From Power Line:

Politics is largely about priorities; so is life, for that matter. Barack Obama’s priorities were put into sharp relief today when he canceled visits to two American military bases in Germany. He still has time, of course, to play the "rock star" in front of cheering multitudes of Germans. Ed Morrisseybroke the story:

Der Spiegel’s blog reports on Obama’s priorities:

1:42 p.m.: SPIEGEL ONLINE has learned that Obama has cancelled a planned short visit to the Rammstein and Landstuhl US military bases in the southwest German state of Rhineland-Palatinate. The visits were planned for Friday. “Barack Obama will not be coming to us,” a spokesperson for the US military hospital in Landstuhl announced. “I don’t know why.” Shortly before the same spokeswoman had announced a planned visit by Obama.

The message here is that thousands of screaming German fans at the Tiergarten take precedence over visiting Americans serving their country at Rammstein and Landstuhl. Maybe one of the networks following Obama could interview a few of the soldiers about how they perceive that set of priorities from Obama.

 

Landstuhl, of course, is where soldiers wounded in Iraq and Afghanistan are sent for treatment. Obama’s visit there no doubt would have included meeting some of them.

It turns out that Obama didn’t stiff the servicemen because of a schedule conflict. Rather, as Jake Tapper pointed out, apparently without knowing that Obama had canceled planned visits to the two military installations, Obama is going sightseeing in Berlin tonight. I can’t say it any better than Ed did:

Obama canceled a previously-planned stop to visit thousands of American service personnel, including troops wounded in Iraq and Afghanistan being treated at Landstuhl, so he could hold a political rally for Germans and go shopping in Berlin. Now that’s a nice set of priorities for a man who wants to become Commander in Chief.

 

 From Little Green Footballs:

‘Now, in terms of knowing my commitments, you don’t have to just look at my words, you can look at my deeds. Just this past week, we passed out of the U.S. Senate Banking Committee, which is my committee, a bill to call for divestment from Iran, as a way of ratcheting up the pressure to ensure that they don’t obtain a nuclear weapon.’

But Obama is not a member of the Senate Banking, Housing and Urban Affairs Committee. Obama just made that up so he could count the committee’s action as one of “my deeds.”

 It makes the media and the Democrats mad – so mad they don’t want to report it or acknowledge it. 

But it is great news.

For news of victory, Americans may have to look to the foreign press. For example, the Times of London, which carried a piece by Marie Colvin the other day. She reported that "American and Iraqi forces are driving al Qaeda in Iraq out of its last redoubt in the north of the country in the culmination of one of the most spectacular victories of the war on terror."

Read the whole article from which this is taken here.

 Anne Applebaum, writing in the Washington Post, just doesn’t seem to get it.

She says: 

In fact, any child who attends Saudi schools until ninth grade will eventually be taught outright that "Jews and Christians are enemies of believers." They will also be taught that Jews conspire to "gain sole control over the world," that the Christian crusades never ended, and that on Judgment Day "the rocks or the trees" will call out to Muslims to kill Jews.

These passages, it should be noted, are from new, "revised" Saudi textbooks, designed to be less harsh on the infidels. 

But the passages she is referring to are not just bad lessons in textbooks, they are either directly (Jews and Christians being enemies of believers, and the ‘rocks and trees’ bit), or indirectly by interpretation, derived from the Koran itself.  She urges Muslims to change the lessons taught in their schools without apparently understanding that she is urging Muslims to change their religion.

If only 1.2 billion Muslims (or 1.4 – accounts vary) could be persuaded to change their religion! But Islam is not going to be reasoned or nudged out of existence. The one thing we can and should do is inform ourselves about it, read the Koran, be guided by reliable exponents and commentators (such as Robert Spencer and Andrew Bostom) and talk about it as it really is.  

As James Miller writes in Islam Watch (quoted in The Religion of Peace today): ’The Koran is a harsh, cruel, uncompassionate book and Islam is its product.’ Read his whole article here.

 At last someone dares to utter the truth about who our enemy is. Robert Spencer writes in Front Page Magazine:

Muslim spokesmen in the U.S. are outraged over remarks made last Friday by Bud Day, a key supporter of John McCain. Day, a much-decorated Air Force Colonel and Medal of Honor recipient who was a prisoner of war in Vietnam with McCain, said during a conference call organized by the Florida Republican Party that “the Muslims have said either we kneel, or they’re going to kill us.” Day added: “I don’t intend to kneel, and I don’t advocate to anybody that we kneel, and John doesn’t advocate to anybody that we kneel.”

The reaction was swift. Saif Ishoof, president of the Center for Voter Advocacy, said that Day’s remarks were “perpetuating a form of Islamophobia.” Khaled Saffuri, the Executive Director of the Islamic Institute (which he co-founded with Grover Norquist), was also deeply offended. “‘This is as close to racist as it gets,” he declared. “These are cheap street tactics. Even if this is called a mistake or a slip of the tongue, it shows a bigger problem with racism. McCain and the Republican party should denounce this.” (Keith Olbermann also termed Day’s words “racism and religious hatred,” although neither he nor Saffuri explained what race Islam is.)

Please don’t apologize, retract, or in any way qualify what you said, Bud Day!  

 Good news! Danes are hitting back at racist Muslims who are trying to take over their country. They are hanging effigies of Muhammad from lampposts.

Read about it and see the PICTURES here.

 Gordon G Chang writes on the Contentions site of Commentary Magazine:

 Is the Bush administration crumbling? Asia experts Liu Kin-ming and June Teufel Dreyer, in postings on the Taiwan Policy Forum listserv today, ask a pertinent question.

The answer, unfortunately, is “yes.” An exhausted Dubya is now doing everything he once said he would not. The President, for example, is rewarding North Korea prior to surrender of its nuclear weapons. On Wednesday, the administration agreed to talk with Iran even though the Islamic Republic is continuing to enrich uranium and undoubtedly maintaining a covert bomb program. And on the same day, it was revealed that the Bush White House isundermining democratic Taiwan to please communist China by refusing to sell the former defensive weapons. Next month, the President will be joining the likes of Zimbabwe’s Robert Mugabe to honor Chinese autocrats at the opening ceremony of an event recently described as the “Totalitarian Olympics.”

Mr. Bush probably won’t have to sit next to Sudan’s Omar Bashir–seating is said to be alphabetical for attending heads of state–only because the prosecutor of the International Criminal Court on Monday asked for an arrest warrant for the genocidal ruler.

The American leader who believes so much in freedom and democracy has done more than any autocrat to support the strengthening coalition of authoritarian states. Getting little in return, Bush is yielding on almost every request from Beijing and most of them from Moscow. In doing so, he is abandoning American allies and undermining critical American goals. By reversing course on major initiatives, he is eroding American credibility. Now, it seems every foreign policy of the Bush administration is, well, Kerryesque.

Some will argue that the President’s recent radical turns are only recognizing reality because Russia and China have been frustrating American initiatives. As an initial matter, it was Bush administration policy that helped put these two authoritarian giants into positions from where they could bedevil America and the rest of the international community. Yet more important, the President’s policy changes come too late to be effective. Now, even if they are the right approaches–and I do not think they are–they can only make the United States appear weak and irresolute. It would have been preferable for the administration to have stuck to its principled stands, which at least had the possibility of leading to enduring solutions, especially if they would have been continued by the next administration.

The President should have realized that, so close to the end of his term, the best he could do was to cause no further harm. Yet we are now witnessing policy disarray in a White House that has lost its confidence and bearings.

 Read this story here, and just think what the life of this Iranian woman has been like since she was a little girl of 13.  Now, after 18 years in prison, she is about to be executed for a crime she did not commit, on the insistence of the actual murderer’s family.  

Needless to say, no Western feminist voices have been raised – at least not so we could hear them – in protest against the way she or any other woman is treated in the Muslim world.

Of course, wimmin are not concerned with such things as justice. They are too busy complaining that men don’t help enough with the housework , or something of that order of significance. 

 You can see a video of a stoning here.

What happens in Stoning?
In stoning to death, the victims’s hands are tied behind their backs and their bodies are put in a cloth sack. Then, this human "package" is buried in a hole, with only the victims heads showing above the ground. If its a woman, she is buried upto her shoulders. This is to give her an seemingly equal (but nonetheless impossible) chance to escape recognizing her lesser physical strength.
After the hapless individual has been secured in the hole, people start chanting "Allah hu Akbar" (meaning, God is great), and throw palm sized stones at the head of the victim from a certain distance (a circle is drawn). 
The stones are thrown until the person dies or until he/she escapes out of the hole and crosses the circle. Escaping is impossible, given that the individual’s hands are tied behind their backs and they are buried in a hole upto their necks or shoulders (in the case of males and females respectively).
Naturally, the procedure is extremely barbaric and bloody. 

 At least some Germans are:

In the case of the controversy over the mosque planned for Cologne’s Ehrenfeld neighborhood, the right-wing Pro protesters have indeed been pushed into the margins. Their complaints have been drowned out by more high-profile statements coming from prominent leftists and liberals including German Jewish journalist Ralph Giordano, women’s rights activist Alice Schwarzer and investigative reporter Günter Wallraff, who have all spoken out against the mosque. Representatives of Germany’s large churches have increasingly added their voices to the criticism as well. The "dishonest dialogue" with Islam described in SPIEGEL’s pages in December 2001 – in which church representatives simply ignored scandalous and unbearable aspects like persecution of Christians, discrimination against women, toleration of terror and "honor" killings for the sake of harmony – is now a thing of the past.

In place of the "fairy tale that we’re all ‘children of Abraham’," in the words of Leggewie, the churches are now making an effort not to entangle themselves in finding contrived common ground with Islam. Instead they are trying to find areas in which they differ – and this applies particularly to the construction of mosques.

 

Read the whole report here.