The values of the West are inverted among the ranks of the political left, the people who now rule Europe and (dreadful to say) America.

Many voices in the Western world continually insist that captured terrorists must be given a fair trial: they must have lawyers to defend them at tax-payers’ expense; all the safeguards that the rule of law requires, whether in civil or military courts, must be provided for those accused of indiscriminate and (usually) mass murder. Yet those same voices are silent .. or at least it is becoming hard to hear them .. they must be murmuring too softly .. or there are too few of them to make an audible chorus on the crime of terrorism itself.

We now know the name of the migrant worker from Thailand who was killed by a Palestinian rocket (see our post No, the name’s not Rachel Corrie, March 18, 2010). His death was little reported in the mainstream media. No government spokesman condemned the act of terrorism that killed him – or not that we heard. The international left whose putative heart bleeds for the moral poseur Rachel Corrie, and whose ideological sense of outrage is roused by the execution of the evil terrorist al-Mabhouh in Dubai – doesn’t apparently give a damn about the killing by terrorists of a Thai farm worker.

Human Rights Watch has usually conformed with the pattern of misplaced indignation. In this instance it has actually condemned the killing. It comes as a surprise – which is in itself an indictment of that organization.

Anav Silverman writes at Front Page:

It is not every day that Human Rights Watch (HRW) comes out with a report that accurately highlights Hamas war crimes against Israel, but in the case of the Thai worker killed by a Gaza rocket on March 18, 2009, HRW did just that.

The tragic story of Manee Singmueangphon, a Thai migrant worker who was killed when a rocket struck an Israeli greenhouse north of Gaza on Thursday March 18, was barely given any in-depth coverage in the mainstream media. Most news reports simply stated that a Thai migrant worker was killed in a rocket attack, not even giving the victim a name.

Indeed, almost no western leader or human rights organization directed words of condemnation to the Islamic terrorists who fired the rockets that killed Manee, a 33-year old husband and father with children back in Thailand, and sent shock waves among his fellow Thai and Nepalese workers…

Human Rights Watch … made it clear in its March 19 report titled Gaza: End Impunity for Indiscriminate Rocket Attacks, that … “Hamas as the de facto authority in Gaza has the responsibility to stop indiscriminate rocket attacks into Israel” …

In general, the Western’s world attitude of toleration towards Islamic terrorists and terrorism has become a very worrying phenomenon. The killing of the Hamas commander, Mahmoud al-Mabhouh in Dubai, was received by shocked disapproval from the international community. Many news outlets, including AP, called his death a murder.

The fact that al-Mabhouh was key to moving arms made or funded by Iranian government to Hamas in Gaza, or for his role in the 1989 kidnapping and killing of two Israeli soldiers, did not elicit any signs of outrage in a world where Islamic terrorists are not often brought to justice.

The underlying result of al-Mabhouh’s death is that a dangerous terrorist, abetting the radical Islamic jihadist organization, Hamas, which is responsible for thousands of Israeli civilian deaths and injuries, is no longer a threat to humanity. Britain, Australia, France and other western nations, however, simply slammed Israel, the accused agent behind the assassination for carrying out the attack by using fake foreign passports. Not one word was said about the global need to successfully combat terrorism and bring terrorists to justice.

In order for terrorism to abate, the anger and words of condemnation and action need to be directed at those terrorists who commit these heinous acts. World leaders both in Europe and the West need to look beyond Islamic jihadist rhetoric and take a firm stand against Islamic terrorists whether it be in Israel, Gaza, Iraq, Afganistan, Iran, Somalia and other areas, where women and children remain their constant targets…

As long as the world tolerates those Islamic jihadists who fire rockets against innocent Israeli civilians and accepts their legitimization for it, terrorism will continue to strike innocent civilians everywhere. The killing of Manee Singmueangphon by a Gaza rocket should serve as a constant reminder that people of all nationalities are indiscriminate victims of Iranian-sponsored Islamic terrorism.

The net-scouring website weasel zippers brings us this cheering news from OKLAHOMA.

State lawmakers have voted to allow Oklahoma voters to prevent judicial rulings in foreign countries from impacting local court decisions through approval of the “Save Our State” constitutional amendment.

House Joint Resolution 1056, by state Rep. Rex Duncan, would allow Oklahomans to vote to amend the Oklahoma Constitution to require the courts to “uphold and adhere to the law” as provided in the United States Constitution, the Oklahoma Constitution, the United States Code and federal regulations, Oklahoma Statutes and rules, and established common law.

The proposed amendment would prohibit all Oklahoma courts from considering the legal precepts of other nations or cultures, even in cases of first impression.

“Unfortunately, some judges in other states and on the federal bench have begun to cite international law in their court decisions, effectively undermining our own democratic system of government,” said Duncan, a Sand Springs Republican and attorney who chairs the House Judiciary Committee. “Our nation’s laws were developed through a democratic process and should not be undermined by haphazard reliance on foreign rulings developed in autocratic societies. Oklahoma court decisions should be based on the U.S. Constitution, Oklahoma Constitution, and our state and national laws – period.”

The proposed amendment declares that courts “shall not consider international law or Sharia Law.”

That is the way to stop leftist judges – the sort Obama favors – who try to “interpret” the Constitution to mean the opposite of what it says. If all the states would follow Oklahoma’s example, Oh what a beautiful morning would break!

Also, if they did do that, and if (a vain hope this, we know) the individual countries of Europe would enact something similar, at least one battle in Islam’s war of conquest would be won by the weakening West.

An Islamic scholar, Sheikh Dr Tahir ul-Qadri, has issued a fatwa against terrorism.

A prominent Islamic scholar has issued a religious fatwa condemning terrorism as “kufr” or an act of disbelief so severe that that those who believe in it forfeit their right to call themselves Muslims… Most previous fatwa rulings only go as far as calling terrorism “haram” or forbidden …

Dr Qadri is a “sheikh ul-Islam”, one of the highest positions in Islamic jurisprudence, and also the head of Minhaj ul-Quran, a global Islamic group whose members are mostly from the Pakistani community.

The 59-year-old scholar, who has written more than 400 books on Islamic jurisprudence, told fellow Muslims: “Terrorism is terrorism, violence is violence and it has no place in Islamic teaching [but see our post Thou shalt kill, March 3, 2010, and the Koran and the hadith] and no justification can be provided for it, or any kind of excuses of ifs and buts. The world needs an absolute, unconditional, unqualified and total condemnation of terrorism”.

He also denounced those who try to justify suicide bombings by claiming Muslims who carry out such operations are martyrs destined for paradise. “They can’t claim that their suicide bombings are martyrdom operations and that they become the heroes of the Muslim umma,” he said. “No, they become the heroes of hellfire and they are leading towards hellfire. There is no place for any martyrdom and their act is never, ever to be considered jihad.”

Although numerous fatwas condemning terrorism have been released by scholars around the world since 9/11, Sheik Tahir ul-Qadri’s 600-page ruling is both significant and unusual because it is one of the few available in English and online. Those hoping to combat terrorism have long spoken of their frustration at the traditional Islamic hierarchy’s inability to exert their influence on the internet, where violent jihadists and Saudi-influenced Wahabis have long reigned supreme.

The fatwa could of course be a very good thing if all Muslims everywhere obey it. But here is one Muslim’s comment, which discourages the hope that many will.

To quote the greater part of it –

Regarding Shaikh Dr Tahir ul-Qadri’s Anti-Terrorism Fatwa, recently launched in London, I guess any steps forward in fighting terrorism should be considered a good thing. However, these initiatives can be read in many ways and I’ll give you a few points off the top of my head, replicates what many others are thinking in the Muslim community.

Firstly, I doubt this will have the clout envisaged by one of it’s apparent key promoters the Quilliam foundation (a counter-terrorism think tank) as the fatwa itself does not have the unanimous backing of the most prominent scholars and Sheikhs, although the opinions and rulings of some prominent scholars do appear to have been involved in drawing it up. Also this is not the first fatwa to condemn suicide bombings/terrorism, and Qadri is not the first ‘important/eminent’ Sheikh to issue such a fatwa, as many more prominent scholars and Sheikhs have done so already …

Secondly, regarding Qadri’s status, the Sheikh in question appears to head a Sufi organisation and as such there will be many branches of the Muslim community that will not recognise his rulings… because in the past he has made segregating comments about some other [fundamentalist] Muslim communities such as Wahabbis and Deobandis. So I’d suggest that this fatwa is not really groundbreaking apart from inside his own organisation and will never be widely acknowledged apart from by his own followers.

Thirdly, although it is important that such a Fatwa has been publicised, the importance and reach perceived by the press, Quilliam foundation, etc, does appear overrated/overestimated. Why? Because those that commit such crimes have already heard existing Fatwa’s stating it to be wrong and ignore them, those that do not recognise this Sheikh would have already heard existing Fatwa’s stating it to be wrong, those that follow this Sheikh should already be clear terrorism is wrong and do not need a Fatwa to tell them this, and those non-followers that already know it to be wrong do not need another Fatwa to remind them.

I’ve read a cross-section of interesting views which collectively place this Fatwa in it’s correct context and weight it’s relevance:

“The fatwa, running to 600 pages, has been written by Muhammad Tahir ul-Qadri, founder and leader of a Muslim sect based in Pakistan, and highlighted in a press release from the Quilliam Foundation, an anti-extremism thinktank which last year received £1m funding from the British government.” (Guardian)

“It (the fatwa) plays on a widely-held (and sometimes willful) misperception that Muslim leaders have not spoken out against Islamist violence. Large numbers of Muslim leaders have denounced violence, suicide bombs, 9/11, 7/7 and many other bloody attacks by Islamist radicals.” (Reuters)

“Tim Winter, a lecturer in Islamic studies at Cambridge University, said while ul-Qadri’s step of declaring “miscreants as unbelievers” was unusual, it was unlikely extremists would take notice of his edict.” (Al Jazeera)

“I don’t think any Muslim will disagree with his fatwa .. Whoever has killed an innocent human beings regardless of religion , colour , race , nationality is a terrorist. At the same time he should have mentioned America and its allies are also terrorists (including govt of pakistan). They have also killed millions of innocent human beings in Iraq , Afganistan … We cant say one side is terrorist and other is fighting for so called democracy.” (Islamonline forum) …

“What’s funny is that the Government have money to waste in what’s supposed to be a recession. They give money to the Quilliam Foundation to elicit fatwas from men who have virtually no influence on the Muslims in the UK…  these “scholars” are seen as a joke by the very Muslims they are meant to be deradicalising.” (Islamic Awakening forum)

So thinking more about the ‘Qadri Fatwa’ and the Quilliam foundation there are some concerns that need to be raised. The Quilliam foundation is headed by Ed Husain, a former religious extremist, and actually has minimal support from Muslims. … Husain has realized that, having tried to make a mark in the world through religious fanaticism, he can make more money and career progress by instead jumping on the anti-Islamist gravy train.

When Husain’s not traveling the world lecturing on the threat of ‘Islamist ideology’, he benefits from the fact that the UK government … has  thrown more than £1 million of taxpayers’ money at [the Quilliam foundation].

It’s about time the public (including Muslims) begin questioning and criticizing these self-proclaiming fatwa writers and the barrage of advice they give to the police and security agencies on counter-extremism methods that only serve to further demonise and stereotype Muslims.

– from which we may gauge  how much effect the well-meaning Sheikh’s fatwa is likely to have on Muslim terrorism.

Post Script: Ed Husain does heroic work trying to counter Islamic terrorism. He has said:

As I left extremism I realised that if you are born here [in Britain] and grow up here, then you belong here. The Islam that was preached 2,000 years ago isn’t going to work here in modern London. Muslims need to alter their lifestyles to a Western lifestyle. To criticise is not Islamaphobic. It’s about opposing certain ideas.

Is the world entering a post-American era? Will the 21st century be dominated by some other power, or several others?

In the splendid speech that John Bolton delivered at the Conservative Political Action Conference in February 2010, he said of Obama, “He is the first post-American president.”

In Obama’s eyes, American superpower status is already over. The decline is happening. There’s no reason to regret it, and it would be pointless and unnecessary to try to halt or reverse it. Obama is content to let America be a nation among the nations, no different in any important respect, and certainly no better. “He sees American decline as a kind of natural phenomenon,” Bolton said.

In Bolton’s own view, however, America is still exceptional and still the one and only superpower. If its status as such is under threat, that threat proceeds from Obama himself, who, almost casually – not caring very much, as John Bolton remarked, about foreign and national security policy – is himself weakening it.

What Obama does care about is domestic policy. To achieve his redistributionist goals he has put America into crushing debt; and being determined, it seems, to turn America into a European-style socialist state, he can only make the debt vaster and heavier. That alone weakens America.

China is America’s chief creditor, but that does not mean China is now a second superpower. A China growing in wealth and confidence, and becoming an increasingly significant world actor, may pose an economic threat to America but is not, or not yet, a rival world power. Militarily it is far from a match. Militarily, America is still far and away the most powerful nation.

But there again, if Obama has his way, it won’t be for much longer. He has, in Bolton’s words, an “incredibly naïve idea” that if the US would get rid of its own nuclear weapons, other countries would give up theirs; those that do not have them but want them – such as Iran and North Korea – would abandon their intense efforts to obtain them; and the world would live at peace forever after. This belief or ambition represents, as John Bolton put it, “a pretty deep-seated strain in the left wing of the Democratic Party.” Obama will soon negotiate an arms control agreement with Russia by which he will undertake substantially to reduce America’s nuclear capability. America will not develop new nuclear weapons, or arms in outer space, or even keep its existing arsenal battle-ready by testing for safety and reliability. It is as if America had no enemies; as if America were not under attack; as if 9/11 had never happened; and as if Iran and North Korea would not drop nuclear bombs on America and its allies if they could do it and get away with it.

Furthermore, with the rest of the dreaming Left both at home and internationally, he aspires to another vision of a new earth: one that is not only sweetly irenic but held forcibly in union by a supreme governing authority. Those proposals for world taxes that we hear of; the intricate business of trading in carbon indulgences in the name of saving the earth from being consumed by fire or ice; international treaty regulations that would result in banning the private ownership of guns – all these are measures to realize the tremendous objective of “world governance”. It would mean the end of American independence, the end of national sovereignty. It would mean that the Revolution was lost, as Bolton said.

In a sense it would be the end of America, because America is an idea of liberty. And it is an idea that the world needs. Its loss would be a colossal disaster, a tragedy for the whole human race.

Can America be saved?

In his book titled The Post-American World, Fareed Zakaria asserts that “America is closing down”, but allows that it “won’t be demoted from its superpower position in the foreseeable future” because “it’s not that the United States has been doing badly over the last two decades. It’s that, all of a sudden, everyone else is playing the game.”

America can “remain a vital, vibrant economy, at the forefront of the next revolutions in science, technology and industry, as long as it can embrace and adjust to the challenges confronting it”.

“The challenges” come from other nations, now rising, which he groups together as “the rest”.

China is the first of them because it is becoming an economic giant. The 21st century, he considers, may be the Chinese century.

What if [China ] quietly positions itself as the alternative to a hectoring and arrogant America? How will America cope with such a scenario – a kind of Cold War, but this time with a vibrant market economy, a nation that is not showing a hopeless model of state socialism, or squandering its power in pointless military interventions? This is a new challenge for the United States, one it has not tackled before, and for which it is largely unprepared.

Next in line is India. Poorer but democratic, India is “the ally”. Then come Brazil and Chile (plausibly); South Africa (less plausibly); and (implausibly) Russia. (Russia is a demographic basket case.)

Ironically, Zakaria says, these nations are rising because they learnt from America:

For sixty years, American politicians and diplomats have traveled around the world pushing countries to open their markets, free up their politics, and embrace trade and technology. … We counseled them to be unafraid of change and learn the secrets of our success. And it worked: the natives have gotten good at capitalism.

America, then, has not been a malign power, or not always. In Roosevelt’s day other countries believed that “America’s mammoth power was not to be feared”. It was after it had won the Cold War, when it became the only superpower, that it began to go to the bad. “Ever since the collapse of the Soviet Union, the United States has walked the world like a colossus, unrivaled and unchecked”, and this “has made Washington arrogant, careless, and lazy.” Furthermore, he tell us, “people round the world worry about living in a world in which one country has so much power.”

To relieve that worry, America “must reduce its weaponry and work towards a non-nuclear world.” It is hypocritical for the US to insist that other countries should not have nuclear weapons while it is hoarding a nuclear arsenal of its own. By giving them up it would “gain credibility”, an end he apparently considers so desirable that it would be worth risking the nation’s very survival to achieve it.

The summer of 2002, Zakaria says, was “the high water-mark of unipolarity”. The world felt sympathy for America after 9/11. America went to war in Afghanistan, which was not good but not too bad. But then it invaded Iraq, which was very bad, and the world’s sympathy dried up. America was being too “unilateral”, too “imperial and imperious”.

George W Bush and “the nefarious neoconservative conspiracy” antagonized the world. He and his conspirators “disdained treaties, multilateral organizations, international public opinion, and anything that suggested a conciliatory approach to world politics.”

So the world’s dislike, contempt, and fear of America were justified, or at least understandable, in the light of the foreign policies of the “arrogant” Bush administration. Zakaria even claims that the animosity filled the Republicans – already full of “chest-thumping machismo” – with pride.

He asks:

Can Washington adjust and adapt to a world in which others have moved up? Can it respond to shift in economic and political power? … Can Washington truly embrace a world with a diversity of voices and viewpoints? Can it thrive in a world it cannot dominate?

The advice he gives to “Washington” for success in adjusting, adapting, responding, embracing, and thriving is to be conciliatory, apologetic. It must listen more; proclaim universal values”, but “phrase its positions carefully”; be like the chair of a board gently guiding a group of independent directors. America must “learn from the rest”. The president must meet more non-government people, have smaller entourages, rely more on diplomacy. Consultation, cooperation, compromise are the key words. He objects to such accomodations being called appeasement. Consult and cooperate, he urges, with Russia, and with “multilateral institutions” such as the UN, NATO, AFRICOM, OAS, and the International Criminal Court. (Even internally, the US legal system “should take note of transnational standards”.)

The federal government has been “too narrow-minded” about terrorism. When bin Laden got America to “come racing out to fight” him (in response to 9/11) this was “over-reaction.”  Zakaria’s advice: “take it on the chin” and “bounce back”. The government must stop thinking of terrorism as a national security issue, and think of it as criminal activity carried out by “small groups of misfits”. Although Democrats were on the whole “more sensible” about terrorism, both parties, he says, spoke “in language entirely designed for a domestic audience with no concern for the poisonous effect it has everywhere else.” His solution is better airport control round the world. The more urgent problem in his view is that American Muslims have become victims of over-reaction to terrorist attacks. Instead of being “questioned, harassed, and detained” they should, he urges, “be enlisted in the effort to understand the appeal of Islamic fundamentalism.”

Zakaria does not consider himself anti-American. He does not even see himself as a man of the left. He reiterates that he is a free marketeer. It is because America became “suspicious of free markets”, he says, that partly explains its “closing down”.

He wrote his book before the economic crisis. He saw a globalized economy bringing about an increasingly prosperous world in which the poorest nations were rising strongly enough for him to declare that “the world is swimming in capital”, and “there really isn’t a Third World any more “. But even then the dollar was sliding, and America was showing signs of being “enfeebled”.

At a military-political level America still dominates the world, but the larger structure of unipolarity – economic, financial, cultural – is weakening… every year it becomes weaker and other nations and actors grow in strength.

For all its military might, its chest-thumping phase is over and now it is “cowering in fear”. It must, he says, “recover its confidence.” ‘It must stop being “a nation consumed by anxiety”, with a tendency to “hunker down”, unreasonably “worried about unreal threats” such as terrorism, and rogue nations like North Korea and Iran. (Iran, he explains, has good reason to fear the United States, with its armies on two of its borders. It’s only to be expected that Iran would try to arm itself with nuclear bombs and missile delivery systems. He does not explain why America should not fear this as a real threat.)

He is certain about what America needs to do to propitiate and serve the world it has alienated. It should ‘‘build broad rules by which the world will be bound’’, rather than pursue “narrow interests”.

What the world really wants from America is … that it affirm its own ideals. That role, as the country that will define universal ideals, remains one that only America can play.

We know Obama has read Zakaria’s book, or at least looked into it, because there is a photograph of him holding it, one finger marking his place. Obama is doing much that Zakaria advises in foreign affairs. But that’s less likely to be because the writer has impressed the president with his arguments than because they have both drunk from the same ideological well.

Obama’s foreign policy lets us see if Zakaria’s theory works. So far it has not.

So is America’s decline beyond all remedy?

It’s a relief to turn from Zakaria’s dull and weakly reasoned book with its uncongenial credo to an article titled The Seductions of Decline (February 2, 2010) by brilliantly witty and insightful Mark Steyn. If America believes it is in decline, he says, it will be. It is a self-fulfilling prophecy. The view that America has been too arrogant a power; that it is not and should not be exceptional; that humility and apology are required of it; that only endlessly patient negotiation in a spirit of compromise will improve foreign relations and dissuade states like North Korea and Iran from acquiring nuclear arms; that Islamic terrorism should be treated as crime and not as the jihad its perpetrators declare it to be; that Russia should be consulted on, say, the deployment of American missile defense; and that the US should reduce its nuclear arsenal and work towards a non-nuclear world – will bring about the decline.

National decline is psychological – and therefore what matters is accepting the psychology of decline.

His answer to the question “is America set for decline?” is yes, because of the policies of Obama and the Democrats, which arise from their acceptance of decline.

Strictly on the numbers, the United States is in the express lane to Declinistan: Unsustainable entitlements, the remorseless governmentalization of the American economy and individual liberty, and a centralization of power that will cripple a nation of this size. Decline is the way to bet.

American decline, he says, “will be steeper, faster and more devastating than Britain’s – and something far closer to Rome’s.” It will not be like France’s, or Austria’s.

Why did decline prove so pleasant in Europe? Because it was cushioned by American power. The United States is such a perversely non-imperial power that it garrisons not ramshackle colonies but its wealthiest “allies”, from Germany to Japan. For most of its members, “the free world” has been a free ride.

And after “Washington’s retreat from la gloire” as hegemon of the world, when America “becomes Europe in its domestic disposition and geopolitical decline, then who will be America?”

Of the many competing schools of declinism, perhaps the most gleeful are those who salivate over the rise of China. For years, Sinophiles have been penning orgasmic fantasies of mid-century when China will bestride the world and America will be consigned to the garbage heap of history. It will never happen: As I’ve been saying for years, China has profound structural problems. It will get old before it gets rich.

Not China then. Russia?

The demographic deformation of Tsar Putin’s new empire is even more severe than Beijing’s. Russia is a global power only to the extent of the mischief it can make on its acceleration into a death spiral.

Not Russia. How about the Caliphate that the terrorist war is being fought to establish?

Even if every dimestore jihadist’s dreams came true, almost by definition an Islamic imperium will be in decline from Day One.

So what might the post-American world look like? Mark Steyn’s answer is deeply depressing:

The most likely future is not a world under a new order but a world with no order – in which pipsqueak states go nuclear while the planet’s wealthiest nations, from New Zealand to Norway, are unable to defend their own borders and are forced to adjust to the post-American era as they can. Yet, in such a geopolitical scene, the United States will still remain the most inviting target – first, because it’s big, and secondly, because, as Britain knows, the durbar moves on but imperial resentments linger long after imperial grandeur.

But nothing is inevitable, and Mark Steyn offers a last hope. Though “decline is the way to bet”, the only thing that will ensure it is “if the American people accept decline as a price worth paying for European social democracy.”

When in 2008 a majority of the American electorate voted for Barack Obama to be president of the United States, it seemed that the deal had been made. But now Obama is failing, the Democratic majority is under threat, and the Tea Party movement is reclaiming the Revolution.

This could be another American century after all.

Jillian Becker   March 1, 2010

Great speeches were made at the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) this February 2010. We particularly liked John Bolton‘s address, and Dick Cheney’s, and George Will’s [see our post A prescription for pleasure, February 20.]

We questioned the wisdom of conservatives accepting the co-sponsorship of the John Birch Society [More harm than help, February 20.] But that is far less objectionable than the convening of a CPAC panel by terrorist sympathizers.

Pamela Geller of Atlas Shrugged, who convened an anti-terrorist event,  tells what happened in an interview with Jamie Glazov at Front Page:

Geller: Last Friday, Robert Spencer and I hosted a standing-room-only event at CPAC. …

Our conference was designed to speak the truths that others will not speak. First to speak was Wafa Sultan, the ex-Muslim who shot to international fame after she stood up for human rights against Sharia on Al-Jazeera in a debate with an Islamic cleric on a famous viral video, and the author of A God Who Hates. She spoke of Islam’s war against the West. Then Steve Coughlin, the former Pentagon Islamic law specialist who was making his first public appearance after being fired from the Defense Department after pressure from those who didn’t like his truth-of-the-matter stance on jihad. He gave a bit of his controversial presentation to the Pentagon, showing how the Defense Department is ignoring the true nature of the jihad threat, to our great detriment – which is the title of his lengthy thesis on this problem.

Then in the second hour our speakers showed the next phases of the advance of jihad and Sharia. While Coughlin was fired for telling the truth about Islam and jihad, human rights activist Elisabeth Sabaditsch-Wolff is being prosecuted for “hate speech” in Austria for the same truth telling. After her came Anders Gravers of Stop the Islamisation of Europe, who has been physically assaulted for standing up for freedom in Denmark. Then Simon Deng, a former slave in Sudan and a leading human rights activist against jihad and Islamic supremacism, showed what life is like for the subjugated, enslaved Christians of southern Sudan – the fourth phase of Sharia encroachment. Finally, the war hero and Congressional candidate Lt. Colonel Allen West gave a stirring speech calling us all to the defense of freedom.

FP: It’s a great sign that CPAC hosted an event like this, right?

Geller: Well Jamie, it’s not really what happened. The truth of the matter is that our event was at CPAC, but it was an independent event, not a CPAC event. And the truths that our speakers told were not aired at any other event at CPAC.

FP: Ok, just a second, let me get something straight: we are facing a deadly enemy in this current terror war, and that enemy is Islamic jihad — based on Islamic theology. CPAC had how many panels about it?

Geller: One. And it was an exercise in misinformation.

FP: Are you kidding me?

Geller: Not at all. The single panel was:

“You’ve Been Lied To: Why Real Conservatives are Against the War on Terror

Sponsored by Campaign for Liberty

Speakers: Retired U.S. Air Force Lt. Karen Kwiatkowski and Jacob Hornberger, President of FFF [The Future of Freedom Foundation]

The message there was that “real conservatives” don’t support the war on terror because it is a creation of the “Israeli lobby” — which coalesces with the left-wing’s new anti-Semitism against neoconservatives. Karen Kwiatkowski is a darling of both the leftist Huffington Post and the anti-Semitic paleocon site Antiwar.com.

FP: Tell us some more about Kwiatkowski.

Geller: Well, let’s put it this way: in a 2006 article, she described John Bolton as “that blubbering bundle of self-righteousness.” She also wrote:

“Many in America oppose the U.S. knee-jerk, unquestioning support for Israel. Many more worry that the Israeli lobby is unusually influential in Washington, while remaining hidden and unaccountable to average Americans. Still others are alarmed that Israel’s constant war mentality has become our new American model, and that Iraq and our own borders have become our own occupied territories, teeming with terror and constituting a never-ending threat to our lives, prosperity and value system.” …

That panel was, of course, a reflection of Ron Paul’s perspective. There were no counter-jihadists, no Robert Spencer, no Ibn Warraq on any CPAC panel, but they had room for this well-funded “Campaign for Liberty” presentation. …

Nothing was said about the Islamic doctrine that shows that jihadists would be waging war against the U.S. even if we did end all actions in Afghanistan and Iraq. The panel agreed with Obama, that Muslims are angry with us because of our actions, and will stop being angry with us if we change our foreign policy. This view is naïve and reflects ignorance of Islamic doctrine…

FP: This is mind-boggling. This is a conservative conference and one would think conservatives are interested in national security and protecting our liberties and American lives. Why do you think this happened?

Geller: I think CPAC’s agenda in 2010, as well as 2009 and before that, reflects the influence of Grover Norquist, the conservative powerhouse and kingmaker. He is a board member of the ACU [American Conservative Union]. … Norquist and his ally Suhail Khan seem to be in charge at CPAC …

FP: Expand a bit on what perspective Norquist represents.

Geller:  Grover Norquist’s troubling ties to Islamic supremacists and jihadists have been known for years. He and his Palestinian wife, Samah Alrayyes … are very active in “Muslim outreach.” …

Geller: In December 2003, David Horowitz wrote that Norquist “has formed alliances with prominent Islamic radicals who have ties to the Saudis and to Libya and to Palestine Islamic Jihad, who are now under indictment by U.S. authorities….

Frank Gaffney here in Frontpage [wrote] how Norquist had given Muslims with jihad terror links access to the highest levels of the U.S. government.

Grover Norquist was on the jihad payroll before and after the carnage and death of September 11. Gaffney revealed Norquist’s close ties to Abdurahman Alamoudi, who is now serving twenty-three years in prison for financing jihad activity. In 2000, Alamoudi said at a rally, “I have been labeled by the media in New York to be a supporter of Hamas. Anybody support Hamas here?…Hear that, Bill Clinton? We are all supporters of Hamas. I wished they added that I am also a supporter of Hizballah.” …

Norquist also introduced Nihad Awad, cofounder and executive director of Council on American-Islamic Relations, to President Bush. CAIR is one of the foremost Islamic supremacist hate sponsors in the U.S. Terror expert Steve Emerson wrote that “CAIR, which touts itself as America’s premier Muslim civil rights organization, was named as an unindicted co-conspirator in the Holy Land [Foundation] terror trial.” …

Emerson also reveals that according to the testimony of an FBI agent, “CAIR was listed as a member of the Muslim Brotherhood’s Palestine Committee.” The Palestine Committee is dedicated to jihad for the destruction of Israel…

Robert Spencer added this about CAIR: “CAIR operatives have repeatedly refused to denounce Hamas and Hizballah as terrorist groups. Several former CAIR officials have been convicted of various crimes related to jihad terror…”

These are Grover Norquist’s bedfellows. Abusing his power and access, he introduced Islamic supremacists who advocate the overthrow of the government to those who have an oath to protect and defend the Constitution…

In this article, at Pajamas Media, Jamie Glazov does five things that we applaud:

He reminds all of us who are free – and trying to remain free under a government that prefers collectivism to liberty – how terrible it is to live under collectivist totalitarian oppression. Specifically he writes about how it was in the Soviet Union.

He exposes the feminists for what they are – indulged, self-absorbed, ignorant, silly, and petty.

He condemns the leftists, who are blind to the value of the freedom they have and strive to destroy it.

He accuses Islam of threatening us with totalitarianism now.

He praises Glenn Beck and his outstandingly excellent film The Revolutionary Holocaust, that conveys, entirely adequately in a very shot space of time, an enormously important lesson to an American generation who are not taught it in their schools, their universities, or by the mass media.

The tortures included laying a man naked on a freezing cement floor, forcing his legs apart, and then an interrogator stepping on his testicles, applying increasing pressure until the confession surfaced. Imagine the consequences of no surfacing confession. Indeed, many people refused to confess to a crime they did not commit. Daughters and sons were raped in front of their fathers and mothers — for the sake of extracting “confessions.”

These are just some of the delicacies that the Stalinist machinery inflicted on its citizenry in the hope of bringing socialism into earthly incarnation. …

Both of my grandfathers were exterminated by Stalinist terror. Both of my parents, Yuri and Marina Glazov, were dissidents in the former Soviet Union. They risked their lives for freedom; they stood up against Soviet totalitarianism. They barely escaped the gulag, a fortune many of our friends and relatives did not share. I come from a system where a myriad of the closest people to my family simply disappeared, where relatives and family friends died under interrogation and torture for their beliefs — or for simply nothing at all.

Now try to imagine me sitting in the company of left-wing “intellectuals” in the West who think they are oppressed. This is my lifelong experience. I remember one radical feminist, whom I sat next to in a graduate student lounge, lecturing me sternly about how women in the West are oppressed because they wear bikinis on beaches; with a reprimanding tone, she explained to me that this represented the way capitalism objectifies women, marginalizes them from spheres of power, and metaphorically decapitates them as human beings. I remember asking her what she thought of female genital mutilation and honor killings in the Muslim world. To this I received a stone-cold silence and a frightening hateful stare, a stare with which I have become accustomed: I would be confined to a gulag or a psychiatric hospital if this particular individual had the power to place me there. This would be done for the good of society of course. My question was heresy: she could not, naturally, admit that evil adversarial cultures and ideologies existed — under which women truly suffer real oppression — for if she did, then she would have to sacrifice her entire worldview and personal identity. …

My family’s nightmarish experience in the Soviet Union was followed by a providential escape from totalitarian hell. We were among the lucky ones, the ones who got away. The United States gave us a safe and protected home — a home of unbelievable material well-being (in comparison to Soviet starvation) and human liberty. I will never forget the awe I felt experiencing my first taste of freedom, even as a young five-year-old boy who wasn’t completely sure what it was. My parents could now, for the first time, speak out without fear of brutal repercussions in defense of Soviet citizens who were being persecuted for their political and/or religious beliefs. For the first time, we lived without the dread to which I had been accustomed throughout my young life.

I remember while we were cherishing our newfound freedom, we encountered a strange species: intellectuals in the universities who reviled my parents for the story they had to tell. For the first time in their lives, my father and mother confronted an intelligentsia that was hostile to them. Back in Russia, dissident intellectuals risked their lives when they pronounced one word of truth about the horrible history (and reality) of their country under communist rule. In America, most of the intellectuals who surrounded us scoffed at the importance of real intellectual freedom and dismissed my parents’ experience; they demonized their own society, wished for its defeat, and supported the communist enemy that muzzled free speech and tortured millions of human beings.

As a very young boy, I learned that these intellectuals were “leftists.”… While my family agonized about the relatives and friends we had left behind, and as we kept the memory of their suffering alive in our hearts, our leftist acquaintances reprimanded us for our views, instructing us to see America — our personal liberator — as the most evil entity not only in the Cold War, but in all of human history. They wanted us to dedicate our lives — as they had done — to the victory of the West’s totalitarian adversaries.

But … today we have a best friend in the West … We aren’t orphans anymore. There is a certain individual in this land, by the name of Glenn Beck, who has a television show on the Fox News Channel with a mass following; he is masterfully exposing this phenomenon that we experienced — and are still experiencing. He is telling the truth about the Soviet regime and about communism and he is beaming a light on leftists and liberals for their long romance, which continues till this day, with communist systems and the ideologies that brought them into place. Just recently, Beck’s program featured his profound documentary, The Revolutionary Holocaust, which powerfully illustrates the evil of communism and the leftist ideals that brought its horrors into existence. Beck’s documentary exposes the crimes against humanity perpetrated by mass murderers such as Che Guevara and Mao Zedong, who, till this day, enjoy great idolization in leftist milieus and, as we know, in the Obama White House itself. …

Mr. Beck, thank you for having the courage and integrity to tell the truth about communism, despite the price you have had to pay for doing so. …

Because of people like you, the millions of victims of communism will not be pushed into the invisible sphere of historical amnesia — where the liberal left has perpetually tried to confine them. Mr. Beck, by producing documentaries like your recent The Revolutionary Holocaust, you are bringing personal affirmation to myriads of families like my own — and to all victims and survivors of communism — by validating our experiences and by telling the whole world that, despite the left’s attempt to impose gulag denial on our culture, we did live what we lived, we did endure what we endured, and we did see what we saw. And you are crystallizing the pernicious socialist idea that comes in the form of humanitarianism, but culminates in mass terror.

Glenn Beck, you are leading the crucial fight of the 21st century. In battling on the front lines for moral clarity on the issue of communism, you are setting a firm terrain on which free men and women will be able to fight the new jihadi totalitarians who seek to destroy our freedom and lives… Thank you.

At the end of How to win the war (1) we asked: How can we fight an enemy who is not only spread over many countries but is also here in our midst, thriving and increasing dangerously amongst us, and striking at us unpredictably and at random?

There is a way. It can be done. America has fought such an enemy before when it was at war with another collectivist ideology, Communism. It was a ‘cold war’ for as long as the country that was ready to engage America in its name – Russia  – held back from military assault. Hot battles in the war were fought by proxy armies in Africa, South America, the Far East. At home it was fought with words.

Within America itself the war was fought by means of law, propaganda, and intelligence.

Eventually America defeated Russia, but it never won the war decisively on its own soil. Within the United States itself, Communism not only survived, but in certain ways triumphed. Its true believers came to dominate in the fields of education, the newspapers, radio and television, and the highly influential film industry. They established a secure stronghold in the universities, in the law courts, in the Democratic Party, and eventually at the apex of power in the presidency itself with the election of Barack Obama. Right now, it is stronger than it has ever been before in America. And it is in alliance with Islam.

The war against Islam will have to be won more decisively than the war against Communism. So how shall we fight it? What must we do? It is not up to the military alone to fight this war – though the armed forces will play their part. Every individual who values liberty is a soldier in this fight.

We must expose Islam for what it is. It must be shown beyond all doubt to be wrong. It must be defeated in argument.

Islam must be made ashamed of itself.

We must do the very thing that the Islamic bloc in the UN is trying to make universally illegal – criticize Islam.  We must do what weak European leaders say should not be done – treat it with brazen insensitivity, with scorn, with loathing.

We must expose every wrong committed in its name. We must stigmatize it, ridicule it with jokes and satire and cartoons, ‘disrespect’ it, force it to try and defend itself with arguments and counter every one of them. We must concede nothing to this ideology of death.

We must let Muslim men know that what they regard as honor we regard as dishonor. In their twisted morality they consider it necessary for the upholding of their honor that they bully helpless women, force their daughters to marry men they hate and fear, kill them if the don’t obey, if they are raped, if they fall in love with someone they don’t approve of. We must impress upon Muslim men that such deeds are deeply dishonorable, low, beneath contempt, as well as intensely cruel and incontrovertibly wrong.

Far from curbing our free speech, it is precisely with words that we must defeat the ideology of Islam. We must make a better job of it than we did with Communism; do it more the way we did with Nazism, which very few people dare now to defend. ‘Nazi’ has become a synonym for evil; so should ‘Islam’.

Hold fast to the understanding that Islam, like Nazism, is an ideology and must be despised and rejected by humanity as a whole. The evil will of Mohammad must be defeated here and now, at last, all these centuries after he first launched his warriors of death in 78 battles against any who would not submit to his vicious tyranny.

Our war is with a set of ideas and those who take action to force them upon us, not with everyone who is born into Islam. On no account must Muslim citizens in western countries be herded into internment camps. But there should be a total ban on Muslim immigration. And Muslim immigrants already admitted must  integrate fully into our way of life, accept our values, our law, our customs and traditional codes of behavior. They must be given no concessions: no separation of the sexes in gyms and swimming-pools, no time off for prayer, no building of special washing facilities in public places and business premises for their rituals of ablution. There must be no allowing of publicly licensed Muslim taxi drivers to refuse to take a passenger who is carrying a bottle of wine or has a lap-dog with him. No public rallies must be allowed that display placards urging murder. No threats against our free speech must be tolerated. No preaching or sloganeering against Christians and Jews must go unpunished. No new mosques may be built. Exclusively Muslim schools must be closed down.

Captured Muslim terrorists must be forced to talk, then tried by military tribunals and if found guilty summarily executed. Any Muslim who uses violence against us in the name of his religion must expect to be treated as a terrorist.

If there are political leaders who oppose these policies to any degree, they must be forced out of office as soon as possible. The present US administration does not want to accept that Islam is the enemy. If it did, it would have to acknowledge that it is fighting on the same side as Israel against the same enemy. It would support and join Israel in the use of force against Hamas and Hizbullah. It would stop Iran by every means possible from becoming a nuclear-armed power. It would not permit Iraq to reinstate sharia law. It would see the folly of having gone to war against Christian states in the Balkans to protect Muslim rebels.

If Muslims use our laws and civil liberties against us, we must do the same against them. For every suit brought by Muslim trouble-makers we must counter sue. Even better, we must sue first and often.

While Muslims may pray to their deity in their own properties, they must be deterred from attempting to do so in public places where, if they do it, they should expect to be mocked and verbally abused. They may dress as they choose, but if their clothing advertizes their faith, they must expect to be challenged. We must make them afraid of our opinion, of our disdain (but not of physical assault which we must abstain from unless in self-defense).

We must make Muslims who want to destroy our values, our liberty, our democracy, our civilization, afraid of us. We must make them afraid to preach their ideology. Also, and even better, we must make them ashamed to preach it.

These measures should be our battle plan. Only if we adopt it in full will we be taking the war and our survival as free people seriously. Only by doing these things will we win the war they have declared against us. Anything short of uncompromising opposition will not do: we will be terrorized, massacred, worn down, until we submit to be ruled by evil, and returned to the darkness of barbarism. We must all be anti-jihad warriors now.

Shocking information on how US homeland security and anti-terrorism policy has been designed by the Islamic jihadist enemies themselves, is provided by Clare M. Lopez, a professor at the Center for Counterintelligence and Security Studies, who writes this plain-speaking article for Human Events:

Counterterrorism policy is being formulated under the influence of the Muslim Brotherhood (MB), the lead international jihadist organization charged with “eliminating and destroying the Western civilization from within and ‘sabotaging’ its miserable house by their hands and the hands of the believers…” It’s important to note that the objectives of the Muslim Brotherhood coincide exactly with those of al Qaeda and every other Islamic jihadist organization in the world today: re-establishment of the caliphate/imamate and imposition of Shari’a (Islamic law) over the entire world. …

Former North Carolina State Senator Larry Shaw, elected CAIR Board Chairman in March 2009 stated that he “looks forward to partnering with the Obama administration…” In case anyone failed to notice, CAIR is an unindicted co-conspirator in the Holy Land Foundation (HLF) terror funding case and an acknowledged affiliate of the Muslim Brotherhood. So, just how close is that partnership?

The policy implications of Brotherhood influence are both startling and evident. For example, Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Secretary Janet Napolitano sets the tone for the Obama administration view of Islamic jihad, but in April 2009, she rejected any notion that the enemy is either Islamic or a jihadi. Absurdly, she even refused to even use the word “terror,” instead preferring the inane “man-made disaster.” She was joined in planting the collective U.S. national security leadership head firmly in the sand by senior counterterrorism advisor to the president, John Brennan, who, apparently oblivious of Islamic doctrine and law, claimed in August 2009 that the meaning of jihad is to “. . . purify oneself or to wage a holy struggle for a moral goal.”

Following the foiled Christmas Day airliner bombing, Brennan made a frenzied round of the Sunday talk shows, shocking most of us with the off-hand announcement that a plea deal was “on the table” for Abdulmutallab (who lawyered up and shut up the moment he’d been Mirandized). Treating Islamic jihad as a legal problem or as though it doesn’t exist cripples U.S. national security policy making. 

Where did such ideas come from? How could our most senior officials entrusted with the defense of national security be so far off the tracks? It matters critically, because policy executed in ignorance of the essential linkage between Islamic doctrine and terrorism is bound to miss warning signals that involve Muslim clerics, mosques, teaching, and texts. A key indicator about our counterterrorism officials’ failures may be found in their advisors: their jihadi and Muslim Brotherhood advisors.

The inability of the National Counterterrorism Center (“NCTC”) to connect the dots is no accident. It is not meant to connect the dots. In the summer of 2008, the NCTC organized a conference on U.S. Counter-Radicalization Strategy. According to a 4 January 2010 posting by Patrick Poole at Pajamas Media, one of the leading speakers at that conference was Yasir Qadhi, a featured instructor at the AlMaghrib Institute in Houston, Texas. But by his own public admission, Yasir Qadhi was on the U.S. terror watch list! 

Yes, a key speaker for an NCTC discussion about Counter-Radicalization Strategy is on the terror watch list. He’s obviously there for good reasons. For one thing, Qadhi’s Ilmquest media company featured audio CD sets of sermons by al Qaeda cleric, Anwar al-Awlaki, on its website and for sale at Ilmquest seminars. Yes, that al-Awlaki — the one linked to both Maj. Nidal Hasan, the Muslim Ft. Hood shooter, and Abdulmutallab, the Nigerian Muslim would-be Christmas airline bomber. 

To be sure, enemy influence within the Intelligence Community didn’t begin in 2009. In fact, the blueprint for the Muslim Brotherhood information warfare operation against the West goes back to a 1981 MB document called “The Project” that was discovered in a raid in Switzerland. More recently, the FBI discovered the MB’s 1991 U.S. Manifesto in a 2004 raid, a manifesto that not only confirmed the existence of the Brotherhood in the U.S., but outlined its organizational structure and agenda in this country.

The dozens of groups listed as associates in that document include a number who’ve succeeded in forging close relationships inside the structures of U.S. national security. One of them is the Islamic Society of North America (ISNA, another unindicted co-conspirator in the HLF trial). The FBI itself has maintained a longstanding liaison relationship with ISNA officials and placed ads in its monthly publication seeking Muslim applicants to become agents. A top FBI lawyer named Valerie Caproni joined senior ISNA official Louay Safi on a 2008 panel discussion at Yale University for a discussion entitled “Behind the Blindfold of Justice: Security, Individual Rights, & Minority Communities After 9/11.” Worse yet, in the wake of the horrific November 2009 military jihad assault at Ft. Hood that took fourteen lives and left dozens injured, it was revealed that Louay Safi was at Ft. Hood providing seminar presentations about Islam to U.S. troops about to deploy to Afghanistan. That’s an amazing record of successful penetration. And it’s just the tip of the iceberg.

As noted above, the influence of the enemy extends to the very words we use to describe that enemy and his campaign of conquest. … Back in 2008, the National Counter-Terrorism Center (NCTC) and Department of Homeland Security (DHS) issued lexicon guidance to their employees, counseling avoidance of words like “jihad” or “ummah” or “Caliphate” when describing the enemy. They refused to identify the Muslim American sources who’d advised them on their decisions.

But it is enlightening to note the list of Muslim Brotherhood front groups that endorsed the vocabulary list once it had been issued: the Muslim American Society (MAS — founded by the Muslim Brotherhood); Muslim Public Affairs Council (MPAC — which lobbies to remove Hamas, Palestinian Jihad, and Hizballah from the U.S. Foreign Terrorist Organizations list); ISNA; and CAIR. When Republicans on the House Permanent Select Committee, led by Congressman Peter Hoekstra, proposed an amendment to the 2009 Intelligence funding bill that would have prohibited the Intelligence Community “from adopting speech codes that encumber accurately describing the radical jihadist terrorists that attacked America and continue to threaten the homeland”, the Democratic majority rejected it outright.

Congressional Democrats would appear to be thoroughly influenced by the MB …

These are the Jihad wars, and they are nearly 1400 years old. The U.S. has only been confronting Islamic jihadis since our 18th century naval campaigns against the so-called Barbary pirates but liberal democracy will not see the 22nd century if we do not acknowledge and confront this enemy here and now in the 21st. Until and unless the United States proves capable of appointing and electing officials to the top ranks of our national security leadership who both understand and reject the influence of Islamic jihad groups like the Muslim Brotherhood, our country will be incapable of effective defense against either kinetic or stealth jihad attack.

It’s absurd to keep repeating, every time a Muslim tries to kill as many non-Muslims as possible in Islam’s war against the rest of us, that ‘most Muslims’ are not doing it. There are well over a billion Muslims in the world, at some estimates as many as 1.4 billion. If only 10% of them actively engage in violent jihad, that’s a huge horde. Islam demands that all Muslims engage in the jihad, either violently or by assisting the actively violent. Islam itself is the cause of the war.

Islam does not deserve respect just because it is a religion. Quite the opposite. Even if it were a ‘religion of peace’, which it explicitly is not, there’d be nothing respectable about it. What is respectable about belief in the supernatural? But its being a creed of massacre and cruelty in the name of its vicious beliefs makes it positively inimical to civilization, liberty, tolerance, peace, everything that makes life supportable. Islam is the enemy of mankind.

The Islamic hordes of death are conquering Europe by slowly repopulating it as the indigenous Europeans die out. From there, especially from Britain, they are striking against America. The president of the United States does not want to admit this is happening – a wilful blindness that greatly increases the peril.

Mark Steyn, who was one of the first to raise the alarm about Islam’s conquest of Europe by demographic means, writes:

It’s good to know the President has abandoned his laughable assurances that the Pantybomber was an “isolated extremist”. After all, when the leader of the global hyperpower says things that any reasonably informed person at home and abroad knows are complete twaddle, he makes his country look stupid to the world. But I think we’re still missing the larger point here.

So the President’s conceded Mr Abdulmuttalab was in Yemen. Good. But, by the time a guy gets on the plane to Sana’a, he’s already on board for jihad. All they do in Yemen is the training. So where was he radicalized and recruited and when did he decide to embrace a life of terror? … Whom should the traveling public thank for these impositions? The 9/11 killers were mostly Saudi. But the Shoebomber was a British subject. So were the Heathrow plotters. And the Pantybomber was educated in British schools – first in Togo; then at University College, London – and there is plenty of evidence he was radicalized while in the UK. …

That ought to prompt astonishment – and great shame in Britons. Yet Timothy Garton Ash, Hoover panjandrum and eminent British complacenik, wrote in The Guardian only three weeks ago:

‘Not all Muslims, all of the time, will be able to support all these minimum essentials of a modern free society. There is a real tension between some of the essentials (for instance, the equal rights and dignity of homosexuals) and what is habitually taught even in mainstream, conservative Muslim communities. But most British Muslims, most of the time, will support most of them.’

Even if that’s true (and it’s by no means clear that it is), is that enough? I said a few years back that Britain had been so hollowed out by Islamic radicals that it was becoming Somalia with chip shops. Mr Abdulmutallab supposedly got the ol’ jihad fever while at university. I see The New York Times reports the remarkable statistic that one-fifth of students at British universities are Muslim. As Professor Garton Ash would say, most British Muslims most of the time will be most unlikely to self-detonate over most American cities. So that’s okay, right? Up to a point. A poll by the Centre for Social Cohesion found that one-third of Muslim students in Britain believe killing in the name of religion is justified and are in favor of a global caliphate. That’s a lot of potential airline tickets.

We applaud Dick Cheney for saying this last Tuesday, December 29 (reported by Politico):

As I’ve watched the events of the last few days it is clear once again that President Obama is trying to pretend we are not at war.

He seems to think if he has a low-key response to an attempt to blow up an airliner and kill hundreds of people, we won’t be at war.

He seems to think if he gives terrorists the rights of Americans, lets them lawyer up and reads them their Miranda rights, we won’t be at war.

He seems to think if we bring the mastermind of Sept. 11 to New York, give him a lawyer and trial in civilian court, we won’t be at war.

He seems to think if he closes Guantanamo and releases the hard-core Al Qaeda-trained terrorists still there, we won’t be at war.

He seems to think if he gets rid of the words, ‘war on terror,’ we won’t be at war.

But we are at war and when President Obama pretends we aren’t, it makes us less safe.

Why doesn’t he want to admit we’re at war? It doesn’t fit with the view of the world he brought with him to the Oval Office. It doesn’t fit with what seems to be the goal of his presidency — social transformation — the restructuring of American society.

President Obama’s first object and his highest responsibility must be to defend us against an enemy that knows we are at war.