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

Here’s the story.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A very fine difference if any at all!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

*

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

Debbie Schlussel writes:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

The manifesto of Anders Breivik, the Norwegian terrorist (see our posts Nemesis comes to Norway, and Nemesis comes to Europe immediately below), can be found here.

It is a long pdf document titled A European Declaration of Independence. The author’s name – an obvious Anglicization of his own name – is given as Andrew Berwick; the place and date of posting online, London 2011.

It is clearly and for the most part correctly written. One would suppose he must have had help from someone whose first language is English, but he says, “It should be noted that English is my secondary language and due to certain security precautions I was unable to have the documents professionally edited and proof read. Needless to say, there is a potential for improving it literarily.” Chunks of it, with small variations, are copied from the writings of the Unabomber.

In most of the first two sections, reasonable arguments are set out chiefly against the Islamization of Europe, multiculturalism, Marxism, political correctness, leftist indoctrination in the universities, feminism, and what he calls “Enviro-Communism”. In support of his views he quotes or refers to many of the writers and authorities we respect, such as Bernard Lewis, Bat Ye’Or, Robert Spencer, Andrew Bostom, Bruce Bawer, Daniel Pipes, Diana West, Melanie Phillips, Theodore Dalrymple. He deplores as we do the influence that revolutionaries like Antonio Gramsci and Georg Lukacs, and Marxist theorists such as Herbert Marcuse and his fellow members of the “Frankfurt School”, have had on the politics of the West over the last half century or so. The values Western leaders have failed, he says, to uphold are individual freedom, freedom of speech, democracy. Histories of Islam’s earlier advances into Europe, quotations from the Koran and accounts of Islamic belief are carefully referenced.

The reasonable arguments are interrupted now and then by flights of romantic fancy inspired by the poetry of Ted Hughes, Nordic legend, and the superman ethics of Friedrich Nietzsche. These foreshadow what becomes, in the third section, full-fledged fantasy. It is here that obsession shows itself. He revives in his imagination the crusading Order of the Knights Templar (destroyed by King Philip the Beautiful and brought to a fiery end in 1314, when the last officers of the order, including the Grand Master Jacques de Molay, were burnt at the stake as heretics on an island in the Seine). He declares himself to be a “Knight Justiciar”. He writes as if a considerable number of others, predominantly northern Europeans, share the fantasy with him; a company that will mount a violent crusade against the powers who have betrayed the ideals and achievements of Christian Europe. The crusade will become a civil war – a global civil war: “not  between capitalists and socialists, but between nationalists and internationalists”; and between Islam and the non-Islamic world.

He condemns Nazism, but is prepared to fight alongside neo-Nazi groups. Criminal organizations would also be co-opted. The manifesto becomes a handbook for terrorists. He specifies the buildings that should be bombed, including government buildings and mosques. He lists the chemicals needed for making bombs, advises how to acquire them (eg. by having a farm and buying fertilizer in large quantities as if for the land), and describes in detail how to make them.

He expresses regret that women must be killed as well as men, but insists that in pursuit of such a high task as the Knights have set themselves, soft feelings cannot be indulged.

He sees the role in which he is casting himself as heroic. He encourages others to become hero-martyrs like him:

You will forever be celebrated by your people as a martyr for your country, protecting your culture and fighting for your kin and for Christendom.

You will be remembered as a conservative revolutionary pioneer, one of the brave European Crusader heroes who said; enough is enough, it is time to take back our countries before our multiculturalist traitor elites actually manages to finalize their agenda and sell us all into Muslim slavery.

Your sacrifice will be a great source of inspiration for generations of Europeans to come.

You will become a role model for hundreds, perhaps thousands of new emerging martyrs fighting the good fight, our fight.

And when we seize political and military power in Europe within a few decades, it will be pioneers and historical pioneers like you who will be celebrated with reverence.

Revolutionary patriots like the Justiciar Knights will then be celebrated as destroyers of Marxism and the slayer of tyrants; the fearless and selfless protectors of Europe, The Perfect Knights.

For there is no greater glory than dying selflessly while pro-actively protecting your people from persecution and gradual demographical annihilation.

We are destined to win in the end, as our people, all Europeans, are gradually waking up from their slumber and realising the deceitfulness and suicidal nature of multiculturalist doctrine.

We do not only have the people on our side, we have the truth on our side, we have time on our side, we have the will of our ancestors and the will of God on our side.

The Left will almost certainly claim that Breivik’s atrocious acts of terrorism are what opposition to Islamization and multiculturalism et cetera lead to. They will probably use his manifesto as proof of a “vast right-wing conspiracy”.

The Obama administration likes to pretend that white middle class Americans are the most likely terrorists.

But the fact is that for the last 45 years, acts of terrorism carried out by leftists and Muslims vastly outnumber those carried out in the name of any cause of the “right”. And terrorism as a method has not been often or strongly condemned by the leftist intelligentsia.

It will be now. As of course it should be.

We’ll have more to say about Breivik, his manifesto, and the right and wrong  lessons to be learnt from his actions.

Today the capital of Norway was bombed. As we are Islamophobic, suspicious by nature, and fairly well-informed, we leap to the conclusion that Muslims did it.

If we’re right, it’s a case of a biter being bitten.

Norway has long been cheering Islam on, because it’s a heavily leftist nation, and because most Norwegians hate Jews.

Bruce Bawer lives in Norway. He speaks authoritatively about Norway’s sentimental sympathy with Islam:

They’re overwhelmingly on the left, and intensely hostile to the West, to capitalism, to the US and to Israel. Before the fall of the USSR, an extraordinary percentage of them were Communists. They have replaced their affinity to the Soviet Union with sympathy for the great totalitarian ideology of our time: Islamism. Thus they romanticize Palestinians and despise Israel.

Part of the motivation for this anti-Semitism is the influx into Norway in recent decades of masses of Muslims from Pakistan, Iraq, Somalia and elsewhere. Multiculturalism has taught Norway’s cultural elite to take an uncritical, even obsequious, posture toward every aspect of Muslim culture and belief. When Muslim leaders rant against Israel and the Jews, the reflexive response of the multiculturalist elite is to join them in their rantings. This is called solidarity.

Norwegian history also plays a role in all this. Anti-Semitism has a long, deeply-rooted history here. This was never a cosmopolitan country – no nation in Europe was less ethnically or religiously diverse. On the contrary, Norway was a remote, rural, mountainous land of pious Lutheran farmers whose early 19th-century constitution banned Jews from its territory.

Norway was notoriously pro-Nazi. Later, after Germany was defeated –

The entrenched leftwing elite did its work through the schools, universities and media – producing a generation of Norwegians for whom being virtuous and intellectually sophisticated means, among other things, embracing the Muslim “victim,” and despising the Israeli “bully.”

On Oslo’s version of Fleet Street there is a bar, a journalists’ hangout, called Stopp Pressen (Stop the Presses). For years, there hung in its window a photograph of a smiling, beatific Yasser Arafat. From the way he was portrayed, you’d have thought he was Albert Schweizer. I walked by that picture almost every day for years. It was a good reminder of the sickness at the top ranks of this society.

How is modern anti-Semitism expressing itself in Norway?

Norwegian academics have sought to ban contacts with Israeli universities. Norwegian activists have encouraged boycotts of Israeli products. Every so often, a high-profile professor or activist, or some famous author … will write a virulent op-ed or give an angry speech denouncing Israel and insulting Jews as a people. …

Nothing … could be safer for them to say in this country; no one will seek to harm them physically or otherwise. On the contrary, their anti-Semitic drivel will only win them plaudits from their colleagues. Yet they are treated as bold, courageous, original truth-tellers. …

Well, they were safe enough from European Jews, who never hit back hard, even with mere words, more’s the pity.

But they were not safe from the very people they brown-nosed, if we’re right about who bombed them today.

How dangerous is political and radical Islam in Norway?

Terrifyingly dangerous. And what makes it dangerous is the eagerness of the cultural elite to whitewash it. Islamists are welcomed into the elite. In recent years, one high-profile Islamist has been given a coveted position as a columnist for the country’s newspaper of record, while another has become a leading member of one of the political parties, and has established himself as a powerful figure in Norwegian society.

These men are invited to parties at the US Embassy, and enjoy friendly relations with top members of the Norwegian government and with members of the royal family. It seems clear that they are being groomed for high political office …

Then there’s our resident terrorist, Mullah Krekar, and his family, who have long been the subjects of fawning newspaper and TV profiles in which they are depicted sympathetically as kind, gentle, suffering victims. (This is a man who founded the terrorist group Ansar al-Islam, and who is known to be guilty of murdering and torturing children.)

Oslo was violently attacked by Muslims two years ago when –

…  supposedly in response to Israel’s actions against Hamas, Muslims rioted in downtown Oslo, making a large area of the city look like Beirut or Sarajevo at their most violent moments in modern history. The violence was out of control, the damage extensive. Yet almost everyone got off scot-free.

Early last year, in the same Oslo Square where Quisling and his henchman once held rallies [Vidkun Quisling was the Minister-President of Norway 1942-1945 who collaborated enthusiastically with Hitler – JB], scores of radical Muslims gathered to hear a Nazi-like message of hate against Jews, gays, secular democracy, America, the West, Israel. The speeches were chilling. Yet the men who gave those speeches continue to be treated with respect by Norwegian authorities.

Will a bombing, by Muslims, of their capital city change the minds of Norwegians about Islam?

More likely they’ll cringe even lower and lick the boots of Muslims more zealously. We’ll wait and see.

Now he’s wooing the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt.

The Muslim Brotherhood is one of the chief Islamic organizations driving the jihad against America and the rest of the non-Muslim world. It is not “moderate” or “secular” as Obama and his henchmen say it is. It’s agenda is to destroy the United States, establish a world-ruling caliphate, impose sharia law, force Christians to pay for being allowed to live, wipe out the Jews, and keep women subservient to men.

Islam is the active enemy of the United States. And the president of the United States is on its side.

His heart is with Islam.

But, you might protest, he allowed the execution of Osama bin Laden. Yes, he did – reluctantly, we believe – because he had to seem to be against the most obvious and violent enemy who had plotted the 9/11 massacre of Americans. The order he gave to the Navy SEALs to kill bin Laden provides Obama with cover for his continuing support of the enemy and undermining of the country he was disastrously elected to lead.

An analogy would be if the British had elected Oswald Mosley, the Nazi-sympathizer and friend of Hitler and Goebbels, to lead them through World War Two.

Here is a timeline, from Investor’s Business Daily, which traces  the steps Obama has taken towards pleasing and finally embracing the Muslim Brotherhood:

2009: The White House invites [the Islamic Society of North America] ISNA’s president to President Obama’s inauguration ceremonies, even though the Justice Department just two years earlier had blacklisted the Brotherhood affiliate as an unindicted co-conspirator in the Holy Land trial — the largest terror-finance case in U.S. history.

2009: Obama delivers his Cairo speech to Muslims, infuriating the Mubarak regime by inviting Brotherhood leaders to attend.

2009: The White House dispatches top presidential adviser Valerie Jarrett to give the keynote speech at ISNA’s annual convention.

2009: Obama appoints a Brotherhood-tied Islamist — Rashad Hussain — as U.S. envoy to the Organization of the Islamic Conference, which strongly supports the Brotherhood. [Its name was changed in June this year to The Organization of Islamic Co-operation – JB]

2010: Hussain meets with the Brotherhood’s grand mufti in Egypt.

2010: Obama meets one on one with Egypt’s foreign minister, Ahmed Aboul Gheit, who later remarks on Nile TV: “The American president told me in confidence that he is a Muslim.”

2011: Riots erupt in Cairo’s Tahrir Square. Crowds organized by the Brotherhood demand Mubarak’s ouster, storm government buildings. The White House fails to back longtime U.S. ally Mubarak, who flees Cairo.

2011: White House sends intelligence czar James Clapper to Capitol Hill to whitewash the Brotherhood’s extremism. Clapper testifies the group is a moderate, “largely secular” organization.

2011: The Brotherhood’s spiritual leader — Sheikh Yusuf Qaradawi — is given a hero’s welcome in Tahrir Square, where he raises the banner of jihad. Qaradawi, exiled from Egypt for 30 years, had been calling for “days of rage” before the rioting in Egypt. Before Obama’s Cairo speech, he wrote an open letter to the president arguing terrorism is a direct response to U.S. foreign policy.

2011: The Brotherhood vows to tear up Egypt’s 30-year peace treaty with Israel. Since Mubarak’s fall, it has worked to formally reestablish Cairo’s ties with Hamas and Hezbollah.

2011: Obama gives Mideast speech demanding Israel relinquish land to Palestinians.

2011: White House security adviser gives friendly speech to Washington-area mosque headed by ISNA’s new president. 2011: Justice Department pulls plug on further prosecution of Muslim Brotherhood front groups identified as collaborators in conspiracy to funnel millions to Hamas. …

Frank Gaffney reports and comments at the Center for Security Policy:

Muslim Brotherhood fronts are routinely cultivated by federal, state and local officials. Representatives of homeland security, Pentagon, intelligence and law enforcement agencies frequently meet with and attend functions sponsored by such groups. … Individuals with family and other ties to the Muslim Brotherhood have actually been given senior government positions. The most recent of these to come to light is Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s Deputy Chief of Staff, Huma Abedin [wife of the former Congressman Anthony Weiner]. …

The Obama administration’s efforts to “engage” the Muslim Brotherhood are not just reckless. They are wholly incompatible with the President’s oath to “preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States” and the similar commitment made by his subordinates.

In Gaffney’s view, it’s a step too far:

These officials’ now-open embrace of the Muslim Brotherhood constitutes a geo-strategic tipping point … Instead of relying upon – let alone hiring – Muslim Brotherhood operatives and associates, the United States government should be shutting down their fronts, shariah-adherent, jihad-incubating “community centers” and insidious influence operations in America. By recognizing these enterprises for what they are, namely vehicles for fulfilling the seditious goals of the MB’s civilization jihad, they can and must be treated as prosecutable subversive enterprises, not protected religious ones under the U.S. Constitution. …

The policy toward the MB in Egypt will, Gaffney explains, strengthen and encourage the organization in America:

By engaging the Ikhwan [Arabic for the Brotherhood] in its native land, the Obama administration is effectively eliminating any lingering impediment to the operations of its myriad front groups in this country. Even before Secretary Clinton’s announcement, many of them have already been accorded unprecedented access to and influence in the U.S. government. …

The EU is following Obama’s lead in embracing the MB.

Robert Spencer writes at Front Page:

Following quickly after the revelation that the Obama administration had resolved to establish contact with the Muslim Brotherhood, the European Union has announced that it, too, is interested in talking with the group. …

So why is the Western world rushing to talk to this malignant group? Why the determination to ignore and deny what it stands for and says it will do?

If the Western world is to survive the Islamic jihad onslaught, it will only manage to do so by decisively rejecting this fantasy-based policymaking. …

Even commentators like Spencer and Gaffney who see clearly what is happening and what must follow, do not confront the most obvious explanation for Obama’s acting as he does towards this powerful spearhead of Islam, setting an example for others to follow, perhaps because it is  “too dreadful to contemplate”  as used to be said of nuclear war breaking out between the West and the Soviet Union.

The too-dreadful-to-contemplate answer is that this is not “fantasy-based policymaking”, but policymaking with a view to achieving the very results that are being achieved: the slow but steady, step-by step conquest of the West by Islam.

We’re saying that Obama wants Islam to succeed.

Melanie Phillips sees Obama’s cozying up to the MB as capitulation. She writes:

The abject capitulation of the Obama administration to the forces waging war on the western world was laid bare a few days ago when US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton announced that the US now wanted to open a dialogue with the Muslim Brotherhood.

And she asks in bewilderment:

Why does supposedly arch-feminist Hillary want to ‘engage’ with a movement that would promote the mutilation of Egyptian women?

Whether Hillary Clinton and the EU foreign policy chief Catherine Ashton understand what it will mean if Islam achieves its aim of  world domination – the universal imposition of sharia law, dhimmification of Christians, annihilation of the Jews, the subjugation of women, a descent into another age of darkness – we don’t know; but we suspect they simply don’t allow themselves to think that those horrors could, let alone will, ensue. For them they would be too dreadful to contemplate.

As, perhaps, would be – for most Americans – the idea that a victorious Islam is the change Obama hopes for.

Ever since the Second World War, the Catholic Church has desperately tried to separate itself from the history of the Third Reich, and repudiate Adolf Hitler as one of its sons.

Before the war, in the early years of Hitler’s chancellorship, the Church in Germany did oppose him. But from 1939 onward, it collaborated with him; a fact which it has gone to great pains to try and disprove, without success.

We suspect it is embarrassed rather than appalled by what Hitler wrought without its interference,  condemnation, or even the mildest official objection when the Final Solution, the genocide of the Jews, was implemented. We say this in consideration of the Catholic Church’s own totalitarian, anti-Semitic, and blood-soaked history.

Hitler was born into a Catholic family and was brought up as a Catholic by a pious mother. He was baptized in the Roman Catholic Church as an infant in April 1889. He was confirmed in 1904. He was a communicant and an altar boy. For a time in his adolescence he thought of becoming a priest.

In adulthood, his ardour for the Church cooled. He did not go to confession or attend mass. But he continued throughout his life to think of himself as a Christian, and as Dictator of the Third Reich he maintained the most cordial and co-operative relationship with the Vatican and the German primates.

The Church will not confess to this. Its revisionism, how it now presents its attitude to Hitler, is illustrated by this quotation from a letter dated November 21, 2002, written by David E. Utsler, the Information Specialist of an organization called Catholics United for the Faith, in Steubenville, Ohio:

It is true Hitler was born to Catholic parents. His father was reported to be lukewarm in his faith, but his mother was very devout. Adolf Hitler was confirmed in 1904, but did not often attend Mass. The question is not whether Hitler was a Catholic, but whether he practiced the Catholic faith and if his lifestyle accurately represented Catholicism. Clearly, the answer to that question is “no.”

Hitler was not a faithful son of the Church, docile to her teaching, but rather looked at the Church in a way that served his own ends. For example, in his Mein Kampf, he makes reference to the Catholic Church, because he perceived the Church to be a blueprint for the totalitarian state he wished to create. It is absurd to construe Hitler’s political delusions as an indictment against the Church. …

The real question is whether Hitler persevered in the faith of his baptism or turned from it. The historical record clearly shows that Hitler, in both word and deed, repudiated the faith of his baptism, so Hitler’s “Catholicism” is a non-issue.

How they would like it to be a “non-issue”! But while Hitler could certainly be described as a “lapsed Catholic”, and although the Church likes to claim now that his deeds demonstrate a repudiation of Catholicism, there is no record of his ever making a statement of renunciation.

What were Hitler’s religious beliefs?

The following information and quotations come from an essay by Chris Thiefe, an American atheist of German descent:

As Hitler approached boyhood he attended a monastery school. (On his way to school young Adolf daily observed a stone arch which was carved with the monastery’s coat of arms bearing a swastika.) …

In MeinKampf he wrote about his love for the church and the clergy. “I had excellent opportunity to intoxicate myself with the solemn splendor of the brilliant church festivals. As was only natural, the abbot seemed to me, as the village priest had once seemed to my father, the highest and most desirable ideal.”…

He was never excommunicated nor condemned by his church. …

In a document dated 22 July 1933, he wrote: “The fact that the Vatican is concluding a treaty with the new Germany [concerning German tax revenues sent to the Vatican] means the acknowledgement of the National Socialist state by the Catholic Church. This treaty shows the whole world clearly and unequivocally that the assertion that National Socialism is hostile to religion is a lie.” …

The Church preached Nazi ideals in their sermons and “in turn Hitler placed Catholic teachings in public education”.

This photo depicts Hitler with Archbishop Cesare Orsenigo, the papal nuncio in Berlin. It was taken On April 20, 1939, when Orsenigo celebrated Hitler’s birthday. The celebrations were initiated by Pacelli (Pope Pius XII) and became a tradition.

In the 1920s, Hitler’s German Workers’ Party adopted a 25 point program. Point 24 stated:

“We demand liberty for all religious denominations in the State, so far as they are not a danger to it and do not militate against the morality and moral sense of the German race. The Party, as such, stands for positive Christianity, but does not bind itself in the matter of creed to any particular confession…”

The Church alleges that Hitler was an atheist, or a pagan, or  was interested in mystical cults and occultism.

But he was positively intolerant of atheism:

“’We were convinced that the people needs and requires this faith. We have therefore undertaken the fight against the atheistic movement, and that not merely with a few theoretical declarations: we have stamped it out’.” -Adolf Hitler, in a speech in Berlin on 24 Oct. 1933.

And, Thiefe writes, “the following words from Hitler show his disdain for atheism, and pagan cults, and reveal the strength of his Christian feelings”:

“’National Socialism is not a cult-movement– a movement for worship; it is exclusively a ‘volkic’ political doctrine based upon racial principles. In its purpose there is no mystic cult, only the care and leadership of a people defined by a common blood-relationship… We will not allow mystically- minded occult folk with a passion for exploring the secrets of the world beyond to steal into our Movement. Such folk are not National Socialists, but something else– in any case something which has nothing to do with us. At the head of our programme there stand no secret surmisings but clear-cut perception and straightforward profession of belief. But since we set as the central point of this perception and of this profession of belief the maintenance and hence the security for the future of a being formed by God, we thus serve the maintenance of a divine work and fulfill a divine will— not in the secret twilight of a new house of worship, but openly before the face of the Lord… Our worship is exclusively the cultivation of the natural, and for that reason, because natural, therefore God-willed. Our humility is the unconditional submission before the divine laws of existence so far as they are known to us men.” -Adolf Hitler, in Nuremberg on 6 Sept.1938.

Of course Nazism itself was a mystic cult – as that statement convincingly confirms. And the cult was not Christian. But the Christian God was never dethroned in Hitler’s mind.

Testimony to this comes from his architect friend, Albert Speer, who wrote in his book Inside the Third Reich:

“Around 1937, when Hitler heard that at the instigation of the party and the SS vast numbers of his followers had left the church because it was obstinately opposing his plans, he nevertheless ordered his chief associates, above all Goering and Goebbels, to remain members of the church. He too would remain a member of the Catholic Church, he said, although he had no real attachment to it. And in fact he remained in the church until his suicide.“

The Catholic Church continues to do its utmost to exonerate Pope Pius XII, pleading that he saved some Jewish lives. But the hard truth remains that the Church stood by as Hitler did his worst.

Jillian Becker    September 17, 2010

What is socialism?

Never mind dictionary definitions. Rather ask, what does a socialist state do?

It controls the resources of a nation and allocates them as it chooses.

More fully: In a socialist state, resources are controlled by an all-powerful central agency, the government, and distributed according to the arbitrary decision of the most powerful person or persons in that government.

Widely, “socialism” is thought of as a creed of equality, as is “communism”.  It is to achieve their high ideal of equality that socialists and communists favor the forced collection and allocation of resources.  If they achieve a kind of equality, it is only and always an equality of misery. For this they have many explanations and excuses, but no remedy.

The difference between socialism and communism is often said to be a difference of degree, or manner of enforcement. In common parlance, at least in the West, “socialism” refers to a similar but milder, less oppressive, system of collectivization.  West European states were happy to call themselves “socialist’, and saw the self-described “communist” states, chiefly the Soviet Union, as their enemies.

In the Soviet Union, however, “socialism” and “communism” were commonly used interchangeably, as synonyms. In Marxist theory, “communism” is an ideal that will be realized when the state – ie government – has “withered away”.  But withering away is not on the agenda of any existing socialist government, nor is likely to be.

In fact, most forms of collectivism can  justifiably be called “socialist”.  (An exception is Islam.) The collectivist idea is that the society, not the individual, is important, so the citizenry must be organized. The organization must be enforced, whether harshly or temperately.  Most self-described “socialist” states consider their rule not only temperate but positively beneficent, while they see “communist” states as cruel and oppressive.

But the word “socialism” cannot bear a connotation of beneficence. Nor does it always imply equality.

Remember that the Nazis were self-described socialists: national socialists. Nazi is the short name for the National Socialist German Workers’ Party.  And of course the Nazis saw themselves as beneficent – to those they counted as worthy of existence, the “Aryan” Germans. They had a tender care for their citizens. In the Third Reich official collections were taken up for the poor to keep them warm in winter (the annual “Winterhilfe” charity drive).  But nobody thinks of the Third Reich as a kindly state, or one that did humankind any good. And its rulers scorned the notion of equality, either between persons or between nations.

So one clear distinction that does exist among socialist states is that some are ideologically egalitarian – eg Soviet Russia, Maoist China, Castroite Cuba – and some are non-egalitarian – eg Nazi Germany.

The Soviet communists considered themselves international socialists – even when Stalin declared his policy to be for a time  “socialism in one country” (the one country being the USSR). The Marxist ideological vision was and remains a world government controlling the world’s resources – a vision now justified in the name of environmentalism.

The biggest political divide comes between collectivism and freedom. Or rather, since a totally free country does not exist, between those who hold collectivism as an ideal, and those who want every individual to be free.

While it is true that a totally free country is nowhere to be found, such a thing could exist. It would not be an anarchy, because freedom is a product of civil order, and  is only possible under the rule of law. Everyone’s freedom should be limited only by everyone else’s, but the protection of every individual, his person, property, and freedom, requires the rule of law.

The USA was as free as any country has ever been, more so than any other large nation. (Small areas have been freer, such as Hong Kong, which was legally under British rule and could rely on the protection of law, but was free of taxes and all the harm that ensues from taxation – such as regulation of trade, and welfare.)

Now Americans are losing their freedom rapidly, since they voted Democratic socialists into power in Congress, and a Marxist-trained “community organizer” to the presidency. He has packed fellow socialists into his administration. Some declare themselves to be “Maoists” or “communists”.  All of them are collectivists.

It will take a hard fight to recover the liberty that has been lost, but for those who want to be free, it’s a battle that must be won.

Jillian Becker    August 13, 2010

In the vocabulary of the militant international Left, the word “peace” is a code word for “pro-tyranny” and “anti-freedom”.

This comes from a must-read article, titled The Peace Racket, by Bruce Bawer in City Journal (reprinted in the current issue from Summer 2007):

We need to make two points about this movement at the outset. First, it’s opposed to every value that the West stands for—liberty, free markets, individualism—and it despises America, the supreme symbol and defender of those values. Second, we’re talking not about a bunch of naive Quakers but about a movement of savvy, ambitious professionals that is already comfortably ensconced at the United Nations, in the European Union, and in many nongovernmental organizations. It is also waging an aggressive, under-the-media-radar campaign for a cabinet-level Peace Department in the United States. Sponsored by Ohio Democratic congressman Dennis Kucinich (along with more than 60 cosponsors), House Resolution 808 would authorize a Secretary of Peace to “establish a Peace Academy,” “develop a peace education curriculum” for elementary and secondary schools, and provide “grants for peace studies departments” at campuses around the country. If passed, the measure would catapult the peace studies movement into a position of extraordinary national, even international, influence.

The Peace Racket’s boundaries aren’t easy to define. It embraces scores of “peace institutes” and “peace centers” in the U.S. and Europe, plus several hundred university peace studies programs. …

At the movement’s heart … are programs whose purported emphasis is on international relations. Their founding father is a 77-year-old Norwegian professor, Johan Galtung, who established the International Peace Research Institute in 1959 and the Journal of Peace Research five years later. Invariably portrayed in the media as a charismatic and (these days) grandfatherly champion of decency, Galtung is in fact a lifelong enemy of freedom. In 1973, he thundered that “our time’s grotesque reality” was—no, not the Gulag or the Cultural Revolution, but rather the West’s “structural fascism.” He’s called America a “killer country,” accused it of “neo-fascist state terrorism,” and gleefully prophesied that it will soon follow Britain “into the graveyard of empires.” …

Fittingly, he urged Hungarians not to resist the Soviet Army in 1956, and his views on World War II suggest that he’d have preferred it if the Allies had allowed Hitler to finish off the Jews and invade Britain.

Though Galtung has opined that the annihilation of Washington, D.C., would be a fair punishment for America’s arrogant view of itself as “a model for everyone else,” he’s long held up certain countries as worthy of emulation—among them Stalin’s USSR, whose economy, he predicted in 1953, would soon overtake the West’s. He’s also a fan of Castro’s Cuba, which he praised in 1972 for “break[ing] free of imperialism’s iron grip.” …

His all-time favorite nation? China during the Cultural Revolution. Visiting his Xanadu, Galtung concluded that the Chinese loved life under Mao: after all, they were all “nice and smiling.” While “repressive in a certain liberal sense,” he wrote, Mao’s China was “endlessly liberating when seen from many other perspectives that liberal theory has never understood.” Why, China showed that “the whole theory about what an ‘open society’ is must be rewritten, probably also the theory of ‘democracy’—and it will take a long time before the West will be willing to view China as a master teacher in such subjects.”  [See our post, Mao in the White House, October 15, 2009, for glimpses of what Mao’s China was really like.]  …

Galtung’s use of the word “peace” to legitimize totalitarianism is an old Communist tradition. …

The people running today’s peace studies programs give a good idea of the movement’s illiberal, anti-American inclinations. The director of Purdue’s program is coeditor of Marxism Today, a collection of essays extolling socialism; Brandeis’s peace studies chairman has justified suicide bombings; the program director at the University of Missouri authorized a mass e-mail urging students and faculty to boycott classes to protest the Iraq invasion; and the University of Maine’s program director believes that “humans have been out of balance for centuries” and that “a unique opportunity of this new century is to engage in the creation of balance and harmony between yin and yang, masculine and feminine energies.” (Such New Age babble often mixes with the Marxism in peace studies jargon.)

What these people teach remains faithful to Galtung’s anti-Western inspiration. First and foremost, they emphasize that the world’s great evil is capitalism—because it leads to imperialism, which in turn leads to war. …

Students acquire a zero-sum picture of the world economy: if some countries and people are poor, it’s because others are rich. They’re taught that American wealth derives entirely from exploitation and that Americans, accordingly, are responsible for world poverty.

If the image of tenured professors pushing such anticapitalist nonsense on privileged suburban kids sounds like a classic case of liberals’ throwing stones at their own houses, get a load of this: America’s leading Peace Racket institution is probably the University of Notre Dame’s Joan B. Kroc Institute for International Peace Studies—endowed by and named for the widow of Ray Kroc, founder of McDonald’s, the ultimate symbol of evil corporate America. It was the Kroc Institute, by the way, that in 2004 invited Islamist scholar Tariq Ramadan to join its faculty, only to see him denied a U.S. visa on the grounds that he had defended terrorism. [He has since been granted a visa by Hillary Clinton – JB.] …

What’s alarming is that these [peace studies] students don’t plan to spend their lives on some remote mountainside in Nepal contemplating peace, harmony, and human oneness. They want to remake our world. They plan to become politicians, diplomats, bureaucrats, journalists, lawyers, teachers, activists. They’ll bring to these positions all the mangled history and misbegotten ideology that their professors have handed down to them. Their careers will advance; the Peace Racket’s influence will spread. And as it does, it will weaken freedom’s foundations.

Adolf Hitler wanted to to be an artist and believed he had the necessary talent.

In his book Hitler, the historian Norman Stone contradicts some assumptions about the young Adolf that were and still are widely held:

Hitler  inherited enough capital [from his father] to keep him roughly at the level of a junior schoolteacher, and he did not have to starve – on the contrary, as he grew up, he became a fussy dresser, and indulged his taste for opera. He could pay for his own  studies, and he made for the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna, hoping to study architecture. The academy thought quite highly of him but competition for places was severe and he was twice rejected in 1907 and 1908.

Actually, Stone gets one thing wrong there. Hitler’s “test drawing” in 1907 was “unsatisfactory”, according to Academy records. And in 1908 his submissions did not even qualify him to take the entrance examination.

But he did make some extra money by selling his paintings to tourists.

Norman Stone writes:

Contrary to legends that he later propagated, he was never crushed by poverty, forced to live in a home for tramps, or become a house painter.

During the Second World War it was commonly believed in the allied countries that Hitler had been a house painter. (Hannah Arendt says so in her book The Origins of Totalitarianism, perhaps because she really believed it, or perhaps because she wanted to believe it. It was an occupation that intellectuals naturally scorned. It would have been unthinkable to her that Hitler was a painter in the sense of being an artist – even a poor one.) Among intellectuals, art was then, as it is now, held in high esteem, and the calling of the artist was to them as near to being sacred as anything on earth could be. It was a view that Hitler shared.

To what extent his failure to become a renowned artist contributed to his becoming a monster, recognized universally as the personification and archetype of evil, nobody of course can know, though many theorize about it. The fact remains that the revolutionary national-socialist genocidal mass-murderer and destroyer of Europe, Adolf Hitler, was an art-loving bohemian, animal-loving vegetarian, and passionate admirer of Wagner’s death-loving operas. (“Death-loving”? See our post The cultivation of evil the sickness of Europe, July 20, 2010.)

Aesthetics should never be confused with ethics. Nor is strong feeling in itself a moral good. Beauty is not truth, nor truth beauty. And often what is true is extremely ugly.

*

Post Script: The paintings in our post below are by (in descending order):-

1. Hitler
2. Hitler
3. Hitler
4. Churchill
5. Hitler
6. Churchill
7. Churchill
8. Churchill
9. Hitler

Is Obama evil? Does he intend to do evil?

Cal Thomas writes at Townhall:

The Obama people are not intrinsically evil. Like someone caught up in a cult, they sincerely believe in the fiction they are peddling: more taxes will produce a healthier economy; the record debt is not a problem; more regulation will result in banks and big businesses operating ethically and for the greater good of their customers and the country; nationalized health care will mean better care for the sick; unrestricted abortion and same-sex marriage are fine; unenforced immigration laws are good because Democrats need to import votes and Republicans want cheap labor.

Maybe he’s right. Maybe Obama intends good and is simply mistaken as to how to achieve it.

We cannot be certain what anyone’s unexpressed thoughts and intentions are.

But we can make some judgments by contemplating the choices they make, and Obama chose to follow Saul Alinsky, who dedicated his book “Rules for Radicals”  – the bible of the “community organizers” whose ranks included Barack Obama – “to Lucifer”. Was Alinsky “only joking”, or was he informing his readers that he meant to do evil?

It seems to be hard for Americans, generally speaking (and perhaps to their credit), to believe that anyone can actually mean to do evil.  They’d rather believe that those who produce evil outcomes are merely making a terrible mistake. Or are victims so stressed by whatever has made them suffer that they act out of uncontrollable but understandable emotion, and so are forgivable.

Europeans know better.

Our post below discusses the European cultivation of evil.