It is incomprehensible why some people’s hearts bleed for terrorists when they are punished for committing their atrocities. The fuss made over those Taliban monsters, all too cushily accomodated at Guantanamo!  Now Abdelbaset Ali Mohmed al-Megrahi, convicted of blowing up the Pan-Am plane over Lockerbie in Scotland on December 21, 1988 , killing 270 people (259 in the plane, 11 on the ground), has been released from prison, after serving a mere 8 years of a ‘minimum 27 year’ sentence, ‘on compassionate grounds’ because the wretch is dying of cancer. What moral right has this Scottish Justice Minister, Kenny MacAskill, whose decision it was, to forgive him any of his punishment time? It may make MacKaskill himself feel good, but 270 people dying a terrible death, and the lasting grief of those who survived them, is an exorbitant price to pay for him to have a feeling of personal virtue. To make the disaster matter so little is to mock the victims, the living and the dead.

And there is even more that is sickening about this story.

If al-Megrahi was guilty of planting the bomb on the plane [some doubts over his personal guilt have been argued not entirely unreasonably, but he was found guilty in a court of law and I thought at the time of the trial that the evidence was convincing  – JB], it was certainly not his own plan. Nothing of that sort could possibly be plotted in Libya without the say-so of Qaddafi. We’re talking about a dictator. There are no free-lance terrorists in a country like Libya. When there’s a Libyan terrorist strike it’s because Qaddafi orders a Libyan terrorist strike. Not just allows it. Orders it. And Qaddafi himself will suffer no lasting consequences.

What ‘negotiations’ – read ‘conspiracy’ –  went on behind the scenes between Qaddafi and British diplomats?

What message does the release send to other plotters of terrorist atrocities?

To look into these events is to look into a moral sewer.  Come to think of it, ‘moral sewers’ is an apt description of  the British Foreign Office and the  left-wing parties that govern Scotland and the United Kingdom.

From The Washington Times:

The House-passed climate change bill, if enacted, would expand the federal government so much that it would take billions of dollars and thousands of new employees to implement.

Now-obscure federal agencies such as the Commodity Futures Trading Commission and the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission would have to become mini-behemoths in order to handle their expanded responsibilities. Congress would have to appropriate billions of dollars for more bureaucrats, much of which is not reflected in the House bill…

The [Commodities Futures Trading] commission, which would police the new futures market for allowances, apparently would need to expand its work force by at least 31 percent initially to fulfill its obligations under the bill. The Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, which would oversee the day-to-day trading of allowances, has estimated that it would have to expand by 20 percent or 30 percent.

The Environmental Protection Agency, which would oversee pollution regulation, also would balloon in size…

The nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office said the government’s expansion would cost $8 billion over a 10-year period. For the bill to operate effectively, nearly 1,500 regulations and mandates would have to be approved for at least 21 federal agencies. The rule-making process alone would take years.

And all to avert an imaginary disaster?

From an article by Alan Oxley in Investor’s Business Daily:

Environmental NGOs (nongovernmental organizations) Greenpeace and Worldwide Fund for Nature have just released the “NGO Climate Change Treaty.” It’s their wish list for terms of a treaty to replace the expiring Kyoto Protocol, and they’re pushing it this week at a U.N. meeting in Bonn, Germany.

Environmental activists have always believed governments should put the environment ahead of every other issue, including economic growth. The NGO Treaty is a blueprint for this.

In addition to soliciting the same sort of tough emissions targets they’ve demanded in the past, this latest document maps out a strict plan to restructure the global economy into their “Brave New World.” Yet it reads like an old Soviet 20-year plan.

The negotiators who inked the original Kyoto treaty envisaged that the agreement would create an open global market for emissions trading which would efficiently distribute the cost of reducing emissions among the world’s economies.

Under the NGO plan, a form of global government supplants national sovereignty, and a central committee of international officials allocates the proceeds from the sale of carbon emission, not the market. The activists lay out, in no uncertain terms, just who should bear the costs and how high those costs should be.

Worldwide Fund for Nature and Greenpeace also want industry in developed nations to pay $160 billion every year for the first five years. Their Treaty creates a “Committee” of backroom officials selected from parties to the Treaty which approves a plan by each member to reduce emissions.

If the plans are deemed unacceptable, countries would be forced to go before two other regulating bodies (the Facilitation Branch and then the Compliance Branch) to “correct” their strategies or be penalized for not doing so.

From Front Page Magazine:

A gala event has occurred in Gaza.

Hamas sponsored a mass wedding for four hundred and fifty couples. Most of the grooms were in their mid to late twenties; most of the brides were under ten.

Muslim dignitaries including Mahmud Zahar, a leader of Hamas, were on hand to congratulate the couples who took part in the carefully staged celebration.

“We are saying to the world and to America that you cannot deny us joy and happiness,” Zahar told the grooms, all of whom were dressed in identical black suits and hailed from the nearby Jabalia refugee camp.

Each groom received a gift of 500 dollars from Hamas.

The pre-pubescent girls, dressed in white gowns and adorned with garish make-up, received bridal bouquets.

“We are presenting this wedding as a gift to our people who stood firm in the face of the siege and the war,” local Hamas strongman Ibrahim Salaf said in a speech.

The wedding photos tell the rest of the sordid tale.

PLEASE SEE THE COMMENT BY C.GEE ON THIS POST

… I thirst for accusation. (W.B.Yeats)

The Abominable Obama, Cruella DeVille (aka Hillary Clinton), and the rest of the ‘America-should-be-ashamed-of-itself’ mob, now long for their country to be tried, judged and punished by envious enemies.

From Investor’s Business Daily: 

Right smack in the middle of the Declaration of Independence is a passionate case against judicial internationalism. Among the charges against King George is the complaint that he “has combined with others to subject us to a jurisdiction foreign to our Constitution, and unacknowledged by our laws.” The effects of that foreign jurisdiction included “transporting us beyond seas to be tried for pretended offenses.”

Though it’s now 233 years after the American people thought we had solved that injustice, this country’s highest-ranking Cabinet secretary, and its newest Supreme Court justice, have different ideas.

Secretary Clinton, speaking in Nairobi on Thursday, called it “a great regret” that the U.S. was not a member of the International Criminal Court, a body that adjudicates on genocide, war crimes and “crimes against humanity” (defined as including attacks “on human dignity”).

There are very good reasons the U.S. refused to join the so-called “war crimes court” when it was founded in Rome in 2002. Too often when America exercises its powers to defend itself and the rest of the free world against terrorism, the thanks we get from much of the rest of the free world comes in the form of ridicule and abuse — extending even to charges of war crimes.

John Brennan, head of the White House homeland security office, may have announced Thursday that we are no longer fighting a global “war on terrorism” against jihadists. But the fact is that virtually every U.S. military action in post-World War II leads to condemnation from some European political or intellectual quarter…

Read the whole article here.

Barack Obama declared himself, in Berlin, to be a ‘citizen of the world’. It was not a mere rhetorical flourish. He has a globalist agenda under which the US will enter into a series of treaties that would subject America to foreign rule over its wealth (redistributing it world-wide), its trade, its laws, its use of energy, and even its defense.

The United Nations, that ghastly powerhouse of corruption, hypocrisy, and injustice, is envisaged as the nascent institution of world government.

Liberal left opinion tends to be against the nation state. It is the opinion of approximately half the voters in the Western world. Half the people of the free West apparently want to destroy their nations, and are literally doing so. They may explain their hatred of the nation state by reference to ‘colonialism’, as if in many cases colonies were not more prosperous, just, and free than the independent tyrannies they have become. Or they may say that the wars and massacres in the last century resulted from ‘nationalism’ so the nation must go; but their thinking would not be right, because the wars and massacres were the work of dictators, not democratic states of which the strongest opposed and defeated the aggressors.

Whatever their explanations, they have launched a movement for the suicide of Western nations.

All over the Western world men and women in national and international assemblies, ministries, academies, councils and committees devote themselves to the business of putting an end to their national identities. Patriotism to them is utterly absurd. Any manifestation of pride in their nation’s history, culture, traditions, institutions, even law, embarrasses if it doesn’t outrage them. In all the countries of Europe, and now under Obama’s leadership in the United States, they work towards their goal.

The very idea of the nation state they consider to be an anachronism; a nasty thing of the past much to be regretted. The more powerful and glorious the past, the more regretful they are. Filled with remorse for what their forefathers achieved, they will apologize to any foreigner who’ll listen to them. However hard their independence as a nation was won, their system of government developed, their individual freedom wrested from the fist of tyranny, they count it all worth nothing. Obama, whose ignorance of history should but doesn’t embarrass him, routinely apologizes for America to appalling little despotisms, and to countries that have survived as comparatively free nations only because America saved them from conquest by tyrannical powers.

National borders between European countries are already as good as gone. The EU plans to have ‘regions’ which will cross the borders of those outdated old nation states and replace them for the convenience of the central administration. American liberals – how many nobody knows – apparently look to this development across the Atlantic as a model to be emulated.

What will be lost if the nation state is lost?

For the most part, our countries have been identical with our nationalities. Our nationalities give us the inestimable gifts of an historical significance and a hopeful destiny beyond our individual lives; a meaning, a kind of immortality, a role in a drama, which, whether we are leading or bit-part players, involves us all. Just by existing as people of this or that country we may feel ourselves to be part of an endless story. Our nation is our greater self, the ‘we’ that is a greatness for every ‘I’, whether the ‘I’ be small or grand in personal achievement.  For many it is worth fighting and dying for. But now the story may end after all. For though it is possible for a nation to live on after its state is destroyed (the Jews did), the likelihood is that it will not. How many nations have disappeared from history with the loss of their settled, coherent, self-protected territory?  Top of the head guess – too many to count.

What else can endow us by birthright or adoption with that powerful plural identity which we seem to need and glory in? How will we fare as individuals without the nation state?  It places us in the scheme of things. It gives us a ‘local habitation and a name’. It defines us for ourselves and for others, clothing us in connotations derived from a certain history to intimate a special character. We inherit its language, which shapes our thoughts. It sets many of our goals, provides the chances for achieving them, holds a place for us, notes and records our existence. It protects us from foreign enemies and domestic assailants. It makes demands of us that we can fulfill with pride and delight, or chafe against. It provides the causes we may strive for or oppose. It is our home, our stage, our shelter, our fortress, our field, our base. Personified, it is our guardian, our teacher, our judge, and our avenger.

The nation state makes and enforces the rules that, at their best, allow us to live in freedom. It was one of the great steps forward of mankind when the city-states of ancient Greece embraced as citizens all those who would live in them not because they sprang from that particular soil but because they would accept a common law. The tribe was superseded by the state. (The great Spanish conservative Ortega y Gasset called it citizenship by virtue of  ius rather than rus – a commonality of law rather than of native soil.)  The citizens could have been born elsewhere, and could remain individual in their tastes and choices, but owed a common duty and allegiance to the state.  The United States of America is the greatest development of that splendid idea.

The European Union may have been intended by some of its enthusiastic founders to be a bigger nation-state itself in which people could live their individual lives as they chose provided only that they obeyed the laws that they themselves would have a hand in making through the democratic process. But it hasn’t worked out like that, and there is cause to doubt that it was ever really meant to. There were other purposes in the minds of its creators: Germany needed to dissolve its guilt for the Holocaust in the ocean of Europe; France hoped to be the hegemonic power in a union populous and rich enough to rival the United States.

In fact the EU is not a democracy. Representatives are elected to a European parliament, but that body is not a legislature and has little power to affect its laws. Tasked with homogenizing peoples who have different histories, languages, traditions, tastes and temperaments, an unelected bureaucracy rules. It is an authoritarian Kafkaesque Castle. Already a police-state-lite, the EU is on the road to totalitarianism.

True, it may not survive long enough to become as bad as the late Soviet Union because a Muslim majority will in all probability turn it in another direction. But there’s little comfort in that thought for those who have always preferred the old national independence to the new Europe with its Babel of tongues, its shameless corruption, its politically correct restrictions on freedom. If a Caliphate should be established by the emerging Muslim majority, freedom will not be merely restricted, it will be destroyed, erased from the book.

Politically correct opinion may like the prospect of the Caliphate because Islam aims to dominate the whole world and will wage jihad until it does, and then the dream of World Government will be realized.

But where, without the protection of the nation state, will the rest of us find shelter?

Jillian Becker   August 2, 2009

Mark Steyn writes in ‘the corner’ of the National Review Online:

The Al-Aqsa Martyrs’ Brigades are “very upset” about Sacha Baron Cohen’s new film Bruno, and have issued a statement attacking it:

“We reserve the right to respond in the way we find suitable against this man,” it said. “The movie was part of a conspiracy against the al-Aqsa Martyrs’ Brigades…”

The group is alleged to be responsible for dozens of suicide bombings and shootings. It has been designated as a terrorist organisation by the European Union and the United States. Baron Cohen’s Austrian character ridicules the Martyrs’ Brigades when he attempts to get himself kidnapped during a meeting with Ayman Abu Aita, who is identified in the film as the leader of the organisation.

Oddly enough, for a guy who heads an organization of martyrs, Mr Abu Aita is complaining that Bruno has endangered his life:

Mr Abu Aita’s lawyer, Hatem Abu Ahmad, said that he is preparing a legal action against Baron Cohen and Universal Studios alleging that the Martyrs’ Brigade reference could get his client in trouble with the Israelis and the homosexual association could get him killed by the Palestinians.

Can’t wait till that winds up in front of our new empathetic Supreme Court: Isn’t it Islamophobic to characterize Palestinians as homophobic?

Read all of the article by Robert Fulford in the National Post from which we quote this:

Lubna Ahmed al-Hussein, an angry Khartoum journalist who works for the UN in Sudan, has started a campaign against shariah law by elevating a local police matter into an international embarrassment: She’s invited the world to witness her judicial flogging, thus making her case part of the struggle between religious traditionalists and independent women … 

In Khartoum, the General Discipline Police Authority patrols the streets, charged with maintaining shariah standards of public decency. Recently it raided a restaurant and arrested 13 women, including al-Hussein, for the crime of … wearing trousers.

Since 1991, that’s been a violation of the Sudanese criminal code. More precisely, it is classified as a violation of public morality. While erratically enforced, the rule is serious enough to carry a penalty of 40 lashes. Ten of the women arrested with al-Hussein pleaded guilty and received a reduced sentence of 10 lashes. But al-Hussein and two others demanded their day in court and al-Hussein decided to provoke a scandal by distributing 500 personal invitations to her trial. She expects to be found guilty (she won’t be allowed a lawyer or a chance to speak), so she informed her guests that they’ll also be expected at her flogging.

The French government has condemned the law, and in Cairo the Arabic Network for Human Rights Information (ANHRI) has launched a campaign to defend al-Hussein and the others. ANHRI also protested a suit brought by the police against another journalist, Amal Habbani, for an article praising al-Hussein ( “A Case of-Subduing a Woman’s Body”). The police claim that the mere act of defending female pants-wearing also violates General Discipline.

When stories such as al-Hussein’s flash around the world, there’s usually a missing element: The feminist movement rarely [never – JB] becomes part of the narrative. The rise of shariah law constitutes the major global change in women’s status during this era, yet Western feminists remain pathetically silent.

Feminist journalists like to speculate about the future of activism among women today, but you can leaf through a fat sheaf of their articles without encountering a mention of Muslim women. Feminist professors, for their part, show even less interest. Trolling through the 40-page program of the European Conference on Politics and Gender, held in Belfast last winter, I found feminist scholars (from Europe, the United States and Canada) dealing with women’s political opportunities, the implications for women of new medical technology, the politics of fashion and even women’s response to climate change. What I couldn’t find was even one lecture or discussion devoted to so-called “honour killing.” Nor was there any mention of the thousands upon thousands of women routinely flogged, raped, imprisoned or stoned to death, often with the tacit or explicit agreement of Islamic governments.

Young women who protest against the Iranian regime risk not only death but sharia-required rape. 

From RantRave:

[An Iranian prison guard] said that, at 18, “I was given the ‘honor’ to temporarily marry young girls before they were sentenced to death.” 

In the Islamic Republic it is illegal to execute a young woman, regardless of her crime, if she is a virgin, he explained. Therefore a “wedding” ceremony is conducted the night before the execution: The young girl is forced to have sexual intercourse with a prison guard – essentially [she is] raped by her “husband.” 

“I regret that, even though the marriages were legal,” he said. 

Why the regret, if the marriages were “legal?” 

“Because,” he went on, “I could tell that the girls were more afraid of their ‘wedding’ night than of the execution that awaited them in the morning. And they would always fight back, so we would have to put sleeping pills in their food. By morning the girls would have an empty expression; it seemed like they were ready or wanted to die. 

“I remember hearing them cry and scream after [the rape] was over,” he said. “I will never forget how this one girl clawed at her own face and neck with her finger nails afterwards. She had deep scratches all over her.” 

The individual who spoke with the reporter was himself later arrested. What was his crime? Knowing what was in store for a female detainee, he set her free, rather than subjecting her to a legalised rape and execution. Apparently there is a decency among common folk that seems to elude their spiritual leaders. Even the “professional husband” employed by the Ahmadinejad regime suffered pangs of conscience. 

From The Volokh Conspiracy (find it here) yesterday:

On the Federalist Society Online Debate on the Sotomayor hearings, Mike Seidman–a cofounder and intellectual leader of the Critical Legal Studies movement in the 1980s–is brutally candid in his opinion of Judge Sotomayor’s testimony today:

Speaking only for myself (I guess that’s obvious), I was completely disgusted by Judge Sotomayor’s testimony today. If she was not perjuring herself, she is intellectually unqualified to be on the Supreme Court. If she was perjuring herself, she is morally unqualified. How could someone who has been on the bench for seventeen years possibly believe that judging in hard cases involves no more than applying the law to the facts? First year law students understand within a month that many areas of the law are open textured and indeterminate—that the legal material frequently (actually, I would say always) must be supplemented by contestable presuppositions, empirical assumptions, and moral judgments. To claim otherwise—to claim that fidelity to uncontested legal principles dictates results—is to claim that whenever Justices disagree among themselves, someone is either a fool or acting in bad faith. What does it say about our legal system that in order to get confirmed Judge Sotomayor must tell the lies that she told today? That judges and justices must live these lies throughout their professional careers?

Perhaps Justice Sotomayor should be excused because our official ideology about judging is so degraded that she would sacrifice a position on the Supreme Court if she told the truth. Legal academics who defend what she did today have no such excuse. They should be ashamed of themselves.