Years and years ago in Texas, a vicious pervert named Humberto Leal raped and murdered a sixteen year old girl named Adrea Sauceda.

From a report of the murder, and the 1995 trial and conviction of her murderer:

The tragic final hours of sixteen-year-old Adrea Sauceda’s life started at an outdoor party in San Antonio, Texas. … Humberto Leal was also at the party. At some point the intoxicated but conscious victim was placed in Leal’s car. …  Several of the party members went looking for Adria … They found her nude body lying face-up on a dirt road. They noticed Adria’s head had been bashed in and it was bleeding. Her head was flinching or jerking. These party members called the police. When the police arrived, they saw the nude victim lying on her back. There was a 30 to 40 pound asphalt rock roughly twice the size of Adria’s skull lying partially on Adria’s left arm. Blood was underneath this rock. A smaller rock with blood on it was located near Adria’s right thigh. There was a gaping hole from the corner of Adria’s right eye extending to the center of her head from which blood was oozing. Adria’s head was splattered with blood. [She had been raped with] a bloody and broken stick approximately 14 to 16 inches long with a screw at the end of it … Another 4 to 5 inch piece of the stick was lying to the left side of Adria’s skull. … Leal was arrested [and his] car was impounded. … [At leal’s trial]  Dr. DiMaio, the medical examiner who performed the autopsy, testified about Adria’s injuries and cause of death. DiMaio testified that even though Adria was intoxicated when she received her injuries, she would have been aware of what was happening to her. …  Adria’s head injuries were consistent with Adria lying on the ground with somebody standing over her striking her. DiMaio testified the large rock could have delivered the injuries to Adria’s head. Based on the injuries to Adria’s head, DiMaio testified Adria would had to have been struck with the rock two or three times. DiMaio testified Adria died from blunt force trauma injuries to the head. …  DiMaio also testified about bite marks he found on Adria’s left cheek, the right side of her neck and the left side of her chest. Another witness compared the bite marks on Adria’s chest and neck with dental impressions of Leal’s teeth. They matched. The State’s indictment charged that Leal killed Sauceda … Leal was convicted and … sentenced to death.

A just sentence.

But demands that the rapist murderer’s life be spared poured over the Governor, Rick Perry.

Who were the murderer’s supporters?

A gaggle of very important lefties from all over this lefty-contaminated planet …

scoundrels slithering about  that sink of iniquity the United Nations …

and the president of the United States, Barack Obama.

From Front Page, by Mark Tapson:

The pleas came not just from the typical capital punishment opponents but from international diplomats, judges, military officials, politicians, even the United Nations. The topper was an eleventh-hour appeal from the Obama administration itself.

What is it about Leal’s case that prompted protest from such high-powered and far-ranging corners? The argument from the White House and others was that his execution “would place the United States in irreparable breach of its international law obligation.” A “Mexican national” (he had lived illegally in the U.S. since the age of two) Leal had not been informed, after his arrest, of his right to consult the crack legal team at the Mexican consulate – an oversight which the International Court of Justice at The Hague rules is a violation of the 1963 Vienna Convention on Consular Relations. Leal, as such, should have been notified of his right to call up his embassy and have all that rape-murder unpleasantness wiped clean as tidily as “some New Guinean ambassador’s parking tickets,” as crime reporter Tina Trent put it in a blistering blog.

Instead, Humberto Leal and his attorney Sandra Babcock were forced to insist on his innocence, despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary, through forty-five hearings and appeals over a period longer than the life of his young victim, before he finally confessed at his execution: “I have hurt a lot of people… I take full blame for everything. I am sorry for what I did.” This was just before he shouted – twice – his patriotic final words, “Viva Mexico!” If Senõr Leal had lived there, of course, instead of illegally in the U.S., Adrea Sauceda would still be alive. …

“A technicality doesn’t give anyone a right to come to this country and rape, torture and murder anyone,” said the victim’s mother. Sorry, Mrs. Sauceda, but President Obama and his radical colleagues have a broader agenda in mind than justice for your insignificant daughter. Tina Trent suggests that Obama’s intervention on Leal’s behalf can be traced back to a 2003 conference called Human Rights at Home: International Law in U.S. Courts, which featured the usual suspects: the ACLU, The Jimmy Carter Center, Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International. Also presenting at the conference was Leal’s attorney Babcock herself and a raft of radical elements: Bernardine Dohrn, the unrepentant former terrorist/current radical academic, and the not-so-better-half of Bill Ayres (whose c.v. is the same); Van Jones, the continually self-reinventing, race-baiting Communist “truther” … and representatives from the [sarcastically named] Open Society Institute, funded by the ubiquitous puppet master of the Left, George Soros. Radical transnationalist Harold Koh, now Obama’s State Department legal adviser and one of those who pushed for Leal’s international “rights” participated as well. The conference’s official description said that one of its purposes was to “ensure U.S. accountability for violating international human rights principles” – hence the campaign for “justice” for illegal alien and rapist-murderer Humberto Leal.

Trent reports that as a professor at Northwestern University School of Law, “Ms. Babcock’s research interest is imposing international law on the American justice system, a hobby she practices with her colleague, terrorist-cum-law-professor Bernardine Dohrn.” Dohrn is the Director of Northwestern’s Children and Family Justice Center who, like Babcock, lists “International Human Rights” among her areas of expertise. It’s ironic that “Juvenile Justice” is Dohrn’s other area of expertise, since she and her transnationalist allies haven’t put any effort toward the defense of 16-year-old Adrea Sauceda’s rights.

Dohrn is a lifelong “revolutionary anti-imperialist” who co-founded the Weather Underground domestic terrorist group, which carried out bombings on American soil, and was accused of planting the bomb that killed a San Francisco police sergeant in 1970, a charge she denies. She salivated over the Manson family’s butchery of innocents (whom she referred to as “pigs”), was a principal signatory of a Declaration of War against “AmeriKKKa,” and today links arms with her Code Pink cohorts to stand with Hamas and denounce the imaginary genocide of Palestinians being waged so ineptly by Israeli oppressors. So her concept of “international human rights” seems rather limited.

Dohrn, Babcock, Koh and the other activists from that 2003 conference all share what the National Review’s Andrew C. McCarthy calls Obama’s “poorly camouflaged loathing of American power, at least when used to pursue American interests.” They are united in their intent to diminish American sovereignty and superpower status, and to usher in a “post-American” world in which the United States submits itself to the judgment of transnational institutions like the United Nations and the International Court of Justice, packed with representatives who, to put it mildly, do not have America’s best interests at heart.

We are happy to say that all protests were ignored by the Governor. Leal was executed earlier this month.

Weathering such protests is nothing out of the ordinary for Perry; a strong proponent of the death penalty, he has overseen the execution of more than two hundred “dead men walking.”

In our view, that alone recommends him as a candidate for the presidency, for which – it is said – he is thinking of standing.

Okay, he’s got religion, but so have they all, all the would-be candidates as far as we know.

And God of course is on everyone’s side. After Leal had carried out his grotesque crime, he “went home, prayed on the side of his mom’s bed.” (Are you not moved?)

And after Leal’s execution, Leal’s uncle said, “There is a God who makes us all pay.”

Anyway, the law does – unless or until Obama and the United Nations abolish it.

Rick Perry, Governor of Texas and a probable presidential candidate, wrote to the Attorney General, Eric Holder, urging him to take action against Americans who sail with a flotilla to “break the Israeli siege of Gaza”.

Of course, Holder is very unlikely to do anything of the kind. He only enforces the law for or against persons according to whether he likes or dislikes them or their race. But it will be interesting to see what response, if any, he makes to Perry’s letter.

Here is what Perry wrote, according to the Washington Post:

“The state of Israel is a friend and critical ally of the United States, and the only stable democracy in an increasingly unstable and hostile region,” wrote Perry, a vocal supporter of Israel who is considering a run for president in 2012. “These initiatives to breach Israel’s maritime blockade of the Gaza Strip is an unacceptable provocation.”

Under federal law, anyone who “prepares a means for, or furnishes the money for, or takes part in, any military or naval expedition” against a friendly country can be fined or jailed for three years. Perry also suggested that Holder prosecute the protesters for providing materials or assistance to a terrorist organization. …

In his letter, Perry identified two of the ships as “The Audacity of Hope” and the “The Challenger II,” both of which he said were registered in Delaware. Perry also wrote that the ships will depend on U.S.-based Inmarsat for communications and navigation, suggesting that the organization could be held responsible for the protesters’ actions.

“I write to encourage you to aggressively pursue all available legal remedies to enjoin and prevent these illegal actions, and to prosecute any who may elect to engage in them in spite of your pre-emptive efforts,” Perry wrote.

Perry’s letter would make him our favorite among declared GOP presidential candidates, if he declares. True, he’s in the God camp, but so are they all.

We expect there will be a woman president, a Jewish president, even a president not born in the United States (although that would be in defiance of the Constitution), before there will be a self-confessed atheist president.

But maybe, for once, we are being too pessimistic.

Geert Wilders has scored a victory for freedom. He has been acquitted of “inciting hatred”.

We agree with Mark Steyn’s comments:

The court ruled that some of Wilders’ statements were insulting, shocking and on the edge of legal acceptibility, but that they were made in the broad context of a political and social debate on the multi-cultural society.

“On the edge of legal acceptability,” eh? As for the latter part — “the broad context of a political and social debate” — the genius “jurists” are effectively conceding … that the Dutch state was attempting to criminalize the political platform of a popular opposition party. That’s the sort of thing free societies should leave to Mubarak & Co, and even then, you can only get away with it for a while before people draw the obvious conclusion.

Nevertheless, as in all these cases, the process is the punishment. The intent is to make it more and more difficult for apostates of the multiculti state to broaden the terms of political discourse. Very few Europeans would have had the stomach to go through what Wilders did …

And at the end the awkward fact remains: Geert Wilders lives under 24-hour armed guard because of explicit death threats made against him by the killer of Theo van Gogh and by other Muslims. Yet he’s the one who gets puts on trial.

That’s the Netherlands, 2011. Shameful. As for the Islamic imperialists, they’re taking their case to the logical venue [the United Nations Human Rights Committee], arguing the ruling meant the Netherlands had failed to protect ethnic minorities from discrimination.

Meanwhile Muslims everywhere in Europe (and all over the world) continue to do their utmost to incite hatred of non-Muslims, especially Chritsians and Jews, as they have done for some 14 hundred years.

However, there does seem to be a turning of the tide in European public opinion on “multiculturalism”, which is to say Islam in Europe.

Reuters reports:

Opposition to immigration, particularly from Muslim or predominantly Muslim countries, is on the rise. …

Wilders, 47, is one of the most outspoken critics of Islam and immigration in the Netherlands.

His Freedom Party is now the third-largest in parliament, a measure of support for its anti-immigrant stance, and is the minority government’s chief ally. …

Wilders told reporters after the ruling. “This is not so much a win for myself, but a victory for freedom of speech. Fortunately you can criticize Islam and not be gagged in public debate.”

The ruling could embolden Wilders further. He has already won concessions from the government on cutting immigration and introducing a ban on Muslim face veils and burqas. …

Some Dutch citizens have started to question their country’s traditionally generous immigration and aid policies, worried by the deteriorating economic climate, higher unemployment, incidence of ethnic crime and signs that Muslim immigrants have not fully integrated into Dutch society.

Similar concerns have helped far-right parties to gain traction elsewhere in Europe, from France to Scandinavia.

And there is also this report at Hudson New York:

The Dutch government says it will abandon the long-standing model of multiculturalism that has encouraged Muslim immigrants to create a parallel society within the Netherlands.

A new integration bill (covering letter and 15-page action plan), which Dutch Interior Minister Piet Hein Donner presented to parliament on June 16, reads: “The government shares the social dissatisfaction over the multicultural society model and plans to shift priority to the values of the Dutch people. In the new integration system, the values of the Dutch society play a central role. With this change, the government steps away from the model of a multicultural society.”

Why has it taken them several decades to wake up?

Immigrants will be required to learn the Dutch language, and the government will take a tougher approach to immigrants to ignore Dutch values or disobey Dutch law.

They had actually been bribing Muslims to immigrate into Holland, and only now see what was wrong with the policy:

The government will also stop offering special subsidies for Muslim immigrants because, according to Donner, “it is not the government’s job to integrate immigrants.” The government will introduce new legislation that outlaws forced marriages and … will impose a ban on face-covering Islamic burqas as of January 1, 2013.

If necessary, the government will introduce extra measures to allow the removal of residence permits from immigrants who fail their integration course.

The measures are being imposed by the new center-right government of Conservatives (VVD) and Christian Democrats (CDA), with parliamentary support from the anti-Islam Freedom Party (PVV) …

That’s the one Geert Wilders leads.

Polls show that a majority of Dutch voters support the government’s skepticism about multiculturalism. According to a Maurice de Hond poll published by the center-right newspaper Trouw on June 19, 74 percent of Dutch voters say immigrants should conform to Dutch values. Moreover, 83 percent of those polled support a ban on burqas in public spaces. …

The Interior Minister’s change of mind is perhaps the visible sign of a deep-sea change in the minds of the Dutch people and maybe of Europeans generally:

Interior Minister Donner… has undergone a late-in-life conversion on the issue of Muslim immigration. In September 2006, while serving as justice minister, Donner provoked an outcry after saying that he welcomed the introduction of Islamic Sharia law in the Netherlands if the majority wants it. He also said Holland should give Muslims more freedoms to behave according to their traditions. …

Fast forward to 2011 and Donner now says his government “will distance itself from the relativism contained in the model of a multicultural society.” Although society changes, he says, it must not be “interchangeable with any other form of society.”

Meaning, Holland cannot be allowed to become an Islamic country.

The trouble is, try as he might, and try as all the leaders of Europe might, they cannot command the demographic tide to retreat. Unless something unpredictable happens to stop it, a Muslim majority will emerge in Europe before the middle of the century.

Europe has capitulated to Islam.

The Jews of Europe, what’s left of them, are being harried out, mostly by the Muslims, but also by the media (such as, and especially, the BBC and the Guardian newspaper), and lickspittle dhimmi politicians and judges who are keeping the seats of power warm for their incoming Muslim overlords.

From the American Thinker:

An ugly, uni-directional pattern of bigoted violence is once again clearly on display in Western Europe. European Muslims have attacked individual Jews, synagogues, and Jewish or Israeli institutions, in Sweden, Denmark, France, Belgium, Spain, Greece, and Britain. …

Scant attention (or none at all) is being paid to the unequivocal, virulent incitement for these Antisemitic attacks emanating from the Muslim world … Hamas, for example, on its official website (posted December 31, 2008 at the site hosted by Emirnet, United Arab Emirates) urged Muslims to attack Jews across the world … Hamas leader Mahmoud Zahar … advocated the murder of Jewish children, globally, claiming Israel had “legitimized the killing of their people all over the world.” …

Murderous calls for indiscriminate anti-Jewish violence … are also expressed locally, by jihadists within Europe….

On a population percentage basis, Muslims in Europe accounted for roughly 24.0 to 32.3 times the number of Antisemitic incidents as their non-Muslim European counterparts.

Hatred of Jews and recommendations that they should be killed are a large part of the religious teaching of Islam:

The ultimate “inspiration” for such rampant Muslim Jew-hatred within Europe’s Muslim communities can be traced to the sacralized bigotry of Islam’s foundational texts, disseminated by Muslim clerics such as Sheikh Feiz. As documented in a British television investigation broadcast January, 2007, the Jew-annihilationist eschatological theme from the canonical hadith quoted in the Hamas Covenant, article 7, The Prophet, ‘Allah’s prayer and peace be upon him, says: “The hour of judgment shall not come until the Muslims fight the Jews and kill them, so that the Jews hide behind trees and stones, and each tree and stone will say: ‘Oh Muslim, oh servant of Allah, there is a Jew behind me, come and kill him, except for the Gharqad tree, for it is the tree of the Jews.’ ”  …

So where are the trials of Muslims charged with incitement to racial hatred and violence?

We’ve tried but failed to find them.

However, Europeans who make known such facts as the American Thinker does, are on trial for doing so.

Also from the American Thinker:

[In Brussels] the Vigilance Musulmane (Muslim Vigilance) advocacy group filed a complaint with the Centre for Equal Opportunities and the Fight Against Racism (CGKR) against professor of sociology Mark Elchardus for statements about Islamic Jew hatred. …

Professor Elchardus’ conclusions are based upon data from a 426 pp. report he co-authored entitled, “Young in Brussels: findings from the JOP monitor Brussels.” Chapter 8 of this study, “Anti-Semitism in Brussels,” devotes some thirty pages to highlighting the problem of rising Jew-hatred in Brussels, particularly amongst young Muslim students. Elchardus provided this overview of the alarming problem to De Morgen:

“Worrying is that half [only half?- JB] of Muslim students can be described as anti-Semitic … Worse, the anti-Jewish feelings have nothing to do with a low educational or social disadvantage, as is the case with racist natives. It is theologically inspired anti-Semitism… Islam’s canonical texts – Koran, hadith, and sira – are redolent with Islamic Jew-hatred …”

The impact of such sacralized, mainstream Islamic Jew hatred on Western Europe’s burgeoning Muslim community is equally apparent. During February of 2008, then European Commissioner for Justice, Freedom, and Security [bit of Orwellian Newspeak there! – JB], Franco Frattini, the European Union (EU) official responsible “for combating racism and Antisemitism in Europe,” revealed that Muslims were responsible for fully half (50%) of the documented Antisemitic incidents on the European continent. Demographic data from 2007 indicated that the total number of Europeans is 494.8 million; estimates of the number of Muslims in Europe range from 15-20 million, or some ~3.0-4.0% of the total European population. Thus, on a population percentage basis, Muslims in Europe already accounted for roughly 24.0 to 32.3 times the number of Antisemitic incidents as their non-Muslim European counterparts. …

Rather than being maliciously sued, the Professor should be commended by all decent people for his intellectual honesty and moral courage.

Other Europeans who, like Professor Elchardus, have spoken the truth about Islam and have famously been brought to trial are Elisabeth Sabaditsch–Wolffe (fined for the “denigration of religious teachings of a legally recognized religion in Austria”); Lars Hedegaard (found guilty of hate speech in Denmark), and Geert Wilders.

Today Geert Wilders made his final remarks to the court trying him for “inciting hatred” of Muslims. Here’s part of what he said:

I am obliged to speak. For the Netherlands is under threat of Islam. As I have argued many times, Islam is chiefly an ideology. An ideology of hatred, of destruction, of conquest. It is my strong conviction that Islam is a threat to Western values, to freedom of speech, to the equality of men and women, of heterosexuals and homosexuals, of believers and unbelievers.

All over the world we can see how freedom is fleeing from Islam. Day by day we see our freedoms dwindle.

Islam is opposed to freedom. Renowned scholars of Islam from all parts of the world agree on this. …

The statements for which I am being tried are statements which I made in my function as a politician participating in the public debate in our society. My statements were not aimed at individuals, but at Islam and the process of islamization. …

I am acting within a long tradition which I wish to honour. I am risking my life in defence of freedom in the Netherlands. Of all our achievements freedom is the most precious and the most vulnerable. Many have given their lives for freedom. …

I do not wish to betray the trust of the 1.5 million voters of my party. I do not wish to betray my country. Inspired by Johan van Oldenbarneveldt and Johan de Witt I wish to be a politician who serves the truth end hence defends the freedom of the Dutch provinces and of the Dutch people. I wish to be honest, I wish to act with honesty and that is why I wish to protect my native land against Islam. Silence is treason.

That is why I have spoken, why I speak and why I shall continue to speak. …

I pay the price every day. Day and night I have to be protected against people who want to kill me. I am not complaining about it; it has been my own decision to speak. However, those who threaten me and other critics of Islam are not being tried here today. I am being tried …

My right to a fair trial has been violated. The order of the Amsterdam Court to prosecute me was not just a decision but a condemning verdict by judges who condemned me even before the actual trial had begun.

Mister President, members of the Court, you must now decide whether freedom still has a home in the Netherlands.

Franz Kafka said: “One sees the sun slowly set, yet one is surprised when it suddenly becomes dark.”

Mister President, members of the Court, do not let the lights go out in the Netherlands. …

Acquit me. Political freedom requires that citizens and their elected representatives are allowed to voice opinions that are held in society.

Acquit me, for if I am convicted, you convict the freedom of opinion and expression of millions of Dutchmen.

Acquit me. I do not incite to hatred. I do not incite to discrimination. But I defend the character, the identity, the culture and the freedom of the Netherlands. That is the truth. That is why I am here. That is why I speak. …

Mister President, members of the Court, though I stand here alone, my voice is the voice of many. This trial is not about me. It is about something much greater. Freedom of expression is the life source of our Western civilisation. …

Mister President, members of the Court, you have a great responsibility. Do not cut freedom in the Netherlands from its roots, our freedom of expression. Acquit me. Choose freedom. …

We ardently hope Wilders will be acquitted. But whether he is or not, Europe has irreversibly condemned itself.

From Big Government, by Bob McCarty:

About six years ago, the Dollarhites wanted to teach their young teenage son responsibility and the value of the dollar. So they rescued a pair of rabbits — one male and one female — and those rabbits did what rabbits do; they reproduced. Before long, things were literally hopping on the three-acre homestead 30 miles south of Springfield, and Dollarvalue Rabbitry was launched as more of a hobby than a business.

“We’d sell ‘em for 10 or 15 dollars a piece,” John said during a phone interview Tuesday afternoon, comparing the venture to a kid running a lemonade stand. In addition, they set up a web site and posted a “Rabbits for Sale” sign in their front yard. Most customers, however, came via word of mouth.

In the early stages, some of the bunnies were raised and sold for their meat. Much further down the road, John said, they determined it more profitable to sell live bunnies at four weeks old than to feed bunnies for 12 weeks and then sell them as meat.

“We started becoming the go-to people” for rabbits in the Springfield area, John said. “If you wanted a rabbit, you’d go to Dollarvalue Rabbitry.” He added that the family even made the local television news just before Easter in 2008 for a report about the care and feeding of “Easter bunnies.”

Initially, the Dollarhites sold the large, white, pink-eyed variety of rabbits. Eventually, however, they switched to selling a couple of different varieties of miniature rabbits, the mating pairs of which were purchased from breeders across the state. Not only did their “show-quality” miniatures reproduce well, but they ate less and seemed to be more popular with theme park visitors and retail buyers.

During the summer of 2009, the Dollarhites bought the rabbitry from their son who had grown tired of managing it. They paid him what he asked for it, $200. Things kept growing, however, and the Dollarhite’s landed a pair of big accounts in 2009.

A well-known Branson theme park, Silver Dollar City, asked the Dollarhites to have them provide four-week-old bunnies per week to their petting zoo May through September. When the bunnies turned six weeks old, they were sold to park visitors. The Springfield location of a national pet store chain, Petland, purchased rabbits from the Dollarhites as well.

In the fall of 2009, the theme park deliveries ended for the year and the Dollarhites scaled back their operation. At about the same time, the folks at Petland asked the Dollarhites to raise guinea pigs that the store would purchase from them. No big deal.

By the year’s end, the Dollarhites had moved approximately 440 rabbits and grossed about $4,600 for a profit of approximately $200 — enough, John said, to provide the family “pocket money” to do things such as eat out at Red Lobster once in a while. That was better than the loss they experienced in 2008.

Then some unexpected matters began demanding their attention.

It’s an understatement to describe the Dollarhites as being “beyond surprised” when, in the fall of 2009, a female inspector from the U.S. Department of Agriculture [USDA] showed up at the front door of the family home, wanting to do a “spot inspection” of their rabbitry. She said she had come across Dollarhite Rabbitry invoices while inspecting the petting zoo at Silver Dollar City.

“She did not tell us that we were in violation of any laws, rules, anything whatsoever,” John said, explaining that the inspector said she just wanted to see what type of operation they had. Having nothing to hide or any reason to fear they were doing anything wrong, the Dollarhites allowed the inspection to proceed.

John said he had to go to work at the family’s computer store, so Judy took the inspector to the back of their property where the rabbits were raised. There, the inspector began running the width of her finger across the cage and told the Dollarhites they would need to replace the cage, because it was a quarter-inch too small and, therefore, did not meet federal regulations.

Such a requirement came as a shock to the Dollarhites, because they had just invested in new cages to ensure the bunnies had a healthy amount of space to develop, John explained. Though raising dwarf breed varieties of rabbits which require less space, they had opted to purchase cages designed for “large breed rabbits” so the dwarfs would have plenty of room. All for naught.

Not only was the cage too small, according to the inspector, but she noted a small rust spot on a feeder and cited it as being out of compliance. When the Dollarhites told the inspector that rabbit urine causes the cages to rust and that they worked hard to keep the rabbits cages in top shape, she told them it didn’t matter. The rust spot would count as an infraction.

The inspector then asked how the cages were sanitized, John said, and Judy explained how she moved the bunnies to travel carriers and powerwashed the cages, using bleach when necessary. Afterward, she allowed the cages to dry in the sun before putting the bunnies back inside them.

The Dollarhites’ practice was much safer than that used by some breeders who used blow torches to burn hair and manure from the cages — a practice that can lead to rusting metal and produce toxic fumes from burning metal.

During the course of the spot inspection, John said, the inspector asked his wife if she and John would like to have their operation certified by USDA. Judy said she wasn’t sure and asked what certification would entail and if it would help them sell more rabbits. The inspector responded, telling her it would involve monthly inspections and was completely voluntary. The inspection ended with the inspector telling Judy that the Dollarhites rabbits looked healthy and well-cared for.

After the inspection, the Dollarhites didn’t hear from the USDA again until January 2010, John said, when he received a phone call from a Kansas City-based investigator from the USDA’s Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service [APHIS].

“He called us and said, ‘I need to have a meeting with you and your wife,’” John recalled.

After explaining that he asked the investigator to come after the workday at the computer store had ended, John said he asked the investigator about the purpose of the meeting,

“He said, ‘Well, it’s because you’re selling rabbits and you’ve exceeded more than $500 dollars in a year,’” John said, “and I went, ‘Okay, what does that have to do with anything?’”

John said the investigator refused to discuss details over the phone and made it clear that rejecting his request for a meeting would be a costly error in judgment.

When Judy asked if they should have an attorney present, the investigator responded, saying, “Well, that might be a good thing.”

“At that point, we kind of set back, (wondering) what in the world is going on,” John said. Then he found an attorney who is also a farmer.

“I didn’t want a ‘city slicker,’” said John, a farmer himself until 1996 when he sold his farm to build a home in Nixa. “I wanted someone that had been around the agriculture and farm business.”

John found a guy and they met for the first time a couple of days later — at the same time both met the APHIS investigator in person at John’s home.

“The first thing (the investigator) said was ‘My name is so and so, I’ve been in the USDA for 30-plus years, and I’ve never lost a case,’” John recalled, continuing. “He said, ‘I’m not here to debate the law, interpret the law or discuss the law, I’m here just to do an investigation.’”

John said the investigator went on to explain that he would ask questions, write a report based on the answers and send that report to his superiors at the USDA regional office in Colorado Springs, Colo. The entire process was suppose to take about a month, and John was told to contact the regional office if he had not heard anything in six weeks.

“At this point in time, we were still not knowing anything about the law he was talking about,” John explained, adding that his rabbitry had never had any issues with any animal welfare agencies.

Eight weeks passed, and John decided to call Colorado Springs. Immediately, he was given the number to a USDA office in the nation’s capitol. He called the new number, and the lady he reached there was blunt, John said.

“She said, ‘Well, Mr. Dollarhite, I’ve got the report on my desk, and I’m just gonna tell you that, once I review it, it’s our intent to prosecute you to the maximum that we can’ and that ‘we will make an example out of you’.”

When John once again tried to determine which law he and his wife had violated, he said the USDA lady replied, “We’ll forward you everything.”

“Ma’am, what law have we broken?” John said.

“Well, you sold more than $500 worth of rabbits in one calendar year,” she replied, according to John.

“Okay, what does that have to do with anything?” John countered.

The lady replied by saying there is a guideline which prohibits anyone from selling more than $500 worth of rabbits per year, John recalled, but she refused to cite any specific law and, instead, promised to send him the report containing details.

At that point, John said he called his attorney and was told not to worry about it, because he couldn’t find evidence of any law or regulation the Dollarhites had violated.

Soon after the meeting with the APHIS investigator and with the stress of the investigation hanging over their heads, John said he and his wife traded everything associated with the rabbit operation for other agricultural equipment. …

Recently, the Dollarhites received a “Certified Mail Return Receipt” letter (dated April 19, 2011) from the USDA informing them that they had broken the law and must pay USDA a fine of $90,643. Their crime? Violating 9 C.F.R. § 2.1 (a) (1): Selling more than $500 worth of rabbits in a calendar year. …

Based on an average price per rabbit sold being $10.45, the fine comes out to more than $206 per rabbit. In addition, the letter contains the following statement:

APHIS laws and regulations provide for administrative and criminal penalties to enforce these regulatory requirements, including civil penalties of up to $10,000 for each of the violations documented in our investigation.

If the threat contained in the letter is to be believed, the family could be fined as much as $10,000 per rabbit beyond the first 50 bunnies that netted the family its first $500. Do the math (390 rabbits x $10,000 each) and, if they don’t pay the initial fine, they could face additional fines totaling $3.9 million.

This is how prosperous nations become poor.

It is government-induced decline.

As President Reagan said:  “Government is not the solution to our problem, government IS the problem”.

Easter: from the name of a goddess whose feast was celebrated at the vernal equinox, Eostre; cognate with Sanskrit usra = dawn, so East: in the direction of the rising sun.

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An editorial in the IBD today, written to mark the festivals of Passover and Easter, is titled Faith and Freedom.

Here’s part of it.

In recent history the phrase “Judeo-Christian values” has been bandied about so much, it’s forgivable to suppose it was invented by politicians pushing their wedge issues. This week it is gloriously more than that.

Those values held unshakable life-and-death meaning, as the celebrations of Passover and Easter remind us, for thousands of years. …

No theology lessons are needed to grasp that these complementary faiths forged the foundations of our free society, requiring us to move progressively toward an ever-larger sphere of human liberty.

Passover … offers a weeklong retelling of the Exodus, when the lawgiver Moses led the children of Israel out of bondage in Egypt. …

From the sorrow of Good Friday to the ecstasy of Easter Sunday, we may still believe that we inherit a “home of the brave.” For believers, the Resurrection’s eternal lesson is that death itself carries no sting. No earthly power, however formidable or diabolical, can snuff out the providential gift of everlasting life.

Moses bequeathed to us the certain knowledge that freedom’s source lies beyond the caprices of statecraft.

Jesus, seconding that original truth, showed us that courage and love may secure an unstoppable advance of human liberty for ourselves and our posterity.

Whether you’re a believer or not, that’s an inheritance to claim boldly …

*

Rather than analyse all that’s wrong with this piece, we prefer to write on the “Judeo-Christian” theme by presenting our own view, which will amply contradict it.

We’ll mention the one thing the IBD editorial says that is true. Yes, “Passover” (its right name is “the Festival of the Unleavened Bread”)  is about setting people physically free. The giving of the Law which followed the Exodus allowed the establishment of a free society, freedom being possible only under law. Law guarantees freedom. That is what law is for.

Judaism dates from the giving of the Law – not from the covenant with Abraham, though (the tradition teaches) monotheism began with that old man of legend. With him too came monotheism’s (revolutionary) foundation myth: the story of an animal being substituted for the patriarch’s son on the altar, signifying that the one and only God did not require human sacrifice.

Judaism’s highest values were freedom and justice. That was good. Justice is hard to achieve, but the need to strive for it followed from the big idea that a free nation must live under the rule of law. In addition, some of the actual laws were wise and necessary – though not exclusive to Judaism. But the religion was burdened with rules governing the performance of rites contributing nothing of importance to human wisdom or civilization. And its God was an irrational conception, a being often profoundly unjust, capricious, and cruel.

Now to the term “Judeo-Christian”.

That Judeo-, tacked on to Christian, like a little trailer drawn behind the big SUV to bring some extra goods to a camping holiday, has as little to do with Judaism as the tents and climbing boots brought from the garage have to do with the life lived in the family home.  By which is meant that Christianity was not a revised or reformed Judaism: it was  an entirely new religion.

The God of Christianity is not the God of Judaism. God the Father in the Trinity  bears no resemblance to Jehovah the Law-giver. The two may seem superficially to be conflated in a shared concept of Creator, but a closer scrutiny of Christian theology with its pre-existing Son who was there “from the beginning” dispels the illusion.

In the sphere of values and morals, Christianity preferred Love to Justice. While justice may be hard, universal love is impossible to achieve. It is alien to human nature as an emotion, and useless as a principle. To try to pretend to it is a recipe for sustained hypocrisy. If sometimes it can be just (though never enforceable) that a person be loved for something he has done to deserve it,  and though individuals are often loved by other individuals whether they justly deserve to be or not, a general order to treat everyone lovingly will seldom be just, always be impractical, and frequently provide an incentive to vicious and criminal behavior by promising an absence of condign reaction. In other words, to claim that one loves all is to live a lie and incite evil.

The author of Christianity, the man known as St Paul who first conceived the idea that Jesus the crucified Jew was divine, wanted nothing of Judaism in his new religion; not its Law, not its scriptures. But the developing Church found it could not do without some of the laws and many chunks of the scriptures. So when the Church Fathers compiled their “New Testament” towards the end of the second century, they allowed the  “Old Testament” to stand as its pre-history. They embraced the moral laws while ignoring the superfluous ritual laws which have nevertheless remained in the Christian record. More essentially, Christianity needed the prophesies of the Jewish bible. Those works of fiction known as the gospels needed to prove that Jesus was the Messiah (the “Christ” in Greek), so they made up stories of his birth, deeds and sayings that would make him seem to fulfill what the “Old Testament” had prophesied.

So these are the bits and pieces from the garage that the big car of Christianity took with it in its trailer: the myths of creation and early times; vestiges of the moral law; the prophesies needed to make Jesus fit the expectations of a Messiah. The outfit, car and trailer, never of course returned to the House of the Law. So we’ll drop that metaphor now, ignore the tacked-on Judeo-, and talk about Christianity.

Was Christianity good for European/Mediterranean man?  To answer that, it’s necessary to judge what it replaced. It replaced (not Judaism but) a Greek civilization that initiated intellectual enquiry, experimental science, the critical examination of all ideas. This was a greater freedom than Judaism had conceived. And to Christianity it was insufferable.

Christianity stamped out intellectual enquiry and the free criticism of ideas. It put a stop to science. It tried to lay down absolute “truths” in which all human beings must believe. In short, Christianity brought darkness where there had been light. The darkness persisted, sustained deliberately by an intolerant and cruel Church, for a thousand years and more, until the Enlightenment brought a new dawn to Europe and Europe’s greatest product, America.

We keep reading that the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) was an unindicted co-conspirator in the Holy Land Foundation terror finance trial in 2007 and 2008. And we keep wondering why it remains unindicted.

Now we have the answer, scandalous but not surprising. It has been obvious from the start of Obama’s presidency that the present US administration is strongly pro-Islam, despite the fact that Islam is waging war on the US.*

Patrick Poole breaks the story at PajamasMedia:

A number of leaders of Islamic organizations … were about to be indicted on terror finance support charges by the U.S. attorney’s office in Dallas, which had been investigating the case for most of the past decade. But those indictments were scuttled last year at the direction of top-level political appointees within the Department of Justice (DOJ) — and possibly even the White House.

“This was a political decision from the get-go,” [our DOJ] source said.

“It was always the plan to initially go after the [Holy Land Foundation] leaders first and then go after the rest of the accomplices in a second round of prosecutions. From a purely legal point of view, the case was solid. …

But from a political perspective there was absolutely no way that they could move forward. That’s why this decision came from the top down. These individuals who were going to be prosecuted are still the administration’s interfaith allies. … It’s kind of hard to prosecute someone on material support for terrorism when you have pictures of them getting handed awards from DOJ and FBI leaders for their supposed counter-terror efforts. How would Holder explain that when we’re carting off these prominent Islamic leaders in handcuffs for their role in a terror finance conspiracy we’ve been investigating for years? This is how bad the problem is. Why are we continuing to have anything to do with these groups knowing what we know?

“By closing down these prosecutions … the evidence we’ve collected over the past decade that implicates most of the major Islamic organizations will never see the light of day.”

The FBI still has boxes and boxes of stuff that has never even been translated  … But it’s already been made public that they have copies of money transfers sent by NAIT [the North American Islamic Trust] directly to known Hamas entities and Hamas leaders. …

The actions by the DOJ to crush these prosecutions are just another schizophrenic episode in the U.S. government’s ongoing relationship with Islamic organizations, especially CAIR. After CAIR was named unindicted co-conspirator in the Holy Land trial, the FBI was forced to cut ties with the group. … Yet …  CAIR leaders continue to be regularly received by top DOJ and FBI officials despite the official ban …

I asked my DOJ source why they decided to come forward now. The source said:

“This is a national security issue. We know that these Muslim leaders and groups are continuing to raise money for Hamas and other terrorist organizations. Ten years ago we shut down the Holy Land Foundation. It was the right thing to do. Then the money started going to KindHearts. We shut them down too. Now the money is going through groups like Islamic Relief and Viva Palestina. Until we act decisively to cut off the financial pipeline to these terrorist groups by putting more of these people in prison, they are going to continue to raise money that will go into the hands of killers. And until Congress starts grilling the people inside DOJ and the FBI who are giving these groups cover, that is not going to change. … ”

But if the U.S. government publicly acknowledges the terror ties of these groups why do they continue to deal with them?

“We tried to do what we could during the Bush administration. After 9/11, we had to do something and [the Holy Land Foundation] was the biggest target.

To say things are different under Obama and Holder would be an understatement. Many of the people I work with at Justice now see CAIR not just as political allies, but ideological allies. They believe they are fighting the same revolution. It’s scary. And Congress and the American people need to know this is going on.”

The American people need to know that the present leadership of the United States is not just letting Islam wage jihad, not just allowing the funding of Hamas terrorism, but is “fighting the same  revolution”. The Islamic revolution. That is the name of the change Obama and Holder hope for.

But how will they be informed of this when most of the media, being themselves complicit in “the revolution”, are unwilling and unlikely to tell them?

*

*Further to this, from Corruption Chronicles:

In the Obama Administration’s continuing effort to befriend Muslims, the United States will for the first time host an international Islamic forum held annually in the Middle East and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton will headline the three-day event. …

Bringing the Islamic forum to the U.S. is simply the latest of many Muslim outreach efforts for the administration. In the last year alone Napolitano discussed national security matters with a group of extremist Muslim organizations, the nation’s space agency (NASA) was ordered to focus on Muslim diplomacy and Clinton signed a special order to allow the reentry of two radical Islamic academics whose terrorist ties long banned them from the U.S. …

The Justice Department also created a special Arab-American and Muslim Engagement Advisory Group to foster greater communication, collaboration and a new level of respect between law enforcement and Muslim and Arab-American communities.

In an article in the Telegraph, Niles Gardiner reveals that the (undemocratic, left-leaning) European Union is actively interfering in US affairs. It is shelling out taxpayers’  money to groups in America that oppose the death penalty.

Here is a large part of what he writes:

Why on earth are British taxpayers being forced to fund European Union lobbying for policy campaigns in the United States? Furthermore, why is the EU directly interfering in domestic political debates in America, and so far without Congressional oversight? As the research detailed below demonstrates, the EU’s European Instrument for Democracy and Human Rights (EIDHR) is spending millions of Euros on US-based campaigns against the death penalty. An extraordinary development. …

This extremely unusual funding for US groups – by a taxpayer-funded foreign entity to advance a political cause – deserves to attract a great deal of public attention, including Congressional scrutiny in Washington and parliamentary scrutiny in London. …

Here is a list of US recipients of EU EIDHR aid in 2009, which amounted to €2,624,395 ($3,643,951). The recipients of EU aid include the rather wealthy American Bar Association, whose annual budget approached $150 million in 2008.

American Bar Association Fund for Justice and Education: EU grant: €708,162 ($983, 277)

Project: The Death Penalty Assessments Project: Toward a Nationwide Moratorium on Executions

Death Penalty Information Center: EU grant: €193,443 ($268,585)

Project: Changing the Course of the Death Penalty Debate. A proposal for public opinion research, message development, and communications of capital punishment in the US.

The National Coalition to Abolish the Death Penalty: EU grant: €305,974 ($424,829)

Project: National Coalition to Abolish the Death Penalty Intensive Assistance Program

Reprieve LBG: EU grant: €526,816 ($731,591) (some of these funds also went to “European countries”) Project: Engaging Europe in the fight for US abolition

Murder Victim’s Families for Human Rights Non-Profit Corporation: EU grant: €495,000 ($686,608) (some of these funds also went to other countries, including Japan and Taiwan). Project: Voices of Victims Against the Death Penalty

Witness to Innocence Protection: EU grant: €395,000 ($548,538)

Project: American DREAM Campaign [Note that this is a far left project – JB.]

MPs reading this should be asking questions why British taxpayers’ money is being used by the European Union to fund campaigns against the death penalty in the United States, without the consent of the British people. (Not least when 51 per cent of the British public support the reintroduction of capital punishment for murder, with just 37 per cent opposing it, in a recent YouGov poll.)

This is also an extraordinary intervention in a highly charged, intensely political domestic debate in the United States over the death penalty, the use of which has been ruled Constitutional by the US Supreme Court on several occasions, and is backed by 64 percent of Americans according to Gallup, with just 29 percent opposing. Can you imagine the outcry in Brussels if the US government funded policy groups in the EU, and the charges of “American imperialism” that would inevitably follow?

It is bad enough that Brussels consistently interferes with the internal affairs of EU member states, but it is surely a bridge too far when it tries to intervene in the affairs of one of the world’s greatest democracies that isn’t even part of the EU. This is hugely insulting to the US. …

Evidently, unelected bureaucrats sitting in the European Commission feel they have a divine right to lecture the United States and its citizens on how they should decide their own policies. This demonstrates a fundamental lack of respect for US national sovereignty, and a sneering condescension towards the American people. But perhaps this should come as no surprise. A supranational entity like the EU that has no respect for the democratic rights of hundreds of millions of Europeans can barely be expected to respect freedom and democracy outside its own borders.

The interference is wrong, and the cause is wrong.

We are for the death penalty.

To remove the death penalty is to permit murder.

The strange inclination some have to pity a murderer facing execution more than his or her victim is the sheerest sentimentality.

Some argue that mistakes can be made, and if someone is executed and later proved not guilty of the crime, there can be no redress. This implies that there can never be certainty; but there can be and there should be, and the law allows for ample (it could be argued too much) opportunity for arriving at it.

Some say the death penalty is not a deterrent. Sociologists and others of that kidney have toiled to show statistically that states with the death penalty have higher rates of murder than states without it. What the statistics cannot show is how many more murders there would have been in the death-penalty states if they did not have it.

We apply a simpler test of the efficacy of the death sentence as a deterrent: does it deter us? And our answer is yes: we’re absolutely sure that it would deter us if ever we thought of killing (and we can’t say the thought has never crossed our mind).

The only argument against it we think has some merit is that a lifetime in prison may be worse for a murderer to endure than execution. But it doesn’t persuade us. Prison these days – for those who don’t feel the lack of freedom to be the worst thing about it – is not unpleasant. Nowhere near dreadful enough to be fitting punishment for murder.

We would also favor the death penalty for treason, a crime that seems to have been removed from the book.

Justice is the prime responsibility of everyone all the time. It may be hard, even impossible, to achieve perfectly. But it has to be attempted constantly, unremittingly. It is what the law is for. Without law and the hope of  justice there is no civilization.

Be judgmental. Without personal judgment there is no morality.

Yesterday we quoted Bernard Lewis on the Arab rebellions and what it is that the Arab people want. (See the post below, Not ready for democracy.) We believe him that they want justice, not democracy or freedom as we understand those two concepts. But we wonder if they want justice as we understand it. He doesn’t say “social justice” – which means the actual injustice of forced redistribution of wealth – but suggests that a return to traditional tribal consultation and arbitration would satisfy them better than the rule of law. We suppose that the sheikhs would be guided by sharia, which is not remotely just, and is extremely cruel. It keeps  women subservient, and while Bernard Lewis deplores the condition of women in most Arab and Islamic countries, he  does not say how a return to the old tribal system would help their emancipation.

They – the Arab masses – want what we have. Sure, they want the products of our civilization, but are not ready for the freedom that makes the invention of those things possible, for the rule of law that makes freedom possible, for the impartial justice that applies the rule of law. Perhaps in time they’ll come to understand this. But to change their ways to our ways, they would have to renounce sharia, throw off the intellectual chains of Islam, and embrace secularism. There are no signs that they will.

The US was right to invade Iraq and topple Saddam Hussein, and right to invade Afghanistan where the 9/11 attack on America was plotted. In both cases war was the answer.

In both cases it was wrong to stay on to attempt “nation-building”.

But once that sentimental policy was decided on, the essential thing for the US to achieve in each case was a constitution of liberty.

Both Iraq and Afghanistan got new constitutions, but neither enshrines liberty. They enshrine sharia law, and where sharia prevails, liberty is shut out.

Andrew McCarthy writes trenchantly about the tragic failure of America’s vision and the ultimate futility of its struggles in Afghanistan and Iraq:

In 2006, a Christian convert named Abdul Rahman was tried for apostasy [in Afghanistan]. The episode prompted a groundswell of international criticism. In the end, Abdul Rahman was whisked out of the country before his execution could be carried out. A fig leaf was placed over the mess: The prospect of execution had been rendered unjust by the (perfectly sane) defendant’s purported mental illness — after all, who in his right mind would convert from Islam? His life was spared, but the Afghans never backed down from their insistence that a Muslim’s renunciation of Islam is a capital offense and that death is the mandated sentence. …

Mainstream Islamic scholarship holds that apostasy, certainly once it is publicly revealed, warrants the death penalty.

Having hailed the Afghan constitution as the start of a democratic tsunami, the startled Bush administration made all the predictable arguments against Abdul Rahman’s apostasy prosecution. Diplomats and nation-building enthusiasts pointed in panic at the vague, lofty language injected into the Afghan constitution to obscure Islamic law’s harsh reality — spoons full of sugar that had helped the sharia go down. The constitution assures religious freedom, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice maintained. …

Read the fine print. It actually qualifies that all purported guarantees of personal and religious liberty are subject to Islamic law and Afghanistan’s commitment to being an Islamic state. We were supposed to celebrate this, just as the State Department did, because Islam is the “religion of peace” whose principles are just like ours — that’s why it was so ready for democracy.

It wasn’t so. Sharia is very different from Western law, and it couldn’t care less what the Universal Declaration of Human Rights has to say on the matter of apostasy. …

The constitution that the State Department bragged about helping the new Afghan “democracy” draft established Islam as the state religion and installed sharia as a principal source of law. That constitution therefore fully supports the state killing of apostates. Case closed.

The purpose of real democracy, meaning Western republican democracy, is to promote individual liberty, the engine of human prosperity. No nation that establishes a state religion, installs its totalitarian legal code, and hence denies its citizens freedom of conscience, can ever be a democracy — no matter how many “free” elections it holds. Afghanistan is not a democracy. It is an Islamic sharia state.

To grasp this, one need only read the first three articles of its constitution:

1. Afghanistan is an Islamic Republic, independent, unitary, and indivisible state.

2. The religion of the state of the Islamic Republic of Afghanistan is the sacred religion of Islam. …

3. In Afghanistan, no law can be contrary to the beliefs and provisions of the sacred religion of Islam. …

Was that what you figured we were doing when you heard we were “promoting democracy”? Is that a mission you would have agreed to commit our armed forces to accomplish? Yet, that’s what we’re fighting for. The War On Terror hasn’t been about 9/11 for a very long time. You may think our troops are in Afghanistan to defeat al-Qaeda and the Taliban — that’s what you’re told every time somebody has the temerity to suggest that we should leave. Our commanders, however, have acknowledged that destroying the enemy is not our objective. In fact, Gen. Stanley McChrystal, the former top U.S. commander, said what is happening in Afghanistan is not even our war. …

It’s not our war, nor is it something those running it contemplate winning. … Indeed, the administration had concluded … that the war could not be won “militarily.” …

Afghanistan is not an American war anymore. It’s a political experiment: Can we lay the foundation for Islamic social justice, hang a “democracy” label on it, and convince Americans that we’ve won, that all the blood and treasure have been worth it? The same thing, by the way, has been done in Iraq. …

The affront here is our own betrayal of our own principles. The Islamic democracy project is not democratizing the Muslim world. It is degrading individual liberty by masquerading sharia, in its most draconian form, as democracy. The only worthy reason for dispatching our young men and women in uniform to Islamic countries is to destroy America’s enemies. Our armed forces are not agents of Islamic social justice, and stabilizing a sharia state so its children can learn to hate the West as much as their parents do is not a mission the American people would ever have endorsed. It is past time to end this failed experiment.

Yes, it is way past time. Leave them now to do it their way.

And it is past time to dispel the sweet illusion of good-hearted Americans that all Others are the same as Us in their values, wants, and desires. They are not.