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

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

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

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

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

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

From The Washington Post:

A majority of Americans now see the war in Afghanistan as not worth fighting.

We atheist conservatives were all for the war in Iraq. We especially liked Rumsfeld’s ‘shock and awe’ idea, but in the event were not satisfied that it was shocking and awful enough. We shouted with glee when the sadistic despot Saddam Hussein was captured, and celebrated when he was hanged. (He was one of those aggressive, absolute rulers of Arab states who, like Colonel Qaddafi of Libya and the ‘Kings’ of Saudi Arabia, constitute a real threat to the West, with or without weapons of mass destruction.) However, we never did, and do not, expect Iraq to remain even as much of a ‘democracy’ as it is now.

We were against NATO’s intervention in the internecine wars in erstwhile Yugoslavia.

We were and remain unswervingly for the pursuit and destruction of terrorists.

We urge the prosecution of a sustained war of words (and cartoons) on Islam. We think it is a cruel, oppressive, and murderous ideology that must be argued against.

But we see no point whatsoever in carrying on the war in Afghanistan. It would be good if Osama bin Laden could be captured and killed. There’s no need to give up pursuing him. But expending blood and treasure on trying to turn Afghanistan into a democracy is a deplorable waste. The effort is doomed to failure.

This is one of the issues on which we find ourselves in agreement with ‘a majority of Americans’.

Daniel Pipes writes:

US President Barack Obama’s assistant for homeland security and counterterrorism, John O. Brennan, conveniently outlined the administration’s present and future policy mistakes in a speech on August 6, “A New Approach for Safeguarding Americans.”…

Disturbingly, Brennan ascribes virtually every thought or policy in his speech to the wisdom of the One. This cringe-inducing lecture reminds one of a North Korean functionary paying homage to the Dear Leader.

Specifics are no better. Most fundamentally, Brennan calls for appeasing terrorists: “Even as we condemn and oppose the illegitimate tactics used by terrorists, we need to acknowledge and address the legitimate needs and grievances of ordinary people those terrorists claim to represent.” Which legitimate needs and grievances, one wonders, does he think al-Qaida represents?

Brennan carefully delineates a two-fold threat, one being “al-Qaida and its allies” and the other “violent extremism.” But the former, self-evidently, is a subset of the latter. This elementary mistake undermines his entire analysis.

He also rejects any connection between “violent extremism” and Islam: “Using the legitimate term jihad, which means to purify oneself or to wage a holy struggle for a moral goal, risks giving these murderers the religious legitimacy they desperately seek but in no way deserve. Worse, it risks reinforcing the idea that the United States is somehow at war with Islam itself.”…

[This is] a deeply deceptive interpretation [of the meaning of ‘jihad’] intended to confuse non-Muslims and win time for Islamists. The George W. Bush administration, for all its mistakes, did not succumb to this ruse. But Brennan informs us that his boss now bases US policy on it.

The speech contains disquieting signs of ineptitude. We learn that Obama considers nuclear weapons in the hands of terrorists to be “the most immediate and extreme threat to global security.” Fine. But how does he respond? With three feeble and nearly irrelevant steps: “leading the effort for a stronger global nonproliferation regime, launching an international effort to secure the world’s vulnerable nuclear material… and hosting a global nuclear summit.”

Nor can Brennan think straight. One example, requiring a lengthy quote. “Poverty does not cause violence and terrorism. Lack of education does not cause terrorism. But just as there is no excuse for the wanton slaughter of innocents, there is no denying that when children have no hope for an education, when young people have no hope for a job and feel disconnected from the modern world, when governments fail to provide for the basic needs of their people, then people become more susceptible to ideologies of violence and death.”

Summary: Poverty and a lack of education do not cause terrorism, but a lack of education and a job make people more susceptible to the ideas leading to terrorism. What is the distinction? Woe on us when the White House accepts illogic as analysis.

Further, let’s focus on the statement “when governments fail to provide for the basic needs of their people, then people become more susceptible to ideologies of violence and death,” for it contains two stunning errors. First, it assumes the socialist fiction that governments provide basic needs. No. Other than in a few commodity-rich states, governments protect and offer legal structures, while the market provides.

Second, every study on the subject finds no connection between personal stress (poverty, lack of education, unemployment) and attraction to radical Islam. If anything, massive transfers of wealth to the Middle East since 1970 contributed to the rise of radical Islam. The administration is basing its policy on a falsehood.

Where, as they say, is the adult supervision? Implementation of the inept policies outlined by Brennan spells danger for Americans, American interests and American allies. The bitter consequences of these mistakes soon enough will become apparent.

Here is an Israeli report of the battle between Hamas and an al-Qaeda linked group in Gaza (see post below):

A senior Hamas commander is reported among the nineteen dead and 120 injured in the gun battles between Hamas forces and hundreds of members of the al Qaeda offshoot Jund Ansar Allah in the southern Gaza Strip town of Rafah Friday Aug. 14. DEBKAfile’s military sources report that Hamas special units fired mortars and heavy machine guns into the Ibn Thaymas mosque where the Jund leader, Abdullah al Latif Mussa earlier proclaimed the enclave an al Qaeda emirate. He urged all its inhabitants to defy Hamas rule and take an oath of allegiance to al Qaeda and Osama bin Laden. After storming the mosque, Hamas forces blew up the Jund leader’s four-storey home with all its occupants. [As our reader aeschines says in a comment on the post below, if the Israelis tried something like that there’d be ‘global fireworks’ – JB.] His death was reported but not confirmed.

Our counter-terror sources report that in recent months terrorist groups identified with al Qaeda are spreading out through the southern Gaza Strip, establishing their influence with plentiful cash, weapons and explosives. They accuse Hamas of failing to establish Islamic law in the enclave.

Which report is the more accurate we’ll have to wait and see. This account puts the episode in a believable context. Credible reports of al-Qaeda groups establishing themselves, well armed, in the southern Gaza Strip have been circulating for some months now. Of course Hamas feels threatened. Which terrorist group will dominate the other? Will war decide the issue? Meanwhile, let crocodile eat crocodile.

From the Telegraph:

Six people were killed and 55 wounded in Gaza fighting on Friday when Hamas police stormed a mosque where radicals had declared an Islamist “emirate” in the Palestinian territory, emergency services said.

Shooting was continuing after dark, witnesses said, after clashes began in the afternoon following weekly prayers in the southern city of Rafah, which straddles the Egyptian border.

Among the dead was Mohammed al-Shamali, head of the Hamas military unit for southern Gaza, emergency services said, adding that bodies of some other victims could not be reached because of the intensity of the fighting…

An Egyptian security official said a three-year-old boy was critically wounded by a bullet from the fighting across the [Egyptian] border.

Witnesses said that following the prayers, a group of Palestinians announced the formation of the Islamist “emirate,” defying the authority of Hamas, which has ruled Gaza’s 1.5 million people for the past two years.

“We are today proclaiming the creation of an Islamist Emirate in the Gaza Strip,” Abdul Latif Musa, a representative of Jund Ansar Allah (Soldiers of the Partisans of God), said at the Bin Taymiyya mosque, the witnesses reported.

Musa was surrounded by armed fighters when he made his statement, according to the witnesses.

Rafah is the Gaza stronghold of the so-called Salafist movement, of which Jund Ansar Allah is said to a part and which is ideologically close to al-Qaeda.

An AFP photographer reported that Hamas police dynamited Musa’s house. It could not be established whether the Islamist was there at the time.

Hamas police blocked all entrances to Rafah, the photographer said.

The Hamas interior ministry warned that those violating the law would be pursued and arrested.

“Everyone outside the law and carrying arms in order to spread chaos will be pursued and arrested,” a ministry statement said.

At the same time, Hamas premier Ismail Haniya denied that the group exists.

“No such groups exist on the ground in Gaza,” he said at prayers in the northern Gaza town of Beit Lahiya. He blamed the “Israeli media for spreading this information with a view to turning the world against Gaza.”

Hamas seized power in Gaza in June 2007 after a week of vicious fighting with forces of the secular Fatah movement of Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas.

Jennifer  Rubin quotes John Bolton on why honoring Mary Robinson is rewarding an enemy:

‘Durban is not the only reason Ms. Robinson should not receive the Medal of Freedom. Over the years she has actively opposed “the security or national interests of the United States,” one of the categories of eligibility for the Medal. Those in the administration who recommended her either ignored her anti-Israel history, or missed it entirely, as they either ignored or overlooked her hostility toward America’s role in promoting international peace and security. Or perhaps they share Ms. Robinson’s views…

Ms. Robinson’s award shows Mr. Obama’s detachment from longstanding, mainstream, American public opinion on foreign policy. The administration’s tin ear to the furor over Ms. Robinson underlines how deep that detachment really is.’

And she comments:

And that really is the bottom line. It is not that Obama and his team “missed” her involvement at Durban or overlooked her record more generally at the UN. It is that they did not find it all that troubling, or perhaps they even considered it admirable. They did give her a prize for it after all. It is not that her views are anathema to them—just to mainstream opinion in the U.S. The Robinson award is important because it tells us whom we are dealing with—in the White House. We already know about Robinson and the UN. The lesson to be learned is that Robinson is the role model, the ideal international citizen, whom the Obama team admires. It is chilling. But that is the reality of what the America public, the West, and Israel must confront for the foreseeable future.

From Front Page Magazine:

A gala event has occurred in Gaza.

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

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

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

Each groom received a gift of 500 dollars from Hamas.

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

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

The wedding photos tell the rest of the sordid tale.

PLEASE SEE THE COMMENT BY C.GEE ON THIS POST

From Iowahawk: 

With apologies to Geoffrey Chaucer

 

1  Whan in Februar, withe hise global warmynge

2  Midst unseasonabyl rain and stormynge

3  Gaia in hyr heat encourages

4  Englande folke to goon pilgrimages.

5  Frome everiches farme and shire

6  Frome London Towne and Lancanshire

7  The pilgryms toward Canterbury wended

8  Wyth fyve weke holiday leave extended

9  In hybryd Prius and Subaru

10  Off the Boughton Bypasse, east on M2.

11  Fouer and Twyntie theye came to seke

12  The Arche-Bishop, wyse and meke

13  Labouryte and hippye, Gaye and Greene

14  Anti-warre and libertyne

15  All sondry folke urbayne and progressyve

16  Vexed by Musselmans aggressyve.

17  Hie and thither to the Arche-Bishop’s manse

18  The pilgryms ryde and fynde perchance

19  The hooly Bishop takynge tea

20  Whilste watching himselfe on BBC.

21  Heere was a hooly manne of peace

22  Withe bearyd of snow and wyld brows of fleece

23  Whilhom stoode athwart the Bush crusades

24   Withe peace march papier-mache paraydes.

25  Sayeth the pilgryms to Bishop Rowan,

26  “Father, we do not like howe thynges are goin’.

27  You know we are as Lefte as thee,

28  But of layte have beyn chaunced to see

29  From Edinburgh to London-towne

30  The Musslemans in burnoose gowne

31  Who beat theyr ownselfs with theyr knyves

32  Than goon home and beat theyr wyves

33  And slaye theyr daughtyrs in honour killlynge

34  Howe do we stoppe the bloode fromme spillynge?”

35  The Bishop sipped upon hys tea

36  And sayed, “an open mind must we

37  Keep, for know thee well the Mussel-man

38  Has hys own laws for hys own clan

39  So question not hys Muslim reason

40  And presaerve ye well social cohesion.”

41  Sayth the libertine, “’tis well and goode

42  But sharia goes now where nae it should;

43  I liketh bigge buttes and I cannot lye,

44  You othere faelows can’t denye,

45  But the council closed my wenching pub,

46  To please the Imams, aye thaere’s the rub.”

47  Sayeth the Bishop, strokynge his chin,

48  “To the Mosque-man, sexe is sinne

49  So as to staye in his goode-graces

50  Cover well thy wenches’ faces

51  And abstain ye Chavs from ribaldry

52  Welcome him to our communitie.” 

53  “But Father Williams,” sayed the Gaye-manne 

54  “Though I am but a layman

55  The Mussleman youthes hath smyte me so

56  Whan on streets I saunter wyth my beau.”

57  Sayed the Bishop in a curt replye

58  “I am as toolrant as anye oothere guy,

59  But if Mussleman law sayes no packynge fudge,

60  Really nowe, who are we to judge?”

61  Then bespake the Po-Mo artist,

62  “My last skulptyure was hailed as smartest

63  Bye sondry criticks at the Tate

64  Whom called it genius, brillyant, greate

65  A Jesus skulpted out of dunge

66  Earned four starres in the Guardian;

67  But now the same schtick withe Mo-ha-med

68  Has earned a bountye on my hed.”

69  Sayed the Bishop, “that’s quyte impressyve

70  To crafte a Jesus so transgressyve

71  But to do so with the Muslim Prophet

72  Doomed thy neck to lose whats off it.

73  Thou should have showen mor chivalrie

74  In committynge such a blasphemie.”

75  And so it went, the pilgryms all

76  Complaynynge of the Muslim thrall;

77  To eaches same the Bishop lectured

78  About the cultur fabrick textured

79  With rainbow threyds from everie nation

80  With rainbow laws for all situations.

81  “But Father Rowan, we bathyr nae one

82  We onlye want to hav our funne!”

83  “But the Musselman is sure to see

84  Thy funne as Western hegemony.

85   ‘Tis not Cristian for Cristians to cause

86  The Moor to live by Cristendom’s laws

87  Whan he has hise sovereyn culture

88  Crist bade us put ours in sepulture.

89  To be divyne we must first be diverse

90  So cheer thee well, thynges could be wors

91  Sharia is Englishe as tea and scones,

92  So everybody muste get stoned.”

93  The pilgryms shuffled for the door

94  To face the rule of the Moor;

95  Poets, Professors, Starbucks workers

96  Donning turbans, veils and burqqas.

97  As they face theyr fynal curtan

98  Of Englande folk, one thynge is certan:

99  Dying by theyr own thousande cuts,

100  The Englande folk are folking nuts.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What will be lost if the nation state is lost?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Jillian Becker   August 2, 2009

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

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

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

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

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

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

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