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.

On September 1, George Will wrote that it was time to stop the war in Afghanistan. Broadly speaking, we agree with him – we have said that the war is pointless. (See A pointless war, August 20, 2009.) To us the most interesting part of the article was this:

The Economist describes Hamid Karzai’s government – – his vice-presidential running mate is a drug trafficker – – as “so inept, corrupt and predatory” that people sometimes yearn for restoration of the warlords, “who were less venal and less brutal than Mr Karzai’s government”.

We don’t trust the Economist, and the statement that people (who exactly? How does the reporter know?) yearn for the restoration of the warlords (did they ever go?) is prima facie unlikely. But that the Karzai government is corrupt, venal and brutal we fully believe. Also that his running-mate is a drug-trafficker. How many rich and influential Afghans are not well-connected to the opium industry, we wonder. And isn’t it like wondering how many rich and influential Saudis are not well-connected to the oil industry?

George Will’s article has been much discussed in the blogosphere. By far the best discussion of it, and of the Afghan war in general – the one with which we are in closest agreement – is by Diana West in Townhall:

Finally, some debate over U.S. war policy in Afghanistan. Or at least debate over George F. Will’s call to pull the plug on U.S. war policy in Afghanistan, headlined “Time to Get Out of Afghanistan.”

The negative response from conservatives was revealing. It showed that after eight years of America’s post-9/11 war efforts, which started out as President Bush’s vaguely named “war on terror” and never crystallized into a cogent strategy against the jihad driving the “terror,” ambiguity and confusion still cloud the prevailing thinking, from the conventional wisdom to war strategy.

Most conservative rebuttals ignored Will’s reckoning of just how grossly ill-suited Afghanistan is to the hallucinogenic U.S. policy of constructing a modern society out of dust as our military worms affection from a hostile population. Instead, they focused on the concept of leaving Afghanistan — a move I, too, have advocated since April in my column and at my blog as a necessary precondition to better repulsing global jihad. Such an effort is, or should be, a multi-level campaign to reverse jihad’s ultimate goal, which is to extend Islamic law by both violent and other means. In this larger context, Afghanistan is not only just one front, it is also a front too far.

Most of my conservative colleagues, however, see withdrawal from Afghanistan as surrender.

This assumption, based in the fallacy that U.S. forces are simply fighting an army called “the Taliban,” rather than struggling with a culture called Islam shared by enemy and civilian alike, makes sense only if withdrawing from Afghanistan means ending our efforts against global jihad. The point of withdrawal is not to stop destroying America’s active enemies in Afghanistan or elsewhere … The point of withdrawal is to stop trying to create an American ally out of Sharia-supreme Afghanistan, something we attempted at great expense in Sharia-supreme Iraq, and failed.

Of course, what animates and drives most conservatives today is their vision of Iraq as a “success,” and their desire to repeat that “success” in Afghanistan. What has become increasingly clear to me, however, is that an infidel nation cannot fight for the soul of an Islamic nation. This, in effect, is what our “nation-building” troops have been ordered to do both in Iraq and Afghanistan. Let me rephrase: An infidel nation can indeed fight for the soul of an Islamic nation. It just can’t win it.

It also turns out there is nothing there for infidels to win. After six U.S.-intensive years, Iraq remains just another OPEC-participating, Israel-boycotting, Hezbollah-sympathetic, Sharia-supreme, anti-U.S. entity with new and improved ties to Iran. Why? Our belief systems, Islam’s and the West’s, are so diametrically opposed that our interests cannot intersect. Left and Right in this country, however, scrub this truth and its centuries of confirming history from all policy — an antiseptic way to view conflict in the world that will always miss the cure by ignoring the germs.

On this count, Will’s column is no different, never once contemplating Islam. Which is why his conclusion may be a little fuzzy. Describing his “offshore” alternatives to basing a massive army inside Afghanistan, Will identifies the key mission as “concentrating on the porous 1,500-mile border with Pakistan, a nation that actually matters.”

I’m not sure what Will means by calling Pakistan “a nation that actually matters.” Certainly, Pakistan’s nuclear arsenal “matters” because it could hurt us, and thus our national security demands an execution-ready plan to neutralize it. But Pakistan, a jihad-based culture, doesn’t “matter” in terms of fitting into an anti-jihad alliance — the ultimate goal, whether admitted or not, of efforts to work together. It can’t. Quick facts: Pakistan’s army’s motto is “Faith, piety and holy war in the path of Allah.” Seventy-eight percent of its people, the latest Pew Poll tells us, support the death penalty for leaving Islam. Not exactly our ideal match.

But we keep such politically incorrect facts out of focus. Then we struggle to see why things go wrong. More clarity is required. More debate is essential. Eight years after 9/11, this means finally reckoning with Islam — discussing jihad, analyzing Sharia, understanding dhimmitude — as a strategic factor in U.S. policy.

One thing we can be sure of: such a ‘reckoning with Islam’ will not happen on President Obama’s watch. He likes Islam.

From the Wall Street Journal:

The White House is facing mounting pressure from lawmakers to work harder to rally flagging public support for the war in Afghanistan.

With casualties rising, the administration is struggling to persuade voters that the war can be won or is worth the human and financial costs. Afghanistan is President Barack Obama’s top foreign-policy priority [is it really? I thought ending the unjustifiable Bush war in Iraq was that … Oh, and apologizing for America  – JB], but recent polls show that a majority of voters oppose the war for the first time since the conflict began eight years ago…

Mark Steyn writes:

It seems to me we have no very clear war aims in Afghanistan, which is never a good position to be in.

Are we “nation-building”? With US commanders talking about ending Afghanistan’s “culture of poverty”, it sounds like it. Yet, even assuming you could build a nation in any meaningful sense of the word on Afghan soil, such a nation would be profoundly uncongenial to us.

Are we there just to quarantine al Qaeda in their Pakistani redoubts and whack any bad guys who wander in range? That might be worthwhile, but is a tough sell to Nato forces who (excepting Brits, Canucks and a couple of others) operate under ludicrously constrained rules of engagement. So the “nation-building” facade is necessary to square it with the multilateral types.

The much misunderstood British strategy in Afghanistan was, by contrast, admirably clear-sighted, and worked (for them) for over a century. They took a conscious decision not to incorporate the country formally within the Indian Empire because they didn’t want a direct British land border with Russia. So instead they were content with a highly decentralized semi-client state and a useful buffer between the British Empire and the Tsars, a set-up that worked well (from London’s point of view) for over a century until it all fell apart in the Sixties when Moscow started outbidding the Brits for the loyalty of various factions – or what passes for loyalty in that part of the world.

The British strategy was cold and calculated and, if you care about Afghan child mortality rates and women’s rights, very unprogressive. But it was less deluded than asking western troops to die in pursuit of the chimera of ending a “culture of poverty” while in reality providing multilateral window-dressing for the country’s slippage back to warlordism and Sharia.

What are the goals here? Maybe the President could tell us. Or are we just going to (to cite the definitive film on the subject) Carry On Up The Khyber?

We doubt the President could tell us. We don’t suppose he has the least idea.

It may take a few more decades for Europe to have a majority population of Muslims, but Europeans are already falling under Islamic law.

Thomas Landen writes at Hudson New York:

The Sharia areas of Europe are expanding rapidly across Western Europe. While currently still restricted to what the French officially call the ZUS (zones urbaines sensibles – sensitive urban areas) these areas are growing fast. Even today, eight million of the sixty million inhabitants of France already live in one of the country’s 751 ZUS.

The month of Ramadan is traditionally the most dangerous time of the year in Europe’s sensitive areas. After sunset, the Ramadan ban on eating, drinking and engaging in sexual activities expires until the following sunrise. Ramadan is a period of nightly feasts for Muslims. Young Muslims are extremely touchy. These feasts easily spill over into nightly spasms of mayhem, vandalism, and violence. Europe’s Ramadan riots often go on for days or weeks, during which hundreds of cars, shops and public buildings are set on fire.

In Muslim countries, such as Indonesia, the police step up patrols during Ramadan in order to crack down on illegal nightly activities. In Europe, however, the police have been given orders to adopt an extra-low profile not to “provoke” Muslim populations. In countries such as Britain, police officers have had to attend “Ramadan awareness” courses. They have even been ordered, “for reasons of religious sensitivity,” to avoid the execution of arrest warrants for Muslims during the month of Ramadan. During Ramadan, Europe is a tinder box.

The most widely reported Ramadan riots so far, which were even covered by the American press, took place in France in 2005. Since the 2005 riots, the French authorities have asked the media not to report about waves of violent unrest in the ZUS – a request which the media seem to have followed. During the 2005 Ramadan riots, several sociologists suggested that polygamy was one of the reasons for the large-scale rioting in Muslim communities among youths who lack a father figure. This theory seemed to have impressed France’s political leaders. Gérard Larcher, then France’s employment minister and currently the president of the French Senate, explained to the Financial Times (Nov. 15, 2005) that multiple marriages among immigrants lead to anti-social behavior, such as criminal activity. Bernard Accoyer, a leading parliamentarian of France’s governing UMP and currently the president of the French National Assembly (France’s Congress), said that children from large polygamous families have problems integrating into mainstream society.

As the Financial Times warned, however, at the time, “Mr Larcher’s comments could further fuel the debate and are likely to outrage Muslim and anti-racism groups.” Apparently, the French government was of the same opinion; it did not follow-up the words of Messrs. Larcher and Accoyer with a clampdown on polygamy. Having multiple wives is illegal under French law, but is allowed under Islamic Sharia law. It is estimated that 30,000 French Muslims have more than one wife and that more than 250,000 people live in polygamous families.

The tolerance of polygamous Sharia marriages is not restricted to France. In Norway, the Islamic Cultural Center Norway (ICCN), an immigrant organization subsidized by the Norwegian state, advises Muslims to take several wives because polygamy “is advantageous and ought to be practised where conditions lend themselves to such practice.” In Britain legislators adopt an equally liberal approach towards polygamy for Muslim men, allowing tax breaks for their second, third and fourth wives… In the Netherlands, the authorities officially register polygamous marriages by non-Dutch citizens from Morocco, Egypt, Pakistan and other Muslim countries. The Amsterdam municipal authorities admitted that they have even registered Dutch citizens (of Islamic origin) with multiple wives. Belgium, too, recognizes polygamous Islamic marriages. Only last month, the welfare department of the city of Antwerp announced that 45 welfare recipients have two or more spouses.

Polygamous immigrants abuse the social security system by collecting state benefits for several wives. In France, residence is only granted to polygamous families if the two wives do not live at the same address, which means that these families claim double social housing, family allowances and other social benefits.

The recognition of polygamous marriages of Muslims in countries where polygamy used to be illegal – and still is illegal for non-Muslims – indicates that Sharia law is already accepted in these countries. They have implicitly accepted a system of “legal apartheid” with different legal systems for Muslims and non-Muslims. The decision to avoid arresting Muslims during Ramadan “for reasons of religious sensitivity,” thereby treating Muslims and non-Muslims differently, confirms this existence of a dual legal system. It is difficult to see, however, how such a dual legal system can continue to exist on the same territory. Ultimately, one of the legal systems is likely to prevail…

And it is not hard to see which system that will be, unless something drastic and unforeseeable comes along to change the present trend.

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.

Michelle Malkin’s book Culture of Corruption: Obama and His Team of Tax Cheats, Crooks, and Cronies (Regnery 2009) is, we’re happy to see, top of the NYT bestseller list for the fourth week running. As the leading supplier of  the most significant facts about Obama and his administration that the mass-media try to hide, she deserves the nation’s  gratitude.

This is from one of her recent Townhall columns:

Savor the silence of America’s self-serving champions of privacy. For once, the American Civil Liberties Union has nothing bad to say about the latest case of secret domestic surveillance — because it is the ACLU that committed the spying.

Last week, The Washington Post reported on a new Justice Department inquiry into photographs of undercover CIA officials and other intelligence personnel taken by ACLU-sponsored researchers assisting the defense team of Guantanamo Bay detainees. According to the report, the pictures of covert American CIA officers — “in some cases surreptitiously taken outside their homes” — were shown to jihadi suspects tied to the 9/11 attacks in order to identify the interrogators…

The ACLU’s team used lists and data from “human rights groups,” European researchers and news organizations that were involved in “(t)racking international CIA-chartered flights” and monitoring hotel phone records. Working from a witch-hunt list of 45 CIA employees, the ACLU team tailed and photographed agency employees or obtained other photos from public records.

And then they showed the images to suspected al-Qaida operatives implicated in murdering 3,000 innocent men, women and children on American soil.

Where is the concern for the safety of these American officers and their families? Where’s the outrage from all the indignant supporters of former CIA agent Valerie Plame, whose name was leaked by Bush State Department official Richard Armitage to the late Robert Novak? Lefties swung their nooses for years over the disclosure, citing federal laws prohibiting the sharing of classified information and proscribing anyone from unauthorized exposure of undercover intelligence agents.

ACLU Executive Director Anthony Romero refused to comment on Project CIA Paparazzi and instead whined some more about the evil Bush/CIA interrogators. Left-wing commentators and distraction artists are dutifully up in arms about such “inhumane” tactics as blowing cigar smoke in the faces of Gitmo detainees. But it’s Romero blowing unconscionable smoke:

“We are confident that no laws or regulations have been broken as we investigated the circumstances of the torture of our clients and as we have vigorously defended our clients’ interests,” he told the Post. “Rather than investigate the CIA officials who undertook the torture, they are now investigating the military lawyers who have courageously stepped up to defend these clients in these sham proceedings.”

Courage? What tools and fools these jihadi-enablers be. Civil liberties opportunism is literally a part of the al-Qaida handbook. A terrorist manual seized in a Manchester, England, raid in 2005 advised operatives: “At the beginning of the trial … the brothers must insist on proving that torture was inflicted on them by state security before the judge. Complain of mistreatment while in prison.” Jihadi commanders rehearsed the lines with their foot soldiers “to ensure that they have assimilated it.”

Since 9/11, the selective champions of privacy have recklessly blabbed about counter-terrorism operations, endangered the lives of military and intelligence officials at Gitmo, and undermined national security through endless litigation… Now, caught red-handed blowing the cover of CIA operatives, they shrug their shoulders and dismiss it as “normal” research on behalf of “our clients.”

But don’t you dare question their love of country. Spying to stop the next 9/11 is treason, you see. Spying to stop enhanced interrogation of Gitmo detainees is patriotic. And endangering America on behalf of international human rights is the ultimate form of leftist dissent.

This just happened in Saudi Arabia:

A 10-year-old bride was returned last Sunday to her 80-year-old husband by her father who discovered her at the home of her aunt with whom she has been hiding for around 10 days. A Saudi local newspaper said the husband, who denies he is 80 in spite of claims by the girl’s family, accused the aunt of meddling in his affairs. “My marriage is not against Shariah. It included the elements of acceptance and response by the father of the bride,” he said. He added that he had been engaged to his wife’s elder sister and that this broke off as she wanted to continue with her education. “In light of this, her father offered his younger daughter. I was allowed to have a look at her according to Shariah and found her acceptable,” he said.

The son of Qaddafi [or Kadhafi] confirms our suspicion that a dirty deal was done and political pressure  brought to bear where it should have no influence (the decision of a British court of law) in connection with the release of al-Megrahi, the Libyan jailed for the Lockerbie bombing (see the post below).

From Breitbart:

The release of Lockerbie bomber Abdelbaset Ali Mohmet al-Megrahi was linked to trade deals with Britain, Seif al-Islam, the son of Libyan leader Moamer Kadhafi, said in a interview broadcast Friday.

For confirmation that the release was arranged by the British Foreign Office go to this article at Power Line:

I thought you might be interested in a conversation I had in London in mid-April (!) with very senior UK Foreign and Commonwealth Office officials about al-Megrahi. After leaving the Bush Administration in January I was on a work trip to London in mid-April and dropped by the FCO to check in with a couple of my former FCO colleagues. One high ranking British diplomat – a personal friend – complained to me that the release of al-Megrahi was forthcoming…

Not only is Andy McCarthy on the right track, it’s even worse than that. We spoke (complained?) at length about the issue and it was very from my conversation that the decision was left to Number 10, and was being driven by the FCO in part to curry favor with Qaddafi after a rocky “rebooting” period.

I’ve been quite perplexed at the characterization of this as a Scottish decision, as my friend spoke of it in terms of something that had already been cleared conditionally by the courts and had been signed off on by the Prime Minister. In fact, he pointed me toward this February 2009 AFP article, mentioning that it was a trial balloon from the British government to test the reaction in the US and UK.

And there is this from Investor’s Business Daily (22 August):

Curiously, last November, just after President Obama’s election, Britain’s Parliament passed a Prisoner Transfer Agreement with Libya. We say “curious” because it appears the only prisoner it could have related to was al-Megrahi. Was he sick then? If not, why was it passed?

We wonder, and we’re not alone, if this was a deal to curry favor with Libyan strongman Moammar Gadhafi, who sent his private jet to pick up al-Megrahi. After all, energy giant BP has contracts and business dealings in Libya and no doubt wants more.