From RealEconTV

Michael Gerson, in an article at Townhall – a conservative website! – objects to Oklahoma’s constitutional amendment preventing the introduction of Islam’s sharia law into the state.

He claims that the measure was introduced to “to taunt a religious minority”, and dubs it “faith-baiting”, warning that other states could follow the example and introduce measures to “bait” Christians, for instance, or Hindus.

He tries to defend sharia:

Anti-Shariah activists argue that Shariah law controls every area of a Muslim’s life … and thus that Islam itself is incompatible with American democracy. Radical Islamists would nod in agreement to each of these claims…

Not surprising really, since the claims are true. But he has a different understanding:

Both are wrong. The proper interpretation of Shariah law is a subject of vigorous debate within Islam. There are some who would freeze societies in the cultural practices of seventh-century Arabia. But there are others who identify a core of Islamic teaching that is separable from the cultural assumptions of the Quran and the teachings of Muhammad. Predominantly Muslim nations take a variety of approaches to the application of Islamic law, from theocracy to official secularism. …

Wherever did he get this idea of a “vigorous debate within Islam” over sharia or anything else? Where is “Islamic teaching separable from the Quran and the teachings of Muhammad”? What taqqiya (religiously sanctioned lies) has he been swallowing? He gives no sources, no references.

Most if not all states that have a majority Muslim population and a constitution  – and we have found only one exception  – claim that the basis of their  law is sharia. The exception was Turkey, but that is changing. Turkey is now governed by a religious party. The genuinely secular state  that Kemal Ataturk created is being dismantled and the Turks are returning to Islamic darkness.

Does Gerson actually know anything about sharia law? He goes on:

So is Shariah law compatible with democracy? In the totalitarian version of the Taliban, it cannot be reconciled with pluralism. But if Shariah is interpreted as a set of transcendent principles of fairness and justice …

If it is so interpreted? It would be interesting to see how a system of law that has a woman’s testimony valued at half that of a man’s, and prescribes death for apostasy, to take just two examples, can be interpreted as “a set of transcendent principles of fairness and justice”.

He really seems not to know what he’s talking about. It is precisely this sort of deliberate blindness to what Islam is and intends that helps it towards its objective of domination.

He also seems to be unaware that sharia is creeping into Western countries and creating a great deal of justified anger and anxiety by the sort of “justice” the sharia courts are doling out. Muslim women in Britain, for instance, who had hoped for protection from sharia under British law, are now subjected to the “justice and fairness” of one or another of 85 sharia courts, whose rulings are enforced by the British state. They feel bitterly betrayed by the country in which they sought refuge from the subjugation that the law of Islam prescribes for them. (See our post Sharia in Britain, November 5, 2010.)

The state of Oklahoma, in our opinion, is foresightful and wise to bar sharia out. What is deplorable is that it has become necessary to take legislative action against it in the United States of America.

General Sir David Richards, Chief of the British Armed Forces, commander of  NATO forces in Afghanistan since 2006, “subscribes to the notion that such an ideologically-driven adversary [as al-Qaeda] cannot be defeated in the traditional sense, and to attempt to do so could be a mistake”, according to the Sunday Telegraph.

Sir David says “War” is the correct term for describing the conflict between the West and al-Qaeda and other Islamic militant groups.

It might not be the stereotypical view of war, he insists, in the sense of massed armies attempting to outmanoeuvre their opponents but it needs to be viewed in the same way. But this war – unlike those of the past – could last up to 30 years.

Why 30? We are not told. The war he describes has no conceivable end:

We are engaged in a global struggle against a pernicious form of ideologically distorted form of Islamic fundamentalism. …

A war against an ideology, he accepts, has to be fought differently from a war against an enemy nation; and whereas “in conventional war, defeat and victory is very clear cut and is symbolised by troops marching into another nation’s capital” , there can be no such moment of clear victory in this “global struggle” against a “form of Islamic fundamentalism”.

The general is all for fighting such a war, even though there can there never be  a “clear cut victory”.

What is more, he thinks no such victory is “necessary”.

You have to ask: “do we need to defeat it (Islamist militancy)?”  in the sense of a clear cut victory, and I would argue that it is unnecessary and would never be achieved.

It is true that the West is engaged in a war with Islam, which makes war because it is ideologically committed to making war, and the general almost says as much. Perhaps he hopes to be understood to mean as much. But he doesn’t exactly say so. He doesn’t say that what we are up against is Islam, or the ideology of Islam. He removes accusation as far from Islam as he can. We are, he says, under attack by  “a pernicious form“, [an] “ideologically distorted form“,  of “Islamic fundamentalism”. Not even Islamic fundamentalism itself, but a pernicious, distorted form of it.

Seen in those terms, the enemy can only be a bunch of deluded fanatics. In the general’s view there will always be such aberrant types who stupidly misunderstand the teaching of their own religion, and of course we must do what we can to protect ourselves from them. “The national security of the UK and our allies is, in my judgement, at stake,” he says.

And he hastens to add that, despite the indefeatable nature of the enemy, the war in Afghanistan is not futile. The deluded fanatics must be fought in any and every state where they establish themselves.

“Make no mistake,”  he states with added emphasis, “the global threat from al-Qaeda and its terrorist affiliates is an enduring one and one which, if we let it, will rear its head in states particularly those that are unstable. …

“Our men and women in Afghanistan are fighting to prevent this [pernicious, ideologically distorted form of Islamic fundamentalism] from spreading.”

But in the long run, what will best overcome it, even if never permanently and decisively, is something other than the weapons of war:

Education, prosperity, understanding and democracy, he argues passionately, are the weapons that would ultimately turn people away from terrorism.

Has he not been informed that most of the Islamic terrorists who have murdered thousands in the West are educated and prosperous, and grew up in the democracies they attacked? What is it that they failed to understand which could make all the difference?

The general is right that the enemies are Muslim, use terrorism, are ideologically driven, and are not defeatable by conventional warfare. He is wrong that they are an ignorant, impoverished, desperate, deluded atypical minority who have misunderstood the teaching of Islam.

The truth is that Islam commands jihad. Jihad is continual war against non-Muslims until Islam rules the whole world. The Taliban, the Wahhabis, the Muslim Brotherhood, the mass murderers of 9/11, all those who have carried out the 16,384 (tally to this date) violent attacks in the name of Islam, understand perfectly what Muhammad taught and are obedient to the ideology of their faith.

Islam needs to be countered by persistent criticism and argument of all sorts, including derision. That is what Islam fears most – argument against it, critical examination, debunking – which is why the Islamic states are trying to make it illegal to say anything against Islam, hoping to achieve protection from reason by means of a United Nations resolution.

If by “education” General Sir David Richards meant continual teaching against Islam, he’d be right.

After the Second World War, the Germans were made to undergo a process of “denazification”. It was a program of education for all Germans to rid them of belief in the ideology of Nazism. Whether it actually cleaned out the minds of true believers or not, it did make it hard for anyone to speak publicly in defense of what the Nazis and the Third Reich had stood for, by making it shameful to do so. (The defeat itself more than anything else convinced Germany that the Nazis had been wrong.)

Ideally, the same should be done with Islam: a de-Islamization program wherever it could be put into effect.

Of course that will not happen. The West upholds freedom of religion, Islam calls itself a religion, so Islam will be left free to spread its malevolent practices: women mutilated, assaulted, enslaved; non-Muslims killed if they will not submit; legal execution carried out by stoning, burning, crucifixion, punishment by the amputation of hands and feet; and the world at large subjected to perpetual warfare until it accepts unquestioningly forever the law and morals of a cruel illiterate bandit of the Dark Ages.

At least we can and must argue against Islam. Learn about it, spread the truth about it, expose it, denounce it. Resist its advance in every way. No footbaths. No same-sex swimming sessions in public pools. No removal of pigs or their effigies from public places. No taxi drivers exempted from carrying dogs and alcohol. No time off work for prayer. No mosque at Ground Zero. No sharia-compliant financial deals. No legitimized sharia courts, enforcement of their rulings, or deference by judges to Muslim custom.

The West has the intellectual resources to defeat Islam. What it lacks is the will.

Charles Krauthammer, whose intelligence must be counted as one of America’s assets (and whose opinion we crave to hear even though we sometimes disagree with it), observes that Obama’s gorgeous cavalcade through East Asia ended up a failure, extending his record of failures in foreign affairs.

From The Corner of National Review Online:

Whenever a president walks into a room with another head of state and he walks out empty-handed — he’s got a failure on his hands.

And this was self-inflicted. With Obama it’s now becoming a ritual. It’s a combination of incompetence, inexperience, and arrogance. He was handed a treaty [with South Korea] by the Bush administration. It was done. But he wanted to improve on it. And instead, so far, he’s got nothing. …

And this is a pattern with Obama. He thinks he can reinvent the world. With Iran, he decides he has a silver tongue, he’ll sweet-talk ’em into a deal. He gets humiliated over and over again. With the Russians he does a reset, he gives up missile defense, he gets nothing.

In the Middle East, he proposes a ban on Jewish construction in Jerusalem, which is never going to happen. And what does it do? After 17 years [of negotiations without any preconditions] it destroys any chance of negotiations.

Again, a combination of [incompetence] — he comes in, I’ll reinvent the world, I know everything — and arrogance. And the result? He gets zero results.

Right. And he’s not likely to become any wiser when his White House advisers are trapped between old dreams and new incomprehension.

From a Washington Post report:

One adviser said they spent the past dozen days “soul-searching.”

Another said that … “people aren’t just sitting around doing soul-searching. They’re gaming out the short, medium and long term.”

“People have given a lot of thought to this,” said that adviser, who like others interviewed spoke on the condition of anonymity in order to freely discuss internal deliberations.

But their deliberations are apparently more of a casting about for comfort than a facing up to the election’s message of rejection:

In some ways, they said, the midterms were not as bleak a harbinger as some Democrats fear. Though Republicans took the House and narrowed the Democratic margin in the Senate, Obama’s personal-approval ratings remain high and his core constituencies remain highly supportive. Re-energizing them will be among his priorities.

So he’s happy with what he is, and will do again what he did before.

Advisers also said it will probably take months, if not longer, to develop a strategy for restoring some of the early promise of the Obama presidency, particularly the notion that he was a different kind of Democrat. …

Yeah, sure – further left than most. Though most voters did not realize that taking the country far to the left was part of his early promise.

Although Obama could benefit from a high-profile compromise – perhaps on extending the Bush-era tax cuts or on other tax initiatives set to expire before the end of the year – officials are also prepared to point out any Republican intransigence….

That they can bring themselves to do. But will they  point out any intransigence on Obama’s part?

One of the many questions Obama faced immediately after Election Day was whether he “got it” – got, that is, voters’ frustration with his governance and policies. Obama hinted that he did in some respects, noting that his failure to make government more transparent or to curb earmarks did not live up to the high standards he had set.

That’s it? That’s all? They should have been “more transparent” – whatever that means – and Obama should have lived up to some high standards that he had set – whatever they were?

So what’s his plan?

A change of advisers – though not of advice.

A series of upcoming personnel moves – coming as outside critics call for a White House shake-up – will put Obama in a stronger position to make substantive progress, especially on the economy… such as finding a replacement for economic adviser Lawrence H. Summers and getting Jacob Lew confirmed at the Office of Management and Budget. … Axelrod will leave, with former campaign manager David Plouffe moving into the White House to assume a similar role … And Pete Rouse, the acting chief of staff, is about to complete an assessment of the White House bureaucracy that could lead to more personnel shifts. …

But –

“There isn’t going to be a reset button. That’s not their style,” said a Democratic strategist who works with the White House on several issues. …

Reset buttons “not their style”? Oh, we thought it was. Can we ever forget Hillary Clinton bustling about with a big red reset button to change American-Russian relations forever? Such fun and games it was, even though perfectly futile.

“They don’t like pivots,” [the strategist said] “and they also believe they’re right.”

There it is, the upshot of all the deliberations. Why should they make any serious changes when they’re certain that their policies are right? To them, it’s the electorate that’s wrong.

Obama, deafened by his arrogance, will not hear what the voters are saying to him.

During his  grand progress through East Asia, Obama made a speech in Jakarta, capital of Indonesia, praising that Muslim country – in which he had spent some years of his childhood – for its “toleration”.

When it comes to religious freedom, Indonesia – he would have it known – is the equal of the United States.

Did he speak the truth?

The people of East Timor, most of them Catholics, would not say that he did. In August 1999 they voted in a referendum for independence from Indonesia. No sooner was the result in, than Muslim militias, aided and abetted by the Indonesian authorities, attacked the civilian population, killing well over a thousand and forcing hundreds of thousands to flee into West Timor. The Muslims proceeded to execute a scorched-earth campaign, razing buildings and destroying infrastructure. (East Timor finally achieved independence in 2002.)

Go here to find lists of atrocities, with pictures, inflicted on the Christians of East Timor in 1999 by Muslim militias and Indonesian troops.

The Christians of West Java would also not agree with Obama that Indonesia is remarkable for its toleration.

From the Gates of Vienna:

The sharia authorities in West Java have developed a two-prong strategy to discourage the practice of Christianity. First they knock down a church, which drives the Christian congregation into open-air worship. Then they harass them for praying in the open, because public worship by non-Muslims is against the law. …

Last Monday, police raided a house used for worship by Narogong Pentecostal Church in the village of Limusnunggal, Cileungsi sub-district. … The building was eventually torn down and ten people arrested.

The police “were not neutral in the dispute”, though their presence could have a calming effect.

A group of 500 Islamic extremists blocked Christians from the Huria Protestant Church in a field where the Sunday service was taking place. The incident occurred last July 18 in the city of Pondok Timur in Mustika Jaya subdistrict, district of Bekasi (West Java).

Muslims blocked all routes to prevent Christians leaving the field and began to insult them, terrorizing them. The group of Protestant believers pray outdoors because their hall for religious functions was closed on the grounds that it was illegal.

The situation improved when a representative of the Bekasi Office for Religious Affairs, along with 200 policemen … [The pastor] asked the representative to help [his] congregation to leave the site without harm. …

For years the Christians of Bekasi have been targeted by Islamic fundamentalists. Early in 2010, radical groups blocked religious services, prevented Christians from access to existing churches and stopped the construction of new churches. Since 2009, more than 17 churches have been affected by Islamic extremists. …

The religious authorities have recently intensified their enforcement of strict sharia practices.

And what might the Christians of Sulawesi province say?

There, in October 2005, three Christian girls were walking to school when Muslims seized them and hacked off their heads.

BBC News reported:

Three girls have been beheaded and another badly injured as they walked to a Christian school in Indonesia.

They were walking through a cocoa plantation near the city of Poso in central Sulawesi province when they were attacked. …

Police say the heads were found some distance from the bodies.

Typically stuck on stupid when it comes to reporting  Muslim violence, the BBC commented:

It is unclear what was behind the attack, but the girls attended a private Christian school and one of the heads was left outside a church leading to speculation that it might have had a religious motive. …

Sure it might have. Especially considering that –

This is an area that has a long history of religious violence between Muslims and Christians. …

Between them? Not violent attacks by Muslims on Christians who defended themselves? How eager are Christians to initiate violent clashes with Muslims in Indonesia?

But  the BBC doesn’t care to find fault with Muslims any more than Obama does.

More than 1,000 people were killed before a government-brokered truce.

Although the violence has been subdued, it has never gone away completely.

A bomb in May in the nearby town of Tentena, which is predominantly Christian, killed 22 people and injured over 30.

That naughty violence with a will of its own!

And what might the opinion be of Christians in Sukohajo and Klaten?

This report and commentary comes from NewAmerican:

Astoundingly, Obama compared Indonesia (a nation that has only recently begun to emerge from being an unabashed dictatorship) to the United States, declaring that the two nations share a spirit of toleration. …

“We are two nations which have traveled different paths. Yet our nations show that hundreds of millions who hold different beliefs can be united in freedom under one flag,” Obama said.

For those Christians whose experience of Indonesian “toleration” is not limited to childhood memories, Obama’s words are likely to elicit sorrow and pain. According to the Jakarta Christian Communication Forum (FKKJ), religious violence has been on the increase since Indonesian independence [from the Dutch, in 1945], and Christians have been the target of much of that violence. …

The latest violent incident occurred in Sukoharjo, Central Java, on Oct. 13 [2010], when 12 people on motorcycles set fire to a Protestant church …  A day before, an attempt to set fire to St. Joseph Catholic church in Klaten, Central Java, was foiled … On Oct. 17, radical Muslims threatened to attack a Catholic church in Karanganyar, Central Java. …

After the start of the reform era in 1998, the number of cases [of attacks on churches] skyrocketed …

Contrary to Obama’s “spin,” the history of the two nations regarding the relationship between Christians and Muslims and the experience of “religious tolerance” is vastly different.

So we ask: What, in addition to his obvious penchant for flattering Muslim potentates, moved Obama to make an assertion, in a speech that will endure in the records of his presidency, so far from the truth?

An intention to deceive? Pig ignorance? Wishful thinking? Dumb acceptance of misinformation? Mental derangement?

Note: In the same speech, delivered in an Islamic country, Obama chose to castigate Israel for building in its own capital city because Palestinians don’t like it. It’s worth noting that the “tolerant” Indonesians do not allow Israelis to set foot in their country.

Foreseeing the possibility that the cruel law of Islam, the system of oppression called sharia, might creep into Oklahoma, the state passed a state constitutional amendment to prevent it. It was supported by 70% of voters.

Up pops the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) – whose aim is to spread sharia over the whole of the United States and ultimately to have it supplant US federal and state law and obliterate the Constitution – with a suit against Oklahoma.

The activist, “progressive”, Clinton-appointed federal judge, Vicki Miles-LeGrange, ruled in CAIR’s favor, granting a temporary restraining order.

Investor’s Business Daily points out that, by bringing the suit, CAIR is bringing sharia – and the Muslim plan to impose it on the whole country – into the bright light of Supreme Court judgment, and so before the bar of public opinion: an exposure that could, and should, put an end to it in America.

The Council on American-Islamic Relations may wish it never sued to overturn an Oklahoma ban on Shariah law. Now the entire nation will get to see it and other Islamists’ true anti-American colors. …

CAIR has ignited a legal firestorm that will likely rage all the way to the Supreme Court. Thanks to CAIR’s latest bit of lawfare, Americans will get to hear a long overdue debate not just about the constitutionality of such bans on Shariah law but about the constitutionality of Shariah law itself.

This is not a debate CAIR wants to have, since it ultimately will have to defend the indefensible. …

It’s a medieval legal code that administers cruel and unusual punishments such as stonings, amputations and honor killings. …

Shariah can be seen in action this week with Pakistan’s death sentence on a Christian woman for blasphemy. …

Read a report on this case at Creeping Sharia. The woman, Asia Bibi, has been convicted on a trumped-up charge. Her conviction is a lurid illustration of the viciousness of sharia.

CAIR, which thinks free speech is a one-way street, is working with the Organization of the Islamic Conference on an international blasphemy law that would criminalize “Islamophobia” …

CAIR says it’s just a “civil rights advocacy group.” But the Justice Department says it’s a front group for Hamas and its parent, the radical Muslim Brotherhood, a worldwide jihadist movement that has a secret plan to impose Shariah law on the U.S. …

U.S. prosecutors in 2007 named CAIR an unindicted co-conspirator in a criminal scheme led by the Holy Land Foundation to funnel millions to Hamas suicide bombers and their families.

Federal courts found “ample evidence” linking CAIR to the conspiracy and are expected to unseal the dossier in coming weeks.

Finally to indict the nefarious organization? We hope so.

The tumult and the shouting about global warming dies. Captains and kings of the great scam quietly depart. The Chicago Climate Exchange is giving up carbon trading, as Investor’s Business Daily is happy to report:

Climate Fraud: As the case for global warming and cap-and-trade has collapsed, so too has the market that was to exploit this manufactured crisis for fun and profit. The climate-change bubble has burst.

The collapse of the Chicago Climate Exchange (CCX) … [has]  implications for the future of the American economy and the business climate [that] are staggering: It is an acknowledgment that both the case for climate trade and cap-and-tax legislation has also collapsed.

On Oct. 21 the exchange announced it was ending carbon trading … Launched as a “voluntary” method of trading “carbon credits,” CCX rested on the hope that cap-and-tax legislation would make such trading mandatory — and profitable. …

The hope of the scammers was that Obama would succeed in forcing through such legislation. He certainly wanted to. He was involved in the hustling from the start:

Barack Obama served on the board of the Joyce Foundation from 1994 to 2002, when it issued CCX start-up grants. Presidential adviser Valerie Jarrett also once sat on the Joyce board. As president, cap-and-trade is one of Obama’s highest priorities.

The exchange’s founder, Richard Sandor … [had] estimated that climate trading could be “a $10 trillion market,” … But now, in the wake of Climate-gate and other scandals, as well as recent election results, that’s an unlikely event.

Can we be so ungenerous as to exult over the scammers’ staggering losses? Yes we can.

The biggest losers are CCX’s two biggest investors, Al Gore’s Generation Investment Management and Goldman Sachs …

CCX’s collapse was inevitable as both the enthusiasm for cap-and-trade — and the world itself — cooled. After the e-mail exchanges from the Climate Research Unit at the University of East Anglia reveled the extent to which global climate data were being manipulated to “hide the decline” in global temperatures, hopes for profiting off the scam with another scam evaporated. …

Carbon trading at CCX all but dried up as prices plunged from over $7 a ton in 2008 to just 10 cents as of August [2010]. …

CCX’s carbon-trading demise is reassuring evidence that eventually all houses of cards will collapse.

When Sarah Palin was chosen as John McCain’s running mate in the 2008 presidential election, she was widely perceived, even by admirers, as lacking the gravitas necessary in a national political leader.

If that was all she lacked to qualify for high office, she now qualifies, because she has acquired it. She has knowledge and sensible opinions about foreign affairs. And she has given serious thought to the nation’s economic predicament.

The Fed announced that it would buy $600 billion in Treasury securities over the next eight months. It’s a dangerous move, and Sarah Palin has spoken out cogently against it.

From the Wall Street Journal:

Sarah Palin, delving into a major policy issue a week after the mid-term elections, took aim Monday at the Federal Reserve and called on Fed chairman Ben Bernanke to “cease and desist” with a bond-buying program designed to boost the economy.

Speaking at a trade association conference in Phoenix, the potential 2012 presidential candidate and tea-party favorite said she’s “deeply concerned” about the central bank creating new money to buy government bonds. Ms. Palin said “it’s far from certain this will even work” and suggested the move would create an inflation problem.

She’s right. It will.

She went on to say:

When Germany, a country that knows a thing or two about the dangers of inflation, warns us to think again, maybe it’s time for Chairman Bernanke to cease and desist … We don’t want temporary, artificial economic growth bought at the expense of permanently higher inflation which will erode the value of our incomes and our savings.

Palin’s influence on public opinion is tremendous, as the November 2 elections proved.

Should she be the Republican choice for the presidency in 2012? The only strong argument against it is that she is “too divisive”. Feeling among the voters runs as strongly against her as for her.

And as that is true of Obama too, her standing against him would present a polarized choice. The contrast between them – what they respectively stand for – would be stark: collectivism versus liberty, the great political division of our time personified in the two candidates. A starker choice than ever before?

The nation would be confronted with an either/or: a commitment to one future or another.

Would it be too intimidating for every voter to have to make such a momentous decision?

America would be deciding what it wanted to be, that “shining city on a hill”, that “beacon of liberty”, that “last best hope of mankind”, if it chose Palin? Or a declining power, a shabby welfare state, beset by enemies and insufficiently armed to defend itself, a glorious ideal abandoned, a vision of civilized freedom lost, a colossal wreck, an historic tragedy, if  it chose Obama.