A tenured university professor praises Osama bin Laden, recruits for the jihad – and is protected by the university.

Julio Pino, a professor at Kent State University speaks for al-Qaeda and ISIS.

Ryan Mauro tells Megyn Kelly of Fox News why this isn’t simply a matter of free speech.

This is an interesting video, shown on Egyptian TV on January 18, 2016.

Ahmad Qhadaf Al-Dam, a former intelligence officer of Colonel Qhadafi’s Libya, and a cousin of the dictator, talks about weapons of mass destruction that Libya had acquired and then bargained away – except for a few chemical weapons hidden in the desert and some sent to Syria – in a deal with the West. He declares that Libya no longer needs weapons to  defend itself against Israel, because Israel is no longer an enemy of the Arabs but their ally. He also says that the Arab nation can only be either the slave or the enemy of the West.

In this excellent video published by the Clarion Project in December 2015, Raheel Raza, president of Muslims Facing Tomorrow, talks truthfully about radical Islam.

(Hat-tip to our Facebook commenter, Darryl Kerney)

Geert Wilders is a brave fighter against the Islamization of his country, Holland – and of Europe and the West in general.

He would stop the floods of Third World, overwhelmingly Muslim, immigrants pouring into Europe. They bring with them their barbarous customs, an ideology of conquest and subjugation, violence and disease. They become instantly dependent on welfare provided out of the taxes of the indigenous Europeans;  and at the same time they declare their intention of subverting the political system and rule of law under which their hosts live, and instituting their authoritarianism and cruel sharia law instead.

It should be intolerable to all Europeans. But so many of them have been brain-washed by leftism since the 1960s to believe that they owe the peoples of the Third World recompense for having colonized their countries, that they are bowing like the Christians they are, to the avengers of their self-confessed sins. (However little they consciously adhere to their ancestral religion, their moral culture was marinaded in it for a long dark age, and its self-abasing dogma still apparently feels right to them.)

In fact, European colonization brought huge benefits to the Third World. The Third World is in debt to the First World, not the other way about.

Will enough Europeans support Geert Wilders’s effort to hold back the flood? As help came to the little Dutch boy who tried to stop the sea breaking through the dyke by putting his finger into the hole?

He seems to think that help is on its way. He  writes at Canada Free press:

We are witnessing America’s struggle to be America, and the struggle of several European nations, among them the Netherlands, Britain, France, Germany and many others to preserve their identity and liberty, to remain the Netherlands, Britain, France, Germany. Everywhere, patriots are on the march. We are living the Patriot Spring.

Everywhere, democratic revolutions are underway. They will drive the elites from power. People are sick and tired of seeing their nations lose. They are fed up with how the political and media elites are weakening their country. They want to regain their national sovereignty from supranational organizations such as the European Union. They want to get rid of the fake parliaments that sell out the national interests because they no longer stand for what the majority of the people want. They want brave and patriot politicians in the legislatures. They also want more direct democracy, so that the people can correct those who misrepresent them.

For decades, Westerners have been told by their elites that multiculturalism was a virtue and patriotism a thing of the past. The values of the middle classes with their common sense, rooted in the traditions and morals passed down by their parents, were undermined and ridiculed by the mindless political correctness of the educational system, the government apparatus, and the mainstream media. The economic prosperity of the people was squandered by high taxes, foolish monetary experiments, and bailouts for foreign countries. “Our nation first” became “our nation last”. 

The elites applaud politicians such as German Chancellor Angela Merkel. President Obama praised her for her leadership. Time dubbed her “Chancellor of the Free World”, for one single reason. Because she has foolishly sold out the safety and wellbeing of her own people to hordes of largely male fortune seekers who rather than fight for their own country, have come to live on German taxpayers’ money.

Frau Merkel is not the only Western politician conducting policies that harm the interests of her own people. In fact, most of our Western leaders, including my own Dutch Prime Minister Mark Rutte, are politically correct adherents of detrimental open door policies. Before the year in which Angela Merkel became “Person of the Year” was over, Germany experienced its own sexual 9/11. On New Year’s Eve in Cologne alone, over 1,000 women were assaulted, groped, raped. So far, 30 suspects have been caught. All of them North-Africans, and half of those asylum seekers. Also in other West European countries we see a rise of “sexual” assaults.

Unlike the ruling elites in politics, media, and academia, ordinary people recognize an existential threat when they see one. Years ago already, they have begun to realize that the democratic institutions in their national capitals no longer represent the will of the people. They realize that time is running out for the West, and that the moment has come for a democratic revolution to halt the folly of the elites, otherwise our superior Western civilization will perish, our nation will change beyond recognition, and our children’s future will be endangered. It is clear what millions of Europeans and Americans want. They want to protect national sovereignty, stop the tsunami of asylum seekers, close the borders to mass immigration, stop spending their taxes on foreigners, they want leaders who truly represent them and defend the national interest. They do not want their countries to be Islamized.

And that is why we should add a new chapter to the long list of historical examples of people standing up for democracy and freedom. Let us add the Patriot Spring of 2016 to the list. And let us all be part of it.

One speaker in the video blames a conspiracy of leftists, Zionists and capitalists for the Muslim rape of Europe. Obviously Zionists have nothing to do with it. It would in no way serve their interests. A Muslim Europe will be disastrous for Israel. Capitalists also have no interest in such an appalling development. They cannot gain anything from so many unemployable dependents. But leftists – yes. They invited them in. (European “conservatives” are welfare state leftists.) If there are enough Europeans who’ve still got balls, there will be civil war. The leftist Jewish lady at the end talks enough balls to furnish a dozen men. She was obviously tacked on to strengthen the idea that what is happening to Europe is a Jewish-capitalist conspiracy! The video is more than likely a neo-Nazi production. Yet what it says is happening to Europe is true!

Afterword: The Jewish (American) woman at the end of the video is Barbara Lerner Spectre, notorious for her promotion of multiculturalism in Europe for completely illogical and borderline insane reasons. She argues that if Europe becomes “multicultural” – ie. overwhelmed and governed by Muslims – the Jews of Europe and Israel will somehow benefit, so they need to help the process along!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MFE0qAiofMQ

Europe is being raped by Islam.

And the filth, stench and diseases of the Third World are now polluting the First World.

Meira Svirsky reports and comments:

Disturbing news out of Germany and Austria reads like a sick advert for a porn movie. “Report: Locals Fled Pool After Migrants Masturbated Into Jacuzzi, Defecated Into Kid’s Pool, Invaded Girls Changing Rooms.” The report continues, saying that when challenged by the pool staff, the men laughed “in the face of pool staff”.

The obscene actions were caught on film by a security camera. After being  thrown out by lifeguards, the men came back, “jeering” and taking selfies in the polluted hot tub.

Many other pools have reported similar incidences, including a series of sexual assaults on bathers as young as a three-year-old boy at the pool with his mother and 11-year-old girls targeted at water slides by gangs of migrants.

After the New Year’s Eve attacks in Germany, where coordinated, organized gangs of migrant men in Cologne and other cities surrounded German women and proceeded to grope, rape and rob them as their helpless boyfriends and police watched (who were themselves surrounded and harassed), the gloves supposedly came off the politically-correct Germany media.

Still, there has been only a trickle of reports. (And disturbingly, included in the reports is the fact that, in one particular sexual-assault incident, the men were detained by police, only to be later released.)

Shamed into reporting the Cologne attacks after a full four days of media silence, the discussion unfortunately centered on victim blaming (by none other than the mayor of Cologne herself — as well as skewed takes on the incidents by feminists ready to sacrifice their sisters to the greater cause of anti-“racism”).

In the cases of gang harassment at pools, officials have taken a similar tack, saying migrant men must be schooled in Europeans values and norms. Pools that refused to allow in migrants in the wake of these incidents have been either shamed or forced into reopening their doors to them, with explanatory posters of improper behavior posted prominently at their doors.

Which completely misses the point.

Yes, a culture of pederasty exists in Afghanistan, where pre-pubescent boys are taken by powerful officials to be “played with” at will.

Yes, women in Middle Eastern and some African countries dress more modestly than their European counterparts, leading some Middle Eastern men to assume European women are “fair meat”.

That doesn’t explain coordinated attacks in at least 12 German states, according to a leaked report of the federal criminal police, nor does it explain leering gangs taking selfies in post-polluted hot tubs. …

Europeans, who expected the migrants to receive their outpouring of largess graciously, have awakened to the latest manifestation of Islamist terror, whose goal is to control and dominate foreign cultures until they submit to the imposition of sharia-compliant Islam.

Apparently, as we have seen with brutalities of the Islamic State and with the above deviant behaviors in Europe, anything goes in order to achieve this goal.

It is being achieved. Without resistance.

Why did the German men not act to protect the women when they were attacked by the savage Muslims? 

Seems they have been emasculated by “political correctness”.  

Who is the woman whom millions of Americans would vote for to become the first woman president of the United States? What sort of woman is she? What has she done? What does she stand for? What sort of model would she be for rising generations of Americans?

Is she a person of model character? No. She is an habitual liar (see here and here), a conniver and plotter; arrogant, corrupt, and vicious and cruel.

Is she a person who has achieved great things? No. Her only achievements have been catastrophes, bringing incalculable suffering upon millions of people who live their precarious lives in frail societies, most notably in Libya, where she brought unending chaos; in Nigeria, where she actively encouraged Boko Haram, the butchers of untold numbers of defenseless Christians; in Egypt, where she did all she could (but fortunately failed) to keep the tyrannical Muslim Brotherhood in power; in Iran, where she has helped Obama strengthen the oppressive dictatorship of the Ayatollahs.

Is she a woman of ideas? Does she at least associate herself with a political philosophy that promotes freedom, openness, tolerance? No. She has not articulated a single original political idea. And far from promoting freedom, openness and tolerance, she has actively worked with Islamic enemies of America to shut down free speech.

Is she clever? No. Cunning, yes, she is. But she lives in a sort of mental glass house in which she is forever throwing stones. Apparently oblivious to the facts of her own life, she denounces the very people and activities that support her political existence. It is a kind of blind, blundering stupidity.

Or call it “cognitive dissonance”. Examples of it are given by Victor Davis Hanson, who writes at Townhall:

Hillary Clinton recently said she would go after offshore tax “schemes” in the Caribbean. …

Yet her husband, Bill Clinton, reportedly made $10 million as an advisor and an occasional partner in the Yucaipa Global Partnership, a fund registered in the Cayman Islands.

Is Ms. Clinton’s implicit argument that she knows offshore tax dodging is unethical because her family has benefitted from it? Does she plan to return millions of dollars of her family’s offshore-generated income?

Clinton is calling for “huge campaign finance reform,” apparently to end the excessive and often pernicious role of big money in politics. But no candidate, Republican or Democrat, raised more than the $112 million that Clinton collected in 2015 for her primary campaign.

In 2013, Clinton earned nearly $1.6 million in speaking fees from Wall Street banks. She raked in $675,000 from Goldman Sachs, and $225,000 apiece from Bank of America, Deutsche Bank, Morgan Stanley and UBS Wealth Management. Did that profiteering finally make Clinton sour on Wall Street’s pay-for-play ethics?

Clinton has also vowed to raise taxes on hedge fund managers. Is that a way of expressing displeasure with her son-in-law, Marc Mezvinsky, who operates a $400 million hedge fund?

For that matter, how did Clinton’s daughter, Chelsea – who worked for a consulting firm and a hedge fund despite having no background in finance – reportedly become worth an estimated $15 million?

Hillary Clinton recently proposed a new $350 billion government plan to make college more affordable. Certainly, universities spike tuition costs, and student-loan debt has surpassed $1 trillion. Colleges spend money indiscriminately, mostly because they know that the federal government will always back student loans.

Yet, since she left office, Clinton routinely has charged universities $200,000 or more for her brief 30-minute chats. Her half-hour fee is roughly equal to the annual public-university tuition cost for eight students.

It’s been said that Clinton is trying to rekindle President Obama’s 2012 allegations of a Republican “war on women”. That charge and the war against the “1 percent” helped deliver key states to Obama. Renewing that theme, Clinton recently declared on Twitter, “Every survivor of sexual assault deserves to be heard, believed, and supported.”

Does Clinton’s spirited advocacy of “every” survivor include the array of women who have accused Bill Clinton of sexual misconduct? In other words, does Hillary now trust the testimonies of survivors such as Juanita Broaddrick, Kathleen Willey and Paula Jones, whose allegations must be “believed and supported”?

Ms. Clinton has also called for more financial transparency and greater accountability in general – something needed after scandals at government agencies such as the IRS, VA and GSA. But Clinton’s use of a private email server probably violated several federal laws. Her laxity with confidential communications was arguably more egregious than that of Gen. David Petraeus, a national icon who pleaded guilty to mishandling classified materials.

Perhaps Clinton assumes that the electorate is still in the ethical world of the 1990s. Back then, it was somewhat easier to dampen scandals – at least the ones that didn’t involve sex in the White House. But in the age of social media, 24-hour cable TV, instantaneous blogging and a different public attitude toward political corruption and sexual assault, Hillary Clinton now appears to be caught in the wrong century.

Womanizing and sexual coercion can no longer be so easily dismissed. The financial antics of the Clinton Foundation don’t past muster …

Ms. Clinton at times tries to offset scandals by pointing to her record as secretary of state. But few believe that her handling of Russia, Iran, China, Benghazi or Islamic terrorism made the world calmer or America more secure.

There is a brazenness, an audacity, a shameless impudence in her hypocrisy that has no match even among politicians. In this, one would have to look back to medieval Popes to find her equal. 

Yet there are tens of millions of voters who would put enormous power into her hands. For no better reason than that she is a woman. Such people deserve their doom, of course. But what of the rest?

America must not fall into the talons of this hell-hag!

Conservative friends and associates in Britain tell us they despair of saving the Kingdom from becoming an Islamic state.

Even if Britain comes out of the EU – which is highly possible at last if the promised referendum goes the right way next year – it is unlikely to be able save itself from its looming fate.

Mark Steyn writes:

Canadians are dead, and so is satire. Six Quebeckers get slaughtered by Islamic terrorists in Burkina Faso, and to honor their memory Prime Minister Justin Trudeau leads a moment of silence … at a mosque.

Speaking of prime ministers, having spent his entire premiership assuring us that whatever happens in the news headlines is nothing to do with Islam, David Cameron has suddenly discovered a few things that are to do with Islam. The opening paragraph from Mr Cameron’s column in the London Times:

Where in the world do you think the following things are happening? School governors’ meetings where male governors sit in the meeting room and the women have to sit out of sight in the corridor. Young women only allowed to leave their house in the company of a male relative. Religious councils that openly discriminate against women and prevent them from leaving abusive marriages. The answer, I’m sorry to say, is Britain.

Ah, right. And who in Britain bears responsibility for letting a parallel self-segregating society incubate and grow these last 20 years?

Much more than 20 years. Nearer to 50 years. See our post Europe betrayed, February 11, 2010 here, where we give an account of how and why the first twenty million Muslims were imported into Europe. 

Mr Cameron has just noticed that 22 per cent of Muslim women in the United Kingdom speak little or no English, despite having lived there for decades. If you’re a Muslim female, the moment of silence can last for decades.

So what’s Cameron proposing to do about it? Well, that’s all a bit more iffy:

Forcing all migrants to learn English and ending gender segregation will show we’re serious about creating One Nation.

Fifty years ago, aside from a few querulous Scots, Welsh and Ulster Catholics, you didn’t need to “create” One Nation, because you already had one. Anointing the most “gender segregating” culture on earth as your principal source of population growth is why you no longer have “One Nation”, and why you’re back starting from scratch. Good luck with that.

Mr Cameron has no serious intention of slowing the right of entry of masses of primitive misogynists into Britain, but in an hour or so he and his fellow MPs will be debating whether to ban Donald Trump. Like I said, satire is dead.

Do some people in Britain really want to ban a possible future president of the United Sates from entering their country? Yes. Because he suggested it might be a good idea to ban Muslims from entering the US since Muslims are committing acts of terrorism on US soil. Our guess is that most of the petitioners to have Trump banned are Muslims.

And any number of primitive misogynistic Muslims are allowed to enter Britain. Bringing sharia law with them.

As for “gender segregation” in the Muslim world, let’s go back to that Peterborough [Canada] mosque where Justin Trudeau had his moment of silence to dishonor the Canadian dead at Islam’s hands. The mosque is run by Imam Shazim Khan …

Who is all for gender segregation:

“Gender segregation”? Bring it on!

There is no need for her [a wife] to go out. There is no need for her to call anybody. There is no need for her to talk to anybody … She only makes available herself to her husband and she protects herself and she stays away from everything that her husband doesn’t like in order to please him and to make the marriage work …

Incidentally, Trudeau’s imam says that, if David Cameron thinks “gender segregation” is bad now, wait till the hereafter:

The Prophet PBUH said because of this ingratitude [of the wives towards their husbands] that is why most inhabitants of hell are women.

Cameron isn’t serious about “assimilating” the likes of Imam Khan, and Trudeau kisses his ass.

Speaking of European leaders, most of them would dearly like to impose a moment of silence on Milos Zeman, the President of the Czech Republic. Mr Zeman has a different take on all this:

The experience of Western European countries which have ghettos and excluded localities shows that the integration of the Muslim community is practically impossible … Let them have their culture in their countries and not take it to Europe, otherwise it will end up like Cologne.

… referring to the mass New Year’s Eve assaults on women in Germany and elsewhere.

President Zeman is a leftie, but not a suicidal one.

Zeman, Cameron, Trudeau: Which of these guys has a better handle on reality?

It will end up as even worse than Cologne. Much worse. Already hundreds of British girls have been made sex-slaves by Muslim men. The British authorities did nothing whatever to put a stop to it.

Well before the end of this century, Britain and most of Europe will end up like Saudi Arabia and Iran.

Later maybe Canada will too.

Just 68 years ago, Britain still possessed the greatest empire in history.

Now it is submitting to weak, primitive Islam.

Western Journalism reports:

Last week, CNN reported that a new mass grave filled with the bodies of mainly Yazidi women and children has been discovered in the city of Sinjar in northern Iraq. Mayor Mahama al-Shangali showed CNN reporter Nima Elgabir the new mass grave that contained the remains of 130 young men, women, and children. The Yazidis were murdered after they refused to convert to Islam or to cooperate with the Islamic State. The Iraqi Minister for Human Rights Affairs [sic!], Mohammed Shia al-Sudani, claims that ISIS terrorists buried more than 500 Yazidis alive in Sinjar.

Breitbart recalls:

On August 3 2014, Islamic State jihadists overran and captured the town of Sinjar, in northern Iraq’s Nineveh province, sending tens of thousands of Yazidis fleeing before them to the supposed safety of Mount Sinjar.

Kurdish forces managed to retake the town in November 2015. The liberators found one grave filled with 78 elderly women and another with at least 50 people.

Who are the Yazidis? What do they believe?

Here is a slightly re-edited version of our April 4, 2010 post on this obscure religion:

The Yazidis worship  The Peacock Angel, Malak Taus. He’s identified by Muslims and Christians with Shaitan/Satan, so the Yazidis are held to be devil-worshipers.

They are ethnic Kurds, most of them  settled in Mosul, Iraq. There are some in Iran, Kurdistan, Armenia, and the Caucuses. In all, it’s estimated, there are [were] about half a million of them. Their cult is in part an offshoot of Sufism, with various accretions.

They build small temples, shrines with conical white spires, and they keep sacred snakes. They practice circumcision. The eating of lettuce is forbidden.

They have an hereditary  priesthood under a High Priest, and sacred books.

There is no need, they believe, to worship the Supreme God, because he is all good and so will never do you harm. The Peacock Angel, on the other hand, must be propitiated. He is capable of doing harm or good, and so must be won over to doing you good. Eventually he will be reconciled with the Supreme God, and that eventuality could come about at any moment.

In their cosmogony, the Supreme God created the world, which is watched over by 7 lesser divinities or “mysteries”, chief among whom is the Peacock Angel, Malak Taus. God created him first, out of his own light, and ordered him never to bow to other beings. Then God created the other six angels, and ordered them to make Adam out of the dust of the earth. God took the inanimate body of Adam and breathed life into him, and instructed the angels to bow down to him. Of course Malak Taus did not bow. “I cannot submit to him because,” he reminded God, “I am made of  your own light, while he is made of dust.” This pleased God who then appointed him his vicar on earth.

As its ruler, Malak Taus visits the earth on the first Wednesday of Nisan (March/April – roughly the same time as Easter), which is the Yazidi New Year’s Day, and the anniversary of the day on which God made the Peacock Angel. On that day they feast, make music, dance, and decorate eggs.

God made the earth by first making a pearl, which remained very small for some forty thousand years, and was then expanded and reworked into its present state. From time to time the 7 angels are incarnated in human form and dwell among the living on earth. Their main annual festival is a week-long pilgrimage to the tomb of Sheikh Adi, their founder, who they say was the incarnation of one of the 7 angels. The tomb is at Lalish, north of Mosul.

All Yazidis are descended directly from Adam, not through Eve. At first the sexual roles of Adam and Eve were not fixed. Each produced a seed which was was sealed in a jar. Eve’s seed bred creepy-crawly things, but Adam’s developed into a boy-child who grew up, married a houri [no word on who made her- ed], and fathered the Yazidis.

As Adam’s seed, they are different from all other peoples. They permit marriage only within the sect, and members of each caste of their social and religious hierarchy can only marry among themselves.

They pray five times a day facing the sun. Their holy day is Wednesday, but their day of rest is Saturday.

In 2007,  al-Qaeda suicide bombers drove oil tankers into two Yazidi communities near Mosul which they exploded, killing more than 500 and injuring about 1,000 more. This sent thousands of Yazidis to the Syrian border to seek asylum.

They are safe nowhere in the region. It is unlikely that the sect will survive the current wars and persecutions in the Middle East.

Something fishy in the Arabian Gulf:

There is something fishy about how such a high-tech U.S. craft can “stray accidentally into Iranian waters due to a navigation error”, as Defense Secretary Ash Carter described it on Thursday to Univision. The Pentagon had previously claimed engine trouble for an incident that’s humiliated the U.S., as Iranian video showed to the world 10 American sailors on their knees at gunpoint.

From Investor’s Business Daily:

How can an advanced, ultra-agile U.S. combat boat suffer a “navigation error” that leads to a terrorist state capturing its sailors? Tehran just revealed military ineptitude warranting a congressional probe.

The Swedish-designed Combat Boat 90 can make the sharpest of turns at high speed, stop nearly on a dime, maneuver like magic and, with its Rolls-Royce jet-propulsion system, can speed along at over 45 miles an hour in rivers and shallow coastlines while transporting 18 amphibious troops.

But what good is any of that if it falls into enemy hands? …

A retired operations commander for the U.S. Navy’s Fifth Fleet in Bahrain, Christopher Harmer, told CNN the capture constituted “a severe failure”,  charging that “either the naval leadership put these sailors in an impossible situation, or the sailors are professionally incompetent”. Harmer has researched the increased lethality of Iran’s submarine fleet for the Institute for the Study of War.

That one of the sailors would appear in an Iranian video apologizing may have actually violated the military’s Code of Conduct, which requires that a detainee give name, rank, serial number and age, but “evade answering further questions” and “make no oral or written statements disloyal” to his country “and its allies or harmful to their cause”.

Harmer told the Washington Times, “The U.S. Navy looks extraordinarily incompetent. … In its ability to transit boats without violating Iranian waters, they look incompetent to know how to deal with a mechanical malfunction, and now that they’ve been taken into custody, they’re apologizing.”

Harmer told CNN there was “no reason for a small vessel to be out that far and especially without escorting ships around it”, and “the Navy has to explain why you have small ships transiting 300 miles of open ocean”.

Iran claims its Revolutionary Guard Corps seized the CB90’s GPS gear and that it revealed U.S. espionage. As reported in Defense News, House Armed Services Committee member Duncan Hunter, R-Calif., a Marine who served in the Iraq War, claimed there was no way the Iran military “didn’t reverse engineer, or look at and copy everything that they possibly could” of the two commandeered boats’ high-tech equipment.

In the midst of this disaster did Secretary of State John Kerry make another bad deal with Tehran, following last year’s nuclear pact, to get the sailors released swiftly?

All of this warrants a high-profile congressional investigation. Sailors and valuable equipment get captured, are humiliated on video, and finally one ends up making a statement that serves terrorist propaganda purposes.

“Semper Fortis” — always strong [an unofficial motto of the US Navy] — hardly describes what this incident reveals about the U.S. Navy after seven years of Barack Obama.

When the captured crews were released the next morning, the two boats sailed away with no sign of  “mechanical failure”. Had both boats been afflicted with it? Had it been hard or easy to repair? Who repaired it?

Here is more editorial comment from IBD:

Ten U.S. sailors kneel at gunpoint before Iran’s military, then actually apologize, and while held captive, merit no mention in the president’s speech to Congress. It’s American weakness illustrated.

We don’t yet have the full facts on how a U.S. naval vessel was allowed to be seized by the world’s foremost terrorist state. But as Desert Storm infantry commander Gen. Barry McCaffrey (ret.) warned in an NBC News interview, “this is an affront to our military presence in the Gulf and will unsettle our allies in the region.” …

Images can hurt a global power profoundly. … For Iran, images of U.S. sailors kneeling in submission, and video of one apologizing on behalf of the rest — and, by extension, on behalf of the U.S. — are priceless.

“It was our fault,” the sailor said on camera. “And we apologize for our mistake.”

What a comparison with the tortured crew of the U.S.S. Pueblo, captured by North Korea in 1968, who during their captivity discreetly extended their middle fingers when posing for propaganda photos.

Today, Secretary of State John Kerry says, “I want to express my gratitude to Iranian authorities. …”

Gratitude!

As Sen. Tom Cotton, R-Ark., said, “Before we thank the Iranian naval forces and attempt to defend and normalize their behavior, as Vice President Biden and Secretaries Kerry and Carter appear inclined to do, we should demand answers” to questions that include:

“Where exactly were the sailors intercepted? Why were they detained instead of being merely escorted into international waters? What was the nature of the technical malfunctions on both vessels? … Was sensitive equipment compromised? (and) Why were the sailors not permitted to contact U.S. higher headquarters in the region for the 16 hours they were detained?”

Cotton also noted that the administration presumes that Iran conducted a rescue mission, “when Iran has characterized the incident as U.S. ships trespassing into its waters and ‘snooping’.”

He added: “Our sailors never should have been detained in the first place, and blithely accepting such action will only embolden the ayatollahs who wish to do harm to Americans and our allies in the Arabian Gulf.”

This humiliation of the U.S. comes less than a week before we lift sanctions unfreezing $150 billion for new terrorist activities, as promised in Obama and Kerry’s Iran nuclear deal — a pact that Tehran has not even been required to sign.

Our sailors were held as Obama stood before Congress on Tuesday night, but they weren’t deemed worthy of mention in the president’s [State of the Union] address.

He could have included among his otherwise untrue boasts one that is outrageously true: that he has achieved something he always said he wanted to achieve – the weakening of America.