Did you hear the one about a crowd of terrorists holding a conference in the name of counter-terrorism? Sponsored by the Obama administration? What’s painfully funny about it is that it really happened.

Diana West writes at Townhall:

The Washington Free Beacon reported this week on the continuing omission of Israel from a U.S.-sponsored organization called the Global Counterterrorism Forum (GCTF). At a recent forum meeting in Spain, Maria Otero, U.S. undersecretary of state for civilian security, democracy and human rights, delivered a speech titled “Victims of Terrorism,” but, in her roll call of victims, she didn’t mention Israel. The conference at which she spoke was described as a “high-level conference on the victims of terrorism,” but Israel wasn’t a participant.

It bears repeating because it is so fantastic: At an international conference devoted to victims of terrorism, the world’s leading victim or, better, leading target of terrorism — Israel — was nowhere in sight, or mind. 

Welcome to the GCTF — U.S. counterterrorism’s new “normal.” This 30-member organization got its official start last September as a “major initiative” of the Obama administration when Secretary of State Hillary Clinton announced its launch in New York.

It was quite an occasion; Hillary curled her hair. Seated next to her Turkish co-chairman, ensconced amid ministers from Algeria, Egypt, Indonesia, Jordan, Morocco, Pakistan, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates …

All of which are or have been breeding-grounds of terrorists, and some of which – Turkey, Algeria, Egypt, Pakistan – are or have been active state sponsors of terrorism …

… and 18 other miscellaneous member-states plus the European Union, she then said the magic words: “From London to Lahore, from Madrid to Mumbai, from Kabul to Kampala, it’s innocent civilians who have been targeted …”

Jerusalem, Tel Aviv, Ashkelon? Poof, gone. And that’s the point: This new counterterrorism organization, with its related counterterrorism center coming soon to Abu Dhabi, is Judenfrei. Not coincidentally, it is also heavily Islamic. Eleven member-states — slightly more than one-third of the organization’s membership — also belong to the Organization of Islamic Cooperation (OIC), a bloc of 56 Islamic countries working to impose Islamic law (Shariah) on the world. Six of those 11 members additionally belong to the Arab League. Both groups have defined “terrorism” to exclude Israeli victims (sometimes U.S. soldiers), and “terrorists” to exclude groups dedicated to the destruction of Israel, such as Hamas and Hezbollah. It is no wonder the Arab-Islamic members would now unite in “counterterrorism” without Israel.

What is both shocking and shameful, however, is that the U.S. would, too. It shows that the U.S. has implicitly but clearly accepted the Arab League/OIC definitions of terrorism and terrorists. …

Their implied definition of terrorism is:  “Israel defending itself”. Their implied definition of terrorist: a Jew.

Under the Bushes … while Israel was not permitted to fight alongside coalition forces, at least it was still recognized for withstanding more than 60 years of Islamic terrorist attacks. Today, under the auspices of the Obama administration, Israel no longer rates mention even as a victim. “Big Satan” has thrown “Little Satan” to the sharks. Which says two things about Big Satan. Our institutions now see the world from the Islamic perspective, and, as far as the sharks go, we’re next.

And this is from politicalmavens.com by Rachel Raskin-Zrihen:

So, there’s this Global Counterterrorism Forum comprised of 32 countries, including the United States, Columbia, Canada, South Africa, Nigeria, Australia and New Zealand. It also includes the European Union, nine European countries, 10 Arab/Muslim countries and three Asian ones.

This group was formed last year, under the United States’ leadership, for policymakers and experts in the counterterrorism field to share insights and best practices.0

Great idea, right?

Inexplicably, however, not included in the forum is Israel, easily in the top three on the list of the world’s most frequent terror targets and likely the most skilled at fighting the scourge. …

Inexplicably? Not at all. It could not be more obvious: Obama loves Islam and hates Israel.

Since no explanation has been offered by our government, we are left to speculate about why this is happening, and I suspect that were they to deign to explain their actions, Obama Administration officials would likely say it’s about getting the nations where the terrorists are spawned to help fight them, without pissing them off by inviting the Jews. It’s the only thing they can say, really. But I’m not buying it. And I’m not the only one.

After it was learned that the United State’s “best friend and closest ally” was excluded from this forum, our country’s officials assured those expressing concern that “a way would be found” to include it.

I find it peculiar, since we created the forum and Israel is among our closest allies and an expert on the issue, that a special way must be found to include it, different from the way the others came to be on the panel, but, evidently, it does.

However, it’s been a year and nothing has changed. Maybe they thought no one would notice.

But, at least two U.S. Senators did notice and wrote to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, who attended this forum, and demanded to know why this glaring omission remains uncorrected.

Also, the Simon Wiesenthal Center took exception to the blatant insult, not to mention the stupidity of failing to include the player with the most direct experience with the phenomenon and the best track record at fighting it, and fired off an urgent letter of protest to Ms. Clinton.

The center’s founder, Rabbi Marvin Hier, reportedly wrote of his awareness that Turkey and some others “oppose an Israeli presence,” but notes that – SO THE EFF WHAT?

Are we trying to fight the most deadly dangerous threat to humanity to ever have slithered out of hell, or are we trying to appease the Arabs?

Answer: Obama and Hillary Clinton are trying to appease the Arabs.

Rabbi Hier also said that “having a Global Counterterrorism Forum and not including Israel, is like having a global technology conference and excluding the United States of America.” And, noting “there is no one with more experience at combating terrorism or educating civilians about it, than the State of Israel,” he said, “I think the time has come for the United States to make it very clear why Israel continues to be excluded.”

Me, too. But, I’m not sure we’ll get an honest answer, or, if we do, we’re prepared to hear it.

The first, and most obvious explanation, is that the Arab/Muslim contingent “objects” to the Jewish state’s inclusion. In other words, the bully objects to the victim’s presence at a discussion ostensibly designed to stop bullying.

Bullying is too mild a word, of course, but her point is good.

It’s a phenomenon similar to the so-called Anti-Racism conference in Durban, South Africa, which was actually an officially sanctioned, international Jew-and-Israel-bashing free-for-all, with a name that really only served to add insult to injury.

It’s another act of bullying, right in our face, and we – and by we I mean the United States and the rest of the free, normal-thinking world – is afraid to set the crazies off by defying their demands. …

This is unfortunate, obviously, because it’s proof certain that terrorism is working to cow even the world’s greatest powers.

In the light of this, the appointment of an Israeli as the UN Security Council’s top counterterrorism lawyer is simply astounding.

The Washington Post reports:

The United Nations has promoted a former Israeli government attorney to a job as the Security Council’s top counterterrorism lawyer, making him the only Israeli national serving in a senior security position within the U.N. Secretariat …  David Scharia has been appointed legal coordinator for the Counter-Terrorism Committee executive directorate, where he will oversee a team of 12 international legal experts who advise the 15-nation Security Council on its counterterrorism efforts. The appointment would not typically be notable were it not so uncommon for Israelis to reach the upper levels at the United Nations. … Of the more than 44,000 international employees within the United Nations, only 124 are Israeli, according to the U.N. None serve in the top ranks of the most sensitive political jobs, which are responsible for maintaining international security, mediating peace deals and coordinating humanitarian assistance.

Why suddenly is an Israeli appointed to such a job at the UN?

A plausible explanation may be that the UN fears a cutting off of funds by the US Congress. (See here and here and here and here.)

Our preference would be for Congress to cut off all funds to the disgusting UN. The UN should be wiped off the face of the earth. See our post Why the UN must be destroyed, June 12, 2012.

A few days ago Obama told a crowd in Roanoke, Va., “If you’ve got a business — you didn’t build that. Somebody else made that happen.”

In Obama’s phrase book, “somebody else” means the government.

Here’s the opposite opinion.

This post is about “the false and dangerous morality of pity”

The quoted words are those of Bret Stephens, deputy editorial page editor and foreign-affairs columnist for the Wall Street Journal. He delivered a speech at Commentary’s annual dinner on June 4 at the St. Regis Hotel in New York City, from which these  extracts, from an adaptation of the speech at the Commentary website, are taken:

On the fourth of June, 1967, there were excellent reasons to side with Israel. It was a democracy besieged and assaulted by tyrannies. Its maritime rights had been violated by Egypt’s closure of the Straits of Tiran; international law was on its side. It had compelling reasons to believe it was under mortal threat. It made no territorial demands on its neighbors, much less call for their destruction. It was a net contributor, scientifically and culturally, to the march of civilization. Simply put, the Israelis were the good guys.

Yet the reason usually cited for sympathizing with Israel that fourth of June is that it was the underdog — the proverbial 98-pound weakling versus its big bullying neighbors. And this was true, albeit only partially true, because Israel quickly demonstrated that it wasn’t such a weakling after all.

And from the moment Israel won that war, thus securing its survival, it lost the sympathy of the world. We know that some newspapers had prepared Crocodile-tear editorials regretting the demise of a short-lived state of Israel. To feel for Jews suffering flattered the “feelers”; to feel for Jews triumphant did not.

It is to this deplorable weakness, this eroticism of the ego, that Christian morality and “social justice” advocacy – which means the entire ideology of the Left – pander.

Bret Stephens reasons:

But it’s hard to make a defensible case for siding with the underdog based on underdog-status alone. Was Saddam Hussein hiding in his spider hole a better man than he was in his palaces? Were the allies in 1945 less deserving of victory than they were in 1942? Was Israel’s cause less right on June 12, right after the war, than it had been on June 4? These are the kind of nonsense propositions you are bound to wind up with if you make moral judgments based on underdog – or overdog – status alone.

The instinct to side with the underdog arises, at least in part, from the guilty pleasure of pity — the feeling of superiority that the sensation of pity almost automatically confers. Pity, it turns out, is not a form of sympathy, or empathy, or a genuinely humane concern for the misfortunes of others. On the contrary, pity is really a form of self-congratulation, an act of condescension, a sublimated type of narcissism. Little wonder, then, that the politics of pity should thrive in … our culture of narcissism.

Consider the ways these politics plays out in our lives today. Remember that headline in Le Monde from September 12, 2001—“Nous Sommes Tous Américains”—“We Are All Americans”? Le Monde’s editorial pity lasted just so long as the wreckage of the Twin Towers smoldered in the ground, and then it was straight back to bashing the hyperpuissance. Or take the condemnation of the United States, by outfits such as Amnesty International, for the killing of Osama bin Laden. Poor Osama, defenseless before those marauding SEALs!

Yet nowhere do the politics of pity play out more vividly than when it comes to the Palestinians. How is it that, at least on the left, the Palestinians have become the new Chosen People? Part of the answer surely lies in the fact that Palestinians, uniquely, are the perceived victims of the Jewish state, and therefore another vehicle for castigating Jews. If you believe that Jews can do no right, you’re probably disposed to think that Palestinians can do no wrong — especially when they are attacking Jews.

But that’s not the whole answer. People who really aren’t anti-Semites or knee-jerk enemies of Israel nonetheless are disposed to make all kinds of allowances for Palestinians that can only be explained by the politics of pity. How many billions in international aid have been given to the Palestinians, and what percentage of those monies has been squandered or stolen? How often have Palestinians made atrocious political choices without ever paying a price for them in terms of international regard?

The reason Palestinians don’t have to earn global sympathy by showing themselves worthy of it is that they are the perceived underdogs and are therefore automatically entitled to the benefit of every doubt. And it is because “caring” for the Palestinians flatters the vanity of their sympathizers. I don’t think the world really loves the Palestinians. But … it does “love to love” them. Being pro-Palestinian, as that term is typically used, is not a testament to compassion. It is, more often than not, an act of self-love. It’s moral onanism.

Competing for the title of who is the most pitiable is shameful. Competing for the title of who is the more pitying is despicable. 

Bret Stephens warns mistaken friends of Israel from entering the pity-stakes:

In recent years, friends of Israel, and many Israelis as well, have sought to reengage the world’s affections by trying to portray Israel as the real underdog — in other words, to enter a contest of victimhood with the Palestinians.

Israel was not founded to serve as another vehicle for showcasing Jewish victimhood, but for ending it.

Right, right, right!

In order for one to deal effectively with the world, whether as individual or statesman, it is necessary to know the world as it is. It is a world full of danger, evil, and cruelty. Sentimentalizing it into something other than it is, pretending that human nature is “fundamentally good”, or can be changed by ideology, is to make a dumb mistake. Every human being suffers, and every human being inflicts suffering. The moral thing to do is to try not to harm others – a hard, if not impossible, task. 

Bret Stephens looks at what is happening in the world now with clear sight:

The world as we would wish it to be is not a world in which Syria is bleeding, the Chinese are increasing the rate of annual military spending by a double-digit percentage, the Arab Spring is turning to an Islamist winter, Europe is imploding economically, and Iran is brazening its way to a nuclear bomb. That world is the real world, and it is the world the rest of us inhabit: the world of the concrete fact, the world of the worsening circumstance. It is the world in which decisions are made harder, not easier, by delay, in which delay increases the chances of failure, and of death.

It is a world choked with pity, yet pitiless.

The whole speech as it appears in Commentary is well worth reading.

Dr Paul Kengor talks about his book The Communist. It is about Frank Marshall Davis, who was Barack Obama’s political mentor early in his life, in the Cold War era. (Later – by his own admission –  Obama deliberately chose Marxist professors to be his teachers. At the start of his political career in Chicago – though he has denied it –  he associated closely with extreme-left terrorists.)

(Video from Impeach Obama Campaign)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Obama is energetically pursuing his policy of making as many Americans as he can dependent on the government.

This is from the Heritage Foundation:

The imperial Presidency has overturned Congress and the law again. Not content to stop at rewriting immigration policy, education policy and energy policy, yesterday, President Obama’s Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) released an official policy directive rewriting the welfare reform law of 1996. The new policy guts the federal work requirements that were the foundation of the Clinton-era reform. …

Welfare reform replaced the old Aid to Families with Dependent Children with a new program, Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF). … The whole point was that able-bodied adults should be required to work or prepare for work as a condition of receiving welfare aid.

This reform was very successful. TANF became the only welfare program (out of more than 70) that promoted greater self-reliance. It moved 2.8 million families off the welfare rolls and into jobs so that they were providing for themselves. Child poverty fell, and single-parent employment rose. Recipients were required to perform at least 20–30 hours per week of work or job preparation activities in exchange for the cash benefit.

Now, Obama’s HHS is claiming that it can waive those work requirements that are at the heart of the law, and without Congress’s consent.

When it established TANF, Congress deliberately exempted or shielded nearly all of the TANF program from waiver authority. They explicitly did not want the law to be rewritten at the whim of HHS bureaucrats. In a December 2001, the non-partisan Congressional Research Service clarified that there was no authority to override work and other major requirements…

But that did not stop the Obama Administration, which has been increasing welfare spending at an alarming rate already. President Obama has added millions to the welfare rolls, and his Administration has come under fire lately for its efforts to expand and add more Americans to the food stamp program. …

Over the past two decades, welfare spending has grown more rapidly than Social Security and Medicare, education, and defense. The TANF reform was one small step in the direction of reducing Americans’ dependence on government programs and getting them back on their feet. Cutting its work component is likely to unnecessarily swell the ranks of welfare recipients and with no way to pay for it.

Heritage experts Robert Rector and Kiki Bradley explained further …:

In the past, state bureaucrats have attempted to define activities such as hula dancing, attending Weight Watchers, and bed rest as “work.” These dodges were blocked by the federal work standards. Now that the Obama Administration has abolished those standards, we can expect “work” in the TANF program to mean anything but work. The new welfare dictate issued by the Obama Administration clearly guts the law.

What can be done about a president who breaks the law, whose administration executes his orders in defiance of the legislature?

Will the Supreme Court stop him? Probably not.

This is from Townhall, by Ken Blackwell:

Chief Justice Roberts shows extraordinary deference to the federal government when the actions of the president or Congress are challenged for exceeding federal powers under the authority clauses. …

Part of the consternation from the Obamacare decision was seeing Chief Justice Roberts engage in linguistic gymnastics to ignore Congress’ word choice in writing the statute and the president’s televised vows, upholding the individual mandate as a tax despite 200 years of precedent that penalties are not taxes. …

This reluctance to unapologetically apply judicial review when authority clauses are implicated bodes ill for many current court challenges. There might not be five votes to succeed in challenges to Dodd-Frank, EPA’s cap-and-trade rules, the FCC’s internet-control rules, the recess-appointment challenges, and other power grabs.

Mr. Obama announced on July 6 in Ohio that this election is about a “clash of visions” about the role of government in our lives, arguing for massive entitlements and regulatory controls. If he wins, he will claim a mandate and take federal power to heights we’ve never seen. We can no longer be confident that the Supreme Court will stop him.

Liberty endures only when each branch fully and fearlessly checks and balances the other two branches. Abdicating judicial review empowers President Obama to subvert the Constitution with an imperial presidency, and fundamentally transform the United States to the detriment of future generations.

One remedy of course is to vote Obama out of office.

But if he is not voted out in November, how will the Republic be saved from becoming a full-blown dictatorship?

We quote from Arnold Ahlert’s open letter to Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney, because we too are irritated by the flaccid, passionless, MacCain-like campaign he is running:

The letter comes from Canada Free Press:

Dear Mr. Romney:

Since you apparently have advisors that are very clever people, perhaps a word from a troglodyte like me might be refreshing. In the last two weeks, you have tried to explain the difference between “off-shoring” and “outsourcing” with respect to the economy, and despite the great gift handed to you by our addled Chief Justice, John Roberts, you insisted on playing a semantical game between calling Obamacare a “constitutional tax” or an “unconstitutional penalty.”

Let me give you a clue: the overwhelming number of people who understand and/or appreciate the nuances in such parsing of the language already know who they’re going to vote for. They’re the ones who follow politics, have a far higher understanding of economics than the average American, and make an ongoing effort to pay attention to what’s happening in general.

The rest of America knows there is an election in November, and not a whole lot else. Luckily for you, most of them won’t even be paying attention to the details of that election until September or October. That doesn’t make them unintelligent …  For the most part it means that a lot of them are busy living their lives, trying to get from one day to the next. And while a lot of them know there’s something not quite right with this economy, they can’t immerse themselves in the kind of facts and figures — or nuance — that you and your campaign managers seemingly think they can.

You know why a slogan like “tax the rich” works so well? Because it taps into one of mankind’s baser instincts, namely envy. And as you and yours have likely surmised by now, Mr. Obama and Democrats will tap into whatever negative instincts human beings possess, if it means winning the 2012 election. Divide-and-conquer is as old as the Romans, and has been effective for that long as well.

So here’s my advice. First, reduce your campaign to its simplest terms. …

The bottom line here is this: you need a slogan that captures the essence of American exceptionalism. …When Ronald Reagan referred to America as a “shining city on a hill,” Mr. Peanuts had no comeback. …

Yet even more importantly, maybe game-changing, have the guts to admit that your Massachusetts healthcare plan was a stinker. That’s right, admit you made a colossal mistake, even if it was for what you considered all the right reasons. If you don’t understand why, let me explain it in political terms that are quite germane, even if somewhat oblique: the cover-up, or in this case the cover-my-ass, is worse than the original “crime.” Watergate, Monica Lewinsky, and Fast and Furious are as in-your-face as it gets regarding that truism. A presidential resignation, an impeachment leading to a $90,000 fine and disbarment, and a contempt of Congress citation are a testament to the kind of arrogance and stubbornness that turns people off. So does giving Mr. Obama and his media harpies something to club you with, over and over again. …

Understand something else as well. You’re never going to be perceived as a regular Joe, no matter how hard you try. It’s just not part of your DNA, it’s never been part of your DNA, and any attempt to make it so will be taken for exactly what it is: overt pandering. What you need to demonstrate above all else is quite different.

You need passion.

It’s not enough to have the right argument, if you’re going to deliver it in measured — dare I say sleep-inducing — terms. Ask John McCain how staying “above the fray” works in a presidential campaign. I know this seems like a contradiction, but it’s worth remembering Ronald Reagan, in the midst of praising the nation, wasn’t afraid to ask the question that became the quintessential slogan of the 1980 election campaign. To wit: are you better of now than your were four years ago? …

Any criticism of this president and his policies will be deemed racist by the Democrats and their useful idiots in the media. Get over it.

And get over the idea that any topic, from the president’s associations with race-baiter Jeremiah Wright and Weather Underground Terrorist Bill Ayers, to the various scandals of this administration, such as the Operation Fast and Furious gun-running debacle and the crony capitalism surrounding Solyndra and LightSquared., are “off-limits” because a bunch of progressives say so. 

Finally, stop pretending Barack Obama is anything less than a Constitutionally-contemptuous, Congress-bypassing, fact-challenged, socialist/Marxist, no matter how “appalled” the chattering classes become.

This country is hanging by a thread, and if you can’t make the case — and make it with gusto — that he and his administration are an unmitigated disaster, you’re going to lose an election you should win in a walk. In other words, a little righteous anger goes a long, long, long way.

Cleverness is for losers, and nice guys finish last. Step out of the self-generated campaign bubble, sir. Whether you like it or not, you may be the last best hope for our nation.

Start acting like it.

Suggestions for a Romney campaign slogan are invited.

The most evil man in the universe possibly

The caption to the picture of the Archbishop of Canterbury, the abominable Rowan Willams, is by James Delingpole. In a clear-sighted article in the Telegraph, he writes:

It seems to me that behind that wild, comedy-wizard beard and those gnomic, overintellectual pronouncements and … platitudes lurks a malign spirit of genuinely evil purpose and influence. And I’m not the only one to have noticed.

Martin Durkin … in a characteristically brilliant essay titled Evil Dressed Up As Good … notes the paradox of the modern Church: that while expressing much concern for … the plight of the poor …, it persistently champions policies guaranteed to make the poor poorer … 

The Archbishop of Canterbury is writing a book in which he lambasts the government for shrinking the State. In its current ‘shrunken’ form, the state accounts for around half of the UK economy. This is evidently sinful. It should be bigger, presumably like the economies of the former communist countries of Eastern Europe. Anglicanism has become extremely political. The Archbishop’s Council has just reprimanded the government for vetoing changes to the EU treaty last December and warned them not to think of leaving the EU. In his speech at the St. Paul’s service to mark the Queen’s diamond jubilee, the Archbishop cursed bankers and said we ought to look after the environment and be less greedy. …

It is not just any old politics the church embraces. It is the big State, high tax, green, protectionist, Keynesian politics of the left and fascist right. But as many people have pointed out, once the sanctimonious veneer is stripped away, these polices have been shown not to be in the interests of ordinary people. Socialism promised to liberate and enrich the masses, but it was discovered long ago that it did the exact opposite. Indeed so many of the bishops’ rants seem to be directed against the interests of the world’s poorest. The E.U. (so beloved of the bishops) is a protectionist club which, it is well known, has caused untold misery to African and Asian farmers, and has also raised the cost of food enormously for everyone in Europe (needless to say, the poorest are hardest hit). The green bandwagon, onto which the bishops have jumped with such fervour, is clearly directed against the world’s poorest people on so many fronts – preventing them from using DDT to keep malaria at bay, preventing them from using inorganic fertilizers and pesticides and herbicides and GM crops in order to grow more food, preventing them from using the cheapest forms of electrical generation in order to join the modern world, and so on. …

Anyone with eyes to see realises that we’re on the edge of a precipice here. …

Friends, allies: we have our work cut out. Victory is by no means certain. But the consequences of failure are unthinkable.

We could suggest a few other persons who have at least equal claim with the Achbishop to the Universal Gold-Medal Championship of Evil, but we certainly accept that he’s well qualified to compete.