hear them going on much about a personal god who answers prayers, or insisting that a Jewish virgin gave birth to baby God in the reign of the Emperor Augustus. They know what’s indefensible, or at least beyond their best powers of debate.

We atheists are winning. Quite soon – in say two or three generations from now – we ourselves may have cause to express some restrained triumphalism.

On 9/11, Flight 93 crashed near Shanksville, Pa, when some of the passengers on the hijacked plane, having heard that the World Trade Center and the Pentagon had been attacked, acted to prevent their plane from being flown by the Muslim hijackers into another building, possibly the Capitol or the White House. Everyone on the plane died.

Their memorial is in the shape of a crescent. The crescent is the symbol of Islam. It is placed so that anyone entering the crescent in the middle of its open arms and proceeding forward is facing Mecca.

Below is a picture of the memorial. Is its shape a mockery of the victims, and America, or is its resemblance to the symbol of Islam a mere coincidence?

Either way, shouldn’t it have been changed once the resemblance was pointed out and reactions of outrage and unhappiness were expressed?

Even if it isn’t intended to be shrine, will its shape and placement not all too easily lend itself to being held and honored as one by Muslims, to the distress of millions of others?

Alec Rawls and Tom Burnett Sr. believe the shape is no error, that it has been designed to be a mihrab pointing to Mecca. A mihrab is a semicircle, usually in the wall of a mosque, that indicates the direction in which Mecca lies –  the qibla in Arabic – which is the way Muslims must face when praying.

Pamela Geller at Atlas Shrugs also believes that the memorial is an Islamic shrine.  She writes:

Please read the following plea from the father of Thomas Burnett. Thomas was the ringleader of the small group of courageous men who fought back against the Muslim terrorists on United Flight 93 on September 11, 2001, that crashed in the fields in Pennsylvania. He made four now-famous cell phone calls to his wife from the plane, making a quick assessment of the Muslims’ suicidal flight plan, and made a decision to “do something.” He gave his life to ensure that the plane would not reach its intended destination in Washington.

This was the email from Thomas Burnett’s father after I told him in no uncertain terms that I would be honored to post his letter:

Dear Pamela

Thank you for posting my letter on your blogs.

We thank you for speaking out against the planned mosque in New York.

We too need your help; we need to stop the National Park Service building another mosque in Shanksville. PA.

I served on the 2005 2nd jury that was commissioned to select a design honoring the passengers and crew on Flight 93. The public submitted over 1100 designs. The first jury went through those 1100 designs and selected 5 designs that were presented to the 2nd jury.

When I saw Crescent of Embrace, I immediately saw the Islamic symbols. I spoke out against the design and explained my reasons to the other members of the jury. The vote was taken, 9 for the Crescent of Embrace and 6 against that design. That vote was not unanimous.

There were 4 excellent designs left; there was absolutely no reason to select a design that even suggested Islamic symbols.

I knew that the public would agree with me when they saw the Crescent of Embrace design. They did, but our government would not listen or investigate our claims. All of our letters ended up in the same hands, the National Park Service. We can’t give up; we must stop this mosque being built in Shanksville, as well as the one in New York.

Thank you for helping us.

Warmly, Tom Burnett Sr.

And here is Michelle Malkin’s view:

Tons of you are stunned, outraged, and sickened by the new Flight 93 Memorial, the “Crescent of Embrace.” I called the architect responsible for the redesign, Paul Murdoch of Los Angeles, yesterday for comment. He did not return my call, but he did speak with the Johnstown, Pa., Tribune Democrat, as quoted in the Pittsburgh Post Gazette.

Neither Murdoch nor his supporters see any problem with the red crescent wrapped around the crash site near Shanksville, Pa., where 40 innocent people were murdered at the hands of Islamic terrorists:

“This is not about any religion per se,” Murdoch said in a telephone interview with the Tribune-Democrat in Johnstown. “It’s a spiritual space, and a sacred place, but it’s open to anyone.”

The word “crescent,” he said, was used as a generic architectural term for a curved line.

“Sure, there is an Islamic crescent,” Murdoch said. “Theirs is a lunar crescent. Ours isn’t based on that.” …

[Yet] even the second-stage jury that selected the design recommended changing its name [not the design! – JB] to steer clear of religious overtones. Rather than crescent, the jury suggested using circle or arc of embrace instead.

Michelle Malkin thinks that the plan has the feel of a practical joke, “a very sick one”.

Here it is:

Crescent of Betrayal

(Credit: Zombie)

Pointing to Mecca

David Solway asks in a PajamsMedia article, “Who and what is the vampire?”

Here’s part of his answer:

It presents itself as a composite figure — a political party, an ostensibly liberal bringer of gifts and cachet, a potent ideology that strives to transform the world, a utopian philosophy that promises bliss upon conversion to its purposes but leads only to a society of the locavore undead. Its acolytes and minions swarm through the world infecting the gullible with the serum of its malignity… It proceeds systematically to undermine the strength of those among whom it freely moves, surviving by transfusions of the energy and substance of others who remain unaware that they are the quarry and not the beneficiaries. It redistributes the lifeblood of nations throughout its own body and the collective body of its adherents. It offers ease, comfort, and security, but at the insidious expense of vitality and freedom — and ultimately of the very ease, comfort, and security it has guaranteed. Its manner can be suave and polished though often enough a rough impatience pokes through its carefully constructed veneer. It responds to challenges with aristocratic haughtiness and gutter ruthlessness. It is clever and unscrupulous. It is a purveyor of lies and deceptions. It loves the accoutrements of power and the grand architecture of its residence. It embraces what appear to be noble causes the better to hide its appetite for dominion. …

Doesn’t it remind you of  … you know … Whatshisname?

Prime Minister Erdogan of Turkey is furious that the Palmer report found Israel was acting legally when it intercepted the protest flotilla launched from Turkey to break the Israeli blockade of Gaza in May 2010. (See our post A surprise, Sept. 1, 2011). The report – although issued by the United Nations – actually found fault with the protestors and with Turkey itself.

The Islamic world is not used to being found fault with by the UN, especially in relation to Israel. And Erdogan won’t stand for it.

He plots revenge – not against the UN but against Israel.

“I will do such things – what they are, yet I  know not: but they shall be the terrors of the earth!”

Well, that wasn’t exacty what he said – that was King Lear. Erdogan has some definite plans in mind, not very awe inspiring, but he sure would like them to be the terrors of the earth.

These are the things he has threatened to do:

Strengthen the presence of the Turkish navy in the eastern Mediterranean, and “pursue a more aggressive strategy”.

Again send ships to “carry aid” to Gaza. Turkish naval vessels will accompany civilian ships carrying aid to Palestinians in the Gaza Strip.Whether to try reaching the shore of Gaza itself, in order to incite action by the Israeli navy, is not clear.

Personally visit Gaza. Whether he’ll sail directly to Gaza, to incite interception, is again not clear. An official said –

“Our primary purpose is to draw the world’s attention to what is going on in Gaza and to push the international community to end the unfair embargo imposed by Israel.”

If the blockade is not illegal it is at least “unfair”, Turkey maintains. To be fair, the Israelis should allow Hamas to import weapons freely into Gaza to use against them.

Will Erdogan really do what he threatens and risk a clash at sea with Israel? Or is all his vengeful talk mere bluster?

According to this report, Israel’s navy is far superior to Turkey’s:

The Turkish Navy is no match for Israeli missile boat technology and their electronic jamming and tracking systems. Neither do the Turks have advanced submarines like Israel’s German-made Dolphins or close air cover.

Stamping about the stage raging against Israel may be all he can do.

Time will tell.

The greatness of the West began with doubting. The idea that every belief, every assumption, should be critically examined started the might of Europe. When those old Greek thinkers who founded our civilization learnt and taught that no one has a monopoly of truth or ever will have, they launched the intellectual adventure that has carried the human race – not without a long interval in the doldrums – literally to the skies.

Socrates taught the utility of suspicion. He is reputed to have said, “The highest form of human excellence is to question oneself and others.” He was not, however, the first to use doubt for discovery. Thales of Miletos, who was born 155 years before Socrates, dared to doubt that religion’s explanatory tales about how the world came to be as it is were to be trusted, and he began exploring natural phenomena in a way that we recognize as scientific. He is often called the Father of Science. With him and his contemporary, Anaximander, who argued with him by advancing alternative ideas, came the notion – for the first time as far as we know – that reason could fathom and describe how the universe worked.

Science is one of the main achievements of the West, but it is not the only product of constructive doubt that made for its greatness. Doubt as a habit of mind or tradition of thinking meant that new, foreign, even counter-intuitive ideas were not dismissed. Europe, before and after it stagnated in the doldrums of the long Catholic Christian night (and even to some extent during those dark centuries), was hospitable to ideas wherever they came from.

Totally opposed to this intellectual openness were the churches with their dogma. Those who claim that the achievements of our civilization are to be credited to Christianity (or in the currently fashionable phrase to “the Judeo-Christian tradition”) have a hard case to make. It was the rediscovery of the Greek legacy in the Renaissance in the teeth of Christian dogmatism, and the new freedom from religious persecution exploited by the philosophers of the Enlightenment that re-launched the West on its intellectual progress, to become the world’s nursery of innovation and its chief factory of ideas.

Our civilization cannot survive without this openness. Critical examination is the breath that keeps it alive. But it is in danger of suffocation. It is more threatened now than it has been for the last four hundred years by dogmatisms: Marxism, environmentalism, religion – above all Islam which absolutely forbids criticism.

The Founding Fathers of the United States perfectly understood the necessity for an open market of ideas. Every citizen of the republic, they laid down, must be free to declare his beliefs, to argue his case, to speak his mind, to examine ideas as publicly as he chose without fear of being silenced.

No longer?

This warning comes from Nina Shea, writing in the National Review:

An unprecedented collaboration between the Obama administration and the Organization of Islamic Cooperation (OIC, formerly called the Organization of the Islamic Conference) to combat “Islamophobia” may soon result in the delegitimization of freedom of expression as a human right.

The administration is taking the lead in an international effort to “implement” a U.N. resolution against religious “stereotyping,” specifically as applied to Islam. To be sure, it argues that the effort should not result in free-speech curbs. However, its partners in the collaboration, the 56 member states of the OIC, have no such qualms. Many of them police private speech through Islamic blasphemy laws and the OIC has long worked to see such codes applied universally. Under Muslim pressure, Western Europe now has laws against religious hate speech that serve as proxies for Islamic blasphemy codes.

Last March, U.S. diplomats maneuvered the adoption of Resolution 16/18 within the U.N. Human Rights Council (HRC). Non-binding, this resolution, inter alia, expresses concern about religious “stereotyping” and “negative profiling” but does not limit free speech. It was intended to — and did — replace the OIC’s decidedly dangerous resolution against “defamation of religions,” which protected religious institutions instead of individual freedoms.

But thanks to a puzzling U.S. diplomatic initiative that was unveiled in July, Resolution 16/18 is poised to become a springboard for a greatly reinvigorated international effort to criminalize speech against Islam, the very thing it was designed to quash.

Citing a need to “move to implementation” of Resolution 16/18, the Obama administration has inexplicably [not if Obama’s Islamophilia is remembered – JB] decided to launch a major international effort against Islamophobia in partnership with the Saudi-based OIC. This is being voluntarily assumed at American expense, outside the U.N. framework, and is not required by the resolution itself.

On July 15, a few days after the Norway massacre, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton co-chaired an OIC session in Istanbul on religious intolerance. It was there that she announced the initiative, inviting the OIC member-states’ foreign ministers and representatives to the inaugural meeting of the effort that the U.S. government would host this fall in Washington. She envisions it as the first in a series of meetings to decide how best to implement Resolution 16/18.

In making the announcement, Clinton was firm in asserting that the U.S. does not want to see speech restrictions: “The resolution calls upon states to ‘counter offensive expression through education, interfaith dialogue, and public debate . . . but not to criminalize speech unless there is an incitement to imminent violence.’” (This is the First Amendment standard set forth in the 1969 Supreme Court case of Brandenburg v. Ohio.)

With the United States providing this new world stage for presenting grievances of “Islamophobia” against the West, the OIC rallied around the initiative as the propaganda windfall that it is. It promptly reasserted its demands for global blasphemy laws, once again sounding the call of its failed U.N. campaign for international laws against the so-called defamation of Islam. It has made plain its aim to use the upcoming conference to further pressure Western governments to regulate speech on behalf of Islam.

The aim of the OIC is to criminalize criticism of Islam, though it might go along with banning the criticism of religion in general as an interim step. It will reserve to itself the right to condemn all other religions and beliefs, but allege that any criticism of Islam is incitement to violence – and call angry crowds on to the streets to prove it. 

Islam is now the major threat to the West. Its ideas are the very opposite of those on which the USA was founded. It is an ideology of intolerance and cruelty. It forbids the free expression of thought. By its very nature, even if it were not now on a mission of world conquest (which it is), it is the enemy of the West.

The best way to defeat it is by criticizing it, constantly and persistently, in speech and writing, on the big screen and the small screen, in the schools and academies, in all the media of information and comment, in national and international assemblies.

If the weapon of words is forbidden, the only alternative will be guns. 

While leftists and other “humanitarians” in the United States and Europe are in a perpetual state of moral outrage concerning Israel’s alleged mistreatment of Palestinians, the savagery of modern-day Arab enslavement of black Africans elicits almost no reaction.

So writes Stephen Brown at Front Page in an article on the Arabs’ African slaves, particularly in Mauritania:

The most recent case highlighting this leftist hypocrisy concerns four anti-slavery activists in Mauritania, who were sentenced last week to six months in jail for protesting the enslavement of a ten-year-old girl earlier in August in Nouakchott, the country’s capital. …  The convicted men belong to the Initiative for the Resurgence of the Abolitionist Movement in Mauritania (IRA), an anti-slavery NGO. …

Yet under Mauritanian law the criminal was the slave-owner:

The IRA discovered the child slave in Nouakchott, and reported the matter to police. Owning a slave was made a crime in Mauritania in 2007. It calls for a penalty of up to ten years in prison and fines ranging from US $2,000 to $4,000. A prison term of up to two years is also mandated for anyone who “facilitates” slavery. …

The law was nodded at:

The ten-year-old slave girl’s mistress… was arrested and charged but only has to report to the police once a week.

The slave child is nowhere to be found:

The child, for whom the demonstrators braved the government’s “draconian response,” is reported as still missing.

Why are the authorities allowing this obvious miscarriage of justice?

A problem in abolishing slavery in Mauritania, says one former slave, now an anti-slavery activist with SOS Esclaves, is that “the authorities themselves keep slaves.” …

SOS Esclaves is another anti-slave group in the country, which –

estimates there are about 500,000 black African slaves among the country’s population of 3.1 million. Their masters are Arab and Berber Mauritanians, who share only the same Islamic religion with their chattel. Unlike in Sudan, where the Arabs get their African slaves from old-fashioned, brutal slave raids, the Mauritanian slaves are the product of a system that has kept them in a state of bondage for generations, going back, in some cases, several hundred years. …

Laws made against slavery in Arab countries are a matter of window-dressing for Western observers. They mean little because sharia, the law of Islam, promotes slavery:

Slavery in Mauritania and other Arab countries will be difficult to eradicate. Slavery is an ingrained, centuries-old institution in Islamic countries. It is also legal under Sharia law …

From the seventh century to the twentieth, it is estimated 14 million Africans were violently enslaved and transported under harsh conditions around the Islamic world.

Black Africans became synonymous in Arab eyes with inferiority and with even something less than human. And since the Islamic world experienced no abolition movement … the black slave … continued to remain sub-human in the Arab worldview.

Which goes a long way towards explaining why black Africans are being hunted down, imprisoned, tortured, or just summarily murdered in Libya by the Libyan rebels whom the US, Britain, France, NATO are actively supporting – while the attention of those multitudes of leftists and other “humanitarians” whom Stephen Brown so rightly scorns is otherwise engaged.

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The plight of the Arabs’ black slaves will not be the subject of UNESCO’s “anti-racism” convention, Durban III, to be held in New York later this month.

No doubt, like Durban I and Durban II, it will be an international hate-fest against Israel and the Jews.

Last November these countries voted against the Durban III session: Australia, Bulgaria, Canada, the Czech Republic, Denmark, Estonia, Germany, Israel, Italy, Latvia, Lithuania, the Marshall Islands, Micronesia, the Netherlands, Palau, Poland, Romania, Slovakia, Sweden, the former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia, the United Kingdom and the United States. (Austria, Belgium, France, Greece, Hungary and Spain abstained.)

Governments (in addition to Israel’s) that have announced they will not be joining in the coven are those of: The Czech Republic, Canada, Australia, Germany, the Netherlands, Austria, and – reluctantly? – the US.

The Palmer report on the flotilla which sailed from Turkey to break the Israeli naval blockade of Gaza and was intercepted on May 31 2010 by Israeli forces, is here in full. It is to be published tomorrow, Friday September 2, 2011.

Proceeding as it does from the nefarious UN, it is something of a surprise.

Here’s a summary of its findings from the New York Times. Since the NYT is an organ of the Left and and ideologically anti-Israel, the information it provides is unlikely to be deliberately spun in favor of Israel’s account of the events. In fact it does its best to stress every fault found with the Israelis, but conveys the report’s conclusion that Israel did not act illegally. 

[The report] found that when Israeli commandos boarded the main ship they faced “organized and violent resistance from a group of passengers” and were therefore required to use force for their own protection. But the report called the force “excessive and unreasonable,” saying the loss of life was unacceptable and the Israeli military’s later treatment of passengers was abusive. …

Turkey is particularly upset by the conclusion that Israel’s naval blockade is in keeping with international law and that its forces have the right to stop Gaza-bound ships in international waters, which is what happened here. …

Israel considers the report to be a rare vindication for it in the United Nations. A Security Council statement at the time assailed the loss of life and Israel suffered widespread international condemnation. …

The United Nations investigation into the events …  was headed by Sir Geoffrey Palmer, former prime minister of New Zealand, aided by Álvaro Uribe, former president of Colombia, along with a representative each from Israel and Turkey.

It takes a broadly sympathetic view of Israel’s sea blockade of Gaza.

“Israel faces a real threat to its security from militant groups in Gaza,” the report says in its opening paragraphs. “The naval blockade was imposed as a legitimate security measure in order to prevent weapons from entering Gaza by sea and its implementation complied with the requirements of international law.”

The report is hard on the flotilla, asserting that it “acted recklessly in attempting to breach the naval blockade.” It said that while the majority of the hundreds of people aboard the six vessels had no violent intention, that could not be said of IHH, the Turkish aid group that primarily organized the flotilla. It said, “There exist serious questions about the conduct, true nature and objectives of the flotilla organizers, particularly IHH.”

It also said that the Turkish government tried to persuade the organizers to avoid an encounter with Israeli forces but that “more could have been done.”

Regarding the boarding of the [Mavi Marmara] ship, the Palmer committee said Israel should have issued warnings closer to the moment of action and should have first turned to nonviolent options. …

Some earlier reports say they did just that, firing nothing more lethal than paint balls in self-defense.

The [Palmer] report does, however, acknowledge that once on board the commandos had to defend themselves against violent attack.

The report also criticizes Israel’s subsequent treatment of passengers saying it “included physical mistreatment, harassment and intimidation, unjustified confiscation of belongings and the denial of timely consular assistance.”

But they were armed passengers according to this source:

The passengers … pulled out bats, clubs, and slingshots with glass marbles, assaulting each soldier as he disembarked. The fighters were nabbed one by one and were beaten up badly …

And as for “the majority of the hundreds of people aboard the six vessels” having “no violent intention”, a video clip casts doubt on that claim. It shows –

the hysteria against Israel being whipped up on board before the ships set sail, with the chanting of intifada songs about ‘Khaybar’ – the iconic slaughter of Jews by Muslims in the 7th century which is used as a rallying cry to kill the Jews today — and threats of ‘martyrdom’. This was not merely a propaganda stunt, but a terrorist attack.

There is far more violence and killing in the Middle East, on the ground and from the air, within and across the borders of sovereign states, than even the most attentive news addict would learn from the Western media.

Here’s a report on Turkey’s bombing of northern Iraq.

The Iraqi government is apparently unmoved by the military attack on its territory – not moved to indignation anyway. Perhaps it silently welcomes the onslaught, since the victims are Kurds. Anyway, it has made no attempt to repel the bombers by force or even by diplomacy.

The Western mass media, and the UN, and the government of the United States, also choose to ignore the continuing military operation.

Western governments, media, and professional humanitarians do not find the Kurds interesting.

Turkey justifies its attack by claiming to be retaliating for the killing of  Turkish soldiers by Kurdish terrorists.

Western governments, media, and professional humanitarians have not proclaimed that the retaliation is “disproportionate”.

Iran too has recently bombed the Kurds in northern Iraq. No protests. Except by the Kurds, of course – but the powers that have signed on to a UN resolution to protect civilians are not listening to them.

Since mid-July hundreds of Kurdish civilians in Iraq have fled bombings by the Iranian and Turkish armies, and set up refugee camps that are situated along the northern part of Iraqi Kurdistan (which borders Turkey and Iran). Up to a hundred Kurds have been killed in these bombings.

A Turkish crackdown on Kurds is nothing new and is part of an ongoing war with the terrorist organization PKK (Kurdistan Workers Party), that started in 1984. In this war approx. 40,000 people – most of them Kurds – died, another two million Kurds or so were displaced and more than 3000 Kurdish villages were destroyed.

This time around however, the stakes are much higher since the Kurds have cast their eyes on the ‘Arab spring’, and feel that this might be the moment to establish an independent Kurdistan.

The situation on the border of northern Iraq started to deteriorate when Iran began bombing Kurdish villages in July. …

Turkish officials insist that the raids are not aimed at civilians but are meant to destroy the PKK’s infrastructure and to annihilate its fighters. …

Aimed at or not, civilians have been killed.

The recent Turkish military campaign triggered Iraqi Kurdish protests. They started when a family of seven was killed by a Turkish air strike near the town of Rania in Iraq, next to the Iranian border.

But let none say that Prime Minister Erdogan, who ordered the Turkish air force to bomb the Kurds in northern Iraq, and under whom “Turkey is rapidly becoming less democratic and more Islamic”, is without a soft side to his nature. He has spoken out against the violence unleashed in Syria, on Kurds and others, by Assad:

Erdogan … harshly criticized Bashar al-Assad’s bloody suppression of opposition protests in neighboring Syria, which has its own Kurdish minority. Tensions between Turkey and Syria boiled over this week, after Assad told Erdogan not to interfere in internal Syrian affairs. …

Erdogan will not confine himself to minding Turkish affairs. He “aims to Islamize Turkish society and to limit political freedom” as the report rightly says, and he is off to a strong start in realizing his agenda not only in his own country but beyond:

The Erdogan regime is supporting the Islamist agenda for the Middle East and working to become a regional superpower.

The writing is on the wall but it is highly doubtful the West will notice it.

Until it must, when the conflagration spreads – as it almost certainly will –  too widely to be ignored any longer.

Note: It should be remembered that Turkey is a member of NATO.