Omnia21

Mark Steyn so often can capture reality in a way we all can understand.

All those big numbers in the Obama budget. What do they mean?

It's not the "debt" or the "deficit," it's the spending. And the only way to reduce that is with fewer government agencies, fewer government programs, fewer government employees, lower government salaries.

The horrifying fact is that the example of federal spending is being followed in too many states and cities and towns. Raise taxes to spend more and still the spending increases.

UNSUSTAINABLE

We are incentivizing financial unsustainability.

Mark Steyn

At the National Prayer Breakfast, Barack Obama singled out for praise Navy Corpsman Christian Bouchard. Or as the president called him, "Corpseman Bouchard." Twice.

Hey, not a big deal. Throughout his life, the commander-in-chief has had little contact with the military, and less interest. And, when you give as many speeches as this guy does, there's no time to rehearse or read through: You just gotta fire up the prompter and wing it. But it's revealing that nobody around him in the so-called smartest administration of all time thought to spell it out phonetically for him when the speech got typed up and loaded into the machine. Which suggests that either his minders don't know that he doesn't know that kinda stuff, or they don't know it either. To put it in Rumsfeldian terms, they don't know what they don't know.

Which is embarrassingly true. Hence, the awful flop speeches, from the Copenhagen Olympics to the Berlin Wall anniversary video to the Martha Coakley rally. The palpable whiff given off by the White House inner circle is that they're the last people on the planet still besotted by Barack Obama, and that they're having such a cool time starring in their own reality-show remake of The West Wing they can only conceive of the public -- and, indeed, the world -- as crowd-scene extras in The Barack Obama Show: They expect you to cheer and wave flags when the floor-manager tells you to, but the notion that in return he should be able to persuade you of the merits of his policies seems entirely to have eluded them.

But, since Obama's mispronunciation is a pithier summation of the State of the Union than any of the dreary 90-minute sludge he paid his speechwriters for, let us consider it: Is America a Corpseman walking?

Well, we're getting there. National Review's Jim Geraghty sums up Obama's America thus: "Unsustainable is the new normal." Indeed. The other day, Douglas Elmendorf, director of the Congressional Budget Office, described current deficits as "unsustainable." So let's make them even more so. The president tells us, with a straight face, that his grossly irresponsible profligate wastrel of a predecessor took the federal budget on an eight-year joyride, so the only way his sober, fiscally prudent successor can get things under control is to grab the throttle and crank it up to what Mel Brooks in Spaceballs (which seems the appropriate comparison) called "Ludicrous Speed."

Obama's spending proposes to take the average Bush deficit for the years 2001-2008, and double it, all the way to 2020. To get out of the Bush hole, we need to dig a hole twice as deep for one-and-a-half times as long. And that's according to the official projections of his Economics Czar, Ms. Rose Colored-Glasses. By 2015, the actual hole may be so deep that even if you toss every Obama speech down it on double-spaced paper you still won't be able to fill it up. In the spendthrift Bush days, federal spending as a proportion of GDP average 19.6 percent. Obama proposes to crank it up to 25 percent as a permanent feature of life.

But, if they're "unsustainable," what happens when they can no longer be sustained? A failure of bond auctions? A downgraded government debt rating? Reduced GDP growth? Total societal collapse? Mad Max on the New Jersey Turnpike?

Testifying to the House Budget Committee, Director Elmendorf attempted to pull back from the wilder shores of "unsustainable": "I think most observers expect that the government will act, that the unsustainability will be resolved through action, not through witnessing some collapse down the road," he said. "If literally nothing is done, then eventually something very, very bad happens. But I think the widespread view is that you and your colleagues will take action."

Dream on, you kinky fantasist. The one thing that can be guaranteed is that a political class led by Harry Reid, Nancy Pelosi, Barney Frank, a handful of reach-across-the-aisle Republican accomodationists and an economically illiterate narcissist in the Oval Office is never going to rein in unsustainable spending in any meaningful sense. That leaves Director Elmendorf's alternative scenario. What was it again? Oh, yeah: "Some collapse down the road."

Speaking of roads, I see that, according to USA Today, when the economic downturn began, the U.S. Department of Transportation had just one employee making over $170,000. A year and a half later, it has 1,690.

Happy days are here again!

Did you get your pay raise this year? What's that, you don't work for the government? Yes, you do, one way or another. Good luck relying on Obama, Pelosi, Frank, and the other Emirs of Kleptocristan "taking action" to "resolve" that. In the last month, the cost of insuring Greece's sovereign debt against default has doubled. Spain and Portugal are headed the same way. When you binge-spend at the Greek level in a democratic state, there aren't many easy roads back. The government has introduced an austerity package to rein in spending. In response, Greek tax collectors have walked off the job.

Read that again slowly: To protest government cuts, striking tax collectors are refusing to collect taxes. In a sane world, this would be a hilarious TV comedy sketch. But most of the Western world is no longer sane. It's tough enough to persuade the town drunk to sober up, but when everyone's face down in the moonshine, maybe it's best just to head for the hills. But where to flee? America is choosing to embrace Greece's future when even the Greeks have figured out you can't make it add up. Consider the opening paragraph of Martin Crutsinger, "AP Economics Writer": "WASHINGTON -- President Barack Obama sent Congress a $3.83 trillion budget on Monday that would pour more money into the fight against high unemployment, boost taxes on the wealthy and freeze spending for a wide swath of government programs."

What language is that written in? How can a $3.83 trillion budget "freeze spending"? And where's the president getting all this money to "pour" into his "fight" against high unemployment? Would it perchance be from the same small businesses that might be hiring new workers if the president didn't need so much money to "pour" away? Heigh-ho. Maybe we can all be striking tax collectors. It seems a comfortable life . . .

If unsustainable is the new normal, it should also be the new national anthem. Take it away, Natalie Cole:

"Unsustainable
That's what you are
Unsustainable
Though near or far
Like a ton of debt you've dropped on us
How the thought of you has flopped on us
Never before
Has someone spent more . . . "

It's not the "debt" or the "deficit," it's the spending. And the only way to reduce that is with fewer government agencies, fewer government programs, fewer government employees, lower government salaries.

Instead, all four are rocketing up: We are incentivizing unsustainability, and, when it comes to "some collapse down the road," you'll be surprised how short that road is.

While America's attention is on the danger of Iran and the other threats emanating from the Islamic world as well as the battle to protect the Constitution from the attacks of the Obama administration, Russia is climbing back to a position of great power. A pivotal election in Ukraine on February 7th will signal that Russia is back.

Ukraine's Election and the Russian Resurgence
January 26, 2010

By Peter Zeihan

Ukrainians go to the polls Feb. 7 to choose their next president. The last time they did this, in November 2004, the result was the prolonged international incident that became known as the Orange Revolution. That event saw Ukraine cleaved off from the Russian sphere of influence, triggering a chain of events that rekindled the Russian-Western Cold War. Next week's runoff election seals the Orange Revolution's reversal. Russia owns the first candidate, Viktor Yanukovich, outright and has a workable agreement with the other, Yulia Timoshenko. The next few months will therefore see the de facto folding of Ukraine back into the Russian sphere of influence; discussion in Ukraine now consists of debate over the speed and depth of that reintegration.

The Centrality of Ukraine
Russia has been working to arrest its slide for several years. Next week's election in Ukraine marks not so much the end of the post-Cold War period of Russian retreat as the beginning of a new era of Russian aggressiveness. To understand why, one must first absorb the Russian view of Ukraine.

Since the break-up of the Soviet Union, most of the former Soviet republics and satellites found themselves cast adrift, not part of the Russian orbit and not really part of any other grouping. Moscow still held links to all of them, but it exercised few of its levers of control over them during Russia's internal meltdown during the 1990s. During that period, a number of these states -- Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Hungary, Romania, Bulgaria and the former Czechoslovakia to be exact -- managed to spin themselves out of the Russian orbit and attach themselves to the European Union and NATO. Others -- Azerbaijan, Georgia, Moldova, Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan and Ukraine -- attempted to follow the path Westward, but have not succeeded at this point. Of these six, Ukraine is by far the most critical. It is not simply the most populous of Russia's former possessions or the birthplace of the Russian ethnicity, it is the most important province of the former Russian Empire and holds the key to the future of Eurasia.
First, the incidental reasons. Ukraine is the Russian Empire's breadbasket. It is also the location of nearly all of Russia's infrastructure links not only to Europe, but also to the Caucasus, making it critical for both trade and internal coherence; it is central to the existence of a state as multiethnic and chronically poor as Russia. The Ukrainian port of Sevastopol is home to Russia's Black Sea fleet, and Ukrainian ports are the only well-developed warm-water ports Russia has ever had. Belarus' only waterborne exports traverse the Dnieper River, which empties into the Black Sea via Ukraine. Therefore, as goes Ukraine, so goes Belarus. Not only is Ukraine home to some 15 million ethnic Russians -- the largest concentration of Russians outside Russia proper -- they reside in a zone geographically identical and contiguous to Russia itself. That zone is also the Ukrainian agricultural and industrial heartland, which again is integrated tightly into the Russian core.
These are all important factors for Moscow, but ultimately they pale before the only rationale that really matters: Ukraine is the only former Russian imperial territory that is both useful and has a natural barrier protecting it. Belarus is on the Northern European Plain, aka the invasion highway of Europe. The Baltics are all easily accessible by sea. The Caucasian states of Armenia, Azerbaijan and Georgia are on the wrong side of the Caucasus Mountains (and Russia's northern Caucasus republics -- remember Chechnya? -- aren't exactly the cream of the crop of Russian possessions). It is true that Central Asia is anchored in mountains to the south, but the region is so large and boasts so few Slavs that it cannot be controlled reliably or cheaply. And Siberia is too huge to be useful.
Without Ukraine, Russia is a desperately defensive power, lacking any natural defenses aside from sheer distance. Moscow and Volgograd, two of Russia's critically strategic cities, are within 300 miles of Ukraine's eastern border. Russia lacks any natural internal transport options -- its rivers neither interconnect nor flow anywhere useful, and are frozen much of the year -- so it must preposition defensive forces everywhere, a burden that has been beyond Russia's capacity to sustain even in the best of times. The (quite realistic) Russian fear is that without Ukraine, the Europeans will pressure Russia along its entire western periphery, the Islamic world will pressure Russia along its entire southern periphery, the Chinese will pressure Russia along its southeastern periphery, and the Americans will pressure Russia wherever opportunity presents itself.
Ukraine by contrast has the Carpathians to its west, a handy little barrier that has deflected invaders of all stripes for millennia. These mountains defend Ukraine against tanks coming from the west as effectively as they protected the Balkans against Mongols attacking from the east. Having the Carpathians as a western border reduces Russia's massive defensive burden. Most important, if Russia can redirect the resources it would have used for defensive purposes on the Ukrainian frontier -- whether those resources be economic, intelligence, industrial, diplomatic or military -- then Russia retains at least a modicum of offensive capability. And that modicum of offensive ability is more than enough to overmatch any of Russia's neighbors (with the exception of China).

When Retreat Ends, the Neighbors Get Nervous
This view of Ukraine is not alien to countries in Russia's neighborhood. They fully understand the difference between a Russia with Ukraine and a Russia without Ukraine, and understand that so long as Ukraine remains independent they have a great deal of maneuvering room. Now that all that remains is the result of an election with no strategic choice at stake, the former Soviet states and satellites realize that their world has just changed.
Georgia traditionally has been the most resistant to Russian influence regardless of its leadership, so defiant that Moscow felt it necessary to trounce Georgia in a brief war in August 2008. Georgia's poor strategic position is nothing new, but a Russia that can redirect efforts from Ukraine is one that can crush Georgia as an afterthought. That is turning the normally rambunctious Georgians pensive, and nudging them toward pragmatism. An opposition group, the Conservative Party, is launching a movement to moderate policy toward Russia, which among other things would mean abandoning Georgia's bid for NATO membership and re-establishing formal political ties with Moscow.
A recent Lithuanian power struggle has resulted in the forced resignation of Foreign Minister Minister Vygaudas. The main public point of contention was the foreign minister's previous participation in facilitating U.S. renditions. Vygaudas, like most in the Lithuanian leadership, saw such participation as critical to maintaining the tiny country's alliance with the United States. President Dalia Grybauskaite, however, saw the writing on the wall in Ukraine, and feels the need to foster a more conciliatory view of Russia. Part of that meant offering up a sacrificial lamb in the form of the foreign minister.
Poland is in a unique position. It knows that should the Russians turn seriously aggressive, its position on the Northern European Plain makes it the focal point of Russian attention. Its location and vulnerability makes Warsaw very sensitive to Russian moves, so it has been watching Ukraine with alarm for several months.
As a result, the Poles have come up with some (admittedly small) olive branches, including an offer for Putin to visit Gdansk last September in an attempt to foster warmer (read: slightly less overtly hostile) relations. Putin not only seized upon the offer, but issued a public letter denouncing the World War II-era Molotov-Ribbentrop Treaty, long considered by Poles as the most outrageous Russian offense to Poland. Warsaw has since replied with invitations for future visits. As with Georgia, Poland will never be pro-Russian -- Poland is not only a NATO member but also hopes to host an American Patriot battery and participate in Washington's developing ballistic missile defense program. But if Warsaw cannot hold Washington's attention -- and it has pulled out all the stops in trying to -- it fears the writing might already be on the wall, and it must plan accordingly.
Azerbaijan has always attempted to walk a fine line between Russia and the West, knowing that any serious bid for membership in something like the European Union or NATO was contingent upon Georgia's first succeeding in joining up. Baku would prefer a more independent arrangement, but it knows that it is too far from Russia's western frontier to achieve such unless the stars are somewhat aligned. As Georgia's plans have met with what can best be described as abject failure, and with Ukraine now appearing headed toward Russian suzerainty, Azerbaijan has in essence resigned itself to the inevitable. Baku is well into negotiations that would redirect much of its natural gas output north to Russia rather than west to Turkey and Europe. And Azerbaijan simply has little else to bargain with.
Other states that have long been closer to Russia, but have attempted to balance Russia against other powers in hopes of preserving some measure of sovereignty, are giving up. Of the remaining former Soviet republics Belarus has the most educated workforce and even a functioning information technology industry, while Kazakhstan has a booming energy industry; both are reasonable candidates for integration into Western systems. But both have this month agreed instead to throw their lots in with Russia. The specific method is an economic agreement that is more akin to shackles than a customs union. The deal effectively will gut both countries' industries in favor of Russian producers. Moscow hopes the union in time will form the foundation of a true successor to the Soviet Union.
Other places continue to show resistance. The new Moldovan prime minister, Vlad Filat, is speaking with the Americans about energy security and is even flirting with the Romanians about reunification. The Latvians are as defiant as ever. The Estonians, too, are holding fast, although they are quietly polling regional powers to at least assess where the next Russian hammer might fall. But for every state that decides it had best accede to Russia's wishes, Russia has that much more bandwidth to dedicate to the poorly positioned holdouts.
Russia also has the opportunity. The United States is bogged down in its economic and health care debates, two wars and the Iran question -- all of which mean Washington's attention is occupied well away from the former Soviet sphere. With the United States distracted, Russia has a freer hand in re-establishing control over states that would like to be under the American security umbrella.
There is one final factor that is pushing Russia to resurge: It feels the pressure of time. The post-Cold War collapse may well have mortally wounded the Russian nation. The collapse in Russian births has halved the size of the 0-20 age group in comparison to their predecessors born in the 1970s and 1980s. Consequently, Russian demographics are among the worst in the world.
Even if Russia manages an economic renaissance, in a decade its population will have aged and shrunk to the point that the Russians will find holding together Russia proper a huge challenge. Moscow's plan, therefore, is simple: entrench its influence while it is in a position of relative strength in preparation for when it must trade that influence for additional time. Ultimately, Russia is indeed going into that good night. But not gently. And not today.

"This report is republished with permission of STRATFOR"

Who can say the truth more clearly and elegantly (and humorously) than Mark Steyn

Mark Steyn: Obama can't say who we're at war with
By MARK STEYN
2010-01-08 10:16:34

Not long after the Ayatollah Khomeini announced his fatwa against Salman Rushdie, the British novelist suddenly turned up on a Muslim radio station in West London late one night and told his interviewer he'd converted to Islam. Marvelous religion, couldn't be happier, Allahu Akbar and all that.

And the Ayatollah said hey, that's terrific news, glad to hear it. But we're still gonna kill you.

Well, even a leftie novelist wises up under those circumstances.

Evidently, the president of the United States takes a little longer.

Barack Obama has spent the past year doing big-time Islamoschmoozing, from his announcement of Gitmo's closure and his investigation of Bush officials, to his bow before the Saudi king and a speech in Cairo to "the Muslim world" with far too many rhetorical concessions and equivocations. And at the end of it the jihad sent America a thank-you note by way of Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab's underwear: Hey, thanks for all the outreach! But we're still gonna kill you.

According to one poll, 58 percent of Americans are in favor of waterboarding young Umar Farouk. Well, you should have thought about that before you made a community organizer president of the world's superpower. The election of Barack Obama was a fundamentally unserious act by the U.S. electorate, and you can't blame the world's mischief-makers, from Putin to Ahmadinejad to the many Gitmo recidivists now running around Yemen, from drawing the correct conclusion.

For two weeks, the government of the United States has made itself a global laughingstock. Don't worry, "the system worked," said Homeland Security Secretary Janet Incompetano. Don't worry, he was an "isolated extremist," said the president. Don't worry, we're banning bathroom breaks for the last hour of the flight, said the TSA. Don't worry, "U.S. border security officials" told the Los Angeles Times, we knew he was on the plane, and we "had decided to question him when he landed." Don't worry, Obama's counterterrorism chief, John Brennan, assured the Sunday talk shows, sure, we read him his rights, and he's lawyered up but he'll soon see that "there is advantage to talking to us in terms of plea agreements."

Oh, that's grand. Try to kill hundreds of people in an act of war, and it's the starting point for a plea deal. In his Cairo speech, the president bragged that the United States would "punish" those in America who would "deny" the "right of women and girls to wear the hijab." If he's so keen on it, maybe he should consider putting the entire federal government into full-body burkas and zipping up the eye slit so that, henceforth, every public utterance by John Brennan will be entirely inaudible. Americans should be ashamed by this all-fools' fortnight.

On Thursday, having renounced over the preceding days "the system worked," the "isolated extremist," the more obviously risible TSA responses, the Gitmo-Yemen express checkout and various other follies, the president finally spoke the words: "We are at war." As National Review's Rich Lowry noted, they were more or less dragged from the presidential gullet by Dick Cheney, who'd accused the commander in chief of failing to grasp this basic point. Again, to be fair, it isn't just Obama. Last November, the electorate voted, in effect, to repudiate the previous eight years and seemed genuinely under the delusion that wars end when one side decides it's all a bit of a bore, and they'd rather the government spend the next eight years doing to health care and the economy what they were previously doing to jihadist camps in Waziristan.

On the other hand, if we are now at war, as Obama belatedly concedes, against whom are we warring? "We are at war against al-Qaida," says the president.

Really? But what does that mean? Was the previous month's "isolated extremist," the Fort Hood killer, part of al-Qaida? When it came to spiritual advice, he turned to the same Yemeni-based American-born imam as the Pantybomber, but he didn't have a fully paid-up membership card.

Nor did young Umar Farouk, come to that. Granted the general overcredentialization of American life, the notion that it doesn't count as terrorism unless you're a member of Local 437 of the Amalgamated Union of Isolated Extremists seems perverse and reductive.

What did the Pantybomber have a membership card in? Well, he was president of the Islamic Society of University College, London. Kafeel Ahmed, who died after driving a burning jeep into the concourse of Glasgow Airport, had been president of the Islamic Society of Queen's University, Belfast. Yassin Nassari, serving three years in jail for terrorism, was president of the Islamic Society of the University of Westminster. Waheed Arafat Khan, arrested in the 2006 Heathrow terror plots that led to Americans having to put their liquids and gels in those little plastic bags, was president of the Islamic Society of London Metropolitan University.

Doesn't this sound like a bigger problem than "al-Qaida," whatever that is? The president has now put citizens of Nigeria on the secondary-screening list. Which is tough on Nigerian Christians, who have no desire to blow up your flight to Detroit. Aside from the highly localized Tamil terrorism of India and Sri Lanka, suicide bombing is a phenomenon entirely of Islam. The broader psychosis that manifested itself only the other day in an axe murderer breaking into a Danish cartoonist's home to kill him because he objects to his cartoon is, likewise, a phenomenon of Islam. This is not to say (to go wearily through the motions) that all Muslims are potential suicide bombers and axe murderers, but it is to state the obvious - that this "war" is about the intersection of Islam and the West, and its warriors are recruited in the large pool of young Muslim manpower, not in Yemen and Afghanistan so much as in Copenhagen and London.

But the president of the United States cannot say that because he is overinvested in a fantasy - that, if only that Texan moron Bush had read Khalid Sheikh Mohammed his Miranda rights and bowed as low as Obama did to the Saudi king, we wouldn't have all these problems. So now Obama says, "We are at war." But he cannot articulate any war aims or strategy because they would conflict with his illusions. And so we will stagger on, playing defense, pulling more and more items out of our luggage - tweezers, shoes, shampoo, snow globes, suppositories - and reacting to every new provocation with greater impositions upon the citizenry.

You can't win by putting octogenarian nuns through full-body scanners.

All you can do is lose slowly. After all, if you can't even address what you're up against with any honesty, you can't blame the other side for drawing entirely reasonable conclusions about your faintheartedness in taking them on.

After that cringe-making radio interview, Salman Rushdie subsequently told The Times of London that trying to appease his would-be killers and calling for his own book to be withdrawn was the biggest mistake of his life. If only the president of the United States was such a quick study.

Why reform American healthcare? Dig below the UN statistics and it's clear that it is the best in the world. All we really need is to curb the tort lawyers and allow insurance companies to sell their health plans in any and all states. We don't need government bureaucrats making life and death decisions for us.

Where U.S. Health Care Ranks Number One
Isn't 'responsiveness' what medicine is all about?

By Mark Constantian
Wall Street Journal Opinion January 8, 2010

The cover of Time pictured President Obama in white coat and stethoscope. The story opened: "The U.S. spends more to get less [health care] than just about every other industrialized country." This trope has dominated media coverage of health-care reform.

Yet a majority of Americans opposes Congress's health-care bills. Why?

The comparative ranking system that most critics cite comes from the U.N.'s World Health Organization (WHO). The ranking most often quoted is Overall Performance, where the U.S. is rated No. 37. The Overall Performance Index, however, is adjusted to reflect how well WHO officials believe that a country could have done in relation to its resources.

The scale is heavily subjective: The WHO believes that we could have done better because we do not have universal coverage. What apparently does not matter is that our population has universal access because most physicians treat indigent patients without charge and accept Medicare and Medicaid payments, which do not even cover overhead expenses. The WHO does rank the U.S. No. 1 of 191 countries for "responsiveness to the needs and choices of the individual patient." Isn't responsiveness what health care is all about?

Data assembled by Dr. Ronald Wenger and published recently in the Bulletin of the American College of Surgeons indicates that cardiac deaths in the U.S. have fallen by two-thirds over the past 50 years. Polio has been virtually eradicated. Childhood leukemia has a high cure rate. Eight of the top 10 medical advances in the past 20 years were developed or had roots in the U.S.

The Nobel Prizes in medicine and physiology have been awarded to more Americans than to researchers in all other countries combined. Eight of the 10 top-selling drugs in the world were developed by U.S. companies. The U.S. has some of the highest breast, colon and prostate cancer survival rates in the world. And our country ranks first or second in the world in kidney transplants, liver transplants, heart transplants, total knee replacements, coronary artery bypass, and percutaneous coronary interventions.

We have the shortest waiting time for nonemergency surgery in the world; England has one of the longest. In Canada, a country of 35 million citizens, 1 million patients now wait for surgery and another million wait to see specialists.

When my friend, cardiac surgeon Peter Alivizatos, returned to Greece after 10 years heading the heart transplantation program at Baylor University in Dallas, the one-year heart transplant survival rate there was 50%--five-year survival was only 35%. He soon increased those numbers to 94% one-year and 90% five-year survival, which is what we achieve in the U.S. So the next time you hear that the U.S. is No. 37, remember that Greece is No. 14. Cuba, by the way, is No. 39.

But the issue is only partly about quality. As we have all heard, the U.S. spends a higher percentage of its gross domestic product for health care than any other country.
Actually, health-care spending now increases more moderately than it has in previous decades. Food, energy, housing and health care consume the same share of American spending today (55%) that they did in 1960 (53%).

So what does this money buy? Certainly some goes to inefficiencies, corporate profits, and costs that should be lowered by professional liability reform and national, free-market insurance access by allowing for competition across state lines. But the majority goes to a long list of advantages that American citizens now expect: the easiest access, the shortest waiting times the widest choice of physicians and hospitals, and constant availability of health care to elderly Americans. What we need now is insurance and liability reform--not health-care reform.

Who determines how much a nation should pay for its health? Is 17% too much, or too little? What better way could there be to dedicate our national resources than toward the health and productivity of our citizens?

Perhaps it's not that America spends too much on health care, but that other nations don't spend enough.

--Dr. Constantian is a plastic and reconstructive surgeon in New Hampshire.

The idiocy of putting the Christmas bomber into the criminal law system is rightly condemned by Charles Krauthammer. But he sees a ray of iight in the President's densely blind world. Would we be this optimistic.

Obama's Guantanamo obsession

By Charles Krauthammer
Friday, January 8, 2010; A21

On Wednesday, Nigerian would-be bomber Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab was indicted by a Michigan grand jury for attempted murder and sundry other criminal charges. The previous day, the State Department announced that his visa had been revoked. The system worked.

Well, it did for Abdulmutallab. What he lost in flying privileges he gained in Miranda rights. He was singing quite freely when seized after trying to bring down Northwest Flight 253 over Detroit. But the Obama administration decided to give him a lawyer and the right to remain silent. We are now forced to purchase information from this attempted terrorist in the coin of leniency. Absurdly, Abdulmutallab is now in control.

And this is no ordinary information. He was trained by al-Qaeda in Yemen, and just days after he was lawyered up and shut up, the United States was forced to close its embassy in Yemen because of active threats from the same people who had trained and sent Abdulmutallab.

This is nuts. Even if you wanted ultimately to try him as an ordinary criminal, he could have been detained in military custody -- and thus subject to military interrogation -- without prejudicing his ultimate disposition. After all, every Guantanamo detainee was first treated as an enemy combatant and presumably interrogated. But some (most notoriously Khalid Sheik Mohammed) are going to civilian trial. That determination can be made later.

John Brennan, President Obama's counterterrorism adviser, professes an inability to see any "downsides" to treating Abdulmutallab as an ordinary criminal -- with a right to remain silent -- a view with which 71 percent of likely voters sensibly disagree.

The administration likes to defend itself by invoking a Bush precedent: Wasn't the shoe bomber treated the same way?

Yes. And it was a mistake, but in the context of the time understandable. That context does not remotely exist today.

Richard Reid struck three months after 9/11. The current anti-terror apparatus was not in place. Remember: This was barely a month after President Bush authorized the creation of military commissions and before that system had been even set up. Moreover, the Pentagon at the time was preoccupied with the Afghan campaign that brought down the Taliban in two months. The last major Taliban city, Kandahar, fell just two weeks before Reid tried to ignite his shoe on an airplane.

To be sure, after a few initial misguided statements, Obama did get somewhat serious about the Christmas Day attack. First, he instituted high-level special screening for passengers from 14 countries, the vast majority of which are Muslim with significant Islamist elements. This is the first rational step away from today's idiotic random screening and toward, yes, a measure of profiling -- i.e., focusing on the population most overwhelmingly likely to be harboring a suicide bomber.

Obama also sensibly suspended all transfers of Yemenis from Guantanamo. Nonetheless, Obama insisted on repeating his determination to close the prison, invoking his usual rationale of eliminating a rallying cry and recruiting tool for al-Qaeda.

Imagine that Guantanamo were to disappear tomorrow, swallowed in a giant tsunami. Do you think there'd be any less recruiting for al-Qaeda in Yemen, Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, London?

Jihadism's list of grievances against the West is not only self-replenishing but endlessly creative. Osama bin Laden's 1998 fatwa commanding universal jihad against America cited as its two top grievances our stationing of troops in Saudi Arabia and Iraqi suffering under anti-Saddam sanctions.

Today, there are virtually no U.S. troops in Saudi Arabia. And the sanctions regime against Iraq was abolished years ago. Has al-Qaeda stopped recruiting? Ayman al-Zawahiri, al-Qaeda's No. 2, often invokes Andalusia in his speeches. For those not steeped in the multivolume lexicon of Islamist grievances, Andalusia refers to Iberia, lost by Islam to Christendom -- in 1492.

This is a fanatical religious sect dedicated to establishing the most oppressive medieval theocracy and therefore committed to unending war with America not just because it is infidel but because it represents modernity with its individual liberty, social equality (especially for women) and profound tolerance (religious, sexual, philosophical). You going to change that by evacuating Guantanamo?

Nevertheless, Obama will not change his determination to close Guantanamo. He is too politically committed. The only hope is that perhaps now he is offering his "recruiting" rationale out of political expediency rather than real belief. With suicide bombers in the air, cynicism is far less dangerous to the country than naivete.

Why is Obama so reluctant to acknowledge what he must know? Islam is at war with America and will continue to be so until it has conquered America.

Was Obama, like many, if not most or all, Muslim-born babies, inculcated with the poison of Islam at birth? Does the poison still run through his veins?

Not the Manchurian candidate, but the Meccan candidate?

Hollow Words on Terrorism

By Charles Krauthammer

WASHINGTON -- Janet Napolitano -- former Arizona governor, now overmatched secretary of homeland security -- will forever be remembered for having said of the attempt to bring down an airliner over Detroit: "The system worked." The attacker's concerned father had warned U.S. authorities about his son's jihadist tendencies. The would-be bomber paid cash and checked no luggage on a transoceanic flight. He was nonetheless allowed to fly, and would have killed 288 people in the air alone, save for a faulty detonator and quick actions by a few passengers.

Heck of a job, Brownie.

The reason the country is uneasy about the Obama administration's response to this attack is a distinct sense of not just incompetence but incomprehension. From the very beginning, President Obama has relentlessly tried to downplay and deny the nature of the terrorist threat we continue to face. Napolitano renames terrorism "man-caused disasters." Obama goes abroad and pledges to cleanse America of its post-9/11 counterterrorist sins. Hence, Guantanamo will close, CIA interrogators will face a special prosecutor, and Khalid Sheik Mohammed will bask in a civilian trial in New York -- a trifecta of political correctness and image management.

And just to make sure even the dimmest understand, Obama banishes the term "war on terror." It's over -- that is, if it ever existed.

Obama may have declared the war over. Unfortunately al-Qaeda has not. Which gives new meaning to the term "asymmetric warfare."

And produces linguistic -- and logical -- oddities that littered Obama's public pronouncements following the Christmas Day attack. In his first statement, Obama referred to Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab as "an isolated extremist." This is the same president who, after the Ford Hood shooting, warned us "against jumping to conclusions" -- code for daring to associate Nidal Hasan's mass murder with his Islamist ideology. Yet, with Abdulmutallab, Obama jumped immediately to the conclusion, against all existing evidence, that the bomber acted alone.

More jarring still were Obama's references to the terrorist as a "suspect" who "allegedly tried to ignite an explosive device." You can hear the echo of FDR: "Yesterday, December 7, 1941 -- a date which will live in infamy -- Japanese naval and air force suspects allegedly bombed Pearl Harbor."

Obama reassured the nation that this "suspect" had been charged. Reassurance? The president should be saying: We have captured an enemy combatant -- an illegal combatant under the laws of war: no uniform, direct attack on civilians -- and now to prevent future attacks, he is being interrogated regarding information he may have about al-Qaeda in Yemen.

Instead, Abdulmutallab is dispatched to some Detroit-area jail and immediately lawyered up. At which point -- surprise! -- he stops talking.

This absurdity renders hollow Obama's declaration that "we will not rest until we find all who were involved." Once we've given Abdulmutallab the right to remain silent, we have gratuitously forfeited our right to find out from him precisely who else was involved, namely those who trained, instructed, armed and sent him.

This is all quite mad even in Obama's terms. He sends 30,000 troops to fight terror overseas, yet if any terrorists come to attack us here, they are magically transformed from enemy into defendant.

The logic is perverse. If we find Abdulmutallab in an al-Qaeda training camp in Yemen, where he is merely preparing for a terror attack, we snuff him out with a Predator -- no judge, no jury, no qualms. But if we catch him in the United States in the very act of mass murder, he instantly acquires protection not just from execution by drone but even from interrogation.

The president said that this incident highlights "the nature of those who threaten our homeland." But the president is constantly denying the nature of those who threaten our homeland. On Tuesday, he referred five times to Abdulmutallab (and his terrorist ilk) as "extremist(s)."

A man who shoots abortion doctors is an extremist. An eco-fanatic who torches logging sites is an extremist. Abdulmutallab is not one of these. He is a jihadist. And unlike the guys who shoot abortion doctors, jihadists have cells all over the world; they blow up trains in London, nightclubs in Bali and airplanes over Detroit (if they can); and are openly pledged to war on America.

Any government can through laxity let someone slip through the cracks. But a government that refuses to admit that we are at war, indeed, refuses even to name the enemy -- jihadist is a word banished from the Obama lexicon -- turns laxity into a governing philosophy.

They are sick.

The followers of Mohammed are injected with the poison of Islam at birth.

Mohammed is the model. Murder people who are in the way or who criticize you? LIe, cheat and steal? Muslim mainstream today as it has been through all of Islamic history.

New Year's Day examples.

Pakistan: Suicide bomber kills 88, wounds 50

A suicide bomber detonated his explosives-packed vehicle in a crowd of people watching a volleyball tournament Friday in northwest Pakistan, killing 88 people in the deadliest attack in the country in more than two months.

Regional Information Minister Mian Iftikhar Hussain reiterated the government's resolve to target militants wherever they may be, saying "we need to be more offensive to fight them."

The attack was the deadliest since a car bomb killed 112 people at a crowded market in Peshawar on Oct. 28.

And this:

Danish police shoot man who tried to kill cartoonist

COPENHAGEN (AFP) - Danish police shot and arrested an axe-wielding Somali who attacked a cartoonist reviled by Muslims for a controversial drawing of their prophet Mohammed, authorities said Saturday.

Kurt Westergaard, who has faced several death threats since his cartoon nearly five years ago set off protests across the Muslim world, hid in a safe room as the 28-year-old suspect tried to break into his home late Friday.

Police said they shot and wounded the intruder, said by intelligence services to be linked to the radical Somali Shebab movement and leaders of Al-Qaeda in East Africa, as he threatened them with an axe and a knife.

"He will be charged for two murder attempts, on Kurt Westergaard and on a police officer," East Jutland Police Superintendent Ole Mabsen told AFP on Saturday.

"He is in the hospital at the moment. He will be taken into court in the afternoon, where we will ask the judge to bring him into custody."

The suspect has not been named, but the Danish internal security service PET said in a statement he was "linked to terrorism" both in Denmark and in east Africa.

Westergaard, 74, was at his home with a five-year-old granddaughter when the intruder tried to get in.

"I locked myself in our safe room and alerted the police. He tried to smash the entrance door with an axe, but he didn't manage," he told Danish news agency Ritzau.

Is there a cure?

A member of the ruthless Iranian enforcement gang the Basij that was charged with putting down any post-election protests defected to London. He has now told his story of the election fraud planning of the regime to Channel 4 in London.

This is the regime the Obama administration continues to honor in the hopes of "reasonable" negotiations while shunning the millions of Iranians who, like us, want that regime to fall.

The extent of the fraud and planned violence against the Iranian people is shocking. While Neda's murder was a symbol of the ayatollah's determination to wipe out protests, what until now was not known is how the entire election was manipulated and the result foreordained. To be sure, there were speculation and accusations of election fraud, but this appears to be hard evidence of what actually happened.

It is a tragedy that Obama did not stand up strongly for the protesters and have the United States seize the opportunity to back the millions ready to overthrow the government instead of pursuing his ineffectual Iran policy.

Obama has guaranteed the world will soon face a nuclear weaponized Iran led by fanatics dedicated to Islamic imperial domination over the Middle East but the world. The doctrine of mutually assured destruction has no meaning for true believers eager to enter paradise by being killed while killing infidels.

If a true believer of Islam knows paradise is his by m

The global warming fanatics have not only manipulated, falsified and invented climate data, they have done their best, successfully, to eliminate contrary opinion from so-called climate "peer review" journals, which are the basis of much if not most of the scientific base.

One of those frozen out of the climate literature details this subversion of science in the service of ideology. As he concludes,

Ironically, with the release of the Climategate emails, the Climatic Research Unit, Michael Mann, Phil Jones and Tom Wigley have dramatically weakened the case for emissions reductions. The EPA claimed to rely solely upon compendia of the refereed literature such as the IPCC reports, in order to make its finding of endangerment from carbon dioxide. Now that we know that literature was biased by the heavy-handed tactics of the East Anglia mob, the EPA has lost the basis for its finding.

Even the New York Times editorial page may be waking up to the internal threat posed by immigrants from barbarian Muslim societies with values far removed from those of the West.

What's happening in Europe is an advanced stage of what can happen and is happening already in America.

Politicians ignore the danger that citIzens increasingly face from unassimilated -- and unassimilable -- Muslims.

Islam is an all-encompassing ideology demanding submission to its command to wage war until Islam rules the world. Its hold on its adherents inculcated from the moment of birth is difficult to break for most and impossible for many.

European politicians turned a blind eye for decades to this fact as they waved Muslim immigrants in. The result is chaos sweeping through Europe with fear, resentment and anger building among the natives. Many are pessimistic about the chances of European civilization surviving the belligerent Islamic onslaught. Political correctness and multiculturalism stand in the way of an aggressive defense.

Oddmakers are betting on Islam.

Op-Ed Columnist

Europe's Minaret Moment

By ROSS DOUTHAT

They toasted to progress in Europe's capitals last week. On Tuesday, the Treaty of Lisbon went into effect, bringing the nations of the European Union one step closer to the unity the Continent's elite has been working toward for over 50 years.

But the treaty's implementation fell just days after a milestone of a different sort: a referendum in Switzerland, long famous for religious tolerance, in which 57.5 percent of voters chose to ban the nation's Muslims from building minarets.

Switzerland isn't an E.U. member state, but the minaret moment could have happened almost anywhere in Europe nowadays -- in France, where officials have floated the possibility of banning the burka; in Britain, which elected two representatives of the fascistic, anti-Islamic British National Party to the European Parliament last spring; in Italy, where a bill introduced this year would ban mosque construction and restrict the Islamic call to prayer.

If the more perfect union promised by the Lisbon Treaty is the European elite's greatest triumph, the failure to successfully integrate millions of Muslim immigrants represents its greatest failure. And the two are intertwined: they're both the fruits of the high-handed, often undemocratic approach to politics that Europe's leaders have cultivated in their quest for unity.

The European Union probably wouldn't exist in its current form if the Continent's elites hadn't been willing to ignore popular sentiment. (The Lisbon Treaty, for instance, was deliberately designed to bypass most European voters, after a proposed E.U. Constitution was torpedoed by referendums in France and the Netherlands in 2005.) But this political style -- forge a consensus among the establishment, and assume you can contain any backlash that develops -- is also how the Continent came to accept millions of Muslim immigrants, despite the absence of a popular consensus on the issue, or a plan for how to integrate them.

The immigrants came first as guest workers, recruited after World War II to relieve labor shortages, and then as beneficiaries of generous asylum and family reunification laws, designed to salve Europe's post-colonial conscience. The European elites assumed that the divide between Islam and the West was as antiquated as scimitars and broadswords, and that a liberal, multicultural, post-Christian federation would have no difficulty absorbing new arrivals from more traditional societies. And they decided, too -- as Christopher Caldwell writes in "Reflections on the Revolution in Europe," his wonderfully mordant chronicle of Europe's Islamic dilemma -- that liberal immigration policies "involve the sort of nonnegotiable moral duties that you don't vote on."

Better if they had let their voters choose. The rate of immigration might have been slower, and the efforts to integrate the new arrivals more strenuous. Instead, Europe's leaders ended up creating a clash of civilizations inside their own frontiers.

Millions of Muslims have accepted European norms. But millions have not. This means polygamy in Sweden; radical mosques in Britain's fading industrial cities; riots over affronts to the Prophet Muhammad in Denmark; and religiously inspired murder in the Netherlands. It means terrorism, and the threat of terrorism, from London to Madrid.

And it means a rising backlash, in which European voters support extreme measures and extremist parties because their politicians don't seem to have anything to say about the problem.

In fairness, it isn't clear exactly what those leaders could offer at this point. They can't undo decades of migration. A large Muslim minority is in Europe to stay. Persisting with the establishment's approach makes a certain sense: keep a lid on prejudice, tamp down extremism, and hope that time will transform the zealous Islam of recent immigrants into a more liberal form of faith, and make the conflict go away.

Or least keep it manageable. Caldwell's book, the best on the subject to date, has a deeply pessimistic tone, but it shies away from specific predictions about the European future. Other writers are less circumspect, envisioning a Muslim-majority "Eurabia" in which Shariah has as much clout as liberalism.

But even a decadent West is probably stronger than this. The most likely scenario for Europe isn't dhimmitude; it's a long period of tension, punctuated by spasms of violence, that makes the Continent a more unpleasant place without fundamentally transforming it.

This is cold comfort, though, if you have to live under the shadow of violence. Just ask the Swiss, who spent last week worrying about the possibility that the minaret vote might make them a target for Islamist terrorism.

They're right to worry. And all of Europe has to worry as well, thanks to the folly of its leaders -- now, and for many years to come.

The American media gave some notice to the massacre of 57 in the Philippines this past week.The New York Times did its usual best at not reporting the real news, as shown by this article that appeared in Saturday's Times.

What is really going on here?

The locale of the massacre is on the Philippine island of Mindanao, which is largely in the hands of Muslims, some of whom play ball with the national parties in the mostly Roman Catholic country. Other Muslims have been waging an insurgent war for decades to make the Philippines totally Islamic, starting with Mindanao.

One of the Muslim clans which rules in the Mindanao province of Maguindanao with the support of the national government did not like the idea of a fellow Muslim mounting a challenge for governor in next year's election. As the challenger's supporters were driving to the provincial capital to file his election certificate in a six-car convoy (which included the candidate's wife), they were ambushed by about 100 supporters of the ruling Ampatuan clan or tribe. Those in the convoy and two other cars that happened to be following the convoy were taken a couple of miles off the road and all 57 captives were brutally maimed and murdered. Army and police alerted to the ambush by witnesses located the massacre site before the Ampatua family had finished the job. Using a provincial government back-hoe, three massive holes in the ground had been dug for the bodies and vehicles and some had been filled and covered, but 22 bodies will still on the ground when the authorities arrived. The attackers had been warned by cell phone and had fled the scene.

Of the 57 victims, about 16 were women and 30 were journalists who joined the convoy to report on the filing of the electoral challenge.

Later, some participants in the massacre, who had pangs of conscience, reported to authorities what had happened, which led to the arrest of the son of the provincial governor.

A Philippine TV station posted a timeline on the internet, which can be accessed by clicking here.

Details are still coming out, as in the Times story linked, which fails to note the Islamic culture of vicious violence that is embedded in Mindanao. The late Harvard historian Samuel P. Huntington, in advancing his theory in the early 1990s that the future would be marked by a "clash of civilizations," specifically referred to the "bloody borders" of Islam. Islam breeds not only a readiness to violence against infidels, but against "the other," including fellow Muslims of a different tribe or sect.

Read the Times piece and think about the brutality involved perpetrated by men who didn't even know their victims, including some who just happened to be in cars behind the official convoy of the challenger. There is what to a westerner appears to be a sick but gleeful use of violence deployed in the massacre, a terrorist warning to all who would challenge the clan that ugly things will happen to them and their followers should they even try.

Was it terrorism, the national government wonders. Of course it was. It is the stock and trade of true Islam that more and more is being revived as the teachings of what the Koran and Mohammed really mean are spread throughout the world by Saudi oil billions.

Mark Steyn is the business of making sensible observations -- often in hilarious fashion -- on the strange turnings of the world.

This weekend he goes even farther, doing investigative reporting that the "lamestream" media fails or refuses to do about the fraudulent global warming scam being perpetrated by Al Gore-type profiteers and governmental organizations eager to expand their reach and control for the riches that are sure to follow.

In this case, Steyn "connects the dots" linking two of the leading global warming "scientist" fraudsters exposed in the internet posting of the damning Unversity of East Anglia emails to a leading "science" reporter for the New York Times Andrew Revkin. The Times leads the chorus in intoning the climate warming dirges of impending world disaster.

The tight little circle of academic "peer-reviewers" who peer-review their "peer-reviewed" colleagues are at the heart of the scam. "Science reporters such as Revkin bestow legitimacy. They support those who create the fraud and benefit those eager to cash in on the fraud for money and power.

Where will it all lead?

As the UN conferees gather in Copenhagen, Steyn quotes the new president of the European Union "an eager proponent of the ecopalypse," who confidently calls 2009 "the first year of global governance."

Global government, huh? I wonder where you go to vote them out of office.

November 28, 2009

CRU's Tree-Ring Circus
Who peer-reviews the peer-reviewers?

By Mark Steyn at National Review Online

My favorite moment in the Climategate/Climaquiddick scandal currently roiling the "climate change" racket was Stuart Varney's interview on Fox News with the actor Ed Begley Jr. -- star of the 1980s medical drama St. Elsewhere but latterly better known, as is the fashion with members of the thespian community, as an "activist." He's currently in a competition with Bill Nye ("the Science Guy") to see who can have the lowest "carbon footprint." Pistols at dawn would seem the quickest way of resolving that one, but presumably you couldn't get a reality series out of it. Anyway, Ed was relaxed about the mountain of documents recently leaked from Britain's Climate Research Unit in which the world's leading climate-change warm-mongers e-mail each other back and forth on how to "hide the decline" and other interesting matters.

Nothing to worry about, folks. "We'll go down the path and see what happens in peer-reviewed studies," said Ed airily. "Those are the key words here, Stuart. 'Peer-reviewed studies.'"

Hang on. Could you say that again more slowly so I can write it down? Not to worry. Ed said it every 12 seconds, as if it were the magic charm that could make all the bad publicity go away. He wore an open-necked shirt, and, although I don't have a 76" inch HDTV, I wouldn't have been surprised to find a talismanic peer-reviewed amulet nestling in his chest hair for additional protection. "If these scientists have done something wrong, it will be found out and their peers will determine it," insisted Ed. "Don't get your information from me, folks, or any newscaster. Get it from people with Ph.D. after their names. 'Peer-reviewed studies is the key words. And if it comes out in peer-reviewed studies . . . "

Got it: Pier-reviewed studies. You stand on the pier and you notice the tide seems to be coming in a little higher than it used to and you wonder if it's something to do with incandescent light bulbs killing the polar bears? Is that how it works?

No, no, peer-reviewed studies. "Peer-reviewed studies. Go to Science magazine, folks. Go to Nature," babbled Ed. "Read peer-reviewed studies. That's all you need to do. Don't get it from you or me."

Look for the peer-reviewed label! And then just believe whatever it is they tell you!

Read on. . .

COLUMBUS, Ohio November 16, 2009 --Dozens of Christian activists descended on Columbus Monday morning to rally in the name of Rifqa Barry, the central Ohio teenager who converted from Islam to Christianity. Bary fled to Florida during the summer, saying she feared her father would kill her because of her conversion. Would she be another "honor killing" victim in the U.S. or in Sri Lanka, should she be sent back by her family to their Muslim relatives back home?

Bary is now back in Ohio under foster care. Her case is moving through the legal system. A hearing scheduled for Monday was postponed until December 22.

Rally-goers said they are worried about Bary's safety if she is returned to her parents.

"There is the larger question of, 'Is Aamerica going to protect religious freedom at this time and allow this girl to make a choice in conscience to be a Christian, rather than a Muslim," asked Robert Spencer, a co-organizer of the rally.

Spencer was interviewed at the rally about the threat of Islam, which has two aspects of concern to America: violent jihad and stealth jihad. The Fort Hood murderer Major Nidal Hasan is a violent jihadist killing "infidels" in the name of Islam. Those Muslims who constantly seek special privileges for Islamic practices or to silence all criticism of Islam as "racist" are examples of stealth jihadists. The ultimate goal of jihad is universal rule of Islam in the world, including Islamic law replacing the Constitution in the United States.

The interviewer of Robert Spencer in the video clip below is an ex-Muslim Nabil Qureshi. Spencer is one of the most knowledgeable students of Islam in the world.

Political correctness and multiculturalism are major obstacles in the battle to preserve Western civilization.

There is no greater expert on the inadequacy and perils of bringing criminal charges against enemy combatants in civilian courts than Andrew McCarthy. McCarthy is the chief government attorney who successfully prosecuted the blind shiekh behind the first bombing of the World Trade Center in 1993. As McCarthy recounts in his book Willful Blindness, many collaborators of the blind shiekh were not prosecuted because certain evidence could not be used against them without disclosing national security investigative secrets to the public, including our enemies at large.

McCarthy now details how maliciously wrong and contemptible and dangerous for American security the Obama/Holder decision is to try Khalid Mohammed in a civilian court in New York.

It is dangerous because of the heightened terrorist risk New York City will be exposed to.

It is dangerous because of the risk of exposing national security secrets to the defendants and their terrorist collaborators still on the loose and free to kill Americans.

It is malicious because the only reason for staging this trial in civilian court where it is impossible to limit discovery of national security information is to provide the "transnational left" with material to seek war crime trials in Europe against officials of the Bush Administration who developed and carried out the counterterrorism strategy that kept America safe since 9/11.

The dismantling of the nation's defenses against Islamic terrorism under Obama is already evident in the re-opening of the investigation of the actions of CIA employees who had already been investigated and cleared. It is evident in the Obama Administration instructions forbidding reference to "Islamic terrorism" and "war on terror." It is evident in the President's message at Fort Hood, calling the terrorist murder a "tragedy" and "incomprehensible" when to any unbiased observer it was was the first successful Islamic massacre on American soil since 9/11.

Now the Obama/Holder plan is to go even further and provide our Islamic enemies with information that will, in the words of Andrew McCarthy, "make our enemies more efficient at killing us."

November 16, 2009, 0:00 a.m.

Trial and Terror
The Left gets its reckoning.

By Andrew C. McCarthy in National Review Online

The decision to bring Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and four other top al-Qaeda terrorists to New York City for a civilian trial is one of the most irresponsible ever made by a presidential administration. That it is motivated by politics could not be more obvious. That it spells unprecedented danger for our security will soon become obvious.

The five 9/11 plotters were originally charged in a military commission. Military commissions have been approved by Congress and the courts. Eleven months ago, the jihadists were prepared to end the military case by pleading guilty and proceeding to execution. Plus, the Obama administration is continuing the commission system for other enemy combatants accused of war crimes. If we are going to have military commissions for any war criminals, it is senseless not to have them for the worst war criminals. In sum, there is no good legal or policy rationale for transferring these barbarians to the civilian justice system. Doing so will prompt a hugely costly three-ring circus of a trial, provide a soapbox for al-Qaeda's anti-American bile, and create a public-safety nightmare for New York City.

There is, however, a patent political rationale behind Obama's decision.

Continue reading . . .

Dr. Thomas Sowell of Stanford's Hoover Institution expresses his disgust and exasperation with Obama's betrayal.

Why is he endangering Americans?

The president is worse than a "jackass."

He is a danger to every American.

Deepest Bow Is Reserved For World Opinion

By THOMAS SOWELL
Posted 07:32 PM ET

In the string of amazing decisions made during the first year of the Obama administration, nothing seems more like sheer insanity than the decision to try foreign terrorists, who have committed acts of war against the United States, in federal court, as if they were American citizens accused of crimes.

Terrorists are not even entitled to the protection of the Geneva Conventions, much less the Constitution of the United States. Terrorists have never observed, nor even claimed to have observed, the Geneva Conventions, nor are they among those covered by it.

But over and above the utter inconsistency of what is being done is the utter recklessness it represents.

The last time an attack on the World Trade Center was treated as a matter of domestic criminal justice was after a bomb was exploded there in 1993. Under the rules of American criminal law, the prosecution had to turn over all sorts of information to the defense -- information that told the al-Qaida international terrorist network what we knew about them and how we knew it.

This was nothing more and nothing less than giving away military secrets to an enemy in wartime -- something for which people have been executed, as they should have been.

Secrecy in warfare is a matter of life and death. Lives were risked and lost during World War II to prevent Nazi Germany from discovering that Britain had broken its supposedly unbreakable Enigma code and could read their military plans that were being radioed in that code.

"Loose lips sink ships" was the World War II motto in the United States. But loose lips are mandated under the rules of criminal prosecutions.

Tragically, this administration seems hell-bent to avoid seeing acts of terrorism against the United States as acts of war. The very phrase "war on terrorism" is avoided, as if that will stop the terrorists' war on us.

The mind-set of the left behind such thinking was spelled out in a San Francisco Chronicle editorial, which said that "Khalid Sheikh 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 be forced to be disclosed to al-Qaida was not mentioned. Nor was there mention of how many foreign nations and individuals whose cooperation with us in the war on terror has been involved in countering al-Qaida -- 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.

We used to wonder what Obama was up to. Now we must wonder why.

Once again he is taking action that endangers all American citiziens.

He is putting on trial in an American courtroom the self-confessed mastermind of 9/11, who, with his collaborators in prison at Guantanamo, asked to be executed. Andrew McCarthy, who successfully prosecuted those behind the first bombing of the World Trade Center in 1993, outlines the damage that Obama is doing:

This summer, I theorized that Attorney General Eric Holder -- and his boss [Barack Obama] -- had a hidden agenda in ordering a re-investigation of the CIA for six-year-old alleged interrogation excesses that had already been scrutinized by non-partisan DOJ prosecutors who had found no basis for prosecution.

The continuing of Bush-era counterterrorism policies (i.e., the policies that kept us safe from more domestic terror attacks), coupled with the Holder Justice Department's obsession to disclose classified national-defense information from that period, enable Holder to give the hard Left the "reckoning" that he and Obama promised during the 2008 campaign.

It would be too politically explosive for Obama/Holder to do the dirty work of charging Bush administration officials; but as new revelations from investigations and declassifications are churned out, Leftist lawyers use them to urge European and international tribunals to bring "torture" and "war crimes" indictments. Thus, administration cooperation gives Obama's base the reckoning it demands but Obama gets to deny responsibility for any actual prosecutions.

Today's announcement that KSM and other top al-Qaeda terrorists will be transferred to Manhattan federal court for civilian trials neatly fits this hidden agenda. Nothing results in more disclosures of government intelligence than civilian trials. They are a banquet of information, not just at the discovery stage but in the trial process itself, where witnesses -- intelligence sources -- must expose themselves and their secrets.

Let's take stock of where we are at this point. KSM and his confederates wanted to plead guilty and have their martyrs' execution last December, when they were being handled by military commission. As I said at the time, we could and should have accommodated them. The Obama administration could still accommodate them. After all, the president has not pulled the plug on all military commissions: Holder is going to announce at least one commission trial (for Nashiri, the Cole bomber) today.

Moreover, KSM has no defense. He was under American indictment for terrorism for years before there ever was a 9/11, and he can't help himself but brag about the atrocities he and his fellow barbarians have carried out.

So: We are now going to have a trial that never had to happen for defendants who have no defense. And when defendants have no defense for their own actions, there is only one thing for their lawyers to do: put the government on trial in hopes of getting the jury (and the media) spun up over government errors, abuses and incompetence.

That is what is going to happen in the trial of KSM et al. It will be a soapbox for al-Qaeda's case against America. Since that will be their "defense," the defendants will demand every bit of information they can get about interrogations, renditions, secret prisons, undercover operations targeting Muslims and mosques, etc., and -- depending on what judge catches the case -- they are likely to be given a lot of it.

The administration will be able to claim that the judge, not the administration, is responsible for the exposure of our defense secrets. And the circus will be played out for all to see -- in the middle of the war. It will provide endless fodder for the transnational Left to press its case that actions taken in America's defense are violations of international law that must be addressed by foreign courts.

And the intelligence bounty will make our enemies more efficient at killing us.

Is Mark Steyn the only sane person writing about jihadism who will bluntly describe the insanity he sees and hears in this diversity and multiculturally plagued society?

Who else has the spine to call Army Chief of Staff General Casey "brain-addled" for his incredibly appalling and and morally bankrupt statement that if Fort Hood turns out to be a setback for diversity it would a worse outcome that the massacre itrself?.

Mark quotes his fellow warrior in the fight for freedom of speech in Canada Ezra Levant who made this chilling observation:

Ezra Levant, my comrade in a long battle to restore freedom of speech to Canada, likes to say that the Danish cartoons crisis may one day be seen as a more critical event than 9/11. Not, obviously, in the comparative death tolls but in what each revealed about the state of Western civilization. After 9/11, we fought back, hit hard, rolled up the Afghan camps; after the cartoons, we weaseled and equivocated and appeased and signaled that we were willing to trade core Western values for a quiet life. Watching the decadence and denial on display this past week, I think in years to come Fort Hood will be seen in a similar light. What happened is not a "tragedy" but a national scandal, already fading from view.

Mark in full.

Mark Steyn: A jihadist hiding in plain sight
By MARK STEYN in the Orange County Register
2009-11-13 11:55:01
Shortly after 9/11, there was a lot of talk about how no one would ever hijack an American airliner ever again - not because of new security arrangements but because an alert citizenry was on the case: We were hip to their jive. The point appeared to be proved three months later on a U.S.-bound Air France flight. The "Shoebomber" attempted to light his footwear, and the flight attendants and passengers pounced. As the more boorish commentators could not resist pointing out, even the French guys walloped him.

But the years go by, and the mood shifts. You didn't have to be "alert" to spot Maj. Nidal Hasan. He'd spent most of the past half-decade walking around with a big neon sign on his head saying "JIHADIST. STAND WELL BACK." But we (that's to say, almost all of us; and certainly almost anyone who matters in national security and the broader political culture) are now reflexively conditioned to ignore the flashing neon sign. Like those apocryphal Victorian ladies discreetly draping the lasciviously curved legs of their pianos, if a glimpse of hard unpleasant reality peeps through we simply veil it in another layer of fluffy illusions.

Continue reading . . .

Here is an electricfying bolt of truth from the Chief Rabbi of London:

"Where today in European culture with its consumerism and instant gratification - because you're worth it - where will you find space for the concept of sacrifice for the sake of generations not yet born?

"Europe, at least the indigenous population of Europe, is dying."

Selfishness, instant gratification rules.

Europeans too selfish to have children, says Chief Rabbi

"In a head-to-head contest between a moral relativist and a fundamentalist, who wins? The fundamentalist must win because he is sure he's right, and you are not sure he's wrong."

Europe is "dying'' because its secular residents are too selfish to have children, according to Lord Sacks, the Chief Rabbi.

Published: 12:02PM GMT 05 Nov 2009 Telegraph, London

Lord Sacks: The Chief Rabbi's provocative comments came as he delivered the annual lecture for theology think-tank Theos in central London

The leader of Britain's Jewish community claimed the continent's population is in decline because people care more about shopping than the sacrifice involved in parenthood.

He blamed atheist "neo-Darwinians" for Europe's low birth rate and said religious people of all denominations are more likely to have large families.

The Chief Rabbi, who entered the House of Lords last week, made his comments in a lecture on religion in the 21st century hosted by Theos, the public theology think-tank, on Wednesday night.

Lord Sacks said that faith had survived so far because it could provide answers to mankind's eternal search for meaning in life - unlike the market, the state, science or philosophy, which underpin modern liberal democracies.

He claimed religion could continue to play an important role worldwide in the future, by engaging in debate with scientists, by campaigning on issues such as global poverty or the environment, and by discussing the nature of the common good with humanists.

The Chief Rabbi warned that secular Europe is at risk, however, because its moral relativism can easily be defeated by fundamentalists.

And he claimed that its population is also in decline, compared with every other part of the world, because non-believers lack shared values of family and community that religions have.

Lord Sacks said: "Parenthood involves massive sacrifice of money, attention, time and emotional energy.

"Where today in European culture with its consumerism and instant gratification - because you're worth it - where will you find space for the concept of sacrifice for the sake of generations not yet born?

"Europe, at least the indigenous population of Europe, is dying."

"That is one of the unsayable truths of our time. We are undergoing the moral equivalent of climate change and no one is talking about it.

"Albert Camus once said, 'The only serious philosophical question is why should I not commit suicide?'.

"I think he was wrong. The only serious philosophical question is, why should I have a child? Our culture is not giving an easy answer to that question."

He added: "Wherever you turn today - Jewish, Christian or Muslim - the more religious the community, the larger on average are their families.

"The major assault on religion today comes from the neo-Darwinians.''

Discussing the popular secular idea that there are no absolute moral values, he said: "You cannot defend a civilisation on the basis of moral relativism.

"In a head-to-head contest between a moral relativist and a fundamentalist, who wins? The fundamentalist must win because he is sure he's right, and you are not sure he's wrong."

He said that although the war on terror had been portrayed by Western politicians as a "battle of ideas", there is little hope that Islamists who believe they owe allegiance to God would be swayed by talk of freedom or democracy.

"The place for religion is in civil society, where it achieves many things essential to liberal democratic freedom. It sanctifies marriage and the family and the obligations of parenthood, and it safeguards the non-relativist moral principles on which Western freedom is based.

"It may not be religion that is dying, it may be liberal democratic Europe that is in danger, demographically and in its ability to defend its own values."

Lord Sacks, who has been Chief Rabbi of the United Hebrew Congregations of the Commonwealth since 1991, described the modern phenomenon of "angry atheists" as the "intellectual equivalent of road rage".

Rush Limbaugh on Fox News Sunday, November 1, 2009

Obama is "immature," "childish" and a danger to America.

Asked if he had but one question to ask of Obama, what would it be, LImbaugh said, Why are you doing this to America? What is it you don't like about America that you want to inflct this kind of damage on America?

PART 1

PART 2

PART 3

The problem with Islam is Islam.

The dominant view in Islam today is that promulgated by Saudi Arabia, which maintains that adherence to the words and practices of Muhammad as reflected in the Koran is the only right path for Muslims.for all time in all places.

Consequently, hatred of the other - be it Shiite, Christian, Hindu or athiest -- is inbred from birth. Generations have so been taught around the world by Saudi-funded texts, teachers, schools and mosques. This rigid, aggressive, all-conquering, violence-promoting ideology is a grave threat to western civilization. Islam, as an all-encompassing guide for every aspect of life, allows no deviation or accommodation.

There are three possibilities for non-Muslims: Accept, appease and be dominated by Islam as the implacable force overwhelms the compliant culture. Oppose by all means possible, from warfare to expulsion of aliens from western lands. An internal struggle within Islam will adapt it to western principles of freedom and individual rights.

In Europe, Islamization is on march and there appears to be no force to stop it.

However, some enlightened few within Islam are trying to make fundamental change. Whether these voices among the Islamic elite will have much effect on the more than one billion Muslims worldwide in the short run will have any effect is doubtful. The propensity if not encouragement to violence in the cause of Islamic domination that is a way of life in Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, India, NIgeria and so many other countries where Muslims are numerous has been building for decades and will take at least decades if not centuries to moderate, if ever there is a movement to do so.

Nonetheless, a report from the Barnabas Fund, a British charity whose mission is providing support for persecuted Christians in Muslim lands, on new voices speaking out for moderation in Islam seems to present some hope.

The founder of the Barnabas Fund Dr Patrick Sookhdeo is an ex-Muslim convert to Christianity and is most knowledgeable about Islamic strategies to confuse and diffuse opposition to the advance of Islam.

That he sees something positive in the new report issuing from the Islamic Center at the University of Cambridge discussed at length in the report (Contexualizing Islam in Britain) is not a result of naivete.

However, optimism must be restrained at least somewhat when one realizes that the Cambridge Islamic Center is funded by the Saudi billionaire Prince Alwaleed Bin Talal. Alwaleed has funded Islamic centers at Georgetown at Harvard which, for example, are promoting the acceptance of Shariah Finance, which was invented decades ago in Pakistan as nothing more than a subtle tool for the spread of Islamic practices in western societies.

The report does express disappointment that some western leaders such as President Obama are not supporting such voices of reform but are catering to those promoting the traditional Islam which is a threat to the West.

The report is well worth reading.

Islam: at war within itself

2009-10-29

Barnabas Fund

Dr Patrick Sookhdeo
International Director, Barnabas Aid

Introduction

Recent months have seen a number of unexpected and extremely encouraging statements coming out of the Muslim world. Respected, mainstream Muslim leaders in a variety of countries have voiced opinions which are at odds with traditional, conservative Islam. They have challenged aspects of shari'a and are calling for a liberal, modernist, enlightened Islam compatible with Western norms. Perhaps the most significant of all is a comment by a group of British Muslims calling for an end to the apostasy law and for full freedom in all religious matters.

Since modernisation first impacted the Muslim world following the imposition of secular laws and education systems by Western colonial empires, there have been tensions between Muslim conservatives and liberal intellectuals. Islamic traditionalists and Islamists have on the whole gained the dominant voice within Islam, especially since the Islamic resurgence which began in the 1970s and has swept all before it. These conservatives saw shari'a as divinely inspired and unchangeable, valid for all times and places, and attacked the few liberal voices seeking to reinterpret the Muslim sources in line with modern contexts and human rights.

A small minority of marginalised Muslim progressives has been bravely defying traditional and Islamist pressures by reinterpreting Islam in a way compatible with modern concepts of secularity, individual human rights, religious freedom and gender equality.

However, recently some significant cracks seem to be forming within the mainstream Islam. Important mainstream leaders are coming out against long-held key traditional views and Wahhabi-Salafi doctrines and practices, openly supporting ideas compatible with modernity. It would seem that the reformist teachings of Ahmad Khan (1817 - 1898) and Muhammad 'Abduh (1849 -1905), which had been suppressed, are now resurfacing within mainstream Islam. As some experts on Islam have always been saying, "the really decisive battle is taking place within Muslim civilization, where ultraconservatives compete against moderates and democrats for the soul of the Muslim public." [1]

Some examples:

Kuwaiti Women MPs refuse to wear hijab

Two Kuwaiti women Members of Parliament, among the first four women to be elected to Kuwait`s National Assembly in May 2009, have refused to wear the Islamic headscarf (hijab) in parliament. They demanded the annulment of an amendment to electoral regulations, introduced by Islamists, that enforces the observation of shari'a in parliament.[2]

Tantawi and the niqab at al-Azhar

During a recent tour of a Cairo secondary school, Sheikh Muhammad Tantawi, the Grand Sheikh of al-Azhar University in Cairo (the most important Sunni theological centre in the world), was angered by the sight of a girl wearing the niqab (the full veil which covers the face with only slits for the eyes). He instructed her to remove the niqab, saying "The niqab is a tradition; it has no connection with religion". Ironically, the girl claimed to have worn the niqab in honour of his visit.[3]

Tantawi angrily told the girl that the niqab "has nothing to do with Islam and is only a custom" and ordered her to take it off. He also announced that he would soon issue a formal order (fatwa) banning girls from entering al-Azhar institutions wearing the niqab. "Niqab has nothing to do with Islam, it is just a habit. I know more about religion than you and your parents," he told the student.[4]

Dr. Mahmoud Hamdi Zarqouq, Egyptian Minister of Religious Affairs, went further than Tantawi declaring his utter opposition to the niqab, stressing that "it is just a habit that has nothing to do with religion . . . niqab is an invention that has nothing to do with religion, for the religious men agree that the women`s face and jaws are not improper [to show]." [5]

Imam condemns Church passivity in face of Muslim persecution of Christians [6]

In an interview with Premier Christian Radio earlier this year, Sheikh Dr Muhammad al-Hussaini, founder of Scripture Reasoning and Lecturer in Islamic Studies at Leo Beck Rabbinical College, blamed the church hierarchy in the UK for not protesting vociferously and actively at Christian persecution around the world. Al-Hussaini mentioned specifically horrendous machete attacks on Christians in Nigeria, Iraqi Christians being burned out of their homes and Christians in Pakistan being stoned or attacked on the slightest pretext. He highlighted Barnabas Aid`s efforts on behalf of persecuted Christians as an example of how concerned Christians ought to respond to the plight of their fellow Christians.

While Muslims are hypersensitive to any ill-treatment of Muslims anywhere in the world, he added, they remain silent about the persecution of Christians in their midst. Many Muslims are simply looking for scapegoats to punish for their own troubles. They know that churches in the West will not do more than utter a whimper, as this issue is not sufficiently important to them, mainly because those suffering are neither white nor wealthy, so they can go on with impunity blaming Crusader-Zionist conspiracies for everything.

He called upon the church to be a voice for justice for persecuted minorities, which he claims would speak "into the heart of the Muslim community".

"Contextualising Islam in Britain" report [7]

This report, published in October 2009, is the work of several prominent British Muslim academics and religious leaders. It has broken new ground in coming out with plain statements on key issues, avoiding the ambiguous statements customarily offered by mainline Muslim leaders. It calls for a Muslim worldview based not exclusively on jurisprudence but including Islamic philosophy (falsafah), theology (kalam) and literature (adab).

For Muslims living as a minority in a secular liberal democracy, applying shari'a is a matter of personal conscience and communal suasion rather than legal sanction, says the report. Muslims are not obliged to implement full shari'a against the wishes of their non-Muslim neighbours.[8] Shari'a is not a detailed code of things forbidden and permitted but an ethical system of moral and spiritual education. There are commonalities between the underlying objectives (maqasid) of shari'a and human rights declarations.[9]

The paper opposes the traditional view of divine sovereignty only implemented in an Islamic state under shari'a. It states that this system engenders a lack of democratic checks and balance, a lack of accountability, and may lead to tyranny. An Islamic state is not necessary for Islam to thrive and be practised. Secular democracy as practised in Britain is legitimate because it holds power to account and upholds fundamental freedoms and non-interference in the religious lives of its citizens.[10]

British Muslims, say the authors, are perfectly happy with the British form of procedural secularism (in contrast to ideological secularism) and support its accommodative tradition. The separation of religion from the state and the principle of non-discrimination by the state between religions guarantee freedom and equality for all, giving Muslims the freedom to practise Islam without interference in an atmosphere of respect, security and dignity. [11]

The authors clearly oppose the concepts of takfir [12] and al-wala` wal-bara` [13] which differentiate sharply between perceived true believers and all others, demanding hostility and enmity. Distinctions between believers and non-believers are important only in matters of doctrine and worship, not in matters of social interaction and of seeking the common good of society. In these matters it is important to have friendly relationships with non-Muslims, treating them as equals, and to focus on commonalities and shared values. [14]

The paper states that Islam teaches the equality of all humans regardless of gender and that it forbids forced marriages, domestic violence, female genital mutilation, and honour killings.[15]

Muslims should campaign against injustices and oppression inflicted by Muslims on other Muslims and on non-Muslims. [16]

On suicide terrorism and bombings they state that there are many ways to oppose oppression other than fighting (jihad). These include lobbying, activism, and writing. Foreign conflicts cannot justify violence in Britain.[17] They add that "Islam is opposed to all forms of terrorism, regardless of who sponsors them . . . Both suicide and suicide bombings are absolutely forbidden (haram) in Islam as is the killing of innocent people. [18]

The authors adopt the modern Christian principle of differentiating between religious sin and state-legislated crime. Thus on apostasy they explain that Islam dislikes apostasy but prohibits discrimination against apostates, adding that: "It is important to say quite simply that people have the freedom to enter the Islamic faith and the freedom to leave it". Similarly on homosexuality they state that the Qur`an forbids both the practice of homosexual acts, and discrimination against homosexuals. [19]

The declaration on apostasy is especially important because it goes clearly against the shari'a law of apostasy, accepted by all Islamic schools of law, which lays down a death sentence for those who leave Islam. The authors explain that in early Islam apostasy was conflated with treason in times of war. It was treason that merited the death penalty, not the apostasy. Therefore today "there is no compulsion and people cannot be coerced into a religious commitment". [20] Other Muslim leaders dealing with apostasy had not dared question the validity of the classical apostasy law, but had either asked for the repentance phase (usually 3 days) to be lengthened indefinitely (for example, Ali Gomaa, Chief Mufti of Egypt) or for a moratorium until the time was deemed ripe for the full implementation of shari'a (for example, Tariq Ramadan).

Analysis

There is now a powerful struggle going on for the soul of Islam. It would seem that under the combined pressure of extremist Islamist terrorism, the "war on terror" and the dangers to Muslim regimes and societies, new voices are emerging within mainstream Islamic leadership embracing a new ijtihad [21] compatible with modernity and human rights. They would seem to accept the liberal reformist view of prioritising the core values of Islam, distilled from the Islamic source texts, as spiritual and moral norms that override literalist, coercive, political and social interpretations. They seem to be willing to ignore traditional Islamic concepts that contradict modern humanistic values of pluralism, freedom and equality.

Conclusion

France has forbidden the wearing of the hijab in public places and recently its highest constitutional authority, the Constitutional Council, has refused the introduction of Islamic finance on the grounds that a secular state must not allow principles of shari'a to be recognised in its legislation.[22] In contrast, the governments of the USA and of the UK have consistently sided with the more repressive, conservative and traditional sections within their Muslim communities, apparently hoping to placate, accommodate and appease them by accepting their demands for shari'a implementation in multiple spheres. At the same time they have ignored the more progressive and liberal voices in the Muslim community implying that they are too weak and marginal to be viable interlocutors for governments.

Arab liberals have criticised President Obama`s tendency to endorse conservative and radical forms of Islam while ignoring liberal Muslim trends. A Yemeni liberal journalist accused Obama of appointing Muslim advisors who do not represent the diversity of Muslim opinion and who want to implement oppressive shari'a rules.[23] Others have criticised Obama`s overtures to the Taliban and Iran as strengthening the radicals and weakening the reformists and liberals.[24]

A similar trend is visible in liberal and mainline Christian denominations whose leaders prefer to deal with Islamic traditionalists and hardliners in interfaith dialogue while ignoring the liberal reformist voices emerging within Islam.

It is time Western governments and Christian Churches implemented a policy of rejecting traditional Muslim and Islamist demands and that they shifted to a position of active support for the new voices of reason and moderation within Islam.

Barnabas Aid applauds these encouraging moves and the courageous Muslims advocating them.

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[1] Robert W. Hefner, "September 11 and the Struggle for Islam", in Craig Calhoun, Paul Price, and Ashley Timmer, eds., Understanding September 11, Project coordinated by the Social Science Research Council, New York: The New Press., 2002, pp. 41-52.

[2] Richard Spencer, "Kuwaiti women MPs refuse to wear hijab in parliament", Daily Telegraph, 12 October 2009.

[3] Adrian Blomfield, "Egypt purges niqab from schools and colleges", Daily Telegraph, 5 October 2009.

[4] "Sheikh al-Azhar forces a student to remove her Niqab", Mideastwire, 5 October 2009, quoting Al-Masry al-Yawm, "Egypt`s Top Cleric Plans Face Veil Ban in Schools", Asharq Alawsat, 6 October 2009.

[5] "Sheikh al-Azhar: I`m not against Niqab and 80% of religious men...", Mideastwire, 13 October 2009, quoting Al-Masry al-Yawm.

[6] "Imam blames Christian leaders for the Persecution of Christians", Christian Concern for our Nation, 28 August 2009, http://www.ccfon.org/view.php?id=825, accessed 20 October 2009.

[7] Contextualising Islam in Britain: Exploratory Perspectives, University of Cambridge in Association with the Universities of Exeter and Westminster, Centre of Islamic Studies: Cambridge, October 2009.

[8] Contextualising Islam in Britain: Exploratory Perspectives, pp. 10-11.

[9] Contextualising Islam in Britain: Exploratory Perspectives, pp. 10-11, 54.

[10] Contextualising Islam in Britain: Exploratory Perspectives, pp. 10-11, 32-33.

[11] Contextualising Islam in Britain: Exploratory Perspectives, pp. 28, 33.

[12] takfir - the process of declaring someone to be an apostate from Islam, a process which has been revived by radical contemporary jihadi groups.

[13] Al-wala` wal bara` - "Friendship and Distinguishing", a doctrine applied by radical groups to differentiate and separate between real and false Muslims. True Islam is defined by a love for Muslims and a hatred for non-Muslims.

[14] Contextualising Islam in Britain: Exploratory Perspectives, pp. 11-12.

[15] Contextualising Islam in Britain: Exploratory Perspectives, pp. 12-13.

[16] Contextualising Islam in Britain: Exploratory Perspectives, p. 65.

[17] Contextualising Islam in Britain: Exploratory Perspectives, p. 14.

[18] Contextualising Islam in Britain: Exploratory Perspectives, pp. 71, 78.

[19] Contextualising Islam in Britain: Exploratory Perspectives, p. 75.

[20] Contextualising Islam in Britain: Exploratory Perspectives, p. 47.

[21] ijtihad - the process of individual effort by a jurist at logical deduction on a legal question, using the Qur`an and hadith as sources. Ijtihad allows fresh interpretations made from the two sources.

[22] "France court quashes Islamic Finance measure", Al-Arabiya News Channel, 15 October 2009.

[23] "Yemeni Liberal Criticizes Appointment of Dalia Mogahed as Obama`s Advisor on Islam", MEMRI Special Dispatch, No. 2518, 4 September 2009.

[24] "Criticism in the Arab Press of the US Administration`s Initiative to Reach Out to 'Moderates in the Taliban`", MEMRI Special Dispatch, No. 2353, 12 May 2009; "Arab Liberals Eight Years After 9-11: Obama`s Overtures Towards Iran Extremists Seen as a Sign of Weakness", MEMRI Inquiry and Analysis, No. 551, 29 September 2009.