The US was right to invade Iraq and topple Saddam Hussein, and right to invade Afghanistan where the 9/11 attack on America was plotted. In both cases war was the answer.

In both cases it was wrong to stay on to attempt “nation-building”.

But once that sentimental policy was decided on, the essential thing for the US to achieve in each case was a constitution of liberty.

Both Iraq and Afghanistan got new constitutions, but neither enshrines liberty. They enshrine sharia law, and where sharia prevails, liberty is shut out.

Andrew McCarthy writes trenchantly about the tragic failure of America’s vision and the ultimate futility of its struggles in Afghanistan and Iraq:

In 2006, a Christian convert named Abdul Rahman was tried for apostasy [in Afghanistan]. The episode prompted a groundswell of international criticism. In the end, Abdul Rahman was whisked out of the country before his execution could be carried out. A fig leaf was placed over the mess: The prospect of execution had been rendered unjust by the (perfectly sane) defendant’s purported mental illness — after all, who in his right mind would convert from Islam? His life was spared, but the Afghans never backed down from their insistence that a Muslim’s renunciation of Islam is a capital offense and that death is the mandated sentence. …

Mainstream Islamic scholarship holds that apostasy, certainly once it is publicly revealed, warrants the death penalty.

Having hailed the Afghan constitution as the start of a democratic tsunami, the startled Bush administration made all the predictable arguments against Abdul Rahman’s apostasy prosecution. Diplomats and nation-building enthusiasts pointed in panic at the vague, lofty language injected into the Afghan constitution to obscure Islamic law’s harsh reality — spoons full of sugar that had helped the sharia go down. The constitution assures religious freedom, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice maintained. …

Read the fine print. It actually qualifies that all purported guarantees of personal and religious liberty are subject to Islamic law and Afghanistan’s commitment to being an Islamic state. We were supposed to celebrate this, just as the State Department did, because Islam is the “religion of peace” whose principles are just like ours — that’s why it was so ready for democracy.

It wasn’t so. Sharia is very different from Western law, and it couldn’t care less what the Universal Declaration of Human Rights has to say on the matter of apostasy. …

The constitution that the State Department bragged about helping the new Afghan “democracy” draft established Islam as the state religion and installed sharia as a principal source of law. That constitution therefore fully supports the state killing of apostates. Case closed.

The purpose of real democracy, meaning Western republican democracy, is to promote individual liberty, the engine of human prosperity. No nation that establishes a state religion, installs its totalitarian legal code, and hence denies its citizens freedom of conscience, can ever be a democracy — no matter how many “free” elections it holds. Afghanistan is not a democracy. It is an Islamic sharia state.

To grasp this, one need only read the first three articles of its constitution:

1. Afghanistan is an Islamic Republic, independent, unitary, and indivisible state.

2. The religion of the state of the Islamic Republic of Afghanistan is the sacred religion of Islam. …

3. In Afghanistan, no law can be contrary to the beliefs and provisions of the sacred religion of Islam. …

Was that what you figured we were doing when you heard we were “promoting democracy”? Is that a mission you would have agreed to commit our armed forces to accomplish? Yet, that’s what we’re fighting for. The War On Terror hasn’t been about 9/11 for a very long time. You may think our troops are in Afghanistan to defeat al-Qaeda and the Taliban — that’s what you’re told every time somebody has the temerity to suggest that we should leave. Our commanders, however, have acknowledged that destroying the enemy is not our objective. In fact, Gen. Stanley McChrystal, the former top U.S. commander, said what is happening in Afghanistan is not even our war. …

It’s not our war, nor is it something those running it contemplate winning. … Indeed, the administration had concluded … that the war could not be won “militarily.” …

Afghanistan is not an American war anymore. It’s a political experiment: Can we lay the foundation for Islamic social justice, hang a “democracy” label on it, and convince Americans that we’ve won, that all the blood and treasure have been worth it? The same thing, by the way, has been done in Iraq. …

The affront here is our own betrayal of our own principles. The Islamic democracy project is not democratizing the Muslim world. It is degrading individual liberty by masquerading sharia, in its most draconian form, as democracy. The only worthy reason for dispatching our young men and women in uniform to Islamic countries is to destroy America’s enemies. Our armed forces are not agents of Islamic social justice, and stabilizing a sharia state so its children can learn to hate the West as much as their parents do is not a mission the American people would ever have endorsed. It is past time to end this failed experiment.

Yes, it is way past time. Leave them now to do it their way.

And it is past time to dispel the sweet illusion of good-hearted Americans that all Others are the same as Us in their values, wants, and desires. They are not.

The West, it seems, has lost interest in the crimes of Communist Russia now that the Cold War is over. But documents from a smuggled Soviet archive throw light not only on the past but also on the present.

Claire Berlinski  has been examining them. She writes in City Journal:

These documents … were available to anyone who wanted to consult them. But nobody did. Publishers were indifferent. Only a fraction of the documents had been translated into English. This was, I argued, a symptom of the world’s dangerous indifference to the enormity of Communist crimes.

One thing that the documents make clear is that the Soviet Union sponsored terrorism in the Middle East. Those who tried to convey this information during the Cold War to governments, politicians, foreign ministries, the media and academics, were met for the most part with a refusal even to entertain the possibility.  (I was one who tried and came up against a wall of denial – JB.]

It is one thing to know abstractly … that the Soviets sponsored terrorism in the Middle East. It is another to read a newly translated memorandum from longtime KGB head Yuri Andropov to Communist Party general secretary Leonid Brezhnev requesting authorization to fund a detailed plan by the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) to kill civilians around the world:

In a confidential conversation at a meeting with the KGB resident in Lebanon in April this year, [PFLP official] Wadia Haddad outlined a prospective program of sabotage and terrorism by the PLFP [sic]. . . . The PLFP is currently preparing a number of special operations, including strikes against large oil storage installations in various countries, . . . the destruction of oil tankers and super-tankers, actions against American and Israeli representatives in Iran, Greece, Ethiopia, Kenya, an attack on the Diamond center in Tel Aviv, etc. . . . We feel it would be feasible, at the next meeting, to give a generally favorable response to Wadia Haddad’s request. …

The documents provide proof that the Russians paid for world-wide anti-US and anti-Israel demonstrations:

Also interesting is a document suggesting the pains taken by the KGB to ensure the eruption of “spontaneous” global demonstrations against Israel. According to the KGB’s estimates, spontaneously outraged Muslims cost approximately a quarter-rupee apiece: “The KGB station in India is capable of organizing a protest demonstration at the U.S. Embassy to India, with up to 20,000 Muslims participating. The expenses for organizing the demonstration would amount to 5,000 Indian rupees and be covered from the funds allocated by the CPSU Central Committee for special measures in India in 1969–1971.”

The Russians were active in stirring up terrorist rebellion and promoting Communist movements in South America:

That there was scarcely a miserable group of miscreants on the planet that the Soviets did not, in some fashion, fund, train, and encourage is vaguely known now by some; it should be widely known by all. … In a 1980 document .. the secretariat of the Central Committee resolves “to grant the request of the leadership of the Communist Party of El Salvador and task the Ministry of Civil Aviation with arranging, in September–October 1980, a shipment of 60–80 tons of small arms and ammunition of Western manufacture from Hanoi to Havana, for the Cuban comrades to transfer it to our Salvadoran friends.”

They sponsored propaganda against the United States to exploit deceptively the issue of racism. The documents show that Soviet support for the Civil Rights movement in America was not provided out of principle but entirely cynically as a Cold War ploy:

Above all, the documents suggest that the most enduringly pernicious fruit of the Soviet Union was its propaganda. The cliché view of the United States as a nation whose foreign policy may best be understood as an expression of racism — an interpretation that continues to hinder American efforts to do the world any good — largely emerged thanks to the Soviet Union’s energetic efforts, as a 1970 document details:

Because the rise of negro protest in the USA will bring definite difficulties to the ruling classes of the USA and will distract the attention of the Nixon administration from pursuing an active foreign policy, we would consider it feasible to implement a number of measures to support this movement and to assist its growth.

Therefore it is recommended to utilize the possibilities of the KGB in African countries to inspire political and public figures, youth, trade union and nationalist organizations to issue petitions, requests and statements to the UN, U.S. embassies in their countries and the U.S. government in defense of the rights of American negroes. To publish articles and letters accusing the U.S. government of genocide in the press of various African countries. Employing the possibilities of the KGB in New York and Washington, to influence the “Black Panthers” to address appeals to the UN and other international bodies for assistance in bringing the U.S. government’s policy of genocide toward American negroes to an end.

The archive has contemporary relevance because they draw “an impressive picture of a world-wide terrorist network, and leave one in no doubt that the Soviet Union deserves all the discredit for the emergence of international terrorism as a major factor in global politics.”

Almost all the terrorist activity throughout the world between the late 1960s and the turn of the century was in the name of left-wing causes, and was promoted in one way or another by the Soviet Union, if not directly by funding and the supply of arms, at the very least by political support in international forums, chiefly the United Nations, and through influence on socialist parties in Europe and “national liberation” movements in the Third World.

Islamic terrorism began with the hijacking of civil aircraft by Palestinians under Arafat’s orders in 1970. He was leader of the PLO, an organization consisting of a number of factions including the PFLP – the Soviet’s foot in the Palestinian door.

In the light of what the documents prove, it would not be an exaggeration to say that Islam’s terrorist war against America and the non-Islamic world in general is an extension of the Cold War. The evil that Communist Russia did lives after it.

This is the part of Iranium, a new documentary about the threat that Iran poses to the world, that we found most interesting.

All of it can be found here, but only for a limited time.

As this video is no longer viewable, go here for information about the documentary.

The American Conservative Political Action Conference, CPAC, will be held this year February 10-12 at the Marriott Wardman Park Hotel in Washington, D.C. About 10,000 conservatives are expected to attend.

It’s a grand annual event. Lots of stimulating ideas are aired and discussed.

There is something, however, about it that troubles us. CPAC’s umbrella organization, the American Conservative Union (ACU), has on its governing board one Suhail Khan, who is expected to speak at this year’s conference.

Like us, Roger Kimball, writing at PajamasMedia, wants to know why:

He presents himself as a conservative Republican who can speak for “moderate Muslims.” In fact … Suhail Khan is a smooth-talking apologist for the Muslim Brotherhood … a radical Islamist group whose credo 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.”

Suhail Khan made his way into the U.S. government during the Bush administration. He has defended “Ground Zero mosque” Imam Feisal Rauf as a “moderate.” … In June 2001, Khan personally accepted an award from the now-notorious Abdurahman Alamoudi, then head of the American Muslim Council. …

Sen. Arlen Specter of the Judiciary Committee … cited a New York Post report documenting how Alamoudi had supported terrorists and “declared an interest in destroying America.”… [In October 2004, the “very supportive” Alamoudi was sentenced to 23 years in federal prison “on charges related to his activities in the United States and abroad with nations and organizations that have ties to terrorism.“]

In September 2001, four days before the 9/11 attacks, Khan spoke at the Islamic Society of North America’s [ISNA] convention. Introducing him was Jamal Barzinji, whose offices and home were raided by federal agents after 9/11. “Barzinji is not only closely associated with PIJ [Palestinian Islamic Jihad], but also with Hamas,” according to the search-warrant affidavit. At the event, Khan shared his experiences from “inside” the White House, and praised his late father, Mahboob Khan, for helping found ISNA — which the government now says is a front for the radical Muslim Brotherhood and has raised money for jihad. The founding documents of the Brotherhood’s operation in America (recently seized by the FBI) reveal that it is in this country to “destroy” the Constitution and replace it with Islamic law.

An alarming prospect: a widespread movement bent on destroying the Constitution and replacing it with Islamic law. Is that overstated? On the contrary, that’s what the Muslim Brotherhood is all about. Here, for example, is a key passage from the 1991 “Explanatory Memorandum” on the Brotherhood’s “strategic goals” for North America. It was written by Mohamed Akram, then a central Muslim Brotherhood leader in the U.S.:

[T]heir work in America is a kind of grand Jihad in eliminating and destroying the Western civilization from within and “sabotaging” its miserable house by their hands and the hands of the believers so that it is eliminated and God’s religion is made victorious over all other religions. …

What happens to “people like” Suhail Khan? They get appointments to influential jobs in the White House, then the Hill. In addition to sitting on the board of the ACU, Khan is currently a spokesman for the Congressional Muslim Staff Association …

While you’re being sexually assaulted at airports in the name of national security, because you might be an Islamic jihadist intent on blowing up a plane, an Islamic jihadist, the open enemy of your country, is being paid to tell the government how to be nice to Muslims dedicated to pursuing the jihad so as to help advance their cause. (See Note below.)

What excuse can the ACU possibly have for allowing this treacherous man anywhere near its governing board?

The American Conservative Union, founded in 1964 with the blessing of folks like William F. Buckley Jr., declares itself on the side of individual rights and “strictly limiting the power of government.” The Muslim Brotherhood and other activist Islamic groups work overtime to subordinate the individual to the will of Allah and recognize no distinction between state and religious authority. They represent as thoroughgoing a totalitarian force as the world has ever seen. Suhail Khan is a prominent spokesman for that anti-democratic species of tyranny. Why does he sit on the board of the ACU? … To my mind, the fact that the ACU’s board of directors includes apologists for the Muslim Brotherhood is the sort of thing that ought to worry our fellow conservatives. He is the proverbial wolf in sheep’s clothing…

Does he even bother to put on the sheepskin? We can see his slavering wolf-jaws when he speaks.

Suhail Khan is not the only member of the ACU’s governing board whose heart is on the side of America’s active enemy Islam. Another is Grover Norquist.

This is from The Jawa Report.

[Suhail Khan] is a protege of GOP activist Grover Norquist, who … co-founded the Islamic Institute with top Al-Qaeda fundraiser Abdurahman Alamoudi. …

Messrs. Norquist and Khan [have had] troubling involvement for over a decade in causes profoundly at odds with U.S. security and national interests. In particular, Grover Norquist helped found and operate a Muslim organization with seed money and staffing from the man who was, at the time, the preeminent MB/al Qaeda financier. …

It is devoutly to be hoped that they [Norquist and Khan], among many other aspects of the Muslim Brotherhood’s determined bid to insinuate shariah into the United States, will also receive close scrutiny in the course of the potentially momentous hearings into “radical Islam” that incoming House Homeland Security Committee chairman Rep. Pete King has pledged to convene in the weeks ahead.

*

Note: See Frank Gaffney’s important article on Suhail Khan, A Jihadist in the Heart of the Conservative Movement, at Front Page here, in which he writes:

… Suhail Khan spent the rest of the Bush administration in the Department of Transportation, ultimately serving as the Assistant to the Secretary for Policy. In that capacity … he had access to classified information. Given the Department’s portfolio and his responsibilities, that would presumably have included secrets concerning: the policies and operations governing the Transportation Security Administration, port, rail, waterway and highway security, the movement of nuclear weapons and other hazardous materials, etc.

(See also an older article by Frank Gaffney on Suhail Khan’s candidacy for the ACU board of directors in 2007 here.)

*

We ourselves cannot be at the conference as we exist only in the ether. But if any of our readers, existing in what we are told is now called “meat space”, should go to it  – and talk about atheist conservatism however unofficially – would he or she please send us a report?

Go here for information about the speakers and panels, and a link to register.

Someone once said “God is the evil in those who believe in him.” Or if someone didn’t, someone is saying it now.

When Khalid Sheikh Mohammed hacked off the head of Daniel Pearl to the greater glory of Allah, he had a video camera record his performance. The cameraman missed the initial slashing of the victim’s throat, so KSM re-enacted that part and then went on energetically to chop and saw through flesh and arteries and bone until Daniel Pearl’s head was separated from the rest of his body.

Writing about this at Townhall, Mona Charen says that KSM “seems to have achieved a kind of religious exultation by decapitating Daniel Pearl.”

They weren’t finished with him, though. After Pearl’s head had been sawed off his neck, Mohammed and his accomplices cut the rest of the body into pieces. They then washed the bloody floor and knelt down in the same spot to pray — perhaps moved to religious ecstasy by the smell of American blood. …

Whether they were moved to religious ecstasy or not, the decapitation of their helpless victim was certainly a religious act, as were the attacks of 9/11 – also the Allah-inspired idea of this same Muslim savage.

How can justice be done to Khalid Sheikh Mohammed? It cannot. But he can and must be put to death.

Mona Charen goes on:

Like the communists, who justified any crime in the name of revolution, Islamists justify any outrage if the goal is fulfilling their twisted vision of Allah’s will.

Twisted? What is the Islamic idea of “Allah’s will” when it is not “twisted”?

Where does any notion of a god’s “will” ever come from but out of human minds?

The cruelties perpetrated in the name of various Christian dogmas to carry out “God’s will” were ineffably appalling. Christians stopped burning and torturing in the name of Gentle Jesus a while back but what was done must never be forgotten or forgiven.

Islam’s cruelty is a busily on-going project. As shown in our margin, there have been up to this day 16,690 acts of murderous violence in the name of Islam since 9/11 recorded by “The Religion of Peace” – as Robert Spencer names his indispensable website in deliberate irony.

With admirable persistence the Special Tribunal for Lebanon pressed on against all discouragement and today indictments have been served for the murder of the former prime minister of Lebanon, Rafik Hariri.

See our post below, Eastern Explosions, for the importance of this to the political crisis in Lebanon and the possible repercussions in the region.

The indictments were submitted by the (Canadian) prosecutor, Daniel Bellemare, to the (Belgian) pre-trial judge Daniel Fransen. They reportedly name members of Hezbollah who planned and carried out the assassination, killing 22 other people in the truck-bombing.

One name is known: Iranian leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei is indicted for giving the instructions to kill Hariri.

The effect this will have on the regime in Iran, and consequently throughout the Middle East and Islam, and thus the world, could be huge.

The Arab world on both the Asian and the North African sides of the Red Sea, and Iran, and Pakistan, are heating up internally to the point of explosion.

Lebanon

On Wednesday last, January 12, 2010, the rickety “unity government” of Lebanon collapsed when the 10 Hezbollah members (out of 30 members in all) left it.

Why? Hezbollah fears the indictments soon to be issued by the Special Tribunal for Lebanon, sitting at the Hague, for the murder in 2005 of then Prime Minister Rafik Hariri in a truck-bombing in Beirut, in which 22 others were also killed. The tribunal has hard evidence that Hezbollah was responsible for it.

This terrorist organization – “The Party of God” is what its name means – is backed (which is to say is manipulated; is subject to the orders of) Syria and – chiefly – Iran. President Assad of Syria may be indicted too, so he’s as frightened of the tribunal as is the Hezbollah leadership. And now there are rumors that the mighty Ayatollah Khamenei – Iran’s head of state – may also be on the indictment list.

The Hezbollah members of the government demanded that the present prime minister, Saad Hariri, the murdered Rafik’s son, should declare that his government rejected whatever the findings of the Tribunal might be, now, before the indictments are issued.

Saad Hariri refused, so the Hezbollah members walked out and the government fell.

Hezbollah is very likely to try to deflect attention from the crisis within Lebanon by attacking Israel. Israel is prepared for the onslaught if and when it comes.

Tunisia

In Tunisia, the explosion came this week. A popular uprising erupted – the Arabs call it an intifada – which unseated the dictator Zine al-Abideen Bin Ali. He fled the country with wife Laila Tarabulsi. The couple have been in power, luxuriating in corruption, for 24 years.

Reaction among influential Arab commentators has been enthusiastically on the side of the revolutionaries. They hope the idea of violent rebellion will spread and unseat other despots, such as those who rule over Morocco and Libya.

The despots themselves are frightened. Some moved quickly to placate their populations.

Jordan

The King of Jordan, reacting to demonstrations in his own country, and spurred on by the events in Tunisia, hoped to subdue discontent by hastily setting controls on food prices.

Algeria

The repressive Algerian government, experiencing the same sort of internal unrest as Jordan – but worse -, and seriously disturbed by the Tunisian upheaval, took similar measures to keep prices down. But there it may be too late; the regime may fall.

Egypt

President Mubarak is ill and may die soon. There is a huge amount of political unrest in his country. He has harshly suppressed his chief opposition, the Muslim Brotherhood (action which, taken on its own, the rest of the world should probably be grateful for). Recent violent attacks on the persecuted Coptic Christians gave rise to demonstrations and have intensified the crisis. Chaos threatens.

Gaza

Hamas has warned that the leadership in the West Bank – headed by Abou Abbas – should expect the same fate as Bin Ali of Tunis. But Hamas itself could soon be at war if the region is ignited by a Hezbollah attack on Israel.

Iraq

On January 5, the Shia cleric Muqtada Sadr, a close ally of Hezbollah’s Hassan Nasrallah, returned from Iran to Iraq. On the same day, the Iranian foreign minister Ali Akbar Salehi arrived on an official visit to Baghdad. Civil war could break out at any time between the Shias and Sunnis of Iraq.

Saudi Arabia

The Saudi regime is constantly targeted by al-Qaeda. In this conflict, two brands of Islamic fundamentalism are pitted against each other. But more than al-Qaeda, the Saudis fear a nuclear-armed Iran.

Iran

President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s hold on power is increasingly precarious. He is protected at present by the head of state, Ayatollah Khamenei. But as we noted under the heading of Lebanon, Khamenei’s own position may not be secure.

Pakistan

As Pakistan has nuclear weapons, the prospect of a take-over of power by the Taliban and al-Qaeda, both of which are constantly and violently trying to topple the government, is extremely threatening not just to the region but to the world.

*

What does all this instability, revolution, and threat of war mean for the United States?

Is there any chance that President Obama and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton have an answer to that question?

Ahmed Ghailani, the al-Qaeda terrorist who participated in the bombing of the U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania in 1998, will be sentenced this month, perhaps to life imprisonment, but perhaps to as little as 20 years.

Ghailani was transported from Guantanamo Bay to New York City to await trial in the United States District Court for the Southern District of New York in June 2009. When the case came to trial, the judge disallowed the testimony of a key witness. On November 17, 2010, a jury found him guilty of one count of conspiracy, but acquitted him of 284 other charges including all murder counts. Critics of the Obama administration said the verdict proves civilian courts cannot be trusted to prosecute terrorists because it shows a jury might acquit such a defendant entirely. Supporters of the trial have said that the conviction and the stiff sentencing prove that the federal justice system works.

Not if he gets only 20 years.

Last month the House banned funding to bring Guantanamo prisoners to the US to be tried as criminals in federal courts.

Predictably, this elicited howls of protest from those who hold the strange opinion that prisoners of war should be tried individually like civilian citizens; the pro-Islam sentimentalists (such as President Obama and Attorney-General Eric Holder) who want “Gitmo” closed, pretending that it’s a tough penal institution rather than the holiday-camp safety-pen it actually is.

Prisoners of war should be kept until the war is over. If trials must be held, they should be conducted by military tribunals, and death sentences should be carried out promptly with guns.

Khalid Sheikh Mohammed the planner of 9/11, Richard Reid the shoe-bomber, Nidal Malik Hasan the Fort Hood mass-murderer, Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab the underwear-bomber, Faisal Shahzad the Times Square car-bomber, and all Muslim terrorists waging jihad against the non-Muslim world should be brought before military tribunals.

This is not what is happening. But if jihadists apprehended on American soil are to be tried as criminals, their sentences should be as harsh as the law allows.

Richard Reid was tried as a criminal and sentenced to life imprisonment.

Judge William Young made a most eloquent case for trying terrorists individually as criminals. He declared in his ruling, delivered January 30, 2003:

You are not an enemy combatant. You are a terrorist. You are not a soldier in any war. You are a terrorist. To give you that reference, to call you a soldier, gives you far too much stature. Whether it is the officers of government who do it or your attorney who does it, or that happens to be your view, you are a terrorist … And we do not negotiate with terrorists. We do not treat with terrorists. We do not sign documents with terrorists. We hunt them down one by one and bring them to justice. ..

It is because we prize individual freedom so much that you are here in this beautiful courtroom. So that everyone can see, truly see, that justice is administered fairly, individually, and discretely. It is for freedom’s sake that your lawyers are striving so vigorously on your behalf and have filed appeals, will go on in their representation of you before other judges.

We are about it. Because we all know that the way we treat you, Mr. Reid, is the measure of our own liberties. Make no mistake though. It is yet true that we will bare any burden, pay any price, to preserve our freedoms. Look around this courtroom. Mark it well. The world is not going to long remember what you or I say here. Day after tomorrow, it will be forgotten, but this, however, will long endure. Here in this courtroom and courtrooms all across America, the American people will gather to see that justice, individual justice, justice, not war, individual justice is in fact being done.

We agree that Reid was not a soldier, and that he is a terrorist. But he tried to blow up a civil aircraft in flight as a Muslim carrying out his duty to wage Holy War, the war that America went to fight in Afghanistan.

On that point we disagree with Judge William Young. But some words of his we think are worth recalling in opposition to those whose hearts bleed for the inmates of Guantanamo :

It seems to me you hate the one thing that is most precious. You hate our freedom. Our individual freedom. Our individual freedom to live as we choose, to come and go as we choose, to believe or not believe as we individually choose. Here, in this society, the very winds carry freedom. They carry it everywhere from sea to shining sea.

And long may they do so, however hard the Obama administration tries to bring them under government control.

But such winds should not fan the cheeks of Islam’s Holy Warriors.

One of our readers, Frank, points out in a comment on our end-of-year post, A picture for history, that flying terrorists could easily disguise themselves as nuns to avoid (actually non-existent) profiling, and he reminds us of the “Jihad Janes” – two American women who tried (though not in nuns’ habits) to join the Islamic jihad, but were arrested before they could carry out their planned acts of violence.

We re-read the story as told by the Sunday Times on March 14, last year.

Colleen LaRose, a divorced woman of 46, living in Pennsburg, PA, who called herself “Jihad Jane”, flew to Europe with the intention of killing a Swedish man she had never met and who had done her no harm whatsoever.

Jamie Paulin-Ramirez, also a divorced woman, aged 31, living in Leadville, CO, chose to play a part in the same plan. Off she flew to help murder the hapless Swede.

LaRose’s only reported motive was to alleviate her own boredom. She “used her  Twitter social networking account to raise funds for Pakistani militants”, and after her arrest, a message was found on her laptop  announcing, “I’m so bored, I want to scream.”

Paulin-Ramirez was in a similar desperate pickle:

“She never liked who she was,” Christine Holcomb-Mott, her mother, told The Wall Street Journal. “She was always looking for something.”

So she converted to Islam for novelty and excitement, which was greatly enhanced by the opening it gave her to join the jihad. She “communicated [on the internet] with Islamic radicals around the globe.”

[She] changed her Facebook photograph to one depicting her in a hijab with only her eyes showing and told her astounded family she had converted to Islam. …

She began posting messages on Facebook forums with headings such as “Stop calling Muslims terrorists!” and communicating with Islamic radicals around the globe.

The stranger targeted by the two bored women was Lars Vilks, the cartoonist made famous by furious global Muslim protest against his drawings of a dog with “the head of Muhammad”, published in a Swedish newspaper in 2007.

When LaRose reached Europe, she “declared online: ‘Only death will stop me now I am so close to the target.’” But a month later she flew back home, mission unaccomplished, and was arrested on landing and charged with terrorism. Her testimony led to the arrest of Paulin-Ramirez.

There is nothing new, so there should be nothing surprising, about self-indulgent bored women seeking distraction, excitement, and a sense of exceptional virtue and importance in dedicating themselves to someone else’s cause. (See our post, When innocence is vice, September 23, 2010.) Still there is something strikingly low about this pair: their blithe insouciance, their thick-headed ignorance. They’re as silly as they’re vicious.

“Let us arise and take our stand for freedom as in the olden time” – as Churchill said (more or less) when Chamberlain sold Czechoslovakia to Hitler in return for a worthless promise of peace.

Now it is the freedom of the internet that is under threat, not only by the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), but – even worse – by Islam.

Pamela Geller – she who alerted America to the Ground Zero mosque plan – writes at the American Thinker:

Late last September, the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), which assigns internet domain names, approved a huge change in the way it operates. Europe and North America will now have five seats on its Board of Directors, instead of ten, and a new “Arab States” region will have five seats as well. …

This has been a long time coming.

Back in October 2009 … ICANN ended its agreement with the U.S. government. …

The new agreement gave other countries (including dictatorships and rogue nations) and the U.N. the ability to set internet use policies. …

The ICANN action in September gave the Organization of Islamic Conference (OIC) and other unfriendly nations a prominent internet role — something they never could get during the administration of George W. Bush. …

The OIC is the main engine of the stealth jihad against the West. See our post Europe betrayed, February 11, 2010 for its role in the quiet conquest of Europe by Islam, now well under way. (And see also The trusted envoy, February 20, 2010, which is about the appointment by President Obama of a Muslim terrorist sympathizer as a US representative to that nefarious organization.)

In practice, the new arrangement makes it much easier for Muslim countries to dictate what stays on the internet and what doesn’t… Anti-jihad sites like … AtlasShrugs.com and the JihadWatch.org site … will likely lose their domain names. It will become harder and harder to find the truth about jihad activity, or any resistance to it, on the internet or anywhere else. …

The new “net neutrality” rules approved last week by the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) will just make that easier as well… [by taking] the operation of the Internet away from the heterogeneous and diversified interests of the private sector that has created it and [concentrating] it in the hands of an unelected and unaccountable board of political appointees atop a federal bureaucracy. …

James G. Lakely, the co-director of the Center on the Digital Economy for the Heartland Institute, a free-market think-tank … charged that FCC chairman Julius Genachowski, an Obama crony, wants to “claim for the FCC the power to decide how every bit of data is transferred from the Web to every personal computer and handheld device in the nation.”  … [in]  an attempt to limit the freedom of internet users by subjecting what [has] always been a free-market give-and-take to government regulation. In short, the FCC would control how all information reached personal computers.

An internet censored by Muslim ideologues and controlled by the feds. Do you see your freedom of speech slipping away?

We see all our freedom slipping away. Obama is not even selling but gifting America to Islam.