By special request of our reader George we are again putting this picture, which we first posted on November 6, 2010, on our front page.

It shows the bodies of Christians burnt to death by Sunni Muslims in Nigeria.

For more such pictures (if you have the stomach for them) see our post Muhammad’s command (March 30, 2010).

Note: Some commenters in October 2011 tell us that these burnt bodies were victims of a truck accident in the Congo. Whatever the provenance of the picture, it was posted in good faith, and Christians were burnt to death in 2010 by Muslims in Nigeria. See the reports here and here and here.

Today Syrian state television showed human bodies and detached limbs floating down the Orontes River.

They are the remains of dead soldiers torn apart by protestors in Hama. Or so the state claims.

A more objective report identifies them differently:

They are the victims of Syrian tank fire and ZU-23 automatic anti-aircraft artillery trained on residential buildings and streets in the last 48 hours as the dead pile up …

Citizens cowering in their homes are throwing the dead out of windows and off roofs into the river. …

The dead are believed to be in the hundreds and rising all the time because the thousands of injured cannot be reached for medical care.

But the numbers of the dead and injured are not known, because the Syrian authorities have “cut off all the city’s ground and cell telephone and Internet links”, and “the satellite phones in the hands of some of the dissident leaders provide the only source of information on the situation in the embattled city.”

Assad has no reason to fear that any power or combination of powers will try to stop him slaughtering his own people by the thousands.

Turkish units had been waiting on the border to enter Syria, and possibly establish a refugee camp on Syrian territory to stop the flow of refugees into Turkey itself. But a few days ago all the chiefs of the Turkish army resigned, and the threat to Assad receded.

The UN will not actively intervene in Syria. Those passionate protectors of “human rights” are not easily distracted from their supreme task of censuring Israel.

The US Congress had exhausted its energies raising the US debt ceiling:

After the Senate … had approved the bill raising the national debt ceiling, the lawmakers were scheduled to turn to the crisis in Syria. However, US Ambassador Robert Ford, on hand to brief the senators, saw them hurrying to leave Capitol Hill.

Only one senator [Sen. Bob Casey (D-PA)] remained for the briefing.

Michael Ledeen writes:

There is no reason to believe that this administration grasps the dimensions of the world war in which we are engaged, like it or not. To look at Syria alone is a failure of strategic vision, because the battle of Syria is part of the larger conflict, involving our current major enemy Iran. Indeed, the Syrian slaughterhouse is a repeat performance of the earlier (and still ongoing) massacre in Iran, and is assisted (perhaps even instructed) from Tehran.

The Iranian Revolutionary Guards have a special force for operations outside Iran called the Al-Quds Force. (Al-Quds is the Arabic name for Jerusalem.) It is assisting Assad in his attempts to crush the popular uprising. Iran has also lent him technicians to help identify and track down activists through their use of the Internet.

The Iranian tyrants tremble at the thought of a free Syria, since, as in Iran itself, the odds favor a successor regime that would devote its energies and depleted resources to the care and feeding of its own people [hmmm- JB] rather than to the support of terrorist proxies like Hezbollah, Islamic Jihad, Hamas, and al-Qaeda. Moreover, the spectacle of the overthrow of Iran’s closest regional ally might well inspire the Iranian people to take to the streets once again against Ahmadinejad and Khamenei.

The Heritage Foundation comments:

The [Obama] Administration has a long way to go to correct its ill-advised efforts to seek better relations with a gangster regime that has murdered more than 1,400 of its own citizens in the last four months; thrown more than 12,000 in jail; served as Iran’s chief ally in the Middle East; supported a wide array of terrorists against the U.S. and its allies; and conspired with North Korea (and probably Iran) to illegally build a nuclear reactor designed to produce fissile material for a nuclear weapon.

The collapse of the Obama Administration’s Syria policy is yet another example of how the Obama Doctrine has undermined U.S. national interests in a naïve effort to engage a despotic regime. Now that the Administration’s timid and weak policy toward Syria has emboldened the Assad regime to attack the U.S. embassy [on July 11], it is time for President Obama … to replace his myopic engagement strategy with meaningful efforts to help the Syrian people oust the predatory Assad regime.

But does he want to? Perhaps Senator Bob Casey could tell us.

This is not the most persuasive speech with the best possible examples of what’s wrong with Islam that the courageous Wafa Sultan has ever made, but we value it because she makes the case that Islam itself is evil, and is not some innocuous ideology to be distinguished from a bad one that the West calls “Islamism”. She wants to change Islam. It needs to be changed – totally.

Obama – or “Bambi” as we hear him called ever more frequently in the data-clouds of the ethereal region where we live – is against war. Being against war is one of the off-the-peg principles that all socialists/collectivists/lefties/Marxists wear on their sleeves. But the small print on the label says it’s okay to got to war if absolutely no interests of your country are served, and it’s even positively noble to spend blood and treasure to protect some class of people you can patronize as underdogs.

So Obama took America to war against Libya to protect “civilians”. Well it wasn’t exactly war. “War” is a nasty word. It was more what you should call a “kinetic operation”. And hardly even that. It was a cheering on of other nations kinetically operating. Supplying them with some equipment and materiel and advice.

And they weren’t exactly  “civilians”. Nobody knows for sure who or what they were or are. Broadly speaking they’re the people who’re against the people whom Bambi and the other nations are against. True, they’re armed. And okay, they include al-Qaeda terrorists. So if you don’t want to call them “civilians”, call them collectively “the rebels”.

Though they’re not not really united except by their shared aim of replacing Muammar Gaddafi as the government of Libya.

In fact, they’re killing each other.

By Frank Crimi at Front Page:

General Abdul Fattah Younes, who had been summoned to the Libyan opposition capital of Benghazi by the ruling Transitional National Council (TNC) for supposed questioning about military operations, was murdered last week along with two other military officials.

Younes, who had assisted Muammar Gaddafi’s rise to power in 1969, was Libya’s interior minister and commander of its powerful Lightning Brigade before he defected to the rebels in February 2011. …

TNC minister Ali Tarhouni said Younes had been killed by rebel fighters who were sent to bring him back from the front lines to Benghazi. Still, despite the apprehension of a suspect, suspicion still remained as to what militia group carried out the assassination.

Some rebel fighters claimed the killers were from the February 17 Martyrs’ Brigade, a rebel group that is part of the larger Union of Revolutionary Forces (URF). However, Tarhouni claimed the killers were from the Obaida Ibn Jarrah Brigade, an Islamist faction in the rebel command.

Despite the lack of clarity surrounding Younes’ assassination … the TNC would replace Younes with Suleiman Mahmud al-Obeidi as well as order all militia factions to disband and come under its control. However, that latter directive may prove particularly difficult to carry out.

None of them will disband easily. Bambi and the other kinetic operators have recently made it very worth their while to continue fighting not only Gaddafi but, with stronger determination, each other.

Specifically, the killing of Younes comes at time when the TNC — having recently been sanctioned as Libya’s legitimate ruling government by 40 nations, including the United States, France and England — now stands to receive over $30 billion of Gadaffi regime funds currently frozen in Western banks.

The sudden influx of such vast sums of money have, according to one Mideast expert, only served to intensify the inner divisions within the TNC, with each faction jockeying for control to “secure the status of being the only legitimate force to lead the country in the future.”

Whoever could have foreseen such a development!

Of course, it should come as little surprise that the Libyan rebels apparently find themselves now locked in a deadly internal struggle. From the onset of the February uprising, it has been well known that the TNC is riddled with a rogue’s gallery of rival factions and alliances that are chock full of duplicitous characters, ranging from former Gaddafi loyalists to criminals to al Qaeda insurgents.

For starters, the Libyan rebel leader, Abdel-Hakim al-Hasidi, has openly said jihadists who fought against US coalition forces in Iraq are well-represented in rebel ranks. While al-Hasidi has insisted his fighters “are patriots and good Muslims, not terrorists.”

But of course it depends what you mean by “terrorists”.

He has also said, “The members of al Qaeda are also good Muslims and are fighting against the invader.”

The invader? Isn’t that the combined forces who are only trying to protect civilians and/or help al-Hasidi’s rebels with a kinetic operation?

Of course, an al Qaeda presence in the TNC shouldn’t come as a complete surprise. According to the US military, Libya, with the exception of Saudi Arabia, contributed more than any other nation to the ranks of those forces fighting against the United States in Iraq. In fact, al-Hasidi has acknowledged that he personally fought against the “foreign invasion” in Afghanistan before being captured in 2002 in Pakistan and sent back to Libya in 2008.

Moreover, the TNC, which has reportedly sold chemical weapons to both Hamas and Hezbollah, has also been linked to supplying arms to Al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM).

In addition to the notorious nature of its membership, the Libyan rebels have been repeatedly accused of committing atrocities on a par with those of Gaddafi’s forces. Those allegations include, according to Human Rights Watch [not always trustworthy but believable in this case – JB], Libyan rebels in the last month “burning homes, abusing women and looting hospitals, homes and shops.” …

The killing of Younes has now created so much distrust within the rivalries, conflicting agendas and alliances of the TNC that stability will be hard to come by, even if it can successfully oust Gaddafi.

And thus far, if any side is winning, it seems to be Gaddafi’s.

However, the prospect that the rebels can overcome Gadaffi on the battlefield looks increasingly bleak. Gaddafi’s regime controls around 20 percent more territory than it did when the uprising began in February despite the recent launching of a rebel offensive in the western mountains near the Tunisian border; more than four months of sustained air strikes by NATO; and the defection of a number of Gaddafi’s senior commanders.

As the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs’ Admiral Mike Mullen said only weeks ago, the war remains a “stalemate,” a status not too surprising when an operation is led without a clear strategy or exit route [or aim]. To that end, it appears that England and France, the two leading nations in the fight against Gaddafi, may also be tiring of the game.

This was evident in a joint press conference last week when British foreign Secretary William Hague said “What happens to Gaddafi is ultimately a question for the Libyans.” Hague’s French counterpart, Alain Juppe, echoed that sentiment by saying that Gaddafi’s fate “is ultimately a question for Libyans to determine.”

So, for now, the fate of Gaddafi, his regime and the future direction of Libya remain as cloudy as ever. However, what is becoming clearer by the day is that even if Gaddafi does go away, all NATO may have done is trade one insane, brutal despot for a far larger and more deadly problem.

And that is not all the bad news.

Not only are the groups within the rebel group fighting each other, they are killing darker-skinned Africans from non-Libyan tribes who have come north to fight as mercenaries for Gaddafi. Or are maybe only passing through from other conflict-torn countries on their way to the safer and happier shores of Europe.

Now they’re underdogs alright but nobody’s protecting them.

Some of them get into boats. Of these, many die harrowing deaths.

From an ABC report:

Italian coast guards have found 25 people dead in the engine room of a tiny boat crammed with 271 African refugees fleeing Libya.

The 15-metre boat landed on the holiday island of Lampedusa on Monday.

It was heavily overcrowded and survivors said they had been at sea for three days.

Prosecutors said the victims, crowded in a space accessible only through a trap door, appeared to have died from asphyxiation.

Refugees cited in Italian news reports said the people in the engine room had tried to get out but were blocked by others because there was not enough space on deck, and probably died of intoxication from the engine fumes. …

Coast guards said the engine room was only accessible through a 50-centimetre wide trap door from the deck.

A fireman who helped pull out the bodies from the boat said: “I will never forget the scene.” …

Thousands of refugees fleeing Libya, mostly migrant workers from other parts of Africa [mainly Ghana, Nigeria, and Somalia], have arrived on Lampedusa in recent weeks.

Hundreds have drowned, often on rickety fishing boats not suitable for choppy seas. In April, 250 refugees drowned off Lampedusa when their boat capsized. …

The Italian authorities are clearing away the refugees as fast as possible. (We don’t know where to.)

Scenes of desperation seen earlier this year have hit the pristine island’s tourism industry but many holidaymakers have started returning to the beaches.

Bambi and Michelle might schedule a vacation there.

A leader of the Workers Youth League, the organization that was targeted in the Utoya attack, was himself a trained terrorist.

Here’s the story.

On May 15, 1974, three terrorists belonging to the Popular Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PDFLP) broke into an apartment at Ma’alot in Israel, and killed three members of the family who occupied it, the father, the pregnant mother, and their four-year-old child, and severely wounded another child. The terrorists then went on to a local school, where they found 100 teenagers and their teachers staying overnight on an outing from Safed. The terrorists held them hostage, using them as sandbags at the windows. Explosives were wired to the walls of the school. At one point the terrorists started singing songs of the Palmach, the commando force of the pre-1948 Jewish Defense Army. After sixteen hours the Israeli security forces stormed the building. The terrorists killed 22 of their hostages and one rescuing soldier, and wounded 56 others before they themselves were shot and killed.

Under the leadership of a Christian from Jordan, Nayef Hawatmeh, the PDFLP had broken away from the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine. Both were self-declared Marxist groups. They  both joined the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) when it was reconstituted in 1968 under the leadership of Yasser Arafat, chief of Fatah.

Two years after the Ma’alot atrocities, the PDFLP [also known as the DFLP] acquired a Norwegian member, Lars Gule, who served as the head of the Workers Youth League – the organization that was running the youth camp on Utoya Island when Anders Breivik perpetrated his massacre.

Daniel Greenfield writes at Front Page that two years after the Ma’alot Massacre –

Lars Gule was trained by the DFLP and dispatched to Israel via Norway with explosives hidden in the covers of his books. …

None of this impeded Gule’s career in any way. He went on to the University of Bergen and served as the head of the Workers Youth League, the organization that was targeted in the Utoya attack. Today he is a prominent figure on the left.

How can we make sense of this? Glenn Beck compared the Workers Youth League camp to a Hitler Youth camp. He was close, but not entirely right. The roots of the Workers Youth League are actually Communist.

A very fine difference if any at all!

Norway’s Labour Party was a member of the Communist International. The Workers Youth League was formed by the merger of the Left Communist Youth League and the Socialist Youth League of Norway. We often use “Communist” as a pejorative– but in this case the Utoya camp, literally was a Communist youth camp.

The day before the massacre, Norwegian Foreign Minister Gahre-Store visited the camp and was greeted with banners calling for a boycott of Israel, and Gahre-Store responded with an Anti-Israel speech to cheers from the campers. …

There are few children of workers at the Workers Youth League camp. They are for the most part the children of the party, the sons and daughters of bureaucrats and party leaders, training the next generation to perpetuate the Labour Party state.

Breivik came from that same background. The son of the left wing elite. And if his parents’ marriage had not collapsed, with the young boy allotting a share of the blame to the Labour Party, he would likely have a comfortable spot in the socialist state. Breivik may have turned against his roots, but the idea that terroristic violence is a legitimate solution is one that he could have easily picked up on the left.

Gahre-Store may have been greeted with a banner calling for the boycott of Israel, but he would never have been greeted with one calling for a boycott of terrorists. And indeed if there is an Islamist terrorist group that Gahre-Store doesn’t support, it’s hard to find. Gahre-Store had called for negotiating with Al-Shahaab in Somalia, an Al-Qaeda offshoot, he spoke with Hamas leader Khaled Mashal and called for a reconciliation with the Taliban.

Nor is the Workers Youth League call for the destruction of Israel a recent one. In the 70′s … the man who led the organization [Johan Jurgen Holst] then went on to become the country’s Foreign Minister playing a key role in the Oslo Accords that turned Israel into a free fire zone for the terrorist allies of the League and the Labour Party.

Media commentators have made a great deal of Breivik’s radicalization, but despite his death toll, his radicalization seems to be an isolated event in comparison to the magnitude of radicalization at Utoya. If Breivik’s violence and bigotry is to be condemned – shouldn’t the species of violence and bigotry at Utoya be condemned as well?

The left can hold up Utoya as an example, but there are a legion of counter-examples. Not the least of which is Lars Gule, traveling with explosives in his backpack, on a journey that took him from DFLP terrorist to Workers Youth League leader.

And behind that is the larger string of DFLP and Fatah atrocities. And that of other terrorist groups around the world. The Utoya attack cannot be viewed as an isolated event. It must be seen within the context of support for terrorism as a valid tactic. An idea that goes back to the Marxist roots of the Labour Party and which is embodied in its political support for terrorism. …

Breivik and Lars Gule had their common origins in a country dominated by a political left which sees violence as a legitimate tool of political change, while dehumanizing its victims. Norway’s ambassador to Israel carefully distinguished between the Utoya attack and the terrorist attacks on Israelis. The latter would go away if Israel just followed Gahre-Store’s example and negotiated with Hamas.

But what Norway’s political elite failed to grasp is that the genie of terrorism cannot be kept in a lamp, to emerge only at your command. Once you legitimize terrorism as a tool of political change, you lose the ability to determine who will make use of it. Breivik followed the example of Lars Gule, that of the Marxist terrorists, whose intellectual legacy is the black tar that seeps through the painted walls of Norwegian foreign policy.

“All the dangerous reptiles and insects, and all the lethal bacteria are far less dangerous than the Jews.”

That’s the view from Islam.

A contrary opinion – one which we share – is put forward by George Gilder, author of The Israel Test. He assesses the value of Israel to the world, and points out that America needs Israel as much as Israel needs America:

Israel cruised through the recent global slump with scarcely a down quarter and no deficit or stimulus package. It is steadily increasing its global supremacy, behind only the U.S., in an array of leading-edge technologies. It is the global master of microchip design, network algorithms and medical instruments.

During a period of water crises around the globe, Israel is incontestably the world leader in water recycling and desalinization. During an epoch when all the world’s cities, from Seoul to New York, face a threat of terrorist rockets, Israel’s newly battle-tested “Iron Dome” provides a unique answer based on original inventions in microchips that radically reduce the weight and cost of the interceptors.

Israel is also making major advances in longer-range missile defense, robotic warfare, and unmanned aerial vehicles that can stay aloft for days. In the face of a global campaign to boycott its goods, and an ever-ascendant shekel, it raised its exports 19.9% in 2010’s fourth quarter and 27.3% in the first quarter of 2011.

Israelis supply Intel with many of its advanced microprocessors, from the Pentium and Sandbridge, to the Atom and Centrino. Israeli companies endow Cisco with new core router designs and real-time programmable network processors for its next-generation systems. They supply Apple with robust miniaturized solid state memory systems for its iPhones, iPods and iPads, and Microsoft with critical user interface designs for the OS7 product line and the Kinect gaming motion-sensor interface, the fastest rising consumer electronic product in history.

Vital to the U.S. economy and military capabilities, tiny Israel’s unparalleled achievements in industry and intellect have conjured up the familiar anti-Semitic frenzies among all the economically and morally failed societies of the socialist and Islamist Third World, from Iran to Venezuela. They all imagine that by delegitimizing, demoralizing, defeating or even destroying Israel, they could take a major step toward bringing down the entire capitalist West. …

U.S. policy is crippled by a preoccupation with the claimed grievances of the Palestinians and their supposed right to a state of their own in the West Bank and Gaza. But the Palestinian land could not have supported one-tenth as many Palestinians as it does today without the heroic works of reclamation and agricultural development by Jewish settlers beginning in the 1880s, when Arabs in Palestine numbered a few hundred thousand.

Actions have consequences. When the Palestinian Liberation Organization launched two murderous Intifadas within a little over a decade, responded to withdrawals from southern Lebanon and Gaza by launching thousands of rockets on Israeli towns, spurned every sacrificial offer of “Land for Peace” from Oslo through Camp David, and reversed the huge economic gains fostered in the Palestinian territories between 1967 and 1990, the die was cast.

It’s time to move on.

For the U.S., moving on means a sober recognition that Israel is not too large but too small. It boasts a booming economy still absorbing overseas investment and a substantial net inflow of immigrants. Yet it is cramped in a space the size of New Jersey, hemmed in by enemies on three sides, with 60,000 Hezbollah and Hamas rockets at the ready, and Iran lurking with nuclear ambitions and genocidal intent over the horizon.

Clearly, Israel needs every acre it now controls. Still, despite its huge technological advances, its survival continues to rely on peremptory policing of the West Bank, on an ever-advancing shield of antimissile technology, and on the unswerving commitment of the U.S.

The commitment has been swerving, almost making a U-turn under the Obama administration.

But this is no one-way street. At a time of acute recession, debt overhang, suicidal energy policy and venture capitalists who hope to sustain the U.S. economy and defense with Facebook pages and Twitter feeds, U.S. defense and prosperity increasingly depend on the ever-growing economic and technological power of Israel.

If we stand together we can deter or defeat any foe. Failure, however, will doom the U.S. and its allies to a long war against ascendant jihadist barbarians, with demographics and nuclear weapons on their side, and no assurance of victory. We need Israel as much as it needs us.

*

What the region was like before… and after…

From Planck’s Constant:

Photos

Top:

Mount Tabor in 1912 when the Ottoman Turks were in charge; a desolate, barren, inhospitable desert. However from Biblical times until their arrival, Mount Tabor was entirely covered with vegetation. When the Turks arrived, they began to deforest the land and overgraze the plains with their animals.

Between the Arab on horse and Mount Tabor (in the distance) is Jezreel Valley where the Battle of Megiddo was fought. In Christian Eschatology, this part of the valley is believed to be destined to be the site of a final battle, between good and evil, known as Armageddon..

 

When the Jews regained control of Israel they began to reforest the area. Today, most of Mount Tabor is covered with pine trees.

What the area looks like now:

How did the Gaza Palestinians treat the more than 3,000 greenhouses [left to them in good condition by the Israeli settlers whom the Israeli government forced to leave Gaza]?

Some theorize that  Islam is strengthening in Europe because Europe is abandoning Christianity. The reasoning goes like this: a religion-vacuum is created, so another religion is “sucked in” to fill the empty space.

Another theory is that the Left actually wants to discard the civilized achievements of the West and return to a primitive way of life, the life of the savage.

Thomas Hobbes described such a life – accurately, we think – as “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short.”

Daniel Greenfield argues that the Left is pining for a return to the primitive; and he sees that the longing of the Left to be disburdened of Western civilization makes it all too easy for Islam to destroy it.

We don’t agree with everything he says in his essay, but we think he’s right about the Left’s perverse wish, and that it coincides with Islam’s ardor to restore the age of its prophet. There does seem to be a suicidal self-hatred among the most privileged class that exists in the world and that ever has existed in all history, which harmonizes with Islam’s hatred of human achievement; an insane nostalgia for the simplicity of poverty which sympathizes with a terrible nostalgia for the dust of the desert soaked with the blood of infidels.

He writes at Sultan Knish:

The clash of civilizations is also a clash of histories. The Western view of history is progressive. A march upward from barbarism to greater phases of enlightenment. … In progressive history, human techniques from the technological to the social can be used to improve life and make the world a better place.

The Islamic view of history is regressive. A lost golden age followed by unbelief and heresy, culminating in a struggle by the believers to restore Islamic dominance. Everything that humans do independently of Islam makes the world a worse place. The perfect touchstone of history was Mohammed. And the only way that history can be set right is by restoring the lost and corrupted caliphates. …

The intellectual elites of the West have begun to make the switch to a regressive model of history. The environmental movement and the postmodern left have become the champions of a regressive history which demands that we turn back the clock and learn to imitate the slums of the Third World in order to become a better society.

That the people doing this are some of the best and the brightest [we’d take issue with that – JB], the graduates of elite institutions and the thinkers and philosophers of the West, who have followed the dark road of social revolution into oblivion and have come away with no reason for their cultures and nations to go on living— testifies to the peril that the West finds itself in.

The progressive model of history is on life support. In its pure form, it hardly exists outside of scientific circles, rationalist atheists and patriotic Americans. And the former two often incorporate it into a global admixture that depends on a … world-state through the United Nations. …

Not real scientists, as opposed to global warmists. And not us rational atheists.

Imagine what Europe would be like if some 90 percent of the population wanted to restore feudalism, theocracy … There’s no need to imagine it. It’s called the Muslim world. And a rising percentage of the European population consists of Muslims who are implementing Sharia, Burqas and Jihad in its major cities.

But the Muslim Jihad is not irrational, it’s arational. Muslims don’t believe in reason as a solution to human problems. They believe in no human solution at all, only the abnegation of humanity to Allah through a clerical guardianship. This is their means of creating a perfect society.

Progressive history accepts human imperfection and builds on it. Regressive history rejects it as a force of evil. Instead it holds up a beacon of a golden past… The daily submission of Muslims arises out of a contempt for the individual as a moral actor, and replaces him with the collective Ummah, the receptacle for their transcendence under the guidance of the clerics. The Jihad abandons individual morality for collective bloodshed in the name of creating a perfect society through world domination. …

Islam … may use modern tools, but it never values them, let alone the gifts and sciences that brought them into being. Its gaze is hopelessly dingy, rimmed with disgust for anything that is less than [their idea of] perfect. The tools are inferior copies of what the Koran makes possible. The societies are corrupted and decadent. …

Everyone is practiced at manipulating everyone else and accordingly there is no real trust outside the family. And little trust even inside it. And all of this only goes to reinforce the essential Islamic message of human worthlessness. …

European expectations of Muslim integration were flawed from the start… Their pessimistic worldview was never compatible with Western democracy. …

Rather than identifying with their new countries, Muslim immigrants instead decided to replace them. To remake them into the same Caliphate mirage under the guardianship of quarreling clerics and greedy uniformed thugs. And no amount of visits to mosques and Ramadan dinners thrown by Western leaders will change that. It only accelerates the process. …

Islam’s aim is unity. The absolute collectivism of the Ummah standing over the diminishing number of Dhimmis who have not yet been convinced to take the plunge into the Sharia pool. It views a society that is based on division as corrupt and confused. Multiculturalism is alien to its ideological DNA. It cannot accept the equality of those who are different. The very idea of it is blasphemous. …

If the West still believed in progress as a moral imperative, it would have no trouble holding the gates. And understanding why the gates need to be held. But the worldview that made that possible is in decline.

The left rejected commercial progress as capitalist, but continued to embrace technological progress and cultural development. Then it rejected technological progress as destructive, culture as perspective and stated that the highest moral principle was for the West to save the world by destroying itself. And under their leadership that is the way it has been ever since…

The left’s regressive history is not national, cultural, religion or even specific. Instead it is primitivism itself that it seeks out. The backward and the barbaric, the poor and the lacking, that is their new compass. …

The sizable number of Muslim immigrants and the Islamic world is more than happy to step into this vacuum created by the willing abandonment of Western civilization. To take another shot at restoring their glory days in gory ways.

Barbarism … undoes civilization, but only once the civilization has undone itself.

We are not so pessimistic. Our civilization is under threat, but it can survive if America comes to its senses and rids itself of its disastrous Left leadership.

*

Post Script: Of course the lefty academics, politicians, writers, trade-union leaders, community organizers, and others of that kidney do not want poverty for themselves. They want the rest of us to live in dim cold rooms, grow our own food, give up our cars, never fly, and gratefully accept whatever cheap medical treatment some bureaucrat allows us to have if any at all. But for themselves they want tenure, guaranteed high pensions, lavish research grants, fast cars, frequent free flights with all possible perks, unstinted health care, and restaurants that never skimp on the salt, all at our expense, because they believe that is their due. (Don’t Nancy Pelosi and Al Gore spring immediately to mind?)

Terrorism is a method. It is not an ideology, or a movement, or a disembodied force on which war can somehow be waged (as per President Bush’s “war on terror”). It is a means, a tactic to achieve objectives which can be of various kinds.

What is the method of terrorism? The use of systematic violence in order to create public fear.

It has been mainly used to attain political objectives (eg. Fatah, Hamas, IRA), religious objectives (eg. the Inquisition, the Salem witch-hunters), commercial objectives (the Mafia), and in modern times the personal objective of self-expression with idealistic pretexts (eg. Ulrike Meinhof, Che Guevara, Bernadine Dohrn, Anders Breivik).

The victims are usually targeted randomly. The deaths and injuries are as atrocious as the terrorist can make them. Randomly chosen victims, whoever and whatever they are, are always innocent in the context of the attack.

There is no actual or conceivable justification for the use of terrorism. It is evil, no matter why it is used and even if it achieves a desirable end.

Acts of terrorism are distinguishable from acts of war. It can be used within the context of war (eg. executions carried out on civilians by invaders as a warning to the invaded).

Communist regimes are terroristic by nature. Stalin, Mao and Pol Pot were terrorists, Castro and Kim Jong Il are terrorists.

All autocracies, such as those of Gaddafi of Libya and Assad of Syria, are terroristic. So are the mullahs who rule Iran.

Is there a test which can be applied to an act of violence (outside of war or democratic law enforcement) to determine whether it is terroristic? Not always, but broadly, yes. If the act makes most people feel less afraid – as when a tyrant is assassinated – then it is not. But , admittedly, examples can be thought of where the distinction is hard to make.

*

Here is an opinion of the Breivik massacre that is worth thinking about, bearing in mind that the use of terrorism is never justifiable.

Debbie Schlussel writes:

The Norwegian newspaper pictures from the “political youth camp” at Utoya Island, Norway – the day before terrorist Anders Behring Breivik attacked it – say it all. The boycott sign is obvious, and the other pic is a game, re-enacting of the HAMAS flotilla in which terrorists tried to murder Israeli soldiers (complete with Palestinian flags and Norwegian kids’ smiles). These kids who were killed by a terrorist . . . well, they sided with Islamic terrorists.  … The man in the pic happily encountering the boycott sign is Norway’s Foreign Minister Gahre-Store, who went on to praise Palestinian terrorists and condemn Israel.

“Victims” or Perpetrators?: Norwegian HAMASniks Join Norway Foreign Minister @ Utoya Island Camp

Funny how Glenn Beck has come under attack for comparing the camp to a Hitler Youth camp. Based on these pics, seems like he’s spot on, though he should have added, HAMAS Youth camp, too. As we all know, Nazis boycotted Jews and were Jew-killers. And these hateful, privileged brats at the camp boycotted Jews and sided with Jew-killers. I don’t condone violent massacres on innocent civilians, and I condemn what Breivik did. He is a terrorist just like the 9/11 hijackers, Hezbollah, HAMAS, and Nidal Malik Hasan. But what goes around comes around. You support terrorists against innocent civilians in Israel, then you get attacked by terrorists who are upset with your support.

For me, this is like Alien v. Predator. I’m not sad for either side. And I make no apologies for it. Now these kids’ families know what it feels like to be victims of the Islamic terrorists whose Judenrein boycotts and terrorist flotillas against Israel they support. We don’t live in a vacuum. I can’t feel sorry for those who support my would-be assassins. And I don’t get too upset when they face the karma that is their fate. HAMAS isn’t just against Israel, it’s against all Jews . . . and all Christians. Just ask the Christians who’ve had to flee Gaza for their lives. And read the HAMAS charter. I’ll bet that’s something these spoiled airheaded kids with their Boycott Israel signs and HAMAS flotilla re-enactment games never did.

Frankly, the HAMAS charter and HAMAS’ behavior, all of which these kids at the Norwegian HAMAS youth camp cheered on, is a lot more scary than the screed and deeds of Breivik.

My late grandfather, a Holocaust survivor, never shed a tear for dead Nazis. My late father, a Vietnam era Army veteran, never shed a tear for those who supported the killing of Americans and Jews. And I shed no tears for these HAMASnik campers with a Scandinavian dialect. Perpetrators are not victims. Sorry. HAMAS collaborators don’t get my pity. They never will.

The Norwegian ambassador to Israel fails to understand that the method of terrorism is wrong whenever, wherever, and by whomever it is used. He opined that it was good when used by Hamas on Israelis, bad when used by Breivik on Norwegians. Debbie Schlussel is not making the same mistake in reverse by condemning Hamas and excusing Breivik. She condemns Breivik’s act. But the act of terrorism in this case does not appall her as it appalls us. Most of the victims on Utoya Island were young. Their opinions were hand-me-downs from their parents and teachers, not arrived at through experience and reason. Some of them would probably have come to a better understanding of political issues as they matured.

However, our sense of justice is outraged – and our sense of irony overwhelmed – by this statement on the massacre issued by Fatah, the other major Palestinian terrorist group:

It is with consternation that we have received the dramatic news of an awful terrorist attack against a summer camp ran by our comrades of Norwegian Labor Youth, AUF.

Fatah Youth declares its consternation about the terror attack. There are no words to describe an attack against people that have been our comrades in our struggle for freedom and independence. Very few people have stood by our side as much as the Norwegian people, and particularly our AUF comrades.

We know those who have been cowardly assassinated. Those are people that have stood for the human and national rights of the Palestinian people both in Europe and while visiting Palestine.

Fatah Youth has participated for almost 15 years in the same summer camp and our youth has benefited by learning and sharing experiences on democracy and advocacy for peace and justice.

We hope that those responsible for this criminal terror attack will be brought to justice. Such sick minds should not have a place in any society.

As a people that has been victim of state terror for the last 64 years, the Palestinian people and particularly Fatah Youth presents its condolences to the families of those killed and sends a strong message of support to our comrades from the Norwegian AUF as well as from other sister parties that were participating in this summer camp.

 

There may now be more Muslims in Europe than Christians. Not that most Europeans have converted to Islam – they’ve  just given up religion.

The Protestant countries of the north shrugged it off some time ago; the Catholic countries, mostly in the south, more recently.

Now Ireland is angrily repudiating the Catholic Church.

From the Telegraph:

The airwaves are full of bitter remarks supporting Taoiseach [Prime Minister] Enda Kenny’s attack on the “disgraceful” Vatican, and recommending every anti-church measure from the dissolution of the monasteries to the expulsion of the Papal Nuncio and the severing of all links with the Holy See. (The recall of the Papal Nuncio this week marks the lowest point of relations between Ireland and Rome.) …

The Taoiseach, meanwhile, has been met with standing ovations for his salvo against the Vatican for failing to respond with sufficient concern to the clerical sex abuse scandals as described in the Cloyne report.

His justice minister, Alan Shatter, is introducing a highly controversial Bill which will compel Irish priests to disclose the secrets of the confessional where paedophilia is mentioned: failure to do so could result in a five-year prison sentence. …

The breach with the Church has been a long time coming, and for the majority of Irish citizens it is welcome. …

There are now calls to remove the Catholic Church from every element of Irish public life, and this is supported by a growing secularist movement.

Contrary to supposition, though, state and Church in Ireland are already separate: the constitution, although it mentions God, makes no mention of the Catholic Church, specifically affirms that there may be no religious discrimination, and rules that no religion may be endowed by the state. However, there is a difference between state and culture: the state construes laws, but the culture draws on history, memory, family, folklore. Despite constitutional separation of Church and state, there remain religious traditions, such as the broadcast of the Angelus on national radio, the prayers that open Dail [Parliament] sittings, and the existence – even dominance – of faith-based schools, which secularists seek to abolish. …

Catholic Ireland … could become as secularist as France, with all allusion to the Almighty officially excised.

We would consider this a good thing if Muslims would follow the Christians’ example and become secularist. But Islam is spreading and its power is growing all over the continent and in Britain.

From the Mail Online:

Islamic extremists have launched a poster campaign across the UK proclaiming areas where Sharia law enforcement zones have been set up.

Communities have been bombarded with the posters, which read: ‘You are entering a Sharia-controlled zone – Islamic rules enforced.’

The bright yellow messages daubed on bus stops and street lamps have already been seen across certain boroughs in London and order that in the ‘zone’ there should be ‘no gambling’, ‘no music or concerts’, ‘no porn or prostitution’, ‘no drugs or smoking’ and ‘no alcohol’.

Hate preacher Anjem Choudary has claimed responsibility for the scheme, saying he plans to flood specific Muslim and non-Muslim communities around the UK and ‘put the seeds down for an Islamic Emirate in the long term’.

In the past week, dozens of streets in the London boroughs of Waltham Forest, Tower Hamlets and Newham have been targeted, raising fears that local residents may be intimidated or threatened for flouting ‘Islamic rules’. Choudary, who runs the banned militant group Islam4UK, warned: “We now have hundreds if not thousands of people up and down the country willing to go out and patrol the streets for us and a print run of between 10,000 and 50,000 stickers ready for distribution. There are 25 areas around the country which the Government has earmarked as areas where violent extremism is a problem. We are going to go to all these same areas and implement our own Sharia-controlled zones. This is the best way for dealing with drunkenness and loutishness, prostitution and the sort of thug life attitude you get in British cities. … The Muslim community will not tolerate drugs, alcohol, pornography, gambling, usury, free mixing between the sexes – the fruits if you like of Western civilisation.” …

 

Seizing control: Activist Jamaal Uddin puts up one of the Sharia stickers in Leyton, in the East London borough of Waltham Forest

 

Drink outlawed: Uddin places his poster on a lamppost outside the now defunct Oliver Twist pub in a part of Leyton in London

The campaign comes just months after stickers proclaiming a ‘gay-free zone’ … appeared in Tower Hamlets.

Women in parts of East London including Tower Hamlets have been threatened with violence and even death by Islamic extremists if they did not wear headscarves.

Anders Breivik, the Norwegian terrorist, was prepared to co-opt not only neo-Nazi groups and professional criminal to assist his “crusade”, but also Islamic jihadists.

Daniel Greenfield writes:

Breivik viewed Muslims as the enemy, but only domestically. He emphasized that; “Knights Templar do not intend to persecute devout Muslims”.

And he contemplated collaborating with them on terrorist attacks against Europe. “An alliance with the Jihadists might prove beneficial to both parties… We both share one common goal.” The Caliphate was a useful enemy for his cause.

In Breivik’s own words, this is how such an arrangement would play out;

“They are asked to provide a biological compound manufactured by Muslim scientists in the Middle East. Hamas and several Jihadi groups have labs and they have the potential to provide such substances. Their problem is finding suitable martyrs who can pass ‘screenings’ in Western Europe. This is where we come in. We will smuggle it in to the EU and distribute it at a target of our choosing. We must give them assurances that we are not to harm any Muslims etc.” …

There might come a time when we, the PCCTS, the Knights Templar will consider to use or even to work as a proxy for the enemies of our enemies.

Under these circumstances, the PCCTS, Knights Templar will for the future consider working with the enemies of the EU/US hegemony such as Iran (South [sic] Korea is unlikely), al-Qaeda, al-Shabaab or the rest of the devout fractions of the Islamic Ummah with the intention for deployment of small nuclear, radiological, biological or chemical weapons in Western European capitals and other high priority locations.

Justiciar Knights and other European Christian martyrs can avoid the scrutiny normally reserved for individuals of Arab descent and we can ensure successful deployment and detonation in the location of our choice.”  …

He was a deluded man who imagined himself leading a takeover of Europe, even if he had to serve as a Muslim proxy to do it.

Investor’s Business Daily reports and comments:

What emerges from his rantings is less a religious zealot than a fame-seeking loser — a wannabe terrorist.

The motive of fame is probably the most common among all terrorists. If not the world-wide fame  which the young European terrorists of the 1960s and 1970s lusted for, at least acclamation as hero-martyrs in their own societies – as for instance among the Arabs of the Middle East – is a powerful lure.

He even seems enamored of jihadists, talking admiringly of their ability to organize “cells,” while describing his own planned attack as a “martyrdom operation.” …

He’s not the “farmer” first reported, but an effete bachelor who lived with his mother in her Oslo flat, where he spent much of his time playing violent video games. He liked to dress up in fancy uniforms and pretend he’s a Knight. He took steroids to gain muscle.

In short, he’s a loser who fantasizes about leading a “revolution.” Like many psychopaths, he’s desperate for attention. Fame may be his real motive.

He claimed in court (where he was denied wearing a uniform) that others like him were waiting to carry out similar attacks.

But that’s likely a bluff to draw more publicity, since his writings and actions indicate that he acted alone.

“Give the impression that your cell is larger by attempting to forward misinformation on the police band or by other means,” he wrote in his diary.

Though what he did in Oslo is large-scale terrorism of the most heinous and treacherous kind, Breivik appears, like McVeigh, to be a one-off threat.

The primary threat still comes from Islamic extremists, including homegrown jihadists. And statistically, the terrorist profile is still overwhelmingly Islamic.

As far as we can discover from our skimming of his book and our search of reports, Breivik has not given a moment’s thought to his victims as individuals, or to their families.

*

A vicious and mendacious attempt by the Left to use Breivik’s massacre to tar all those who oppose the Islamization of the West, proceeds with the massed drums and bells of media clamor in an ecstasy of Schadenfreude. (See, for example, the New York Times here.)

But with what success?

Here’s a link to a video in which an EDL (English Defence League) leader, Tommy Robinson, interviewed by one of the BBC’s most self-righteous and aggressive interviewers who wants to implicate him and the EDL in Breivik’s crime, condemns the mass murderer and violent action in general. He defends his organization from accusations of neo-Nazism, denying any connection with neo-Nazi individuals or groups.

Tommy Robinson’s English may be a little hard for many listeners to follow at times. But perseverance is rewarded. He speaks for the common man – not only of Britain but, we believe, of Europe and the West. The short drama could not have been better cast had a professional producer staged it. Tommy (the name generally bestowed on the British private soldier) speaking from the heart, versus snooty Jeremy Paxman, a typical BBC man, self-annointed member of the elite intelligentsia, notorious for his sneering manner. But Tommy will not be shouted down, and makes his points simply and fearlessly.

Please watch it.