The U.S. armed the Afghans and helped them drive out the Soviets, rescued Kuwait and Saudi Arabia from the psychopathic sadist Saddam Hussein, bombed Christian Serbs to rescue Muslim Kosovars and Bosnians, liberated Shiite Iraqis from Hussein, liberated Afghans from the brutal Taliban, poured billions of dollars of aid to terrorist Palestinian regimes, used our jets to help the Muslims in Libya free themselves from the psychotic Gaddafi, and supported in word and coin the jihadist, America-hating, anti-Semitic Muslim Brothers in Egypt so that Muslims can enjoy “freedom and democracy.” And that’s not all. We have incessantly protested our respect for the wonderful Islamic faith, censored our official communications and training programs to remove any references to jihadism or the Islamic theology that justifies holy war, euphemized jihadist attacks like the Fort Hood murders as “workplace violence,” invited imams to pray in the White House, filled our schools with curricula praising Islam and its contributions to civilization, scolded and prosecuted writers or cartoonists who exercise their First Amendment right to criticize Islam, abandoned “profiling” as a technique for identifying possible terrorists trying to board a plane or enter the country, hired as advisors to the FBI, the Pentagon, and the CIA Muslim apologists who recycle blatant lies and distortions – we have done all this liberating of Muslims and flattering of them and their faith, and they still don’t like us, and they still want to kill us.

We’ve taken this list of What America Has Done For Muslims from an article  by Bruce Thornton. He compiled it to refute the oft-repeated fallacy that Muslim violence is an understandable (even condonable) reaction to “Western bad behavior”, such as – in Muslim eyes – “colonialism, imperialism, greed for oil, support for Israel, disrespect of Islam and Mohammed, the War on Terror that has demonized Muslims”. He doesn’t indicate approval of any of the actions he lists, but refers to them only to show that accusations of American ill-treatment of Muslims are untrue; that in fact America has treated Muslims tremendously well.

Far too well. That is the point we want to stress. More than that, we say America should not have done any of those things. (With the exception of destroying Saddam Hussein; a worthwhile achievement not because Kuwait and Saudi Arabia were “rescued” from him, but because the destruction of a monstrous tyrant is not a thing to be regretted.)

By going to the aid of the Kosovar terrorists against the Serbs, and the Afghans against the Soviets and the Taliban; by supporting the Muslim Brotherhood and the terrorist Palestinian regimes; by inviting Muslims to give policy advice in government departments; by defending them against criticism and praising them in the schools, America has not only flattered Muslims, but boosted their arrogance, endorsed their claim that they are owed much by the West in general and America in particular. Worse, America’s willingness to expend blood and treasure in their causes has positively encouraged them to carry on with their own “bad behavior” since that is what has brought them such rewards. If they are intensifying their jihad against the non-Muslim world – and they are – it is very largely because the are finding it profitable to do so. Some jihadists might be jailed; a few might even be executed; but for the most part Islam is being treated like the maiden needing to be rescued by the brave knight who will slay any dragon threatening her.

Islam is the self-declared enemy of the West, of America and what America stands for: liberty, tolerance, equality before the law.

Until Islam is treated as the enemy and not as a victim needing rescue and largesse, it will continue to kill and maim Americans, disrupt their lives, deprive them of their nearest and dearest, and constitute an ever intensifying menace.

But will  America stop playing Lady Bountiful and St. George to its mortal enemy, and act like the great power it is? Will the present Islam-loving administration be got rid of and sane pro-American leadership take over? Will America win this war?

This post follows on from How goes the jihad?, posted four days ago after two lethal bombs were exploded near the finishing line of the Boston Marathon, killing three people – one of them Martin Richard, aged 8 – and wounding about 180 others, crippling some for life by blowing off their limbs. We quoted a short article we had first posted seventeen months earlier, to focus attention on jihad, because we suspected that the Boston bombing was a continuation of Islam’s perpetual “holy war”. We didn’t mention the bombing. We were waiting to know who the Boston bombers were.

Now we know. We are not surprised. They were Muslims. A pair of Muslim brothers, Dzhokhar and Tamerlan Tsarnaev, were zealously fighting the jihad, as their religion commands them to do.

The Left however will remain utterly at a loss to imagine what their motive could possible be. Typically Politico, for instance, reporting who the bombers were and many things about them, including their religion, comments: “It remains unclear at this time what the motive was behind the Boston Marathon bombing.”

In another piece on the subject, Politico asks and comments:

Why would Chechen refugees, who’ve been locked for nearly two decades in a bitter, violent conflict against the Russian government, harbor such anger against the United States that they’d want to carry out a terrorist attack at the Boston Marathon?” Politico asks.

“The answer is far from obvious,” it concludes.

Which prompts Daniel Greenfield to point out rightly at Front Page:

Those few lines sum up the whole problem with our war on terror. A Muslim terrorist attack by Muslim terrorists? Why? The political establishment has spent decades choosing to ignore the basic facts. Then each time it’s baffled when the obvious happens.

Greenfield lists a few of the facts about one of these Muslim terrorists:

Tamerlan Tsarnaev’s YouTube channel had a playlist titled “Islam” and another playlist titled “Terrorists”. That should be obvious enough even for Politico.

His last subscription was to a channel “Allah is the One.” His Islam playlist includes “The Emergence of Prophecy: The Black Flags From Khorasan”, a Jihadi video that refers to those black flags you see Salafists, including Al Qaeda, waving around.

The video deals with a key part of jihadist mythology: That one of the most significant battles fought against the “infidels” will take place in the Khorasan, a geographic area that includes parts of Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iran, Uzbekistan and Tajikistan.

And where the final battle, the Muslim Eschaton, will take place according to Islamic prophecy.

But the Left, which includes the mainstream media, will ignore all this, because –

Muslim terrorists are non-persons. The political establishment pretends they don’t exist. And then they kill a bunch of people and the media has to explain why the people they can’t see and who they don’t believe exist somehow carried out an atrocity for no reason at all.

And Greenfield concludes with a quotation from the Muslim prophet – that also the Left will ignore:

“I have been made victorious through terror” Mohammed said.

NBC News can find out nothing bad about the brothers, and gathers glowing testimonials for them:

One became an American citizen last year on Sept. 11. The other was a boxer who once said: “I like the USA.” …

The suspect at large early Friday was Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, 19, born in Kyrgyzstan, who became a naturalized American citizen on Sept. 11, 2012 … He had a Massachusetts driver’s license and living in the Boston suburb of Cambridge. …

His father, speaking from Russia, told The Associated Press that he was “a true angel” with an interest in medicine. He was registered as a student at the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth, the school said. He was awarded a $2,500 city scholarship toward college two years ago. …

A high school friend of Dzhokhar Tsarnaev told NBC News that he had lots of friends … He was a nice guy. He was shy … As we knew him, he was funny.”

[Another admirer said he was] “just a light, airy, curly-haired kid. I can’t tell you enough what a beautiful young man this was,” she said.

The other brother, killed in a firefight with law enforcement, was identified as Tamerlan Tsarnaev, 26, born in Russia. He became a legal permanent resident in 2007 …

Tamerlan Tsarnaev studied at Bunker Hill Community College in Boston and wanted to become an engineer, according to a profile that appeared in a Boston University magazine in 2010. He said that he hoped to become an American citizen and one day join the U.S. Olympic boxing team. …He also said that he was a Muslim who did not smoke or drink. …

Tamerlan Tsarnaev boxed in a 2004 tournament as part of a program called Golden Gloves, according to The Lowell Sun newspaper. He told the newspaper then: “I like the USA.”

He said that his first love was music, and that he played the piano and violin.

“America has a lot of jobs,” he said. “That’s something Russia doesn’t have. You have a chance to make money here if you are willing to work.”

His former wrestling coach … described him to NBC News as quiet and courteous …

The father, Anzor Tsarnaev, said that he had seen on television that his son was killed. “They were set up!” he exclaimed …

Both men were believed to have entered the country with their family in 2002 or 2003, when the family sought asylum.

Most of the Muslims of Chechnya are Sufis. The Sufis are the Gnostics of Islam. (Dervishes – those mystics who ritually whirl wearing tall hats – belong to the Sufi order.) By reputation they form an especially peaceful branch of that reputedly peaceful religion.

Most, or more probably all, of the terrorists who seized a school at Beslan and killed hundreds of small children (southern Russia, September 1-3, 2004) were Chechen Sufi Muslims.

Here’s a quotation from the Washington Post describing what they did:

Hundreds of children, their parents and teachers died in the bloody culmination of a 52-hour siege that began when heavily armed Muslim guerrillas [Washpo for “terrorists”] stormed their school Wednesday and ended in an hours-long battle with Russian troops Friday.

The battered, burned and scorched survivors of Beslan’s School No. 1, many of them half-naked children, filled the region’s hospitals as troops continued to fight through the afternoon with guerrillas [Muslim terrorists] holed up inside the school. …

Between 500 and 700 injured former hostages were hospitalized Friday, more than 300 of them children … Hundreds were still unaccounted for … Officials acknowledged that the death toll would exceed 250.

The worst carnage, according to escaped hostages and rescuers, came at the start of the pitched battle just after 1 p.m. Friday, when the [Muslim terrorists] exploded the bombs they had rigged inside the school’s cavernous gym. The children had been held there without food or medicine, and scores perished [were crushed to death] when the gym’s roof fell on them. …

The siege of School No. 1, attended by 6- to 16-year-olds, began just after 9 a.m. Wednesday, when the [Muslim terrorists] blasted their way into the building at the end of the opening-day assembly. …  They … demonstrated their seriousness by mining the school with explosives and threatening to blow it up if Russian forces moved in on them.

For 52 hours, that didn’t happen. Then came what looked to be progress midday Friday, when the hostage takers agreed to allow Russians to collect several bodies … of adults killed in the initial shootout. At 1 p.m., four doctors from the Emergency Situations Ministry arrived to do so.

Instead, a battle erupted.

First, two powerful explosions from inside the building rocked Beslan. Soon, scores of hostages started fleeing, some of them dodging gunfire from the guerrillas. “When the children ran, they began to shoot them in their backs,” said [a] Putin aide …

“Bandits [Muslim terrorists] opened fire on the escaping children and adults,” said [the] regional head of the Federal Security Service. “To save their lives, we retaliated.” …

After initial confusion, the Russian attack began. Helicopters roared overhead, special forces stormed the building, tanks swerved into position. Many of Beslan’s anxious fathers also ran toward the school, some armed, some not – intent only on rescuing their children.

Amidst the shooting, many young hostages, most of them barefoot and almost naked after three days in the withering heat of their gym-turned-prison, ran or limped or were carried to safety. Those still standing gulped bottles of water handed to them by rescue workers. “They’re killing us,” a young girl on a stretcher told a police officer. “They’re exploding everything.”

Many of the injured were bloodied and burned and covered in dirt. A man came out carrying a naked girl, her hair matted, her body streaked with shrapnel cuts, her head lolled back. He laid her on the ground and tried to revive her. When she didn’t respond, he started to cry.

The rescue operation was interrupted by a new round of shooting, right near the line of makeshift ambulances. Rocket-propelled grenades and gunfire from automatic rifles sent the volunteers retreating a block farther from the school, and it was there that four children’s corpses soon appeared, laid out under bloodstained white sheets. Several parents came up and looked under the sheets, searching. Then an old woman in a torn flowered dress was brought out on a stretcher, also dead, and rolled onto the grass next to the four children. …

Across the railroad tracks that divide Beslan, the scene at the hospital was bedlam. The courtyard was crowded with rank upon rank of stretchers with injured and dazed children. Hundreds of relatives clamored to inspect the handwritten lists of the wounded.

Through it all, the battle with the remaining [Muslim terrorists] continued. Some apparently remained inside the school well into the evening  … Others escaped and fought elsewhere in Beslan with Russian troops. As night fell, the school’s gym was still smoldering, its massive windows blown out. The walls inside were pocked with bullet holes and echoed with periodic gunfire and explosions. …

Russian officials have long claimed that Chechen rebels were connected to international Islamic fighters [terrorists], including al Qaeda. Late Friday, they announced that 10 of the dead guerrillas in the school siege were Arabs, and state television showed video from inside the building showing several dead fighters who appeared to be foreign.

And again we pick information and apt comment from an article by Daniel Greenfield, titled Beslan Comes to America:

There has been too much sympathy in some circles for Chechen terrorists. After the Beslan Massacre, Time Magazine asked, “Does Russia Share Blame for Beslan?” The London Times reported that the mastermind of the massacre was “is in a state of shock over what happened, but blames the Russians.”

This was Beslan.

Survivors told how screaming teenage girls were dragged into rooms adjoining the gymnasium where they were being held and raped by their Chechen captors who chillingly made a video film of their appalling exploits. They said children were forced to drink their own urine and eat the petals off the flowers they had brought their teachers after nearly three days without food or water in the stifling hot gym.

These are the types of savage monsters who could place a bomb next to an 8-year-old boy.

Beslan has come to America and it should be a wake up call. There should be no more sympathy for Chechen terrorists. Or for that matter any Muslim terrorists.

And we need to stop bringing refugees from Muslim conflicts to America. That goes for Chechens, Afghans, Syrians and all the rest. All we’re doing is importing bloody wars from around the world here.

Events like the Marathon Massacre are inevitable if we keep maintaining an immigration policy that invites the people responsible for atrocities such as Beslan to repeat them in this country.

The jihad goes on.

At Guantanamo Bay, prisoners of war are treated unjustly – by being treated far too well.

A punishment should fit the offense. If it’s too harsh, justice isn’t served; and if it’s too lenient, justice isn’t served.

Enemy combatants taken prisoner in the midst of war should not be tried as civilians. They should be held until the hostilities are over then returned to their country. If they are to be tried – for committing atrocities say – it should be by a military court as soon as possible after their capture. Executions should be carried out  by firing squad. (Not by boiling them in oil, great as the temptation to do so might be when they’re terrorists.)

While captive they should all be locked up for 23 hours a day; have no privacy, yet very little company; have no entertainment except books; and be fed on whatever their captors consider adequate for keeping them alive.

If information needs to be extracted from them against their will, physical torture should not be used because no one wants a world in which it’s okay deliberately to inflict physical pain; but humiliation could be effective – especially with those who come from a primitive “honor” society.

But at Guantanamo, the prisoners are indulged to the point of being coddled, and even treated with respect!

And the more they are indulged and respected, the more they complain.

This is from an Investor’s Business Daily editorial:

Earlier this week, the New York Times published a tear-jerker column penned by none other than Osama bin Laden’s bodyguard.

The paper gave Samir Naji al-Hasan Moqbel a national forum to whine about supposed mistreatment at Guantanamo.

“Gitmo is killing me,” claimed the Times’ new “op-ed contributor.” In fact, Moqbel is trying to kill himself. It’s the prison hospital that’s keeping him alive. He gets round-the-clock feedings by nurses he spits on.

The al-Qaida operative vows not to eat until his captors release him and “restore my dignity.” No doubt that will be achieved by rejoining the Islamic jihad in Afghanistan.

The Times editors, apparently doubling as ACLU activists, worked with the terrorist’s lawyers to get out his sob story. They even tasked an illustrator to depict a gaunt Moqbel strangled by feeding tubes.

He and other detainees responsible for the deaths of 3,000 Americans in the Mideast are finding a sympathetic ear inside the administration and media for their incessant bellyaching about how conditions at Gitmo are “killing” them.

Only, these same poor, abused prisoners have 20-hour access to a new $750,000 soccer field and state-of-the art fitness equipment, as well as their own Muslim chef cooking Islamic meals for them after they work up an appetite at Club Gitmo.

The detainees now have three recreational facilities — an indoor rec yard, an outdoor rec yard and a new soccer field. Special passageways let them pass into the rec yards without being escorted by the military.

And yes, you the taxpayer are paying for all this.

The terrorists also are issued prayer beads and rugs and called to prayer five times a day in Arabic. No one is allowed to interrupt them while they bow to Mecca.

We even point them in the right direction with helpful black arrows affixed to their cell floors. They get their choice of Islamic books and videos stocked by a Muslim librarian. They even have their own clerics to preach to them in Arabic.

Everyone gets a Quran, along with little hammocks to keep them from touching the ground when not in use. …

Detainees even convinced prison officials to no longer raise the American flag anywhere they could see it.

Gitmo is no longer a prison camp; it’s a state-sponsored madrassa. But that’s not good enough for the terrorists and their supporters.

They’re now demanding newer facilities and easier access to lawyers. And more are threatening hunger strikes and unrest if they don’t get their way.

Letting them starve themselves to extinction if they choose to would be a good way of getting rid of them, once they have told their captors everything they have to tell.

So naturally the Pentagon is considering plans for a $150 million overhaul to what is already by far the most expensive prison per capita.

Gitmo has an operating budget this year of almost $177 million. That means that taxpayers are paying more than $1 million for the care and maintenance of each of the remaining 166 terrorists.

The administration already has signed off on construction projects that include a new $11 million hospital and medical units for the detainees, and a $10 million “legal meeting complex,” where lawyers can meet their detainee clients and no doubt conjure up more sob stories to plant in the U.S. media.

Yep, that’s one nasty concentration camp we’re running down there in Cuba.

Seventeen months ago, on September 30, 2011, we posted an article on how Islam was winning its jihad against the non-Islamic world.

Here’s part of it:

Islam’s terrorist tactic is proving hugely powerful and has gained victories that would have been unimaginable a few years ago. It has cowed all the governments of western Europe, and innumerable authorities at all levels in the US. Islam is advancing day by day. Its terrorism is not practiced continually in all target countries, but the threat of it, and the memories of what has been done and could be done again at any moment, are always there. Because authorities are afraid, Islam creeps on.

Day by day, in Western countries into which Muslims migrate in ever-growing numbers, Islam gains its concessions, its privileges: here a mosque; there a partition of a public swimming pool for Muslim women; here a prayer room in a government building; there the removal from a public library of famous children’s books with pictures of pigs in them; here (in Britain for instance) the allowing of sharia courts and the upholding of their rulings by the state; there entitlements tamely paid to multiple Muslim wives by a welfare state with laws against polygamy; and here and here and here the establishment of faculties of Islamic studies, or even whole colleges, with immense grants of money from the Wahhabis of Saudi Arabia. Chunks of history, such as the Holocaust, are omitted from school courses because they might offend Muslim students – let truth be damned. Defense contracting companies in the US fall under the ownership of Muslims, who divert a part of the profits – and what defense secrets? – to the Muslim Brotherhood. In places of hot battle, Iraq is plagued with terrorist attacks day after day; and in Afghanistan the Taliban is undefeated and undefeatable, and ready to re-assume its despotic rule when the coalition soldiers have departed. In Libya an al-Qaeda leader has seized a position of power. And all the while, the mullahs of Iran are preparing to attack the West with nuclear weapons.

True, there have not been any more planes flown into buildings in America, but smaller plots of destruction and mass murder are constantly being laid. True, some of them are foiled, but some are attempted (such as an underwear bomb in a plane over Detroit) and some carried out (such as the massacre at Fort Hood), and the motive behind all of them remains: jihad, the holy war of Islam, perpetually waged one way and another for the conquest of the world by successive generations of Muslims, and coming closer to success now than ever before in history.

Not a word needs to be changed.

This is from Investor’s Business Daily, by Andrew Malcom:

In the satellite photo above on a typical night, note the bustling glow of South Korea and the power-less dark North.

Obama administration officials … rushed to play down their own recent announcements of defensive U.S. military movements in response to threats and provocations from the hermit kingdom of North Korea. …

As with Iran, President Obama has chosen a diplomatic path of international sanctions to discourage the weapons program. As with Iran, they haven’t worked. So, as with Iran, Obama has chosen to apply more of them.

This winter the North set off another underground nuclear test. Then, in recent weeks its officials grew increasingly bombastic, threatening South Korea, shutting down joint economic projects and talking of imminent war with the United States. …

Reports from intelligence posts, so sophisticated they can eavesdrop on conversations between individual troop commanders, were leaked to the media, telling of ominous military movements in the North.

This is familiar behavior for Pyongyang, which regularly ramps up tensions for domestic political reasons and to be mollified by shipments of food and fuel oil and loosening of currency and trade restrictions.

It’s also possible, given the youth and inexperience of the new exalted great leader, Kim Jung-un, that the bombast reflects an internal power struggle. Few senior officials – even their first wives – get to retire in North Korea. They get dead, like Kim’s grandmother when she’d served her purpose.

North Korea is a nation of about 25 million diminutive people, a result of long-term malnutrition to support one of the world’s larger armies. A single modest bag of rice can cost a month’s salary. Brutal concentration camps house an estimated 150,000 political prisoners and release no survivors. …

The most immediate threat from North Korea … is not yet to the American mainland. It’s to South Korea (the capital of Seoul is barely 30 miles from the North). And it’s to Japan, where the U.S. maintains considerable forces, and Guam, home to major Pacific B-52 and nuclear submarine bases.

Just days ago Pentagon officials touted the build-up as involving B-52 “training mission” flyovers of the South, the deployment of anti-missile naval assets to the area and Guam, F-22 stealth Raptor flights and long-range “Hey, watch this” missions of B-2 bombers capable of carrying standard or nuclear weapons. The displays and maneuvers were meant to “reiterate the U.S. commitment to the security of our allies and partners,” spokesmen said.

Voice from a sensible American: “Well done and well said!  The iron will of Barack Obama on display. The only superpower on earth warning the potty little tyranny in North Korea to pipe down or else.”

Voice from the Obama administration: “Who said that? Why are you calling us a superpower? Don’t you know it riles all the countries of the Third World? Hurts their feelings? Suggests they are inferior? If we don’t treat them with respect they may come to hate us. Do you want to take that risk? Shut up!”

Now Obama officials appear to be caving to the North’s threats and bluffs.

“We’re trying to turn the volume down,” an unidentified [shivering] one told CNN. 

“We are absolutely trying to ratchet back the rhetoric,” another worried official told the cable channel.

“We became part of the cycle [of belligerent talk and gestures]. We allowed that to happen.”

“Oh, we are covered with shame! Are our faces red! We are soooo sorry, Kim Jung-un! Please forgive us? Here – here are some shiploads of food for you and your henchmen. Here’s some oil. And a heap of money. And more apologies.”

All delivered with a smiley face.

“Okay now?”

*

Three days ago The Blaze reported:

Amid mounting tensions with North Korea, the Pentagon has delayed an intercontinental ballistic missile test that had been planned for next week at Vandenberg Air Force Base in California …

Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel decided to put off the long-planned Minuteman 3 test … because of concerns the launch could be misinterpreted and exacerbate the Korean crisis.

Margaret Thatcher died today.

Prime Minister David Cameron says, correctly, that she not only led Britain, she saved Britain.

Simon Richards, Director of The Freedom Association, writes to Jillian Becker, Council member of the TFA and editor -in-chief of The Atheist Conservative (as to all the other TFA Council members):

Dear Jillian,

Margaret Thatcher: Freedom Fighter

So, the news that I and millions of other admirers of the greatest British Prime Minister since Churchill had long dreaded has finally come to pass. Let there be no mistake about it, Margaret Thatcher was one of the greatest leaders the world has ever known.

Faced with a Britain in a parlous state, where defeatism and demoralisation held sway, Margaret Thatcher grabbed the nation by the scruff of its neck and gave it back its self-belief. Decades of socialism and growing state control had undermined not only this country’s economy, but its belief that it had a future. Margaret Thatcher, championing the values that had made Britain great, transformed this country and gave it back its self belief. 

After years of surrender to the over-mighty trades union barons, she stood up to them, on behalf of the silent majority, and defeated even [militant trade union leader] ‘King’ Arthur Scargill himself.

When that murdering, drunken tyrant Galtieri invaded the Falkland Islands, she fought to regain what was rightfully ours, restoring pride in Britain and her magnificent soldiers, sailors and airmen.

Margaret Thatcher championed ‘freedom under the law’, realising that a successful society must be based on respect for the individual and for the family. An early collection of her speeches, “Let Our Children Grow Tall”, said it all about her determination to restore independence of mind and self-respect, and grow tall is what a whole generation did. Many, though they benefited from her revival of the British economy and her extension of ownership to countless millions, will never see fit to thank the great Prime Minister who made their own successes possible. That is for them and their conscience.

Maggie, as so many knew her, was, for me, the very definition of courage – the embodiment of Britannia. I shall never forget seeing her, a small, surprisingly frail figure, outside 10 Downing Street on 4 May 1979 – Prime Minister for the first time. That frail figure stood up to the IRA, the PLO, the Soviet Empire, the EU and anybody else who threatened the freedom and democracy she cherished. She made me – and millions of others proud, once again, to be British.

On behalf of The Freedom Association, which upholds that ‘Freedom under the law’ which she championed, I give thanks for the magnificent life of a true fighter for freedom. She will always remain an inspiration to those of us who value individual freedom and the independence of the United Kingdom.

Just so. We at The Atheist Conservative do not “give thanks” for her life, but we are grateful to her for all she did, not just for Britain – which was much – but for the world. Above all, she and President Ronald Reagan won the war against the evil empire of the Soviet Union. 

The New York Times in its report of Lady Thatcher’s death, refers to …

…the principles known as Thatcherism — the belief that economic freedom and individual liberty are interdependent, that personal responsibility and hard work are the only ways to national prosperity, and that the free-market democracies must stand firm against aggression. 

And this is also from the NYT – which one must remember is hostile to “Thatcherism” but gets this right:

At home, Lady Thatcher’s political successes were decisive. She broke the power of the labor unions and forced the Labour Party to abandon its commitment to nationalized industry, redefine the role of the welfare state and accept the importance of the free market. In October 1980, 17 months into her first term, Prime Minister Thatcher faced disaster. More businesses were failing and more people were out of work than at any time since the Great Depression. Racial and class tensions smoldered so ominously that even close advisers worried that her push to stanch inflation, sell off nationalized industry and deregulate the economy was … courting chaos.

No such disaster, but the contrary happened:

Her policies revitalized British business, spurred industrial growth and swelled the middle class.

And this is from the Telegraph:

Lady Thatcher was the only British prime minister to leave behind a set of ideas about the role of the state which other leaders and nations strove to copy and apply … monetarism, privatisation, deregulation, small government, lower taxes and free trade …

Alas, the victories she won were not to last. The war goes on. We have to fight the same battles all over again, with the same set of ideas, on the the same principles.

Post Script: Jillian Becker in her book “L: A Novel History” considers what might have happened to Britain if Margaret Thatcher had not succeeded in quelling the race riots, defeating trade union militancy, and returning Britain to a free market economy.

In Islam, to be raped is to commit a crime punishable by death. Similarly, if a nation is subjected to an act of war by an Islamic state, the victim nation must be forced to apologize and pay the aggressor compensation.

The West’s idea of justice is different. Or has been until very recently.

This is from Front Page, by Andrew C. McCarthy:

To keep the tepid support of his country’s essential but icy ally, Israel’s prime minister would have to do what he’d spent nearly three years steadfastly refusing to do. Netanyahu would have to apologize to a state sponsor of terrorism that openly, notoriously, and enthusiastically supports Hamas.

 ThHe would have to apologize to Turkey — to its prime minister, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, Obama’s close friend and confidant.

He would have to apologize for military action taken in his country’s righteous defense against violent jihadists with close connections to Erdogan’s ruling party and, seamlessly, to the Muslim Brotherhood, as well as al-Qaeda. …

The violent jihadists in question were from the grotesquely named “Humanitarian Relief Foundation” or IHH (İnsan Hak ve Hürriyetleri ve İnsani Yardım Vakfı). The IHH is an Islamic “charity” based and basted in the Islamic supremacism of Erdogan’s Turkey. It is part of the Union of Good (sometimes referred to as the “Union for Good”), a jihadist umbrella enterprise that was designated by the United States government, during the Bush administration, as an international terrorist organization. Under the direction of a top Muslim Brotherhood honcho, Sheikh Yusuf al-Qaradawi, the Union of Good’s main purpose is to transfer funds to Hamas, another designated terrorist organization. Besides being the Brotherhood’s Palestinian branch, Hamas Sheikh Yusuf al-Qaradaw boasts Turkey, our NATO “ally,” as its chief benefactor.

In late May 2010, IHH terrorists attempted to break Israel’s lawful naval blockade of the Gaza Strip. The blockade is necessary to stem the flow of weapons to Hamas, Gaza’s rulers having responded to Israel’s painful peace offering — its withdrawal in 2005 from territory it had captured in a war of Arab aggression — by stepping up their terror campaign against the Jewish state. In seeking to break the blockade, an act of war, the IHH was willfully abetted by the Turkish government.

Israeli officials had pleaded with their Turkish counterparts to prevent the terrorists from embarking on their “peace flotilla.” Members of Erdogan’s government and party not only turned a deaf ear; they sold the jihadists the offending vessel, the Mavi Marmara. They allowed the jihadists — armed with flares, night-vision goggles, 150 bulletproof vests, 200 gas masks, several dozen slingshots, 200 knives, 20 axes, 50 wooden clubs, 100 assorted iron bars, etc. — to board the ship without inspection. When the inevitable high-seas confrontation occurred, the Israeli Defense Forces tried to subdue the terrorists with paintball guns. The IDF resorted to lethal force only after being premeditatedly and savagely attacked — with several of its sailors seriously wounded. In that response, nine of the terrorists were killed.

Squeezed by Obama, Netanyahu would have to apologize for the killing of those terrorists.

More often than not these last five years, Israel’s prime minister has felt President Obama’s heel on the back of his neck. In stark contrast, Turkey’s prime minister has enjoyed Obama’s warm embrace. In Ankara, Erdogan hosts the leaders of Hamas and Hezbollah as foreign dignitaries. He accuses Israel of turning Gaza into a “concentration camp.” Only days before Netanyahu’s coerced apology, Erdogan — whose history of anti-Semitism is infamous — publicly pronounced that Zionism is a “crime against humanity.”

This heinous accusation, “crime against humanity,” has become something of a verbal tic with Erdogan. He cavalierly applies it to Israel’s self-defense from thousands of jihadist rockets fired into its territory, and to the suggestion by European governments that the millions of Muslims who’ve immigrated to the West ought to assimilate into their new societies.

Nevertheless, Obama openly regards Erdogan as one of his most trusted partners on the world stage. …  

With Obama on the phone egging him on, Netanyahu abased himself. Not only did he apologize to Turkey, he further capitulated to Erdogan’s demand that Israel pay compensation to the Mavi Marmara “victims.” After the apology, Erdogan briefed his Hamas confederates and announced he would be visiting them in Gaza next month. Predictably, he has since announced that Netanyahu’s humiliating act of contrition will not be sufficient to restore diplomatic relations between the two nations. Just as predictably, other Islamic states are now preparing demands for apologies and compensation for sundry exercises of Israeli self-defense against jihadist terror.

There has been no shortage of speculation about why Israel caved. Perhaps it was anxiety over Iranian nukes and Syrian tumult — the hope that rapprochement with Turkey would give Washington more maneuvering room to protect Israel’s interests. Perhaps there were financial considerations, including billions potentially to be made in the exportation of natural gas. None of these explanations is very satisfying.

They are not satisfying at all. None of them is sufficient reason for Netanyahu to apologize to the despicable aggressor Erdogan. Netanyahu should not have done it no matter what the threat or what the bribe. His apology was a submission to a lie. Making it, he abased and betrayed his people.

For Andrew McCarthy, however, that is not the worst thing about the disgusting affair. It is even “beside the point”.

For Americans, what matters is not what this episode says about shifts in Israeli policy. It is the sea-change in U.S. counterterrorism that most concerns us. …

The Obama administration is actively engaged in the financial support of Hamas — sluicing hundreds of millions of dollars in aid to Gaza, fully aware that it is under Hamas’s totalitarian control. In this, too, Obama is in concord with Erdogan, whose regime has similarly backed Hamas with hundreds of millions of dollars — news that comes to us courtesy of Turkey’s grateful friends at the Union of Good.

Until 2009, U.S. policy was straightforward: Hamas was a terrorist organization and America would not deal with it unless and until it acknowledged Israel’s right to exist and convincingly renounced violence. All that has changed, though. 

Under Obama’s governance, Islamic-supremacists are bankrolled even as they act on their pledge to destroy Israel. Israel, in turn, is expected to apologize.

Our military’s killing of Osama bin Laden, complemented by the controversial drone campaign, has given President Obama cover. The occasional terrorist is taken out, the administration beats its chest, and few notice that al-Qaeda is resurgent, that the administration spends far more time appeasing Islamists than killing terrorists, and that Hamas has won. 

Hamas has won. Erdogan has won. IHH has won. Islam has won. Obama has won.

Netanyahu has handed victory to the enemies of his nation and of America, and trampled on human dignity, truth, and justice.  

To befriend a creep like Erdogan, and make Americans pay billions to the Muslim Brotherhood and Hamas is moral perversion. Obama is a moral pervert.

And Netanyahu – what is he?

What is a person who lets a pervert have his way with him in return for cash or an IOU?

Diana West, writing a column in the form of an open letter to General David Petraeus, suggests that he should be “testifying before the American people” about “national scandals” which, she accuses him, “you have so far successfully left in your dust”.

The scandals she means are:

Lying to the House Intelligence Committee about Benghazi twice; causing death and dismemberment of U.S. forces by directing them to walk the IED-packed roads of Afghanistan as part of a counterinsurgency (COIN) strategy to win Afghans’ trust; and your see-no-Islam COIN strategy itself.

And she asks him to –

Take that apparently bulletproof reputation of yours and use it to seek clemency for the so-called Leavenworth 10.

The Leavenworth 10? She explains:

This tag refers to a group of American soldiers now serving long prison terms mainly at Fort Leavenworth, Kan., for crimes committed on your COIN battlefield in Iraq, and also Afghanistan. Across time and space, from desks in orderly offices peering into ghastly battlefields, obsessed military prosecutors have been able to see murder and even premeditated murder in the eyes of these soldiers who were blinded by the densest fog of war.

Since it was you who ordered these young men into the hostile urban combat zones in Iraq to win hearts and minds, since it was you who set them up, unable to tell friend from foe, to earn trust and confidence amid hostile outposts in Afghanistan, it should now be you who leads them out of their living hells. Long after the U.S. government has released tens of thousands of insurgents in Iraq and Afghanistan — including Hezbollah mastermind Musa Daqduq, for example — it is time for you, the leading general in these wars, to declare that these young Americans, these American prisoners of COIN, have been punished enough.

She goes on to cite some of the Leavenworth 10 in particular – what they’re accused of, the draconian punishments they’ve been sentenced to endure:

I refer, for example, to 1st Lt. Michael Behenna, the elite Army Ranger whose last-ditch interrogation of an al-Qaida terrorist ended when, as forensic evidence indicates, he killed the detainee he was questioning in self-defense. Michael has served roughly four years behind bars, but that’s only a dent in his 15-year sentence.

There is Pvt. Corey Clagett, the most junior and the only imprisoned member of an Army squad implicated in following direct orders to shoot captured Iraqi insurgents in Operation Iron Triangle. Corey was sentenced to 18 years; cruelly and unusually, he has already spent nearly seven years in solitary confinement.

There is Sgt. Evan Vela, the first-tour Army sniper whose commander ordered him to kill a captured Iraqi struggling to blow the squad’s cover behind enemy lines. He was sentenced to 10 years.

There is also Sgt. Derrick Miller, an Army National Guard veteran of Afghanistan, who, during a harsh interrogation, killed in self-defense an Afghan who had penetrated his squad’s defensive perimeter. He received life in prison, with the possibility of parole in 10 years.

There are more such men whose names you should know — Marine Sgt. Lawrence Hutchins (sentenced to 11 years), Army Master Sgt. John Hatley (sentenced to 40 years) — whose tragic stories should in truth keep you awake at night …

All of these young Americans marched into the crosshairs of COIN, the place where your hearts and minds strategy blew up, the place where living among, loving, respecting and bribing Iraqis and Afghans according to COIN’s see-no-Islam tenets became life-or-death propositions. These men managed to stay alive. According to COIN, that’s their main offense.

She asks him to plea for clemency for them.

As he hopes for forgiveness for himself, he should – we agree – want it for these men who are – yes – the victims of his misguided, even absurd policy, best summed up as a redirection of the American military in chaotic Iraq and savage Afganistan to act as an army of social workers rather than as warriors.

The B-2 Spirit stealth bomber

Superb! Marvelous! Beautiful!

Our by-the-way note on a passing reference in the video:  Re the bombing of Serbia, those several wars in the 1990s in ex-Yugoslavia – President Bill Clinton’s wars – served absolutely no US or west European interest whatsoever.

The big threat hanging over the human race and Western civilization is Islam (not “climate change”).

Is it possible that the threat was totally ignored at this year’s Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC)?

Robert Spencer,  one of the best exponents and opponents of Islamic ideology, was shut out of the event.

So was the most urgent issue of the time totally ignored?

Fortunately not totally. We quote a National Review report:

Freshman Arkansas congressman Tom Cotton, a rising GOP star and an Iraq War veteran, criticized today the idea that the U.S. is fighting a “war against terror.”

“We’re fighting one war and it’s a war against radical Islamic jihad,” Cotton said at the Conservative Political Action Conference. “It’s not a war against terror alone. Terror is a technique or a tactic . . . It’s a war against specific people, radical Islamic jihadists, who are trying to using terror to defeat the United States.

“Iraq and Afghanistan, as much as we might see those as distinct, are just two battle fronts in that war,” added Cotton, a former Army officer. …

Obama [he said] thought the United States was involved in a “law-enforcement campaign,” not a war.

He brought up the case of Sulaiman Abu Ghaith, Osama bin Laden’s recently captured son-in-law.

“Did we send him to Guantanamo Bay for interrogation, and ultimately, for a military trial? No. We read him his Miranda rights, and we sent him to federal district courts in New York City.

“The president … is returning us [to] a law-enforcement construct, the kind that prevailed in the 1990s before the 9/11 attacks.”

Yes, because Obama, who is pro-Islam, wants us to believe that there is no war being waged against us: that 9/11 was a crime rather than the act of jihad which it was. He also wants us to believe that al-Qaeda – the piece of Islam that perpetrated the attack and which he is prepared to pursue for reasons of political expediency – has been almost defeated by the killing of Osama bin Laden and other of its leaders. He would have us believe that al-Qaeda alone was the threat, and the rest of Islam is no danger to us at all.

The truth is that the cohorts of al-Qaeda are more numerous than ever; that it is much stronger than it was in 2001, and is the foremost fighting force of Islam. It was behind the attack in Benghazi – a fact the Obama and his henchmen do not want known, which is no doubt the main reason why they refused to send military aid to the ambassador and soldiers at the mission; why they pretended that the violence was an outburst of spontaneous civilian indignation over some video no one in Libya had even seen; and why they persist in playing down the rout as an event of very little importance. (“What difference does it make at this point?” Secretary of State Hillary Clinton asked some months after the attack occurred.)

Tom Cotton was right to raise the subject at CPAC, but he understated the threat. The war is not being waged only by “radical Islamic jihadists” but by Islam as such, and not only by violent means but by infiltration and subversion.

That is what Robert Spencer would have been able to explain to the Conference if he had not been excluded by pro-Islamic members of the organization – chiefly Grover Norquist and his close Muslim associate Suhail Khan.      

At his website Jihad Watch, Robert Spencer himself writes that he’s glad Tom Cotton “enunciated these truths”; but he points out that at the same time –

Cotton endorses the misadventures in Afghanistan and Iraq, despite their manifest failure. How much American blood and treasure does he expect the U.S. to commit to the futile effort to bring “democracy” to those countries?

The West will not win the war with Islam on the battlefields of Iraq and Afghanistan. Not now. While every new violent act should be punished with violence – with drone attacks, with the capture and execution of jihadis whenever possible – the war will ultimately only be won by defeating the ideology itself. That means the religion of Islam must be subjected to criticism. It must be attacked and destroyed by words. By argument, by contempt, by mockery.

Muslims know that words are the greatest danger to the survival of their religion; that criticism is the strongest defense against their war of conquest – which is precisely why they are doing their utmost to make such criticism a crime.

Islam must become as universally scorned as Nazism, which it closely resembles.