Pat Condell is as outspoken as ever about his contempt for Islam. Perhaps even more so. We find it therapeutic just to listen to him.

We are in principle against intervention in the internal affairs of other countries. But we are not for isolationism or pacifism – we regard either philosophy as a formula for national suicide. If other countries become belligerent, build up their armed strength, send their warships towards our shores, establish bases in countries on our borders, and declare their aggressive intentions towards us, the politics of those countries become our business. That is happening now. We are under threat – because Obama is deliberately weakening America. And his reaction to the result is to weaken America even more.

The conditions for major war develop much more easily when the U.S. is too weak. They are developing as we speak. 

To a meaningful extent, the significant increase we’ve seen in unrest around the globe since 2010 has been made possible, and inevitable, by the retraction of American power. Even where we still have power in place, it has become increasingly obvious that we aren’t going to use it. 

We quote from a website interestingly named Liberty Unyielding. The article on the extreme folly of the Obama administration’s moves to weaken America is by Commander Jennifer Dyer, now retired from the US navy. (Her own blog is at Theoptimisticconservative.wordpress.com):

The collapse of order in the Arab nations in 2011 was the first significant stage of the process. The perception that the United States would do nothing about a Hezbollah coup in Lebanon was tested in January of that year. The perception proved to be true, and when protests erupted in Tunisia and Egypt, for causes both natural and manufactured, a set of radical Islamist actors – the “establishment” Muslim Brotherhood, Sunni jihadists, Iran – saw an opportunity. The establishment Muslim Brotherhood has largely won out in Tunisia, but the battle still rages among these radical actors for Egypt, Syria, and now Iraq. Lebanon is being incrementally sucked into the maelstrom as well.

In multiple venues, Russia has watched the U.S. and the West effectively back Islamists in Russia’s “near abroad”: in Turkey (with support for the now struggling Erdogan government); in the Balkans, especially Bosnia and Kosovo; and in Syria. …

There was a time when the implicit determination of the U.S. to enforce the “Pax Americana” order – the post-World War II alignments of the region – held Russia in check. The Russians still derived some security benefit from that order, after all … It appears to me, however, that 2014 will be the year in which it becomes clear that, according to Russians’ perception, they no longer benefit from the old order. If we’re not going to enforce it, Russia will do what she thinks she has to.

In fact, Moscow’s pushback against the plan for Ukraine to affiliate with the EU constitutes just such a blow for perceived Russian interests. It is of supreme importance for Westerners to not misread the recent developments. The EU and the U.S. did back down when Russia pushed hard last fall. The only ones who didn’t back down were the Ukrainian opposition. I predict Vladimir Putin will try to handle the opposition factions cleverly, as much as he can, and avoid a pitched battle with them if possible. He respects what they are willing to do. But he has no reason to respect Brussels or Washington.

And that means he has more latitude, not less, for going after the regional props to the old order, one by one. As always, Russia’s inevitable competition with China is a major driver, along with Russia’s concern about Islamism on her southern border. The whole Great Crossroads – Southwest Asia, Southeast Europe, Northeast Africa, the waterways that snake through the region – is, if not up for grabs, at least in ferment. Look wherever you like: there are almost no nations where there is not a very present menace from radicalism, or where governments and even borders are not gravely imperiled by internal dissent.

Israel is the chief standout for politically sustainable stability and continuity. Romania and Turkey seem likely to at least retain their constitutional order in the foreseeable future, but Turkey’s geopolitical orientation, in particular, is less certain. Greece and Kosovo – even Bosnia – have serious internal problems. Egypt, Sudan, South Sudan, Ethiopia, Eritrea, and Somalia all remain in crisis at various levels. Jordan and Saudi Arabia are relatively stable, and the Arab Persian Gulf states relatively so as well. But their neighborhood is going downhill fast. Iran is riding a wave of radical confidence, and the Taliban are resurgent in Afghanistan.

In this tumultuous region, it’s actually a little funny that Pakistan looks stable and staid compared to Iran, Afghanistan, and neighbors west. We can hope that Islamabad’s perceived need to maintain a symmetrical stance against India will keep Pakistan’s loose federation of intransigents federated, and the nukes under central control. But as we move across South Asia, we near another boiling pot. Thailand – long an American ally and pillar of stability in the region – has been rocked in recent months by national unrest of a kind not seen in Southeast Asia for decades. Islamist radicalism is a growing threat in Indonesia, and an unpacified one in the Philippines, after more than a decade of U.S.-Philippines collaboration in fighting it.

And, of course, China is making real, transformative moves against regional security with her proclamations about air space and maritime rights off her southeast coast.

This disruptive process, like the battles for many of the Arab nations, is already underway. We’re not waiting for something to happen; it’s started.

China assumes, quite correctly, that there will be no effective pushback from the United States. But two other nations with power and means will regard it as intolerable for China to dictate conditions in Southeast Asia: Japan and Russia. The dance of realignment among these nations has implications for everyone in Central Asia and the Far East. The day may be on the horizon sooner than we think when maintaining a divided Korea no longer makes sense to at least one of the major players. The day is already here when Chinese activities in Central Asia are alarming the whole neighborhood, just as Chinese actions are in the South China Sea. …

Russia and Iran are advancing on the US through Central America:

It’s no accident that as radical leftism creeps across Central America (falsely laying claim to a noble “Bolivarian” political mantle), the maritime dispute between Nicaragua and American ally Colombia heats up – and Russia shows up to back Nicaragua and Venezuela – and so does Iran – and unrest turns into shooting and government brutality and violence in Venezuela – and Hezbollah shows up there to openly support the radical, repressive Maduro government.

Now Iran has a naval supply ship headed for Central America, very possibly with a cargo of arms that are not only prohibited by UN sanction, but capable of reaching the United States if launched from a Central American nation or Cuba.

We’re not still waiting for the shocks to start to the old order. They’ve already started. I haven’t surveyed even the half of what there is to talk about …

She looks at the latest defense cuts with dismay and considers what the consequences will be:

This is the world in which the United States plans to reduce our army to its lowest level since before World War II, and eliminate or put in storage much of its capabilities for heavy operations abroad (e.g., getting rid of the A-10 Warthogs, moving Blackhawk helicopters into the National Guard). It’s in this world that DOD proposes to cease operating half of our Navy cruisers, while delaying delivery of the carrier-based F-35 strike-fighter to the Navy and Marine Corps. These cutbacks come on top of cuts already made to training and maintenance expenditures in the Navy, Marine Corps, and Air Force that will affect unit readiness for years to come. …

Then comes what should be a shocking observation:

By cutting back on defense so drastically, America is deciding, in essence, to “fight fair”: to give whatever opponents emerge more of a chance to kill our soldiers, damage our interests, and drag out conflicts. …

That would be hard to believe of any American leadership – until now. It is ludicrous. Worse, it is lunatic. But Obama has never concealed or disguised his wish to weaken America’s military capacity.

The decision “to further limit our capabilities to use power in politically relevant ways” will result in “even more global unrest: more conflict, more shooting, more blood, more extortion and political thuggery menacing civil life in the world’s poorer and more vulnerable nations”, and that cannot be good for America. The point is that –

These unpleasant trends will spill over into civil life in the wealthier nations soon enough …

As it has, she points out, in Ukraine, Thailand, and Venezuela, “whether directly or through second-order consequences”.

Peace and freedom have to be tended constantly; they are not the natural state of geopolitical indiscipline, but its antithesis. …

We’re extraordinarily unprepared for the world that is shaping up around us. …

[And] a world that doesn’t want quiescent trade conditions, tolerance of dissent, the open flow of ideas, and mutual agreements, peacefully arrived at, will not have them.

That’s the world we are sentencing ourselves, for now, to live in. Perhaps we will learn from the consequences how to think again: about what it takes to guard freedom, and indeed, about what freedom actually is. 

It is Obama who needs to think again, but there is no reason to hope that he will. It could hardly be more obvious that he does not care for freedom.

The State Department has spent millions of taxpayers’ dollars acquiring Art. That is to say, paying for objects that its resident or consultant aesthetes swear are works of Art, worth every penny.

The acquisitions were apparently a priority for Hillary Clinton when she was Secretary of State. If you would see her monument, tour US embassies and look about you.

Fashionable Art doesn’t come cheap. So there was no money left to pay for such a humdrum thing as effective protection of the US diplomatic and CIA missions in Benghazi. Denied the security they needed, four Americans, including the ambassador, were killed there by savage jihadis. Well – Hillary might say – there has to be human sacrifice on the altar of Art, it makes all the difference, and if you don’t understand that, you are a philistine bourgeois.

Look on the bright side. The Art is displayed in many a US embassy. Americans can be proud.

In London, there’s a granite wall built by Sean Scully that cost $1million. We couldn’t find a picture of it, but it’s like this one displayed in an art gallery.

Daniel Greenfield illustrates an article on the subject – which inspired this post – with these pictures of works by Cy Twombly. The  top one is at the embassy in Rome.  

From his text:   

Beijing [embassy] contains $23 million worth of art. Bern has $1.2 million and Luxembourg has $2.2 million.

And here is the grave of Ambassador Stevens, murdered at Benghazi. We don’t know how much it cost, or who paid for it.

*

Post Script: Here is some wall art that really has meaning. The wall is part of the US mission in Benghazi. The paint is blood. A hand put it there the night of the attack. It might have been the hand of Ambassador Stevens himself – or of one of his brutal killers. One does not have to read Arabic to know who signed in for the event on the other wall.

(Hat-tip: our reader and commenter donl)

Have you wondered why Muslim terrorists in Nigeria, calling themselves Boko Haram (which means “book-learning, ie Western education, is against the will of Allah and so is forbidden”), are slaughtering Christians, hacking them to death with machetes, gunning them down, throwing their children on to bonfires, by the hundred, by the thousand, and – they intend – by the million?

The explanation is given in an article by Robert Spencer at Jihad Watch:

Jama’atu Ahlus Sunnati Lidda’awati Wal Jihad [the official name of Boko Haram] means “the Party of the People of the Sunnah for Dawah and Jihad”.

[It’s leader] Shekau clearly is motivated entirely by Islamic principles, and he thinks shedding Infidel blood is a pleasure, that democracy is incompatible with Islam, and that he and his group must commit murder until Islamic law is established in Nigeria.

Where did he get these ideas? What programs do mosques and Islamic schools in the West have in place to teach against this understanding of Islam they ostensibly reject? Why, none. Now, why is that?

Spencer quotes Ameh Comrade Godwin’s transcription from a video, at the Daily Post:

Leader of the Jama’atu Ahlus Sunnati Lidda’awati Wal Jihad (otherwise known as Boko Haram), Abubakar Shekau, has vowed to launch more attacks on Nigeria and Nigerians.

This is coming barely 73 hours after its members wasted lives in renewed attacks in Adamawa and Borno States.

He said the state of emergency currently imposed on Adamawa, Borno and Yobe State would not prevent them from carrying out their attacks.

Shekau called on his members in other states, particularly Kano, to attack civilians and government institutions.

The full text of his 28-minute video, delivered in Hausa, reads thus:

My brethren, you should hold on to your weapons and continue fighting. Let them understand that our work is not confined to Yobe, Borno and Adamawa [states]. Make them understand that we are not restricted by emergency rule. They should understand we are under the canopy of Allah. This is the beginning. Yes, this is the beginning. We, Jama’atu Ahlus sunnati Lidda’awati Wal Jihad, are fighting Christians wherever we meet them and those who believe in democracy, those who pursue Western education wherever we meet them. By Allah, we will kill whoever practices Democracy. And you the infidels of Rivers state, Niger (Delta), the town of [President Goodluck] Jonathan, Shekau is talking to you. Shekau is talking to you, that small boy that has become the nightmare of infidels is talking to you. Oh you the leader of the Niger Delta, you will soon see your refinery destroyed. You will in the incoming days see your refinery you are boasting about bombed. Our refinery is Allah. Niger-Delta you are in trouble. Jonathan you are in trouble. Banki Moon [Ban Ki-Moon, Secretary General of the UN] you are in trouble. Benjamin Natanyahu you are in trouble. Queen Elizabeth, you are in trouble.  Babangida, Kwankwaso, Shekarau, Kashim, Buhari, you are in trouble. Yahaya Jingir, the cleric of Jos, the advocate of ‘Boko Halal’ [‘Book-learning is blessed and permitted’], right? We are Boko Haram, you are Boko Halal. You will see, bastard. We killed Albani of Zaria. We killed Albani of Zaria. Shekau killed Albani of Zaria.Tomorrow he will kill Jingir, the day after tomorrow he will kill Dapchia, the next day he will kill Wapchama, next he will kill Shehu of Borno, Ado Bayero. We rebel against you, between us and you is enmity and rancor until you believe only in Allah. This is from the Qur’an, in which Abraham says to his pagan relatives: “We have rejected you, and there has arisen, between us and you, enmity and hatred for ever, unless ye believe in Allah and Him alone” (60:4). The reason why I will kill you is you are infidels, you follow Democracy. Whoever follows Democracy is an infidel. This is Shekau, this is why I’m in enmity with you. Buhari is an infidel, Babangida is an infidel, Atiku is an infidel, late Yar’adua was an infidel, Shehu of Borno is an infidel. You are all infidels. What makes you infidels is Democracy and constitution and western education. I therefore call on brethren in Kano to rise up and replicate the Baga attack. All these infidels we are the ones killing them. We enjoy shedding their blood. The Koran must be supreme, we must establish Islam in this country, not only in Borno. We will henceforth destroy any schools wherever we see them.

You see now? Perfectly clear, isn’t it? It’s because of the religion. 

Islam requires literacy to be stamped out. The world will then be the good place Allah wants it to be.

So stop carping about those dismembered bodies, those burnt babies, the pools of blood in those churches and villages.

Or are you – ugh! – an Islamophobe?

*

News just in Wednesday 2/26/2014 – Reuters reporting :

Gunmen from Islamist group Boko Haram shot or burned to death 59 pupils in a boarding school in northeast Nigeria overnight, a hospital official and security forces said on Tuesday.

“Some of the students’ bodies were burned to ashes,” Police Commissioner Sanusi Rufai said of the attack on the Federal Government college of Buni Yadi, a secondary school in Yobe state, near the state’s capital city of Damaturu.

Schoolboys, all of them.

What a rotten job the official representatives of Jewish communities in Western countries are doing!

British Jews are still so grateful to Oliver Cromwell for letting them into the country some 350 years ago, that they’d rather put up with anything – slander, humiliation, threats, even physical attack – than complain. Their official representatives play along with the phony “interfaith” racket in the stubborn (but forlorn) hope that it will soften Islamic hatred of them, although that hatred is ineradicably doctrinal as well as political. If it wasn’t for the excellent institution Stand For Peace under the inspired directorship of  Sam Westrop exposing the racket for what it is, there would hardly be any resistance at all to the intensifying anti-Semitism and advancing stealth-jihad in the United Kingdom.

And it’s far worse in France and Sweden.

How well are “official Jews” doing to earn their salaries in Canada and the US?

Abraham Foxman recently announced after 27 years steering the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) he will retire next year. How well has he done?

Andrew Bostom, writing at American Thinker, said of Foxman in 2011 that he is –

… the most blindly agenda-driven organizational Jewish “leader.” The Anti-Defamation League (ADL)’s Foxman sprays defamatory charges – rooted in willful ignorance – against all those legitimately concerned with the ceaseless efforts of mainstream institutional American Islam to insinuate Sharia mores and jurisdiction into US society.

Today Mark Steyn says what needs to be said about this self-blinkered Official Jew:

Canada’s “official Jews” [are] among the most useless people on the planet. Under Bernie Farber, for example, the Canadian Jewish Congress was obsessive about the last three neo-Nazi losers living in their mum’s basement and contributing unread blog posts to obscure “white supremacist” websites. But it had nothing to say about the broad-daylight mass Jew-hatred and, indeed, brazen incitement to murder of large groups of people parading through downtown Calgary, Toronto and Montreal. Farber & Co were cardboard warriors, capable only of fighting the battles others had already won long ago.

And so it goes for America’s “official Jews”:

Anti-Defamation League chief Abe Foxman believes that anti-Semitism is at its height since the Holocaust, and threatens the lives of Jews all around the world.

He got that right. He got everything else wrong:

Europe is where the Jewish people have paid the highest price for anti-Semitism, and it’s sort of an old-new phenomenon,” he said, defining it as “nationalists, anti-government people, neo-fascists, neo-Nazis of anti-immigration and anti-government coming together with a glue and cement of anti-Semitism. I think it’s a serious threat to Jewish life.

Is it really possible in 2014 even for the capo di tutti capi of official Jews to be so blind? Foxman is either the most wicked dissembler or, to be more charitable, he reflects merely the blinkered parochialism of America’s liberal Jewish elites. Unlike the head of the ADL, I have no special interest in or responsibility for the welfare of the Jewish people, but I have been to Toulouse, Antwerp, Malmö and the old Jewish East End of London, and I know what I have seen there.

I would like Foxman to go to Toulouse, a city the size of Jacksonville, Florida, where in recent years one synagogue has been firebombed, another set alight when two burning cars were driven into it, a third burgled and “Dirty Jews” scrawled on the ark housing the Torah, where a kosher butcher’s was strafed with gunfire, and a Jewish sports association attacked with Molotov cocktails, and three Jewish children murdered outside their grade school, I would like Foxman to go to Toulouse and tell any Jew he finds there (they are advised by their rabbis not to wear identifying marks of their faith) that it’s all the work of “anti-government people”.

I would like him to go to Malmö – once the first Christian city in Norway and soon to be the first Muslim city in Sweden – and tell such Jews as he can find (they are abandoning the city) that the desecration of Jewish cemeteries and the ugly reinforced steel doors at the Jewish kindergarten and the rocket-proof glass in the windows of the synagogue are all the fault of “neo-Nazis”. Sweden is renowned for its neo-Nazis, isn’t it? Doubtless they were the reason why a year or two back at the Davis Cup the Israeli tennis players had to play their match behind closed doors, in a Baltiska Hallen stadium without a single spectator. For had they opened the doors, the seats would have filled up with Swedish “nationalists” and Swedish “neo-fascists” and all hell would have broken loose.

I would like Abe Foxman to go to Tower Hamlets in London’s East End, where on Holocaust Memorial Day a couple of years ago a visiting New Yorker had to be taken to the Royal London Hospital in Whitechapel after a Jewish tour group was pelted with stones by a group jeering “If you go any further, you’ll die.” I would like Foxman to tell those Jews that their attackers were an “anti-immigration” group.

I would like him to go to Villiers-le-Bel, where a Jewish girl was brutally attacked by a gang shouting “Jews must die!”, or to Odense, where the headmaster says his school can no longer take Jewish pupils for security reasons, and tell them it’s the fault of Danish “nationalists” and French “neo-Nazis”.

But I don’t suppose Abe Foxman will go anywhere outside his bubble, will he? Is it really too much to expect him somewhere in that long laundry list of antiquated irrelevances to utter the “M” word? As Laura Rosen Cohen writes of this contemptible nothing of a man:

Shame on you, Abraham Foxman. Shame on you.

These Jews are a danger to the Jewish people.

Their denial is so thick and so amoral that it is difficult sometimes to find the words to express my utter disgust and contempt.

By fighting the last war against the German Nazis over and over in their heads, they endanger living Jews. But they will never learn.

It’s so cozy to be a professional Jew, fighting the ghosts of WW2 over and over and never facing the real threats to the Jewish people.

Though the Holocaust must never be forgotten, it must not so obsess generation after generation that they fail to see what is happening all about them. 

Jewish groups missed the threat 80 years ago, too. But why wouldn’t they? There’d always been anti-Semitism in Europe: You can’t buy property here, you can’t stand for parliament there, and everywhere always a certain sliver of people who just don’t want to be around Jews. But it didn’t turn genocidal until the 1930s, and, after a millennium of low-level Jew hate, you can understand why nobody saw it coming.

But the violent, murderous phase of the new Jew-hatred is already here – in the emergency ward of the Royal London Hospital; in the corpse-strewn schoolyard of Toulouse; in the synagogue in Brussels set alight by Molotov cocktails; in a pleasant Jewish home in Antwerp, where burning rags were pushed through the mail flap; at the RER train station in Auber, where a commuter was savagely assaulted by a mob taunting, “Palestine will kill the Jews”; in the suburban home where a young Frenchman was tortured to death over three weeks while his family listened via phone to his howls of agony as his captors chanted from the Koran; in the stairwell of the apartment house where a Paris disc-jockey had his throat slit, his eyes gouged out, and his face ripped off by a neighbor who crowed, “I have killed my Jew!” 

Those “anti-government people” get around, don’t they? The groups who perpetrate this violence come from a minority community – larger than the Jews but not yet larger than everyone else. They are telling you what they will do when they have the numbers to do it. …

Abe Foxman has not had his eyes gouged out, but he is blind, utterly blind.

Continuing the theme of the post immediately below, here’s a story of how the big Shiite terrorist organization Hizballah is terrified of being attacked by terrorists.

This comes from DebkaFile:

The Lebanese Shiite Hizballah, itself a listed terrorist group, was forced Thursday, Feb. 13 to cancel its most solemn annual event in memory of fabled “special security chief” Imad Mughniyeh, over an inability to keep the event safe from terrorist attacks. …

Hizballah and its Shiite following in Lebanon live in fear of devastating suicide bombing attacks by al Qaeda and other Sunni extremists. Since last July, they have staged 10 attacks and claimed scores of lives in Beirut and other parts of Lebanon over Hizballah’s participation in the Syrian war. In a single attack last year, the bombing of the Iranian embassy, 25 people were killed.

Its Syrian expedition has left the Hizballah short of manpower for self-protection. This situation has become more acute since an intelligence tip was received disclosing that the terrorists were now gunning for Nasrallah [present leader of Hizballah] and other top operatives. This has necessitated doubling up security on their persons.

A special counterterrorism command center has begun operating at the Iranian embassy in Beirut. …

This center was set up by a high-ranking Iranian intelligence delegation … [which] had arrived in Beirut to tackle the terrorist threats to their Lebanese proxy. It was composed of senior IRGC Al Qods Brigades [Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps Jerusalem Brigades] operatives and high officials of Iran’s Ministry of Intelligence and Security (MOIS).

The decision to cancel the Mughniyeh memorial assembly was taken by the new counterterrorism center at the Iranian embassy for four reasons:

1. Iranian undercover agents in Syria discovered that al Qaeda elements were plotting to hit the assembly for mass casualties.

2. This information was confirmed Wednesday, Feb. 12, by three women captured in the Lebanese Beqaa on their way to conduct suicide bombings at the Beirut event. Under interrogation, the captives revealed that several more female suicide bombers were heading for Shiite targets across Lebanon.

3. Hizballah is in the middle of a campaign to raise additional Shiite volunteers for the different Syrian warfronts … A new wave of anti-Shiite terrorism in Lebanon would quickly derail this effort, especially in view of the hundreds of Hizballah fighters who have already laid down their lives in Syria. The organization is intent on concealing the real figure, but cannot hide all the funerals.

4. Its Iranian bosses understand that … Hizballah’s manpower resources cannot be stretched both for providing security at home and for augmenting its fighting personnel input for the Syrian war.

Is an even more radical, more terrifying terror group than Hamas now establishing itself in Gaza and “throwing Palestinians into a panic”?

It seems that ever more “extreme” groups emerge daily or even hourly into our purview out of the chaos of Islam’s internecine strife.

The death-dealing monsters in this picture, belonging to an al-Qaeda affiliate called DAESH, are jittering the master-terrorists of Hamas itself.

The Arabic acronym DAESH stands for the “Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant”. They have produced a YouTube video in which they fiercely announce their plans to wage jihad against “infidels, traitors and Crusaders”.

The picture and our quotations come from a Gatestone Institute article by Khaled Abu Toameh:

The announcement is seen as a challenge to the Palestinian Islamist movement Hamas, which has been in control of the Gaza Strip since July 2007.

Palestinian Authority security officials in Ramallah expressed fear that the Al-Qaeda-affiliated group would try to establish terrorist cells also in the West Bank.

[These] 10 heavily-armed masked terrorists declare allegiance to DAESH, whose men are responsible for most of the atrocities in Syria and Iraq over the past few years.

Most? Surely that’s impossible to know. But we can believe they have committed a great many atrocities.

In the video, a spokesman for the group announces that in addition to Syria and Iraq, DAESH now has “lions and armies in the environs of Jerusalem.”

Lions? We guess they mean human beasts of prey.

The spokesman says that the group’s goal is to restore the dignity of Muslims who have been “humiliated” by their enemies. He urges Muslims to rally behind his group and support its members in their jihad against the enemies of Islam and “Arab tyrants.”

Palestinians have reacted with panic to the emergence of the Al-Qaeda-affiliated group in the Gaza Strip.

According to reports from the Gaza Strip, Palestinians are worried that the DAESH terrorists will perpetrate atrocities against those who oppose their ideology and activities.

“This group is much more dangerous and radical than Hamas,” said a Palestinian journalist from Gaza City. “The presence of Al-Qaeda in the Gaza Strip is bad news not only for Hamas, but for all Palestinians. Palestinians see the crimes and massacres perpetrated by Al-Qaeda in Iraq and Syria and fear that they could be repeated in the West Bank and Gaza Strip.”

Hamas leaders, for their part, have reacted with skepticism to the announcement by DAESH, describing it as another attempt to “distort” Hamas’s image and “resistance”. 

Salah Bardaweel, a senior Hamas official in the Gaza Strip, said that the Gaza Strip was a “small area with no room for Al-Qaeda-affiliated groups”. 

Hamas has not hesitated in the past to confront tiny jihadi groups whose members had openly challenged its rule. Like DAESH, these groups believe that Hamas is too “moderate” and is no longer committed to the “armed struggle” against Israel.

In one of the deadliest confrontations, Hamas security forces killed and arrested a number of jihadi terrorists who found shelter in a mosque in the town of Rafah in the Gaza Strip. At least 28 jihadi terrorists were killed and 120 wounded during the 2009 raid on members of a group called Jund Allah [Soldiers of God].

It now remains to be seen whether Hamas will be able to crush the new Al-Qaeda-affiliated group, whose members are also operating in the neighboring Sinai Peninsula.

The enemy of Islam is modernity itself. Until Muslims realize that, they will never recover from humiliation.

This map and the text come from an article by Katie Pavlich at Townhall:

Government watchdog Judicial Watch has released an unclassified map showing the military fleet positions the night of the 9/11 Benghazi terror attack. The map shows dozens of military ships, including two aircraft carriers and 13 destroyers, were stationed in the North Africa Area of Responsibility when radical Islamic militants stormed the U.S. consulate in Benghazi, killing four Americans including U.S. Ambassador Chris Stevens. Diplomatic Security agent David Ubben, a survivor of the attack, waited severely wounded on a roof with Navy SEALS Tyrone Woods and Glen Doherty for 20 hours before help arrived. Woods and Doherty were killed during the waiting period.

Air Force Lieutenant Colonel Randall R. Schmidt supplied Judicial Watch with the map and has been investigating the Benghazi attack for more than a year. Based on his experience as a fighter pilot, Schmidt has repeatedly said there is no reason why military forces could not have responded more efficiently to the attack.

“Destroyers could have responded to the attack,” Schmidt told Judicial Watch, adding that forces in the area are trained to do rapid response. “There were enough forces to respond.”

To think for yourself and express your thoughts is a capital offense in Iran and Saudi Arabia, because Islam will not tolerate it.

This is from Poetry Foundation:

We were saddened and horrified today to learn of the death of Hashem Shaabani, who was executed on January 27th by the order of Iranian President Hassan Rouhani.

From Radio Free Europe:

An Islamic Revolutionary Tribunal reportedly had sentenced the poet to death, along with 14 others, last July on charges that included “waging war on God.”

Press reports said Shaabani was hanged after his sentence was approved by President Hassan Rohani.

In a statement on February 5, Freedom House said Shaabani was subjected to severe torture and interrogation during his three years in prison.

Human Rights Voices also reports on the execution, writing:

To those who knew him, Hashem Shaabani was a man of peace and understanding struggling to extend spaces of individual freedom within the despotic Khomeinist system…In one of his letters from prison, made available to use through his family, Shaabani says he could not have remained silent against ‘hideous crimes against Ahvazis* perpetrated by the Iranian authorities, particularly arbitrary and unjust executions’.  He adds, ‘I have tried to defend the legitimate right that every people in this world should have which is the right to live freely with full civil rights. With all these miseries and tragedies, I have never used a weapon to fight these atrocious crimes except the pen.’

And this is from the Friendly Atheist section of Patheos Press:

Saudi blogger and religious dissident Raif Badawi has been cruelly punished and toyed with by the Saudi legal system for about a year now, and things have taken a darker turn. According to Badawi’s wife, now living in Lebanon, the high court will try Badawi on the charge of apostasy. If convicted, Badawi could be executed.

This comes after a court opted not to charge him with apostasy in January, but did put him up on charges of “insulting Islam and showing disobedience.” How did they come to this decision? Badawi is the co-founder of a website called the Liberal Saudi Network, which is bad enough, but imagine the horror that washed over Saudi society with this kind of action:

The evidence against him included the fact that he pressed the “Like” button on a Facebook page for Arab Christians.

As a result of this heinous behavior, in July, Badawi was sentenced to 600 lashes and seven years in prison.

Which was horrifying enough. But now it looks like Badawi is being brought up on apostasy charges in earnest. Badawi’s case is one of many being watched by the Office of Public Policy at the Center for Inquiry, where I work, and our Campaign for Free Expression. …

Those who position themselves as “allies” of Saudi Arabia, such as the United States, need to discover their consciences. How can the civilized world refer to itself as such when an ally practices such barbarism, it looks the other way?

Hangings in Iran

* Ahvazis – people of the city of Ahvaz or Al-Ahwaz, capital of  Khuzestan Province, Iran. Many of them are Arabs. Sympathetic as we are to Hashem Shaabani and his principles, we hope he was not defending the four Ahvazis who had been executed for a terrorist bombing in their city in 2007. (Terrorists should be executed. But the Iranian regime has no principled approach to terrorism. It is itself a terrorist regime. And just think of the thousands who have been killed, and continue to be killed by Iran-sponsored terrorists, chief among them the criminal organization Hezbollah.) 

This video is the trailer of a forthcoming documentary, Honor Diaries: