Why has Israel not yet taken action to destroy Iran’s nuclear installations?

Perhaps because it has to deal with a more immediately urgent threat nearer home.

According to this report and commentary, Iran’s proxies – Syria, Hizbullah in Lebanon, Hamas in Gaza – are poised to launch another war against Israel:

Defense minister Ehud Barak’s snap nomination of OC Southern Command Maj. Gen. Yoav Galant as Israel’s 20th chief of staff was necessary  … to pull the high command together in view of the preparations to attack Israel gathering momentum …

The general expectation of a US-Israeli strike on Iran’s nuclear sites has therefore faded into the background of the threatening stance currently adopted by Tehran’s allies, Syria, Hizballah and the Palestinian Hamas and Islamic Jihad. …

Jerusalem is extremely concerned by the placing of four hostile military forces on the highest level of war preparedness in the last few days and are asking why. …

Syrian prime minister Naji al-Otari and Abbas Zaki, one of Palestinian Authority chairman Mahmoud Abbas’ closest aides, have spoken of a “very imminent” Middle East war …

There is no telling in the Middle East when an isolated incident may not deteriorate rapidly into a major conflict when the climate is as tense as it is at present. It came dangerously close on Aug. 3, when a Lebanese army sniper shot dead an Israeli colonel precipitating a heavy exchange of fire.

Lebanon is on tenterhooks over the nine Hizballah leaders the international court inquiring into the 2005 Hariri assassination plans to summon as suspected perpetrators of the crime. Hizballah’s leader Hassan Nasrallah has given the Beirut government due notice that if his top people are surrendered to the tribunal, he will plunge the country in a civil conflict.

Hizballah, backed by Damascus, recently began accusing Israel of engineering the murder, so providing themselves with a neat pretext for going to war and avoiding facing the music.

Thursday, Aug. 19, all Syrian homeland defenses and emergency services were placed on the highest war readiness for an outbreak of hostilities without further notice. …

We don’t doubt that all this is true. But our own view – admittedly from a distance – is that a devastating blow to Iran itself would stop the cat’s paw forces dead.

What else might be staying Israel’s hand against Iran? Bullying threats and orders from anti-Israel HQ, the White House?

Yes, we suspect that’s the answer. If we ‘re right, the danger of a widespread conflagration will intensify, and the pointless charade of “peace talks” between Israel and the Palestinian Authority’s powerless Abu Abbas, due to start September 2 on Obama’s insistence, can make not a jot of difference.

The UN does an enormous amount of harm. It would have to do an enormous amount of good just to balance its moral books, but does it do or has it ever done any good at all? If so, we’ve missed it.

Whatever the noble intentions behind its creation, its General Assembly is nothing better than a grand coven where evil-wishers chant curses on the United States and Israel. Its Security Council occasionally passes resolutions, of dubious value at best, that theoretically have the force of law but cannot be enforced. Its plethora of commissions and agencies send their devils posting about, going to and fro on the earth and driving up and down on it, doing wrong on tax-free wages.

And who pays pays the most for it? Why, the United States of course.

From the Heritage Foundation:

The U.S. has been the largest financial supporter of the U.N. since the organization’s founding in 1945. The U.S. is currently assessed 22 percent of the U.N. regular budget and more than 27 percent of the U.N. peacekeeping budget. In dollar terms, the Administration’s budget for FY 2011 requested $516.3 million for the U.N. regular budget and more than $2.182 billion for the peacekeeping budget.

That includes cash for UNIFIL, the organization that assists Hizbullah (see here and here), and for Moroccan rapists sent to keep peace for the UN in the Ivory Coast (see here).

The U.S. also provides assessed financial contributions to other U.N. organizations and voluntary contributions to many more U.N. organizations. …

The OMB [Office of Management and Budget] released its report on FY 2009 U.S. contributions to the U.N. in June 2010. The report revealed that the U.S. provided $6.347 billion to the U.N. system in FY 2009, including over $4 billion from the State Department, over $1.7 billion from USAID, over $245 million from the Department of Agriculture, and tens of millions more from the Departments of Health and Human Services, Labor, and Energy.

This is an all-time record in U.S. financial contributions to the U.N. system but, considering recent budget trends in the U.N., the record is likely to be broken in FY 2010.

Claudia Rosett writes about the UN’s waste, fraud, and abuse. She combs through such reports as can be winkled out of it and finds these instances among others:

In the realms of UN peacekeeping, with its more than $8 billion annual budget, for which U.S. taxpayers alone fork out roughly $2 billion per year, check out the UN’s nearly $1 billion annual program for peacekeeping air operations. In an August, 2009 report, the UN’s own internal auditors noted that participation by senior management was “inadequate,” current staffing levels were “insufficient,” time of effective bidding on air charter services was “insufficient,” provisions in air charter agreements were “unclear” and some vendor registration was “improper.”

It takes a certain amount of determination to slog through the UN jargon, in which an executive summary of “not adequate” is often code for outright abuse or screaming failure, if you slog on to the details of the report. But in these reports, which cover only a sampling of the UN’s sprawling global system, the problems roll on and on. In corners that rarely receive attention from the media, they range from poorly documented lump-sum handling of noncompetitively-sourced travel arrangements for the UN mission in East Timor (UNMIT), to the UN’s disregard of its own rules in choosing a director for the UN Centre for Regional Development (UNCRD), headquartered in Japan. …

When the Oil-for-Food scandal [UN/Iraq, see here] broke big time in 2004, the UN refused to release its internal audits of the program even to governments of member states, including its chief donor, the U.S. After a showdown with congressional investigators, the internal audits were finally tipped out in early 2005, via the UN inquiry led by Paul Volcker. They provided damning insights into UN administrative abuses and derelictions that helped feed the gusher of Oil-for-Food corruption. Those reports might have been useful in heading off the damage of that UN blowout, had they been released to the public as they were produced, instead of being exposed later as an embarrassing piece of the UN’s self-serving coverup. …

The UN delenda est!

The UN must be destroyed!

These days there cannot  be many states, if any, with governments free from corruption, but some are more corrupt than others. Afghanistan looks to be among the worst. Its make-believe democratic institutions, president and parliament, and the police and the military, are oiled with corruption. Bribery and extortion characterize the politics of the country. A thousand busy Americans driven by noble intentions will not easily succeed in purifying the soul of the nation or changing the Afghan way. Even John Kerry, whose noble intentions are on display though his own soul has been tainted by fibs about his military adventures, has failed to persuade President Karzai – the fellow who literally wears a mantle of power – to play nice. And though Secretary of State Hillary Clinton calls Karzai to inform him loftily of her “displeasure”, he continues to do it his way. This so disheartens the well-intentioned folk pursuing the counter-corruption endeavor that they are thinking of abandoning it.

This is from the Washington Post:

A close adviser to President Hamid Karzai, arrested last month on charges of soliciting a bribe, was also under investigation for allegedly providing luxury vehicles and cash to presidential allies and over telephone contacts with Taliban insurgents, according to Afghan officials familiar with the case.

The Afghan officials also said that it had been Karzai himself who intervened to win the quick release of the aide, Mohammad Zia Salehi, even after the arrest had been personally approved by the country’s attorney general. The new account suggests that the corruption case against Salehi was wider than previously known and that Karzai acted directly to secure his aide’s release. …

The intervention by Karzai came after the Afghan investigators had begun to pursue corruption cases against the aide and possibly other Karzai allies inside the presidential palace. A commission formed by Karzai after his aide was released concluded that Afghan agents who had carried out the investigation with support from U.S.-backed law enforcement units had violated Salehi’s human rights and were operating outside the constitution.

The back-and-forth revolves around the work of two American-backed Afghan task forces, one known as the Major Crimes Task Force and the other called the Sensitive Investigative Unit. It has created perhaps the most serious crisis this year in relations between Afghanistan and the United States. Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton called Karzai to express her displeasure with any decision that undermines anti-corruption enforcement, and Sen. John F. Kerry (D-Mass.) flew to Kabul this week with a warning to Karzai that his actions put at risk U.S. funding and congressional support for the war. …

Salehi is a Pashtun from Wardak province who heads the administration of Afghanistan’s National Security Council. Salehi has played a key role in support of Karzai’s efforts to win reconciliation with Taliban insurgents and end the war in Afghanistan. The current and former Afghan officials said he had spoken regularly by cellphone with Taliban representatives and had arranged meetings between the Karzai administration and members of the Taliban …

The Afghan officials said that the investigation had determined that Salehi had also been involved with making cash payments from a palace fund to pay off Karzai’s political supporters, and distributed gifts such as armored Land Cruisers and luxury Lexuses.

“He was one of the most trusted staff members in the palace to do special things,” said one Afghan official with direct knowledge of the case. …

One of the special things he did was to accept a bribe not to investigate bribery:

Wiretapped conversations had also produced evidence that Salehi had accepted gifts, including a car provided to his son, in return for playing a role in opposing a corruption investigation aimed at New Ansari, the nation’s largest money-transfer business, which was raided by investigators in January. “The talk on the intercepts was pretty clear that this car was intended to get Salehi to interfere with the investigation,” said a senior U.S. official who worked with Afghan anti-corruption teams. The American official said the evidence had been presented to Afghanistan’s attorney general, Mohammad Ishaq Aloko, who signed an arrest warrant for Salehi and instructed the Major Crimes Task Force, an Afghan police unit mentored by the FBI, to execute the arrest. …

On July 25 … Salehi was taken to a counternarcotics detention center in Kabul.

By 6 p.m. the same day, however, police with the Major Crimes Task Force received a second letter from Aloko, the attorney general, ordering Salehi’s release.

An Afghan official with direct knowledge of the case said that Aloko had come under “enormous pressure” from Karzai to set Salehi free. A second Afghan official with direct knowledge of the events said that Aloko “received an order from the president” that Salehi be released. …

According to the Afghan officials, corruption investigators now say they fear for the safety of their families and do not believe it is possible to convict those close to the president. They do not expect Salehi to be indicted. Some believe the two elite task forces will be disbanded.

That would be a blow to General Petraeus. Apparently he’s pinned his hopes on them, believing that the country could be “restored” to stability if only the corruption could be got rid of.

Gen. David H. Petraeus the new American commander, has made clear that he sees the effort as central to restoring stability to the country.

So the story of Salehi is not encouraging to those who still believe there is something to be won in Afghanistan. To others it bears a message of despair.

The last US combat brigade has left Iraq. From now on American military personnel will be there only to “advise and assist” the Iraqi government – when there is an Iraqi government to advise and assist. Five months ago parliamentary elections were held, but which party or coalition of parties should govern, and which party leader should be prime minister, are still in dispute. Prospects for agreement are not growing brighter.

Still, the US mission of pacifying and democratizing the country is regarded as almost accomplished.

Not that the country is entirely pacified any more than it is truly democratized. Though everyone agrees that “the surge” succeeded, the terrorists do not consider themselves defeated. Only two days ago a suicide bomber killed 61 Iraqi Army recruits with nail-packed explosives.

So what will happen there? Will Iraq yet turn into a peaceful united democracy?

Or will it be torn and shattered by civil war as some Israeli observers foresee?

At least two civil conflicts are at boiling point – Sunni-Shiite strife and hostilities between the two Muslim factions and the Kurds of the North – and Iran’s followers stand ready to seize Iraq’s oil-rich South potentially sparking yet another world conflagration.

The political vacuum in Baghdad created by Nouri al-Maliki’s refusal to step down or join a unity government is unsustainable and the cause of a rising spiral of violence. Neither of the two leading Iraqi parties which emerged from the general election earlier this year – Maliki’s State of Law Party and ex-prime minister Iyad Allawi’s Iraqiya Party – is seen capable of commanding a parliamentary majority any time this year.

Dropping out of negotiations for joining Allawi in a coalition government, the transitional prime minister has turned his attention to preparations for a Shiite war against the Sunnis to be launched as soon as the Americans are gone. He has lined up senior Shiite commanders in the Iraqi Army who are willing to lead an all-out offensive against the Sunnis in Baghdad and central and western Iraq.

US intelligence is perfectly aware of the imminent threat. It is according to them that –

[The Shiites] are preparing to capture large parts of Baghdad as well as Habaniya, Ramadi, Tikrit, Falluja and sections of Anbar Province, in order to achieve two objectives.

One is to defeat Sunni forces, forcing them to accept their loss of political influence and bow to his conditions, or else face more casualties, the loss of more territory in the cities and more debacles.

The second is to crush the power bases the Saudis are building in Iraq at great expense.

While the Saudis and the Syrians are spending money to buy off Maliki’s supporters, he plans to physically destroy the Sunni power centers in which they are investing.

The war could be protracted, and disastrous not only for Iraq:

His plans could ignite a Shiite-Sunni war lasting from one to two years up to late 2012 or early 2013. At least one to one-and-a-half million Iraqi Sunnis will be put to flight and flood neighboring Jordan which has neither the resources not the utilities to support that many refugees.

And while that civil war is raging, another could break out:

A second Iraqi community, the Kurds of the north, is in the midst of war preparations out of a bitter sense of betrayal by Washington.

They are furious over America quitting the country without solving the critical issue of Kirkuk and its oilfields. Calculating that the Shiites and Sunnis will be caught up in their own war and have no soldiers to spare for stopping them, the Kurds have lined up this strategic northern city for capture as soon as September.

They also plan to exploit the anticipated armed Sunni-Shiite feud to drive south and grab parts of central Iraq up to a line some 250 kilometers north of Baghdad.

Holding such towns as Saghir, Chay Khanah, Qarah Tappah, Muhsin Aziz and As-Sadiyah would be the key to Kurdish control of the eastern provinces bordering on Iran. …

And all the while Iran will be watching, ready to take advantage of the turmoil for its own ends:

Tehran is also eyeing rich spoils in Iraq’s post-American era.

The networks in Iraq run by the Iranian Intelligence Ministry, the MOIS, and the Revolutionary Guards Al Qods Brigades have joined forces with their Iraqi allies to take over the southern oilfields centering on the city of Basra, which account for about 60 percent of the country’s oil output.

This would be Iran’s payback for the energy sanctions President Barack Obama imposed in July.

Iran also covets the two holiest cities of the world Shiite movement, Karbala and Najaf. …

Have seven and a half years of  war in Iraq achieved nothing worth the blood and sacrifice? We wouldn’t say so. We think President Bush was right to invade Iraq. It was good that the tyrant Saddam Hussein was toppled, captured, and hanged. But perhaps that was as much as could be done, and the Iraqis should have been left then to flounder into their next calamity on their own.

Imam Rauf, who insists on building a mosque next to Ground Zero (a triumphal monument to the Muslim mass-murderers 0f 9/11), is trying to hide the connection of his “Cordoba Initiative” with Iran.

Anne Bayefsky writes:

A Cordoba-Iranian connection? …

More questions have arisen about the attempt to build a mosque adjacent to Ground Zero, as part of the so-called Cordoba Initiative. In particular, why has the Cordoba website just removed a photograph of Iranian Mohammad Javad Larijani, secretary-general of the High Council for Human Rights in Iran? Is the move an attempted cover-up of their Iranian connections?

Two weeks ago the Cordoba Initiative website featured a photograph of the project’s chairman, Imam Faisal Abdul Rauf, and Iranian Mohammad Javad Larijani at an event that the Initiative sponsored in Malaysia in 2008. This week, the photograph, which appears below, has disappeared.

Larijani was the Iranian representative who defended Iran’s abysmal human rights record before the UN Human Rights Council in February and June of this year. Among other things, Larijani told the Council: “Torture is one thing and punishment is another thing. … This is a conceptual dispute. Some forms of these punishments should not be considered torture according to our law.” By which he meant flogging, amputation, stoning … which are all part of Iranian legal standards. …

The Iranian connection to the launch of Cordoba House may go beyond a relationship between Rauf and Larijani. The Cordoba Initiative lists one of its three major partners as the UN’s Alliance of Civilizations. The Alliance has its roots in the Iranian-driven “Dialogue Among Civilizations,” the brainchild of former Iranian President Hojjatoleslam Seyyed Mohammad Khatami. Khatami is now a member of the High-level Group which “guides the work of the Alliance.” His personal presidential qualifications include the pursuit of nuclear weapons, a major crackdown on Iranian media, and rounding up and imprisoning Jews on trumped-up charges of spying. …

In addition, a Weekly Standard article in July suggested that the idea of building an Islamic memorial in lower Manhattan may have originated back in 2003 with two Iranian brothers: M. Jafar “Amir” Mahallati, who served as ambassador of the Iranian Islamic Republic to the United Nations from 1987 to 1989, and M. Hossein Mahallati.

Also pictured at the same Cordoba-sponsored meeting is U.S. representative to the Organization of the Islamic Conference, Sada Cumber. The meeting was part of the Initiative’s so-called “Shariah Index Project,” a plan to rank and measure the “Islamicity” of a state or “how well … nations comply in practice with this Islamic legal benchmark of an Islamic State.” …

*

The State Department has assured America that Imam Rauf will not use his tax-payer funded tour of oil-rich Arab states to raise money for his Ground Zero project.

Absolutely not! The State Dapartment would never permit him to do such a thing. Of course not. How could you suspect otherwise? If you even suggest it, you must be guilty of Islamophobia.

From the Washington Times:

Mr. Rauf is scheduled to go to Saudi Arabia, Dubai, Abu Dhabi, Bahrain and Qatar, the usual stops for Gulf-based fundraising. The State Department defends the five-country tour saying that Mr. Rauf is “a distinguished Muslim cleric,” but surely the government could find another such figure in the United States who is not seeking millions of dollars to fund a construction project that has so strongly divided America.

By funding the trip so soon after New York City’s Landmarks Preservation Commission gave the go-ahead to demolish the building on the proposed mosque site, the State Department is creating the appearance that the U.S. government is facilitating the construction of this shameful structure. It gives Mr. Rauf not only access but imprimatur to gather up foreign cash. And because Mr. Rauf has refused to reveal how he plans to finance his costly venture, the American public is left with the impression it will be a wholly foreign enterprise. This contradicts the argument that a mosque is needed in that part of New York City to provide services for a burgeoning Muslim population. If so many people need the mosque so badly, presumably they could figure out a way to pay for it themselves.

Americans also may be surprised to learn that the United States has been an active participant in mosque construction projects overseas. In April, U.S. Ambassador to Tanzania Alfonso E. Lenhardt helped cut the ribbon at the 12th-century Kizimkazi Mosque, which was refurbished with assistance from the United States under a program to preserve culturally significant buildings. The U.S. government also helped save the Amr Ebn El Aas Mosque in Cairo, which dates back to 642. The mosque’s namesake was the Muslim conqueror of Christian Egypt, who built the structure on the site where he had pitched his tent before doing battle with the country’s Byzantine rulers. For those who think the Ground Zero Mosque is an example of “Muslim triumphalism” glorifying conquest, the Amr Ebn El Aas Mosque is an example of such a monument – and one paid for with U.S. taxpayer funds.

The mosques being rebuilt by the United States are used for religious worship, which raises important First Amendment questions. U.S. taxpayer money should not be used to preserve and promote Islam, even abroad. …

For example, our government rebuilt the Al Shuhada Mosque in Fallujah, Iraq, expecting such benefits as “stimulating the economy, enhancing a sense of pride in the community, reducing opposition to international relief organizations operating in Fallujah, and reducing incentives among young men to participate in violence or insurgent groups.” But Section 205.1(d) of title 22 of the Code of Federal Regulations prohibits USAID funds from being used for the rehabilitation of structures to the extent that those structures are used for “inherently religious activities.” It is impossible to separate religion from a mosque; any such projects will necessarily support Islam.

The State Department is either wittingly or unwittingly using tax money to support Mr. Rauf’s efforts to realize his dream of a supersized mosque blocks away from the sacred ground of the former World Trade Center, which was destroyed by Islamic fanaticism.

We are not conspiracy theorists. Generally we believe in the cock-up theory of government and history. But we cannot help catching a whiff of conspiracy steaming up from the ingredients in this cauldron: The Cordoba Initiative, the Arab States, Iran, the State Department, the Obama Administration’s “Muslim outreach” program …

Maybe we’re wrong. Maybe it’s just a nice warm brew of inter-faith nourishment and sweet tolerance, spiced with religious diversity.

How does it smell to you?

For once we have reason to applaud a trade union.

From the Washington Times:

The National Immigration and Customs Enforcement Council of the American Federation of Government Employees, which represents 7,000 ICE agents and employees, voted 259-0 for a resolution saying there was “growing dissatisfaction and concern” over the leadership of Assistant Secretary John Morton, who heads ICE, and Phyllis Coven, assistant director for the agency’s office of detention policy and planning.

The resolution said ICE leadership had “abandoned the agency’s core mission of enforcing U.S. immigration laws and providing for public safety,” instead directing its attention “to campaigning for programs and policies related to amnesty and the creation of a special detention system for foreign nationals that exceeds the care and services provided to most U.S. citizens similarly incarcerated.

“It is the desire of our union … to publicly separate ourselves from the actions of Director Morton and Assistant Director Coven and publicly state that ICE officers and employees do not support Morton or Coven or their misguided and reckless initiatives, which could ultimately put many in America at risk,” the union said.

In a strongly worded statement, the union and its affiliated local councils said the integrity of the agency “as well as the public safety” would be “better provided for in the absence of Director Morton and Assistant Director Coven.”

The statement also noted that:

• The majority of ICE’s enforcement and removal officers are prohibited from making street arrests or enforcing U.S. immigration laws outside of the jail setting.

• Hundreds of ICE officers nationwide perform no law enforcement duties whatsoever because of resource mismanagement within the agency.

• ICE detention reforms have transformed into a detention system aimed at providing resortlike living conditions to criminal aliens based on recommendations not from ICE officers and field managers, but from “special-interest groups.”

• The lack of technical expertise and field experience has resulted in a priority of providing bingo nights, dance lessons and hanging plants to criminals, instead of addressing safe and responsible detention reforms for noncriminal individuals and families. …

The no-confidence vote, taken in June and made public last week in a letter by the union, said the agency’s senior leadership dedicated “more time to campaigning for immigration reforms aimed at large-scale amnesty legislation than advising the American public and federal lawmakers on the severity of the illegal-immigration problems.”

The would-be builders of the mosque and community-center next to Ground Zero do not own all of the site they want to develop.

Half of it is owned by Consolidated Edison Company of New York, Inc. (“Con Ed”), a company that provides electric, gas, and steam service in New York City.

Apparently neither Community Board 1, which approved the plans for the mosque, nor the Muslim developers themselves knew this.

From the New York Post:

“We never heard anything about Con Ed whatsoever,” said a stunned Julie Menin, the chairwoman of Community Board 1, which passed a May resolution supporting the mosque.

Daisy Khan, one of the mosque’s organizers [and wife of its imam, Feisal Abdul Rauf], told The Post last week that both buildings on Park Place are needed to house the worship and cultural center. But she claimed ignorance about the Con Ed ownership of 49-51 Park Place and referred questions to Soho Properties, which bought the building at 45-47 Park Place in 2009.

Rep. Peter King, who opposes the mosque, said the developers seemed to be “operating under false pretenses.”

“I wonder what else they are hiding,” said King (R-LI). “If we can’t have the full truth on this, what can we believe?”

Any hope that Con Ed will refuse to sell – a refusal that could scuttle the offensive project – would be misplaced. Their site, 49-51 Park Place, “is being appraised for a possible sale to Soho Properties, the developer behind the controversial mosque.”

However, the Public Service Commission would have to approve the sale. It’s a five-member board, controlled by Governor Paterson.

Governor Paterson seems to be more aware than Mayor Bloomberg that a huge mosque built on the edge of Ground Zero will offend millions of Americans. He has offered state help for the Muslim project if the developers will consent to building their mosque and community-center elsewhere:

“It does seem to ignite an immense amount of anxiety among the citizens of New York and people everywhere, and I think not without cause,” Paterson said in a news conference in Manhattan.

But the offer left the developers and Mayor Bloomberg cold:

The developers declined to comment. Mayor Michael Bloomberg, who last week made an impassioned defense of the project planned for lower Manhattan, declined to comment through a spokesman.

So it seems that the important thing for the Muslim developers is to build on the site next to Ground Zero.

Why is Mayor Bloomberg so keen that the mosque projects should go ahead?

Kathy Barkulis at Front Page suggests why:

Mayor Bloomberg’s strident support of building a mosque at Ground Zero made me think that he had to make nice with the Saudi’s for monetary purposes. In my mind there could be no other reason for Bloomberg to take such a stand as the Mayor of New York City. …

I don’t know what’s in Mayor Bloomberg’s heart, but I’ll take an educated guess. His vast empire depends on current and future financial dealings with Saudi Arabia. It is in his best interest to make nice with them. … Bloomberg can score big personally by staying in favor with the Saudis.

So the plan to build the mosque, plainly motivated to start with by nothing better than sheer malice, will almost certainly be carried out.

Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, having to make a statement about the 10 members of the medical team working for a Christian aid organization who were shot dead by the Taliban, said yesterday in that cold dead voice of hers:

With these killings, [the Taliban] have shown us yet another example of the lengths to which they will go to advance their twisted ideology.

Their twisted ideology? What is their ideology? It has a name – Islam. The ideology in the name of which the Taliban killed those men and women is Islam.

It is not their ideology that is objected to by the administration of which Hillary Clinton is a member. On the contrary, they protect it. Obama positively promotes it.

It is only the method the Taliban use that bothers Barack and Hillary: the method of terrorism. They have to denounce that, regardless of where their sympathies lie. But Muslims who help advance Islamic jihad by other means – infiltration, indoctrination – have the full blessing of Obama’s henchmen and henchwomen. Hillary Clinton herself lifted the ban on Tariq Ramadan getting a visa to enter the US, and he’s a Muslim who devotes his life to promoting the ideology of Islam.

When Attorney General Eric Holder had  to comment on the arrest of 14 American Muslims for supplying money and recuits to al-Shabab, the al-Qaeda  affiliated terrorist organization in Somalia, he did not say – not even once – that they were Muslims. He studiously avoided mentioning the fact. The word only came into his statement when he praised unnamed Muslims for helping to bring about the arrests. Then he went on to lecture us all, hastening to instruct us that Muslims are victims of terrorism. So are others, Mr Holder! In America many more non-Muslims than Muslims are victims of Muslim terrorism, but they don’t deserve a mention?

The administration is in denial that Islam is intrinsically militant, terroristic, cruel, and intent on the conquest of the rest of the world. But that is why the 10 Christians were killed in cold blood in Afghanistan. That is why American Muslims are helping al-Shabab and al-Qaeda.

What’s the point of pretending otherwise? Reality is not changed by pretense.

What was the Israeli Air Force doing in Romania when one if its helicopters crashed on July 26, killing six of its airmen?

The crash itself is distressing, but the answer to the question is good news: the IAF was rehearsing for an attack on Iranian nuclear sites.

This report comes from DebkaFile:

The Israeli Air Force had been drilling high-risk attacks on precipitous cliff caves similar to the mountain tunnels in which Iran has hidden nuclear facilities. The crash occurred in the last stage of a joint Israeli-US-Romanian exercise for simulating an attack on Iran. Aboard the helicopter were six Israeli airmen and a Romanian flight captain. …

Iran has given up on adequate air and missile defense shields for its nuclear sites and in the last couple of years has been blasting deep tunnels beneath mountain peaks more than 2,000 meters high for housing nuclear facilities. There, they were thought by Tehran to be safe from air or missile attack.

The American and Israeli air forces have since been developing tactics for evading Iranian radar and flying at extremely low-altitudes through narrow mountain passes so as to reach the tunnel entrances for attacks on the nuclear equipment undetected. The drill in Romania took place at roughly the same altitude and in similar terrain that a US or Israeli air attack would expect to encounter in Iran.

For such strikes, special missiles would be used that are capable of flying the length of a tunnel, however twisty, and detonating only when its warhead identifies and contacts its target.

The entire maneuver is extremely hazardous. The pilots must be exceptionally skilled, capable of split-second timing in rising from low-altitudes to points opposite the high tunnel entrances without crashing into the surrounding mountain walls.

The Israeli helicopter is reported to have flown into a cloud patch hanging over its simulated target and crashed into a steep mountainside, while the second helicopter flying in the formation avoided the cloud and continued without incident. Israeli and American Air Force pilots are instructed, when encountering cloud cover of the target, to go around it. At all times, they must have eye contact with their target.

The accident revealed to military observers that the Israeli Air Force is practicing long-distance flights not only by bombers, but also heavy helicopters, such as the “Yasour” CH-53, which would require in-flight refueling. These practice flights have been taking place in cooperation with Greece and Bulgaria as well as Romania, whose distance from Israel of 1,600 kilometers approximates that of Iran. American air bases in Romania and Bulgaria participate in the drills.

Good to know, but the information that the US is participating in the exercise, and the fact that it is being reported – albeit through news of a disaster – makes us wonder if the point of publishing it is to frighten Ahmadinejad and the mullahs rather than actually prepare for a strike. Is it really likely, we wonder, that Obama has decided to take military action against Iran?

Charles Krauthammer seems to think it possible and even probable. The administration, he says, is “hardening its line”. And he sees a growth of determination among Western states and Arab states to stop Iran forcibly from becoming a nuclear power.

He gives these reasons in his column in Investor’s Business Daily:

Passage of weak U.N. sanctions was followed by unilateral sanctions by the United States, Canada, Australia and the European Union. Already … Iran is experiencing a sharp drop in gasoline imports as Lloyd’s of London refuses to insure the ships delivering them.

Second, the Arab states are no longer just whispering their desire for the U.S. to militarily take out Iranian nuclear facilities. The United Arab Emirates’ ambassador to Washington said so openly at a conference three weeks ago. …

The UAE ambassador[‘s] … publicly expressed desire for an attack on Iran’s nuclear facilities speaks for the intense Arab fear approaching panic, of Iran’s nuclear program and the urgent hope that the U.S. will take it out.

It is true that the UAE ambassador, Yousef al-Otaiba, was heard to be pleading or at least arguing for military action by “an outside force”, but his government hastily denied that he meant it. There was no denial, however, that his country regards Iran’s nuclear program as a grave and imminent threat.

There is also a rumour, not mentioned today by Krauthammer, that Saudi Arabia would be willing to look the other way while Israeli planes flew through its airspace on a mission to bomb Iranian nuclear installations.

But what of American participation in such a raid? Krauthammer goes on to say:

Third, and perhaps even more troubling from Tehran’s point of view, are developments in the U.S. Former NSA and CIA Director Michael Hayden suggested last Sunday that over time, in his view, a military strike is looking increasingly favorable compared with the alternatives. Hayden is no Obama insider, but Time reports (“An Attack on Iran: Back on the Table,” July 15) that high administration officials are once again considering the military option.

Here is part of what Time had to say:

[Secretary of Defense] Gates … told Fox News on June 20. “We do not accept the idea of Iran having nuclear weapons.” In fact, Gates was reflecting a new reality [sic – shouldn’t it be “realism”?] in the military and intelligence communities. Diplomacy and economic pressure remain the preferred means to force Iran to negotiate a nuclear deal, but there isn’t much hope that’s going to happen. “Will [sanctions] deter them from their ambitions with regards to nuclear capability?” CIA Director Leon Panetta told ABC News on June 27. “Probably not.” So the military option is very much back on the table. …

Intelligence sources say that the U.S. Army’s Central Command, which is in charge of organizing military operations in the Middle East, has made some real progress in planning targeted air strikes — aided, in large part, by the vastly improved human-intelligence operations in the region. “There really wasn’t a military option a year ago,” an Israeli military source told me. “But they’ve gotten serious about the planning, and the option is real now.” Israel has been brought into the planning process … because U.S. officials are frightened by the possibility that the right-wing Netanyahu government might go rogue and try to whack the Iranians on its own.

There’s a lefty explanation! If whacking the Iranians is now considered a good thing to do, why would it be bad, or “going rogue”, for the Israelis to do it? Note the insistent mention that Netanyahu’s government is “right-wing”. Right-wings are, of course, on the edge of roguery at all times in the assumptions of the left.

One other factor has brought the military option to a low boil: Iran’s Sunni neighbors really want the U.S. to do it. When United Arab Emirates Ambassador Yousef al-Otaiba said on July 6 that he favored a military strike against Iran despite the economic and military consequences to his country, he was reflecting an increasingly adamant attitude in the region. Senior American officials who travel to the Gulf frequently say the Saudis, in particular, raise the issue with surprising ardor. Everyone from the Turks to the Egyptians to the Jordanians are threatening to go nuclear if Iran does. That is seen as a real problem in the most volatile region in the world: What happens, for example, if Saudi Arabia gets a bomb, and the deathless monarchy there is overthrown by Islamist radicals?

Message to Time: The “deathless monarchy” IS radically Islamist. The Saudis are, however, Sunni radicals who fear the hegemony of Iranian Shia radicals. So their ardor is not really surprising at all.

For the moment, the White House remains as skeptical as ever about a military strike.

Ah, we thought so!

Most senior military leaders also believe … a targeted attack on Iran would be “disastrous on a number of levels.” It would unify the Iranian people against the latest in a long series of foreign interventions. It would also unify much of the world — including countries like Russia and China that we’ve worked hard to cultivate — against a recowboyfied US. [There’s a coinage for you!- JB].  There would certainly [?] be an Iranian reaction — in Iraq, in Afghanistan, by Lebanese Hizballah against Israel and by the Hizballah network against the U.S. and Saudi homelands. A catastrophic regional war is not impossible.

Of course, it is also possible that this low-key saber-rattling is simply a message the U.S. is trying to send the Iranians: it’s time to deal. … But it is also possible that the saber-rattling is not a bluff, that the U.S. really won’t tolerate a nuclear Iran and is prepared to do something awful to stop it.

So our question remains: is it likely that Obama will even consider the bombing of Iran?

We hope with ardor that Iran’s nuclear capability is knocked out soon by military force. It would be best of course if the US and Israel acted together. But if the US under Obama’s weak leadership holds back, may Israel strike alone – soon, and to devastating effect.

The Obama administration will not use the words “Islam” or “Muslim” in connection with terrorism, which means they are not serious about countering the actual terrorist activity that has killed thousands of Americans; but they will use the continuing and growing threat of it as an excuse to invade our privacy, to watch us in the manner of the KGB and the Stasi.

They are taking steps to find out exactly whom you are emailing and what Internet sites you visit.

The Washington Post reports:

The Obama administration is seeking to make it easier for the FBI to compel companies to turn over records of an individual’s Internet activity without a court order if agents deem the information relevant to a terrorism or intelligence investigation.

The administration wants to add just four words — “electronic communication transactional records” — to a list of items that the law says the FBI may demand without a judge’s approval. Government lawyers say this category of information includes the addresses to which an Internet user sends e-mail; the times and dates e-mail was sent and received; and possibly a user’s browser history. It does not include, the lawyers hasten to point out, the “content” of e-mail or other Internet communication.

But what officials portray as a technical clarification designed to remedy a legal ambiguity strikes industry lawyers and privacy advocates as an expansion of the power the government wields through so-called national security letters. These missives, which can be issued by an FBI field office on its own authority, require the recipient to provide the requested information and to keep the request secret. They are the mechanism the government would use to obtain the electronic records.

If this encroachment on our privacy were necessary to protect us from terrorism, we might reluctantly accept it as a temporary measure. But it is not. What is necessary to stop the terrorists is to name their cause, Islamic jihad, and to formulate and implement a policy to defeat it.

Deep surveillance of our private lives is not only unnecessary, it is intolerable.