I highly recommend Mark Steyn’s Washington Times column this weekend.  He lays out a chilling case that those interested in advancing Political Islam are winning the ideological struggle hands-down.

Islam smells weakness at the heart of the West. The post-World War II order is dying: The European Union’s decision to toss a trillion dollars to prop up a Greek economic model that guarantees terminal insolvency is merely the latest manifestation of the chronic combination of fiscal profligacy and demographic decline in the West at twilight. Islam is already the biggest supplier of new Europeans and new Canadians, and the fastest-growing demographic in the western world. Therefore, it thinks it not unreasonable to shape the character of those societies – not by blowing up buildings and airplanes, but by determining the nature of their relationship to Islam.

For example, the very same day that Mr. Holder was doing his “Islam? What Islam?” routine at the Capitol, the Organization of the Islamic Conference was tightening its hold on the United Nations Human Rights Council - actually, make that the U.N. “Human Rights” Council. The OIC is the biggest voting bloc at the U.N. and it succeeded in getting its slate of candidates elected to the so-called “human rights” body – among them the Maldives, Qatar, Malaysia, Mauritania and Libya.

But along with the big headline victories go smaller ones. These days, Islam doesn’t even have to show up. The Metropolitan Museum of Art has quietly pulled representations of Muhammad from its Islamic collection. With the Danish cartoons, violent mobs actually had to kill large numbers of people before Kurt Westegaard was sent into involuntary “retirement.” Even with “South Park,” the thugs still had to threaten murder. But the Metropolitan Museum caved pre-emptively – no murders, no threats, but best to crawl into a fetal position, anyway.

Last week, the American Association of Pediatricians (AAP) noted that certain, ahem, “immigrant communities” were shipping their daughters overseas to undergo female genital mutilation FGM). So, in a spirit of multicultural compromise, they decided to amend their previous opposition to the practice: They’re not (for the moment) advocating full-scale clitoridectomies, but they are suggesting federal and state laws be changed to permit them to give a “ritual nick” to young girls.

So, our own Attorney General couldn’t even utter the words “Radical Islam” last week during a Congressional hearing.  And liberals/feminists are silent about the chilling of free speech and mutilation of young women due to the PC-handling of Islam.

Enough said.  Read the whole thing.

-Bruce (GayPatriot)

I believe this is the first time I have even chosen to put one of my posts in a category Bruce created, “Useless Nations.” Well, today the UN seems pretty useless, given the election of “Iran to its Commission on the Status of Women, handing a four-year seat on the influential human rights body to a theocratic state in which stoning is enshrined in law and lashings are required for women judged ‘immodest.’”

Asking us to ”have a look at what the newest defender of international women’s rights is up to these days”, Allahpundit opines:

This is the same group whose Human Rights Council includes luminaries like China and Saudi Arabia. See now why Ahmadinejad always includes a passage in his annual speech about expanding the number of permanent members in the Security Council or giving more power to the General Assembly? In the interest of “equality,” there’s no laugh test for exerting influence at the UN.

Jennifer Rubin notes one nation that didn’t object to this choice:

The U.S. couldn’t muster a word of opposition — not even call for a vote. That would be because . . . why? Because our policy is not to confront and challenge the brutal regime for which rape and discrimination are institutionalized policies. No, rather, we are in the business of trying to ingratiate ourselves, and making the U.S. as inoffensive as possible to the world’s thugocracies. We’d no sooner object to Iran on the UN Commission on the Status of Women than we would leave the UN Council on Human Rights.

Gosh, it sure helps having women at the helm of our nation’s foreign policy and representing us at the UN.

Mark Steyn has an excellent piece over at NRO today about the degredation of Greece, and it as a model of how socialist policies there (and in Europe as a whole) have driven it to the verge of disaster. Are we headed there? Directionally, Steyn says, yes. But there’s still time to recover. It starts off:

While Barack Obama was making his latest pitch for a brand-new, even-more-unsustainable entitlement at the health-care “summit,” thousands of Greeks took to the streets to riot. An enterprising cable network might have shown the two scenes on a continuous split-screen — because they’re part of the same story. It’s just that Greece is a little further along in the plot: They’re at the point where the canoe is about to plunge over the falls. America is farther upstream and can still pull for shore, but has decided instead that what it needs to do is catch up with the Greek canoe. Chapter One (the introduction of unsustainable entitlements) leads eventually to Chapter Twenty (total societal collapse): The Greeks are at Chapter Seventeen or Eighteen.

And it ends:

Think of Greece as California: Every year an irresponsible and corrupt bureaucracy awards itself higher pay and better benefits paid for by an ever-shrinking wealth-generating class. And think of Germany as one of the less profligate, still-just-about-functioning corners of America such as my own state of New Hampshire: Responsibility doesn’t pay. You’ll wind up bailing out anyway. The problem is there are never enough of “the rich” to fund the entitlement state, because in the end it disincentivizes everything from wealth creation to self-reliance to the basic survival instinct, as represented by the fertility rate. In Greece, they’ve run out Greeks, so they’ll stick it to the Germans, like French farmers do. In Germany, the Germans have only been able to afford to subsidize French farming because they stick their defense tab to the Americans. And in America, Obama, Pelosi, and Reid are saying we need to paddle faster to catch up with the Greeks and Germans. What could go wrong?

I highly recommend reading the whole thing.

- Nick (ColoradoPatriot, from HQ)

Clearly, this is the blogosphere-story-of-the-year (if not decade).  It matters not that the Mainstream Media is covering up this scandal, the free-wheeling democratized Internet is getting the information out.

Here’s another great summary from Robert Tracinski at RealClearPolitics:

For more than a decade, we’ve been told that there is a scientific “consensus” that humans are causing global warming, that “the debate is over” and all “legitimate” scientists acknowledge the truth of global warming. Now we know what this “consensus” really means. What it means is: the fix is in.

This is an enormous case of organized scientific fraud, but it is not just scientific fraud. It is also a criminal act. Suborned by billions of taxpayer dollars devoted to climate research, dozens of prominent scientists have established a criminal racket in which they seek government money-Phil Jones has raked in a total of £13.7 million in grants from the British government-which they then use to falsify data and defraud the taxpayers. It’s the most insidious kind of fraud: a fraud in which the culprits are lauded as public heroes. Judging from this cache of e-mails, they even manage to tell themselves that their manipulation of the data is intended to protect a bigger truth and prevent it from being “confused” by inconvenient facts and uncontrolled criticism.

The damage here goes far beyond the loss of a few billions of taxpayer dollars on bogus scientific research. The real cost of this fraud is the trillions of dollars of wealth that will be destroyed if a fraudulent theory is used to justify legislation that starves the global economy of its cheapest and most abundant sources of energy.

This is the scandal of the century. It needs to be thoroughly investigated-and the culprits need to be brought to justice.

As I stated on Twitter earlier today… “Can we at least all agree now that Global Warming is a political philosophy and not a scientific enterprise?”

-Bruce (GayPatriot)

As the international “distractions” keep mounting for President Barack Obama, here are today’s developments in AMERICA HELD HOSTAGE: DAY FOUR.

• Somali pirates threaten to kill the Alabama‘s captain, Richard Phillips
• The Alabama arrives in port, without its captain
• Due to the non-response of America and NATO, another US-owned vessel is taken by Somali pirates

The Somali pirates stole $30M last year alone through bringing terror to international waters.  And where, my friends, do you think that money is going? 

After the Bush Administration shut down the financing of Al-Qaeda, they had to resort to the Somali pirates.  $30M can do quite a lot of damage when it is used to finance terror training, WMD development and fighting American forces in Iraq and Afghanistan.

So, thanks President Obama.  Not only are you losing a third front in the Global War On Terror “Man-Made Disasters”, but violence has disturbingly increased in Iraq since you took office.

I wonder if Al-Qaeda knows that Obama is weak?   Nah, couldn’t be.

AMERICA HELD HOSTAGE: DAY FOUR.

-Bruce (GayPatriot)

I suspect Dan will have some thoughts on this analogy, but the words of Victor Davis Hanson pretty much sum up my dim view of the world we live in.

There is something especially nauseating about the latest Middle East war — scenes of worldwide Islamic protests with photos of Jews as apes, protesters (in Ft. Lauderdale, Florida of all places!) screaming about nuking Israel and putting Jews in ovens, parades of children dressed up with suicide vests and fake rockets, near constant anti-Semitic vicious sloganeering, Gaza mosques stuffed with rockets to be used against civilians — all to be collated with creepy Hamas rhetoric about the annihilation of Israel. This is the world in which we now live.

Almost no other issue in recent memory has illustrated the moral bankruptcy of much of the international community. Hamas has no pretensions, like the PA, of being a governing authority; it used violence to rout the PA and then bragged that its charter pledging the destruction of Israel remained unchanged. Israel evacuated Gaza; Gazans in response looted their own infrastructure, alienated both the PA and Egypt,and then sent off more than 6,000 rockets against Israeli civilians, while eagerly becoming a terrorist puppet of theocratic Iran.

Nothing could be more clear: either the fact that a constitutional republic was trying to avoid civilian casualties while a terrorist organization was intent on killing Jewish civilians as it used its own citizens as shields to protect mostly young male terrorists; or the world’s craven reaction to all this.

Again all very creepy — the stuff of Tolkien’s Mordor. It is now clear that the so-called and much praised “international community,” the hallowed U.N., the revered EU, all pretty much are indifferent to the survival of a democratic Israel, or are actively supportive of its terrorist Hamas enemy. Only the U.S. (for now) stands by a constitutional state in its war against a murderous terrorist clique, with annhilation its aim and religous fascism its creed.

By the way, Leah….. your nephew Achikam is in my thoughts and prayers.  Please keep us updated.

UPDATE:  Here’s video of the lovely demonstration in Ft. Lauderdale on 12/30/08.

-Bruce (GayPatriot)

From the President of Iran, the same man the American Left embraced when he spoke at Columbia University: (h/t – The Corner)

“I must announce that the Zionist regime (Israel), with a 60-year record of genocide, plunder, invasion and betrayal is about to die and will soon be erased from the geographical scene,” he said.

“Today, the time for the fall of the satanic power of the United States has come and the countdown to the annihilation of the emperor of power and wealth has started.”

Since taking the presidency in August 2005, Ahmadinejad has repeatedly provoked international outrage by predicting Israel is doomed to disappear.

“I tell you that with the unity and awareness of all the Islamic countries all the satanic powers will soon be destroyed,” he said to a group of foreign visitors ahead of the 19th anniversary of the death of revolutionary leader Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini.

What exactly would a President Obama talk to this guy about??  Oh, its okay.  No need to worry….. Let’s just get the child-raping, money-stealing, dictator-propping, resolution ignoring, Isreal-hating  United Nations on the case!

-Bruce (GayPatriot)