Read all of the article by Robert Fulford in the National Post from which we quote this:

Lubna Ahmed al-Hussein, an angry Khartoum journalist who works for the UN in Sudan, has started a campaign against shariah law by elevating a local police matter into an international embarrassment: She’s invited the world to witness her judicial flogging, thus making her case part of the struggle between religious traditionalists and independent women … 

In Khartoum, the General Discipline Police Authority patrols the streets, charged with maintaining shariah standards of public decency. Recently it raided a restaurant and arrested 13 women, including al-Hussein, for the crime of … wearing trousers.

Since 1991, that’s been a violation of the Sudanese criminal code. More precisely, it is classified as a violation of public morality. While erratically enforced, the rule is serious enough to carry a penalty of 40 lashes. Ten of the women arrested with al-Hussein pleaded guilty and received a reduced sentence of 10 lashes. But al-Hussein and two others demanded their day in court and al-Hussein decided to provoke a scandal by distributing 500 personal invitations to her trial. She expects to be found guilty (she won’t be allowed a lawyer or a chance to speak), so she informed her guests that they’ll also be expected at her flogging.

The French government has condemned the law, and in Cairo the Arabic Network for Human Rights Information (ANHRI) has launched a campaign to defend al-Hussein and the others. ANHRI also protested a suit brought by the police against another journalist, Amal Habbani, for an article praising al-Hussein ( “A Case of-Subduing a Woman’s Body”). The police claim that the mere act of defending female pants-wearing also violates General Discipline.

When stories such as al-Hussein’s flash around the world, there’s usually a missing element: The feminist movement rarely [never – JB] becomes part of the narrative. The rise of shariah law constitutes the major global change in women’s status during this era, yet Western feminists remain pathetically silent.

Feminist journalists like to speculate about the future of activism among women today, but you can leaf through a fat sheaf of their articles without encountering a mention of Muslim women. Feminist professors, for their part, show even less interest. Trolling through the 40-page program of the European Conference on Politics and Gender, held in Belfast last winter, I found feminist scholars (from Europe, the United States and Canada) dealing with women’s political opportunities, the implications for women of new medical technology, the politics of fashion and even women’s response to climate change. What I couldn’t find was even one lecture or discussion devoted to so-called “honour killing.” Nor was there any mention of the thousands upon thousands of women routinely flogged, raped, imprisoned or stoned to death, often with the tacit or explicit agreement of Islamic governments.

Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano has appointed Arif Alikhan, a terrorist apologist with connections to terrorist supporting agencies, to a key position in her department. 

She is the lady who declared that returning veterans posed a terrorism risk. 

Read all about it here.

David Solway is the author of  a well informed and well reasoned article at Front Page Magazine. We who see ourselves as belonging to the RATIONAL RIGHT  agree with him.

We quote a part of the article. We recommend the whole thing. 

 If the rational Right fails to consolidate its base in the European political landscape, then the European Left will have brought its own eventual demise upon itself in the form of militant, illiberal and xenophobic parties of the extreme Right. It will, in fact, find itself squeezed between the jaws of an ideological vise of its own making, as two competing fascisms, one Islamic and the other indigenous, engage in a battle to the finish. Absenting the rebirth of a hardy and vigorous conservative movement, which does not shrink from instituting stringent immigration policies and enacting rules for the deportation of those who undermine the common peace, the long-term prospect for Europe doesn’t look encouraging. Even a best-case scenario is problematic: it may be too late for a conservative “revolution” to forestall either an Islamic or an ultra-reactionary denouement.

Europeans, says Walter Laqueur in The Last Days of Europe, idling away their future while Islamic political organizations patiently wait, “once the time is ripe, to launch mass violence” and the demographic time bomb is also ticking, are “quietly acquiescing in their own decline.” But, as I have argued, a growing number of Europeans are not, and the means they will adopt to counter the menace, whether successfully or not, will be harsh, coercive and turbulent. For as violence begins to move in from the Muslim enclaves in the banlieu toward the city center, as it were, and the authorities prove themselves increasingly helpless and vacillating before its progress, the reactionary Right will earn more and more legitimacy among the masses. We should make no mistake about this. The Jain-like attitude of the stimming [?]  political classes toward their avowed enemies, resulting in an anemic lack of fortitude that has become chronic, can only energize the factions of the extreme Right. The same applies to the Islamophilic and ever-compliant media, operating in tandem with a complaisant political establishment, whose motto might well be: Have pen, will grovel.

 The problem, however, is not confined to the Continent. It would be sheer folly to assume that we in North America are privileged spectators who are somehow exempt from the savage dialectic that Europe is now experiencing. It is starting to happen here as well. We may have a little more time at our disposal to try and come to terms with the predicament, but we are equally at risk. The gravest peril to America today is not an external enemy but its own developing fault lines. The tectonic plates that undergird the sense of national unity are moving apart. Strictly speaking, our situation is not identical to Europe’s, but close enough to warrant concern. If we are not vigilant and prepared to reconsider our generic assumptions about the culture of indiscriminate inclusion and the politics of spineless appeasement, Europe is our inevitable future.

Speaking at the National Press Club on June 10, 2009, Morris Dees of the Southern Poverty Law Center warned that a “perfect storm is brewing for the buildups of these hate groups,” of which the Center lists over 900. Many of the members of these cadres enlist in the army “to learn skills they will later take back to their groups while, in other instances, [they] work to recruit frustrated veterans.” Dees isolates the phenomenon of rampant Latino immigration as “the biggest engine generating increase in hate groups,” though Jew-hatred also figures prominently. But there can be no doubt that galloping Muslim immigration and high fertility rates, as well as the burgeoning influence of radical Islamic organizations, will fuel the rage felt and violence perpetrated by these virulent cells and networks.

There is only one way to defeat the extreme Right as it rises to its own depraved version of the defence of the West, and that is to disarm the common enemy and, by so doing, deprive a nascent fascism of its populist fuel. Which is another way of saying that immigration policies currently in place will need to be rethought and rendered more appropriate to the nation’s requirements, as is the case, for example, inSwitzerland, the sole western European country that attaches a high value to citizenship. And unpleasant as this may sound, we will also have to become less tolerant of the intolerant Other which refuses to recognize our values if we are to avoid the pendulum swing toward a vicious intolerance of all perceived outsiders.

We will, in short, have to embrace the conservative tradition of the moderate Right, based on the liberty of the individual, the duties of responsible citizenship, a coherent pluralism that respects the customs of the majority culture rather than a fractious multiculturalism that corrodes them, and the robust defence of the homeland against the threats, both domestic and external, that mobilize against it.

 Given that we can manage to avoid the Islamic future prophesied by Ottoman thinker Said Nursi who, in his famous Damascus Sermon, predicted that “Europe and America are pregnant with Islam. One day they will give birth to an Islamic state,” there is only one conceivable way out of the corner we are backing ourselves into. By electing moderate Right administrations, we may—just may—slip between the Clashing Rocks of the defeatist Left and the triumphalist Right.

To put it succinctly: assuming that Nursi’s prophecy does not come to pass—and that is a very big if—survival dicates that, as a society, we will have to “go conservative” and abandon the doctrinaire Left if we are not to succumb to the doctrinaire Right.

There is no doubt that Europe will be predominantly Muslim well before this century is out.

To see a Muslim gloating over this fact, watch this video:

The gloater points out, correctly, that Islam is spreading in Europe not only because of Muslim immigration and Muslim prolific breeding (while the native European populations are dying out), but also through conversion – or as the Muslims  call it, ‘reversion’,  their theory being that every human being is born a Muslim but many are forced into some other faith, so their turning to Islam is ‘turning back’.

What can be done about this ominous threat of a Muslim Europe, assuming the Europeans want to do something about it, which at present it seems they don’t, preferring appeasement or denial?

Christians who bring themselves to admit the approaching Islamic conquest say that Europe must recover its Christian faith and defeat Islam by converting its followers to Christianity.  A very long shot, that. It’s hard to defeat one irrationality with another.

What the West as a whole can do (and the threat is in the long run to all of the West), is argue continually and insistently against the easily demolished beliefs of Islam. The teachings of Muhammad stand up to no scrutiny. He taught murder, intolerance, hate, enslavement, subjugation of women, and the silliest of superstitions (djinns play a big part in the Koran). If a majority of the Muslim population of Europe could be brought to an enlightened view of their inherited Islamic ideology, be persuaded that Western values are better for all mankind than their Prophet’s self-serving dark-age creed, their dominance would not be fearful as it is now.

Remorseless criticism of the ideology of Islam is urgently needed. Its ideas need to be attacked and defeated.

But the opposite is happening. Western leaders – Gordon Brown as a squashed dhimmi, Barack Hussein Obama as a sincere believer – tell us that Islam is a fine, noble, admirable faith, in complete conformity with Western values.  And the United Nations is  trying to make any criticism of Islam a punishable offense.

But now is the time to  raise every possible objection to the faith of the Muslims. Demolish it by argument. Ridicule it with cartoons and jokes. As a model, see this satirical video: 

Read the Koran and the hadith and go every day to Robert Spencer’s website The Religion of Peace for ammunition against the enemy.  Expose the evil of Islam as much as possible, at every opportunity, to the vast  numbers who look for informed comment on the Internet.

Become active soldiers for Reason, with the potent weapon of words, against the worst of the world’s widespread religions – even more cruel than Communism, even more restrictive than Environmentalism – and the one that now most threatens us all with conquest, oppression, enslavement and death.

Young women who protest against the Iranian regime risk not only death but sharia-required rape. 

From RantRave:

[An Iranian prison guard] said that, at 18, “I was given the ‘honor’ to temporarily marry young girls before they were sentenced to death.” 

In the Islamic Republic it is illegal to execute a young woman, regardless of her crime, if she is a virgin, he explained. Therefore a “wedding” ceremony is conducted the night before the execution: The young girl is forced to have sexual intercourse with a prison guard – essentially [she is] raped by her “husband.” 

“I regret that, even though the marriages were legal,” he said. 

Why the regret, if the marriages were “legal?” 

“Because,” he went on, “I could tell that the girls were more afraid of their ‘wedding’ night than of the execution that awaited them in the morning. And they would always fight back, so we would have to put sleeping pills in their food. By morning the girls would have an empty expression; it seemed like they were ready or wanted to die. 

“I remember hearing them cry and scream after [the rape] was over,” he said. “I will never forget how this one girl clawed at her own face and neck with her finger nails afterwards. She had deep scratches all over her.” 

The individual who spoke with the reporter was himself later arrested. What was his crime? Knowing what was in store for a female detainee, he set her free, rather than subjecting her to a legalised rape and execution. Apparently there is a decency among common folk that seems to elude their spiritual leaders. Even the “professional husband” employed by the Ahmadinejad regime suffered pangs of conscience. 

The US and Europe’s message to Israel: 

We’ll let you save us from a nuclear-armed Iran if you’ll promise to let yourself be put in existential jeopardy. 

Apparently, Israel may accept the offer!!!

From the Jerusalem Post:

A deal taking shape between Israel and Western leaders will facilitate international support for an Israeli strike on Iran’s nuclear facilities in exchange for concessions in peace negotiations with the Palestinians and Arab neighbors,The Times reported Thursday.

According to one British official quoted by the paper, such an understanding could allow an Israeli attack “within the year.”

The report in the UK paper quoted unnamed diplomats as saying Israel was prepared to offer concessions on the formation of a Palestinian state as well as on its settlement policy and “issues” with Arab neighbors, in exchange for international backing for an Israeli operation in Iran.

We strongly recommend this brilliantly clear, highly informative, and supremely  relevant speech by Colonel Richard Kemp, CBE, erstwhile Commander of British Forces in Afghanistan. Its subject is ‘the practicalities, challenges and difficulties faced by military forces in trying to fight within the provisions of international law against an enemy that deliberately and consistently flouts international law.’ The good against the bad. 

We only question whether reporters will tell the truth when they are shown it in the ways that Colonel Kemp advises. With reason, we do not trust the mainstream media. They have demonstrated amply and often that they are, for the most part, on the side of the terrorists.  They are the ugly.

… but not for the gander. 

We hope that Israel will destroy Iran’s nuclear facilities by force. We have noticed that talking to Iran  accomplishes nothing.

Obama’s anti-Israel administration is plainly trying to make it hard for Israel to take action against Iran.  

But Israel is a sovereign state and will make its own defense decisions.   

When Sarah Palin said so, her media critics called it ‘stupid’.

When Joe Biden says it  … 

James Taranto writes in the Wall Street Journal:

Over the weekend, as we noted yesterday, Vice President Biden said that if Israel decides it needs to take military action against the Iranian nuclear-weapons program, the U.S. will not “dictate” otherwise. A reader points out that Sarah Palin, who ran against Biden in last year’s election, said much the same thing in a September interview with ABC’s Charlie Gibson:

Gibson: What if Israel decided it felt threatened and needed to take out the Iranian nuclear facilities?

Palin: Well, first, we are friends with Israel and I don’t think that we should second-guess the measures that Israel has to take to defend themselves and for their security.

Gibson: So if we wouldn’t second-guess it and they decided they needed to do it because Iran was an existential threat, we would cooperative or agree with that.

Palin: I don’t think we can second-guess what Israel has to do to secure its nation.

Gibson: So if it felt necessary, if it felt the need to defend itself by taking out Iranian nuclear facilities, that would be all right.

Palin: We cannot second-guess the steps that Israel has to take to defend itself.

Palin reiterated the point in a later interview with CBS’s Katie Couric.

This column agrees with both Biden and Palin and is glad to see that the bipartisan consensus recognizing Israel’s right to defend itself appears sturdy. But we suspected not everyone would be so consistent, so we went back to see what people had said about Palin.

Matthew Yglesias, who when he was young drew much praise for his thoughtful and fair-minded commentary, wrote a blog post titled “Palin: If Israel Wants to Bomb Bomb Bomb, Bomb Bomb Iran, That’s Okay With Me”:

Palin reiterated her absurd view that the President of the United States shouldn’t “second-guess” Israeli policy under any circumstances.

Palin is okay at repeating various “pro-Israel” buzzwords, but she can’t run away from the fact that her underlying position on this topic is stupid.

So when Biden said the same thing, did Yglesias call it “absurd” and “stupid”? Well, is the pope Italian? Here’s what he wrote yesterday:

This is being read by some . . . as a “green light” for an Israeli attack. . . . I think the most straightforward reading of what Biden said is rather different, he’s trying to distance the United States from any possible Israeli military action by making it clear that what Israel does or doesn’t do is decided in Israel rather than in Washington.

The main problem with this, I think, is that probably nobody’s going to believe it. Already you see many Americans taking Biden’s statement that the U.S. doesn’t control Israeli policy to “really” mean that the U.S. is encouraging Israel to attack.

When Palin says it, it’s stupid. When Biden says it, he gets graded on a curve: The problem is that other people are too stupid to understand the deep subtlety of Biden’s thinking.

Then there’s M.J. Rosenberg of TalkingPointsMemo.com. In September, he described Palin as “robotic” and suggested that she is the puppet of a Jewish cabal:

Now we know why among the very first people Sarah Palin sat down with after being nominated was [sic] Joe Lieberman and the head of AIPAC.

She needed the latest talking points and, boy, did she learn her lines. . . .

In other words, under the Palin administration, we won’t second guess Israel. I think I’ve got it.

Palin sure has.

And when Biden said it? Rosenberg kept mum until he was persuaded that the vice president’s words didn’t really reflect U.S. policy. Then he wrote this:

The President said today that he has “absolutely not” given Israel a “green light” to attack Iran.

So Biden either misspoke, was misinterpreted, or has just been corrected by his boss. Israel will get no green light to attack. We will, as Obama said all along, rely on diplomacy to solve the Iran problem.

Fair enough, right? Wrong. Look what Palin said to Charlie Gibson just before he asked about a hypothetical Israeli strike:

Gibson: So what do you do about a nuclear Iran?

Palin: We have got to make sure that these weapons of mass destruction, that nuclear weapons are not given to those hands of Ahmadinejad, not that he would use them, but that he would allow terrorists to be able to use them. So we have got to put the pressure on Iran and we have got to count on our allies to help us, diplomatic pressure.

Gibson: But, Governor, we’ve threatened greater sanctions against Iran for a long time. It hasn’t done any good. It hasn’t stemmed their nuclear program.

Palin: We need to pursue those and we need to implement those. We cannot back off. We cannot just concede that, oh, gee, maybe they’re going to have nuclear weapons, what can we do about it. No way, not Americans. We do not have to stand for that.

What Palin said last year was precisely what Obama and Biden have now said: Diplomacy is the optimal way of dealing with the Iranian nuclear threat, but if it fails, Israel has a right to defend itself. In a way, the inconsistency of some of Palin’s critics is reassuring. It shows that a good deal of anti-Israel sentiment is mere partisanship masquerading as something uglier.

In his Cairo speech, Obama painted a graphic picture of the sufferings of slaves, and went so far as to liken the plight of slaves in America in the past to the (self-inflicted) condition of the Palestinians in the present, implying that the Israelis are guilty of holding them in subjugation and inflicting extreme cruelty on them. A bigger lie, a more extreme libel is hardly possible. At the same time he does not choose to notice  that Arab Muslims are the world’s most persistent and unashamed slave owners. They keep, buy, sell and cruelly use slaves, most of them captured or bought in Africa.  

With fully justified righteous indignation, David Podvin writes in Canada Free Press:

Barack Obama’s speech in Cairo exemplified the craven liberal compulsion to appease evil. While progressives accuse conservatives who oppose affirmative action of being racist, Obama lavished praise upon his Muslim audience that enslaves millions of Africans. America’s first black president uttered nary a word on behalf of Islam’s many black captives. Liberals once opposed slavery rather aggressively [depends wh0 you mean by liberals – JB], but now ingratiate themselves to the slave masters.

Obama also abandoned gays to the predations of Muslim zealots. Although liberals have vilified Miss California USA for opposing gay marriage, Obama did not issue even the mildest rebuke to the Muslim world for perpetrating gay murder. When Mormons support traditional matrimony, progressives publicly explode in anger. When Palestinians commit homophobic homicide, the Left is unable to generate any discernible outrage.

The Obama speech failed to confront the barbarism of Islamic misogyny. Across the Koranic world, women are relentlessly abused. Islamic females are routinely flogged, sexually mutilated, and subjected to honor killings by their Muslim brethren. Yet Obama so yearned to avoid offending Muslim misogynists that his fleeting reference to Islamic women drew moral equivalence between their plight and the situation facing their American counterparts. Muslim females must deal with having their genitals disfigured while Western women must deal with the corporate glass ceiling. Obama equated these asymmetrical forms of bigotry, fecklessly declaring that all humanity must improve its treatment of women. His unwillingness to confront specifically the sadistic misogyny of Islam leaves imperiled Muslim women without the advocacy they so desperately need.

Obama forfeited a precious opportunity to champion the cause of the blacks and gays and women who are persecuted by Muslims. Theoretically, the welfare of these groups is of paramount importance to liberals. In reality, progressives concern themselves with the oppression of blacks and the slaughter of gays and the torment of women only when such injustices can be used to gain political advantage against Republicans…

Liberals not only refuse to condemn the racism and homophobia and misogyny being perpetrated by Muslims, they also smear as “Islamophobic” anyone who does object… Jihadists constantly commit atrocities while their liberal sycophants insist that Islam cannot be held responsible for the evil committed in its name… 

The liberal devotion to Islam constitutes history’s greatest unrequited love. Every social principle that progressives claim to cherish is rejected by the Muslim world:

Freedom of speech… Freedom of the press… Separation of Church and State… Civil rights…Women’s equality…

Liberals insist that these tenets are incomparably precious. Islamists could not disagree more. As Obama has proven again, progressives eagerly capitulate whenever protecting their cherished beliefs conflicts with the higher liberal principle of appeasing Islam.

Barack Obama’s speech was an amoral profile in cowardice. It therefore faithfully represented the modern liberal movement, which is extremely long on rhetoric, painfully short on backbone, and totally devoid of integrity.

Charles Krauthammer writes:

Obama the Humble declares there will be no more “dictating” to other countries. We should “forge partnerships as opposed to simply dictating solutions,” he told the G-20 summit. In Middle East negotiations, he told al-Arabiya, America will henceforth “start by listening, because all too often the United States starts by dictating.”  

An admirable sentiment. It applies to everyone — Iran, Russia, Cuba, Syria, even Venezuela. Except Israel. Israel is ordered to freeze all settlement activity. As Secretary of State Clinton imperiously explained the diktat: “a stop to settlements — not some settlements, not outposts, not natural-growth exceptions.”

What’s the issue? No “natural growth” means strangling to death the thriving towns close to the 1949 armistice line, many of them suburbs of Jerusalem, that every negotiation over the past decade has envisioned Israel retaining. It means no increase in population. Which means no babies. Or if you have babies, no housing for them — not even within  the existing town boundaries. Which means for every child born, someone has to move out. No community can survive like that. The obvious objective is to undermine and destroy these towns — even before negotiations.

To what end? Over the last decade, the U.S. government has understood that any final peace treaty would involve Israel retaining some of the close-in settlements — and compensating the Palestinians accordingly with land from within Israel itself.

That was envisioned in the Clinton plan in the Camp David negotiations in 2000, and again at Taba in 2001. After all, why turn towns to rubble when, instead, Arabs and Jews can stay in their homes if the 1949 armistice line is shifted slightly into the Palestinian side to capture the major close-in Jewish settlements, and then shifted into Israeli territory to capture Israeli land to give to the Palestinians?

This idea is not only logical, not only accepted by both Democratic and Republican administrations for the last decade, but was agreed to in writing in the letters of understanding exchanged between Israel and the United States in 2004 — and subsequently overwhelmingly endorsed by a concurrent resolution of Congress.

Yet the Obama State Department has repeatedly refused to endorse these agreements or even say it will honor them. This from a president who piously insists that all parties to the conflict honor previous obligations.

The entire “natural growth” issue is a concoction. It’s farcical to suggest that the peace process is moribund because a teacher in the Jewish Quarter of Jerusalem is making an addition to her house to accommodate new grandchildren — when Gaza is run by Hamas terrorists dedicated to permanent war with Israel and when Mahmoud Abbas, having turned down every one of Ehud Olmert’s peace offers, brazenly declares that he is in a waiting mode — waiting for Hamas to become moderate and for Israel to cave — before he’ll do anything to advance peace.

In his much-heralded “Muslim world” address in Cairo Thursday, Obama declared that the Palestinian people’s “situation” is “intolerable.” Indeed it is, the result of 60 years of Palestinian leadership that gave its people corruption, tyranny, religious intolerance and forced militarization; leadership that for three generations — Haj Amin al-Husseini in 1947, Yasser Arafat in 2000, Abbas in December 2008 — rejected every offer of independence and dignity, choosing destitution and despair rather than accept any settlement not accompanied by the extinction of Israel.

In the 16 years since the Oslo accords turned the West Bank and Gaza over to the Palestinians, their leaders — Fatah and Hamas alike — built no schools, no roads, no courthouses, no hospitals, no institutions that would relieve their people’s suffering. Instead they poured everything into an infrastructure of war and terror, all the while depositing billions (from gullible Western donors) into their Swiss bank accounts.

Obama says he came to Cairo to tell the truth. But he uttered not a word of that. Instead, among all the bromides and lofty sentiments, he issued but one [two actually, see our post immediately below – JB] concrete declaration of new American policy: “The United States does not accept the legitimacy of continued Israeli settlements,” thus reinforcing the myth that Palestinian misery and statelessness are the fault of Israel and the settlements.

Blaming Israel and picking a fight over “natural growth” may curry favor with the Muslim “street.” But it will only induce the Arab states to do like Abbas: sit and wait for America to deliver Israel on a platter. Which makes the Obama strategy not just dishonorable but self-defeating.

Self-defeating? While we agree with almost everything in this column, we question whether what Obama is doing is ‘self-defeating’.  For America, certainly. But for Obama himself? No. He has shown every sign of intending to augment Muslim power and prestige, and a willingness – no, an eagerness – to sacrifice Israel to that end.