We say in the post below, Hope and change in the Arab world, that the violent revolts could develop into a conflict between a movement for freedom and religious tyranny. We say that if America ignores the dramatic change occurring there, Islamic forces (the militant Iranian Shia regime, the Muslim Brotherhood, Taliban-like al-Qaeda) stand a better chance of winning.

Already the dark Islamic forces are positioning themselves to seize power.

Oliver North writes at Townhall:

What’s most important right now is how the Obama administration handles the increasingly intense cries for greater freedom sweeping from Tunisia to Yemen — threatening every authoritarian Muslim regime in that region save one: Iran’s.

The theocrats in Tehran didn’t foment the “Jasmine Revolution” — the youth-driven popular uprising that forced Tunisia’s Zine El Abidine Ben Ali to flee the presidential palace he occupied for 23 years. … But the ayatollahs are capitalizing on the expanding chaos.

Expatriate Iranian opposition figures claim that members of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps’ Quds force have been dispatched to Tunis “to help guide developments.”

Ominous! And worse news follows – if it is true:

Tehran’s government-controlled Fars News Agency has since quoted Jamil bin Alawi, a Tunisian “student activist,” as saying, “The advanced revolutionary and Islamic models like the Hezbollah of Lebanon can provide a bright and promising prospect for Tunisia.”

Jamil bin Alawi sounds to us – as he does to Oliver North, we guess, since he puts the words “student activist” in quotation marks – like a parrot-mouth for the Ayatollahs rather than a spokesman for the Tunisian revolutionaries.

In Egypt — where riot police and the army are confronting angry protesters with tear gas, batons and gunfire — the Iranians may well see another autocratic regime ripe for Islamic revolution. Student-led riots opposing the 30-year reign of President-for-Life Hosni Mubarak erupted Monday in Cairo and quickly spread throughout the country.

Unlike their counterparts in Tunisia and Lebanon, the Egyptian police and army thus far appear loyal to their leader, Mubarak, and the government has all but shut down press access and communications, including many Internet links. …

Now reports are coming out of Egypt that at least some policemen and soldiers are discarding their uniforms and joining the protestors.

The world is changing as swiftly as a turn of a kaleidoscope. The upheaval in the Arab states is momentous. These events could be at least as transformative as the fall of the Soviet Union.

It’s good in itself that that the oppressed are rising against their tyrants, but outcomes are uncertain. Worse despots could take power – but against them too the people might rise.

A vital factor in the mass protests has been the equipment that puts individuals in touch with each other without permission of governments. The uprisings were co-ordinated in Egypt and Tunisia by means of Facebook, Twitter, and cell phones. If millions of Arabs want a bright future enabled by such things instead of lives slogged out in the ancient ways of Islam, then Islam may have had its day.

The conflict now, we hope, is between those who want  the sort of life Westerners have in this twenty-first century, and those who want to restore the old dark world of Islamic superstition, ignorance, and cruelty: a conflict between a movement for freedom and a religious tyranny. It may even spread through all the Islamic world.

If the movement for freedom wins, many good effects could flow from its victory. The Arab countries could be transformed into productive, prosperous  trading nations; their self-crippling opposition to the existence of Israel might stop, and Israel’s Arab neighbors could at last benefit from its presence as a pattern of the modernity they need.

Such a movement towards a bright tomorrow would be more certain of victory if it were helped by an awakened America: an America led by an intelligent administration (which now it lacks).

Whether the West wakes up to it or not, and whether Western politicians encumbered with the mental paraphernalia of outdated ideologies such as socialism like it or not, dramatic change is occurring in the Arab world. If America ignores it, Islamic forces (the militant Iranian Shia regime, the Muslim Brotherhood, Taliban-like al-Qaeda) stand a better chance of winning.

America should actively guide it towards freedom and real democracy – the bright and possible future.

Jillian Becker  January 28, 2011

America’s magnificent technology, not its dwindling political power, is helping to set oppressed nations free.

Western governments – in particular the Obama administration, obsessively and weirdly convinced that peace and joy would prevail on earth if it could only stop Israel building houses for its citizens in its capital city – have been so blinded by their own misguided assumptions that they are overtaken with surprise by what is happening in  North Africa and the Arabian Peninsula, and at a loss to know what to do.

The Arab rulers themselves are astonished and shaken. They found it very useful to blame Israel and America for the miseries of those they oppressed, but now the people aren’t buying the excuse, and the rulers fear not just overthrow but the loss of their lives.

It was never true that what happened in and round Israel mattered to the ordinary Arab man and woman (beyond lip-service to the Palestinian cause when they were asked). What matters to them is the struggle to live. A steep rise in the price of food has brought them to furious revolt.

The greater part of the Arab world is in turmoil. The revolution in Tunisia has sent its autocratic ruler scuttling for asylum in Saudi Arabia.

In Egypt, tens (some reports say hundreds) of thousands are out in the streets of Cairo and Alexandria. Hundreds have been arrested, but the protests continue. The son of the president has fled to Britain, having sneaked out of Egypt from a military airfield in West Cairo, with his family and an immense quantity of baggage – which suggests that he has a long stay abroad in mind. President Mubarak, now 82 and ailing, has been in power for 30 years. If he was expecting his son Gamal to succeed him, as was generally supposed, that  hope has now been dashed. In any case there were strong forces opposed to Gamal’s succession, chiefly the military – which is probably why they helped him on his way. (In Tunisia, it was the military switching sides from the government to the people that ensured the success of the revolution.)

In Mauritania, Algeria, Morocco, Jordan crowds are marching, and the monsters of corruption that keep them hungry are afraid.

They had to wonder, how did it come about that so many appeared on the streets at the same time on the same days, with the same banners in their hands, the same slogans on their lips? How were the protests organized?

The answer is: Twitter, Facebook, and cell phones. When the Egyptian authorities realized this, they tried to block both Twitter and Facebook in a feeble gesture against the overwhelming tide of progress that is suddenly transforming the Arab world. They managed to do it for a short time only. Then they issued banning orders which were not obeyed. They used tear gas, water cannon and beatings to try and disperse the demonstrators. Official reports admitted that three people were killed, two demonstrators and a policeman. An unofficial figure is some 150 dead. But still thousands continue to protest.

The Muslim Brotherhood, however, hovers in the wings to seize power if it can. And if it does, Egypt will no longer be a secular state; diplomatic relations with Israel will almost certainly be broken off; and relations with the US will change for the worse.

In Lebanon, Hezbollah is in the process of putting its own choice of prime minister into power. It is a Shia organization and the prime minister of Lebanon must (by the terms of a 1943 unwritten agreement called the National Pact) be a Sunni. The man designated for the office, Najib Miqati, is a Sunni who is sympathetic to Hezbollah’s demand that the government refuse all co-operation with the International Court at the Hague in its efforts to bring the murderers of former Prime Minister Rafiq Hariri to trial. As a result, the Lebanese Christians rioted yesterday in many parts of the country. They know  that under Miqati’s leadership, Lebanon will become a proxy for Iran, which created, finances, and arms Hezbollah. The threat Iran already poses to Israel will be greatly enhanced.

What did the president of the United States say that touched on any of this in his State of the Union address last night? Just two sentences:

And we saw that same desire to be free [as in Southern Sudan, recently seceded from the North] in Tunisia, where the will of the people proved more powerful than the writ of a dictator. And tonight, let us be clear: The United States of America stands with the people of Tunisia, and supports the democratic aspirations of all people.

And Hillary Clinton, US Secretary of State? She declared yesterday that the government of Egypt is “stable”.

Jillian Becker   January 26, 2011

The American Conservative Political Action Conference, CPAC, will be held this year February 10-12 at the Marriott Wardman Park Hotel in Washington, D.C. About 10,000 conservatives are expected to attend.

It’s a grand annual event. Lots of stimulating ideas are aired and discussed.

There is something, however, about it that troubles us. CPAC’s umbrella organization, the American Conservative Union (ACU), has on its governing board one Suhail Khan, who is expected to speak at this year’s conference.

Like us, Roger Kimball, writing at PajamasMedia, wants to know why:

He presents himself as a conservative Republican who can speak for “moderate Muslims.” In fact … Suhail Khan is a smooth-talking apologist for the Muslim Brotherhood … a radical Islamist group whose credo 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.”

Suhail Khan made his way into the U.S. government during the Bush administration. He has defended “Ground Zero mosque” Imam Feisal Rauf as a “moderate.” … In June 2001, Khan personally accepted an award from the now-notorious Abdurahman Alamoudi, then head of the American Muslim Council. …

Sen. Arlen Specter of the Judiciary Committee … cited a New York Post report documenting how Alamoudi had supported terrorists and “declared an interest in destroying America.”… [In October 2004, the “very supportive” Alamoudi was sentenced to 23 years in federal prison “on charges related to his activities in the United States and abroad with nations and organizations that have ties to terrorism.“]

In September 2001, four days before the 9/11 attacks, Khan spoke at the Islamic Society of North America’s [ISNA] convention. Introducing him was Jamal Barzinji, whose offices and home were raided by federal agents after 9/11. “Barzinji is not only closely associated with PIJ [Palestinian Islamic Jihad], but also with Hamas,” according to the search-warrant affidavit. At the event, Khan shared his experiences from “inside” the White House, and praised his late father, Mahboob Khan, for helping found ISNA — which the government now says is a front for the radical Muslim Brotherhood and has raised money for jihad. The founding documents of the Brotherhood’s operation in America (recently seized by the FBI) reveal that it is in this country to “destroy” the Constitution and replace it with Islamic law.

An alarming prospect: a widespread movement bent on destroying the Constitution and replacing it with Islamic law. Is that overstated? On the contrary, that’s what the Muslim Brotherhood is all about. Here, for example, is a key passage from the 1991 “Explanatory Memorandum” on the Brotherhood’s “strategic goals” for North America. It was written by Mohamed Akram, then a central Muslim Brotherhood leader in the U.S.:

[T]heir work in America is a kind of grand Jihad in eliminating and destroying the Western civilization from within and “sabotaging” its miserable house by their hands and the hands of the believers so that it is eliminated and God’s religion is made victorious over all other religions. …

What happens to “people like” Suhail Khan? They get appointments to influential jobs in the White House, then the Hill. In addition to sitting on the board of the ACU, Khan is currently a spokesman for the Congressional Muslim Staff Association …

While you’re being sexually assaulted at airports in the name of national security, because you might be an Islamic jihadist intent on blowing up a plane, an Islamic jihadist, the open enemy of your country, is being paid to tell the government how to be nice to Muslims dedicated to pursuing the jihad so as to help advance their cause. (See Note below.)

What excuse can the ACU possibly have for allowing this treacherous man anywhere near its governing board?

The American Conservative Union, founded in 1964 with the blessing of folks like William F. Buckley Jr., declares itself on the side of individual rights and “strictly limiting the power of government.” The Muslim Brotherhood and other activist Islamic groups work overtime to subordinate the individual to the will of Allah and recognize no distinction between state and religious authority. They represent as thoroughgoing a totalitarian force as the world has ever seen. Suhail Khan is a prominent spokesman for that anti-democratic species of tyranny. Why does he sit on the board of the ACU? … To my mind, the fact that the ACU’s board of directors includes apologists for the Muslim Brotherhood is the sort of thing that ought to worry our fellow conservatives. He is the proverbial wolf in sheep’s clothing…

Does he even bother to put on the sheepskin? We can see his slavering wolf-jaws when he speaks.

Suhail Khan is not the only member of the ACU’s governing board whose heart is on the side of America’s active enemy Islam. Another is Grover Norquist.

This is from The Jawa Report.

[Suhail Khan] is a protege of GOP activist Grover Norquist, who … co-founded the Islamic Institute with top Al-Qaeda fundraiser Abdurahman Alamoudi. …

Messrs. Norquist and Khan [have had] troubling involvement for over a decade in causes profoundly at odds with U.S. security and national interests. In particular, Grover Norquist helped found and operate a Muslim organization with seed money and staffing from the man who was, at the time, the preeminent MB/al Qaeda financier. …

It is devoutly to be hoped that they [Norquist and Khan], among many other aspects of the Muslim Brotherhood’s determined bid to insinuate shariah into the United States, will also receive close scrutiny in the course of the potentially momentous hearings into “radical Islam” that incoming House Homeland Security Committee chairman Rep. Pete King has pledged to convene in the weeks ahead.

*

Note: See Frank Gaffney’s important article on Suhail Khan, A Jihadist in the Heart of the Conservative Movement, at Front Page here, in which he writes:

… Suhail Khan spent the rest of the Bush administration in the Department of Transportation, ultimately serving as the Assistant to the Secretary for Policy. In that capacity … he had access to classified information. Given the Department’s portfolio and his responsibilities, that would presumably have included secrets concerning: the policies and operations governing the Transportation Security Administration, port, rail, waterway and highway security, the movement of nuclear weapons and other hazardous materials, etc.

(See also an older article by Frank Gaffney on Suhail Khan’s candidacy for the ACU board of directors in 2007 here.)

*

We ourselves cannot be at the conference as we exist only in the ether. But if any of our readers, existing in what we are told is now called “meat space”, should go to it  – and talk about atheist conservatism however unofficially – would he or she please send us a report?

Go here for information about the speakers and panels, and a link to register.

Someone once said “God is the evil in those who believe in him.” Or if someone didn’t, someone is saying it now.

When Khalid Sheikh Mohammed hacked off the head of Daniel Pearl to the greater glory of Allah, he had a video camera record his performance. The cameraman missed the initial slashing of the victim’s throat, so KSM re-enacted that part and then went on energetically to chop and saw through flesh and arteries and bone until Daniel Pearl’s head was separated from the rest of his body.

Writing about this at Townhall, Mona Charen says that KSM “seems to have achieved a kind of religious exultation by decapitating Daniel Pearl.”

They weren’t finished with him, though. After Pearl’s head had been sawed off his neck, Mohammed and his accomplices cut the rest of the body into pieces. They then washed the bloody floor and knelt down in the same spot to pray — perhaps moved to religious ecstasy by the smell of American blood. …

Whether they were moved to religious ecstasy or not, the decapitation of their helpless victim was certainly a religious act, as were the attacks of 9/11 – also the Allah-inspired idea of this same Muslim savage.

How can justice be done to Khalid Sheikh Mohammed? It cannot. But he can and must be put to death.

Mona Charen goes on:

Like the communists, who justified any crime in the name of revolution, Islamists justify any outrage if the goal is fulfilling their twisted vision of Allah’s will.

Twisted? What is the Islamic idea of “Allah’s will” when it is not “twisted”?

Where does any notion of a god’s “will” ever come from but out of human minds?

The cruelties perpetrated in the name of various Christian dogmas to carry out “God’s will” were ineffably appalling. Christians stopped burning and torturing in the name of Gentle Jesus a while back but what was done must never be forgotten or forgiven.

Islam’s cruelty is a busily on-going project. As shown in our margin, there have been up to this day 16,690 acts of murderous violence in the name of Islam since 9/11 recorded by “The Religion of Peace” – as Robert Spencer names his indispensable website in deliberate irony.

The popular rising in Tunisia – sweetly dubbed (by whom and why?) the “Jasmine Revolution” – is very unlikely to herald the democratization of Tunisia itself or a widespread democratizing movement in the wider Arab world as optimists in the West are quickly assuming it might do.

It is far more likely to bring Tunisia under a strict Islamic regime.

Robert Spencer is of this opinion. He writes at his website Jihad Watch:

The great unacknowledged truth about Tunisia and the rest of the Islamic world is that Islamic jihadists and pro-Sharia forces, far from being the “tiny minority of extremists” of media myth, actually enjoy broad popular support. Any genuine democratic uprising is likely to install them in power. That’s why jihadists are hailing events in Tunisia, and why all lovers of freedom should view those events with extreme reserve — for a Sharia government in Tunisia is unlikely to be any kind of friend to the United States, and if the “Jasmine Revolution” does indeed spread and other Arab and Muslim dictators are toppled, an already hostile anti-American environment could become much, much worse.

The news media in the United States are not concerning themselves much with the upheavals varying in intensity from angry demonstrations to revolution in Arab states. Young men immolating themselves in Tunisia, Egypt and Mauritania induce pensive theorizing in the West rather than close attention.

The US government doesn’t seem to believe that the turmoil has any importance for America. If so, it’s making a serious mistake. The jihad against the West will be intensified if religious parties come to power in North Africa.

Robert Spencer does not expect the administration to grasp the significance of what is happening or – therefore – to prepare for the probably grave consequences. He writes almost despairingly:

The events in Tunisia also show yet again the crying need for realistic analysis in Washington of the jihad threat, rather than the fantasy-based analysis that prevails there now. But that is even less likely than the flowering of a pluralistic, secular democracy in Tunisia.

It is not the scent of jasmine but of blood and burnt flesh that permeates the air over North Africa, more a stench than a fragrance.

With admirable persistence the Special Tribunal for Lebanon pressed on against all discouragement and today indictments have been served for the murder of the former prime minister of Lebanon, Rafik Hariri.

See our post below, Eastern Explosions, for the importance of this to the political crisis in Lebanon and the possible repercussions in the region.

The indictments were submitted by the (Canadian) prosecutor, Daniel Bellemare, to the (Belgian) pre-trial judge Daniel Fransen. They reportedly name members of Hezbollah who planned and carried out the assassination, killing 22 other people in the truck-bombing.

One name is known: Iranian leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei is indicted for giving the instructions to kill Hariri.

The effect this will have on the regime in Iran, and consequently throughout the Middle East and Islam, and thus the world, could be huge.

The Arab world on both the Asian and the North African sides of the Red Sea, and Iran, and Pakistan, are heating up internally to the point of explosion.

Lebanon

On Wednesday last, January 12, 2010, the rickety “unity government” of Lebanon collapsed when the 10 Hezbollah members (out of 30 members in all) left it.

Why? Hezbollah fears the indictments soon to be issued by the Special Tribunal for Lebanon, sitting at the Hague, for the murder in 2005 of then Prime Minister Rafik Hariri in a truck-bombing in Beirut, in which 22 others were also killed. The tribunal has hard evidence that Hezbollah was responsible for it.

This terrorist organization – “The Party of God” is what its name means – is backed (which is to say is manipulated; is subject to the orders of) Syria and – chiefly – Iran. President Assad of Syria may be indicted too, so he’s as frightened of the tribunal as is the Hezbollah leadership. And now there are rumors that the mighty Ayatollah Khamenei – Iran’s head of state – may also be on the indictment list.

The Hezbollah members of the government demanded that the present prime minister, Saad Hariri, the murdered Rafik’s son, should declare that his government rejected whatever the findings of the Tribunal might be, now, before the indictments are issued.

Saad Hariri refused, so the Hezbollah members walked out and the government fell.

Hezbollah is very likely to try to deflect attention from the crisis within Lebanon by attacking Israel. Israel is prepared for the onslaught if and when it comes.

Tunisia

In Tunisia, the explosion came this week. A popular uprising erupted – the Arabs call it an intifada – which unseated the dictator Zine al-Abideen Bin Ali. He fled the country with wife Laila Tarabulsi. The couple have been in power, luxuriating in corruption, for 24 years.

Reaction among influential Arab commentators has been enthusiastically on the side of the revolutionaries. They hope the idea of violent rebellion will spread and unseat other despots, such as those who rule over Morocco and Libya.

The despots themselves are frightened. Some moved quickly to placate their populations.

Jordan

The King of Jordan, reacting to demonstrations in his own country, and spurred on by the events in Tunisia, hoped to subdue discontent by hastily setting controls on food prices.

Algeria

The repressive Algerian government, experiencing the same sort of internal unrest as Jordan – but worse -, and seriously disturbed by the Tunisian upheaval, took similar measures to keep prices down. But there it may be too late; the regime may fall.

Egypt

President Mubarak is ill and may die soon. There is a huge amount of political unrest in his country. He has harshly suppressed his chief opposition, the Muslim Brotherhood (action which, taken on its own, the rest of the world should probably be grateful for). Recent violent attacks on the persecuted Coptic Christians gave rise to demonstrations and have intensified the crisis. Chaos threatens.

Gaza

Hamas has warned that the leadership in the West Bank – headed by Abou Abbas – should expect the same fate as Bin Ali of Tunis. But Hamas itself could soon be at war if the region is ignited by a Hezbollah attack on Israel.

Iraq

On January 5, the Shia cleric Muqtada Sadr, a close ally of Hezbollah’s Hassan Nasrallah, returned from Iran to Iraq. On the same day, the Iranian foreign minister Ali Akbar Salehi arrived on an official visit to Baghdad. Civil war could break out at any time between the Shias and Sunnis of Iraq.

Saudi Arabia

The Saudi regime is constantly targeted by al-Qaeda. In this conflict, two brands of Islamic fundamentalism are pitted against each other. But more than al-Qaeda, the Saudis fear a nuclear-armed Iran.

Iran

President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s hold on power is increasingly precarious. He is protected at present by the head of state, Ayatollah Khamenei. But as we noted under the heading of Lebanon, Khamenei’s own position may not be secure.

Pakistan

As Pakistan has nuclear weapons, the prospect of a take-over of power by the Taliban and al-Qaeda, both of which are constantly and violently trying to topple the government, is extremely threatening not just to the region but to the world.

*

What does all this instability, revolution, and threat of war mean for the United States?

Is there any chance that President Obama and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton have an answer to that question?

Some forty years ago, Europe made the decision that it would open its gates and let in the conquering hordes of Islam. In our post, Europe betrayed, February 11, 2010, we trace (using the research of the great authority, Bat Ye’or) how step by step Islam advanced into Europe with the keen help of Europeans. Who were these Europeans? Many of them were officials in the foreign ministries. But we do not know their names. We hope that in time historians will discover and reveal who they were. It is a huge and terrible drama: la trahison des clercs on a scale unmatched in history; the betrayal of an entire continent to a dark and primitive force by those whose high calling it was to protect their countries. The traitors should be named and blamed at last, but are slippery enough to slither into obscurity and evade personal accusation forever.

In addition to those who actively worked for Islamic infiltration and occupation – for reasons so obscure that perhaps no historian will ever fathom them – there is always a predominance of those dumb sort of politicians who somehow manage not to notice what is happening to their countries. They have welcomed immigration from anywhere as an augmentation of the work force; they have prided themselves on being more tolerant than the next oaf, and have chosen to accept Islam as just another religion – “Oh yes, sir, one of the great monotheistic moral religions, you know” – and could see no reason why they should inform themselves about  the actual beliefs and practices of the immigrants.

But reality goes on accruing its consequences no matter how persistently it is overlooked or falsely discerned. And eventually reality hits the blindest self-deluding know-nothing in the face.

Now even the BBC, which has become a mouthpiece of Islamic propaganda in Britain and wherever else it is heard, has had to notice a flaw or two in its conviction that Islamic immigration is a great blessing to the kingdom.

The shock to “Auntie” (as Brits call the BBC) came when Jack Straw, former Shadow Deputy Prime Minister, remarked recently that “Pakistani heritage” men targeted white girls for sexual abuse.

“Auntie” set out to prove that Straw was wrong, and to her consternation and distress found that he was right.

From the Telegraph:

Are young men of Pakistani origin really fizzing with testosterone, and do they target young white women for sex because they see them as easy meat, as Jack Straw claimed last week? The Today programme went to Bradford this morning to find out, and you got the distinct impression that no one was more shocked than the BBC to find young Asian men, by and large, confirming what Mr Straw said.

A minority of interviewees sounded a note of caution, said everyone was equal and there was no such thing as an “easy target”. A more typical response, however, was: “It’s the way the white women dress, innit. Miniskirts. Encourages them, innit, to go jack ‘em and that, d’you get me?” (That’s an exact quote, by the way.)

Interpretation: “Innit” is barbarian-speak for “Isn’t it so?”

Or: “A lot of Asian women wouldn’t actually have their body showing, whereas white women you would find them like that.” Or: “White women drink, so when they [are] under the influence of alcohol the Pakistani men probably – the ones from Pakistan that have recently come – probably think they can take advantage, innit.”

It is true, by the way, that a lot of British girls get drunk in public, and dress and behave sluttishly. But none of that is usually accepted as an excuse for their being raped or pressed into prostitution.

Zubeida Malik [the BBC reporter] introduced her report by saying: “Given the huge controversy that Jack Straw’s comments raised, you might be surprised by what you hear.” But were listeners really shocked by what they heard? Over at the BBC they might have been surprised, but no one else the programme interviewed sounded as though the comments were news to them. …

Then Nihal from the Asian Network came on and I can only imagine the hand-wringing among BBC multiculturalists when they heard what he had to say: “We did this story back in November and we asked the question whether there is something in the Pakistani culture that led men to do this. Many people called in my phone-in show and said: ‘Yes we know that this is happening. Our men have this attitude towards white girls.’ [On Monday] a caller said: ‘White girls are easy. Fact.’ That’s what he said and he was unapologetic about that. I told him it wasn’t fact it was an opinion. …

“Keith Vaz, chairman of the home affairs select committee, on my show this week said that he had never heard anybody say this, that white women were easy or promiscuous. … ” …

Today the BBC took a good look at multicultural Britain – and they didn’t like what they saw.

Interpretation: “Oops! What have we done? They gave out they were good guys, these Muslim immigrants.”

So one small spark of illumination has forced itself under the eyelids of the BBC and the home affairs select committee.

At least for the moment they reluctantly notice one tiny aspect of the vast tragedy of what Britain has become. The harlots have always been there, of course. And men who will exploit them have always been there. But the killing infection of Islam began only some forty years ago.

Here, from the excellent British journal Standpoint, is part of a story, told by the unnamed wife of a Christian clergyman, that illustrates how fatally the infection is working:

I have just returned to London, where I have lived since I was 11. I have been away for four years, living as an ethnic minority in a monocultural part of the world, amassing a host of stories to tell to disbelieving friends. On the whole, I am glad to return. I shan’t miss some locals’ assumptions that, being a white woman, if I was outside after dark, as I occasionally was, usually to walk the few metres between my house and the church, I must be a prostitute eager to give them a blow job. I shan’t miss the abuse my priest husband received: the daubing of “Dirty white dogs” in red paint on the church door, the barrage of stones thrown at him by children shouting “Satan”. He was called a “f***ing white bastard” more than once … I will also not miss the way our garden acted as the local rubbish dump, with items ranging from duvets and TV sets, to rats (dead or twitching) glued to cardboard strips, a popular local method of vermin control to stem the large numbers of them which scuttled between the rubbish piled in gardens and on pavements. Yes, I am very glad to have left Britain’s second city.

For four years, we lived in inner-city Birmingham, in what has been a police no-go area for 20 years. … When we arrived, the population was predominantly Pakistani. Now Somalis are there in equal number. Most of the run-down Irish pubs were turned into mosques during our time. …

One day [my husband] was chatting to a man with a passing resemblance to Lawrence of Arabia, who had just arrived from Antwerp — one of an increasing number of Muslims who are arriving here with EU passports. He asked him why he had come to Birmingham. He was surprised at the question: “Everybody know. Birmingham — best place in Europe to be pure Muslim.” Well, there must be many places in Europe where Muslims are entirely free to practise their faith, but I suspect there are few places in which they can have so little contact with the civic and legal structure of a Western state if they choose. It seems to be particularly easy to “disappear” if that is their intention. A parishioner once described a lorry pulling up outside his house, the side opening to reveal stacked mattresses full of sleepy, and presumably illegal, immigrants, who staggered out into broad Brummie daylight. …

When I recently told a friend how a large Taliban flag fluttered gaily on a house near St Andrew’s football stadium for some months, her cry of “Can’t you tell the police?” made me reflect how far many of our inner cities have been abandoned by our key workers: our doctors and nurses drive in from afar, the police, as mentioned before, have shut down their stations and never venture in unless in extremis — they and ambulance crews have been known to be attacked …

We get stabbings that never make the news, dog- and cock-fighting rings, cars torched as pranks and cars used for peddling heroin. (One of the more amusing moments of our time came when a local lad provided one reason people often gave us stares when we drove past such deals: “Two white people wearing seatbelts — you’ve got to be cops.”) …

If current demographic trends continue over the next few decades [they will – JB], the West Midlands, as well as other parts of the country [actually the entire country – JB], will become a predominantly Muslim area.

Unless …? Even this thoroughly awakened witness prescribes an ineffective cure:

Much more needs to be done to integrate the communities among whom I lived, and we need to be much less negligent of our own values too.

What values would those be, we wonder.

We have commented on the trials of Geert Wilders in the Netherlands and Elisabeth Sabaditsch-Wolff in Austria, both of whom are being prosecuted for telling the truth about Islam. (See our post, Civilization on trial, October 10, 2010.)

Throughout Europe it has become a crime to say anything about Muslims and Islam that Muslims do not like. It makes no difference if what is said is provably true. This means that not only is speaking the truth in this regard a crime, but free speech itself is a heresy.

We wrote that what is really on trial is our civilization. The Western world owes its greatness to the Enlightenment. Now the values with which the Enlightenment endowed us, chief among them freedom and truth – the freedom to search for truth and declare openly what we find –  are under threat. If we are to be returned to the darkness that prevailed in Europe before that dawn of the intellect, to the time when this church or that decided what people were permitted to know and say, and would punish in the cruelest imaginable ways any thinker who challenged the prevailing dogma, our civilization is as surely doomed as was Rome by Christianity.

The darkness is visibly spreading. In Denmark, Lars Hedegaard, President of the Danish Free Press Society, and Jesper Langballe, Member of Parliament, have been charged with committing the same “crime” as Geert Wilders and Elisabeth Sabaditsch-Wolff.

With her usual moral clarity, Melanie Phillips writes about this travesty of justice:

A Danish MP, Jesper Langballe, was convicted of hate speech last month for endorsing Hedegaard’s comments about ‘honour’ violence and sexual abuse within Muslim families. In his statement in court … Langballe wrote about the Orwellian Danish legal rules which effectively convicted him in advance of his trial, causing him to choose to ‘confess’ rather than participate in such a totalitarian ‘circus’.

Now Lars Hedegaard faces a similar circus. Later this month, he is to stand trial for ‘racism’ after he stated about Muslim ‘honour’ violence within families: “They rape their own children.”

In vain did Hedegaard explain the following day that obviously he had not meant by this that all Muslims engage in such practices, any more than saying ‘Americans make good films’ means that all Americans make good films; in vain did he adduce copious evidence of concern — including from Muslim victims themselves — about the amount of sexual and ‘honour’ violence, including rape and incest, within Muslim families. None of this made any difference. Hedegaard is about to be burned at the Danish legal stake for his heresy. …

As far as I can see, these developments in Denmark have been totally ignored in the English-speaking media. So much for the liberals’ fetish of free speech — so noisily defended whenever Christianity [MP’s one blind spot, in our view, is her defense of religion- JB], America, Israel or the west are being demonised and libelled; so much for the feminists’ professed concern for the rights of women and the obscenity of rape and sexual abuse. Two men who actually stand up for these principles are being persecuted for doing so, while the so-called progressive world is either helping pile up the faggots for their fire or looking the other way.

It’s not just Hedegaard or Langballe who are being consumed by these flames, however, but Europe’s own freedom.