We are against terrorism whoever commits it. [I personally devoted some 20 years of my life to investigating terrorism, hunting terrorists, writing and publishing about terrorists and their appalling activities – JB]

A Norwegian named Anders Behring Breivik has been arrested on the charge of killing dozens of people, 92 at the time of this writing: 85 of them shot while attending a Labor Party youth camp on Utoya Island, 7 killed by a bomb explosion in Oslo. [For later figures see foot of this post.] The shooting and bombing were acts of terrorism.

Breivik’s Facebook entries* reveal that he was trying to organize anti-Muslim action.

So these acts were carried out by an anti-Muslim terrorist, not by a Muslim. Islam is nevertheless the cause of what happened in Norway.

The point we made yesterday, that nemesis has come to Norway, is reinforced.

Breivik’s targets were not, it seems, Muslims themselves (unless incidentally), but those who, in the mind of the mass-murderer, were connected to the politicians responsible for admitting and privileging Muslims. The Labor Party,  in coalition with the Socialist Left Party and the Center Party, governs Norway at present.

Here’s an example of how Muslims have been privileged in Norway. According to a recent report, “all rapes” in Norway over the last five years were committed by Muslims, and the reaction of politicians to this shocking information was to tell Norwegian women they should adapt to Islamic custom by covering themselves as Muslim  women do.

Did they not think for one moment that such blatant injustice might make at least some of their citizens angry?

These are comments on the Telegraph report of the Norwegian terrorist attack:

I hope that the Labour Youth movement in Norway realize that if they flood their country with Moslems, they will seek to establish a caliphate and undermine freedom and democracy. Their attitude towards migration may appear enlightened humanism but it will erode everything that they and their ancestors hold dear.

Far right is on the rise in the whole of Europe and no one can do a thing about it.

The commenters imply that a backlash has started against Norway’s, and Europe’s, capitulation to Islam. We think they may well be right.

(See also the comments on our own article Nemesis comes to Norway, which are full of interesting points.)

When a few individuals, most notably Geert Wilders in Holland, Elisabeth Sabaditsch-Wolff in Austria, Jesper Langballe in Denmark**, offered peaceful and extremely necessary criticism of multiculturalism  – the policy that brought Islam into Europe and protected and privileged it – the reaction from the authorities was to bring them to trial for heresy.  That’s what it amounted to, whatever charges were specified. To do this was to go against the best tradition on which European greatness and power was built, at least since the Enlightenment: the Socratean idea of free intellectual examination in open debate.

European leaders lost sight of what tolerance means. In the name of tolerance they allowed the intolerance of Islam to prevail in whole towns and areas of their cities. To tolerate intolerance is to be intolerant. And that is what they’ve become.

They lost sight of what freedom means. They protected an ideology which names itself “submission” (the literal meaning of Islam) to deny freedom of speech to the indigenous peoples of Europe.

They lost sight of what “racism” means. In the name of “anti-racism” they permitted Muslims openly and stridently to express hatred and murderous intent against Jews.

They sowed the wind and they are reaping the whirlwind.

Too late some of them have nervously murmured the suggestion that maybe the policy of multiculturalism – meaning the admission of millions of Muslims into Europe – was not a good idea. New organizations are being formed (see here and here) in many European countries to oppose what they see as an invasion of their countries by Islam. Their opposition is all too likely to be murderous.

When emotion is strongly aroused in the political arena, and open debate is suppressed, there will be violence, there will be blood.

Perhaps even civil war.

* Eg:

Islam(ism) has historically led to 300 million deaths

Communism has historically led to 100 million deaths

Nazism has historically led to 6-20 million deaths

ALL hate ideologies should be treated equally.

There are political forces in Oslo who want mass subsidised and low cost “Islam-blocks” in Oslo West for “better integration”… If this ever becomes the case, most of Oslo West will move to Bærum (and most will eventually follow).

I have on some occasions discussed with … the EDL [English Defence League] and recommended them to use conscious strategies. The tactics of the EDL is to “entice” an overreaction from Jihad Youth/Extreme-Marxists something they have succeeded several times already.

The agenda of the Norwegian cultural conservative movement over the next 5 years …

1. Newspaper with national distribution

2. Work for control of several NGOs

3. Norwegian EDL

Also go here for more quotations from Breivik, in some of which he talks specifically about his opposition to multiculturalism.

* * See our post The new heresy, January 11, 2011

*

Update on the numbers Monday, July 25:  The count of the dead has been lowered by the Norwegian police. It now stands at 76 instead of 93, 8 of them in Oslo.

Today the capital of Norway was bombed. As we are Islamophobic, suspicious by nature, and fairly well-informed, we leap to the conclusion that Muslims did it.

If we’re right, it’s a case of a biter being bitten.

Norway has long been cheering Islam on, because it’s a heavily leftist nation, and because most Norwegians hate Jews.

Bruce Bawer lives in Norway. He speaks authoritatively about Norway’s sentimental sympathy with Islam:

They’re overwhelmingly on the left, and intensely hostile to the West, to capitalism, to the US and to Israel. Before the fall of the USSR, an extraordinary percentage of them were Communists. They have replaced their affinity to the Soviet Union with sympathy for the great totalitarian ideology of our time: Islamism. Thus they romanticize Palestinians and despise Israel.

Part of the motivation for this anti-Semitism is the influx into Norway in recent decades of masses of Muslims from Pakistan, Iraq, Somalia and elsewhere. Multiculturalism has taught Norway’s cultural elite to take an uncritical, even obsequious, posture toward every aspect of Muslim culture and belief. When Muslim leaders rant against Israel and the Jews, the reflexive response of the multiculturalist elite is to join them in their rantings. This is called solidarity.

Norwegian history also plays a role in all this. Anti-Semitism has a long, deeply-rooted history here. This was never a cosmopolitan country – no nation in Europe was less ethnically or religiously diverse. On the contrary, Norway was a remote, rural, mountainous land of pious Lutheran farmers whose early 19th-century constitution banned Jews from its territory.

Norway was notoriously pro-Nazi. Later, after Germany was defeated –

The entrenched leftwing elite did its work through the schools, universities and media – producing a generation of Norwegians for whom being virtuous and intellectually sophisticated means, among other things, embracing the Muslim “victim,” and despising the Israeli “bully.”

On Oslo’s version of Fleet Street there is a bar, a journalists’ hangout, called Stopp Pressen (Stop the Presses). For years, there hung in its window a photograph of a smiling, beatific Yasser Arafat. From the way he was portrayed, you’d have thought he was Albert Schweizer. I walked by that picture almost every day for years. It was a good reminder of the sickness at the top ranks of this society.

How is modern anti-Semitism expressing itself in Norway?

Norwegian academics have sought to ban contacts with Israeli universities. Norwegian activists have encouraged boycotts of Israeli products. Every so often, a high-profile professor or activist, or some famous author … will write a virulent op-ed or give an angry speech denouncing Israel and insulting Jews as a people. …

Nothing … could be safer for them to say in this country; no one will seek to harm them physically or otherwise. On the contrary, their anti-Semitic drivel will only win them plaudits from their colleagues. Yet they are treated as bold, courageous, original truth-tellers. …

Well, they were safe enough from European Jews, who never hit back hard, even with mere words, more’s the pity.

But they were not safe from the very people they brown-nosed, if we’re right about who bombed them today.

How dangerous is political and radical Islam in Norway?

Terrifyingly dangerous. And what makes it dangerous is the eagerness of the cultural elite to whitewash it. Islamists are welcomed into the elite. In recent years, one high-profile Islamist has been given a coveted position as a columnist for the country’s newspaper of record, while another has become a leading member of one of the political parties, and has established himself as a powerful figure in Norwegian society.

These men are invited to parties at the US Embassy, and enjoy friendly relations with top members of the Norwegian government and with members of the royal family. It seems clear that they are being groomed for high political office …

Then there’s our resident terrorist, Mullah Krekar, and his family, who have long been the subjects of fawning newspaper and TV profiles in which they are depicted sympathetically as kind, gentle, suffering victims. (This is a man who founded the terrorist group Ansar al-Islam, and who is known to be guilty of murdering and torturing children.)

Oslo was violently attacked by Muslims two years ago when –

…  supposedly in response to Israel’s actions against Hamas, Muslims rioted in downtown Oslo, making a large area of the city look like Beirut or Sarajevo at their most violent moments in modern history. The violence was out of control, the damage extensive. Yet almost everyone got off scot-free.

Early last year, in the same Oslo Square where Quisling and his henchman once held rallies [Vidkun Quisling was the Minister-President of Norway 1942-1945 who collaborated enthusiastically with Hitler – JB], scores of radical Muslims gathered to hear a Nazi-like message of hate against Jews, gays, secular democracy, America, the West, Israel. The speeches were chilling. Yet the men who gave those speeches continue to be treated with respect by Norwegian authorities.

Will a bombing, by Muslims, of their capital city change the minds of Norwegians about Islam?

More likely they’ll cringe even lower and lick the boots of Muslims more zealously. We’ll wait and see.

Islam to the West: “You are willing to tolerate the intolerant and the intolerable. That will be your epitaph. We are intolerant of the tolerant. That will be the message of our victory.”

We quote from an article by Edward Cline at Family Security Matters.

He writes as a secularist, and praises individual freedom. A thinker after our own heart.

Twenty years before 9/11, when Saudi nationals hijacked American passenger planes and used them as suicide bombs, the West was warned by one of our main enemies of things to come. The warning was announced in an unsigned Reuters article which appeared in April, 1981, in The New York Times: “Saudis Shield Islam From ‘Alien Values.’”

The headline sums up one half of the truth. A subheading may as well have read: “Values Alien to Islam to be Liquidated.”

A page-two heading could also have paraphrased Vladimir Lenin: “Westerners will sell us the rope with which we will subjugate them.”

The physical rope is the oil-production capacity which the barbarians nationalized (pioneered by Venezuela and Saudi Arabia, which then helped to form OPEC in 1960), which the West refrained from reclaiming. The ideological rope is multiculturalism and cultural relativism. Their ultimatum was and remains: If you Westerners insist there is no difference between our cultural and politics and yours, then it can make no difference to you if we take over and set the terms of your existence.You are willing to tolerate the intolerant and the intolerable. That will be your epitaph. We are intolerant of the tolerant. That will be the message of our victory.

The Times article is a fawning puff piece about our less than benevolent extortionist, the royal kingdom of Saudi Arabia, and about its pseudo-angst over how Western values are no match for a medieval, totalitarian ideology that is insulated from any and all threats from Western civilization.

Saudi Arabia’s economic planners believe they can successfully link the West’s technology and the Islamic faith without rending society, but acknowledge they face a challenge.

The text of the country’s economic plan recognizes that there is concern in the Government and among the populace that ”alien values and the spirit of materialism” may threaten religion, adding that this is a difficult problem. …

But as Cline points out,  “Islam is safe. It faces no peril from the West.” It is the West that is threatened by Islam. And if the West is overcome by Islam, scientific and technological development will cease.

Islam is by nature a parasitical ideology which cannot allow its adherents to create, innovate, or think outside the suffocating box of blind faith. Islam cannot allow its elect or anyone else freedom of thought without sabotaging itself. It will not abide criticism ranging from cartoons of its prophet to examination of its central tenets. So, it must feed off the West, which does allow freedom of thought, and freedom of action.

It is not … Islamic society that is being rent by the conflict between Islam and the West. It is the West’s societies, in virtually every Western nation, that are being torn asunder thanks to their pragmatic, tolerant, non-judgmental, and politically correct perception of Islam as just another religion. Europe is experiencing this dissolution first hand.

What are the “alien values” that the Saudis wish to keep – and have successfully kept for decades at box-cutter’s length? The supreme value of the individual. The idea that it is the individual who is the prime mover of his own life, responsible for his own values and actions. The value of that individual to be free to act in his own self-interest. The value of the idea that his rights to exist and to act do not emanate from society, or the state, or any monarchy, but from his nature as a being of volitional consciousness beholden to no dogma or faith.

We interrupt him to applaud.

And we nod in agreement as he goes on:

The “spirit of materialism”? What is meant by that? Ostensively, an overriding concern for one’s material comfort and happiness at the expense of intangible “spiritual” or moral values …

We like those quotation marks round “spiritual” – whatever does the word mean?

… which, in the case of Islam, is unquestioned submission to the theology and pseudo-ethics of Islam. However, blind, unquestioning acceptance of any morality is not a moral action. And one does not witness the sacrifice of “material values” in Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Kuwait, Dubai, or any other oil-windfall Arab regime. Like the ancient Egyptians, the Saudis have embarked on an “economic plan” which consists of building monumental skyscrapers, housing developments, and other neo-pyramids, all of which, funded by petrodollars, are white elephants that can never earn back their enormous investment. They represent the siphoning off of genuine, productive wealth from the West into unimaginable money pits. …

Willful blindness keeps most Western politicians from seeing and acknowledging the truth that Islam is waging a war of conquest. President Obama, we observe, acts consistently to ease Islam’s path to victory (see our post Too dreadful to contemplate, July 9, 2011).

The West is on the defensive, Islam on the offensive. As communists in the past have done in pursuit of global socialist state, Islamists [we just call them Muslims – JB] are plotting the overthrow of the West and its replacement with a global caliphate …  They are quite frank about their ends and means. …

While one totalitarian system has collapsed of its own ineptness, another has sprung up to take its place. …

Journalistic and politically correct diffidence continues to this day …  [towards] death fatwas on critics and cartoonists, rising sexual assaults on non-Muslim women in Western countries, honor killings of disobedient girls and women, riots and mass car burnings in “no-go” ghettoes in major cities, a resurgence of anti-Semitism spread by Muslim clerics, brazen calls for sedition and the overthrow of Western governments in mosques, the de facto establishment of Sharia courts in contravention of civil law, the meek accommodation of Muslim “needs” such as foot baths, prayer rooms, and halal food, often paid for by non-Muslim taxpayers (yes, it is jizya, or the Islamic tax on conquered infidels), the Ground Zero mosque … and so much more, all abetted, condoned, or ignored by a liberal news media, our leftist/liberal intelligentsia, and often by our judiciary.

And by most teachers in our schools and academies, and most of our military and political leaders.

Even our technology won’t save us if we lack the will to win this war.

America’s war in Afghanistan is at long last coming to an end.

Daniel Greenfield has these thoughts on the failed campaign:

Obama has made it clear that Karzai has no future, and that means that a growing realignment is happening in Afghanistan. With two sides to choose from, one that is on the way out, and one that is on the way in, a new tide of support is flowing away from the American backed government and to the Taliban. …

Afghanistan is the Muslim world at its most elementally tribal with fewer of the mock civilized interfaces between the Westerner and the ragged edge of the frontier than are found in Pakistan or the Middle East.

The Taliban took power there in the same way that Mohammed once did in the Arabian desert, by packing together ruthless brutality and a fanatical religious ideology. Their coalition was based on naked power and terror. Ours was based on foreign aid, elections and soldiers digging wells. It’s not that we never had a shot, but that we were trying to impose order on what is really a permanent state of chaos.

Even before the choppers have begun taking off, the chaos is reclaiming the land. The Islamists will return, celebrate their victory, and fall into another civil war. Without foreign troops there to target, they will not be able to count on the same level of aid from the Muslim world. Which will move the clock back to before the American invasion.

Kabul will hold out for a while, but eventually it will fall, and all the NGO’s, the girls we taught to read, the elections and the laws will all go back under the Burqa. …

The story will play out the same way that it did in Vietnam and the Russian occupation of Afghanistan. Not because it was foretold, but because we lost sight of what the mission was.

The same mission creep took hold in Afghanistan and Iraq, that has taken hold in most of our wars. We stopped fighting to destroy an enemy and began trying to win the hearts and minds of the population. No longer as a means, but as an end. …

If we had put our focus into hunting down the Taliban, wiping out any village that harbored them and leaving behind a trial of chaos and refugees, then we would have at least taught a lasting lesson.

But for what? Is it certain that 9/11 was prepared in Afghanistan, or was Osama bin Laden in Pakistan, or even perhaps Iran, when he plotted the attack?

One might think that America should have whacked the Taliban regardless of whether it had anything to do with 9/11. Perhaps another whack may be necessary one day. But America should whack and go.

Instead we believed that by exporting our system, we could implement a state of stability. Transform Afghanistan from a collection of villages and hovels run by gangs and large families into something more modern. The effort was doomed to fail. Afghanistan is not a modern state. It isn’t a state at all. Like most of the Muslim world it’s a patchwork of families and clans with borders and a flag stuck on top. To run it, is a matter of managing chaos. …

Our drive for democracy was based on a fundamental error. We had not taken into account that the difference between us and them, was not that we had voting booths, and they didn’t. But that we were civilized and they weren’t.

Is civilization rendered impotent by its own moral values when it comes to using force against savages?

When the Romans despaired of taming wild tribes they built walls to keep them at bay: the limes in Germany, Hadrian’s Wall in Britain. In our time, no wall can protect us from Islamic savages. From time to time we will need to whack them, but we should never hang about trying to tame them.

How can we possibly learn the answer, when we keep asking the wrong question. … The right question wasn’t how do we stabilize Afghanistan, it was how do we find the people who did this to us and teach them and their backers an enduring lesson.

There was a brief shining moment when we understood that this was the question. When it was “You’re either with us or against us” and “Give us Bin Laden’s head”. When politicians seemed to have reverted to the common sense approach of the man on the street. But then the experts took over. And the question became one of reconstructing Afghanistan in the name of some greater good. Now the Taliban are giving the final answer to that question.

The only true moral of war is that you shouldn’t begin one that you aren’t going to fight to win. And we didn’t fight to win. We fought for hearts and minds. And now when the troops go, we will discover how little those hearts and minds were worth all along.

Just how phony the claim is (put out by Obama and his henchwomen*) that the Libyan engagement is all about the “responsibility to protect” civilians, is demonstrated by this report published two days ago on July 18, 2011, by Asia News – and nowhere in the West:

Benghazi-based rebels took Brega over night. The town, which is 740 km east of Tripoli, is the country’s main oil hub. The National Transitional Council (NTC) called the fall of the city its greatest victory since the war against Gaddafi began. However, doubts remain about rebel intentions. Human Rights Watch (HRW) has accused them of retaliatory violence against pro-Gaddafi regime civilians. … HRW said rebels looted and torched homes in towns that had fallen under NTC control. In villages south of Tripoli, Gaddafi loyalists were beaten, their houses set on fire.

We have little respect for Human Rights Watch having observed their frequent incapacity or reluctance to tell the truth, but in this case their accusation is backed up by another source:

Tiziana Gamannossi, an Italian businesswoman in Tripoli, told AsiaNews that the rebels’ push is causing fear in the civilian population. …

In her view, NATO is funding and arming violent groups that lack any training or code of honour. …

For Gamannossi, a war that was launched to defend civilians is absurd. The latter watch powerless as their cities and country are torn down amid the silence of western media.

“These days, hundreds of thousands of people have demonstrated against NATO in Tripoli, Zliten, Ajaylat and Sabha, demanding an end to the air strikes. No newspaper has given such news much importance, calling the protests ‘ demonstrations funded by the regime’.”

Last week the 30-member contact group on Libya, including the United States, China and Russia, “formally recognised the NTC as the sole representative of the Libyan people. This will give the council access to about US$200 billion in Libyan government assets held in foreign banks to fund the rebel advance.”

What makes this contact group expect that the people leading the National Transitional Council will be any better for Libyans, or for other states to deal with, than Gaddafi has been?

The answer is, absolutely nothing. They may even be worse.

* Samantha Power, Senior Director of Multilateral Affairs, National Security Council;  Susan Rice, US Ambassador to the UN;  Hillary Clinton, Secretary of State.  See our post A siren song from hell, April 1, 2011.

Now he’s wooing the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt.

The Muslim Brotherhood is one of the chief Islamic organizations driving the jihad against America and the rest of the non-Muslim world. It is not “moderate” or “secular” as Obama and his henchmen say it is. It’s agenda is to destroy the United States, establish a world-ruling caliphate, impose sharia law, force Christians to pay for being allowed to live, wipe out the Jews, and keep women subservient to men.

Islam is the active enemy of the United States. And the president of the United States is on its side.

His heart is with Islam.

But, you might protest, he allowed the execution of Osama bin Laden. Yes, he did – reluctantly, we believe – because he had to seem to be against the most obvious and violent enemy who had plotted the 9/11 massacre of Americans. The order he gave to the Navy SEALs to kill bin Laden provides Obama with cover for his continuing support of the enemy and undermining of the country he was disastrously elected to lead.

An analogy would be if the British had elected Oswald Mosley, the Nazi-sympathizer and friend of Hitler and Goebbels, to lead them through World War Two.

Here is a timeline, from Investor’s Business Daily, which traces  the steps Obama has taken towards pleasing and finally embracing the Muslim Brotherhood:

2009: The White House invites [the Islamic Society of North America] ISNA’s president to President Obama’s inauguration ceremonies, even though the Justice Department just two years earlier had blacklisted the Brotherhood affiliate as an unindicted co-conspirator in the Holy Land trial — the largest terror-finance case in U.S. history.

2009: Obama delivers his Cairo speech to Muslims, infuriating the Mubarak regime by inviting Brotherhood leaders to attend.

2009: The White House dispatches top presidential adviser Valerie Jarrett to give the keynote speech at ISNA’s annual convention.

2009: Obama appoints a Brotherhood-tied Islamist — Rashad Hussain — as U.S. envoy to the Organization of the Islamic Conference, which strongly supports the Brotherhood. [Its name was changed in June this year to The Organization of Islamic Co-operation – JB]

2010: Hussain meets with the Brotherhood’s grand mufti in Egypt.

2010: Obama meets one on one with Egypt’s foreign minister, Ahmed Aboul Gheit, who later remarks on Nile TV: “The American president told me in confidence that he is a Muslim.”

2011: Riots erupt in Cairo’s Tahrir Square. Crowds organized by the Brotherhood demand Mubarak’s ouster, storm government buildings. The White House fails to back longtime U.S. ally Mubarak, who flees Cairo.

2011: White House sends intelligence czar James Clapper to Capitol Hill to whitewash the Brotherhood’s extremism. Clapper testifies the group is a moderate, “largely secular” organization.

2011: The Brotherhood’s spiritual leader — Sheikh Yusuf Qaradawi — is given a hero’s welcome in Tahrir Square, where he raises the banner of jihad. Qaradawi, exiled from Egypt for 30 years, had been calling for “days of rage” before the rioting in Egypt. Before Obama’s Cairo speech, he wrote an open letter to the president arguing terrorism is a direct response to U.S. foreign policy.

2011: The Brotherhood vows to tear up Egypt’s 30-year peace treaty with Israel. Since Mubarak’s fall, it has worked to formally reestablish Cairo’s ties with Hamas and Hezbollah.

2011: Obama gives Mideast speech demanding Israel relinquish land to Palestinians.

2011: White House security adviser gives friendly speech to Washington-area mosque headed by ISNA’s new president. 2011: Justice Department pulls plug on further prosecution of Muslim Brotherhood front groups identified as collaborators in conspiracy to funnel millions to Hamas. …

Frank Gaffney reports and comments at the Center for Security Policy:

Muslim Brotherhood fronts are routinely cultivated by federal, state and local officials. Representatives of homeland security, Pentagon, intelligence and law enforcement agencies frequently meet with and attend functions sponsored by such groups. … Individuals with family and other ties to the Muslim Brotherhood have actually been given senior government positions. The most recent of these to come to light is Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s Deputy Chief of Staff, Huma Abedin [wife of the former Congressman Anthony Weiner]. …

The Obama administration’s efforts to “engage” the Muslim Brotherhood are not just reckless. They are wholly incompatible with the President’s oath to “preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States” and the similar commitment made by his subordinates.

In Gaffney’s view, it’s a step too far:

These officials’ now-open embrace of the Muslim Brotherhood constitutes a geo-strategic tipping point … Instead of relying upon – let alone hiring – Muslim Brotherhood operatives and associates, the United States government should be shutting down their fronts, shariah-adherent, jihad-incubating “community centers” and insidious influence operations in America. By recognizing these enterprises for what they are, namely vehicles for fulfilling the seditious goals of the MB’s civilization jihad, they can and must be treated as prosecutable subversive enterprises, not protected religious ones under the U.S. Constitution. …

The policy toward the MB in Egypt will, Gaffney explains, strengthen and encourage the organization in America:

By engaging the Ikhwan [Arabic for the Brotherhood] in its native land, the Obama administration is effectively eliminating any lingering impediment to the operations of its myriad front groups in this country. Even before Secretary Clinton’s announcement, many of them have already been accorded unprecedented access to and influence in the U.S. government. …

The EU is following Obama’s lead in embracing the MB.

Robert Spencer writes at Front Page:

Following quickly after the revelation that the Obama administration had resolved to establish contact with the Muslim Brotherhood, the European Union has announced that it, too, is interested in talking with the group. …

So why is the Western world rushing to talk to this malignant group? Why the determination to ignore and deny what it stands for and says it will do?

If the Western world is to survive the Islamic jihad onslaught, it will only manage to do so by decisively rejecting this fantasy-based policymaking. …

Even commentators like Spencer and Gaffney who see clearly what is happening and what must follow, do not confront the most obvious explanation for Obama’s acting as he does towards this powerful spearhead of Islam, setting an example for others to follow, perhaps because it is  “too dreadful to contemplate”  as used to be said of nuclear war breaking out between the West and the Soviet Union.

The too-dreadful-to-contemplate answer is that this is not “fantasy-based policymaking”, but policymaking with a view to achieving the very results that are being achieved: the slow but steady, step-by step conquest of the West by Islam.

We’re saying that Obama wants Islam to succeed.

Melanie Phillips sees Obama’s cozying up to the MB as capitulation. She writes:

The abject capitulation of the Obama administration to the forces waging war on the western world was laid bare a few days ago when US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton announced that the US now wanted to open a dialogue with the Muslim Brotherhood.

And she asks in bewilderment:

Why does supposedly arch-feminist Hillary want to ‘engage’ with a movement that would promote the mutilation of Egyptian women?

Whether Hillary Clinton and the EU foreign policy chief Catherine Ashton understand what it will mean if Islam achieves its aim of  world domination – the universal imposition of sharia law, dhimmification of Christians, annihilation of the Jews, the subjugation of women, a descent into another age of darkness – we don’t know; but we suspect they simply don’t allow themselves to think that those horrors could, let alone will, ensue. For them they would be too dreadful to contemplate.

As, perhaps, would be – for most Americans – the idea that a victorious Islam is the change Obama hopes for.

Airports are on high alert for al-Qaeda terrorists plotting to blow up jets using “body bombs” surgically inserted in them.

Attempts are being made to implant explosives into the abdomens, buttocks and breasts of suicide bombers so they can pass undetected through new airport body scanners.

US security experts have warned airlines and airport authorities about the new threat … They fear fanatics could inject a detonating chemical into themselves to trigger the bombs. … Potential bombers would carry a letter from a doctor claiming they have had surgery and need to carry a needle and syringe for medical reasons. It would be sufficient to clear security during check-in for a flight.

Terror experts confirmed small pouches of high explosives such as Pentaerythritol Tetra Nitrate could be implanted into the body. The wounds would be allowed to heal over and the bomb, which would be detonated in mid air by injecting a chemical into the pouch. Just eight ounces of PETN, the weight of a Rubik’s Cube, could bring down a plane …

But are there doctors willing to help the cause by supplying false certificates and performing the surgery?

One security source said there is concern that the US may harbour a significant number of medical students sympathetic to al-Qaeda.He said: “There are a large number of students from Arab countries studying medicine in the US. … All that would be needed is a basic grounding in rudimentary surgery to help implant a small amount of explosive.”

In fact, terrorist doctors, fully qualified in the profession, are not in short supply: a number of Arab doctors have prostituted their skills to serve the Islamic ideology of torture and murder.

Michelle Malkin writes:

Our homeland security officials have sent fresh warnings to foreign governments that “human bombs” may try to board planes with surgically implanted explosives. The ticking terrorists are reportedly getting help from murder-minded Arab Muslim physicians trained in the West. Infidels beware: Dr. Jihad’s version of the health care oath omits the “no” in “Do no harm.”

The death docs may be using their expertise to play “Hide the IED” in body cavities that bomb-detection equipment cannot penetrate. At least one Saudi operative has been nabbed with explosives in his bum, and British intel picked up on Arab website chatter last year about possible breast-bomb inserts. Officials are now said to be on the lookout for physicians’ notes requesting that passengers be allowed to carry syringes — which could carry detonation chemicals. …

There should be no shock at the role of purported healers in these and other hellish plots to destroy masses of innocent lives in the name of Allah. …

Medical charities have long served as front groups for jihad. Palestinian jihadists used ambulances owned and operated by the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees (UNRWA) — subsidized with billions in American tax dollars — to ferry explosives and gunmen from attacks. Hezbollah terrorists used ambulances as props in Lebanon to stage anti-Israel propaganda and elicit sympathy from Western media.

Radical Islam’s bloody perversion of the medical profession traces back to the Egypt-based Muslim Brotherhood, the global terror operation that wooed wealthy young docs and other intellectual elites with cushy union benefits.

• Ayman al-Zawahiri, a surgeon from a family of doctors, was raised in the Muslim Brotherhood; helmed the murderous Islamic Jihad; and masterminded myriad al-Qaida plots before succeeding Osama bin Laden this summer.
• Former Hamas leader Abdel Rantissi, bent on wiping out the children of Israel, was a pediatrician.
• Convicted al-Qaida scientist Aafia Siddiqui studied microbiology at MIT and did graduate work in neurology at Brandeis.
• Rafiq Abdus Sabir was a Columbia University grad who served as an emergency room physician in Boca Raton, Fla., before his terrorism conviction in 2007 for agreeing to provide medical aid and treatment to wounded al-Qaida fighters so they could return to Iraq to kill American soldiers.
• Rafil Dhafir, an Iraqi-born oncologist, practiced in New York before being convicted in 2004 on 59 criminal counts related to violating Iraqi sanctions and committing large-scale medical charity fraud.
• A den of well-heeled jihadi doctors from around the world was implicated in the 2007 London/Glasgow bombings. At least one of the convicted terror MDs worked for Britain’s National Health Service.
• Mahmoud al-Zahar, another bloodthirsty Hamas biggie and medical doctor, described his specialty to a New York Times reporter in 2006 this way: ”’Thyroids: I’m very good at cutting throats,’ Dr. Zahar said, drawing his forefinger across his neck as a rare smile spread across his face.”

And at least one Christian Arab could be added to the list: George Habash, a Palestinian Greek-Orthodox Christian, leader of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), one of the terrorist groups that came together to form the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) under Arafat’s leadership. He qualified as a doctor of medicine at the American University of Beirut in 1951.

Michelle Malkin goes on to remind us of the Muslim psychiatrist who carried out the Fort Hood massacre:

Closer to home, Army psychiatrist Nidal Hasan starkly diagnosed the ideological fanaticism of every soldier of Allah in a Koranic-inspired PowerPoint presentation that concluded: “We love death more then (sic) you love life!”

Military officials plagued by political correctness ignored Hasan. Thirteen Fort Hood soldiers and civilian personnel, and one unborn child, paid with their lives.

How many more Dr. Jihads are operating in the open, exploiting our borders and tolerance, wielding medical licenses to kill?

Iran, the foremost state sponsor of terrorism, recently held an international “anti-terrorism” conference – under the flag of the United Nations.

Caroline Glick writes at Townhall:

Speaking at the conference, Iran’s supreme dictator Ali Khamenei called Israel and the US the greatest terrorists in the world. Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad said the US was behind the September 11 attacks and the Holocaust and has used both to force the Palestinians to submit to invading Jews.

The UN has never been able to agree on a definition of terrorism. It seems to be all one to the Secretary General of that demonic institution whether it is exemplified by “measures taken by the US and Israel to defend themselves” or “Muslims flying planes into New York buildings”.

Aside from the fact that the leaders from Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan – who owe their power and freedom to the sacrifices of the US military – participated in the conference, the most notable aspect of the event is that it took place under the UN flag. UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon sent greetings to the conferees through his special envoy. According to Iran’s Fars news agency, “In a written message… read by UN Envoy to Teheran Mohammad Rafi Al-Din Shah, [Ban] Kimoon [commended] the Islamic Republic of Iran for holding this very important conference.”

According to Fars, Ban added that the UN had “approved a large number of resolutions against terrorism in recent years, and holding conferences like the Teheran conference can be considerably helpful in implementing these resolutions.”

When journalists inquired about the veracity of the Iranian news report, the UN Secretary-General’s Office defended its position. Ban’s spokesman Farhan Haq sniffed, “If we’re reaching out and trying to make sure that people fight terrorism, we need to go as far as possible to make sure that everyone does it.”

So as far as the UN’s highest official is concerned, when it comes to terrorism there is no qualitative difference between Iran on the one hand and the US and Israel on the other. Here it is worth noting that among the other invitees, Iran’s “counterterror” conference prominently featured Sudanese President Omar al-Bashir.

That’s the Butcher of Dafur to most of us.

Bashir is wanted by the International Criminal Court on genocide charges for the genocide he has perpetrated in Darfur.

Iran, it should be noted, now occupies the vice-presidency of the UN General Assembly.

And North Korea, whose tyrant spends the meager resources of his impoverished country on making nuclear weapons while the people starve, heads the UN’s Conference on Disarmament.

The new General Assembly vice president is not merely the world’s largest state sponsor of terrorism. It is also a nuclear proliferator. This no doubt is why Iran’s UN representative expressed glee when earlier this month his nation’s fellow nuclear proliferator North Korea was appointed the head of the UN’s Conference on Disarmament.

This would be the same North Korea that has conducted two illicit nuclear tests; constructed an illicit nuclear reactor in Syria; openly cooperated with Iran’s nuclear and ballistic missile program; attacked and sank a South Korean naval ship last year, and threatened nuclear war any time anyone criticizes its aggressive behavior.

What these representative examples of what passes for business as usual at the UN show is that the international institution considered the repository of the will of the “international community” is wholly and completely corrupt. It is morally bankrupt. It is controlled by the most repressive regimes in the world and it uses its US- and Western-funded institutions to attack Israel, the US, the West and forces of liberty and liberalism throughout the world.

Given the utter depravity of the UN and the international system it oversees, what can explain the international Left’s kneejerk obeisance to it?

Caroline Glick does not answer her own question.

The answer is that the Left is wholly and completely corrupt and morally bankrupt.

And it forms the present government of the United States of America. Which accounts for the economic and political ruin engulfing the world.

The ideals enshrined in the Constitution – liberty above all – are considered obsolete by the Left.

This clowning at the UN; this calling of  things by the names of their opposites; this political and diplomatic sarcasm practiced in concert by dozens of vicious little powers; this mockery of civilized values by the international Left, is nihilism – and it is winning.

P.S. The UN must be destroyed.

If a doctor workng under a tyrannical regime uses his skill to patch up victims of torture, is he doing evil, or can he plead that he has no choice?

From the Mail Online:

A doctor involved in horrific torture by Saddam Hussein’s henchmen is working in British hospitals.

In an astonishing immigration scandal, border officials have allowed the suspected war criminal to treat thousands of British patients.

Dr Mohammed Kassim Al-Byati was given a permit to work as a doctor in the NHS by the Labour government in 2004.

Checks failed to uncover his history of working for the notorious Iraqi Intelligence Agency, which ran the country in a reign of terror during the Saddam years.

His job was to patch up torture victims so that they could be subjected to more appalling treatment.

In 2007, Al-Byati contacted the Home Office to confess to his horrific past so that he could claim asylum.

But, incredibly, this did not prevent him from carrying on earning tens of thousands of pounds working at a hospital in Wales.

Even now, despite his file being referred to a specialist war crimes unit, he remains cleared by the General Medical Council, and has been working in the West Midlands.

Whitehall sources say the case shows the total shambles which UKBA [United Kingdom Border Agency] became under Labour.

At its heart lies the Human Rights Act and a little-known EU directive which permitted the doctor to work even when his past was known. …

Under Saddam Hussein’s brutal regime countless Iraqis were tortured, maimed and imprisoned.

Favoured methods used by his secret police included eye-gouging; piercing of hands with an electric drill; suspension from a ceiling; electric shock; rape and other forms of sexual abuse; beating of the soles of feet; mock executions; extinguishing cigarettes on the body, and acid baths.

A case history seen by the Mail shows that Al-Byati arrived in Britain on a six-month visitor visa in January 2000, nine years after the end of the first Gulf War which left Saddam in power.

Officials twice extended his leave to stay so he could undertake clinical attachments as a doctor.

In January 2004, by which time Iraq had been invaded again, a work permit was granted and he was employed at a hospital in Wolverhampton until February 2007.

At this point, Al-Byati claimed asylum. In his witness statement he says he worked for the Iraqi Intelligence Agency.

In March 2007, while being interviewed by UKBA, Al-Byati stated that he patched people up after torture and was aware that the victims were returning to torture, but did not feel he could do anything about it.

A month later, his file was referred to the war crimes unit.

In 2008, he applied for permission to work as he had the offer of a four-month contract with a hospital in Wales.

Normally, asylum seekers are barred from working. But there is an EU directive that allows an asylum seeker to work if the case has not been dealt with for 12 months or more through no fault of their own.

As a result, since 2008 Al-Byati has been working full-time as a locum registrar and occasionally as a consultant in the West Midlands. …

One perversity of the asylum system is that the worse the crimes an applicant has been involved in, the more likely he is to be allowed to stay.

He can claim that, if sent back to the country where the offences were committed, he may be subjected to degrading treatment, which is not allowed under the Human Rights Act.

“Degrading treatment” is of course just what such savages need. Rather than physical torture, they should suffer humiliation. For men who belong to an “honor” society, where saving face is the highest good, humiliation would be an apt punishment. In any decent evaluation, Al-Byati, by working with and for torturers, abased himself: if further abasement hurts him, what injustice is done?

The Human Rights Act has turned values upside down:

In the past some asylum seekers have made their past exploits sound worse to bolster their case.

A report last year branded Britain a ‘safe haven’ for war criminals with hundreds of people wanted for murder and torture living here free from prosecution. …

Al-Byati complains that his life is now difficult.

But Al-Byati said:  ‘I can’t go out of this country. I want to see my 70-year-old mother and my brother in America. My wife has family in Jordan, she wants to go there. But we have no passport. It’s like my wife and children are in prison.

‘I can’t get a job, I can’t progress. To be honest, I’m very upset.’

No doubt the compassioneers of the churches and the sentimentalists of the Left will find it in their ever-bleeding hearts to pity him.

But does he deserve any pity, any mercy at all, do you think?