America’s war in Afghanistan is at long last coming to an end.

Daniel Greenfield has these thoughts on the failed campaign:

Obama has made it clear that Karzai has no future, and that means that a growing realignment is happening in Afghanistan. With two sides to choose from, one that is on the way out, and one that is on the way in, a new tide of support is flowing away from the American backed government and to the Taliban. …

Afghanistan is the Muslim world at its most elementally tribal with fewer of the mock civilized interfaces between the Westerner and the ragged edge of the frontier than are found in Pakistan or the Middle East.

The Taliban took power there in the same way that Mohammed once did in the Arabian desert, by packing together ruthless brutality and a fanatical religious ideology. Their coalition was based on naked power and terror. Ours was based on foreign aid, elections and soldiers digging wells. It’s not that we never had a shot, but that we were trying to impose order on what is really a permanent state of chaos.

Even before the choppers have begun taking off, the chaos is reclaiming the land. The Islamists will return, celebrate their victory, and fall into another civil war. Without foreign troops there to target, they will not be able to count on the same level of aid from the Muslim world. Which will move the clock back to before the American invasion.

Kabul will hold out for a while, but eventually it will fall, and all the NGO’s, the girls we taught to read, the elections and the laws will all go back under the Burqa. …

The story will play out the same way that it did in Vietnam and the Russian occupation of Afghanistan. Not because it was foretold, but because we lost sight of what the mission was.

The same mission creep took hold in Afghanistan and Iraq, that has taken hold in most of our wars. We stopped fighting to destroy an enemy and began trying to win the hearts and minds of the population. No longer as a means, but as an end. …

If we had put our focus into hunting down the Taliban, wiping out any village that harbored them and leaving behind a trial of chaos and refugees, then we would have at least taught a lasting lesson.

But for what? Is it certain that 9/11 was prepared in Afghanistan, or was Osama bin Laden in Pakistan, or even perhaps Iran, when he plotted the attack?

One might think that America should have whacked the Taliban regardless of whether it had anything to do with 9/11. Perhaps another whack may be necessary one day. But America should whack and go.

Instead we believed that by exporting our system, we could implement a state of stability. Transform Afghanistan from a collection of villages and hovels run by gangs and large families into something more modern. The effort was doomed to fail. Afghanistan is not a modern state. It isn’t a state at all. Like most of the Muslim world it’s a patchwork of families and clans with borders and a flag stuck on top. To run it, is a matter of managing chaos. …

Our drive for democracy was based on a fundamental error. We had not taken into account that the difference between us and them, was not that we had voting booths, and they didn’t. But that we were civilized and they weren’t.

Is civilization rendered impotent by its own moral values when it comes to using force against savages?

When the Romans despaired of taming wild tribes they built walls to keep them at bay: the limes in Germany, Hadrian’s Wall in Britain. In our time, no wall can protect us from Islamic savages. From time to time we will need to whack them, but we should never hang about trying to tame them.

How can we possibly learn the answer, when we keep asking the wrong question. … The right question wasn’t how do we stabilize Afghanistan, it was how do we find the people who did this to us and teach them and their backers an enduring lesson.

There was a brief shining moment when we understood that this was the question. When it was “You’re either with us or against us” and “Give us Bin Laden’s head”. When politicians seemed to have reverted to the common sense approach of the man on the street. But then the experts took over. And the question became one of reconstructing Afghanistan in the name of some greater good. Now the Taliban are giving the final answer to that question.

The only true moral of war is that you shouldn’t begin one that you aren’t going to fight to win. And we didn’t fight to win. We fought for hearts and minds. And now when the troops go, we will discover how little those hearts and minds were worth all along.

Years and years ago in Texas, a vicious pervert named Humberto Leal raped and murdered a sixteen year old girl named Adrea Sauceda.

From a report of the murder, and the 1995 trial and conviction of her murderer:

The tragic final hours of sixteen-year-old Adrea Sauceda’s life started at an outdoor party in San Antonio, Texas. … Humberto Leal was also at the party. At some point the intoxicated but conscious victim was placed in Leal’s car. …  Several of the party members went looking for Adria … They found her nude body lying face-up on a dirt road. They noticed Adria’s head had been bashed in and it was bleeding. Her head was flinching or jerking. These party members called the police. When the police arrived, they saw the nude victim lying on her back. There was a 30 to 40 pound asphalt rock roughly twice the size of Adria’s skull lying partially on Adria’s left arm. Blood was underneath this rock. A smaller rock with blood on it was located near Adria’s right thigh. There was a gaping hole from the corner of Adria’s right eye extending to the center of her head from which blood was oozing. Adria’s head was splattered with blood. [She had been raped with] a bloody and broken stick approximately 14 to 16 inches long with a screw at the end of it … Another 4 to 5 inch piece of the stick was lying to the left side of Adria’s skull. … Leal was arrested [and his] car was impounded. … [At leal’s trial]  Dr. DiMaio, the medical examiner who performed the autopsy, testified about Adria’s injuries and cause of death. DiMaio testified that even though Adria was intoxicated when she received her injuries, she would have been aware of what was happening to her. …  Adria’s head injuries were consistent with Adria lying on the ground with somebody standing over her striking her. DiMaio testified the large rock could have delivered the injuries to Adria’s head. Based on the injuries to Adria’s head, DiMaio testified Adria would had to have been struck with the rock two or three times. DiMaio testified Adria died from blunt force trauma injuries to the head. …  DiMaio also testified about bite marks he found on Adria’s left cheek, the right side of her neck and the left side of her chest. Another witness compared the bite marks on Adria’s chest and neck with dental impressions of Leal’s teeth. They matched. The State’s indictment charged that Leal killed Sauceda … Leal was convicted and … sentenced to death.

A just sentence.

But demands that the rapist murderer’s life be spared poured over the Governor, Rick Perry.

Who were the murderer’s supporters?

A gaggle of very important lefties from all over this lefty-contaminated planet …

scoundrels slithering about  that sink of iniquity the United Nations …

and the president of the United States, Barack Obama.

From Front Page, by Mark Tapson:

The pleas came not just from the typical capital punishment opponents but from international diplomats, judges, military officials, politicians, even the United Nations. The topper was an eleventh-hour appeal from the Obama administration itself.

What is it about Leal’s case that prompted protest from such high-powered and far-ranging corners? The argument from the White House and others was that his execution “would place the United States in irreparable breach of its international law obligation.” A “Mexican national” (he had lived illegally in the U.S. since the age of two) Leal had not been informed, after his arrest, of his right to consult the crack legal team at the Mexican consulate – an oversight which the International Court of Justice at The Hague rules is a violation of the 1963 Vienna Convention on Consular Relations. Leal, as such, should have been notified of his right to call up his embassy and have all that rape-murder unpleasantness wiped clean as tidily as “some New Guinean ambassador’s parking tickets,” as crime reporter Tina Trent put it in a blistering blog.

Instead, Humberto Leal and his attorney Sandra Babcock were forced to insist on his innocence, despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary, through forty-five hearings and appeals over a period longer than the life of his young victim, before he finally confessed at his execution: “I have hurt a lot of people… I take full blame for everything. I am sorry for what I did.” This was just before he shouted – twice – his patriotic final words, “Viva Mexico!” If Senõr Leal had lived there, of course, instead of illegally in the U.S., Adrea Sauceda would still be alive. …

“A technicality doesn’t give anyone a right to come to this country and rape, torture and murder anyone,” said the victim’s mother. Sorry, Mrs. Sauceda, but President Obama and his radical colleagues have a broader agenda in mind than justice for your insignificant daughter. Tina Trent suggests that Obama’s intervention on Leal’s behalf can be traced back to a 2003 conference called Human Rights at Home: International Law in U.S. Courts, which featured the usual suspects: the ACLU, The Jimmy Carter Center, Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International. Also presenting at the conference was Leal’s attorney Babcock herself and a raft of radical elements: Bernardine Dohrn, the unrepentant former terrorist/current radical academic, and the not-so-better-half of Bill Ayres (whose c.v. is the same); Van Jones, the continually self-reinventing, race-baiting Communist “truther” … and representatives from the [sarcastically named] Open Society Institute, funded by the ubiquitous puppet master of the Left, George Soros. Radical transnationalist Harold Koh, now Obama’s State Department legal adviser and one of those who pushed for Leal’s international “rights” participated as well. The conference’s official description said that one of its purposes was to “ensure U.S. accountability for violating international human rights principles” – hence the campaign for “justice” for illegal alien and rapist-murderer Humberto Leal.

Trent reports that as a professor at Northwestern University School of Law, “Ms. Babcock’s research interest is imposing international law on the American justice system, a hobby she practices with her colleague, terrorist-cum-law-professor Bernardine Dohrn.” Dohrn is the Director of Northwestern’s Children and Family Justice Center who, like Babcock, lists “International Human Rights” among her areas of expertise. It’s ironic that “Juvenile Justice” is Dohrn’s other area of expertise, since she and her transnationalist allies haven’t put any effort toward the defense of 16-year-old Adrea Sauceda’s rights.

Dohrn is a lifelong “revolutionary anti-imperialist” who co-founded the Weather Underground domestic terrorist group, which carried out bombings on American soil, and was accused of planting the bomb that killed a San Francisco police sergeant in 1970, a charge she denies. She salivated over the Manson family’s butchery of innocents (whom she referred to as “pigs”), was a principal signatory of a Declaration of War against “AmeriKKKa,” and today links arms with her Code Pink cohorts to stand with Hamas and denounce the imaginary genocide of Palestinians being waged so ineptly by Israeli oppressors. So her concept of “international human rights” seems rather limited.

Dohrn, Babcock, Koh and the other activists from that 2003 conference all share what the National Review’s Andrew C. McCarthy calls Obama’s “poorly camouflaged loathing of American power, at least when used to pursue American interests.” They are united in their intent to diminish American sovereignty and superpower status, and to usher in a “post-American” world in which the United States submits itself to the judgment of transnational institutions like the United Nations and the International Court of Justice, packed with representatives who, to put it mildly, do not have America’s best interests at heart.

We are happy to say that all protests were ignored by the Governor. Leal was executed earlier this month.

Weathering such protests is nothing out of the ordinary for Perry; a strong proponent of the death penalty, he has overseen the execution of more than two hundred “dead men walking.”

In our view, that alone recommends him as a candidate for the presidency, for which – it is said – he is thinking of standing.

Okay, he’s got religion, but so have they all, all the would-be candidates as far as we know.

And God of course is on everyone’s side. After Leal had carried out his grotesque crime, he “went home, prayed on the side of his mom’s bed.” (Are you not moved?)

And after Leal’s execution, Leal’s uncle said, “There is a God who makes us all pay.”

Anyway, the law does – unless or until Obama and the United Nations abolish it.

We often speak of persecutions and cruelties carried out in the name of Christianity. Multitudes of examples are to be found in the history of the medieval Papal Inquisition. Volumes have been written about that terrifying institution, and the chronicles hold an immense fund of horrors. A good case could be made that the Catholic Church is the most terrible institution ever established in human history, in that its intensely cruel and terrifying power of oppression continued for hundred of years. Nazism and Communism, no less cruel and terrifying, were comparatively short-lived in the 20th century. But Communism is still with us, and there is the possibility that it might persist  in parts of the world, or even be spread over all of it, for an unpredictable length of time. And of course Islam, an ideology of oppression and mass murder, has lasted longer than all the active Catholic inquisitions, is still with us, and is spreading at an ever accelerating pace.

But we will concentrate at present on the Roman Catholic Church’s arm of persecution.

On May 1, 2011, we posted The heretics of Languedoc, an outline of the story of the Cathars who were destroyed by the Catholic Church. As a sequel, we have selected these quotations from an essay to be found here.

The Inquisition set up in the Languedoc was not the first Inquisition set up by the Roman Church.. The Inquisition which is the subject of this page was the Medieval Inquisition, established informally by Pope Innocent III in the early thirteenth century and formalised by later popes. …

The express purpose of this original medieval Inquisition was to discover and eliminate vestiges of Cathar belief left after the Cathar Crusades. …

By the end of the fourteenth century Catharism had been virtually extirpated. Before the Crusade the Languedoc, under the Counts of Toulouse, had been the most civilised land in Europe. People here had preferred simple asceticism to venality and corruption. Learning had been highly valued. Literacy had been widespread, and popular literature had developed earlier than anywhere else in Europe. Religious tolerance had been widely practised. Jews enjoyed ordinary civil rights. The Languedoc had been the home of courtly love, poetry, romance, chivalry and the troubadours. All this was swept away by the Albigensian Crusade and Inquisition.

Procedures were developed over time, evolving from fairly amateur attempts to establish guilt to a sophisticated mechanism that would guarantee guilt. …

From contemporary documents we can trace the development of the torture techniques developed by Dominican Inquisitors. Here for example is an extract from an open letter written around 1285 by the Consuls of Carcassonne to Jean Galand, an Inquisitor at Carcassonne.

Contrary the the practice and custom of your predecessors, you have created a prison called “The Wall”, which would be better called “Hell”. In it you have constructed small cells to inflict pain and to mistreat people using various types of torture. Some cells are so dark and airless that those imprisoned there cannot tell whether it is night or day. They permanently lack air and light. In other cells the miserable prisoners remain in fetters – of either wood or metal – and are unable to move. They excrete and urinate where they are, and cannot lie down except on their backs on the cold earth … In other places in the prison they lack air and light and also food, exept the “bread of adversity, and the water of affliction” which are provided only rarely. Some are placed on the chevelet [an instrument of torture]; many of them have lost the use of their limbs because of the severity of the torture and are rendered entirely powerless … Life for them is an agony, and death a relief. Under these constraints they affirm as true what is false, prefering to die once than to be thus tortured multiple times … they accuse not only themselves but also others who are innocent, in order to escape their suffering in any way … those who so confess reveal afterwards that what they have said to the Brother Inquisitors [Dominicans] is not true, but false, and that they have confessed out of fear of the peril of the moment. To some of those [witnesses] that you cite you promise immunity so that they will more freely denounce others without fear. …

From other sources we know that the bread was stale and the water fetid – a diet that often resulted in death within weeks or months. …

The procedure was that Inquisitors would announce their arrival in a town in advance. Everyone was invited to attend and confess their errors. When the Inquisitors arrived “volunteers” were interviewed. If they confessed to relatively minor misdeeds, were prepared to swear fidelity to the Catholic Church, and were willing to provide useful information about others then they were given a small penance and the matter was closed. Some of the consequences of this practice were:

It provided an opportunity for obliging Catholics to betray friends and family, and a virtual obligation for everyone to do so – failure to provide useful information was taken as lack of genuine zeal and commitment to the One True Church.

It provided a formal record of a first offence. This had a salutary effect since a second offence carried the death penalty.

It efficiently filtered out Cathar parfaits [“perfects”] and other “heretics” who were not willing to swear any oath, let alone one of fidelity to the Catholic Church. Anyone who had not volunteered was immediately suspected, and their failure to confess voluntarily was itself evidence against them.

Repentant first offenders who admitted to having been Cathar heretics, when released on licence by the Inquisition were required to:

“… carry from now on and forever two yellow crosses on all their clothes, except their shirts, and one arm shall be two palms long while the other transversal arm shall be a palm and a half long and each shall be three digits wide with one to be worn in front on the chest and the other between the shoulders.”

Victims were required to renew the crosses if they became torn or destroyed by age. These yellow crosses, like the yellow badges of a different shape that the Catholic Church required Jews to wear, were badges of infamy – warning to good Catholics to shun the wearers. These crosses were known in Occitan as “las debanadoras” – reels or winding machines. The idea seems to be that offenders could be “reeled in” by the Inquisition at any time. This was a serious concern since a second accusation meant a second conviction, and a second conviction meant death.

From its begining, the Papal Inquisition worked by ignoring all rules of natural justice. Guilt was assumed from the start. The accused had no right to see the evidence against them, or their accusers. They were not always told what the charges were against them. They had no right to legal counsel, and if exceptionally they were allowed a legal representative then the representative risked being arrested for heresy as well.

People were charged on the say-so of hostile neighbours, known enemies and professional informers who were paid on commission. False accusations, if exposed, were excused if they were the result of “zeal for the Faith”. Guilty verdicts were assured – especially since, in addition to their punishment, half of a guilty person’s property was seized by the Church. The Dominicans soon hit on the idea of digging up and trying dead people, so that they could seize property from their heirs. …

Torture became a favourite method of extracting confessions for offences both real and fabricated. Its use was explicitly sanctioned by Pope Innocent IV in 1252 in his bull ad extirpanda though it had been practiced from the earliest days. Inquisitors and their assistants were permitted to absolve one another for applying torture. Instruments of torture, like crusaders’ weapons, were routinely blessed with holy water.

Torture was applied to obtain whatever confessions were required, and sometimes just to punish people that the Church authorities did not like – people could be and were tortured even after they had confessed. …

These techniques were responsible for the first police state in Europe, where the only thoughts and actions permitted were those approved of by the Roman Church, where no-one could be trusted, and where duty to the totalitarian authority took precedence over all other duties …

It is difficult to find any technique of modern totalitarianism that was not pioneered by the Medieval Inquisition …

Inquisitors even charged people for the equipment used to execute members of their families …

Tortures varied from time to time and place to place, but the following represent the more popular options.

Victims were stripped and bound. The cords were tied around the body and limbs in such a way that they could be tightened, by a windlass if necessary, until they acted like multiple tourniquets. By attaching the cords to a pulley the victim could be hoisted off the ground for hours, then dropped. Whether the victim was pulled up short before the weight touched the floor, or allowed to fall to the floor, the pain was acute. This was the torture of the pulley, also known as squassation and the strappado. John Howard, the prison reformer, found this still in use in Rome in the second half of the eighteenth century.

The rack was a favourite for dislocating limbs. …

The victim could be flogged, bathed in scalding water with lime, and have their eyes removed with purpose designed eye-gougers.

Fingernails were pulled out. Grésillons (thumbscrews) were applied to thumbs and big toes until the bones were crushed.

The victim was forced to sit on a spiked iron chair that could be heated by a fire underneath until it glowed red-hot.

Branding irons and red-hot pincers were also used.

The victim’s feet could be placed in a wooden frame called a boot. Wedges were then hammered in until the bones shattered, and the ‘blood and marrow spouted forth in great abundance’. Alternatively the feet could be held over an open fire, and literally roasted until the bones fell out; or they could be placed in huge leather boots into which boiling water was poured, or in metal boots into which molten lead was poured.

Since the holy proceedings were conducted for the greater glory of God the instruments of torture were sprinkled with holy water.

Whole families were accused. …

Hearings … were held in secret, generally conducted by men whose identities were concealed. In the Papal States and elsewhere, Dominicans acted as both judges and prosecutors. By papal command they were forbidden to show mercy. There was no appeal. …

No genuine defence could be sustained. For example, if a husband provided an alibi, saying that his wife had been asleep in his arms when she was alleged to have been attending a witches’ sabbat, it would be explained to him that a demon had adopted the form of his wife while she was away….

Spies were employed with the incentive of payment by results. Perjury was pardoned if it was the outcome of ‘zeal for the faith’ – i.e. supporting the prosecution. …

Those who helped the inquisitors were granted the same indulgences as pilgrims to the Holy Land. Any advocates acting for and any witnesses giving evidence on behalf of a suspect laid themselves open to charges of abetting heresy. No one was ever acquitted, a released person always being liable to re-arrest and a condemned person liable to a revised sentence with no retrial, at the discretion of the Inquisitor. … Confessions were virtually guaranteed unless the victim died under torture. Then came the sentence, and execution of the sentence.

The method of execution was most often burning at the stake.

The Church claims that it never killed its victims; it handed them over to the lay authorities to be punished. This was called “relaxing” the condemned heretic. He or she was “handed to the magistrates with a recommendation to mercy and instruction that no blood be shed. The supreme hypocrisy of this was that if the magistrate did not burn the victims on the following day, he was himself liable to be charged with abetting heresy.”

People were executed for failing to fast during Lent, for homosexuality, fornication, explaining scientific discoveries, and even for professional acting. …

The victims were forced to pay for their torture and execution:

The estates of those found guilty were forfeit, after the deduction of expenses. Expenses included the costs of the investigation, torture, trial, imprisonment and execution. The accused bore it all, including wine for the guards, meals for the judges, and travel expenses for the torturer. Victims were even charged for the ropes to bind them and them and the tar and wood to burn them. Generally, after paying these expenses, half of the balance of the estate went to the Inquisitors and half to the Pope, or a temporal lord.

Torture and murder were highly profitable to a church that preaches poverty as a virtue. Why, we ask – expecting no answer – doesn’t universal disgust, if nothing else, deprive it of all its adherents?

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This picture illustrates a burning to death of “heretics” by the Spanish Inquisition

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Footnote: It should not be imagined that Protestantism was any more merciful than Catholicism. See our post Calvin: a chapter in the terrible history of Christianity, April 25, 2010.

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.

Airports are on high alert for al-Qaeda terrorists plotting to blow up jets using “body bombs” surgically inserted in them.

Attempts are being made to implant explosives into the abdomens, buttocks and breasts of suicide bombers so they can pass undetected through new airport body scanners.

US security experts have warned airlines and airport authorities about the new threat … They fear fanatics could inject a detonating chemical into themselves to trigger the bombs. … Potential bombers would carry a letter from a doctor claiming they have had surgery and need to carry a needle and syringe for medical reasons. It would be sufficient to clear security during check-in for a flight.

Terror experts confirmed small pouches of high explosives such as Pentaerythritol Tetra Nitrate could be implanted into the body. The wounds would be allowed to heal over and the bomb, which would be detonated in mid air by injecting a chemical into the pouch. Just eight ounces of PETN, the weight of a Rubik’s Cube, could bring down a plane …

But are there doctors willing to help the cause by supplying false certificates and performing the surgery?

One security source said there is concern that the US may harbour a significant number of medical students sympathetic to al-Qaeda.He said: “There are a large number of students from Arab countries studying medicine in the US. … All that would be needed is a basic grounding in rudimentary surgery to help implant a small amount of explosive.”

In fact, terrorist doctors, fully qualified in the profession, are not in short supply: a number of Arab doctors have prostituted their skills to serve the Islamic ideology of torture and murder.

Michelle Malkin writes:

Our homeland security officials have sent fresh warnings to foreign governments that “human bombs” may try to board planes with surgically implanted explosives. The ticking terrorists are reportedly getting help from murder-minded Arab Muslim physicians trained in the West. Infidels beware: Dr. Jihad’s version of the health care oath omits the “no” in “Do no harm.”

The death docs may be using their expertise to play “Hide the IED” in body cavities that bomb-detection equipment cannot penetrate. At least one Saudi operative has been nabbed with explosives in his bum, and British intel picked up on Arab website chatter last year about possible breast-bomb inserts. Officials are now said to be on the lookout for physicians’ notes requesting that passengers be allowed to carry syringes — which could carry detonation chemicals. …

There should be no shock at the role of purported healers in these and other hellish plots to destroy masses of innocent lives in the name of Allah. …

Medical charities have long served as front groups for jihad. Palestinian jihadists used ambulances owned and operated by the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees (UNRWA) — subsidized with billions in American tax dollars — to ferry explosives and gunmen from attacks. Hezbollah terrorists used ambulances as props in Lebanon to stage anti-Israel propaganda and elicit sympathy from Western media.

Radical Islam’s bloody perversion of the medical profession traces back to the Egypt-based Muslim Brotherhood, the global terror operation that wooed wealthy young docs and other intellectual elites with cushy union benefits.

• Ayman al-Zawahiri, a surgeon from a family of doctors, was raised in the Muslim Brotherhood; helmed the murderous Islamic Jihad; and masterminded myriad al-Qaida plots before succeeding Osama bin Laden this summer.
• Former Hamas leader Abdel Rantissi, bent on wiping out the children of Israel, was a pediatrician.
• Convicted al-Qaida scientist Aafia Siddiqui studied microbiology at MIT and did graduate work in neurology at Brandeis.
• Rafiq Abdus Sabir was a Columbia University grad who served as an emergency room physician in Boca Raton, Fla., before his terrorism conviction in 2007 for agreeing to provide medical aid and treatment to wounded al-Qaida fighters so they could return to Iraq to kill American soldiers.
• Rafil Dhafir, an Iraqi-born oncologist, practiced in New York before being convicted in 2004 on 59 criminal counts related to violating Iraqi sanctions and committing large-scale medical charity fraud.
• A den of well-heeled jihadi doctors from around the world was implicated in the 2007 London/Glasgow bombings. At least one of the convicted terror MDs worked for Britain’s National Health Service.
• Mahmoud al-Zahar, another bloodthirsty Hamas biggie and medical doctor, described his specialty to a New York Times reporter in 2006 this way: ”’Thyroids: I’m very good at cutting throats,’ Dr. Zahar said, drawing his forefinger across his neck as a rare smile spread across his face.”

And at least one Christian Arab could be added to the list: George Habash, a Palestinian Greek-Orthodox Christian, leader of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), one of the terrorist groups that came together to form the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) under Arafat’s leadership. He qualified as a doctor of medicine at the American University of Beirut in 1951.

Michelle Malkin goes on to remind us of the Muslim psychiatrist who carried out the Fort Hood massacre:

Closer to home, Army psychiatrist Nidal Hasan starkly diagnosed the ideological fanaticism of every soldier of Allah in a Koranic-inspired PowerPoint presentation that concluded: “We love death more then (sic) you love life!”

Military officials plagued by political correctness ignored Hasan. Thirteen Fort Hood soldiers and civilian personnel, and one unborn child, paid with their lives.

How many more Dr. Jihads are operating in the open, exploiting our borders and tolerance, wielding medical licenses to kill?

It’s getting ever worse, the mess that Obama and some European leaders have made with their interference in Libya “to protect civilians”.

The “civilians” include al-Qaeda operatives and murderous mobs which use the upheaval of war to hunt down and kill “aliens” in their country whose ethnicity they don’t like.

And now Omar al-Bashir, the mass-murderer tyrant of Sudan, has been let in to help the most powerful military alliance in the world with their failing campaign against the tin-pot dictator of Libya, Muammar Gaddafi.

Stephen Brown writes at Front Page:

While the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) says it is protecting civilians in Libya from Muammar Gaddafi, an International Criminal Court (ICC)-indicted fugitive, it has allowed another ICC-wanted criminal to send his army into the country.

In an under-reported event, Sudanese leader Omar al-Bashir, currently under indictment by the ICC for genocide in Darfur, recently sent troops across the Libyan-Sudanese border into southern Libya to occupy Kufra, a town located in an important oil-producing area. Only last May in his own country, Bashir, who could teach Gaddafi lessons on killing civilians, had used the same army to ethnically cleanse 60,000 Dinka tribesmen with tanks from Abyei, while his air force is currently bombing Nuba civilians indiscriminately in their mountain villages in possible preparation for a new genocide. Indicating that a deal with the devil may have been made prior to the Sudanese army’s cross-border move, NATO, which controls Libyan airspace, did not oppose the occupation.

“Our surveillance shows that they are not moving the oil, so it is not about money in the short term,” one Western official was quoted as saying.

What the Sudanese intervention most likely is about, however, is oil. More specifically, it is about getting it flowing again, a NATO priority. British officials are reported to “have worked closely” with the rebels in Benghazi to this end.

The role of the Sudanese troops in achieving this goal, it seems, is to provide the oil-producing area around Kufra with protection from Gaddafi’s forces. The Libyan leader’s fighters have been attacking oil facilities around Kufra and elsewhere to prevent the rebels from selling the oil and using the proceeds to prosecute the war against him. Without money, the rebels say they are “incapable of battling Gaddafi.” …

The Sudanese army moved into Kufra only days after the last attack by Gaddafi forces on the area’s oil fields on June 12. Prior to the Sudanese arrival, there had been a lot fighting around the town. What Sudan’s government expects to receive for its help in Kufra is unclear. But one can rest assured that Bashir is not helping out for nothing.

If NATO acquiesced or assisted in hiring the army of a war criminal and mass murderer like Bashir for use against a similarly indicted criminal, as appears likely, it throws a hypocritical shadow over the military alliance’s oft stated mission statement of protecting Libyan civilians. Enlisting Bashir proves protecting civilians from a brutal dictator was never NATO’s priority; rather it proves, as has long been suspected, the war is primarily about oil.

In our opinion, oil is a very good reason for going to war. Oil is the lifeblood of our commerce, essential to our civilization. We regret that the US did not take possession of the major Middle East oil-fields long ago – in 1973 at the latest.

It’s a much more respectable reason than “protecting civilians”, even if that were a genuine reason, and not the hypocritical pretext that it is.

What does it say about our culture that a sentimental lie is thought necessary to justify a war that is actually being fought for the vital interest of at least some of the NATO powers (chiefly France)?

One African columnist, Obi Nwakanma, has most likely discerned the true reason for NATO’s involvement in the Libyan civil war. Britain and France, Nwakanma maintains, feared being shut out of the Libyan oil fields in favour of China and India. Libya contains the largest oil reserves in Africa.

“It is no longer a secret that behind this NATO alliance war on Libya, and far beyond the ‘do-good’ face it …wears…as its reason for bombing Libya to smithereens is the quest to control the oil fields of Libya, guarantee Western access to energy sources in the face of growing concern over the rise of China and India and their…emerging gluttony for oil…,” Nwakanma writes.

It would be just like the sadistic Gaddafi to turn around and make oil exploration deals with China and India after Britain and France had suffered humiliation at his hands in expectation of getting such agreements. But NATO is running out of options in bringing a quick end to the bloody mess the Libyan war has become. The rebels are no closer to deposing Gaddafi than they were last February when the rebellion began. Facing a stalemate in eastern Libya, they have also not advanced from Misrata in western Libya despite having the advantage of NATO air support. As an indication of their weakness, and perhaps of their desperation, the rebels’ ruling council in Benghazi has now offered to allow Gaddafi to stay in Libya, if he would only step down. This offer was promptly rejected.

A possible sign of NATO’s desperation occurred when it was revealed last week France had air-dropped arms to anti-Gaddafi Berber rebels in Libya’s western mountains, defying the UN resolution banning the supplying of weapons to either side. The French defended their actions, saying the weapons, “rocket-propelled grenades, assault rifles, machine guns and, above all, anti-tank missiles,” were to protect the rebels against Gaddafi’s troops. Frustratingly for NATO, the French weapons have not helped so far. The French-armed Berber rebel force, now positioned 50 miles south of Tripoli, first offensive failed. Fighting on flat plains is not the same as mountain warfare.

Failing is bad enough, but making common cause with a blood-soaked savage like al-Bashir is worse. If they weren’t pretending not to be fighting for oil, the Western powers could send an army in and take it. It’s the sentimental pretense that has landed them in a disgusting alliance with al-Bashir.

And to what further depravities and slaughter is it all leading?

Even if NATO does prevail, one must question what kind of democracy does it expect to appear in Libya after Gaddafi’s downfall? The rebel forces are not very united, except in their desire to get rid of Gaddafi, and some have even been accused of war crimes, especially against black Africans. Made up largely of tribes, the opposition forces may eventually start to fight each other over power and control of oil revenues after Gaddafi’s demise, setting the stage for a never-ending, multi-phase civil war like happened in Afghanistan after the 1989 Soviet withdrawal. If this is the case, NATO may inadvertently have created more candidates for the ICC, against which it will again eventually have to act “to protect Libyan civilians.”

In the video, Michelle Bachmann deplores the Iranian regime – good – and then praises an organization that opposes it – not good, because the organization is a terrorist group. She should be better informed.

She is not the only one in Congress who is misinformed about the Mujahedin al-Khalq Organization. Even the admirable Ileana Ros-Lehtinen has swallowed their propaganda.

Everyone in the world who is not in favor of submitting to Islamic rule should know they must beware, in all contexts and circumstances, of any group that calls itself or in any way involves “Mujahedin”.

“Mujahedin” are jihadis, irregular warriors for Islam, whose method is terrorism. In short, “Mujahedin” are terrorists.

Michael Rubin traces the MKO’s history here.

He writes, in part:

Few terrorists groups garner the bipartisan endorsement and support that Iran’s Mujahedin al-Khalq Organization [MKO] has. On October 20, 2005, several congressmen and many aides attended a briefing in Congress. Maryam Rajavi, co-leader of the group and self-styled president-elect of Iran, addressed the gathering by video from France. She received a warm reception. Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee (D-Texas) thanked “Sister Maryam.” A bipartisan group of U.S. Congressmen have signed petitions calling for the U.S. Department of State to lift its 1997 classification of the group as a terrorist organization. In an April 8, 2003 interview, Rep. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen (R-Fla.), chairwoman of the House International Relations Committee’s Central Asia and Middle East Subcommittee said, “This group loves the United States. They’re assisting us in the war on terrorism; they’re pro-U.S. This group has not been fighting against the U.S. It’s simply not true.” Ros-Lehtinen is wrong. Unfortunately, hers is a mistake common to some on the left and the right who care deeply about Iranian freedom but fail to understand the nature of a group which, in public, says the right things about freedom and democracy but, in reality is dedicated to the opposite. Maryam Rajavi and her husband Masud are adept at public relations and adroit at reinvention, but the organization over which they preside eschews democracy and embraces terrorism, autocracy, and Marxism… and Islamism.

They argued that not only did God create the world, but he also set forth a historical evolution in which a classless society would supplant capitalist inequity. …

In order to prepare itself for armed struggle, the MKO reached out to the Palestinian Liberation Organization. In 1970, several leading MKO, including [Masud] Rajavi received terrorist training in PLO camps in Jordan and Lebanon. The group subsequently cemented links to the Libyan regime of Mu‘ammar Qadhafi and to the People’s Democratic Republic of Yemen, the Soviet Union’s Arabian Peninsula satellite. …

In May 30 and 31, 1972, shortly before President Richard Nixon’s state visit to Iran, the MKO launched a wave of bomb attacks which targeted the Iran-American Society, the U.S. Information Office, the Hotel International, Pepsi Cola, General Motors, and the Marine Oil Company. They failed to assassinate General Harold Price, head of the U.S. Military Mission in Iran. Less than three months later, they bombed the Jordanian embassy to revenge King Hussein’s September 1970 crackdown on their PLO patrons. In 1973, the MKO bombed the Pan-American Airlines building, Shell Oil, and Radio City Cinema in Tehran, and assassinated Colonel Lewis Hawkins, the deputy chief of the U.S. military mission. They did not only target foreigners. In a wave of bombings that continued into 1975, the MKO group attacked clubs, stores, police facilities, minority-owned businesses, factories it accused of having “Israeli connections,” and symbols of state and capitalism.

Not all was well within the MKO leadership. In 1975, the group divided into a Marxist faction that eschewed Islam, and a Muslim faction which did not. … Both groups continued their attacks on government and Western targets, all the while striking at each other. While the Marxist MKO was unsuccessful in an attempt to assassinate a senior U.S. diplomat, it killed three American employees of Rockwell International.

While both MKO factions participated in the Islamic Revolution, the Muslim MKO found shelter under the banner of Taleqani and rode the Revolution to prominence. They claimed some credit for the seizure of the U.S. embassy and subsequent hostage taking, and later demonstrated against their release. …

In the wake of the Islamic Revolution, [Masud] Rajavi consolidated his control over the organization. Rajavi divided the leadership into a Politburo and a Central Committee, and created a number of organizations to recruit and train new members. This proliferation of front organization, all serving an ideological and disciplined leadership, remains characteristic of the group today.

It was not long before Rajavi and the MKO came into conflict with the clerical circles surrounding Khomeini. …  [who] considered the MKO’s blending of Islam with Marxism, as well as the group’s denial of past jurisprudence, to be anathema. …

Khomeini … closed the group’s offices, banned its papers, and forced the MKO underground. …

The MKO called for national protests on June 20, 1980, and demonstrators heeded their call. Perhaps a half million poured into the streets in Tehran; many more turned out in cities across Iran. But Khomeini and his supporters in the Islamic Republic Party were ready. They labeled anyone marching in support of the MKO to be enemies of God, subject to summary execution. They kept their word. Khomeini’s followers killed hundreds. The warden of Evin Prison, Tehran’s main political prison, bragged of his execution of teenage girls.

Khomeini’s opponents responded. Terrorists—their affiliation unclear—blew up the Islamic Republic Party headquarters, killing hardline Ayatollah Mohammed Hosseini Beheshti, founder of the Islamic Republic’s judiciary, and 72 party members. Khomeini used the attack as reason to accelerate his purge. A reign of terror began. Thousands perished before Islamic Republic firing squads and upon its gallows. As Khomeini consolidated control, Iranians’ willingness to support the MKO evaporated.

The MKO did not surrender, though. It drove its terrorist campaign to a fever pitch, assassinating several hundred regime officials and Revolutionary Guards, and bombing the homes and offices of clerics. The group also targeted judges who passed sentence against their members. The MKO used suicide bombers with deadly effect, killing in separate incidents the Friday prayer leaders of Tehran and Shiraz. At its peak in July 1982, the group assassinated, on average, three regime officials per day; publicly, the MKO has claimed responsibility for the murders of over 10,000 people in Iran since 1981. But while the terrorist campaign shook the Islamic Republic to its core, it also claimed many innocent victims.

Rajavi… fled to Paris during Khomeini’s crackdown. …  Still more MKO supporters fled to Iraq, where they accepted the protection of President Saddam Hussein. What little support the group had once enjoyed in Iran evaporated, as Iranians saw the MKO rally in support of a dictator who launched a war that, by its conclusion in 1988, killed several hundred thousand Iranians. Ordinary Iranians are quite vocal in their hatred of the Islamic Republic and ridicule its current Supreme Leader ‘Ali Khamene‘i. …  But, without exception, all spew venom toward the MKO. The group violence and its betrayal of Iranian nationalism lost it all popular support in Iran. …

While the MKO lost both its revolutionary power struggle and the battle for Iranian hearts and minds, Rajavi has worked tirelessly to reinvent the MKO’s image. Again, he sought power in and sympathy from so many members’ martyrdom. At first, the group reached out to its old leftist and Arab nationalist patrons in Algeria, Lebanon, and among the PLO. It also sent delegations to the Italian and Greek Communist Parties, the Indian Socialist Party, and the British Labour Party. It found a sympathetic audience among left-leaning human rights organization and academics. The group targeted European parliamentarians. More than 3,000 parliamentarians signed a 1986 petition of support.

Paliamentarians have research staff. Why don’t they ever seem to find out the facts about Islamic terrorists, or even about Islam itself?

Seems that in America, members of Congress have been easily seduced by “pretty young women” to believe that the MKO is a paragon of noble goodness:

The admission of Ayatollah Hossein ‘Ali Montazeri, long-time Khomeini deputy, that Khomeini ordered the executions of 3,000 incarcerated MKO allowed the organization to further play the martyr card. The National Council of Resistance’s website describes an international organization with “official contacts with most European countries… [and] amicable relations with Middle Eastern nations.” The group has continued its petition drives. Congressional aides describe how the group sends pretty young women into the halls of Congress and various parliaments with innocuous petitions. Most lawmakers have little idea of the baggage the group carries. The MKO devotees get results. The group brags, “In 1992, in a joint global initiative, 1,500 parliamentarians declared their support for the NCR as the democratic alternative to the Khomeini regime. This included a majority in the US House of Representatives.” …

The organization sends baskets of goodies to ingenuous “lawmakers and commentators” who can’t be bothered to instruct their staff to find out the truth about it.

Within the United States, MKO members tell Congressmen, their staffs, and other policymakers what they want to hear: That the MKO is the only opposition movement capable of ousting the unpopular and repressive Islamic Republic. They are slick. Friendly lawmakers and commentators get Christmas baskets full of nuts and sweets. Well-dressed and well-spoken representatives of MKO front organizations approach American writers, politicians, and pundits who are critical of the regime. …

It would not be difficult for anyone investigating the MKO to learn that these mujahedin ” have little in their record to suggest democracy to be a goal. While they opposed the Islamic Republic only after Khomeini purged them from power, the group sought to replace Khomeini’s dictatorship with its own.”

They use methods of indoctrination or “brain-washing” that are common to many cults:

Today, Masud Rajavi — and his second wife Maryam — work to impose totalitarian control over its membership. Portraits of Masud and Maryam loom large in MKO demonstrations and facilities. In the West, the group forbids its members from reading anything but MKO newspapers and publications. Many MKO live in communal households and participate in mandatory study groups. In Camp Ashraf, Iraq, where many members sit in limbo following Saddam’s fall, MKO minders enforce celibacy, employ cult methods to break down individual will, and shield members from unsupervised exposure to outsiders.

The group hopes that the US has forgotten its terrorist strikes against Americans. And it seems that the US government is willing to forget:

Prior to Iraq’s liberation, there was rare interagency agreement about the MKO within the U.S. government. From Foggy Bottom to the Pentagon to the Old Executive Office Building, there was rare unanimity. As a terrorist organization closely allied with Saddam’s regime, the MKO should be considered combatants if they raised arms, and prisoners if they did not. …

During Iraq’s liberation, U.S. troops surrounded Camp Ashraf, the main MKO base in Iraq. … The U.S. military confined 3,800 MKO “security detainees” in the Camp. The Iranian government demanded forced repatriation and, through intermediaries, offered to trade al-Qaeda members sheltering in Iran for MKO members captured in Iraq. This offer was refused …

What brought about a change of view? –

How did the Left subsequently bolster Rajavi and empower the MKO? … General Ray Odierno, commander of the 4th Infantry Division, [said] …”Any organization that has given up their equipment to the coalition clearly is cooperating with us, and I believe that should lead to a review of whether they are still a terrorist organization or not.” Odierno’s statement was unwise. He had no authorization to make such a comment nor did it reflect anything but his own opinion. The MKO are masters of propaganda; he was unaware of the group’s history. Complacency in the face of an opponent’s overwhelming firepower makes an adversary smart, not democratic.

The gaffe made, the Pentagon fumbled its response. … Left-wing pundits and academic conspiracy theorists went into overdrive. …   enabling the group to project a false image of support where none existed. Partisan bloggers … and Washington Post correspondents, and New York Times’ columnists, repeated the story, substituting hypothesis for fact, citing each other and justifying their beliefs with anonymous sources. None can produce an iota of evidence. While the MKO has the support of a handful of congressmen and a small number pundits, Rajavi has no support in the power centers of Washington. Nevertheless, he bolsters his supporters’ morale and basks in the claim of support, however false.

Even in the era of resurgent realism, some issues should remain absolute. Terrorism, the deliberate targeting of civilians for political gain, should never be acceptable. Mitigating factors do not exist. True, in August 2003 the MKO exposed Iran’s covert nuclear enrichment program. It continues to penetrate Iran’s defenses and assassinate its opponents. This, though, is more a result of corruption and the Islamic Republic’s crumbling control over its periphery. The MKO — and any other group — can bribe officials and penetrate defenses. This should not give reason, on the hundredth anniversary of Iran’s Constitutional Revolution, to advance or reward Rajavi’s life-long megalomaniacal quest for power and his backward blend of Marxism and Islamism. Many “monsters of the left” use the rhetoric of democracy to realize their ambition. Masud and Maryam Rajavi, and the organization over which they exert dictatorial control, are no exception.

So Michele Bachmann has got it very wrong about whom to support in Iran against the grim ayatollahs and Ahmadinejad.  She is not alone in making this mistake, but unless she corrects her view in the light of the known facts about MKO, she does not deserve to be the GOP candidate for the presidency.

*

But wait, there’s more (as the TV salesmen say when they are about to “double the offer”).

Michelle Bachmann also wants “intelligent design” taught in the schools along with evolution. She thinks that both are science.

“I support intelligent design,” Bachmann told reporters in New Orleans following her speech to the Republican Leadership Conference. “What I support is putting all science on the table and then letting students decide. I don’t think it’s a good idea for government to come down on one side of a scientific issue or another, when there is reasonable doubt on both sides.”

“Intelligent design” is a euphemism for “In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth”.  That is not science.

As far as we know all the Republicans who are standing for the presidency are religious – as any who has yet to declare will be. There cannot (yet) be a presidential candidate who would not be religious. Or admit that he/she is not religious.

But we note Bachmann’s unintelligent design to have “intelligent design”  taught to children as if it were science, and mark it against her.

Iran, the foremost state sponsor of terrorism, recently held an international “anti-terrorism” conference – under the flag of the United Nations.

Caroline Glick writes at Townhall:

Speaking at the conference, Iran’s supreme dictator Ali Khamenei called Israel and the US the greatest terrorists in the world. Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad said the US was behind the September 11 attacks and the Holocaust and has used both to force the Palestinians to submit to invading Jews.

The UN has never been able to agree on a definition of terrorism. It seems to be all one to the Secretary General of that demonic institution whether it is exemplified by “measures taken by the US and Israel to defend themselves” or “Muslims flying planes into New York buildings”.

Aside from the fact that the leaders from Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan – who owe their power and freedom to the sacrifices of the US military – participated in the conference, the most notable aspect of the event is that it took place under the UN flag. UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon sent greetings to the conferees through his special envoy. According to Iran’s Fars news agency, “In a written message… read by UN Envoy to Teheran Mohammad Rafi Al-Din Shah, [Ban] Kimoon [commended] the Islamic Republic of Iran for holding this very important conference.”

According to Fars, Ban added that the UN had “approved a large number of resolutions against terrorism in recent years, and holding conferences like the Teheran conference can be considerably helpful in implementing these resolutions.”

When journalists inquired about the veracity of the Iranian news report, the UN Secretary-General’s Office defended its position. Ban’s spokesman Farhan Haq sniffed, “If we’re reaching out and trying to make sure that people fight terrorism, we need to go as far as possible to make sure that everyone does it.”

So as far as the UN’s highest official is concerned, when it comes to terrorism there is no qualitative difference between Iran on the one hand and the US and Israel on the other. Here it is worth noting that among the other invitees, Iran’s “counterterror” conference prominently featured Sudanese President Omar al-Bashir.

That’s the Butcher of Dafur to most of us.

Bashir is wanted by the International Criminal Court on genocide charges for the genocide he has perpetrated in Darfur.

Iran, it should be noted, now occupies the vice-presidency of the UN General Assembly.

And North Korea, whose tyrant spends the meager resources of his impoverished country on making nuclear weapons while the people starve, heads the UN’s Conference on Disarmament.

The new General Assembly vice president is not merely the world’s largest state sponsor of terrorism. It is also a nuclear proliferator. This no doubt is why Iran’s UN representative expressed glee when earlier this month his nation’s fellow nuclear proliferator North Korea was appointed the head of the UN’s Conference on Disarmament.

This would be the same North Korea that has conducted two illicit nuclear tests; constructed an illicit nuclear reactor in Syria; openly cooperated with Iran’s nuclear and ballistic missile program; attacked and sank a South Korean naval ship last year, and threatened nuclear war any time anyone criticizes its aggressive behavior.

What these representative examples of what passes for business as usual at the UN show is that the international institution considered the repository of the will of the “international community” is wholly and completely corrupt. It is morally bankrupt. It is controlled by the most repressive regimes in the world and it uses its US- and Western-funded institutions to attack Israel, the US, the West and forces of liberty and liberalism throughout the world.

Given the utter depravity of the UN and the international system it oversees, what can explain the international Left’s kneejerk obeisance to it?

Caroline Glick does not answer her own question.

The answer is that the Left is wholly and completely corrupt and morally bankrupt.

And it forms the present government of the United States of America. Which accounts for the economic and political ruin engulfing the world.

The ideals enshrined in the Constitution – liberty above all – are considered obsolete by the Left.

This clowning at the UN; this calling of  things by the names of their opposites; this political and diplomatic sarcasm practiced in concert by dozens of vicious little powers; this mockery of civilized values by the international Left, is nihilism – and it is winning.

P.S. The UN must be destroyed.

Should the United States refrain from any intervention in the world beyond its borders except in its own incontrovertible interest?

Or should it act as the world’s policeman? Does it have a “responsibility to protect”- if so, whom from what? Populations from their rulers? Vulnerable groups from any and all attackers?

To bring the debate to the moment and the actual, should the US keep its forces in Afghanistan after 10 years of fighting savage peasants and failing to crush them? Should there still be a US military presence in Iraq? In Germany? In South Korea? Should the US be fighting – as it is –  in Libya, Pakistan, and Yemen?

Should it not be using force to stop Iran becoming a nuclear power? And immediately against Iran’s ally, Bashar Assad, the bloody tyrant of Syria?

Should it not be outspending China on defense?

Should it not be helping Georgia liberate two of its provinces from Russia?

Should it be protecting South Sudan from its northern neighbors and their Ugandan proxies? Or the Nigerian Christians from their Muslim persecutors? Or the ethnic African Muslims of Dafur from the Arab Muslims who are raping, robbing, hounding and massacring them? Or destroying the pirates of Somalia? Or putting an end to the Arab/African slave trade?

Can those who answer yes to the first question fairly be called “isolationists”?

David Harsanyi considers, in a column at Townhall, whether the label is apt when applied to those who want America to withdraw from Afghanistan and refrain from any further participation in the NATO intervention in Libya:

There’s been a lot of talk about an alleged turn in American public opinion — particularly among Republicans — toward “isolationism.”

In a recent debate among GOP presidential hopefuls, there was some discussion about ending the United States’ commitment to the tribal warlords and medieval shamans of the Afghan wilderness. This induced John McCain to complain about the rise of a new “strain of isolationism” … McCain sidekick Lindsey Graham went on to notify Congress that it “should sort of shut up and not empower Gadhafi” when the topic of the House’s potentially defunding the military — er, kinetic, non-warlike bombing activity over Libya — came up. It would be a mistake, he vented, for Republican candidates to sit “to the left” of President Barack Obama on national security.

So if you don’t shut up and stop carping about this non-war war of ours, you are abetting North African strongmen. Makes sense. It’s the return of Teddy Roosevelt-style Republicanism, in which arbitrary power (and John McCain’s singular wisdom) matters a lot more than any democratic institution.

Sure, some on the far right and swaths of the protectionist, union-driven left oppose international trade agreements and [are] endlessly freaking us out about foreign influences.

Our interpolation: Is this protectionist section of the left aware of the left-elite’s longing for world government?

But isolationists? Judging from our conduct in the real world of economy, we’re anything but insular. So perhaps McCain simply meant noninterventionists — as in folks who have an unwavering ideological aversion to any and all overseas entanglement.

That can’t be it, either. Maybe, like many Americans, some in the GOP are simply grappling with wars that never end and a war that never started.

And with plenty of troubles here at home, it’s not surprising that Americans have turned their attention inward.

We can’t be in a constant state of war. Then again, Afghanistan is not a war per se, but a precarious social engineering project that asks our best and bravest (or, as our ally Hamid Karzai calls them, “occupiers”) to die for the Afghan Constitution, which is roundly ignored — except for the parts codifying Islamic law, that is. But all these conflicts come with the price of endless involvement. We almost always win.

When and where? Since World War Two, where has America won a hot war? Oh yes – against Granada.

But we never really go home. …

Did sometimes. From Granada after victory. From Vietnam after defeat.

This week, we learned that Obama rejected the advice of lawyers at the Pentagon and the Justice Department who questioned his legal authority to continue this nonmilitary military involvement in Libya without congressional authorization. Instead, the administration offered a string of euphemisms concocted to bypass the Constitution.

Without any tangible evidence that this conflict furthers our national interests or any real proof that we are preventing a wide-scale humanitarian crisis, it’s not a surprise that Defense Secretary Robert Gates says we’re “leading from behind” — which is, in fact, as stupid and deceptive as the case it doesn’t make.

Are you an isolationist for questioning those who continue to weaken the Constitution? … Are you an isolationist for questioning this brand of obfuscation? Are you an isolationist for wanting American forces to win and leave the battlefield rather than hang around for decades of baby-sitting duty?

And Tony Blankley writes, also  at Townhall:

I was one of the first GOP internationalist-oriented commentators or politicians to conclude that the Afghanistan War effort had served its initial purpose and that it was time to phase out the war. As a punitive raid against the regime that gave succor to Osama bin Laden, we had removed the Taliban government and killed as many al-Qaida and Taliban fighters as possible. …

But as the purpose of that war turned into nation building, even GOP internationalists had a duty to reassess whether, given the resources and strategy being brought to the new purpose, such policy was likely to be effective.

Now many others in the GOP and in the non-isolationist wing of the Democratic Party are likewise judging failure in Afghanistan to be almost inevitable. That is not a judgment driven by isolationism. Neither are we isolationist in our judgment (along with the opinion of Defense Secretary Robert Gates and almost the entire uniformed chain of command) that we see no national interest in Libya.

This is not isolationism; it is a rational effort at judging how best to advance American values and interests in an ever-more witheringly dangerous world.

Both Harsanyi’s and Blankley ‘s opinions are apt as far as they go.

But  the problem is deeper, the questions that need to be raised about foreign policy harder than those they are answering.

Can America have a coherent foreign policy that America itself and the other states of the world can depend upon for any useful length of time? The two political parties are now so divided ideologically that foreign policy will depend on whether the president is a Republican or a Democrat. It will necessarily chop and change. Or if relations with some states stay more or less the same for a while, they will do so unreliably.

Could the very uncertainty characterize foreign policy usefully? No foreign state being secure in its relations with the US, each would have to be vigilant, tack according to the US wind, adjust to the changes. A case could be made that a Machiavellian preference to be feared by other nations rather than loved might serve America well.

But there are other developments to be considered. In countries throughout the world – led in this by Europe –  there is an ideological tendency towards world government. The nation state is not liked: new political alignments, such as the European Union, are trying to phase it out. Democrats, for the most part, are in sympathy with the movement; Republicans are not. Democrats – like most leftists everywhere – have a vision of the UN turning into a world government; Republicans – many of them at least – would be happy to see the monstrous institution disbanded. It cannot continue long as it is: being a house of lies, it must fall down.

NATO is weakening. Letting Turkey into it was fatal. No longer secular, Turkey is now in the camp of Islam, inimical to the West.

The world as it was conceived to be after World War Two is changing kaleidoscopically under our eyes.

In relation to the rest of the world, what are American interests? How should they be pursued?

Should America concentrate on preserving itself as a fenced-in area of freedom on an otherwise unfree planet?  That would be isolationism. Should it form a union with other as-yet-free nation-states: Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Israel? India perhaps? Honduras? Papau? …

What would such a union do, what would be in its joint interest – “spreading democracy”, “protecting civilians”, “building nations”? The questions troubling America now would trouble it jointly, and the answers remain as hard to find.