Ben Johnson at Floyd Reports writes that Juliette Kayyem, the assistant secretary for intergovernmental affairs at the DHS, urges the beaming of al-Jazeera into American homes and minds:

[She] wrote an op-ed in the Boston Globe this week entitled, “Let US See Al-Jazeera.” … In it, she rakes ign’ernt Americans over the coals for not appreciating Al Jazeera English (AJE), the Anglophone counterpart to Al-Jazeera. Kayyem writes that cable providers should be “promoting engagement in the Arab world” by “bringing a major player in the Arab world to American audiences.”

Al-Jazeera is a Qatar-owned enterprise and a medium of Islamic propaganda.

Juliette Kayyem is the American-born daughter of Christian Lebanese parents. So it’s likely that she would have an emotional bias towards the Arab world – but towards Islam?

Yes, apparently she has that too.

Kayyem wants America to step aside, promote Islamic interests, and hope our enemies will reciprocate our selfless acts of goodwill. In this case, she wants a major Islamic fundamentalist propaganda outlet beamed into 300 million infidel homes. “AJE’s battle with the cable carriers is major news in the Middle East,” she writes. Not carrying the network “sends a message to the Arab world.” Although she reassures her readers, “Cable companies have no obligation to run programming,” she warns that shunning AJE is “understood by the Arab world as a value-laden decision about America’s lack of desire to hear from the Arab world about the Arab world.”

When she served as Assistant Attorney General for Civil Rights in the Clinton White House, and as an adviser to Janet Reno on terrorism, she “came to believe that within the FBI and the Immigration and Naturalization Service, there was a bias against Muslims which the Justice Department had a responsibility to address.” Now she wants the government to make good … by serving Muslim interests.

However, (Johnson informs us):

Taxpayers are already paying $1.5 million a year to put Al-Jazeera on public radio airwaves. Two of the three sites attacked on 9/11 now have at least one hour of Al-Jazeera radio piped in over publicly funded Pacifica Radio stations.

He reminds his readers:

Kayyem’s not-so-subtle pressure on American carriers to run Islamic fundamentalist programming joins numerous other Obama initiatives to give more airtime to its friends and deny airtime to its political foes.

It should be obvious to everyone  by now that Obama has a pro-Muslim agenda. Still, we don’t think Al-Jazeera should be prevented from competing for viewers in Western countries. All opinions should be allowed to be heard so that they can be judged. True, Al-Jazeera might win some converts to the ideology of Islam, but it is likely to confirm more in their rejection of it.

What we would like to see is a massive effort at teaching, by every one of the numerous means that now exist, our opinions, our culture, our history, our enlightenment, our method of critical examination, to the Arab and the wider Islamic worlds.

In our post, A cure for religion, February 6, 2011, we wrote:

If the West only took the trouble to teach its values to the peoples who live in darkness – those billions of Others – it might achieve what wars have failed to: the subduing of the barbaric hordes, the ending of their persistent onslaught.

During the Cold War, America spoke to the Communist bloc through Radio Liberty and Radio Free Europe. The effort was made to tell the enslaved peoples that what their masters would have them believe was not true. Those broadcasts helped to bring the Wall down. Why is no such effort being made to give new ideas to the Muslims? Vast numbers of them are taught nothing but the Koran – or rather, have it beaten into them. …  Why doesn’t the secular West give them something better to think about?

We are not alone in asking that question. Donald Kochan, Associate Professor at Chapman University School of Law,  writes in the Wall Street Journal that we should spread Western ideas in the Arab world by dispensing books:

At this time of unrest and transition in the Arab world, the United States’s capacity to communicate core values of democracy and individual liberty is a priority. Our capability to translate them into Arabic is a necessity. We need to expose the Arab world to the fundamental texts of Western political and philosophical thought. Indeed, the export of ideas may be the most valuable commodity we have to offer.

We agree with him of course. But there is a difficulty to be taken into account.

Literacy rates in the Arab countries are below that of the West, in some very far below. About half of all Arab women are illiterate, and in some countries more than two-thirds. In Yemen, for instance, the male literacy rate is 69%, the female only 28%.

In Afghanistan the literacy rate is 43% for men, and 12.6% for women.

Professor Kochan says, “Our seduction by the power of the Internet has distracted us from remembering the power of books.” But while we might try to teach millions in the Third World to read, we could start teaching them to think by using television, radio, and every device that connects individuals with the world wide web, and that those millions are snatching up with obvious delight.

We think that the best ideas of the West – individual freedom, secular polities, democratic rule of law, limited government, the questioning of all ideas – stand a very good chance of winning in competition with those of collectivism and religion. At least they should be sent into the arena to compete.

The West, it seems, has lost interest in the crimes of Communist Russia now that the Cold War is over. But documents from a smuggled Soviet archive throw light not only on the past but also on the present.

Claire Berlinski  has been examining them. She writes in City Journal:

These documents … were available to anyone who wanted to consult them. But nobody did. Publishers were indifferent. Only a fraction of the documents had been translated into English. This was, I argued, a symptom of the world’s dangerous indifference to the enormity of Communist crimes.

One thing that the documents make clear is that the Soviet Union sponsored terrorism in the Middle East. Those who tried to convey this information during the Cold War to governments, politicians, foreign ministries, the media and academics, were met for the most part with a refusal even to entertain the possibility.  (I was one who tried and came up against a wall of denial – JB.]

It is one thing to know abstractly … that the Soviets sponsored terrorism in the Middle East. It is another to read a newly translated memorandum from longtime KGB head Yuri Andropov to Communist Party general secretary Leonid Brezhnev requesting authorization to fund a detailed plan by the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) to kill civilians around the world:

In a confidential conversation at a meeting with the KGB resident in Lebanon in April this year, [PFLP official] Wadia Haddad outlined a prospective program of sabotage and terrorism by the PLFP [sic]. . . . The PLFP is currently preparing a number of special operations, including strikes against large oil storage installations in various countries, . . . the destruction of oil tankers and super-tankers, actions against American and Israeli representatives in Iran, Greece, Ethiopia, Kenya, an attack on the Diamond center in Tel Aviv, etc. . . . We feel it would be feasible, at the next meeting, to give a generally favorable response to Wadia Haddad’s request. …

The documents provide proof that the Russians paid for world-wide anti-US and anti-Israel demonstrations:

Also interesting is a document suggesting the pains taken by the KGB to ensure the eruption of “spontaneous” global demonstrations against Israel. According to the KGB’s estimates, spontaneously outraged Muslims cost approximately a quarter-rupee apiece: “The KGB station in India is capable of organizing a protest demonstration at the U.S. Embassy to India, with up to 20,000 Muslims participating. The expenses for organizing the demonstration would amount to 5,000 Indian rupees and be covered from the funds allocated by the CPSU Central Committee for special measures in India in 1969–1971.”

The Russians were active in stirring up terrorist rebellion and promoting Communist movements in South America:

That there was scarcely a miserable group of miscreants on the planet that the Soviets did not, in some fashion, fund, train, and encourage is vaguely known now by some; it should be widely known by all. … In a 1980 document .. the secretariat of the Central Committee resolves “to grant the request of the leadership of the Communist Party of El Salvador and task the Ministry of Civil Aviation with arranging, in September–October 1980, a shipment of 60–80 tons of small arms and ammunition of Western manufacture from Hanoi to Havana, for the Cuban comrades to transfer it to our Salvadoran friends.”

They sponsored propaganda against the United States to exploit deceptively the issue of racism. The documents show that Soviet support for the Civil Rights movement in America was not provided out of principle but entirely cynically as a Cold War ploy:

Above all, the documents suggest that the most enduringly pernicious fruit of the Soviet Union was its propaganda. The cliché view of the United States as a nation whose foreign policy may best be understood as an expression of racism — an interpretation that continues to hinder American efforts to do the world any good — largely emerged thanks to the Soviet Union’s energetic efforts, as a 1970 document details:

Because the rise of negro protest in the USA will bring definite difficulties to the ruling classes of the USA and will distract the attention of the Nixon administration from pursuing an active foreign policy, we would consider it feasible to implement a number of measures to support this movement and to assist its growth.

Therefore it is recommended to utilize the possibilities of the KGB in African countries to inspire political and public figures, youth, trade union and nationalist organizations to issue petitions, requests and statements to the UN, U.S. embassies in their countries and the U.S. government in defense of the rights of American negroes. To publish articles and letters accusing the U.S. government of genocide in the press of various African countries. Employing the possibilities of the KGB in New York and Washington, to influence the “Black Panthers” to address appeals to the UN and other international bodies for assistance in bringing the U.S. government’s policy of genocide toward American negroes to an end.

The archive has contemporary relevance because they draw “an impressive picture of a world-wide terrorist network, and leave one in no doubt that the Soviet Union deserves all the discredit for the emergence of international terrorism as a major factor in global politics.”

Almost all the terrorist activity throughout the world between the late 1960s and the turn of the century was in the name of left-wing causes, and was promoted in one way or another by the Soviet Union, if not directly by funding and the supply of arms, at the very least by political support in international forums, chiefly the United Nations, and through influence on socialist parties in Europe and “national liberation” movements in the Third World.

Islamic terrorism began with the hijacking of civil aircraft by Palestinians under Arafat’s orders in 1970. He was leader of the PLO, an organization consisting of a number of factions including the PFLP – the Soviet’s foot in the Palestinian door.

In the light of what the documents prove, it would not be an exaggeration to say that Islam’s terrorist war against America and the non-Islamic world in general is an extension of the Cold War. The evil that Communist Russia did lives after it.

Dennis Prager recently visited Vietnam and was understandably stirred to anger.

He writes a bitter reminder that communism is the worst of all the terrible ideologies ever inflicted on long-suffering humanity.

His essay is also a stinging condemnation of the “moral idiots” in America who made a hero of Ho Chi Minh and handed over the Vietnamese people to the communists.

Communists still rule the country. Yet, Vietnam today has embraced the only way that exists to escape poverty, let alone to produce prosperity: capitalism and the free market. So what exactly did the 2 million Vietnamese who died in the Vietnam War die for? I would like to ask one of the communist bosses who run Vietnam that question. “Comrade, you have disowned everything your Communist party stood for: communal property, collectivized agriculture, central planning and militarism, among other things. Looking back, then, for what precisely did your beloved Ho Chi Minh and your party sacrifice millions of your fellow Vietnamese?”

There is no good answer. There are only a lie and a truth, and the truth is not good.

The lie is the response offered by the Vietnamese communists and which was repeated, like virtually all communist lies, by the world’s non-communist left. It was (and continues to be) taught in virtually every Western university and was and continues to be spread by virtually every news medium on the planet: The Vietnam communists, i.e., the North Vietnamese and the Viet Cong, were merely fighting for national independence against foreign control of their country. First, they fought the French, then the Japanese and then the Americans. American baby boomers will remember being told over and over that Ho Chi Minh was Vietnam’s George Washington, that he loved the American Constitution, after which he modeled his own, and wanted nothing more than Vietnamese independence.

Here is the truth: Every communist dictator in the world has been a megalomaniacal, cult of personality, power hungry, bloodthirsty thug. Ho Chi Minh was no different. He murdered his opponents, tortured only God knows how many innocent Vietnamese, threatened millions into fighting for him — yes, for him and his blood soaked Vietnamese Communist Party, backed by the greatest murderer of all time, Mao Zedong. But the moral idiots in America chanted “Ho, ho, Ho Chi Minh” at antiwar rallies, and they depicted America as the real murderers of Vietnamese — “Hey, hey, LBJ, how many kids did you kill today?”

The Vietnamese communists were not fighting America for Vietnamese independence. America was never interested in controlling the Vietnamese people, and there is a perfect parallel to prove this: the Korean War. Did America fight the Korean communists in order to control Korea? Or did 37,000 Americans die in Korea so that Koreans could be free? Who was (and remains) a freer human being — a Korean living under Korean communist rule in North Korea or a Korean living in that part of Korea where America defeated the Korean communists?

And who was a freer human being in Vietnam — those who lived in non-communist South Vietnam (with all its flaws) or those who lived under Ho, ho, Ho Chi Minh’s communists in North Vietnam?

America fights to liberate countries, not to rule over them.

True, and though sometimes – as in Kosovo and Bosnia – well-meaning America has made the wrong judgment as to just who is on the side of freedom, in Vietnam the issue was clear enough:

It was the Vietnamese Communist Party, not America, that was interested in controlling the Vietnamese people. But the lie was spread so widely and so effectively that most of the world — except American supporters of the war and the Vietnamese boat people and other Vietnamese who yearned for liberty — believed that America was fighting for tin, tungsten and the wholly fictitious “American empire” while the Vietnamese communists were fighting for Vietnamese freedom.

I went to the “Vietnam War Remnants Museum” — not a word about those who risked their lives to escape by boat, preferring to risk dying by drowning, being eaten by sharks or being tortured or gang-raped by pirates, rather than to live under the communists who “liberated” South Vietnam. …

I hope I live to see the day when the people of Vietnam, freed from the communist lies that still permeate their daily lives, understand that every Vietnamese death in the war against America was a wasted life, one more of the 140 million human sacrifices on the altar of the most bloodthirsty false god in history: communism.

The Vietnamese war is now an old story. Those who remember it with bitterness hardly speak of it, the memories being too painful and the young being uninterested. But it should not be forgotten. The truth about it should be taught to new generations so that the right lessons may be learnt from it.

The most important lesson is that collectivist ideologies are inescapably cruel and destructive, and it is a lesson that should be applied to the collectivist ideology most threatening to the free world right now: Islam.

Yet again the moral idiots are are on the wrong side; the side of  misery, oppression, and death. The communists, the socialists, the “progressives” are in alliance with the jihadists.

The right lessons about the histories of Russia, China, Cambodia, Cuba, Vietnam, have not been learnt, most probably because they have not been taught. As Dennis Prager mourns:

There is little difference between the history of the Vietnam War as told by the Communist Party of Vietnam and what just about any college student will be told in just about any college by just about any professor in America, Europe, Asia or Latin America.

When Soviet Russia perished and Mao Zedong died;  when Russia, China, and Vietnam relented to “the natural order of liberty” (as Adam Smith called capitalism) because they’d learnt the hard way that Marxist economics do not work; the “bloodthirsty god”, communism, found asylum in the academies. In almost every university the monster reigns unchallenged, and has recently taken on a consort: Islam.

For the moral idiots of the left – many of whom have Ph.Ds – there are now two gods, communism and Allah, and Obama is their prophet.

This is the part of Iranium, a new documentary about the threat that Iran poses to the world, that we found most interesting.

All of it can be found here, but only for a limited time.

As this video is no longer viewable, go here for information about the documentary.

It ought not to be surprising that a Muslim should write what Salim Mansur has written in this letter; or that the friend it is addressed to is Jewish; or that a professor in an American university should write it; but it is surprising on all these counts, especially the last.

Here is part of what he writes:

Just ponder how a third-rate community organizer — from the most incestuously corrupt political region in the U.S.; with a record of participation in the most vulgar gathering of Jeremiah Wright posing as a reverend, spouting Fanonian rhetoric and bigotry; with mentors such as the unrepentant terrorist Bill Ayers; channelling the teachings of Saul Alinsky and Rashid Khalidi of the Chomsky school of self-loathing and sophistry — could advance through the ranks of American politics at an astounding speed, with little or no record of experience in government, to become the 44th president. …

There is not a very long arc connecting the joyful news of Soviet disintegration with the painfully distressing slide of American politics framed for posterity in the election of Obama. … [T]he presence of the Soviet Union placed upon liberal democracies, led by the U.S., a discipline and a check upon the excesses and follies of democracy. But once this discipline was removed it [led] to a bacchanalia in the West, the near instant raising of the slogan “end of history” even as the dust from the tearing down of the Berlin Wall had not settled, and this lack of discipline combined with the “flower children” of the sixties coming of age and grasping for power, [brought] about a situation that would do more damage than the old men of the Communist plutocracy could ever deliver without committing suicide …

[A]fter 1992 we have been in the state of enjoying our unrestrained appetite for endless orgy, the zeal that comes to declining bodies from the artificiality of induced eroticism by pills which give to narcissists of the “sixties” generation the pathetic sense of immortality. These are the folks the people have elected to run their lives, protect their cultural legacy, hold back the enemies of freedom, maintain balance of power in strategic and vulnerable regions of the world and … maintain the promise of the present and inheritance of the past as trustees for the unborn generations of the future.

Ten years after 9/11, we, the broad public of liberal democracies, still have not fully grasped the meaning of that horror-filled morning, or understood without any apologetics or polemics the evil nature and ideology of the men who planned and executed the deed. We remain more or less preoccupied with re-litigating the debate over the decision by the Bush administration to take the war declared upon the West into the heartland of the enemy and expunge them; and instead of faulting Bush for not going far enough at home and abroad in defeating the Islamist jihadi assault on the West, for reasons that have everything to do with the nature of our corrupted polity, we have contorted ourselves to find the right mix of appeasement. …

The fault, as Cassius reminds Brutus, is in ourselves, a decaying civilization that will be saved (if it will be) not by the snobs in Washington and New York, London and Paris, Rome and Berlin, but by our version of the unsophisticated children of truckers who are now waking up from the drug-induced stupor of their parents’ and grandparents’ generation. I have hope, the eternal hope of a fearful heart, that the West will survive and yet again gather speed, but how sad are the losses and tears that have piled up — with more to come. They could have been avoided if we, as a people, were not so irresponsible or unfaithful to our history as to place at the head of our societies leaders so unworthy and clueless as the one who so unfittingly occupies the seat of Washington and Lincoln, at the head of this great republic.

Salim Mansur is a professor of political science at the University of Western Ontario.

The poor and oppressed of the world are rising and moving in ever greater numbers.

If there is no hope of their getting opportunity for bettering their lives in their own countries – though they might demand it as now in Egypt – they go where they believe opportunity already exists: to the prosperous Western democracies.

At the same time, the borders of the prosperous Western democracies are becoming ever more porous.

Last year 36,000 migrants walked into the EU through its Western frontier, the Greek-Turkish border, ten times the number who had slipped through in the year before. That’s 90% of all the illegal immigrants entering Europe.

Mark Steyn writes about it. Not for the first time (see his book America Alone on the ominous demographic decline of the indigenous European populations) he draws attention to a trend that will bring about historic change.

The influx has shattered the rhythm of life in one of Greece’s most isolated regions. Farmers in the main, the locals speak of the fear they have felt at suddenly encountering thousands of bedraggled men, women and children from the likes of Afghanistan and Iraq, Algeria and Morocco, India, Palestine, Congo and Somalia.

“It’s been an unbelievable caravan of humanity. I must have seen at least 10,000 of them pass,” said Giorgos Liakides, who runs a little mini-market in Nea Vissa, the first village after the border. “You wake up and find them on your doorstep, and at night when you go to water the fields you find them hiding in the bushes. We understand their plight, we are human as well. But we’re afraid. None of us ever used to lock our doors before; now we worry all the time.”

Mostly economic migrants, those who do get in readily hand themselves over to Greek police, eager to elicit the documents that will allow them to stay for up to 30 days in the EU member state.

In theory, they are meant to be deported after that, but in practice many just blend into the back streets of Athens before attempting to sneak into another European country by train, boat or bus. …

Global population is supposed to peak at about nine billion in 2050, then level off and start to decline. If you’re one of those eco-fetishists who think of humanity as a species, then that nine billion is the number to watch, up from six billion at the turn of the century. But, if you don’t think of the world as one unified global parking lot, you’re less interested in the big number and more in its constituent parts: On the road to that nine billion, almost all the increase in global population will come from Islam and sub-Saharan Africa – ie, “the likes of Afghanistan and Iraq, Algeria and Morocco, [the Muslim minority of] India, Palestine, Congo and Somalia”.

Between 2010 and 2030, the worldwide Muslim community  is predicted to increase from somewhere between a fifth and a quarter of the global population to one third of humanity. … They’ll be “citizens” of countries which have done a cracking job of killing almost all human progress of the modern age. In the first decade of the 21st century, Niger, which is over 90 per cent Muslim, increased its population by almost half – from just over ten million to just over 15 million. In 2000, half a million of its children were estimated to be starving, but hey, that’s no reason not to add a few million more. Its population is predicted to hit just under 100 million by the end of this century – in a country that can’t feed a people one-tenth that size. Is it likely that an extra 90 million people will choose to stay within Niger?

Sub-Saharan Africa will double its population between now and 2030. They’re poor and getting poorer. Excepting South Africa, the Dark Continent’s per capita income averaged $355 in 2004, but is expected to fall by almost 20 per cent to $290 by 2030. … It would be asking an awful lot for untold millions of them to remain in the teeming, disease-ridden shanty megalopolises into which Africa’s population is consolidating – rather than to, say, head for the lusher fields of Giorgos Liakides’ village.

If any citizens of the EU fancy themselves safe from a colossal invasion by destitute hordes from the Third World, they are living in a fool’s paradise.

What’s to stop that vast “caravan of humanity” just walking in and taking it the way Robert Mugabe’s thugs took any Zimbabwean farm that tickled their fancy?

Nothing. Nothing at all.

The hands of Europeans raised in horror will not be seen as a stop signal by the desperate multitudes who have nothing to lose and everything to gain by pressing on to where democratic law and order, freedom, education, and the ideas and work of millions of  individuals have brought prosperity.

The dreadful irony of it is, their coming to share in that prosperity will almost certainly destroy it: not because there is not enough opportunity for millions more to make their contributions in freedom, but because freedom itself, the necessary condition for prosperity, is slipping away.

Freedom depends on law and order. You think you are secure in your own property because you have a title-deed?  What if that title-deed ceases to be recognized as proof of anything? A piece of paper is all it will be.

A ragged army of the wretched comes along your street and some turn and walk into your house and settle in it. What are you going to do?

In most Western European countries it’s already hard to find a police force that would come to your aid.

In America there is an administration in power that is happily defying the law right now.

It could be argued that the weakening of the United States by its present leadership has expedited the chaos spreading through the world.

That clamor we hear in Egypt, that sound of many feet marching towards Athens, are harbingers of what’s coming to all of us. We had better look to our defenses; arm ourselves; and as soon as we can in America, empower a new government which will re-enforce the strongest protector of civilization: the law.

Obama wants the Muslim Brotherhood to participate in the government of Egypt, the country where it was founded but in which it is officially banned.

Obama may or may not be a Muslim, but it’s plain enough that he holds Islam in high esteem. He has steadily extended its reach and influence inside the United States, strengthened Islamic regimes, and facilitated the spread of sharia. We see him as a man with a mission – to aid the advance of Islamic power.

Here, in selected quotations from two articles at FrontPage Magazine, are facts and informed opinion that support our contention.

By Ryan Mauro:

The [Obama] administration has extensive relations with groups and leaders tied to the Muslim Brotherhood. … [It has] opened its doors to Muslim Brotherhood legacy groups such as the Council on American-Islamic Relations, the Muslim Public Affairs Council, the Islamic Society of North America and other Islamic leaders who come from Muslim Brotherhood backgrounds …

Even before Obama came into office, he was choosing advisers with relationships to Brotherhood front groups. … In the first month of becoming President, Obama selected Ingrid Mattson, the president of the Islamic Society of North America (ISNA), to take part in the inaugural prayer services. The federal government has designated ISNA as an “unindicted co-conspirator” in the Holy Land Foundation trial, and the Brotherhood’s internal documents identify it as one of its fronts. …

President Obama chose Rashad Hussain to be his special envoy to the Organization of the Islamic Conference. He has long been a featured speaker at conferences by Brotherhood-tied groups in the U.S., …  has spoken for ISNA since being appointed, and has shared the stage with officials from the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), another Brotherhood-tied group that has been listed as an “unindicted co-conspirator” in the Holy Land Foundation trial.

One of the members of the President’s Advisory Council on Faith-Based and Neighborhood Partnerships is Dalia Mogahed. She has been described as the “most influential person” in crafting Obama’s speech in Cairo to the Muslim world. She is a close colleague of John Esposito, perhaps the Brotherhood’s most prestigious apologist in the U.S. He gave expert testimony on behalf of the Holy Land Foundation during its trial and is a vocal defender of CAIR, ISNA and the other organizations tied to the Brotherhood. …

In June 2009, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton invited Esam Omeish, who describes the Brotherhood as “moderate,” to take part in a conference call following President Obama’s speech to the Muslim world in Cairo. Omeish sits on the board of directors of the extremist Dar al-Hijrah mosque, which is closely connected to the Muslim Brotherhood and Hamas. …

Officials have met with the Muslim Public Affairs Council (MPAC) on at least two dozen occasions, including Attorney General Eric Holder, the assistant director in charge of the FBI, and Secretary of Homeland Security Janet Napolitano. From January 27 to 28, 2010, leaders from ISNA, the Muslim American Society and MPAC met with Napolitano and other officials to be briefed on the agency’s counter-radicalization and counter-terrorism efforts. …

The influence of Brotherhood groups in the government even extends to the FBI and military. An official from ISNA was asked to lecture U.S. troops at Fort Hood about Islam after the terrorist shooting took place. The FBI has also held meetings with top ISNA officials and is engaging the organization as part of its outreach to the Muslim community. Shockingly, the decision to use the ISNA came after the FBI decided to end its relationship with CAIR because of concerns over the organization’s ties to Hamas and designation as an “unindicted co-conspirator”—the same label applied to ISNA from the same trial.

A known member of the Muslim Brotherhood, Kifah Mustapha, was even given a six-week tour last year of FBI facilities including the National Counterterrorism Center and a training compound. Documents from the Holy Land trial show that he is a member of the Brotherhood’s secret “Palestine Committee” that set up organizations in the U.S. to support Hamas. …

By Nonie Darwish:

The Muslim Brotherhood has long been a major political force in the Muslim world. … [It] has been a major force in bringing down regimes and installing new governments, and whether we like it or not [it] will play a significant role in any administration, whether it is openly Islamic or nominally secular. …

Now the Brotherhood is operating in the U.S. under pretty names, and influencing our politicians from the lowest to the highest levels. …

Obama has empowered the Islamists not only in the Muslim world, but also inside in the U.S. Could anyone have imagined the U.S. president [would] support the building of a mosque on Ground Zero against the wishes of his own people and the families of the victims? Could anyone have imagined that Islamists are being hired in our homeland security apparatus and in the White House? Could anyone have imagined an American president bowing before the Arabian despot King whose countrymen were behind 9/11? …  Who could have imagined that the first US president elected after 9/11 would declare  … that America is … a Muslim nation?

How can these actions and policies of Obama’s be explained if not by his being devoted to Islam?

Islam is waging war on America, and America’s head of state is devoted to Islam?

Can it be true?

Howard Rotberg writes President Obama’s 2015 State of the Union address. It is satirical, but disturbingly close to the all-too-possible.

Here are parts of it from PajamasMedia:

… “While the United States, given its history, adopted a constitutional democracy, I have always taken the position that we cannot force the rest of the world to act like us, and that different cultures are as deserving of respect and tolerance as we are.

[applause]

“Accordingly, we accept the will of the people in the Middle East to act to restore and enhance their Caliphate.

[applause and standing ovation]

… “I received a tremendous amount of criticism for my position on the Iranian led war on Israel of 2013. However, it was Israel’s decision not to accept the proposal made jointly by America and the European Union that Europe was prepared to accept all Israeli Jews with European ancestry for resettlement in Europe, and that our country would accept all Israeli Jews with ancestry from the Arab, Asian, and African countries for resettlement in the United States. We pledged an enormous amount of money and resources for this effort, and it was rebuffed.

“But, still, I say to the remnants of Israeli Jewry, hiding out in the caves of the Judean desert: send us your survivors, your radiation-poisoned and cancer patients. No matter whether they can ever be productive citizens, the U.S. is pledged to assist in this humanitarian crisis.

[applause and standing ovation]

“And let me say to the Iranians: we are sorry that the Israelis launched so many nuclear weapons on your people, in their disproportionate response to your nuclear attack wiping out only one Israeli city. The injustice of that disproportionate response, wherein nearly 20 million Iranian men, women, and children were killed, stands as a light unto the nations as a warning of how we must accept tolerance over vengeance. One can certainly understand the outrage this stirred up in the Muslim world, although we cannot condone the atrocities against the Israeli Jews. …

“We are truly ashamed of the intolerant position of certain Evangelical Christians who have fought against the interests of their own country in this regard, and lost so many young men fighting overseas in the last battles for the Israeli cities.

“For without tolerance, who are we?

[applause]

… “And so, today, after all the bloodshed and all the suffering, a new Islamic identity prevails in the Middle East. We must accept that no Christians and no Jews are entitled to participate in that great nation. I am proud of our record in accepting truly notable numbers of refugees.

[applause]

“Today, I announce that just as we opened our borders to countless Jews and Christians, we are doing the same to permit immigration to America for the countless Muslims of the Middle East who are now choosing to escape the sectarian violence between Shias and Sunnis that has spread from Iraq throughout the entire Middle East. We accept responsibility for all of that, because, as I have reminded the American people many times, it was the fault of the Bush administration for starting an unwarranted war in Iraq and unleashing the sectarian tensions that more authoritative Muslim governments had tempered.

“Notwithstanding my many overtures to the Muslims of the Middle East, there are still so many who blame America for their problems of extreme poverty and internecine violence. Accordingly, I announce today a major move to convince the Islamic world that we in America truly welcome them, wherever they live. We truly are a tolerant nation, willing to have more Muslims immigrate here — for I have made it clear in many past speeches how Islam has played a positive force in America since the founding of our great nation.

[applause]

“My move today is to recognize that Americans cannot roam the world imposing our particular notions of liberty and democracy on the world. The world is composed of many people who find their liberty depends on a religious supervision of all aspects of their daily lives. …

“We recognize that not all people in the world accept our notions of liberty. … To demonstrate that we have learned that tolerance is the most important world value, and not a narrow definition of liberty, we are changing the name of the great statue just off the shore of New York from the Statue of Liberty to the Statue of Tolerance.

[applause, cheering and standing ovation]

“And to absolutely prove the seriousness of our tolerant new order, I have exercised my jurisdiction to order an alteration of the statue, so that instead of a crown on the statue’s head, there will be a hijab. …

Read all of it here.

The production of bio-fuels promotes hunger. Ethanol is the sacrifice of food to ideology.

Driven by its obsession with “green energy”, the left – whose heart, remember, is constantly aching for the wretched of the earth – has food turned into fuel (rather than drill for more oil in the Gulf of Mexico and Alaska). The result – the wretched of the earth go hungrier.

This is from Breitbart:

World food prices reached their highest level ever recorded in January and are set to keep rising for months, the UN food agency [Food and Agricultural Organization, FAO] said on Thursday, warning that the hardest-hit countries could face turmoil.

Some of them already have – Tunisia, Egypt, Jordan, Morocco, Mauritania, Algeria …

And in its latest survey, the Food and Agriculture Organisation said its index which monitors monthly price changes for a variety of staples averaged 231 points in January — the highest level since records began in 1990. …

The Index rose by 3.4 percent from December — with big increases in particular for dairy [cattle feed becomes more expensive because of the ethanol program], cereal and oil prices. …

The data from the Rome-based FAO showed that prices for dairy products rose by 6.2 percent from December, oils and fats gained 5.6 percent, while cereals went up by 3.0 percent because of lower global supply of wheat and maize. …

The Food Price Index hit 200 points over the whole of 2008 at the height of the 2007/2008 food crisis. It breached that level for the first time in October 2010 with 205 points. …

And this is from FrontPage Magazine:

One of the most common causes of societal discontent, the very factor that led to the ongoing Egyptian protests, is hunger. Unfortunately, worldwide global warming fanaticism has only contributed to this plight. By consuming ever-expansive portions of the world food supply for the production of green bio-fuels, the left has increased the cost of food for those who can least afford it. This has caused much undue suffering for the world’s poor and significantly exacerbated Third World instability — and Egypt is no exception. …

Today, we’re seeing that effect in Egypt and we’re going to see more of it throughout the world unless we can fix the growing worldwide food crisis. We’ve been skating on thin ice, in terms of food supply, for more than a decade now. Between 2000 and 2010, the World Food Price Index, the inflation-adjusted measure of how expensive food is across the globe, almost doubled. In 2000 the index sat at a value of 90. By 2010, the index had risen to a value of 172. That’s a 91% increase in the cost of food over the course of a decade. …

Between 1999 and 2009, the amount of cropland used to grow wheat in America dropped by over 3 million acres, or almost 5 per cent. … The amount of land used to grow rice dropped over 15 per cent; for oats, over 30 per cent; for rye, over 20 per cent; for peanuts and edible beets, over 25 per cent; and for sugarbeets, a shade under 25 per cent. These are some of the commodities that are used, directly and indirectly, to produce the food that once fed the world. And, those statistics are just a few highlights, or lowlights if you will, of the overall trend.

In the US, farmers use ever more land to grow “energy-crops” – chiefly corn and soybeans – because they are subsidized by the government, and ever less for crops that can only be eaten.

Overall, the amount of United States cropland used to grow basic food commodities — crops other than corn and soybeans — has decreased by over 22 million acres since 1999. …

The American taxpayer … ultimately pays the bill for the bio-fuel incentive programs that make growing energy crops more profitable than providing nutrition to the globe.

It’s ironic that the United Nations should be warning about the disastrous results of the food-into-fuel policy, since it is the central church, the Vatican one might say, of the “green” religion.

But don’t take my word for it, consider instead the viewpoint of the organization that has been pushing global warming hysteria harder than anyone this side of Al Gore: the United Nations. According to the UN, almost 10 per cent of world grain production – that’s about 100 million metric tons per year – goes for bi-fuel production. They expect that number to double by 2018. The UN’s Food and Agriculture Organization says that “competition between the three Fs (food, feed and fuel) is expected to intensify,” which is probably about as close in tone to criticism that one branch of the UN is going to use about another branch: the International Panel on Climate Change.

So it seems that the left has now become more sentimental about the planet than about the poor.

Michelle Obama and her fans might try fussing less about Americans being too fat and think more (if think they can) about why other nations are too thin.

President Bush tried to democratize the Arab Middle East. It was an effort worth making. But did he understand what he was up against?

In his World Economic Forum Address, delivered at Sharm el Sheikh International Congress Center, Egypt, on May 18, 2008, he said:

“Democracies do not take the same shape; they develop at different speeds and in different ways, and they reflect the unique cultures and traditions of their people.”

This is typical waffle of Western statesmen trying to accommodate multicultural “values” when speaking of dysfunctional polities.

There is some variety among national democracies, differences in types of representation and electoral process – administrative differences – which may reflect local mores and preferences, but these are superficial. True democracies, the ones which allow for change of government and limits upon government, do not reflect the “unique cultures and traditions” of their people: they reflect a core Western (British) cultural development, a tradition of limiting absolute power constitutionally. This political principle – like the zero in mathematics – may have originated within one culture, but it is of benefit to all mankind in the establishment of national political institutions. It is through these institutions that we know freedom (civil rights, the freedoms of speech, assembly, religion, the individual protected from the predations of power). Democracy is a superior idea, and the West should continue to offer it – insist on it – to nations which have inferior arrangements. Diluting the idea by allowing for local versions of power-sharing to substitute for it is foolish. For example, I do not count the loya jirga, the traditional tribal forum for dispute arbitration, as a cultural equivalent of democratic government, nor can I see how it could form the institutional basis for a national democracy as it enshrines tribal power. Societies which borrow the trappings of democracy – elections – without the civil institutions that sustain the core principle are parodies of democracy (one-party communist states, kleptocracies, oligarchies, autocracies, theocracies). There is a distinct element of parody in setting up national arrangements which submit to local traditions by enshrining sectarian power, by having individuals of different sects take up different political offices (as in Lebanon).

When the West allows parodies of democracy to be installed because this shape of democracy “reflects the unique culture and tradition of [a] people”, it is relegating the people to more of the (not so unique) culture and tradition of absolute power: dynastic, tribal, sectarian, ideological powers asserting themselves and oppressing their rivals for as long as they have strength of arms and/or superior numbers (not to be confused with a democratic majority).

Allowing the Muslim Brotherhood power, or Shia equivalents, or communists for that matter, in Egypt would not be an expression of freedom, nor an example of democracy in action. These are not political parties, they are absolute powers waiting to seize office. The West has long established that one may not sell oneself into slavery. That idea is incorporated into the idea of democracy: an electorate may not vote itself out of sovereignty.

Obama is making a very grave error – as have administrations before him – in allowing totalitarians opportunities to take power at all, but to do so under the pretense that their elected accession to power reflects “democratic self-determination” or some collective expression of “freedom” is an appalling betrayal of democratic principles. The Nobel peace prizewinner is guaranteeing that there will be blood …

C.Gee   February 2, 2011