Barrel Strength

Muammar “Brotherly Leader and Guide of the Revolution” al-Gaddafi, gives a ringing endorsement to Obama’s presidential bid.

“There are elections in America now. Along came a black citizen of Kenyan African origins, a Muslim, who had studied in an Islamic school in Indonesia. His name is Obama.

All the people in the Arab and Islamic world and in Africa applauded this man. They welcomed him and prayed for him and for his success, and they may have even been involved in legitimate contribution campaigns to enable him to win the American presidency….

We are still hoping that this black man will take pride in his African and Islamic identity, and in his faith, and that [he will know] that he has rights in America, and that he will change America from evil to good, and that America will establish relations that will serve it well with other peoples, especially the Arabs.”

This endorsement preceded endorsements from Kim Jong-Il and Fidel Castro.

Obama told a news conference today that “… I think there is an executive order out on Osama bin Laden’s head and if I’m president, and we have the opportunity to capture him, we may not be able to capture him alive… What would be important would be for us to do it in a way that allows the entire world to understand the murderous acts that he’s engaged in and not to make him into a martyr, and to assure that the United States government is abiding by basic conventions that would strengthen our hand in the broader battle against terrorism,”

He might want to recall the troubles that bedeviled previous attempts to capture bin Laden, during the Clinton administration, with the help of the full force of the US law. On MSNBC’s “Hardball with Chris Matthews”, Michael Scheuer, a former CIA terrorism analyst shared the following:

“When we were going to capture Osama bin Laden, for example, the lawyers were more concerned with bin Laden‘s safety and his comfort than they were with the officers charged with capturing him. We had to build an ergonomically designed chair to put him in, special comfort in terms of how he was shackled into the chair. They even worried about what kind of tape to gag him with so it wouldn‘t irritate his beard.”

One hopes that a better tape has been manufactured and better seating is available since the last attempt.

The modern era in the US federal energy policy began in 1973 with OPEC oil embargo. Other than blaming, in no particular order, oil companies, speculators or OPEC, where does US stand with the implementation of the energy policy over a protracted period?

All your correspondent can see is restriction on drilling in places such as Alaska and Louisiana, steps to sue OPEC and increased taxes on oil companies. How this leads to increase in the supply of oil is a mystery. Of course there is also the solution proposed in the video below by Congresswoman Maxine Waters (D-CA), who was named in 2005 and 2006 as one of the “most corrupt” members of congress by Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, to nationalize the oil companies.

Direct link to video on Youtube

Given the bipartisan consensus that a energy policy is required, it is disconcerting that nothing has happened over an extended period. With all the roadblocks and intransigence for the energy policy, one has to ask what hope is there for formulating a broadly accepted consensus for the War on Terror? Bush is derided as a lone wolf but what were and are the options?

Those who fondly recall and point to the bipartisan consensus during the Cold War might want to recall the following statement by Dukakis’ running mate, Congressman Lloyd Bentsen, that shows how different the Democrats were back then: “I propose the president of the United States advise the commander of the North Korean troops to withdraw his forces beyond the 38th parallel within one week or use that week to evacuate civilians from a specified list of North Korean cities that will be subjected to atomic attack by the United States Air Force.”

So the EU will soon be receiving messengers from the Pakistani government who will demand that freedom of speech be restricted so as to avoid an onslaught of terrrorist attacks. Thankfully there is already a good script in place for the reply:

Direct link to video on Youtube

But I doubt that the Eurowusses will be up to the task.

Liberal Senator and command washout Romeo Dallaire pumps up the volume and keeps his rhetoric fact-free in today’s National Post:

We are permitting the United States to try a Canadian child soldier using a military tribunal whose procedures violate basic principles of justice.

Let’s parse this one.

Canadian?

Like the rest of his loathsome, misbegotten family, Omar Khadr was a willing and proud minion of al Qaeda who regarded Canada as nothing better than “the greatest hotel on Earth”, as described by that other Great Canadian™, Yann Martel. Waving a passport doesn’t trump one’s membership in a pathologically criminal enterprise.

Soldier?

In whose army, precisely, as determined by the much invoked albeit barely read Geneva Conventions? It takes a bit more than sporting dirty pajamas and shouting “Allahu Akhbar!” to be a uniformed party to a military conflict. Again, Omar Khadr has no legal status greater than that of a pirate or brigand.

Basic principles of justice?

Why should the people of the United States, particularly the families and neighbours of servicemen slain by Khadr and his fellow irregulars, be denied justice in seeing murderers punished for their crimes? And does anyone think a criminal proceeding fair to both the offender and his American victims can occur in a neo-Trudeaupia where the public utterance of the “I-Word” is being criminalized?!

What finally places Senator Dallaire firmly beyond the pale is the headline of his tract, “Who are the real criminals in Omar Khadr’s case?”. What can one say of a man who holds public office yet, clasping to his chest the faint title of “national hero” , calls an entire state and nation criminals for not attempting to free a willing servant of evil from the burden of his crimes?

Senator, you disgust me.

British police and prosecutors have been forced to apologize and pay damages and legal costs to documentary makers over their factual reporting of statements made by extremist imams in their mosques:

West Midlands Police and the Crown Prosecution Service have apologised for accusing the makers of a Channel 4 documentary of distortion.

The apology and the promise of £100,000 were made at the High Court on Thursday.

It follows comments made about a Dispatches programme, Undercover Mosque, which tackled claims of Islamic extremism in the West Midlands.

[...]

But in November, Ofcom rejected the police and CPS claims, and Channel 4 said it was going to sue the CPS and police for libel.

The statement, released to the media after the High Court hearing by West Midlands Police, said they accepted there had been no evidence that Channel 4 or the documentary makers had “misled the audience or that the programme was likely to encourage or incite criminal activity”.

It added that the Ofcom report showed the documentary had “accurately represented the material it had gathered and dealt with the subject matter responsibly and in context”.

The police statement concluded: “We accept, without reservation, the conclusions of Ofcom and apologise to the programme makers for the damage and distress caused by our original press release.”

Direct link to video on Youtube

So the Mister Snuffalluffagus of the human rights fast-set, whingeing Senator Romeo Dallaire is in a right tizzy about our moral standing over the case of al-Qaeda youth squad star Omar Khadr.

Dallaire serves up his favourite shibboleth, the “child soldier” argument. Well, that has been smacked down solidly by your correspondent, among many others. The apple of his father’s evil eye was a willing and fervent brigand, not a coerced innocent child.

Save your tears for real victims, General, and keep a better eye on your own credibility.

I took a course in communications law at the University of Ottawa last year. As is usual in such courses, we had to deliver a class on a topic of our choice. One young man in the class gave his lecture on “freedom of speech”, contrasting Canada and the United States. He dismissed it as “an American concept”, alien to the concept of controlled speech which we have in Canada. He cited leftist, feminist professors of law; he repeated their views in the communications law class. I questioned him. When it got down to it, he frankly admitted that he did not trust the people of Canada to defend the right values, he had more trust in the Supreme Court and the specialized institutions of human rights commissions and state-subsidized Court Challenges program than in the electoral process and in Parliament. I told him a brilliant future awaited him in the Liberal Party. I thought him a scoundrel, another fatuous leftist whose only virtue was fthe frankness with which he disdained elected governments. He considered himself a “progressive”.

So when Mark Steyn went on Steve Paikin’s show last night, I considered the nature of the three young Canadians who are arguing with him about their rights. They are all lawyers. They are all Muslims. They seemed, from how they argued and what they said, to have learned their law from the same sources as my classmate.

Steve Paikin had to maintain peace between Steyn and his young Muslim contenders, and at times the show descended into everyone shouting at once. What was clear to me, was that the kids - I am at the age I will call them that - were unpreprared to discuss the fundamentals. One of their arguments was that, since the Human Rights Commissions are not criminal in nature, Steyn mischaracterized them when he said he had been subject to “criminal” prosecution. As if going to jail, being forced to pay a fine, and enduring years of state subsidized prosecution is somehow made better because it is not “criminal”? Well, can we agree it is prosecution for heresy?

The basis of their objection to Steyn was that they had been offended, and wanted MacLean’s to give them a mutually agreeable amount and type of rejoinder. Steyn pointed out that they had had exposure in seven Canadian major newspapers to make their point.

Paikin finally asked the question of them: do you have a right not to be offended? And apparently all the young Muslim lawyers can think about is how offended they have a right to be. They have been educated in Supreme Court rulings that have sustained the Human Rights Commission’s prosecutions of neo-Nazis. For them, there is no cultural experience of the Human Rights Commissions and hate-speech prosecutions as an exceptional novelty. This is the Canada they grew up in. They have no recollection of the Canada that existed before the Charter of Rights and Freedoms was enacted in 1982. When Steyn talks of Trudeaupia, he is referring to a reality that I perceived last night in the attitudes of these young Muslim lawyers. I found it deeply disturbing that they were incapable of discussing the real issues - objective facts about demographics - which lead to the apprehensions we all have about the future of western societies.

Does it matter whether the take-over is peaceful or violent, in the great scheme of things? Would it be better if it were peaceful? Would it make a difference? From what perspective? From whose? The debate was not engaged.

I saw three young Canadian lawyers, accidentally Muslims, and essentially people whose sense of entitlement is so vast they would crush free speech in this country and not even know what they were doing. I have seen too many young lawyers, white, brown, you-name-it, who have no idea whatever of our pre-Trudeau British constitutional freedoms and responsibilities, and no concern that they are so ignorant. All they want is a Supreme Court and Liberal government appointing the judges. Then they and their kind can rule us forever without interference from Parliamentary institutions. Our law schools are failing us. The Sock Puppets are altogether typical of what modern Canadian legal education is producing. Thank God for Steyn for bringing them up short.

  G.R.A.S.P.

The Supreme Council

23-B Plurekh 4389

Commendation to Agent 117

From Department of Subversion, Supreme Council, Galactic Racially Aryan Supremacy Party

By the authority vested in us by the Executive Committee, know ye the following:

You are commended for the brilliant subversion you have achieved of the confidence and thought control techniques of the Dominators.

Read the rest…

Dr. Bruce Thornton lays out the facts starkly in a Q&A on his new book, “Decline and Fall: Europe’s Slow-Motion Suicide“.

At least one cynical moonbat will again froth at the notion of a professor of classics and humanities daring to comment on the downward paths of civilizations. Good. If this blog is upsetting the Usual Suspects™, then it is getting the job done. 

In the truly goofiest of efforts at ecumenism, Dutch Catholics try to rebrand Lent as the “Christian Ramadan“.

Indeed. And Daniel Pearl got an Islamic Glasgow Kiss.

Given the current debate on global warming one would assume anybody with the title of Environment Minister would be suspect to faulty logic. Phil Woolas, a Labour Member and Minister of State in the Department of Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, belies that assertion with facts in linking British Muslims, and their propensity for marrying first cousins, to birth defects.

The linked articles states that “Medical research suggests that while British Pakistanis are responsible for 3% of all births, they account for one in three British children born with genetic illnesses.” Although the article only references British Pakistanis, the practice of first-cousin marriages is widespread in other Muslim communities as well with associated problems.

And they want to do this, this and this?

The Rev. Dr. Rowan Williams, Archbishop of Canterbury steps up his campaign for Dhimmi of the Year:

He stressed that “nobody in their right mind would want to see in this country the kind of inhumanity that’s sometimes been associated with the practice of the law in some Islamic states; the extreme punishments, the attitudes to women as well”.

But Dr Williams said an approach to law which simply said “there’s one law for everybody and that’s all there is to be said, and anything else that commands your loyalty or allegiance is completely irrelevant in the processes of the courts - I think that’s a bit of a danger”.

“Sometimes associated” in “some Islamic states”? Who, indeed, will rid us of this meddlesome priest?!

In today’s NY Times, Fouad Ajami, one of the leading critics of Samuel Huntington’s “The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order” and its preceding essay in Foreign Affairs, throws in the towel:

Nearly 15 years on, Huntington’s thesis about a civilizational clash seems more compelling to me than the critique I provided at that time. In recent years, for example, the edifice of Kemalism has come under assault, and Turkey has now elected an Islamist to the presidency in open defiance of the military-bureaucratic elite. There has come that “redefinition” that Huntington prophesied. To be sure, the verdict may not be quite as straightforward as he foresaw. The Islamists have prevailed, but their desired destination, or so they tell us, is still Brussels: in that European shelter, the Islamists shrewdly hope they can find protection against the power of the military.

“I’ll teach you differences,” Kent says to Lear’s servant. And Huntington had the integrity and the foresight to see the falseness of a borderless world, a world without differences. (He is one of two great intellectual figures who peered into the heart of things and were not taken in by globalism’s conceit, Bernard Lewis being the other.)

We grew up in the shadow of nuclear war, and it nearly makes me erase that sentence it sounds so dramatic, false, and trivial. The Soviet Union, a militantly hostile state, whose goal was the overthrow of the capitalist system, and which held Eastern Europe in its prison-like embrace, and which subsidized revolution the world, lasted until 1989. The communists did not lack for mouthpieces within western liberal societies, at every level, and we spent a good deal of time in university having to take Karl Marx in large doses. Marxists seized microphones at the Student Union and, with their spokesmen telling us there was no free speech in a capitalist university, their thugs prevented any further discussion. Such were the late sixties and early seventies.

President Jimmy Carter was colossally inept, and seemed to agree with our enemies that the United States was in inevitable decline. It was a very bad time for freedom, capitalism, and for liberal-democratic society. It took the election of Reagan and Thatcher, together with the Polish Pope, to reject the assumptions of decline and defeat. It was a crisis and we overcame it. The sudden collapse of the Soviet Union between 1987 and 1989 proved, more decisively than we could have imagined, that everything we had been saying about that place was true. Indeed, we had not had enough faith that the whole system of communism was built on lies at every level. I had thought that communism would decline for centuries, like the Ottoman Empire. I had heard of a Hungarian taxi-driver, when asked by a visitor about the political situation in 1985, simply say: “It’s over”, but we had no way of knowing that Communism would collapse so catastrophically. It reminded me of the fall of Sauron’s Tower, the Baradûr, in the final battle in Lord of the Rings. Everything built with the power of the One Ring (”one ring to rule them all, and in the darkness bind them”) turned to dust.

Read the rest…