In his Cairo speech, Obama painted a graphic picture of the sufferings of slaves, and went so far as to liken the plight of slaves in America in the past to the (self-inflicted) condition of the Palestinians in the present, implying that the Israelis are guilty of holding them in subjugation and inflicting extreme cruelty on them. A bigger lie, a more extreme libel is hardly possible. At the same time he does not choose to notice  that Arab Muslims are the world’s most persistent and unashamed slave owners. They keep, buy, sell and cruelly use slaves, most of them captured or bought in Africa.  

With fully justified righteous indignation, David Podvin writes in Canada Free Press:

Barack Obama’s speech in Cairo exemplified the craven liberal compulsion to appease evil. While progressives accuse conservatives who oppose affirmative action of being racist, Obama lavished praise upon his Muslim audience that enslaves millions of Africans. America’s first black president uttered nary a word on behalf of Islam’s many black captives. Liberals once opposed slavery rather aggressively [depends wh0 you mean by liberals – JB], but now ingratiate themselves to the slave masters.

Obama also abandoned gays to the predations of Muslim zealots. Although liberals have vilified Miss California USA for opposing gay marriage, Obama did not issue even the mildest rebuke to the Muslim world for perpetrating gay murder. When Mormons support traditional matrimony, progressives publicly explode in anger. When Palestinians commit homophobic homicide, the Left is unable to generate any discernible outrage.

The Obama speech failed to confront the barbarism of Islamic misogyny. Across the Koranic world, women are relentlessly abused. Islamic females are routinely flogged, sexually mutilated, and subjected to honor killings by their Muslim brethren. Yet Obama so yearned to avoid offending Muslim misogynists that his fleeting reference to Islamic women drew moral equivalence between their plight and the situation facing their American counterparts. Muslim females must deal with having their genitals disfigured while Western women must deal with the corporate glass ceiling. Obama equated these asymmetrical forms of bigotry, fecklessly declaring that all humanity must improve its treatment of women. His unwillingness to confront specifically the sadistic misogyny of Islam leaves imperiled Muslim women without the advocacy they so desperately need.

Obama forfeited a precious opportunity to champion the cause of the blacks and gays and women who are persecuted by Muslims. Theoretically, the welfare of these groups is of paramount importance to liberals. In reality, progressives concern themselves with the oppression of blacks and the slaughter of gays and the torment of women only when such injustices can be used to gain political advantage against Republicans…

Liberals not only refuse to condemn the racism and homophobia and misogyny being perpetrated by Muslims, they also smear as “Islamophobic” anyone who does object… Jihadists constantly commit atrocities while their liberal sycophants insist that Islam cannot be held responsible for the evil committed in its name… 

The liberal devotion to Islam constitutes history’s greatest unrequited love. Every social principle that progressives claim to cherish is rejected by the Muslim world:

Freedom of speech… Freedom of the press… Separation of Church and State… Civil rights…Women’s equality…

Liberals insist that these tenets are incomparably precious. Islamists could not disagree more. As Obama has proven again, progressives eagerly capitulate whenever protecting their cherished beliefs conflicts with the higher liberal principle of appeasing Islam.

Barack Obama’s speech was an amoral profile in cowardice. It therefore faithfully represented the modern liberal movement, which is extremely long on rhetoric, painfully short on backbone, and totally devoid of integrity.

Charles Krauthammer writes:

Obama the Humble declares there will be no more “dictating” to other countries. We should “forge partnerships as opposed to simply dictating solutions,” he told the G-20 summit. In Middle East negotiations, he told al-Arabiya, America will henceforth “start by listening, because all too often the United States starts by dictating.”  

An admirable sentiment. It applies to everyone — Iran, Russia, Cuba, Syria, even Venezuela. Except Israel. Israel is ordered to freeze all settlement activity. As Secretary of State Clinton imperiously explained the diktat: “a stop to settlements — not some settlements, not outposts, not natural-growth exceptions.”

What’s the issue? No “natural growth” means strangling to death the thriving towns close to the 1949 armistice line, many of them suburbs of Jerusalem, that every negotiation over the past decade has envisioned Israel retaining. It means no increase in population. Which means no babies. Or if you have babies, no housing for them — not even within  the existing town boundaries. Which means for every child born, someone has to move out. No community can survive like that. The obvious objective is to undermine and destroy these towns — even before negotiations.

To what end? Over the last decade, the U.S. government has understood that any final peace treaty would involve Israel retaining some of the close-in settlements — and compensating the Palestinians accordingly with land from within Israel itself.

That was envisioned in the Clinton plan in the Camp David negotiations in 2000, and again at Taba in 2001. After all, why turn towns to rubble when, instead, Arabs and Jews can stay in their homes if the 1949 armistice line is shifted slightly into the Palestinian side to capture the major close-in Jewish settlements, and then shifted into Israeli territory to capture Israeli land to give to the Palestinians?

This idea is not only logical, not only accepted by both Democratic and Republican administrations for the last decade, but was agreed to in writing in the letters of understanding exchanged between Israel and the United States in 2004 — and subsequently overwhelmingly endorsed by a concurrent resolution of Congress.

Yet the Obama State Department has repeatedly refused to endorse these agreements or even say it will honor them. This from a president who piously insists that all parties to the conflict honor previous obligations.

The entire “natural growth” issue is a concoction. It’s farcical to suggest that the peace process is moribund because a teacher in the Jewish Quarter of Jerusalem is making an addition to her house to accommodate new grandchildren — when Gaza is run by Hamas terrorists dedicated to permanent war with Israel and when Mahmoud Abbas, having turned down every one of Ehud Olmert’s peace offers, brazenly declares that he is in a waiting mode — waiting for Hamas to become moderate and for Israel to cave — before he’ll do anything to advance peace.

In his much-heralded “Muslim world” address in Cairo Thursday, Obama declared that the Palestinian people’s “situation” is “intolerable.” Indeed it is, the result of 60 years of Palestinian leadership that gave its people corruption, tyranny, religious intolerance and forced militarization; leadership that for three generations — Haj Amin al-Husseini in 1947, Yasser Arafat in 2000, Abbas in December 2008 — rejected every offer of independence and dignity, choosing destitution and despair rather than accept any settlement not accompanied by the extinction of Israel.

In the 16 years since the Oslo accords turned the West Bank and Gaza over to the Palestinians, their leaders — Fatah and Hamas alike — built no schools, no roads, no courthouses, no hospitals, no institutions that would relieve their people’s suffering. Instead they poured everything into an infrastructure of war and terror, all the while depositing billions (from gullible Western donors) into their Swiss bank accounts.

Obama says he came to Cairo to tell the truth. But he uttered not a word of that. Instead, among all the bromides and lofty sentiments, he issued but one [two actually, see our post immediately below – JB] concrete declaration of new American policy: “The United States does not accept the legitimacy of continued Israeli settlements,” thus reinforcing the myth that Palestinian misery and statelessness are the fault of Israel and the settlements.

Blaming Israel and picking a fight over “natural growth” may curry favor with the Muslim “street.” But it will only induce the Arab states to do like Abbas: sit and wait for America to deliver Israel on a platter. Which makes the Obama strategy not just dishonorable but self-defeating.

Self-defeating? While we agree with almost everything in this column, we question whether what Obama is doing is ‘self-defeating’.  For America, certainly. But for Obama himself? No. He has shown every sign of intending to augment Muslim power and prestige, and a willingness – no, an eagerness – to sacrifice Israel to that end.  

From Investor’s Business Daily:

In the torrent of analysis of the president’s Muslim speech, a major policy shift went largely unnoticed. We now endorse equal opportunity regarding what countries can have atomic weapons.

President Obama’s Cairo University address to the world’s Muslims on Thursday squandered a historic opportunity that perhaps only a president with a Muslim father and a Muslim name could have utilized: effectively rallying the Islamic world against Iran as it pursues nuclear weapons.

Instead, he did pretty much the opposite, declaring that “no single nation should pick and choose which nation holds nuclear weapons.”

This is multilateralism taken to its reductio ad absurdum. Since the dawn of atomic weapons, it has been mostly the United States’ job — what Harry Truman called “an awful responsibility which has come to us” — to act as a kind of global nuclear custodian.

Truman made no bones about defending our building of the bomb, noting that the Nazis “were on the search for it” and that “we know now how close they were to finding it. And we knew the disaster which would come to this nation, and to all peace-loving nations, to all civilization, if they had found it first.”

That Democratic president made it clear to the world that “Great Britain, Canada and the United States, who have the secret of its production, do not intend to reveal that secret until means have been found to control the bomb so as to protect ourselves and the rest of the world from the danger of total destruction.”

If we are honest with ourselves today, we must admit that even now, nearly six-and-a-half decades into the nuclear age, there remains no foolproof means of controlling the bomb. It continues to be, in Give ’em Hell Harry’s words, “too dangerous to be loose in a lawless world.”

So it is chilling to hear a U.S. president go to Egypt and, after issuing an unprecedented apology for the 1953 CIA coup that kept Iran and its oil from the clutches of Iran’s direct neighbor to the north, the Soviet Union, declare that Iran has “the right” to nuclear power — which it can easily use to build bombs.

There is nothing new in a president calling for “a world in which no nations hold nuclear weapons,” as Obama did in Cairo. Ronald Reagan expressed such hopes. But isn’t contending that “no single nation should pick and choose which nation holds nuclear weapons” the opposite of zero nuclear tolerance?

How is it a step toward a nuclear-free world when we announce that the West should stop practicing what might be called “nuclear discrimination?” Tehran will interpret Obama’s words as carte blanche to pursue its goal of building a nuclear weapons arsenal.

According to the United Nations’ International Atomic Energy Agency, Iran has now amassed 1,359 kilograms of low-enriched uranium hexafluoride. It has nearly 5,000 centrifuges up and running — and is making it more difficult for international inspectors to scrutinize its nuclear program.

Yet at the G-8 foreign ministers conference at the end of this month in Italy, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton will rub shoulders with Tehran’s diplomatic mission, invited to attend by the Italians, just as if Iran were Finland or New Zealand or any other civilized nation, not the Islamofascist threat to the world that it is.

Neither Europe nor the U.N. has the willingness or the fortitude to “pick and choose” multilaterally which nations can be accepted into the nuclear club. Only the U.S. can lead in such an “awful responsibility.”

But last week in Cairo we apparently relinquished that grave duty.

To our consternation,  many conservative commenters have failed to see the evil in Obama’s Cairo speech.

Fortunately, some are more discerning than others. Caroline Glick has written a very perceptive piece , worth reading in full. Here’s a part of it:  

Obama’s “straight talk” to the Arab world, which began with his disingenuous claim that like America, Islam is committed to “justice and progress, tolerance and the dignity of all human beings,” was consciously and fundamentally fraudulent. And this fraud was advanced to facilitate his goal of placing the Islamic world on equal moral footing with the free world.

In a like manner, Obama’s tough “truths” about Israel were marked by factual and moral dishonesty in the service of political ends.

On the surface, Obama seemed to scold the Muslim world for its all-pervasive Holocaust denial and craven Jew hatred. By asserting that Holocaust denial and anti-Semitism are wrong, he seemed to be upholding his earlier claim that America’s ties to Israel are “unbreakable.”

Unfortunately, a careful study of his statements shows that Obama was actually accepting the Arab view that Israel is a foreign – and therefore unjustifiable – intruder in the Arab world. Indeed, far from attacking their rejection of Israel, Obama legitimized it.

The basic Arab argument against Israel is that the only reason Israel was established was to sooth the guilty consciences of Europeans who were embarrassed about the Holocaust. By their telling, the Jews have no legal, historic or moral rights to the Land of Israel.

This argument is completely false. The international community recognized the legal, historic and moral rights of the Jewish people to the Land of Israel long before anyone had ever heard of Adolf Hitler. In 1922, the League of Nations mandated the “reconstitution” – not the creation – of the Jewish commonwealth in the Land of Israel in its historic borders on both sides of the Jordan River.

But in his self-described exercise in truth telling, Obama ignored this basic truth in favor of the Arab lie. He gave credence to this lie by stating wrongly that “the aspiration for a Jewish homeland is rooted in a tragic history.”

He then explicitly tied Israel’s establishment to the Holocaust by moving to a self-serving history lesson about the genocide of European Jewry.

Even worse than his willful blindness to the historic, legal and moral justifications for Israel’s rebirth, was Obama’s characterization of Israel itself. Obama blithely, falsely and obnoxiously compared Israel’s treatment of Palestinians to white American slave owners’ treatment of their black slaves. He similarly cast Palestinian terrorists in the same morally pure category as slaves. Perhaps most repulsively, Obama elevated Palestinian terrorism to the moral heights of slave rebellions and the US civil rights movement by referring to it by its Arab euphemism, “resistance.”

But as disappointing and frankly obscene as Obama’s rhetoric was, the policies he outlined were much worse. While prattling about how Islam and America are two sides of the same coin, Obama managed to spell out two clear policies. First, he announced that he will compel Israel to completely end all building for Jews in Judea, Samaria, and eastern, northern and southern Jerusalem. Second, he said that he will strive to convince Iran to substitute its nuclear weapons program with a nuclear energy program.

Obama argued that the first policy will facilitate peace and the second policy will prevent Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons. Upon reflection, however, it is clear that neither of his policies can possibly achieve his stated aims. Indeed, their inability to accomplish the ends he claims he has adopted them to advance is so obvious, that it is worth considering what his actual rationale for adopting them may be.

The administration’s policy toward Jewish building in Israel’s heartland and capital city expose a massive level of hostility toward Israel. Not only does it fly in the face of explicit US commitments to Israel undertaken by the Bush administration, it contradicts a longstanding agreement between successive Israeli and American governments not to embarrass each other.

Moreover, the fact that the administration cannot stop attacking Israel about Jewish construction in Jerusalem, Judea and Samaria, but has nothing to say about Hizbullah’s projected democratic takeover of Lebanon next week, Hamas’s genocidal political platform, Fatah’s involvement in terrorism, or North Korean ties to Iran and Syria, has egregious consequences for the prospects for peace in the region.

As Fatah leader Mahmoud Abbas made clear in his interview last week with The Washington Post, in light of the administration’s hostility toward Israel, the Palestinian Authority no longer feels it is necessary to make any concessions whatsoever to Israel. It needn’t accept Israel’s identity as a Jewish state. It needn’t minimize in any way its demand that Israel commit demographic suicide by accepting millions of foreign, hostile Arabs as full citizens. And it needn’t curtail its territorial demand that Israel contract to within indefensible borders.

In short, by attacking Israel and claiming that Israel is responsible for the absence of peace, the administration is encouraging the Palestinians and the Arab world as a whole to continue to reject Israel and to refuse to make peace with the Jewish state…

The only reasonable explanation is that the administration is baiting Israel because it wishes to abandon the Jewish state as an ally in favor of warmer ties with the Arabs. It has chosen to attack Israel on the issue of Jewish construction because it believes that by concentrating on this issue, it will minimize the political price it will be forced to pay at home for jettisoning America’s alliance with Israel. By claiming that he is only pressuring Israel to enable a peaceful “two-state solution,” Obama assumes that he will be able to maintain his support base among American Jews who will overlook the underlying hostility his “pro-peace” stance papers over…

By his words as well as by his deeds, not only has Obama shown that he is not a friend of Israel. He has shown that there is nothing that Israel can do to make him change his mind.

Joshua Muravchik writes in the Wall Street Journal: 

The results of Kuwait’s elections last month — in which Islamists were rebuffed and four women were elected to parliament — will likely reinvigorate the movement for greater democracy in the region that has stalled since the hopeful “Arab spring” of 2005. It also puts pressure on the Obama administration to end its deafening silence on democracy promotion.

Although ruled by a hereditary monarch, Kuwait is the most democratic of the Arab countries. The press is relatively free, parliament has real power, and politicians are chosen in legitimate elections. However, Kuwait is a part of the Persian Gulf, where the subordination of women is traditionally most severe. Historically, Kuwait’s political process was for males only. But in 2005 parliament yielded to female activists and approved a bill giving women the right to vote and hold office.

In 2006 and 2008, several women ran for parliament, though none won. The women that captured four of the 50 seats last month weren’t aided by quotas; they won on their own merits. Their success will undoubtedly inspire a new wave of women’s activism in nearby countries.

Almost as significant as the women’s gains were the Islamist losses. The archconservative Salafist Movement’s campaign for a boycott of female candidates obviously fell flat, and the number of seats held by Sunni Islamists fell sharply.

Thus continues a string of defeats for Islamists over the last year and a half from west to east. In September 2007, Morocco’s Justice and Development Party, a moderate Islamist group, was widely forecast to be the winner. Its support proved chimerical: It came away with 14% of the seats, trailing secularists. Iraq’s provincial elections this January signaled a turn away from the sectarian religious parties that had dominated earlier pollings. This trend, capped by Kuwait’s elections, has important implications.

What sapped the vitality of the “Arab spring” was the triumph of Islamists — the Muslim Brotherhood’s strong showing in Egypt’s 2005 parliamentary election, Hamas’s victory in Gaza, and Hezbollah’s ascendance in Lebanon. In response to these election results, the Bush administration muffled its advocacy of democracy in the Middle East. Some democrats in the region even took a go-slow stance.

To put it bluntly, these outcomes renewed questions about whether the Arabs were ready for democracy. If elections produce victory for parties that are not themselves democratic in practice or philosophy, then democracy is at a dead end. But the Kuwait election, following those in Iraq and Morocco, suggests that such fears may have been overblown.

If this election is a harbinger of larger developments, its symbol is Rola Dashti, an American-educated economist who led the fight for women’s political rights in Kuwait and who lost narrowly in 2006 and 2008 before triumphing this year.

Her victory was remarkable for several reasons. Half-Lebanese by birth, Ms. Dashti speaks Arabic with a distinct Lebanese accent that stamps her as an outsider in a relatively insular country. She is also proudly secular. She wears no head covering and makes no effort to conceal the fact that she remains unmarried although she is in her forties.

This flies in the face of the custom that is the essence of women’s subordination in the culture of the Gulf. The system of “guardianship” requires that women be under the supervision of some male — father, uncle, husband, brother or even son — at all times. Ms. Dashti lives with her divorced mother in a household devoid of males. She has brothers, but they serve as campaign aides rather than as guardians.

The fact that Kuwaiti voters sent Ms. Dashti and three other women to parliament suggests that the Arab world may be ready for democracy after all. The Obama administration should take heed.

The most surprising thing to us in all this – that Muravchik thinks Obama gives a damn.    

Pamela Geller (of Atlas Shrugs) reports on the torturing to death of a young man by Muslims in Paris for no other reason than that he was a Jew; and on how the French authorities, police, media and a court of law continue to maintain the pretense that this sustained sadism was carried on only for ransom. Imagine if a Muslim had been subjected to this horror by non-Muslims, how the French government and the media would have fallen over themselves to condemn the perpetrators.  French Jews have been pouring out of France, many of them going to live in Israel. The sooner the Jews of Western Europe leave those dhimmi-minded states to the fate they have brought upon themselves – full Islamization in under 50 years – the better their chances of survival.  

The abduction and murder in Paris of a young Jewish man by a gang of Muslim immigrants calling themselves the Barbarians shocked the whole of France in 2006. But now that the accused are on trial – silence. 

A French judge has ordered the latest issue of the magazine Choc (“shock”) removed from the shelves. The cover showed a man with duct tape completely covering his head, except for a small opening around his nostrils. His nose is bloody. His hands are also bound with duct tape.

It was a photo of Ilan Halimi, the 23-year-old Parisian Jew who was kidnapped and tortured for 24 days by the Barbarians. His captors took the picture and sent it to his family. A lawyer for Halimi’s family had complained about the magazine, but Choc‘s editor-in-chief Paul Payan responded: “Of course, we understand the anguish of the parents and, of course, we share their anguish…. But what’s so harrowing is not the publication of this photo. What’s harrowing is what it represents, what happened, the reality behind it.”

And it gets worse. The New York Times reported last week that “in the two and a half weeks since 27 people went on trial [in Paris] for the brutal 2006 kidnapping, torture and killing of a young Jewish man, little has filtered out about the proceedings.” Worse still, the little that has emerged indicates that French government and law enforcement have done everything in their power to obscure the Islamic Jew-hatred that led these Muslims to commit this crime.

The corrupt media, aligned with the jihad forces, has long blacked out the truth about Halimi’s homemade concentration camp and the inconceivable horrors that were suffered by this French Jew, chosen by Islam’s soldiers for unimaginable torture. They covered up the religious aspects of this depraved barbarity. Law enforcement did as well…

Ilan’s uncle, Rafi Halimi, reported that “the gang phoned the family on several occasions and made them listen to the recitation of verses from the Koran, while Ilan’s tortured screams could be heard in the background.”

Three weeks of unimaginable torture. Three weeks. So many clues. So many guilty animals partaking in the continuing torture in their “homemade concentration camp.” Twenty-three people participated in torturing Ilan. Another twenty were involved indirectly. The custodian of the building gave them the key to an apartment where they said they wanted to “keep someone.” French journalist Guy Millière reported that “the screams must have been loud because the torture was especially atrocious: the thugs cut bits off the flesh of the young man, they cut his fingers and ears, they burned him with acid, and in the end poured flammable liquid on him and set him on fire.”

Horrible tortures. Horrible torturers. One of the torturers would go to work at a TV station every day and come back to partake in the torture. The girls who lured Halimi into the trap knew he had been kidnapped. They knew Youssef Fofana, the leader of the Barbarians, was extremely violent. They knew Ilan was still in his hands three weeks later. All they had to do was make an anonymous phone call to the police. No one would have known. They did not do it. No neighbor thought to say to the police that something strange was going on in their building.

The police told the family not to say a word. The Jewish community was not warned when prior attempts to kidnap Jewish men had failed. The Jewish community was not warned before the successful attempt.

Even the one member of the gang who dropped out because he was shocked by their violence did not call the police.

When Ilan was found, the head of the fire department who was called to the scene, a man with decades of experience, almost fainted when he saw the victim. The last thing Youssef Fofana did was slit Ilan’s throat, twice, and pour a flammable liquid on him to try to set him on fire. But this did not burn him to death, because Ilan walked for perhaps one hour, trying still to find a way to live.

It was another brutal Islamic slaughter of a defenseless Jew. To cover it up now is only to help ensure that it happens again.

 

From the moment John McCain was chosen to be GOP candidate for the presidency we knew the battle was lost. McCain never made the case that needed to be made for any part of Republican policies. He enthusiastically helped Obama to trash the Bush administration. Where Bush was certainly right and successful was in all that he did to prevent another 9/11 on his watch. At last someone who can speak with authority and be listened to is saying so. 

This is an extract from the speech on national security made by Dick Cheney yesterday, defending the measures taken by the last adminsitration to keep Americans safe. Here’s a link to the whole text. 

The United States of America was a good country before 9/11, just as we are today. List all the things that make us a force for good in the world — for liberty, for human rights, for the rational, peaceful resolution of differences — and what you end up with is a list of the reasons why the terrorists hate America. If fine speechmaking, appeals to reason, or pleas for compassion had the power to move them, the terrorists would long ago have abandoned the field.

And when they see the American government caught up in arguments about interrogations, or whether foreign terrorists have constitutional rights, they don’t stand back in awe of our legal system and wonder whether they had misjudged us all along.

Instead the terrorists see just what they were hoping for — our unity gone, our resolve shaken, our leaders distracted. In short, they see weakness and opportunity.

What is equally certain is this: The broad-based strategy set in motion by President Bush obviously had nothing to do with causing the events of 9/11. But the serious way we dealt with terrorists from then on, and all the intelligence we gathered in that time, had everything to do with preventing another 9/11 on our watch. The enhanced interrogations of high-value detainees and the terrorist surveillance program have without question made our country safer. Every senior official who has been briefed on these classified matters knows of specific attacks that were in the planning stages and were stopped by the programs we put in place.

This might explain why President Obama has reserved unto himself the right to order the use of enhanced interrogation should he deem it appropriate. What value remains to that authority is debatable, given that the enemy now knows exactly what interrogation methods to train against, and which ones not to worry about. Yet having reserved for himself the authority to order enhanced interrogation after an emergency, you would think that President Obama would be less disdainful of what his predecessor authorized after 9/11. It’s almost gone unnoticed that the president has retained the power to order the same methods in the same circumstances. When they talk about interrogations, he and his administration speak as if they have resolved some great moral dilemma in how to extract critical information from terrorists. Instead they have put the decision off, while assigning a presumption of moral superiority to any decision they make in the future.

Releasing the interrogation memos was flatly contrary to the national security interest of the United States. The harm done only begins with top secret information now in the hands of the terrorists, who have just received a lengthy insert for their training manual. Across the world, governments that have helped us capture terrorists will fear that sensitive joint operations will be compromised. And at the CIA, operatives are left to wonder if they can depend on the White House or Congress to back them up when the going gets tough. Why should any agency employee take on a difficult assignment when, even though they act lawfully and in good faith, years down the road the press and Congress will treat everything they do with suspicion, outright hostility and second-guessing? Some members of Congress are notorious for demanding they be briefed into the most sensitive intelligence programs. They support them in private, and then head for the hills at the first sign of controversy.

As far as the interrogations are concerned, all that remains an official secret is the information we gained as a result. Some of his defenders say the unseen memos are inconclusive, which only raises the question why they won’t let the American people decide that for themselves. I saw that information as vice president, and I reviewed some of it again at the National Archives last month. I’ve formally asked that it be declassified so the American people can see the intelligence we obtained, the things we learned and the consequences for national security. And as you may have heard, last week that request was formally rejected. It’s worth recalling that ultimate power of declassification belongs to the president himself. President Obama has used his declassification power to reveal what happened in the interrogation of terrorists. Now let him use that same power to show Americans what did not happen, thanks to the good work of our intelligence officials.

Daniel Greenfield writes in Canada Free Press (read it all, it’s strong stuff):

The only reason for creating Palestine 2.0 [Palestine 1 being Jordan – JB] is the destruction of Israel. It will not bring regional stability. It will not even bring local stability. It cannot even function unless its entire workforce is funded from abroad. It cannot even stop engaging in terrorism.

Palestine 2.0 is a Frankenstein’s monster, with body parts from Shiite, Sunni and Marxist terrorists. It only knows how to do one thing and one thing alone, kill. It is not a natural creature, because no Palestinian state ever existed throughout history. It is an artificial state whose existence has only one purpose. The destruction of Israel.

And that answers our question at last. Who needs a Palestinian state? Someone who is either ignorant, foolish or needs to destroy Israel.

The Two State Solution is not a formula for any kind of stability or end to the violence. It’s meant to take the violence to a whole new level. It is a formula for the destruction of Israel. 17 years of peacemaking by Israelis has produced 17 years of terrorism by the Palestinian Arabs. Everything sowed on the Palestinian Authority, from money to guns, from autonomy to infrastructure, have come up as dragon’s teeth.

Palestine is not a state. It was never a state. It will never be a state. It is currently ruled by two factions who have both disowned a negotiated Palestinian state in favor of the destruction of Israel. It is not a country, it is a weapon.

Palestine is a gun aimed at the head of Israel with one goal, its destruction. Palestine is a gun aimed at the head of every Jew in the world, legitimizing the worst and ugliest kinds of bigotry. Palestine is an imaginary place given form as a vicious myth brainwashing generation after generation of Jordanian and Egyptian Arabs to call themselves Palestinians and kill and die in the name of perpetuating a second Holocaust, all for the glory of Allah, Mohammed, Marx, not to mention Saddam Hussein, Ahmadinejad, the House of Saud, and every cause and ruler with an interest in toppling Israel into the dust.

Palestine is death. It exists only as a form of living death by a population taught to see themselves as willing martyrs to the bomb belt from birth. It breathes death, it celebrates death, it teaches death and preaches death. It is the final ugly end of the hatred and cruelty bottled up in the Arab and Islamic dictatorships of the region. It is the true face of Islam and its shining reflection in the mirror of the Western press and diplomats is the true measure of their Dhimmism.

The Cult of Death in Palestine and the war against Israel is only a preview for the West of things to come. Palestine is not a place, it is hate and homicide boiled down into myth. Palestine is not only in Israel. It is in Paris and London. It is in Madrid and Detroit. It is in Sydney and Moscow. It is everywhere that the toxic brew of Muslim fanaticism and Arab nationalism flows. Its flag is the flag of death. Its constitution is a death warrant for every free nation. Its legislature is a smug coven of obese terrorist chieftains sending their followers off to death with the promise of virgin demons fornicating with them in Paradise.

Palestine 2.0 is a monster with only one purpose, to create Holocaust 2.0. That is who needs a Palestinian state. That is why the far left and the far right are both so hellbent on bringing one into being. Accepting the Two State Solution means accepting death. Rejecting it means embracing life.

Christians in Islamic states are being continually and ruthlessly persecuted and slaughtered.  Heads of the various Christian churches, Western Governments, the big political parties, and the mainstream media are pretending it’s not happening.

Click on the video (from David Horowitz’s Freedom Center) to learn how bad it is.

Meanwhile, because European governments and political parties are refusing to acknowledge that there is any threat to the survival of their indigenous cultures as Muslim numbers grow by birth and conversion, neo-Nazi parties are gaining support among the electorates. Angry voices are calling for the forceful expulsion of Muslims. There is reason to fear outbreaks of Muslim and anti-Muslim violence this summer in many parts of Europe. The stench of genocidal hatred is in the air.

What should be attacked are not Muslims but the ideology of Islam. Not people, but ideas. The fight should not be with clubs, fists, boots and guns, but with words. Islam should be argued against, rationally, strongly, persistently in every public forum, actual and electronic, that our civilization has at its disposal.

Yet the UN is trying to stop all criticism of that cruel, intolerant, oppressive, murderous creed.

Furthermore, it’s hard to argue against the nonsense Muhammad taught without also pointing out that all other religious belief  is equally absurd. True, Judaism and Christianity do not preach moral evil as Islam does.  But Christianity has practiced it (both the Catholic and Protestant branches have burnt their heretics), and besides, any insistence on irrational belief is corrupting.

But as the Taliban take over Pakistan and its nuclear arms; as Ahmadinejad prepares his nuclear bombs to destroy the Jewish state; as the Sunni fanatics of Hamas gain support from the Shias of Iran (as well as from Obama’s administration); as Hizbollah takes control of Lebanon; as Turkey turns Islamist; as Somalia ferments jihad on the high seas; as terrorists train under Somali and Pakistani jihadis in camps scattered through the US; as Christians are slaughtered in Indonesia, Iraq, Egypt, Lebanon, Sudan; it would seem clearer than ever that the  human race would be better off without religion.

Between 1968 and 1990, about 95% of the terrorist groups doing their murderous work all over the world were Marxist, backed verbally at least and in many cases with training and arms, by the Soviet Union.

Now, David Solway writes, about 95% of the terrorist groups doing their murderous work all over the world are Islamic:

One may argue that most Muslims are not terrorists, but there is no denying that most terrorists are Muslims. Unless one is wearing blinders. The Dalai Lama, for example, whose celebrity status in the West is in inverse proportion to his political acumen and intellectual vigour, tells us that “Muslims cannot be terrorists. If a person is a terrorist, he cannot be a Muslim” (Rediff.com, June 1, 2008). Such pablum only weakens the corporate will to resist what is nothing less than a historically verified and scripturally sanctioned campaign of terror, the evidence for which stares us daily in the face.

Surveys show that over 95% of global terrorism is Islamic in origin. One may legitimately wonder whether fanaticism has not become commonplace, as the hysterical reaction that swept the Muslim world over the publication of satirical cartoons in certain European newspapers would appear to demonstrate. These were not merely rent-a-mob protestors, as some attenuating commentators have held; on the contrary, their numbers are legion and the damage they have caused is substantial. The uproar following Pope Benedict XVI’s citation of a medieval text faulting Islam for spreading the faith by the sword, which resulted in the burning of churches and the murder of a nun, is only par for the course. Ditto the commotion provoked by Geert Wilders’ video Fitna, an assemblage of pre-existent materials which correlates scenes of violence with well-known Koranic passages (and which most Western websites found too hot to handle).

Such disturbances would not cut so wide a swath through the entire Muslim world were popular anti-Western sentiment not so easily harnessed and ignited by Islamic autocrats intent on shoring up their regimes. Events of this nature and the feeling which animates them are far more representative of the historic impulsion of the faith than we are willing to concede, since doing so would require the courage and lucidity we are now scarcely able to muster.

The same is true of Muslim anti-protestor protestation, which has been even scantier. One may ask whether this deafening absence of public opposition may not be owing to the possibility that professedly moderate Muslims have been overtaken by the extremists among them, the expunging of whom from the body of the faith seems highly unlikely. On the contrary, the sense of no exit permeates the Muslim world…