Listen to what the rebels in Syria, whom the West supports politically, are chanting:

Bashar Assad, Dictator of Syria, is a cruel man. Most dictators are. He’s a cool mass murderer, as his father was before him. Holding on to power seems to be his only aim, however small the Syrian nation may be that eventually remains for him to exercize power over.

A part of the oppressed nation is now rebelling against him in diverse fighting factions, not a co-ordinated force under a single command. For some reason we cannot figure out, the Western powers want this rabble of rebels to succeed in overthrowing Assad. They must imagine that whichever faction leader supplants Assad will be a better dictator. They surely cannot expect him not to be a dictator at all. As with the rebel rabbles in Tunisia, Egypt, and Libya they spoke of the insurgent masses as aspiring democrats, thirsting for liberty. They helped rebels to topple sitting dictators. They applauded when, the old dictators gone, temporary authorities smiling like crocodiles presided over Western-style elections. It was a grand show, a political charade. The result has been new oppressors  coming to power in Tunisia, Egypt, and Libya.

Why do we of little faith suppose that the same result will come about in Syria? Might there not be a faction among the rebels there which has a humane, tolerant  sort of leader, one who respects human life,  abominates torture, wants more nursery schools, cleaner hospitals, a better transport system, and  genuine friendship with the West?

What is known about the rebel groups? Anything at all? We’ve heard that there are al-Qaeda affiliates among them. How big? Growing or shrinking? How armed and by whom?

We found some answers in an article by Jackson Diehl, deputy editor of the editorial page of the Washington Post. (Surprisingly, it is critical of President Obama.)

For more than a year, the Obama administration has been assuring the world that the downfall of Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad is “a matter of time.” Yes, its own Middle East experts warned, but how much time matters. The longer the fighting goes on, they said, the more likely it is that what began as a peaceful mass opposition movement would be hijacked by extremists, including allies of al-Qaeda.

President Obama ignored that advice, ruling out measures that could have quickly brought down the regime — such as a no-fly zone — in favor of a year of feckless diplomacy. But it turned out the experts were right. So now the consequence of Obama’s passivity has a name, one that will surely haunt the occupant of the White House in 2013: Jabhat al-Nusra.

Actually, the full name of the Middle East’s latest jihadist terror movement, announced on an al-Qaeda-linked Web site last January, is Jabhat al-Nusra li-Ahl al-Sham Min Mujaheddin al Sham fi Sahat al Jihad, which means “Support Front for the People of Syria from the Mujaheddin of Syria in the places of Jihad.”

It was dismissed at first as a hoax, or maybe as a concoction of Assad’s intelligence service. Now its black flag is recognized, and often cheered, across Syria, and its bearded, baggy-pantalooned fighters are at the forefront of the critical battle for the city of Aleppo.

In the spring Jabhat al-Nusra had maybe 50 adherents, most of them in hiding, and had claimed credit for only a handful of attacks. Now it may have close to 1,000 core followers, and fighting units around Syria have begun openly claiming to belong to it. On YouTube, videos show the residents of areas taken over by the rebels waving its flag and chanting its name.

“They have been able to take an extremist identity and really give it a popular following in a context of bloody civil war,” says Elizabeth O’Bagy, the author of a sobering study of Syria’s jihadists for the Institute for the Study of War. “They have become the most significant threat to long-term stability in Syria.”

“Stability in Syria.” There was stability of a kind under Assad dictatorship. One of the abiding mysteries is why persons in the West want stability at any cost in regions of wretchedness such as the Arab Middle East. Whether stable or in the throes of revolution, wretchedness is the norm and survival is precarious. But we value Elizabeth O’Bagy’s information that this al-Qaeda affiliated faction has become most significant.

Was it to them the murdered US ambassador to Libya, Christopher Stevens, and the large CIA operation set up in Benghazi, were organizing the shipment of arms through Turkey? (See our post Obama the arms broker to al-Qaeda, October 26, 2012.) To what extent has aid and encouragement from the Obama administration helped  Jabhat al-Nusra to grow?

Jackson Diehl anticipates our question and replies:

No, Barack Obama’s policies alone did not create this monster. [Our emphasis.] It is, first of all, a creature of Assad’s own regime, blowback from his years of sponsoring terrorist networks in Lebanon, Iraq and the Palestinian territories. For more than a decade, Syrian intelligence allowed al-Qaeda and other jihadist groups to establish bases and logistical networks to support attacks on American troops in Iraq, anti-Syrian politicians in Lebanon, and Israel. Now many of those rat lines have been reversed, and the extremists are targeting Assad.

He sponsored their training and arming. Now the beast he has fattened is turning on him. It’s a perfect vignette of Middle Eastern chaos.

They do so because they were never his natural allies — Assad’s Alawite sect, an offshoot of Shiite Islam, is considered heretical by the Sunni jihadists — and because they see an opening to rebuild a movement that was shattered in Iraq and Afghanistan.

One of the first contingents to bolster Jabhat al-Nusra, O’Bagy found, came from Fatah al Islam, a former Syrian intelligence client that launched a battle in 2007 to take over a Palestinian refu­gee camp near Tripoli, Lebanon. “These individuals,” O’Bagy writes, “received training in weapons and insurgency tactics from the Syrian government and gained experience using them in Iraq and Lebanon. They also have knowledge of and connections to the Syrian intelligence and security apparatus.”

In fact, the group has specialized in attacks on intelligence facilities. On Oct. 9, it staged a sophisticated, three-stage assault on an air force intelligence compound outside Damascus. Earlier in the month, it claimed credit for a string of bombings in Aleppo that targeted an officer’s club and other government-held facilities, reportedly killing dozens.

The rebel groups are not even willingly co-operating with each other. Only for the moment they fight together because they have the common aim of toppling the tyrant Assad.

Leaders of the Free Syrian Army, the mainstream rebel force that emerged from the original protest movement, don’t support the jihadists or their tactics. But as the war in cities like Aleppo becomes more desperate, Jabhat al-Nusra has provided precious reinforcements. Thanks to generous support from sources in Saudi Arabia and other Persian Gulf states, its units are often better-armed than secular forces …

We note in passing that this al-Qaeda linked faction is generously supported by the Saudis. But we stop to consider what O’Bagy says next –

… which have been starved by Obama’s ban on U.S. weapon supplies.

“Obama’s ban on U.S. weapon supplies.” So to whichever factions Ambassador Stevens and the CIA were getting or trying to get arms, whether to the “secular” forces or the al-Qaeda affiliates or both, Obama was subverting his own policy? If that is so, it can be no wonder that he is trying to cover up the disaster in Libya.  

The result, says O’Bagy, is that the character of Syria’s opposition has changed. “It’s no longer a pro-democracy force trying to bring down a dictatorship. It no longer holds the moral high ground. They have muddied the waters.”

“No longer a pro-democracy force”. Was it ever?

The Washington Post article ends on a note of dire warning:

If the war drags on, Jabhat al-Nusra will surely grow stronger. …  It could try to get hold of Syria’s abundant stocks of chemical weapons. And it could start looking beyond Syria for targets. You might say it’s a matter of time.

Does Obama have the faintest idea of what he has got America into? Does Defense Secretary Panetta? Or CIA chief General Petraeus? Or Secretary of State Hillary Clinton?

We very much doubt it.

The greatness of the West resulted from the Socratean wisdom that all ideas must be questioned. (Though it endured a thousand dark years when the Catholic Church forbade and punished all such questioning.) Critical examination is the wellspring of science. Our superiority in science and technology – and economic and military might – came about precisely because we doubted, questioned, examined, and experimented.

Islam is backward because it does not permit criticism. It does not allow any questioning of its beliefs. It punishes doubt and dissent.

If we give up criticism at the behest of our implacable enemy, we will be abandoning the mainstay of our might and poisoning our civilization at its root. If we silence our objections to Islam, we allow Muslims to claim that it is the Truth.

Nothing is more important for our survival than freedom of thought. Thought is argument. Argument is progress. We cannot accept any restriction on our expression of ideas. None. Ever.

We should do everything we can to make this absolutely clear to those who believe in an unquestionable orthodoxy like Communism or Islam.

Islam cannot be allowed to claim immunity from criticism on the grounds that it is a religion. Religion is anti-reason, and of all ideas those of religion are the least defensible.

The sacredness in which some hold a belief cannot preserve it from doubt. Reason knows no blasphemy. If Islam appalls us, we must be free to say so in whatever terms we choose. If Muslims take offense, let them try winning us to their beliefs by arguing with us and not by killing us. Violence is no argument. Murder persuades nobody. It might compel obedience, but never intellectual conviction.

Let us express our offense at being assailed by blunt ignorance, and at being ordered by foolish politicians to hold our tongues. If Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton cannot understand that Islam must be criticized, may – considering its doctrine and practice – be denigrated, they must not be left in a position to pay our mortal enemy the ransom of our freedom.

Jillian Becker  September 23, 2012

YouTube has been praised for refusing to remove the video, titled “Innocence of Muslims”, which has been blamed for the latest explosion of Islamic rage against America, and even for the murder of Ambassador Christopher Stevens and three other Americans in Libya.

Well, now YouTube has removed it.

The reason they give:

This video has been removed as a violation of YouTube’s policy against spam, scams, and commercially deceptive content.

Sorry about that.

But it’s more than likely that they have given in to pressure from the Obama administration.

Were they threatened by Muslims? Or only by the government? If so, with what?

Now we are all under threat.

Goodbye, First Amendment? Goodbye, Freedom?

Reuters reports:

A French magazine ridiculed the Prophet Mohammad on Wednesday by portraying him naked in cartoons, threatening to fuel the anger of Muslims around the world who are already incensed by a film depiction of him as a lecherous fool.

A video film made by a Californian Coptic Christian which mocks  Muhammad and which the Obama administration is absurdly blaming for the Islamic world going up in flames and al-Qaeda murdering a US ambassador in Libya.

The drawings in satirical weekly Charlie Hebdo risked exacerbating a crisis that has seen the storming of U.S. and other Western embassies, the killing of the U.S. ambassador to Libya and a deadly suicide bombing in Afghanistan.

Riot police were deployed to protect the magazine’s Paris offices after it hit the news stands with a cover showing an Orthodox Jew pushing the turbaned figure of Mohammad in a wheelchair.

On the inside pages, several caricatures of the Prophet showed him naked. One, entitled “Mohammad: a star is born”, depicted a bearded figure crouching over to display his buttocks and genitals.

The French government … had urged the weekly not to print the cartoons …

“We have the impression that it’s officially allowed for Charlie Hebdo to attack the Catholic far-right but we cannot poke fun at fundamental Islamists,” said editor Stephane Charbonnier, who drew the front-page cartoon.

“It shows the climate – everyone is driven by fear, and that is exactly what this small handful of extremists who do not represent anyone want – to make everyone afraid, to shut us all in a cave,” he told Reuters.

We like what Charlie Hebdo have done (though we don’t think the cartoons are great). We applaud their courage. But  – only a “small handful of extremists”? Are most of the 1.5 billion Muslims in the world serenely tolerant of criticism?

One cartoon, in reference to the scandal over a French magazine’s decision to publish topless photos of the wife of Britain’s Prince William, showed a topless, bearded character with the caption: “Riots in Arab countries after photos of Mrs. Mohammad are published.”

French Foreign Minister Laurent Fabius criticized the magazine’s move as a provocation.

So much for the Liberté part of the French national motto, Liberté, égalité, fraternité!

“We saw what happened last week in Libya and in other countries such as Afghanistan,” Fabius told a regular government news conference. “We have to call on all to behave responsibly.”

Except Muslims. They can behave as irresponsibly as they like. Because the French government is afraid of them.

Charlie Hebdo has a long reputation for being provocative. Its Paris offices were firebombed last November after it published a mocking caricature of Mohammad, and Charbonnier has been under police guard ever since. …

The French Muslim Council, the main body representing Muslims in France, accused Charlie Hebdo of firing up anti-Muslim sentiment at a sensitive time.

“The CFCM is profoundly worried by this irresponsible act, which in such a fraught climate risks further exacerbating tensions and sparking damaging reactions,” it said.

It is the expression of opinion that must be stopped, you see, not the “damaging reactions”.

Well, that may not be entirely fair:

French Prime Minister Jean-Marc Ayrault said the authorities had rejected a request to hold a march against the Mohammad film in Paris.

We wait to see what will happen to the Charlie Hebdo offices, and to Stephane Charbonnier. We hope for his safety. But the savage war of Islam against the rest of us will go on until the West uses all its weapons, of law, argument, wealth, political and military power, and mockery to crush the murderous Muslim hordes storming out of the Dark Ages.

(Charlie Hebdo cover cartoon via Creeping Sharia, where you can see the rest of them – here.)

Environmentalists, collectivists, communists, barbarians, lunatics – it doesn’t matter which of those words you use to designate them, they are all synonymous in this case – really are taking over control of the world.

Here is the Wildlife Project map showing their plans for the future of America:

We have taken the map and the following quotations from Dr Ileana Johnson Paugh, who writes authoritatively at Canada Free Press:

The map was produced by Dr. Michael Coffman, editor of Discerning the Times Digest and NewsBytes and CEO of Sovereignty International, to stop the ratification of the international treaty on Convention on Biological Diversity one hour before the scheduled cloture and ratification vote.

Which, however, it failed to do.

The mandate of the Convention of Biological Diversity draws buffer zones, core reserves and corridors to protect biodiversity. Areas in green will allow housing. Areas in yellow will be buffer zones, highly regulated with no homes and possible hiking. Red areas will be core reserves and corridors off-limits to human access and human habitation. …

After numerous United Nations conferences around the globe spanning decades and a concerted effort by third world governments led by individuals like Maurice Strong and Gro Harlem Brundtland … the UN Agenda 21 became reality at the UN Conference on Environment and Development (UNCED) in 1992 in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil.

This conference produced three documents: The United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (an international treaty), the United Nations Convention on Biological Diversity (an international treaty), and UN Agenda 21 (not a treaty but a “soft law”).

President Herbert Walker Bush signed along with 178 countries but refused to sign the United Nations Convention on Biological Diversity because it required transfer of technology without recognition of proprietary rights. However, President Bush said, “It is the sacred principles enshrined in the UN Charter to which the American people will henceforth pledge their allegiance.” I am sure the American people were very surprised or perhaps totally unaware that a U.S. President would pledge allegiance to a foreign body instead of the U.S. Constitution.

UN Agenda 21 is a “soft law” document, not ratified by Congress. Parts of it have been incorporated into other laws passed because Congressmen do not read the bills they pass or do not understand the full scope of the UN Agenda 21. The 40-chapter document limits the behavior and freedoms of individuals and firms, involving every facet of human life.

UN Agenda 21 makes suggestions and recommendations that are adapted into law at the state and local levels through comprehensive land use plans which are voted on and included by the board of supervisors into local zoning codes. Citizens do not understand its damaging ramifications to their private property, the ability to make a living, to use their land, grow food in their gardens, sell their produce freely, and engage in agriculture.  …

UN Agenda 21 goals include but are not limited to:

• Redistribution of population according to resources

• Government control of land use in order to achieve equitable distribution of resources

• Land use control through zoning and planning

• Government control of “excessive” profits from land use [our quotation marks here]

• Urban and rural land control through public land ownership

• Developing rights must be held by public authorities via “regionalist” authorities

President Bill Clinton facilitated President Herbert Walker Bush’s initial commitment by signing an executive order which created the President’s Council on Sustainable Development to translate UN Agenda 21 into U.S. public policy under the guise of ecosystem management.

One World Governance in the name of protecting the environment, racial justice, and social justice/equity is a communist system that redistributes wealth and promotes universal health care as a human right.

“Racial justice” means affirmative action, and affirmative action means race discrimination. Like “social justice”, it is a euphemism for redistribution of goods, material and abstract, from those who have legally acquired them through their own efforts to those who haven’t. In short, injustice.

Harvey Rubin, the Vice Chair of ICLEI [International Council for Local Environmental Initiatives], proclaimed his vision of a communistic sustainable world in which “Individual rights must take a back seat to the collective.”

You’ve earned your wealth? Give it up. You have some particular skill or talent? Suppress it. You hate being in crowds? Too bad. You want to have a child? Sorry, no. You are old and becoming a drain on the communal resources? Die. You don’t agree with Harvey Rubin? Off with you to a re-education camp.

One World Governance will control:

• Energy production, delivery, distribution, and consumption

• Food growth and production …

• Education control via a curriculum centered on environment and Mother Earth and global citizenship …

• Water through irrigation denial in agriculture, home use, recreation activities; destruction of dams and reservoirs; abolishing hydroelectric generation use of water as a contributor to the now discredited theory that greenhouse gases cause global warming

• Land control through abolishing of private property

• Finances (one world currency to replace the U.S. dollar as the world’s reserve currency)

• De-population (restructuring the family unit and reducing population to “manageable levels” through sterilization and eugenics)

• No borders/no sovereignty

• No national language and culture (a multi-cultural hodgepodge devoid of a nation’s history, and shameless promotion of global citizenship)

• Mobility restriction to 5 minutes-walk/bike from work, school, shopping

• Longer distance travel through rail use

• Homestead by stacking people in high-rise tenements in order to designate formerly privately owned land for wildlife habitat

The One World Governance of the UN Agenda 21 requires that every societal decision be based on the environmental impact on global land use, global education, and global population control and reduction. They have deemed “not sustainable” most human activities that form our modern civilization: private property, fossil fuels, consumerism, farming, irrigation, commercial agriculture, pesticides, herbicides, farmlands, grazing of livestock, paved roads, golf courses, ski lodges, logging, dams, reservoirs, fences, power lines, suburban living, and the family unit.

“Current lifestyles and consumption patterns of the affluent middle class – involving high meat intake, use of fossil fuels, appliances, home and work air conditioning, and suburban housing are not sustainable.” (Maurice Strong, Secretary General of the UN’s Earth Summit, 1992)

“We must make this place an insecure and inhospitable place for Capitalists and their projects – we must reclaim the roads and plowed lands, halt dam construction, tear down existing dams, free shackled rivers and return to wilderness millions of tens of millions of acres of presently settled land.” (Dave Foreman, Earth First) …

There is never a shortage of new converts – the educational system is deliberately dumbing down our students in order to accept the Sustainable Development goals. “Generally, more highly educated people, who have higher incomes, consume more resources than poorly educated people, who tend to have lower incomes. In this case, more education increases the threat to sustainability.”

The few human beings who will be allowed to live for a short time will be kept in a state of environmentally-friendly ignorance. There will need to be book-burning on a massive scale. There’s nothing worth knowing anyway:

In some states, the curriculum includes “constructivism,” a teaching method by which “students construct [their own] understandings of reality and [realize] that objective reality is not knowable.” …

Math, for instance, beyond simple arithmetic, is completely superflous:

The New World Order teachers recommend Connected Mathematics because “Mathematics is man-made, is arbitrary, and good solutions are arrived at by consensus among those who are considered expert.” With the right consensus of experts, two plus two may not be four but five. …

The point to grasp is that Agenda 21 is being implemented right now.

The murder by Muslims of US Ambassador to Libya Christopher Stevens was a cause for war because he was a US  ambassador.

The statement must stand without any qualification.

That said, we need to take a closer look at the man himself. He was the victim not only of Islamic savagery but also of US policy towards Islam over the past decade – a policy which under President Obama positively encouraged and finally enflamed that savagery. And we ask: To what extent did Mr Stevens himself accept, agree with, endorse, or even actively and enthusiastically promote the policy that brought him, as an official representative of it, to his violent death?    

Daniel Greenfield has also asked that question, and he writes:

Christopher Stevens was a Middle Eastern diplomat who typified the new breed going from the University of Berkeley and the Peace Corps to desks in Saudi Arabia, Egypt and Syria. He taught English to Moroccan children in the Peace Corps and helped Palestinian Arabs in the East Jerusalem Consulate, which has a firm policy of pretending that Israel does not exist.

Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said of Christopher Stevens that he “made other people’s hopes his own” and that may serve as a fitting eulogy both for Stevens and for the disastrous foreign policy of making “other people’s hopes” our own that brought on the Arab Spring.

Stevens, like Clinton and Obama, made the hopes of Islamists his own and they repaid him for it, just as Afghans repaid America for supporting them against the Soviet Union, as Lebanon and Somalia repaid America’s peacekeeping efforts by killing American troops and on down the litany of gratitude in bombs and bullets that have come America’s way from the Muslim world.

“He risked his life to stop a tyrant, then gave his life trying to build a better Libya,” Hillary Clinton said, but if anything his murder exposed the lie that there is a better Libya now than there was before Hillary and he intervened in Libya. Clinton’s eulogy comes perilously close to conceding Stevens’ real mission and the degree of American intervention in the overthrow of Gaddafi.

Stevens was the connection between the Islamist Benghazi rebels and the Obama administration’s illegal war to overthrow Gaddafi. His mission, like the true mission of the war, was secret, and the consulate, marginally fortified and devoid of Marines, reflected that secrecy. Stevens did not think that he had anything to fear from the Islamists because they were his friends.

And he wanted to be their friend because he romanticized them. He looked at them through a veil of pro-Third World “anti-colonialist” leftist sentimentality. It made him feel good.

In the Wikileaks cables…

Useful things, those!

… Stevens cheerfully described fighters who saw “resistance against coalition forces in Iraq” as “an important act of ‘jihad’” …

Of which campaign for world domination by Islam – one must therefore conclude – he heartily approved!

For years he had walked safely in their company without understanding that he was just as much of a target as a Marine in Baghdad, but without the training, the weapons or the survival skills.

The only reason Christopher Stevens had lasted this long is that the jihadist fighters had known a useful man when they met him. And Stevens proved to be very useful, but his usefulness ended with Gaddafi’s death. Once the US successfully overthrew Gaddafi and began focusing on stabilizing Libya, Stevens ceased to be a useful idiot and became a useless nuisance. Attacks soon followed on the Benghazi consulate and on other consulates as well, but the Marines were not brought in and Stevens continued relying on local goodwill to secure his offices. It was only a matter of time until the attackers got through.

Clinton, her State Department and its media allies appear unnaturally eager to paint Christopher Stevens as an American martyr to the cause of Libyan Islamism, a kinder, gentler Rachel Corrie who willingly died so that the Islamists might have their dream of an Islamic state in Libya.

We will of course never know what was going through Christopher Stevens’s mind on September 11, 2012, as he battled the choking smoke, experiencing what so many New Yorkers had experienced on September 11, 2001. Like them, he was faced with a terrible dilemma, a choice between remaining in the fire and committing suicide by going outside.

Many in the World Trade Center chose to jump to their deaths, but Christopher Stevens chose to remain inside and die rather than face the tender mercies of his attackers. Stevens had spent enough time in Libya to have seen what the jihadist fighters did to their captives and must have known what horrors he could expect at their hands. The photos that have been released, along with claims by Libyan jihadists that they sexually assaulted his corpse, suggest that he made the right choice. And perhaps in those final moments, facing that terrible choice, Christopher Stevens finally understood the true horror of the Muslim world that he had fallen in love with as a Peace Corps volunteer.

But could he, even at that moment, especially at that moment, have allowed himself to admit the unendurable truth?

“He was an avid student of Islam and the Middle East, and consistently strove to build the proverbial bridge between our two cultures in the face of sometimes overwhelming antagonism and bitter misunderstanding,” a friend from the diplomatic service tells us. But though Christopher Stevens may have studied Islam, he had learned very little about it, and so his final lesson was the bloody one that Westerners who never really learn what Islam is about end up receiving.

“The world needs more Chris Stevenses,” Hillary Clinton said, but does it really? … Does it need men who give up the hopes and dreams of their country to take on the dreams of their enemies without ever realizing where the fatal road of those dreams leads?

Stevens’ former Peace Corps colleague says of him, “Chris devoted his career, and life, to improving relations between the Arabic/Islamic world and the West.” That he did and he died doing it …

And failing to achieve the impossible goal of course …

… losing whatever career or life he might have had if he had not embarked on a futile errand to make the Muslims who killed him and paraded his body around like him. And … the effort was to no avail.

“It’s especially tragic that Chris Stevens died in Benghazi because it is a city that he helped to save,” Obama said, repeating the same lie that he used to drag America into his illegal war. Benghazi was not in any need of saving, it was the Americans who came to Benghazi, like Chris Stevens, who needed saving.

That is the terrible blind spot in our vision which, like Christopher Stevens, tells us that we need to save the Muslims who hate us, rather than showing us that we need to save ourselves.

So it emerges that Christopher Stevens in his illusions and commitment is like John Walker Lindh, who “wanted to help” the Afghans and is serving a 20-year prison sentence for fighting with the Taliban. The only significant difference between them is that John Walker Lindh the Traitor devoted himself to helping barbaric Muslim terrorists when they were fighting against American forces as their enemy, while Christopher Stevens the Martyr devoted himself to helping barbaric Muslim terrorists when they were fighting with American forces as their ally.

And therein lies the stark proof of the confusion of values which arose when America, a nation idealizing life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness was forced into a betrothal with Islam, a cult idealizing total control, joyless submission, and death.

The article by James Delingpole from which we quote is about property rights and what he rightly calls the “green religion”; matters of concern equally on both sides of the Atlantic:

Property rights are a cornerstone of our liberty, our security, our civilisation. …

Here’s the Virginia Bill of Rights, precursor to the US Declaration of Independence:

“That all men are by nature equally free and independent, and have certain inherent rights, of which, when they enter into a state of society, they cannot, by any compact, deprive or divest their posterity; namely, the enjoyment of life and liberty, with the means of acquiring and possessing property, and pursuing and obtaining happiness and safety.”

Here’s Samuel Adams:

“The Natural Rights of the colonists are these: first, a right to life; second, to liberty; third to property; together with the right to support and defend them in the best manner they can.”

And here, most trenchantly, is the philosopher who inspired them, John Locke:

“Whenever the legislators endeavour to take away and destroy the property of the people, or to reduce them to slavery under arbitrary power, they put themselves into a state of war with the people, who are thereupon absolved from any further obedience …”

Time for a revolution, then, for the theft of our property rights is exactly what is happening to us now under our notionally “Conservative” prime minister and his increasingly desperate and damaging attempts to position his collapsing administration as the “greenest ever.” I’m thinking especially of the ongoing renewables scam.

The wind farm industry is surely the worst offender. Some vexatious twerp complained the other day about my claim that wind farms reduce property values by between 25 per cent and 50 per cent. Actually, if anything, I’m understating the problem here. I know of cases where properties have been rendered unsaleable by wind farms. But whatever the exact figures, I think those of us not in the pay of Big Wind or trotting out propaganda for the preposterous and devious Renewable UK would all agree that the very last thing we’d want on our doorstep would be a wind farm and that we certainly would never dream of buying a property near one. QED.

Since not a single one of the wind farms blighting Britain would have been built without state incentives (in the form of Renewable Obligations Certificates, Feed In Tariffs, and legislation which makes it very hard for communities to prevent wind farms being built in the area) we can reasonably say therefore that wind farms represent a wanton assault by the state on property rights. We expect such confiscatory measures “for the common good” from socialist regimes. But from a Conservative-dominated Coalition it’s a disgrace.

The Coalition itself is a disgrace. How a co-called Conservative Party ever decided to team up with a Liberal Democratic Party that is well to the left of the opposition Labour Party would be beyond comprehension to anyone who didn’t know that the so-called Conservative Party of Great Britain is not remotely conservative. In fact its leader, David Cameron, is an ardent fan of Saul Alinsky, the communist revolutionary who inspired Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama.

But it’s not just the wind farm industry which is complicitous in this scam. … The hydro power industry turns out to be very nearly as damaging, unpleasant, slimy and untrustworthy as its nasty elder brother Big Wind. …  yet another taxpayer-subsidised boondoggle for rent-seeking scuzzballs, which produces next to no electricity and which – just like wind farms – causes immense damage to wildlife (in this case fish rather than birds or bats). …

The hypocrisy of it! Environmentalists going to endless lengths to protect a smelt while they feed other fish and innumerable birds to their terrible engines. Above all, they hurt people. Delingpole gives a particular instance where property rights are harmed:

Nottingham Angling Club … in 1982 forked out £150,000 for the fishing rights to a one and half mile stretch of the river Trent above a weir which is now about to be converted to hydropower. The quality of their fishing will almost certainly diminish. And there are stories like this from all over the country. Whether its wealthy fly fishing enthusiasts who’ve paid a fortune for a prime stretch of river in Hampshire or Dorset, or an ordinary working man’s club like the one in Nottingham, people are going to suffer as a result of this state-sponsored drive for renewables. Again, as with wind power, the only reason these hydropower schemes are going ahead is because of the government subsidies and incentives for those canny or cynical enough to get in on the scam. So again, what we have here is a clear case of the state arbitrarily confiscating people’s property rights because of its desire to be seen paying lip service to the green religion.

But the harm to people caused by governments pursuing the green superstition is far greater than that. It is general, affecting the price everyone has to pay for electricity. Not just property rights but liberty itself is going with the wind.

All over America, city councils, implementing Agenda 21, are trying to increase the amount of energy they provide from “green sources” at ever greater expense. What’s more, they hope to ration it, to keep us colder in winter and hotter in summer.

This is the newest form of religious persecution.

Photo and text are from MEMRI:

On August 27, 2012, a member of the leading jihadi forum Shumoukh Al-Islam posted a YouTube link to a video showing a man accused of spying for the U.S. by placing chips to direct drones targeting terrorists being crucified on an electric pylon in Abyan province in south of Yemen. A sign placed above the man’s head shows the group’s flag and verse 5:33 of the Koran, which reads: “The recompense of those who wage war against Allah and His Messenger and do mischief in the land is only that they shall be killed or crucified or their hands and their feet be cut off from opposite sides, or be exiled from the land. That is their disgrace in this world, and a great torment is theirs in the Hereafter.”

The crucified man is Saleh Ahmed Saleh Al-Jamely who was executed on February 12, 2012 after being convicted by a court managed by Al-Qaeda-affiliated Ansar Al-Shari’a.

And Reuters reports: (We don’t recommend that you read the whole thing. Reuters talks about the Taliban as if they might have actual human motivation instead of just being the wild beasts they are.)

An adolescent boy and a young girl have been beheaded in two separate incidents in Afghanistan …

A 12-year-old boy was kidnapped and killed in southern Kandahar province on Wednesday, his severed head placed near his body to send a warning to police, said provincial governor spokesman Jawid Faisal.

The brother of the boy, neither of whom were named by officials, was a member of the Afghan Local Police (ALP), a U.S.-trained militia charged with making Afghans in Taliban strongholds, like Kandahar, feel more secure …

Separately, a 6-year-old girl was beheaded in eastern Kapisa province on Thursday, said provincial police chief Abdul Hamed.

How would those who believe in a merciful and all-powerful God – as the Taliban do – explain that?

A rhetorical question only. We know the answers. Muslims think doing such things positively qualifies them for an eternity of bliss. Christians would say “it’s His mysterious ways.”

The murders follow the shooting or beheading of 17 young revelers attending a party in southern Helmand province this week …

In Kandahar’s Zhari district, officials also said on Friday that a 16-year-old boy accused by the Taliban of spying for the government was beheaded and skinned in late July.

*

There are many reports of Muslims crucifying Christians, for instance here and here. We cannot be sure that any particular report is true*, but we don’t doubt that atrocities of the kind are commonly committed.

* We are not convinced that the figure crucified in the picture was ever a living man. The head may have belonged to a man, but the whole thing is probably a dummy. The arms, shown in close-up in the video from which the picture is taken, look decidedly artificial. However, as we say in the text, we don’t doubt that Islam uses crucifixion as a punishment. The Koran commands it in the quoted verse.

So those 72 virgins that heaven provides for good Muslim men when they “pass on” are nine years old?

Frank Crimi writes at Front Page:

As Iranian lawmakers now seek to lower the legal age of marriage for girls to nine-years-old, the number of Iranian brides already under 10 years of age is sharply rising.

The Iranian decision to allow nine-year-old girls the legal opportunity to be married to fully grown men was announced by Mohammad Ali Isfenani, chairman of the Iranian Parliament’s Legal Affairs Committee.

Isfenani called Iran’s current civil legislation, which sets the minimum legal age of marriage for girls at 13-years-old, “un-Islamic and illegal,” saying, “We must regard nine as being the appropriate age for a girl to have reached puberty and qualified to get married. To do otherwise would be to contradict and challenge Islamic Sharia law.”

Isenfani’s clarion call for prepubescent marriage comes at the same moment a new report from the Union for the Protection of Children’s Rights (UPCR) found 75 Iranian girls less than 10-years-old were forced to marry in the past two months, part of a sharp rise in the overall number of Iranian child brides under the age of 10.

According to UPCR, of the 342,000 Iranian marriages among girls under 18-years-old registered in 2010, at least 713 marriages involved girls under 10-years-old, more than twice as many as were registered in the prior three years. Moreover, of these underage marriages, 42,000 involved girls between the ages of 10 to 14.

There are now more than 50 million child brides, a number that is growing by 10 million each year and which is expected to reach 100 million young victims over the next decade. …

These unfortunate children are married off for a bevy of cultural and religious reasons, ranging from ensuring familial alliances to economic necessities, such as settling debts or overcoming natural disasters to ensure a family’s survival. …

Drought-stricken Africa has witnessed the emergence of so-called “drought brides” who are being sold for as little as $170. …

While the reasons behind these human transactions may vary, the one commonality is that the younger the girl, the better the deal. Specifically, it is important that these girls be sold off at a young enough age to better ensure their virginity, thus increasing their economic value and protecting the honor of their families.

Not surprisingly, once handed-off, these child brides are then consigned to a terrifyingly nasty, brutish and short-lived existence … The life expectancy of their frightful existence is likely to be cut exceedingly short given the multitude of health risks inherent in being a child bride, not the least of which is the high mortality rate from childbirth injuries, where an estimated 70,000 girls under 15 die each year from complications during pregnancy or childbirth. …

Most of these child marriages take place in predominantly Islamic countries spread throughout the Middle East, South Asia and Africa.

The deeply rooted Islamic attachment to prepubescent marriage finds religious justification in the [fictitious*] Prophet Muhammad’s marriage to a six-year-old child bride, a marriage consummated when she was nine-years-old …

While most would find it hard to believe that a 15-year-old-girl, let alone a nine-year-old girl, is physically or emotionally ready to start engaging in sexual activity and carrying a child, others think that girls barely removed from the womb are more than fully capable of handling those activities. That enlightened attitude was on display in January when one of Saudi Arabia’s most influential clerics, Sheik Saleh al-Fawzan, issued a fatwa allowing fathers to arrange marriages for their daughters “even if they are in the cradle.”

However, lest anyone think a man would actually engage in sex with such a young infant, al-Fawzan was quick to add that it wasn’t “permissible for their husbands to have sex with them unless they are capable of being placed beneath and bearing the weight of the men.”

You don’t want to crush your baby bride, do you? Not when you’ve paid for her?

Given that, it’s not surprising that many believe that underage marriage is little more than legally permissible and religiously sanctioned pedophilia. Yet, some defenders of the horrid practice argue that critics have no moral or ethical qualms about child marriage but are instead driven by less than pure concerns.  One such person is Yemeni Sheik Mohammed Hamzi, an imam and official of the Islamist Yemeni opposition party, Islaah. Hamzi had been asked his opinion in reaction to international complaints to the death of a 13-year-old Yemeni child bride who bled to death after being tied down and forced to have sex with her 23-year-old husband.

Should we still call it “making love”?

Hamzi simply ascribed their dissatisfaction to the fact [sic] that “No one wants to marry these women’s-rights activists anyway. They’re just depressed and jealous that they are not married.”

We are surprised to learn that there are any “women’s-rights activists”, married or single, who are trying to save little girls from being legally raped to death in accordance with Islamic law.

We listened hard and long for the voices of Western feminists raised en bloc against the plight of Muslim women and girls, but have given up hope of ever hearing them.

* See also our post “The Prophet Muhammad” did not exist, August 26, 2012.