These pictures are from a collection of 24  at the Huffington Post.  The report and the video are also from that dhimmi site.

Quotations from the report:

Ashura, an optional fast day for Muslims that commemorates different things for Sunnis and Shiites, falls on Dec. 4-5, 2011. The word itself, ashura, means 10, and the holiday is the 10th day of the Islamic month of Muharram. The Islamic calendar is lunar, so the date of Ashura can vary depending on sighting of the moon.

Ashura marks many things: the creation of the world, Noah’s departure from the ark, Moses’ flight from Egypt and the martyrdom of the Prophet Muhammad’s grandson, Hussein ibn Ali, in 680 A.D.

Nice to know the exact lunar date of the creation of the world.

But Ashura chiefly marks the martyrdom of Hussein ibn Ali.

Sunni Muslims consider Ashura a fast day for two reasons: Muhammad fasted then and Moses fasted in appreciation of the successful Exodus for Egypt. Shiite Muslims mark Ashura as a day of mourning for the Prophet Muhammad’s grandson. In fact, Hussein’s martyrdom is one of two major events that led to the Sunni-Shiite split in Islam. Shiites, who constitute Islam’s second-largest denomination (about 10-15 percent of the world Muslim population), consider Hussein to be the one true heir of Muhammad’s legacy.

Shiite Muslims observe Ashura through mourning rituals such as self-flagellation and reenactments of the martyrdom. Many … march through the streets chanting and hitting themselves in the chest. Some use whips and chains — or cut themselves on the forehead — to ritually punish their bodies. …

And many – including very young boys – whip themselves with blades.

Here are some celebrants:

Now watch the video. We don’t think the sweet young anchor is being satirical in the least. She really, really wants her viewers to know all about the holy day of Ashura. She asks a Turk – a Sunni Muslim who in theory should be observing the day by fasting – to tell her all about it. He doesn’t mention the Shia custom of self-flagellation.

She thinks it all sounds just lovely. America, she says, needs to import Ashura. Well, the Turk makes it sound delicious. It’s all about cooking and eating and sharing, especially desserts.

“It’s about joy,” she says fawningly, “and embracing your neighbor”.

Oh, yeah! So bring it on!

“It’s a problem in the US that we need more community,” she grovels cheerfully.

As we provoked indignant comments from an environmentalist enemy with our post yesterday (though he/she only addresses marginal points), we return to the attack today with more on the UN’s climate conference being held now in Durban, South Africa, and the lethal threat named “Agenda 21”  (see our posts Beware “Agenda 21”, June 24, 2011; The once and new religion of earth-worship, October 27, 2011; Agenda 21: the “smart growth” conspiracy, November 21, 2011).

Phyllis Schlafly goes right to the heart of the matter – the UN making a power-grab on the pretext of protecting the planet from human depredation – with this article at Townhall:

The United Nations Climate Change Conference in Durban, South Africa, opening on Nov. 28, called COP-17, is one of a series of U.N. meetings working toward a specific goal … to move the United States into a global government by environmental regulations and a vast network of taxes. These newly imposed taxes will give the U.N. a tremendous stream of money in addition to U.S. dues and congressional appropriations.

The plan for taxes was launched at the 1992 U.N. meeting in Rio de Janeiro, known as the Earth Summit, where Conference Secretary-General Maurice Strong produced a 300-page document with 40 proposals called Agenda 21.

The tax-seeking route then proceeded through U.N. meetings in Cancun in 2010, in Durban this November and will be finalized next year at what is called Rio+20 (i.e., Rio de Janeiro after 20 years).

Agenda 21 is a comprehensive master plan to reshape and control the U.S. while locking us into the clutches of the U.N. under the innocuous phrase “sustainable development.” Along with 178 countries, President George H.W. Bush accepted Agenda 21 as “soft law.” It was adopted by a new tactic called collaborative consensus building, instead of by treaty.

Bush popularized the term “new world order,” but left it for others to define. Mikhail Gorbachev said the threat of an environmental crisis will be the international key to unlocking the new world order, and former President Bill Clinton issued an executive order in 1993 creating the President’s Council on Sustainable Development.

Advocates of Agenda 21 talk about the three E’s of sustainable development: economy, equity and environment.

Equity means replacing our American constitutional system with central planning and social justice, which is a code word for redistribution of wealth, abolition of private property rights and giving favored corporations tax breaks, grants, and use of eminent domain.

Economy means shifting from a private enterprise system to government, private-corporation partnerships. That would be a giant step toward total government and U.N. control of our economy, with the ability to redistribute our goods and services to foreign countries.

Environment means giving animals and plants more rights or equal rights with humans. It also promotes worship of nature and mother Earth.

Yes, a multitude of genuine anti-human fanatics are only too happy to be used by the UN as it pursues its political aim of a centrally controlled world economy, which is to say a global socialist tyranny.

To talk about Agenda 21, you will have to get used to a new vocabulary: green jobs, green building codes, going green, regional planning, smart growth, biodiversity, sustainable farming, growth management, resilient cities, sustainable communities, redistribution, urban growth boundaries, redevelopment districts and consensus.

Agenda 21 wants to herd people into crowded communities with limited housing space and limited parking spaces. This will promote the green goal of reducing our use of automobiles, allowing only electric cars that can’t go very fast or very far, so people will have to walk, use bicycles and mass transit.

Agenda 21 supports the Wildlands Project, which seeks to re-wild 50% of our nation and turn it into a pre-Columbian wilderness where animals roam freely and humans are crowded into limited spaces. Already, we find that rural roads are not being repaired or maintained.

Agenda 21 has started its attacks on rural and small-town property rights. Six hundred U.S. cities and counties have signed on to the International Council for Local Environmental Initiatives putting themselves indirectly under supervision of U.N. regulations and restrictions.

Advocates of Agenda 21 believe the earth is overcrowded. They demand an 85% reduction in human population. It’s a major goal of Agenda 21 to lower the U.S. standard of living by cutting our use of energy. Agenda 21 plans to use smart meters, smart grids and smart growth so that our nation’s use of electricity can be controlled, limited and redistributed.

Schools and universities are important to Agenda 21’s goals. The plan is make them indoctrination institutions, where kids are taught “green” propaganda, as well as global education to make them citizens of the world.

The UN will tax “currency transfers, fossil energy production including oil, natural gas and coal, the commercial use of oceans, international airplane tickets and all foreign exchange transactions”.

Taxes of this magnitude would give the U.N. so much power that it would become a de facto world government.

So, Phyllis Schlafly urges, take action to prevent this happening:

Tell your members of Congress to pledge that the day the U.N. adopts this nonsense will be the day we say goodbye to the U.N.

But why wait until then? The UN does enough harm right now.

The UN must be destroyed.

Another UN conference  on “climate change” with the ulterior motive of setting up a world government to redistribute wealth from prosperous Western countries to the bank accounts of Third World tyrants is running now in Durban, South Africa.

As we hoped and expected, Lord Christopher Monckton is there, speaking out as he constantly does against this conspiracy:

Mainstream science, politics, bureaucracy, academe, banking, business, media – all were of one mind. The West, so the playbook ran, must be shut down at once to Save The Planet from “global warming”, er, “climate change”, um, “climate disruption”, no, “extreme-weather events”, ah, that is, “energy-security challenges”. …

I find myself … in Durban among the creatures of “consensus” for the annual UN climate gabfest. Yet the party line was wrong. … Every dire prediction that the usual suspects had made with such sneering arrogance has failed.

Just look. Professor “Phil” Jones of the “University” of East Anglia had to admit … that there had been no statistically-significant “global warming” for 15 years. …

Arctic sea ice was supposed to be gone by 2013. Then it rebounded. Then it was going to reach a new low on 15 September this year …. [but] Antarctic sea ice has been on the up throughout the satellite era. Global sea ice shows little trend in 30 years.

Polar bears were supposed to be headed for extinction. … Today there are five times as many polar bears as 70 years ago.

Kilimanjaro has been losing ice since 1880. …  “Global warming” could not have caused the recent ice loss … The summit temperature, monitored by satellites, has not changed. Now the glacier is growing again.

Sea level is the big one. James Hansen of NASA, who made more than $1 million out of the climate scare last year alone, had predicted it would rise imminently by 246 feet. Was he right? No. The increase over the past eight years, according to the Envisat satellite, was at a rate equivalent to 2 inches per century. Not meters, not even feet. Inches. Two of them. Per century. …

Malaria was going to spread because of “global warming.” Yet the terrible leap in mortality from 50,000 to 1 million child deaths a year occurred a generation ago, when the Environmental Defense Fund – which, with Greenpeace and the World Wide Fund, spent $1 billion of taxpayers’ and donors’ cash on anti-Western pseudo-enviro propaganda last year alone – successfully campaigned for a worldwide ban on DDT, the only effective agent against the mosquitoes that carry malaria.

When the Board of the EDF met to plan the DDT ban, its then legal advisor, Victor John Yannacone Jr., begged it to ban only outdoor use: DDT sprayed inside houses would harm only the mosquitoes and spare the children. The then chairman, furious, fired Yannacone on the spot. As he left the room, someone said: “That’s the last time we employ anyone who knows any science.” That ban has killed 40 million children.

Extreme-weather deaths are down sharply. Global tropical-cyclone and hurricane activity is almost at its least in 30 years. Severe tornadoes have declined. Patterns of drought and flood remain as unpredictable and as devastating as ever. Bangladesh and nearly all of the Pacific atolls are gaining land mass, not losing it.

Net primary productivity of trees and plants worldwide is up. If you want a greener planet, add as much CO2 to the air as you can. Your emissions are also helping to stave off the next Ice Age. It’s already 6000 years overdue.

Yet the dreary, wasteful, pointless congresses of the greedy feeble-minded continue. The Bali Road-Map to Nowhere. The Copenhagen World-Government Treaty that collapsed as soon as it saw the light of day. The Cancun Concordats to establish 1000 – yes, 1000 – new bureaucracies: the structure of the unelected world government that every ex-politician from Gore and Chirac to Attali is demanding.

Everyone says nothing will happen at Durban. That worries me. It suggests the process of building a totalitarian global junta by what one UN official at Cancun called “transparent impenetrability” – publishing documents of such prolix length and complex obscurantism that no one can understand a word and yet no one can later deny the information was available – will invisibly gather pace. …

We like “transparent impenetrability”! Could we suspect that the UN official who invented it had a sense of irony?  No – too unlikely.

The Marxists’ wet dream …  is global totalitarian dictatorship. … But the Committee For A Constructive Tomorrow and I are in Durban to stop them. So perhaps you’re not going to have it after all.

It’s good to know that a Committee and the noble lord are defending us from world totalitarian dictatorship. But it would be better if the United States, which should be and can be and was always meant to be the truly powerful defender of liberty, had a president and administration that would put an end to the UN and a stop to all its evil schemes forever.

The UN must be destroyed.

Dozens of taxis sit outside the Islamic Cultural Center on Riverside and 72nd Street every day during prayer time.

This is from the Mail Online:

With a sea of yellow stretching into the distance, it looks like the taxi queue at a busy airport.

But this picture was actually taken outside a Mosque during a prayer service – with 200 Muslim cabbies illegally parked.

Residents of the wealthy Upper West Side of Manhattan are outraged that their streets are being taken over multiple times each day for the 45-minute service. …

The taxi drivers are double and triple parking in a huge line that forces traffic into the oncoming lane.

The situation has flared up and on one occasion a cop telling a taxi driver to move on was swarmed by other hacks – and had to call for reinforcements. …

Prayers take place five times a day but the busiest is on Fridays at lunchtime when up to 300 worshippers – and 200 taxi drivers – are in attendance.

Most of the taxi drivers appear unrepentant with one claiming: ‘I have to pray. I have no choice but to break the rules.’

Of course he must pray. It’s an absolute necessity. And the non-Muslim population must understand that new priorities are being set in their city.

The Islamification of New York has begun well, and is progressing at a brisk pace.

However, we have been told by an authoritative source who wishes to remain anonymous for fear of being assassinated by a member of the Religion of Peace, that the city’s name will not be changed to New Mecca in the near future.

The Western media have been parroting the official Iranian line, that “students” stormed, ransacked and burnt the British Embassy in Tehran. (Why the hell does Britain even have an embassy in Tehran?)

In a regime such as Iran’s, the storming of an embassy would not be possible without the approval of the rulers. In fact, it couldn’t happen without their positive orders.

Yet CNN is astonished to find evidence that this is the case.

CNN reports:

At least one of the “students” who attacked the UK embassy in Iran – identified as a Rev Guard COMMANDER!!!

Head of the Revolutionary Guards IRGC Qods brigade Karim Jalali [is photographed] among today’s attackers at the British Embassy in Tehran.

According to the regime, university “students” stormed the embassy. But this guy is a Qods force officer, Karim Jalali. It means that the Sepah was behind it at direct orders of the supreme leader.

So the Iranians were lying. Good grief, what next!

President Obama is allowing the heroic US military – and, therefore, the American people – to be humiliated in Iraq and Afghanistan. He is withdrawing US soldiers from Iraq and leaving some in Afghanistan under demeaning conditions imposed by vengeful, spiteful, corrupt enemy leaders.

Diana West writes at Townhall:

This withdrawal [from Iraq] will mark the end of a misguided misadventure to convert, in a zealously secular and even philo-Islamic way, a member of the Islamic world to the ways of the West. Despite the courage, dedication and sacrifice of American and allied troops, despite the so-called surge, despite the endless (and endlessly expensive) attempts to win Iraqi “hearts and minds,” it was a flop.

The top American spokesman in Iraq, Gen. Jeffrey Buchanan, can spin all he wants – “It’s not about winning or losing but making significant progress” – but this eight-year “counterinsurgency” didn’t work. It was a failure – unless, of course, you’re Iran. To borrow from the great Winston Churchill, also unenthralled with the British misadventure in Iraq in the year 1922, we have been paying billions of dollars “for the privilege of living on an ungrateful volcano out of which we are in no circumstances to get anything worth having.”

In Afghanistan … President Hamid Karzai has just presided over a gathering of the clans, a “loya jirga” assembly of some 2,000 Afghans, who have produced a list of conditions for a continuing American presence. 

Here, culled from different news sources, is a list of the loya jirga’s conditions:

1) no more immunity from Afghan law for U.S. forces;

2) no more night raids by U.S. forces;

3) no more “arbitrary” detention of Afghan suspects;

4) no more U.S. detention centers;

5) transfer Afghan detainees to Afghan detention centers;

6) a capped 10- year limit to any pact with the United States;

7) Afghans must lead all security missions after 2014;

8) the United States should commit to training role and “support”;

9) no more U.S.-run “parallel” structures to handle contracting and other matters; rather, America should support Afghan institutions; and

10) no U.S. attacks on neighbors [ie Pakistan, Iran] from Afghan soil.

What they’re saying, these vicious, uncivilized, dark-minded men, is “continue to give us what we want from you, but don’t interfere with anything we choose to do”.

But still Karzai wants more. “The U.S. wants military installations from us. We will give those to them. But we have conditions for this. We will benefit from this. Our soldiers will be trained. Our police will be trained. We will benefit from their money.”

The Iraqis and Afghans are, she says, “cold and numb to the blood and sacrifice of tens of thousands of Americans.”

So too, it is plain to see, is President Obama.

A few samples of the sublime silliness of Islam:

It has been mentioned that the person who masturbates shall be resurrected on the Day of Judgment with a pregnant hand. – Shaikh ul Arab wal Ajam Hazrat Maulana Shah Hakeem Muhammad Akhtar Saheb

Abu Huraira reported Allah’s Messenger (may peace be upon him) as saying: None of you should drink while standing; and if anyone forgets, he must vomit. – Sahih Muslim 23:5022

Whoso is wont to think (through envy) that Allah will not give him (Muhammad) victory in the world and the Hereafter (and is enraged at the thought of his victory), let him stretch a rope up to the roof (of his dwelling), and let him hang himself. Then let him see whether his strategy dispelleth that whereat he rageth!. – Qur’an 22:15

Buraida reported on the authority of his father that Allah’s Apostle (may peace be upon him) said: He who played chess is like one who dyed his hand with the flesh and blood of swine. – Sahih Muslim 28:5612

Narrated Ibn ‘Abbas: Once the Prophet, while passing through one of the grave-yards of Medina or Mecca heard the voices of two persons who were being tortured in their graves. The Prophet said, “These two persons are being tortured not for a major sin (to avoid).” The Prophet then added, “Yes! (they are being tortured for a major sin). Indeed, one of them never saved himself from being soiled with his urine while the other used to go about with calumnies (to make enmity between friends). The Prophet then asked for a green leaf of a date-palm tree, broke it into two pieces and put one on each grave. On being asked why he had done so, he replied, “I hope that their torture might be lessened, till these get dried.” – Sahih Buhhari 1:4:15

Abu Dharr reported: The Messenger of ‘Allah (may peace be upon him) said: When any one of you stands for prayer and there is a thing before him equal to the back of the saddle that covers him and in case there is not before him (a thing) equal to the back of the saddle, his prayer would be cut off by (passing of an) ass, woman, and black Dog. I said: O Abu Dharr, what feature is there in a black dog which distinguish it from the red dog and the yellow dog? He said: O, son of my brother, I asked the Messenger of Allah (may peace be upon him) as you are asking me, and he said: The black dog is a devil. – Sahih Muslim 4:1032

Abu Umama narrated: “The Messenger of God said, ‘Everyone that God admits into paradise will be married to 72 wives; two of them are houris and seventy of his inheritance of the [female] dwellers of hell. All of them will have libidinous sex organs and he will have an ever-erect penis.’ ” – Sunan Ibn Maja, Zuhd (Book of Abstinence) 39

“Each time we sleep with a Houri we find her virgin. Besides, the penis of the Elected never softens. The erection is eternal; the sensation that you feel each time you make love is utterly delicious and out of this world and were you to experience it in this world you would faint. Each chosen one [i.e. Muslim] will marry seventy [sic] houris, besides the women he married on earth, and all will have appetizing vaginas.” – Al-Itqan fi Ulum al-Qur’an, p. 351

Abu Huraira reported: The Apostle of Allah (may peace be upon him) said. When any one of you awakes up from sleep and performs ablution, he must clean his nose three times, for the devil spends the night in the interior of his nose. – Sahih Muslim 2:462

And Allah taught Adam all the names as follows: He taught him the name of everything, down to fart and little fart. – Tabari I 267

Narrated Ibn ‘Abbas: The Prophet said, ‘When you eat, do not wipe your hands till you have licked it, or had it licked by somebody else.” – Sahih Bukhari 7:65:366

Narrated Abu Said: A man came to the prophet and said, ‘My brother has got loose motions. The Prophet said, Let him drink honey.” The man again (came) and said, ‘I made him drink (honey) but that made him worse.’ The Prophet said, ‘Allah has said the Truth, and the abdomen of your brother has told a lie.” – Sahih Bukhari 7:71:614

Narrated Jabir bin ‘Abdullah: The Prophet used to stand by a tree or a date-palm on Friday. Then an Ansari woman or man said. “O Allah’s Apostle! Shall we make a pulpit for you?” He replied, “If you wish.” So they made a pulpit for him and when it was Friday, he proceeded towards the pulpit (for delivering the sermon). The date-palm cried like a child! The Prophet descended (the pulpit) and embraced it while it continued moaning like a child being quieted. The Prophet said, “It was crying for (missing) what it used to hear of religious knowledge given near to it.” – Sahih Bukhari 4:56:784

There are many more with those came from.

(Hat-tip to our reader and commenter Andrew M)

Chris Christie asks Obama, “What the hell are we paying you for? ”

A Melbourne Israeli Dancing group was dropped from participating in a Victorian dance festival [ie a festival held in Victoria, Australia] after refusing organisers’ moves to drop all references to Israel.

Find the full report here.

The Machol Israeli Dancing Club was scheduled to appear at Multicultural Folk Dance Festival of High Country in the Victorian country town of Mansfield earlier this month.

The festival was organised under the auspices of the Victorian Multicultural Commission and a grant had been awarded to Marta Balan who according to a submission to the Victorian Equal Opportunity and Human Rights Commission approved the performance of the Machol Group.

When the participants’ names were released, Esther Blumenthal-Skop of Machol was surprised to learn that the name of the Machol Israeli Dancing Club had been truncated to Machol Group and all references to Israel had been removed with the club being described as a Jewish dance group.

But that wouldn’t be an accurate description since not all the members of the Machol dance group are Jewish. (How many are not, and what they are is not reported.)

No change had been made to [the names of] other groups including Chinese, Hungarian, Armenian and Ukrainian Traditional Folk Dances and the Irish Reel and Jigs.

In her submission to VEOHRC, Blumenthal-Skop said she asked for an explanation and was told that the organiser would not be held responsible for consequences if the words “Israel” or “Israeli” were used to describe the group. 

Consequences? What might they be? Whose reaction to the name was to be dreaded? The Chinese? The Hungarians? The Armenians? The Ukrainians? The Irish? The Australian hosts? All of them?

Or was there an invisible presence, a ghostly threat hovering over the Multicultural Event? If so, what could it be? What –  invited or uninvited – “culture”? What is its name? What might it do? And was the organiser quite sure that it wouldn’t find the name “Jewish” just as offensive as the name “Israeli”?

Would Israelis be saved from this unnamed terror, we wonder, if their country were to change its name to – say – Judea?

The politically correct organisers of multicultural events could try putting it out there; dub any old Israeli troupe or team of any art or sport “Judean”, and see how it floats.

Multiculturalists simply have to become more resourceful in dealing with these anonymous forces of evil.

Islamic “justice” and the development of  Islamic power advance in North Africa.

USA Today reports:

The victory of an Islamist Party in Morocco’s parliamentary elections appears to be one more sign that religious-based parties are benefiting the most from the new freedoms brought by the Arab Spring.

The phrase “new freedoms” means an election, nothing more.

Across the Middle East, parties referencing Islam have made great strides, offering an alternative to corrupt, long serving dictators, who have often ruled with close Western support.

Are they less likely to be corrupt or dictatorial? And if the new bosses should turn out to be much like the old bosses, will they fail to secure Western support?

The Justice and Development Party dominated Morocco’s elections through a combination of good organization, an outsider status and not being too much of a threat to Morocco’s all-powerful king.

By taking 107 seats out of the 395 seats, almost twice as many as the second place finisher, the party ensured that King Mohammed VI must pick the next prime minister from its ranks and [it will] form the next government out of the dozen parties in Morocco’s parliament.

It is the first time the PJD will be part of the government and its outsider status could be just what Morocco, wracked by pro-democracy protests, needs.

Needs?

Although it didn’t bring down the government, the North African kingdom of 32 million, just across the water from Spain, was still touched by the waves of unrest that swept the Arab world following the revolution in Tunisia, with tens of thousands marching in the streets calling for greater freedoms and less corruption.

The king responded by modifying the constitution to give the next parliament and prime minister more powers, and held early elections.

But there was still a vigorous movement to boycott the elections. There was only a 45 percent turnout in Friday’s polls, and many of those who went to vote turned in blank ballots or crossed out every party listed to show their dissatisfaction with the system. …

But now they’re getting what USA Today thinks they need?

In the face of such widespread distrust of politics, historian and political analyst Maati Monjib said a government led by a new political force could be the answer.

If the abstainers had thought PJD was the answer, wouldn’t they have voted for it?

“If the PJD forms a coalition in a free and independent way and not with a party of the Makhzen,” he said referring to the catch-all phrase for the entrenched establishment around the king, “this will be a big step forward for Morocco.”

In Tunisia, Morocco, and on Monday most likely also Egypt, newly enfranchised populations are choosing religious parties as a rebuke to the old systems, which often espoused liberal or left-wing ideologies.

“The people link Islam and political dignity,” said Monjib, who describes himself as coming from the left end of the political spectrum. “There is a big problem of dignity in the Arab world and the people see the Islamists as a way of getting out of the sense of subjugation and inferiority towards the West.”

They were subjugated by their own tyrants, not the West. But if they feel inferior to the West they are only being – for once – realistic.

Like the Ennahda Party in Tunisia, the PJD is also from the more moderate end of the Islamist spectrum.

The term “Islamist” was coined by Western appeasers to designate Islamic extremism, so that “Islam” could be exonerated from charges of aggressively waging jihad. But now we have moderate Islamism.

The party doesn’t describe itself as “Islamist” but rather as having an Islamic “reference,” meaning that its policies follow the moral dictates of the religion. …

Only the moral dictates? Beating wives, stoning adulterers, amputating the limbs of thieves, executing apostates and homosexuals, keeping slaves, waging aggressive jihad? That’s the good side?

Egypt, where there is an election in progress, will end up getting a more religious government too, and as Professor Ephraim Karsh of King’s College, London, said at a recent conference:

Islam remains the strongest identity framework in Egyptian society in particular, and in Arab society generally. The Arab national dictatorships that were layered over this basic Islamic identity for the past 80 years were but a thin veneer of repression. With the fall of these dictatorships, what remains is the core Islamic underpinnings of society, and these will now come to the fore. Consequently, no democratic structures, processes or values are likely to emerge in the Arab world for many generations.”

We think he’s right.

But for an alternative view – for the sake of balance – see what Wadah Khanfar, writing in the leftist Islam-sympathetic Guardian has to say. Here’s a bit of it:

The uproar that has accompanied the Islamists’ gains is unhelpful; a calm and well-informed debate about the rise of political Islam is long overdue. …

We must understand the history of the region. In western discourse Islamists are seen as newcomers to politics, gullible zealots who are motivated by a radical ideology and lack experience.

Sure we suspect, on very good evidence, that they’re zealots motivated by a radical ideology. But do we say they’re gullible newcomers lacking in experience? Not in any discourse we’ve heard in our corner of the West.

In fact, they have played a major role in the Arab political scene since the 1920s. Islamic movements have often been in opposition, but since the 1940s they have participated in parliamentary elections, entered alliances with secular, nationalist and socialist groups, and participated in several governments – in Sudan, Jordan, Yemen and Algeria. …

A number of other events have had an impact on the collective Muslim mind, and have led to the maturation of political Islam: the much-debated Islamic Revolution in Iran in 1979; the military coup in Sudan in 1989; the success of the Algerian Islamic Salvation Front in the 1991 elections and the army’s subsequent denial of its right to govern; the conquest of much of Afghan territory by the Taliban in 1996 leading to the establishment of its Islamic emirate; and the success in 2006 of Hamas in the Palestinian Legislative Council elections. The Hamas win was not recognised, nor was the national unity government formed. Instead, a siege was imposed on Gaza to suffocate the movement. …

What lessons were learnt from such examples? He doesn’t say.

He makes it plain as he goes on, however, that he has great hopes of desirable outcomes from Islamist rule in North Africa:

The region has suffered a lot as a result of attempts to exclude Islamists and deny them a role in the public sphere. … Islamists should be careful not to fall into the trap of feeling overconfident: they must accommodate other trends, even if it means making painful concessions. Our societies need political consensus, and the participation of all political groups, regardless of their electoral weight. It is this interplay between Islamists and others that will both guarantee the maturation of the Arab democratic transition and lead to an Arab political consensus and stability that has been missing for decades.

And maybe that is what the Arab world needs. But what will the rest of the world get? The end of jihad? Skeptics that we are, we doubt it.