Obama Flunks First Tests On Foreign Policy

Original article
By CHARLES KRAUTHAMMER | Posted Thursday, February 19, 2009 4:20 PM PT

The Biden prophecy has come to pass. Our wacky veep, momentarily inspired, had predicted last October that "it will not be six months before the world tests Barack Obama."

Biden probably had in mind an eve-of-the-apocalypse drama like the Cuban Missile Crisis. Instead, Obama's challenges have come in smaller bites. Some are deliberate threats to U.S. interests, others mere probes to ascertain whether the new president has any spine.

Preliminary X-rays aren't encouraging.

Consider the long list of brazen Russian provocations:

(a) Pressuring Kyrgyzstan to shut down the U.S. air base in Manas, an absolutely crucial NATO conduit into Afghanistan.

(b) Announcing the formation of a "rapid reaction force" with six former Soviet republics, a regional Russian-led strike force meant to reassert Russian hegemony in the Muslim belt north of Afghanistan.

(c) Planning to establish a Black Sea naval base in Georgia's breakaway province of Abkhazia, conquered by Moscow last summer.

(d) Declaring Russia's intention to deploy offensive Iskander missiles in Kaliningrad if Poland and the Czech Republic go ahead with plans to station an American (anti-Iranian) missile defense system.

President Bush's response to the Kaliningrad deployment—the threat was issued the day after Obama's election — was firm.

He refused to back down because giving in to Russian threats would leave Poles and Czechs exposed and show the world that, contrary to post-Cold War assumptions, the U.S. could not be trusted to protect Eastern Europe from Russian bullying.

The Obama response? "Biden Signals U.S. Is Open to Russia Missile Deal," as the New York Times headlined Biden's Feb. 7 Munich speech to a major international gathering. This followed strong messages from Obama's team even before the inauguration that Obama wasn't committed to the missile shield. And just to make sure everyone understood that Bush's policy no longer held, Biden said the U.S. wanted to "press the reset button" on NATO-Russian relations.

Not surprisingly, the Obama wobble elicited a favorable reaction from Russia. (There are conflicting reports that Russia might suspend the Kaliningrad blackmail deployment.) The Kremlin must have been equally impressed the other provocations — Abkhazia, Kyrgyzstan, the rapid reaction force — elicited barely a peep from Washington.

Iran has been similarly charmed by Obama's overtures. A week after the new president went about sending sweet peace signals via al-Arabiya, Iran launched its first homemade Earth satellite. The message is clear. If you can put a satellite into orbit, you can hit any continent with a missile, North America included.

And for emphasis, after the roundhouse hook, came the poke in the eye.

A U.S. women's badminton team had been invited to Iran. Here was a chance for "ping-pong diplomacy" with the accommodating new president, a sporting venture meant to suggest the possibility of warmer relations.

On Feb. 4, Tehran denied the team entry into Iran.

Then, in case Obama failed to get the message, Iran's parliament speaker in Munich responded to Obama's olive branch.

Executive summary: Thanks very much. After you acknowledge 60 years of crimes against us, change not just your tone but your policies, and abandon the Zionist criminal entity, we might deign to talk to you.

With a grinning Goliath staggering about sporting a "kick me" sign on his back, even reputed allies joined the fun. Pakistan freed from house arrest A.Q. Khan, the notorious proliferator who sold nuclear technology to North Korea, Libya and Iran.

Ten days later, Islamabad capitulated to the Taliban, turning over to its tender mercies the Swat Valley, 100 miles from the capital. Not only will Shariah law now reign there, but the democratically elected secular party will be hunted down as the Pakistani army stands down.

These Pakistani capitulations may account for Obama's hastily announced 17,000-troop increase in Afghanistan even before his various heralded reviews of the mission have been completed.

Hasty, unexplained, but at least something. Other than that, a month of pummeling has been met with utter passivity.

I would like to think the supine posture is attributable to a rookie leader otherwise preoccupied (i.e. domestically), leading a foreign policy team as yet unorganized if not disoriented.

But when the State Department says that Hugo Chavez's president-for-life referendum, which was preceded by a sham government-controlled campaign featuring the tear-gassing of the opposition, was "for the most part . . . fully consistent with democratic process," you have to wonder if Month One is not a harbinger of things to come.

© 2008 Washington Post Writers Group

So Far, Amateur Hour

Original article
By Kathleen Parker
Wednesday, February 11, 2009; A19

The first however-many days of Barack Obama's presidency have been a study in amateurism.

Many suspected that Obama wasn't quite ready, but kept their fingers crossed. Optimistic disappointment is the new holding pattern.

What's missing from Obama's performance isn't the intelligence that voters acknowledged in electing him. It's the experience they tried to pretend didn't really matter. Experienced politicians, after all, got us into this mess.

Absent is maturity -- that grown-up quality of leadership that is palpable when the real deal enters a room. There's a reason why elders are respected. They have something the rest of us don't have -- yet -- because we haven't lived long enough. We haven't made the really tough decisions, the ones that are often unpopular.

There's also a reason why it's lonely at the top. The view is better, but the summit isn't so much a mountaintop as a deserted city.

Obama wants too much to be liked. This isn't a character flaw. In fact his winning personality and likability have served him well through the years. Growing up in multiple cultures -- black and white, American and Indonesian -- he had to learn how to get along. By all accounts, he became easy company.

But there's a price one pays in becoming president. Giving up being liked is the ultimate public sacrifice. This was the hardest lesson for Bill Clinton, who loved people and found the isolation of the presidency particularly brutal. Similarly, Obama wants to stay in touch with everyday Americans, as symbolized by his reluctance to surrender his BlackBerry.

There was a time last week when Obama looked younger than usual. Not youthful so much as not fully formed. He seemed out of place in his presidential role. In a word, he seemed haunted. Had he been visited by the ghosts of Christmas future?

Or had he looked across the table into the eyes of Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid and realized that he was not among friends? Obama's lack of authority over the stimulus package has underscored the value of political experience and toughness -- and given weakened Republicans the leverage they needed to launch an aggressive attack.

In the midst of it all, Obama and his wife went to an elementary school to read to second-graders, a now time-honored presidential release valve. Clinton read to children during his impeachment hearings. Bush, eternally and infamously, will be remembered for reading "The Pet Goat" to an elementary school class as airplanes were slamming into the World Trade Center towers.

Obama said they were "just tired of being in the White House." Oh, just wait.

Other manifestations of Obama's political greenness include his apology for picking lax taxpayers for prominent positions, his campaign-like tour to Elkhart, Ind., on Monday and his ponderous first news conference later that evening.

First the apology.

Why did Obama feel it necessary to apologize for others' mistakes? If improper vetting was the problem, then say so and correct it. The tax code is absurdly complex, and most people with complicated lives hand over their numbers to accountants and hope for the best.

Admittedly, the problem became comical as one after another Obama appointee turned up with tax debts. Q: How do you get Democrats to pay taxes? A: Appoint them to Cabinet positions.

But Obama's eager confession -- "I screwed up" -- hit a hollow note. Doubtless, he was trying to demonstrate "change" by distinguishing himself from Bush, who could never quite put a finger on his mistakes. Rather than seeming Trumanesque in stopping the buck at his desk, Obama seemed more like an abused spouse who starts her day saying, "I'm sorry. It's all my fault."

He appeared weak.

In Elkhart, the president seemed locked in campaign mode, still wooing the crowd and seeking approval. At his news conference, the overriding impression was of a man not fully in control of his message or his material. Nine minutes into the first answer to the first question, I began missing Bush's customary dispatch. Bush's contempt for the media meant he never stayed long enough to bore us. The faith of the American people may not have been misplaced in Obama. But the young senator from Illinois became a president overnight, before he had time to gain the confidence and wisdom one earns through trials and errors.

Those have just begun.

Islamic subversion alleged by speaker

Original article
Tuesday, February 17, 2009
By Brian Mosely

A former FBI special agent told law enforcement and Homeland Security personnel that a network of Islamic organizations are working to incrementally implement Islamic law in the United States.

During a presentation at the Bedford County Emergency Management Agency, former FBI agent John Guandolo briefed members about groups such as the Muslim Brotherhood, which he claims is working with other Islamic groups to slowly implement Shariah, also known as Islamic law, which encompasses all areas of life.

Guandolo worked in the FBI since 1996, including nine years as a member of its SWAT team. After 9/11, he worked in the Bureau's Washington Field Office's Counterterrorism Division, developing expertise concerning Al Qaeda, Muslim Brotherhood organizations and the Islamic movement in the U.S.

He now works with Stephen Coughlin, former Islamic Expert for the Joint Chiefs of Staff, to advise leaders at the federal level and also brief local law enforcement about the Islamic threat at home.

Coughlin was fired from his position with the Joint Chiefs following a report revealing opposition to his work by officials within the office of Deputy Defense Secretary Gordon England, according to a Washington Times report dated Jan. 4, 2008.

Coughlin had run afoul of a key aide to England, Hasham Islam, who accused him of being a Christian zealot or extremist "with a pen," according to defense officials, the report states.

Muslim Brotherhood

Every major Muslim organization is controlled by the Muslim Brotherhood, the former FBI agent said, which he said was formed to overthrow America and establish Islamic law.

"They're having great success of implementing Shariah law, I could give you a thousand examples," Guandolo said.

He said small concessions like installing foot baths, and colleges forced to have separate swimming times for Islamic men and women so not to offend Muslims, are other parts of the strategy.

But Guandolo said that federal leadership is reluctant to act against these Islamic organizations due to political correctness and the threats of lawsuits.

He said that Muslim groups will demand concessions on matters by saying, "You have to do this; you have to do this or I will be offended."

"The solution to this is you," Guandolo said. "If you are looking to DHS, the FBI and Congress to solve this ... you're going to be woefully disappointed."

He said that FBI agents in the field "are working good cases," but that the FBI leadership "is unwilling to do what the agents are asking them to do, which is to pony up and use some courage and start stepping on these people."

"This is political subversion, this is an insurgency in the United States," he said of the Islamic movement. "Insurgency is thwarted at the local level and the tip of the spear is local police."

Guandolo also said that the group CAIR, the Council on American-Islamic Relations, is actually a front for the terror group Hamas.

He also said that he was threatened with his job no less than three times by superiors in the FBI "that told me we were creating waves in the Muslim community."

Guandolo also said to watch what is happening in Great Britain, where Islamic radicalism has taken root. He noted that a member of the Danish Parliament was recently denied entry into the United Kingdom for fear that it would offend Muslims.

"They denied him access while at the same time, Islamic law is being instituted on the streets of Great Britain," he said.

Documentary shown

Also presented was a viewing of the documentary "Homegrown Jihad: The Terrorist Camps Around the U.S.", produced by the group Christian Action Network (CAN).

The group describes its purpose as "to protect America's religious and moral heritage through intensive lobbying efforts -- both in the nation's capital and at the grass roots level."

They claim that for the past two years, members have "been on location, deep inside hidden Islamic terrorist training compounds, scattered across the United States."

The terror group is called Jamaat ul-Fuqra, but is known in America as Muslims of America, which CAN alleges is a front organization for Pakistani Islamic cleric Sheikh Mubarak Ali Shah Gilani.

CAN asserts that one of these compounds is near Dover, in rural Stewart County. The site was the subject of a 2002 Tennessean article about the small Muslim community.

The compound is located on the south side of the Cumberland River, near Cumberland City, where the TVA Cumberland Fossil Plant is located, CAN says.

The sheriff of Stewart County was unavailable for comment about the compound. Personnel at that office referred the T-G to the Tennessee Fusion Center, a partnership of the Tennessee Bureau of Investigation and the Tennessee Office of Homeland Security, which did not return inquiries by press time.

The documentary cites a Justice Department document from 2006 that exposed 35 compounds in the U.S., which the group alleges are used for terrorist training. The document was marked "Dissemination Restricted to Law Enforcement" and was not supposed to be released to the public.

CAN claims that all copies of Sheik Muburak Gilani's terrorist training video, "Soldiers of Allah," had been confiscated and sealed except for a copy the Christian organization obtained.

In the documentary, Gilani is shown saying "We are fighting to destroy the enemy. We are dealing with evil at its roots and its roots are America."

The alleged training video also shows men taught how to use AK-47s, rocket launchers, and machine guns, as well as how to kidnap and kill Americans, how to conduct sabotage and subversive operations, and instructions on the use mortars and explosives.

CAN also wants to have Jamaat ul-Fuqra placed on the State Department's Foreign Terrorist Organization Watch List, which would shut down the camps.

Guandolo said that "cowardness" has prevented officials from taking action about the camps scattered across the country.

"We see at the local and state level, a lot of anger towards the federal government, and that anger is well placed."

Presenting the video was Wes Campbell, who works with the national intelligence community as chief of intelligence at Arnold Engineering Development Center, and Jonna Bianco with the Center for Security Policy.

EMA director Scott Johnson said in his introduction to the presentation that fundraising and training were important parts of the Islamic movement, not just attacks like 9/11.

"We like to provide awareness to our citizens ... we can't forget about this kind of stuff, it's a long term thing," Johnson said. "We don't want to be paranoid, we just want to be prudent."

"We can't ignore it, it's not going to go away."

The Audacity of Irony

“Hope and change” meet reality. The ironies bring us back to the unlamented days of Jimmy Carter.

Original article
By Victor Davis Hanson

We have seen irony before, when the moralist Jimmy Carter chastised us with sermons about our paranoid, inordinate fear of Communism and our amoral unconcern with human rights, even as the dividends of his policies were the Soviets in Afghanistan and the Ayatollah Khomeini in Iran — and even greater global misery than before.

For the last 24 months a youthful Barack Obama has daily offered unspecified “hope and change” idealism — all set against the supposed cynical wrongdoing of the tired Bush administration. In the unhinged manner in which his supporters turned a center-right president like George Bush into some sort of sinister reactionary, so too they deified a rookie senator as the long-awaited liberal messiah.

How could irony not follow from all that?

For the past seven years the United States has seen no repeat of 9/11, although plots were uncovered and threats from radical Islam were leveled in serial fashion. The ability to intercept and hold terrorists overseas, to tap into cell-phone calls abroad, to detain terrorists caught on the field of battle, and to ensure that intelligence agencies freely swapped information was critical to our unexpected salvation.

Like Lincoln, Wilson, FDR, Truman, and other wartime presidents (though none of the above witnessed 3,000 Americans butchered on the soil of the United States by foreign agents), George Bush, with strong bipartisan support, enacted new wartime protocols in the effort to protect the security of the United States. Only a fool would suggest that these homeland-security efforts were unnecessary, or that, in unprecedented fashion, they shredded the Constitution.

But such foolish criticism was exactly the sort leveled against the Bush security protocols by candidate Obama. And so almost at the minute he assumed governance, the now President Obama discovered that his Bush the Constitution-shredder had been a clumsy caricature of Bush the sober commander-in-chief. For Obama on the stump, the choices were endless; in the Oval Office suddenly only bad and worse. So the new president, the favorite of the ACLU, is now in the ironic position of maintaining the hated Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act reforms, keeping the repugnant Patriot Act, retaining “extraordinary renditions,” and continuing — task forces and promises aside — operation of the Gulag at Guantanamo.

There were many legitimate critiques of the Iraq war. But insisting, as Barack Obama did, that we invaded recklessly and in haste was not one of them. From the fall of the Taliban in December 2001 to the invasion of Iraq in March 2003, the Bush administration deliberately and in public fashion sought debate in the Congress for over a year, received bipartisan authorization, and tried for months to win sanction from the United Nations.

In contrast, Barack Obama immediately upon entering office demanded the largest government expansion in the history of the nation. The staggering debt program will require nearly a trillion dollars in borrowing to fund all sorts of entitlements and redistributive efforts, and in revolutionary fashion redefine the role of government itself. Obama pronounced the current economic crisis the moral equivalent of war, and he wanted a national mobilization to meet it — pronto.

But unlike the Bush administration, which took 15 months to prepare the country for a real war in Iraq, the Obama administration gave the public only a few hours to read the final draft of the legislation before it was made into law. Where the polarizing partisan George Bush managed to obtain the vote of majorities in both parties to remove Saddam Hussein, the healing bipartisan Barack Obama lacked the support of even a single Republican in the House and won over a mere three Republicans in the Senate.

Liberals who once screamed that congressional opponents of the Iraq war were being unfairly tagged as unpatriotic by the Bush administration now yelled louder that the opponents of the Obama debt program were, in fact, unpatriotic.

Bush was pilloried for supposedly hyping al-Qaeda in order to create a security state. Obama trumped that by proclaiming that the present recession is a catastrophe, a disaster, a Great Depression. He ceased his scare-mongering only when he had exhausted the vocabulary of doom. “You never want a serious crisis to go to waste,” bragged Rahm Emanuel, reminding us that the envisioned Obama socialism could take root only if a climate of fear was created.

In foreign policy the irony is more telling still.

Obama on the campaign trail either did not grasp that Bush’s second-term foreign policy was largely centrist — or found it politically advantageous to ignore that fact. Either way, irony followed. The problem with Europe’s failing to get tough with Iran, or failing to fight in Afghanistan, or appeasing Russia, was not George Bush, but the nature of Europe. Bush inherited, he did not create, Osama bin Laden, Putin’s authoritarianism, Ahmadinejad’s Iran, Chávez’s Venezuela, Kim Jong Il’s North Korea, Qaddafi’s Libya, or the Dr. A. Q. Khan laboratory.

More often, Bush ameliorated, rather than exacerbated, these problems, by being both tough and, yes, multilateral — as friendly governments in the United Kingdom, France, Germany, Italy, and India attested. Yet by demonizing George Bush — and that is how Team Obama prefaces each announcement of a new initiative — Obama has only set himself up for more irony. He can continue his first few weeks of damning Bush and emulating Jimmy Carter. But if he does, he will soon see another 9/11-like strike, more Russian pressure on Europe, more North Korean missiles, a bomb in Iran, the restarting of Dr. Khan’s nuclear franchise and its appendages in Libya and Syria, and a theocratic nuclear Pakistan.

One can make many criticisms of the Bush administration — occasional hubris, an inability to communicate its ideas, excessive federal spending, unnecessary bellicose rhetoric not matched always by commensurate action — but corruption is not really one of them. While the Republican Congress gave us Duke Cunningham, Larry Craig, and Mark Foley, the Bush administration itself was one of the most corruption-free in recent memory — no Monicas, no serial Clintongates, no pay-to-play presidential pardons, no shaking down donors for a library and a spousal Senate campaign.

So when Barack Obama of Chicago lineage — with former associates like Tony Rezko, Gov. Rod Blagojevich, Mayor Richard Daley, and the Rev. Jeremiah Wright — began offering moral platitudes about his soon-to-be-enacted revolutionary ethics, we expected the irony that always follows such hubris and brings in its wake nemesis.

Now we are witnessing one of the most scandal-plagued incipient administrations of the last half-century. And these ethical embarrassments are doubly ironic. The Treasury secretary and nominal head of the IRS is a tax dodger. The egalitarian liberal Tom Daschle, who was going to make health care accessible for the masses, was caught hiding from the tax man tens of thousands of dollars in free limousine service. Reformist cabinet nominees like Bill Richardson (who has already withdrawn) and Hilda Solis cannot themselves follow the laws they were asked to enforce. The would-be performance czar, Nancy Killefer, did not perform on her taxes. We are now awaiting a third try for commerce secretary. The more Obama railed about his new no-lobbyist policies, the more he issued exemptions for the dozen or more insider lobbyists he hired.

The list of ironies could be expanded. Reps. Maxine Waters, Barney Frank, and Gregory Meeks — infamous for their Fannie Mae laxity — now interrogate supposedly incompetent or greedy bank CEOs. Nancy Pelosi, who demanded that the Speaker of the House in novel fashion receive a government-financed private jet, rails against government-enabled private jets. Bush supposedly politicized the White House, so in reaction Obama moves control of the census — the very linchpin of the American political system — for the first time into the White House. Big Brother comes not through tapping a terrorist’s phone, but, perhaps soon, through having the state collect and centralize everyone’s medical records or monitor the content of talk radio.

Why again the audacious irony of Barack Obama?

First, George Bush was not Judas Iscariot nor was Obama Jesus Christ. In the vast abyss between those two caricatures was plenty of room for hypocrisy. The more Obama claimed moral culpability on the part of the sober Bush, the more he proved his own — either by ratifying in hypocritical fashion many of the Bush policies or by reminding the public that if Texas perennially gives us spurs, six-guns, and bring-’em-on lingo, Chicago entertains us with the likes of Tony Rezko, the Daley machine, Rahm Emanuel, and Blago.

Second, Obama did not duly appreciate the sort of pernicious culture that permeates Washington in general, and the Democratic Congress in particular. While it was easy to say that Jack Abramoff and Duke Cunningham typified a culture of Republican corruption, the truth was always that they were just the flip side to Sen. Chris Dodd and Rep. Barney Frank taking cash from Fannie Mae as it exploded, or Rep. Charles Rangel overseeing the tax code that he serially ignored, or Rep. William Jefferson stashing payoff cash in his fridge. A true messiah would have lamented the bipartisan rot in Washington, and then in Lincolnesque fashion figured out a way to clean up his own party first, and the opposition second.

The truth is that Americans don’t take well to self-appointed holy men like Woodrow Wilson or Jimmy Carter. Yes, we’ve had our rare saints, but they were reluctant moralists like Washington and Lincoln, who were recognized as such only after they had saved the nation and stoically endured slander by enemies in war and at home.

Obama can end his irony only when he accepts that he and his supporters were never saints, and his predecessor not a notable sinner, and then accepts that history will judge him on what he does rather than what he says he might do.

______________________________________
NRO contributor Victor Davis Hanson is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution.

Ethics Violations, YES WE CAN

Original article

With each passing day it is becoming more obvious that the when the Obamessiah talks about change and transparency he is talking about a level of corruption not seen in Washington since Watergate.

Obama has not been President for a month but we have already seen one senior administration pick resign in a pay for play scandal, two for failing to pay taxes, another being confirmed despite not paying taxes and one who's confirmation is being delayed because her husband didn't pay taxes. And don't forget Mr. Transparency is about to sign a stimulus bill with a historic amount of pork.

One person that has "escaped" the Obama scandal mill is Chief of Staff Rahm Emanual..well maybe until now:

RAHM'S 'RENT' IS JUST THE TIP OF ETHICS ICEBERG

By DICK MORRIS & EILEEN MCGANN

NEWS broke last week that Rahm Emanuel, now White House chief of staff, lived rent- free for years in the home of Rep. Rosa De Lauro (D-Conn.) - and failed to disclose the gift, as congressional ethics rules mandate. But this is only the tip of Emanuel's previously undislosed ethics problems.

One issue is the work Emanuel tossed the way of De Lauro's husband. But the bigger one goes back to Emanuel's days on the board of now-bankrupt mortgage giant Freddie Mac.

Emanuel is a multimillionaire, but lived for the last five years for free in the tony Capitol Hill townhouse owned by De Lauro and her husband, Democratic pollster Stan Greenberg.

During that time, he also served as chairman of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee - which gave Greenberg huge polling contracts. It paid Greenberg's firm $239,996 in 2006 and $317,775 in 2008. (Emanuel's own campaign committee has also paid Greenberg more than $50,000 since 2004.)

To be fair, Greenberg had polling contracts with the DCCC before - but each new election cycle brings its own set of consultants. And Emanuel was certainly generous with his roommate.

Emanuel never declared the substantial gift of free rent on any of his financial-disclosure forms. He and De Lauro claim that it was just allowable "hospitality" between colleagues. Hospitality - for five years?

Some experts suggest that it was also taxable income: Over five years, the free rent could easily add up to more than $100,000.

Nor is this all that seems to have been missed in the Obama team's vetting process. Consider: Emanuel served on the Freddie Mac board of directors during the time that the government-backed lender lied about its earnings, a leading contributor to the current economic meltdown.

The Federal Housing Enterprise Oversight Agency later singled out the Freddie Mac board as contributing to the fraud in 2000 and 2001 for "failing in its duty to follow up on matters brought to its attention." In other words, board members ignored the red flags waving in their faces.

The SEC later fined Freddie $50 million for its deliberate fraud in 2000, 2001 and 2002.

Meanwhile, Emanuel was paid more than $260,000 for his Freddie "service." Plus, after he resigned from the board to run for Congress in 2002, the troubled agency's PAC gave his campaign $25,000 - its largest single gift to a House candidate.

That's what friends are for, isn't it?

Now Rahm Emanuel is in the White House helping President Obama dig out of the mess that Freddie Mac helped start.

The president's chief of staff isn't subject to Senate confirmation, but his ethics still matter. Is this the change that we can depend on?

Britain's Surrender to Islamists

There is a direct link between the 'Rushdie Affair' and the Wilders ban.

Original article
By DANIEL SCHWAMMENTHAL | From today's Wall Street Journal Europe.

This time, no fatwa was necessary. Two decades after Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini called for Salman Rushdie's murder, U.K. authorities no longer need instructions in Shariah law. In pre-emptive submission to Islamist sensibilities, Britain barred Dutch parliamentarian Geert Wilders last Thursday from entering the country and speaking at the House of Lords.

His short anti-Islam video "Fitna," which juxtaposes Quranic verses calling for jihad with footage of Islamic terror, threatened "public security in the U.K," according to the Home Office. Since Mr. Wilder has never called for violence -- in his home country, the only life threatened as a result of his work is his own -- the imagined security threat could come only from people opposed to him, i.e. Muslim radicals. Britain is punishing Mr. Wilders not for his own actions but for the hypothetical actions of his adversaries.

What makes this surrender of free speech and fairness -- the most noble of British traditions -- particularly depressing is its totality. All main British parties support the Labour government's ban against Mr. Wilders -- the so-called Liberal Democrats just as eagerly as the Tories. Contrast this with the reaction in the Netherlands. All main Dutch parties -- although they too reject Mr. Wilders's unbalanced assault on Islam -- condemned the British decision.

It's a fitting coincidence that this suppression of free speech in the motherland of parliamentary democracy happened just two days before the 20th anniversary of the fatwa against Mr. Rushdie for penning "The Satanic Verses." Khomeini reportedly never read the book that so insulted him; rumors of its alleged offensiveness were enough for the leader of the Islamic Revolution. In an eerie parallel, rumors are also enough for the leaders of Britain. Foreign Minister David Miliband admitted on Friday to the BBC that he had not seen the film that he nevertheless found to be "hateful." It seems Britain has not only adopted Islamist standards of free speech but also Islamist standards of proof.

There is a direct line between Khomeini's 1989 death sentence against the British author and last week's detention of Mr. Wilders at Heathrow Airport. The "Rushdie Affair" was the first illustration of the West's conflict with Islamists who believe that the Quran is superior to any man-made law.

The protests in Britain sparked by "The Satanic Verses" contained all the elements of Islamist intimidation and Western appeasement with which we are now so familiar. British Muslims burned the book in the streets of Britain and called for Mr. Rushdie's murder, while the police looked on passively. Leftists began their defense of Muslim fanatics -- perfected today -- as the "real" victims who should not have been provoked. And radical Muslims and their apologists for the first time claimed to represent the British Muslim community, a questionable claim that the state made official by choosing them as their dialogue partners.

"Death, perhaps, is a bit too easy for him (Mr. Rushdie)," Iqbal Sacranie, founding secretary general of the Muslim Council of Britain, said at the time. "His mind must be tormented for the rest of his life unless he asks for forgiveness to Almighty Allah." It is now "Sir Iqbal" as this "moderate" received a knighthood in 2005 "for services to the Muslim community, to charities and to community relations."

The Rushdie Affair was the first time Islamists not just ignored national and international law but acted, successfully, to supersede it. They didn't manage to stop the book's publication or to kill Mr. Rushdie -- although the Norwegian publisher and Italian translator were seriously wounded in separate attacks and the Japanese translator murdered.

But they managed to force Mr. Rushdie into hiding, foreshadowing the fate of later Islam critics -- including that of Mr. Wilders, who has been living for more than four years under 24-hour police protection. Because Khomeini's death sentence could have been carried out by any radical Muslim around the world, there was no escape for Mr. Rushdie, just as there is no escape for those on today's Islamic death lists. For Mr. Rushdie there was only the exile of "safe houses" and body guards.

His ordeal, and that of others, serve as a warning to any potential critic of Islam. This has led to what is euphemistically called "self-censorship" in the media, arts and politics, supposedly a sign of respect for Muslims' "religious feelings." But in truth such self-censorship is no act of courtesy but the result of intimidation and fear.

Islamists are relying not just on threats and violence, though. The 56-nation Organization of the Islamic Conference is pushing for changes to international law and national law in Western countries to make them conform with Shariah law. One of the main goals of the United Nations' "antiracism" conference in April in Geneva will be to commit member states to implement laws to stop the "defamation" of Islam.

No other major Western country seems to have internalized this Islamist mindset to the degree that Britain has. Radical Muslims -- homegrown and from abroad -- can freely preach hatred, but one of their critics has just been banned.

Britain's capital earned its "Londonistan" sobriquet -- supposedly coined by French counterterrorism agents in the mid-1990s -- when it became a center for Islamic radicals fleeing persecution in their Muslim home countries. These Islamists flocked to Britain precisely because of its tradition of tolerance. It's a cruel twist of history that radical Muslims have been allowed to use the freedom they found there to limit freedom for everybody else.

In October 2007, shortly after becoming prime minister, Gordon Brown gave a powerful speech on a central element of British identity: "From the time of Magna Carta," he said, " . . . there has been a British tradition of liberty -- what one writer has called our 'gift to the world.'" Mr. Brown's ill-advised tolerance of the intolerant is now threatening this treasured tradition.

_________________________________________
Mr. Schwammenthal edits the State of the Union column.

Ronald Reagan, the MAN, the anti-Obama

President Reagan's approach to recession in his two inaugural speaches:

President Reagan's First Inaugural Address
January 20, 1981

...The business of our nation goes forward. These United States are confronted with an economic affliction of great proportions. We suffer from the longest and one of the worst sustained inflations in our national history. It distorts our economic decisions, penalizes thrift, and crushes the struggling young and the fixed-income elderly alike. It threatens to shatter the lives of millions of our people.

Idle industries have cast workers into unemployment, causing human misery and personal indignity. Those who do work are denied a fair return for their labor by a tax system which penalizes successful achievement and keeps us from maintaining full productivity.

But great as our tax burden is, it has not kept pace with public spending. For decades, we have piled deficit upon deficit, mortgaging our future and our children's future for the temporary convenience of the present. To continue this long trend is to guarantee tremendous social, cultural, political, and economic upheavals.

You and I, as individuals, can, by borrowing, live beyond our means, but for only a limited period of time. Why, then, should we think that collectively, as a nation, we are not bound by that same limitation?

We must act today in order to preserve tomorrow. And let there be no misunderstanding--we are going to begin to act, beginning today.

The economic ills we suffer have come upon us over several decades. They will not go away in days, weeks, or months, but they will go away. They will go away because we, as Americans, have the capacity now, as we have had in the past, to do whatever needs to be done to preserve this last and greatest bastion of freedom.

In this present crisis, government is not the solution to our problem.

From time to time, we have been tempted to believe that society has become too complex to be managed by self-rule, that government by an elite group is superior to government for, by, and of the people. But if no one among us is capable of governing himself, then who among us has the capacity to govern someone else? All of us together, in and out of government, must bear the burden. The solutions we seek must be equitable, with no one group singled out to pay a higher price.

We hear much of special interest groups. Our concern must be for a special interest group that has been too long neglected. It knows no sectional boundaries or ethnic and racial divisions, and it crosses political party lines. It is made up of men and women who raise our food, patrol our streets, man our mines and our factories, teach our children, keep our homes, and heal us when we are sick--professionals, industrialists, shopkeepers, clerks, cabbies, and truck drivers. They are, in short, "We the people," this breed called Americans.

Well, this administration's objective will be a healthy, vigorous, growing economy that provides equal opportunity for all Americans, with no barriers born of bigotry or discrimination. Putting America back to work means putting all Americans back to work. Ending inflation means freeing all Americans from the terror of runaway living costs. All must share in the productive work of this "new beginning" and all must share in the bounty of a revived economy. With the idealism and fair play which are the core of our system and our strength, we can have a strong and prosperous America at peace with itself and the world.

So, as we begin, let us take inventory. We are a nation that has a government--not the other way around. And this makes us special among the nations of the Earth. Our government has no power except that granted it by the people. It is time to check and reverse the growth of government which shows signs of having grown beyond the consent of the governed.

It is my intention to curb the size and influence of the Federal establishment and to demand recognition of the distinction between the powers granted to the Federal Government and those reserved to the States or to the people. All of us need to be reminded that the Federal Government did not create the States; the States created the Federal Government.

Now, so there will be no misunderstanding, it is not my intention to do away with government. It is, rather, to make it work--work with us, not over us; to stand by our side, not ride on our back. Government can and must provide opportunity, not smother it; foster productivity, not stifle it.

If we look to the answer as to why, for so many years, we achieved so much, prospered as no other people on Earth, it was because here, in this land, we unleashed the energy and individual genius of man to a greater extent than has ever been done before. Freedom and the dignity of the individual have been more available and assured here than in any other place on Earth. The price for this freedom at times has been high, but we have never been unwilling to pay that price.

It is no coincidence that our present troubles parallel and are proportionate to the intervention and intrusion in our lives that result from unnecessary and excessive growth of government. It is time for us to realize that we are too great a nation to limit ourselves to small dreams. We are not, as some would have us believe, doomed to an inevitable decline. I do not believe in a fate that will fall on us no matter what we do. I do believe in a fate that will fall on us if we do nothing. So, with all the creative energy at our command, let us begin an era of national renewal. Let us renew our determination, our courage, and our strength. And let us renew our faith and our hope....

President Reagan's Second Inaugural Address
Monday, January 21st, 1985

...Four years ago, I spoke to you of a new beginning and we have accomplished that. But in another sense, our new beginning is a continuation of that beginning created two centuries ago when, for the first time in history, government, the people said, was not our master, it is our servant; its only power that which we, the people, allow it to have.

That system has never failed us, but, for a time, we failed the system. We asked things of government that government was not equipped to give. We yielded authority to the national government that properly belonged to states or to local governments or to the people themselves. We allowed taxes and inflation to rob us of our earnings and savings and watched the great industrial machine that had made us the most productive people on Earth slow down and the number of unemployed increase.

By 1980, we knew it was time to renew our faith, to strive with all our strength toward the ultimate in individual freedom consistent with an orderly society.

We believed then and now there are no limits to growth and human progress when men and women are free to follow their dreams.

And we were right to believe that. Tax rates have been reduced, inflation cut dramatically, and more people are employed than ever before in our history....

... we must not repeat the well-intentioned errors of our past. We must never again abuse the trust of working men and women, by sending their earnings on a futile chase after the spiraling demands of a bloated federal establishment. You elected us in 1980 to end this prescription for disaster, and I don't believe you reelected us in 1984 to reverse course.

At the heart of our efforts is one idea vindicated by 25 straight months of economic growth: Freedom and incentives unleash the drive and entrepreneurial genius that are the core of human progress. We have begun to increase the rewards for work, savings, and investment; reduce the increase in the cost and size of government and its interference in people's lives.

We must simplify our tax system, make it more fair, and bring the rates down for all who work and earn. We must think anew and move with a new boldness, so every American who seeks work can find work; so the least among us shall have an equal chance to achieve the greatest things--to be heroes who heal our sick, feed the hungry, protect peace among nations, and leave this world a better place.

The time has come for a new American emancipation--a great national drive to tear down economic barriers and liberate the spirit of enterprise in the most distressed areas of our country. My friends, together we can do this, and do it we must, so help me God.

From new freedom will spring new opportunities for growth, a more productive, fulfilled and united people, and a stronger America--an America that will lead the technological revolution, and also open its mind and heart and soul to the treasures of literature, music, and poetry, and the values of faith, courage, and love.

A dynamic economy, with more citizens working and paying taxes, will be our strongest tool to bring down budget deficits. But an almost unbroken 50 years of deficit spending has finally brought us to a time of reckoning. We have come to a turning point, a moment for hard decisions. I have asked the Cabinet and my staff a question, and now I put the same question to all of you: If not us, who? And if not now, when? It must be done by all of us going forward with a program aimed at reaching a balanced budget. We can then begin reducing the national debt.

I will shortly submit a budget to the Congress aimed at freezing government program spending for the next year. Beyond that, we must take further steps to permanently control government's power to tax and spend. We must act now to protect future generations from government's desire to spend its citizens' money and tax them into servitude when the bills come due. Let us make it unconstitutional for the federal government to spend more than the federal government takes in.

We have already started returning to the people and to state and local governments responsibilities better handled by them. Now, there is a place for the federal government in matters of social compassion. But our fundamental goals must be to reduce dependency and upgrade the dignity of those who are infirm or disadvantaged. And here a growing economy and support from family and community offer our best chance for a society where compassion is a way of life, where the old and infirm are cared for, the young and, yes, the unborn protected, and the unfortunate looked after and made self-sufficient.

President Reagan's thoughts on dealing with the enemy (replace our current enemy with the communists, hint they actually attacked us):

America's Purpose In The World
March 17, 1978
5th Annual CPAC Conference

...Few Americans accept the belief of some of those now in positions of importance in guiding our foreign policy that America's purpose in the world is to appease the mighty out of a sense of fear or to appease the weak out of a sense of guilt...

...by using a combination of heavy-handed moves against allied countries, on the one hand, and making "pre-emptive concessions" toward unfriendly or potentially unfriendly countries on the other, the Carter administration has managed to convey the view that it desperately wants the whole world to have democratic institutions that would be the envy of the most ardent ACLU lawyer, and that wishing will make it so.

That view of the world ranks along with belief in the Tooth Fairy. But confusion of purpose and a false sense of guilt are not the only elements in this administration's foreign policy.

Too often, the president is advised by men and women who are forever trapped in the tragic but still fresh memory of a lost war. And from Vietnam they have drawn all the wrong lessons. When they say "never again," they mean the United States should never again resist Communist aggression.

In saying "never again," implying that the war should have been lost -- that it is all right for the victors to conduct a brutal campaign against their own people, violating even minimal human rights.

That it is alright to ignore these massive violations and alright for us to seek better relations with the governments responsible. That White House document lists as an "accomplishment" the fact that "the administration has started the process of normalizing relations" with the Communist conquerors of South Vietnam. The lesson we should have learned from Vietnam is that never again will Americans be asked to fight and die unless they are permitted to win. We need a foreign policy stripped of platitudes, cant and mere moral earnestness -- an earnestness fatally compromised by the massive crimes of some of the Communist world's newer members...

...The problem with much of the Carter team is that they know too little, not too much, of history. And, they have lost faith in their own country's past and traditions.

Too often, that team has operated under the assumption that the United States must prove and reprove and prove again its goodness to the world. Proving that we are civilized in a world that is often uncivilized -- and unapologetically so -- is hardly necessary.

The themes of a sound foreign policy should be no mystery, nor the result of endless agonizing reappraisals. They are rooted in our past -- in our very beginning as a nation.

The Founding Fathers established a system which meant a radical break from that which preceded it. A written constitution would provide a permanent form of government, limited in scope, but effective in providing both liberty and order. Government was not to be a matter of self-appointed rulers, governing by whim or harsh ideology. It was not to be government by the strongest or for the few. Our principles were revolutionary. We began as a small, weak republic. But we survived. Our example inspired others, imperfectly at times, but it inspired them nevertheless. This constitutional republic, conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal, prospered and grew strong. To this day, America is still the abiding alternative to tyranny. That is our purpose in the world -- nothing more and nothing less.

To carry out that purpose, our fundamental aim in foreign policy must be to ensure our own survival and to protect those others who share our values. Under no circumstances should we have any illusions about the intentions of those who are enemies of freedom. Our Communist adversaries have little regard for human rights because they have little interest in human freedom. The ruling elites of those countries wish only one thing: to preserve their privileges and to eliminate the nagging reminder that others have done and are doing better under freedom...

War and Peace - and Deceit - in Islam

Original article
by Raymond Ibrahim
Pajamas Media
February 12, 2009

Editor's note: Substantial portions of the following essay made up part of Mr. Ibrahim's written testimony that was presented to Congress on February 12, 2009

Today, in a time of wars and rumors of wars emanating from the Islamic world — from the current conflict in Gaza, to the saber-rattling of nuclear-armed Pakistan and soon-to-be Iran — the need for non-Muslims to better understand Islam's doctrines and objectives concerning war and peace, and everything in between (treaties, diplomacy), has become pressing. For instance, what does one make of the fact that, after openly and vociferously making it clear time and time again that its ultimate aspiration is to see Israel annihilated, Hamas also pursues "peace treaties," including various forms of concessions from Israel — and more puzzling, receives them?

Before being in a position to answer such questions, one must first appreciate the thoroughly legalistic nature of mainstream (Sunni) Islam. Amazingly, for all the talk that Islam is constantly being "misunderstood" or "misinterpreted" by "radicals," the fact is, as opposed to most other religions, Islam is a clearly defined faith admitting of no ambiguity: indeed, according to Sharia (i.e., "Islam's way of life," more commonly translated as "Islamic law") every conceivable human act is categorized as being either forbidden, discouraged, permissible, recommended, or obligatory. "Common sense" or "universal opinion" has little to do with Islam's notions of right and wrong. All that matters is what Allah (via the Koran) and his prophet Muhammad (through the hadith) have to say about any given subject, and how Islam's greatest theologians and jurists — collectively known as the ulema, literally, the "ones who know" — have articulated it.

Consider the concept of lying. According to Sharia, deception is not only permitted in certain situations but is sometimes deemed obligatory. For instance, and quite contrary to early Christian tradition, not only are Muslims who must choose between either recanting Islam or being put to death permitted to lie by pretending to have apostatized; many jurists have decreed that, according to Koran 4:29, Muslims are obligated to lie.

The doctrine of taqiyya

Much of this revolves around the pivotal doctrine of taqiyya, which is often euphemized as "religious dissembling," though in reality simply connotes "Muslim deception vis-à-vis infidels." According to the authoritative Arabic text Al-Taqiyya fi Al-Islam, "Taqiyya [deception] is of fundamental importance in Islam. Practically every Islamic sect agrees to it and practices it. We can go so far as to say that the practice of taqiyya is mainstream in Islam, and that those few sects not practicing it diverge from the mainstream. … Taqiyya is very prevalent in Islamic politics, especially in the modern era [p. 7; my own translation]."

Some erroneously believe that taqiyya is an exclusively Shia doctrine: as a minority group interspersed among their traditional enemies, the much more numerous Sunnis, Shias have historically had more "reason" to dissemble. Ironically, however, Sunnis living in the West today find themselves in a similar situation, as they are now the minority surrounded by their historic enemies — Christian infidels.

The primary Koranic verse sanctioning deception vis-à-vis non-Muslims states: "Let believers [Muslims] not take for friends and allies infidels [non-Muslims] instead of believers. Whoever does this shall have no relationship left with Allah — unless you but guard yourselves against them, taking precautions" (3:28; other verses referenced by the ulema in support of taqiyya include 2:173, 2:185, 4:29, 16:106, 22:78, 40:28).

Al-Tabari's (d. 923) famous tafsir (exegesis of the Koran) is a standard and authoritative reference work in the entire Muslim world. Regarding 3:28, he writes: "If you [Muslims] are under their [infidels'] authority, fearing for yourselves, behave loyally to them, with your tongue, while harboring inner animosity for them. … Allah has forbidden believers from being friendly or on intimate terms with the infidels in place of believers — except when infidels are above them [in authority]. In such a scenario, let them act friendly towards them."

Regarding 3:28, Ibn Kathir (d. 1373, second in authority only to Tabari) writes, "Whoever at any time or place fears their [infidels'] evil may protect himself through outward show." As proof of this, he quotes Muhammad's close companion, Abu Darda, who said, "Let us smile to the face of some people [non-Muslims] while our hearts curse them"; another companion, al-Hassan, said, "Doing taqiyya is acceptable till the Day of Judgment [i.e., in perpetuity]."

Other prominent ulema, such as al-Qurtubi, al-Razi, and al-Arabi, have extended taqiyya to cover deeds. In other words, Muslims can behave like infidels — including by bowing down and worshiping idols and crosses, offering false testimony, even exposing fellow Muslims' weaknesses to the infidel enemy — anything short of actually killing a Muslim.

Is this why the Muslim American sergeant Hasan Akbar attacked and killed his fellow servicemen in Iraq in 2003? Had his pretense of loyalty finally come up against a wall when he realized Muslims might die at his hands? He had written in his diary: "I may not have killed any Muslims, but being in the army is the same thing. I may have to make a choice very soon on who to kill."

War is deceit

None of this should be surprising considering that Muhammad himself — whose example as the "most perfect human" is to be tenaciously followed — took an expedient view of lying. It is well known, for instance, that Muhammad permitted lying in three situations: to reconcile two or more quarreling parties, to one's wife, and in war (see Sahih Muslim B32N6303, deemed an "authentic" hadith).

As for our chief concern here — war — the following story from the life of Muhammad reveals the centrality of deceit in war. During the Battle of the Trench (627), which pitted Muhammad and his followers against several non-Muslim tribes known as "the Confederates," one of these Confederates, Naim bin Masud, went to the Muslim camp and converted to Islam. When Muhammad discovered that the Confederates were unaware of their co-tribalist's conversion, he counseled Masud to return and try somehow to get the Confederates to abandon the siege — "For," Muhammad assured him, "war is deceit." Masud returned to the Confederates without their knowing that he had "switched sides," and began giving his former kin and allies bad advice. He also went to great lengths to instigate quarrels between the various tribes until, thoroughly distrusting each other, they disbanded, lifting the siege from the Muslims, and thereby saving Islam in its embryonic period (see Al-Taqiyya fi Al-Islam; also, Ibn Ishaq's Sira, the earliest biography of Muhammad).

More demonstrative of the legitimacy of deception vis-à-vis infidels is the following anecdote. A poet, Kab bin al-Ashruf, offended Muhammad by making derogatory verse concerning Muslim women. So Muhammad exclaimed in front of his followers: "Who will kill this man who has hurt Allah and his prophet?" A young Muslim named Muhammad bin Maslama volunteered, but with the caveat that, in order to get close enough to Kab to assassinate him, he be allowed to lie to the poet. Muhammad agreed. Maslama traveled to Kab, began denigrating Islam and Muhammad, carrying on this way till his disaffection became convincing enough that Kab took him into his confidences. Soon thereafter, Maslama appeared with another Muslim and, while Kab's guard was down, assaulted and killed him. Ibn Sa'ad's version reports that they ran to Muhammad with Kab's head, to which the latter cried, "Allahu Akbar!" (God is great!)

It also bears mentioning that the entire sequence of Koranic revelations is a testimony to taqiyya; and since Allah is believed to be the revealer of these verses, he ultimately is seen as the perpetrator of deceit — which is not surprising since Allah himself is described in the Koran as the best "deceiver" or "schemer" (3:54, 8:30, 10:21). This phenomenon revolves around the fact that the Koran contains both peaceful and tolerant verses, as well as violent and intolerant ones. The ulema were baffled as to which verses to codify into Sharia's worldview — the one, for instance, that states there is no coercion in religion (2:256), or the ones that command believers to fight all non-Muslims till they either convert, or at least submit, to Islam (8:39, 9:5, 9:29)? To get out of this quandary, the ulema developed the doctrine of abrogation (naskh, supported by Koran 2:106) which essentially maintains that verses "revealed" later in Muhammad's career take precedence over the earlier ones, whenever there is a contradiction.

But why the contradiction in the first place? The standard view has been that, since in the early years of Islam, Muhammad and his community were far outnumbered by the infidels and idolaters, a message of peace and coexistence was in order (sound familiar?). However, after he migrated to Medina and grew in military strength and numbers, the violent and intolerant verses were "revealed," inciting Muslims to go on the offensive — now that they were capable of doing so. According to this view, quite standard among the ulema, one can only conclude that the peaceful Meccan verses were ultimately a ruse to buy Islam time till it became sufficiently strong to implement its "true" verses which demand conquest. Or, as traditionally understood and implemented by Muslims themselves, when the latter are weak and in a minority position, they should preach and behave according to the Meccan verses (peace and tolerance); when strong, they should go on the offensive, according to the Medinan verses (war and conquest). The vicissitudes of Islamic history are a testimony to this dichotomy.

A Muslim colleague of mine once made this clear during a casual, though revealing, conversation. After expounding to him all those problematic doctrines that make it impossible for Muslims to peacefully coexist with infidels — jihad, loyalty and enmity, enjoining the right and forbidding the wrong — I pointedly asked him how and why he, as a Muslim, did not uphold them. He kept prevaricating, pointing to those other, abrogated verses of peace and tolerance. Assuming he was totally oblivious of such arcane doctrines as abrogation, I (rather triumphantly) began explaining to him the distinction between Meccan (tolerant) and Medinan (intolerant) verses, and how the latter abrogate the former. He simply smiled, saying, "I know; but I'm currently living in Mecca" — that is, like his weak and outnumbered prophet living among an infidel majority in Mecca, he too, for survival's sake, felt compelled to preach peace, tolerance, and coexistence to the infidel majority of America.

War is eternal

The fact that Islam legitimizes deceit during war cannot be all that surprising; as the saying goes, all's fair in love and war. Moreover, non-Muslim thinkers and philosophers, such as Sun Tzu, Machiavelli, and Hobbes, all justified deceit in war. The crucial difference, however, is that, according to all four recognized schools of Sunni jurisprudence, war against the infidel goes on in perpetuity — until "all chaos ceases, and all religion belongs to Allah" (Koran 8:39). In its entry on jihad, the definitive Encyclopaedia of Islam simply states:

The duty of the jihad exists as long as the universal domination of Islam has not been attained. Peace with non-Muslim nations is, therefore, a provisional state of affairs only; the chance of circumstances alone can justify it temporarily. Furthermore there can be no question of genuine peace treaties with these nations; only truces, whose duration ought not, in principle, to exceed ten years, are authorized. But even such truces are precarious, inasmuch as they can, before they expire, be repudiated unilaterally should it appear more profitable for Islam to resume the conflict.

Moreover, going back to the doctrine of abrogation, the vast majority of the ulema agree that Koran 9:5, famously known as ayat al-saif — the "sword verse" — has abrogated some 124 of the more peaceful Meccan verses.

The obligatory jihad is best expressed by Islam's dichotomized worldview that pits Dar al-Islam (the "realm of submission," i.e., the Islamic world), against Dar al-Harb (the "realm of war," i.e., the non-Islamic world) until the former subsumes the latter. Internationally renowned Muslim historian and philosopher Ibn Khaldun (d. 1406) articulates this division thusly: "In the Muslim community, holy war [jihad] is a religious duty, because of the universalism of the Muslim mission and the obligation to convert everybody to Islam either by persuasion or by force. The other religious groups [specifically Christianity and Judaism] did not have a universal mission, and the holy war was not a religious duty for them, save only for purposes of defense. … But Islam is under obligation to gain power over other nations."

This concept is highlighted by the fact that, based on the ten-year treaty of Hudaibiya (628), ratified between Muhammad and his Quraish opponents in Mecca, ten years is, theoretically, the maximum amount of time Muslims can be at peace with infidels. Based on Muhammad's example of breaking the treaty after two years (by citing a Quraish infraction), the sole function of the "peace treaty" (or hudna) is to buy weakened Muslims time to regroup before going on the offensive once more. Incidentally, according to a canonical hadith, Muhammad said, "If I take an oath and later find something else better, I do what is better and break my oath." The prophet further encouraged Muslims to do the same: "If you ever take an oath to do something and later on you find that something else is better, then you should expiate your oath and do what is better."

After negotiating a peace treaty criticized by Muslims as conceding too much to Israel, former PLO leader and Nobel Peace Prize winner Yasser Arafat, speaking to Muslims in a mosque and off the record, justified his actions by saying, "I see this agreement as being no more than the agreement signed between our Prophet Muhammad and the Quraish in Mecca." In other words, like his prophet, the "moderate" Arafat was giving his word only to annul it once "something else better" came along — that is, once Palestinians became strong enough to renew the offensive.

Most recently, a new Islamic group associated with Hamas called Jaysh al-Umma (Islam's army) stated clearly, "Muslims all over the world are obliged to fight the Israelis and the infidels until only Islam rules the earth." Realizing their slip, they quickly clarified: "We say that the world will not live in peace as long as the blood of Muslims continues to be shed." Which is it — until Muslim blood stops being shed in Israel or "until only Islam rules the earth"?

These are all clear instances of Muslims feigning openness to the idea of peace simply in order to buy more time to build up their strength.

Here, then, is the problem: If Islam must be in a constant state of war with the non-Muslim world, which need not be physical, as the ulema have classified several non-violent forms of jihad, such as "jihad-of-the-pen" (propaganda) and "money-jihad" (economic); and if Muslims are permitted to lie and feign loyalty, amiability, even affection to the infidel, simply to further their war efforts — what does one make of any Muslim overtures of peace, tolerance, or dialogue?

This is more obvious when one considers that, every single time Muslims "reach out" for "peace," it is always when they are in a weakened condition vis-à-vis infidels — that is, when they, not their non-Muslim competitors, benefit from the peace. This is the lesson of the last two centuries of Muslim-Western interaction, wherein the former have been militarily inferior and thus beholden to the latter.

One wonders if the reverse would hold true. If, for example, the Palestinians suddenly became stronger than Israel and could annihilate it, if Israel reached out for peace or concessions, would the (overwhelmingly Muslim) Palestinians grant it? In fact, the answer to this question is evident in all those countries where non-Muslim groups live as minorities among Muslim majorities: while living in constant social subjugation (according to Koran 9:29) they are also sporadically persecuted and killed — such as the Christian Copts of Egypt who, after merely assembling for prayer in a condemned factory, found 20,000 rioting Muslims surrounding them, screaming the Muslim war cry, "Allah Akbar," while throwing stones at them.

Reciprocal treatment or religious obligation?

Why did Osama bin Laden, who firmly believes in the division of the world into two entities — Islam and the rest — which must war until the former dominates the globe, attack the U.S.? The following anecdote sheds some light: after a group of prominent Muslims wrote a letter to Americans saying that Islam is a peaceful religion that wishes to coexist with others, seeking only to "live and let live," bin Laden, thinking no non-Muslim would see his letter, castigated them as follows:

As to the relationship between Muslims and infidels, this is summarized by the Most High's Word: "We [Muslims] renounce you [non-Muslims]. Enmity and hate shall forever reign between us — till you believe in Allah alone" [Koran 60:4]. So there is an enmity, evidenced by fierce hostility from the heart. And this fierce hostility — that is, battle — ceases only if the infidel submits to the authority of Islam, or if his blood is forbidden from being shed [i.e., a dhimmi], or if Muslims are at that point in time weak and incapable [i.e., taqiyya]. But if the hate at any time extinguishes from the heart, this is great apostasy! … Such, then, is the basis and foundation of the relationship between the infidel and the Muslim. Battle, animosity, and hatred — directed from the Muslim to the infidel — is the foundation of our religion. And we consider this a justice and kindness to them (from The Al Qaeda Reader, p. 43).

It bears repeating that this hostile weltanschauung is well supported by mainstream Islam's schools of jurisprudence (i.e., there is nothing "radical" about it). When addressing Western audiences, however, bin Laden's tone drastically changes; he lists any number of "grievances" for fighting the West — from Palestinian oppression, to the Western exploitation of women and U.S. failure to sign the Kyoto protocol — never once alluding to fighting the U.S. simply because it is an infidel entity that must be subjugated. Indeed, he often initiates his messages to the West by saying, "Reciprocal treatment is part of justice" or "Peace to whoever follows guidance" — though he means something entirely different than what his Western audience thinks.

This is of course a clear instance of taqiyya, as bin Laden is not only waging a physical jihad, but one of propaganda. Convincing a secular West (whose epistemology does not allow for the notion of religious conquest) that the current conflict is entirely its fault only garners him and his cause more sympathy; conversely, he also knows that if Americans were to realize that, all political grievances aside — real or imagined — according to Islam's worldview, nothing short of their submission to Islam can ever bring peace, his propaganda campaign would be quickly compromised. Yet the fact is al-Qaeda is motivated more by religious obligation than reciprocal treatment. Hence the constant need to lie, "for war," as their prophet asserted, "is deceit."

It should be added that, though the vast majority of the world's Muslims are not active terrorists, bin Laden's list of grievances against the West is paradigmatic of the average Muslim's grievances. However, if they are unaware that, according to Islam — not bin Laden — animosity towards infidels transcends time, space, and grievances, and that religious obligation commands the war continue till "all religion belongs to Allah," they are either ignorant of their own faith, or — taqiyya?

With friends like these …

Associated with Hamas, denounced by American politicians for "pursuing an extreme Islamist political agenda," its members arrested for terrorism-related charges — the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) is another Muslim group which appears to be less than sincere to its non-Muslim audience; situated in the U.S., it is also much closer to home. When it comes to the issue of jihad, perpetual warfare, even doctrines such as taqiyya — indeed, all that has been delineated in this essay — CAIR has been at the forefront of not only denying their existence, but accusing of "Islamophobia" and threatening with lawsuits anyone alluding to them, thereby censoring any critical talk of Islam.

Could CAIR be taking lessons from the Muslim convert Masud, whom Muhammad urged to go and live among the Confederate infidels, solely in order to mislead and betray them, so that Islam might triumph?

The most obvious example of taqiyya, however, comes from an entire nation: Saudi Arabia. If any nation closely follows Sharia — including, but not limited to, the division of the world into two perpetually warring halves, Islam and infidelity — it is Saudi Arabia, a.k.a. America's "friend." According to Sharia, for instance, the Saudis will not allow the construction of a single church or synagogue on their land; Bibles are banned and burned; Christians engaged in any kind of missionary activity are arrested, tortured, and sometimes killed; Muslim converts to Christianity are put to death.

Yet for all that, in their attempt to portray Islam as a "tolerant" religion, a religion that, once again, merely seeks "peacefully coexist" with others, the Saudis have been pushing for more "dialogue" between Muslims and non-Muslims, specifically Christians and Jews (ironically, those two peoples who are currently much more powerful than Islam). Rather tellingly, however, Saudi Arabia refuses to host any of these conferences; after all, their prophet Muhammad's deathbed wish was to expel the Jews and Christians from the Arabian peninsula; how to re-invite them now and talk of peace and tolerance? Moreover, surely the Saudis fear that a real "debate" — not just the perfunctory talk of "mutual understanding" that permeates these farces — might take place, once the non-Muslim participants discover that they are not free to practice their faiths on Saudi soil? The most recent interfaith conference was held in Madrid, where King Abdullah, despite all the aforementioned, asserted, "Islam is a religion of moderation and tolerance, a message that calls for constructive dialogue among followers of all religions."

Mere days later, it was revealed that Saudi children's textbooks still call Christians and Jews "infidels," the "hated enemies," and "pigs and swine." A multiple choice test in a fourth-grade book asks Muslim children, "Who is a 'true' Muslim?" The correct answer is not the man who prays, fasts, etc., but rather, "A man worships God alone, loves the believers, and hates the infidels" — that is, those same people the Saudis want to "dialogue" with.

Clearly, then, when Saudis — or other Sharia-following Muslims — call for "dialogue" they are merely following the aforementioned advice of Muhammad's friend, Abu Darda: "Let us smile to the face of some people while our hearts curse them."

Implications

There is also a troubling philosophical — again, specifically epistemological — aspect to taqiyya. Anyone who truly believes that no less an authority than God justifies and, through his prophet's example, sometimes even encourages deception, will not experience any ethical qualms or dilemmas about lying. This is especially true if the human mind is indeed a tabula rasa shaped by environment and education: deception becomes second nature.

Consider the case of Ali Mohammad — bin Laden's "first trainer" and longtime al-Qaeda operative. Despite being entrenched in the highest echelons of the terror network, his confidence at dissembling enabled him to become a CIA agent and FBI informant for years. People who knew him regarded him "with fear and awe for his incredible self-confidence, his inability to be intimidated, absolute ruthless determination to destroy the enemies of Islam, and his zealous belief in the tenets of militant Islamic fundamentalism." Indeed, this sentence sums it all: for a "zealous belief" in Islam's "tenets," which, as seen, legitimize deception, will certainly go a long way in creating "incredible self-confidence" when lying.

The bottom line is, any Muslim who closely observes Sharia law — and that is, incidentally, the definition of a Muslim, "one who submits to (the laws of) Allah" — laws that, among other bellicosities, clearly and unambiguously split the world into two perpetually warring halves — such a Muslim will always have a "divinely sanctioned" right to deceive, until "all chaos ceases, and all religion belongs to Allah" (Koran 8:39). All Muslim overtures for peace, dialogue, or even temporary truces must be seen in this light.

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Raymond Ibrahim is the associate director of the Middle East Forum and the author of The Al Qaeda Reader, translations of religious texts and propaganda.

Geert Wilders and the Fight for Europe

Does defending Western values constitute “inciting hatred”?

Original article
By Bat Yeor
February 16, 2009 4:00 AM

Britain has just witnessed the spectacle of a duly elected parliamentarian from another EU country, Geert Wilders of the Netherlands, being denied entry to the country because he constituted “a threat to public policy.” Wilders, after being detained briefly at Heathrow, was sent back to Holland — where he has further legal troubles. Three weeks earlier, a Dutch appeals court had ordered prosecutors to begin criminal proceedings against Wilders for “inciting hatred and discrimination” and “insulting Muslim worshippers” through his public statements and his 2008 film, Fitna. The order to proceed with the criminal prosecution resulted from pressure put on European states and on the UN Human Rights Council by the Organization of the Islamic Conference (OIC). The OIC’s aim is to punish and suppress any alleged Islamophobia, around the world but particularly in Europe, and it has been a leader in creating the conditions that made the U.K.’s Wilders ban possible.

The OIC is one of the largest intergovernmental organizations in the world. It encompasses 56 Muslim states plus the Palestinian Authority. Spread over four continents, it claims to speak in the name of the ummah (the universal Muslim community), which numbers about 1.3 billion. The OIC’s mission is to unite all Muslims worldwide by rooting them in the Koran and the Sunnah — the core of traditional Islamic civilization and values. It aims at strengthening solidarity and cooperation among all its members, in order to protect the interests of Muslims everywhere and to galvanize the ummah into a unified body.

The OIC is a unique organization — one that has no equivalent in the world. It unites the religious, economic, military, and political strength of 56 states. By contrast, the European Union represents half as many states and is a secular body only, and the Vatican — which speaks for the world’s 1.1 billion Catholics — is devoid of any political power. Many Muslims in the West resist the OIC’s tutelage and oppose its efforts to supplant Western law with sharia. But the OIC’s resources are formidable.

The organization has numerous subsidiary institutions collaborating at the highest levels with international organizations in order to implement its political objectives worldwide. Its main working bodies are the Islamic Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (ISESCO), which seeks to impose on the West the Islamic perception of history and civilization; the Observatory of Islamophobia, which puts pressure on Western governments and international bodies to adopt laws punishing “Islamophobia” and blasphemy; and the newly created Islamic International Court of Justice. As stated in its 1990 Cairo Declaration on Human Rights in Islam, the OIC is strictly tied to the principles of the Koran, the Sunnah, and the sharia. In a word, the OIC seeks to become the reincarnation of the Caliphate.

The OIC regularly reiterates its commitments to protecting the political, historical, religious, and human rights of Muslims in non-OIC states, especially Muslims who form the majority in specific regions of non-Muslim countries — such as the southern Philippines, southern Thailand, and western Thrace in Greece — as well as Muslims in places like the Balkans, the Caucasus, Myanmar, India, and China. The OIC supports Hamas and the Palestinians in their struggle to destroy Israel, as well as the Muslim fight for “legitimate self-determination” in “Indian-occupied Jammu and Kashmir.” It has condemned the “continual Armenian aggression against Azerbaijan,” and it expresses its full solidarity with “the just cause of the Muslim Turkish people of Cyprus” and with Sudanese President Omar Hassan Al-Bashir, whom many hold responsible for encouraging the massacres in Darfur. The seat of the OIC is in Jeddah, but the organization regards that location as temporary: Its headquarters will be transferred to al-Kods (Islamized Jerusalem) when that city has been “liberated” from Israeli control.

In its efforts to defend the “true image” of Islam and combat its defamation, the organization has requested the UN and the Western countries to punish “Islamophobia” and blasphemy. Among the manifestations of Islamophobia, in the OIC’s view, are European opposition to illegal immigration, anti-terrorist measures, criticism of multiculturalism, and indeed any efforts to defend Western cultural and national identities. The OIC has massive funding from oil sources, which it lavishly spends on the Western media and academia and in countless “dialogues.” It influences Western policy, laws, and even textbooks through pressures brought by Muslim immigrants and by the Western nations’ own leftist parties. Hence, we have seen Kristallnacht-like incitements of hate and murder against European Jews and Israel conducted with impunity in the cities of Europe — where respect for human rights is supposed to be one of the highest values.

Geert Wilders is the latest victim of this enormous world machinery. His crime is maintaining that Europe’s civilization is rooted in the values of Jerusalem, Athens, Rome, and the Enlightenment — and not in Mecca, Baghdad, Andalusia, and al-Kods. He fights for Europe’s independence from the Caliphate and for its endangered freedoms. He had received serious death threats even before Fitna was released.

Many Muslims in the West support him, but Geert Wilders’s principal weapons are his courage and his willingness to resist even his own government, which is slowly submitting to the OIC’s pressures. Wilders’s enemies pretend that he is an insignificant personality who makes “provocative” statements only in search of fame. In fact, if his motivation were self-interest, he could do far better by courting the OIC’s favors — as so many Europeans are doing, consciously or unconsciously — rather than risking his freedom and indeed his life.

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— Bat Yeor is the author of studies on the conditions of Jews and Christians in the context of the jihad ideology and the sharia law. Recent books include: Islam and Dhimmitude: Where Civilizations Collide and Eurabia: The Euro-Arab Axis, both from Fairleigh Dickinson University Press.

The truth about Hamas

Hamas discourages Palestinians from seeking treatment in Israel

Original article
by Anav Silverman
Published: 02.16.09, 12:34 / Israel Opinion

One of the most frequently reported items in the Arab-Israeli conflict today are the crossings between Gaza and Israel. As the only way for cargo, aid, and other goods to enter and leave Gaza, these crossings are essential to the livelihood of the 1.4 milion Palestinians who live in the Gaza Strip.

Ten minutes away from Sderot, sits the Erez Crossing - the only crossing that serves as a pedestrian exit point for Gaza Strip residents entering Israel. The crossing is open to Palestinian workers holding permits and families seeking medical treatment in Israel. Large numbers of journalists and international foreign press also pass through the point.

I recently had the opportunity to visit the Erez crossing where the first site that greeted me was a brand new medical center, which had been opened at the start of the unilateral ceasefire between Hamas and Israel in mid-January. Israel's Magen David Adom ambulance service, in cooperation with the Israeli Department of Health, opened the center to treat wounded Gazans, with the Israeli government investing millions of dollars into its construction.

The new Israeli medical center can handle 30 patients per hour and is staffed by paramedics and doctors who specialize in emergency medicine, pediatrics, trauma, gynecology, orthopedics, and other fields. It is equipped with state of the art laboratories, X-ray machines, and a pharmacy.

"The only problem," said Shlomo Tzaban, a manager at the Erez Crossing, "is that the medical center stands empty. No one is using it because Hamas discourages Palestinians from seeking treatment at Israeli hospitals."

Before entering Erez, Palestinians must first pass through a checkpoint on the Gaza side. Hamas controls that point on the Gaza end and therefore has complete authority on Palestinians seeking to enter Israel. Subsequently, there has been a dramatic decrease in the number of Palestinians seeking medical treatment in Israel - down to 80-90% - says Tzaban.

"Everyone in Gaza lives under Hamas control," explains Tzaban. "Hamas uses terror and fear to rule the Palestinian people.” Tzaban uses the judicial system in Gaza as an example.

Back in December 2008, the Hamas parliament sanctioned that Palestinian courts were to condemn offenders according to violent punitive measures under Islamic Sharia laws. Hamas punishments for Palestinian offenders include whipping, severing hands (for stealing,) crucifixion and hanging.

Tzaban, a 28-year old veteran of the IDF, emphasizes that Hamas will use any means now to win support of the Palestinians after the heavy damages inflicted by the war. "The fact that Hamas police recently raided an UNRWA storehouse in order to distribute the humanitarian aid on its own accord may shock the international community but it's happened before," says Tzaban.

"In order to maintain the support of the Palestinian civilian population, Hamas is trying to show that only their regime has the power to provide for the welfare of the Palestinian people, while simultaneously waging war against Israel.”

Terrorists target crossings

The United Nations Relief and Work Agency accused Hamas of seizing humanitarian aid sent into Gaza from countries across the world on February 4. UNRWA stated that Hamas had seized thousands of blankets and hundreds of food packages that were meant to be delivered to hundreds of poor families in Gaza after UNRWA refused to hand over the humanitarian aid to the Hamas Ministry of Social Welfare.

Today, the Erez compound stands practically empty, except for a couple of Palestinian families and foreign journalists, and two peace activists standing outside. The compound was built five years ago and was meant to check through around 20,000-25,000 Palestinian workers at a time.

Although the opening of the crossings is essential to the Gaza economy, Palestinian terror networks have frequently attacked the Erez crossing. “On average, there are between two to four attempted Palestinian terrorist attacks on the Erez compound each month,” according to Erez, an IDF security officer at the checkpoint.

In the last four years, Palestinian terror networks have targeted the Erez crossing with almost 500 mortar shells. In May 2008, a Palestinian bomber from Gaza blew up an explosive-laden truck on the Palestinian side of the Erez crossing, causing an estimated $3.5 million in damages to the Israeli checkpoint.

Along with the Erez crossing, the three other crossings between Gaza and Israel include Karnei, Kerem Shalom and Nahal Oz. Initially, the crossing points were part of the Gaza security buffer facilitated under Yitzchak Rabin’s 1994 Oslo Accords. A wave of Palestinian suicide bombers had flooded into Israel and the security buffer was built as a means to prevent the entrance of such terrorists, which it was successfully able to do.

Once Palestinian terror groups recognized that suicide bombers could no longer enter Israel, they began developing rockets and explosives, intensely targeting Israeli communities bordering Gaza and the closest Israeli city to Gaza-Sderot, as well as the crossings themselves.

At this point, most of the crossings are considered closed, although the transfer of humanitarian aid into the Strip continues through the Karni, Kerem Shalom, and Nahal Oz crossings. Israel plans to fully open the crossings only when Hamas releases Gilad Shalit, the IDF soldier kidnapped at the Kerem Shalom border crossing almost three years ago.

Pause and Take a Deep Breath

Original article
February 15th, 2009 12:09 am

Five Easy Pieces

I. “Bush did it!”

Sec. Clinton went abroad this week and immediately, and yes, gratuitously, blamed Bush. On her initial tour abroad, Sec. Clinton announced that she would follow an approach that “values what others have to say”: “Too often in the recent past, our government has acted reflexively before considering available facts and evidence or hearing the perspectives of others.” And then she promised a policy “neither impulsive nor ideological.”

Yet can’t Team Obama get a life? We are now into month two; and will it always be “Bush did it?” (I don’t recall Bush circa 2001 in a constant anti-Clinton mode); (1) Does Sec. Clinton realize she is sending a subtle message to our friends and enemies, “All our fault—not yours” . Germany won’t really participate fully in the martial sense in the NATO effort in Afghanistan due to George Bush? Iran spread terror due to Bush’s twang? (Do other foreign leaders do such things?); (2) Does she realize that soon, like her boss and his flips on FISA, the Patriotic Act, and rendition, she too will discover few good choices with Russia, Iran, North Korea, and Venezuela, and then often will follow Bush’s centrist policies—suffering the additional wage of hypocrisy, given the above rhetoric? (3) Cannot Hillary simply show us her own diplomatic brilliance rather than trashing by implication Condoleezza Rice’s performance? Far better to embarrass Bush by showing brilliant diplomacy and creating anew a safer world, not by trashing the past governance of your own country. We are back to the Obama al-Arabiya interview all over again. These thoughts are the legacies of the 1960s that reveal uncertainty about the US and the puerile campus notion that there is always “they” , the “man”, the “establishment,” the “government” that can assume responsibility for our perceptions of imperfections and unhappiness.

II. Better to owe than to save.

I think we are seeing the most marked redistribution of wealth in our recent history. The erosion of home equity and, especially, the 20-30% decline in 401(k)s— followed by nearly $1 trillion in additional entitlement spending (“stimulus”)— mean essentially that much of the capital in the hands of those who owned property and had stocks and mutual funds was destroyed and will be recreated by transferring monies to others. How odd that the printing of billions of new paper dollars to spread he wealth is offset by the virtual destruction of billions of old paper dollars in savings and home equity. Maybe that will slow inflation (e.g., some of us figuratively had money burned up at about the same amount that more was printed afresh). In any case, we live in the age of the debtor—low interest, soon to be high inflation, all sorts of plans to alleviate debt, and government transfers favoring those who owe rather than those who saved.

III. To be or not to be.

Obama’s problem is simple. At Columbia, Harvard Law, while Chicago organizing, amid the pews of Trinity Church, and the Democratic Senate caucus, and in the campaign mode, Obama embraced the adversarial mentality of us versus them. The country was illiberal and those in power culpable for various sins, past and present, as one would expect of Michelle’s reference to a “mean” country. But suddenly as President Obama, now he must do what? He owns the governance of the United States that suddenly must either morph under his leadership into something quite good or be defended as it is. Note the unease. So “they” “Bush” etc. are still evoked who did the damage to America here and abroad, as our own leaders triangulate with our enemies and allies against other past administrations. (NB: I have no idea whether Obama will confound and confuse our enemies or simply unduly enrage them by sending mixed signals—if he should prove tough with the Russians on missile defense or Iran or terrorism.)

IV. The Passing of an Age

Apart from the crisis of World War II, we are seeing an historical rise in the size and importance of government—the result not just of a reaction against Wall Street greed, incompetence, and irresponsibility, but also of the growth in a decades-long ideology that insisted that the self was not responsible for his predicament, but that government could step in and right the wrongs done by others.

No health care? It is never because some of us chose to buy a cell phone or a plasma television rather than spend $250 a month for catastrophic private health plans.

College? All of us are owed free tuition, or at least state-subsidized loans. None of us is at fault for not saving for college. Much less are there those among us who do not belong in college (as a professor emeritus of some 21 years at a public university, a key problem, it seemed to me, were thousands of listless students, living at home, subsidized by state and federal loans and stipends, prolonging a four-year protocol into five, six, and, yes, ten years of off and on study, as they sorta, kinda attended class—as if life begins at 28 rather than 21.)

Mortgages? Seven to eight percent of us defaulted. Here are the rules of discourse: no one bought far more house than they needed or could afford. Few forgot to factor in taxes, maintenance, power bills, or insurance as costs additional to the mortgage payment. Almost none, of course, ever took a second or third mortgage to energize credit card purchases. None of us are by nature renters, and simply not up to the burdens of home maintenance, of prompt payment of fees and mortgages, and the other responsibilities of ownership that are different from those of the renter.

But I think these are merely symptoms of a far more worrisome pathology— the eclipse of the tragic view itself. Like it or not, the bedrock of the American experience has always been the self-employed truck driver, the farmer, the small-businessman, the jack-of-trades entrepreneur. That is not to say that the public employee is not noble and all that, only that the American character renown for blunt speech, decisive action, free-thinking, and resolute action, even for eccentricity and stubborness was better nurtured by some professions and less by others. But bury him under high taxes, regulations, politically-correct statutes, litigiousness, intrusive government, and confusing postmodern culture, and we begin to see that profile eroding. Helping friends and hurting enemies is now slandered as Manichean. Assuming that most places abroad in South America, Africa, and Asia are illiberal and worse is ethnocentric, chauvinist, parochial.

I think we are seeing a rising tide of an antithetical profile that says. I work for government and expect protection from government, whose mission to ensure an equality of result that takes no consideration of ignorance, criminal behavior, bad personal decisions, fate, bad luck, sloth, poor health, or intrinsic unfairness, but instead by intellect, capital, and good intentions promises, if given enough power, to overcome all such factors and in infinite wisdom not mererly to level the playing field, but to ensure there are no winners, or losers, just equal particpants who start and end the same.

I deserve, I am owed, I must receive is our mantra. We must become more like the world, rather they like us. War is caused by miscommunications rather than intrinsic evil that is difficult to negotiate away. America is simply one of many nations, exceptional only to the degree that we suffer from unusual race, class, and gender transgressions. The founders and their epigones were mostly preeminent as racist and elites, not geniuses who knew far more than 99% of us today. I think all that more or less sums up the lesson from today schools and colleges, and explains why today the average American when abroad rarely defends his country from the caricatures and attacks of foreigners, or why we read daily of the errant policeman, not of the thousands of deadly miscreants he is asked to monitor, why were are told ad nauseam that health care is broken, ruined, never that hourly millions of dollars are given in emergency room care to those here illegally, or who arrive suffering from gang trauma, or those who chose not to purchase health insurance—and who were given topflight care which earns no thanks when good but often a law suit when not perfect.

V. Do no harm.

There was at least a good chance that the current recession—so far less unemployment and loss of GDP than during the late Carter and early Reagan years—would have, as past recessions, ended in 24 months or so, with moderate expansionary policy by the government and the fed, and without a permanent radical growth in government. As we see from the unexpected stability of the dollar, other economies are far more shaken by the downturn, and were even more reckless in their lending, or dependant solely on oil or reliant only on exporting. Abroad, the losses to Hamas have strengthened the US hand in the Middle East. During the last administration, favorable governments came to power in Italy, Germany, and France. India is close to the United States. China is, well, China. Iraq is quiet.

In short, America does not have to be reinvented here or abroad.