Recently in Islamic Terrorism Category

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 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.

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.

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 . . .

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 . . .

Just another reminder of reality.

Muslim threats to Christians rise in Pakistan

October 4, 2009

Anjum Herald Gill THE WASHINGTON TIMES

LAHORE, Pakistan | Christians in Pakistan are feeling increasingly insecure after several violent attacks by Muslim extremists in the past two months.

In one case, eight Christians were burned to death by a Muslim mob after reports that the Muslim holy book, the Koran, had been desecrated.

Growing Talibanization of the country and a blasphemy law in place for two decades make non-Muslims, especially Christians, easy targets for discrimination and attacks, Christian and human rights activists say.

"The attacks on Christians seem to be symptomatic of a well-organized campaign launched by extremist elements against the Christian community all over central Punjab since early this year," Human Rights Commission of Pakistan Chairwoman Asma Jehangir said at a press conference last month.

The situation has become so serious that Pope Benedict XVI and Pakistani President Asif Ali Zardari discussed it during a meeting Thursday at the papal summer retreat in Castel Gandolfo, near Rome, the Associated Press reported.

The Vatican said the two stressed "the need to overcome all forms of discrimination based on religious affiliation, with the aim of promoting respect for the rights of all."

Most of the attacks on Christians' houses and churches followed claims of desecration of the Koran. Subsequent investigations generally proved the claims to be false.

Pakistani Minority Affairs Minister Shahbaz Bhatti, a Christian himself, said that no Christian would even think of desecrating the Koran. Some elements wanted to create an atmosphere of disharmony, but the government would not allow anybody to play with the lives and properties of the Christians, he said.

On June 30, a mob attacked Christians' houses in the village of Bahmani Wala in Kasur district of Punjab province, destroying more than 50 houses after looting.

On July 30, eight people were burned alive in the village of Gojra, also in Punjab, after a purported incident of desecration of the Koran in the nearby village of Korian Wala. Churches were attacked and copies of the Bible and hymn books were burned in both villages. In Korian Wala alone, more than 50 houses of Christians were ransacked.

On Sept. 11, a church in a village in Punjab's Sialkot district was burned after claims that a 20-year-old Christian youth had desecrated the Koran. On Sept. 15, a day after his arrest, Robert Masih was found dead in his jail cell. Police reported it as a suicide, but Mr. Masih's family claims he was killed. Joseph Francis, who runs an organization providing legal assistance to Christians, said he saw marks of torture on Mr. Masih's body.

Christians account for about 4 percent of the 170 million population of Pakistan, which was carved out of India as a state for Muslims at the time of independence from Britain in 1947.

Since then, successive civilian and military rulers have progressively strengthened the Islamic character of the country by introducing Shariah law. A controversial blasphemy law introduced in 1986 also has widened the gap between the minority Christians and majority Muslims.

The U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom listed Pakistan as a "country of particular concern" in 2006, citing forced conversions of Christians to Islam and a rise in hate crimes against religious minorities.

All the recent attacks targeting Christians, activist groups claimed, were provoked by hate speeches made by Muslim clerics on loudspeakers from mosques.

"The rising intolerance and violence against Christians is a result of the Talibanization and promulgation of Shariah law in the country," said Kanwal Feroze, a well-known journalist. "It is not a matter of blasphemy law, but shows a mind-set of the common man."

When the blasphemy law was introduced during the rule of Gen. Muhammad Zia ul-Haq, the punishment was life imprisonment. It was changed to the death penalty by the Federal Shariah Court in 1992 when Nawaz Sharif was prime minister.

Since the inception of the blasphemy law, as many as 976 cases have been registered under it, of which 180 were against Christians. When a Christian is accused of blasphemy, he or she can be granted bail only by the top court in the province.

The step-by-step Islamization of Pakistan began in 1956, when the country's name was changed from the Democratic Republic of Pakistan to the Islamic Republic of Pakistan. In 1973, Prime Minister Zulfikar Ali Bhutto changed the country's constitution to declare Islam the religion of the state. Non-Muslims were barred from becoming president or the prime minister, and denied seats in the Senate.

Mr. Bhutto - father-in law of current President Asif Ali Zardari - also nationalized church-run schools and institutions. Some of them were denationalized later by Gen. Pervez Musharraf, who led Pakistan from 1999 until 2008.

In 1979, Gen. Zia introduced several Islamic laws that discriminated against non-Muslims - strengthening fundamentalist organizations and sowing the early seeds for Talibanization.

Under the Evidence Act of the Islamic law, a Christian man's witness is worth half that of a Muslim. Christian women would not be deemed as witnesses at all.

Muslim men can marry non-Muslim women but a Christian man cannot marry a Muslim woman. The constitutional provisions also welcome a Christian to embrace Islam, but when a Muslim converts to Christianity, the penalty is death.

Prime Minister Yousaf Raza Gilani has promised to review laws that could fuel hate for non-Muslim citizens after the recent attacks. A committee has been formed to look into the laws and make recommendations.

However, hard-line parties such as Jamaat-e-Islami and the banned militant organization Dawat-ul-Irshad already have warned of protests if the blasphemy law is rescinded. Even the mainstream Pakistan Muslim League-Q party of Mr. Musharraf has threatened to resist any change in the law.

One commentator on this report said this:

Wake up world. Muslims have been raping, terrorising and pillaging for 1500 years. The Koran teaches to kill all infidels, unless they convert to Islam. It won't stop on its own. Islam is like a cancer, unless you kill it, it will kill you.

Another:

FINALLY, THE TRUE TARGET OF ISLAMISTS IS BEING REVEALED. IT IS NOT ISRAEL AS MANY LIKE TO BELIEVE. NOR IS IT UNITED STATES, AS SUCH. THE TARGET OF THE WAR ISLAM IS WAGING SINCE MUHAMMAD WENT TO MEET ALLAH, AND EVEN BEFORE THAT, WAS AND CONTINUES TO BE CHRISTIANITY.

While top Obama officials are erasing from their vocabularies such terms as Islamic terrorism, jihad, jihadism, radical Islam, war on terror and Islamic war of world conquest, the Islamic war of world conquest goes on.

It's going on in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Indonesia, the Philippines, Russia, the United Kingdom, Somalia, Nigeria, Somalia, Kenya, the United States, Canada, Australia and India, to name just a few places. It's also fanning out from the Islamic terrorist strongholds in Algeria down into the almost ungovernable states of Niger, Mali and Mauritania.

What's unusual about this report in the Wall Street Journal is that, unlike reports carried in the New York Times, other mainstream media and Associated Press and Reuters newswires the reporter actually uses correct descriptives in telling what's happening.

The Koran commands all Muslims to engage in worldwide jihad until Islam is universal and all infidels are killed or enslaved. Almost all Muslims learn this from birth and many decide the way to glory and Paradise is to take up arms, kidnap, rape, kill and seize the property of others (booty, as Mohammad called it). You can get rich and have fun in the process once you get used to the blood.

Islamic Rebels Gain Strength in the Sahara

Moving South From Algeria, al Qaeda-Affiliated Insurgents Find Support Among Locals in Mauritania, Mali and Niger

By YAROSLAV TROFIMOV

NOUAKCHOTT, Mauritania -- Al Qaeda-affiliated rebels are spreading far beyond their original battleground in Algeria and increasingly threatening Africa's Sahara belt, scaring away investors and tourists as they undercut the region's fragile economies.

Click to enlarge.

Dozens of security personnel, as well as an American aid worker and a British tourist, were killed by militants in several attacks in the region this summer alone. The attacks -- which prompted this year's lucrative Paris-Dakar car race to relocate to South America -- have become more frequent and brazen. Recent hits occurred not just in the remote desert but also in Mali's tourist magnet Timbuktu and in the Mauritanian capital Nouakchott, where a suicide bomber attacked the French Embassy last weekend.

Though still dominated by the veterans of Algeria's civil war, this Saharan insurgency has grown deep local roots. Armed bands roaming the desert include hundreds of recruits from Mauritania, Mali and Niger -- vast and impoverished countries that straddle the Arab world and black West Africa, and that relied on the now-collapsed tourism industry as the key source of foreign exchange.

"What had started out as an Algerian problem is now engulfing Mali and Mauritania. They are the weak link," says Zakaria Ould Ahmed Salem, a specialist on political Islam at the University of Nouakchott.

An Islamist insurgency that cost 200,000 lives erupted in Algeria 18 years ago, after that country's secular regime annulled the second round of elections that the Islamists were poised to win. But it is only in the past few years, as Algerian security forces contained the violence at home, that the rebels -- who seek to create an Islamic state encompassing North Africa -- began mounting operations in neighboring Saharan countries that had been unscathed by international terrorism.

Underlining its wider ambitions, the main Algerian insurgent movement, the Salafist Group for Call and Combat, re-branded itself in 2007 as al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb, or AQIM. Actual operational links between AQIM militants in the Sahara and traditional al Qaeda leadership in Pakistan or Afghanistan are tenuous, if they exist at all, Western officials say.

But the group's new name has made it easier to find money and recruits for the cause outside Algeria. "Someone like Bin Laden is considered a hero here," explains Mohamed Fall Ould Oumere, publisher of La Tribune newsweekly in Nouakchott.

Mauritania, where most people speak Arabic and watch satellite TV chains like Al-Jazeera, is a particularly fertile ground for AQIM's growth, and accounts for a growing share of the movement's cadres, Western diplomats say. In Mali, Niger and Chad, the bulk of AQIM recruits also come from Arab-speaking communities, which in these countries are outnumbered by black African majorities.

AQIM is trying to spread south, "aiming to attract the young Muslims of the region -- white ones and black ones," says Isselmou Ould Moustafa, a specialist on AQIM who interviewed many of the group's members for his Mauritanian publication, Tahalil Hebdo.

Security officials in Nigeria recently claimed that AQIM trained in Algeria some members of Boko Haram, the Islamist sect whose armed uprising cost several hundred lives in northern Nigeria last month. According to some experts on AQIM, there is also evidence of contacts between the Saharan insurgents and the Shabaab, the radical Islamist militia controlling a chunk of Somalia. "It's an arc of fire," says Mr. Oumere.

All the governments in the region say they are fighting back. But the area's political instability and frequent bickering between neighboring countries have long made it easy for Islamist rebels to roam the Sahara, obtaining sanctuary and help from local tribes. Mali and Mauritania both have strained relations with Algeria. Planned regional summits to tackle the cross-border terrorism problem have been repeatedly postponed.

A military coup in Mauritania last year complicated the situation: The U.S. reacted to the overthrowing of Mauritania's democratically elected president by reducing military cooperation with the country and pulling out a reconnaissance plane that flew regular sorties over the Sahara to search for insurgents. Cooperation is likely to be restored now that Mauritania has held a democratic election last month.

Government officials here say that, without outside help, Saharan countries have little chance of defeating AQIM. "This is a zone that can't be controlled. We don't know who's out there in the vast desert and what are they doing," says Mohamed Ould Rzeizim, who served until this week as Mauritania's minister of interior.

To finance its campaign, AQIM is smuggling Europe-bound cigarettes, drugs and illegal immigrants through the desert, Mauritanian and Western officials say. Depots of untaxed cigarettes, often brought in by ship from South America, dot the desert along Mauritania's porous northern borders.

An equally important source of revenue for AQIM is ransom money -- estimated at tens of millions of dollars -- paid by European governments for the freedom of European tourists kidnapped in separate attacks in Algeria, Tunisia, Mali and Niger. The hostages were usually transported across the Sahara to AQIM's bases in lawless northern Mali, where local officials helped negotiate the ransom collection and the tourists' release.

Mali's role as a sanctuary for AQIM has long infuriated Algeria and the U.S. The country appears to be taking a harder line after the Islamist rebels -- who refrained from killing their hostages in the past -- announced in June that they executed their British captive, Edwin Dyer.

A few days after the killing of Mr. Dyer, suspected militants also gunned down in Timbuktu the regional chief of Malian intelligence, Lt. Col. Lamina Ould Bou. The colonel, an ethnic Arab and former Islamist rebel, had played a crucial role in Mali's efforts against AQIM. According to Malian government accounts and al Qaeda Internet postings, armed clashes in the region in following weeks killed dozens of Malian troops and Islamist guerrillas.

"We are now engaged in a total struggle against al Qaeda," Mali's President Amadou Toumani Touré declared last month.

The Saharan rebels have so far targeted only foreigners and security forces, sparing civilian targets like restaurants and hotels. In Algeria, Pakistan and Iraq, by contrast, al Qaeda-affiliated militants showed no concern about killing large numbers of Muslim civilians.

"These youngsters are not yet ready to carry out blind attacks and to explode car bombs, Algerian-style. They have not yet completely broken with the Mauritanian society," says Mr. Moustafa, the AQIM expert. But, he cautions, bloodier attacks are likely to happen soon: "They have bad teachers. Their future targets will be Mauritanian."

American columnist Diana West makes an excellent point: We are playing into Islam's hands in its war of world conquest by refusing, because of fear of offending Muslims or the corrosive habit of political correctness (and perhaps fear of violence), to speak of "the gross incompatibility of Islamic ideology with Western liberty."

Fudging with words and terms such as "Islamist" and "Islamofascism" and "radical Islam" is to confuse Americans who need to know the truth about Islam's true nature and why it must be tamed or turned back. The problem with Islam is its core ideology as contained in the Koran and proclaimed and acted out by Mohammad. Our problem is not with fringe groups who have hijacked Islam. Mohammad's Islam is a religion of war, not of peace, and it has been so for 1400 years. Jihad until Islam rules the world is the duty of every true believer Muslim.

But we must not say that.

Muslim organizations are working on "hate-crime" legislation in the UN and in various countries, including the United States, to make it a punishable offense to criticize Islam. The Attorney General of the United States under the leadership of President Obama is currently advocating expanded coverage of hate-crime legislation. (Dutch pro-freedom parliamentarian Geert Wilders and American Islam expert Robert Spencer both support all hate-crime laws.)

We may have the First Amendment and free speech in the United States, but, it we stifle ourselves from telling the truth about Islam, it is as if free speech doesn't exist.

There is an Islamic network of organizations active in the United States today working on their program of subverting the country from within with the goal that one day Sharia, Islamic law, will replace the U.S. Constitution.

Fanciful, you say? Islam has been engaged in this war of conquest against the rest of the world since it was begun by Mohammad. Today, with trillions in oil wealth and more than a billion followers, Islam may be in the best position at any time in its history to press forward with its war.

Strategies of conquest are tailored to the situation in each country. War in Afghanistan, terrror in Nigeria, aggressive immigration, high birth rates and intimidation in Europe, quiet subversion and random terrorism in the United States and building allies for control over human rights and other policies at the UN.

Ms. West delivered her timely warning against pre-emptive surrender to Islam at the free speech conference of the International Free Press Society held in Denmark's parliament on June 17th.

The Impact of Islam on Free Speech in America

Americans are proud, and rightly so, of the First Amendment in the Bill of Rights, which, among other things, protects speech from government control. The Amendment says in part: "Congress shall make no law abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press."

Increasingly, however, Americans seem content to regard the First Amendment not as the fundamental working tool of democracy, but as a national heirloom, a kind of antique to admire rather than put to use. I don't think many of my countrymen perceive how profoundly their attitude toward free speech has changed. But there is a difference between having freedom of speech and exercising freedom of speech, one that has become glaringly and distressingly obvious to me since September 11, 2001. So, while it is true that the US government is not Constitutionally empowered to make laws that censor Americans, it is also true, I believe, that Americans have come to censor themselves. But why?

President Obama is endangering American citizens not only by his constant displays of weakness in the face of foreign aggression, but by surrending to the Global War on Terror, preferring to treat terrorists driven by ideology seeking to destroy American and kill Americans as ordinary criminals rather than the war combatants they are.

Andrew McCarthy, who more than almost anyone, knows the limitiations of the criminal justice system in defending against attacks of war, makes clear the dangers that President Obama is exposing his country and its citizens to.

President Obama and Attorney General Holder are fond of labeling as a "false choice" the reality that, in national exigencies, we have to decide whether to trim some protections for enemy combatants in order to promote security. That's no false choice. It's a real choice, with the lives of our citizens hanging in the balance. If you want to defeat this enemy and prevent these attacks, you go to war and you get intelligence. If you are content to live with this enemy and endure its attacks, you go to court . . . . Obama has decided to go to court.

The problem is that [Obama] wants to treat international terrorists as suspects in a law-enforcement matter rather than as wartime enemies.

The consequences:

[I]f we return to law-enforcement mode under the Obama FBI's new "Global Justice" initiative, then we are back to September 10 -- to the embassy-bombing approach to counterterrorism, in which completed terrorist attacks, rather than interrupted terrorist plots, await us.

Americans will die in terrorist attacks because of Obama's abandoning the war against Islamic terrorism. Is this part of his wish to placate Muslims by denying the ideological hostility at the heart of Islam? In doing so, he is risking the lives of American citizens.

National security has always been the first responsibility of American presidents -- until Barack Obama.

Read the whole frightening story.

How War Fighting Became Law Enforcement

Obama Goes to Court

by Andrew C. McCarthy
National Review Online
June 17, 2009

(Note: In Part I of this article, Andrew C. McCarthy showed how Miranda warnings grew from a procedural safeguard into an inviolable constitutional right. In Part II, he explained how judges and the Justice Department expanded this right to the point where it applied to terrorists captured abroad. Here, in the final part, he describes how the odd couple of John McCain and Barack Obama have put the nation in great danger by turning the War on Terror into something resembling a police investigation.)

Two months after the 1998 bombers of the U.S. embassy in Kenya were convicted, al-Qaeda destroyed the Twin Towers, struck the Pentagon, and was foiled by the martyred patriots of Flight 93 in an attempt to attack the Capitol or the White House. Unlike its predecessor, the Bush administration deemed the attack an act of war, as did Congress, which overwhelmingly authorized the use of military force a week later. American officials were dispatched to foreign lands to conduct military and intelligence operations, not criminal investigations. Prosecution, which in the eight previous years had managed to neutralize fewer than three dozen jihadists, most of them low-level, was aptly judged to have been a provocatively weak response to a transnational terrorist network with global aims and frightful capabilities.

The name of the game was now intelligence and prevention, not evidence and prosecution. Radical Islam had to be stopped from attacking -- there could be no trials of suicide terrorists after they'd struck, and even if there could, they'd be a grossly inadequate measure. After 9/11, a premium was put on obtaining information for purposes of mapping the terror network, uncovering ongoing plots, and acquiring operational intelligence that would be of use to our military and covert intelligence forces.

Miranda was separate from all of this. The Miranda rule is a device to ensure the constitutional integrity of confession evidence for use at trial. It has no place in situations where trial either is not contemplated or, if contemplated, is at best a third- or fourth-tier consideration, subordinate to national security, force security, and the preservation of foreign intelligence sources and national-defense secrets. Miranda is designed for the criminal-justice process, in which we impose the burden of proof on the government, the suspect is presumed innocent, we arguably do not want him to implicate himself unless he sees it as in his interest to do so, and we would rather see the government lose than see an innocent person convicted. To the contrary, when the nation goes to war, our primary concern is the national interest, not the suspect's interest; we don't presume a detained combatant innocent, because it is not our purpose to establish his guilt; the government's burden is to prosecute the war, not the war prisoners; and we see it as imperative that the government win -- to the point that we sacrifice our blood and treasure and are resigned to the inevitability of horrific collateral casualties and damage.

In the post-9/11 strategy, then, Miranda had no place. Interrogation was conducted by military and intelligence personnel whose objective was to obtain intelligence, not derive prosecutable evidence. And the emphasis on interrogation has been remarkably effective. For eight years, despite intense efforts to reprise 9/11, al-Qaeda has not carried out a terrorist attack in the United States.

Nevertheless, scandal erupted in 2004, with revelations about prisoner abuse at Abu Ghraib and, later, the CIA's top-secret enhanced-interrogation program for a small number of high-level al-Qaeda detainees. Amid growing public unrest over the war in Iraq, the interrogations controversy provided ample opportunity for demagoguery. Chief among the grandstanders was Sen. John McCain, then planning a 2008 run for the White House. A Vietnam War hero who had famously endured a years-long ordeal of captivity, isolation, and torture, McCain railed at the harsh treatment of prisoners in U.S. custody. Echoed by allies like Sens. Ted Kennedy (who likened the U.S. administration of Iraq to Saddam Hussein's) and Dick Durbin (who compared American soldiers to thugs who had served the Nazis, the Soviets, and Pol Pot), McCain contributed mightily to the Left's smear that the Bush administration had instituted a systematic torture regime.

In 2005, capitalizing on the atmosphere he had stoked, McCain proposed legislation (the "McCain Amendment") that would vest every person detained by American officials, anywhere in the world, with rights under the Fifth Amendment (as well as the Eighth and Fourteenth). I was among a small number of naysayers who vigorously opposed the McCain Amendment (see, e.g., here, here, here, and here). In the climate of the times, we were slandered as torturemongers for our trouble. But while I continue to believe it would be foolish to take off the table coercive interrogation tactics that do not meet the strict legal definition of torture, that was not the only reason for opposing the McCain Amendment. A principal reason was Dickerson, particularly as its Miranda requirement was construed by Judge Sand.

McCain explicitly included the Fifth Amendment in his legislation because it addresses his target, coercive interrogation. As we've seen, in Dickerson, the Supreme Court held that Miranda was now considered part of the Fifth Amendment's core. In the al-Owhali case, Judge Sand ruled that Miranda imposes daunting burdens on American agents overseas -- burdens far more challenging than the rote reading of an advice-of-rights card that typically happens in domestic policing. With the Supreme Court, beginning in 2004, imposing more and more criminal-justice procedure on the battlefield, the McCain Amendment would almost certainly be used by courts or a Democratic administration to impose Miranda protocols not just on FBI agents conducting criminal investigations (which is what it's meant for) in foreign countries, but on U.S. military and intelligence agents conducting combat and covert operations. That would be the death knell not of the "torture" over which McCain obsessed but of any effective intelligence collection.

The McCain Amendment passed by a 90-9 margin in the Senate, with all but nine Republicans joining the unanimous Democrats. It became law -- incorporated in the Detainee Treatment Act of 2005 -- with the signature of President Bush.

OBAMA GOES TO COURT
This is the background against which we must consider Steve Hayes's report that the Obama administration has orchestrated the world's first Mirandized war. A war against a terror network that specializes in sneak mass-murder attacks, in which intelligence is at an unprecedented premium, is a strange setting for inaugurating a practice in which detainees are told they needn't speak to you and have a right to the assistance of an attorney underwritten by the American taxpayers they've been trying to kill.

But expect President Obama to gaze at his teleprompter and assure you that he is not inaugurating that practice. It was President Clinton, he'll quite rightly tell you, whose (Reno/Holder) Justice Department first started Mirandizing captured terrorists overseas. He'll elaborate that it was President Bush, prompted by Senator McCain, who extended Fifth Amendment rights to enemy aliens and imposed on our soldiers and intelligence agents the duty to safeguard those rights. And this, he'll insist, was just a recognition of the "rule of law," because after all, it was the Supreme Court that developed Miranda and (relying on the arguments of the Reno/Holder Justice Department) made it part and parcel of the Fifth Amendment. Why are you blaming me, Obama will shrewdly ask, for a lawful, long-established policy that I am merely continuing?

It will all be very clever. But it will be wrong. Contrary to what his spokesmen have said, Obama is not simply continuing the policy of previous administrations; he is vastly expanding it, to the point where it becomes a serious threat to our nation's security.

The Obama administration's protestations ring false from the start. The very notion of advising enemy combatants of Miranda rights seems so absurd that, as The Weekly Standard's John McCormack reports, President Obama himself poked fun at it only three months ago ("Now, do these folks deserve Miranda rights? Do they deserve to be treated like a shoplifter down the block? Of course not."). And that was after, as a candidate, he had mocked Gov. Sarah Palin for arguing that he intended to give terrorists Miranda protections.

This is not about Miranda; it's about how we view terrorism.

Miranda has been applied to some alien terrorists captured overseas for eleven years, but only in the context of criminal investigations. It arose in the embassy-bombing case -- and nearly cost that case -- because the Clinton administration chose to treat that attack as a crime and the captured prisoners as criminal defendants. Had President Clinton adopted the Bush approach and proceeded with a military response -- not a flurry of cruise missiles but a real war -- he'd have had robust congressional support, Miranda would never have been an issue, al-Qaeda would have been decimated, and Pres. Al Gore would never have had a 9/11 to deal with.

The McCain Amendment is a debacle because it theoretically extends Miranda to enemy combatants. That is a trickier problem, yet not an insurmountable one, for two reasons. First, the courts have held that a Fifth Amendment violation -- and therefore a Miranda violation -- occurs not during the actual questioning but when the prosecution attempts to use the statement in court. There is thus at least a plausible argument that if you do not intend to bring a detainee to court -- if you are just questioning him to gather intelligence -- you do not need to give him Miranda rights.

Concededly, this is dicey. The concept that the conduct giving rise to the violation (the coercion used during the questioning) is somehow not really the violation is a legal fiction, and an unattractive one. But it has been enough to justify withholding Miranda warnings in most cases where high-value suspects have been captured. Still, it would help if the McCain Amendment were repealed, or at least amended to make clear that it was not Congress's intention to impose the Miranda component of the Fifth Amendment on U.S. officials overseas.

Second, in upholding al-Owhali's conviction earlier this year, a panel of the Second Circuit Court of Appeals issued a superb opinion that clipped the worst excesses of Judge Sand's nine-year-old ruling. Federal agents, it instructs, are merely required to communicate accurate information about a suspect's rights; it is not their job to master foreign law, intercede with other countries on behalf of captured terrorists, or browbeat nations whose cooperation we need into adopting American right-to-counsel rules.

Perhaps more important, the Second Circuit construed Dickerson as glossing the Fifth Amendment with a commonsense Miranda, one that is flexible in its application to varying circumstances. The panel observed that Miranda itself disavowed "creat[ing] a constitutional straitjacket" and that Rehnquist's opinion for the Dickerson Court admonished that "no constitutional rule is immutable." Indeed, on this point, the panel noted that the Supreme Court had long ago dispensed with any need to comply with Miranda "in a situation posing a threat to public safety." The public-safety exception was carved out by the Supreme Court in 1984 (in New York v. Quarles) in a peacetime domestic police emergency. A fortiori, there should be no Miranda requirement at all in battlefield circumstances or in connection with national-security emergencies.

But here, at last, is the point. The problem is not just that Obama wants to extend Miranda to nearly all captured terrorists. That's just a symptom. The problem is that he wants to treat international terrorists as suspects in a law-enforcement matter rather than as wartime enemies.

Despite the McCain Amendment, the requirement of Miranda in warfare is something we have been navigating around fairly well. The recent Second Circuit ruling provides further reason for optimism that we can continue doing so -- as long as we remain in war mode. But if we return to law-enforcement mode under the Obama FBI's new "Global Justice" initiative, then we are back to September 10 -- to the embassy-bombing approach to counterterrorism, in which completed terrorist attacks, rather than interrupted terrorist plots, await us.

There's no point making this into a controversy about Miranda. After all, if we go the law-enforcement route, there is no question that Miranda applies. The issue is not Miranda, but whether we should view terrorists like Khalid Sheikh Mohammed as mere criminals. If so, then obviously we must follow criminal protocols, and there is no question that Miranda applies. We must tell them they don't have to talk to us, and that we will get them a free lawyer -- who will promptly advise them to clam up. We must also accept that we will no longer get the timely intelligence that thwarts attacks. We must resign ourselves to more dead Americans.

President Obama and Attorney General Holder are fond of labeling as a "false choice" the reality that, in national exigencies, we have to decide whether to trim some protections for enemy combatants in order to promote security. That's no false choice. It's a real choice, with the lives of our citizens hanging in the balance. If you want to defeat this enemy and prevent these attacks, you go to war and you get intelligence. If you are content to live with this enemy and endure its attacks, you go to court and you get Miranda. Obama has decided to go to court.

--Andrew C. McCarthy is a senior fellow at the National Review Institute and the author of Willful Blindness: A Memoir of the Jihad (Encounter Books, 2008). McCarthy was the lead prosector who sent the blind shiekh who mastermineded the first Wold Trade Center bombing in 1993 to prison.

President Obama has become the self-proclaimed apologist for Islam and is "either unable or unwilling to come to terms with the nature of the radical Islamic threat to America and the West." HIs Cairo speech was a collection of missstatements and half-truths that exaggerated if not falsified Islamic claims for academic progress and tolerance.

His actions with respect to Islamic terrorists are even more alarming: Bringing terrorists captured on the battlefield to New York for a court trial? Reading Miranda rights to Taliban mauraders rounded up in the Afghan mountains? Expressing a willingness to release Guantanomo detainees in the United States? Stacking his administration with Arabists and selling out Israel?

What is the extent of the danger in all this for Americans?

The Bush administration was justifiably taken to task for refusing to recognize or do anything about the nefarious role played by state sponsors of extremism such as Saudi Arabia and Pakistan in the spread of radical Islam. President Obama has already gone beyond that, with a policy of pandering and appeasement. History teaches us that tolerating the intolerant and appeasing the unappeasable results in more conflict and bloodshed.

Read all of what Alex Alexiev has to say.

June 11, 2009, 4:00 a.m.

Obama's Fantasy Islam
Obama has seemingly chosen to act as an apologist for Islamism.

By Alex Alexiev of the Hudson Institute

With the media's rhapsodic paeans to President Obama's "historic" Cairo speech now receding into the background, this may be an opportune moment to take a sober look at America's policies vis-à-vis the Muslim world and, no less important, at where Islam itself may be heading.

It is now clear that the president is either unable or unwilling to come to terms with the nature of the radical Islamic threat to America and the West. To him, the problem is a few violent extremists, a "small but potent minority of Muslims," which leaves one wondering how a small minority got to be quite so potent. In any case, the West is dealing not with a few militants, or even with terrorism as such, but with a murderous, totalitarian doctrine couched in Islamic terms that has already become the dominant idiom in much of the Muslim world and its diaspora communities. Whether it is called "radical Islam," "Islamism," "Salafism," or "Islamofascism," it aims at nothing short of the conquest of the world for Islam, by violent means if need be. And not just any kind of Islam, but the most reactionary and intolerant interpretation of the Muslim faith.

It is an ideology that elevates violent jihad as a religious obligation for all Muslims, openly discriminates against non-Muslims and women, banishes democracy and secularism, and ordains the murder of apostates and homosexuals. This doctrine is preached today in tens of thousands of Salafi, Wahhabi, and Deobandi mosques and madrassas, and promoted by countless Islamist organizations, from the Muslim Brotherhood networks in America to the Taliban and its fellow jihadists in Pakistan. Extremism and terrorism are the results of this malignant phenomenon. The Taliban and al-Qaeda did not bring Pakistan to the edge of the precipice on their own; rather, 30 years of state-sponsored Islamization of Pakistani society made Islamism the threat it is.

While President Bush was also remiss in explaining to Americans that we're in a deadly conflict with a violent Islamist doctrine that has deep and spreading roots among a quarter of the human population -- rather than with terrorism, which is simply its symptom -- Obama has seemingly chosen to act as an apologist for this ideology. There is no other credible reason for a man with an army of experts, researchers, and fact-checkers at his disposal to utter so many half-truths and outright falsehoods about what Islam is and what it is not. These include his touting ostensible Islamic contributions to music (an art form prohibited among the devout) and printing (regarded by the mullahs as the devil's invention, and not available to Muslims until three centuries after Gutenberg), and his preposterous promotion of Saudi King Abdullah, ruler of the most religiously intolerant country on earth, as a champion of "interfaith dialogue."

More telling still are Obama's historically inaccurate portrayals of Muslims as being at "the forefront of innovation and education," and his blaming colonialism and the Cold War for their falling behind. In fact, Muslims have not been at the forefront of anything since ijtihad (reason) was declared un-Islamic ten centuries ago and replaced by blind obedience to reactionary sharia dogma, which, in turn, ushered in a cultural and intellectual stagnation that is yet to be overcome. Indeed, the greatest Muslim minds over the centuries, from Averoes and Avicenna to Noble Prize physicist Abdus Salam, have invariably been persecuted and declared apostates by the guardians of Islamic orthodoxy. While colonialism is a favorite Islamist whipping boy for all real or imagined ills visited upon the Muslims, it was the result, not the cause, of the inexorable decline of Islam as a world power and civilization that culminated in the collapse of the Ottoman Empire in the early 20th century. Nor should it be forgotten that throughout most of its history, Islam has been a premier imperialist and colonialist power itself.

Perhaps the greatest failure of the president's vaunted new approach to Islam is his reluctance to examine the profoundly oppressive and despotic nature of governance in most Arab and Muslim countries as one of the root causes of radical Islam. Worn-out clichés that Islam is "an important part of promoting peace" do little to explain to either Westerners or Muslims the nature of the conflict and how it affects their well-being. It is, of course, a well-known fact that radical Islam would have never reached critical mass without massive financial support and political sponsorship from states such as Saudi Arabia, Iran, Pakistan, and Sudan. What's less well-known is that many Muslim regimes that are considered moderate, or even American allies, have also aided and abetted Islamic extremism.

Egypt, the recipient of billions of U.S. aid dollars, is a case in point. Faced with a virulent Islamist threat from the Muslim Brotherhood, Cairo's dictatorial rulers, from Sadat to Mubarak, sought to appease the Islamists by allowing them to play an ever-greater role in society. First Sadat promoted sharia as one of the sources of law and later proclaimed it the sole source of Egyptian legislation, providing the Islamists with a powerful weapon against their secular opponents. Mubarak then appointed the mullahs of Al-Azhar as the sole arbiters of what books should be published in or imported into Egypt. Predictably, anything that does not meet their medieval criteria is being censored, while books that discuss how many angels could be recruited for a war against Israel (120 million) are encouraged.

This is the same organization that, in President Obama's words, "paved the way for Europe's Renaissance and Enlightenment." The inevitable result of such policies is evident in the mufti of Egypt's open support for Hezbollah and Hamas, and in his Taliban-like fatwa that sculpture and sculptors are against Islam.

The inescapable reality is that the policies that have served the venal and corrupt Arab regimes well (by keeping their oppressed populations poor, uneducated, and ignorant) have served the violent religious obscurantism of the Islamists even better. Consider that not a single Western government had the courage to criticize the Organization of the Islamic Conference in 1990 when all 45 of its members voted for the "Cairo Declaration of Human Rights in Islam," which, de facto and de jure, denied most internationally recognized human rights to Muslims by making all rights and freedoms in Muslim countries subject to sharia as their "sole source." To discuss our relations with the Muslim world in the abstract, as the Obama administration is now doing, without even mentioning the vast gulf separating most Muslim regimes from the rest of the world when it comes to the most basic aspects of modern civilization is disingenuous as well as futile.

The Bush administration was justifiably taken to task for refusing to recognize or do anything about the nefarious role played by state sponsors of extremism such as Saudi Arabia and Pakistan in the spread of radical Islam. President Obama has already gone beyond that, with a policy of pandering and appeasement. History teaches us that tolerating the intolerant and appeasing the unappeasable results in more conflict and bloodshed.

-- Alex Alexiev is an adjunct fellow at the Hudson Institute in Washington, D.C.

Jeff Jacoby contrasts what Ronald Reagan did with his opportunity in Berlin and what Obama didn't do in Cairo.

What the Brandenburg Gate was for Ronald Reagan in 1987, Cairo University could have been for Obama. Reagan seized the moment, spoke the truth, and helped liberate half a continent. All Obama did was give a speech.

Oh, well. Maybe there'll be a next time.

In Cairo, the president pandered

by Jeff Jacoby
The Boston Globe
June 7, 2009

PRESIDENT OBAMA went to the Middle East, he said, to speak frankly and forthrightly about the issues that bedevil America's relations with the Muslim world. "Part of being a good friend is being honest," he had said in an interview just before his trip. He warned his Cairo audience that he intended to be blunt. "We must say openly the things we hold in our hearts and that too often are said only behind closed doors," he declared; so he was going to "speak as clearly and plainly as I can."

About some things, the president was indeed direct. He conveyed his impatience with those -- there are many in the Middle East -- who blame the 9/11 terrorist attacks on a Jewish or American conspiracy. "Let us be clear: Al-Qaeda killed nearly 3,000 people on that day" and "the victims were innocent men, women and children. . . . These are not opinions to be debated; these are facts to be dealt with."

He was even more scornful about Holocaust denial, which is also rife in the Arab world. "Six million Jews were killed" by Nazi Germany, Obama said -- "more than the entire Jewish population of Israel today. Denying that fact is baseless, ignorant, and hateful."

Would that the rest of his remarks had been equally plain-spoken. As the first American president with Muslim roots, Obama benefits from much acclaim and goodwill in the Middle East. Rarely has a president had a better opportunity to openly address the pathologies and prejudices that drag Islamic societies backward, trapping so many of the world's Muslims in cultures that are unfree and unenlightened. As a candidate for president, Obama had argued that his experience of Muslim life gave him the moral authority to speak truth to Islamic power. "I can speak forcefully," he told The New York Times, "about the need for Muslim countries to reconcile themselves to modernity in ways they have failed to do."
Alas, that is just what he didn't do. Instead Obama pandered to his audience. He repeatedly praised Islamic history and teachings, repeatedly drew attention to American or Western shortcomings -- and repeatedly avoided speaking frankly about the dysfunctions in contemporary Islam.

He spoke of democracy, for example, but only in gauzy platitudes about "the freedom to live as you choose" and the need for "government of the people and by the people." Obama could have mentioned that democracy is almost entirely absent from the Arab world, or called for the release of imprisoned dissidents. He could have used his bully pulpit to urge an end to Egypt's repressive "state of emergency," which has lasted 28 years. He could have contrasted Iraq's hard-won constitutional democracy with the Middle East's ugly autocracies and dictatorships. He could have offered hope and encouragement to persecuted reformers and pro-democracy activists. Why didn't he?

"I want to address . . . women's rights," the president said, as well he might, given the appalling subjugation of women in so many Muslim countries. But about that subjugation -- the gender apartheid in Saudi Arabia, the fanatic misogyny of the Taliban, the widespread female genital mutilation, the "honor" killings of women who get pregnant out of wedlock -- he spoke not a word. The closest he came to denouncing the thugs who blow up girls' schools and murder their teachers was to observe tepidly that "a woman who is denied an education is denied equality." He disagreed, he said, with those who think "that a woman who chooses to cover her hair is somehow less equal." But what about women who are forced to wear a hijab? About them, Obama was silent.

Most astonishing of all, Obama never spoke the words "Islamist" or "Islamism." In a speech directed to Muslims worldwide, he made no effort to refute radical Islam's endorsement of global jihad. He spoke only of "extremists" -- as in "violent extremists who pose a grave threat to our security" -- but said nothing about the totalitarian religious ideology that drives them. For Obama, speaking in the heart of the Arab world at a seat of Muslim learning, it was the perfect moment to strike an intellectual blow against radical Islam. It was the ideal venue to implore Muslims to rise up, vocally and en masse, against the jihadists who preach and commit violence in the name of Islam.

What the Brandenburg Gate was for Ronald Reagan in 1987, Cairo University could have been for Obama. Reagan seized the moment, spoke the truth, and helped liberate half a continent. All Obama did was give a speech.

Melanie Phillips is the author of the shocking story of Britain's indifference to and in some ways aid of the rise of radical Islam. "Londonistan" is must reading.

Phillips here does a careful review of the Obama Cairo speech and its carefully crafted anti-Semitic, pro-Muslim messages are revealed.

Obama in Cairo
Melanie PhillipsThursday, 4th June 2009

First, the good bits in Obama's speech in Cairo.

He told the Palestinians unequivocally that violence was wrong.

He said that there was an unbreakable bond between America and Israel.

He told the Arab states firmly:

The Arab-Israeli conflict should no longer be used to distract the people of Arab nations from other problems. Instead, it must be a cause for action to help the Palestinian people develop the institutions that will sustain their state; to recognize Israel's legitimacy; and to choose progress over a self-defeating focus on the past.

He condemned the persecution of non-Muslims in the Islamic world and urged equal rights for Muslim women.

He referred to Iran's role since 1979 in acts of hostage-taking and violence against U.S. troops and civilians.

Now the bad bits - and they were really bad.

He revealed gross ignorance of the Jews' unique claim to the land of Israel. He said that America's unbreakable bond with Israel was based upon

the recognition that the aspiration for a Jewish homeland is rooted in a tragic history that cannot be denied. Around the world, the Jewish people were persecuted for centuries, and anti-Semitism in Europe culminated in an unprecedented Holocaust...

The Jews' aspiration for their homeland does not derive from the Holocaust, nor their overall tragic history. It derives from Judaism itself, which is composed of the inseparable elements of the religion, the people and the land. Their unique claim upon the land rests upon the fact that the Jews are the only people for whom Israel was ever their nation, which it was for hundreds of years - centuries before the Arabs and Muslims came on the scene. As for antisemitism, he made no mention of the alliance between the Palestinians and the Nazis during the 1930s, and the fact that Nazi-style Jew-hatred continues to pour out of the Arab and Muslim world to this day.

Worse, Obama appeared to draw a subliminal equivalence between the Holocaust extermination camps and the Palestinian 'refugee' camps:

Tomorrow, I will visit Buchenwald, which was part of a network of camps where Jews were enslaved, tortured, shot and gassed to death by the Third Reich. Six million Jews were killed - more than the entire Jewish population of Israel today. Denying that fact is baseless, ignorant, and hateful. Threatening Israel with destruction - or repeating vile stereotypes about Jews - is deeply wrong, and only serves to evoke in the minds of Israelis this most painful of memories while preventing the peace that the people of this region deserve.

On the other hand, it is also undeniable that the Palestinian people - Muslims and Christians - have suffered in pursuit of a homeland. For more than 60 years they have endured the pain of dislocation. Many wait in refugee camps in the West Bank, Gaza, and neighboring lands for a life of peace and security that they have never been able to lead.

And with this awful and revealing linkage, he duly segued seamlessly into the distorted Arab and Muslim narrative of Israel's history. It is not undeniable that the Palestinians 'have suffered in pursuit of a homeland' because it is untrue. The Palestinians have been offered a homeland repeatedly - in 1936, 1947, 2000 and last year. They have repeatedly turned it down. The Arabs could have created it between 1948 and 1967, when the West Bank and Gaza were occupied by Jordan and Egypt. They chose not to do so. They could have created it after 1967, when Israel offered the land to them in return for peace with Israel. They refused the offer. The Palestinians have suffered because they have tried for six decades to destroy the Jews' homeland.

For more than sixty years they have endured the pain of dislocation.

The 'pain of dislocation' was caused by the fact that six decades ago they went to war against the newly recreated Israel to destroy it, and were subsequently deliberately kept in 'refugee' camps by the Arab world. What other aggressors in the world are described as suffering 'the pain of dislocation' caused by their own aggression -- which has continued for sixty years without remission and shows no sign of ending?

Many wait in refugee camps in the West Bank, Gaza, and neighboring lands for a life of peace and security that they have never been able to lead.

There is one reason for that and one reason alone - the Palestinians have ensured that Israel has never lived in peace or security, because they have continued to attack it and murder its citizens. And Gaza? Doesn't Obama realise the Israelis no longer occupy Gaza? It is run by Hamas, which shows its commitment to the peace and security of its inhabitants by throwing them off the tops of tall buildings.

So let there be no doubt: the situation for the Palestinian people is intolerable.

And what about the intolerable situation of Israel, forced to live in a state of siege for sixty years because of the unending aggression of the Palestinians and the wider Arab and Muslim world? The Palestinians could have lived in peace and prosperity alongside Israel at any time since 1948. If they were to end their attempt to destroy Israel and accept instead the right of Israel to exist as a Jewish state -- that crucial qualification Obama omitted to mention -- they could do so tomorrow. The only reason their position is intolerable is because they themselves have made it so. What other aggressors in the world have their situation described as 'intolerable'?

Palestinians must abandon violence.

Good. But then:

Resistance through violence and killing is wrong and does not succeed.

'Resistance'? 'Resistance' is a term of moral approval. 'Resistance' describes a fight against injustice. But the Palestinians have been engaged in an attempt to wipe out Israel. Obama sees this as 'resistance' - even though he says violence is wrong. And then this:

For centuries, black people in America suffered the lash of the whip as slaves and the humiliation of segregation. But it was not violence that won full and equal rights. It was a peaceful and determined insistence upon the ideals at the center of America's founding. This same story can be told by people from South Africa to South Asia; from Eastern Europe to Indonesia.

So Obama has equated genocidal terrorism by the Palestinians with the civil rights movement in America and the true resistance against apartheid in South Africa. Thus the moral bankruptcy of the moral relativist.

Next, he repeated that the settlements (all of them? just new ones?) undermined peace and so had to stop. But they don't undermine peace. It is Arab rejectionism that prevents peace in the Middle East, and the settlements are a palpable excuse. Yet Obama delivered no ultimatum of any kind to Iran, the real threat to peace in the region and the world; indeed, he repeated that Iran

should have the right to access peaceful nuclear power if it complies with its responsibilities under the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty,

an alarming indication that he might view as acceptable a formulation which might enable Iran to continue to make nuclear weapons under some kind of verbal and political camouflage.

For his egregious sanitising of Islam and its history, and his absurd claims about its contribution to western civilisation, read Robert Spencer here. But in this regard, one of Obama's references in particular made me catch my breath. It was this:

The Holy Koran teaches that whoever kills an innocent, it is as if he has killed all mankind; and whoever saves a person, it is as if he has saved all mankind.

This is boilerplate misrepresentation by Islamists and their apologists. The fact is that it is Judaism which teaches this as a cardinal precept. The Talmud states:

Whoever destroys a single soul, he is guilty as though he had destroyed a complete world; and whoever preserves a single soul, it is as though he had preserved a whole world.

The Koran appropriated this precept - but altered it to mean something very different. Thus (verses 5:32-5:35):

That was why we laid it down for the Israelites that whoever killed a human being, except as punishment for murder or other villainy in the land, shall be regarded as having killed all mankind; and that whoever saved a human life shall be regarded as having saved all mankind. Our apostles brought them veritable proofs: yet many among them, even after that, did prodigious evil in the land. Those that make war against God and His apostle and spread disorder in the land shall be slain or crucified or have their hands and feet cut off on alternate sides, or be banished from the land. (My emphasis)

In other words, this turns a Talmudic precept affirming the value of preserving human life into a prescription for violence and murder against Jews and 'unbelievers'. Yet Obama passed it off as evidence of the pacific nature of Islam.

So in conclusion, yes, there was some positive stuff in this speech - but it was outweighed by the United States President's shocking historical misrepresentations, gross ignorance, disgusting moral equivalence between aggressors and their victims, and disturbing sanitising of Islamist supremacism.

In short, deeply troubling.

How can Prime Mnister Netanyahu prevent Obama from destroying Israel and keeping Iran front and center as the most dangerous threat to peace in the Middle East? By rolling out his own peace plan. The Middle East's most brilliant political analyst Caroline Glick explains.

Column One: Netanyahu's peace plan

May. 21, 2009
Caroline Glick , THE JERUSALEM POST

Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu's visit with US President Barack Obama at the White House on Monday was a baptism of fire for the new premier. What emerged from the meeting is that Obama's priorities regarding Iran, Israel and the Arab world are diametrically opposed to Israel's priorities.

During his ad hoc press conference with Netanyahu, Obama made clear that he will not lift a finger to prevent Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons. And acting as Obama's surrogate, for the past two weeks CIA Director Leon Panetta has made clear that Obama expects Israel to also sit on its thumbs as Iran develops the means to destroy it.

Obama showed his hand on Iran in three ways. First, he set a nonbinding timetable of seven months for his policy of appeasement and engagement of the ayatollahs to work. That policy, he explained, will only be implemented after next month's Iranian presidential elections. And those direct US-Iranian talks must be given at least six months to show results before they can be assessed as successful or failed.

But Israel's Military Intelligence has assessed that six months may be too long to wait. By the end of the year, Iran's nuclear program may be unstoppable. And Iran's successful test of its solid fuel Sejil-2 missile with a 2,000 kilometer range on Wednesday merely served to show the urgency of the situation. Obviously the mullahs are not waiting for Obama to convince them of the error of their ways.

Beyond the fact that Obama's nonbinding timeline is too long, there is his "or else." Obama made clear that in the event that in December or January he concludes that the Iranians are not negotiating in good faith, the most radical step he will be willing to take will be to consider escalating international sanctions against Teheran. In the meantime, at his urging, Congressman Howard Berman, chairman of the House International Affairs Committee, has set aside a bill requiring sanctions against oil companies that export refined fuel into Iran.

Finally there was Obama's contention that the best way for the US to convince Iran to give up its nuclear program is by convincing Israel to give away more land to the Palestinians. As Obama put it, "To the extent that we can make peace with the Palestinians, between the Palestinians and the Israelis, then I actually think it strengthens our hand in the international community in dealing with a potential Iranian threat." This statement encapsulates the basic lack of seriousness and fundamental mendacity of Obama's approach to "dealing with a potential Iranian threat."

Iran has made clear that it wants Israel destroyed. The mullahs don't care how big Israel is. Their missiles are pointing at Tel Aviv, not Beit El. As for the international community, the Russians and Chinese have not been assisting Iran's nuclear and missile programs for the past 15 years because there is no Palestinian state. They have been assisting Iran because they think a strong Iran weakens the US. And they are right.

The Arab states, for their part, are already openly siding with Israel against Iran. The establishment of a Palestinian state will not make their support for action to prevent Iran from acquiring the means to dominate the region any more profound.

On the face of it, Obama's obsessive push for a Palestinian state makes little sense. The Palestinians are hopelessly divided. It is not simply that Hamas rules the Gaza Strip and Fatah controls Judea and Samaria. Fatah itself is riven by division. Palestinian Authority Chairman Mahmoud Abbas's appointment of the new PA government under Salaam Fayad was overwhelmingly rejected by Fatah leaders. Quite simply, there is no coherent Palestinian leadership that is either willing or capable of reaching an accord with Israel.

As for the prospects for peace itself, given that there is little distinction between the anti-Semitic bilge broadcast daily in Gaza by Hamas-controlled media, and the anti-Semitic bilge broadcast daily in Judea and Samaria by the Fatah/Abbas/Fayad-controlled media, those prospects aren't looking particularly attractive. That across-the-board anti-Semitic incitement has engendered the current situation where Hamas and Fatah members and supporters are firmly united in their desire to see Israel destroyed. This was made clear on Thursday morning when a Fatah policeman in Kalkilya used his US-provided rifle to open fire on IDF soldiers engaged in a counterterror operation in the city.

Given that the establishment of a Palestinian state will have no impact on Iran's nuclear program, and in light of the fact that under the present circumstances any Palestinian state will be at war with Israel, and assuming that Obama is not completely ignorant of the situation on the ground, there is only one reasonable explanation for his urgent desire to force Israel to support the creation of a Palestinian state and to work for its establishment by expelling hundreds of thousands of Israelis from their homes. Quite simply, it is a way to divert attention away from Obama's acquiescence to Iran's nuclear aspirations.

BY MAKING the achievement of the unachievable goal of making peace between Israel and the Palestinians through the establishment of a Palestinian terror state the centerpiece of his Middle East agenda, Obama is able to cast Israel as the region's villain. This aim is reflected in the administration's intensifying pressure on Israel to destroy Israeli communities in Judea and Samaria.

In portraying Jews who live in mobile homes on barren hilltops in Judea and Samaria - rather than Iranian mullahs who test ballistic missile while enriching uranium and inciting genocide - as the greatest obstacle to peace, the Obama administration not only seeks to deflect attention away from its refusal to prevent Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons. It is also setting Israel up as the fall guy who it will blame after Iran emerges as a nuclear power.

Obama's intention to unveil his Middle East peace plan in the course of his speech to the Muslim world in Cairo on June 4, like his decision to opt out of visiting Israel in favor of visiting a Nazi death camp, make it clear that he does not perceive Israel as a vital ally, or even as a partner in the peace process he wishes to initiate. Israeli officials were not consulted about his plan. Then, too, from the emerging contours of his plan, it is clear that he will be offering something that no Israeli government can accept.

According to media reports, Obama's plan will require Israel to withdraw its citizens and its military to the indefensible 1949 armistice lines. It will provide for the free immigration of millions of Israel-hating Arabs to the Palestinian state. And it seeks to represent all of this as in accord with Israel's interests by claiming that after Israel renders itself indefensible, all 57 members of the Organization of the Islamic Conference (including Iran) will "normalize" their relations with Israel. In short, Obama is using his peace plan to castigate the Netanyahu government as the chief destabilizing force in the region.

During his meeting with Obama, Netanyahu succeeded in evading the policy traps Obama set for him. Netanyahu reserved Israel's right to act independently against Iran and he conceded nothing substantive on the Palestinian issue.

While itself no small achievement, Netanyahu's successful deflection of Obama's provocations is not a sustainable strategy. Already on Tuesday the administration began coercing Israel to toe its line on Iran and the Palestinians by engaging it in joint "working groups."

Then, too, the government's destruction of an outpost community in Judea on Thursday was perceived as Israeli buckling to US pressure. And it doubtlessly raised expectations for further expulsions in the near future.

SO WHAT must Netanyahu do? What would a strategy to contain the Obama administration's pressure and maintain international attention on Iran look like?

Under the present circumstances, the Netanyahu government's best bet is to introduce its own peace plan to mitigate the impact of Obama's plan. To blunt the impact of Obama's speech in Cairo, Netanyahu should present his peace plan before June 4.

Such a plan should contain three stages. First, in light of the Arab world's apparent willingness to engage with Israel, Netanyahu should call for the opening of direct talks between Israel and the Arab League, or between Israel and the Organization of the Islamic Conference, regarding the immediate normalization of relations between Israel and the Arab-Islamic world. Both Obama and Jordan's King Abdullah claim that such normalization is in the offing. Israel should insist that it begin without delay.

This, of course, is necessary for peace to emerge with the Palestinians. As we saw at Camp David in 2000, the only way that Palestinian leaders will feel comfortable making peace with Israel is if the Arab world first demonstrates its acceptance of the Jewish state as a permanent feature on the Middle East's landscape. Claims that such an Israeli demand is a mere tactic to buy time can be easily brushed off. Given Jordanian and American claims that the Arab world is willing to accept Israel, once negotiations begin, this stage could be completed in a matter of months.

The second stage of the Israeli peace plan would involve Israel and the Arab world agreeing and beginning to implement a joint program for combating terrorism. This program would involve destroying terror networks, cutting off funding for terror networks and agreeing to arrest terrorists and extradite them to The Hague or the US for trial. It should be abundantly clear to all governments in the region that there can be no long-term regional peace or stability as long as terrorists bent on destroying Israel and overthrowing moderate Arab regimes are allowed to operate. So making the implementation of such a join program a precondition for further progress shouldn't pose an obstacle to peace. Indeed, there is no reason for it to even be perceived as particularly controversial.

The final stage of the Israeli peace plan should be the negotiation of a final-status accord with the Palestinians. Only after the Arab world has accepted Israel, and only after it has agreed to join Israel in achieving the common goal of a terror-free Middle East, can there be any chance that the Palestinians will feel comfortable and free to peacefully coexist with Israel. And Israel, of course, will feel much more confident about living at peace with the Palestinians after the Arab world demonstrates its good faith and friendship to the Jewish state and its people.

Were Netanyahu to offer this plan in the next two weeks, he would be able to elude Obama's trap on June 4 by proposing to discuss both plans with the Arab League. In so doing, he would be able to continue to make the case that Iran is the gravest danger to the region without being demonized as a destabilizing force and an enemy of peace.

Whether Netanyahu advances such a peace plan or not, what became obvious this week is that his greatest challenges in office will be to prevent Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons while preventing the Obama administration from blaming Israel for the absence of peace.

Ralph Peter focuses on Obama's foreign policy. He finds it terrifying. The level of naivete and ignorance demonstrated is breathtaking.

We now have a president who doesn't know that Pakistan was founded as a democracy, a secretary of state who thinks we created the Taliban, a head of the Department of Homeland Security who doesn't believe Islamist terrorists exist and a vice president who claims FDR gave televised speeches during the Depression.

Read it all.

THE OBAMA DOCTRINE
By RALPH PETERS
April 29, 2009 -- New York Post

AFTER a mere 100 days, the "Obama Doctrine" for our foreign and security poli cies has emerged. And it's terrifying.

The combination of dizzying naivete, dislike of our allies, disdain for our military, distrust of our intelligence services and distaste for our own country promises the worst foreign policy of our lifetimes.

That includes President Jimmy Carter's abysmal record of failure.

The core tenets of the Obama Doctrine to date would make a charter member of the Weather Underground cheer:

We're to blame. If there are problems anywhere, they're America's fault. This central conviction of leftist ideology appears to have soaked so thoroughly into our president's consciousness during his lengthy friendships with extremists that it's now second nature to him.

Problems can be negotiated away. From Somali pirates to Moscow's belligerency, Obama and his Cabinet see a good chat as the best response to a challenge. Our president got to the Oval Office by talking, not doing, and his faith in his powers of persuasion is unlimited.

An acquaintance who may have our government's best grasp of the Russians shakes his head at the tone in Washington. The current mantra: "We have to get over our Cold War thinking." Great -- except that it's the Russians who've revived Cold War hostility.
The Taliban devours Pakistan, and we want to talk. President Hugo Chavez destroys Venezuela's democracy, and we want to talk. Iran pursues nuclear weapons with refreshed enthusiasm . . . and we want to talk.

Problems that can't be talked out can be bought off. Pakistan, a nuke-armed state of 170 million Muslims seething with anti-Americanism stirred up by our "friends," faces a crack-up as its once-monolithic military splinters. Obama's answer? Send billions of dollars that will disappear and weapons that may soon be used against our troops.

Secretary of State Hillary Clinton thinks the solution to piracy is a generous program to rebuild Somalia. (Been there, done that.) She'd also like to hand Hamas a billion bucks.
The "Las Vegas law" applies: You can buy sex but not enduring love. We can't defeat terror with welfare checks.

Islamist terrorism doesn't exist. The term's even been banned from government departments. As Muslim extremists slaughter innocent victims by the thousands, we're assured Islam's a "religion of peace" that contributed profoundly to our country's development. (Huh?)

It's as if 9/11 never happened. The "nonterrorists" drenching the greater Middle East in blood and threatening us as loudly as they can are just victims of our aggression. It's all our fault.

Terrorists do exist, though -- among our returning veterans and amid those Americans who don't subscribe to MoveOn.org's revulsion at our country.

Israel's the obstacle to Middle East peace. Palestinians are all victims. Hamas consists of struggling community activists. The terrorists are in the Israeli military.

Our nukes threaten world peace and we need to get rid of them. Other states only maintain or seek nuclear arsenals because we worry them. If we can get down to zero nukes, peace will reign on earth.

Forget that only our nuclear weapons prevented World War III and that they still deter potential enemies. Just get rid of them, OK?

Our military is dangerous. Beyond Obama's cynically choreographed appearances with our troops, he and his coterie clearly disdain military advice and uniformed service. The administration views our troops as primitive creatures who must be collared and leashed, not as part of any solutions.

Our intelligence services are even more dangerous than our military. The administration's already begun to gut our intelligence capabilities. Carter at least pretended to study the problem. Obama's plunging straight in with the demoralization of our shadow warriors.

It's only torture if we do it.

Blame President George W. Bush. Should the Obama Doctrine lead to new terror attacks (sorry, Janet: I meant "man-caused disasters") or to foreign-policy humiliations, it won't be Obama's fault, but Bush's.

We're becoming a third-world country, succumbing to a sickening (in both senses of the word) culture of blame. And that culture is fostered by breathtaking ignorance.

We now have a president who doesn't know that Pakistan was founded as a democracy, a secretary of state who thinks we created the Taliban, a head of the Department of Homeland Security who doesn't believe Islamist terrorists exist and a vice president who claims FDR gave televised speeches during the Depression.

If Bush had made such gaffes, the media would've mocked him. But Obama and his entourage excite orgasmic forgiveness among journalists. Which brings us to the Obama Doctrine's final tenet:

Our media sluts will portray defeat as victory.

Ralph Peters is Fox News' strategic analyst.

There is no sounder, clearer thinker writing today than Thomas Sowell.

It is frightening the danger President Obama is exposing the citizens of this nation and of our allies to.

Survival Optional

Thomas Sowell
Syndicated Writer

Tuesday, April 28, 2009

It used to be said that self-preservation is the first law of nature. But much of what has been happening in recent times in the United States, and in Western civilization in general, suggests that survival is taking a back seat to the shibboleths of political correctness.

We have already turned loose dozens of captured terrorists, who have resumed their terrorism. Why? Because they have been given "rights" that exist neither in our laws nor under international law.

These are not criminals in our society, entitled to the protection of the Constitution of the United States. They are not prisoners of war entitled to the protection of the Geneva Convention.

There was a time when people who violated the rules of war were not entitled to turn around and claim the protection of those rules. German soldiers who put on U.S. military uniforms, in order to infiltrate American lines during the Battle of the Bulge, were simply lined up against a wall and shot.

Nobody even thought that this was a violation of the Geneva Convention. American authorities filmed the mass executions. Nobody dreamed up fictitious "rights" for these enemy combatants who had violated the rules of war. Nobody thought we had to prove that we were nicer than the Nazis by bending over backward.

Bending over backward is a very bad position from which to try to defend yourself. Nobody in those days confused bending over backward with "the rule of law," as Barack Obama did recently. Bending over backward is the antithesis of the rule of law. It is depriving the people of the protection of their laws, in order to pander to mushy notions among the elite.

Even under the Geneva Convention, enemy soldiers have no right to be turned loose before the war is over. Terrorists-- "militants" or "insurgents" for those of you who are squeamish-- have declared open-ended war against America. It is open-ended in time and open-ended in methods, including beheadings of innocent civilians.

President Obama can ban the phrase "war on terror" but he cannot ban the terrorists' war on us. That war continues, so there is no reason to turn terrorists loose before it ends. They chose to make it that kind of war. We don't need to risk American lives to prove that we are nicer than they are.

The great Supreme Court justice Oliver Wendell Holmes said that law is not some "brooding omnipresence in the sky." It is a set of explicit rules by which human beings structure their lives and their relationships with one another.

Those who choose to live outside those laws, whether terrorists or pirates, can be-- and have been-- shot on sight. Squeamishness is neither law nor morality. And moral exhibitionism is beneath contempt, when it sacrifices the safety of those who live within the law for the sake of self-satisfied preening, whether in editorial offices or in the White House.

As if it is not enough to turn cutthroats loose to cut throats again, we are now contemplating legal action against Americans who wrung information about international terrorist operations out of captured terrorists.

Does nobody think ahead to what this will mean-- for many years to come-- if people trying protect this country from terrorists have to worry about being put behind bars themselves? Do we need to have American intelligence agencies tip-toeing through the tulips when they deal with terrorists?

In his visit to CIA headquarters, President Obama pledged his support to the people working there and said that there would be no prosecutions of CIA agents for prior actions. Then he welshed on that in a matter of hours by leaving the door open for such prosecutions, which the left has been clamoring for, both inside and outside of Congress.

Repercussions extend far beyond issues of the day. It is bad enough that we have a glib and sophomoric narcissist in the White House. What is worse is that whole nations that rely on the United States for their security see how easily our president welshes on his commitments. So do other nations, including those with murderous intentions toward us, our children and grandchildren.

The stain of Sharia spreads across Pakistan aided by the Pakistani government. The former tourist destination the beautiful Swat Valley has been handed over to Islamic true believers who will install Islamic law -- and want government troops to help enforce it. Their goal is to take all of Pakistan back to the 7th century rule of Mohammad. They are well on their way.

Not content with forcing women into full head-to-toe covering and isolation at home, they have burned schools for girls and taken to public flogging of women seen in public without a blood male relative (a father-in-law doesn't count).

The Pakistan goverrnment sent as its negotiator with the Swat Valley Taliban Maulana Sufi Muhammad. Muhammad was to work out a "peace" deal with the head of the Swat Valley Taliban Maulana Fazlullah. Not only is Fazlullah his son-in-law, Muhammad founded the Taliban party his son-in-law now leads. Peace would come, they agreed, when the government agreed that Sharia, Islamic law, would reign in Swat Valley. After the Pakistani parliament voted in favor, President Zadari approved the deal.

Now the father-in-law has taken up residence with his son-in-law in Swat Valley and is threatening the government he recently represented. He is demanding the government troops work with the Taliban to enforce Sharia.

And the spokeman for the Swat Taliban Muslim Khan has let the press know that Osama bin Laden is welcome to come and settle among them -- and he will be protected.

The Swat Valley is about 100 miles from the nation's capital Islamabad. In Islamabad, the Supreme Court released from prison the head imam Maulana Abdul Aziz of the Red Mosque which was the violent epicenter of the movement in 2007 to establish Islamic courts in Islamabad. Government troops were forced to storm the mosque and hundreds died. The head imam Maulana Abdul Aziz sought to escape hiding in a female's top-to-toe dress, but was captured. During the height of the insurrection, his female followers watched the chaos below the mosque walls.

In a rally in the capital city of Islamabad, thousands chanted "Our way is jihad!" The clericleading the defiance of the government by establishing a Sharia court has threatened suicide attacks if the government tries to stop him. '[Maulana Abdul] Aziz addressed about 3,000 people at the mosque for a conference on Sharia and jihad - Islamic law and holy war. Listeners filled the courtyard and packed the roof of the red-walled building just a few hundred yards from the city's government district.

Aziz then asked the gathering, "What is our way?" and students bellowed back: "Jihad! Jihad!"

The rule of law in Pakistan is disintegrating. Islamist forces are growing stronger and taking control of more and more of the country. Pakistan, already a nuclear weapons power, is emerging as the greatest danger to the civilzed world.

Taliban in Pakistani: `Welcome, Osama!' By KATHY GANNON, Associated Press Writer Kathy Gannon, Associated Press Writer April 20, 2009 MINGORA, Pakistan - Pakistan was trying to end bloodshed when it let the idyllic Swat Valley fall under Islamic law last week. Instead, it has emboldened the Taliban to extend a hand to militants, including Osama bin Laden.

The local spokesman for the Taliban, which control the valley, told The Associated Press he'd welcome militants bent on battling U.S. troops and their Arab allies if they want to settle there.

"Osama can come here. Sure, like a brother they can stay anywhere they want," Muslim Khan said in a two-hour interview Friday, his first with a foreign journalist since Islamic law was imposed. "Yes, we will help them and protect them."

Khan spoke in halting English he learned during four years painting houses in the U.S. before returning to Swat in 2002. He averted his eyes as he spoke to a female journalist, in line with his strict understanding of Islam.

Pakistan reacted with alarm to his comments, saying it would never let him shelter the likes of bin Laden.

"We would have to go for the military operation. We would have to apply force again," said Information Minister Qamar Zaman Kaira. "We simply condemn this. We are fighting this war against al-Qaida and the Taliban."

But it is far from clear that the government has the means to do much of anything in the Swat Valley. It agreed to Islamic law in the region -- drawing international condemnation -- after trying and failing to defeat the Taliban in fighting marked by brutal beheadings that killed more than 850 people over two years.

"We lost the war. We negotiated from a position of weakness," said Afrasiab Khattak, a leader of the Awami National Party, which governs the province that includes Swat. He said the region's police force is too underpaid, undertrained and underequipped to take on the militants.

At the behest of the National Assembly, President Asif Ali Zardari last week signed off on a regulation establishing Islamic law throughout the Malakand Division, a strategic territory bordering Afghanistan, and Pakistan's tribal belt where bin Laden has long been rumored to be hiding. The Swat Valley, where tourists once flocked to enjoy Alpine-like scenery, is part of the area.

Whether Swat someday proves an alluring haven for bin Laden could depend on how threatened he feels in his current location, and how successful the Taliban militants are in keeping state forces at bay there.

U.S. officials said they would work with Pakistan to make sure militants aren't safe anywhere.

"With regard to Mullah Omar and Osama bin Laden, this is not a place where they should be welcome. We believe ... that violent extremists need to be confronted," State Department spokesman Robert Wood said Monday.

In an interview with Pakistan's Geo TV, Prime Minister Yousuf Raza Gilani was asked about U.S. envoy Richard Holbrooke's concerns over the Swat deal.

"He doesn't need to worry about that," Gilani said. "This is our country. We know the ground realities better than he does. We will continue supporting this deal if peace comes there. I'm seeing peace is coming there."

On Friday, Taliban fighters in pickup trucks with black flags rumbled through the rutted streets of the valley's main city of Mingora, demanding over loudspeakers that shops shutter their windows and prepare for prayers.

In the city center, a district police station lay in ruins, destroyed by a suicide bomber. The only music blaring praised the Taliban and extolled the young to fight holy war.

Aftab Alam, president of the district court lawyers, took a journalist through an open courtyard and closed the door to his office before whispering in a soft, angry voice about the Taliban.

"They are more than beasts. Our government is impotent, stupid and corrupt. We are helpless (facing) this militancy," he said, calling the Taliban "barbaric" and "illiterate."

Alam said he feared for his life, "but I dare to speak because I am worried about my nation, my religion, my home."

The Swat deal comes as Pakistan's hodgepodge of militant groups appear to be growing increasingly integrated and coordinated.

The Taliban spokesman counted among his allies several groups on U.N. and U.S. terrorist lists: Lashkar-e-Taiba, blamed for last year's bloody siege in Mumbai, India; Jaish-e-Mohammed, which trains fighters in Pakistan's populous Punjab province; the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan; al-Qaida, and the Taliban of Afghanistan.

"If we need, we can call them and if they need, they can call us," Khan said.

He said his forces would go to help the Taliban in Afghanistan if the United States and NATO continue to fight there.

"You must tell (the Americans) if they want peace ... to withdraw their forces, keep them on the other side of the Atlantic Ocean," he said.

Khattak, the provincial politician, described the implementation of Islamic law as replacing traditional judges with qazis, special judges trained in Islamic law. Already, a handful of qazis have begun hearing minor cases. The deal's broker, fundamentalist cleric Sufi Mohammed, has said no regular courts will be allowed in the region.

But Khan said the Taliban envisions an even a broader system: a whole new set of laws following a strict interpretation of Islam, akin to the system Afghanistan's Taliban imposed during their 1996-2001 rule. There, the government banned music and television, restricted girls' education and women's movement and cut off limbs and stoned women to death in public ceremonies.

"We don't need just qazis. We have to change the laws," Khan said.

He said his group wants to expand Islamic law, also known as Shariah, into all of nuclear-armed Pakistan.

"You will see the National Assembly will follow after one year, two years, six months," he said. "I don't know, but they will have to pass Shariah for all of Pakistan."

Already, Taliban fighters have moved unhindered into nearby Buner district -- also part of Malakand Division -- declaring themselves to be the enforcers of Islamic law and threatening tribesmen.

"It used to be that you crossed the Malakand Pass to Swat and you thought, 'I am in heaven,'" said Alam, the lawyer. "Now you think, 'I am in Hell.'"

A Kuwaiti professor lectures an appreciate audience on how 300,000 Americans can be easily killed by a man of courage carrying four pounds of Antrax across the Mexican border and then releasing the antrax like confetti on "the White House lawn." He proclaims that so-called "terrorists" are his friend as they should be theirs, because they are the most honorable people in the world.

That the U.S. rescued Kuwait from Saddam Hussain's invasion and occupation didn't change this professor's opinion of the infidel Americans and the Jews.

If one is needed, this MEMRI video is a reminder how deeply inbred the culture of hatred and death to the "other" of Mohammad's Koran is in the Muslim world. Listen to the cultured tone of the speaker, listen to the appreciative chuckles from his audience, watch the enjoyment in the speaker's face as he explains how easy and satisfying it is to kill 300,000 Americans.

The professor doesn't note that his courageous anthrax suicide killer could also be murdering President Obama, who is determined to convince Americans that followers of Islam are just like any old American.

Memri-TV is always worth a visit.

"Distractions" are what the president calls them. North Korea, Iran, pirates.

Mark Steyn has a different view.

When all the world's a "distraction," maybe you're not the main event after all. Most wealthy nations lack the means to defend themselves. Those few that do, lack the will. Meanwhile, basket-case jurisdictions send out ever bolder freelance marauders to prey on the civilized world with impunity. Don't be surprised if "the civilized world" shrivels and retreats in the face of state-of-the-art reprimitivization. From piracy to nukes to the limp response of the hyperpower, this is not a "distraction" but a portent of the future.

Friday, April 10, 2009
Civilization walking the plank
Pirate problem joins North Korean missile, Iranian nukes as 'distractions' for Obama.
Mark Steyn

The Reuters headline put it this way: "Pirates Pose Annoying Distraction For Obama."

So many distractions, aren't there? Only a week ago, the North Korean missile test was an "annoying distraction" from Barack Obama's call for a world without nuclear weapons and his pledge that America would lead the way in disarming. And only a couple of days earlier the president insisted Iraq was a "distraction" - from what, I forget: The cooing press coverage of Michelle's wardrobe? No doubt when the Iranians nuke Israel, that, too, will be an unwelcome distraction from the administration's plans for federally subsidized day care, just as Pearl Harbor was an annoying distraction from the New Deal, and the First World War was an annoying distraction from the Archduke Franz Ferdinand's dinner plans

If the incompetent management driving The New York Times from junk status to oblivion wished to decelerate their terminal decline, they might usefully amend their motto to "All The News That's Fit To Distract." Tom Blumer of Newsbusters notes that in the past 30 days there have been some 2,500 stories featuring Obama and "distractions," as opposed to about 800 "distractions" for Bush in his entire second term. The sub-headline of the Reuters story suggests the unprecedented pace at which the mountain of distractions is piling up: "First North Korea, Iran - now Somali pirates."

Er, OK. So the North Korean test is a "distraction," the Iranian nuclear program is a "distraction," and the seizure of a U.S.-flagged vessel in international waters is a "distraction." Maybe it would be easier just to have the official State Department maps reprinted with the Rest of the World relabeled "Distractions." Oh, to be sure, you could still have occasional oases of presidential photo-opportunities - Buckingham Palace, that square in Prague - but with the land beyond the edge of the Queen's gardens ominously marked "Here be distractions..."

contnue reading . . .

87% of American Jews voted for Obama. They must hate Israel.

It was abundantly clear from his Chicagoland associates -- Farrakhan, Jeremiah Wright and Rashid Khalidi -- he felt no identification with the cause of Israeli democracy.

Yet they voted for him overwhelmingly.

Now he is surrounding himself with known, open haters of Israel -- Susan Rice at the UN, Samantha Power inside the National Security Council and now the despicable Chas Freeman as head of National Intelligence.

And, sadly, despite President Clinton's seemingly sincere support of Israel, his wife is selling out Israel in her role as Obama's spokesman. To see Senator Kerry of Massachustts joining in is really no surprise. He sold out the United States when he returned from four months in Vietnam. Why wouldn't he sell out Israel for state dinners at the White House?

Obama's radical turn of American policy is a threat to Israel. Accepting Iran as a nuclear power the U.S. can chat with. Welcomiing Iranian puppet Syria back into the good graces of America even though the murder of the former Lebanese prime minister is still traced to Assad's doorstep. Giving $900 million to the rebuilding of Hamas-controlled Gaza which today is still firing rockets and missiles at Israeli communities.

Yet American Jews support Obama.

Obama has many missions. One appears to be to destroy the Jewish state -- or enable someone else -- Iran, most likely -- to do it.

It's well known that Obama does not have Jewish roots. He has Muslim roots. While it has been fashionable to brush aside the early years he lived as an Indonesian in Jakarta, he apparently has not left behind the hatreds and prejudices he learned there.

The only immediate relations he has are Muslim, whose hatred of Jews is inbred from birth. It can only be assumed that the same indoctrination enveloped Barack Hussein Obama during his early years in Jakarta. The hatred apparently lives on.

And now he is in a position to do something about it.

Is Israel alarmed? Of course.

More than 60 years of American support from Israel is coming to an end if President Obama has his way. He's well on his way with no or only meek protests from the supposed Democratic congressional supporters of Israel or even from American Jews.

Caroline Glick documents the American betrayal of their only reliable ally in the Middle East. Apparently exasperated with their sorry performance during the presidential election, she does not dwell on the craven behavior of American Jews.

Column One: Soldiers of Peace

Mar. 6, 2009
Caroline Glick , THE JERUSALEM POST

Compare and contrast the following three events: At the International Atomic Energy Agency's Board of Governors meeting on Wednesday, George Schulte, the US ambassador to the IAEA, pointed an accusatory finger at Syria. Damascus, Schulte said, has not come clean on its nuclear program. That program, of course, was exposed in September 2007 when Israel reportedly destroyed Syria's North Korean-built, Iranian-financed al-Kibar nuclear reactor.

In its report to its Board of Governors, the IAEA stated that in analyzing soil samples from the bombed installation, its inspectors discovered traces of uranium. The nuclear watchdog agency also noted that the Syrians have blocked UN nuclear inspectors from the site and from three other suspected nuclear sites.

Reacting to the IAEA report, Schulte said that it "contributes to the growing evidence of clandestine nuclear activities in Syria."

He added, "We must understand why such [uranium] material - material not previously declared to the IAEA - existed in Syria, and this can only happen if Syria provides the cooperation requested."

On Tuesday, at a press conference in Jerusalem with outgoing Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni, visiting US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton announced that the Obama administration is sending two senior envoys to Damascus. Their job, as she put it, is to begin "preliminary conversations" on how to jumpstart US-Syrian bilateral ties.

Clinton's statement made good headlines, but she was light on details. On Wednesday, hours after Schulte accused Syria of covering up its illicit nuclear program, US Sen. John Kerry helpfully filled in the blanks about the nature of the Obama administration's overtures to nuclear-proliferating Damascus. In an address before the left-leaning Saban Center for Middle East Policy at the Brookings Institute in Washington, the Chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, who just returned from a visit to Syria, Israel and the Palestinian Authority, said that the purpose of US overtures to Damascus is to appease Syrian President Bashar Assad.

If in the past, both American and Israeli policy-makers interested in engaging Damascus have made ending Syria's alliance with Iran a central goal of their proposed engagement, Kerry dismissed such an aim as unrealistic. In his words, "We should have no illusions that Syria will immediately end its ties with Iran."

Indeed, as far as Kerry is concerned, Syria's role in these talks is not to actually give the US anything of value. Rather, Syria's role is to take things of value from the US - and of course from Israel.

Kerry proposed that in exchange for Syrian acceptance of the US's offer of friendship and Assad's willingness to negotiate an Israeli surrender of the Golan Heights, America should consider "loosening certain sanctions" against Syria. Doing so, he claimed, will also be good for the US economy because it will open new opportunities for US businesses.

ON THE surface, the disparate statements by Schulte, Clinton and Kerry present us with a puzzle. In Geneva, Schulte noted that Syria is a nuclear proliferating rogue state that has refused to cooperate with UN inspectors. And in Jerusalem and Washington, Clinton and Kerry ignored Syria's dangerous actions, and advocated a policy of appeasement.

At the same IAEA Board of Governors meeting this week, the agency reported that Iran has produced more than a thousand kilograms of low enriched uranium - enough to build a bomb after further enrichment. That enrichment can be completed by year's end with Iran's 5,600 centrifuges. Moreover, between the Russian-built, soon-to-be-opened nuclear reactor in Bushehr and the illicit heavy water reactor in Arak, Iran will have the capacity to build plutonium-based bombs within two years.

Commenting on the IAEA's report on Iran, Adm. Michael Mullen, the Chairman of the US Joint Chiefs of Staff, acknowledged that Iran has enough uranium for a bomb. Seemingly contradicting Mullen, Defense Secretary Robert Gates claimed that there is no reason to worry about all that uranium because Iran won't have a bomb for some time, given that the uranium it possesses is not sufficiently enriched to make a weapon.

For his part, US President Barack Obama is receiving guidance on contending with Iran from former Congressman Lee Hamilton, who co-authored the Baker-Hamilton Iraq Study Group report published in December 2006. That report called for the US to coordinate the withdrawal of its forces from Iraq with Iran and Syria - the principal sponsors of both the Shi'ite and Sunni insurgencies in the country. It recommended that the US purchase Syria's good will by pressuring Israel to surrender the Golan Heights to Damascus, and Judea, Samaria and Jerusalem to Hamas. It recommended that the US win Iran's trust by accepting it as a nuclear power and pledging not to overthrow the regime.

In an interview last month with Washington Post columnist David Ignatius, Hamilton reiterated those recommendations. He claimed that the starting point for US-Iran discussions is for the US to "state our respect for the Iranian people, renounce regime change as an instrument of US policy, seek opportunities for a range of dialogue across a range of issues, and acknowledge Iran's security concerns and its right to civilian nuclear power."

Hamilton assured Ignatius that these recommendations have been adopted by the White House.

ALL OF the above show that there is no contradiction between what the Obama administration understands about Iran and Syria and the policy it has adopted toward them. Specifically, as Schulte's and Mullen's statements make clear, the administration is aware of the dangers that both Iran and Syria constitute to global security. And as Clinton, Kerry, Gates and Hamilton all make clear, the administration's policy for dealing with those dangers is to change the subject and hope the American public won't notice or mind.

To this end, the administration is now asserting that Iran and Syria - the two most active agents of regional instability - share the US's interest in a stable, democratic Iraq. And owing to their sudden devotion to stability, Obama's surrogates tell us the Syrians and Iranians will support the new anti-Syrian and anti-Iranian Iraqi democracy and even protect it after the US withdraws its forces from the country.

Then, too, as both Kerry and Clinton made clear, the administration plans to ignore Syria's support for Iraqi, Palestinian and Lebanese terrorism, its nuclear proliferation activities and its massive ballistic missile arsenal, as well as its strategic alliance with Iran. Rather than confront Syria about its bad behavior, the administration favors a policy based on making believe that in his heart of hearts, Assad is a liberal democrat who aspires to peace, and hope, and change.

But the core of the administration's campaign to ignore Iran's nuclear program - as well as Syria's - is its unrelenting quest for the big payoff: Palestinian statehood.
This week Iran staged yet another "Destroy Israel" conference in Teheran, replete with Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's trademark Holocaust denial, Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei's ritual castigation of the Jewish state as a "cancerous tumor," and the US as a treacherous enemy, and Ali Larijani's threat to attack Israel's suspected nuclear sites. The conference enjoyed a newfound sense of international legitimacy, taking place as it did just after burka-clad Annette Bening's goodwill Hollywood celebrity visit to the mullocracy.

THE GENOCIDAL pageantry in Teheran elicited no significant response from Clinton and Kerry. They had bigger fish to fry. While the administration and its supporters seem to believe that the US has no right to make demands on Iran and Syria, which, they assert, are both just advancing their national interests, for them Israel is a completely different story. As Clinton and Kerry demonstrated this week, the administration and its supporters will not stop making demands on Israel.

Kerry justified Syria's continued alliance with Iran by saying that Syria should be expected to "play both sides of the fence [with the US and Iran] as other nations do when they believe it is in their interests."

But Israel has no right to similarly take what action it deems necessary to secure its interests. In Kerry's view, the time has come for the US to show that it is serious about Palestinian statehood, and the way to do that is to force Israel to block all Jewish building in Judea and Samaria.

In his words, "On the Israeli side, nothing will do more to make clear our seriousness about turning the page than demonstrating - with actions rather than words - that we are serious about Israel freezing settlement activity in the West Bank."

He also called for the US to compel Israel to open its borders with Gaza. And he said that from his perspective, it is unacceptable for the incoming Netanyahu government not to embrace establishing a Palestinian state as its most urgent goal.

Clinton joined Kerry in his efforts to compel the Jewish state to ignore its national interests in the cause of the higher goal of Palestinian statehood. Like him, she attacked Israel for not handing control over its borders with Gaza to Hamas. And like Kerry, she stated repeatedly that her greatest goal is to establish a Palestinian state.

Clinton's unique contribution to that great "pro-peace" endeavor this week was her outspoken criticism on Wednesday of the Jerusalem Municipality's decision to enforce the city's building and planning ordinances equally toward both Jews and Arabs. That policy was made clear this week when city inspectors destroyed illegal buildings in both Jewish and Arab neighborhoods.

Since as far as Clinton is concerned, Israel will one day be required to throw all the Jews out of East, South and North Jerusalem to make room for what she believes is the "inevitable" Palestinian state, Israel has no right to treat Arabs and Jews equally in its soon-to-be-inevitably divided capital city. Arabs should be allowed to break the law at will. When Israel insists on enforcing its laws without prejudice, Clinton condemns it for being anti-peace.

Kerry argues that by forcing Israel to give its land to the Palestinians, the US will be promoting regional stability by doing the bidding of anti-Iranian Arab states like Egypt and Saudi Arabia. But even if putting the screws to Israel makes Cairo and Riyadh happy, their happiness will have no impact whatsoever on Iran's nuclear weapons programs or on Syria's proliferation activities. That is, Israeli land giveaways will have no impact on regional stability.

And that's precisely the point. The Obama administration has no intention of preventing Iran from becoming a nuclear power or Syria from maintaining its alliance with the mullahs. The White House seeks far more modest ends.

Through its policies toward Israel on the one hand and Iran and Syria on the other, the Obama administration demonstrates that it has already accepted a nuclear Iran. Its chief concern today is to avoid being blamed when the mushroom clouds appear in the sky. And it may well achieve that aim. After all, how could the administration be blamed for a nuclear Iran when it has wholly devoted its efforts to advancing the righteous cause of peace?