American and Afghan officials in Afghanistan’s Farah province were holding an inauguration ceremony last Friday for new recruits to a village police force. As part of the ceremony, the new policemen were given weapons that they would use for training. As soon as one of the recruits, Mohammad Ismail, received his, he turned it on the American soldiers who were present, murdering two. This was the seventh such attack in two weeks — and each one is emblematic of just how foolish and wrongheaded our national adventure in Afghanistan has become.

These are extracts from an article by Robert Spencer at PJ Media:

These murders keep happening because there is no reliable way to distinguish an Afghan Muslim who supports American troops from one who wants to murder them, and political correctness prevents authorities from making any attempt to do so anyway, because it would suggest that Islam is not a Religion of Peace. And so ever more U.S. troops are sacrificed to this madness.

Does any Afghan Muslim support American troops? Why would he?

Meanwhile, Barack Obama is urging Afghan President Hamid Karzai to come to a settlement with the Taliban …

What is the difference between Karzai and the Taliban?

… has secretly dropped charges in the case of a Florida man accused of funding the Pakistani Taliban … 

Why can the president of the US interfere in the process of law like that?

 … and is considering sending Taliban detainees back to Afghanistan as a gesture of goodwill.

America feels good will towards the Taliban?

This is manifest denial and self-delusion. …

A  Taliban jihadist who murdered an American soldier, Ghazi Mahmood (“Warrior Mahmood”), said … when asked, “Are there others who will carry out attacks similar to what you have?,” … replied: “Yes. There are some people who are looking for the opportunity to kill infidels. They will carry out their jihad and join us.”

Some? Or a lot? The whole male population of that ghastly country maybe?

Note also that Mahmood characterizes the Americans as enemies of his religion. Yet American authorities insist that this conflict has nothing to do with religion, and that even to study Islam in order to understand the motives and goals of people like Mahmood is unacceptable.

Thus have Muslim Brotherhood elements in the U.S. rendered us complacent and defenseless before the advancing jihad that we refuse to understand.

What are we fighting for at this point, anyway?

Yes, that is the question.

The Taliban are never going to surrender. …

American forces have supervised the implementation of an Afghan constitution that enshrined Islamic law as the highest law of the land. Yet Islamic law is nothing like the democratic principles that we went into Afghanistan to defend (over here) and establish (over there). Sharia institutionalizes the oppression of women and non-Muslims, extinguishes the freedom of speech, and denies the freedom of conscience.

Was that what we were fighting for?

Nonetheless, America continued to pour out her blood and treasure for this repressive state, with no clear objective or mission in view other than a never-defined “victory.” No one has defined what victory would look like in Afghanistan. What would victory have looked like? What could it possibly have looked like?

Has the Karzai regime ever allowed women to throw off their burqas and take their place in Afghan society as human beings equal in dignity to men? Does the Karzai government, or any Afghan government that would follow it, ever intend to guarantee basic human rights to the tiny and ever-dwindling number of non-Muslims unfortunate enough to live within its borders? Of course not.

And no matter how long American troops stay in Afghanistan, no Afghan regime is ever going to do such things.

In July, the U.S. designated Afghanistan a “major non-Nato ally” … [which]  gives the Afghans “preferential access to U.S. arms exports and defence co-operation.” Thus unless Afghanistan is stripped of this status, we could be funding the Taliban with billions annually for years to come … 

So the next time an Afghan soldier murders a group of American troops, remember: you paid for his weapon.

Could the story of the sacrifice of American soldiers to the cause of the Taliban be any more outrageous?

Yes. It could be and it is.

This is from Investor’s Business Daily:

It’s now clear why so many U.S. troops have fallen prey to Afghan insider attacks: The administration disarmed them while arming their Afghan trainees, making them sitting ducks.

It was a standing order “requiring troops to remove their magazines from their weapons while quartered inside bases with their trusted Afghan partners”!

The number of insider attacks this year already exceeds the total for last year. Since the start of 2012, there have been 32 attacks resulting in 40 deaths, many more than last year’s 21 total attacks.

Earlier this month, an Afghan security commander ambushed U.S. troops. The officer, who was helping U.S. special forces train the local police force, lured elite U.S. soldiers to a Ramadan meal at his outpost to talk security. He then opened fire on them at close range, killing three and wounding one. 

The Taliban took credit for the attack. The terror group released a video indicating it has heavily infiltrated the Afghan national army and police force. …

Now, after years of denying the attacks were anything but an “isolated” problem, U.S.-led command has finally let American soldiers carry loaded weapons at all times to protect them not just from terrorists but from the Afghan security forces they’re training.

The policy reversal exposes the suicidal nature of the prior order. Even as our disarmed soldiers were being systematically ambushed and gunned down by their Afghan counterparts, high command continued to co-locate entire Afghan military units inside U.S. bases.

As a gesture of trust toward these Muslim partners, commanders ordered U.S. soldiers to remove their magazines from their weapons while training and working alongside them. The Afghans, however, were allowed to remain armed. Further exposing them to “friendly fire,” American troops generally removed their heavy Kevlar body armor once they got inside the base.

Trust should not be, cannot be a matter of gesture. Trust has to be earned, and what Afghan has earned American trust? Lives should not be hazarded on the off-chance of trustworthiness. By doing just that, the politically correct high command of the US defense forces have been feckless with American lives.

Disarming the Afghans would have been the obvious solution. But of course that would expose this whole “training partnership” as the farce it really is.

Training and standing up a national security force in Afghanistan is the linchpin of President Obama’s withdrawal strategy.

His hand-victory-to the-Taliban strategy, more like.  The US should have got out of Afghanistan ten years ago, when they’d given the Taliban a thorough beating. But if US troops were going to stay there, it should have been to destroy the Taliban, not to help it back into power as Obama is doing now.

The Pentagon is reducing troop presence … Many of the remaining soldiers will switch from fighting to training and advising Afghan forces. This means even more of them will be exposed to insider attacks.

But we’re not just training Afghans to replace soldiers. We’re hiring them to protect our soldiers right now, and many of them have also turned on our soldiers.

Obama has insisted on using Afghan security guards for base security as a way to limit the size of the U.S. military footprint in Afghanistan. …

[His]  rush to withdraw has needlessly cost at least 100 soldiers’ lives and wounded countless others.

The only thing that should matter to Americans about Afghanistan is that it should not plot or carry out any attacks on the US or its interests. If it does that it should be hit again extremely hard. If it does not, let it return to its savage ways, to cruel Taliban rule, to the miseries of sharia. Not one drop of American blood should be spilt to save it from itself.

Yesterday, August 17, the South African police opened fire on striking miners, killing 34 and wounding 78 according to press reports.

The incident recalls another South African miners’ strike which began way back in December 1921, when the gold-mining companies reacted to a drop in the world price of gold by lowering the wages of white miners, and, in defiance of the color bar, proposed to employ black miners in the more skilled jobs that the whites held to be their prerogative.

Under the leadership the Communist Party the strike escalated into a violent revolt.

The slogan of the Communist Party was: “Workers of the world unite and fight for a white South Africa”.

In March 1922 the prime minister, Jan Smuts, called out the army and air force to crush the uprising. With the use of heavy artillery, tanks, and bombing from the air he succeeded. More than 200 men were killed.

The political outcome was that trade unions for whites only were recognized, and the color bar was reinforced.

Blacks were kept in poverty. There was no way they could rise by their own effort. The system of apartheid, which was to be entrenched in law some twenty years later, was launched by the demand of the Communist Party.  

The present strike, put down with guns, began with a dispute over wages.

The miners were armed with spears and machetes. The police say some had guns, but that remains to be ascertained.

Will the world that claims to abhor apartheid (as it should), also condemn a massacre of black miners under the predominantly black and leftist government of post-apartheid South Africa?

Why do we hardened skeptics doubt it?

A tense drama, more full of nerve-racking suspense than the most gripping cliff-hanger any thriller-writer or epic movie-maker has ever conceived, is being enacted right now, in reality, on the world stage.

It is potentially the most devastating tragedy of all recorded history; more destructive than the terrible plagues that ravaged populations in the Dark and Middle Ages; more totally and irredeemably catastrophic for humankind than all the wars ever fought put together.

And yet, at the same time, it is a prodigious comedy, a gargantuan farce.

Here’s the plot:

Two tribes are scheming to change the world, each to something nearer to their heart’s desire.

The one is the tribe of the Masters. They are self-annointed kings, tsars, chieftains, tyrants. They know what’s right for humankind. They believe themselves to be brilliantly cunning. Their aim is to re-organize all the nations of the world and hold them in perpetual control. Their hope is that everyone now living, and everyone born from this time on, will be kept in a place performing a task or suffering a destiny that the Masters will assign to him or her, and none will dare to disobey.

The other is the tribe of the Loonies. They are child-like romantics, fantasists, fanatics, wild-eyed maniacs, psychopaths. They know what’s right for the Earth. They believe themselves to be irresistibly persuasive. Their aim is to reduce the population of the world, by any and all effective means, however ruthless, to about one tenth of the present number. Their hope is that those (very thin) persons permitted to survive, and to breed to the extent the Loonies may allow, will live in caves on wild berries and such vegetation as they can scratch from the soil beneath their feet; in helpless fear of man-eating beasts of prey; having no cures for pain or illness; no literacy; no possessions other than something that cuts, something that holds water, something that wraps, and sandals perhaps. (About sandals they haven’t yet made up their minds; they are doing some studies.) They are against civilization because they believe it is unfair to flora and fauna, to rocks and stones and trees, to oceans and rivers. So for as long as we humans are necessary to the earth at all – and that may not be very long – we must go back to the life of the savage (“solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short”, as Thomas Hobbes described it).

The Masters would not allow the world’s population to shrink to a tenth of its present size. They have no liking for beasts of prey. They require literacy because they plan to indoctrinate. They can use medical science for their own ends. They must be able to depend on the assured continuation of the human race since they need to have people in their power. In sum, they do not share the vision of the Loonies. They despise it. But they understand that their plan will not appeal to many people, whereas the vision of the Loonies unaccountably attracts a lot of sympathy. They do not argue against it. They listen to the Loonies describe their vision and nod as if in sympathy. They need the Loonies.

The Loonies need the Masters to start the process of depriving people of their ability to support and defend themselves.

If the Masters attain their objective, they will eliminate the Loonies. If the Loonies attain their objective, there will be no Masters. Each side knows this. Neither says it. Each side believes that it is able to make use of the other and then dispense with it, and each believes it will prevail.

So they meet, usually at a place in North America called Turtle Bay, but sometimes in cities on other continents, such as Kyoto, Copenhagen, Rio. And they smile at each other, and whisper to each other, and nod and nod. They compose documents and issue them. The Masters having the power of governments behind them, spread the Loonies’ message that human life must change, that the earth must be saved from the alleged depredations of civilization, that people must be forced to serve the planet. And many people are persuaded that the planet needs to be saved from dangers imagined by the Loonies, and so accept the need for re-organization and concerted action which the Masters propose. And the Masters are careful to make cautious demands for changes that will not look and feel as transformational as they or the Loonies have in mind.

Together, thus far, they are making progress. The first act, Separate Plotting, is long over. The second act, Conspiracy and Co-operation – highly amusing to those in the audience who realize the bluff that’s going on from each side – is underway. The third act, Success and Subjugation, will bring all people everywhere under world government by the Masters. The fourth act will be a fierce battle to decide the denouement of the drama: Communism or Savagery, depending on which tribe will be the ultimate victor.

Whichever side wins, the human race will lose. 

Now we must show you that though we may embroider a little we are not merely fantasizing or grossly exaggerating.

The United Nations, the headquarters of the Masters, has a “Sustainable Development” program which is called Agenda 21. It is a socialist program concerned with the use of land and natural resources, the size of populations and the distribution of wealth, the organization of communities. It is being stealthily implemented in the name of environmental protection, with the hope that Western electorates will not notice that it is a socialist agenda.

In the name of preserving the environment, populations are being “nudged”  by states and local authorities to move from the countryside into towns and cities. Suburbs are marked for demolition. This will require the  expropriation of private property by the state.

And what will be done with the emptied countryside?

The Loonies have a program for it, and a word to describe it: “RE-WILDING“.

The following quotations and factual information come from an article by Kelly O’Connell at Canada Free Press:

‘Re-wilding” — or returning huge tracts of land to wilderness and re-establishing wild animals on it is –

One of the most dramatically anti-human ideas ever conceived, defined  [as] “the scientific argument for restoring big wilderness based on the regulatory roles of large predators,” [by] Soul and Reed Noss in their landmark 1998 Wild Earth article Rewilding and Biodiversity….

The goal is to provide large carnivorous animals with “big parcels of land so the elite caste might macro-manage earth according to their dictates.”

The term “rewilding” was coined by Dave Foreman, founder of Earth First! — one of the most radical and violent environmentalists in history. Foreman’s book, Rewilding North America: a Vision for Conservation in the 21st Century, is a primary codex for those seeking a radical reduction of humanity’s presence on earth.

The Rewilding Institute elucidates Dave Foreman’s book:

Three major scientific arguments constitute rewilding, justifying emphasis on large predators.

1. The structure, resilience, and diversity of ecosystems are maintained by “top-down” ecological (trophic) interactions initiated by top predators.

Translation: Trophic means having to do with what animals eat. Big animals that eat other animals are (the Loonies believe, and have persuaded the Masters) essential for the maintenance of “ecosystems”.

2. Wide-ranging predators usually require large cores of protected landscape for foraging, seasonal movements, and other needs; they justify bigness.

Translation: Because big beasts are the best ecosystem preservers, they must be given all they need to do their work, and they need lots of space.

3. Connectivity is also required because core reserves are typically not large enough in most regions; they must be linked to insure long-term viability of wide-ranging species…

Translation: Their spaces, however large, must lead into one another over the whole of a continent.

The US Congress –  no doubt “nudged” by the UN – was convinced that this was the way forward. It passed the Wildlife Corridors Conservation Act 0f 2010, calling for “wild animal bridges and tunnels, and increasing roadless areas.”

Implication: Roads must be taken away,  and bridges and tunnels (whether in existence or having to be specially built) must be provided for the use of animals. (Though why, if they have the whole of the wild, and there are no roads, they will needs tunnels or bridges is a puzzle. Perhaps the Loonies want them to be able to get though mountains and over rivers, the grass being always greener, and the prey always plumper, on the other side of any barrier.)

Of course, reintroducing large carnivores where they do not live at present, “will drive out humans“. But this is not a problem. It is in fact “the ultimate intent of the re-wilding project, as its planners admit”.

Quotation from Loonies – probably Soul and Reed:

“If native large carnivores have been killed out of a region, their reintroduction and recovery is the heart of a conservation strategy. Wolves, cougars, lynx, wolverines, grizzly and black bears, jaguars, sea otters, and other top carnivores need restoration throughout North America in ecologically effective densities in their natural ranges where suitable habitat remains or can be restored. Without the goal of rewilding for large areas with large carnivores, we are closing our eyes to what conservation really means — and demands.”

This the Masters can probably organize. But it will not be enough to satisfy the Loonies, zealots for whom the restoration of a pre-civilized world requires the resurrection of extinct species. Not possible? Well, they think it may be. The idea is –

– to find DNA materials to recreate extinct animal groups. For example, under this plan, well-preserved extinct animals — such as glacier-bound woolly mammoths, recently disappeared passenger pigeons, or the La Brea Tarpits’ saber toothed cats – could be raised as fetuses from scratch.

On this Science Daily published A Plan for Reintroducing Megafauna to North America:

“Dozens of megafauna (large animals over 100 pounds) — such as giant tortoises, horses, elephants, and cheetah — went extinct in North America 13,000 years ago during the end of the Pleistocene [Period]. As is the case today in Africa and Asia, these megafauna likely played keystone ecological roles via predation, herbivory, and other processes.”

So they must be resurrected.

In the American Naturalist, 12 scientists provide a detailed proposal for the restoration of North America’s lost megafauna. Using the same species from different locales or closely related species as analogs, their project “Pleistocene Rewilding” is conceived as carefully managed experiments in an attempt to learn about and partially restore important natural processes to North American ecosystems [which were] present for millennia until humans played a significant role in their demise 13,000 years ago. …

The Loonies much prefer wooly mammoths to human beings.

French explorer Bernard Buigues and Larry Agenbroad [of] Northern Arizona University hope that Jarkov Wooly Mammoth sitting inside a 23-ton block of ice will contain flesh samples with some perfectly preserved DNA. That and some proven cloning technology could resurrect a long-gone species.

What Buigues and his team would do is something similar to the process that created the famous sheep Dolly: extracting the nucleus of one adult mammoth cell and inserting it into an empty egg cell. The embryo would then be implanted in the uterus of an Asian elephant, the mammoth’s closest living relative, a surrogate mother that would gestate it as its own but without transferring to the baby any of the elephant’s genes.

A certain number of trained human beings will be necessary to do this work. They will be allowed the necessary equipment, such as sedatives for Asian elephants while they are being operated on. But the rest of humanity will not have so much as a white coat. The reduced masses will have to huddle close, to leave as much space as possible for the hairy mammoths and other “megafauna”.

The Wildlands Project would claim 50% of the North American continent for “wild land”, protected from “human use”, in order to preserve “biological diversity”.

“Moral and ethical guidelines for the Wildlands Project are based on the philosophy of Deep Ecology”, according to which:

• Personal possessions must be kept to a minimum. 
• All life, human and non-human, has equal value.
• Consumption of resources above what is absolutely vital for human needs is immoral.
• Human population must be reduced
• Western civilization must radically change its present economic, technological, and ideological structures.
• Believers have an obligation to try to implement the necessary changes.

To a certain extent the Masters and the Loonies are able to agree on ideals, but what the Masters see as means, the Loonies see as ends.

Both want to “sow chaos into human history to cause anarchy”.

The Masters would then step in to restore order.

The Loonies, however, would want  anarchy to continue as long as human beings continued – which shouldn’t be very long. According to them:

Rewilding is the process of undoing domestication. In [the philosophy of] green anarchism and anarcho-primitivism, humans are said to be “domesticated” by civilization. Supporters of such human rewilding argue that through the process of domestication, our wildness has been tamed and taken from us. Rewilding, then, is about overcoming our domestication and returning to our innate wildness. Though often associated with primitive skills and relearning knowledge of wild plants and animals, it emphasizes primal [ie primitive] living as a holistic reality rather than just a number of skills or specific type of knowledge. Rewilding is most associated with green anarchy and anarcho-primitivism or anti-civilization anarchy in general. 

But this is not what the Masters envisage. They need the human race to be not just “domesticated” and “tamed”, but firmly ordered.  By them.

As the probable outcome of the drama becomes clear to the audience, people will ask themselves which fate they would rather embrace:

Living in serfdom enforced by the gulag, the lash, and the firing squad – which is to say, in an illusion of security,

or  –

Scratching a bare living out of the soil until dying soon of famine or incurable disease, or in the jaws of a predator beast – which is to say in an illusion of freedom.

It would be best to reject both now, and destroy the UN while we can.

Mitt Romney, visiting Israel in late July, spoke of the economic stagnation of the Arab world and attributed it to Arab culture. He was certainly correct, though not “politically correct”. Predictable offense was enjoyed by Arabs and Democrats. Loudest with objection were the Palestinians, a beggar nation who like to blame their dependency – on which they and their Arab brethren and the United Nations insist – on Israel and America.

Arab culture is stagnant and sterile. It won’t be changed by the West. President George W. Bush went to war to get regime change in Iraq, and he got it;  but what he did not get was democracy. Oh, some Iraqis are playing at democracy, with purple-finger elections and a parliament and a prime minister, but their country is no more a democracy now than it has ever been.

No sudden Arab Spring will transform the Muslim Middle East. Uprisings can change governments but they cannot bring civilization. The Muslim world has access to Western learning, just as it had access to Indian, Roman and Greek learning. It made use of some of those ideas in a slapdash fashion just as it made use of Judaism, Christianity, Socialism and Democracy, in a similar fashion.

We quote from an article by Daniel Greenfield at Canada Free Press. (It’s well worth reading in full.)

The Palestinians are a fraud, but so are the Jordanians, and to a lesser degree, the Egyptians and the Syrians. Every [Arab] nation is an artificial entity ruled over by powerful families or old soldiers who are keeping the whole thing together with guns and bribes, not to mention imported bread and circuses.

The British treated the region as a grab-bag of clans, and backed any powerful family willing to throw in with them. That is how the Hashemite kings and the Arab-Israeli wars came to be. Unlike the Brits, the United States was not interested in an empire, just in oil rights, which is how we got in bed with one of the most powerful families in the region, who became far more powerful thanks to their association with us. And who repaid us by trying to conquer us in their own way.

At some point we forgot that the Saudis, the King of Jordan, the Palestinian Authority and most of our so-called allies, are just powerful families with territorial claims based on that power. And even slightly more civilized countries such as Egypt, aren’t really any better, the invaders who overran them just absorbed more culture and civilization from their conquests and their proximity to more civilized parts of the world.

Mostly they’re feudal states with skyscrapers planned by foreign architects and built by foreign labor …

A primitive society confronted with an advanced civilization does not become civilized, it adopts some of the habits and facades of civilization in cargo cult fashion, it uses some of its tools, and hybridizes some of its ideas, but all this is done in pursuit of its existing goals. Everything that the Muslim Middle East has taken in from the civilized world has been used to pursue the same goals that it was pursuing a thousand years ago.

Imagine savages buying advanced steel knives, designed with space age technology, manufactured to never rust or grow dull, then shipped by jet plane to their island, where they are used to perform ritual human sacrifices so that the crops may grow. That in a nutshell is the relationship between the civilized world and the Muslim Middle East—except that the savages are not content to stay on their island and perform their human sacrifices only on their own tribe.

The barbarians lavish their petro-dollars on cars, aircraft, guns, computers, cell phones – and the high-tech machines of contemporary medicine which are, many of them, invented and manufactured in Israel, and which wealthy Arabs use in foreign countries though they won’t import them into their own. But such things do not inspire them to question the worth of the primitive superstition and oppressive laws that dominate their lives.

Their ideology and culture need to be criticized, and though seriously repulsive, laughed at:

The persecution Christians are suffering in Islamic countries is apparently of little or no concern to the ever-bleeding hearts of the American Left.

The Obama administration is positively ignoring it.

We quote from an article by Raymond Ibrahim at Front Page:

The Obama administration’s support for its Islamist allies means lack of U.S. support for their enemies, or, more properly, victims — the Christian and other non-Muslim minorities of the Muslim world. …

On May 24 this year the US State department released the Country Reports on Human Rights.

For the first time ever, the State Department simply eliminated the section of religious freedom …

The State Department “refused to list Egypt as ‘a country of particular concern,’ even as [Coptic] Christians … were being murdered, churches destroyed, and girls kidnapped and forced to convert to Islam. ”

Legislation to create a special envoy for religious minorities in the Near East and South Central Asia … has been stalled by Sen. James Webb (D-Va). In a letter sent to Webb Wednesday night, Rep. Frank Wolf [R-Va, who introduced the envoy bill] said he “cannot understand why” the hold had been placed on a bill that might help Coptic Christians and other groups “who face daily persecution, hardship, violence, instability and even death.” … Webb spokesman Will Jenkins explained the hold by saying that “after considering the legislation, Senator Webb asked the State Department for its analysis.” In a position paper issued in response, State Department officials said “we oppose the bill as it infringes on the Secretary’s [Hillary Clinton’s] flexibility to make appropriate staffing decisions …  The new special envoy position is unnecessary, duplicative, and likely counterproductive”.

The word “flexibility” has a special meaning when used by the Obama gang. Obama quietly informed the Russians that after he’d won the election in November he would have more “flexibility” – presumably to meet Putin’s demands more fully than he can before it. So the word may be taken to mean “ability to accommodate the wishes of America’s enemies”.

Once this reasonable deduction is made it is easy to see that Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s need for “flexibility to make appropriate staffing decisions” means she does not want to have a pro-Christian or anti-Muslim envoy. (The same thing in the circumstances.)

In regard to which it should be recalled that among Hillary Clinton’s closest advisers – possibly standing alone as her closest adviser – is Huma Abedin, a Muslim with close ties (see here and here) to the Muslim Brotherhood.

With that fact in mind, no one should be surprised when “flexible” decisions are  seen to be implemented.

The administration … had nothing to say when Islamic terrorists bombed Nigerian churches on Easter Sunday, killing some 50 Christians and wounding hundreds. And when the Egyptian military indiscriminately massacred dozens of unarmed Christians for protesting the nonstop attacks on their churches, all the White House could say is, “Now is a time for restraint on all sides”—as if Egypt’s beleaguered Christian minority needs to “restrain” itself against the nation’s military, a military that intentionally ran armored-vehicles over them at Maspero.

In light of all this, naturally the Obama administration, in the guise of the State Department, would oppose a bill to create an envoy who will only expose more religious persecution for the administration to suppress or obfuscate.

Such is the current state of affairs. In its attempts to empower its Islamist allies, the current U.S. administration has taken up their cause by waging a war of silence on their despised minorities — the Christians and other non-Muslims of the Islamic world.

The Obama administration cannot allow Islam to be guilty of anything, even of deeds carried out insistently in its name. It will have America and the world know that Islam is irreproachably innocent of any aggression, persecution,  intolerance, or terrorism.

As an example of the administration’s campaign to “suppress knowledge” both of “the sufferings of religious minorities under Islam”  and of “knowledge concerning Islam itself” in connection with them, Raymond Ibrahim provides a link to this instructive video clip:

 

One of the main instruments of regime terror against the people is the practice of public hangings.

We found a link to this video and the text in an article by Michael Ledeen at PJ Media:

In the city of Sirjan, the regime strung up three [?] men, and the spectators rioted, charged the executioners, drove them off, cut down the intended victims, and saved them.

Here is the spectacular video:

 

David Limbaugh asks these questions at Townhall:

Does Obama truly harbor a grudge against America? What did he mean when he said he wanted to fundamentally change America? What did his wife mean when she said she’d never been proud of America in her adult life before he rose to power? What possesses Obama to deride and apologize for America? What drives him to instinctively distrust business and the private sector and to believe that federal planners ought to have enormously more discretion in how our income and wealth are distributed? What drives him to reject the American concept of equal opportunity and promote the notion of equality of outcomes? Why is he determined to energize labor unions and encourage a permanently adversarial climate between labor and management? Why is he so adamant about the United States deferring to international bodies in the conduct of its foreign affairs? Why is he hellbent on downscaling our nuclear and conventional forces and dismantling our military space program and our missile defenses?

The questions ineluctably give rise to another. He asks:

Do I believe that he wants to “destroy” America, as such?

To which he answers?

No.

!

Then why is Obama doing this wrecking job?

Apparently, David Limbaugh thinks, out of a kind of insanity:

In his mind, as warped and foreign as I think it is, he doubtlessly believes he is helping to create a better America – a utopia of sorts. That is, he is intentionally trying to fundamentally transform America into something that he believes would be better but that most Americans – and infinitely more if they understood the full scope of what he is up to – would consider horrific, an America that we would barely recognize as the one bequeathed to us by our ancestors.

On the financial front alone, Obama is single-handedly preventing entitlement and discretionary spending reform, without which — as I’ve said dozens of times — America will face financial catastrophe. There is less than zero question that he is doing that on purpose, regardless of whether you think he is otherwise intentionally damaging America. There is no question that he is acting as though he has a vendetta against the oil, coal, natural gas and nuclear power industries. There is also little question that he is intentionally dividing Americans on the basis of race, economic class, gender, sexual orientation and, sometimes, religion.

You don’t have to be a conspiracy theorist to recognize the damage Obama is doing to the republic, and we haven’t even touched on his unconstitutional and lawless usurpations of authority.

And yet –

The question isn’t whether he is intentionally destroying America. The question is whether he is intentionally pursuing a set of policies that are definitely damaging America, irrespective of his motives.

The answer is — irrefutably, emphatically — “yes.”

So David Limbaugh thinks that Obama is destroying America;  that everything he is doing that is destroying America he is doing on purpose; but that he might not really mean to destroy America, only make it something quite different that he – Obama – thinks will be better, because his mind is “warped and foreign”.

While he is right about all that Obama is doing, and we applaud him for raising the questions he does, we find that his explanation doesn’t  make sense. Ignoring the implications of the possible “foreignness” of Obama’s mind, we consider the plea-in-mitigation that his mind is “warped” as he deliberately wrecks the Republic and turns it into a poorer, weaker, ever more collectivist, nightmare.

We declare it a monstrous crime, and reject the insanity defense.

Has Russia forever to be cursed with a tsar?  Tsar, Starlin, Putin … whatever he’s called.

The following extracts and the picture are from Front Page, by Jacob Laksin:

The past year has seen an inspired stirring of political opposition in Russia, as thousands of young and middle-class Russians have poured out onto the streets to protest the country’s regressive slide into authoritarianism under Vladimir Putin. For sheer novelty and provocation, however, no protest action quite matched the spectacle that took place this past February, when the members of all-female punk rock band Pussy Riot commandeered the altar of Moscow’s main cathedral and, clad in multicolored balaclava masks, proceeded to belt out a protest song titled “Virgin Mary, Redeem Us of Putin.”  …

An increasingly rare piece of political blasphemy, the song assailed the Russian Orthodox Church for its uncomfortably close ties to the Russian president. That subservience was exemplified by the Church patriarch’s devout assessment prior to the presidential election this spring that Putin’s democracy-trampling 12-year rule represented nothing less than a ”miracle of God.”

In mocking the Church, Pussy Riot’s lyrics proclaimed that the “head of the KGB is their chief saint.”

The church was not amused, the Russian government even less so. After their performance, the three members of Pussy Riot were arrested and charged with “hooliganism.” That was in March. Since then, they have been held without trial in extended custody. Last Friday, their detention was extended by another six months until next January. If the band members are found guilty, they could be imprisoned for seven years. …

The message seems to be that such limited license as the government was prepared to extend to opposition and protest views has now been totally revoked. Plainly discomfited by this winter’s mass anti-government protests, the powers that be have decided that enough is enough. Thus, Putin marked his swearing-in ceremony in Moscow this May with a citywide crackdown on demonstrators in which some 400 were arrested. Some reports suggested that young demonstrators were issued military draft notices in reprisal. The trumped-up prosecution of Pussy Riot is only the latest sign that the government is taking a zero-tolerance approach to political dissent.

On the legal front, too, there is a burgeoning government effort to outlaw opposition. Last month, the Russian legislature, dominated by Putin’s United Russia party, passed a law that would impose ruinous fines of up to $9,300 for those who participate in unsanctioned demonstrations and double that for protest organizers. Since few Russians could afford to pay such penalties, and since the government is not eager to sanction opposition protests, the law amounted to a de facto ban on opposition protests and demonstrations.

And the government was just getting started. Last week it passed a raft of new and vaguely worded laws whose overall effect would be to undermine criticism of the government officials. Among the laws was one criminalizing libel that included a special provision for libel “against judges, jurors, prosecutors, and law enforcement officials,” — in short, those responsible for upholding the country’s corrupt security state. Another law would create a blacklist of websites that all Russian Internet search engines would have to block. The government claimed that such a blacklist was intended to protect children from harmful content, but given the virtually limitless discretion to decide which websites qualify as harmful it is easy to see how the notoriously censorship-prone Russian authorities could use the law to quash disfavored speech. Each of the laws, in short, is ripe for abuse, and that seems to be the point: Having concluded that it can’t suppress all opposition openly, the government wants to force critics into silence. …

The case against Pussy Riot rests on the dubious charge that they incited “religious hatred.” The government has even found ten witnesses who have come forward to claim that they have suffered “moral damage” as a result of the band’s performance. Interestingly, the Russian Orthodox Church was prepared to forgive the band, initially calling for merciful treatment for the arrested members. But as soon as Putin’s press secretary called their protest “despicable” and vowed to pursue the band “with all the necessary consequences,” the church fell into line. It too is now urging harsh punishment, inadvertently proving Pussy Riot’s point about the church’s obeisance to Putin.

Could it happen in America? Yes, we think it could, if Obama is re-elected in November.

Obama has tried hard to cozy up to Putin, star of the KGB. We suspect he would like to emulate him.

Here’s Pat Condell, our fellow atheist, indignant about things that ought to rouse indignation in everyone, and as eloquent as always, protesting against (inter alia) the persecution of Christians in Arab countries.

It would be nice if someone could get Janet Napolitano (see the video immediately below) to watch this one.

We are witnessing a seismic shift in global affairs. The shake-up is a perfect storm of political, demographic and technological change that will soon make the world as we have known it for the last 30 years almost unrecognizable.

Those attention-gripping words open an article by Victor Davis Hanson at Townhall:

Since the mid-1980s there have been a number of accepted global constants. The European Union was assumed to have evolved beyond the nation-state as it ended the cycle of militarism and renounced free-market capitalism. With its strong euro, soft power and nonaligned foreign policy, the EU was praised as a utopian sort of foil to the overarmed U.S. with its ailing dollar. …

The Arab Middle East for the last 40 years seemed to be the world’s cockpit, as its huge petroleum reserves brought in trillions of dollars from an oil-depleted West, along with political concessions. Petrodollars fed global terrorism. Oil-poor Israel had little clout with Europe. In general, the West ignored any human-rights concerns involving the region’s oil-rich dictatorships, monarchies and theocracies, as well as their aid to Islamic terrorists.

Conventional wisdom also assumed that an indebted U.S. was in permanent decline, a cash-rich China in ascendency. …

But none of that conventional wisdom now seems very wise — largely because of a number of technological breakthroughs and equally unforeseen political upheavals.

The eurozone is unraveling. An aging, shrinking population and a socialist welfare state lead to serfdom, not utopia. …

The Arab Middle East is now in a free fall. Tyrants in Egypt, Libya, Tunisia and Yemen were ousted, while one in Syria totters. But while the world hoped secular democrats would follow in their wake, more likely we are witnessing the emergence of one-election Islamists like the Muslim Brotherhood. The region will be mired in turmoil whether these upheavals turn out to be like the hijacked Iranian revolution that ended in theocracy, or the Turkish democratic model that is insidiously becoming Islamist.

Horizontal drilling and fracking have made oil shale and tar sands rich sources of oil and natural gas, so much so that the United States may prove to possess the largest store of fossil fuel reserves in the world — in theory, with enough gas, oil and coal soon never to need any imported Middle Eastern energy again. “Peak oil” is suddenly an anachronism. Widespread American use of cheap natural gas will do more to clean the planet than thousands of Solyndras.

If the United States utilizes its resources, then its present pathologies — massive budget and trade deficits, mounting debt, strategic vulnerability — will start to subside. These new breakthroughs in petroleum engineering are largely American phenomena, reminding us that there is still something exceptional in the American experience that periodically offers the world cutting-edge technologies and protocols — such as those pioneered by Amazon, Apple, Google, Microsoft, Starbucks and Walmart.

In comparison, China is not only resource-poor but politically impoverished. For decades we were told that Chinese totalitarianism, when mixed with laissez-faire capitalism, led to sparkling airports and bullet trains, while a litigious and indulgent America settled for a run-down LAX and creaking Amtrak relics. But the truth is that the Los Angeles airport will probably sooner look modern than the Chinese will hold open elections amid a transparent society — given that free markets did not make China democratic, only more contradictory.

Even more surreal, tiny oil-poor Israel, thanks to vast new offshore finds, has been reinvented as a potential energy giant in the Middle East. Such petrodollars will change Israel as they did the Persian Gulf countries, but with one major difference. Unlike Dubai or Kuwait, Israel is democratic, economically diverse, socially stable and technologically sophisticated, suggesting the sudden windfall will not warp Israel in the manner it has traditional Arab autocracies, but instead become a force multiplier of an already dynamic society. Will Europe still snub Israel when it has as much oil, gas and money as an OPEC member in the Persian Gulf?

Good, good – but Islam is still waging jihad and spreading sharia law; and the UN still exists; and Iran is still becoming a nuclear power; and Obama is still occupying the Oval Office.