Glenn Beck asks:

Why did it take President Obama nine days to speak out against the atrocities taking place in Libya? After all, he immediately came out to condemn Mubarak when protesters spoke up in Egypt.

Jay Carney, the President’s new Press Secretary, explained, “This is just a scheduling issue. As I said, the president will meet with Secretary of State Clinton this afternoon, his regular meeting and they will obviously discuss Libya. He will have something to say at that meeting and it’s possible the president will speak this afternoon or tomorrow.”

Well, Obama finally did make one of his “let me be clear” speeches –  in which he never is clear – on what’s happening in Libya, without mentioning the name of the tyrant Gaddafi who’s trying to stop the revolution by having hundreds of protestors killed in the streets. But in the speech can be found, by suspicious minds like ours, the reason why he had to wait for nine days before he could say anything.

He had to wait until he knew what certain others thought about the issue. Which others? “The Arab League, the African Union, the Organization of the Islamic Conference*, and many individual nations.” (Oh, he also put in “the European Union”, perhaps to make the list look respectable.)

A list of those “individual nations” would be interesting, but we don’t expect to hear which they were. Russia? China? Probably the individual members of the Arab League, the African Union, and the Organization of the Islamic Conference.

The Washington Post, though its bias is generally towards Obama and the left, is not uncritical of the administration’s absence of a coherent foreign policy:

Jay Carney … is the mouthpiece of an administration that has painfully little to say. …

[But] the passivity wasn’t the fault of the new spokesman. He merely had the uncomfortable task of articulating a coherent policy in the absence of one.

What sort of leader is Obama then?

David Solway in a longish article trying to answer that question, arrives at this opinion:

There is no question that Obama is a man driven by a power pack of hard-left theories and precepts. Yet when responding to sudden events whether at home or abroad, he has no settled mind, only impulses and inclinations. This explains why he is constantly backtracking in trying to explain his switchback itinerary and impetuous behavior …

But then Solway wonders:

Which Obama inspires greater uneasiness, the dedicated socialist or the vacillating flibbertigibbet?

When it comes to foreign affairs, look for the flibbertigibbet every time.

*For the leading role of the OIC in advancing the spread of Islam in the West, see our post Europe betrayed, February 11, 2010; and see The trusted envoy, February 20, 2010, for Obama’s appointment of a US representative to the organization.

Colonel Muammar Gaddafi

Our Yukkie Award for the Most Personally Repulsive Tyrant in modern times goes, in a line-up of stiff competition, to Colonel Gaddafi of Libya.

Maybe only just in time. His tyrant status is slipping. He’s no longer supremo over the whole of his bleak desert country. About a third to a half of the six-or-so million miserable people whose faces he’s been grinding in the dust for decades are in full rebellion, and the blood of hundreds of them is soaking the sand as his still-obedient goons mow them down on land, from the air, and from the sea.

Here is one of DebkaFile’s reports, which, though not necessarily accurate in all details, contains more concrete information than most US news sources:

Cyrenaican protesters … who control half of the country and part of its oil resources, embarked Sunday, Feb. 20, on a full-scale revolt against Muammar Qaddafi and his affluent ruling Tripolitanian-dominated regime.

Cyrenaica is in the east of the country. There the coastal towns of Benghazi and Tobruk are in the hands of the rebels.

Unlike the rights protests sweeping the Middle East and North Africa, in Libya, one half of the country is rising up against the other half, as well as fighting to overthrow a dictatorial ruler …

Since last week, heavy battles have been fought in Benghazi, Al Bayda, Al Marj, Tobruk and at least two other two cities. In some places … protesters stormed army bases and seized large quantities of missiles, mortars, heavy machine guns and armored vehicles – and used them. The important Fadil Ben Omar Brigade command base in Benghazi was burnt to the ground.

Qaddafi’s 42-year rule of Libya appeared to have begun disintegrating Monday, Feb. 21, as civil war swept the country with no signs of him quitting. Instead, he ordered the army to redouble its brutal assaults on the opposition. The Air Force began bombing crowds at random while army tanks and armored vehicles blasted them with live ammunition – not just in the insurgent eastern provinces of Cyrenaica, but the capital of Tripoli and its environs too. There, helicopter gunships aimed heavy machine fire into the main market, the Souk al Jumma, while the first tribal militias loyal to Qaddafi to arrive in the capital from the Sahara fought alongside the army. Casualties soared to an estimated 600, with 250 in Tripoli alone …

High officials of his regime and businessmen began fleeing Tripoli aboard Libyan Air Force fighter jets and helicopters which landed Monday at Malta’s MIA international airport. Government officials in Valetta said the pilots had defected rather than bomb demonstrators, while all the Libyan arrivals asked for political asylum and more flights were on the way.

The United States and European Union have concentrated airplanes and ferries on the island ready to evacuate the thousands of their citizens employed in Libya, most in the oil and gas fields …

And here is a later report from the same source:

In a long, fiery speech broadcast by Libyan state TV Tuesday, Libya’s ruler Col. Muammar Qaddafi … made it clear he had no intention of devolving his powers or “stepping down and giving up like other leaders.” …

The 22,000-man strong Libyan Air Force with its 13 bases is Muammar Qaddafi’s mainstay for survival against massive popular and international dissent… 44 air transports and a like number of helicopters swiftly lifted loyal tribal militiamen fully armed from the Sahara and dropped them in the streets of Tripoli Monday, Feb. 21.

Qaddafi had mustered them to fill the gaps left by defecting army units and the large tribal militia which went over to the people.

One of the ruler’s sons, Mutassim Qaddafi, is in command of the Tripoli crackdown. Air Force planes, mostly from the Libyan Air Force’s inventory of 226 trainers, and helicopter gunships, bombed and fired heavy machine guns to scatter every attempt to stage a rally in the city’s districts. In their wake, Mutassim’s “Libyan Popular Army” cleared the streets of protesters.

The tactics employed by Qaddafi and his sons was, first, to give the protesters free rein to rampage through the city, torch state TV and government buildings and so generate an impression among them and in the West that the Qaddafis were about to fall. But when the demonstrators fanned out to seize the rest of the capital, they were bombed from the air and targeted by the tribal militias, who had no qualms about shooting directly at civilian crowds.

By the small hours of Tuesday, Feb. 22, when Qaddafi went on air to demonstrate he was still in Tripoli, he was again in control of the capital. …

His strategy for staying in power rests first on consolidating his grip on Tripoli and then using it as a base for military operations to regain control of the rest of the country, including Cyrenaica . … Libyan Navy missile ships began pounding Benghazi from the sea.

We’ll all soon be feeling the effects of the Libyan revolution and civil war:

Straight after [Gaddafi’s] speech, Tripoli announced that Libyan oil and gas exports were blocked to Europe, causing pandemonium in a world market that saw a 12 percent price hike of crude oil this week and seriously threatens the fragile economies of many nations.

The US was right to invade Iraq and topple Saddam Hussein, and right to invade Afghanistan where the 9/11 attack on America was plotted. In both cases war was the answer.

In both cases it was wrong to stay on to attempt “nation-building”.

But once that sentimental policy was decided on, the essential thing for the US to achieve in each case was a constitution of liberty.

Both Iraq and Afghanistan got new constitutions, but neither enshrines liberty. They enshrine sharia law, and where sharia prevails, liberty is shut out.

Andrew McCarthy writes trenchantly about the tragic failure of America’s vision and the ultimate futility of its struggles in Afghanistan and Iraq:

In 2006, a Christian convert named Abdul Rahman was tried for apostasy [in Afghanistan]. The episode prompted a groundswell of international criticism. In the end, Abdul Rahman was whisked out of the country before his execution could be carried out. A fig leaf was placed over the mess: The prospect of execution had been rendered unjust by the (perfectly sane) defendant’s purported mental illness — after all, who in his right mind would convert from Islam? His life was spared, but the Afghans never backed down from their insistence that a Muslim’s renunciation of Islam is a capital offense and that death is the mandated sentence. …

Mainstream Islamic scholarship holds that apostasy, certainly once it is publicly revealed, warrants the death penalty.

Having hailed the Afghan constitution as the start of a democratic tsunami, the startled Bush administration made all the predictable arguments against Abdul Rahman’s apostasy prosecution. Diplomats and nation-building enthusiasts pointed in panic at the vague, lofty language injected into the Afghan constitution to obscure Islamic law’s harsh reality — spoons full of sugar that had helped the sharia go down. The constitution assures religious freedom, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice maintained. …

Read the fine print. It actually qualifies that all purported guarantees of personal and religious liberty are subject to Islamic law and Afghanistan’s commitment to being an Islamic state. We were supposed to celebrate this, just as the State Department did, because Islam is the “religion of peace” whose principles are just like ours — that’s why it was so ready for democracy.

It wasn’t so. Sharia is very different from Western law, and it couldn’t care less what the Universal Declaration of Human Rights has to say on the matter of apostasy. …

The constitution that the State Department bragged about helping the new Afghan “democracy” draft established Islam as the state religion and installed sharia as a principal source of law. That constitution therefore fully supports the state killing of apostates. Case closed.

The purpose of real democracy, meaning Western republican democracy, is to promote individual liberty, the engine of human prosperity. No nation that establishes a state religion, installs its totalitarian legal code, and hence denies its citizens freedom of conscience, can ever be a democracy — no matter how many “free” elections it holds. Afghanistan is not a democracy. It is an Islamic sharia state.

To grasp this, one need only read the first three articles of its constitution:

1. Afghanistan is an Islamic Republic, independent, unitary, and indivisible state.

2. The religion of the state of the Islamic Republic of Afghanistan is the sacred religion of Islam. …

3. In Afghanistan, no law can be contrary to the beliefs and provisions of the sacred religion of Islam. …

Was that what you figured we were doing when you heard we were “promoting democracy”? Is that a mission you would have agreed to commit our armed forces to accomplish? Yet, that’s what we’re fighting for. The War On Terror hasn’t been about 9/11 for a very long time. You may think our troops are in Afghanistan to defeat al-Qaeda and the Taliban — that’s what you’re told every time somebody has the temerity to suggest that we should leave. Our commanders, however, have acknowledged that destroying the enemy is not our objective. In fact, Gen. Stanley McChrystal, the former top U.S. commander, said what is happening in Afghanistan is not even our war. …

It’s not our war, nor is it something those running it contemplate winning. … Indeed, the administration had concluded … that the war could not be won “militarily.” …

Afghanistan is not an American war anymore. It’s a political experiment: Can we lay the foundation for Islamic social justice, hang a “democracy” label on it, and convince Americans that we’ve won, that all the blood and treasure have been worth it? The same thing, by the way, has been done in Iraq. …

The affront here is our own betrayal of our own principles. The Islamic democracy project is not democratizing the Muslim world. It is degrading individual liberty by masquerading sharia, in its most draconian form, as democracy. The only worthy reason for dispatching our young men and women in uniform to Islamic countries is to destroy America’s enemies. Our armed forces are not agents of Islamic social justice, and stabilizing a sharia state so its children can learn to hate the West as much as their parents do is not a mission the American people would ever have endorsed. It is past time to end this failed experiment.

Yes, it is way past time. Leave them now to do it their way.

And it is past time to dispel the sweet illusion of good-hearted Americans that all Others are the same as Us in their values, wants, and desires. They are not.

Here is the whole of the documentary on Iran:

Ben Johnson at Floyd Reports writes that Juliette Kayyem, the assistant secretary for intergovernmental affairs at the DHS, urges the beaming of al-Jazeera into American homes and minds:

[She] wrote an op-ed in the Boston Globe this week entitled, “Let US See Al-Jazeera.” … In it, she rakes ign’ernt Americans over the coals for not appreciating Al Jazeera English (AJE), the Anglophone counterpart to Al-Jazeera. Kayyem writes that cable providers should be “promoting engagement in the Arab world” by “bringing a major player in the Arab world to American audiences.”

Al-Jazeera is a Qatar-owned enterprise and a medium of Islamic propaganda.

Juliette Kayyem is the American-born daughter of Christian Lebanese parents. So it’s likely that she would have an emotional bias towards the Arab world – but towards Islam?

Yes, apparently she has that too.

Kayyem wants America to step aside, promote Islamic interests, and hope our enemies will reciprocate our selfless acts of goodwill. In this case, she wants a major Islamic fundamentalist propaganda outlet beamed into 300 million infidel homes. “AJE’s battle with the cable carriers is major news in the Middle East,” she writes. Not carrying the network “sends a message to the Arab world.” Although she reassures her readers, “Cable companies have no obligation to run programming,” she warns that shunning AJE is “understood by the Arab world as a value-laden decision about America’s lack of desire to hear from the Arab world about the Arab world.”

When she served as Assistant Attorney General for Civil Rights in the Clinton White House, and as an adviser to Janet Reno on terrorism, she “came to believe that within the FBI and the Immigration and Naturalization Service, there was a bias against Muslims which the Justice Department had a responsibility to address.” Now she wants the government to make good … by serving Muslim interests.

However, (Johnson informs us):

Taxpayers are already paying $1.5 million a year to put Al-Jazeera on public radio airwaves. Two of the three sites attacked on 9/11 now have at least one hour of Al-Jazeera radio piped in over publicly funded Pacifica Radio stations.

He reminds his readers:

Kayyem’s not-so-subtle pressure on American carriers to run Islamic fundamentalist programming joins numerous other Obama initiatives to give more airtime to its friends and deny airtime to its political foes.

It should be obvious to everyone  by now that Obama has a pro-Muslim agenda. Still, we don’t think Al-Jazeera should be prevented from competing for viewers in Western countries. All opinions should be allowed to be heard so that they can be judged. True, Al-Jazeera might win some converts to the ideology of Islam, but it is likely to confirm more in their rejection of it.

What we would like to see is a massive effort at teaching, by every one of the numerous means that now exist, our opinions, our culture, our history, our enlightenment, our method of critical examination, to the Arab and the wider Islamic worlds.

In our post, A cure for religion, February 6, 2011, we wrote:

If the West only took the trouble to teach its values to the peoples who live in darkness – those billions of Others – it might achieve what wars have failed to: the subduing of the barbaric hordes, the ending of their persistent onslaught.

During the Cold War, America spoke to the Communist bloc through Radio Liberty and Radio Free Europe. The effort was made to tell the enslaved peoples that what their masters would have them believe was not true. Those broadcasts helped to bring the Wall down. Why is no such effort being made to give new ideas to the Muslims? Vast numbers of them are taught nothing but the Koran – or rather, have it beaten into them. …  Why doesn’t the secular West give them something better to think about?

We are not alone in asking that question. Donald Kochan, Associate Professor at Chapman University School of Law,  writes in the Wall Street Journal that we should spread Western ideas in the Arab world by dispensing books:

At this time of unrest and transition in the Arab world, the United States’s capacity to communicate core values of democracy and individual liberty is a priority. Our capability to translate them into Arabic is a necessity. We need to expose the Arab world to the fundamental texts of Western political and philosophical thought. Indeed, the export of ideas may be the most valuable commodity we have to offer.

We agree with him of course. But there is a difficulty to be taken into account.

Literacy rates in the Arab countries are below that of the West, in some very far below. About half of all Arab women are illiterate, and in some countries more than two-thirds. In Yemen, for instance, the male literacy rate is 69%, the female only 28%.

In Afghanistan the literacy rate is 43% for men, and 12.6% for women.

Professor Kochan says, “Our seduction by the power of the Internet has distracted us from remembering the power of books.” But while we might try to teach millions in the Third World to read, we could start teaching them to think by using television, radio, and every device that connects individuals with the world wide web, and that those millions are snatching up with obvious delight.

We think that the best ideas of the West – individual freedom, secular polities, democratic rule of law, limited government, the questioning of all ideas – stand a very good chance of winning in competition with those of collectivism and religion. At least they should be sent into the arena to compete.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The sort of civil war that – as this video reports – immigrant Muslims are waging on the indigenous population of France, is likely to spread throughout Europe.

This is the part of Iranium, a new documentary about the threat that Iran poses to the world, that we found most interesting.

All of it can be found here, but only for a limited time.

As this video is no longer viewable, go here for information about the documentary.

How goes the stealth jihad in Europe?

Here’s a look at it from a Muslim’s point of view.

Notice this keen analyst’s claim that Europe deliberately provokes Muslims to carry out bombings.

Can the Arab states be democratized? Not just hold elections but firmly establish institutions for government of the people, by the people, for the people ?

Charles Krauthammer thinks it is possible.

He writes (in part) at Investor’s Business Daily:

As the states of the Arab Middle East throw off decades of dictatorship, their democratic future faces a major threat from the new totalitarianism: Islamism. As in Soviet days, the threat is both internal and external.

Iran, a mini version of the old Soviet Union, has its own allies and satellites — Syria, Lebanon and Gaza — and its own Comintern, with agents operating throughout the region to extend Islamist influence and undermine pro-Western secular states. That’s precisely why in this revolutionary moment, Iran boasts of an Islamist wave sweeping the Arab world.

We need a foreign policy that not only supports freedom in the abstract but is guided by long-range practical principles to achieve it — a Freedom Doctrine composed of the following elements:

(1) The U.S. supports democracy throughout the Middle East. It will use its influence to help democrats everywhere throw off dictatorial rule.

(2) Democracy is more than just elections. It requires a free press, the rule of law, the freedom to organize, the establishment of independent political parties and the peaceful transfer of power. Therefore, the transition to democracy and initial elections must allow time for these institutions, most notably political parties, to establish themselves.

(3) The only U.S. interest in the internal governance of these new democracies is to help protect them against totalitarians, foreign and domestic. The recent Hezbollah coup in Lebanon and the Hamas dictatorship in Gaza dramatically demonstrate how anti-democratic elements that achieve power democratically can destroy the very democracy that empowered them.

(4) Therefore, just as during the Cold War the U.S. helped keep European communist parties out of power (to see them ultimately wither away), it will be U.S. policy to oppose the inclusion of totalitarian parties — the Muslim Brotherhood or, for that matter, communists — in any government, whether provisional or elected, in newly liberated Arab states.

We may not have the power to prevent this. So be it. The Brotherhood may today be so relatively strong in Egypt, for example, that a seat at the table is inevitable. But under no circumstances should a presidential spokesman say, as did Robert Gibbs [the bumbling and fumbling White House press secretary – JB], that the new order “has to include a whole host of important nonsecular actors.”

Why gratuitously legitimize Islamists? Instead, Americans should be urgently supporting secular democratic parties in Egypt and elsewhere with training, resources and diplomacy.

We are, unwillingly again, parties to a long twilight struggle, this time with Islamism — most notably Iran, its proxies and its potential allies, Sunni and Shiite. We should be clear-eyed about our preferred outcome — real democracies governed by committed democrats — and develop policies to see this through.

And then the Arab states would become tolerant, pacific, industrious, productive, and prosperous?

We don’t think so. We don’t think they can be democratic as long as they remain – not “Islamist” but – Islamic.

Why? Because Islam and democracy, Islam and liberty, are essentially incompatible. Islam and Western civilization are totally antithetical to each other.

Islam is a dogmatism that forbids doubt – and doubt is the very DNA of our civilization. Doubt alone guarantees the tolerance which makes democracy possible. Doubt starts scientific enquiry, demands experiment and exploration.

Islam cannot be “reformed” to become its opposite.