Americans, Gallup tells us, admire Hillary Clinton more than any other woman in the world — again. This latest accolade marks the 17th time Gallup has found Clinton to be the Most Admired Woman (MAW?) since she became first lady nearly 20 years ago. … And therein lies America’s cosmic flaw. A country that could time and again embrace Hillary Clinton as its MAW has lost its mind or its memory or both.

So Diana West writes at Townhall. She goes on to remind Hillary Clinton’s numerous fans why their admiration is misplaced. We quote in part:

Does the phrase “congenital liar” tinkle any bells? … As conjured by the late New York Times columnist William Safire in 1996, the phrase described the then-first lady for her shameless prevarications. These included what sure looked like bribery (“cattle futures”), defrauding taxpayers (“Whitewater”), obstructing justice — or, rather, “finding” her Rose Law Firm billing records (under subpoena for two years) just days after the statute of limitations ran out — among other corrupt behaviors that must have slightly suppressed Hillary-admiration that same year. The phrase remains apt.

“I remember landing under sniper fire,” Clinton declared on the presidential campaign trail in 2008, describing a 1996 trip to Bosnia. “There was supposed to be some kind of a greeting ceremony at the airport, but instead we just ran with our heads down (chuckles) to get into the vehicles to get to our base.” It was a vivid but debunkable whopper, as CBS footage of the event proved. In reality, Clinton, accompanied by daughter Chelsea, made her ceremonial way into Bosnia through a warm throng marked by smiling faces and a kiss from a local girl — not bullets. Admirable?

On a more nationally significant level, Clinton recently supported President Obama’s Big Lie that a movie trailer of “Innocence of Muslims” on YouTube “resulted” (her word) in the September attack on the U.S. compound in Benghazi, Libya — a concerted falsehood for which neither Clinton nor Obama nor former CIA Director David Petraeus has yet answered. Even several days after intelligence agencies determined that a planned assault, not a video-driven protest, had taken place, Clinton went so far as to promise a grieving Charles Woods, father of slain former SEAL Tyrone Woods, that “we” were going to have the video maker “arrested and prosecuted.” Why was Clinton still perpetuating the false narrative that the exercise of free speech under the First Amendment, not Islamic jihad, had resulted in the attack? Was that admirable? …

Meanwhile, the video maker, Nakoula Basseley Nakoula, was indeed arrested and swiftly prosecuted, and is now serving one year in jail for “parole violations.” His incarceration, however, is better understood as punishment for violating the Islamic ban on free speech about Islam. … The fact is, Hillary Clinton has worked assiduously with the Islamic bloc nations, known as the Organization of Islamic Cooperation (OIC), to promote Islamically correct speech codes through the so-called Istanbul Process. The goal of this process — and the goal of transnational Islam — is to implement Shariah speech codes via U.N. Human Rights Council Resolution 16/18, which seeks to criminalize “defamation” — free speech — about Islam. In leading this drive against free speech, Hillary Clinton is actually leading a drive against the First Amendment.

Most Americans don’t know about the Istanbul Process, let alone how Islamic speech codes are unconstitutional, but it is this policy against free speech that may stand as Clinton’s enduring legacy as secretary of state. It is of a piece with having presided over, first, the shredding of U.S. alliances with Egypt’s Hosni Mubarak and Libya’s Moammar Gadhafi and then supporting jihadist factions and organizations, such as the Muslim Brotherhood, now implementing Islamic law across the Middle East. This, of course, is President Obama’s policy, but Hillary Clinton has been an active team player.

Another aspect of this same foreign policy Clinton has spearheaded is the launch of the Global Counterterrorism Forum. The forum’s roster of 29 nations plus the European Union is stunning for its exclusion of Israel, a leading counterterrorism force as much as it is a leading terrorism victim. But not so, according to Islamic definitions. Knowingly or not, as a leader of this forum, one-third of whose members come from the Islamic bloc, Clinton has accepted the Arab League and OIC definitions of terrorism, which both deny the existence of Israeli victims (sometimes U.S. soldiers) and legitimize the terrorism of Hamas, a wing of the Muslim Brotherhood, and Hezbollah. …

What influences have led Clinton to formulate or follow such policies? … It is hard not to wonder about the input of top Clinton aide Huma Abedin, a young woman with well-established familial and personal ties to Muslim Brotherhood figures and front groups (including a “charity” linked to al-Qaida and a group banned in Israel for ties to Hamas). Indeed, what may be most astounding and mysterious about Clinton’s whole public tenure is how Abedin ever received the security clearance necessary to work so closely with the secretary of state.

And further to all that, the burning question is: what has Hillary Clinton ever done that is admirable? 

 All our training manuals have been purged of the true nature of the threat from Islam and Shariah.

We quote from an important article in the Washington Times by Retired Admiral James A. Lyons, former commander in chief of the U.S. Pacific Fleet:

The U.S. Army’s final-draft handbook … indoctrinates our military personnel heading to Afghanistan in how to be sensitive to and accept Muslim and Afghan 7th-century customs and values — or possibly be killed by our Afghan partners.

Unbelievable. This is being done to prevent the so-called “green-on-blue” attacks, which have cost 63 American lives this year.

According to the Army’s Combined Arms Center at Ft. Leavenworth, Kan., it is our military’s ignorance and lack of empathy for Muslim and Afghan cultural norms that is the basic cause for our Afghan military partners to react violently and kill our troops.

For example, if our military personnel hear or witness an Afghan soldier sodomizing a young boy, the handbook tells U.S. service members to voice no objection, accept it or ignore it, or they could be killed. If an Afghan beats, rapes or kills a woman in the presence of a U.S. serviceman, they are not to interfere or stand up for women’s rights or else they might be killed.

What the Army is saying, in effect, is that if Afghan partners conduct violence against U.S. service personnel, it is the serviceman’s fault. This is mind-boggling. We know, according to former Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Adm. Mike Mullen, that nine out of 10 Afghan military personnel are illiterate and cannot be counted on in combat. Endemic corruption is embedded in Afghan culture and certainly extends to their military. They cannot be trusted.

Other cultural norms our professional U.S. military must accept without reservation by our Afghan partners is desertion, drug use, thievery, dog torture and collusion with the enemy, the Taliban. Also, U.S. military members must not discuss Islam in any form.

So the US military commanders know perfectly well that Afghans may be seen sodomizing young boys; beating, raping, killing women; deserting, taking drugs, stealing, torturing dogs, and colluding with the enemy – and they want to tolerate it. Why are American forces in Afghanistan at all? What have they been fighting for these eleven years and more? What do they risk their lives for?

All of this guidance is un-American. It is totally against our core principles and everything we stand for as Americans. It threatens to further diminish our military principles, stature and fighting spirit. …

We will be forcing our military to submit to Islam and its governing Shariah law or die — exactly the choice offered to infidels who have been vanquished by jihad. Our military’s silence and acquiescence would be the humiliating price for their existence.

This should be seen as another attempt to undercut our professional military and our warrior reputation that has guaranteed our freedom and way of life for the past 236 years.

None of this humiliating guidance should come as a surprise. The Obama administration has had a massive purge under way to remove all training manuals, lectures and instructors who link Islamic doctrine and its governing Shariah law in a factual way to Islamic terrorism. These manuals are being removed from all government agencies, including the Department of Defense and intelligence agencies. All our training manuals have been purged of the true nature of the threat from Islam and Shariah.

The degrading of our military’s fundamental principles should be viewed in a much broader perspective. We cannot overlook the fact that with or without sequestration, we are unilaterally disarming our military force. This is happening in spite of an uncertain world situation with the Mideast still in a state of turmoil and evolving threats posed by China, Russia and Iran.

Separately, we see our First Amendment rights being trashed by our secretary of state through her participation in the Istanbul Process championed by the 57-member-nation Organization of Islamic Cooperation (OIC). The OIC is sponsoring a United Nations mandate that would make it a crime to express anything they consider blasphemous against Islam or the Prophet Muhammad. This same theme was expressed by President Obama in his September speech to the U.N. General Assembly in New York.

If these attacks on America’s exceptionalism and core principles are collectively analyzed, it appears that there is an insidious agenda at work to fundamentally change America. All of these negative factors must be challenged and defeated.

As a first step, the Army’s draft handbook should be trashed.

Second, Congress must take positive action to protect our First Amendment rights and force the Obama administration to withdraw from any further participation in the Istanbul Process.

Third, the unilateral disarmament of our military must be reversed. It’s time for members of the Joint Chiefs of Staff to take a position that supports the oath they took to protect and defend our Constitution.

Challenge their pacifist commander-in-chief, who has never served in the armed forces, has an emotional attachment to Islam, and disregards his own oath to defend the US Constitution?

It would be a great thing if they would do it.

It is our contention that Christianity brought a thousand years of darkness down on Europe. It extinguished the bright light of classical culture, of which Socratean doubt, the need to examine all ideas critically, was the enlightening principle. Christianity claimed a monopoly of truth, and the  totalitarian-minded Catholic Church did its utmost to suppress dissent by the cruelest means imaginable. So did Protestant churches as far as they could reach. Like Communism and all ideological orthodoxies, Christianity feared open criticism, recognizing that it’s power could not survive argument. The Enlightenment proved that to be the case; a great upwelling of doubt, criticism, exploration and discovery, it loosened the grip of theocratic tyranny, dispersed the darkness of superstition, and let Europe flower again after a long and terrible night. Science flourished once more, achieving an immense extension of knowledge and giving birth to new technologies. The might of the West is rooted in the Greco-Roman culture revived in the Enlightenment, not in a “Judeo-Christian tradition”.

Now darkness is descending again on the West. Islam, a tyranny of the mind as cruel as Christianity and even more intolerant, an ideology from the Dark Ages that forbids criticism and kills critics, is spreading rapidly through Europe and America, zealously assisted by Western governments and passionately defended by the intelligentsia of the political left – which on principle favors ideological conformity and its totalitarian enforcement.

This is from the Stonegate Institute, by Soeren Kern:

The European Union has offered to host the next meeting of the so-called Istanbul Process, an aggressive effort by Muslim countries to make it an international crime to criticize Islam.

The announcement comes less than one month after the United States hosted its own Istanbul Process conference in Washington, DC.

The Istanbul Process – its explicit aim is to enshrine in international law a global ban on all critical scrutiny of Islam and/or Islamic Sharia law – is being spearheaded by the Organization of Islamic Cooperation (OIC), a bloc of 57 Muslim countries.

Based in Saudi Arabia, the OIC has long pressed the European Union and the United States to impose limits on free speech and expression about Islam.

But the OIC has now redoubled its efforts and is engaged in a determined diplomatic offensive to persuade Western democracies to implement United Nations Human Rights Council (HRC) Resolution 16/18, which calls on all countries to combat “intolerance, negative stereotyping and stigmatization of … religion and belief.” (Analysis of the OIC’s war on free speech can be found here and here.)

Resolution 16/18, which was adopted at HRC headquarters in Geneva in March 2011, is widely viewed as a significant step forward in OIC efforts to advance the international legal concept of defaming Islam.

However, the HRC resolution – as well as the OIC-sponsored Resolution 66/167, which was quietly approved by the 193-member UN General Assembly on December 19, 2011 – remains ineffectual as long as it lacks strong support in the West.

The OIC therefore scored a diplomatic coup when the Obama Administration agreed to host a three-day Istanbul Process conference in Washington, DC on December 12-14, 2011. In doing so, the United States gave the OIC the political legitimacy it has been seeking to globalize its initiative to ban criticism of Islam.

Following the Obama Administration’s lead, the European Union now wants to get in on the action by hosting the next Istanbul Process summit, tentatively scheduled for July 2012.

Up until now, the European Union has kept the OIC initiative at arms-length. But Ekmeleddin Ihsanoglu, Secretary-General of the OIC, says the EU’s offer to host the meeting represents a “qualitative shift in action against the phenomenon of Islamophobia,” according to the International Islamic News Agency (IINA), the OIC’s official news/propaganda organ.

According to the IINA, “The phenomenon of Islamophobia is found in the West in general, but is growing in European countries in particular and in a manner different than that in the US, which had contributed to drafting Resolution 16/18. The new European position represents the beginning of the shift from their previous reserve over the years over the attempts by the OIC to counter ‘defamation of religions’ in the Human Rights Council and the General Assembly of the United Nations. …

Europe is retreating from the Enlightenment. But not without  protest.

The OIC is especially angry over its inability to silence a growing number of democratically elected politicians in Europe who have voiced concerns over the refusal of Muslim immigrants to integrate into their host countries and the consequent establishment of parallel Islamic societies in many parts of Europe.

According to the IINA, “Ihsanoglu said that the growing role of the extreme right in politics in several European countries has become stronger than the capacity of the Organization [OIC], explaining that the extreme right, who [sic] hates Muslims, became leverage in the hands of politicians. He added that the rise of the extreme right through elections has become an issue that cannot be countered, considering the democratic way in which these extremists reach their positions. He pointed out to the referendum held in Switzerland, as an example, which resulted in suspending the construction of minarets there following a vote by the Swiss people.”

In other words, the OIC is now seeking the support of non-elected bureaucrats at the headquarters of the European Union in Brussels to enact pan-European hate speech legislation to limit by fiat what 500 million European citizens – including democratically elected politicians – can and cannot say about Islam.

To be sure, many individual European countries that lack First Amendment protections like those in the United States have already enacted hate speech laws that effectively serve as proxies for the all-encompassing blasphemy legislation the OIC is seeking to impose on the European Union as a whole.

The author lists a dozen examples of Europeans who have dared to raise their voices to criticize the barbarous ideology of Islam and defend their own culture, only to be prosecuted and punished for it under recently enacted, bad and stupid laws. Among them, Elisabeth Sabaditsch-Wolff and Geert Wilders, whose cases we have discussed in our posts: The West on trial (December 16, 2009); Freedom versus Islam (January 20, 2010); Civilization on trial (October 11,2010); An honest confession of hypocrisy (October 23, 2010);The new heresy (January 11, 2011); Darkness descending – again (February 7, 2011); Sharia is the law in Austria (December 25, 2011); Only the gagged may speak freely (December 26/11).

Almost everywhere in Europe now, “speaking the truth about Islam is subject to swift and hefty legal penalties” as the author says.

Why should any religion be exempt from criticism? Religious ideas above all need to be criticized, being the most irrational and the most oppressive. And even more than other religions, Islam needs to be dragged into the sunlight. It is the only intolerant religion of our time –  and it is asking to be protected from intolerance!

Right now, when Islam is intent on conquering the West by all possible means including terrorism, it is especially necessary to be Islamophobic.

Americans must resist the Obama administration’s efforts to help the OIC drive our world back into darkness. At least in the United States – the great product and political embodiment of the Enlightenment – the light of liberty must be kept burning.