Thomas Sowell writes about the Obama administration’s decision to try 9/11 terrorists in a federal court in New York. Read the whole article here.

This is how he concludes:

The mindset of the left … was spelled out in an editorial in the San Francisco Chronicle, which said that “Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, the professed mastermind of the 9/11 terrorist attacks, will be tried the right way — the American way, in a federal courtroom where the world will see both his guilt and the nation’s adherence to the rule of law.”

This is not the rule of law but the application of laws to situations for which they were not designed.

How many Americans may pay with their lives for the intelligence secrets and methods that can forced to be disclosed to Al Qaeda was not mentioned. Nor was there mention of how many foreign nations and individuals whose cooperation with us in the war on terror have been involved in countering Al Qaeda — nor how many foreign nations and individuals will have to think twice now, before cooperating with us again, when their role can be revealed in court to our enemies, who can exact revenge on them.

Behind this decision and others is the notion that we have to demonstrate our good faith to other nations, sometimes called “world opinion.” Just who are these saintly nations whose favor we must curry, at the risk of American lives and the national security of the United States? 

Internationally, the law of the jungle ultimately prevails, despite pious talk about “the international community” and “world opinion,” or the pompous and corrupt farce of the United Nations. Yet this is the gallery to which Barack Obama has been playing, both before and after becoming President of the United States. 

In the wake of the obscenity of a trial of terrorists in federal court for an act of war — and the worldwide propaganda platform it will give them — it may seem to be a small thing that President Obama has been photographed yet again bowing deeply to a foreign ruler. But how large or small an act is depends on its actual consequences, not on whether the politically correct intelligentsia think it is no big deal.

As a private citizen, Barack Obama has a right to make as big a jackass of himself as he wants to. But, as President of the United States, his actions not only denigrate a nation that other nations rely on for survival, but raise questions about how reliable our judgment and resolve are — which in turn raises questions about whether those nations will consider themselves better off to make the best deal they can with our enemies.

On the fourth anniversary of the publication of the Muhammad cartoons by the Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten, we consider the question: has terrorism proved itself a successful tactic in the Islamic jihad against the rest of the world?:

In the 20th century, in the era of the Cold War, most of the world’s terrorist groups were ideologically communist, whatever else they were: revolutionary, or national-separatist, or national-liberationist. Most of them were aided and abetted by the Soviet Union. (So were small groups of young, free, prosperous West Europeans who committed acts of terrorism on the pretext of serving selfless causes but primarily to get a thrill out of it, such as the so-called Baader-Meinhof group.) There were no terrorist groups within the Communist Bloc.

In Latin America and Africa some groups gained their objectives, and their success may have been due in part to their use of terrorism; but it cannot be said that terrorism proved a reliably winning tactic wherever it was tried, and it certainly cannot be said that Communism won.

In the 21st century, however, terrorism has been highly successful. Almost all terrorist activity since the turn of the century has been perpetrated by Muslims acting in the name of Islam. It can accurately and fairly be called ‘Islamic terrorism’ without implying that every Muslim in the world is a terrorist, any more, it might be said, than ‘Basque terrorism’ taints every citizen of the Basque country. Yet the comparison would be misleading. While it is true enough that every Muslim is not an active terrorist, it is nevertheless the religious duty of every Muslim to help the advance of holy war against the non-Muslim world. Confirmation that Muslim terrorists are intent on fulfilling a religious duty may be found in these unequivocal statements by the 9/11 plotters, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and five others, submitted in writing at their trial in December 2008: ‘Our prophet was victorious because of fear… our religion is a religion of fear and terror to the enemies of God: the Jews, Christians, and pagans. With God’s willing, we are terrorists to the bone. So, many thanks to God… We ask to be near to God, we fight you and destroy you and terrorize you. The Jihad in god’s [sic] cause is a great duty in our religion.’

All collectivist ideologies – for glaring examples Nazism and Communism – are intrinsically violent, since the collective obedience of a citizenry can only be sustained by force. Islam is a collectivist ideology and this alone makes it intrinsically violent; but more explicitly, Islam demands of every one of its devotees that he (and she) be a holy warrior against all who remain outside of its collective. It teaches that to die in a violent onslaught against unbelievers is the highest service a Muslim can render to its God, so a ‘martyr’ who kills himself while perpetrating murder will be rewarded by God with instant admission into an eternity of sensual rewards in a leisurely afterlife.

Other collectivist creeds employ torturers and executioners to terrorize their collective into remaining submissive, and employ individuals to deliver their fellow citizens into the hands of the torturers and executioners; but Islam goes further and lays on every one of its votaries a God-ordered duty to kill for the cause of conquest, or at the very least to assist a fellow Muslim to kill. Since they do not fear death, nothing can stop Islam’s holy warriors. Their willingness, their positive eagerness to die for their cause, powerfully promotes success.

No wonder then that Islamic terrorism has succeeded. The ‘Muhammad cartoon’ episode alone demonstrates its triumph. When, four years ago today, a Danish newspaper published cartoons of Islam’s prophet, Muslims reacted by threatening civil disorder throughout Europe, killing Christians in the Middle East, and so intimidating the editors of almost all other newspapers in the world that very few dared to reproduce the cartoons. European governments cringed, apologized, and groveled. Even in America, a book about the cartoons omits the cartoons themselves, because the publishers, Yale University, fear Muslim reprisals.

Fear of Islam has become a fact of life in Europe. All EU governments rush to gratify the demands of their growing and incendiary Muslim minorities. Police are reluctant to enforce the law in ‘Muslim areas’. Judges hesitate or refuse to impose harsh sentences on Muslims who incite and plot violence, or to deport them. The indigenous populations are effectively ‘dhimmified’: rendered subservient to the will of the Muslim immigrants. There, by the use of terrorism, Islam has won.

In America, as this is being written, Muslims have been charged with plotting or attempting to carry out violent attacks with weapons of mass destruction in New York, Chicago, Dallas, and a Marine Corps base in New Mexico. An organizer of the Muslim march on Washington, D.C. on September 25th wrote on his Facebook site: ‘We don’t want to democratize Islam, we want to Islamize democracy.’

The dhimmification of America with its much larger population will take longer than it did in Europe, but day after day, step by step, Islam is making its gains. Governments, editors, police, judges, citizens already hesitate to use their constitutional right to speak freely if what they say might offend Muslims.

Since the mass murder of some 3,000 Americans by nineteen Muslims in 2001, there have been more than 14,000 Islamic terrorist attacks in Europe, Asia, and Africa. The al-Qaeda organization, probably now headquartered in Pakistan, inspires and trains terrorists from Europe and America to carry out acts of mass murder in Western cities. The Islamic state of Iran sponsors Hizbullah, the terrorist organization that has battened on to Lebanon and threatens Israel; sends arms and equipment through Syria to terrorists in Iraq; supplies the Hamas terrorists with materiel so it can continue to wage perpetual rocket war against Israel from Gaza; and directly threatens Israel with annihilation by nuclear attack.

Against all this the United Nations, sentimentally established after the Second World War to be a peace maker, proves itself worse than useless, having long ago become an agency of the Islamic states, continually manipulated by them to lie and propagandize, and actively enable anti-Western violence.

How can civilization fend off this enemy whose power lies in its invulnerability to physical damage? What strategy can it plan – short of annihilation, which is hardly possible even if it were to be unconscionably contemplated, there being over a billion Muslims in the world? Legislatures cannot do it. Police forces cannot do it. Armies cannot do it.

An optimistic view is that prosperity could do it. Encourage immigration into Western countries and grant massive economic aid to Islamic states. The reasoning goes that as people become more prosperous they become better educated, have fewer children, are less influenced by – or even renounce – religion; they see and desire the benefits of western civilization, take advantage of its openness to individual effort, and try to become part of it rather than destroy it. Unfortunately it is a theory that has been tested and not proved. It is out of the prosperous third generation of Muslim immigrants that Islamic terrorists have arisen in Britain, to place bombs in trains and park a car full of explosive in the streets of its capital. Even if there were strong evidence in favor of the theory, an experiment that requires the First World to pour its resources into the Islamic Third World is unrealistic and impracticable because it is not affordable.

An alternative idea is to isolate the Islamic nations: apply extreme sanctions; refuse to trade with them, even though they have the oil that the West needs; do not give them aid; do not permit Muslim immigration into Western countries, and deport back to their countries of origin as many present immigrants as law and civilized values permit; in sum, leave Islam to its own devices, and let internecine conflict, lack of modern technology, poor medical knowledge and general ignorance take their toll of the enemy to reduce it to impotence. This too is unrealistic, if for no other reason than that such measures would offend the sense of moral self-worth that determines the political choices of at least half the people in the Western world; those who hold compassion as their highest value and vote for parties that claim to be motivated by it – in other words, the political left.

There is no easy answer. The civilized world has at present the intellectual and economic, as well as military advantage over Islam. But if it cannot find a way with all its powers to preserve itself, it will be overcome. Europe has chosen not to resist. When most of Europe as well as most of Asia have become fully Islamized, as they very likely will be, how might America, if it is still free, deal with such a changed world? What will it do to ensure its survival when it is the last stronghold of civilization?

Jillian Becker September 30,  2009

The International Atomic Energy Agency has written a report stating that Iran can now make the bomb and is now developing a missile delivery system.

VIENNA — Experts at the world’s top atomic watchdog are in agreement that Tehran has the ability to make a nuclear bomb and is on the way to developing a missile system able to carry an atomic warhead, according to a secret report seen by The Associated Press.The document drafted by senior officials at the International Atomic Energy Agency is the clearest indication yet that the agency’s leaders share Washington’s views on Iran’s weapon-making capabilities.It appears to be the so-called “secret annex” on Iran’s nuclear program that Washington says is being withheld by the IAEA’s chief.The document says Iran has “sufficient information” to build a bomb. It says Iran is likely to “overcome problems” on developing a delivery system.

A Daily Telegraph report has more:

Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, the Supreme Leader of Iran, has always publicly denied any ambition to build a weapon. But the IAEA report says that he wanted to acquire nuclear weapons as long ago as 1984, when he served as president. He allegedly told a meeting of senior officials that a “nuclear arsenal would serve Iran as a deterrent in the hands of God’s soldiers”.

Emanuele Ottolenghi also writes in Standpoint about the Iranian nuclear programme and the West’s possible response:

The American report was a game changer. It declared that Tehran had “halted its nuclear weapons programme” in autumn 2003. It suggested that Iran had suspended its military programme “primarily in response to increasing international scrutiny and pressure resulting from exposure of Iran’s previously undeclared nuclear work.”

There were many caveats to this judgment, buried in the footnotes and intervening text, but the headline was that Iran no longer pursued nuclear weapons. The report undermined any residual credibility to the threat of US military action. Diplomacy was the only option left. George W. Bush endorsed it — and a new proposal was delivered to Iran with the signature of the Secretary of State, Condoleezza Rice, in June 2008. President Obama picked up where Bush left off, and made engagement with Iran a centrepiece of his new foreign policy. Then, recently, Obama’s Secretary of State Hillary Clinton offered a nuclear umbrella to US allies in the region, as if to suggest that the US was now resigned to a nuclear Iran.
…

The answer came recently, in two separate reports that were leaked to the press. Last March, a German intelligence report was submitted to Germany’s Constitutional Court to back the conviction of a German-Iranian businessman accused of supplying Iran with technology for its nuclear programme. The defence had cited the NIE to suggest that the transaction, which occurred in 2007, could not have been used to supply Iran’s military programme, given that the latter had been halted four years before. The court upheld the conviction based on the intelligence, which contradicted the NIE — the weapons programme, the German spies said, had never been suspended. A more recent report, published in July in The Times, cited Western intelligence sources as suggesting that Iran had indeed halted its weapons programme in 2003 but only because by then it had been successfully completed.

If the report is accurate, it answers the question the NIE did not address. Iran stopped its nuclear weaponisation programme in 2003 because its strides had far outpaced the enrichment programme. The decision to suspend had nothing to do with the invasion of Iraq or with the much-vaunted secret negotiations between the US and Iran that were ongoing in Paris at the time. It mattered little that IAEA inspectors had started snooping around the recently exposed nuclear installations. Rather, Iran had finished the weaponisation part of the programme before it had completed perfecting a delivery system and mastering the enrichment process.

Iran’s decisions have never been influenced by offers and incentives. The only thing that has ever mattered to Tehran was time. The only reason Iran might still be willing to negotiate is again time: if it still needs time to complete its goal of nuclear weapons capability. US engagement will not change this. Iran can build a bomb, has been busy building one and has never even considered changing its mind.

There are some analysts who believe that the theory of Mutually Assured Destruction (MAD) will prevent war between Israel and Iran. IMED believe this to be completely untrue. Iran’s autocratic regime is not rational, and the concept of self-destruction in the name of religious self-sacrifice is not just likely; it is expected. After all, praise and encouragement of suicide bombers is not an uncommon sight in Iran.

This excellent article by Shmuel Bar explains the need to negate the (apparently) comforting theory of MAD:

The countries of the Middle East will probably be more predisposed than the Cold War protagonists to brandish their nuclear weapons, not only rhetorically but through nuclear alerts or nuclear tests, leading to escalation. Once one country has taken such measures, the other nuclear countries of the region would probably feel forced to adopt defensive measures, leading to multilateral escalation. However, such multilateral escalation will not be mitigated by Cold War-type hotlines and means of signalling and none of the parties involved will have escalation dominance. This and the absence of a credible second-strike capability may well strengthen the tendency to opt for a first strike.

True, we may safely assume that the leaders and peoples of the Middle East have no desire to be the targets of nuclear blasts. However, the inherent instability of the region and its regimes, the difficulty in managing multilateral nuclear tensions, the weight of religious, emotional and internal pressures and the proclivity of many of the regimes in the region towards military adventurism and brinkmanship do not bode well for the future of this region once it enters the nuclear age.

For news on Iran and the nuclear programme, visit IMED’s blog – also look out for our campaign against the Iranian nuclear programme, coming soon in the UK.

David Horowitz endorses our warning in the post below about the Left’s intentions for the UN, writing on his website FrontPage magazine:

Neo-communism is a view whose members consider themselves “citizens of the world,” not of America, and who therefore agitate for open borders and want the morally repulsive collection of autocracies, slaveocracies and kleptocracies called “the United Nations” to reign over us and the world.

A neo-communist is someone who believes that America is ruled by corporations who put “profit over people” — and thereby show that they don’t understand either profit or people. A neo-communist is someone who is convinced that race, class, and gender hierarchies make it not only legitimate but necessary to describe America as a “white supremacist” society. Neo-communists believe that a revolution is necessary (if not opportune at the moment), that the Consitution is a disposable document, and that America’s communist and Islamo-fascist enemies (Iran, Venezuela, Cuba, Nicaragua, Hizbollah, the PLO and Hamas), are freedom fighters or at least on the right side of the armageddon that faces us.

These are views shared by The Nation magazine, by Commonsense.org, by the Indymedia crowd, by the social justice movement, by the majority of the Black Caucus and the Progressive Caucus on the Democratic side in Congress, and by tens of thousands of university professors who indoctrinate their students in these pernicious ideologies every day. They are the views held by the leaders of ACORN, the SEIU, AFCSME and other leftwing unions, by radical feminists, by organizations like MALDEF and La Raza, by the ACLU and the Center for Constitutional Rights who are working to support the Islamo-fascist agenda in America, by the major Muslim organizations including the Muslim Students Association, CAIR, and the Islamic Circle of North America…

He lists many more in his book Unholy Alliance.

The UN must be destroyed!

The Secretary-General of the United Nations, Ban Ki-moon, demands world-wide redistribution of wealth and the curbing of economic activity in order to ‘save the planet’ from poverty, hunger, disease, and insecurity. This must be done within four months he says, or  else…

We have just four months. Four months to secure the future of our planet.

Any agreement must be fair, effective, equitable and comprehensive, and based on science. And it must help vulnerable nations adapt to climate change…

The science is clear… What is needed is the political will. We have the capacity. We have finance. We have the technology. The largest lacking is political will. That is why I will convey some meetings focused on climate change. I have invited all the leaders of the world … Two years ago, only a handful of world leaders could talk about climate change. Today, leaders of all the world, all the countries on every continent are aware of the threats we face now. This is great progress, for we need leadership of the very highest order. Awareness is the first step. The challenge now is to act. Since my first day as Secretary-General, I have spoken out about the grave climate change threat. My words, at times, have been blunt. When the leaders of the G-8 agreed in July to keep the global temperature increase within two degrees centigrade by the year 2050, that was welcomed and I welcome that statement. But I also said again, it was not enough. But leaders have agreed to cut green house gas emissions by 80 per cent by 2050. That is welcomed again. But that must be accompanied by the ambitious mid-term target by 2020 as science tells us to do. There I said, while I applaud their commitment, that is not enough. I called for matching these long-term goals with ambitious mid-term emission reduction targets.

Let me be clear about what we need to do.

There are four points [of] very important key political issues.

First industrialized countries must lead by committing to binding mid-term reduction targets on the order of 25 to 40 per cent below 1990 levels. Unfortunately, the mid-term emission targets announced so far are not close enough to this range…

Second, developing countries need to take nationally appropriate mitigation actions in order to reduce the growth in their emissions substantially below business as usual…

Third, developed countries must provide sufficient, measurable, reportable and verifiable financial and technological support to developing countries… Significant resources will be needed from both public and private sources. Developing countries, especially the most vulnerable, will collectively need billions of dollars in public financing for adaptation. I am talking here about new money – not re-packaged Official Development Assistance…

Fourth, we need an equitable and accountable mechanism for distributing these financial and technological resources, taking into account the views of all countries in decision-making.

Accomplishing all of this requires tough decisions. It will take flexibility and hard work to negotiate the most difficult issues. Trust between developed and developing countries is essential. When governments succeed in sealing a deal in Copenhagen, we will have shown the spirit of international solidarity. We will have shown leadership – political will…

Roll on, Copenhagen. Only, while they’re at it, why don’t they agree to make gold out of moonbeams? The science is clear.

Thomas Sowell writes in part:

We have no respect for Gordon Brown personally, but he is the Prime Minister of Great Britain – America’s closest ally –  and as his country’s representative he should have been treated with respect and courtesy by the President of the United States on his recent official visit to the US. Instead, Obama was off-hand and rude to him, later making the silly and childish excuse that he was ‘tired’.  Obama is not, however, too tired to court the heads of Islamic states, and even travel abroad to confer with them.   

Frank Gaffney writes:

On Friday, President Obama reiterated for the umpteenth time his determination to develop a “new relationship” with the Muslim world.  On this occasion, the audience were the leaders of Saudi Arabia, Indonesia and the Philippines. Unfortunately, it increasingly appears that, in so doing, he will be embracing the agenda of the Muslim Brotherhood – an organization dedicated to promoting the theo-political-legal program authoritative Islam calls Shariah and that has the self-described mission of “destroying Western civilization from within.”

As part of Mr. Obama’s “Respect Islam” campaign, he will travel to Turkey in early April.  While there, he will not only pay tribute to an Islamist government that has systematically wrested every institution from the secular tradition of Ataturk and put the country squarely on the path to Islamification.  He will also participate in something called the “Alliance of Civilizations.”

The Alliance is a UN-sponsored affair that reflects – as, increasingly do most things the United Nations is involved in – the views of the Organization of the Islamic Conference (OIC).  The OIC is made up of 57 Muslim-majority nations. Thanks to support from Saudi Arabia and its proxies, the Muslim Brotherhood has become a driving force within the Conference and their agendas largely coincide.

For example, in 2005 a communiqué issued after a summit in Mecca declared: “The Conference underlined the need to collectively endeavor to reflect the noble Islamic values, counter Islamophobia, defamation of Islam and its values and desecration of Islamic holy sites, and to effectively coordinate with States as well as regional and international institutions and organizations to urge them to criminalize this phenomenon as a form of racism.”

Ominously, as part of its bid to “criminalize” Islamophobia, the OIC is seeking “deterrent punishments.” It insists that not only freedom of expression but all human rights be circumscribed by the OIC’s 1990 Cairo Declaration on Human Rights in Islam, which concludes with the caveat that, “All the rights and freedoms stipulated in this Declaration are subject to the Islamic Shariah.” Translation: Liberties enshrined in the UN’s foundational Universal Declaration of Human Rights are largely rendered null and void.

Not that the UN has been a great upholder of liberty in practice. Quite the contrary, in fact. It is now such a threat to liberty, the best thing that could happen to it is its total abolition, before it evolves into an Islamic World Government imposing Shariah on us all. 

 Read here about the disgusting United Nations signing a treaty with an organization on its own terrorist list.