Lois Lerner, head of the Internal Revenue Service’s tax-exempt organizations office, told Congress last week that she had broken no laws and had done nothing wrong.  Then she hastily “took the Fifth” – ie refused to say anything more or answer any questions so as not to incriminate herself, as the Fifth Amendment allows her to do.

So she would have us believe that there was no corruption in her department under her authority. No crime was committed. None at all.

Yet this happened. It comes from Discover the Networks:

The Barack H. Obama Foundation (BHOF) was established in 2008 by Abon’go Malik Obama, the half-brother of U.S. President Barack Obama.

Abon’go, a Kenyan-born Muslim with twelve wives, created the foundation in memory of his (and President Obama’s) biological father, Barack H. Obama (1936-82) of Nyan’goma Kogelo village in Kenya.

Seeking to “provide people everywhere with resources to uplift their welfare and living standards,” BHOF claims to be “committed to a wide array of development and humanitarian projects which will help mitigate social shortcomings in areas of education and literacy, health and well-being, poverty, and … community infrastructure” — particularly as regards “basic needs such as water, electricity, shelter and sustenance.” The foundation’s guiding principle is “the inherent belief that no one can truly enjoy the riches he has reaped if his neighbor suffers.”

A noble sentiment. But how nobly has BHOF acted?

BHOF currently identifies its major project as the Siaya Community Self-Help Group, which focuses on helping impoverished residents of Siaya, Kenya to access clean drinking water, financial assistance, K-12 education, academic scholarships, medical care, leadership training, and guidance in small-business development. The foundation also claims to have funded the construction of a madrassa in Kenya. There is no concrete evidence, however, that BHOF has actually done any of these things.

Financial records indicate that from 2008-10, the foundation received grants and donations totaling $42,923 but awarded no grants at all.

Shared none of the riches it reaped with the impoverished residents of Siaya in Kenya? Nope. None at all.

On its website, BHOF asserts that its “future projects in Kenya and elsewhere around the globe” will focus on:

• Education development
• Child development and welfare
• Infrastructure development, to include water, electricity and sanitation
• Energy development, to include wind turbines, solar and power generation
• Health improvement through health clinics, vaccinations and disease prevention
• Humanitarian and natural disaster intervention and response
• Nutrition, to include food security, diet assurance, vitamin deliver [sic]
• HIV/AIDS, particularly child-affected transmissions and prevention
• Advocacy and Partnerships
• Life skills, training and modeling

BHOF’s website lists the foundation’s physical address as 107 S. West St. #401 in Alexandria, Virginia, a location that actually houses only a UPS store. “They probably just rent a mailbox here or receive mail here,” said one UPS employee there in May 2013.

Equally problematic is the address listed in BHOF’s IRS filings — 4201 Wilson Blvd., Suite 110-152 in Arlington, Virginia — which houses only a marketing center for a drug-and-alcohol treatment organization known as A Better Today Recovery Services. When questioned about BHOF in May 2013, not a single employee in A Better Today’s office had ever heard of the foundation.

From 2008-11, BHOF operated illegally as a nonprofit group and falsely claimed tax-exempt status —f or which it had not yet formally applied. The foundation finally submitted its 2010 application for nonprofit, tax-exempt status on May 23, 2011; seven days later, it submitted its filings for 2008 and 2009. Within just one month of these filings — on June 26, 2011 — Lois Lerner, the senior official who headed the IRS’s tax-exempt organizations office, signed paperwork granting tax-exempt status to BHOF.

This promptness represented a stark contrast to the experience of many conservative organizations that, beginning in 2010, had been intentionally forced (by Lerner’s office) to wait more than three years, in some cases, for approval. Moreover, Lerner broke with the norms of tax-exemption approval by making BHOF’s tax-exempt status retroactive to December 2008.

According to Ken Boehm, chairman of the National Legal and Policy Center: “The Obama Foundation raised money on its web page by falsely claiming to be a tax deductible. This bogus charity … had not even applied and yet subsequently got retroactive tax-deductible status.” Boehm described Abon’go Malik Obama’s attempt to raise money under the nonprofit banner as “common law fraud and potentially even federal mail fraud.” 

The case of BHOF needs to be compared with the case described  in our post Political persecution in America, May 21, 2013, which is about Catherine Engelbrecht having waited for three years – and waits still – for tax-exempt status to be granted by Lois Lerner’s office for two “non-profits” she founded. In that time she and her husband and their business and their farm have been  investigated … and investigated … and investigated. The IRS required her to answer “hundreds and hundreds of questions”. Other  government agencies were sent to inspect their manufacturing  business, which was fined thousands of dollars for trivial “offenses” such as an employer wearing the wrong type of protective glasses.

Mrs Englebrecht is not related to President Obama, and the organizations she launched, King Street Patriots and True the Vote, are not planning ambitious projects round the world, or promising to re-distribute grants and donations to the poor in Africa. She declared them to be patriotic and against voter fraud. Not causes, we now know, scoring high marks on the approval chart of Obama’s IRS.

This infuriating story, which we quote almost in full, is about a victim of the Obama administration, showing how it zealously, even sadistically, implements its leftist policy, through the IRS and other government agencies, to target conservative groups and persecute individuals who form them. It comes from National Review, written by Jillian Kay Melchior.

The Engelbrechts were not, until recently, particularly political. They had been busy running a tiny manufacturing plant in Rosenberg, Texas. After years of working for others, Bryan, a trained machinist, wanted to open his own shop, so he saved his earnings, bought a computerized numerical-control machine, which does precision metal-cutting, and began operating out of his garage. “That was about 20 years ago” he says. “Now, we’re up to about 30 employees.” 

For two decades, Bryan and Catherine drove to work in their big truck. Engelbrecht Manufacturing Inc. now operates out of a 20,000-square-foot metal building on the prairie just outside of Houston … They went back to their country home each night. Stress was rare, and life was good.

But the 2008 elections left Catherine feeling frustrated about the debates, which seemed to be a string of superficial talking points. So she began attending tea-party meetings, enjoying the political discussion. A spunky woman known for her drive, Catherine soon wanted to do more than just talk. She joined other tea partiers and decided to volunteer at the ballot box. Working as an alternate judge at the polls in 2009 in Fort Bend County, Texas, Catherine says, she was appalled and dismayed to witness everything from administrative snafus to outright voter fraud.

These formative experiences prompted her to found two organizations: King Street Patriots, a local community group that hosts weekly discussions on personal and economic freedoms; and True the Vote, which seeks to prevent voter fraud and trains volunteers to work as election monitors. It also registers voters, attempts to validate voter-registration lists, and pursues fraud reports to push for prosecution if illegal activity has occurred. …

In July 2010, Catherine filed with the IRS seeking tax-exempt status for her organizations.

Shortly after,the troubles began.

That winter, the Federal Bureau of Investigation came knocking with questions about a person who had attended a King Street Patriots event once. Based on sign-in sheets, the organization discovered that the individual in question had attended an event, but “it was a come-and-go thing”,  and they had no further information on hand about him. Nevertheless, the FBI also made inquiries about the person to the office manager, who was a [King Street Patriots] volunteer.

The King Street Patriots weren’t the only ones under scrutiny. On January 11, the IRS visited the Engelbrechts’  shop and conducted an on-site audit of both their business and their personal returns, Catherine says.

“What struck us as odd about that,” she adds, “is the lengths to which the auditor went to try to … find some error. She wanted to go out and see [our] farm, she wanted to count the cattle, she wanted to look at the fence line. It was a very curious three days. …”

Bryan adds: “It was kind of funny to us. I mean, we weren’t laughing that much, but we knew we were squeaky clean. … ” 

Two months later, the IRS initiated the first round of questions for True the Vote. Catherine painstakingly answered them, knowing that nonprofit status would help with the organization’s credibility, donors, and grant applications. In October, the IRS requested additional information. And whenever Catherine followed up with IRS agents about the status of True the Vote’s application, there was always a delay that our application was going to be up next, and it was just around the corner …

As this was occurring, the FBI continued to phone King Street Patriots. In May 2011, agents phoned wondering “how they were doing”.  The FBI made further inquiries in June, November, and December asking whether there was anything to report.

The situation escalated in 2012. That February, True the Vote received a third request for information from the IRS, which also sent its first questionnaire to King Street Patriots. Catherine says the IRS had “hundreds of questions, hundreds and hundreds of questions.”  The IRS requested every Facebook post and Tweet she had ever written. She received questions about her family, whether she’d ever run for political office, and which organizations she had spoken to.

“It’s no great secret that the IRS is considered to be one of the more serious [federal agencies],” Catherine says. “When you get a call from the IRS, you don’t take it lightly. So when you are asked questions that seem to imply a sense of disapproval, it has a very chilling effect.” 

On the same day they received the questions from the IRS, Catherine says, the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF) launched an unscheduled audit of their machine shop, forcing the Engelbrechts to drop everything planned for that day. Though the Engelbrechts have a Class 7 license, which allows them to make component parts for guns, they do not manufacture firearms. Catherine said that while the ATF had a right to conduct the audit, “it was odd that they did it completely unannounced, and they took five, six hours. It was so extensive. It just felt kind of weird.” 

That was in February. In July, the Occupational Safety and Health Administration paid a visit to Engelbrecht Manufacturing while Bryan, Catherine, and their children were out of town. The OSHA inspector talked with the managerial staff and employees, inspecting the premises minutely. But Bryan says the agent found only “little Mickey Mouse stuff, like, ‘You have safety glasses on, but not the right kind; the forklift has a seatbelt, but not the right kind.’” Yet Catherine and Bryan said the OSHA inspector complimented them on their tightly run shop and said she didn’t know why she had been sent to examine it.

Not long after, the tab arrived. OSHA was imposing $25,000 in fines on Engelbrecht Manufacturing. They eventually worked it down to $17,500, and Bryan says they may have tried to contest the fines to drive them even lower, but “we didn’t want to make any more waves, because we don’t know [how much further] OSHA could reach.” 

“Bottom line is, it hurt,”  he says. “[$17,500 dollars] is not an insignificant amount to this company. It might be to other companies, but we’re still considered small, and it came at a time when business was slow, so instead of giving an employee a raise or potentially hiring another employee, I’m writing a check to our government.” 

A few months later, True the Vote became the subject of congressional scrutiny. In September, Senator Barbara Boxer (D., Calif.) wrote to Thomas Perez, then the assistant attorney general of the civil rights division at the Department of Justice (who has now been nominated for labor secretary): “As you know, an organization called ‘True the Vote’, which is an offshoot of the Tea Party, is leading a voter suppression campaign in many states,” Boxer wrote, adding that “this type of intimidation must stop. I don’t believe this is ‘True the Vote’. I believe it’s ‘Stop the Vote’.”

And in October, Representative Elijah Cummings (D., Md.), the ranking minority member of the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, attacked True the Vote in a letter. He wrote that: “Some have suggested that your true goal is not voter integrity, but voter suppression against thousands of legitimate voters who traditionally vote for Democratic candidates.”  He added that: “If these efforts are intentional, politically motivated, and widespread across multiple states, they could amount to a criminal conspiracy to deny legitimate voters their constitutional rights.”  He also decried True the Vote on MSNBC and CNN. …

The next month, in November 2012, the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality, the state’s environmental agency, showed up for an unscheduled audit at Engelbrecht Manufacturing. Catherine says the inspector told her the agency had received a complaint but couldn’t  provide any more details. After the inspection, the agency notified the Engelbrechts that they needed to pay for an additional mechanical permit, which cost about $2,000 per year.

Since then, the IRS has sent two further rounds of questions to Catherine for her organizations. And last month, the ATF conducted a second unscheduled audit at Engelbrecht Manufacturing.

Catherine says she still hasn’t received IRS approval for her nonprofits, though she filed nearly three years ago. …

On behalf of the True the Vote and King Street Patriots, Representative Ted Poe (R., Texas) sent a Freedom of Information Act request to the FBI, OSHA, and the ATF, inquiring whether the organizations were under criminal investigation. A statement on Poe’s website states that “the reply from these agencies was that none of these individuals were under criminal investigation. Well, if they’re not, why are they being treated like criminals? Just because they question government?” 

… Other Tea Party groups decided not to form nonprofits at all after learning about her experience, [Catherine] says. “They were scared,” she explains, “and you shouldn’t be scared of your government.”

Meanwhile, Catherine says the harassment has forced her to seriously reconsider whether her political activity is worth the government harassment she’s faced.

“I left a thriving family business with my husband that I loved, to do something I didn’t necessarily love, but [which] I thought had to be done,” she says.”But I really think if we don’t do this, if we don’t stand up and speak now, there might not [always] be that chance.”

Her husband offers an additional observation: “If you knew my wife, you’d know she doesn’t back down from anybody. They picked on the wrong person when they started picking on her.”

*

The Washington Post reports that Steven T. Miller, the Acting Commissioner of the Internal Revenue Service, appearing today before the Senate Finance Committee, denied that he misled Congress about the targeting of conservative groups seeking tax-exempt status.  He said –

I’m not going to disagree at all with the characterization of bad management here, but the actions were not politically motivated.

!!!

If you wondered why the sky is full of flying pigs, and why the rumor is spreading that hell is freezing over, it’s because the Press and the mainstream media in general are beginning to notice that the feet of Obama are made of clay – or at least that his hands are, the persons who administer his policies.

This criticism of Attorney General Eric Holder, claiming to know nothing about his department’s illegal raid on Associated Press phone records in order to investigate the source of an information leak, comes from the pen of Dana Milbank writing in the left-leaning Washington Post:

As the nation’s top law enforcement official, Eric Holder is privy to all kinds of sensitive information. But he seems to be proud of how little he knows.

Holder was appearing before the House Judiciary Committee for an oversight hearing. He was asked –

Why didn’t his Justice Department inform the Associated Press, as the law requires, before pawing through reporters’ phone records?

“I do not know,” the attorney general told the House Judiciary Committee on Wednesday afternoon, “why that was or was not done. I simply don’t have a factual basis to answer that question.”

Why didn’t the DOJ seek the AP’s cooperation, as the law also requires, before issuing subpoenas?

“I don’t know what happened there,” Holder replied. “I was recused from the case.”

He “recused” himself from the case because, he said, he was ” a possessor of information eventually leaked” – which leak his department was investigating. But if he had the information, was it not therefore already leaked? And what reason would there be in that for him to “recuse” himself? If he were likely to be  investigated as one of the people who could have, might have, done the leaking, he would be right to recuse himself, as he couldn’t be both investigator and investigatee. But the leak was of  a plan by the Intelligence Services. If Horder heard of it because it was leaked, and therefore had his department investigate it, wasn’t that the proper thing for him to do? Or is he afraid that not having his department investigate the leak when he first heard of it makes him vulnerable to investigation? Curiouser and curiouser!

Why, asked the committee’s chairman, Rep. Bob Goodlatte (R-Va.), was the whole matter handled in a manner that appears “contrary to the law and standard procedure”?

“I don’t have a factual basis to answer the questions that you have asked, because I was recused,” the attorney general said.

On and on Holder went: “I don’t know. I don’t know. . . . I would not want to reveal what I know. . . . I don’t know why that didn’t happen. . . . I know nothing, so I’m not in a position really to answer.”

Holder seemed to regard this ignorance as a shield protecting him and the Justice Department from all criticism of the Obama administration’s assault on press freedoms. But his claim that his “recusal” from the case exempted him from all discussion of the matter didn’t fly with Republicans or Democrats on the committee, who justifiably saw his recusal as more of an abdication. …

“[I]t seems to me clear that the actions of the department have, in fact, impaired the First Amendment,” Rep. Zoe Lofgren (D-Calif.) told Holder. “Reporters who might have previously believed that a confidential source would speak to them would no longer have that level of confidence, because those confidential sources are now going to be chilled in their relationship with the press.”

In a sense, the two topics that dogged Holder most on Wednesday — the AP phone records and the IRS’s targeting of conservative groups — were one and the same. In both cases, Americans are being punished and intimidated for exercising their right of free expression — by the taxing authorities, in the conservatives’ case, and by federal prosecutors, in the reporters’ case.

But Holder cared so little about those two issues that he said not a peep about either the IRS or the AP in his opening statement. When he was questioned about the AP case, his first response was to suggest the criticism of him was political. “I mean, there’s been a lot of criticism,” Holder said. “In fact, the head of the RNC [Republican National Committee] called for my resignation, in spite of the fact that I was not the person involved in that decision.” …

[Holder]  may have recused himself from the leak probe that led to the searches of reporters’ phone records (a decision he took so lightly that he didn’t put it in writing), but he isn’t recused from defending the First Amendment. 

Didn’t the deputy attorney general who approved the subpoenas have the same potential conflict of interest that Holder claimed?

“I don’t know.”

When did Holder recuse himself?

“I’m not sure.”

How much time was spent exploring alternatives to the subpoenas?

“I don’t know, because, as I said, I recused myself.”

But when the Justice Department undermines the Constitution, recusal is no excuse.

Strictly speaking, the word “recuse” can only apply to a judge or juror: he can recuse himself from a case because of a conflict of interest.

But Eric Holder sets a precedent that extends the application of the term.

It’s a great tactic: avoid being held responsible for whatever goes wrong in the organization under your control by “recusing” yourself. 

The head of BP might have recused himself when his company’s oil rig polluted the waters of the gulf.

The heads of Enron and Solyndra might have repelled accusations of mismanagement  by recusing themselves.

The Nazi war criminals might have escaped trial at Nuremberg by recusing themselves.

Napoleon might have avoided exile on St Helena by recusing himself.

And just think of the cosmic and historical disasters from which omnipotent “God” could claim to have recused himself!

Obama might elude responsibility for capitulating to the Islamic enemy in Benghazi, using the IRS to intimidate his political opponents, subverting the First and Second Amendments, plunging the US into deep debt, and numerous other calamities which he should be called to answer for, by simply recusing himself.

He could try it anyway, if Holder gets away with it.

*

These important points about collaboration – or conspiracy – between Attorney General Eric Holder’s Department of Justice and the nefarious group Media Matters are made by Arnold Ahlert in an article at Front Page. They show how habitual the corruption of the Obama DOJ has become:

Internal DOJ emails obtained in 2012 by the Daily Caller revealed the leftist advocacy group regularly collaborated with the DOJ to attack reporters who covered DOJ scandals.

Tracy Schmaler, Office of Public Affairs Director for the Justice Department, worked with Media Matters staffers to attack a number of prominent journalists, including Townhall Magazine’s Katie Pavlich, Breitbart.com writers Joel Pollak and Ken Klukowski, Fox News’s William LaJeunesse, Judge Andrew Napolitano, Megyn Kelly, Martha MacCallum, Bill Hemmer, Bill O’Reilly and Sean Hannity, and National Review’s Andrew C. McCarthy. Former DOJ Civil Rights Division attorneys J. Christian Adams and Hans von Spakovsky were also attacked.

The Daily Caller obtained the emails after filing a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request that was fulfilled long after the 20-business-day limit required by law.

Moreover, the Office of Public Affairs has no business conducting a political operation. Its function is to keep the public informed about what the DOJ is doing to enforce the laws. That it was more than willing to violate its mandate is a good indication of how deep the rot at the DOJ goes.

Yesterday [May 15, 2013], Eric Holder did what he does best whenever he appears before a Congressional Committee: provide as little information as possible, become indignant when anyone suggests he has acted improperly, and fob responsibility for every possible impropriety conducted by his department onto someone else – when he’s not busy stonewalling scandals. Even a contempt of Congress citation for his refusal to provide critical information in the Fast and Furious gunrunning debacle that resulted in the death of Border Patrol Agent Brian Terry, along with hundreds of Mexican nationals, including children, has failed to chasten his contempt for the rule of law, or his determination to maintain the most ideologically-compromised Department of Justice in modern history.

Holder can only serve as long as he maintains the support of President Barack Obama. That he still does, speaks volumes – about both men.

A major religious war of conquest is being waged by Islam all over the world.

It is encountering no determined resistance by the Western powers.

The only battlefield where forces of the West fought back was Afghanistan, but there the West, led by the United States’ which has the mightiest military force on earth, gave up trying to win, and has unspokenly but in effect conceded victory to the savage hordes of Islam.

The information and quotations below come from two articles at the website of Raymond Ibrahim:  here from an article by Ibrahim himself about the war on Christians wherever  Islam rules, and here from another by Enza Ferreri on how the West is being subverted by Islam with a new kind of colonization – and how one man is showing a way to resist it.

First, the religious war waged by Muslims on Christians. 

We summarize:

A mass exodus of Christians is currently underway. Millions of Christians are being displaced from one end of the Islamic world to the other. In 2003, Iraq’s Christian population was at least one million. Today fewer than 400,000 remain.

In Egypt, some 100,000 Christian Copts have fled their homeland soon after the “Arab Spring”.

In Mali, after a 2012 Islamic coup, as many as 200,000 Christians fled. According to reports, “the church in Mali faces being eradicated”.

In Bosnia, Christians are leaving en masse amid mounting discrimination and Islamization. Only 440,000 Catholics remain in the Balkan nation, half the prewar figure.

That is the result of  President Clinton’s sacrifice of American lives when under his leadership the West allied with Islam to fight the battles of the 1990s. 

In Ethiopia, after a Christian was accused of desecrating a Koran, thousands of Christians were forced to leave their homes homes when “Muslim extremists set fire to roughly 50 churches and dozens of Christian homes.”

In the Ivory Coast — where Christians have been crucified — Islamic rebels massacred hundreds and displaced tens of thousands of Christians.

In Libya, Islamic rebels forced Christian nun orders to flee.

In Muslim-majority northern Nigeria, where nary a Sunday passes without a church bombing, Christians are fleeing by the thousands; one region has been emptied of 95% of its Christian population.

In Pakistan, after a Christian child was falsely accused of desecrating a Koran, Muslims went on an anti-Christian rampage.

In Somalia, where Christianity is completely outlawed, Muslim converts to Christianity are fleeing to neighboring nations, including Kenya and Ethiopia, sometimes to be tracked down and executed.

In Sudan, over half a million people, mostly Christian, have been stripped of citizenship in response to the South’s secession, and forced to relocate.

Now as the U.S. supports the jihad on secular president Assad, the same pattern has come to Syria: entire regions and towns where Christians lived centuries before Islam came into being have been emptied, as the opposition targets Christians for kidnapping, plundering, and beheadings, all in compliance with mosque calls that it’s a “sacred duty” to drive Christians away. In October 2012 the last Christian in the city of Homs — which had a Christian population of some 80,000 before jihadis came — was murdered.

Next, how Islam is colonizing the West – for example, Britain:

Here one man is fighting back. The story shows how easily Islam can be defeated where there’s a will to do so. But it must be noted that throughout most of the West there is no such will. Most western European countries have capitulated, preferring to punish anyone who objects to the vicious ideology of Islam and Muslim encroachment on his native territory, rather than to resist the appalling conqueror. And the United States has elected a leader whose administration positively helps the advance of Islam.

“We don’t debate unprofessional councillors, unprincipled journalists, and self-righteous community organizers; we turn the tables on them”: this is how British planning lawyer Gavin Boby, also known as the “mosque buster”, describes the activity of his organization, the Law And Freedom Foundation.

He uses the law to stop the building of mosques in the UK by demonstrating to local councils that the building of a mosque or an Islamic centre is actually in violation of British law. And he succeeds: the count so far is 16 victories out of 17 cases.

Gavin Boby is a 48-year-old planning lawyer from Bristol, South-West England. He deals with planning permissions or zoning permissions.

00Like many other people in Britain, for almost 10 years Boby had witnessed the progressive penetration of Islam in his country, but like many other people he watched idly not knowing what to do about it.

It was the same feeling of impotence that most of us shared. But then, a couple of years ago, he had this idea. Many mosques disrupt neighbourhoods and drive out long-time residents. … Why not use his legal skills to help local communities resist planning applications for mosques? …

This is very topical in light of the recent revelations that the Boston bombers’ mosque “has been associated with other terrorism suspects, has invited radical speakers to a sister mosque in Boston and is affiliated with a Muslim group that critics say nurses grievances that can lead to extremism”, has classic jihadi texts in its library, and gave money to two terrorist charities which have been shut down by the U.S. government. But then again, when is something about the violent nature of Islam not topical these days? 

… What are mosques? As we know, mosques are not like churches or synagogues, they are far more than houses of worship and contemplation, many of them are centres of jihadist activity that indoctrinate to commit and support violence against infidels. In America, as many as 4 different studies have independently come to the same conclusion that 80 per cent of US mosques “were teaching jihad, Islamic supremacism, and hatred and contempt for Jews and Christians”.

The Law And Freedom Foundation website declares: “A mosque is not merely a place of worship. Islamic doctrine requires the application of Islamic law within its geographical reach.”

We can see the truth of that in London. It is no coincidence that sharia-law areas or self-declared Muslim areas with Muslim patrols acting like vigilantes in cities like London are near mosques. We are increasingly seeing Muslim patrols in the proximity of mosques saying to passers-by that they can’t walk a dog, wear a skirt, drink alcohol.

… Gavin Boby explains that mosques are being used as the bridgehead, the forefront of the advance of Islam in a territory.

What happens in neighbourhoods – usually working class districts which are not used to dealing with officialdom – where a mosque is built is that the area changes forever for its residents, who no longer recognize it and eventually have to move out, due to things like the parking jihad, general harassment, vandalism.

“The parking jihad is” he describes, “soon after the construction of a mosque, people will find no parking space there, their driveway is being blocked or even a car is parked in the driveway inside your property and if you ask them to move their car they’ll say it’s only for an hour.” The parking tends to be used as a way to establish possession and control over the area, of saying: ”This is a mosque area, we are the owners now and there’s nothing you can do about it”, and then after that it gets worse until the point when people move out. …

The mosque is not simply a building of worship but also a political one …

Every mosque is instructed to be based upon the original mosque in Medina, where Muhammad originally in the 7th century set up his religious-political doctrine of social control, and the mosque is a place of government, it is a place where treaties are made, death sentences are passed, armies are blessed and dispatched, it is primarily about political control and it is very much used as a tool of advance.

So, this is the why of the Law And Freedom Foundation’s operation. Now let’s see the how.

Gavin works pro bono as a planning lawyer for anyone wishing to fight the erection of a mosque. He says:

“The method is very simple. A planning application gets submitted for a mosque in an area, and it will never be called a ‘mosque’. It will be called a community centre; an inter-faith centre; a public community, harmony-building outreach centre, and then the neighbours contact us, and it’s usually people who have never been involved in politics before, are shy of politics and officialdom and ask us to help them to resist it. And that’s what we do, we help them to simply use established methods of consultation to tell the local authorities: ‘We object to this proposal because of the effect it will have on the neighbourhood, the effect on parking, the effect on noise, the effect on disturbance, the architectural effect, the effect of concentrations of people generally, the amenity for residents.’ …”

That has proved to be a successful method of mosque busting. But Gavin Boby does more than that:

The second approach …  goes more to the core of what Islam is. [His] organization’s website states: ”Also, it is hard to see how a Local Authority has the power to grant planning permission for a mosque, since the purpose of a mosque is to promote a doctrine that incites killing, enslavement and war.” …

He advises his clients: “Don’t focus on the religious and political aspects, focus on the technical ones, but what we are doing is trying to stop the area from being Islamized.” But the two issues, i.e. the political question and the concern about community safety, are in fact indissolubly interconnected; he acts from knowledge of the intimidation and violence that the mosques regularly bring with them.

He observes that mosques are increasingly being built in the UK in numbers which are disproportionate to the need for them, and often in areas with hardly any Muslim population. …

Boby has become a household name in the counterjihad movement, and others outside the UK are following his example, like Geert Wilders in Holland, whose party recently launched the “MoskNee” (“MosqueNo”) project. …

He was also invited to speak in Ottawa, Canada by the organization Act for Canada, which points out that the University of Alberta’s former Chair in Islamic Studies explained how the founder of the Muslim Brotherhood Hassan al-Banna hoped to change “the status of the Mosque, bringing it from a static place of worship to a center of Islamic revolution”, while Youssef Qaradawi, unconditionally endorsed by leaders of the Muslim Brotherhood operating in Canada, wrote: “It must be the role of the mosque to guide the public policy of a nation, raise awareness of critical issues, and reveal its enemies. From ancient times the mosque has had a role in urging  jihad for the sake of Allah“. …

In August/September 2012 Mr Boby toured Australia on invitation of the Q Society of Australia. … Many Australians did not know that in their country there are already over 340 mosques and Islamic prayer rooms, many of which are rooms in once secular public buildings and public spaces.

As can be expected, there is controversy and attempts to stop this mosque-busting lawyer from giving speeches wherever they are scheduled, and he has been vilified by the mass media.

Of course he would be vilified, since the media throughout the West are predominantly on the Left, and the Left refuses to see Islam as the advancing menace that it is.

Republicans tried to make a law preventing the application of foreign law – in particular, sharia – in Florida courts. Although they had a majority in the state legislature, they failed.

This is from WatchdogWire:

The minority Democrats effectively killed the Florida version of American Law for American Courts on its third try in as many years in the final days of the 2013 Legislature in Tallahassee. SB 58, Acceptance of Foreign Law in Certain Cases, was defeated on a procedural vote by the minority Senate Democrats: 25 Republicans to 14 Democrats. 27 votes were required to reach the required two-thirds margin to use the House version which passed the Florida House on April 18th, 79 Republicans to 39 Democrats. One Republican Senator Ms. Nancy Detert from Venice was absent from the floor for the vote while a Democrat who originally supported the vote requested release from a promise to vote for the House version after enormous pressure was brought on the Senator by the Democrat caucus. That fractious activity was witnessed by the House sponsor of HB 351, Rep. Larry Metz. Consideration of the House ALAC version in the Florida Senate lost by two critical votes.

SB 58 sponsor, Sen. Alan Hays, Republican of Umatilla had a list of more than 19 cases involving foreign law that had been appealed in Florida courts.

Senate Rules [Republican] Committee Chair John Thrasher … [said] SB58 was “effectively dead”.

So, appallingly, it must be concluded that Democrats in Florida actually want sharia law to apply in their state.

The Democrats in Congress, who finagled the passing of Obama’s socialist health care legislation – the Affordable Care Act, laughably so called – don’t want the horrid thing to affect themselves adversely. So they are moving to exempt themselves from certain of its provisions.

And the Republicans – who at least opposed its ever becoming law – also fear it applying to them, so they’re helping the Democrats achieve the exemption for all Representatives and Senators and their aides.

They all fear being hit by the exorbitant costs of Obamacare.

This is from Politico:

Congressional leaders in both parties are engaged in high-level, confidential talks about exempting lawmakers and Capitol Hill aides from the insurance exchanges they are mandated to join as part of President Barack Obama’s health care overhaul, sources in both parties said.

The talks — which involve Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.), House Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio), the Obama administration and other top lawmakers — are extraordinarily sensitive, with both sides acutely aware of the potential for political fallout from giving carve-outs from the hugely controversial law to 535 lawmakers and thousands of their aides. Discussions have stretched out for months, sources said.

A source close to the talks says: “Everyone has to hold hands on this and jump, or nothing is going to get done.”

Yet if Capitol Hill leaders move forward with the plan, they risk being dubbed hypocrites by their political rivals and the American public. By removing themselves from a key Obamacare component, lawmakers and aides would be held to a different standard than the people who put them in office.

The poor dears shouldn’t fear being called hypocritical. Everyone’s always known they’re that and worse.

There is concern in some quarters that the provision requiring lawmakers and staffers to join the exchanges, if it isn’t revised, could lead to a “brain drain” on Capitol Hill, as several sources close to the talks put it.

The problem stems from whether members and aides set to enter the exchanges would have their health insurance premiums subsidized by their employer — in this case, the federal government. If not, aides and lawmakers in both parties fear that staffers — especially low-paid junior aides — could be hit with thousands of dollars in new health care costs, prompting them to seek jobs elsewhere. Older, more senior staffers could also retire or jump to the private sector rather than face a big financial penalty. …

As Sen. Richard Burr (R-NC) pointed out, if the federal government doesn’t pick up “the 75 percent that they have been, then put yourself in the position of a lot of entry-level staff people who make $25,000 a year, and all of a sudden, they have a $7,000 a year health care tab? That would be devastating.”

Congressmen’s concern for their aides is sincere. They need those people. 

And even more sincere is their concern for how the Act is about to hit themselves:

Plus, lawmakers — especially those with long careers in public service and smaller bank accounts — are also concerned about the hit to their own wallets.

But how can they answer those accusations of hypocrisy?

Well, how’s this for some smart-ass double-talk by spokesmen for the lawmakers? –

House Minority Whip Steny Hoyer (D-Md.) is worried about the provision. … “Mr. Hoyer is looking at this policy, like all other policies in the Affordable Care Act, to ensure they’re being implemented in a way that’s workable for everyone, including members and staff,” said Katie Grant, Hoyer’s communications director.

Sleight-of-tongue! Brilliant!

And here’s a beautiful ‘s explanation of why the Republican Speaker of the House will support the shocked Democrats in trying to protect themselves from the result of their own folly:

When asked about the high-level bipartisan talks, Michael Steel, a Boehner spokesman, said: “The speaker’s objective is to spare the entire country from the ravages of the president’s health care law. He is approached daily by American citizens, including members of Congress and staff, who want to be freed from its mandates. If the speaker has the opportunity to save anyone from Obamacare, he will.”

Talk about smart! Such brains must not be drained!

Surely a little Schadenfreude on the public’s part is permissible now that the Democrats are rueing what they gloated over achieving by sly and shady means:

The developing narrative is potentially brutal for congressional Democrats and the White House. … The health care law, controversial since it was passed in 2010, has been a target of the right and, increasingly, the left.

Hoist  with their own petard. Harry Reid, who pushed and screwed the legislation through, now worried for himself. Nancy Pelosi concerned for her aides, now that she’s found out what’s in the Act as she so looked forward to doing when she enthusiastically voted for it without having read it … 

Okay, some of us at TAC tried covering our mouths to muffle our laughter, but finally had to leave the dignified chamber where we work in considerate silence to guffaw freely outside …

(Hat-tip Frank)

Evil speaks, as so often, in the name of good. And as so often, in an op-ed in the New York Times.

Three Cheers for the Nanny State is by Sarah Conly, an assistant professor of philosophy at Bowdoin College who is also the author of a book titled Against Autonomy: Justifying Coercive Paternalism.

In her op-ed she asks:

Why has there been so much fuss about New York City’s attempt to impose a soda ban, or more precisely, a ban on large-size “sugary drinks”? After all, people can still get as much soda as they want. This isn’t Prohibition. It’s just that getting it would take slightly more effort. So, why is this such a big deal?

Which makes us ask: If it’s so trivial why do it at all?

And we know the right answer: In order to exercise power.

These would-be totalitarians start with small things so you’ll get used to the interference in your private life, get used to them imposing their will on you.

Conly says:

Americans, even those who generally support government intervention in our daily lives, have a reflexive response to being told what to do, and it’s not a positive one. It’s this common desire to be left alone that prompted the Mississippi Legislature earlier this month to pass a ban on bans — a law that forbids municipalities to place local restrictions on food or drink.

Mississippi did that? Bravo, Mississippi!

Conly says:

We have a vision of ourselves as free, rational beings who are totally capable of making all the decisions we need to in order to create a good life. Give us complete liberty, and, barring natural disasters, we’ll end up where we want to be. It’s a nice vision, one that makes us feel proud of ourselves. But it’s false. …

A lot of times we have a good idea of where we want to go, but a really terrible idea of how to get there. It’s well established by now that we often don’t think very clearly when it comes to choosing the best means to attain our ends. We make errors. This has been the object of an enormous amount of study over the past few decades, and what has been discovered is that we are all prone to identifiable and predictable miscalculations.

Oh yes. We know about those academic studies. There are millions of them gathering dust. Each study was conducted and written up to prove something –  and lo! managed to prove it.

But did any sane person on earth really need “an enormous amount of study” to “discover” that we often go wrong in trying to achieve something?

Conly says:

Research by psychologists and behavioral economists … identified a number of areas in which we fairly dependably fail. They call such a tendency a “cognitive bias,” and there are many of them — a lot of ways in which our own minds trip us up.

For example, we suffer from an optimism bias, that is we tend to think that however likely a bad thing is to happen to most people in our situation, it’s less likely to happen to us — not for any particular reason, but because we’re irrationally optimistic. Because of our “present bias,” when we need to take a small, easy step to bring about some future good, we fail to do it, not because we’ve decided it’s a bad idea, but because we procrastinate.

Wow! Who’d have thought that people hope for the best? Or that they put off doing things they don’t much want to do? Where would we be without these revelations from “psychologists and behavioral economists”? However did humanity make out before they came along?

We also suffer from a status quo bias, which makes us value what we’ve already got over the alternatives, just because we’ve already got it — which might, of course, make us react badly to new laws, even when they are really an improvement over what we’ve got. …

The crucial point is that in some situations it’s just difficult for us to take in the relevant information and choose accordingly. … [So] we need help.

That help must come, she tells us, from laws, though we’ll be cross about them just because they’re new.

No, we’ll be cross about them because the purpose of law should be to protect freedom, and a law against the sale of large sodas does not protect freedom; it limits it.

Conly is not concerned with freedom. She’s concerned – really truly deeply cares, she’d have you know  – whether the soda is good for you or not.

Is it always a mistake when someone does something imprudent, when, in this case, a person chooses to chug 32 ounces of soda? No. For some people, that’s the right choice. They don’t care that much about their health, or they won’t drink too many big sodas, or they just really love having a lot of soda at once.

But – Conly says  – just because you like it, and may not be harmed by it, or know when to stop indulging yourself with it, doesn’t mean there shouldn’t be a law against it, because most people need to be forbidden it by law for their own good. It’s the age-old excuse for tyranny.

She reasons:

Laws have to be sensitive to the needs of the majority. That doesn’t mean laws should trample the rights of the minority, but that public benefit is a legitimate concern, even when that may inconvenience some.

So do these laws mean that some people will be kept from doing what they really want to do? Probably — and yes, in many ways it hurts to be part of a society governed by laws, given that laws aren’t designed for each one of us individually. … Giving up a little liberty is something we agree to when we agree to live in a democratic society that is governed by laws.

We emphatically disagree. We contend that each person’s liberty should be limited by nothing but everyone else’s. That is the individualist’s view.

But Conly is a collectivist. She says:

What people fear is that this is just the beginning: today it’s soda, tomorrow it’s the guy standing behind you making you eat your broccoli, floss your teeth, and watch “PBS NewsHour” every day. What this ignores is that successful paternalistic laws are done on the basis of a cost-benefit analysis: if it’s too painful [to too many people], it’s not a good law.

You “do” a law. You experiment. If people are badly hurt by it, “it’s not a good law”. Which isn’t to say you repeal it.

Then comes her most fatuous assertion. Of what you should and should not be allowed to do, she says:

Making these analyses is something the government has the resources to do. 

What resources? A bevy of bureaucrats?

She says:

In the old days we used to blame people for acting imprudently, and say that since their bad choices were their own fault, they deserved to suffer the consequences. Now we see that these errors aren’t a function of bad character, but of our shared cognitive inheritance.

That is to say, human nature. But though she uses the word “our”, she and her fellow statists do not believe they are like the rest of us. They know that they know, as we cannot know, what our ends ought to be, and how best we can get there. And whether we like it or not, they’ll see that we do.

She says:

The proper reaction is not blame, but an impulse to help one another.

“Helping one another” is the nice lefty way of saying “interfering in other people’s lives”. “I know better than you what’s good for you”, is the fixed belief of Conly and her fellow busybodies. To which impertinence the right and time-honored retort is, “Mind your own business!”

Conly’s college, where she teaches the virtues of totalitarianism, is critically scrutinized by Bruce Bawer in an article at Front Page. He writes:

If you want to see ideological lockstep and rinse-and-repeat brainwashing in their very purest form, it’s best to look to the small, elite liberal-arts colleges – preferably those that are located out in the middle of nowhere or in adorable little college towns where the colleges themselves set the local tone.

Case in point: Bowdoin … founded in 1794 … located in Brunswick, Maine, has just under 1800 students …

All of whom  apparently have a very high opinion of themselves just for having got there. Bruce Bawer quotes (from a recent report) a student saying:

“Our student body represents some of the most intelligent youth of the world. Bowdoin’s worst student is by far and away much more astute than the vast majority of humans.”

Bruce Bawer goes on:

Students are encouraged to see the college itself as … a small-scale model of the better, more progressive world they should strive to help establish after they graduate. …

At Bowdoin, as at other such colleges … identity-studies programs constitute no less than 18 percent of the curriculum. … [And] there’s a proliferation of student clubs based on group identity. Long lost is the idea that it should be an objective, when bringing together kids from a wide variety of backgrounds to be educated, to transcend such categories; on the contrary, the idea is to produce young adults for whom class, race, and gender labels are the very pillars of self-knowledge. …

Women’s studies, black studies, gay studies, transgender studies …

Bowdoin is not concerned with the inculcation of knowledge in its students, but with –

The inculcation of “knowingness” … [These are] ignorant students who have been trained to be smug and self-satisfied, to think that they’ve already got all the answers and that they themselves are the solution to the world’s problems. Why, after all, should they be eager to learn? Academic ideology has already answered all the important questions. Besides, it’s been made clear to them that there’s nothing in particular they need to learn. All of life is an elective. Course content is irrelevant; what matters is that you approach every topic with a reflexive, unquestioning belief in social construction, “social justice,” and “global citizenship.”

They are our betters, who will govern us tomorrow – if we let them.

Here are two stories of asylum-seeking in Europe.

News story one:  

Abu Qatada could be here for life: Judges admit he’s very dangerous but won’t kick him out… as HIS human rights come first

See our posts The tale of a Muslim terrorist parasite, January 18, 2012, and Human rights are wrongs in Europe, January 6, 2013, for the long drawn out and infuriating history of Abu Qatada in Britain.

The judges said that while Qatada’s deportation was “long overdue”, his risk to the public was not “a relevant consideration” under human rights laws.

Q: What about the “human rights” of his reluctant host population?  

A: In Europe, Muslim rights always take precedence.

The verdict drew a furious response from the Tories and sparked new demands for the Government to ignore the courts and simply throw him out of the country.

The Appeal Court yesterday upheld an earlier verdict that sending the hate preacher to face a terror trial in Jordan would not be fair.

Being “fair” is a traditional British – and now apparently European – value. The idea of being “fair” to a terrorist is a lunacy – unless one understands it as first putting him or her in the hands of those inventive US soldiers at Abu Ghraib and then executing him.

Home Secretary Theresa May will now lodge a last-ditch appeal to the Supreme Court. If that fails, it would raise the prospect of Qatada … Osama bin Laden’s right-hand man in Europe – never being deported. He could apply to be freed within days.

He is in Belmarsh high-security jail for breaching his immigration bail conditions. He “has been linked to a long list of international terrorists [and] featured in hate sermons found on videos in the flat of one of the September 11 bombers.”

Qatada … has now defied the wishes of six Labour and Tory home secretaries over eight years.

Yesterday Justice Secretary Chris Grayling said: “Labour and the Liberal Democrats’ refusal to contemplate big changes to human rights law is inexplicable given problems like this. I am bitterly unhappy that we have to wait until the next general election to sort this out.” …

Ministers have been trying for a decade to send Qatada to Jordan, where he is accused of plotting a terrorist atrocity …

His removal was originally approved by the British courts, only to be halted by the European Court of Human Rights last year. Judges in Strasbourg said he would not get a fair trial because some of the evidence used against him may have been obtained by torture. Controversially, Mrs May opted not to appeal against this verdict. …

Instead, she and her ministers secured personal promises from the Jordanian authorities there would be no use of torture evidence, and began the deportation process again in the UK legal system.

But last November, the Special Immigration Appeals Commission said it was not satisfied with the assurances, and halted Qatada’s removal. The court said it must reflect the Strasbourg ruling. …

Tory MPs have repeatedly urged Mrs May to ignore the courts and throw Qatada out.

But that would mean taking the unprecedented step of defying judges in both Europe and Britain.

Last night, there was growing unrest among Tories at the failure to get rid of the cleric.

Backbencher Dominic Raab said: “The Government made a strategic mistake in the way it argued this case. There is nothing in the European Convention or UK law that says we have to guarantee fair trials at the other end when we deport foreign criminals or terrorists. If we had made clear that we rejected Strasbourg’s ruling – and meddling – on principle at the outset, the UK Border Agency could have deported Qatada without the UK courts stopping them.”

He will probably be freed, and if he is –

Qatada would go back under round-the-clock surveillance estimated to cost £100,000 a week, or £5million a year.

News Story Two:

Iranian Christians Denied Asylum Even Though Arrest, Torture and Death Await Back in Iran

Iranian Christian applying for asylum in Sweden have been denied their request for asylum even though authorities know these Christians face arrest, torture and death if they were to be forced to return. …

A number of Iranian Christians facing persecution for their faith back home have reportedly been denied asylum in Sweden, despite authorities being aware of the hardships awaiting them if they are returned to their homeland. …

Sweden … has been described as one of the most progressive countries in the world. However [or should that be “Therefore”, since Progressives are on the side of Islam? – ed], the Swedish Immigration Board is rejecting their request despite knowing that the converts face arrest, torture and even death back home. …

The Immigration Board has apparently questioned the validity of the converts’ Christian faith, accusing them of trying to scheme their way to asylum. But the senior pastor of the Iranian church in Stockholm has testified that the believers have served on the worship team at the church and contributed to Iranian Christian TV networks and websites. …

“We have told our families in Iran that we are Christian now, and they have disowned us. So we don’t have a family to return to. Our blood is now halal – it is holy for Muslims to kill us,” said Ali Roshan and Mahtab Shafadi, who were denied asylum to Sweden with their young daughter.

So back they must go. Unless … we wonder …. what if they applied to Britain for asylum?

Naa! Obviously, Europe prefers Muslims.

Note well: All this grief comes from religion.

Free marketeers should never let go of the proposition that taxation is theft.

However, as they are realists, they have also to concede – very grudgingly – that some money must be given to a government. As little as possible. Just enough for it to do what only a government can do: protect the country and the freedom of everyone in it.

So okay, governments may take a small percentage of earners’ incomes and label it “not stolen”.

But they always take more, and that’s morally abhorrent.

They make their immorality look honest by dressing it in laws.

Needless to say, the biggest thieves are the socialists. The more socialist a government is, the more it robs the nation. The fatter the government, the thinner the people.

Every now and then a government reveals its naked criminality. As now, for instance, in Cyprus, where the state is visibly extending its prehensile claw to snatch people’s money out of the banks. It calls the looting a tax.

This is from an article by Paul A. Rahe at Ricochet:

This weekend, the government of Greek Cyprus — under pressure from the European Union — negotiated a bailout that had as one of its provisions an assessment on the capital of those with deposits in the banks on Cyprus.

“An assessment on the capital” implies taxing, but the intention is to steal a portion of it.

Those with under 100,000 Euros in their accounts are slated to receive a 6.6% haircut while those with more than 100,000 Euros in their accounts will be docked 9.9%.

Rumor has it that the first proposal by the EU muggers in power was to seize 40%.

Whether the government can secure the approval of the Cypriot legislature for this unprecedented move remains unclear. There is talk of lowering the tax on deposits under 100,000 Euros to 3% and of raising the tax on larger deposits to 12.5%. But while the difference no doubt matters to ordinary Cypriots, whose savings are modest, and to the Russian oligarchs who have parked huge sums in the Cypriot banks, when viewed from a larger perspective, it matters not one whit. Indeed, at this point, it does not even matter whether the Cypriot government backs off from this plan altogether.

Banks are fiduciary institutions. They rely on trust; and, if there is a breach of trust, they are cooked. Individuals deposit money in banks instead of stuffing it in their mattresses because they believe that it will be safe there. Once they realize or even suspect that the money they put in the bank is anything but safe, they will take what is left of their money and run — and the bank will collapse. …

The Greeks will draw their own conclusions, as will the Spanish and the Italians and perhaps even the Irish and the French. No one who lives in a country that is in financial trouble and that may need emergency help from the European Union will entrust his loose change to a bank in his own country. The Euros in his mattress will retain their full value; those which he entrusts to the bank may, at least in part, be confiscated. …

That’s assuming the state won’t expropriate his Euro-stuffed mattress.

It would be hard to imagine what one could do to turn an ongoing crisis into a total catastrophe that would be more effective than the terms imposed by the European Union on Cyprus. That such a move is in contemplation is an indication of the degree to which the authorities in Brussels and Nicosia are in the grips of desperation.

And are foolish. And criminal.

Greek Cyprus got into in trouble in large part because of … Russian [mafia] deposits. The banks there had a great deal more money than they knew what to do with on the island, and so they loaned money to their less than creditworthy cousins in the republic of Greece. Now they have obligations that they cannot pay, and so they have turned to Brussels.

Had Greek Cyprus not joined the Euro, this problem would be relatively easy to solve. The government could simply devalue the currency and give the Cypriot banks’ Russian depositors a haircut in this time-honored fashion. That is what was done with considerable regularity in places such as Greece and Italy before they joined the Euro; and, if the Cypriots could do it now, it would have this virtue. The haircut imposed on their own citizens would — initially, at least — be less onerous. Abroad, the savings of the Cypriots would buy them less, to be sure. But, at home, for a while, it would buy them what it had before. Moreover, what the Cypriots produced at home would be more competitive in the world market — since its purchase would set the buyer back less — and as a tourist destination the island would be more attractive, since accommodations and food would for foreigners be cheaper than it had been. For a time, there might even be a boom.

I am not suggesting that devaluation is a joy nor that its long-term consequences are salutary. It isn’t a joy, and the consequences are not good. Inflation is apt to erupt, and inflation can all too easily become habitual. But a devaluation of the currency would not lead to a complete collapse of credit, which this tax on savings might well achieve.

Credit, you need to keep in mind, is what makes the world go round. Modern economies do not operate on cash. They operate on credit — which is to say, they rely on the very trust against which the European Union and the Greek Cypriot government have launched a devastating attack.

Bill Tatro points out that such robbery by the state could happen in America: 

To think those types of financial and economic events couldn’t happen here, hmmmmm…..In 1933, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt declared a national bank moratorium (he closed all banks.) Then, via Executive Order 6102, the government confiscated all gold and gold certificates, exchanging them for paper. Consequently, if you didn’t surrender your gold, you went to jail. The price of gold was set at $20.67 per ounce. Yet, within a year, the government reset the price to $35.00 per ounce, effectively fleecing the American public by 69%.

And speaking of rip-offs, just remember that … in 2009, President Barack Obama [when he bailed out GM] rejected the rule of law for GM senior and subordinated debtholders, thus relegating them to the back of the line. …

[And remember that] after extensive 2011 Congressional analysis failed to discover where the missing $1.6 billion of MF Global customer money had gone, J.P. Morgan was recently found to not have disclosed the risks taken and monies lost by the excess deposits as compared to the loans domiciled at J.P. Morgan. …

Following the “lost decade” of investment (2000-2009) which shed a very bright light on the failure of self-directed retirement accounts, former Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner discussed the possibility of nationalizing IRAs and 401ks [retirement savings accounts] …

So, regarding the current situation involving the third largest island in the Mediterranean Sea, can it happen right here in our country? …

It has happened, it is happening right now, and it will continue to happen.

An IBD editorial reports and comments:

Markets tumbled after Cyprus and the EU said they might tax private bank accounts to pay for a bailout. …

As bad as tumbling markets around the world are, they seem to be the only signal strong enough to catch the attention of Europe’s otherwise unaccountable bureaucrats who have long since learned to ignore street riots.

As stocks fell from Tokyo to New York, Europe’s leaders are scrambling to say they had nothing to do with the cause — the shutdown of all Cyprus banks and ATMs for at least three days and the expropriation of a large chunk of each now-captive account, as a “tax” to pay for Cyprus’ $13 billion EU bailout, Europe’s fifth.

Cyprus Prime Minister Nicos Anastasiades bitterly asserted he had been “blackmailed” by the EU and the International Monetary Fund to go along with the idea on Saturday, or there’d be no bailout. …

Aside from the fact that no fiscally responsible country should need a bailout and the roots of Cyprus’ financial crisis is based on long-term big-spending government and low-information voters, the bank shutdown nevertheless sets an ugly precedent rooted in the growing arrogance of EU power.

Until now, tax hikes and haircuts for bond-holders have been how Europe’s bailouts have been handled. …

Confiscating savings in banks and denying people access to their property without warning is something entirely different — and will do great damage to citizens’ willingness to save, invest and build wealth.

Oh sure, the rationale was that most of the depositors were shady foreigners, particularly from Russia, laundering money. But the photos of Cypriots banging on bank doors and protesting, much as the people of Argentina did when the same thing happened to them in 2002, tells a different story of human suffering.

The expropriation of the tiny country’s savings may have seemed like an easy test case for the EU because the population is small and some of the depositors are rich and unsympathetic, but the blowback will hit savings and investment — and future economic growth — all over Europe.

Worse still, it could catch on here.

Already Congressional Democrats are plotting the expropriation of Americans’ private 401(k) and IRA retirement savings accounts in favor of “a guaranteed income.”

If bank accounts can be casually expropriated in Cyprus to pay for big-spending governments and bailouts, there is no reason a nice slice of the $19 trillion in retirement accounts can’t get the same treatment.

Determined violent killers who cannot get guns will not refrain from killing; they’ll use less efficient weapons, such as knives or clubs, and so in all probability make the killing slower and more painful.

The answer to anti-gun fever is that it isn’t the gun that kills but the person who shoots with it. 

Here the case is well argued by Daniel Greenfield writing at his website Sultan Knish:

Every day another one of the stories comes in. A teacher panicked by a plastic gun, an army man on a cupcake, a t-shirt, a pop tart chewed into the shape of a gun or a finger gun hits the panic button. Supensions and lectures quickly follow as the latest threat to the gun-free zone, usually in the form of a little boy, is tackled to the ground and lectured to within an inch of his life.

There are some very stupid people in charge of schools!

Tellingly these incidents rarely take place in the inner city schools where teenage gang members walk through metal detectors at the start of the day. The safety officers in those schools, big weary men with eyes that look everywhere at once, don’t waste their time on toys. Not unless those toys are full-size, painted black and filed down to look like real guns.

It’s usually the schools where a shooting is wholly unlikely; where gun violence is not a daily reality, but an unlikely convergence of horror, that institutional vigilance hits an irrational peak as every school imagines that it could be the next Columbine or the next Sandy Hook.

The NRA’s initial proposal of armed school guards was met with an irrational chorus of protests. More guns aren’t the answer, was the cry. And the leading crier was the White House’s expert skeet shooter. … The problem was not the man, it was the gun. Get rid of the guns and you stop the killing. Schools across the country are banning not [only] the gun, but the idea of the gun. It is a conceptual prohibition that is meant to push away the threat of gun violence by eliminating any mention of the G word. Gun-free zones mean places where guns cannot be mentioned, depicted or even symbolized as if the refusal to concede the existence of a firearm will eliminate the threat of it being used on the premises.

This isn’t a precautionary attitude, but a pacifist one. Gun horror is not a productive emotion, but learned helplessness disguised as moral superiority. Rather than teaching children to hate killers, schools are instead teaching them to hate guns. And reducing murders to instruments rather than morals, children are left with no sense of right and wrong, only an instinctive horror of violence.

Pacifists have always demonized armies rather than invaders. …  By dealing with the object rather than the subject, they are able to avoid the question of moral responsibility. Rather than hold the Nazis, Communists or Islamists accountable for their actions, they extended a blanket condemnation over the weapons-wielders. …

While the left likes to indulge in stereotypes of gun-toting rednecks and bomb-brandishing generals, the only people who judge the worth of a man by his weapon are the pacifists, the gun-fearers and gun-hiders who mythologize weapons as black agents of evil.

To believe that there is no such thing as constructive violence is to reject free will. Without accepting the necessity of constructive violence, there is no good and evil, only armed men and unarmed men. Without constructive violence, two boys playing cops and robbers in the schoolyard are not acting out a childish morality play, they are becoming desensitized to murder …

If there is no such thing as constructive violence, then the police officer is not the solution to crime, he is part of the cycle of violence. And if that cycle of violence does not begin with a man choosing to use a gun for good or evil, then it must begin with the gun. The man becomes the object and the gun becomes the subject. American ICBMs become just as bad as Russian ballistic missiles. An Israeli soldier killing a suicide bomber is just as bad as the terrorist. There are no good guys with guns. To have a gun is to be the bad guy.

For decades the gun-control lobby has brandished assault rifles at press conferences and spent more time describing their killing power than their manufacturers have. The rifle has been upgraded to the assault rifle and now, in the latest Orwellian vernacular used by the White House and the entire media pyramid beneath it, weapons of war. …

Shootings in America are not caused by guns, they are caused by crime. Guns really do not walk off store shelves and go on killing sprees. That’s what criminals are for. But the trouble with that discussion is that it takes us into moral territory. … We have to ask the difficult question of what does kill people.

It’s a bigger question than just Adam Lanza pulling the trigger in a classroom full of children. It is a big question that encompasses the Nazi gas chambers and the Soviet gulags, the Rape of Nanking and September 11. It is a question as big as all of human history.

Pacifists once used to be able to address such questions, but they have become obsessed with the technology of violence … ,[which] is largely beside the point. Guns do not motivate people to kill. …

Some of history’s worst massacres happened long before firearms became useful for more than scaring off peasants. The heavily armed Americans of the 50s had lower per capita murder rates than medieval London. It isn’t the gun that makes the killer. It’s not the hand that kills, but the mind.

The gun-free society has little interest in individuals. Its technocratic philosopher-kings want big and comprehensive solutions. Their answer to gun violence is to feed a horror of guns. Their answer to obesity is to ban sodas. Their solutions invariably miss the point by treating people like objects and objects like people.

In the Middle Ages, rats were put on trial for eating crops. Today we put guns on trial for killing people.

The left has tried to reduce people to economics, to class and then race, gender and sexual orientation. It has done its best to reduce people to the sum of their parts and then to tinker with those parts and it has failed badly. The best testimony of its … failure is that the worst pockets of gun violence are in urban areas that have been under the influence of their sociologists, urban planners, psychologists, social justice activists, community organizers and political rope-pullers for generations. And what have those areas brought forth except malaise, despair, blight and murder?

Banning guns will do as much for those areas as banning drugs did. …

The gun-control activists drew the wrong lesson from [the murder of children at Sandy Hook school in] Newtown as they drew the wrong lessons from WW2 and September 11. The lesson is not that weapons are bad, the lesson is that people in the grip of evil ideas are capable of unimaginable horrors regardless of the tools at their disposal. A single man can kill a classroom full of children with a gun and a few men can kill thousands with a few box cutters. It isn’t the tool that matters. It’s the man.

Unwishing the gun brings us back to the sword. Unwishing the sword brings us back to the spear. Unwishing the spear brings us back to the stone club. And what then? When every weapon that ever existed or will exist is undone, all that remains is the deadliest weapon of all. The mind of man.

The gun, the sword, the spear and the club took countless lives and saved countless lives. Civilization has always balanced on a future made possible by little boys playing cops and robbers and playing with little green army men. They can either grow up to be the protectors of the future or the frightened men who will stand aside and do nothing when they hear the screams begin to come because they have been told that all violence is evil.