The Right has regained considerable power. The cheers die down. The champagne has been drunk. The recovery of America is only just beginning.

Continuing to explore ideas about what will follow now, we quote an excellent article – or a rallying cry – by J. E. Dyer, posted yesterday at Liberty Unyielding:

Commander J.E.Dyer

There’s a division of sentiment among conservatives, the day after a big electoral victory for Republicans.

There are plenty of conservatives who were glad to be able to vote for candidates they admire and believe in. That distinguishes them from other conservatives who had to either withhold their votes in certain races, or vote for GOP candidates they didn’t particularly like.

But even many conservatives who had attractive candidates to vote for share something important with less fortunate conservative voters. They share a sense that America has already experienced a break with the political consensus of the past that can’t be repaired with this election.

This isn’t only because Congress will remain divided from the president across policy lines for the next two years. That is important – and not mainly because it will theoretically result in gridlock.  (Some gridlock would actually be pretty darn healthy at this point.) It’s important because the president has executive power, and Congress doesn’t.

Realistically, we can expect Congress to be slow and timid in any attempts to block executive unilateralism by the Obama administration. The American people, the targets of weaponized government, won’t get any meaningful relief.

But it’s even more than that. Something bigger than American partisan politics is going on in the world, and what the voters accomplished on Tuesday will do little to position America better to face it. That’s the sense of settled foreboding I see in many conservatives.

It won’t all be up to the United States government, in any case. The world is going to hand us problems created by others – diseases, foreign despots who churn out refugees; Islamists, Russia, China, Iran, some damn fool thing in the hot-spot of your choice – that could very well impinge as much on the daily lives of Americans as anything Obama does before 2017. They could impinge more, whether they involve geopolitical disruption or economic shocks.

Too much is unsettled now. Getting from where we are to where we need to be will require stopping at a waypoint we haven’t reached yet. The election on Tuesday is not that waypoint.

Indeed, to revive the American spirit of liberty, the waypoint will almost certainly have to have the same weight and import as our constitutional convention of 1787-89.  It’s not clear yet what combination of circumstances might make it possible to identify such a waypoint, and take advantage of it.

For the time being, those with a coherent idea of liberty and limited government expect little gratification from today’s partisan politics. They see what those who voted for Republicans as a status-quo alternative to Democrats don’t: that the status quo itself can’t continue. Creeping bureaucratic despotism – what we live under now – is unsustainable. It’s not the future. …  People have nothing to live for under its lash; ultimately, as limitations and pessimism drive out opportunity and hope, it must destroy itself.

That’s a statement of enormous optimism. What can bring bureaucratic despotism to an end?

Even this clear-eyed writer cannot answer that vital question.

But what the outlines of the future will look like, and what factors might give events a push, no one can foresee from here. …

But Commander Dyer is sure there are better times ahead – because America is the embodiment of an idea: the idea of liberty, and it is an idea that cannot die.

The truth is that deadlines keep passing, for everyone who predicts one certain doom or another. America has not been loaded into a garbage truck from which the only exit is in the landfill. This country still has a lot of living to do.

Liberty has always been an idea, and as an idea, it can’t be killed. It stills burns in the hearts of millions of Americans.

Only some of them know what liberty really is, but there are still millions of those people. And here’s what I perceive about them. Although they remain committed to the political process – they think it’s important not to give up on it – their investment in it is on the wane right now.

The reason?  The political process is not making the difference between liberty and overweening government anymore.  Electing Republicans doesn’t bring relief from overregulation, collectivist statism, and the growth of public bureaucracies that are easily taken over by fanatical ideologues.

This is why the 2014 midterm election isn’t an end-state, nor … a model for the future. It isn’t good enough to elect Republicans to take over the same business the U.S. federal government has been doing for 100 years now.  It’s the business that has to change.

Seeing this clearly is going to keep liberty-minded conservatives in tension with old-consensus Republicans between now and 2016.  But having a vision for something better always does that. …

So, though it is good that the Democrats – the ideologists of serfdom – have been defeated, she does not believe that the Republican Party will bring us the liberty we crave.  

It’s actually exciting, and a source of optimism, to realize that our future doesn’t have to be charted within the confines of the patterns of the past.  Yes, the GOP leadership in Congress is still an old-consensus leadership.  But it’s not discouraging to recognize that the Republicans we’ve just handed a congressional majority aren’t going to change much for us.  It’s liberating to stop expecting them to.

The task now is for the sons and daughters of liberty to educate themselves on liberty itself, and man the ramparts as watchmen on the walls.  … The watchmen on the walls have to be on the lookout for opportunity: knowledgeable about how liberty has been established in the past, and ready to interpret circumstances and openings when they arise.

I think those circumstances and openings are going to arise, although I can’t tell you today what they will be.  I do know that the day has come when it is more important to fan the flames of liberty than to damp them down, through the political process, in search of consensus.  Putting too much into consensus only teaches us to believe lies about freedom, and we’ve been doing that for too long. …

I look to the future.  Join me if you can.  History gives us every reason to be optimistic about a future with liberty, because liberty is healing.  Liberty is the empire of hope.  So get up on those walls, troops.  We’ve got some watching to do.

Andrew Klavan interprets the language of the Left.

A new American conservatism? It’s not here yet – not even on the horizon – but we’re thinking about how and what it might be.

[Added after discussion in the comments section with Azgael:] We atheist conservatives are, or could be, an incipient movement. We must be prepared to say what we stand for, and not seem to be locked in the past. So we invite readers to tell us their thoughts. Help us define a new Conservatism for a new era.

We’ll start with what should be kept out of a future libertarian-conservative manifesto.

Sex and gender. There’s no need for the sex and gender choices of individuals to be treated as matters of political importance. Not constantly, anyway. Hardly ever, actually. We all know there are many ways people seek sexual satisfaction, but they are not res publica (public affairs). Needless to say there is, always has been and always will be, homosexuality, heterosexuality, bestiality, polygamy, orgies, sado-masochism, pornography, rape, pedophilia and pederasty, and good old fashioned procreation in the marriage bed. All fine and dandy – except the bestiality, the rape, the pedophilia and the pederasty. Let consenting adults do what they will with what’s their own. Only, if it should happen that a child is conceived by someone in the course of her pursuit of erotic delight – a biological effect that happens often enough to keep the world populated – then the privacy is terminated. The advent of a third party, not able to express consent or refusal, alters the story. It becomes a matter of ethics, and so, marginally, of politics (public affairs).

Religion. Religion should be as private as sex. For many it is, and they should be left to enjoy or endure it as they choose. It will not cause public offense unless it is constantly bruited about. But organized religion is egregious. With luck it will die out. To the non-religious, public worship by congregants might be viewed as comparable to orgies; an emotional – or the religious would say “spiritual” – equivalent of sexual communion. Public expressions of an eroticism of the “spirit”. A pornography of superstition. There would be absolutely no loss to any consistent and reasonable set of political principles if religion were to be totally cut out of them. (Some political ideologies, such as Islam, are formed only to serve a religion, and therefore should have no place in the political forum whatsoever.)

As for what should be put in, there are first the everlasting principles:

Individual freedom

Free-market economy

Small government

Low taxes

Strong defense

Upholding and defending the Constitution

Defending states’ rights

What should be added to them?

 *

Soon now the Republicans will be in control of both the House and the Senate. What will they do with the power they have regained?

Here are some sketchy notes for new policies. The need for them is urgent because of the damage done to America by the far left pro-Islam world-government-favoring regime tragically elected to power in 2008:

Secure the borders and scrupulously enforce existing immigration laws.

Withdraw from the United Nations and all its agencies, confiscate its headquarters at Turtle Bay, and pay not a dime more to assist or promote any of its programs and purposes.

Cancel every treaty to do with arms and the sea that puts the US at a disadvantage.

Facilitate the fullest possible development of energy resources, especially natural gas and shale oil.

Stop negotiating with terrorist groups in the Middle East, and stop keeping the Palestinians as a beggar nation on handouts.

Support allies and punish enemies.

Prohibit the application of any foreign system of law.

Repeal the laughingly-so-called Affordable Care Act, and let there be nation-wide competition among health insurers.

Hugely reform education.

Lift and curb regulations on business.

Abandon the minimum wage.

Hugely reduce all taxes. Introduce flat rate income tax. Tax forms, 2 pages max.

Hugely reduce entitlements and phase them out.

Reduce the size of government.

Abolish the Fed, the EPA, Fannie and Freddie … Oh the list of institutions and agencies needing to be abolished is very long. But the Fed must be the first to go. Abolitions will reduce the size of government.

Overhaul the IRS to make it serve the nation and not terrify everyone.

Root out corruption in government as far as possible.

*

Readers are invited to expand, reduce, correct or re-write these first-thought suggestions of ours.

But what better could be expected from Barry (“Chickenshit”) Obama?*

 “Chickenshit” is on the right. The man on the left was a soldier who became the leader of his country.

This is from an article by Diana West at Townhall:

In the summer of 2009, U.S. Marines pushed into Afghanistan’s Helmand province to begin the new offensive that President Obama had ordered based on the model of President Bush’s Iraq strategy of nation-building and counter-insurgency (COIN). This fall, a little over five years later, U.S. Marines turned over their last base in Helmand to Afghan forces and, except for a residual force, left the country.

And?

Maybe a crescendo in background noise, but not much else. Surely, after 13 years of war, it’s not too soon for a public reckoning. Then again, maybe it’s too late. Maybe Americans have forgotten the fiasco of vision, strategy and tactics that civilian and military leaders forced onto the backs of U.S. service members. If so, it’s worth returning to those early days of this war’s final phase.

It started with that childish, lethal idea – COIN. The US-led International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) would fight to make the Islamic tribespeople of Afghanistan like us more than they liked the Islamic tribespeople of the Taliban. Then, according to COIN-plan, Western forces would transfer this fought-over affection of the Afghan people to the Kabul government that the West was simultaneously building and propping up. Presto – COIN victory.

Grown men gushed at the prospect. “Victory in this conflict is about winning the hearts and minds of the Afghan people and engendering their trust,” Air Force Brig. Gen. Steven L. Kwast said in 2009. “When the Afghan people trust us and believe us when we tell them what we’re going to do, we will win this overnight.”

COIN’s fight for Afghan “hearts and minds” meant pandering was the order of the day. “I’m reading a very good book now about this part of the world. It’s written in English, but it’s all about you – it’s the Quran,” the top commander in Afghanistan at the time, Gen. David D. McKiernan, told Afghan tribal leaders in April 2009.

Did he really read it? Surely not – or how could he call that manual for massacre “a very good book”?

COIN also meant commanders ordered their troops into proximity and even intimacy with the local population – the menfolk, anyway, pederasts, polygamists and misogynists by culture and religion, and, all too often, jihadists.

“You’re going to drink lots of tea. You’re going to eat lots of goat. Get to know the people,” Marine Brig. Gen. Lawrence D. Nicholson said, explaining this COIN order of battle to officers in July 2009. “That’s the reason why we’re here.”

This was “population-centric COIN,” as executed by President Obama’s new ISAF commander, Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal. It is a doctrine that values (Afghan) population protection over (U.S.) force protection — but don’t worry, it’s all for the good of the “long-term” cause. In the “short term,” COIN commanders set highly restrictive “rules of engagement” to enforce the doctrine, undoubtedly leading to innumerable U.S. casualties.

And how’s that long-term cause doing?

On “60 Minutes” in October 2009, Marine Lt. Col. Christian Cabaniss explained how he got COIN concepts across to the fighting man.

“As I told the Marines before we deployed, it’s about a three-second decision, especially with his personal weapon. The first second is ‘Can I?’ The next two are ‘Should I?’ ‘What is going to be the effect of my action? Is it going to move the Afghan closer to the government or further away?'”

By which time the US soldier has been shot.

As even McChrystal would say about COIN in 2010, as reported in Rolling Stone: “This is the philosophical part that works with think tanks. But it doesn’t get the same reception from infantry companies.”

That’s because infantry companies deal with bullets, not PowerPoint. “I understand the reason behind it, but it’s so hard to fight a war like this,” Lance Corporal Travis Anderson told The Associated Press in 2010. “They’re using our rules of engagement against us,” he said, adding that his platoon had repeatedly seen men dropping their guns into ditches before disappearing among civilians.

COIN was also very much about stuff – “baksheesh,” or bribes – on a massive scale.

“What do you need here?” … McChrystal asked locals … on a walk-through in a Helmand town in 2010.

Schools. Security. Hospitals. Roads.

“Inshallah, we will provide the services as soon as possible.”  …

But Afghans still didn’t like us or trust us. Cultural chasm between Islam and the West, anyone? Nope, not enough COIN, U.S. commanders concluded.

When Gen. David Petraeus became ISAF commander in 2010, he issued a fresh, new COIN guidance that included: “Walk. Stop by, don’t drive by. Patrol on foot whenever possible and engage the population.”

Foot patrols on IED-laced roads made COIN horrifically costly. In June 2011, the U.S. Army reported on a new pattern of injury — “dismounted complex blast injury” — and defined it thus: “An injury caused by an explosion occurring to a service member while dismounted in a combat theater that results in amputation of at least one lower extremity at the knee or above, with either amputation or severe injury to the opposite lower limb, combined with pelvic, abdominal or urogenital injury.”

The final line may be most chilling of all: “This definition is not meant to define a subset of injuries for policy-making decisions.” Heavens, no. Keep walking those IED-laced roads, for the love of not Mike, but Ahmed. Keep reality from all policy-making decisions, or COIN will self-destruct, along with the reputations of its enforcers.

Exactly why a public reckoning is essential.

* An Obama administration official said recently that Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu is “chickenshit”, according to Jeffrey Goldberg writing in The Atlantic. The official was undoubtedly relaying the opinion of President Obama, who must have wanted it to be made public. If it wasn’t Obama himself saying it directly to the journalist. The implication was that Netanyahu was a coward. Why? For not bombing Iranian nuclear facilities  – an action he would probably have taken had not the Obama gang done everything they could to prevent him from doing it.

James O’Keefe exposes voter fraud – which Attorney General Eric Holder says does not exist:

The first – many libertarians would argue, the only – duty of government is to protect the nation from other nations and the individual from other individuals. Its instruments are military might and the rule of law.

That duty includes keeping the nation and the individual safe from infectious disease. The law must isolate persons and animals that could make others sick.

It may be hard to identify the infectiously sick. But to the extent that it can the state must do it, and force the infected into quarantine.

The people can insist that the conditions of the quarantine are pleasant, even luxurious (why not, if luxury can be afforded?), but the quarantine must be as absolute as can be.

Right now, Americans need to be protected from the horrific killer disease Ebola. It is known where it comes from; what its symptoms are; what its gestation period is; how it spreads or could be spread. The countries from which it comes should be quarantined.

To take every necessary protective measure would be to prevent panic, not create it.

Fear of Ebola is perfectly rational. It is fearsome. To do whatever is necessary to contain and cure it is also rational.

It is those who say do nothing and don’t even talk about it who are being emotional and unreasonable. Nothing goes away just because it’s taken no notice of.

This horror exists, it has been brought to the United States, now it must be dealt with forcefully, dictatorially, with high-handed authoritarianism – in the interest of freedom.

(Hat-tip Don L)

How deeply has the Democratic Party sunk into immorality and lawlessness?

Out of many possible examples of its descent into both, this is one.

We quote part of an article by Heather Mac Donald at the Wall Street Journal:

The Rev. Al Sharpton once epitomized New York’s bad old days of the 1980s, when the then-corpulent, gold-medallion-bedecked tub thumper inflamed racial hatred and courted violence. Today, against all expectations and at least 100 pounds lighter, he has been rehabilitated into the Democratic Party’s civil-rights leader of choice. Has Mr. Sharpton changed or simply outlasted his critics?

President Obama ’s embrace of Mr. Sharpton has been particularly intense this year. On Monday he called Mr. Sharpton’s radio show to discuss the Nov. 4 elections. In April the president appeared at a political rally organized by Mr. Sharpton’s National Action Network. Mr. Obama’s closest adviser, Valerie Jarrett, conferred with Mr. Sharpton in August about the police killing of an unarmed black teenager in Ferguson, Mo., as Mr. Sharpton led protests against the Ferguson police.

The Democratic establishment is just as obsequious. It turned out in force earlier this month to celebrate Mr. Sharpton’s 60th birthday party at New York’s tony Four Seasons restaurant. Hillary Clinton phoned in with best wishes. Barack and Michelle Obama sent a congratulatory letter. New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo gushed: “He’s the nation’s Rev. Sharpton—and the nation is better for it.” New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman , Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand , and Reps. Charles Rangel and Jerry Nadler rushed to pay their respects.

Obeisance to this louse, from the most powerful in the land! Such is the character of these Democrats.

Worrying as it might be for America to see Mr. Sharpton catapulted into the national limelight, that is nothing compared with the alarm felt by many New Yorkers now witnessing his emergence as a political power in their city.

When New Yorkers elected Bill de Blasio as mayor last year, they knew they were getting a self-styled “progressive” who pledged to soak the rich and shackle the New York Police Department. What they didn’t know was that they were also voting to bring Al Sharpton and his influence into the very heart of City Hall. The mayor’s alliance with the racial provocateur is now creating the biggest crisis of his mayoralty.

So far Mr. de Blasio is pretending not to notice. As the crisis escalated, involving a former Sharpton aide now working for the mayor’s wife, Mr. de Blasio ladled on the praise at the Four Seasons. “Al Sharpton has been a blessing for this city,” the mayor enthused. “He’s been a blessing for this nation. And the more people criticize him, the more I want to hang out with him. Because a lot of times, just look who’s doing the criticizing and the way they’re saying it—it makes you realize the Rev must be doing something right. You know, sometimes, your enemies are the best endorsers of the righteousness of your actions.”

Where to start in evaluating what a “blessing” Al Sharpton has been to New York and America? …

Heather Mac Donald recalls some of the worst instances of Al Sharpton’s supporting, condoning, inciting and personally directing criminal acts, from false accusations of rape to anti-Semitic riots in which people were beaten and burnt to death.

For a full history of Al Sharpton ‘s iniquitous career of race hustling, defying court orders, and generally flouting the law and getting away with it, go here.

In 2008 the Associated Press reported that Mr. Sharpton and his business entities owed nearly $1.5 million in taxes and penalties, as well as tens of thousands of dollars in fines for unpaid workers’ compensation and unemployment insurance. By this year Mr. Sharpton’s tax liabilities had ballooned to $4.7 million, according to the New York Post. He still owes the Federal Election Commission $208,000 for the improper use of campaign money during his 2004 presidential bid.

Not relevant, apparently, to Mr. Sharpton’s increasing reach into Democratic circles. Mr. Sharpton believes that New York’s mayor owes him his job — a belief shared, it seems, by Mr. de Blasio himself. Mr. Sharpton pointedly declined to endorse the sole black candidate in the Democratic primary last year. That left the field open for a late-surging Mr. de Blasio, who had run a demagogic campaign against the New York Police Department, denouncing its stop-question-and-frisk policies as racist. Candidate de Blasio also pandered to black voters by prominently featuring his biracial son in campaign ads. “We won the election,” Mr. Sharpton later told CBS New York.

Mr. de Blasio’s first offering of thanks was to hire Mr. Sharpton’s longtime public-relations adviser as his wife’s $170,000-a-year chief of staff. Such a position was unprecedented, but the choice of Rachel Noerdlinger to fill it was even more startling. It put an Al Sharpton confidante at the center of city power.

Next, Mayor de Blasio implied that Mr. Sharpton was a major player in police affairs. In late July the mayor convened a meeting of “community advocates” to discuss the death of a black man following the man’s arrest for selling untaxed loose cigarettes. Mr. Sharpton’s inevitable protests against the NYPD had blamed the death on the enforcement of public-order laws, including the ban on selling loose cigarettes. Such enforcement is key to “broken windows” policing—stopping minor crimes as a way of preventing major ones.

Mr. Sharpton was led in to the mayor’s community meeting by his former aide, Ms. Noerdlinger, and seated on Mr. de Blasio’s left, with Police Commissioner William Bratton, serving his second tour as New York’s top law officer, on the mayor’s right. The symbolism was lost on no one, least of all police officers. The next day, a mock NYPD identification card circulated through police headquarters showing Mr. Sharpton as commissioner.

By the time of the Four Seasons birthday blowout, the mayor’s Noerdlinger-Sharpton connection was turning toxic. As the local press reported, the 43-year-old single mother had failed to disclose in her City Hall background check that she was living with an unemployed ex-convict who had served time for fatally shooting a man over a jacket and for drug dealing. The boyfriend, Hassaun McFarlan, had referred to the police as “pigs” on his now-vanished Facebook page.

Ms. Noerdlinger had received a waiver of the city’s residency requirement by citing her teenage son’s need to continue a physical-therapy regime in New Jersey following a traffic accident. She didn’t mention that he was fit enough to play linebacker on his high-school football team. Like Mr. McFarlan, that son has referred to the police as “pigs” on social media, and he has tweeted: “I’m convinced all white people are the devil.”

Ms. Noerdlinger has a federal tax lien against her, typical of the Sharpton inner circle, but failed to report it to the city’s conflict of interest board. She has been involved to varying degrees in McFarlan-related dust-ups with the law, including hundreds of dollars in unpaid traffic tickets issued to her Mercedes-Benz since her City Hall job began.

Mayor de Blasio has refused to discuss the implications for his administration of these and other revelations. Nor has he disciplined Ms. Noerdlinger for her multiple omissions on city background checks.

Police morale is plummeting, given the mayor’s stubborn allegiance to a former Sharpton aide and the seeming elevation of Mr. Sharpton to near-parity with Police Commissioner Bratton. Cops in certain high-crime precincts have all but abandoned pedestrian stops, which candidate de Blasio had so fiercely criticized.

As for Mr. Sharpton, he portrays the Noerdlinger fiasco as a conspiracy to bring down the de Blasio mayoralty and Mr. Sharpton’s connection to it. After leading a few rounds of “no justice, no peace” on a recent Saturday at his National Action Network headquarters — still little more than a shabby storefront despite the millions shoveled into it by supplicant corporate donors — Mr. Sharpton told his supporters: “They will keep trying to prevent [the mayor] from transforming this city, whether it’s Rachel”—Ms. Noerdlinger—“or it’s someone else. When Mayor de Blasio and his wife reached out and said they wanted Rachel to come, I said: ‘Don’t think that they won’t put a target on your back. They’ll find something. They gonna think I cut some deal.’ ”

The longer Mayor de Blasio sticks by Ms. Noerdlinger, the more it will appear that the mayor did cut a deal. But firing her would invite Mr. Sharpton’s wrath, jeopardizing Mr. de Blasio’s hopes for a second term. Worse, Mr. Sharpton is demanding an end to broken-windows policing, while Commissioner Bratton has vowed to continue it. Mayor de Blasio cannot satisfy both men.

Despite Mr. Sharpton’s current mainstream patina … he still peddles the dangerous lie that police officers are the greatest threat facing young black men and that racial discrimination is the main force holding blacks back.

In fact, it is other young black men who are responsible for the high homicide risk faced by black teens, and it is proactive policing that has dramatically reduced that risk, saving thousands of young lives in places like New York City.

Mr. Sharpton’s longevity as a public figure rests on the enduring power of racial grievance to elevate those politicians who accede to it, while distracting attention from the family and social breakdown afflicting the black community.

Al Sharpton embodies the spirit of the Democratic Party. So does Mayor de Blasio, for whose sleazy political biography go here.

Zale Thompson, a convert to Islam, yesterday tried to kill New York police officers with an axe.

While the group of four stood on a rain-wet Queens sidewalk, Thompson took his weapon out of a bag and rushed at them. He seriously wounded two. With one of his blows he chopped into the arm of Officer Joseph Meeker. With another he cracked the skull of Officer Kenneth Healey. Both victims are in hospital and expected to survive. Thompson was shot dead.

The New York Post calls Thompson a “psycho”, a “madman”. And it reports Police Commissioner William Bratton stating at a press conference –

There’s nothing we know at this time that would indicate that [Islamic terrorism] is the case.

It also reports:

Thompson’s Facebook page includes a passage from the Quran in Arabic script beseeching Allah’s guidance in finding “the straight path” and a black-and-white photograph of a black-scarved militant.

And he wrote on his Facebook page:

Helicopters, big military will be useless on their own soil. They will not be able to defeat our people if we use guerilla warfare. Attack their weak flanks.

The paper also mentions this:

Thompson is being investigated for broader terrorist connections, a law enforcement source said, adding, “There are suspected terror ties.”

So why does a fairly sensible newspaper call this obvious Muslim jihadi a madman, as if to exonerate Islam?

In our opinion, it is insanity to believe the absurdities every religion teaches. We think belief is for the most part a quirk in the minds of otherwise rational beings.

But if this Muslim, Zale Thompson, is to be considered mad because he carries out his duty, as prescribed by Islam, to kill non-Muslims, then all jihadis everywhere are madmen. There are no exceptions.

Their lunacy cannot, however, be regarded as an extenuating condition. Deranged or not, they are a threat to non-Muslims anywhere, to the Western world as a whole, and the United States in particular.

Contrary to President Obama’s assertion that “we will never be at war with Islam”, Islam is at war with us.

Is it not time we fought back?

While the US Air Force continues to bomb what it thinks are IS/ISIS/ISIL positions in what was, but may not still be, Syria and Iraq, convoys of trucks bearing life-saving aid in huge supplies donated by the US taxpayer (among others) also continue, trailing unstoppably into enemy territory.

No other air forces seems to be at work there, though to prop up the lie that a huge coalition – including Sunni Arab states – had joined the US in its aerial action against  the Islamic State, the world was treated to a glamor pic of a pretty female Qatari pilot leading a squadron of three bombers on the first day of the venture. Did she drop any bombs? And where has she gone? Will she be back? Without her, Obama and Kerry must seem to be combatting IS/ISIS/ISIL all by themselves (by proxy of course) from the clouds.

They also drop crates of arms and ammunition to whomever finds them down below. Some to the Kurds who are fighting ISIS on the ground – if the Kurds are lucky enough to find them. And one load – at least – whether by accident or intention, to ISIS.

And while the bombing displays admirable militancy on the part of the White House, and the gift of arms to ISIS may have been an accident, the US and Britain and the (abominable) United Nations and possibly the EU are deliberately delivering massive quantities of aid to the Islamic State (IS/ISIS/ISIL).

ISIS crucifies boys; saws off Americans’ and Britons’ heads; stoned a timid young girl to death just recently – her own father among her killers. And still the trucks of aid go trundling in, bringing food and medical supplies to ISIS. Well, ostensibly it’s for “civilians” and “displaced persons”, but ISIS rules the route.

This is our Facebook page summary of an article by Jamie Dettmer in the Daily Beast:

In addition to accidentally airdropping loads of weapons to ISIS, and while U.S. warplanes strike at them, truckloads of U.S. and Western aid is flowing into their territory, assisting IS/ISIS/ISIL to build their caliphate. The food and medical equipment, meant for civilians, is funded by the U.S. Agency for International Development, European donors, and the United Nations. But the aid convoys have to pay off ISIS.

The bribes are disguised and itemized as transportation costs. Aid coordinators say that USAID and other Western government agencies and NGOs actually employ ISIS people on their staffs. “They force people on us. And when a convoy is being prepared, the negotiations go through them. They contact their leaders and a price is worked out.”

The aid itself isn’t carefully monitored. ISIS keeps some of it to feed and treat its fighters. At a minimum, the aid means ISIS doesn’t have to divert cash from its war budget to help feed the local population or the displaced persons.

Last year when there was a polio outbreak in Deir ez-Zor, the World Health Organization worked with ISIS to carry out an immunization campaign. In these ways the West, and in particular the US, is providing support for the Islamic State.

Many aid workers are uncomfortable with what’s happening. “A few months ago we delivered a mobile clinic [to the Islamic State],” says one of them. “A few of us debated the rights and wrongs of this. The clinic was earmarked for the treatment of civilians, but we all know that wounded ISIS fighters could easily be treated as well. So what are we doing here, treating their fighters so they can fight again?”

What makes the picture even more bizarre is that while a lot of aid is going into ISIS-controlled areas, very little is going into Kurdish areas in northeast Syria where the Kurds are now defending Kobani with the support of U.S. warplanes. Last November, tellingly, Syrian Kurds complained that they were not included in the U.N. polio-vaccination campaign.

According to the same source: Jonathan Schanzer, Mideast expert at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, thinks that any aid that reaches the people will  help to keep them contented with ISIS rule. He’s quoted as saying:

I am alarmed that we are providing support for ISIS governance. By doing so we are indemnifying the militants by satisfying the core demands of local people, who could turn on ISIS if they got frustrated.

We see his point, but doubt that there is going to be an uprising against ISIS within the Islamic State any time soon, no matter what the circumstances.

A State Department official is reported to fear that if the aid convoys were to be stopped, there would be an humanitarian crisis for which the West would be blamed. We don’t think fear of blame should be of any concern. Why are all these sentimental Western policy makers and executives so afraid of being blamed? It is blame by Muslims that they particularly fear. What is withholding aid from an enemy state compared to what the Muslims of ISIS are doing? It’s an absurd consideration, but it distorts policies, both domestic and foreign, over and over again.