Western sages coined the word “Islamist” to mean someone who took Islamic ideology too far; religious duty to pursue jihad to the point of mass killing, perhaps by suicide bombing, too seriously. In other words, an extremist. This allowed the sages, whose heads were more full of pride in their own tolerance than of little grey cells, to intone ad nauseam, “the vast majority of Muslims are peace-loving people who wouldn’t hurt a fly”. After which some of them would urge unknown spokesmen for that “vast majority” to come forward and denounce the “Islamist'” violence loud and clear.

They wait patiently, year in year out, for the silence to be broken.

The idea was that there are two Islams: a “moderate” one that does not take the commandments of the Koran – such as “kill the infidel” (Sura 9:5) – to be instructions to action, and another Islam that does.

The term “Islamist” has passed into common use to mean fanatical pursuers of Islamic jihad.

Now comes a new division: “moderate Islamists” – in other, equally oxymoronic, words: moderate fanatics, moderate extremists.

The idea crops up in this report about the elections in Tunisia:

A moderate Islamist group [Ennahdha] that was brutally repressed for decades was poised Monday to become Tunisia’s dominant political faction after a landmark election to choose a council that will draft the country’s new constitution and appoint an interim government. …

“The best way to deal with the Islamists is to include them in the process,” said Marwan Muasher, vice president for studies at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and an election observer with the National Democratic Institute. “There’s no excuse for keeping them out.”

In stark contrast to the Islamists’ success was the apparent poor performance of the secular Progressive Democratic Party …  The PDP ran a campaign that cast its leaders as the protectors of secular and modern values. … The PDP conceded its loss and pledged to work in the opposition rather than with Ennahdha.

In “the opposition”? How long will an opposition be allowed, we wonder.

The same idea of “moderate Islamism” was implied by the US Director of National Intelligence, James Clapper, when, in February, 2011, he told a House Intelligence Committee hearing that the Muslim Brotherhood was ” largely secular” and “eschewed violence .”

The Muslim Brotherhood, however, does not agree with him. Its motto is:  “Allah is our objective. The Prophet is our leader. Qur’an is our law. Jihad is our way. Dying in the way of Allah is our highest hope.”

The probable coming to power of “Islamist” parties in Tunisia, Egypt, and Libya is in fact a most ominous development.

Frank Gaffney, President Reagan’s assistant secretary of defense, warns:

War is on its way in the Middle East as Muslim countries are determined to force a showdown over the future of Israel …

“I’m afraid there’s a war coming, a very serious, perhaps cataclysmic regional war,” he said. “It will be presumably over, at least in part, the future existence of the state of Israel. It may involve all of its neighbors, as they have in the past, attacking Israel to try, as they say, to drive the Jews into the sea.

“It may involve the use of nuclear weapons … But whatever form it takes and whenever it occurs, it is unlikely to be contained to that region, and we must do everything we can to prevent freedom’s enemies from thinking they have an opportunity to engage in that kind of warfare.”

That means standing “absolutely, unmistakably” as one with Israel and doing everything to prevent Iran getting its hands on nuclear weapons.

Gaffney …  was speaking on the day that the “moderate” Islamist party Ennahda claimed victory at the ballot box in Tunisia and the day after Libya’s new rulers declared that country will be run on Islamic principles and under Sharia law. Gaffney does not believe Ennahda is really a moderating force. “I don’t believe there is such a thing as a moderate Islamist party,” he said. “The challenge with Islamists is that they seek to impose what they call Sharia on everybody, Muslim and non-Muslim alike. …

“They may, as a matter of tactical expediency, choose to do so in incremental ways, often nonviolently, at least initially.

“The problem is that, because ultimately they must — according to Sharia, according to what they believe is God’s will — make everyone feel subdued in order to achieve their God-mandated direction, they will not remain moderate. They will not be satisfied with anything less than the ultimate supremacy of Sharia and they certainly will not resist the use of violence when it becomes expedient to get their way.”

Gaffney … foresees a rising tide of Islamist governments growing throughout Middle East and North Africa and spreading even further.

“We’re witnessing not just the violent kind of jihad that these Islamists believe God compels them to engage in, but also, where they must for tactical reasons, a more stealthy kind, or civilizational jihad as the Muslim Brotherhood calls it. We’re witnessing that playing out, not only in places in the Middle East but also in Europe, in Australia, in Canada and here in the United States as well,” he said.

The spread of Sharia, which Gaffney said is often referred to as “Communism with a god,” is “the most urgent and grievous challenge we face as a free people.

“Those who follow this program of Sharia believe that God is directing them to engage in jihad or whatever form of warfare is necessary to accomplish their goals . . . .Through stealth, they have successfully penetrated important parts of the free world including our own government and civil society institutions.”

The Obama administration has to stop “embracing” the Muslim Brotherhood, Gaffney said.

“This is legitimating our enemies … It is facilitating their influence operations and their penetration and it greatly increases the prospect that they will be successful at what the Muslim Brotherhood’s own documents indicate is their desire, which is to destroy western civilization from within.”

Gaffney noted that Ennahda had won what appears to be a clean election in Tunisia, but that doesn’t mean there ever will be another vote there.

“The problem is not simply democracy. People are pointing to Tunisia as a perfect example of democracy at work. …  fine if all you want is one-man-one-vote one-time. That is precisely what the Muslim Brotherhood and its like-minded Islamist friends want.” …

“What we are likely to wind up with, not just in Tunisia, not just in Libya, not just in Egypt, but probably in due course in Syria — as we have in Lebanon, as we have in Gaza and probably will have down the road in Yemen, Bahrain, maybe Saudi Arabia — is the takeover, the unmistakable takeover, perhaps through the ballot box, of people who will not seek or allow others freedom, who will impose Sharia and who will use whatever resources they amass as a result, not only to suppress their own people, but to endanger us.”

We think Frank Gaffney is right about the Arabs wanting to make war again on Israel. They ache to make war on Israel. He’s also right that “Islamist” leaders are the most likely to try it.

But could they do it? Perhaps not in the near future. Egypt is desperately poor, on the verge of bankruptcy and mass starvation. Libya is rich enough to make war, but for all the pretense that the rebels were an army, it was only a collection of ad hoc militias, and the Libyan nation is a mass of quarreling tribes and factions vying to get their hands on the money Gaddafi stacked up round the world. True, a war against Israel would unite them, but could they fight it? Not on their own.

Yet sooner or later the war that Gaffney predicts will come. It may not come until the middle of the century, when Europe will be predominantly Muslim. Or it may be initiated soon by Iran, with nuclear bombs.

And when the war comes, the sages of the West who have helped to put “moderate Islamist” parties in power throughout the Arab world, will have gone a long way to promote the victory of “Communism with a god” and the fall of our civilization.

Although some of their leaders imported the idea of nationalism from Europe in the 20th century, it is not a motivating cause among Arabs. Tribe and religion are what matter to them. They regard the existence of Israel as an offense against Islam, and their hatred of it has nothing to do with territory, boundaries, settlements, states, no matter that their spokesmen pretend otherwise when they address the Western media or the United Nations. Islam teaches that all non-Muslims are worthy only of hatred, subjugation, and ignominious death.

This article is by Giulio Meotti from Front Page:

What can motivate the current Palestinian society to … the most horrible form of childhood molestation and child sacrifice? The way in which the Palestinian Authority educates children and society is a key indicator of its true intentions.

Convincing ordinary individuals to sacrifice themselves to kill the Jews is not easy, it requires subhuman ideas and institutions. The logo of the “Permanent Observer Mission of Palestine to the United Nations” – on their website and on top of their official statements at the U.N. – shows the Palestinian Authority’s claim to a Palestine that stretches throughout the entire historical entity of the former Palestine mandate, which had nothing to do with those who call themselves Palestinians today and everything to do with a national homeland for the Jewish people..

Palestinian Media Watch also revealed that Mahmoud Abbas chose an icon of genocidal anti-Semitism, the mother of four terrorists, one of whom killed seven Israeli civilians and attempted to killed twelve others, as the person to launch the statehood campaign with the United Nations.

In a widely publicized event, Abbas had Latifa Abu Hmeid lead the procession to the UN offices in Ramallah and hand over a letter for the UN Secretary General, Ban Ki Moon. It is a measure of how deeply the ethos of martyrdom has penetrated Abbas’ policy, hailed for its “moderation”.

For as long as the PA continues to foment violence and promote hatred, the number of youngsters willing to blow themselves up or to slit Israeli throats will unfortunately continue to mount. The Palestinian Authority is still a font of incitement …

Palestinian leadership now seeks self-determination at the United Nations, but its daily policy shouts to the world that even after statehood, the fight must continue against the Jews. …

There is no precedent in the history of humanity for this god of martyrdom.

Well, perhaps there is. There were long dark ages when untold numbers of Christians sought martyrdom as a qualification to enter their heaven, often through murderous encounters with other Christians over differences of doctrine. And the lust for martyrdom must have been the motive of at least some of the Christian warriors of the Crusades. That sort of thing is not done so much now by Christians. But many Christians, notably on the political left, condone and even actively encourage Palestinian terrorism.

Generations of PA Arabs are taught to see … terrorist operations as a way to “open the door to Paradise” …  It’s the highest level of paradise, the one reserved for prophets and saints.

Signs on the walls of Palestinian kindergartens currently proclaim their students as “the shaheeds (martyrs) of tomorrow”. Elementary school principals commend their students for wanting to “tear [Zionists’] bodies into little pieces and cause them more pain than they will ever know”.

Terrorism is sanctified throughout all the PA areas. The streets are plastered with posters glorifying the suicide bombers. Children trade “martyr cards” instead of Pokemon cards. Necklaces with pictures of terrorists are very popular.

But are there not some Muslims who dislike the teaching of hatred?

This comes from AhlulBayt News Agency (ABNA),  an English-language Shia television channel headquartered in London:

Saudis export anti-Christian and anti-Jewish textbooks across the world.

Textbooks used in Saudi Arabia’s schools contain virulent forms of anti-Christian and anti-Jewish bigotry that continue to fuel intolerance and violence around the globe, says a new report.

The problem is far greater than the five million students in Saudi Arabia who use these texts every day, said Nina Shea, director of the Washington-based Hudson Institute’s Center for Religious Freedom.

“Because of the Saudis’ great oil wealth, it is able to disseminate its textbooks far and wide,” she wrote in the report, Ten Years On.

“[These textbooks] are posted on the Saudi Education Ministry’s website and are shipped and distributed free by a vast Saudi-sponsored Sunni infrastructure to many Muslim schools, mosques and libraries throughout the world.

“This is not just hate mongering, it’s promoting violence,” she said in an interview. It is exporting terrorism through textbooks.

Christians are referred to as “swine” and Jews as “apes,” while being blamed for much of the world’s ills.

She notes in the report that since the Saudis control Islam’s holiest shrines in Mecca and Medina, they can “disseminate its religious materials among the millions of Muslims making the Hajj each year. Hence, these teachings can have a wide and deep influence.”

ABNA is apparently quoting Nina Shea with approval. But are these Shias exposing these facts about the Sunnis of Saudi Arabia out of genuine disgust or only because they are their doctrinal enemies?

The greatest real threat at present to the non-Muslim world is the aggressive Shia regime of Iran with its active pursuit of nuclear arms.

Today the estimable Lt. Col. Ralph Peters, commenting on the just assassination in Yemen of the American-born al-Qaeda leader Anwar al-Awlaki, said on Fox News that “we are winning” the “War on Terror”.

Great news, if it were true. But the US, the West, the non-Islamic world are not winning.

For one thing, it is not, and never was, a “war on terror”. It is a war of defense against Islam. And Islam is winning. Terrorism is winning. The West is allowing it to win.

Islam’s terrorist tactic is proving hugely powerful and has gained victories that would have been unimaginable a few years ago. It has cowed all the governments of western Europe, and innumerable authorities at all levels in the US. Islam is advancing day by day. Its terrorism is not practiced continually in all target countries, but the threat of it, and the memories of what has been done and could be done again at any moment, are always there. Because authorities are afraid, Islam creeps on.

Day by day, in Western countries into which Muslims migrate in ever-growing numbers, Islam gains its concessions, its privileges: here a mosque; there a partition of a public swimming pool for Muslim women; here a prayer room in a government building; there the removal from a public library of famous children’s books with pictures of pigs in them; here (in Britain for instance) the allowing of sharia courts and the upholding of their rulings by the state; there entitlements tamely paid to multiple Muslim wives by a welfare state with laws against polygamy; and here and here and here the establishment of faculties of Islamic studies, or even whole colleges, with immense grants of money from the Wahhabis of Saudi Arabia. Chunks of history, such as the Holocaust, are omitted from school courses because they might offend Muslim students – let truth be damned. Defense contracting companies in the US fall under the ownership of Muslims, who divert a part of the profits – and what defense secrets? – to the Muslim Brotherhood. In places of hot battle, Iraq is plagued with terrorist attacks day after day; and in Afghanistan the Taliban is undefeated and undefeatable, and ready to re-assume its despotic rule when the coalition soldiers have departed. In Libya an al-Qaeda leader has seized a position of power. And all the while, the mullahs of Iran are preparing to attack the West with nuclear weapons.

True, there have not been any more planes flown into buildings in America, but smaller plots of destruction and mass murder are constantly being laid. True, some of them are foiled, but some are attempted (such as an underwear bomb in a plane over Detroit) and some carried out (such as the massacre at Fort Hood), and the motive behind all of them remains: jihad, the holy war of Islam, perpetually waged one way and another for the conquest of the world by successive generations of Muslims, and coming closer to success now than ever before in history.

If the West does not capitulate totally and abjectly – which it might – the fiercest battles are still to come.

Jillian Becker   September 30, 2011

You won’t find much about it in the news media, but the pro-Arab Guardian reports on the bloody suppression of the continuing insurrection in Yemen:

For the past few weeks Change Square in Sana’a has belonged to Yemen’s young revolutionaries. It has been filled with dancing and singing to protest against the regime of President Ali Abdullah Saleh.

But there was no singing on Monday. Instead, the square was filled with the echoes of gunfire and screams as the young demonstrators carried injured friends to safety, their blood dripping in a long crimson trail that led to the field hospital.

It was one of the bloodiest days yet in Yemen’s nine-month uprising, with more than 22 killed and at least 350 wounded. The carnage followed an attack on Sunday that left 30 dead and set the scene for the violence that has broken new ground in the stand-off between anti-government groups and loyalist security forces. …

On Monday night [September 19] Sana’a’s hospitals said they were unable cope with the number of casualties. Demonstrators were urgently calling for blood donors and trying to ferry the wounded to hospitals on Sana’a’s outskirts. Many of the wounds appeared to have been caused by high-calibre rounds fired into the crowds from anti-aircraft guns.

[President] Saleh, who was wounded during an explosion as he prayed in a mosque earlier in the year, remains in Riyadh as the guest of the Saudi Arabian monarch, King Abdullah …

The day’s violence was vividly illustrated bya live video stream from a field hospital set up by protesters after skirmishes with forces loyal to the president. A dead 10 month-old girl with a head wound … a screaming man with no right arm … 23 bodies were laid out in a makeshift morgue.

As night fell the shooting appeared to have spread across Sana’a as rebel units clashed with loyalist forces in a series of running battles across the city. There were reports that security forces loyal to Saleh’s son, Ahmed, were stationed near several of the hospitals that were treating the defected soldiers. …

Anti-government activists in the capital blame state media for the chaos in Yemen, claiming they openly provoke attacks. …

And who does the government blame?

Yemen’s government blamed al-Qaida elements it claimed were inciting trouble inside the anti-government movement for sparking Monday’s violence.

Like all governments everywhere, this one – it will have you believe – has a soft heart and wants nothing more than to be just and to protect the people from harm:

“The government of Yemen expresses its sorrow and condemnation for all acts of violence and bloodshed as those that happened yesterday in Sana’a,” the foreign minister, Abu Bakr al-Kurbi, told the UN human rights council. “The government will investigate and hold accountable all those who were in charge of these acts.” …

It sorrows. It condemns acts of violence and bloodshed. However –

As he spoke government helicopters patrolled the skies of Sana’a and reportedly targeted homes and property of senior opposition leaders.

“But, but – ?” you may splutter, pointing upwards.

It helps to know that in Arab culture, reality is what is said, not what is actually happening.

Whenever we have to think of Saudi Arabia, we remember how its Morality Police would not let schoolgirls escape from a burning building because they were not covered and veiled as Muhammad-aka-Allah deemed they must be. The event is symptomatic of the double hell stoked by Islam and Arab culture.

Any news that the Saudi Arabian despots are at the receiving end of a figurative punch on the nose is good news to us. Best of all would be a death blow, but a defeat for them in the lawcourts is to be resoundingly cheered by all decent persons.

To add to the good news we posted yesterday about “lawfare” successes, here’s a report about a British insurance group suing Saudi Arabia to recover damages paid out to 9/11 victims:

A U.K.-based insurance syndicate is suing the Saudi government to recover more than $215 million it paid out to victims of the 9/11 attacks.

The amount is chump change to those oil-rich despots, but their political loss of face if the verdict goes against them will be historic. We have often advocated humiliation as a suitable punishment for “honor” obsessed Muslims who commit or co-author acts of terrorism.

In a complaint filed Thursday in a Johnstown, Penn. district court, Lloyd’s Syndicate alleges that the government of Saudi Arabia provided direct operational and financial support to al-Qaida and its affiliates in the years leading up to the September 11 attacks.

“Absent the sponsorship of al Qaeda’s material sponsors and supporters, including the defendants named herein,” the suit claims, “al Qaeda would not have possessed the capacity to conceive, plan and execute the September 11 attacks.”

The complaint extensively quotes counter-terrorism officials affirming that financial resources are crucial to al-Qaida’s ability to launch attacks. It also gives specific examples linking the Saudi government to al-Qaida financing. 

Saudi-funded charities, such as the Muslim World League (MWL), World Assembly of Muslim Youth (WAMY), International Islamic Relief Organization (IIRO) and the al Haramain Islamic Foundation, have allowed al-Qaida to sustain its global network, it says …

The groups, in addition to providing funding, organized recruitment of al-Qaida fighters, training camps, reconnaissance missions and weapons delivery. …

The Saudi regime was aware of Osama bin Laden’s jihadist efforts from the very beginning, it says. “More fundamentally, the jihadist worldview bin Laden was promoting was firmly grounded in Wahhabi ideology and the Western Cultural Attack narrative, as promoted by the Saudi regime itself over a period of many years.”

It is not a message the US government wants to hear. Saudi Arabia is a “valued ally” and – ahem! – oil-supplier.

Filed on behalf of Lloyd’s Syndicate by Cozen O’Connor law firm, the suit is not the first to blame the Saudi government for aiding terrorists. A federal appeals court previously dismissed the Saudi government as a defendant in a similar case, but ruled that other organizations affiliated with the Saudi government could remain defendants.

In 2009, the Supreme Court chose not to hear the case. The government said that the Saudi government’s funding of the Islamic charities was not clearly linked to terrorist groups.

This time we hope the link will be so brilliantly clear that it will hurt the eyes of those who would rather not see it.

From The Religion of Peace:

How bleak and sad life is for the religious, especially for Muslims, and most miserably for their women and children.

Osama bin Laden was a rich man. Phyllis Chesler tells how he kept his wives and children in want, hunger, discomfort, and deliberate joylessness.

While he still lived in Saudi Arabia, before he had to flee to Sudan and thereafter to Afghanistan, [Osama bin Laden] condemned his wives and children to lives of physical, medical, and psychological hardship. …

He insisted on an increasingly spartan existence as a matter of ideology …

Here is what Omar bin Laden has written about his life with his father Osama:

“There were absurd rules regarding our conduct. ..  We were told that we must not become excited at any situation. We should be serious about everything. We were not allowed to tell jokes. We were ordered not to express joy over anything. He did say that he would allow us to smile so long as we did not laugh. If we were to lose control of our emotions and bark a laugh, we must be careful not to expose our eyeteeth. I have been in situations where my father actually counted the exposed teeth, reprimanding his sons on the number their merriment had revealed.”

According to Omar, his father … “caned” him and his brothers “for the slightest infraction.” Osama… deprived his sons of their much needed asthma medication … He force marched them without water for hours and in the desert. In addition, he allowed his sons to be brutalized by sadistic teachers. He refused to give his sons “pocket money” for “school snacks.” He told them, Omar writes:

“‘No. You need to suffer. Hunger pangs will not hurt you.’ … Our father appeared to relish seeing us suffer, reminding us that it was good for us to know what it felt like to be hungry or thirsty, to do without while others had plenty. Why? He said that we would end up being the stronger. Those with plenty would grow up weak men, unable to defend themselves.” …

Omar and his brothers all learned that they would have to endure paternal cruelty and humiliation and that their tender and sympathetic mothers would not and could not intercede on their behalf. Osama bin Laden’s wives, especially Najwa, Omar’s mother, are portrayed as … submissive, uncomplaining, very religious, quite passive. Najwa gave up her desire to decorate her home, which was, essentially, her prison. … She never uttered a single complaint—not even when she was deprived of most conveniences and normal amenities. Omar writes:

“Although we lived in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, which is one of the hottest and most humid cities in a country that is known for its hot climate, my father would not allow my mother to turn on the air-conditioning that the contractor had built into the apartment building. Neither would he allow her to use the refrigerator that was standing in the kitchen. My father announced, ‘Islamic beliefs are corrupted by modernization.’”

Yet “he himself had fast cars, fast planes … weaponry too.”

Although he has every reason to hate his father, Omar bin Laden is complaining that the cruel old man did not receive justice.

What would be justice for a man who has killed thousands of people? He has only two eyes to give for thousands of eyes, only one mouthful of teeth for thousands of teeth. He cannot be made to choose between death by fire or leaping from a height, or to choke in smoke, or to crash to the ground in a plane, thousands of times over.

Besides, justice has no place in war. War happens when law and all civil norms have broken down. Osama bin Laden made war on the United States, so American warriors hunted him down and shot him dead. He deserved worse.

Christians teach their children lies and force them to lie (see our post immediately below, A loathsome Jesus). They make them afraid of everlasting “hell”. That’s bad enough. But what Islam does to its children is worse.

Frank Crimi writes about thousands of child suicide bombers being trained in Afghanistan:

Despite the Taliban’s denial that it uses children as human explosives, its spring offensive began with a suicide bombing by a 12-year-old boy. The attack is just one more sign that the militant group and its terrorist allies are increasing their efforts to recruit, train and utilize child suicide bombers. …

It was one of two such suicide attacks carried out by child bombers in eastern Afghanistan over the past several weeks, attacks that killed over 15 people. Soon after those assaults, Afghan authorities showed off five captured would-be suicide bombers –all under the age of 13 — trained by Taliban and al Qaeda terrorists in Pakistan.

As one Afghan intelligence official said, “They have been told that infidels are in Afghanistan … and they have been encouraged to go for Jihad.” In a disturbing twist, one of the captured bombers thought he would survive the attack when he was told by his instructors that “the (infidels) will be killed and you will live.” …

The Taliban denied using children as human explosives …[But that] contradicts its past claims to have trained anywhere from a few hundred to several thousand juveniles as suicide bombers. In fact, the Afghan government places the figure of trained child suicide terrorists closer to 5,000. …

Most suicide bombers are under the age of 18… The recruitment and training of these children is not only extensive and well organized, but growing.

To that end, suicide training factories have sprouted up all over the Afghan-Pakistan border, with most located in the Pakistani province of Waziristan. There, it’s been estimated that the Fedayeen-e-Islam have trained over 1,000 suicide bombers at three facilities. More disturbingly, many suicide training centers have been designated into junior and senior camps.

The Pakistani army found one such junior camp, equipped with computers, video equipment and literature, where children as young as age 10, according to one army officer, “knew about the planting of explosives, making and wearing and detonating suicide jackets.”

The increased demand for child bombers comes as the Taliban have focused its efforts on attacking an expanding list of civilian targets, sites which include schools, mosques, markets, government offices and other public places.

In Saudi Arabia, where women are stoned to death as punishment for being the victims of rape, girls as young as 5 are sold to “wealthy men” as sex slaves. Read about it here.

It’s common practice among Muslims to use children as shields in war – and then wail to the UN, the New York Times, the Guardian, and all their other reliable sympathizers when the children are hurt or killed, accusing American, or Israeli, or NATO  forces, of deliberately targeting them.

At the same time they themselves, without a trace of conscience, deliberately murder the children of “infidels” in the cruelest ways they can devise.

In Thailand, Muslims beheaded a 9 year old boy. (There is a “graphic” video of this atrocity, but it has been removed from the linked site, and we cannot find it anywhere else.)

In Nigeria Muslims have been throwing children on fires, and cutting them up.

This report is full of sentimental Christian nonsense about the dead being saved by Jesus and meeting again never to be parted, but we think it gives a true – and certainly a believable – account of what Muslims did to a 13 year old girl, the daughter of a Christian pastor:

Muslim extremists … attacked Kurum village, in the Bogoro local government area of Nigeria’s Bauchi state …  in a rampage that began Wednesday (May 4) at midnight. [James Musa] Rike, pastor of a Church of Christ in Nigeria (COCIN) congregation in Kurum, .. heard the cries of his 13-year-old daughter, Sum James Rike …“I rushed to my daughter, only to discover that she … was cut with a machete on her stomach, and her intestines were all around her,” he said.

Graphic enough without pictures.

We have spoken of the Three Harpies of the Obama administration, Hillary Clinton, Samantha Power, and Susan Rice (see our post, A siren song from hell, April 1, 2011). They wanted America to intervene militarily in the Libyan civil war “to protect civilians”, and they got their way, so the US is involved in a costly and ineffective engagement, along with ramshackle NATO; and Libyan civilians continue to be displaced, injured, and killed, often by the “protective” operations of the US and NATO – or the US in NATO, say, since the administration pretends that it has withdrawn from the fray.

Today we liken the three women to three witches, cooking up a lethal brew of global socialism, pro-Islamism, and anti-Americanism, in a steaming pot of self-righteous sentimentality.

Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, a disciple of the Communist Revolutionary Saul Alinsky, is the most powerful of them by reason of her position in the administration. But she’s probably not the equal of the other two in gathering venomous ideas.

Samantha Power runs Obama’s “Office of Human Rights” and has written a book about genocide. It’s a long grope for a definition of the word. She believes, as the left generally does, that America should only go to war as an act of altruism, never to protect its own interests such as securing oil supplies or punishing attackers, and whenever possible as an instrument of the UN.

As for Susan Rice, the current US ambassador to that evil institution, here’s an account of her by Rick Moran from Front Page:

President Obama’s ambassador to the United Nations, Susan Rice, has long been an advocate for weakening American sovereignty in order to benefit the UN and its anti-American agenda. It is a policy known as “engagement,” where the United States subsumes its own vital interests, abandons its traditional role of leadership in the world community, and … pushes the process of “subcontracting American national security” to the UN.

Time Magazine refers to this policy — without a hint of irony — as “leading from the back.” … Her vision of what the US’s role in the world should be … includes an open hostility to the state of Israel, a dangerous reliance on the UN to keep Iran from going nuclear, as well as the world body’s inexplicable granting Tehran membership on the UN’s Commission on the Status of Women. …

While one expects a UN ambassador to be an advocate for internationalism, Rice slipped the bounds of reason and waxed poetic in her testimony about the importance of the United Nations to our national security. … Rice claimed that … “the U.N. promotes universal values Americans hold dear.” …

That statement is nonsense. It is beyond rhetorical excess and enters the sublime milieu of self-delusion. Unless she believes that America “holds dear” values like racism, anti-Semitism, corruption, sexism, child rape, and a host of other execrable hallmarks of United Nations actions and policies, then she is either naive or willfully blind to the true nature of the UN. …

In one of the most extraordinary statements ever made by an American official about Israel, Rice bitterly complained last February about having to veto a Security Council resolution condemning Israel and its settlement policy. She deliberately undercut the impact of the veto by saying, “For more than four decades, [Israeli settlement activity] has undermined security … corroded hopes for peace and security … it violates international commitments and threatens prospects for peace.” During her testimony last week, Rice reiterated that sentiment, adding “Israeli settlement activity is illegitimate.”

What angered Rice was that the Security Council vote was 14-1, with countries like Great Britain, France, and Russia co-sponsoring the Palestinian-inspired condemnation. To Rice’s and the administration’s way of thinking, going against international “consensus” — even if inimical to US interests — was a blow to their strategy of “engagement.”

Rice’s statements before the committee on the UN’s massively hypocritical selections for the Human Rights Council can only be termed bizarre. The HRC features such stellar advocates for human rights as Angola, China, Cuba, Kyrgyzstan, Russia, and Saudi Arabia — a rogue’s gallery of thuggish states. After acknowledging that it is difficult to find nations that have good human rights records to serve on the council, Rice seemed proud of the fact that US opposition had kept Iran off the HRC. She chalked that “success” up to the fact that the United States had agreed to join the HRC rather than refuse to participate in such a farce.

What Rice didn’t mention was that in order to get Iran to withdraw its application for membership on the HRC, Washington agreed not to raise a stink when the fundamentalist Islamic Republic that mandates stoning women for adultery wanted to join the Commission on the Status of Women. With no objection from the US, Iran was duly elected to the commission.

Instead of Iran joining the HRC, Libya got the slot. How this can be termed a “success” takes pretzel-like logic — something Rice appears to excel at. …

Rice’s thinking on terrorism has also heavily influenced administration policy. In 1996, she advised President Clinton not to accept Sudan’s offer to turn over Osama Bin Laden because Sudan’s human rights record was so wretched, she thought we shouldn’t have anything to do with them.

Refusing to contaminate her idealistic beliefs with the ample evidence that has been produced to the contrary, Susan holds fast to her conviction that the “cause of terrorism” is “poverty”.

Her steadfast belief that poverty, not radical Islamist ideology, is responsible for terrorism has upended 20 years of American anti-terrorism policy. Rice is the inspiration behind the Obama administration’s de-emphasizing military action against terrorists, while looking for ways to address the “root causes” of the violence. …

It is Rice’s solution to what she considers the “real” causes of terrorism that is of great concern. She supports the transfer of nearly $100 billion every year to UN’s Millennium Development Project for redistribution to poorer nations and their kleptocrat leaders. How this will address the problem of “poverty” in poor countries never seems to get explained. The history of aid to these nations is that the elites end up with most of it while precious little trickles down to the masses. Rice ignores this history — and the reality that America doesn’t have $100 billion for such a cockamamie scheme. …

What isn’t generally known is her advocacy for unilateral American action in cases where the UN fails to act. Along with Samantha Power, the president’s national security advisor, Rice is responsible for pushing through the Security Council a strong resolution authorizing military force against Gaddafi. But when it comes to Darfur and other potential hot spots where the UN refuses to act, Rice has advocated that America go it alone to prevent a humanitarian disaster. … She has … suggested that the US should contribute a percentage of its military to a UN force, under UN command, to intervene where humanitarian crises threaten disaster.

This goes far beyond what most would advocate for when it comes to the Responsibility to Protect doctrine. But it is one more indication that Susan Rice casually sets aside the interests of her own country in order to cater to the whims and capricious agenda of a world body that has proven itself an enemy of the United States.

Because the left hates individual freedom, it hates America. It wants the UN to become the world’s governing body and redistribute wealth from the developed countries to the rest. And it’s making progress towards achieving its terrible aims. The thugocracies that have a permanent seat on its Security Council – Russia and China – are no longer restrained by Western powers. France and Britain are ghosts of the powers they used to be. And as Susan Rice represents an American leadership that does not like America, it looks as if Turtle Bay could actually become the capital of the whole-earth hell that the international left dreams of …

… unless the United States again, and soon, has strong wise men governing it, and they have the will to abolish the United Nations.

The UN must be destroyed!

A Saudi Arabian considers the Israeli-Palestinian conflict from a point of view that is unusual, to say the least, in the Arab world:

From Arab News, by Abdulateef Al-Mulhim:

What if Arabs had recognized the State of Israel in 1948?

I have been exposed to Palestinians since I was in first grade in Al-Hassa, Saudi Arabia They were my favorite teachers. They were the most dedicated and the most intelligent among all my instructors, from elementary to high school.

When I was attending New York-based SUNY Maritime college (1975-1979), I read a lot of books about Palestinians, Arabs and the Israelis. I have read every article about the many chances the Palestinians had and missed to solve their problem, especially the Camp David agreement between Egypt and Israel.

I have seen and read about the lives of the Palestinians in the US and other places. They are very successful in every field. And at the same time I saw the Arab countries at the bottom of the list in education and development. And I always ask the question: What if the Palestinians and the Arabs accepted the presence of Israel on May 14, 1948 and recognized its right to exist? Would the Arab world have been more stable, more democratic and more advanced?

If Israel was recognized in 1948, then the Palestinians would have been able to free themselves from the hollow promises of some Arab dictators who kept telling them that the refugees would be back in their homes and all Arab lands will be liberated and Israel will be sent to the bottom of the sea. Some Arab leaders used the Palestinians for their own agenda to suppress their own people and to stay in power.

Since 1948, if an Arab politician wanted to be the hero and the leader of the Arab world, then he has a very easy way to do it. He just shouts as loud as he can about the intention to destroy Israel, without mobilizing one soldier (Talk is cheap).

If Israel was recognized in 1948, then there would have been no need for a coup in Egypt against King Farouq in 1952 and there would have been no attack on Egypt in 1956 by the UK, France and Israel. Also there will be no war in June 1967 and the size of Israel will not be increased and we, the Arabs would not have the need for a UN resolution to beg Israel to go back to the pre-1967 borders. And no war of attrition between Egypt and Israel that caused more casualties on the Egyptian side than the Israeli side.

After the 1967 war, Israel became a strategic ally of the US because before this war, the US was not as close to Israel as people in the Arab world think. The Israelis fought in that war using mainly French and British weapons. At that time, the US administrations refused to supply Israel with more modern aircraft and weapon systems such as the F-4 Phantom.

The Palestinian misery was also used to topple another stable monarchy, this time in Iraq and replacing it with a bloody dictatorship in one of the richest countries of the world. Iraq is rich in minerals, water reserves, fertile land and archaeological sites. The military led by Abdul Karim Qassim killed King Faisal II and his family. Bloodshed in Iraq continued and this Arab country has seen more violent revolutions and one of them was carried out in the 1960s by a brigade that was sent to help liberate Palestine. Instead it made a turn and went back and took over Baghdad. Even years later, Saddam Hussien said that he will liberate Jerusalem via Kuwait. He used Palestinians misery as an excuse to invade Kuwait.

If Israel were recognized in 1948, then the 1968 coup would not have taken place in another stable and rich monarchy (Kingdom of Libya). King Idris was toppled and Muammar Qaddafi took over.

There were other military coups in the Arab world such as Syria, Yemen and the Sudan. And each one of them used Palestine as their reason for such acts. The Egyptian regime of Jamal Abdul Nasser used to call the Arab Gulf states backward states and he tried to topple the governments of these Gulf states by using his media and his military forces. He even attacked southern borders of Saudi Arabia using his air force bases in Yemen.

Even a non-Arab country (Iran) used Palestine to divert the minds of their people from internal unrest. I remember Ayatollah Khomeini declaring that he would liberate Jerusalem via Baghdad and President Ahmadinejad making bellicose statements about Israel, though not even a single fire cracker was fired from Iran toward Israel.

Now, the Palestinians are on their own. Each Arab country is busy with its own crisis. From Egypt, Tunisia, Libya, Sudan, Yemen, Syria, Jordan, Somalia, Algeria, Lebanon and the Gulf states. For now, the Arab countries have put the Palestinian-Israeli conflict on hold.

Abdulateef Al-Mulhim is Commodore (Retd.), Royal Saudi Navy. He is based in Alkhobar, Saudi Arabia, and can be contacted at: [email protected]