An Italian journalist, Vittorio Arrigoni, has been murdered in Gaza.

Passionately pro-Palestinian and anti-Israel, he was a member if the International Solidarity Movement (ISM), and had been in Gaza since 2008 when he arrived there on a “Free Gaza” boat mission intended to “break the Israeli blockade”.

ISM supports Hamas, the terrorist organization that rules Gaza; and those terrorist friends of President Obama, Bill Ayers and Bernadine Dohrn, are involved with it.

Discover the Networks says about ISM:

Radical, anti-Israel organization that recruits westerners to travel to Israel to obstruct Israeli security operations.

Justifies Palestinian terrorism against Israeli civilians.

Though professing  a commitment to nonviolence, ISM members openly advocate the “liberation” of Palestinians “by any means necessary,” including “legitimate armed struggle”.

But the members of ISM consider themselves to be “humanitarian”.

From the (anti-Israel) BBC:

Vittorio Arrigoni, 36, was seized on Thursday by a radical group that has been in conflict with Hamas and is seeking the release of its leader.

Police said he was found hanged in a Gaza City house after receiving a tip-off. Two people have been arrested. …

“He came from across the world, left his country and family and his entire life and came here to break the siege, and we kill him? Why?” asked one of his [Palestinian] friends. …

Vittorio Arrigoni was a fierce critic of Israel but it is Palestinians that killed him.

Two members of an al-Qaeda inspired Salafist group have been arrested. Salafists practise an ultra-conservative form of Islam and regard Hamas as too moderate. …

The Salafists had threatened to execute Mr Arrigoni by 1400 GMT on Friday unless several prisoners, including their leader [who was] arrested by Hamas police last month in Gaza City. …

It is not clear why Mr Arrigoni was killed before the given deadline, but the Hamas interior ministry said he had died soon after being abducted.

Ministry spokesman Ehab al-Ghussein said he was killed “in an awful way”. …

He described the killing as a “heinous crime which has nothing to do with our values, our religion, our customs and traditions.” …

Huwaida Arraf, a co-founder of the ISM, said he was very well known in the territory and had a “dynamic, humanitarian personality”.

“I even thought that whoever has him is going to see his humanity and just let him go, so when I heard what happened to him I was totally shocked.”

Nothing to do with Hamas’s “religion, customs and traditions”?

And a founder of ISM expects Salifists to “see his humanity and just let him go”?

The bitter delight of ironies like those makes the reading of thousands of lines of news and commentary worth while!

News for ISM: the Arab culture is dishonorable and cruel. In the culture of the West, to be honorable, to act honorably, is to do what you know to be right. It is not a matter of what other people expect of you, but of what you expect of yourself: living up to your own principles of decency. It is to do with your probity, not with how you appear to others. You are answerable to your own conscience. Not what you seem to be but what you are, not what you are reputed to do but what you actually do, makes you honorable or dishonorable.

In Arab culture it is what a man seems to be to his fellow Arabs that matters, so the right word for what Arabs call “honor” is “face”. So important is face that if the least breath of unsubstantiated gossip threatens a man with the loss of it, he’ll go to any lengths to recover it. If it touches on the chastity of his wife or daughter or sister, he’ll kill her to recover it. Such an act his fellow Arabs call “restoring his honor”, a man’s face being more important than a woman’s life. Even if she is innocent of any unchaste act or look or thought, if she is being maliciously maligned, or if she is the victim perhaps of violent sexual assault that she resisted by all means, if others say she is defiled his reputation is stained, and he can only cleanse the stain by killing her. Judged by Western standards of morality, such abuse of women is profoundly dishonorable.

As these so-called “honor killings” are carried out in Islamic societies generally, it may be that Islam is the source of the custom. But whatever the origin, this cruelty, this injustice, persists in Arab culture.

We are not speaking of ethnicity. Whatever can be said of a race or a nation, whatever characteristics it is perceived to have, cannot be ascribed to any individual member of it. But a culture is made of religion, custom and tradition. It is what the majority accept, enact, continue, and hand on. And a culture that subjugates women; that beats the Koran into children; that tortures prisoners as a matter of routine; that sends children walking over minefields (as was done in the Iran-Iraq war); that uses children, civilians, hospital patients as human shields, is vicious, uncivilized, and needs to be completely changed.

We do not condone the murder of Vittorio Arrigoni. We are distressed that he was tortured. He was wrong and foolish, he assisted terrorists, and failed to see that the regime he supported was cruel and unjust. Like all his fellow members of ISM, he was blind to the fact that America and Israel, among a minority of countries, genuinely strive for freedom and justice in a dangerous world. He and all those who have lived safely in Western countries and go to places like Gaza to prove their moral superiority, to serve a cause they little understand in societies where quite different ways prevail, seem to expect to be privileged, exempt from the practices they excuse. If they find they are not exempt, that their grand moral gestures are not appreciated, that they are not seen as heroes but as foreign interferers, and are treated in the customary way, they ought to blame themselves. But we don’t think they will.

Is ISM likely to draw the right conclusions from the death of Vittorio Arrigoni, and disband? Probably not. If experience is no cure for foolishness, nothing is.

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.

A surprising interview. Hasan Afzal, a Briton of Palestinian origin, objects to the vicious world-wide movement to delegitimize the State of Israel.

Hasan tells The Atheist Conservative this about himself:

At present I’m on a leave of absence from the University of Birmingham where I’m studying Political Economy.

I come from a secular Muslim family. Religion was often a private experience with the family only ever becoming overtly religious during Ramadan and the two Eid festivals. Other than that, there were no boundaries on what we could talk about so I had complete academic freedom to talk/think/debate with whatever I liked.

The Israel/Palestine issue was never talked about at home, not out of censorship but it never really came up. When I was at University, I was forced to think about it. I guess I’ve been rather influenced by democratic peace theorists and liberal interventionists (aka Neocons – cough!). Sadly, university degrees are too easy to commit one’s mind too, so I spent most of my time reading around the subject. I read Strauss, Hobbes, Locke.

I began to ask: How could this little democracy, Israel, be all the evils that the hate-preachers say it is? I did my own research, and I found out it wasn’t. I got involved in anti-Islamism and discovered the Israel delegitimisation network.  Since then I have had an almost instinctive sympathy for Israel and sadness for the short-sighted leadership of Palestinians. It’s equally a pragmatic support as well as a little ideological. When I see how skewed the debate has become about Israel/Palestine, it is the Israelis I feel are the victims of a sophisticated delegitimisation network.

In the course of his researches, he met Sam Westrop, our British editor. Together they founded the organization British Muslims for Israel, which is beginning to attract media attention.

Sam and I set up British Muslims for Israel. When something happens in the Middle East – the Jerusalem bomb was a perfect example – we come out and make our point clear and provocative. The hope is that Muslims who are hesitant or unsure of their support for Israel will one day put one and one together and see who their real enemies are.

Undhimmi features the video and comments:

It is not before time that a voice of reason from the Muslim community was heard – particularly in Britain – which is fast gaining a reputation as an anti-Semite’s paradise. The cacophany of uninformed and biased, agenda-driven noise (for that it what it is), emanating from the British media and the Islamo-Left coalition – who are dedicated to dehumanising Israelis and falsely presenting the ‘Palestinians’ as perpetual victims – goes virtually unchallenged here [in the US], Britain and the West [in general].

And Melanie Phillips writes in her column at the Spectator:

A warm welcome to a new and very brave kid on the block – British Muslims for Israel. As I have often said, where someone stands on Israel is for me the litmus test of whether they are a decent and rational human being or pose a threat not merely to Jewish interests but to civilised values. Unfortunately, even among those many Muslims who are opposed to the jihad and support western democracy, animosity towards Israel often runs horrifyingly deep. Any Muslim who speaks up in defence of Israel runs significant personal risks. So those behind British Muslims for Israel, which has emerged from the Institute for Middle Eastern Democracy*, merit a huge amount of praise and support. They also offer a ray of hope for the future. They show that there are Muslims who pass that key civilisational litmus test with flying colours.

Listen here to their spokesman Hasan Afzal, explaining that the group was set up to counter the dangerous notion which is gaining ground that Israel should cease to exist at all; that Muslims get a better deal if they live in Israel rather than Saudi Arabia; and even that he would happily volunteer to be involved [in Israeli public relations] in the face of the ‘sophisticated internet campaign to delegitimise Israel’.

We applaud Hasan’s efforts and will continue to cheer him on.

*Sam was also one of the founders of The Institute for Middle East Democracy.

Okay, we have to concede that Obama cannot – either deliberately or through negligence – cause earthquakes and tsunamis. For all our scathing contempt of him, our seething animosity towards him, we cannot blame him for the destruction and loss of life those natural disasters have caused in Japan.

But for all other major calamities presently afflicting the world and America in particular, we do hold him responsible.

Obama is chiefly to blame for the continuing economic crisis in America. Incompetent though he is, this could be his singular success, the one goal he aimed at and achieved. America, in his eyes, was too prosperous. He took measures to make the country he led poorer and weaker. He extended government control over the economy, increased government spending, and so put people out of work. Food and energy prices are soaring. He intentionally raised the cost of energy. Higher energy costs mean higher food prices. He puts the hungrier country deeper into debt. Inflation looms. And lo! – it’s done: America is no longer the most prosperous, the freest, the mightiest country on earth. “God damn America!” Pastor Jeremiah Wright prayed. His parishioner Barack Obama heard him, and, having had power put in his hands by a misled electorate, acts to grant that iniquitous prayer.

And he is largely to blame for the growing danger of chaos and war in North Africa and the Middle East, which will affect the whole world, as oil supplies are endangered, and Iran seizes the opportunity created for it by violent upheavals and slaughter to arm its proxies, al-Qaeda, Hamas, Hizbullah, Syria …

This is from Investor’s Business Daily  …

With all eyes on upheaval in the Middle East and Japan’s triple catastrophe, Iran is quietly working under the radar to wreak havoc. It’s moving fast to ship illegal weapons for use against us and our allies.

The Israeli navy on Tuesday intercepted a ship loaded with Iranian weapons 125 miles off its coast. The Liberian-flagged, German-owned Victoria, which debarked from Turkey full of what it claimed were lentils and cotton, made a pit stop at the Syrian port of Latakia and then sailed for Egypt.

In reality, the ship was hauling 2,500 mortar shells, six C-704 anti-ship missiles, two radar systems, two launchers, two hydraulic mounting cranes and 67,000 bullets.

Its Syrian stop just happened to be at the same port an Iranian ship visited when it crossed the Suez Canal last Jan. 22, and no, the Victoria was not bound for Egypt.

“The weaponry originated in Iran, which is trying to arm the Gaza strip,” said Israel’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu.

As disturbing as it is, it seems to be just one element of an accelerating Iranian plan to arm terrorists in areas where it thinks it can get away with it. …

Israel in fact has been encircled from all sides by Iranian arms in the past three days. Coming up from the south, Egyptian security forces on Sunday captured another load of rocket-propelled grenades, mortar rounds, rifles and explosive in five trucks coming from Sudan on their way to terrorists in Gaza.

Around the same time, Turkey forced an illicit Iranian plane flying over its territory to land. It was carrying, analysts believe, weapons bound for Syria.

And it seems a creepy coincidence that five members of an Israeli settler family in the West Bank were murdered over the weekend by Al Aqsa Martyrs Brigade terrorists who named their subgroup after a Hezbollah terrorist with links to Iran.

Iran in fact is stepping up arms shipments all over, blithely ignoring the United Nations embargo.

Three weeks ago, Senegal sent Iran’s ambassador packing after separatist rebels in the south fought pitched battles with Iranian weapons against Senegalese troops, killing three of them. …

Gambia has had it with Iran, too.

Last November, it gave Iran’s diplomats 48 hours to leave, without giving a reason. But it was believed to involve a huge shipment of illegal Iranian rocket launchers and grenades discovered in a Nigerian port on a ship that claimed to be hauling building materials.

Nigeria reported the illegal shipment to the United Nations Security Council — to no effect. Gambia booted the Iranians.

Meanwhile, illegal Iranian arms continue to flow to the Taliban in Afghanistan, and there’s cause to worry that they’ll end up in the hands of Mexican and Central American drug traffickers via Nicaragua.

It all signals that nuclear weapons are not the only danger from Iran — the country is spreading weapons of war in earnest, especially now that it sees its chance.

The world should be alert to the unquestionably violent aims of this evil regime. Its weapons shipments signal a will to make war. But who will stop them?

Not America. It could stop the Iranian regime from becoming a nuclear-armed power, but its president doesn’t want it to.

It is the recognition by dictators, rogue states, terrorists, and the Islamic “community of believers” – the ummah – that America under Obama’s presidency has resigned from its super-power status, has opted to be weak, a passive nation among nations, unjudging of others, no threat to any tyrant, wanting pathetically to be friendly with the bloodiest regimes, that has moved them to act as they do now. By his silence and inactivity he has given them permission.

This article by Ernest S. Christian and Gary A. Robbins, whose bitterness and anger we applaud, also comes from IBD:

Other nations no longer look to America’s mysterious president for leadership. …

President Obama … has not done one single thing to make America better off. His presidential scorecard is all negatives, a mixture of strikeouts, bunts, pop flies and game-losing errors so dumb and off-base they must be deliberate. Why else would he spend us into bankruptcy and lower our flag of freedom?

Obama’s foreign policy is a moral and intellectual outrage. People in Egypt, Libya and elsewhere in that region seek liberty and need help. But from Obama they get flabby babble that means nothing or is too little, too late and grudging. He is condemning whole populations to further enslavement — and pushing millions of people into the arms of bin Laden, thereby pointing a gun right back at America’s head. …

Obama is as a matter of principle reluctant to interfere with the evil plans of despots — not even the mullahs in Iran who threaten nuclear holocaust — but he does not hesitate to impose harmful, downright bizarre “solutions” on innocent Americans.

He spent trillions of dollars to create a mountain of debt and a few temporary make-work jobs — but, guess what? The debt must be repaid with tax increases that will destroy millions of real private-sector jobs for years to come. Smart move, Barack! …

Obama talks airily about creating “green jobs,” but what he’s really doing is outlawing carbon fuels and destroying all the high-paying jobs in America’s manufacturing sector.

Through the combination of stultifying regulations, Obama-created high energy prices (gas may soon hit $5) and the sheer in terrorem effect of his continued presence in the White House, the president is “resetting” America’s economy to operate at a low GDP growth rate that for the foreseeable future is insufficient to provide jobs for our growing population.

Unless Republicans quickly succeed in cutting back federal spending and downsizing government — despite Obama’s opposition — and unless they repeal ObamaCare, Americans face a bleak future of massive tax increases, lower living standards, government-run and rationed health care — and a gradual loss of personal freedom. …

Obama traduces the truth daily and has already done more damage to the U.S. than Nixon, Carter and Clinton combined — and the worst may be yet to come. The man is a public menace who should be kept under political quarantine.

Better still, impeached and removed from office. Beyond that – is there a punishment that would fit what he has done?

There is no power greater than brain power, and Israel has it.

From the Jerusalem Post:

Antitank rockets … had been the bane of the IDF (Israeli Defense Forces) Armored Corps. Until now, the answers had been increasingly thick steel protective plates for the tanks to literally dull the blow. But improved rockets proved essentially able to penetrate any shield and there are limits to how much armor can be piled on a tank without impeding its movement.

Realizing how deadly portable hollow-pipe devices can be, both Hamas and Hezbollah stocked up on them, amassing colossal arsenals. In the Second Lebanon War in 2006, dozens of Israeli tanks were struck, 19 crewmen were killed and others wounded.

But while Israel’s enemies were arming themselves to the teeth, Israel’s scientists … were busy re-accentuating the country’s qualitative military edge, which had sometimes appeared to be fading.

They have invented a new missile interceptor called Trophy.

The first time it was used in the field, this is what happened:

It happened so quickly and functioned so flawlessly that the IDF tank crews doing routine duties last Tuesday near the security fence in the southern Gaza Strip frontline didn’t even notice anything unusual.

They didn’t immediately realize that they had just witnessed history in the making and that the lives of a fourman crew had been spared when the miniature Trophy system, fixed onto all tanks in the Gaza sector, recognized that a rocket propelled grenade (RPG) had been launched at one of the tanks.

Trophy intercepted the RPG with a neutralizer and blew up the incoming projectile in mid-air, with no harm wrought to either the tank or to the corpsmen in its belly.

(Pronounced cor-men, President Obama.)

The system quickly reloads in a fully automated process. It’s “smart” enough to hold fire if an RPG is about to miss its target. Moreover, the explosion it sets off is so small that friendly-fire casualties are highly unlikely.

The Trophy is perceived as the harbinger of the future in ground warfare, being the first operational active defense system, and capable of granting Israel a new strategic advantage.

Trophy will be available to Israel’s allies.

The Trophy’s premiere matters not only for Israel but globally. This was the first time that antitank fire had been successfully intercepted under real combat zone conditions, as distinct from controlled trials. The implications both to Israel and its allies cannot be overestimated.

Rocketry that is easy to carry is a favorite weapon for terrorists and a whole host of irregulars [such as] the roadside-ambushers in Iraq and Afghanistan. The Trophy could radically alter the balance of power on both the Lebanese and Gaza fronts and it could become crucial for US and allied forces battling al-Qaida and associated insurgents.

And there’s more to come:

[Trophy] is not alone. In the works is the Iron Fist, an antimissile defense that is being custom-designed for armored personnel carriers. Its jamming capabilities can swerve an oncoming rocket off course, or it can detonate it with shock waves.

Lots more is being concocted in Israeli labs, workshops and testing grounds. Despite our proven penchant for fault-finding and self-deprecation, this is a fitting occasion for unstinting collective pride. Our defenses and those who man them are, mercifully, a little more secure today in the face of our enemies.

It seems likely then that those massive stockpiles of heavy pipes, those colossal arsenals of RPGs, so painfully assembled in Gaza by smuggling pieces through tunnels, will soon have no more value than any old pile of scrap metal. Unless Hamas puts them to use against fellow Arabs, which is more than likely.

Days went by and the president of the United States had nothing to say about the revolution and civil war that broke out  in Libya. Eventually, having consulted with the Arab League and the Organization of the Islamic Conference, he said that the Libyan government’s murderous violence against its people was “unacceptable”, but avoided condemning Gaddafi the dictator by name. Why had he waited so long to say so little? The ever-ready Office of Glib Excuses and Pretty Pretexts (OGEPP) which, being abstract, is able to hover perpetually in the air of the Oval Office and the corridors of the State Department simultaneously, came out with a sweet one: Obama had held back from saying anything in case the dictator took revenge on American citizens in Libya. The president would have it known that he was desperately keen on protecting the “safety and well-being” of individual Americans. And as usual, the ingenuously gullible – or disingenuously biased – members of Obama’s hurrah-chorus in the media reported the shiny new excuse as if it were credible.

Why do we doubt it?

Oliver North, as skeptical in this instance as we are, explains:

According to Hillary Clinton, “the safety and well-being of Americans has to be our highest priority.” Oh, really? That comment, proffered by our secretary of state Tuesday, is overshadowed by the serious jeopardy U.S. citizens now encounter thanks to the ideological blindness and national security incompetence of the Obama administration.

Since 2011 began, more than 20 Americans have been injured, killed or gone missing in the midst of violence in Lebanon, Tunisia, Iran, Egypt, Yemen, Bahrain, Libya, Mexico and the Indian Ocean. American citizens are being held by government authorities in Iran, Yemen and Pakistan — and by pirates in Somalia. Our State Department says it is “concerned.”

Last week, two U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents were ambushed in Mexico. Special Agent Jaime Zapata was killed, and his partner was grievously wounded. Mexican authorities now claim they have apprehended some of the perpetrators with “connections” to one or more drug cartels. The Obama administration, with its history of “slow rolling” counter-narcotics assistance to Mexico and doing next to nothing to protect our borders, is confronted now by news that a Saudi national has been apprehended in Texas with plans to attack sensitive U.S. infrastructure.

Last week, four Americans aboard the sailing vessel Quest were seized by Somali pirates in the Indian Ocean. A U.S. warship was ordered to the scene as the seaborne terrorists headed for safe haven in Somalia. If past is prologue, it should have ended like previous armed rescue operations conducted by U.S. Navy SEALs, U.S. Marines, South Korean navy commandos and even Russian and French special operations units — with the safe recovery of nearly all hostages.

But in this case, our ships were inexplicably ordered to simply tail the captured yacht while an FBI hostage negotiator conducted a parley with the pirates. During the negotiations, all four hostages were killed.

We think the four were stupid to go sailing in those pirate-infested waters. Or they were inexcusably uninformed, which is also to say stupid. Or if not uninformed, deliberately courting martyrdom – they were apparently sailing about on the high seas to distribute bibles hither and yon. But as stupidity, ignorance and Christianity are not capital crimes, the four should have been and could have been saved. But their lives were simply not Commander-in-chief Obama’s “highest priority”. Not harming the Islamic terrorist-pirates was higher.

In Pakistan, Raymond Allen Davis, an officially credentialed American with diplomatic immunity, is being held on murder charges at a notorious and often deadly detention facility in Lahore. Unnamed “U.S. officials” are widely quoted in international media claiming Davis is variously a “CIA officer,” a “CIA employee” or a “CIA contractor.” Any of these sobriquets are a virtual extrajudicial death sentence for an American held by anybody in Pakistan. …

The State Department has filed a “protest note” complaining that the government in Islamabad is not abiding by its international obligations and held a surreal media conference call with an unnamed government official to explain diplomatic immunity.

Meanwhile, U.S. Army Spc. Bowe Bergdahl [who is] in the hands of the Taliban, isn’t even mentioned by the administration.

But the Americans have been rescued from Libya. Obama sent a boat to fetch them out – a ferry boat unsafe on winter seas. After three days of hesitation in the Libyan port, its passengers waiting nervously on board, it finally set out for safe haven. (China, Britain, and Italy sent military ships.) Now the might of the United States may be used to strike terror into Gaddafi.

But will it be?

Instead of sending a U.S. aircraft carrier to the coast of Libya to prevent members of the Libyan air force from bombing their countrymen, our commander in chief has dispatched Secretary of State Clinton to Geneva to confer with the absurdly impotent, anti-American United Nations Human Rights Council.

Of which Libya is a member. In fact, Libya actually chairs the UNHRC at present*, seeing to it that its regular business of condemning Israel for something-0r-other is conscientiously carried out.

Oliver North concludes by saying –

Now — with rebellion sweeping Libya, Yemen and Bahrain, which is the home of our 5th Fleet, and U.S. oil spiking at more than $100 per barrel, the highest it has been since 2008 — [Obama’s] commitment to the “safety and well-being of Americans” rings more hollow by the minute. His weakness, incoherence and passivity have bred chaos that places us all at risk.

We agree that he is weak, incoherent and passive, but we tend to the view that he acts weakly, incoherently and passively because, deep in the heart of him, he has no wish to defend Americans or America.

*Correction: This is an error. Libya was elected to the chair of the UNHRC in 2003, but at present a Thailand representative presides over it. Libya was a member until it was suspended yesterday, March 1, 2011. The point we’re making about the nature of the organization remains the same.

As might be expected, the best informed and therefore the most valuable opinion on the present upheaval in the Arab states comes from Professor Bernard Lewis, the famous and deservedly much honored historian of Islam and the Middle East.

His view is so different from the common opinion and received wisdom recited by media pundits as to be – at least in some instances – surprising.

We’ve chosen these extracts from his recent interview with David Horovitz, editor of the Jerusalem Post.

The Arab masses certainly want change. And they want improvement. But when you say do they want democracy, that’s a more difficult question to answer. What does “democracy” mean? It’s a word that’s used with very different meanings, even in different parts of the Western world. And it’s a political concept that has no history, no record whatever in the Arab, Islamic world.

I think it’s a great mistake to try and think of the Middle East in [Western] terms and that can only lead to disastrous results, as you’ve already seen in various places. They are simply not ready for free and fair elections.

In Egypt now, for example, the assumption is that we’re proceeding toward elections in September and that seems to be what the West is inclined to encourage. I would view that with mistrust and apprehension. If there’s a genuinely free election – assuming that such a thing could happen – the religious parties have an immediate advantage. First, they have a network of communication through the preacher and the mosque which no other political tendency can hope to equal. Second, they use familiar language. The language of Western democracy is for the most part newly translated and not intelligible to the great masses. In genuinely fair and free elections, [the Muslim parties] are very likely to win and I think that would be a disaster. A much better course would be a gradual development of democracy, not through general elections, but rather through local self-governing institutions. For that, there is a real tradition in the region.

If you look at the history of the Middle East in the Islamic period, and if you look at their own political literature, it is totally against authoritarian or absolutist rule. The word they always insist on is consultation.

You have this traditional system of consultation with groups which are not democratic as we use that word in the Western world, but which have a source of authority other than the state – authority which derives from within the group, whether it be the landed gentry or the civil service, or the scribes or whatever. That’s very important. And that form of consultation could be a much better basis for the development of free and civilized government.

They’re all agreed that they want to get rid of the present leadership, but I don’t think they’re agreed on what they want in its place. For example, we get very, very different figures as to the probable support for the Muslim Brothers. And it’s very difficult to rely on these things. People don’t tell the truth when they’re being asked questions.

One has to understand … the differences in the political discourse. In the Western world, we talk all the time about freedom. In the Islamic world, freedom is not a political term. It’s a legal term: Freedom as opposed to slavery. This was a society in which slavery was an accepted institution existing all over the Muslim world. You were free if you were not a slave. It was entirely a legal and social term, with no political connotation whatsoever.

The major contrast is not between freedom and tyranny, between freedom and servitude, but between justice and oppression. Or if you like, between justice and injustice.

To say that [the Muslim Brotherhood] is secular [as the US intelligence chief James Clapper did] would show an astonishing ignorance of the English lexicon. I don’t think it is in any sense benign. I think it is a very dangerous, radical Islamic movement. If they obtain power, the consequences would be disastrous for Egypt.

I don’t know how one could get the impression that the Muslim Brotherhood is relatively benign unless you mean relatively as compared with the Nazi party.

I’m an historian. My business is the past, not the future. But I can imagine a situation in which the Muslim Brotherhood and other organizations of the same kind obtain control of much of the Arab world. It’s not impossible. I wouldn’t say it’s likely, but it’s not unlikely. And if that happens, they would gradually sink back into medieval squalor.

Remember that according to their own statistics, the total exports of the entire Arab world other than fossil fuels amount to less than those of Finland, one small European country. Sooner or later the oil age will come to an end. Oil will be either exhausted or superseded as a source of energy and then they have virtually nothing. In that case it’s easy to imagine a situation in which Africa north of the Sahara becomes not unlike Africa south of the Sahara.

There’s a common theme [in the Arab states] of anger and resentment. And the anger and resentment are universal and well-grounded. They come from a number of things. First of all, there’s the obvious one – the greater awareness that they have, thanks to modern media and modern communications, of the difference between their situation and the situation in other parts of the world. I mean, being abjectly poor is bad enough. But when everybody else around you is pretty far from abjectly poor, then it becomes pretty intolerable.

I was expecting a wave of such movements. I didn’t think it would be as quick and easy as it was in Egypt. But I expect that there will be more. We can see in so many countries, the regimes are already gravely in danger.

One method [of supporting the rebels – in Iran, for instance] is by political warfare, by having some sort of propaganda campaign against the regime. This would not be difficult. There’s a vast Iranian population now in the Western world, particularly in the United States, who I’m sure would be willing to help in this, and thanks to modern communications, it would not be too difficult to get the message across.

People talk about American imperialism as a danger. That is absolute nonsense. People who talk about American imperialism in the Middle East either know nothing about America or know nothing about imperialism. … As applied to American policy in the Middle East at the present time, it is wrong to the point of absurdity.

[Among the Arabs] two things have happened. One is that their position on the whole has been getting worse. The second, which is much more important, is that their awareness of that is getting much greater. As I said before, thanks to modern communications, they can now compare their own position with that in other countries. And they don’t have to look very far to do that. I have sat with friends in Arab countries, watching Israeli television, and their responses to that are mindboggling. [That is to say – the context indicates -they found freedom of speech “mindboggling” – JB.]

There are increasing numbers of people in the Arab world who look with wonderment at what they see in Israel, at the functioning of a free and open society. I read an article quite recently by a Palestinian Arab whom I will not endanger by naming, in which he said that “as things stand in the world at the present time, the best hope that an Arab has for his future is as a second class citizen of a Jewish state.” A rather extraordinary statement coming from an Arab spokesman. But if you think about it, he’s not far wrong. The alternative, being in an Arab state, is very much worse. They certainly do better as second class citizens of the Jewish state. There’s a growing realization of that. People would speak much more openly about that if it were safe to do so, which it obviously isn’t.

There are two things which I think are helpful towards a better understanding between the Arabs and Israel. One of them is .. the perception of a greater danger. … Sadat turned to Israel because he saw that Egypt was becoming a Russian colony. The same thing has happened again on a number of occasions. Now they see Israel as a barrier against the Iranian threat.

One sees similar calculations later than that. Consider for example, the battle between the Israeli forces and Hezbollah in 2006. It was quite clear that the Arab governments were quietly cheering the Israelis and hoping that they would finish the job and were very disappointed when they failed to finish the job. The best way of attaining friendship is by confronting a yet more dangerous enemy. There have been several such [enemies] in the Middle East and there are several at the present time. That seems to me the best hope of understanding between the Arabs on the one hand and either the West or the Israelis on the other hand.

The other one, which is less easy to define but in the long run is probably more important, is [regarding Israel] as a model of democratic government. A model of a free and open society with rights for women – an increasingly important point, especially in the perception of women.

The case has been made, and I think there is some force in it, that the main reason for the relative backwardness of the Islamic world compared to the West is the treatment of women. As far as I know, it was first made by a Turkish writer called Namik Kemal in about 1880. At that time an agonizing debate had been going on for more than a century: What went wrong? Why did we fall behind the West? He said, “The answer is very clear. We fell behind the West because of the way we treat our women. By the way we treat our women we deprive ourselves of the talents and services of half the population. And we submit the early education of the other half to ignorant and downtrodden mothers.”

It goes further than that. A child who grows up in a traditional Muslim household is accustomed to authoritarian, autocratic rule from the start. I think the position of women is of crucial importance. That is why I am looking with great interest at Tunisia. Tunisia is the one Arab country that has really done something about women. In Tunisia there is compulsory education for girls, from primary school, right through. In Tunisia, women are to be found in the professions. There are doctors, lawyers, journalists, politicians and so on. Women play a significant part in public life in Tunisia. I think that is going to have an enormous impact. It’s already having this in Tunisia and you can see that in various ways. But this will certainly spread to other parts of the [Islamic] world.

A fuller record of the interview may be found here.

Here it comes, looming into sight over the horizon – war.

Tomorrow, Monday February 21, 2011, Iranian warships, at least one of them carrying long-range missiles for Hizbullah, will pass through the Suez Canal and enter the Mediterranean. [Monday update: their passage has been postponed to Tuesday.]

From DebkaFile:

Up until now, Saudi Arabia, in close conjunction with Egypt and its President Hosni Mubarak, led the Sunni Arab thrust to contain Iranian expansion – especially in the Persian Gulf. However, the opening of a Saudi port to war ships of the Islamic Republic of Iran for the first time in the history of their relations points to a fundamental shift in Middle East trends in consequence of the Egyptian uprising. It was also the first time Cairo has permitted Iranian warships to transit Suez from the Red Sea to the Mediterranean, although Israeli traffic in the opposite direction had been allowed. …

Iran is rapidly seizing the fall of the Mubarak regime in Cairo and the Saudi King Abdullah’s falling-out with President Barack Obama as an opportunity not to be missed for establishing a foothold along the Suez Canal and access to the Mediterranean …

King Abdullah’s “falling-out” with Obama? The King to whom Obama bowed deeply now furious with him? Not much reported in the US, although it’s a transformative event.

The King (DebkaFile reports here) has changed his policy towards Iran as a result of what he regards as Obama’s betrayal of Mubarak.

The conversation between President Barack Obama and Saudi King Abdullah early Thursday, Feb. 10, was the most acerbic the US president has ever had with an Arab ruler … They had a serious falling-out on the Egyptian crisis which so enraged the king that some US and Middle East sources reported he suffered a sudden heart attack. …

Those sources disclose that the call which Obama put into Abdullah … brought their relations into deep crisis …

The king chastised the president for his treatment of Egypt and its president Hosni Muhbarak calling it a disaster that would generate instability in the region and imperil all the moderate Arab rulers and regimes which had backed the United States until now. Abdullah took Obama to task for ditching America’s most faithful ally in the Arab world and vowed that if the US continues to try and get rid of Mubarak, the Saudi royal family would bend all its resources to undoing Washington’s plans for Egypt and nullifying their consequences.

According to British intelligence sources in London, the Saudi King pledged to make up the losses to Egypt if Washington cuts off military and economic aid to force Mubarak to resign. He would personally instruct the Saudi treasury to transfer to the embattled Egyptian ruler the exact amounts he needs for himself and his army to stand up to American pressure.

It’s too late for King Abdullah to save Mubarak now, but he is carrying out his threat to end his country’s alliance with the United States and turn towards Iran.

Through all the ups and downs of Saudi-US relations since the 1950s no Saudi ruler has ever threatened direct action against American policy. … [But this time] the King informed Obama that without waiting for events in Egypt to play out or America’s response, he had ordered the process set in train for raising the level of Riyadh’s diplomatic and military ties with Tehran. Invitations had gone out from Riyadh for Iranian delegations to visit the main Saudi cities.

Abdullah stressed he had more than one bone to pick with Obama. The king accused the US president of turning his back not only on Mubarak but on another beleaguered American ally, the former Lebanese Prime Minister Sa’ad Hariri, when he was toppled by Iran’s surrogate Hizballah.

Our sources in Washington report that all of President Obama’s efforts to pacify the Saudi king and explain his Egyptian policy fell on deaf ears. …

The initiation of dialogue between Riyadh and Tehran is the most dramatic fallout in the region from the crisis in Egypt. It is a boon for the ayatollahs who are treated the sight of pro-Western regimes either fading under the weight of domestic uprisings, or turning away from the US as Saudi Arabia is doing now.

This development is also of pivotal importance for Israel. Saudi Arabia’s close friendship with the Mubarak regime dovetailed neatly with Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu’s alignment with Egypt and provided them with common policy denominators. The opening of the Saudi door to the Iranian push toward the Red Sea and Suez Canal tightens the Iranian siege ring around Israel.

DebkaFile lists six strategic advantages that Iran gains by acquiring an open route through Suez into the Mediterranean:

1. To cut off, even partially, the US military and naval Persian Gulf forces from their main route for supplies and reinforcements

2. To establish an Iranian military-naval grip on the Suez Canal, through which 40 percent of the world’s maritime freights pass every day

3. To bring an Iranian military presence close enough to menace the Egyptian heartland of Cairo and the Nile Delta and squeeze it into joining the radical Iranian-Syrian-Iraqi-Turkish alliance

4. To thread a contiguous Iranian military-naval line from the Persian Gulf to the Red Sea through the Suez Canal and the Gaza Strip and up to the ports of Lebanon, where Hizballah has already seized power and toppled the pro-West government

And not improbably –

5. To eventually sever the Sinai Peninsula from Egypt, annex it to the Gaza Strip and establish a large Hamas-ruled Palestinian state athwart the Mediterranean, the Gulf of Aqaba and the Red Sea

And evidently –

6. To tighten the naval and military siege on Israel.

Israel is about to be threatened on three fronts: from Lebanon on its north, from Gaza on its west, and from Sinai on its south.

Obama’s policies have brought about this world-endangering crisis. He has weakened Israel (see here and here); relied on wrong intelligence about Egypt; lost the alliance of hitherto friendly Arab states; and above all allowed Iran to grow steadily stronger despite its president’s repeated announcements that his country intends to make war.

Here is the whole of the documentary on Iran:

Liberty is the highest value.

It is the ideal that the United States of America was founded upon and should always stand for.

Mark Steyn speaks about this in a discussion with Hugh Hewitt:

I think the United States should stand for liberty, simply because that’s the right thing to do. That’s the idealistic position. The United States should be, have a bias toward liberty. In a real politick sense, I think it’s also good to have a bias toward liberty, because it’s a good way of messing with dictators’ heads. I’m not a great fan of stability in the Middle East. I don’t think the Americans wound up with a lot to show for shoveling all this money at Mubarak for thirty years. So it’s one thing to have a philosophical predisposition toward liberty. And liberty’s the word here rather than democracy, rather than, you know, saying we’re going to have an election on Thursday, and the polling station open at eight, and you can all wave your purple fingers. That’s relatively easy to do. Actually establishing liberty is tough, hard work.

Hard work fighting off collectivism.

The collectivist ideologies of the last couple of hundred years, which so enchanted most Western intellectuals with an hallucination of equality, have a shabby, musty, weary, worn-out look about them now – though some nations are still enchained by them. Equality, other than before the law, is not possible. Any effort to impose economic equality has to be done by central governments which – therefore – instantly become totalitarian tyrannies, and yet still fail to achieve the impossible goal. The French Revolution motto of “Liberty, Equality, Fraternity” is a piece of nonsense. “Fraternity” means nothing, and Liberty and Equality – in the sense that the revolutionaries meant it – are mutually exclusive.

That comunist/socialist ideals are rotting is another point which Mark Steyn makes, saying in the same interview when asked by Hugh Hewitt (referring to events in the Middle East), “What is your hope that the Team Obama is thinking through right now or doing?”:

Well, I don’t think they’re thinking at all, actually. I don’t think that’s something that the Obama team do a lot of. They’re mired in outmoded, polytechnic, Marxist claptrap that even before these recent events was the best part of half a century out of date.

But older, darker, and quite as nasty as the egalitarian type of collectivism is the inegalitarian type, such as Catholicism was in the Middle Ages and Islam is still. Islam, old as it is, remains all too athletically alive, and is a real and present threat to liberty in America.