This past weekend there has been, and there continues to be, a blood-bath in Syria, as its Alawite dictator, Bashar Assad, slaughters the people his family has been oppressing for decades.

There is little about it in the news media in America.

This is what’s happening there:

Bashar Assad has launched all-out war on his people. Tanks firing artillery, APCs [Armored Personnel Carriers], infantry units, commandoes and snipers were deployed for the first time at daybreak Monday, April 25 in cities across Syria for the most brutal assault on any Arab anti-government protest in the four-month uprising.

In the first few hours, hundreds are estimated to have been massacred (over and above the 350 shot dead in the last three days) and thousands injured. Denied medical attention, they are left in the streets to die. …

Cities with populations of 2-3 million have been stormed by Syrian troops backed by tanks firing automatic 120-mm guns at random, commandoes dropped by helicopter and snipers.

The military offensive to break the back of the uprising is led by [dictator Bashar Assad’s] younger brother Maher Assad at the head of the Republican Guard and the 4th Division which is made up mostly of the Assad’s Alawite clan. Its first target Sunday night was the southern town of Deraa where the protest movement began and the Mediterranean coastal town of Jableh.

Monday, Syria shut its land borders to Jordan to conceal the scale of the carnage inflicted on the border town of Deraa from outside eyes. Foreign correspondents have been banned from the country since the uprising began.

Monday, indiscriminate fire was also reported in Duma, a dissident suburb of the capital Damascus. By Monday afternoon, thousands of soldiers had spread out across the North, South and Center of the country, apparently preparing to storm the large cities and protest centers of Hama, Homs, Latakiya and the Kurdish north. …

April 23 saw the constantly mounting uprising against the Assad regime finally reaching the Syrian capital Damascus where  300,000 – 15 percent of the city’s dwellers – took the streets shouting: “Bashar Assad you are a traitor!” That day too the Syrian ruler unleashed his security forces for the harshest crackdown yet in order to break the back of the five-week civil uprising. The result: 350 dead, tripling the number of Friday’s bloodbath and thousands of injured.

Early Sunday, secret service thugs hauled thousands of protesters out of their homes. They broke down doors in the Harasta and Ghouta districts of Damascus, dragged their victims out and dumped them on covered trucks which drove off to unknown destinations. ….

The growing number of injured are condemned to being treated privately or not at all. The authorities have commandeered ambulances to prevent them reaching hospital and hospital wards are raided by security agents who either kill the wounded or arrest them.

PajamasMedia has videos of the protests and the killing. SEE THEM HERE.

Roger L. Simon comments:

In more proof, if any were needed, that liberals are the reactionaries of our time, it was only weeks ago that Hillary Clinton was calling Bashar al-Assad a “reformer” and Vogue magazine was proclaiming his wife a “rose in the desert.”

As we know, and the horrific videos from Syria on PJM show conclusively …  the ophthalmologist is as much a reformer as Josef Mengele and Asma as much a rose as Eva Braun.

Since his father Hafez brutally imposed his will over Syria in the Hama massacre, the Assads have been a family of secular fascist torturers and murderers in league with religious fascist torturers and murderers in Lebanon (Hezbollah), Gaza (Hamas), and Iran (the mullahs) … They assassinate democratically elected foreign leaders (Hariri), encourage and facilitate global terrorism, and shoot as many of their own people as necessary to maintain power while exploiting the best of their country’s resources for personal gain. In other words, pure evil.

Nothing new there — yet, for some reason, our liberal leadership and their media allies were never able to acknowledge fully something so obvious. Always — as Obama did with Ahmadinejad while the Iranian democracy demonstrators were being shot in their streets and tortured in prison cells — they sought to reason with despotism. Or, more likely, pretended to do so because it was all game for the aggrandizement of the self, for image. The policy itself never made sense.

When the Middle East street started to rebel, our government had no plan. They didn’t know what to do about Egypt and then went into Libya willy-nilly when things started to look bad. So now we are left with the odd situation where Gaddafi — clearly also a murderous sociopathic dictator — is despot number one, with NATO intervening and the U.S. providing Predators, while Assad, demonstrably a much more active and dangerous enemy of the U.S. and its allies, is merely verbally chastised by our president and secretary of State. …

Because of the moral confusion at the heart of our administration, the USA and by extension the West have their priorities screwed up. The downfall of Assad would mean big trouble for the mullahs, Hezbollah, and Hamas — good things for the region and the world. The downfall of Gaddafi would mean what exactly? Nobody knows. An al-Qaeda regime? The Muslim Brotherhood? Some oil contracts for the French? …

But during all this, there is no question that the foreign policy of the United States is simply ad hoc. It doesn’t exist. The secretary of State was in cloud-cuckoo-land when she called Assad a reformer, the same totalitarian-loving cloud she inhabited when she bussed Suha Arafat.

The president himself has no real values, only vague notions received from lamebrain post-modernist professors …

We don’t think that America should intervene in Syria. We also don’t think that America should have diplomatic relations with tyrannies like Assad’s, and we’d like to see the ambassador whom Obama foolishly sent there withdrawn. We don’t think America should interfere in an Arab country whether to give it money, or “protect” its civilians, or unseat its tyrants. We’d rather America was drilling for its own oil than buying it from Arab countries. We’re not dismayed by rebellion, civil war, or revolution in the Arab or wider Islamic world – whichever side wins in any Islamic state, the victory will go to Islam. But we observe the inconsistencies and sheer incoherence of Obama’s foreign policy with trepidation. How long will it take for America to recover its leadership role in the world after Obama is gone? American hegemony, which Obama has deliberately sabotaged, is essential. The world needs a power that stands for liberty and has the military might to support it. By forcing America to abdicate its responsibility as the world’s only superpower, Obama – far from causing rising seas to subside, as he claimed he could and would – has stirred up tumult in the oceans of human discontent. The result is a manmade disaster as the heat of war and blood spreads over the earth.

Easter: from the name of a goddess whose feast was celebrated at the vernal equinox, Eostre; cognate with Sanskrit usra = dawn, so East: in the direction of the rising sun.

*

An editorial in the IBD today, written to mark the festivals of Passover and Easter, is titled Faith and Freedom.

Here’s part of it.

In recent history the phrase “Judeo-Christian values” has been bandied about so much, it’s forgivable to suppose it was invented by politicians pushing their wedge issues. This week it is gloriously more than that.

Those values held unshakable life-and-death meaning, as the celebrations of Passover and Easter remind us, for thousands of years. …

No theology lessons are needed to grasp that these complementary faiths forged the foundations of our free society, requiring us to move progressively toward an ever-larger sphere of human liberty.

Passover … offers a weeklong retelling of the Exodus, when the lawgiver Moses led the children of Israel out of bondage in Egypt. …

From the sorrow of Good Friday to the ecstasy of Easter Sunday, we may still believe that we inherit a “home of the brave.” For believers, the Resurrection’s eternal lesson is that death itself carries no sting. No earthly power, however formidable or diabolical, can snuff out the providential gift of everlasting life.

Moses bequeathed to us the certain knowledge that freedom’s source lies beyond the caprices of statecraft.

Jesus, seconding that original truth, showed us that courage and love may secure an unstoppable advance of human liberty for ourselves and our posterity.

Whether you’re a believer or not, that’s an inheritance to claim boldly …

*

Rather than analyse all that’s wrong with this piece, we prefer to write on the “Judeo-Christian” theme by presenting our own view, which will amply contradict it.

We’ll mention the one thing the IBD editorial says that is true. Yes, “Passover” (its right name is “the Festival of the Unleavened Bread”)  is about setting people physically free. The giving of the Law which followed the Exodus allowed the establishment of a free society, freedom being possible only under law. Law guarantees freedom. That is what law is for.

Judaism dates from the giving of the Law – not from the covenant with Abraham, though (the tradition teaches) monotheism began with that old man of legend. With him too came monotheism’s (revolutionary) foundation myth: the story of an animal being substituted for the patriarch’s son on the altar, signifying that the one and only God did not require human sacrifice.

Judaism’s highest values were freedom and justice. That was good. Justice is hard to achieve, but the need to strive for it followed from the big idea that a free nation must live under the rule of law. In addition, some of the actual laws were wise and necessary – though not exclusive to Judaism. But the religion was burdened with rules governing the performance of rites contributing nothing of importance to human wisdom or civilization. And its God was an irrational conception, a being often profoundly unjust, capricious, and cruel.

Now to the term “Judeo-Christian”.

That Judeo-, tacked on to Christian, like a little trailer drawn behind the big SUV to bring some extra goods to a camping holiday, has as little to do with Judaism as the tents and climbing boots brought from the garage have to do with the life lived in the family home.  By which is meant that Christianity was not a revised or reformed Judaism: it was  an entirely new religion.

The God of Christianity is not the God of Judaism. God the Father in the Trinity  bears no resemblance to Jehovah the Law-giver. The two may seem superficially to be conflated in a shared concept of Creator, but a closer scrutiny of Christian theology with its pre-existing Son who was there “from the beginning” dispels the illusion.

In the sphere of values and morals, Christianity preferred Love to Justice. While justice may be hard, universal love is impossible to achieve. It is alien to human nature as an emotion, and useless as a principle. To try to pretend to it is a recipe for sustained hypocrisy. If sometimes it can be just (though never enforceable) that a person be loved for something he has done to deserve it,  and though individuals are often loved by other individuals whether they justly deserve to be or not, a general order to treat everyone lovingly will seldom be just, always be impractical, and frequently provide an incentive to vicious and criminal behavior by promising an absence of condign reaction. In other words, to claim that one loves all is to live a lie and incite evil.

The author of Christianity, the man known as St Paul who first conceived the idea that Jesus the crucified Jew was divine, wanted nothing of Judaism in his new religion; not its Law, not its scriptures. But the developing Church found it could not do without some of the laws and many chunks of the scriptures. So when the Church Fathers compiled their “New Testament” towards the end of the second century, they allowed the  “Old Testament” to stand as its pre-history. They embraced the moral laws while ignoring the superfluous ritual laws which have nevertheless remained in the Christian record. More essentially, Christianity needed the prophesies of the Jewish bible. Those works of fiction known as the gospels needed to prove that Jesus was the Messiah (the “Christ” in Greek), so they made up stories of his birth, deeds and sayings that would make him seem to fulfill what the “Old Testament” had prophesied.

So these are the bits and pieces from the garage that the big car of Christianity took with it in its trailer: the myths of creation and early times; vestiges of the moral law; the prophesies needed to make Jesus fit the expectations of a Messiah. The outfit, car and trailer, never of course returned to the House of the Law. So we’ll drop that metaphor now, ignore the tacked-on Judeo-, and talk about Christianity.

Was Christianity good for European/Mediterranean man?  To answer that, it’s necessary to judge what it replaced. It replaced (not Judaism but) a Greek civilization that initiated intellectual enquiry, experimental science, the critical examination of all ideas. This was a greater freedom than Judaism had conceived. And to Christianity it was insufferable.

Christianity stamped out intellectual enquiry and the free criticism of ideas. It put a stop to science. It tried to lay down absolute “truths” in which all human beings must believe. In short, Christianity brought darkness where there had been light. The darkness persisted, sustained deliberately by an intolerant and cruel Church, for a thousand years and more, until the Enlightenment brought a new dawn to Europe and Europe’s greatest product, America.

Obama, under the spell of the three witches, Hillary Clinton, Samantha Power, and Susan Rice (see our post, Round about the cauldron go, April 18, 2011), cannot weep enough crocodile tears for the “civilians” that America has the “responsibility to protect” in Libya, or drop enough alms into their outstretched hands. But circumspectly, adhering strictly to politically correct rules.

From Yahoo! News:

The Obama administration plans to give the Libyan opposition $25 million in non-lethal assistance in the first direct U.S. aid to the rebels after weeks of assessing their capabilities and intentions, officials said Wednesday.

Amid a debate over whether to offer the rebels broader assistance, including cash and possibly weapons and ammunition, the administration has informed Congress that President Barack Obama intends to use his so-called drawdown authority to give the opposition, led by the Transitional National Council in Benghazi, up to $25 million in surplus American goods to help protect civilians in rebel-held areas threatened by Libyan leader Moammar Gadhafi’s forces.

Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton, who recommended that Obama authorize the assistance, said the aid would go to support the council and “our efforts to protect civilians and the civilian populated areas that are under threat of attack from their own government in Libya.” She said the aid “will be drawn down from items already in government stocks that correspond with the needs that we have heard from the Transitional National Council.”

The list is still being revised but now covers items such as medical supplies, uniforms, boots, tents, personal protective gear, radios and Halal meals … Most of the items are expected to come from Pentagon stocks …

Initially, the administration had proposed supplying the rebels with vehicles and portable fuel storage tanks but those items were dropped from the list of potential aid on Wednesday after concerns were expressed that those could be converted into offensive military assets. …

Hillary must be awfully careful not to go against the pacifist sentiments of the Democratic Party, while yet satisfying its goodie-goodie need to give cast-offs to those vulnerable “civilians”. Or “rebels”.

“This is not a blank check,” Clinton told reporters, adding that the move was consistent with the U.N. mandate that authorized international action to protect Libyan civilians and acknowledging that the opposition is in dire need of help.

Wouldn’t do a damned thing the UN didn’t approve of!

“This opposition, which has held its own against a brutal assault by the Gadhafi forces was not an organized militia,” she said. “It was not a group that had been planning to oppose the rule of Gadhafi for years. It was a spontaneous response within the context of the broader Arab spring. These are mostly business people, students, lawyers, doctors, professors who have very bravely moved to defend their communities and to call for an end to the regime in Libya.”

Oh, yes. She’s sure of that. Respectable, professional people, those civilians in dire need. Not an organized militia. Perfectly harmless, innocent. Give them the cast-offs, for the sake of Jesus!

“The Europeans” – namely Britain, France and Italy – are sending “military advisers”.

Because the military intervention by the US and Nato didn’t stop Gaddafi’s army.

From the Washington Post:

The arrival of European military advisers and U.S. uniforms is unlikely to rapidly change the trajectory of the conflict … and NATO and its Arab partners in the Libya operation continue to count on their economic and diplomatic war of attrition against Gaddafi paying off in the end.

“We are dealing with a set of imperfect options,” a senior administration official said, noting that the measure of success is not “where things stand” but “where they would have stood had we done nothing.” The NATO airstrikes and a no-fly zone enforced by NATO and Arab countries “have essentially frozen the battle space in terms of the advance of Gaddafi’s forces,” he said, and “if you work all the other levers, you can make time work against Gaddafi.”

Ah, Time. The West’s last, best weapon.

The official emphasized that Obama has no intention of sending U.S. ground forces — including noncombat military advisers — to Libya. But the administration’s attempts to firmly limit its involvement have also contributed to an image of disarray within NATO.

Only the image of disarray? Inside NATO all is harmony and sweet accord?

A senior European official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to avoid antagonizing the Americans, said that Obama’s eagerness to turn over command of the Libyan air operation to NATO late last month, and the withdrawal of U.S. fighter planes from ground-strike missions, had undermined the strength of their united front against Gaddafi. …

The brilliant, well-informed Vice-President of the United States had an answer to that:

In a feisty response to any suggestion that the U.S. move to the back seat had undermined the NATO campaign, Vice President Biden said the alliance was perfectly capable of handling the air attack mission itself.

“It is bizarre to suggest that NATO and the rest of the world lacks the capacity to deal with Libya — it does not,” Biden said in an interview with the Financial Times.

“Occasionally other countries lack the will,” he said, “but this is not about capacity.”

Biden said U.S. resources were better spent trying to guide Egypt’s transition toward democracy. He denied that U.S. public reluctance to become deeply involved in another conflict in the Muslim world had anything to do with Obama’s decisions.

“This is about our strategic interest and it is not based upon a situation of what can the traffic bear politically at home,” Biden said. “The traffic can bear politically more in Libya,” he said, because “everybody knows [Gaddafi] is a bad guy.”

But it’s better not to risk it, hey Joe?

But as the situation in Libya has continued without resolution, popular disapproval of the president’s handling of the situation has shot up 15 percentage points, from 34 to 49, since mid-March, shining a light on the political risks Obama faces on the issue amid a host of domestic problems, according to a new Washington Post-ABC News poll. Among political independents, disapproval jumped to 51 percent. …

Those sending advisers or other assistance to the rebel forces are doing so as individual nations, in coordination with but outside the NATO command structure.

Why would that be? Don’t tell us that NATO as a whole would not approve!

No, no, it’s not that. God or someone forbid!  It’s because, you see, the “rebels” – not to be confused with the “civilians” please – don’t want the Western help they asked for to be too obvious:

“The rebels themselves are afraid of being accused by other Arab countries of having allowed ‘crusaders’ on their land,” said an Italian official who was not authorized to discuss the issue on the record.

Turns out the US administration didn’t feel too comfortable with the “rebels” at first, but it’s okay now:

Obama administration officials said their comfort level with the rebel council had grown in recent weeks, after high-level meetings with its leaders and direct contact by a U.S. diplomatic mission sent to Benghazi.

Still, you’ve gotta keep an eye on the bastards. Though God or whoever knows what we’d do if we saw something happening that made us uncomfortable again:

“Whether there are people in Libya who may have more extremist or nefarious agendas, that is something we watch very carefully,” the senior administration official said in reference to suggestions of possible al-Qaeda involvement. “We don’t believe that the organized opposition, represented by the TNC, reflects that agenda.”

So who has a bad agenda? Who are the “rebels”? Who are the needy “civilians”?

From PajamasMedia:

While the International Criminal Court has announced that it is investigating charges of war crimes against Muammar al-Gaddafi and other members of the Libyan regime, harrowing video evidence has emerged that appears to show atrocities committed by anti-Gaddafi rebels. Among other things, the footage depicts summary executions, a prisoner being lynched, the desecration of corpses, and even a beheading. The targets of the most serious abuse are frequently black African prisoners. The ultimate source of the footage appears to be rebel forces or sympathizers themselves.

(Warning: Due to the graphic nature of the videos linked below, viewer discretion is advised.)

What is probably the most harrowing of the clips depicts a public beheading. A man with a long knife can be seen alternately sawing and hacking at the neck of a man who has been suspended upside-down. The victim’s inert body is soaked in blood. The beheading takes place in front of a burnt-out building in … the main square of the rebel capital of Benghazi.

A crowd numbering at least in the hundreds cheers on the assailants. At one point, a man begins chanting “Libya Hurra!”: “Free Libya!” According to the NOS translation, someone can be heard saying, “He looks like an African.” As the principal assailant begins to saw at the victim’s neck, members of the crowd yell “Allahu Akbar!” Dozens of members of the crowd can be seen filming the proceedings with digital cameras or cell phones.

SEE THE VIDEO CLIP here. A raging mob yells for the utmost agony to be inflicted on the victim. (We loathe this savagery, but we do not for a moment imagine that the victim would not do the same to any member of the raging mob if he had the opportunity.)

A second clip depicts a black African prisoner being aggressively questioned and beaten. The man is alleged to be a pro-Gaddafi mercenary. Extracts from the footage have been broadcast on both the Libyan state television Al-Libya and on Al-Jazeera. More complete “raw footage,” which is available on YouTube, shows the beating continuing even after the man is lying face down on the ground, the surrounding concrete splattered with his blood. By way of photographs and identity papers, a video from an unknown source on YouTube identifies the victim as a Libyan citizen and a regular member of the Libyan army. [Link provided – go to the article to see it, and descriptions, with links to more video clips, of more horrors.]

Similar footage of rebels demanding a confession from an alleged black African mercenary has also been shown on Western television. It should be noted that even just the mere exposure of a prisoner to “public curiosity” constitutes a violation of the Geneva Conventions – to say nothing of acts of intimidation and abuse or the outright lynching that appears to be documented in the above clip. …

At first glance, it might seem odd that the rebels would document their own atrocities. But given all the indications that the eastern Libyan heartland of the rebellion is a bastion of jihadist militancy, it is in fact not so odd. It is standard jihadist procedure to film beheadings and other sorts of atrocities committed against captured enemy soldiers and hostages.

Meanwhile, Gaddafi’s capability is swelling with mercenaries and materiel not only from Africa but also from China, Russia, and Europe.

From DebkaFile:

Both of Libya’s fighting camps are taking delivery of a surging influx of weapons shipments and military personnel – each hoping to use the extra aid for breaking the military standoff in its own favor …  The British, French and Italian military officers bound for rebel headquarters in Benghazi are part of a package that includes arms and military equipment from the US, Britain, France, Italy and Qatar.

On the other side of the Libyan divide, China, Russia, Ukraine, Belarus and Serbia are keeping the pro-Qaddafi camp’s arsenals stocked with new hardware along with combat personnel from Eastern Europe and the former Yugoslavia. …

From mid-March, hundreds of “volunteers” – professional soldiers ranking from colonel down to corporal – have joined the army loyal to Qaddafi. …

One group says it is in Libya for unfinished business with the West, especially the United States, for their role in the Bosnia and Kosovo conflicts.

China is helping him with arms, mostly through African neighbors, and intelligence on NATO strikes  …

The NATO bombardment of a large ammunition dump near Tripoli on April 14 aimed at destroying the latest Chinese arms shipments. …

[There are]  four major difficulties still confronting the next, intensified, round of Western coalition operations in Libya:

1. Pushing Qaddafi too hard could split NATO between West and East European members [not to mention Turkey’s angry refusal to participate – JB].

2. The alliance is short of fighter-bombers for blasting the arms convoys destined for government forces in western Libya, and lacks the precision bombs and missiles for these attacks. These shortages have forced NATO to limit its air strikes for now.

3. It is not clear that UN Security Council resolutions provide a mandate for this kind of attack. The Russians criticize the Western alliance almost daily for exceeding its mandate.

4. In view of this criticism, Washington, London, Paris and Rome are careful to label their war aid to Libyan rebels as “non-lethal military aid” and the military personnel helping them “military advisers” – raising memories of the euphemisms used in previous wars.

The trouble is that all the additional military assistance the West is laying on is barely enough … to maintain the current stalemate against the Qaddafi regime’s boosted capabilities – certainly not sufficient to tip the scales of the war.

Qaddafi holds one major advantage: His army can absorb [trained, experienced] foreign assistance [mercenaries] without delay …  whereas Western aid drops into a pit of uncertainty with regard to the rebel groups and their chiefs. The military advisers arriving in Benghazi first need to guide the opposition’s steps in fighting Qaddafi’s forces, then form the rebels into military units and teach them how to use the weapons they are receiving.

It could take months for regular rebel units to take shape under the direction of British, French and Italian military personnel who, too, are not necessarily working in harness.

And we’ve just heard (from Fox news) that Obama will send armed predator drones for use in Libya. So the US is rejoining the armed intervention after all, Joe? What will your pacifist base say to that, Obama and Hillary?

The cauldron bubbles.

George Soros uses his immense wealth to promote evil on a vast scale.

In a recently published booklet titled From Shadow Party to Shadow Government* by David Horowitz and John Perazzo, the authors “distill down” Soros’s agendas to “three overriding themes: the diminution of American power, the subjugation of American sovereignty in favor of one-world government, and the implementation of a socialist redistribution of wealth.”

The booklet describes how Soros has set about achieving his aims. He has come very far.  He had to get a puppet into the presidency of the United States, and he did.

(The authors do not bring Obama’s promotion of Islam into their survey. Islam’s relevance to the grand scheme must be hard for the Shadow Party to determine. How will Global  Communism deal with Islam’s competing ambition to dominate the world? What should be done with it when it is not longer useful as a destructive force? How treat its utterly different system of suppression?)

Here’s the authors’ Conclusion:

If George Soros were a lone billionaire, or if the Shadow Party consisted of a few disgruntled billionaires, these facts and achievements would not be so ominous. But the Shadow Party is far more than a reflection of the prejudices or one special interest or one passing generation. The Shadow Party is the current incarnation of a socialist movement that has been at war with the free market economy and the political system based on liberty and individual rights for more than two hundred years. It is a movement that has learned to conceal its ultimate goal, which is a totalitarian state, in the seductive rhetoric of “progressivism” and “social justice”. But its determination to equalize outcomes, its zeal for state power and for government control as the solution to social problems, and its antagonism to America as a defender of freedom are the tell-tale signs of a radical movement whose agenda is to change fundamentally and unalterably the way Americans have lived.”

In fact, as the authors say in their distillation of themes, the movement aims even further, much further. It aims for a totalitarian world.

The puppet whom Soros got into the White House not only shares that further aim but sees himself as the chief actor in the realization of it – and is not a puppet but one of the conspirators, in the view of Leon de Winter, expressed in an article titled Wake Up, Critics: Here’s Obama’s Grand Plan. Beneath the title de Winter gives a hint: “the White House is a stepping stone”.

He too sees Soros as one of the evil operators in the shadows, but only mentions him in passing. He starts with another – David Axelrod.

[David Axelrod’s] creation of the Obama myth is one of the most impressive marketing and propaganda feats in history, carefully crafted from a simple set of rules and masterfully applied to challenging, shifting circumstances.

Axelrod knew just what he was doing. He created an African American candidate without the ghetto rap. He created an ultimate urban intellectual alternative to George W. Bush — a veritable anti-Bush. He created a pseudo-legend based upon a semi-fictional autobiography.

He created a quasi-evangelical being with the gift to heal the earth.

To create this myth, the Axelrod team had to suppress the dark pages of Obama’s life. Obama’s ideological convictions were simply too far off center, too much the result of a radical leftist ideology.

Obama was a lifelong student of Marxist and neo-Marxist thinkers, his life dedicated to a theoretic approach based on the “historical” conflict of opposing classes. Long before he received the Axelrod touch, Obama was planning the long march through the institutions as a student. …

(And if Obama ever had any friends who were not Marxists and America–haters, we have yet to hear of them.)

He has been as much a brilliant strategist and tactician as Axelrod. He has known when to lay low, and when to attack; when to aggrandize, and when to diminish.

Leon de Winter believes, as Horowitz and Perazzo do, that Obama’s intention is to transform America, but he defines the president’s vision for what America must be turned into as something less extreme:

It’s his goal to transform the nation into a European welfare state, which he can only execute when he can work around America’s original ideas as formulated by the founding fathers. The almost boundless liberty of free citizens, he believes, should be limited by a strong federal state which demands a sizeable part of the fruits of the labor of its citizens. Obama is enforcing laws and introducing institutions derived from European socialist concepts of “social justice” …

And without a doubt, it is the long-term vision of president Obama. His economic transformation will enforce a cultural and ideological transformation. Everything he is doing is driven by this vision. It is postmodern revolutionary socialist methodology at work.

His career is proof that Barack Obama can plan far ahead. … I started to understand the fascinating phenomenon of Barack Obama when it suddenly dawned upon me that his present office may not be his final ambition. …

A transformed America will, naturally, lead to a completely different balance of power in the world. Internal change will create external change. The vacuum left behind by a weakened U.S. — a world without a superpower, a globe of equal nations — should be filled by a new transnational body. This is the core dream of every progressive ideologue.

World governments or governances have been part of the Marxist curriculum for decades, driven by anti-colonialist, anti-imperialist, and anti-capitalist ideologies. At the moment, the driving forces are earthism, environmentalism, and fear of manmade global warming. … The future of the globe and the human race is at stake — and in order to suppress global warming, the world needs special taxes and special tools to regulate industries and modify human behavior. Who will control these new controlling mechanisms? …

Does Obama, in word and deed, start to make sense when one starts to understand that he sees his role from a vantage point far above the presidency? Beyond the White House, there is a world for him to gain. What he achieved in Washington he could repeat on a global scale. …

As a smart, suave man, he knew exactly what he was doing when he started to climb the ladder. … Obama had the intuition to pick capable operators for his campaigning and policymaking teams.

Or did they pick him? We think Obama is more the puppet of Horowitz’s and Perazzo’s understanding than the cunning planner of de Winter’s. In our view, de Winter gives Obama far too much brain and skill. But we think it probable that in Obama’s own mind he is the future leader of the world.

De Winter also gives the Left too much by attributing sincerity to it. We do not think the “warmists” give a damn about the climate. They use “manmade global warming” to trump up a crisis and agitate that it can only be “solved” with their remedy – world government by a central Presidium.

His conservative critics dramatically underestimate him. Obama knows precisely what kind of America he envisions. He wants to mold a certain type of America in order to mold a certain type of global governance. For that, he needs another term to reach his goal.

In 2016, he will move on to higher office.

But will Soros and his bat-winged minions want this Obama guy, this upstart whom they made out of nothing, in that supreme role? With that much power? We think not.

The way they see it, we guess, is that Obama did very well for the presidency of the US, to start the destruction of the Republic and the ideals on which it was founded. Millions of people – kept uninformed about him by the complicit media –  would vote for him simply because he was black. But that quality is not necessary to a candidate for the world’s pinnacle of power.

They would drop him. If they let him survive at all, they would cast him in a minor role. Perhaps give him a sinecure with a grandiose title, or perhaps a pension, or perhaps diddly squat. Put him back in his box, the strings lying loose, the lid closed.

Of course the full plan must never be allowed to come to fruition. Not even the intermediary step which Obama fronts: the transformation of America. He must not be re-elected in 2012.

The Shadow Party must be dragged further out into the sunlight, exposed, thwarted, and exterminated.

*From Shadow Party to Shadow Government is published by and available from the Freedom Center, www.frontpagemag.com

We have spoken of the Three Harpies of the Obama administration, Hillary Clinton, Samantha Power, and Susan Rice (see our post, A siren song from hell, April 1, 2011). They wanted America to intervene militarily in the Libyan civil war “to protect civilians”, and they got their way, so the US is involved in a costly and ineffective engagement, along with ramshackle NATO; and Libyan civilians continue to be displaced, injured, and killed, often by the “protective” operations of the US and NATO – or the US in NATO, say, since the administration pretends that it has withdrawn from the fray.

Today we liken the three women to three witches, cooking up a lethal brew of global socialism, pro-Islamism, and anti-Americanism, in a steaming pot of self-righteous sentimentality.

Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, a disciple of the Communist Revolutionary Saul Alinsky, is the most powerful of them by reason of her position in the administration. But she’s probably not the equal of the other two in gathering venomous ideas.

Samantha Power runs Obama’s “Office of Human Rights” and has written a book about genocide. It’s a long grope for a definition of the word. She believes, as the left generally does, that America should only go to war as an act of altruism, never to protect its own interests such as securing oil supplies or punishing attackers, and whenever possible as an instrument of the UN.

As for Susan Rice, the current US ambassador to that evil institution, here’s an account of her by Rick Moran from Front Page:

President Obama’s ambassador to the United Nations, Susan Rice, has long been an advocate for weakening American sovereignty in order to benefit the UN and its anti-American agenda. It is a policy known as “engagement,” where the United States subsumes its own vital interests, abandons its traditional role of leadership in the world community, and … pushes the process of “subcontracting American national security” to the UN.

Time Magazine refers to this policy — without a hint of irony — as “leading from the back.” … Her vision of what the US’s role in the world should be … includes an open hostility to the state of Israel, a dangerous reliance on the UN to keep Iran from going nuclear, as well as the world body’s inexplicable granting Tehran membership on the UN’s Commission on the Status of Women. …

While one expects a UN ambassador to be an advocate for internationalism, Rice slipped the bounds of reason and waxed poetic in her testimony about the importance of the United Nations to our national security. … Rice claimed that … “the U.N. promotes universal values Americans hold dear.” …

That statement is nonsense. It is beyond rhetorical excess and enters the sublime milieu of self-delusion. Unless she believes that America “holds dear” values like racism, anti-Semitism, corruption, sexism, child rape, and a host of other execrable hallmarks of United Nations actions and policies, then she is either naive or willfully blind to the true nature of the UN. …

In one of the most extraordinary statements ever made by an American official about Israel, Rice bitterly complained last February about having to veto a Security Council resolution condemning Israel and its settlement policy. She deliberately undercut the impact of the veto by saying, “For more than four decades, [Israeli settlement activity] has undermined security … corroded hopes for peace and security … it violates international commitments and threatens prospects for peace.” During her testimony last week, Rice reiterated that sentiment, adding “Israeli settlement activity is illegitimate.”

What angered Rice was that the Security Council vote was 14-1, with countries like Great Britain, France, and Russia co-sponsoring the Palestinian-inspired condemnation. To Rice’s and the administration’s way of thinking, going against international “consensus” — even if inimical to US interests — was a blow to their strategy of “engagement.”

Rice’s statements before the committee on the UN’s massively hypocritical selections for the Human Rights Council can only be termed bizarre. The HRC features such stellar advocates for human rights as Angola, China, Cuba, Kyrgyzstan, Russia, and Saudi Arabia — a rogue’s gallery of thuggish states. After acknowledging that it is difficult to find nations that have good human rights records to serve on the council, Rice seemed proud of the fact that US opposition had kept Iran off the HRC. She chalked that “success” up to the fact that the United States had agreed to join the HRC rather than refuse to participate in such a farce.

What Rice didn’t mention was that in order to get Iran to withdraw its application for membership on the HRC, Washington agreed not to raise a stink when the fundamentalist Islamic Republic that mandates stoning women for adultery wanted to join the Commission on the Status of Women. With no objection from the US, Iran was duly elected to the commission.

Instead of Iran joining the HRC, Libya got the slot. How this can be termed a “success” takes pretzel-like logic — something Rice appears to excel at. …

Rice’s thinking on terrorism has also heavily influenced administration policy. In 1996, she advised President Clinton not to accept Sudan’s offer to turn over Osama Bin Laden because Sudan’s human rights record was so wretched, she thought we shouldn’t have anything to do with them.

Refusing to contaminate her idealistic beliefs with the ample evidence that has been produced to the contrary, Susan holds fast to her conviction that the “cause of terrorism” is “poverty”.

Her steadfast belief that poverty, not radical Islamist ideology, is responsible for terrorism has upended 20 years of American anti-terrorism policy. Rice is the inspiration behind the Obama administration’s de-emphasizing military action against terrorists, while looking for ways to address the “root causes” of the violence. …

It is Rice’s solution to what she considers the “real” causes of terrorism that is of great concern. She supports the transfer of nearly $100 billion every year to UN’s Millennium Development Project for redistribution to poorer nations and their kleptocrat leaders. How this will address the problem of “poverty” in poor countries never seems to get explained. The history of aid to these nations is that the elites end up with most of it while precious little trickles down to the masses. Rice ignores this history — and the reality that America doesn’t have $100 billion for such a cockamamie scheme. …

What isn’t generally known is her advocacy for unilateral American action in cases where the UN fails to act. Along with Samantha Power, the president’s national security advisor, Rice is responsible for pushing through the Security Council a strong resolution authorizing military force against Gaddafi. But when it comes to Darfur and other potential hot spots where the UN refuses to act, Rice has advocated that America go it alone to prevent a humanitarian disaster. … She has … suggested that the US should contribute a percentage of its military to a UN force, under UN command, to intervene where humanitarian crises threaten disaster.

This goes far beyond what most would advocate for when it comes to the Responsibility to Protect doctrine. But it is one more indication that Susan Rice casually sets aside the interests of her own country in order to cater to the whims and capricious agenda of a world body that has proven itself an enemy of the United States.

Because the left hates individual freedom, it hates America. It wants the UN to become the world’s governing body and redistribute wealth from the developed countries to the rest. And it’s making progress towards achieving its terrible aims. The thugocracies that have a permanent seat on its Security Council – Russia and China – are no longer restrained by Western powers. France and Britain are ghosts of the powers they used to be. And as Susan Rice represents an American leadership that does not like America, it looks as if Turtle Bay could actually become the capital of the whole-earth hell that the international left dreams of …

… unless the United States again, and soon, has strong wise men governing it, and they have the will to abolish the United Nations.

The UN must be destroyed!

We found this happy snap of Secretary of State Hillary Clinton shaking hands in 2009 with one of Colonel Gadhafi’s sons, Mutassim, at Creeping Sharia. Also through them we found the following story about another of the Libyan dictator’s sons, Khamis, coming recently to the US as an intern with AECOM:

From the Daily Caller:

A son of Libyan leader Moammar Gadhafi toured U.S. ports and military facilities just weeks before he helped lead deadly attacks on rebels protesting his father’s authoritarian regime.

Khamis Gadhafi, 27, spent four weeks in the U.S. as part of an internship with AECOM, a global infrastructure company with deep business interests in Libya, according to Paul Gennaro, AECOM’s Senior Vice President for Global Communications. The trip was to include visits to the Port of Houston, Air Force Academy, National War College and West Point, Gennaro said. The West Point visit was canceled on Feb. 17, when the trip was cut short and Gadhafi returned to Libya … The uprising there began with a series of protests on Feb. 15….

Gennaro said the U.S. State Department approved of the trip, and considered Gadhafi a reformer. He said the government signed off on the itinerary, at times offering advice that affected the company’s plans for Gadhafi.

State department officials denied any role in planning, advising or paying for the trip. “We did greet him at the airport. That is standard courtesy for the son of the leader of a country,” said State Department spokesman Mark Toner. Toner said the government was aware of Gadhafi’s itinerary, but “did not sign off on it.” …

One or the other is lying. Our guess, it’s the State Department.

So the State Department regularly greets the children of all national leaders when they arrive at a US airport? Even if the national leader is a dictator responsible for the deaths of American servicemen in a Berlin discotheque and hundreds of civilians in the Pan Am plane he had blown up in the air?

Gennaro was one of the AECOM executives who met with Gadhafi during the trip, to educate him on U.S. corporate practices. He said Gadhafi was “very, very interested in the planning, design, how do you advance large infrastructure projects. That was the nature and the tenor of this internship” …

Khamis Gadhafi was [reported] killed earlier this week after a disaffected Libyan air force pilot crash-landed his jet in the ruling family’s headquarters … [He had] led the Khamis Brigade, one of several professional military units that are loyal to leader Moammar Gadhafi. …

U.S. diplomats in leaked memos have called it “the most well-trained and well-equipped force in the Libyan military.”

In one brutal attack, his forces surrounded Zawiya while rebels in the city celebrated their victory and cared for the injured. The Khamis Brigade then unleashed an all-out assault from three sides, unloading their weapons and artillery as they stormed the city.

Maybe some of those rebels are among the “thousands of lives” that Hillary Clinton “knows” were saved by US intervention.

If Gadhafi ends up deposed or dead, he’ll possibly be replaced by one of the rebel leaders who fought against Americans in Iraq or was trained by al-Qaeda in Afghanistan. He too, and his close relations, would of course be welcome in America and treated with the State Department’s standard courtesy.

Obama does not make war. Definitely not. So what’s the US doing firing Tomahawk subsonic cruise missiles at Libyan targets?

According to official spokesmen, it is taking “kinetic military action”. And that only to protect civilians.

Let us, in this stifling atmosphere of pacifism and sentimentality, consider some information (from Wikipedia) that raises questions in an enquiring mind:

The numbers of US military personnel in foreign lands “as of March 31, 2008”, though it must be remembered that  numbers change due to the recall and deployment of units, show that there are more US military personnel in Germany, 52,440, than in Iraq, 50,000.

Why are they in Germany?

9,660 in Italy and 9,015 in Britain.

What for?

28,500 in South Korea (good);  71,000 in Afghanistan (we know what for) and about half as many, 35,688, in Japan.

Why are they in Japan?

Altogether, 77,917 military personnel are located in Europe [more than in Afghanistan], 141 in the former Soviet Union …

What are the 141 doing in “the former Soviet union”?

47,236 in East Asia and the Pacific,  3,362 in North Africa, the Near East, and South Asia, 1,355 are in sub-Saharan Africa with 1,941 in the Western Hemisphere excepting the United States itself …

Within the United States, including U.S. territories and ships afloat within territorial waters –

As of 31 December 2009, a total of 1,137,568 personnel are on active duty within the United States and its territories (including 84,461 afloat). The vast majority, 941,629 of them, were stationed at various bases within the Contiguous United States [the 48 U.S. states on the continent of North America that are south of Canada, plus the District of Columbia, not the states of Alaska and Hawaii, or off-shore U.S. territories and possessions, such as Puerto Rico]. There were an additional 37,245 in Hawaii and 20,450 in Alaska. 84,461 were at sea, 2,972 in Guam, and 179 in Puerto Rico.

What of the US navy?

The United States Navy is the largest in the world; its battle fleet tonnage is greater than that of the next 13 largest navies combined. The U.S. Navy also has the world’s largest carrier fleet, with 11 in service, three under construction, and one in reserve. The service had 328,516 personnel on active duty and 101,689 in the Navy Reserve in January 2011. It operates 286 ships in active service and more than 3,700 aircraft.

The 21st century United States Navy maintains a sizable global presence, deploying in such areas as East Asia, the Mediterranean, and the Middle East. It is a blue-water navy with the ability to project force onto the littoral regions of the world, engage in forward areas during peacetime, and rapidly respond to regional crises, making it an active player in U.S. foreign and defense policy.

See a list of US Navy ships here.

The air force?

As of 2009 the USAF operates 5,573 manned aircraft in service (3,990 USAF; 1,213 Air National Guard; and 370 Air Force Reserve); approximately 180 unmanned combat air vehicles, 2,130 air-launched cruise missiles, and 450 intercontinental ballistic missiles. The USAF has 330,159 personnel on active duty, 68,872 in the Selected and Individual Ready Reserves, and 94,753 in the Air National Guard as of September 2008. In addition, the USAF employs 151,360 civilian personnel, and has over 60,000 auxiliary members in the Civil Air Patrol,making it the largest air force in the world.

See the list and the pictures of the military aircraft here.

Weaponry – here. And a quotation:

We have achieved a level of technology in military weapons and equipment that no other nation on earth comes close to.

What of US nuclear armament? The US maintains an arsenal of 5,113 warheads.

Space dominance? The question of weapons in space has been much discussed and is not settled. Not wanted by Obama.

What conclusions can be drawn from these facts and figures?

The Cold War is not over?

China is a menace?

The US is still the Watch of the World? Patrolling, protecting, ready to defend? Defend what, specifically?

One thing is certain. The United States of America is a military colossus.

Its military might is a hard – and surely very comforting – fact.

The fact alone should be enough to deter impudent adventurer states, like Russia and Iran, and make tyrannical chieftains who think of plotting massacre, like Gaddafi, think again – unless a silly leader like Obama announces that America will not go to war.

America must not be humble. Far better that it be feared than loved.

America must remain strong. Its ineluctable duty is to awe the world.

Days went by and the president of the United States had nothing to say about the revolution and civil war that broke out  in Libya. Eventually, having consulted with the Arab League and the Organization of the Islamic Conference, he said that the Libyan government’s murderous violence against its people was “unacceptable”, but avoided condemning Gaddafi the dictator by name. Why had he waited so long to say so little? The ever-ready Office of Glib Excuses and Pretty Pretexts (OGEPP) which, being abstract, is able to hover perpetually in the air of the Oval Office and the corridors of the State Department simultaneously, came out with a sweet one: Obama had held back from saying anything in case the dictator took revenge on American citizens in Libya. The president would have it known that he was desperately keen on protecting the “safety and well-being” of individual Americans. And as usual, the ingenuously gullible – or disingenuously biased – members of Obama’s hurrah-chorus in the media reported the shiny new excuse as if it were credible.

Why do we doubt it?

Oliver North, as skeptical in this instance as we are, explains:

According to Hillary Clinton, “the safety and well-being of Americans has to be our highest priority.” Oh, really? That comment, proffered by our secretary of state Tuesday, is overshadowed by the serious jeopardy U.S. citizens now encounter thanks to the ideological blindness and national security incompetence of the Obama administration.

Since 2011 began, more than 20 Americans have been injured, killed or gone missing in the midst of violence in Lebanon, Tunisia, Iran, Egypt, Yemen, Bahrain, Libya, Mexico and the Indian Ocean. American citizens are being held by government authorities in Iran, Yemen and Pakistan — and by pirates in Somalia. Our State Department says it is “concerned.”

Last week, two U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents were ambushed in Mexico. Special Agent Jaime Zapata was killed, and his partner was grievously wounded. Mexican authorities now claim they have apprehended some of the perpetrators with “connections” to one or more drug cartels. The Obama administration, with its history of “slow rolling” counter-narcotics assistance to Mexico and doing next to nothing to protect our borders, is confronted now by news that a Saudi national has been apprehended in Texas with plans to attack sensitive U.S. infrastructure.

Last week, four Americans aboard the sailing vessel Quest were seized by Somali pirates in the Indian Ocean. A U.S. warship was ordered to the scene as the seaborne terrorists headed for safe haven in Somalia. If past is prologue, it should have ended like previous armed rescue operations conducted by U.S. Navy SEALs, U.S. Marines, South Korean navy commandos and even Russian and French special operations units — with the safe recovery of nearly all hostages.

But in this case, our ships were inexplicably ordered to simply tail the captured yacht while an FBI hostage negotiator conducted a parley with the pirates. During the negotiations, all four hostages were killed.

We think the four were stupid to go sailing in those pirate-infested waters. Or they were inexcusably uninformed, which is also to say stupid. Or if not uninformed, deliberately courting martyrdom – they were apparently sailing about on the high seas to distribute bibles hither and yon. But as stupidity, ignorance and Christianity are not capital crimes, the four should have been and could have been saved. But their lives were simply not Commander-in-chief Obama’s “highest priority”. Not harming the Islamic terrorist-pirates was higher.

In Pakistan, Raymond Allen Davis, an officially credentialed American with diplomatic immunity, is being held on murder charges at a notorious and often deadly detention facility in Lahore. Unnamed “U.S. officials” are widely quoted in international media claiming Davis is variously a “CIA officer,” a “CIA employee” or a “CIA contractor.” Any of these sobriquets are a virtual extrajudicial death sentence for an American held by anybody in Pakistan. …

The State Department has filed a “protest note” complaining that the government in Islamabad is not abiding by its international obligations and held a surreal media conference call with an unnamed government official to explain diplomatic immunity.

Meanwhile, U.S. Army Spc. Bowe Bergdahl [who is] in the hands of the Taliban, isn’t even mentioned by the administration.

But the Americans have been rescued from Libya. Obama sent a boat to fetch them out – a ferry boat unsafe on winter seas. After three days of hesitation in the Libyan port, its passengers waiting nervously on board, it finally set out for safe haven. (China, Britain, and Italy sent military ships.) Now the might of the United States may be used to strike terror into Gaddafi.

But will it be?

Instead of sending a U.S. aircraft carrier to the coast of Libya to prevent members of the Libyan air force from bombing their countrymen, our commander in chief has dispatched Secretary of State Clinton to Geneva to confer with the absurdly impotent, anti-American United Nations Human Rights Council.

Of which Libya is a member. In fact, Libya actually chairs the UNHRC at present*, seeing to it that its regular business of condemning Israel for something-0r-other is conscientiously carried out.

Oliver North concludes by saying –

Now — with rebellion sweeping Libya, Yemen and Bahrain, which is the home of our 5th Fleet, and U.S. oil spiking at more than $100 per barrel, the highest it has been since 2008 — [Obama’s] commitment to the “safety and well-being of Americans” rings more hollow by the minute. His weakness, incoherence and passivity have bred chaos that places us all at risk.

We agree that he is weak, incoherent and passive, but we tend to the view that he acts weakly, incoherently and passively because, deep in the heart of him, he has no wish to defend Americans or America.

*Correction: This is an error. Libya was elected to the chair of the UNHRC in 2003, but at present a Thailand representative presides over it. Libya was a member until it was suspended yesterday, March 1, 2011. The point we’re making about the nature of the organization remains the same.

Yesterday we quoted Bernard Lewis on the Arab rebellions and what it is that the Arab people want. (See the post below, Not ready for democracy.) We believe him that they want justice, not democracy or freedom as we understand those two concepts. But we wonder if they want justice as we understand it. He doesn’t say “social justice” – which means the actual injustice of forced redistribution of wealth – but suggests that a return to traditional tribal consultation and arbitration would satisfy them better than the rule of law. We suppose that the sheikhs would be guided by sharia, which is not remotely just, and is extremely cruel. It keeps  women subservient, and while Bernard Lewis deplores the condition of women in most Arab and Islamic countries, he  does not say how a return to the old tribal system would help their emancipation.

They – the Arab masses – want what we have. Sure, they want the products of our civilization, but are not ready for the freedom that makes the invention of those things possible, for the rule of law that makes freedom possible, for the impartial justice that applies the rule of law. Perhaps in time they’ll come to understand this. But to change their ways to our ways, they would have to renounce sharia, throw off the intellectual chains of Islam, and embrace secularism. There are no signs that they will.

As might be expected, the best informed and therefore the most valuable opinion on the present upheaval in the Arab states comes from Professor Bernard Lewis, the famous and deservedly much honored historian of Islam and the Middle East.

His view is so different from the common opinion and received wisdom recited by media pundits as to be – at least in some instances – surprising.

We’ve chosen these extracts from his recent interview with David Horovitz, editor of the Jerusalem Post.

The Arab masses certainly want change. And they want improvement. But when you say do they want democracy, that’s a more difficult question to answer. What does “democracy” mean? It’s a word that’s used with very different meanings, even in different parts of the Western world. And it’s a political concept that has no history, no record whatever in the Arab, Islamic world.

I think it’s a great mistake to try and think of the Middle East in [Western] terms and that can only lead to disastrous results, as you’ve already seen in various places. They are simply not ready for free and fair elections.

In Egypt now, for example, the assumption is that we’re proceeding toward elections in September and that seems to be what the West is inclined to encourage. I would view that with mistrust and apprehension. If there’s a genuinely free election – assuming that such a thing could happen – the religious parties have an immediate advantage. First, they have a network of communication through the preacher and the mosque which no other political tendency can hope to equal. Second, they use familiar language. The language of Western democracy is for the most part newly translated and not intelligible to the great masses. In genuinely fair and free elections, [the Muslim parties] are very likely to win and I think that would be a disaster. A much better course would be a gradual development of democracy, not through general elections, but rather through local self-governing institutions. For that, there is a real tradition in the region.

If you look at the history of the Middle East in the Islamic period, and if you look at their own political literature, it is totally against authoritarian or absolutist rule. The word they always insist on is consultation.

You have this traditional system of consultation with groups which are not democratic as we use that word in the Western world, but which have a source of authority other than the state – authority which derives from within the group, whether it be the landed gentry or the civil service, or the scribes or whatever. That’s very important. And that form of consultation could be a much better basis for the development of free and civilized government.

They’re all agreed that they want to get rid of the present leadership, but I don’t think they’re agreed on what they want in its place. For example, we get very, very different figures as to the probable support for the Muslim Brothers. And it’s very difficult to rely on these things. People don’t tell the truth when they’re being asked questions.

One has to understand … the differences in the political discourse. In the Western world, we talk all the time about freedom. In the Islamic world, freedom is not a political term. It’s a legal term: Freedom as opposed to slavery. This was a society in which slavery was an accepted institution existing all over the Muslim world. You were free if you were not a slave. It was entirely a legal and social term, with no political connotation whatsoever.

The major contrast is not between freedom and tyranny, between freedom and servitude, but between justice and oppression. Or if you like, between justice and injustice.

To say that [the Muslim Brotherhood] is secular [as the US intelligence chief James Clapper did] would show an astonishing ignorance of the English lexicon. I don’t think it is in any sense benign. I think it is a very dangerous, radical Islamic movement. If they obtain power, the consequences would be disastrous for Egypt.

I don’t know how one could get the impression that the Muslim Brotherhood is relatively benign unless you mean relatively as compared with the Nazi party.

I’m an historian. My business is the past, not the future. But I can imagine a situation in which the Muslim Brotherhood and other organizations of the same kind obtain control of much of the Arab world. It’s not impossible. I wouldn’t say it’s likely, but it’s not unlikely. And if that happens, they would gradually sink back into medieval squalor.

Remember that according to their own statistics, the total exports of the entire Arab world other than fossil fuels amount to less than those of Finland, one small European country. Sooner or later the oil age will come to an end. Oil will be either exhausted or superseded as a source of energy and then they have virtually nothing. In that case it’s easy to imagine a situation in which Africa north of the Sahara becomes not unlike Africa south of the Sahara.

There’s a common theme [in the Arab states] of anger and resentment. And the anger and resentment are universal and well-grounded. They come from a number of things. First of all, there’s the obvious one – the greater awareness that they have, thanks to modern media and modern communications, of the difference between their situation and the situation in other parts of the world. I mean, being abjectly poor is bad enough. But when everybody else around you is pretty far from abjectly poor, then it becomes pretty intolerable.

I was expecting a wave of such movements. I didn’t think it would be as quick and easy as it was in Egypt. But I expect that there will be more. We can see in so many countries, the regimes are already gravely in danger.

One method [of supporting the rebels – in Iran, for instance] is by political warfare, by having some sort of propaganda campaign against the regime. This would not be difficult. There’s a vast Iranian population now in the Western world, particularly in the United States, who I’m sure would be willing to help in this, and thanks to modern communications, it would not be too difficult to get the message across.

People talk about American imperialism as a danger. That is absolute nonsense. People who talk about American imperialism in the Middle East either know nothing about America or know nothing about imperialism. … As applied to American policy in the Middle East at the present time, it is wrong to the point of absurdity.

[Among the Arabs] two things have happened. One is that their position on the whole has been getting worse. The second, which is much more important, is that their awareness of that is getting much greater. As I said before, thanks to modern communications, they can now compare their own position with that in other countries. And they don’t have to look very far to do that. I have sat with friends in Arab countries, watching Israeli television, and their responses to that are mindboggling. [That is to say – the context indicates -they found freedom of speech “mindboggling” – JB.]

There are increasing numbers of people in the Arab world who look with wonderment at what they see in Israel, at the functioning of a free and open society. I read an article quite recently by a Palestinian Arab whom I will not endanger by naming, in which he said that “as things stand in the world at the present time, the best hope that an Arab has for his future is as a second class citizen of a Jewish state.” A rather extraordinary statement coming from an Arab spokesman. But if you think about it, he’s not far wrong. The alternative, being in an Arab state, is very much worse. They certainly do better as second class citizens of the Jewish state. There’s a growing realization of that. People would speak much more openly about that if it were safe to do so, which it obviously isn’t.

There are two things which I think are helpful towards a better understanding between the Arabs and Israel. One of them is .. the perception of a greater danger. … Sadat turned to Israel because he saw that Egypt was becoming a Russian colony. The same thing has happened again on a number of occasions. Now they see Israel as a barrier against the Iranian threat.

One sees similar calculations later than that. Consider for example, the battle between the Israeli forces and Hezbollah in 2006. It was quite clear that the Arab governments were quietly cheering the Israelis and hoping that they would finish the job and were very disappointed when they failed to finish the job. The best way of attaining friendship is by confronting a yet more dangerous enemy. There have been several such [enemies] in the Middle East and there are several at the present time. That seems to me the best hope of understanding between the Arabs on the one hand and either the West or the Israelis on the other hand.

The other one, which is less easy to define but in the long run is probably more important, is [regarding Israel] as a model of democratic government. A model of a free and open society with rights for women – an increasingly important point, especially in the perception of women.

The case has been made, and I think there is some force in it, that the main reason for the relative backwardness of the Islamic world compared to the West is the treatment of women. As far as I know, it was first made by a Turkish writer called Namik Kemal in about 1880. At that time an agonizing debate had been going on for more than a century: What went wrong? Why did we fall behind the West? He said, “The answer is very clear. We fell behind the West because of the way we treat our women. By the way we treat our women we deprive ourselves of the talents and services of half the population. And we submit the early education of the other half to ignorant and downtrodden mothers.”

It goes further than that. A child who grows up in a traditional Muslim household is accustomed to authoritarian, autocratic rule from the start. I think the position of women is of crucial importance. That is why I am looking with great interest at Tunisia. Tunisia is the one Arab country that has really done something about women. In Tunisia there is compulsory education for girls, from primary school, right through. In Tunisia, women are to be found in the professions. There are doctors, lawyers, journalists, politicians and so on. Women play a significant part in public life in Tunisia. I think that is going to have an enormous impact. It’s already having this in Tunisia and you can see that in various ways. But this will certainly spread to other parts of the [Islamic] world.

A fuller record of the interview may be found here.