Mark Steyn repeats a column he wrote seven years ago about the Washington, D.C. sniper Muslim terrorist, John Allen Muhammad – who, we are happy to inform our readers, is to be executed today. Mark Steyn rightly observes that what he wrote then serves as apt comment on the recent Fort Hood murders by a Muslim terrorist:

Broadly speaking, in these interesting times, when something unusual and unprecedented happens, there are those who think on balance it’s more likely to be a fellow called Mohammed than, say, Bud, and there are those who climb into the metaphorical burqa, close up the grille and insist, despite all the evidence, that we should be looking for some angry white male. I’m in the former camp and, apropos the sniper, said as much in the Telegraph’s American sister papers. I had a bet with both my wife and my assistant that the perp would be an Islamic terrorist. The gals, unfortunately, had made the mistake of reading The New York Times, whose experts concluded it would be a “macho hunter” or an “icy loner”.

Speaking as a macho hunter and an icy loner myself, I’m beginning to think the media would be better off turning their psychological profilers loose on America’s newsrooms. Take, for example, the Times’s star columnist Frank Rich. Within a few weeks of September 11, he was berating John Ashcroft, the Attorney-General, for not rounding up America’s “home-grown Talibans” – the religious Right and “the anti-abortion terrorist movement”. In a column entitled “How to Lose a War” last October he mocked the administration for not consulting with abortion clinics, who had a lot of experience dealing with “terrorists”.

You get the picture: sure, Muslim fundamentalists can be pretty extreme, but what about all our Christian fundamentalists? Unfortunately, for the old moral equivalence to hold up, the Christians really need to get off their fundamentalist butts and start killing more people. At the moment, the brilliantly versatile Muslim fundamentalists are gunning down Maryland schoolkids and bus drivers, hijacking Moscow theatres, self-detonating in Israeli pizza parlours, blowing up French oil tankers in Yemen, and slaughtering nightclubbers in Bali, while Christian fundamentalists are, er, sounding extremely strident in their calls for the return of prayer in school.

John Allen Muhammad had been a soldier in the US army, as John Allen Williams, before he converted to Islam. Nidal Hasan was a Muslim when he joined the army. After coming under suspicion as a subversive, he was promoted, incredibly, to the rank of major. (Almost as incredibly, he was a psychiatrist. Considering that ‘Islam’ means submission, and psychiatry questions and probes thought and feeling, an ‘Islamic psychiatrist’ would seem to be something of an oxymoron.)

We have said that Muslims should not be allowed to serve in the armed forces. The exclusion could be enforced  politely by telling Muslims that as they belong to ‘the Religion of Peace’, they are not required to serve. They can be excused from military service, like Quakers and other conscientious objectors.

Seems to us the lesson to be learnt is that the army should ideally consist of nothing but insensitive, aggressive, conservative, heterosexual, arrogantly patriotic men. ‘Male chauvinist pigs’, if you like. Highly disciplined, but fierce. They could bother God or any number of gods to their hearts’ content, only not Allah. We atheists would positively recommend to any of those brave brutes who need to believe in supernatural powers that they revive Mithraism, the rude, rough, bloody cult of the Roman army. It would be entirely suitable.

Such an army is at present a pipe dream. It is unlikely to be raised in this era. Elsewhere, Mark Steyn writes of ‘the collapse of confidence’ of the West at the same time as the Berlin Wall collapsed. He speaks of the ‘enervation of the West’. We would also call it the feminization of the West. What hope do we have of recovering?

Yesterday the fall of the Berlin Wall was celebrated in Germany. The fall of the wall marked the beginning of the fall of Communism in Eastern Europe. As tens of thousands of people poured through the opened gates into West Berlin twenty years ago, the atrocious creed of Communism itself was visibly exposed as the enemy of the human spirit. Chief among the causes of the fall was the resolute opposition to Communist tyranny by the United States. But  – Oh, the painful ironies of history! – who was it who stood and spoke yesterday in Berlin as representative of the United States? Hillary Clinton, disciple of the Communist revolutionary Saul Alinsky, who had wanted to turn America into the very same hell that East Germany had been!

Here’s part of an eyewitness report of the day the Berlin Wall came down:

Then came the now-famous press conference given by Günter Schabowski, the East German Politburo member and ex-editor of the Communist Party newspaper Neues Deutschland. Mr Schabowski, yellow and utterly exhausted, sat on a podium before the world’s media and read out utterly confusing details of the regime’s draft travel law – including the announcement that the right to travel to the West came into force immediately.

Within about an hour the first West German reports started coming in about East Germans gathering at crossing points. We leapt into a car and raced to the centre of Berlin. The watchtowers and guard houses were manned with their customary Kalashnikov-toting sentries. There was nothing to report.

Following the Wall northwards, we wound through a maze of dimly lit streets until we began to see single people walking towards us. Single people turned into groups. We thought: “They are just inquisitive West Berliners taking a look.” But then the groups turned into a small crowd and we had to park the car and start walking.

What confronted us at the Bornholmer bridge was beyond belief: a vast tide of people, some in tears, many just looking stunned, flooding across. Behind them were the huge glaring arc lights, guard huts, raised barriers and a line of puffing Trabant and Wartburg cars. Two East German border guards stood there looking bewildered. One, I remember, was crying. With no orders from above, the guards had simply buckled under the pressure of a 20,000 strong crowd of East Berliners chanting “Open the gate!” and raised the barriers.

An article from the Institute of Middle Eastern Democracy:

A very interesting study here by iKibbitz on the nature of the HRC’s vote last Thursday based on the evidence provided in the Goldstone report. The article looks at the Freedom Index scores given to countries that voted for the resolution, against and abstained.

Although this is never an outright reason to dismiss a democratic vote on a resolution, given the enormous amount of criticism of Goldstone and his study – this now paired with this examination of the Freedom Index scores given to the countries that voted for the resolution – certainly provides a strong basis to levy further examination and criticism of the report’s relevance and usefulness.

Another interesting article that has to come light is…read on

Today, November 9, 2009, is the 20^th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall.

It was one of the greatest events of history.

The wall both literally and symbolically marked the division between tyranny and freedom.

It was erected on Sunday, August 13, 1961, to prevent people living under the Soviet-controlled Communist regime in East Germany from fleeing into free West Berlin.  About 1500 people a day had been migrating westward.

Within 24 hours West Berlin was sealed off from the so-called Democratic Republic of Germany.

At first it was a fence consisting of barbed wire, spread over some 96 miles.

In 1962 an inner wall was built. The 100 yard gravel area between the fence and the wall was booby-trapped with trip wires, and mined.

In 1975  a stronger, higher, thicker wall made of concrete and reinforced with mesh fencing and barbed wire was constructed. It was known as the ‘Grenzmauer 75’. Soldiers stationed in some 300 watchtowers had a clear view of the space, and orders to shoot down anyone attempting to cross it.

Over 100,000 people tried to escape to freedom. Some 5,000 succeeded, mostly in the early years before the ‘Grenzmauer 75’ was built. Later, successful crossings were made through tunnels. Two families succeeded by hot-air balloon, and one man in a light aircraft. At least 136 people were killed in the attempt, most famously 18-year-old Peter Fechter, shot on August 17, 1962, as he tried to climb the wall. He lay for hours in the space between the wall and the fence, crying out for help while he bled to death. The East German border guards waited for him to die before they carried him away.

Twenty-five years later, on June 12, 1987, President Ronald Reagan of the United States stood on the west side of the Brandenberg Gate beyond which the wall ran, and said to the Russian leader in a famous speech, ‘Mr Gorbachev, tear down this wall!’

The speech was symptomatic of the firm stand he maintained against the Soviet Union.

Two and a half years later the wall was brought down.

Its fall heralded the collapse of Soviet Russia and its evil empire. It marked the end of the Cold War and the victory of the free world, led by the United States of America.

The conquering hero of that stupendous victory was President Reagan. How he won the Cold War is the subject of volumes, but win it he did.

Of inestimable help to him was Margaret Thatcher, Prime Minister of Great Britain.

A few days ago Mikhail Gorbachev, George H. W. Bush who was president of the US when the Soviet Union was dissolved in 1991, and Helmut Kohl who was Chancellor of West Germany at the time, met on the stage of a Berlin theatre to commemorate the fall of the wall.

Margaret Thatcher, who had not wanted the reunification of Germany but nevertheless played a decisive part in defeating the Communist tyranny over Eastern Europe, was not included.

The president of the United States, Barack Obama, has refused to attend any of the celebratory ceremonies in Germany. His excuse is that he is ‘too busy’.

Jillian Becker  November 9, 2009

A diary has been found in the US National Security Archive which reveals details of the relationship between the British Labour Party and the Soviet Union. It was kept by one Anatoly Chernyaev, the man who pandered between the Kremlin and the Labour leaders (particularly Michael Foot and Neil Kinnock). If anyone should know, he should. And it’s quite likely he’s telling the truth, though with such people there can be no certainty, of course.

The diary is making some headlines in Britain, notably in The Spectator, which has made it this week’s cover story, and the Daily Mail.

Among its ‘revelations’ is a story that the Labour leaders tried to get the Soviets to help them beat the ‘common enemy Margaret Thatcher’. The Soviets apparently agreed to help these treacherous men, and maybe they did something or other, but whether they did or not, Mrs Thatcher remained triumphantly in Downing Street throughout the 1980s, to be replaced by another Conservative leader, John Major, in 1990.

The Mail, realizing perhaps that this isn’t much of a revelation, and that as news it is rather stale, does its best to work up something juicier:

More worrying, perhaps, is the fact that the document shows in stark detail how the political ideology of so many of those who govern today was shaped by the unspeakable communist creed of the Soviet Union. The unpalatable truth is that many ministers in Government today rose through the ranks of a British socialist movement that was heavily influenced – and even controlled – by the Kremlin in Moscow. … In Britain, those on the Left who know about the depth of the Soviet influence over this country in the latter half of the 20th century, have maintained an embarrassed silence about this shameful episode in British political history. Above all, the intimate co-operation between Moscow and the trades unions which nearly brought the country to its knees in the Sixties and Seventies has been an utterly taboo subject. … This diary reveals that the cosy relationship between the Kremlin and Labour was far more widespread than previously thought – and had been going on for years. …’

Actually, it was pretty well known that the particular trade union leaders mentioned by the Mail were sponsored by the Soviets. The subject, far from being ‘utterly taboo’ was discussed at length and often in Conservative circles, especially when Prime Minister Thatcher tamed the trade unions good and proper. As for the ‘intimacy’ between the Labour Party rats and the Soviet top brass, such details as the diary records – and only the details are news really, the general picture being well known to anyone who took an interest in such things back then – show the rats in a rather pathetic light. It seems that they had to beg for a few minutes with Brezhnev, and later with ‘the senile’ Chernenko, so they could tell the newspapers back home that they were received by the Man. Hardly a ‘cosy’ relationship!

The Mail tries harder yet:

It is not just the Left’s close connection with the Soviet Union, but the lasting influence of that connection that should concern us all.

By which it means that Gordon Brown, who is still in power though not for much longer, was originally given his safe seat by the decision of two senior trade union officials who were themselves sponsored by the USSR. Thus, urges the Mail, ‘the control the Soviets had over Labour, its leadership and aspiring politicians, is still having a profound impact on Britain.’

Even this, we surmise, will not greatly scandalize or even startle most British readers.

We find one comment interesting. It’s made by Peter Oborne in his Spectator column on the subject. He says that ‘these communist influences’ account for many of the ‘characteristics’ of Tony Blair’s New Labour. The characteristics he notes are:

‘Its deep suspicion of outsiders, its structural hostility to democratic debate, its secrecy, its faith in bureaucracy, embedded preference for striking deals away from the public eye, its ruthless reliance on a small group of trusted activists .’

Why this list strikes us as worth noting is that it applies equally to Obama’s Democratic Party. And the influences are of the same sort, and from the same poison well: not the Kremlin, which was only a conduit, but the Communist creed itself.

From an IBD editorial:

The Fort Hood terrorist is … just one of many examples of jihadist traitors in the ranks of the military. Together they form a dangerous Fifth Column, and the Pentagon — thanks to institutionalized political correctness — is doing next to nothing to root them out.

Instead, brass are actively recruiting Muslim soldiers — whose ranks have swelled to more than 15,000 — and catering to their faith by erecting mosques even at Marine headquarters in Quantico, Va. More, they’re hiring Muslim chaplains endorsed by radical Islamic front groups, who convert and radicalize soldiers.

In the wake of the worst domestic military-base massacre in U.S. history, this is an outrage to say the least. And the PC blinders explain how Fort Hood commanders could have failed so horrifically in protecting their force from the internal threat there. …

Islam is the enemy of the United States. No Muslim should be allowed to serve in the US armed forces.

That ex-governor Sarah Palin is a lot smarter and better informed than vice-president Joe Biden is proved yet again by a new report on energy, commented on by Investor’s Business Daily (at their Investors.com website):

As Palin jousts with Biden on energy independence, the government reports that we lead the world in energy reserves. From oil to gas to coal, we are sitting on prosperity. So why are we importing anything?

One of the interesting sidelights of the NY-23 race was an exchange on energy independence between Vice President Joe Biden and the former governor of energy-rich Alaska, Sarah Palin. Biden, who came in to campaign for Democrat Bill Owens, was reminded of the issue of energy.

“The fact of the matter is that Sarah Palin thinks the answer to energy was ‘Drill, baby, drill,'” Biden said at an Owens fundraiser, referring to Palin’s own campaign slogan last year. “No, it’s a lot more complicated, Sarah, than ‘Drill, baby, drill.'”

Actually, it’s not, according to a new report produced by the Congressional Research Service, hardly an outpost of the vast right-wing conspiracy or on the payroll of Big Oil. The report says that if all our energy resources are added up and converted to a barrels of oil equivalent (BOE), the U.S. has the largest reserves in the world.

According to the CRS, the U.S. has 1,321 billion barrels of oil (or barrels of oil equivalent for other sources of energy) if you combine its recoverable natural gas, oil and coal reserves. Russia is close behind with 1,248 billion barrels BOE. Other energy-producing nations, including many that export oil to the U.S., lag behind.

Of course, much of our world-leading reserves are off-limits by government edict. We recently commented on the federal government designation of 200,541 squares miles off the coast of Alaska as critical habitat for the abundant polar bear, effectively killing hopes to exploit the vast energy riches of the American Arctic.

Alaska’s Chukchi Sea, part of the designated habitat, holds more oil and gas than anyone thought — 1,600 trillion cubic feet of undiscovered gas, or 30% of the world’s supply and 83 billion barrels of undiscovered oil, 4% of the estimated global resources.

The CRS report also notes the U.S. has 28% of the world’s coal reserves, with Russia again coming in second with 19%. …

Nidal Malik Hasan, the army officer who yesterday massacred his fellow soldiers at Fort Hood, is a MUSLIM TERRORIST.

He should have been recognized as a potential terrorist, removed from the army, and watched.

All the warning signs were there. He is a Muslim who advertised his identity as such by wearing traditional Muslim clothing off base. He  defended suicide bombing. Though born in Virginia, he had his nationality recorded as Palestinian because his parents were Jordanians of Palestinian origin (as most Jordanians are, Jordan being the British-established Palestinian Arab state). He vociferously objected to being deployed in Iraq or Afghanistan. He had been reported to ‘channels’ for raging against America’s wars on Muslim enemies.

Yet  ‘channels’ apparently turned a deaf ear,  because it would have been politically incorrect to take all this into account and act on the information.

The result of this absurd timidity imposed by a stupid ideology is 12 dead (by today’s count) and many more wounded.

David Horowitz sees the case as we do:

A Muslim fanatic with an Internet site praising Islamic suicide bombers as defenders of their comrades is a Major in the U.S. Army with access to military intelligence and lethal weaponry. And it’s not as though the army didn’t know that he was a Muslim fanatic and supporter of the Islamic jihad against the West. He was under investigation for six months because of his anti-American, jihadist rantings. He did not want to be deployed. He wanted to be discharged.

But despite his identification with America’s enemies, the army kept him in its officer corps. How in God’s name was this possible? But it was. And so, after calling America the “aggressor” in Afghanistan and Iraq this Muslim jihadist traitor army officer picks up his semi-automatic weapons and heads for the center at Ft. Hood where soldiers are being deployed to fight the jihadists in Afghanistan to conduct his massacre. Yet this morning the Fox News Channel chiron says “Investigators search for a motive in the Ft. Hood killings.” Is everybody out of their mind?

The Ft. Hood killings are the chickens of the left coming home to roost. … The fifth column formed out of the unholy alliance between radical Islam and the American left is now entrenched in the White House and throughout our government. And in matters like the Muslim jihadist Major Hasan our military is its captive.

The Fort Hood massacre is the first of the preventable atrocities we have been warning about on our websites since 9/11 — the atrocities which are apparently necessary for Americans to wake up to the threat that confronts us. We have a vast internal threat in this country in the form of this unholy alliance between the anti-American Left and radical Islam – whose Muslim Brotherhood network extends through our universities, our government and our military. It is “politically incorrect” to recognize this fact. You can be barred — as I have been — from speaking at universities for even talking about it. The embargo of discussion of the Islamo-fascist threat puts every American (including the infidel collaborators) at risk. …

Are we really entirely in the dark, at a complete and utter loss, wondering what Army Major Nidal Malik Hasan‘s motive could possibly be for his murderous attack at Fort Hood?

Or do we have a clue?

How surprised were we to learn that he is a Muslim –

Very?

Or not at all?

Five British soldiers were shot dead Tuesday by an Afghan ‘policeman’ they were training.

An unnamed soldier contributed this to The Independent:

When I heard the news this morning, I thought “Christ, five in one go…” I was shocked and saddened – but I was not surprised that it had happened. I’m surprised it took this long.

We went out to Helmand to mentor the Afghan National Police without understanding the level they were at. We thought we would be arresting people, helping them to police efficiently. Instead we were literally training them how to point a gun on the ranges, and telling them why you should not stop cars and demand “taxes”.

Most of them were corrupt and took drugs, particularly opium. The lads would go into police stations at night and they would be stoned; sometimes they would fire indiscriminately at nothing.

They had no understanding of the basics of what it means to be a policeman. We expected to be teaching adults at a certain level and then realised we would be changing nappies. Give them 20 rounds and they will hit the target once.

The first time I saw them I realised that they had almost no training; some of them had very little ability. Their uniforms were dirty and didn’t fit. Their weapon-cleaning was non-existent.

They certainly didn’t have a concept of being upstanding members of the community. They had no loyalty, esprit de corps or cameraderie. …

How do you train this band of idiots and turn them into a force to be reckoned with if they have no sense of loyalty, no sense of belonging?

The biggest problem was that we didn’t know who we were getting. There were no security checks – they were literally allowed to come into the compound and we had to rely on the local chief of police, who recruited them. We kept a close eye on them because we didn’t know or trust them – it was for our own security.

Perhaps half of them genuinely wanted to try to make the community safe: they had the right intention but the attention span of gnats. Twenty would turn up one day, none the next, then 15, then suddenly a new face would appear.

It was difficult just getting them to a basic level, to do things like man a post. They would take drugs, go to sleep, leave their post, have sex with each other. Very few were vigilant or alert. …

British troops felt extremely vulnerable. If they were going out on patrol they didn’t tell the Afghans where, so they couldn’t pass on the information – they didn’t want improvised explosive devices (IEDs) laid in the area. They didn’t trust them one bit.

There was an operation involving the Brits and the Afghan National Army to clear Nad-e-Ali, and it cost lives. The police were left at checkpoints, but within 48 hours all the checkpoints had been overrun or the police just buggered off. As soon as the ground was won it was lost again. …

Lives get lost for nothing. …

I am convinced that a lot of money has been wasted and people have lost their lives unnecessarily because it was for a political end, and not a military decision. The British Army has been pushed into doing something it should not be. …