We keep reading that the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) was an unindicted co-conspirator in the Holy Land Foundation terror finance trial in 2007 and 2008. And we keep wondering why it remains unindicted.

Now we have the answer, scandalous but not surprising. It has been obvious from the start of Obama’s presidency that the present US administration is strongly pro-Islam, despite the fact that Islam is waging war on the US.*

Patrick Poole breaks the story at PajamasMedia:

A number of leaders of Islamic organizations … were about to be indicted on terror finance support charges by the U.S. attorney’s office in Dallas, which had been investigating the case for most of the past decade. But those indictments were scuttled last year at the direction of top-level political appointees within the Department of Justice (DOJ) — and possibly even the White House.

“This was a political decision from the get-go,” [our DOJ] source said.

“It was always the plan to initially go after the [Holy Land Foundation] leaders first and then go after the rest of the accomplices in a second round of prosecutions. From a purely legal point of view, the case was solid. …

But from a political perspective there was absolutely no way that they could move forward. That’s why this decision came from the top down. These individuals who were going to be prosecuted are still the administration’s interfaith allies. … It’s kind of hard to prosecute someone on material support for terrorism when you have pictures of them getting handed awards from DOJ and FBI leaders for their supposed counter-terror efforts. How would Holder explain that when we’re carting off these prominent Islamic leaders in handcuffs for their role in a terror finance conspiracy we’ve been investigating for years? This is how bad the problem is. Why are we continuing to have anything to do with these groups knowing what we know?

“By closing down these prosecutions … the evidence we’ve collected over the past decade that implicates most of the major Islamic organizations will never see the light of day.”

The FBI still has boxes and boxes of stuff that has never even been translated  … But it’s already been made public that they have copies of money transfers sent by NAIT [the North American Islamic Trust] directly to known Hamas entities and Hamas leaders. …

The actions by the DOJ to crush these prosecutions are just another schizophrenic episode in the U.S. government’s ongoing relationship with Islamic organizations, especially CAIR. After CAIR was named unindicted co-conspirator in the Holy Land trial, the FBI was forced to cut ties with the group. … Yet …  CAIR leaders continue to be regularly received by top DOJ and FBI officials despite the official ban …

I asked my DOJ source why they decided to come forward now. The source said:

“This is a national security issue. We know that these Muslim leaders and groups are continuing to raise money for Hamas and other terrorist organizations. Ten years ago we shut down the Holy Land Foundation. It was the right thing to do. Then the money started going to KindHearts. We shut them down too. Now the money is going through groups like Islamic Relief and Viva Palestina. Until we act decisively to cut off the financial pipeline to these terrorist groups by putting more of these people in prison, they are going to continue to raise money that will go into the hands of killers. And until Congress starts grilling the people inside DOJ and the FBI who are giving these groups cover, that is not going to change. … ”

But if the U.S. government publicly acknowledges the terror ties of these groups why do they continue to deal with them?

“We tried to do what we could during the Bush administration. After 9/11, we had to do something and [the Holy Land Foundation] was the biggest target.

To say things are different under Obama and Holder would be an understatement. Many of the people I work with at Justice now see CAIR not just as political allies, but ideological allies. They believe they are fighting the same revolution. It’s scary. And Congress and the American people need to know this is going on.”

The American people need to know that the present leadership of the United States is not just letting Islam wage jihad, not just allowing the funding of Hamas terrorism, but is “fighting the same  revolution”. The Islamic revolution. That is the name of the change Obama and Holder hope for.

But how will they be informed of this when most of the media, being themselves complicit in “the revolution”, are unwilling and unlikely to tell them?

*

*Further to this, from Corruption Chronicles:

In the Obama Administration’s continuing effort to befriend Muslims, the United States will for the first time host an international Islamic forum held annually in the Middle East and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton will headline the three-day event. …

Bringing the Islamic forum to the U.S. is simply the latest of many Muslim outreach efforts for the administration. In the last year alone Napolitano discussed national security matters with a group of extremist Muslim organizations, the nation’s space agency (NASA) was ordered to focus on Muslim diplomacy and Clinton signed a special order to allow the reentry of two radical Islamic academics whose terrorist ties long banned them from the U.S. …

The Justice Department also created a special Arab-American and Muslim Engagement Advisory Group to foster greater communication, collaboration and a new level of respect between law enforcement and Muslim and Arab-American communities.

Was the Republic of the United States created as a Christian nation?

Warren Throckmorton, in a Townhall article here, asks a question more precisely focused but essentially the same: “Did the first amendment create a Christian nation?”

His answer is no. He explains:

Most states had established Christian denominations in the years before the passage of the Constitution but two states did not, Rhode Island and Virginia. Virginia, the home of Madison and Jefferson, is the most relevant to what would become the First Amendment. In 1786, Madison succeeded in shepherding religious freedom protections through the Virginia legislature that in his words, “have in this country extinguished forever the ambitious hope of making laws for the human mind.”

Unfortunately not forever. “Hate crimes” are laws for the human mind. And they are entirely unnecessary. Those who commit them are either committing a crime, in which case they should be prosecuted regardless of what emotion accompanied it, or they did not, in which case the law should disregard them, hate though they might.

Still, what Madison did achieve was great and lasting – at least until now.

The law that gave Madison his ebullient hope was the Virginia Act for Establishing Religious Freedom, which reads in part:

“Be it enacted by the General Assembly, That no man shall be compelled to frequent or support any religious worship, place, or ministry whatsoever, nor shall be enforced restrained, molested, or burthened in his body or goods, nor shall otherwise suffer on account of his religious opinions or belief; but that all men shall be free to profess, and by argument to maintain, their opinion in matters of religion, and that the same shall in no wise diminish, enlarge, or affect their civil capacities.”

According to Thomas Jefferson, who had no small hand in the matter,some Virginia legislators wanted to direct the act toward Christianity by inserting Jesus Christ into a section of the Preamble. Jefferson’s account makes clear the extent of the freedom of expression which the Virginia legislature affirmed:

“The bill for establishing religious freedom, the principles of which had, to a certain degree, been enacted before, I had drawn in all the latitude of reason and right. It still met with opposition; but, with some mutilations in the preamble, it was finally passed; and a singular proposition proved that its protection of opinion was meant to be universal. Where the preamble declares, that coercion is a departure from the plan of the holy author of our religion, an amendment was proposed, by inserting the word “Jesus Christ,” so that it should read, “a departure from the plan of Jesus Christ, the holy author of our religion;” the insertion was rejected by a great majority, in proof that they meant to comprehend, within the mantle of its protection, the Jew and the Gentile, the Christian and Mahometan [Islam], the Hindoo [Hinduism], and Infidel of every denomination.”

So Jefferson allowed a “holy author of our religion” to haunt the law, but managed to exclude naming it Jesus Christ. It seems most of the legislators had some notion that “Jew, Gentile, Christian, Mahometan and Hindoo ” all shared a belief in such a being. If so, they were mistaken of course. And whether Jefferson himself believed in it no one can be certain.

Jefferson and Madison sought to get the state out of the business of “making laws for the human mind.” In so doing …  Madison and Jefferson moved Virginia, and later the nation away from a national religion. …

Virginia moved away from having one of the most solidly established churches all the way to join little Rhode Island on the side of full religious liberty and the separation of church and state.

Madison followed up his success in Virginia with a proposed amendment to the Constitution in 1789 covering religious expression:

“The civil rights of none shall be abridged on account of religious belief or worship, nor shall any national religion be established, nor shall the full and equal rights of conscience be in any manner, or on any pretext, infringed.”

Through debate, Madison’s language was modified to the current First Amendment – “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.” Madison’s work in Virginia and his original proposal make clear that freedom of religious expression is an individual right and not meant for adherents of a particular religion, namely Christianity. …

The First Amendment forbids federal laws which interfere with a citizen’s free expression of religion and the Fourteenth Amendment extends the prohibition to the states.

Madison argued that Christianity itself supported the broad tolerance he was enshrining. Whether he was using the argument purely to achieve his end, or sincerely believed that Christianity was as tolerant as he was painting it, remains unknowable. The point is, it worked. He persuaded the people he needed to persuade.

He put it this way – explaining to the Virginia Assembly why they should not vote funds for teachers of Christianity:

“The establishment proposed by the Bill is not requisite for the support of the Christian Religion. To say that it is, is a contradiction to the Christian Religion itself, for every page of it disavows a dependence on the powers of this world: it is a contradiction to fact; for it is known that this Religion both existed and flourished, not only without the support of human laws, but in spite of every opposition from them, and not only during the period of miraculous aid, but long after it had been left to its own evidence and the ordinary care of Providence.”

With that he must have have sounded like a true believer, which he needed the Assembly to be convinced he was.

If he really was as firm a believer as he sounded then, it is all the more remarkable that he worked and pleaded so persistently and skillfully for the greatest possible tolerance of all religious belief and (by implication) none.  Or to put it another way: either he was an extraordinarily broad-minded Christian, or he was an extraordinarily persuasive non-believer. It matters not which, since he achieved the end which did matter and continues to matter – the absence of a national religion.

But now the freedom of conscience and belief that Madison bequeathed to the nation is under threat from “the Mahometan”.  Muslims whose freedom of religion he ensured, are exploiting the tolerance he enshrined, in order to destroy it.

Ann Barnhardt speaks here as a Christian, and of course we don’t go along with her “divinely ordained”, “Christ commands” statements, but otherwise we applaud what she says – eg. “Allah’s a son of a bitch” – and what she does: marking especially evil passages in the Koran with bacon, and then burning the pages. Generally, we’d rather people read the Koran than burnt it  as it is likely to appall them, but we appreciate that burning it now after the killing of 20 people in Afghanistan by Muslims because a Koran was burnt by Terry Jones in Florida (see our post, Muslim animals, April 4, 2011), is a strong and necessary political action.

We said it was a mess, the intervention in Libya. It is. And the mess is getting messier, as this RedState article makes plain:

NATO’s operations to date in Libya have been a joke … Libyan Rebel Leader Abdel Fattah Younes has asked NATO to please quit the field. He wants them out of the way…

He said: “Nato is moving very slowly, allowing Gaddafi forces to advance. Nato has become our problem. … One official calls another and then from the official to the head of Nato and from the head of Nato to the field commander. This takes eight hours.”

A part of NATO’s reticence comes from the fact that Libyan Strongman Muammar Khadafy [same guy spelt Gaddafi above] has started taking prisoners and using them as human shields.

Of course he has. That is what Arabs do. It should have been expected. Expect the rebels to do it too.

So much for Obama’s stated aim of the war: to protect civilians.

He let this girl, Samantha –  a political sentimentalist who’s been going about for years weeping for people she knows nothing about, and earning honors for doing so in the vicious circles of the left – persuade him, quite easily, that he suddenly had to “protect” Libyans from their own Ruthless Dictator (normal sort, this one established for forty years), and the result is more Libyans are being victimized than ever before.

What will the squabbling coalition diplomats and generals do now? Do they have a plan at all? A strategy? An objective?

Hmmm?

Socialism has failed in America as it has failed everywhere it has been tried, and always must. It’s a bad idea.

Now the harm the socialists have done must be undone.

We agree for the most part with these comments from an article at RedState on Paul Ryan’s budget.

This budget proposal, which would cut $5.8 trillion from the CBO baseline over the next decade, is a mature and well balanced plan emanating from a city full of fatuous demagoguery. …

It is a laudable first step that has come to fruition through the assiduous work of Paul Ryan and his Republican colleagues on the Budget Committee. It is a fresh breath of moderation and seriousness amidst the extremism that is so endemic in Washington among the Democrats. Here is a cursory breakdown of some of the major provisions of the Ryan plan, categorized by the excellent, the good, and the need for improvement.

The Excellent

Medicaid: The budget proposes a transformational change to Medicaid by converting it to a block grant program which would give states more flexibility in how to spend their Medicaid dollars. There would also be an overall cap placed on the block grants. This would encourage states to innovate and formulate the best ideas for reducing dependency, instead of exacerbating it through an open ended entitlement program. The plan would trim the cost of Medicaid by $771 billion from the CBO baseline over the next decade.

Corporate Welfare/Ethanol/Farm Subsidies: Ryan’s proposal repeals the odious ethanol subsidies lock, stock and barrel. It also reforms farm subsidies by trimming farm/corporate welfare from its current level of $25 billion. This is especially prescient given the record high food prices that have been spurred in part by these market-distorting subsidies. To address the record high energy prices, the proposal calls for an end to tax cuts for the rich – no more green subsidies!

Obamacare: It defunds Obamacare lock, stock and barrel. While much of the budget is driven by choices between several evils in order to reform existing Democrat entitlement programs, this proposal prevents ObamaCare from becoming another Medicare/Medicaid disaster.

Taxes: The proposal reduces the highest corporate and personal income tax rates to 25%.

Earmarks: The ban on earmarks is made permanent.

Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae: The budget plan cancels these economic destructive government entities and calls for their privatization. …

The Good

Medicare: Ryan proposes a premium-support program to replace the current market-distorting, bankrupting, and open-ended subsidization of all health care for seniors. Under such a plan, the government would pay the premiums of Medicare enrollees’ so they can purchase an insurance plan of their choice in the free market. As with the Medicaid proposal, this plan would mandate an overall spending cap on the amount of the premium payments.

While this plan is a prudential first step to infusing the free market into an otherwise socialized sector of the economy, the changes will not take effect for another 10 years. Also, a more conservative approach would have called for the issuance of vouchers, thereby directly empowering the individual, as opposed to perpetuating the role of government through their payments to insurance companies. …

Welfare Reform: Ryan proposes converting the Food Stamp program into a block grant to states that would be indexed to inflation and tailor made to each state’s own unique circumstances. He also wants to apply the 1996 welfare reform accountability mechanisms to other housing assistance programs. There are currently a staggering 44 million Americans on food stamps and the program is projected to cost $700 billion over the next 10 years. Ryan’s reforms offer a very good first step. On the other hand, there are still over 70 other welfare programs that cost another trillion dollars, but are untouched in this proposal. …

Need for Improvement

Social Security: The most glaring omission of Ryan’s budget plan is a fix to Social Security. It is understandable why Ryan would shy away from touching the most sacrosanct program in the federal arsenal, especially as he is bravely striking out at virtually all of the other major programs. However it must be reformed.

Abolished, we would say. We are deskchair politicians, and as such do not have to be strictly realistic. We know that politics is “the art of the possible”. We know that it is not possible to legislate too far ahead of public opinion. But as we are not legislators, only opinion pedlars, we airily declare that we would like to see absolutely no government interference in the market. There shouldn’t be the least whiff of a stub of socialism left in the ash-tray of American history, but Social Security goes smouldering on, a huge reeking stogie.

Many good conservatives are so concerned about solvency that they are calling for a raise in the retirement age and means-testing of benefits. While those proposals might succeed in making SS more solvent, they are an anathema to the ideals of free market capitalism and individual liberty. It is inconceivable that a hard working 30 year-old should be forced to work until 70 (maybe longer) and then awarded his retirement at the whims of a means-tested regime, all the while having no property rights over his retirement security.

The objective of entitlement reform is not to make a Democrat-run program solvent. Our objective vis-à-vis entitlement reform should be focused on returning the wealth to the American worker and taxpayer by promoting more liberty and prosperity. It is fair to propose much needed innovative changes such as benefit cuts and retirement age adjustments for those who optionally enroll in such a program. However, there can be no discussion of raising the retirement age without offering young workers private accounts or an option to opt out.

Taxes: Repeal Death Tax- One of the more egregious components of the grand tax deal last year was the reinstating of the immoral Death Tax at 35%. The Death Tax needs to be abolished. Period.

Non-defense discretionary spending: The proposal only cuts $1.7 trillion from domestic discretionary programs over 10 years. That adds up to roughly $170 billion in discretionary spending cuts per year. This is accomplished by bringing non-security discretionary spending back below 2008 levels and then freezing it for five years. Spending levels for most agencies should be reduced to 2006 levels. Furthermore, Republicans should take a closer look at Rand Paul’s proposal to cut up to $500 billion a year by eliminating such impotent departments as HUD [Housing and Urban Development], Education, and Energy. His plan would also seriously reduce the funding, size, and scope of the Departments of Agriculture, Commerce, HHS [Health and Human Services], Interior, and Labor.

Keep in mind that when we fund these agencies, we are not merely losing the billions or tens of billions of dollars in wasted expenditures. These superfluous agencies use that funding to impose onerous market-distorting regulations and mandates on job creation, income growth, energy productivity, and consumer purchasing power. Such a cost to our economy is incalculable.

Debt and Deficit: Due in part to the previous point, the proposal would take too long to balance the budget. For FY 2012, the government would spend $3.529 trillion and collect $2.533 trillion, still resulting in a gargantuan deficit of $995 billion. It would take another 26 years to fully balance the budget.

Conclusion

The Democrats have worked indefatigably for a century to destroy the fabric of our free market, liberty seeking society. We will not restore our republic overnight. … Paul Ryan’s proposal provides us with the building blocks from which to bring about the restoration of our constitutional government.

Will it, or something close to it, be passed?

Not easily. Socialism is an addiction, very hard to cure.

Here’s a scandalous story of the present American government doing such positive harm to American interests that it might surprise even those who believe the worst of President Obama and his clique.

Since the very first days of this president’s administration, the drug-fueled cartel violence in Mexico has provided a stalking horse for the gun control agenda. Early on, both Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and Attorney General Eric Holder cited Mexican violence as a reason to renew the Bill Clinton gun ban of 1994. After those trial balloons were shot down, the ball was passed to Mexican President Felipe Calderon, who repeatedly has blamed American gun rights for Mexican violence. And more recently, the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives [ATF] cited cartel mayhem as justification for an attempt to mandate the reporting of all multiple long gun sales in border states … effectively creating a registry.

But now, shocking revelations that grow bigger every day completely undercut the argument for additional restrictions. In fact, they illuminate bureaucratic arrogance, recklessness and hypocrisy of the highest order in the hallways of the Obama administration — including the spreading stench of a massive cover-up.

As it turns out, the ATF was already aware of efforts by shady characters to undertake mass gun purchases in border states, because law-abiding gun dealers reported the attempted purchases voluntarily. But ATF agents acting on “orders from Washington” encouraged gun dealers to complete these transactions against the dealers’ better judgment. Worse yet, the guns — thousands of them — then were allowed to be smuggled, or “walked,” into Mexico and into the hands of drug cartels. And worst of all, these guns now are turning up at crime scenes — including where a U.S. federal agent was murdered.

The operation is called “Fast and Furious,” and it’s absolutely appalling — but it’s all true, and there is still much more to come. Attorney General Holder has attempted to deflect the call for an investigation by asking the inspector general of the Justice Department to look into the matter. …

The ATF has been stonewalling inquiries from Sen. Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, and now Rep. Darrell Issa, R-Calif., has joined the fray — and he has subpoena power as chairman of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee. …

To their credit, numerous rank-and-file ATF agents [objected] to the “Fast and Furious” operation from the get-go. Their superiors told them they “have to break some eggs to make an omelet” and then apparently threatened the agents with career discipline if they continued their objections.

The agents also were warned that the operation had been approved at the highest levels of the Justice Department — levels that are populated by presidential appointees, not career law enforcement officials. And now the Mexican government has elevated the scandal into an international incident, launching its own investigation and warning that “sanctions will have to be carried out with the full force of law to (whoever) could have been responsible.”

Barack Obama himself was questioned about the scandal …  He quickly passed the buck, claiming ignorance of the operation and saying, “There may be a situation here (in) which a serious mistake was made, and if that’s the case, then we’ll find out and we’ll hold somebody accountable.” But a presidential effort to pin the tail on the donkey ignores the tremendous scope of “Fast and Furious,” which apparently involved personnel from not only the ATF and Justice but also the Homeland Security and State departments. Any attempt to lay this massive botch at the feet of an individual ignores systemic problems that “Fast and Furious” illustrates in the federal bureaucracy.

Our quotations are from an article by Chuck Norris at Townhall. He concludes by saying:

Proponents of gun control — including the White House — should focus on bringing U.S. government agencies into compliance with our existing laws before pushing new restrictions on the rest of us.

Read it all here.

The UN’s “Responsibility to Protect” (R2P) doctrine (see our posts A siren song from hell, April 1, 2011; and The danger of R2P, March 23, 2011), in the name of which Obama has taken America into a third war on a Muslim enemy while insisting it is all for the good of the Muslims populations as a whole, is an extension, a perversion, and potentially a contradiction of the real responsibility to protect, which is the most important duty of the national government of every nation-state.

The chief reason to have a national government is that it’s the only or best institution for protecting the nation from foreign enemies, and every individual from harm by others to his or her person and property. That it can effect such protection is the chief virtue of the nation-state, a reason why nation-states are necessary and – if not ruled by oppressive despots – essentially good.

To interpret R2P as a high moral pretext for allowing a bunch of communist and/or Islamic nations to manipulate America and other strongly armed Western nations into using military force against states they dislike, is to take away its purpose by depriving the nation-state of its defensive power, the very thing the “responsibility to protect” needed, and so to render every state vulnerable to conspiring enemies.

The sinister purpose behind the re-interpreting maneuver is to establish “world governance” by turning the corrupt, hypocritical, worse-than-useless United Nation Organization into an institution of world government.

To achieve this collectivist end, cabals of collectivist powers, organizations, and individuals have tried a series of ploys.

The UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report and all that followed from it, was one. They hoped that they could convince governments, through heavily propagandized public opinion, that the only way to save the earth from the catastrophic man-made global warming they invented, was to hand over power to the UN, which would set about redistributing wealth equally among the  nations, thus crippling the developed world where the liberty they loathe still prevails.

Another ploy, not as widely known or as dramatic in its immediate effects as IPCC and R2P, was the World Health Report 2000, put out by the World Health Organization (WHO).

There is an excellent article about it, by Professor Scott W. Atlas in the April 2011 issue of  Commentary magazine, on which we have drawn for the following information, analysis, and comment:

[The Report’s] most  most notorious finding – that the United States ranked a disastrous 37th out of the world’s nations in “overall performance” – provided Barack Obama’s transformative health-care legislation with a data-driven argument for swift and drastic reform, particularly in the light of the fact that the U.S. spends more on health than any other nation.

Professor Scott proceeds to demonstrate that –

In fact, World Health Report 2000 was an intellectual fraud of historic consequence – a profoundly deceptive document that is only marginally a measure of of health-care performance at all. The report’s true achievement was to rank countries according to their alignment with a specific political and economic ideal – socialized medicine – and then claim it was an objective measure of “quality”. … It sought not to measure performance but something else.

That “something else” was a figment of its compilers’ collective dream. They wrote:

“In the past decade or so there has been a gradual shift of vision towards what WHO calls the ‘new universalism’,” WHO authors write, “respecting the ethical principle that it may be necessary and efficient to ration services”.

So we’d all be subjected to the lowest common standard of health care – not for the sake of good health, but for the sake of ideological equality.

Professor Atlas substantiates his case by explaining in some detail the criteria the compilers of the report used to make its ranking assessments. The report, he says “went on to argue, even insist, that governments need to promote community rating” and “a common benefit package” .

And he comments aptly:

It is a curious version  of objective study design and data analysis  to assume the validity of a concept like “the new universalism” and then to define policies that implement it as proof  of that validity.

The report endorsed wealth-redistribution and centralized administration – ie. socialized health-care, the authors’ very definition of good quality health provision. A country’s rank depended on the extent to which its health care was government controlled.

The policy recommendation preceded the research.

Just as – we would point out – the policy recommendation of IPCC preceded the research.

Automatically, this pushed the capitalist countries … to the bottom of the list.

Professor Atlas concludes:

If World HealthRreport 2000 had  simply been issued and forgotten, it would still have been a case study in how to produce a wretched and unreliable piece of social science masquerading as legitimate research. That it served so effectively as a catalyst for unprecedented legislation is evidence of something more disturbing. The executive and legislatoive branches of the United States government used WHO’s document as an implicit Exhibit A to justify imposing radical changes to America’s health-care system, even in the face of objections from the American people. To blur the line between politics and objective analysis is to do violence to them both.

The whole of Professor Atlas’s article is well worth reading.

Ben Johnson lists what he believes are the real reasons why Obama started the war on Libya. See them all. We quote parts of the two we find most interesting:

It advances fundamentalist Muslim interests.

A West Point study found Libyans made up a large section of Iraq’s foreign jihadists, perhaps as high as 20 percent. Libyan rebel leader Abdel-Hakim al-Hasidi has admitted he fought the Crusader enemy (that’s us) on the hills of Pakistan before personally leading 25 Libyans to the Iraqi front. …

The civil war has reportedly given al-Qaeda the opportunity to steal surface-to-air missiles. ..

Empowering al-Qaeda in the Sahara is a risk the Community-Organizer-in-Chief is willing to take as part of his outreach to the Muslim ummah. Other examples include his limp-wristed approach to Iran, his support for the Muslim Brotherhood in neighboring Egypt, his instruction for NASA administrator Charles Bolden to make Muslims “feel good about their historic contribution to science,” his financing of mosques around the world, his pledge to make a priority of prosecuting anti-Muslim “hate crimes,” his promotion and financing of Al Jazeera broadcasts, and his lawsuit on behalf of a Muslim teacher seeking three weeks leave to make hajj. This is just the latest way of begging the world’s Mohammedans to like him.

Add to that his deliberate distancing of the US from Israel and his obvious personal hostility to the Jewish state – strong enough, we think, to connive at its destruction.

Strengthens the globalist socialists at the UN.

Obama stated Monday night if he had not gone into Libya, “The writ of the United Nations Security Council would have been shown to be little more than empty words, crippling that institution’s future credibility to uphold global peace and security.” He had no trouble ignoring more than a dozen UNSC resolutions about Iraq before that war, but the Left typically genuflects at the altar of the UN and the “international community.” …

American liberals congregate at the UN, because they believe other nations are more enlightened than their fellow citizens and they hope Eurosocialists can save them from American yokels. They often say things like, “America is the only industrialized nation that….” Obama shares this view. He has derided “our tragic history” and said the U.S. Constitution “reflected the fundamental flaw of this country that continues to this day.” He has appointed Supreme Court nominees who believe in placing international law on equal footing with the U.S. Constitution. His UN-worship reached its apogee when he hauled Arizona before the United Nations Human Rights Council over its common sense immigration law, having the people of Arizona judged by the cronies of Cameroon. His first-ever U.S. report to the UNHRC provided a blueprint for socialism, which stated bluntly, “Our commitment to the rights protected in our Constitution is matched by a parallel commitment to foster a society characterized by shared prosperity.” The internationalist Left defers to the UN on domestic and foreign policy, including when to send American troops into harm’s way.

We think a very strong inducement, perhaps the strongest, was the siren song of the three harpies (to mix a couple of classical myths), Samantha Power, Susan Rice, and Hillary Clinton. We hear them singing an ominous lyric along these lines: “Let’s set a precedent for international action carrying out the UN approved Responsibility To Protect, and then we can attack Israel on the grounds that we are protecting the Palestinians.” See our post, The danger of R2P, March 23, 2011.

See also an article by Alan W. Dowd at Front Page, titled A Dangerous Doctrine, from which this comes:

Who at the UN, ICC, Arab League or European Union decides what justifies an R2P intervention? R2P advocates are quick to answer that an R2P intervention can only be triggered by genocide, war crimes, ethnic cleansing, crimes against humanity or inciting such actions. Of course, all of these are subjective terms. Just ask Armenia and Turkey, Kosovo, Croatia, Bosnia and Serbia, Russia and Chechnya, the people of Sudan. Everyone from Tony Blair to Tommy Franks was accused of war crimes during the Iraq war. Today, Libya’s rebels and Libya’s government, NATO’s leaders and Khadafy’s henchmen, are all accusing each other of war crimes. This isn’t to say that there aren’t genuine cases of war crimes, genocide and the like in the world, but rather that Americans may define these terms differently than the bureaucrats who roam the UN. …

if Khadafy is guilty of violating R2P principles, what about Syria’s Assad, Sudan’s Bashir, Cuba’s Castro, Iran’s Ahmadinejad, North Korea’s Kim? The list could go on and on. In fact, if I made the list, it might include China’s leaders and Russia’s leaders (see Tiananmen, Tibet and Chechnya). If they made the list, it might include the United States or Estonia. If Kosovo made the list, it might include Serbia. If the Serbs made the list, it might include Kosovo. If Pakistan made the list, it might include India. If India made the list, it might include Pakistan. You get the point.

Moreover, what level of negligence or outright willfulness constitutes “failure to protect”—disproportionate death rates among different ethnic groups, mass-arrests, seizure of property? These sorts of things could be twisted to apply to the United States, especially in a world awash in moral relativism. Before scoffing at this, recall that Belgian lawyers tried to put U.S. commanders in the dock for failing to stop postwar looting in Iraq. One wonders where their outrage was when a bona fide war criminal reigned in Baghdad. But this points out one of the problems with many R2P advocates. They are surprisingly silent on the obvious cases: the Saddam Husseins and Kim Jong Ils and Fidel Castros of the world. It’s difficult to understand why.

It’s only difficult to understand if one is so credulous as to believe that the Left gives a damn for victims of  persecution as such. They only weep their crocodile tears over the plight of this or that  selected group if doing so suits their agenda: Serb victims? Not interested. Bosnian or Kosovar victims? How terrible, let’s protect them with bombs and diplomatic outrage. Cuban victims? Shrug. Palestinians? Let’s send a “mammoth”  force (Siren Samantha’s word) against Israel. Israelis? They’re asking for it by building homes where they shouldn’t be allowed to. Christian victims in Muslim lands? Don’t take any notice. Muslim “victims” in the US? Appalling.

Whatever their motives, it seems that advocates of R2P are opening the door to the further weakening of national sovereignty and the further weakening of the nation-state system—a system which has served America well. It pays to recall that the United States has thrived in the nation-state system. We were born into it, raised in it, grew to master and shape it, and today we benefit from it, sustain it and dominate it. When and if it ceases to be the main organizing structure for the world — if R2P seduces America into taking sides everywhere, weakening the responsibilities and benefits of sovereignty along the way — there is no guarantee that Americans will have the same position and place they enjoy today.

Too mildly imagined! It would be a communist-governed or Islam-governed world. In other words, one total global inescapable hell.

Another sadistic Christian sect (see our post immediately below, The Church of Christ Sadist) lets children die in agony. It calls itself the Church of Christ Scientist (an oxymoron).

No date is given for the report we quote from here. These horrors were allowed to happen decades ago. Has legal action stopped them from ever happening again?

Authorities in four states are prosecuting Chris­tian Science parents on manslaughter, murder, or child abuse charges for refusing medical care to their dying chil­dren.

The cases — six of them in all, including three in California — represent the largest assault in history against Christian Science reliance on prayer instead of medical treatment to cure dis­ease …

Christian Science began in 1875 with the publication of Mary Baker Eddy’s Science and Health. About the same time the organization of “Chris­tian Scientists,” an association of Mrs. Eddy’s students, formed to learn the finer points of her mind cure techniques. In 1879 the organization incorporated under its official name — The Church of Christ, Scientist.

Although 44 states have enacted laws to prevent prose­cution of Christian Scientists on the basis of religious beliefs, a growing number of prosecutors are going after parents on the basis of child abuse statutes. Child abuse is not directly allud­ed to in most of the statutes pro­tecting Christian Scientists.

The Massachusetts law pro­tecting Christian Scientists passed by the state legislature in 1971 is similar to that of other states. Prosecutors argue that although it shields parents from charges of child neglect, it does not deal with child abuse.

A child is not deemed to have been abused if prevented by parents from being medically treated:

It reads: “A child shall not be deemed to be neglected or lack proper physical care for the sole reason that he is being provided remedial treatment by spiritual means alone.”

These cases are cited:

Robin Twitchell, 2, died on April 3, 1986, after suffering for five days from a congenital bowel obstruction. [Painful beyond description – JB] …

Mr. Twitchell said he blamed him­self for his son’s death, not for failing to seek a doctor, but because he “failed” in his “belief”. He said he prayed over his baby every night. …

William and Christine Her­manson of Sarasota, Florida, are accused of killing their dia­betic daughter [Amy, 7] by denying her insulin injections. …

The door for the above and other cases to be prosecuted was opened by a recent ruling by the California Supreme Court involving … three active cases in its jurisdiction. The same ruling also opened the door for potential legal action generally against religious groups accused of child abuse. That recent ruling stated that Christian Science parents who attempt spiritual healing and fail to the loss of life can be tried for manslaughter. In all three cases the children involved died of the same ailment — bacterial meningitis; and the parents were all charged with felony child endangerment and invol­untary manslaughter. [All too voluntary in reality – JB.]

The parents charged includ­ed Laurie Walker of Sacramen­to, whose four-year-old daugh­ter Shauntay died in March 1984; Elliot and Lisa Glaser of Santa Monica, whose 16-month son Seth died in March 1984; and Mark and Susan Rippberger of Santa Rosa, whose 8-year-old daughter Natalie died in December 1964.

The most recent case to be publicized is perhaps the most gruesome. Elizabeth Ashley King died of bone cancer near Phoenix, Arizona, on June 5, 1988. At the time of her death, the 12-year-old girl, who had been out of school for seven months, had a 42-inch-round tumor on her leg that had eaten through her bones and genital area.

Elizabeth’s parents, John and Katherine King, were charged with child abuse for let­ting her die. Prosecutor K. C. Scull said he recommended that manslaughter charges also be filed against the Kings, but the county Grand Jury would not go along with it after hear­ing tearful testimony from them.

How mysterious that the merciful God, for all the praying, did not save the children.

Any explanations?

CNN’s religious blog “belief” carries this report:

The Society of Jesus‘ Pacific Northwest unit and its insurers have agreed to pay a record $166.1 million to about 470 people who were sexually and psychologically abused as children by Jesuit priests from the 1940s to the 1990s, the victims’ attorneys said Friday.

Blaine Tamaki, an attorney in Yakima, Washington, described the payment as “the largest settlement between a religious order and abuse victims in the history of the United States.”

The Oregon Province of the Society of Jesus is now in federal bankruptcy court in Portland, Oregon …

“The $166.1 million is the largest settlement by a religious order in the history of the world,” Tamaki said. “Over 450 Native American children … were sexually abused repeatedly, from rape to sodomy, for decades …

Jesuits are the world’s largest order of Catholic priests and are considered the most educated in the priesthood … [They] number about 19,000 worldwide, according to the Society of Jesus in the United States. …

The abuse primarily took place in Jesuit-operated mission schools and boarding schools on Indian reservations in Washington, Alaska, Idaho, Montana and Oregon …

Most of the abuse occurred in the 1960s, so many of the alleged victims are now in their late 40s and early 50s, Tamaki said.

None of the 57 Jesuit priests accused of sexual abuse by the victims has been charged with any crimes, Tamika said. …

Forty-nine of the almost 100 victims represented by Tamaki were sexually abused when they were 8 years old or younger, he said. The remaining victims were ages 9 to 14 during the abuse, he said.

One of the victims, now dead, “was in third grade when the molestation began allegedly by a priest and a nun who worked with the Jesuit missionaries.”

Before he died, Lawrence provided a statement for Friday’s press conference: “The nun or one of the brothers would send me to the rectory to see (the priest). He would give me candy or call me special – and then he would molest me. They all did at various times,” his statement said.

Asked why he never told anyone outside the order about it, he replied “we were scared that if we uttered even one word, we would go to hell.”

With its doctrine of hell, Christianity is still a cruel religion.

(Thanks to our commenter Macnvettes for the link.)