The map shows the spread of Islam round the tiny state of Israel – which President Obama wants to make even smaller – as it is now.

In the latter half of this century the greater part of Europe, if present demographic trends continue, will also be predominantly Muslim and governed by sharia law.

Think of it: a vast expanse of Asia from Bangladesh to Turkey, from Turkey across Europe to Britain, from north Africa to the top of Norway, all Islamic lands, all governed by sharia.

And no, it is not likely to be a “milder form” of Islam in Europe than in Afghanistan, Iran, or Saudi Arabia. There is only one Islam and it’s only name is Islam.

We take these extracts from an article, which needs to be read in full, by Andrew C. McCarthy at Family Security Matters. It is titled Islam is Islam:

Islam … is an entirely different way of looking at the world. We struggle with this truth, which defies our end-of-history smugness. …

So we set about remaking Islam in our own progressive image … We miniaturize the elements of the ummah (the notional global Muslim community) that refuse to go along with the program: They are assigned labels … Islamist, fundamentalist, Salafist, Wahhabist, radical, jihadist, extremist, militant, or, of course, “conservative” Muslims adhering to “political Islam.”

There is a “real Islam” – McCarthy’s “we” pretend – which is  a “religion of peace”. “The vast majority of Muslims,” it is said ad nauseam, “are peaceful and law-abiding”. Abiding by what law given a choice? It’s a question “we”  don’t want answered.

We consequently pretend that Muslims who accurately invoke Islamic scripture in the course of forcibly imposing the dictates of classical sharia — the Islamic legal and political system — are engaged in “anti-Islamic activity,” as Britain’s former home secretary Jacqui Smith memorably put it. When the ongoing Islamization campaign is advanced by violence, as inevitably happens, we absurdly insist that this aggression cannot have been ideologically driven, that surely some American policy or Israeli act of self-defense is to blame, as if these could possibly provide rationales for the murderous jihad waged by Boko Haram Muslims against Nigerian Christians and by Egyptian Muslims against the Copts, the persecution of the Ahmadi sect by Indonesian and Pakistani Muslims, or the internecine killing in Iraq of Sunnis by Shiites and vice versa — a tradition nearly as old as Islam itself — which has been predictably renewed upon the recent departure of American troops.

The main lesson of the Arab Spring ought to be that this remaking of Islam has happened only in our own minds, for our own consumption. The Muslims of the Middle East take no note of our reimagining of Islam, being, in the main, either hostile toward or oblivious to Western overtures. Muslims do not measure themselves against Western perceptions, although the shrewdest among them take note of our eagerly accommodating attitude when determining what tactics will best advance the cause.

That cause is nothing less than Islamic dominance.

‘The underlying problem for the West is not Islamic fundamentalism,” wrote Samuel Huntington. “It is Islam, a different civilization whose people are convinced of the superiority of their culture.”

Samuel Huntington famously called the conflict between the West and Islam “a clash of civilizations”. But it’s better described as a clash of Western civilization with Islamic barbarism.

Not convinced merely in the passive sense of assuming that they will triumph in the end, Muslim leaders are galvanized by what they take to be a divinely ordained mission of proselytism — and proselytism not limited to spiritual principles, but encompassing an all-purpose societal code prescribing rules for everything from warfare and finance to social interaction and personal hygiene. …

An all-purpose societal code. That is what sharia is.

Most Americans still do not know that hurriya, Arabic for “freedom,” connotes “perfect slavery” or absolute submission to Allah, very nearly the opposite of the Western concept. Even if we grant for argument’s sake the dubious proposition that all people crave freedom, Islam and the West have never agreed about what freedom means. …

The Muslim Brotherhood is the ummah’s most important organization, unabashedly proclaiming for nearly 90 years that “the Koran is our law and jihad is our way.”

Hamas, a terrorist organization, is its Palestinian branch, and leading Brotherhood figures do little to disguise their abhorrence of Israel and Western culture. …

[Yet] the Obama administration, European governments, and the Western media tirelessly repeated the mantra that the Brothers had been relegated to the sidelines. …  Surely the Tahrir throngs wanted self-determination, not sharia. Never you mind the fanatical chants of Allahu akbar! as the dictator fell. Never mind that Sheikh Qaradawi was promptly ushered into the square to deliver a fiery Friday sermon to a congregation of nearly a million Egyptians.

The Arab Spring is an unshackling of Islam, not an outbreak of fervor for freedom in the Western sense. Turkey’s third-term prime minister Recep Erdogan, a staunchBrotherhood ally who rejects the notion that there is a “moderate Islam” (“Islam is Islam, and that’s it,” he says), once declared that “democracy is a train where you can get off when you reach your destination.” The destination for Muslim supremacists is the implementation of sharia — the foundation of any Islamized society, and, eventually, of the reestablished caliphate. …

Led by the Muslim Brotherhood, Islamic parties have become expert at presenting themselves as moderates and telling the West what it wants to hear while they gradually ensnare societies in the sharia web, as slowly or quickly as conditions on the ground permit. They know that when the West says “democracy,” it means popular elections, not Western democratic culture. They know the West has so glorified these elections that the victors can steal them (Iran), refuse to relinquish power when later they lose (Iraq), or decline to hold further elections (Gaza) without forfeiting their legitimacy. …

Once in power, they are sure to make virulent anti-Americanism their official policy and to contribute materially to the pan-Islamic goal of destroying Israel. …

We should not be under any illusions about why things are shaking out this way. The Arab Spring has not been hijacked any more than Islam was hijacked by the suicide terrorists of 9/11. Islam is ascendant because that is the way Muslims of the Middle East want it.

In our time and the foreseeable future, the war between intellectual light and darkness will, we envision, increasingly be fought out by secularists, rationalists, atheists against the religious of all denominations, but most necessarily and urgently against Islam.

This is by Daniel Greenfield, from Front Page:

Alexander Aan was just another bureaucrat holding down a desk at the [Indonesian] Department of Planning until his Facebook Atheism page came to the notice of Indonesian authorities in Obama’s old stomping grounds. Now Aan is facing a five year jail sentence for using social media to spread the message that Allah does not exist. 

Alexander is being charged with “defiling” Islam by using passages from the Koran to challenge the Islamic religion. And while the State Department and the media routinely go on the attack against any manifestation of what they call “Islamophobia,” it isn’t likely that they will be rushing to Aan’s defense. This isn’t exactly the first time that atheists have run afoul of the Islamic codes under which the Muslim world operates.

Two years ago, the Palestinian Authority arrested Waleed Hasayin on similar charges of blaspheming against Islam on Facebook. Waleed Hasayin had written that, “Muhammad was no different than barbaric thugs who slaughtered, robbed and raped women” and that “Islam has legitimized slavery, reinforced the gap between social classes and allowed stealing from the infidels, taking women in captivity during wars and sexual abuse of women slaves.” 

For these and other truthful statements, he was arrested and his family demanded that he be sentenced to life in prison. He has since written a letter of apology in hopes of being released.

The regimes imprisoning Aan and Hasayin are funded by the United States. Indonesia is on the list of the top twenty countries benefiting from USAID funding and the Palestinian Authority, including its security forces and prisons, is mostly subsidized by American taxpayers. The arrests were accompanied by mob protests and violence reflecting populist Muslim hostility toward non-Muslims.

Underlying these individual incidents is a legal code that goes to the very definition of what it means to be a citizen of a Muslim country. Muslim countries recognize a limited set of legal religions. Non-Muslims who are members of legal religions have fewer rights and run the usual risks that come with being a minority group. Non-Muslims who are not members of official religions do not. This includes Muslim sects that the Islamic system does not recognize as legitimate. It includes Muslims who wish to convert to another religion, and it includes atheists who are not a recognized religious group. 

Religious identity is linked to civic participation in public life in a way that most Americans are not aware of. It appears on identity cards, it is a basic requirement for doing anything from attending a university to getting married. Without membership in an officially recognized religious group, the atheist is a non-person.

Well, that’s in the Islamic world. We know how it is there. We know that in some Islamic countries – Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, Iran, Sudan, Afghanistan – the punishment for “blasphemy”, which of course includes atheism, is death.

But in our Western world, where freedom is a high value, and freedom of speech a right enshrined in a constitution (as in the US) or established by tradition (as in the UK), such tyrannous bigotry is not tolerated.

Or is it?

Atheists no longer have to live in the Muslim world in order to be subject to Islamic rules. At Queen Mary, University of London, a public research university with roots going back nearly a thousand years, the Atheism, Secularism and Humanism Society attempted to hold a discussion on “Sharia Lw and Human Rights.” The discussion came to an abrupt end when a man entered the room and warned that they would be murdered if they said anything critical about Mohammed. 

The return of blasphemy laws to the United Kingdom has been slow, but not all that stealthy. At the University College London, the president of the Atheist, Secularist and Humanist Society resigned after the college student union backed a Muslim student association’s complaints about a cartoon strip of Mohammed having a drink that was posted on Facebook.

The steady flow of Muslim immigrants into London has turned it into Londonistan with nearly a tenth of the city answering the Call of the Mosque. In two decades their numbers will double and with 40 percent of British Muslims polling for Sharia, it’s not difficult to see that the trajectory for atheists in London is not a very promising one.

Atheists are a minority with legal protections in the West. Which is why the majority of the signatories on the Manifesto for a Secular Middle East and North Africa were activists who had left the Muslim world and were living in Europe or the United States. The impossibility of signing a similar manifesto while living full time in Iran or Pakistan went without saying.

But as the Muslim populations of Western countries continue to grow, they are becoming dangerous places for non-Muslims, including atheists. If a dialogue on the consequences of Islamic law can be shut down with threats of violence at University College London, then it’s hard to think of any place that it cannot be shut down. 

We like to think of our cities as fundamentally different places than Tehran or Islamabad, but it’s the population that shapes the character and values of a city. Demographic change means cultural and religious change and as the norms of Tehran and Islamabad become the norms of London and Paris, religious minorities and irreligious minorities will both find themselves silenced. …

Muslim persecution of a hated minority group increases proportionally in relation to their numerical advantage. Atheists are a larger percentage of the population in Europe, but demographics are still catching up to them. In the United States the demographic race may already be done, as far as atheists are concerned.

In the United States approximately 0.7 percent of the population identifies as atheist and 0.8 percent of the population as Muslim. If these surveys are correct then the number of Muslims in the United States has already exceeded the number of atheists. While not a single member of Congress identifies as an atheist, two identify as Muslims.

We may accept Daniel Greenfield’s finding that 0.7 percent of Americans “identifies as atheist”, but we doubt that only 0.7 Americans are atheist. We suspect that tens of millions of Americans do not believe in the supernatural.

We think it more than likely that many members of Congress and the Senate are atheists but are aware that saying so publicly would end their political careers.

We suspect – and ardently hope – that with each generation more and more adult, sane, educated, intelligent people realize that the supernatural is superfluous to requirement; that gods do not exist; and that religion is a major cause of conflict.

Whether this intellectual evolution will dominate forcefully enough to save the world from the growing and spreading counter-movement of Islam – the darkest, most ignorant, most stupid, and in our day the cruelest of all superstitions and all systems of totalitarian tyranny – remains to be seen.

This is from Creeping Sharia.

Beat a camel, beat a wife.

The duty of a Muslim wife is to “lick pus and blood from her husband’s nose” – 0r be beaten.

Comments by feminists are invited but not expected.

We are of course against the deliberate infliction of physical pain. But the infliction of humiliation, especially on enemies who hold what they call honor as their highest value, seems to us a very good way of punishing them or, used as a threat, of eliciting information from them. Which is why we do not condemn the humiliating treatment some Muslim terrorists famously received at the hands of American soldiers at Abu Ghraib.

Now the International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) – and the bien pensant throughout the West –  are claiming to be shocked by a video of some marines pissing on Afghan corpses. Comparisons are being made with Abu Ghraib. A criminal investigation is underway.

Since the Afghans are dead, they are not even being humiliated. The pissing merely relieved the feelings as well as the bladders of American soldiers. But by publicizing the picture, condemning the soldiers, launching criminal enquiries, the ISAF are choosing to feed propaganda fuel to the enemy.

President Karzai, he who wears literally the mantle of power in his hell-hole of a country, purses his mouth and blusters – frankly taking the piss out of the US and its allies:

“The government of Afghanistan is deeply disturbed by a video that shows American soldiers desecrating dead bodies of three Afghans. This act by American soldiers is simply inhuman and condemnable in the strongest possible terms. We expressly ask the U.S. government to urgently investigate the video and apply the most severe punishment to anyone found guilty in this crime.”

The enemy will only see self-castigation by the Western allies as proof of weakness. For them, war has to be ruthless. Muhammad and his followers slaughtered all the men of a tribe and enslaved the women and children, setting the god-authorized pattern for Muslims to follow forever. The desecration of enemy corpses is routine for jihadis.

And what else do they do? What do Afghans themselves do to their own people?

This is from the Telegraph:

“You must become so notorious for bad things that when you come into an area people will tremble in their sandals. Anyone can do beatings and starve people. I want your unit to find new ways of torture so terrible that the screams will frighten even crows from their nests and if the person survives he will never again have a night’s sleep.”

These were the instructions of the commandant of the Afghan secret police to his new recruits. For more than three years one of those recruits, Hafiz Sadiqulla Hassani, ruthlessly carried out his orders. But sickened by the atrocities that he was forced to commit, last week he defected to Pakistan, joining a growing number of Taliban officials who are escaping across the border.

In an exclusive interview with The Telegraph, he reveals for the first time the full horror of what has been happening in the name of religion in Afghanistan. …

He became a Taliban “volunteer”, assigned to the secret police. Many of his friends also joined up as land owners in Kandahar were threatened that they must either ally themselves with the Taliban or lose their property. Others were bribed to join with money given to the Taliban by drug smugglers, as Afghanistan became the world’s largest producer of heroin.

At first, Mr Hassani’s job was to patrol the streets at night looking for thieves and signs of subversion. However, as the Taliban leadership began issuing more and more extreme edicts, his duties changed.

Instead of just searching for criminals, the night patrols were instructed to seek out people watching videos, playing cards or, bizarrely, keeping caged birds. Men without long enough beards were to be arrested, as was any woman who dared venture outside her house. Even owning a kite became a criminal offence.

The state of terror spread by the Taliban was so pervasive that it began to seem as if the whole country was spying on each other. “As we drove around at night with our guns, local people would come to us and say there’s someone watching a video in this house or some men playing cards in that house,” he said.

“Basically any form of pleasure was outlawed,” Mr Hassani said, “and if we found people doing any of these things we would beat them with staves soaked in water – like a knife cutting through meat – until the room ran with their blood or their spines snapped. Then we would leave them with no food or water in rooms filled with insects until they died.

“We always tried to do different things: we would put some of them standing on their heads to sleep, hang others upside down with their legs tied together. We would stretch the arms out of others and nail them to posts like crucifixions.

“Sometimes we would throw bread to them to make them crawl. Then I would write the report to our commanding officer so he could see how innovative we had been.” …

After Kandahar, he was put in charge of secret police cells in the towns of Ghazni and then Herat, a beautiful Persian city in western Afghanistan that had suffered greatly during the Soviet occupation and had been one of the last places to fall to the Taliban.

Herat had always been a relatively liberal place where women would dance at weddings and many girls went to school – but the Taliban were determined to put an end to all that. Mr Hassani and his men were told to be particularly cruel to Heratis.

It was his experience of that cruelty that made Mr Hassani determined to let the world know what was happening in Afghanistan. “Maybe the worst thing I saw,” he said, “was a man beaten so much, such a pulp of skin and blood, that it was impossible to tell whether he had clothes on or not. Every time he fell unconscious, we rubbed salt into his wounds to make him scream.

“Nowhere else in the world [is there] such barbarity and cruelty as in Afghanistan. At that time I swore an oath that I will devote myself to the Afghan people and telling the world what is happening.”

Before he could escape, however, because he comes from the same tribe, he spent time as a bodyguard for Mullah Omar, the reclusive spiritual leader of the Taliban.

“He’s medium height, slightly fat, with an artificial green eye which doesn’t move, and he would sit on a bed issuing instructions and giving people dollars from a tin trunk,” said Mr Hassani. “He doesn’t say much, which is just as well as he’s a very stupid man. He knows only how to write his name “Omar” and sign it.

“It is the first time in Afghanistan’s history that the lower classes are governing and by force. There are no educated people in this administration – they are all totally backward and illiterate. … I think many in the Taliban would like to escape. The country is starving and joining is the only way to get food and keep your land.”

This Hafiz Sadiqulla Hassani should not be let off his crimes simply because he piously promised himself to tell the world about them and has done so. Why isn’t he being tried, condemned, executed – and pissed on?

The Washington Post usefully informs us:

U.S. military law and the Geneva Conventions prohibit desecration, mishandling or exploitation of bodies of people killed in war.

Prohibit do they? To our own certain knowledge their prohibition has been about as useful as the Pope’s pudenda. (In Lebanon in 1982-1983, the corpses of men killed by the PLO had their genitals cut off and stuffed into their mouths, and no cry of “Foul!” went up from Geneva or anywhere else – JB.)

The human capacity for indignation is inadequate to react commensurately to the savagery of the murdering, torturing Afghans.

The best thing our soldiers can do is kill them. They should also, if they feel like it, piss on their corpses.

P.S. Seems the four marines didn’t actually piss at all.  (Hat-tip Indigo Red)

It is our contention that Christianity brought a thousand years of darkness down on Europe. It extinguished the bright light of classical culture, of which Socratean doubt, the need to examine all ideas critically, was the enlightening principle. Christianity claimed a monopoly of truth, and the  totalitarian-minded Catholic Church did its utmost to suppress dissent by the cruelest means imaginable. So did Protestant churches as far as they could reach. Like Communism and all ideological orthodoxies, Christianity feared open criticism, recognizing that it’s power could not survive argument. The Enlightenment proved that to be the case; a great upwelling of doubt, criticism, exploration and discovery, it loosened the grip of theocratic tyranny, dispersed the darkness of superstition, and let Europe flower again after a long and terrible night. Science flourished once more, achieving an immense extension of knowledge and giving birth to new technologies. The might of the West is rooted in the Greco-Roman culture revived in the Enlightenment, not in a “Judeo-Christian tradition”.

Now darkness is descending again on the West. Islam, a tyranny of the mind as cruel as Christianity and even more intolerant, an ideology from the Dark Ages that forbids criticism and kills critics, is spreading rapidly through Europe and America, zealously assisted by Western governments and passionately defended by the intelligentsia of the political left – which on principle favors ideological conformity and its totalitarian enforcement.

This is from the Stonegate Institute, by Soeren Kern:

The European Union has offered to host the next meeting of the so-called Istanbul Process, an aggressive effort by Muslim countries to make it an international crime to criticize Islam.

The announcement comes less than one month after the United States hosted its own Istanbul Process conference in Washington, DC.

The Istanbul Process – its explicit aim is to enshrine in international law a global ban on all critical scrutiny of Islam and/or Islamic Sharia law – is being spearheaded by the Organization of Islamic Cooperation (OIC), a bloc of 57 Muslim countries.

Based in Saudi Arabia, the OIC has long pressed the European Union and the United States to impose limits on free speech and expression about Islam.

But the OIC has now redoubled its efforts and is engaged in a determined diplomatic offensive to persuade Western democracies to implement United Nations Human Rights Council (HRC) Resolution 16/18, which calls on all countries to combat “intolerance, negative stereotyping and stigmatization of … religion and belief.” (Analysis of the OIC’s war on free speech can be found here and here.)

Resolution 16/18, which was adopted at HRC headquarters in Geneva in March 2011, is widely viewed as a significant step forward in OIC efforts to advance the international legal concept of defaming Islam.

However, the HRC resolution – as well as the OIC-sponsored Resolution 66/167, which was quietly approved by the 193-member UN General Assembly on December 19, 2011 – remains ineffectual as long as it lacks strong support in the West.

The OIC therefore scored a diplomatic coup when the Obama Administration agreed to host a three-day Istanbul Process conference in Washington, DC on December 12-14, 2011. In doing so, the United States gave the OIC the political legitimacy it has been seeking to globalize its initiative to ban criticism of Islam.

Following the Obama Administration’s lead, the European Union now wants to get in on the action by hosting the next Istanbul Process summit, tentatively scheduled for July 2012.

Up until now, the European Union has kept the OIC initiative at arms-length. But Ekmeleddin Ihsanoglu, Secretary-General of the OIC, says the EU’s offer to host the meeting represents a “qualitative shift in action against the phenomenon of Islamophobia,” according to the International Islamic News Agency (IINA), the OIC’s official news/propaganda organ.

According to the IINA, “The phenomenon of Islamophobia is found in the West in general, but is growing in European countries in particular and in a manner different than that in the US, which had contributed to drafting Resolution 16/18. The new European position represents the beginning of the shift from their previous reserve over the years over the attempts by the OIC to counter ‘defamation of religions’ in the Human Rights Council and the General Assembly of the United Nations. …

Europe is retreating from the Enlightenment. But not without  protest.

The OIC is especially angry over its inability to silence a growing number of democratically elected politicians in Europe who have voiced concerns over the refusal of Muslim immigrants to integrate into their host countries and the consequent establishment of parallel Islamic societies in many parts of Europe.

According to the IINA, “Ihsanoglu said that the growing role of the extreme right in politics in several European countries has become stronger than the capacity of the Organization [OIC], explaining that the extreme right, who [sic] hates Muslims, became leverage in the hands of politicians. He added that the rise of the extreme right through elections has become an issue that cannot be countered, considering the democratic way in which these extremists reach their positions. He pointed out to the referendum held in Switzerland, as an example, which resulted in suspending the construction of minarets there following a vote by the Swiss people.”

In other words, the OIC is now seeking the support of non-elected bureaucrats at the headquarters of the European Union in Brussels to enact pan-European hate speech legislation to limit by fiat what 500 million European citizens – including democratically elected politicians – can and cannot say about Islam.

To be sure, many individual European countries that lack First Amendment protections like those in the United States have already enacted hate speech laws that effectively serve as proxies for the all-encompassing blasphemy legislation the OIC is seeking to impose on the European Union as a whole.

The author lists a dozen examples of Europeans who have dared to raise their voices to criticize the barbarous ideology of Islam and defend their own culture, only to be prosecuted and punished for it under recently enacted, bad and stupid laws. Among them, Elisabeth Sabaditsch-Wolff and Geert Wilders, whose cases we have discussed in our posts: The West on trial (December 16, 2009); Freedom versus Islam (January 20, 2010); Civilization on trial (October 11,2010); An honest confession of hypocrisy (October 23, 2010);The new heresy (January 11, 2011); Darkness descending – again (February 7, 2011); Sharia is the law in Austria (December 25, 2011); Only the gagged may speak freely (December 26/11).

Almost everywhere in Europe now, “speaking the truth about Islam is subject to swift and hefty legal penalties” as the author says.

Why should any religion be exempt from criticism? Religious ideas above all need to be criticized, being the most irrational and the most oppressive. And even more than other religions, Islam needs to be dragged into the sunlight. It is the only intolerant religion of our time –  and it is asking to be protected from intolerance!

Right now, when Islam is intent on conquering the West by all possible means including terrorism, it is especially necessary to be Islamophobic.

Americans must resist the Obama administration’s efforts to help the OIC drive our world back into darkness. At least in the United States – the great product and political embodiment of the Enlightenment – the light of liberty must be kept burning.

Obama has brought America to abject defeat.

He is entreating a vicious Muslim cleric, acclaimed as a spokesman for Islam, Yusuf al-Qaradawi, to negotiate with the Taliban for the United States’ terms of surrender.  

In choosing such an envoy, he is begging the savage Taliban to let the United States of America save face in a pretense of mutually desired peace-making.  

Andrew McCarthy writes at the National Review Online:

Al-Qaradawi is the most influential Sunni Islamist in the world, thanks to such ventures as his al-Jazeera TV program (Sharia and Life) …

In 2003, he issued a fatwa calling for the killing of American troops in Iraq. …[He champions] Hamas, mass-murder attacks, and suicide bombings… [urges]  the destruction of Israel, rebuking clerics who dare counsel against killing civilians. …

After thousands of young Americans have laid down their lives to protect the United States from jihadist terror, President Obama apparently seeks to end the war by asking Qaradawi, a jihad-stoking enemy of the United States, to help him strike a deal that will install our Taliban enemies as part of the sharia state we have been building in Afghanistan. …

The price tag will include the release of Taliban prisoners from Gitmo …

The administration will also agree to the lifting of U.N. sanctions against the Taliban, and recognition of the Taliban as a legitimate political party (yes, just like the Muslim Brotherhood!).

In return, the Taliban will pretend to forswear violence, to sever ties with al-Qaeda, and to cooperate with the rival Karzai regime.

It would mark one of the most shameful chapters in American history.

Correction: What the President of the United States has done and is doing to advance the Islamic jihad is the most shameful chapter in American history.

Daniel Greenfield writes at Canada Free Press:

The news that the Obama Administration has brought in genocidal Muslim Brotherhood honcho Yusuf Al-Qaradawi to discuss terms of surrender for the transfer of Afghanistan to the Taliban caps a year in which the Brotherhood and the Salafists are looking up carve up Egypt, the Islamists won Tunisia’s elections, Turkey’s Islamist AKP Party purged the last bastions of the secular opposition and Libya’s future as an Islamist state was secured by American, British and French jets and special forces. …

In 2010, the Taliban were still hiding in caves. In 2012 they are set to be in power from Tunisia to Afghanistan and from Egypt to Yemen. …

2011 will be remembered [as] a pivotal year in the rise of the next Caliphate. …

If [Obama] really had no interest in winning Afghanistan … why did we stay for so long and lose so many lives fighting a war that the White House had no intention of winning? The ugly conclusion that must be drawn from the timing of the Iraq and Afghanistan withdrawals is that the wars were being played out to draw down around the time of the next election.

We don’t believe that any sort of victory is now possible in Afghanistan. We argue that the US should have pulled out of Afghanistan after it whacked the Taliban out of power. Staying “to build democracy” was a stupid mistake. Withdrawal now should be carried out with serious warnings that if the Taliban come back to power they will be whacked again. But we agree with the writer’s point about the timing of withdrawal.

What that means is Obama sacrificed the thousands of Americans killed and wounded in the conflict as an election strategy. The idea that American soldiers were fighting and dying for no reason until the time when maximum political advantage could be gained from pulling them out is horrifying, it’s a crime beyond redemption, an act worse than treason — and yet there is no other rational conclusion to be drawn from the timetable.

Isn’t it treason itself? And what could be worse than that the leader of the United States should commit treason against his country?

If the Taliban were not our enemy …

– as unintelligent and ill-informed Vice-President Joe Biden recently said was the case –

… then the war should have ended shortly after the election. Instead Obama threw more soldiers into the mix while tying their hands with Rules of Engagement that prevented them from defending themselves or aggressively going after the Taliban. Casualties among US soldiers and Afghan civilians increased. … Now … we are negotiating a withdrawal.

There are only two possible explanations. Either we lost the war or Obama never intended to win it and was allowing the Taliban to murder American soldiers until the next election. If so we’re not just looking at a bad man at the teleprompter, we are looking into the face of an evil so amoral [immoral, we’d say – JB] that it defies description. …

But wait, there is more.

Iraq will likely fall to Iran in a bloody civil war, whether it will be parts of the country or the whole country depend on how much support we provide to the Kurds. Under the Obama Administration the level of support is likely to be none.

Once the Islamists firmly take power across North Africa they will begin squeezing the last states that have still not fallen. Last month the leader of the murderous Enhada Islamists who have taken power in Tunisia stopped by Algeria. Morocco has not yet come down, but at this rate it’s only a matter of time.

Syria remains an open question. The Muslim Brotherhood is in a successor position there and would welcome our intervention against the Assad regime. The Assads are no prize and they’re Iranian puppets, but shoving them out would give the Brotherhood yet another country and its sizable collection of weaponry.

All that is bound to make 2012 an ugly year in its own right, especially if the Obama Administration continues allowing the Muslim Brotherhood to control its foreign policy. … The region has become an indisputably worse place this year with the majority of moderate governments overthrown and replaced, or in the process of being replaced by Islamist thugs. …

Yemen too may be taken over by jihadists according to the Washington Post:

With pro-democracy demonstrators now in the 11th month of a populist uprising that has forced President Ali Abdullah Saleh to agree to step down, al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula and its sympathizers have taken full advantage of the turbulence.

In May, they overran large swaths of Abyan province, including this regional capital. Today, they rule over significant territory in this strategic region, near important oil shipping lanes.

[Their] stated goal is to create an Islamic emirate in Yemen, which American officials fear could be used as a base to plan more attacks against the United States.

The Iranian regime closed the Straits of Hormuz for five hours yesterday to demonstrate how easily they could do it. Obama shows no inclination to force that bellicose Islamic state to stop building a nuclear arsenal.

While in Europe Islam is steadily achieving power by demanding  and being granted the establishment of sharia law, inside the United States it has advanced its influence by leaps and bounds under the protection and with the active encouragement of the Obama administration.

Worse than that. There is plainly a fixed intention by Obama personally to give victory to Islam. His support of the Muslim Brotherhood is an indication of it. His surrender to the Taliban is proof of it. 

Will the United Nations pause in its continual condemnation of Israel for daring to exist, and say a word or two against the enslavement of children by Arabs?

We all know the answer to that question.

Will the US State Department censure the practice?

We know the answer to that one too.

This is by Stephen Brown from Front Page:

It is perhaps the most pernicious of evils. The words “child slavery” would cause most people nowadays to recoil in horror, but in the oil-rich countries of the Saudi Arabian Peninsula, it apparently still doesn’t.

There are … many … parents among Pakistan’s large, poverty-stricken population willing to sell their male offspring into the Persian Gulf. Boys as young as three are bought from poor parents, and sometimes simply kidnapped from the street, principally in Pakistan and Bangladesh, and sent as slaves to these oil-rich states for one purpose only: to win camel races for their new Arab masters. The boys are expected to do this after being trained as riders under very brutal conditions for what is a very popular sport in that region. …

The unfortunate boys kept on an “ousbah,” an isolated camel farm, are caught up in a nightmare of hellish proportions. After experiencing the trauma of suddenly being separated from their families, they are made to work 18-hour days. A camel jockey-in-training is also starved, beaten and sometimes sexually abused. Serious injury, even death, is a fate that also awaits many of the child riders, some as young as five, when training or racing over distances between four and 10 kilometres atop of 800-900 pound animals that can run as fast as 40 miles per hour. Even if the rider does not fall, damaged genitals is one of the serious wounds the slave boys often suffer. …

Along with the boys, young girls from South Asia and other impoverished countries are also trafficked to the Arabian Peninsula but for sexual exploitation. …Traffickers have also sometimes been taught at Third World airports leaving for the Arabian Peninsula with their human cargo. In 2007, one was caught in Karachi with both a boy and a young, pregnant woman. He was headed for Oman where he planned to sell the boy as a camel jockey and the girl as a sex slave. Her unborn baby was also destined to become a camel jockey or a sex slave, according to Pakistani police, who claim pregnant women are being trafficked for the purpose of producing future slaves. …

Unfortunately for its innocent victims, both present and future, the eradication of slavery on the Arabian Peninsula will be difficult, if not impossible, to achieve. It is an ingrained, centuries-old institution. … Under sharia law, which governs Saudi Arabia and the Gulf States, Muslims are legally allowed to own slaves. … Another reason for this inhuman sense of entitlement is that the prophet Muhammad was also a slave owner, setting the example for the fundamentalists. …

Perhaps the greatest obstacle to abolishing slavery in places like the Arabian Peninsula and Mauritania is the mindset. In these countries, enslaving non-Arab human beings, including children, is simply viewed as the natural order of things. …

Victims of child slavery also cannot look to the United Nations Human Rights Council for help. It contains despots and tyrants whose human rights records are just as bad as Mauritania’s and Saudi Arabia’s, as well as Islamic countries that bribe them and may be practising slavery themselves.

There is a UN agency that ostensibly exists to prevent the exploitation of human beings: the International Labor Organization (ILO).

The ILO does nothing to save little boys and young girls from Arab enslavement.

Arabs are never to be offended by any UN interference in their affairs. Islam is never to be offended by any criticism whatsoever.

That being its policy  – unofficial but fully implemented – the UN is not only the protector of slave owners and traffickers, it is collaborating with them. By permitting slavery, it encourages it.  

The UN must be destroyed.

If you find yourself plunged now and then into cynicism and enjoy a bitter laugh, try this report from the Washington Post:

A team of Arab League monitors began its second day of work in Syria on Wednesday as the death toll continued to climb in the restive cities of Homs and Hama and questions mounted about the observers’ methods and credibility.

The delegation, which was in Homs, is tasked with observing whether Syrian authorities are upholding an agreement to withdraw troops from cities, free political prisoners and end the use of deadly force to quell a nine-month-old uprising against the government of President Bashar al-Assad.

Syrian forces fired teargas and reportedly live ammunition at protesters in central Syrian cities despite the presence of an Arab League observer team on hand to monitor compliance with plans to stop the bloodshed.

On the monitors’ first day in Homs, residents gathered by the thousands to demonstrate against the government and plead for help from the outside world.

Saleem al-Qabani, a member of the Local Coordination Committees opposition group, said in a telephone interview that he had canceled a planned meeting with the observers because they insisted on having army officers with them, including at least one whom Qabani said he recognized as having killed protesters. …

Another activist, who is in contact with people in the area, said government forces fired from buildings in Baba Amr while observers were nearby.

Because Syria has closed its borders to journalists, it is not possible to independently confirm such reports. …

Sarah Leah Whitson of Human Rights Watch … expressed concern about reports obtained by the rights group that …  detainees [ie prisoners] were being moved, possibly in advance of planned inspections by the monitors. 

Whitson also raised concerns about whether the Arab League monitors are properly qualified for their mission. About 60 monitors are in Syria, with more due to arrive. Their names have not been released. She said the Arab League should have offered some assurances that the group had received training in human rights investigations before being deployed to Syria.

“It’s not enough to have once been in government. They need training in finding things that governments are trying to hide,” Whitson said.

She must be sitting somewhere very safe and remote from the scene to imagine that that is possible. Somewhere in the West. A bureau. Air-conditioned, sound-proofed, comfortable, where all tyranny and violence are only theoretical. Still, she has valid concerns:

Specifically, Whitson questioned what she called “troubling” information about the head of the delegation, Gen. Mohammed Ahmed Mustafa al-Dabi, a veteran of the Sudanese intelligence service.

A Facebook group of Damascus-based doctors said Dabi was a senior army officer in the 1990s, when Sudanese forces played a brutal role in their country’s ethnic war. “Many questions were raised about his knowledge of Darfur massacres,” a statement by the group said.

Questions such as: “Could he have been one of the leading perpetrators of the massacres?” With an answer such as: “Could have been and was.”  

The Arab League did not respond to requests for comments about how its monitors were selected and trained, or the circumstances under which they are conducting their mission.

Opposition activists said shelling and gunfire continued in Homs on Wednesday, killing at least three people. They also reported troops opening fire on unarmed protesters in Hama, killing at least six.

But Dabi told Reuters news agency that “the situation seemed reassuring so far” in Homs and that he had seen “nothing frightening.” 

And in any case there’s nothing much to worry about because the “international community” is keeping an eye on the Syrian civil war, even though it can receive no reliable information about it so is staring into the dark.

“Used to the dilatory maneuvers of the Damascus regime, the international community will be vigilant in the face of all attempts at dissimulation or manipulation,” Bernard Valero, a spokesman for the French Foreign Ministry, said in Paris.

– Another observer in a comfy bureau.

And here’s one more reason why we can all rest easy about Syria. The  Russians, renowned for their strictness when it comes to truthfulness and disinterested impartiality, are also seeing to it that only independent, objective monitoring will be acceptable:

Meanwhile, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov, whose government until recently was a staunch ally of Assad, told reporters: “The mission [Dabi and co] should be able to visit any part of the country, any towns or villages, and come up with its own independent, objective opinion about what is happening and where.”

Ha-ha-ha!  Whoo!  Let us recover our breath.

In the Arab world it’s a farce without end!

Elisabeth Sabaditsch-Wolff has been found guilty of saying that Muhammad was a pedophile. Which he was.

However, she didn’t actually say what she is being penalized for saying.

This is by Ned May from Andrew Breitbart’s Big Peace:

On February 15, 2011, the Austrian anti-jihad activist Elisabeth Sabaditsch-Wolff was convicted of hate speech in a Vienna courtroom. The original charge against her was “incitement to hatred”. On the second day of her trial, the judge decided to added a second charge, “denigration of religious beliefs of a legally recognized religion.” The latter count is the one on which Elisabeth was convicted. …

The prosecution and the judge in Elisabeth’s case apparently settled on the sentence long before considering a verdict. …

The judge in the case, Bettina Neubauer, convicted Elisabeth for saying that Mohammed was a pedophile. There’s only one problem: Elisabeth never said any such thing. As the transcript of her seminar demonstrates, Elisabeth in fact said that “Mohammed had a thing for little kids”, the plain facts of which even the judge was forced to accept.

In other words, the judge in Elisabeth’s trial, acting on her own initiative, put words into Elisabeth’s mouth and then convicted her for saying them.

We have unqualified sympathy with Elisabeth Sabaditsch-Wolff, but have to say that we cannot see any significant difference between the alleged and the actual statement. She should have been free to say it either way, to make her point as she chose.   

Here is the story behind the prosecution from Front Page, also by Ned May:

Elisabeth Sabaditsch-Wolff is the daughter of a retired diplomat in the Austrian foreign service. During her childhood and young adulthood she experienced Islam up close and personal, in places such as Libya, Kuwait, Iraq, and Iran. She was in Tehran with her parents during the Islamic Revolution of 1979. As a student, she was working during her summer break in Kuwait when Saddam Hussein invaded the country. On September 11, 2001, Elisabeth was working in the Austrian embassy in Tripoli. She saw the Libyan people celebrate the destruction of the World Trade Center and the deaths of nearly 3,000 Americans. All of these experiences were lessons she took to heart, but 9-11 motivated her to examine Islam more closely over the next few years.

In October 2007 Elisabeth attended the Counterjihad Brussels conference and delivered the country report on the state of Islamization in Austria. In early 2008 she began a series of seminars on Islam in Vienna, explaining to interested parties what the Qur’an and the hadith actually teach, along with the basic tenets of Islamic law.

For the next year and a half the interest in her seminars grew, and attendance increased. The success of her lectures drew the interest of Austrian leftists, who are as determined as leftists in other Western countries to discredit and destroy the work of those they view as “racists”, “fascists”, and “Islamophobes”. Unbeknownst to Elisabeth, the left-wing magazine NEWS sent a reporter to one of her seminars to make a surreptitious recording of it. …

The complainant in the case against Elisabeth was not the state, but NEWS magazine itself, the publication whose reporter had infiltrated the seminar. For the next ten months the possibility of a formal charge was left hanging over Elisabeth’s head, but she received no official word about what might happen to her. All she could do was retain legal counsel and wait.

In February 2010 she gave a deposition to the Office for the Protection of the Constitution and Prevention of Terrorism. After that there was nothing from the prosecutor’s office. Finally, on September 15, Elisabeth learned that a formal charge would be filed against her. Ironically enough, she didn’t find out through a court document, an official summons, or her lawyer. Instead she learned of the charge by reading about it in the press — in NEWS, the very same magazine that had published the undercover report and filed the complaint against her. … A few days later she received official notice from the court [setting] her trial date …

Now the verdict has been given. She has been notified of it by her lawyers, who wrote in part:

You were found, however, to have committed the offense of denigration of a religion because of your statements in the seminars of October 15, 2009 and November 12, 2009 about Mohammed and his sexual intercourse with nine year-old Aisha. The judge’s basis for that focused on the circumstance that the offense of § 188 StGB is an abstract criminal threat, and therefore the mere aptness to cause offense was sufficient to qualify as the crime. What was incomprehensible was the judge’s conclusion that Mohammed’s sexual contact with nine-year-old Aisha was not pedophilia, because Mohammed continued his marriage to Aisha until his death.

Punishment was set at 120 per diem payments of €4, in total €480 or an alternative sentence of 60 days imprisonment.

Further, the costs of the trial must be paid.

Ned May comments:

Take a deep breath, everyone, and think about the implications of the above material.

Elisabeth Sabaditsch-Wolff was convicted for stating the plain facts: the prophet Mohammed had sex with a nine-year-old-girl. She never used the word pedophilia; she simply described in everyday language the prophet’s … tastes.

The statements she made are not considered false by [observing] Muslims. They are written down in Islamic scripture, and are considered correct and authoritative by virtually every Islamic scholar and theologian.

These scriptural passages are not considered offensive to Muslims when they are recited in a mosque or a madrassa. Mohammed was the perfect man, so by definition his actions cannot be offensive. They are in fact exemplary. That is why Muslim men continue to marry little girls to this day.

Elisabeth’s statements are offensive because they were made by a non-Muslim in public, and brought discredit upon Islam in the eyes of other non-believers.

This offense is referred to as “Islamic slander”, and is a grave violation of Islamic law. Under sharia, the penalty is death.

But it is only illegal under sharia.

Monday’s verdict had nothing to do with Austrian law, or European law. It was based solely on the unwritten laws of politically correct Multiculturalism, which absolutely forbids the offending of Muslims.

This entire judicial farce was necessary in order to establish a sharia-based precedent in Austria.

– and so in Europe.

Europe is retreating from the Enlightenment. Going back into the darkness that reigned before it in the European mind. The thinkers who brought the new morning after the long night when Christian churches of one sort or another had tyrannized over the nations of the continent and beyond, took the great leap forward by denigrating religious belief. Hume, Spinoza, Diderot, Voltaire …… dared to criticize religious belief both specifically and generally. Their intellectual victory made  the scientific discoveries of the last three hundred years possible. But the ruling class of Europe cares nothing for its heritage.

If Austria wants to save itself, every decent Austrian should now go into the streets and shout “Muhammad was a pedophile!” If Europe wants to save itself, every European should do it.

They should write it on walls, print it on the front page of every newspaper, on bumper-stickers, on T-shirts, on billboards, on banners trailed in the sky; announce it on the stage of every theatre, in movies, in television ads, at sports events, on radio, in parliament, in songs; write it in emails, on facebook, on twitter, in cartoons, jokes, books ……

The fact that Arab culture generally was what we might justifiably call “pedophilic”  when Muhammad lived, in that little girls, even pre-pubescent little girls, were forcibly married to men any number of years older than themselves, and still are, can only make such a campaign the more vital at any time. But the really important thing right now is that a non-Muslim is not allowed to say that Muhammad was a pedophile in Austria (or anywhere else in Europe it is safe to guess), because Muhammad and his nasty religion Islam are protected from criticism.

It is good and right to criticize Muhammad and Islam. More, it is an absolute necessity if we are to win the war Islam is waging against us; and if we are to preserve the legacy of the Enlightenment, free and open enquiry into everything and anything, not only in the natural world but also in history and the world of ideas. That is what Islam must fear the most.