One of our readers, Mr Nosy, has gone to great trouble, for which we thank him, to give us many quotations from Infidel by that amazing woman, Ayaan Hirsi Ali. She is the Somalian who became a Member of Parliament in Holland, and worked with Theo van Gogh on the film about the oppression of  women in Islam for which he was murdered by a Muslim. Ayaan Hirsi Ali herself had  to flee from Holland – even the political party of which she was a member turned against her – and seek asylum in America.

Mr Nosy’s quotations are to be found as a comment on our post titled How to defeat Islam (July 20, 2009). What they tell us about Islam is appalling – and true.

Please read them.

From The Sunday Times, London:

The British government decided it was “in the overwhelming interests of the United Kingdom” to make Abdelbaset Ali Mohmed al-Megrahi, the Lockerbie bomber, eligible for return to Libya, leaked ministerial letters reveal. Gordon Brown’s government made the decision after discussions between Libya and BP over a multi-million-pound oil exploration deal had hit difficulties. These were resolved soon afterwards. The letters were sent two years ago by Jack Straw, the justice secretary, to Kenny MacAskill, his counterpart in Scotland, who has been widely criticised for taking the formal decision to permit Megrahi’s release. The correspondence makes it plain that the key decision to include Megrahi in a deal with Libya to allow prisoners to return home was, in fact, taken in London for British national interests.

However, the business secretary Peter Mandelson is still lying about it:

Lord Mandelson, the business secretary, said last weekend: “The idea that the British government and the Libyan government would sit down and somehow barter over the freedom or the life of this Libyan prisoner and make it form part of some business deal … it’s not only wrong, it’s completely implausible and actually quite offensive.”

So is BP, the chief beneficiary – along with al-Megrahi himself, of course – of the sneaky deal:

BP last week denied the agreement was influenced by talks over prisoner transfers and specifically Megrahi. But other sources insist the two were clearly linked. Saad Djebbar, an international lawyer who advises the Libyan government and who visited Megrahi in jail in Scotland, said: “No one was in any doubt that if alMegrahi died in a Scottish prison it would have serious repercussions for many years which would be to the disadvantage of British industry.”

So is the Foreign Office:

Last week we reported on a letter sent by Ivan Lewis, a Foreign Office minister, to the Scottish government. In it he said there was no legal barrier to the release of Mr Megrahi, adding: “I hope on this basis you will now feel able to consider the Libyan application in accordance with the provisions of the prisoner transfer agreement.” The Foreign Office said this letter did not imply the government was encouraging the release. It would be difficult, however, to find a form of language that provided much more encouragement.

As a result of the deal that Mandelson and BP deny was done, other happy results appear:

SAIF GADAFFI, the son of the Libyan ruler, is moving his burgeoning media empire to London as he seeks to capitalise on blossoming trade ties with Britain. Gadaffi, who escorted Abdelbaset Ali Mohmed al-Megrahi, the freed Lockerbie bomber, from Scotland to Tripoli, has bought a £10m home in Hampstead, north London.

The really good result of the whole wicked business and the scandalous deception surrounding it, is that it will help to ensure the fall of the Labour Party from power. It’s a pity that the Conservative Party doesn’t offer a much better alternative.

Europe is being slowly, and it seems willingly, crushed to death by the ‘soft’ jihad of Muslim immigration and birth increase. Europeans abase themselves before Muslim threats; fall over themselves to grant Muslim demands however unreasonable; abandon the values their ancestors fought and died for in order to appease the oppressive ideologists of Islam. European governments do anything, however dishonorable, to worm themselves into the good graces of disgusting Muslim tyrannies such as Libya and Saudi Arabia. Hardly  a word of condemnation of the ‘human rights’ record  of Muslim countries ever issues from a European leader’s mouth. Every day terrorists murder  in the name of Islam (see our left margin for the tally).

There are over 50 Muslim-dominated states. There are more than one and a quarter billion Muslims in the world, and growing. There is one tiny Jewish state. It is democratic. Its population, Jews and Arabs alike, enjoy freedom equally under the law. There is a free press, an uncorrupted judiciary. It is a country that has generously given asylum to non-Jews (such as persecuted refugees from North Africa, Muslims among them). When it is forced to defend itself with military action, it takes more trouble than any country in history to avoid civilian casualties. It has fulfilled its promises to yield territory taken in defensive wars in exchange for peace with its neighbors that they never deliver.

Yet it  is this small, beleaguered  state that is reviled, hated, accused, punished by the Europeans as a moral outrage – as if  there is a single European country that has earned the moral right to judge the Jews!

The continent is persistently and profoundly anti-Semitic. In their  blind and irrational obsession with Jew-hatred, Europeans cannot even bring themselves to acknowledge the immense contribution that Jews – a tiny minority in the world – have made to their civilization: their sciences, their philosophy, their arts, their technology, their prosperity, their power and glory. Jews are understandably pouring out of Europe by the tens of thousands, mostly to shelter in Israel – where they are threatened with annihilation by the hostile Islamic state of Iran, fast acquiring nuclear weapons.

It seems that Europeans would be more than content to see Israel annihilated. They will cheer. A last happiness for them before they themselves are overwhelmed by Islam.

And even in America, where a majority want the Jewish state to survive and flourish, there are those who positively wish for its demise – among them, we understand, the present radical left administration.

The brilliant Israeli columnist Caroline Glick paints the picture vividly in this article:

The main fantasy governing Europe’s attitude toward the Middle East is the belief in Israeli militaristic venality, fundamentalist messianism, and territorial greed. It is this fantasy that protects European leaders from the need to account for their six years of failed appeasement toward Iran, during which Iran has made its swiftest progress toward completing its nuclear weapons program.

It is the predominance of anti-Israel attitudes throughout the continent that enables European leaders to make light of the Iranian nuclear threat even as ever growing swathes of the continent fall within the range of the Islamic republic’s ballistic missiles.

A mere glance at the daily Middle East coverage of your standard European newspaper suffices to demonstrate the depths of Europe’s obsession with hating Israel. The absence of peace is always Israel’s fault. The fact that the Arabs have never accepted Israel’s right to exist is either whitewashed or justified. So too, Arab terrorism is explained away while every act – small and large – that in any way asserts Israel’s right to defend itself is pounced upon as proof of Israel’s criminality and brutality…

Israel has for years based its public diplomacy regarding Teheran’s nuclear weapons program on successive governments’ assessments that given Iran’s global reach and the threat it poses to global security, states will be more willing to act to prevent it from acquiring nuclear weapons than they are to acknowledge Palestinian terrorism which is employed almost exclusively against Israel. What Israeli leaders – including Netanyahu – have failed to recognize is that the antipathy of Europeans toward Israel is so great that they are willing to explain away Iran’s nuclear weapons program because it is aimed first of all against Israel. …

Such views inevitably temper any propensity European leaders may have to act against the Islamic republic…

Case in point is the newest Swedish media blood libel against Israel, and the numerous blood libels – most prominently France 2’s [TV] Muhammad al-Dura blood libel from September 2000 – that preceded it. Stories like [the Swedish newspaper] Aftonbladet‘s fiction of IDF theft of Palestinian organs and France 2’s false allegation that the IDF murders Arab children sell newspapers and raise television ratings because the popular animus against Israel is so great that people are willing to buy newspapers and watch television networks that propagate obvious lies that feed this irrational hatred. Indeed, it pays to disseminate such lies.

France 2’s Charles Enderlain, the father of the al-Dura lie, just received France’s Légion d’honneur from President Nicolas Sarkozy. Then, too, anti-Israel activist Felicia Langer just received Germany’s Federal Cross of Honor, and Israel-hater and former Irish president Mary Robinson was just awarded the US Presidential Medal of Freedom.

The lesson of all of this for Israel is clear. Whether Netanyahu is dealing with Obama or European leaders, the game is rigged against us. Any move that Israel makes toward these leaders will simply facilitate their further castigation of the Jewish state and support their clear intentions to do nothing to prevent Iran from acquiring the means to destroy Israel.

As we have been all too often in our history, today Israel stands alone against our enemies. We can either defeat them, or we can be defeated. The choice is ours.

It now appears that the medical advice providing the pretext for the release of  al-Megrahi is suspect.

This from The Scotsman:

JUSTICE secretary Kenny MacAskill was last night under pressure to reveal more details of the medical evidence that led to the release of the Lockerbie bomber, after it emerged that only one doctor was willing to say Abdelbaset Ali Mohmed al-Megrahi had less than three months to live.

Labour and Conservative politicians have demanded the Scottish Government publish details of the doctor’s expertise and qualifications, amid suggestions he or she may not have been a prostate cancer expert.

The parties have also raised questions over whether the doctor was employed by the Libyan government or Megrahi’s legal team, which could have influenced the judgment.

The evidence provided by the doctor is crucial as compassionate release under Scots law requires that a prisoner has less than three months to live.

Doubts about Megrahi’s life expectancy have already been raised by American relatives of the 270 victims of the bomb that blew up Pan Am flight 103 over Lockerbie on 21 December, 1988. But last night the Scottish Government said it would not publish details of the individual who gave the crucial advice…

The report suggests that only one doctor was willing to support the claim that Megrahi had just weeks to live…

And suggestions that the doctor who gave the prognosis may have been employed by the Libyan government emerged in the report’s notes. It said that a professor from Libya had been involved in Megrahi’s care and the medical officer who wrote the report had been “working with clinicians from Libya over the past ten months”…

Did you know they have really great doctors in Libya, far better than any Scottish oncologists that could be found?

Even these super-experts took ten months to make their prognosis. But eventually one was clear that the mass-murderer had only three months to live, so Heartbreak Kenny could at last sob out that the poor pitiable creature was free to go home.

As we have explained below (Mocking the victims of Lockerbie), Qaddafi himself orders every act of terrorism carried out by Libyans. Qaddafi is the mass murderer. But British, European and American diplomats are on the best of terms with him.

Of Libya under Qaddafi’s totalitarian dictatorship, Michael J. Totten writes at Commentary’s ‘contentions’ website (read it all here):

The place stinks of oppression. You can’t escape the state without leaving the country or going off-road and into the desert. Informers and secret police are omnipresent and all but omniscient. Hotel rooms are bugged. No one can travel from one city to another without a thick stack of permits and papers. I saw propaganda posters and billboards literally everywhere, even alongside roads in the wilderness where nobody lived. State propaganda is even carved into the sides of the mountains. Pictures of Qaddafi hang inside every building, and an entire floor of the museum in the capital is dedicated to glorifying him personally. Libya even looks like a communist country, with its Stalinist tower blocks outside Tripoli’s old city center and its socialist-realist paintings depicting happy proletarians in their Workers’ Paradise.

No one I met would talk about politics if there was the slightest chance anyone might overhear us. Those who did open up when we were safely in private were unanimous in their hatred, fear, and loathing of the regime. And they made sure to tell me that their entire families would be thrown in prison if I repeated what they said to anyone.

I visited several bookstores and found only four types of books in two genres: the Koran, commentaries on the Koran, Qaddafi’s Green Book and other works supposedly authored by him, and state-approved commentaries on his manifestos. If other genres were in circulation—fiction, poetry, economics, history—I couldn’t find them. And I quickly gave up trying to locate an international newspaper or any other source of information that didn’t belong to Qaddafi…

In an article by the admirable John Bolton (read it all here) about the release of al-Megrahi, the convicted Lockerbie bomber, we find this :

The state department said on Friday that Secretary of State Hillary Clinton worked “for weeks and months” to persuade Britain not to release the murderer.

As we have learnt that foreign offices, which are dedicated to promoting the interests of foreigners, are very unlikely to tell the truth, we do not believe that Hillary Clinton did anything of the kind.

But we do believe the implication of what the State Department is claiming without apparently realizing what they’re saying: that the release  of al-Megrahi was under discussion for ‘weeks and months’, and that Hillary Clinton knew about it and may have been party to the secret negotiations.

Here is the full text (from the Telegraph):

Dear Mr. Secretary:

Over the years I have been a prosecutor, and recently as the Director of the FBI, I have made it a practice not to comment on the actions of other prosecutors, since only the prosecutor handling the case has all the facts and the law before him in reaching the appropriate decision.

Your decision to release Megrahi causes me to abandon that practice in this case. I do so because I am familiar with the facts, and the law, having been the Assistant Attorney General in charge of the investigation and indictment of Megrahi in 1991. And I do so because I am outraged at your decision, blithely defended on the grounds of “compassion.”

Your action in releasing Megrahi is as inexplicable as it is detrimental to the cause of justice. Indeed your action makes a mockery of the rule of law. Your action gives comfort to terrorists around the world who now believe that regardless of the quality of the investigation, the conviction by jury after the defendant is given all due process, and sentence appropriate to the crime, the terrorist will be freed by one man’s exercise of “compassion.” Your action rewards a terrorist even though he never admitted to his role in this act of mass murder and even though neither he nor the government of Libya ever disclosed the names and roles of others who were responsible.

Your action makes a mockery of the emotions, passions and pathos of all those affected by the Lockerbie tragedy: the medical personnel who first faced the horror of 270 bodies strewn in the fields around Lockerbie, and in the town of Lockerbie itself; the hundreds of volunteers who walked the fields of Lockerbie to retrieve any piece of debris related to the breakup of the plane; the hundreds of FBI agents and Scottish police who undertook an unprecedented global investigation to identify those responsible; the prosecutors who worked for years–in some cases a full career–to see justice done.

But most importantly, your action makes a mockery of the grief of the families who lost their own on December 21, 1988. You could not have spent much time with the families, certainly not as much time as others involved in the investigation and prosecution. You could not have visited the small wooden warehouse where the personal items of those who perished were gathered for identification–the single sneaker belonging to a teenager; the Syracuse sweatshirt never again to be worn by a college student returning home for the holidays; the toys in a suitcase of a businessman looking forward to spending Christmas with his wife and children.

You apparently made this decision without regard to the views of your partners in the investigation and prosecution of those responsible for the Lockerbie tragedy. Although the FBI and Scottish police, and prosecutors in both countries, worked exceptionally closely to hold those responsible accountable, you never once sought our opinion, preferring to keep your own counsel and hiding behind opaque references to “the need for compassion.”

You have given the family members of those who died continued grief and frustration. You have given those who sought to assure that the persons responsible would be held accountable the back of your hand. You have given Megrahi a “jubilant welcome” in Tripoli, according to the reporting. Where, I ask, is the justice?

Sincerely yours,

Robert S. Mueller, III

Director

The protests coming out of the British Foreign Office, the British government, and the government of Scotland that they had nothing to do with the release of al-Megrahi (see posts below) ring hollow. Especially the denials of the Business Secretary, Peter Mandelson –  a buddy of Qaddafi’s son, Seif al-Islam – are unlikely to convince any but the most gullible. Mandelson is a Liar of Record. He is the strongest candidate in Britain for the title of Public Liar Number One, and it’s a strong field. He has twice been kicked out of government – or reluctantly dropped by his pal Tony Blair – for offenses that, when he was first accused of them, he tried to wriggle out of by lying. His denials are almost a guarantee that the opposite is the truth.

Another way to look at the case is this: is it remotely plausible that the Scottish Justice Minister, Kenny MacAskill, whose responsibility it was to release the mass murderer or not, would take it upon himself, all alone, to let him go, in the teeth of public opinion at home and abroad, against the wishes of the government of which he is part, and the Westminster government?

Wakes up one morning, this remarkable Kenny guy, and with everything else he has to think about suddenly banished from his mind, is overwhelmed with a sense of pity for that Libyan mass murderer – whatsisname? – in prison because the poor chap has a terminal illness. Can’t bear to think of it. ‘I’ll let him go, to die at home, in the bosom of his family,’ this deeply compassionate politician decides. ‘I’ll brave the howls of anger and pain that will come from the families of his victims. I’ll defy my government and the government of the United Kingdom. I’ll ignore the understanding we had with the Americans that the bomber will stay in prison for life. I’ll risk derision and reproach, and do this great good deed even if it means my removal from office! That’s how heroic I am going to be.’

Has any politician in history ever been so selfless before, or is likely to be again?

You have to admire him!

Strange though, we might think, that a man so supremely compassionate couldn’t spare a little of that feeling for the families of the victims.

But there it is. He acted alone. Moved by nothing but a moral consideration. And luckily for him not a word of reproach, or disagreement, or even surprise, was flung his way by the governments who had nothing to do with his out-of-the-blue decision.

Or is it possible that we, the general public, are being played for fools?

Noah Pollak writes on the Commentary ‘contentions’ site:

The world’s nuclear weapons watchdog is hiding data on Iran’s drive to obtain nuclear arms … The officials and diplomats said that the International Atomic Energy Agency under Director General Mohamed ElBaradei was refraining from publishing evidence obtained by its inspectors over the past few months that indicate Iran was pursuing information about weaponization efforts and a military nuclear program.

ElBaradei … has said that the agency does not have any evidence that suggests Iran is developing a nuclear weapon.

But … new evidence was submitted to the IAEA in a classified annex written by its inspectors in the Islamic Republic. The report was said to have been signed by the head of the IAEA team in Iran. The classified report, according to the sources, was not incorporated into the agency’s published reports. The details, they said, were censored by senior officials of the IAEA in the organization’s Vienna headquarters.

Charles Krauthammer calls the release of al-Megrahi (see our two posts below) ‘decadence masquerading as compassion’.  Brilliantly right-on!

Abe Greenwald writes at Commentary’s ‘contentions’ website:

Qaddafi is due in New York next month to address the United Nations. In preparation for his first-ever trip to the U.S., the arms supplier for everyone from Idi Amin to Charles Taylor has requested that he be allowed to set up his Bedouin-style tent somewhere on U.S. soil and reside in it when not at the General Assembly lectern. Whether Qaddafi ends up on Central Park’s Great Lawn or at the New York Palace, the Libyan leader, who himself is believed to have played a crucial role in the Lockerbie bombing, will be hosted in the U.S. It kind of takes the sting off the moralistic denunciations which emanated from Washington yesterday.

The American State Department and the UN are hardly alone in pretending that Qaddafi has become a reliable Western ally. He was an honored guest at last month’s G8 meeting in Italy, where he met personally with England’s prime minister, Gordon Brown. Moreover, British Petroleum is launching its biggest exploration project in oil-rich Libya. Needless to say, the Russians are also interested in Libya’s oil and natural-gas reserves, but so far Qaddafi seems partial to Western countries whose technologies hold the most promise for full production.

Yesterday, Hillary Clinton condemned Megrahi’s release. But on what grounds can Secretary Clinton denounce the actions of Scotland’s authorities? She is on the record as a fan of Qaddafi’s “rehabilitation.” So too is President Obama. In all likelihood, the thriving, jet-setting Qaddafi played a more important role in the killing of 189 Americans in the 1988 midair bombing than did the dying Megrahi.

Not incidentally, it is Qaddafi, and not Megrahi, who presides over a government that is a human-rights abomination. A still active law passed in 1972 states that Libyans who “exercise their rights to freedom of expression and association may face the death penalty.” There are no independent human-rights NGOs in Libya, there is no asylum law, and foreign nationals are tortured and sometimes executed without recourse.

As the U.S.—the indispensable guardian of justice and human rights—continues to buddy up to individuals like Qaddafi (and Kim Jong-il and Manuel Zelaya and Gen.Than Shwe and Hosni Mubarak et al.), Americans should not be surprised if other governments ease up on similar and lesser monsters. And our statespeople will sound ever more hypocritical in their condemnations of the moral laxity and bad judgment demonstrated by our allies.