From the Washington Times:

About 50 parishioners were locked into the Assemblies of God church before it was set ablaze. They were mostly women and children. Those who tried to flee were hacked to death by machete-wielding members of a mob numbering 2,000.

The 2008 New Year Day atrocity in the Kenyan village Eldoret, about 185 miles northwest of Nairobi, had all the markings of the Rwanda genocide of a decade earlier.

By mid-February 2008, more than 1,500 Kenyans were killed. Many were slain by machete-armed attackers. More than 500,000 were displaced by the religious strife. Villages lay in ruin. Many of the atrocities were perpetrated by Muslims against Christians.

The violence was led by supporters of Raila Odinga, the opposition leader who lost the Dec. 27, 2007, presidential election by more than 230,000 votes. Odinga supporters began the genocide hours after the final election results were announced Dec. 30. Mr. Odinga was a member of Parliament representing an area in western Kenya, heavily populated by the Luo tribe, and the birthplace of Barack Obama’s father.

Mr. Odinga had the backing of Kenya’s Muslim community heading into the election. For months he denied any ties to Muslim leaders, but fell silent when Sheik Abdullahi Abdi, chairman of the National Muslim Leaders Forum, appeared on Kenya television displaying a memorandum of understanding signed on Aug. 29, 2007, by Mr. Odinga and the Muslim leader. Mr. Odinga then denied his denials.

The details of the MOU were shocking. In return for Muslim backing, Mr. Odinga promised to impose a number of measures favored by Muslims if he were elected president. Among these were recognition of "Islam as the only true religion," Islamic leaders would have an "oversight role to monitor activities of ALL other religions [emphasis in original]," installation of Shariah courts in every jurisdiction, a ban on Christian preaching, replacement of the police commissioner who "allowed himself to be used by heathens and Zionists," adoption of a women’s dress code, and bans on alcohol and pork. …

Initially, Mr. Odinga was not the favored opposition candidate to stand in the 2007 election against President Mwai Kibaki, who was seeking his second term. However, he received a tremendous boost when Sen. Barack Obama arrived in Kenya in August 2006 to campaign on his behalf. Mr. Obama denies that supporting Mr. Odinga was the intention of his trip, but his actions and local media reports tell otherwise.

Mr. Odinga and Mr. Obama were nearly inseparable throughout Mr. Obama’s six-day stay. The two traveled together throughout Kenya and Mr. Obama spoke on behalf of Mr. Odinga at numerous rallies. In contrast, Mr. Obama had only criticism for Kibaki. He lashed out against the Kenyan government shortly after meeting with the president on Aug. 25. "The [Kenyan] people have to suffer over corruption perpetrated by government officials," Mr. Obama announced.

"Kenyans are now yearning for change," he declared. The intent of Mr. Obama’s remarks and actions was transparent to Kenyans – he was firmly behind Mr. Odinga.

Mr. Odinga and Mr. Obama had met several times before the 2006 trip. Reports indicate Mr. Odinga visited Mr. Obama during trips to the U.S. in 2004, 2005 and 2006. Mr. Obama sent his foreign policy adviser Mark Lippert to Kenya in early 2006 to coordinate his summer visit. Mr. Obama’s August trip coincided with strategizing by Orange Democratic Movement leaders to defeat Mr. Kibaki in the upcoming elections. Mr. Odinga represented the ODM ticket in the presidential race.

Mr. Odinga and Mr. Obama’s father were both from the Luo community, the second-largest tribe in Kenya, but their ties run much deeper. Mr. Odinga told a stunned BBC Radio interviewer the reason why he and Mr. Obama were staying in near daily telephone contact was because they were cousins. In a Jan. 8, 2008, interview, Mr. Odinga said Mr. Obama had called him twice the day before while campaigning in the New Hampshire primary before adding, "Barack Obama’s father is my maternal uncle."

President Kibaki requested a meeting of all opposition leaders in early January in an effort to quell the violence. All agreed to attend except Mr. Odinga. A month later, Mr. Kibaki offered Mr. Odinga the role of prime minister, the de facto No. 2 in the Kenyan government, in return for an end to the attacks. Mr. Odinga was sworn in on April 17, 2008.

Mr. Obama’s judgment is seriously called into question when he backs an official with troubling ties to Muslim extremists and whose supporters practice ethnic cleansing and genocide. It was Islamic extremists in Kenya who bombed the U.S. Embassy in 1998, killing more than 200 and injuring thousands. None of this has dissuaded Mr. Obama from maintaining disturbing loyalties. 

 The Long War Journal reports on one of 157 camps in South Waziristan (Pakistan) where children are trained to blow themselves and as many others as they can to pieces:

Scores of children train to become suicide bombers at a camp run by Qair Hussain in Spinkai, South Waziristan. Image courtesy of AfPax Insider.

The Taliban have rebuilt a camp in South Waziristan that trains children to be suicide bombers, a video from Pakistan shows. Children as young as seven years old are indoctrinated to wage jihad in Pakistan and Afghanistan.

The video, obtained by AfPax Insider, was shot in August in Spinkai Ragzai, South Waziristan, a tribal area run by Pakistani Taliban leader Baitullah Mehsud. The Taliban are seen "training dozens of boys ranging in age from seven to 14," the news service reported. "The video attempts to justify suicide bombings as a legitimate means of attack against "infidels.’"

The images shows the children reading from the Quran and an adult Taliban training the children. One slide shows a poster board with the words “Killing a Spy” written in English.

While not explicitly stated in the AfPax Insider report, the camp is run by Qari Hussain, a senior lieutenant to Baitullah who has close links to al Qaeda. Hussain has rebuilt his child training camp after the Pakistani military demolished his suicide nursery during a short offensive in Spinkai in January 2008.

In May, a senior Pakistani general described the previous camp as a "factory." The military seized numerous documents and training materials in the demolished camp.

"It was like a factory that had been recruiting nine to 12-year-old boys, and turning them into suicide bombers," said Major General Tariq Khan, the commander of Pakistan’s 14 Division, which led the operation in South Waziristan.

"The computers, other equipment and literature seized from the place … give graphic details of the training process in this so-called ‘nursery,’" Dawn reported in May. "There are videos of young boys carrying out executions, a classroom where 10- to 12-year olds are sitting in formations, with white band of Quranic verses wrapped around their forehead, and there are training videos to show how improvised explosive devices are made and detonated." 

 … though not intentionally, of course. 

This from al-Aqsa TV on September 3, 2008, translated by MEMRI: 

Dr. Ahmad Al-Muzain: The Prophet Muhammad said that there is no need to wash off the urine of the male infant. Only the urine of the female infant should be washed. In the case of the urine of the male infant, it is enough to sprinkle water lightly over it. From this, the religious scholars have concluded that the urine of the male is less impure than the urine of the female. This gives rise to many questions: Why is there a distinction between the urine of the male and the female? What is the wisdom in this? Is this, as some Orientalists claim, discrimination against the female, even in infancy? God forbid that this is true.

[…]

In order to prove the wisdom behind this, scientists from an Iraqi university have conducted a unique experiment. Of course, this experiment was supervised by a professor from the International Commission on Scientific Signs in the Quran and the Sunna.

[…]

This experiment proved that a type of bacteria known as E. coli – and you can see a picture of this bacteria behind me… We found this type of bacteria in the urine culture of both male and female infants. What was strange, however, was that the urine of the male infant contained much fewer bacteria than that of the female.

[…]

This proves unequivocally that this is the true religion, and that this knowledge was conveyed to the Prophet by Allah.

It seems likely that the man who wins the presidential race gets the booby-prize. The new president’s task would daunt Hercules.

The difficulty of guiding and protecting America, leading the West, and keeping guard over the whole seething world at this point in human affairs should be too formidable for any man or woman of normal intelligence to think of tackling it.

Either both candidates have a measure of self-confidence in their capabilities amounting to almost lunatic self-delusion, or both are astonishingly blind to what they’d be undertaking.

America is in the grip of an economic crisis that no man and his dogs can save it from. Only time and free economic activity can eventually restore confidence and prosperity. But both candidates propose regulation: one of them full-blown socialism. Their remedies can only make the crisis worse. The winner will be blamed and damned for that, but even if he should decide not to regulate, blame and cursing is what he’ll get.

The world is threatened by the dark regressive force of militant Islam; by proliferating nuclear arms in the hands of evil men; by an aggressive Russia and the rising power of Communist China; and by the slow but steady pre-emptive capitulation of an ignominious Western Europe to all these threats. One candidate seems not to grasp the reality of the dangers, and might even have sympathy with the ideologies behind them. Neither candidate could bring himself to warn Islam, or the evil despots, or Vladimir Putin, or the Chinese potentates, that America is willing to use its military might to force them to change their ways. Without that threat and a manifest resolution to carry it out, nothing will stop them.

While we fall ever deeper into debt with China; while Russian warships cruise the Caribbean and Russian arms and technology strengthen our enemies in South America and the Middle East; while every day Islam advances further until it can overwhelm us; our Don Quixote in the White House will go to war against the weather. Some will praise him for that, no doubt, until real disaster ruins him and them.

In the light of all this, competing for the presidency looks very like competing for the captaincy of the Titanic.

If one of the candidates should suddenly see clearly what he will be confronted by if he wins, he might do everything he can to hand the victory and the burden to the other. Perhaps John McCain is doing just that. It’s the only plausible explanation for his failure to use the potent ammunition he’s got against Barack Obama, to defeat him in the contest for the dreadful job of leading us to shipwreck.

Jillian Becker

October 2008

 Geert Wilders, the hero from the Netherlands who made the film Fitna and  refuses to be intimidated by jihadis, speaks in New York:

All throughout Europe a new reality is rising: entire Muslim neighbourhoods where very few indigenous people reside or are even seen. And if they are, they might regret it. This goes for the police as well. It’s the world of head scarves, where women walk around in figureless tents, with baby strollers and a group of children. Their husbands, or slaveholders if you prefer, walk three steps ahead. With mosques on many street corner. The shops have signs you and I cannot read. You will be hard-pressed to find any economic activity.These are Muslim ghettos controlled by religious fanatics. These are Muslim neighbourhoods, and they are mushrooming in every city across Europe. These are the building-blocks for territorial control of increasingly larger portions of Europe, street by street, neighbourhood by neighbourhood, city by city. 

There are now thousands of mosques throughout Europe. With larger congregations than there are in churches. And in every European city there are plans to build super-mosques that will dwarf every church in the region. Clearly, the signal is: we rule. 

Many European cities are already one-quarter Muslim: just take Amsterdam, Marseille and Malmo in Sweden. In many cities the majority of the under-18 population is Muslim. Paris is now surrounded by a ring of Muslim neighbourhoods. Mohammed is the most popular name among boys in many cities. In some elementary schools in Amsterdam the farm can no longer be mentioned, because that would also mean mentioning the pig, and that would be an insult to Muslims. Many state schools in Belgium and Denmark only serve halal food to all pupils.  In once-tolerant Amsterdam gays are beaten up almost exclusively by Muslims. Non-Muslim women routinely hear “whore, whore”. Satellite dishes are not pointed to local TV stations, but to stations in the country of origin.  In France school teachers are advised to avoid authors deemed offensive to Muslims, including Voltaire and Diderot; the same is increasingly true of Darwin. The history of the Holocaust can in many cases no longer be taught because of Muslim sensitivity.  In England sharia courts are now officially part of the British legal system. Many neighbourhoods in France are no-go areas for women without head scarves.  Last week a man almost died after being beaten up by Muslims in Brussels, because he was drinking during the Ramadan. Jews are fleeing France in record numbers, on the run for the worst wave of anti-Semitism since World War II. French is now commonly spoken on the streets of Tel Aviv and Netanya, Israel. I could go on forever with stories like this. Stories about Islamization…

 The war against Israel is not a war against Israel. It is a war against the West. It is jihad. Israel is simply receiving the blows that are meant for all of us. If there would have been no Israel, Islamic imperialism would have found other venues to release its energy and its desire for conquest. Thanks to Israeli parents who send their children to the army and lay awake at night, parents in Europe and America can sleep well and dream, unaware of the dangers looming.

 Many in Europe argue in favor of abandoning Israel in order to address the grievances of our Muslim minorities. But if Israel were, God forbid, to go down, it would not bring any solace to the West. It would not mean our Muslim minorities would all of a sudden change their behavior, and accept our values. On the contrary, the end of Israel would give enormous encouragement to the forces of Islam. They would, and rightly so, see the demise of Israel as proof that the West is weak, and doomed. The end of Israel would not mean the end of our problems with Islam, but only the beginning. It would mean the start of the final battle for world domination. If they can get Israel, they can get everything. Therefore, it is not that the West has a stake in Israel. It is Israel.

It is very difficult to be an optimist in the face of the growing Islamization of Europe. All the tides are against us. On all fronts we are losing. Demographically the momentum is with Islam. Muslim immigration is even a source of pride within ruling liberal parties. Academia, the arts, the media, trade unions, the churches, the business world, the entire political establishment have all converted to the suicidal theory of multiculturalism. So-called journalists volunteer to label any and all critics of Islamization as a ‘right-wing extremists’ or ‘racists’. The entire establishment has sided with our enemy. Leftists, liberals and Christian-Democrats are now all in bed with Islam…

America may hold fast to the dream that, thanks to its location, it is safe from jihad and sharia. But seven years ago to the day, there was still smoke rising from ground zero, following the attacks that forever shattered that dream. Yet there is a danger even greater danger than terrorist attacks, the scenario of America as the last man standing. The lights may go out in Europe faster than you can imagine. An Islamic Europe means a Europe without freedom and democracy, an economic wasteland, an intellectual nightmare, and a loss of military might for America – as its allies will turn into enemies, enemies with atomic bombs. With an Islamic Europe, it would be up to America alone to preserve the heritage of Rome, Athens and Jerusalem.

 

 As if in immediate reply to my last entry, Front Page Magazine today carries an article about one foresightful American who wants to take measures against the encroachment of sharia. 

International reaction was almost uniformly negative last week when news broke that Britain had officially granted Muslim Sharia courts permission to rule on everything from divorce to domestic violence. After all, in its strictest form, Sharia law requires the stoning of women accused of adultery, and the execution of converts from Islam, among other draconian punishments for offences that aren’t even considered crimes in the West. In the U.K. and abroad, pundits and politicians denounced Britain’s capitulation, but only one elected official responded with a daring proposal aimed at preventing Sharia law from gaining such a foothold in America.

That that politician was Rep. Tom Tancredo won’t surprise observers of American politics. The Colorado congressman has long been an outspoken critic of the unofficial “open-borders” policy that encourages millions of undocumented immigrants – including would-be terrorists – to enter the U.S. each year. During his short-lived presidential campaign in 2007, Tancredo repeatedly raised the immigration issue during televised debates. He also aired a provocative television ad in which he promised to “stop all visas to nations that sponsor terrorism and [to] arrest and deport any alien who preaches violence and hatred.”

The ad earned Tancredo scorn on the Left and also on some parts of the Right. Undaunted, he has now proposed a “Jihad Prevention Act” that “would bar the entry of foreign nationals who advocate Sharia law [and] make the advocacy of Sharia law by radical Muslims already in the United States a deportable offense.” In his official announcement on September 18, Tancredo observed: “This is a case where truth is truly stranger than fiction. Today the British people are learning a hard lesson about the consequences of massive, unrestricted immigration.”

“When you have an immigration policy that allows for the importation of millions of radical Muslims,” he explained, “you are also importing their radical ideology – an ideology that is fundamentally hostile to the foundations of western democracy – such as gender equality, pluralism, and individual liberty. The best way to safeguard America against the importation of the destructive effects of this poisonous ideology is to prevent its purveyors from coming here in the first place.”

 

A disaster far more devastating even than universal economic collapse is underway, and our governments, our pundits, our professoriat, the most powerful of our movers-and-shakers, are averting their eyes from it, pretending it is not happening.

Europe is dying. Unless it is prevented by some as yet unproposed and almost unimaginable means, its greatness is coming to an end. The shadow of Islam, an ideology out of the Dark Ages, is advancing over it day-by-day, mile-by-mile, state-by-state. The European nations are dwindling and Islamic peoples are replacing them.  Perhaps because the disaster is too dreadful to contemplate,  we distract ourselves with imaginary urgencies like climate-change, racism, feminism, gay marriage, and, with the loudest hullabaloo, the zealous promotion of the very cause that is destroying us: ‘multiculturalism’, the pretence or fatal illusion that there are other civilizations not just equal to but worthier than our own, and that to them we must give way.

What is threatening is nothing less than the Second Fall of Civilization.  European governments are doing nothing to stop it happening.  In various ways they are expediting it: admitting millions of Muslims as immigrants; permitting the establishment of sharia courts, sharia-compliant finance, Saudi-supported madrassas that teach the fundamentalist Wahhabi creed, and the building of thousands of mosques; bestowing tax-payers’ on Muslim groups without control over how it is used; all-too-easily accommodating Muslim demands for footbaths or prayer-rooms (even in Buckingham Palace); knowingly sheltering terrorist leaders and supporting them and their families; policing those who expose Muslim sedition rather than the seditious themselves; laying down Newspeak rules for official commentators so that Islam cannot be associated with the terrorism that Muslims carry out – and so on. The list could be very much longer.

In the late eighteenth century Edward Gibbon wrote, in The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire: ‘The system of arts, of laws, of manners … distinguish, above the rest of mankind, the Europeans and their colonies. The savage nations of the globe are the common enemies of civilized society; and we may inquire with anxious curiosity, whether Europe be still threatened with a repetition of those calamities which formerly oppressed the arms and institutions of Rome.’ 

Rome fell. It was arguably the greatest disaster in history. Darkness descended over Europe for a thousand years. Like a mansion decayed, deserted by its owners, half buried by an encroaching wildness, it sheltered precariously under its broken roof tribes of lawless and illiterate barbarians restrained only by the terrible would-be-totalitarian power of the Catholic Church. 

But the essence of Rome never died. Light broke again, eventually. Europe rediscovered its Roman heritage. Our culture is fundamentally Roman – or to be more precise, Greco-Roman.

The silver age of Rome (no golden age ever existed) was the Republic.  The republican idea – surely one of the greatest ideas that humankind has ever conceived – arose in ancient Greece: the idea that people of different origins and customs could live together, pursue their chosen trades and occupations, bring knowledge and information, inventions and techniques from many sources, contribute in individual ways to the general prosperity, act and express themselves freely, provided only that they accept the rule of the same law; and the law was to be made by the people themselves. It was the innovation of popular self-government, revolutionary and unique.

The citizens of the Greek city-states realized that they could dispense with the autocratic authority of a king, a chief, a headman. They alone in all the world broke the old universal pattern of human organization – adherence of person to family, of family to tribe, of the tribe being rooted in a piece of earth, its cohesion forcefully maintained by the arbitrary rule of an hereditary chief. To this day the old tribal pattern prevails in Africa and the Middle East. It continues among native peoples of all continents, even where European colonists have established themselves as permanent populations. In Europe itself there are traces and remnants of tribalism, persistent in atavistic sentiment, and lately in active political movements for reversion (for example, among Celts in Britain, Basques in Spain, the Flemish in Belgium.) Such political movements are pathetically nugatory in the dying days of the continent.  

The Renaissance was the re-birth of Greco-Roman civilization.  Again, as in Rome and classical Greece, thinkers began to speculate freely, in defiance of the Universal Church. Science and philosophy could flourish there again, and flourish they did. Exploration and discovery opened new worlds. Europe rapidly became the most fertile and powerful civilization of all time. In the most potent and productive states, kings weakened into figureheads; the people ruled.

From Europe and its erstwhile colonies, the science, the technology, the inventions that the world desires, have flowed. The inventions themselves are copied by far distant nations, which grow wealthy on their production and sale. But few of those countries copy the condition of freedom-under-the-law, and the institutions that preserve it, which allow and therefore foster innovation and experiment, those magnificently daring adventures into the new, with all its risks and rewards. So what will the world do if the source dries up?

Now ‘those calamities’ which threatened Rome are again threatening Europe, as Gibbon feared they might. It is not a clash of civilizations, but of civilization with barbarism. If Europe will not raise a finger to save itself, will America be willing once again to save Europe? What could it do? And if it can do nothing, is there any attempt by Americans to prepare for the time when they’ll no longer have any European allies?

The answer may depend on what leadership comes to power in the United States in the near future.  One candidate for the presidency obviously does not recognize the approaching catastrophe, and seems even to have some sympathy with Islam. The other may see and hear it, but will he act against it?  

Whether the darkness descends slowly through change in the demography of Europe, or is hastened through aggression by a nuclear armed Iran, it will be deep and persistent, unless the American Republic resists it. This time Europe will not be lawless. Worse, it will be under a system of law that, far from protecting freedom, ensures oppression. Sharia, the law of Islam, fixed since the Dark Ages and unchangeable, will hold the people   in subjection. Less escapable and even more cruel than the mediaeval Christian Church; utterly opposed to Justice as it is conceived in the post-Enlightenment West; contemptuous of women, forbidding homosexuality, caring nothing for ‘the environment’, unfavorable to figurative art and music; resistant as iron to innovation, is the law of Islam. It proceeds, Muslims believe, from an authority higher than any king or tyrant, and more absolute: their God. To him all must submit absolutely. ‘Islam’, remember, means ‘submission’.  

Western civilization has at present the political, economic, military, and intellectual resources to prevent a second fall. What is missing as yet is the will. To gain it, we must first take pride in our achievements; recognize, believe in, and have the courage to proclaim the superiority of our customs and ideals over the customs and ideology of our enemy. 

The US presidential election of 2008 may be decisive as to whether our civilization resists and survives, or submits and falls. 

Jillian Becker

September 2008

 Little Green Footballs reports:

ISLAMIC law has been officially adopted in Britain, with sharia courts given powers to rule on Muslim civil cases.

The government has quietly sanctioned the powers for sharia judges to rule on cases ranging from divorce and financial disputes to those involving domestic violence. Rulings issued by a network of five sharia courts are enforceable with the full power of the judicial system, through the county courts or High Court. Previously, the rulings of sharia courts in Britain could not be enforced, and depended on voluntary compliance among Muslims.

It has now emerged that sharia courts with these powers have been set up in London, Birmingham, Bradford and Manchester with the network’s headquarters in Nuneaton, Warwickshire. Two more courts are being planned for Glasgow and Edinburgh.

To the Muslim women of Britain we say: Abandon hope all ye who enter here.

 This from Power Line, by Debra Burlingame, sister of the pilot Charles F Burlingame, whose hijacked plane was crashed into the Pentagon: 

There is a disturbing phenomenon creeping into the public debate about all things 9/11. Increasingly, Sept. 11 is compared to hurricanes, bridge collapses and other mechanical disasters or criminal acts that result in loss of life, with "body count" being the primary factor that keeps it in the top spot of "worst in the nation’s history."

Misremembering is as dangerous as forgetting. If we must know one thing, it is that the Sept. 11 attacks were neither a natural disaster, nor the unfortunate result of human error. 9/11 wasn’t the catastrophic equivalent of a 3,000-car pileup.

The attacks were not a random act of violence or insanity. They were a deliberate and brutal act of war committed by religious fanatics engaged in Islamic jihad against the United States, all non-Muslim people and any Muslim who wishes to live in a secular society. Worse, the people who perpetrated the attacks have explicitly told us that they are not done.

Sept. 11 is a date that comes and goes once a year, but "9/11" is with us every day. The body count keeps rising – Bali, Riyadh, Istanbul, Madrid, Beslan, London, Amman.

We now clearly know that the 1993 World Trade Center bombing was part of the holy war against America. When we previously dismissed this as a random attack by crazy men and declared ourselves lucky that "only six lives were lost," we effectively disarmed ourselves. Eight years later, six became 3,000. While the comparison to other "tragedies" may help us cope with what has befallen us, we must resist being glib and intellectually careless.

Our fellow human beings were not "lost" in 1993 or on 9/11. They were torn to pieces. We must not give the enemy any quarter. We must confront the reality of their acts.

 

 That lone voice crying the truth in the wilderness of Europe, Melanie Phillips declares in The Spectator:

The message Putin wants to deliver is that no-one messes with Russia. Like a Mafia godfather, he wants respect for his country’s power – and will mow down anyone who fails to offer it. That’s also why Russia is busy murdering those of its own citizens who oppose its fascistic regime. (It is, after all, the only country so far to have carried out an act of nuclear terrorism in Britain by murdering Alexander Litvinenko with Polonium 210 and leaving a trail of radioactive poison across London – for which it has never been brought to account, flicking away our huffing and puffing Foreign Office like a mosquito on the nose of a bear).

It is behaving in this way because it has correctly perceived that America is paralysed and Europe is steadily destroying itself, and so there is an enormous vacuum in global power which it thinks it can fill. It has no less correctly concluded that the west will no longer defend itself or the values for which it once stood. See yesterday’s entirely predictable and futile hand-wringing over Georgia by the EU, full of sound and fury but signifying no action at all. Once upon a time, the west believed it should go to war to defend the sovereignty of nations. Now, it supports instead those who destroy that sovereignty – as it did when it recognised Kosovo as an independent state, thus demonstrating contempt for the sovereignty of Serbia. Who therefore can be surprised that Russia, which not only complained bitterly about Kosovo but had previously insisted on the virtue of its own suppression of the Chechens on the grounds that national sovereignty had to be upheld or else chaos would follow, is now cynically using that very same Kosovo precedent to justify its support for South Ossetia and Abkhazia breaking away from Georgia?

Despite the fact that Russia is threatened by Islamism, there are nevertheless notable similarities between the attempt to re-establish the Russian empire and the attempt to re-establish the Islamic Caliphate. In similar fashion, both employ not only violent force but cultural infiltration and sedition; both use sophisticated propaganda and covert influence; both invert truth and lies; both hijack the concept of victimhood. Thus Russia’s patently absurd claim of genocide in south Ossetia parallels the preposterous Islamist claims of genocide in Iraq, the West Bank and Gaza; thus both claim that their own aggression is merely self-defence against victimisation. Such similarities are scarcely surprising considering that Islamism borrowed so much from Communism (as it did also from fascism). Nor is it surprising that both Russians and Islamists make common cause against the west – their common enemy.

The whole article is a must-read.