Hugh Hewitt and Mark Steyn survey an eventful day – yesterday, May 6, 2010 – and cover a lot of ground in their discussion of it. Here’s an extract, ending on a hopeful note as they look forward to the November elections:

HH: What a day, Mark Steyn. The markets went crazy. The Dow dropped at one point a thousand points. It finished off, you know, it was a bad day, but it wasn’t a horrific day. In reaction to what I think is a glimpse of our future, I think that the Greek debacle is simply, you know, the Christmas Future, showing … what’s going to happen to this country if we do not change. Your thoughts?

MS: Yes, I think what it illustrates, as I understand it, it might just have been as simple as one trader typing a B instead of an M for million, typing a B for billion, and it wipes off a thousand points off the stock market, as opposed to being a reaction to what’s happening in Greece, where real people are being killed in what are essentially riots over keeping unsustainable, featherbedded, government jobs. And in a way, what happened in Greece and what happened in New York, I think, both illustrate the kind of fragility of the global economy, and in a broader sense, of civilization …

HH: I think there will be defaults, a rolling series of defaults, … and that people had better look at Greece right now to see what’s coming. But Mark Steyn, that may not be the most important act of violence by a long shot. We had another successful terrorist penetration in the United States. But for their incompetence, a second massacre within four months of Detroit, the fourth under President Obama, counting the Arkansas and Fort Hood terrorist attacks, and still, it does not seem that they can get past the idea of when do we give them their Miranda rights.

MS: Yes, and this idea that it’s a criminal matter involving a few isolated extremists, or whatever the president said in reaction to the panty bomber at Christmas time. The most absurd commentary, I thought, was from the Washington Post, which speculated it was because the guy hadn’t been able to keep up payments on his home in Connecticut, so that this was in fact something to do with actually the Greek story, it’s to do with the global economy, it’s to do with subprime mortgages, that this is somehow an act of subprime terrorism and not Islamic terrorism. This is ridiculous. The guy spent five months in Pakistan, so clearly when a guy is spending five months in Pakistan, we don’t know what he was doing there, that’s the pretty obvious reason for why he isn’t able to keep up payments on his home in Connecticut. It’s because his job in Connecticut, and his house in Connecticut, are not what’s important to him, and are not what he sees as his primary identity. And the stupidity, the persistent stupidity in trying to look for anything other than what is really driving this activity is becoming beyond parody now.

HH: Mark Steyn, today’s profile of him in the New York Times, I don’t know if you had a chance to read it yet, but it’s very much the same. It’s the lonely, Mr. Lonely Hearts. He’s sitting on couches not drinking…and it makes it sounds like he’s depressed, so he became a jihadist.

MS: Yes, and that was the same thing that was said about the panty bomber just before Christmas time. In fact, they’re very similar, they’ve very similar types in a way. They’re not poor people. This idea that we heard after September 11th, poverty breeds terrorism, these are middle class people leading middle class lives. This guy had an MBA and some other super duper degree. He could be holding down a big time six figure salary anywhere on the planet. And instead, he decides that’s not what he wants to do, and instead he wants to blow up Times Square. And at some point, we have to confront the reality of that. And our unwillingness to, you know, when the enemy, which is what they are, by the way, when the enemy read the New York Times and the Washington Post, they draw their conclusions from that kind of coverage.

HH: Mark Steyn, the incompetence displayed in the Gulf after the explosion, and now the gaps in our security system, add the hat trick for the president. We’ve got ideological extremism, plus a hyper-partisan approach to politics, and now incompetence thrown in. That’s a heavy burden for Democrats. I think it’s why David Obey quit yesterday. Do you think the president can escape this, and his party can escape this by November?

MS: No, I think in a way, he’s lucky, he’s as lucky as he’s going to be, because if this had been a Republican in the White House, we would be getting the full Katrina on what’s going on in the Gulf. Instead, he’s got friends at these dying publications like Newsweek that are willing to protect him almost to absurd degrees. But the hyper-partisanship, with the perceived softness on national security, and the willingness to abase himself before thugs and dictators, plus, plus the incompetence issue in the Gulf, I think is just a lethal combination for Democrats this November.

We hope he’s right about November. They say “a week is a long time in politics”, so six months is an age. A lot more harm can be done to civilization by the Democrats in that stretch of time. And if the Republicans return to power in Congress in November, will they, can they, save civilization?

Judith Miller asks ten pertinent questions about the Times Square act of terrorism.

Read them all here.

We are most interested in the answers to these, the last five, though we don’t expect to get them:

• On Sunday just after the failed Times Square attack, why did DHS Secretary Janet Napolitano describe the failed terrorist attack as a “one-off”? And what on earth did she mean by that? [Actually, we know what she meant: “don’t even suggest that this attack is part of the jihad” – JB.]
• Why did members of President Obama’s national security team – Napolitano, Holder, and Robert Gibbs (who as press secretary seems to be an insider even on national security issues and operating way beyond his pay grade) go out of their way to avoid using the term “terrorism” to describe the failed attack until the obvious could no longer be denied? And why, to this day, has the term “Islamic” never been linked with Shahzad or his plot?
• If Shahzad really got some terrorist training up in Waziristan, what on earth did they teach him? How to pick a fertilizer for a bomb that could not explode? How to leave your own car and house keys in the ignition of the vehicle you intend to blow up in Times Square? And how can Washington ensure that all aspiring terrorists enroll in such classes?
• But seriously and most important – when, where, why, and how was Faisal Shahzad radicalized? How did a happy-go-lucky Facebook guy, married with two kids and apparently doing OK in America, go from watching “Everyone Loves Raymond” – listed as one of his favorite TV shows – to Peshawar for terrorist training and back to Times Square to kill his fellow Americans? Was he radicalized during his stay in Pakistan by the steady stream of deadly American drone attacks on Muslim extremists as some newspapers are now suggesting? Or, more likely and as some of his neighbors have alleged, was he already withdrawing from society and being radicalized in Shelton, or Bridgeport, Connecticut?
• Finally, as former deputy police commissioner Michael Sheehan has asked, if “home-grown” radicalization is the challenge we believe it to be, why have local police forces in areas with large clusters of young Muslim residents – yes, in Connecticut and New Jersey and Rhode Island — not mimicked the NYPD by investing at least SOME resources in trying to spot radicalized, potentially dangerous people and prevent terrorist organizations from establishing a presence in their communities? This is not rocket science. As Sheehan argues, we know how to do this.

Until we know the answers to these and other vexing questions surrounding our latest terrorist near-miss, self-congratulation is, to say the least, premature. Let’s remember that [the] Faisal Shahzad alleged deadly plot failed not because America’s law enforcement and homeland defense systems are effective, but because he was incompetent.

No satire could surpass the reality of the Obama administration’s stupid pretense that the attempt by the Muslim terrorist, Faisal Shahzad, to set off a car bomb in New York had nothing to do with Islam’s jihad against America and the whole non-Muslim world.

Ann Coulter – whom we like for making us laugh, though we stop our ears when she beats her Christian drum – writes here about the administration’s non-existent strategy for combating terrorism while refusing to notice the common motivation of the terrorists.

Extract:

It would be a little easier for the rest of us not to live in fear if the president’s entire national security strategy didn’t depend on average citizens happening to notice a smoldering SUV in Times Square or smoke coming from a fellow airline passenger’s crotch.

But after the car bomber and the diaper bomber, it has become increasingly clear that Obama’s only national defense strategy is: Let’s hope their bombs don’t work!

If only Dr. Hasan’s gun had jammed at Fort Hood, that could have been another huge foreign policy success for Obama.

The administration’s fingers-crossed strategy is a follow-up to Obama’s earlier and less successful “Let’s Make Them Love Us!” plan.

In the past year, Obama has repeatedly apologized to Muslims for America’s “mistakes.” …

He has apologized to the entire Muslim world for the French and English colonizing them — i.e. building them flush toilets.

He promised to shut down Guantanamo. And he ordered the mastermind of 9/11, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, to be tried in the same courthouse that tried Martha Stewart.

There was also Obama’s 90-degree-bow tour of the East and Middle East. For his next visit, he plans to roll on his back and have his belly scratched like Fido.

Despite favorable reviews in The New York Times, none of this put an end to Islamic terrorism.

So now, I gather, our only strategy is to hope the terrorists’ bombs keep fizzling. …

If our only defense to terrorism is counting on alert civilians, how about not bothering them before they board airplanes, instead of harassing them with useless airport “security” procedures?

Both of the attempted bombers who sailed through airport security, I note, were young males of Middle Eastern descent. I wonder if we could develop a security plan based on that information? …

Who on earth made the decision to allow Shahzad the unparalleled privilege of becoming a U.S. citizen in April 2009?

Our “Europeans Need Not Apply” immigration policies were absurd enough before 9/11. But after 19 foreign-born Muslims, legally admitted to the U.S., murdered 3,000 Americans in New York and Washington in a single day, couldn’t we tighten up our admission policies toward people from countries still performing stonings and clitorectomies?

On Thursday May 6, 2010, a general election will be held in Britain. It’s likely that the Conservative Party will win with a small majority.

It will make little difference who wins and who governs. None of the parties has a policy that can save Britain from its deepening economic crisis or from its future as a predominantly Muslim country under sharia law.

Here is an address I delivered at a conference of Conservatives in London in 2008. The figures were accurate then according to each country’s published statistics, and they haven’t changed significantly.

My prognosis for Britain and Europe is profoundly depressing. I wish it could be otherwise.

*

The people of Europe are dying out. In that sense it could be said that Europe is coming to an end. The continent is entering a new phase of its history and is already being called by a new name: Eurabia.

Here are the facts and figures:

The birth-rate by which a population is merely stabilized, not increased however slightly, is 2.1 births per woman.

With that in mind, let’s take a look at some European figures:

Austria 1.3

Britain 1.77

Czech Republic 2

France 1.9

Germany 1.37

Greece 1.29

Italy 1.2

Ireland 1.87

Netherlands 1.73

Norway 1.81

Poland 2

Russia 1

Spain 1.1

Sweden 1.75

These are all declining populations. Some are declining more steeply than others. Russia’s population will be halved in 50 years, while Poland’s half-life will take a little longer.

It’s hard to imagine what if anything could halt the decline. A sudden explosion of births, with most women of child-bearing age having numerous children in the next couple of decades? Too late. A mass return of European descendants from the New World to the ancestral lands? Yes, but as unlikely to happen as a miracle.

What is actually happening to swell the numbers is an accelerating growth of the Muslim immigrant populations. In Britain today the average age of the non-Muslim population is 41, the average age of the Muslim population is 28. This order of difference is typical of all West European countries. In all of them, furthermore, the Muslim birth-rate is higher than the native birth-rate. It means they have not long to wait for their Muslim majorities. Europe is being Islamized, to become in all likelihood a Muslim-dominated continent by the end of the century [revised estimate – by the middle of the century]. We can now see – we can hardly miss seeing – the change in our cities. Though it seems to have come upon us suddenly, it has been growing for decades. It is about 20 years since the Islamic Foundation issued a declaration from Leicester that the Islamic movement is ‘an organized struggle to change the existing society into an Islamic society based on the Koran’.

Realistically we must confront the demise of our political power and reconcile ourselves to a loss of liberty, because, barring a miracle, Islam will not transform itself into a force for the protection of individual freedom. By no stretch of the imagination can Muslim law, sharia, be described as liberal.

Here are a few examples of it: Women must obey their husbands who should beat them if they do not. Women must cover their heads and figures in public. Thieves must have hands and feet cut off; adulterers are to be stoned to death; unmarried fornicators lashed with 100 stripes; homosexuals burnt, stoned, or dropped from a height; apostates killed. Criticism of the Prophet Mohammed is apostasy. Non-Muslims must convert to Islam, or be killed, or, if Christian or Jewish, may pay a tax called the jizya and so be suffered to live, not as citizens but as dhimmi, subjugated and abased persons forced to submit to numerous laws which mark and preserve their inferior status.

We could cling to a hope that sharia law will not be imposed on our grandchildren, or that if it is, it will be in some modified form. We may surmise that Muslims born and brought up here will be influenced by our values and modes of thought to the extent that they themselves come to prefer our common law to sharia. For this to happen they would have to be thoroughly secularized en masse. In such a development lies our best chance of remaining free. But how probable is it? We can only read the existing signs and they do not inspire optimism.

To some degree young Muslim men in Britain are already secularized. In English cities they can be as enthusiastic Saturday-night bingers and brawlers as their native English counterparts, the Islamic ban on drinking alcohol notwithstanding. But they are inclined to adhere to Islamic customs, as in marriage for example, expecting their wives to remain in a traditionally subservient role. Importantly, the imams still have power to influence the communities, and it is largely because Muslim communities have been established in geographical enclaves that their power remains strong.

Successive British governments have failed to integrate Muslim immigrants. They have preferred, in accordance with the ill-thought-out ideology of ‘multiculturalism’, to permit and even approve the establishment of ethnic enclaves. Yet these are ghettoes of a kind, and the policy itself is, in effect, segregationist, or what might be called apartheid-lite. It has meant that there are areas into which the police are reluctant to enter, so that ‘honour killings’, forced marriages, child marriages, wife beatings and burnings, separation according to gender in schools and offices, are often – no one knows how often – practised with impunity.

Then there are the madrassas. Some 700 [many more now in 2010 – JB] of these religious schools have been established in Britain, at least a few of them with tax-payers’ money. They teach fundamentalist doctrine, including the complete subjugation of women, and the waging of jihad, holy war.

We are often told that Islam means ‘peace’, but it does not. It means ‘submission’. We are told it is a ‘religion of peace’, but it was spread by the sword. Our experience of it in recent years has been traumatic. What Islam has shown us of itself is that it is murderous, destructive, cruel and terrifying, bringing death and agony to many places in the world, including New York, Madrid, and here to us in London.

Conquest of the rest of the world by Islam is ordained by its holy book, the Koran. There it is written that the highest duty of the ‘true believer’ is to wage war against infidel lands – such as ours – until they become part of the realm of Islam and their populations are converted. Every Muslim must participate in the war. Those who do not actively fight must assist those who do in whatever ways they can. Refusal is punishable by mutilation or death.

‘O you who believe! Fight those of the unbelievers who are near to you and let them find hardness in you’ (sura 9.123). ‘Those who fight Islam should be murdered or crucified or their hands and feet should be cut off on opposite sides’ (sura 5.33). ‘Let those who fight in the way of Allah, who sell this world’s life for the hereafter; and whoever fights in the way of Allah, be he slain or be he victorious, We shall grant him a mighty reward’ (sura 4.74).

This last injunction with its promise of reward fully authorizes suicide bombing. It is the standing order for such atrocities as those of 9/11 in New York and 7/7 in London.

We have heard from imams and sheikhs that other injunctions abrogate these; or that we must not take them literally. But the important point for us is that there are Muslims who obey them literally. We can hardly avoid noticing, belatedly but plainly at last, that not only are we being colonized by Islam, but at the same time we are being subjected to jihad.

The violence can only get worse, the attacks more destructive, possibly obliterating millions. The President of the Islamic State of Iran, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, claiming to be divinely inspired, is threatening to unleash nuclear war. He has the capability of producing nuclear warheads, and Western Europe, we are told, is within range of his missiles. The nuclear bomb is the greatest boon for furthering jihad that has come into Islam’s possession in all the fourteen hundred years of its history. Can we doubt that he will use it?

Jillian Becker    May 3, 2010

Books I recommend:

Mark Steyn, America Alone: The End of the World as We Know It (Regnery, Washington D.C., 2006)

Bruce Bawer, While Europe Slept: How Radical Islam Is Destroying the West from Within (Doubleday, New York, 2006)

Oriana Fallaci, The Rage and the Pride (Rizzoli, New York, 2002), The Force of Reason (Rizzoli, New York, 2006)

Bat Ye’or, Eurabia: the Euro-Arab Axis (Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, Cranbury, New Jersey, 2005)

Melanie Phillips, Londonistan (Gibson Square, London, 2006)

The West has allowed terrorism to succeed.

It seems we are reluctant to fight back.

We citizens of the free world, heirs to the victorious struggles of courageous and principled forerunners, have for too long taken the freedom they won us for granted.

Freedom is never won forever. It has to be fought for over and over again.

Are we, the living generations, too  feeble, too cowardly, too comfortable, too distracted by trivia, to fight the battle when it becomes necessary to choose between freedom and submission to tyranny?

Are enough of us even aware that once again freedom is under severe and immediate threat?

The present threat, Islam, is at least as atrocious as those of the last century, Nazism and Communism. It is the same in being collectivist and tyrannical. It is different and more frightening to the imagination in that it comes out of the double darkness of a past age and a primitive mentality.

America has elected a leader who is highly sympathetic to it, and is doing everything he can to strengthen it.

Daniel Greenfield expresses an opinion which we heartily share in this article from which we take a large extract:

What is a free country? Is it a country that is free of being ruled by any other country, or is it a country of free people who are not afraid. The truth is that no country can be free, unless its people are free. Not freedom as embodied in legal documents or stirring anthems, which nearly every country has, but free in their minds. Unafraid to believe, to speak and to live.

Tyranny isn’t a man holding a gun to your head and telling you what to do. Tyranny is when you do what you’re told because you’re holding the gun to your own head. And then you have become a collaborator in your own oppression. It is possible to be enslaved without ever becoming a slave… for people to act like slaves without any chains being anywhere in sight.

No regime, no ideology and no power can maintain absolute physical control of all the people all of the time. To rule, they need to control not their bodies, but their minds and their souls. Tyranny wants loyalty but it will settle for fear. And fear, once internalized, destroys moral courage and replaces it with moral cowardice, eroding the strength of beliefs and ideas with the poisonous liquid of dread. The individual becomes an agent for the forces of tyranny, warning himself against any action that could get him into trouble. And then he is finally a slave.

In Stockholm Syndrome, hostages try to take control of their powerlessness by identifying with their captors. Under tyranny, entire populations can suffer from Stockholm Syndrome, paying devoted obeisance to the tyrants …

Recently, we rediscovered the simple fact that even on cable television, on a network where anything goes, one thing does not go: Depicting Mohammed, even in a bear suit. That same iron law has been unofficially passed in country after country, where operas, newspapers, books, television programs have been censored in order to avoid offending the people who might kill them, if they were not censored. …

And that is exactly the point. They don’t have to silence us, if we silence ourselves first. They don’t have to oppress us if we oppress ourselves first. They don’t have to demand our surrender and submission, if we surrender and submit first. Islam, we love it. Sharia law, we’ll gladly adopt it. Free speech, it has to have its limits. Women’s rights, we’ll have to walk a fine line. Freedom. Ha, what freedom. We’ve already traded that away for a nice set of multicultural bongos, a few curry shops, a glass of arrack and a leatherbound copy of the Koran.

A free country … is a country whose people uncompromisingly refuse to surrender their freedoms, in the face of tyranny, torture and death, in the face of armies, tanks, secret police and all the forces of the world arrayed against them. A country that compromises on its freedom is no longer free. It will know fear. It will know terror. It will be oppressed, and there will be no relief from that oppression, until they choose freedom over tyranny once again.

Fear is a reflex. Tyranny thrives on it, imbues it and feeds it. It kills randomly in order to spread that terror further to create populations who never know when their day will come; when the suicide bomber, the black van, the sword and the secret police will come for them. Men will fight and die for freedom on the battlefield, but the struggle to remain defiant in a society where everyone is afraid all the time is a much harder fight. Yet overcoming that reflex to find safety by surrendering and collaborating, by learning to love Big Brother and embracing his ideals, is what it takes to be a free citizen of a free nation. …

Freedom comes from standing up to evil, from confronting it and defying it – not from submitting to it and collaborating with it …

And what is the source of Islam’s power? Comedy Central [by censoring South Park – see our post Not bearing the unbearable, March 25, 2010] reminds us of that again. … No military victory. No superior technology. Not even sheer numbers, as there is still no First World country in which Muslims have officially become a majority. Their power comes from fear. From being prepared to murder anyone who disagrees with them until the mere threat alone, from a worthless source, is enough to badly panic a multibillion dollar corporation – the same corporation that would never take protests from Jews or Christians seriously caves when a single Muslim on a previously obscure website threatens a beheading. What is the difference? The difference is murder. Muslims murder people who offend them. And having gained a reputation for that, they are quickly parlaying it into practical political power.

A nation’s police, legal and military divisions are entirely useless if they cannot protect the exercise of such basic freedoms. Without it, they become nothing more than glorified social service centers that enforce the law only when it isn’t too dangerous for them, when it won’t offend the wrong people – the wrong people being those who kill on casual provocation. And such a country, though it may have documents to its name attesting its freedoms, and endless ranks of judiciary appointees and professors debating those freedoms– they mean nothing if the people cannot actually exercise those freedoms. …

Only by defying Islam, can we begin the process of taking back our freedoms. Only by speaking out, do our voices matter. Because they don’t have to silence us, if we silence ourselves first.

Hamas says jump, and al-Reuters says how high, inshallah. …

Hamas was upset at an on-line ad that was seen at the Reuters Arabic service site, offering a $10 million reward for information on the whereabouts of Gilad Shalit [the Israeli soldier Hamas is holding captive].

Reuters’ response to the terrorist group is instructive.

Palestine Today reports that Reuters responded to the criticism, saying that it was an automated ad placed there by Google Ads, and not – Allah forbid! – placed by any Reuters staffers. After all, an ad that seeks to free a prisoner illegally held in an unknown location without any access to the Red Cross would be thoroughly offensive to any Reuters employee, right?

Reuters then cravenly added that they immediately acted to remove the ad, and “we are now taking steps to ensure non-recurrence of such things in the future.”

Reuters additionally wrote back to the offended terrorist organization that Reuters has a long history of covering the Middle East in a neutral and accurate manner, stressing that they are committed to continuing this approach, they wrote “We are clear and faithful to our principles of integrity, independence and distance from bias.”

Clear and faithful to Islamic principles, which explains Reuters principles of integrity, dependence, and bias. Keep this in mind when reading any of their “news.”

This comes from Creeping Sharia, one of the websites that keeps us informed of news the mainstream media often prefer not to spread.

Hard as it is to believe, this Washington Post column by Fred Hiatt is not satire. He seems seriously to mean what he says.

Gays, immigrants, union leaders, budget hawks, campaign finance reformers, environmentalists, free-traders, human rights activists and civil libertarians all have had cause to wonder whether they were right to trust Obama. The list is familiar, but the explanation remains disputed.

My theory: The culprit is less ideology than Obama’s fidelity to a strategy he can’t, for tactical reasons, publicly acknowledge. Given the hand he was dealt, the evidence suggests he resolved that he had to choose only one domestic and one foreign objective for his first two years in office.

An ambitious set of goals motivated Obama’s candidacy, and early in his presidency the rap was that he was taking on too many. But the legacy of wars abroad and the Great Recession at home threatened his ability to accomplish any of them. Simply managing that bleak inheritance, he realized, might consume his entire term.

To avoid that trap, Obama had to govern with discipline. First, he would have to turn potential negatives into successes. At home, that meant not only engineering a stimulus program to end the recession but also designing financial reform to prevent a recurrence. In Iraq and Afghanistan, it meant charting a path to not just to withdrawal but stable outcomes.

Since both fronts would take enormous energy and political capital, Obama could not afford to squander whatever remained across an array of worthy electives. So over time he subordinated everything to just two: health-insurance reform and blocking Iran’s development of nuclear weapons. Anything else, no matter how popular or deserving, had to give way if it interfered with those.

Obama has put enormous energy into repairing relations with Russia, for example, and relatively less into ties with allies such as India, Mexico or Britain because stopping Iran would require Russia’s support of sanctions. Without a new START arms-control treaty, Russia would not play ball on Iran, so Obama worked assiduously to negotiate a new START. The nuclear summit he hosted in Washington this month; playing down trade tensions with China; the relative reticence on North Korea’s nukes; prodding Israel toward peace talks — all of these were crafted with an eye toward Iran.

At home, the mono-focus is more obvious. Obama would like to close the Guantanamo prison, curb traffic of assault weapons crossing the Mexican border, reform immigration laws and reduce carbon emissions. But each would have carried a political cost, to Obama or Democratic allies he needed on health care, so they all had to wait.

I don’t mean to suggest that Obama would go to any lengths to achieve the main objective. He bargained hard on START, for example, insisting that the treaty meet U.S. military needs as well as serve the larger goal.

And it’s not that he has abandoned everything else: Where he could advance other objectives at minimal cost, he has done so, usually by executive action. He wouldn’t fight for labor law reform, but he promulgated regulations that favor unions. He hasn’t replaced No Child Left Behind, but he allowed his education secretary to spur reform by judicious granting and withholding of stimulus funds. There’s no climate change legislation, but the Environmental Protection Agency hiked mileage standards for cars and trucks. And so on.

Obama can’t acknowledge all this. You don’t tell allies, whether gay rights groups or India, that they’ve slipped down your priority list. (That’s especially true now, before an election, as immigration, education and energy advocates jockey to go next.) And the best negotiating strategy to get things you want isn’t always to show how much you want them.

So we may have to wait until Obama writes his memoirs to discover why he elevated these two goals. Was he set on health reform from the start, for instance, or did congressional politics nudge that ahead of, say, coping with climate change?

Abroad, the strategy, with its hope of turning autocracies such as China and Russia into long-term partners, remains at best unproven. At home, it seems to be paying off, with major health reform approved and financial reform in sight. For those at the back of the line — such as the District last week — the opportunity costs are sharply felt. But even at such times, it’s hard not to admire Obama’s focus.

Every statement cries out for exegesis. Some of them – Obama’s “ending of the recession”, his financial reform, his “charting a path to stabilize Iraq and Afghanistan” – need at least a paragraph each. But there’s one that clamors for objection above the rest.

“Blocking Iran’s development of nuclear weapons” has been Obama’s foreign policy priority? Everything else except health care has been subordinated to that goal? He’s focussed on it?

Strange – we haven’t noticed that he’s done a damn thing about it. It seems to us that he’s perfectly willing to let Iran become a nuclear-armed power. A series of  “deadlines” have been allowed to pass without there being any penalty for Iran’s ignoring them. Talk of sanctions has been nothing but talk, and those talked of have been steadily weakened. No military option is “on the table”. Obama has begged Ahmadinejad for his friendship, and the poisonous little dictator has gleefully said no over and over again. How come Mr Hiatt hasn’t noticed all that?

How has the START treaty affected Iran? Russia is still not willing to vote for sanctions. And what US military needs have been served by it?  It is plainly to the detriment of the US and the advantage of Russia. Relations with Russia are in no way “repaired”. If changed at all, they’re probably worse. Nor will China vote for sanctions. And Obama’s “reticence” on North Korea’s nukes has resulted in – what?  As for the nuclear summit, Iran wasn’t even mentioned. And “prodding” Israel – that has made the world safe from Iranian bombs? What it has really done is tell Israel that it has “slipped down the priority list”, along with India and Britain and a number of other allies.

Well, we’ve recovered from being flabbergasted by Mr Hiatt’s quaint perspective and now we find it amusing. And it’s gratifying to know that numerous bunches of lefties (but surely “free-traders” and “budget hawks” do not belong among them) feel disappointed by the president of their dreams. From our perspective he has gone fearfully far to satisfy them, with the “executive action” and “regulations” and so on that Mr Hiatt tells us were thrown to them as mere sops or stop-gaps. So apparently he might have gone further and done even worse.

The implication of Mr Hiatt’s apologia for his hero is that when he has succeeded with his two chosen “electives”, he will go further. Now the health care legislation has been forced through, but there still remains the other goal Mr Hiatt believes Obama is focussed on: stopping Iran going nuclear.

If Mr Hiatt is right and the achievement of that goal really stands between Obama and the rest of the far left agenda he’s expected to foist on us, then we can rest easy. Or could, if dread of those bombs wasn’t keeping us awake nights.

But what if Mr Hiatt is wrong? We’ll get the bombs and the radical left agenda.

…. and Osama bin Laden.

It seems that bin Laden is not in Afghanistan, not in Pakistan, but in Iran. And it is possible he is being held captive there.

Ken Timmerman tells the story:

A new documentary film premiering at the prestigious Tribeca film festival in New York this week presents stunning new evidence that al-Qaida leader Osama bin Laden is living in Iran, where the Iranian regime is sheltering him. 

The film, “Feathered Cocaine,” began as a simple documentary of the illicit trade in hunting falcons to Middle East desert sheikhs. But as filmmakers Thorkell (Keli) Hardarson and Örn Marino Arnarson delved deeper into their subject, they discovered a dark underworld in which terrorism and falcon smuggling met with astonishing regularity.

In March 2008, the filmmakers ventured into Afghanistan and the former Soviet republics along with Alan Parrot, the head of the Union for the Conservation of Raptors, a conservationist group that seeks to protect wild falcons, to interview a falcon smuggler they code-named “T-2.”

For three days, the team waited in a mountain village while the smuggler kept them under surveillance from afar. Satisfied that they hadn’t been followed, he granted them a 55-minute interview — only if they agreed to disguise his voice and his appearance. …

“T-2” told the filmmakers that he met bin Laden by chance in late November 2004 at a falcon-hunting camp in northeastern Iran.

“I met him five times after 2004,” he said. “The last time we met was in October 2007. Every time, it was in Iran.”  …

“Feathered Cocaine” includes excerpts from the footage with “T-2,” as well as interviews with lawyer John Loftus, former CIA clandestine officer Bob Baer, and others, including this reporter and former Washington Post reporter and terrorism expert Steve Coll.

Loftus revealed that “T-2” provided the filmmakers with the specific frequencies of small transmitters bin Laden had strapped to the backs of his hunting falcons so he could find them if they failed to return to base. Loftus said the CIA could use that information to track bin Laden and capture him, and that he offered it to the director of the Central Intelligence Agency and to the heads of other U.S. intelligence agencies at the request of the filmmakers, with no response. 

Last year, they approached “Rewards for Justice,” the State Department office that is offering a $50 million reward for information leading to bin Laden’s capture, but never received any acknowledgement of their information.

Speaking to a packed house after the Tribeca premier on Friday, Parrot was asked to speculate about why “T-2” agreed to talk to the filmmakers, because the details surely would allow bin Laden to guess his identity.

“I believe that bin Laden wanted ‘T-2’ to send a message through us,” Parrot said. “He wanted the world to know that he was in Iran, but that he couldn’t leave.”

In the movie, Parrot said the Iranian regime is giving bin Laden “a long leash” but is holding his family hostage in Tehran in the event bin Laden revealed his relationship to them. “This was confirmed by one of bin Laden’s sons last year,” Parrot said.

Omar bin Laden, who married a British woman and broke with his father before the 9/11 attacks, revealed in December 2009 that seven of his siblings were living in Tehran and seeking to leave the country.

The story of American-born falconer Alan Howell Parrot lies at the center of this extraordinary tale and lends it credibility. Parrot began breeding falcons and selling them to the king of Saudi Arabia and then to the president of the United Arab Emirates (U.A.E.) in the late 1970s, and was a frequent guest at their royal palaces and elaborate hunting camps in the wilds of southern Afghanistan.

In the late 1990s, so was renegade Saudi financier Osama bin Laden. Parrot described the royal hunting camps “al-Qaida’s board room,” because they gave bin Laden the opportunity to spend weeks of quality time with wealthy backers from the U.A.E. and other gulf states.

Parrot alleges that bin Laden’s royal backers transferred “hundreds of millions of dollars” in cash to him during these hunting expeditions, as well as military equipment and off-road vehicles. The movie includes footage of a U.A.E. military C-130 transport plane landing at a makeshift airstrip in western Pakistan to deliver equipment to the hunting camps.

“I see bin Laden as a falcon smuggler,” Parrot states in the film, “and in that capacity I went after him. All the locals in Kandahar hated bin Laden because he stole all the falcons.”

If only that had been his worst crime!

Osama bin Laden could have been eliminated at one of those camps. The CIA was for doing it, but President Clinton decided against it.

After al-Qaida blew up two U.S. embassies in Africa in July 1998, the CIA also began hunting for bin Laden in earnest. Local agents in Afghanistan spotted him at a royal hunting camp near Kandahar in February 1999, according to an account that appeared in the final report of the 9/11 Commission.

CIA Director George Tenet asked the White House for permission to launch a cruise missile strike on the camp on Feb. 8, 1999, but soon ran into interference from an unusual source: Richard Clarke, the top counter-terrorism adviser to President Clinton.

As the 9/11 Commission report concluded, “policymakers were concerned about the danger that a strike would kill an Emirati prince or other senior officials who might be with bin Laden or close by,” so they called off the strike.

On March 7, 1999, Richard Clarke called Sheikh Mohammed bin Zayed, the U.A.E. defense minister, to “express his concerns about possible associations between Emirati officials and bin Laden,” the 9/11 Commission report states.

It is not clear whether Clarke told Mohammed that U.S. intelligence had evidence that U.A.E. officials were with bin Laden in Afghanistan, but after the call, bin Laden and his patrons quickly dispersed and the camps were dismantled.

Clarke claims the CIA approved the tip-off call. However, former CIA official John Mayer III told the commission it was “almost impossible” for the CIA to have approved Clarke’s move.

“When the former bin Laden unit chief found out about Clarke’s call, he questioned CIA officials, who denied having given such a clearance,” the report states. “Imagery confirmed that, less than a week after Clarke’s phone call, the camp was hurriedly dismantled and the site was deserted.”

The vulgar, funny, satirical cartoon South Park brought the “prophet” Muhammad  into its 200th episode by having it said that he was hidden in a U-haul truck and then in a bear costume (out of which, however, emerged Santa Claus, according to Jon Stewart below – we didn’t see the episode).

Muslims took offense. At what exactly isn’t clear. A Muslim named Abu Talhah al Amrikee warned Trey Parker and Matt Stone, the creators of South Park, by means of a video on the net that they could be punished with death like the film-maker Theo van Gogh.

So Comedy Central, the channel that shows South Park, censored the episode. They bleeped out all mention of Muhammad, and a final statement deploring intimidation.

That’s what Islam’s all about. That’s what Muslims do: take offense, intimidate, and kill people for making films and drawing cartoons of Muhammad, while also bombing, blowing up planes, flying planes into buildings, shooting unarmed soldiers, plotting mass murder in the New York subway, running over their daughters, beheading their wives, sending money to terrorist organizations to pay for suicide-bombing equipment, parking cars full of explosive outside nightclubs, etc.  And Western authorities feel dreadfully ashamed over offending Muslims, and try not to, and apologize, and pretend it’s not Muslims doing the bombing and shooting and all that.

Almost everyone’s scared of Muslims, as Muslims do their best to make us so. Though they pretend that it’s cruel of non-Muslims to fear them, to be what they call “Islamophobic”.

On Islam’s victory over South Park – an everyday story of the contemporary Western world – find excellent comment by Mark Steyn here, and Diana West here.

May 20 will be “Everybody Draw Muhammad” day. We will join in enthusiastically, and urge our readers to do the same.

Here’s Jon Stewart. We’ll overlook his silly remark about atheists.

Good news. CAIR had these ads on Miami buses removed. Now they’re to be put back. Here’s a report on how justice prevailed.

The SIOA [Stop the Islamization of America] legal complaint against Miami-Dade Transit has been settled. Not only will our FDI [Freedom Defense Initiative] and SIOA religious liberty bus ads be going back up, but another twenty will be added and will soon be on the streets of Miami.

This is a major victory for the freedom of speech and a disastrous defeat for the thuggish Islamic supremacists of CAIR. It is also a major victory for SIOA. …

The bus ad, which appears above, began running on Tuesday, April 13th. Just two days later, on Thursday, after pressure from CAIR, the bus ads had already been pulled down …

CAIR [Council on American-Islamic Relations], as it typically does, issued nationwide press releases and blasted emails to tens of thousands of outlets on Friday crowing over its “victory” of suppressing free speech on the grounds that the ads promoted “bigotry”. Newspaper and other media stories in the Miami Herald, the Orlando Sentinel, Fox Business News, and NBC ran blindly with the CAIR-generated story on Friday with headlines like: “Miami-Dade Transit Throws Islamic Ad Under the Bus.”

Ironically, CAIR, which has been named by the U.S. Attorney’s Office and the FBI as a Muslim Brotherhood-Hamas front group and unindicted co-conspirator in the Holy Land Foundation terror fund raising trial – a trial which culminated in guilty verdicts for all of the Muslim Brotherhood defendants – claims it is “the nation’s largest Muslim civil rights organization.” …

The Center for Security Policy, a leading Washington D.C. national security think tank run by former Reagan administration official Frank Gaffney, has documented that CAIR is an illegal, unregistered foreign agent of the OIC [Organisation of the Islamic Conference], receiving millions of dollars from Islamic countries in order to pursue their political goals in the U.S. …

The day after the bus ads had been pulled … a teleconference was arranged …  with the Miami-Dade County Attorney’s office, which took place [the following] Monday afternoon… The county attorneys conceded the ads should not have been pulled. By Tuesday [it was agreed that ] not only would the original 10 king-sized ads go back up on the Transit Authority buses, but CBS would run an additional 20 king-sized bus ads for no additional charge.

The new agreement was inked and signed by Wednesday, April 21. The ads are expected to go back up by early next week.

Congratulations to Pamela Geller of Atlas Shrugged and Robert Spencer of Jihad Watch who caused this to happen.