Did anyone who voted for Obama, or even the media that shilled for him, imagine that he would go this far to abase his country?

Take precautions against your blood boiling when you watch this:

Video made by Eye on the UN

General Petraeus has claimed counterinsurgency success in the Helmand province of Afghanistan. But if this Washington Post report provides a true picture of what success amounts to, it makes failure hard to define.

Helmand is the place with the highest concentration of American troops, and the site of the first major operation under the new military strategy, when U.S. Marines in February retook the Taliban-held town of Marja. Coalition commander Gen. David H. Petraeus now points to parts of Helmand, such as Nawa, as examples of counterinsurgency success.

But the Helmand refugees living in this squalid camp, known as Charahi Qambar, offer a bleaker assessment. They blame insecurity on the presence of U.S. and British troops, and despite official claims of emerging stability, these Afghans believe their villages are still too dangerous to risk returning.

“Where is security? The Americans are just making life worse and worse, and they’re destroying our country,” said Barigul, a 22-year-old opium farmer from the Musa Qala district of Helmand … “If they were building our country, why would I leave my home town and come here?” …

The camp has since grown to more than 1,000 families, making it the largest of some 30 informal settlements around Kabul. …

The residents say they are mostly farmers who brought their bundles by bus and taxi to live in these mud hovels or under scraps of tarp. It is a place of wailing children and dirt-caked faces, where husbands search for menial labor and wives burn heaps of trash to cook their daily gruel. …

Ahunzada, a 35-year-old mullah, gets by on meager donations from other refugees, given to him as payment for teaching Islamic classes and leading the daily prayers in a low-ceilinged makeshift mosque built from mud. Two years ago, he left his opium fields in Sangin, one of the most violent parts of Helmand, which British troops recently handed over to U.S. Marines after taking casualties for four years.

“Every day, fighting is going on there. The more infidels who come to our country, the more Afghans die, and the less safe we become,” he said.

Ahunzada has little affection for the Taliban. His father, Mohammad Gul Agha, and his brother, Abdul Zahir, both died when a fireball engulfed their car on the road to the provincial capital. The insurgents, he said, had planted the bomb to target a passing U.S. military convoy.

“We are not happy from either side, but I believe the British and American troops are more cruel than the Taliban,” he said. “I have seen it happen: The Taliban come on motorbikes, they open fire, then they leave. Then the Americans just come and kill us, they bomb us, they open fire on us, they kill the children and innocent people.” …

He makes this claim although “U.S. commanders say they have made reducing civilian casualties a top priority, and they say their soldiers accept more risk in order to minimize collateral damage” – a deplorable fact we know to be true.

Barigul [the 22-year-old opium farmer mentioned above] and his family left Helmand last month. He said the decision was the culmination of long-running harassment from American troops and their insurgent enemies. He has been detained, he said, accused of planting bombs, searched at checkpoints, and slapped in the face by foreign troops. Outside the Musa Qala district center, where American troops are dominant, the Taliban patrol the villages, block children from attending school and kill Afghans accused of collaborating with foreigners.

“If we grew our beards, the Americans arrested us and put us in jail saying we were Taliban. If we shaved, the Taliban gave us a hard time,” he said. “What are we supposed to do, shave half of our beard?” …

These camp residents – refugees though they are, who have sought protection in the camp from the Taliban – have decided that the Taliban is after all the lesser of two evils. They “clearly want foreign troops to depart”.

They blame the Americans for bombing them out of their homes:

“Who are the Taliban? They are our brothers, our cousins, our relatives. The problem is the Americans,” said Lala Jan, 25, also from Musa Qala. “If somebody attacks from one house, the Americans bomb the whole place. If the Taliban come inside, during the night the Americans come and raid the house. That’s the problem.”

As the number of foreign troops has risen – there are now about 140,000 U.S. and allied NATO soldiers on the ground – the population of those who have been displaced from their homes and have moved elsewhere in Afghanistan has also grown. …

Mohammad, a 36-year-old imam, said that during the Marine operation in Marja, his family hid in a hole, covered by boards, for 12 days as the Taliban fought Americans from house to house. This spring his mother-in-law’s home in Marja was obliterated by an American bomb, he said, killing six of his relatives.

“It was impossible to stay,” he said. “The house had collapsed. “If I go back to Marja, I will have to pick a side,” he said. “If I support the foreign forces, the Taliban will behead me. If I join the Taliban, I will also get killed.” …

For many, the lure to return remains strong. The rain seeps into Ahunzada’s hovel. … He lies on the floor at night and yearns to return to Helmand.

“I keep thinking I should go back to my village, either to cultivate opium or to stand alongside the Taliban. Then at least I will have money. I could send it to my wife and son,” he said. “I think about this every night.”

Yet he is not quite ready.

“When the infidels leave our province, on the next day I will go home.”

Where in this calamitous story does an Afghan army come in, well trained, effective, competently commanded, and seriously willing to take on the Taliban without foreign assistance?  Is it even remotely in prospect?

Without such a thing – and who at this stage can seriously believe in it? – whenever the infidel forces withdraw, whether in 2011 or in 2014 (dates that have been named) or in any unspecified year beyond that,  the Taliban will have won.

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High taxes do nothing for the prosperity of a nation. Never have, never will.

High-taxing governments immiserate the people.

Unless the lame-duck Democratic majority in Congress suddenly decides otherwise in the next few days, taxes will go up steeply next year.

And Thomas Paine is indignant about it.

Or put it this way: if Thomas Paine had written today this passage from part of his introduction to The Rights of Man, it would be just as apt as it was when it was first published some 220 years ago:

From the rapid progress which America makes in every species of improvement, it is rational to conclude that, if the governments of Asia, Africa, and Europe had begun on a principle similar to that of America, or had not been very early corrupted therefrom, those countries must by this time have been in a far superior condition to what they are. Age after age has passed away, for no other purpose than to behold their wretchedness. Could we suppose a spectator who knew nothing of the world, and who was put into it merely to make his observations, he would take a great part of the old world to be new, just struggling with the difficulties and hardships of an infant settlement. He could not suppose that the hordes of miserable poor with which old countries abound could be any other than those who had not yet had time to provide for themselves. Little would he think they were the consequence of what in such countries they call government.

If, from the more wretched parts of the old world, we look at those which are in an advanced stage of improvement we still find the greedy hand of government thrusting itself into every corner and crevice of industry, and grasping the spoil of the multitude. Invention is continually exercised to furnish new pretences for revenue and taxation. It watches prosperity as its prey, and permits none to escape without a tribute.

Ralph Langner, a German computer security expert, has fathomed what Stuxnet was designed to do (by whom, nobody knows), and declares it  a stunningly advanced technological achievement.

(See our posts A virus that might save us all, Sept 25, 2010, and Sound the trumpet!, September 29, 2010.)

Praising the sophistication of the attack code, Langner … compared it to “the arrival of an F-35 fighter jet on a World War I battlefield.” He called the technology, “much superior to anything ever seen before, and to what was assumed possible.”

It was designed, he says, specifically to attack Iran’s nuclear program by means of two distinct “digital warheads” aimed respectively at two military targets: uranium enrichment plants and the Bushehr nuclear power plant.

He explained how the worm works to destroy these targets:

The portion of the worm that targeted uranium enrichment plants manipulated the speeds of mechanical parts in the enrichment process, which would ultimately “result in cracking the rotor, thereby destroying the centrifuge.”  …

The second “warhead” [that] targeted the Bushehr nuclear plant … had no relation to the first “warhead” … [It]  was intended to attack the external turbine controller of the Bushehr plant, a 150 foot “chunk of metal,” that could “destroy the turbine as effectively as an air strike.”

He did not say that he or anyone else could “cure” the infected Iranian computer systems.

However, Iran does not apparently need any outside help. Having superior technological know-how, it can deal effectively with Stuxnet all by itself,  according to its intelligence minister Heldar Moslehi:

“Iran’s intelligence department has found a solution for confronting (the worm) and it will be applied,” he was quoted as saying. “Our domination of virtual networks has thwarted the activities of enemies in this regard.”

Somehow he doesn’t sound either convinced or convincing. We cheerfully guess – and affably hope – that the Iranian dominators of virtual networks will struggle on unsuccessfully with the Stuxnet depredations for a good long time to come.

From RealEconTV

The proposition for the debate at Cambridge University was: Israel is a Rogue State.

The mood now in Britain and the British universities – Cambridge no exception – is anti-Israel.

Gabriel Latner, a strong supporter of Israel, was on the side whose remit it was to argue for the proposition.

He did it so convincingly that – the other side won. By a decisive majority.

Here’s part of what he said (but enjoy reading it all):

This is a war of ideals, and the other speakers here tonight are rightfully idealists. I’m not. I’m a realist. I’m here to win. I have a single goal this evening – to have at least a plurality of you walk out of the “Aye” door. I face a singular challenge – most, if not all, of you have already made up your minds.

This issue is too polarizing for the vast majority of you not to already have a set opinion. I’d be willing to bet that half of you strongly support the motion, and half of you strongly oppose it. I want to win, and we’re destined for a tie. I’m tempted to do what my fellow speakers are going to do – simply rehash every bad thing the Israeli government has ever done in an attempt to satisfy those of you who agree with them. And perhaps they’ll even guilt one of you rare undecided into voting for the proposition, or more accurately, against Israel.

It would be so easy to twist the meaning and significance of international “laws” to make Israel look like a criminal state. But that’s been done to death. It would be easier still to play to your sympathy, with personalized stories of Palestinian suffering. And they can give very eloquent speeches on those issues. But the truth is that treating people badly, whether they’re your citizens or an occupied nation, does not make a state “rogue.” If it did, Canada, the US, and Australia would all be rogue states based on how they treat their indigenous populations. Britain’s treatment of the Irish would easily qualify them to wear this sobriquet. These arguments, while emotionally satisfying, lack intellectual rigor.

More importantly, I just don’t think we can win with those arguments. It won’t change the numbers. Half of you will agree with them, half of you won’t. So I’m going to try something different, something a little unorthodox … to try and convince the die-hard Zionists and Israel supporters here tonight to vote for the proposition. …

A rogue state is one that acts in an unexpected, uncommon or aberrant manner. A state that behaves exactly like Israel. …

The fact that Israel is a Jewish state alone makes it anomalous enough to be dubbed a rogue state: There are 195 countries in the world. Some are Christian, some Muslim, some are secular. Israel is the only country in the world that is Jewish. …

The second argument concerns Israel’s humanitarianism – in particular, Israel’s response to a refugee crisis. Not the Palestinian refugee crisis – for I am sure that the other speakers will cover that – but the issue of Darfurian refugees. Everyone knows that what happened, and is still happening in Darfur, is genocide, whether or not the UN and the Arab League will call it such. There has been a mass exodus from Darfur as the oppressed seek safety. They have not had much luck. Many have gone north to Egypt – where they are treated despicably. The brave make a run through the desert in a bid to make it to Israel. Not only do they face the natural threats of the Sinai, they are also used for target practice by the Egyptian soldiers patrolling the border.

Why would they take the risk? Because in Israel they are treated with compassion – they are treated as the refugees that they are – and perhaps Israel’s cultural memory of genocide is to blame. The Israeli government has even gone so far as to grant several hundred Darfurian refugees citizenship. This alone sets Israel apart from the rest of the world.

But the real point of distinction is this: The IDF sends out soldiers and medics to patrol the Egyptian border. They are sent looking for refugees attempting to cross into Israel. Not to send them back into Egypt, but to save them from dehydration, heat exhaustion, and Egyptian bullets. …  To call that sort of behavior anomalous is an understatement. …

When you compare Israel to its regional neighbors, it becomes clear just how roguish Israel is.

Israel has a better human rights record than any of its neighbors. At no point in history has there ever been a liberal democratic state in the Middle East – except for Israel. …

In Kuwait, Lebanon, Oman, Qatar and Syria, homosexual conduct is punishable by flogging, imprisonment, or both. But homosexuals there get off pretty lightly compared to their counterparts in Iran, Saudi Arabia and Yemen, who are put to death. Israeli homosexuals can adopt, openly serve in the army, enter civil unions and are protected by exceptionally strongly worded anti-discrimination legislation. …

Freedom House is an NGO that releases an annual report on democracy and civil liberties in each of the 195 countries in the world. It ranks each country as “free,” “partly free” or “not free.” In the Middle East, Israel is the only country that has earned designation as a “free” country. …

Iran is …  given the rating of “not free,” putting it alongside China, Zimbabwe, North Korea, and Myanmar. … Iran is the world leader in terms of jailed journalists, with 39 reporters (that we know of) in prison as of 2009. They also kicked out almost every Western journalist during the 2009 election. I guess we can’t really expect more from a theocracy.

Which is what most countries in the Middle East are – theocracies and autocracies. But Israel is the sole, the only, the rogue, democracy. Out of all the countries in the Middle East, only in Israel do anti-government protests and reporting go unquashed and uncensored. …

Israel willfully and forcefully disregards international law. In 1981 Israel destroyed Osirak – Saddam Hussein’s nuclear bomb lab. Every government in the world knew that Hussein was building a bomb. And they did nothing. Except for Israel.

Yes, in doing so they broke international law and custom. But they also saved us all from a nuclear Iraq. That rogue action should earn Israel a place of respect in the eyes of all freedom-loving peoples. But it hasn’t.

Tonight, while you listen to us prattle on, I want you to remember something: While you’re here, Khomeini’s Iran is working towards the Bomb. And if you’re honest with yourself, you know that Israel is the only country that can, and will, do something about it. Israel will, out of necessity, act in a way that is not the norm, and you’d better hope that they do it in a destructive manner. Any sane person would rather a rogue Israel than a nuclear Iran.

In a recent article, the Townhall columnist Jeff Jacoby discusses the proposition, put forward by the American Humanist Association in a series of TV and press ads, that people “can be good without God”.

Jacoby concedes that “people can be decent and moral without believing in a God who commands us to be good”. However, he argues, that is not because they reason their way to ethical behavior but because they “reflect the moral expectations of the society in which they were raised”.

He writes:

In our culture, even the most passionate atheist cannot help having been influenced by the Judeo-Christian worldview that shaped Western civilization. …

In a world without God, there is no obvious difference between good and evil. There is no way to prove that murder is wrong if there is no Creator who decrees “Thou shalt not murder.’’ It certainly cannot be proved wrong by reason alone.

Now then, now then (as British policemen used to say when approaching an area of rising excitement). Every moral law ever taught, whether or not as a divine injunction, came out of the heads of human beings. They may have claimed that a god inspired them, or instructed them, addressed them in dreams, or snatched them up for a brief sojourn in heaven and “revealed”  the message to them, but what they were actually doing was thinking.

Jewish sages bade people to obey the moral laws because, they warned, it was God’s will that they should. Disobey and you offend a terrible power! The Christian churches promised everlasting reward in paradise to those who obeyed and eternal punishment in the flames of hell to those who didn’t. The hope and the dread probably kept a lot of people behaving decorously a lot of the time.

The more sensible moral laws of Judaism and Christianity  – do not kill, do not steal, do not lie (“bear false witness”)  – are sound principles and are to be found in other cultures which do not claim that they were issued by a deity. They are precepts of Buddhism, for instance. It’s more than probable that many a forgotten tribe, whose gods were not of a kind to be drafted into law enforcement, penalized murder and theft and deception.

As for “doing unto others as you would be done by”, or refraining from doing to them what you wouldn’t like done to you – “the Golden Rule” that many religions preach -, was divine inspiration necessary for its conception? Common sense prompts it, experience teaches it, and reason approves it. It’s an excellent example of a moral idea arising out of intelligent self-interest.

Yet Jacoby opines:

Reason is not enough. Only if there is a God who forbids murder is murder definitively evil. Otherwise its wrongfulness is a matter of opinion. …

Atheists may believe — and spend a small fortune advertising — that we can all be “good without God.’’ History tells a very different story.

The story that history tells is that religion has been the greatest source of human suffering next to bacteria, viruses, and natural disasters. And until quite recently, Christianity in all its major branches inflicted more agony on human bodies and minds than any other religion since Baal required babies to be thrown into the iron furnace of Moloch’s belly.

Jacoby is right that “in our culture, even the most passionate atheist cannot help having been influenced by the Judeo-Christian worldview that shaped Western civilization”. For good or ill, that must be the case. But there have been far better influences.

To men of reason since the dawn of the Enlightenment, to their skepticism, their enquiry, their science, their commerce, their exploration and invention we owe what is best in our civilization.

Jillian Becker  November 17, 2010

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.