Israel’s Bad Week on Campus

It hasn’t been the best of weeks on campus for  Israel.  

• On Monday, Danny Ayalon, the deputy foreign minister, was almost physically assaulted at Oxford Univesity while giving an address to the Oxford Union.  Antisemitic and anti-Israel abuse was shouted throughout  Ayalon’s speech with onse student even running toward him during the  hour-long session, shouting the Arabic phrase “Itbah Al-Yahud” “(Slaughter the Jews!”).  As many as 10 others, carrying Palestinian flags, made attempts to attack Mr Ayalon but were intercepted and removed by security.
• The same day, on the other side of the Atlantic, Michael Oren, Israel’s ambassador to the United States, attempted to deliver an address at U.C. Irvine in Southern California and was interrupted 10 times before the protestors were forcibly removed.   Eventually eleven of the students involved inthe distrubances were arrested.   At one stage, Oren had to leave the podium for 20 minute while the auditorium was cleared of hecklers.
• On Tuesday it was the turn of Benny Morris, the iconclastic professor from Ben Gurion University of the Negev, who was prevented from giving his plannned speech at Cambridge University.   The Israel Society at Cambridge University succumbed to pressure and canceled  his scheduled addres  after protesters accused him of “Islamophobia” and “racism.”

If anyone thinks that the three incidents are merely coincidental, think again.  All three are part of a concerted plan to demonize I srael on campuses across the world, a campaign that has acheived more success than its organizers  could have ever imagined.  In Morris’ case, according to the Jerusalem Post, the Muslim victory was self -righteously congratulated by Islamic groups: 

“ The  Muslim Public Affairs Committee congratulated Cambridge’s Islam Society on the success of their campaign and lobbying to stop the Islamophobe Benny Morris giving a speech at their university… A simple Facebook group and a well written letter is all that it takes to defend your religion,” the group said.” 

And how did the authorities react?    Well at Oxford there was a reprimand and at UCI, arrests.   But at Cambridge, no figure of authority sought to comment onthe irony that while the actress Miriam Margolis is permitted to depict Jews as both bigoted and blood-thirsty, a historian of Morris’  pedigree – with a reputation for remarkable even handedness is treated as a pariah.   Last October, lawyer Michel Massih, a man distinguished by his defense of such luminaries as Sudan’s President Bashir, dredged up traditional anti-Semitic tropes, merely switching the word ‘Jew’ for Zionist. In  March, 2009  Abdul Bari Atwan, editor of the London-based Al-Quds Al-Arabi newspaper and who  had declared the  attack on Jerusalem’s Mercaz Harav yeshiva, in which eight students were killed and 15 were wounded, was “justified” as the school was responsible for “hatching Israeli extremists and fundamentalists.”   

And to top it all, in just a few days,  Daud Abdullah, deputy-secretary of the Muslim Council of Britain, will speak at Islam Week organized by the Cambridge University Islamic Society. Last year, the British government distanced itself from Abdullah after he signed the Istanbul Declaration, in which he called for attacks on the British navy, were it to enforce a ban on arms smuggling to Gaza.  He has also called for continued military action against Israel. 

Throughout the world, university administrations turn a blind eye to Muslim bigotry and hatred while doing nothing to quell the bilious assault on Jews and Israel.    But the rising tide of venom will not stop at  just Jews and Zionists.   It will eventually swamp the university itself, bringing with it fear and instability. That is a day our universities are attempting to forestall through policies of appeasement.   But like all policies of appeasement,  they will only serve to swell the tide.

A Truth Too Hard to Handle

If anyone wants to get a close look at the way both our government and military delude themselves about fundamental dangers this country faces, then go no further than the recently issued Department of Defense report on the Fort Hood slayings- Protecting the Force: Lessons from Fort Hood.

In this 85 page report, released last week and which relates to the November 5th massacre of 13 enlisted men and women together with an unborn child, you will find recommendations for tighter security for recruitment purposes, updated procedures to help the Department of Defense identify contributing factors to violent conduct and the suggested development of programs to educate DoD personnel when individuals might commit violent acts or become radicalized.

What you won’t find is the following:

• The name of the assassin
• Documentation on his Islamic background
• The characterization of his motives
• Information on how signs of his radicalism were manifested in his actual military career
• The kinds of communications he received from a Yemen based sheikh in the weeks and months prior to the killings.
• The Jihadist inspiration behind the attacks.
• Why the details of the killer’s behavior at Walter Reed Hospital, referred to in his file, were not passed on to his military superiors

So lets fill in the blanks for those military researchers who still remain mind-numbingly agog that such an event could have occurred at all:

• The killer (not the alleged killer) at Fort Hood was Major Nidal Malik Hassan
• He is a Muslim
• His writings, communications with fellow officers prior to the events of November 5,  all provide convincing evidence that that he was a Jihadist, driven by a religious ideology
• He took inspiration from Yemen-based preacher named Imam Anwar AlWaki and had at least ten email communications with him in the 30 days prior to the shootings;
• He shouted “Allahu Akbar “as he sprayed  the dining room with bullets
• He admitted that he committed his acts of murder in the name of Islam

In fact, not once in the report are the words “ Islam,”  “Jihad”  or “anti-Americanism” employed.   Nor are we given a sense that this event registered as anything more than another case of criminal behavior which can be adequately dealt with by the criminal justice system.  Hence the military’s apparent unwillingness to ascribe motivation to the attack or even a name to the ‘alleged’ offender.   After all, to do so would be prejudice Hassan’s upcoming trial, a prospect the report’s authors seem to fear more than the truth itself.

Instead the report is content to commend the military personnel at Fort Hood on how effectively they responded to the attack (in other words ‘it was bad but could have been a helluva lot worse’) and reaches the astonishing conclusion that “identifying potentially dangerous people before they act is difficult” and that “religious fundamentalism in itself is not a risk factor.”

The report screams the word “denial” at us, bathed as it is in the politically correct milk of multicultural sensitivity.   In this regard, of course, it is completely in keeping with the sentiments of Chief of Staff, Gen. George Casey, who, in the wake of the massacre, proclaimed that, “as horrific as this tragedy was, if our diversity becomes a casualty, I think that’s worse.”

No, sir, what is far worse is the obfuscation of a basic truth – that Islamists are among  us and want to kills us.  What registers as an graver issue than even  this however, is the way such cognitive dissonance leads to the eclipse of good judgment within our military leadership.  For underlying this empty report is the notion that the country is not at war at all, but rather faces occasional incidents which amount to little more than isolated criminal nuisances.

It is extraordinary that the most violent act of murder committed against U.S. troops on American soil in modern times, should be summed up as a case of a good soldier gone bad.

But Hassan didn’t ‘go bad.’   He was already bad.   The fact that his colleagues and superiors failed to notice, despite all the warning signs he offered them, is an indictment of the system in which he operated – a system apparently quite comfortable with its soldiers’ regular expression of  rabid anti-Americanism and the spouting of Jihadist ideology.

The true report of what happened at Fort Hood is not yet available.  But when it does become available it will almost certainly not bear the stamp of the Department of Defense.   The truth, apparently, in Jack Nicholson inimitable words, is just a little  too hard for that institution to handle.

Interrogating the Detroit Bomber

Michael Mukasey, the U.S. Attorney General, 2007-09 writes an outstanding piece in today’s Wall Street Journal  What Does the Detroit Bomber Know?

Mukasey’s views on  the subject  of how the Bomber should have been dealt with are presented succinctly in this paragraph:

” Had Abdulmutallab been turned over immediately to interrogators intent on gathering intelligence, valuable facts could have been gathered and perhaps acted upon. Indeed, a White House spokesman has confirmed that Abdulmutallab did disclose some actionable intelligence before he fell silent on advice of counsel. Nor is it any comfort to be told, as we were, by the senior intelligence adviser referred to above—he of the “no smoking gun”—that we can learn facts from Abdulmutallab as part of a plea bargaining process in connection with his prosecution. “

How much crucial information we may have lost from the failure to regard Abdulmuttalab as a terrorist rather than a criminal, with all the protections that the American system of justice now affords him,  is a symptom of the problems which have engulfed our intelligence services who are politically constrained in executing their responsibilities. Abdulmuttalab is the luckiest terrorist in the world for having landed in the United States.   Where else would someone who had plotted to kill 300 people at the behest  of  an organization determined to see the country of destination destroyed,  be given such immediate assistance and solicitous advice in defending his rights once he lands?  Some state that this bespeaks America’s greatness as a moral nation. 

But what point is there in being moral when you are dead? .

I dealt with this very subject on my radio program yeserday, which you can listen to here.

You might also want to check out other radio programs with similar themes:  The Road from 9/11: How Secure Is the Homeland Today?   and an earlier interview with Victor Davis Hanson The CIA Secret Files: What Are the Consequences for Their Release?

Mukasey’s piece concludes with this terrific final paragraph:

“What the gaffes, the almost comically strained avoidance of such direct terms as “war” and “Islamist terrorism,” and the failure to think of Abdulmutallab as a potential source of intelligence rather than simply as a criminal defendant seem to reflect is that some in the executive branch are focused more on not sounding like their predecessors than they are on finding and neutralizing people who believe it is their religious duty to kill us.”

It couldn’t be said better. 

A Decade in Review

When the clock struck midnight on January 1, 2000, I had to wonder what all  the fuss was about.  The clock apparently marked off two thousand years, but from what, no one was quite certain.   I guess I am one of those contrarians who believes that we are woefully underserved by the Gregorian Calendar, which has been in use in the West since 1582.  That is because marking off dates in decades, centuries and millennia is next to meaningless when we remember that Jesus was actually born in the year 4 BCE (therefore providing a somewhat awkward starting point for the first millennium); that the Earth’s orbit around the sun takes not 365 days but 365.2423 days, (a number not divisible by 4, 7 or 12) and that there wasn’t even a common subscription to the Gregorian Calendar until England converted to it in 1752 (abandoning the long used Julian Calendar).

Therefore, we might assume, there are minutes, hours and even days that might be unaccounted for in our  spin through the universe.  Given this sad state of affairs, using the clock to mark off a decade seems pretty pointless. With no universally accurate measurement of time, its all just pomp and circumstance about nothing.

Yet dates do bear meaning for us time-bound humans if only as a means of segmenting our lives into appreciable chunks of relevance and allowing us the means of chronicling our passage through life.

The marking of another decade is therefore an opportunity to reflect on what has passed in the ten years since that last supposed millenarian event.

Our past decade was bracketed by two completely unexpected occurences – the attacks of September 11, 2001 and the financial collapse of 2008.  Everything else in between –  the contested federal election of  2000, the three turbulent years of Intifada which broke the back of the Middle East peace process,  the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq,  the tsunami which devastated Southern Asia in December, 2004, the flooding of New Orleans in August, 2005 – were blips on our radar screens by comparison.

Having trawled through the events of the decade, there appear four major themes  that I believe will dictate much of what occurs in the coming years of this century:  

1. The Emergence  of Tension between National Security and Individual Rights

After the shock of 9/11 subsided and Americans got on with their normal lives, the horror of the day receded, while the government remained active in pressing for tighter security, passing the Patriot Act of 2002 with little dissent, establishing Guantanomo Bay as a maximum security prison  and creating the Department of Homeland Security. This retreating tide however, exposed the hulk of the embittered federal election of 2000 and the remembrance of George W. Bush as an illegitimate president.

It wasn’t long, then, before the Democratic Party had launched into an assault on the Bush Administration’s national security measures – measures that almost any American government, from left or right, would certainly have enacted following such a devastating attack.

The hatred for Bush, Cheney and Rumsfeld became so palpable in the latter part of the first Bush Administration that a romday could not go by without some vituperative attack on the character and morals of the governing Administration from some major media source.  The failure to uncover evidence of weapons of mass destruction, the most important reason proffered for the invasion of Iraq, only underscored, for the left at least, the Administration’s mendacity.

As the decade progressed though, it became increasingly clear that the struggle was not between opposing Democratic and Republican policies on issues of national security, but between two fundamentally differing world views.  The war on terror, declared by the Bush Administration, was not a conventional war and could not be fought conventionally.  It would involve not only a struggle abroad, but a struggle to contain potential terrorist activity within.  Therefore wire tapping, stricter control over financial transfers, tough border controls and increased surveillance of potential insurgents within our towns and cities, were all necessary measures.

Yet the idea that Americans might have to surrender some fundamental rights to privacy was anathema to the left and they refused to countenance it.  Perhaps they refused to understand that America was as much at war as it had been in 1917 or 1941; perhaps they failed to appreciate that individual liberty and the protection of personal rights were more robust than they had ever been in America’s history, even with the tightened security measures.  But the venom with which the left attacked these necessary security measures was a gauge of the struggle between the right to privacy and national security imperatives. It will remain the guiding national debate of much of the coming decade.

2. The Rise of Radical Environmentalism

What started as a fringe movement in the early 1970s gained world attention in the 2000s.   Environmentalism transformed from a movement to combat pollution and to conserve wilderness areas  into a multinational effort to build awareness of anthropogenic global warming and as an attack against human development itself.  With world politicians subscribing to the spurious notion of ‘scientific consensus’ on the issue, radical environmentalists, who decry human interference in the environment and are in fact opposed to development of almost any kind, were able to hitch their wagon  to luminaries such as Al Gore and Mikhail Gorbachev and obtain an international spotlight they didn’t otherwise deserve.

But the global warming lobby has not provided entirely convincing science.  Simply put, our climate and weather is governed by so many variables that predictions are fraught with difficulty.  Computer models have been used to advance the idea of likely severe weather change but they are fed data that are not always verifiable.  The same models have been used to predict weather patterns over the coming 100 years, but, as was discovered in October of this year, with the revelation that climate researchers in England manipulated, manufactured or otherwise doctored the same data, put the lie to the idea that climate science is not susceptible to political pressure or ideology.  It seems, at least from the rash of emails uncovered in exchanges between the climate researchers, that sometimes the models are adapted to reach conclusions which are keeping with a political platform rather than as a reflection of real climate science.

The Bush Administration brooked this wave as bravely as it could, but its power as public policy was irresistible.  We have now seen the discussion of global warming completely overwhelm our national narrative and become one of the leading political discussion points of this century. It came into political form last year in the guise of Cap and Trade legislation which thankfully exhausted itself before it could obtain strenuous political support.  But it lives on in the rhetoric of our president, in widespread support in the media and  academia and as a subject of strong advocacy among members of our political class.

But even as the movement has gained such extraordinary traction, there has been a countervailing movement pushing back against it.  It was led by the weather itself.

The past ten years have proven, even according to most climatologists, decidedly colder than the previous twenty.  The year 2008 was actually one of the coldest in the northern hemisphere since the 1850s.  Scientific reports are emerging that  it might not be man-produced fossil fuels which are causing any heating of the earth’s  atmosphere but in fact natural cycles of the sun and the absence of cloud cover.

Whatever the conclusion of the scientific debate, there is now, for once, public discussion on the issue and doubt is beginning to creep into some independent thinkers’ minds.  The collapse of an international agreement on climate control at the International Conference on Climate Change in Copenhagen in December, reflects, to a certain degree, this concern.  We await developments but the likelihood is that anthropogenic global warming will fade as a matter of international consensus.

3.  The Fragility of the International Economic System

Why the financial crash of September 2008 came as such a surprise, is beyond my understanding.  The collapse of major U.S.financial institutions, many of which had been around for a nearly century, was due to a complete failure of imagination and an unwillingness to take seriously the growing signs of collapse.

Credit, used in increasingly complicated and sophisticated ways, to the point where borrowings were made against assets that barely existed, undermined the entire structure of our paper (rather than monetized) economy.  The signs should have been apparent, but even such revered figures as former Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan, couldn’t figure it out.  But in retrospect it was fairly clear: the economy had grown top heavy with debt based on collapsing assets, and like a listing galleon over-freighted with cargo, just toppled over.

The international repercussions were telling.  Almost every Western economy was struck by the seismic shock which followed the U.S. banking crisis of 2008. It drove down the international value of the dollar, upended the U.S. balance of trade and created havoc in world currency markets.

The cure administered to address the country’s economic woes seemed sometimes worse than the disease. The relatively modest Bush stimulus package in September, 2008 was followed by the massive $787 billion Obama stimulus for 2009, with hundreds of billions being made available to shore up not just the banking and investment industries but public companies as well.  Never in American history had public funds been used to support failing enterprises in this way.   It set an ominous precedent for any future economic difficulties that the country might be forced to confront.

The future of the West and its international financial system hangs in large part, on how the United States manages its fiscal problems.  Building confidence in economic stability is probably the first order of business for any American government.

4. The Scourge of Islamic Fundamentalism

Prior to 9/11 terrorism appeared as little more than nuisance which affected other countries and not the United States.  While it is true there had been urban terrorists of the 70s and 80s, the Oklahoma bombing of 1995 and assorted attacks against American military units stationed outside the country – these were perceived as the work of isolated groups with no unified motivation.  Domestic terrorism, the kind which resulted in huge urban casualties, and motivated by an abiding hatred of U.S citizens as a people, was largely unknown.

The events of that September day, however, changed everything.  The recognition that Americans were vulnerable, not just on isolated military bases in Beirut or Riyadh, but in their own homes and public places, altered the national dialogue. It  has had a sizable impact on daily life, from the lines at security check points at  airports, to the security measures regarding bank accounts to tougher immigration policies.

Yet what has failed to penetrate the West’s public consciousness was the motivation behind the September 11 attacks and the subsequent assaults on Western targets around the world.  The rise of Islam, which began to take its fundamentalist political shape with the establishment of the Iranian theocracy in 1979, gathered clout with the upsurge in oil prices and sought to fill the oppositional role vacated in the 1990s with the fall of communism. Fundamentalist Islamic communities grew prodigiously in Europe where they took advantage of the benevolent welfare benefits offered to new immigrants by their host countries. As they gained in collective confidence and drew inspiration from the growing international prestige of the Iranian theocracy, these communities made a play for political power, though not necessarily through the political system.   The French riots of 2005 and the Danish cartoon riots of 2006, both made it adamantly clear that the Islamic communities of Europe intended to become a serious political force to be reckoned with.

The reaction of the West was craven appeasement. Steeped in multicultural pieties, Western leaders bent over backwards to make it clear they were not knee jerk racists and would take no issue with Muslim demands for a certain degree of  communal autonomy and separation from mainstream culture.  This effort had its crowning achievement in February, 2008 when the Archbishop of Canterbury and the former Chief Justice of Britain both conceded that the establishment of a parallel legal system to adjudicate certain internal Muslim disputes, is  inevitable.

It all took place against a backdrop of the rise of Islamic terrorism throughout the West. The 2002 Bali Night Club bombing,  the  2005 London bombings, the 2006 Madrid Bombings, the 2008 Mumbai attack and hundreds of other assaults on soft targets in major world capitals, were all carried out, almost without exception, in the name of Islam.  Apologists wrung their hands over the claim that these desperate attacks were not the work of true followers of the Muslim faith and that Islam remained a religion of peace.

But contrary proof was readily available.  There were few Muslim religious leaders willing to publicly condemn the terrorist plague which had engulfed the societies in which they lived.  In the United States, the willful blindness to the reality of Muslim representative organizations covertly supporting terrorism while feigning allegiance to American values was even more troubling.  The Bush Administration went out of its way to pretend that the drive behind the terrorist scourge was something other than real Islam and the Obama Administration has continued on the same wayward path.

Until Western leaders connect the dots and recognize that the West is engaged in a physical, moral and philosophical battle with hardened murderers pledged to a religious creed that calls for the the West’s destruction;  until it concedes that representatives of those men live, plot and recruit within their very own societies and are an ever present danger to us; until they face the reality that not all religions are “religions of peace” and that some might actually more resemble death cults pledged to the slaughter of unbelievers – we face a very difficult and prolonged struggle for which there is no certain victory.

Conclusion

The years 2000-2009 have been decried as a lost decade by many pundits and commentators.  I don’t agree with them.  I see the past decade as offering important lessons about the world in which we live – from the true nature of Islam to the fragility of the international economic system to the necessity to sometimes trade individual rights for personal security. What we make of these lessons will determine the kind of world in which we will live in the coming decade.  Lets hope the human capacity for growth, ingenuity and recovery continues to reassert itself and that we will come to view these past ten years as the necessary growing pains of a maturing civilization.

AN AWAKENING FROM THE MULTICULTURAL SLUMBER

Anyone who wants to obtain a sense of the havoc that architecture can wreak on a nation’s identity, need only visit Moscow.  In the many churches and public buildings surviving from the 13th century onwards, you can gaze upon the ghost of the Mongol conquest of Russia, characterized by the bulbous and ubiquitous onion dome.   The prevalence of the dome has left such an eerily Asian stamp on the landscape, that looking at it you can easily forget that you are standing on European soil. Indeed, Russia’s historic defensiveness and traditional resistance to be being brought within the European ambit is at least partly attributable to its connections to Asia, cemented during the 200 years of Mongol rule.

No one can dispute that conquerors usually have the last word on architectural style in their vanquished realms.  The Greek, Roman, Byzantine and Moorish empires all left their permanent architectural mark on the nations they conquered and there is little doubt that the manner and style of their constructions also had a significant impact on the way the people of those conquered territories thought of themselves.

Perhaps that’s what the Swiss citizenry remembered when they voted November 29, so decisively, to ban the further construction of minarets in Swiss towns and cities.  One can understand the resistance to the encroachment of Muslim architecture.  It is, after all, difficult to imagine a Swiss chalet, nestled in one of those pleasantly verdant Alpine villages, forced to compete with a minaret for the domination of its skyline.  

But there is much more than aesthetics involved in the Swiss decision.  It represents a turning point in European awareness of the threat to national identity encouraged by relentless Muslim encroachment.

This was expressly recognized by a report from The Egerkinger Committee – an alliance of the conservative Swiss People’s Party and the Federal Democratic Union of Switzerland, responsible for placing the initiative on the ballot.   The committee reported that “the construction of a minaret has no religious meaning. Neither in the Qur’an, nor in any other holy scripture of Islam, is the minaret expressly mentioned. The minaret is far more a symbol of  a religious-political power claim.”

The initiators justified their point of view by quoting parts of a speech made by the would-be Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan in 1997: “Mosques are our barracks, domes our helmets, minarets our bayonets, believers our soldiers. This holy army guards my religion.”  Ulrich Schluer, who is one of the Egerkinger committee’s most prominent exponents, states in this respect: “A minaret has nothing to do with religion: It just symbolizes a place where Islamic law is established.”

The success of the initiative is even more startling when we appreciate the alliance of forces that were arrayed against it. The Swiss Federal Council, the seven-member executive council which serves as the Swiss collective head of state, rejected the initiative.  The Federal Assembly, (the Swiss Parliament) voted 129-50 in  the spring of this year to advise Swiss citizens to spurn it. Both the Catholic Church and the Swiss Federation of Jewish Communities came out adamantly in the negative.  Advocacy groups such as the Society for Minorities in Switzerland and Amnesty International decried  it  “as an assault on human rights.” Swiss labor unions such as the influential Economiesuisse claimed it would affect Swiss foreign interests and would cause turmoil in the Islamic world.

These elites, some of whom are now plotting to have the ban overturned, see in the approval of the initiative an atavistic tribalism which threatens their multicultural ethos. They see no problems associated with the spread of Islam in Europe, have no fear of Europe becoming Islamicized, and seem full of confidence that minarets, blaring amplified calls to prayer and set in the middle of suburban streets, can only add to the blessed polyglot magic that is Switzerland.

But it is more likely fear which drives them. Perhaps they all remember the Danish cartoon riots of 2006 and its result – how the Danish government cravenly fell to its knees begging forgiveness from its Muslim population as its embassies in Muslim lands were torched and Danes the world over vigorously denounced.

With such deep seated fear driving opposition, the obvious question remains:  how did this initiative pass? If we read deeply enough into the debate and the final vote, we might arrive at the conclusion that the Swiss people have begun to recognize what the emergence of the true ‘multicultural state’ really portends:  Perhaps it means the surrender of a united national culture;  or maybe the acceptance of values that are at odds with the general thrust of Western humanism; Or, with the confirmation of Muslim power, an ultimate capitulation to Muslim intolerance and its abiding contempt for democratic values.

Awareness of this threat is growing in other parts of Europe.  This year the French were convulsed by a debate on whether the burqa, or Islamic veil, should be banned for women in public – a reaction to its ubiquity in certain parts of that country. The initiative did not pass, but the debate itself underlines the discomfort many in France feel about the insistence of Muslim leaders on social separation and their rejection of the majority culture. 

Today those who led the successful initiative are being accused of racism, bigotry and prejudice. Yet we must see it all in context.  Muslims the world over routinely declare Europe ripe for conquest. They understand that multicultural sensitivities offer them an effective tool to pry open European society, exposing the weakness and lack of self belief at its heart.

Last week, the citizens of Switzerland proved them wrong.   Despite the opposition of their elites and despite the unrelenting denunciations of human rights groups, the Swiss declared their commitment to preserving their own and Europe’s heritage.  Other European nations may quickly follow suit , confirming the growing consciousness that tolerance of the intolerant is not a recipe for integration but a prescription for the almost certain collapse of national identity.

MULTICULTURALISM WAS THE TRUE KILLER AT FORT HOOD

Pundits, commentators, newscasters and our political class are all looking for the clues:  Who and what caused Major Nidal Malik Hasan to launch a deadly attack on his fellow soldiers in Fort Hood, Texas last week  resulting in the massacre of 14, including the life of an unborn baby?

Take your pick of the reasons:

• Hasan was bridling with indignation that the United States was carrying out military operations against fellow Muslims in Afghanistan and Iraq
• Hasan cracked under the strain of dealing with trauma victims returning from overseas duty.
• Hasan was inflamed by the prejudicial treatment he had received from his colleagues and superiors.
• Hasan was infuriated that the army would not allow practicing Muslim servicemen to become conscientious objectors before shipping  them out to countries where they would be forced to shoot and  kill their co-religionists
• Hasan was the latest example of America’s love affair with guns and its fatal ambivalence in policing them.
• Hasan was simply a very disturbed individual who had exhibited paranoid, anti-social behavior at numerous times during his military career

Such reasons seem to echo the same motivations our chattering classes once ascribed to another famous killer, Lee Harvey Oswald, following the assassination of John F. Kennedy, viz: the killer was driven by personal issues which had nothing to do with his adoption of  a hateful ideology or contempt for America and its values.

But the truth is now becoming stunningly clear.  Hasan was a confirmed jihadist, his values and ideals tied directly to the same ideology which resulted in 3,000 deaths in America on a sunny morning in September, 2001 and has been the catalyst for 14,327 individual terrorist incidents worldwide since that date.

Even at this early stage of the investigation, his emails, recorded conversations and own writings provide conclusive proof that he considered suicide bombings, the premeditated mass killings of innocents and fatal attacks against United States civilians and  military personnel as justified acts of homicide. He was deeply influenced in these views by the preachings of an imam, Anwar al-Alwaki, who, according to the 9/11 Commission, was the spiritual guide to two of the 9/11 hijackers in a San Diego mosque.  Hasan had also attended the Dar al-Hirjah mosque in Falls Church, Virgina where al-Awlaki once preached. In the month before the massacre Hasan had exchanged 10-20 emails with the imam who is now believed living in exile in Yemen. 
 
On the day following the Ft. Hood massacre, on his website,  al-Awlaki praised Hasan as a true Muslim warrior, as “a hero” and “a man of conscience who could not bear living the contradiction of being a Muslim and serving in an army that is fighting against his own people.”

How long will it take for our cognoscenti  to connect these dots? 

Perhaps we should indeed be moving beyond an examination of Hasan’s motivations, which are clear and incontrovertible, to asking ourselves these far more relevant questions: 

Why was a man of Hasan’s temperament and ideology not properly vetted before being accepted into the U.S. Army?  

Why was no one willing to pay heed to the warning signs of an impending catastrophe?

 Why is the media working so assiduously to obscure the true motivations for his crime?

The answer to the first question is that since 9/11, the U.S. military  has been under increasing pressure to embrace diversity as a governing principle for recruitment.  Military advertisements, in a range of communities, suggest that cultural affinities and religious observance are respected in the U.S. army while accommodations are made for particular aspects of appearance.  It should be no surprise then that the November 9th edition of Army Times carries a front page story headlined – Regs Make Way for Religion – Sikh, Muslim Allowed To Incorporate Customs Into Army Dress.

The story details how Captain  Kamaljeet Singh Kalsi, a practicing Sikh, was granted permission on October 22  to wear a beard and a turban with his uniform.   The decision stands in stark contrast to a 1986 Supreme Court decision (Goldman vs Weinberger), where the Court upheld a proscription on Jews wearing yarmulkes while in uniform. 

With the army displaying such giddy obeisance to diversity and multicultural sensitivities, is it any wonder that its own Chief of Staff, Gen. George Casey, in the wake of the massacres, proclaimed that, “as horrific as this tragedy was, if our diversity becomes a casualty, I think that’s worse.”

Given such hand wringing over the necessities to produce a  true “multicultural” army, it seems fairly clear that Nidal Malik Hasan was accepted into the armed forces and then rose to the rank of major, despite his dubious associations and anti-American beliefs, because he was a Muslim.  The inescapable conclusion is that the army feels it must have Muslims within its ranks in order to prove it has no beef with Islam and that this over rides the suitability of  practicing Muslim recruits for actual army service.

The answer to the second question is even more troubling.

Hasan’s penchant for spouting anti-American rhetoric and for declaiming on the essential justice of a jihadist campaign was well known to his superiors and the FBI.   But as a Fox News report, investigators were loathe to launch an investigation of the  email trail which led from Hasan to Anwar al-Alwaki  for fear of being “ crucified” in the breach of the Major Hasan’s First Amendment rights.

But what of  Hasan’s superiors, who certainly knew of his beliefs and ideological commitments?  In 2007, as a recruit, he made a power point presentation at Walter Reed Hospital in Washington D.C. where he underlined Muslim grievances against the U.S. and supported the Jihadist justification for attacks on U.S. military personnel.  You would think that this would offer some cause for alarm. Yet no one  spoke up or complained about these outrageous views emanating from the mouth of a U.S. army officer, even though one colleague expressed reservations about “sharing a foxhole” with the man.

Why was no one willing to expose this ticking time bomb within their midst?   For the same reason the FBI resisted the urge to build a more comprehensive file on Hasan:  he is  a Muslim, and therefore, as a defamed and persecuted minority within the United States, a case to be handled with delicacy.  

The evidence unfortunately grows that multicultural sensitivities will often trump security interests, even when the lives of American citizens are directly threatened. 

Finally we come to the media.

The New York Times, in an editorial on November 6, declared that:  “It is unclear what might have motivated Major Hasan.  He seems to have been influenced by a mixture of political, religious and psychological factors.”
It followed a day later with a story suggesting  that Hasan was driven crazy by the stress of his job as a psychiatrist.

CNN’s Chris Matthews , in an interview on November 11 with Nihad Awad, a representative of  the Council on American Islamic Relations (CAIR), focused not on the motivations for the crime but on whether Muslims in America should fear a wave of reprisals as revenge for the shootings. In the course of the interview the two men seemed to agree that we may never discover the true motivations for the killings.  
 
And here’s a doozy from The Guardian’s Michael Tomasky:

“ The fact that Hasan reportedly shouted the Allahu Akaba is meant, I suppose, to imply that he was an extremist fanatic. I’m not sure that it does. My understanding is that it’s something Arab people often shout before doing something or other.”

The fact that suicide jihadists are regularly recorded as intoning these words before committing murder and that two flight recorders from the four planes which crashed on 9/11 have the hijackers murmuring them repeatedly, seems to say nothing to Tomasky and others like him.

Why?  Why such a cognitive suspension of  one’s own powers of analysis and deduction? 

 Why such an apparent inability to parse wishful thinking from reality?

Because the members of our media are loathe to present us anything as starkly black and white as good and evil, prefering an infinitely more comfortable grey zone where no reader or listener need  be railroaded into judgement or moral distinctions.

Yet it is this murky grey zone which provides the intellectual fodder for multicultural sensitivites and cultural acceptance of deviant, asocial behavior.  It also happens to be the same swamp from which  Jihadists fish for their claims of moral equivalence  and the materials from which their protective social dome is constructed.

Expressions of Islamic extremism go unchecked in our society because no one seems  willing to trip  the wires of multicultural correctness.  Despite the events of 9/11, despite the thousands of  terrorist attacks and murders around the world which have drawn their inspiration from the Koran and Islam, our society  – from our government, to our houses  of learning to our armed forces, insists on subscribing to an utter falsehood that religion plays no role whatosever in these attacks.   Instead  they hew to multicultural tropes which deaden our acceptance of the truth.

A jihadist ideologue may well have pulled the trigger that ended 14 lives last week.  But it was multiculturalism and its inveterate partner ‘diversity’  which opened the gate and  allowed him entry  into our lives.   

We should all be questioning how much further we can allow that gate to swing open.  We should all be wondering, if the gate is to remain even a  little ajar, what barriers will exist to  prevent further expressions of hatred, acts of incitement and the perpetration of wanton, indiscriminate murder.

WESTERN CIVILIZATION HAS NO LEADER

One would think that an appearance by a president of the United States before the United Nations General Assembly would afford an unequalled opportunity for our Chief Executive to lay  it on the line:  to inform that august body that its chief financier and host was no longer going to tolerate the kind of graft, corruption or venality of office which had become the hallmark of the institution ; that it would reject entirely  the leadership of its Human Rights Council which is led by the most vile abusers of human rights on the planet and mocks the form of human dignity the U.N. was created to protect and enshrine;  that its obsession with the Arab-Israeli conflict and its inexhaustible demonization of the Jewish state has rendered it blind to the multiple depredations of other member states in flashpoints around the globe; that is has failed, signally, to address the plight of millions of women throughout the world who live shackled by primitive  rituals and social standards that enforce a form of slavery;  that its willingness to be admonished by tyrants and murderers who speak the soft language of peace and justice while exhibiting no interest whatsoever in embracing either  – all would have been concepts that one would expect might travel the distance from thought to words and form the bedrock of  an American president’s speech.

But if you had listened to Barack Obama’s address to the United Nations on Wednesday morning, you would have heard none of these things.   Nor would you have heard him fervently advocate for the benefits of democracy, the value of a free enterprise system, the social imperatives of bolstering the traditional family unit as the touchstone for civilizational survival, and the necessity for the West to arrest the alarming decline of birth rates in most developed countries.

Instead you would have heard the 44th President mouth meaningless platitudes about global cooperation;  insistent admonishments about  global warming and climate change;  you would heard apologies for American conduct on at least three occasions and  an address to the Palestinians as worthy of the bestowal of statehood, (ignoring their continuing refusal to recognize a neighboring state’s right to exist).  

Those of us who have come to view the proceedings of the United Nations with a jaundiced eye, dismissing its meaningless resolutions and proceedings as little more than a theater of the absurd, must see in Barack Obama’s new form of engagement,  not a signal of his statesmanship, but rather as evidence of a hapless naivety about the world’s realities.   The failure to grasp that the United States stands, almost alone, as a bulwark against civilizational collapse while its allies surrender to moral relativism, multicultural doctrine and defeatism can only lead us to hang our heads in utter dismay.

The president did as much as he could  within the bounds of decency to distance himself from the policies and legacy of his predecessor.  But the Obama Administration’s rejection of Bush unilateralism ( which is a conceit belied by the U.N’s endorsement of  the Afghan War and the fact that the Iraq War was joined by over 35 countries in an international coalition) fails to grasp that the former Administration’s impatience with a multilateral approach was the culmination of over half a century of the failure of such statecraft.  Since the early 1970s, the United Nations has been hijacked by special interests and been transformed into a bully pulpit for radicals and tyrants and a mouthpiece for a rabid form of antisemitism.   A succession of Administrations sought to restore balance to the institution, only to see their efforts defeated by an alliance of Muslim states and third world nations who used the United Nations as an effective club to wield against the developed world.

This week it fell to Benjamin Netanyahu, the prime minister of Israel, to stand courageously for Western values and ideals, where Obama would or could not.  In identifying the rise of fundamentalist Islam as the greatest threat to Western civilization, Netanyahu encapsulated, better than any other speaker before or after him,  the true threats faced by the West:

“The primitivism of the 9th century,”  he declared, “ ought to be no match for the progress of the 21st century. The allure of freedom, the power of technology, the reach of communications should surely win the day. Ultimately, the past cannot triumph over the future. And the future offers all nations magnificent bounties of hope. The pace of progress is growing exponentially.”

“This conflict,” he added, “ pits civilization against barbarism, the 21st century against the 9th century, those who sanctify life against those who glorify death.”

In those words Netanyahu made clear that the threats to Israel from Iran, Hamas and Hizbullah are not simply threats to the State of Israel, but to all countries who seek to uphold human dignity and seek to preserve and protect hard won human freedoms.

Why these words appeared only in the speech of the prime minister of a tiny nation on the shores of the Mediterranean  and were not spoken or even alluded to by the leader of the Western world, might be a question for historians to ponder.

But  for now that silence  seems to augur a period in which Western civilization will be without an effective  leader or spokesman.  It will be  bereft of the kind of advocacy that affirms the value of democracy, the worth of free enterprise, the fragility of  human freedom and the necessity for all nations who seek to preserve these hard won assets,  to stand defiantly and resolutely united in their defense..

A PEOPLE OF WHOM WE KNOW NOTHING

If there was any real doubt about where the Obama Administration’s foreign policy is heading, then Thursday’s events provided an important clue.  The Administration’s decision to cancel a long planned and heavily negotiated missile defense shield for both Poland and the Czech Republic pounded home a message that American allies can no longer rely on prior U.S. commitments and  that the hard necessities of confronting  aggression from rogue states will from now on give way to diplomatic expediency.

“Shameful” is a word which has been flung at the Administration by many on the right and it may be true that the cancellation of the early warning stations was a moral disgrace.  But the real damage done is not to our sense of pride, but the impact it has had on Russian and Iranian perceptions of American resolve.

The Russians knew perfectly well that they had nothing to seriously fear from an American presence in either Poland or the Czech Republic.  The anti- missile defense shield could only interdict incoming missiles and would  be incapable of  creating a  base  for the launch of  ballistic missiles of its own.   

The problem now appears to be that a major concession has been made to the Russians  without securing anything in return.  On Saturday the Los Angeles Times quoted Russian Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev as describing the cancellation of the program as “ a step in the right direction, with the hope that more would follow”  Translation:  “We have secured a victory at no cost to ourselves  and we will now press our advantage in other areas.”  That expectation will be fulfilled when Russia invades or intimidates one of the former Soviet satellites (Latvia, Estonia Lithuania, the Ukraine or Georgia) and demands U.S. acquiescence.   We shouldn’t forget that Russian diplomacy is largely a zero sum game which relies on projecting hard power in order to force diplomatic gains.  This was most clearly seen in operation last year in the invasion of Georgia and the gas dispute with the Ukraine. No doubt it will be employed again.

The Administration’s explanation for the cancellation of the program is similarly weak.  Claiming that Iran’s long range ballistic missile program is still years away from completion, the Administration has decided that  a more muscular ( and less expensive) short  and medium range  missile defense system in Europe   would help facilitate the defense of Europe.  But as many commentators have asked over the past few days – that might take care of the defense of Europe but what about the defense of  the United States?

It is no secret that the  anti-missile battery planned for  the Czech Republic and Poland would not only help defend those countries but would also impede the trajectory of a ballistic missile  launched into space from Iran and aimed at the United States.  Yet the protection of the  continental United States has already been significantly weakened by the cancellation of Kinetic Energy Inceptors ( designed to eliminate an enemy missile at an earlier stage of its trajectory ) which were to be located in Germany and Turkey. They were canceled as part of the $1.4 billion cuts in the missile defense budget. 

What does it all mean?    It means that the United States is wide open to a ballistic missile attack with only the continental anti- ballistic missile system in Fort Greely, Alaska and another at Vandenberg Air Force Base in California for use in preventing a catastrophic nuclear attack upon the United States.  Without the German, Turkish, or Eastern European inceptors, the entire U.S Eastern seaboard is exposed to an Iranian ballistic missile attack, something that should worry any Administration and any American.

The argument that the Iranians are nowhere near the construction of an ICBM that could reach North America also falls flat.  Iran has already become the first Muslim country to launch a missile into space – which it achieved in 2005.   The capacity to launch a  rocket into space is not so dissimilar to the technology needed to launch an ICBM and it is therefore foolish for anyone to suggest that Iran could not achieve the latter capacity soon – particularly with Russian support.    

The Iranians themselves will view U.S. deference  to Russian demands with no small amount of satisfaction.    The attempt to mollify an aggrieved Russia will be read in Tehran as weakness and a further indication that the Obama Administration does not have the will to confront Iranian aggression. The laughable pursuit by the Administration of the Iranians for ‘dialogue’ has turned into a tragic-comedy  wherein, with each passing day, it becomes clear that the Iranians  have no intention whatsoever of negotiating away their potential nuclear arsenal.  The U.S retreat  over a missile defense shield  aimed at protecting Eastern Europe from that very same  Iranian threat, will not be lost on the mullahs who recognize cowardice when they see it.

Other nations who have a bone to pick with the United States should also be smirking.  North Korea, a country which has flouted all of its previous agreements on nuclear disarmament, will take heart from the Administration’s volte face and will recognize that such timidity  gives them an opening to move aggressively ahead with their own program.  Venezuela, the Latin American thorn in America’s side will use the episode to continue to stir Latin American antipathy to the United States, characterizing it as a toothless lion. 

Seventy years ago, another toothless lion failed to confront a nation with regional ambitions – resulting in catastrophe for the West.   The important lesson then, as now, is that nations often act like human beings and that they can be frightened or intimidated into taking actions which are clearly at  odds with their own and their friends’ best interests.  That era of appeasement, with the leader of the West firmly fixed in his belief that the German leader was adamantly opposed to the needless waste of innocent life, was the precursor to a conflagration.  Chamberlain came back from Munich with nothing but a piece of paper, having traded away the sovereignty of a fellow democratic nation in exchange for empty promises.  In this case, Obama did not even receive the promises.

Russia may not be a mirror of 1930s Germany but no one can doubt for a minute that it  has been itching for nearly two decades  to regain the superpower status it lost after the collapse of the Soviet Union.   It should also be clear that the humiliation of the United States is an important step upon that particular road to recovery.  How sad it is that the U.S. has now unwittingly opened up that road for a Russian advance.

The Obama Administration, in its naivety, may well believe that it is winning the hearts of the Russian leaders, but in fact it has achieved just the opposite.  Its policy of appeasement will make the Russian bear hungry for another morsel of Western flesh.  What a true disgrace it would be, that rather than having American troops stationed in Poland or the Czech Republic manning defensive weapons, they will end up, by necessity, on the Georgian, Latvian or Ukranian borders defending those countries from an aggression their government could have once deterred.

As we remember the capitulation at Munich the words of Neville Chamberlain should echo down  to us with an eerie resonance:  “How horrible, fantastic, incredible it is that we should be digging trenches and trying on gas masks here because of a quarrel in a far-away country between people of whom we know nothing.”

The same people of whom we once knew nothing  – the Czech and the Poles – could have once been the guarantors of own security.   In betraying them, we may have also betrayed ourselves.

OBAMA’S TOUGH LOVE

There was something for everyone in Barak Obama’s speech in Cairo on Tuesday.  It hit all the acceptable notes on compassion, human dignity and peaceful coexistence and delivered its vision of a world without conflict, war or inequality with generous helpings of hyperbole. Perhaps no one should fault the President for the desire to rebuild damaged relations in the Muslim world or in calling for a nuclear weapons free world. But he can and should be faulted for presenting facts that are patently untrue and for the implicit willingness to accommodate evil in his search for an unrealizable vision of world amity.

Obama’s speech was, for all and intents and purposes, a “ hovering speech”, that is, in the great Wilsonian tradition, it hovered over conflicts, border disputes and nuclear proliferation issues, sagaciously dispensing wisdom on how those conflicts could be resolved.   Taking no particular side (not really even his own)  he could then expostulate that he had come to Cairo to build a new relationship between the United States and the Muslim world – one based on  mutual interest and mutual respect:  “ America and Islam are not exclusive and need not be in competition. Instead, they overlap, and share common principles — principles of justice and progress; tolerance and the dignity of all human beings.”

Well that is well and good if you are talking to the Rotary Club of Cairo, Georgia.  But the crowd in Cairo, Egypt, to which he addressed his comments, may not be quite as open to “ sharing what is in our heart” and expressing solidarity with Obama’s universalistic vision of a humanity with similar goals and aspirations.

After all, what does the United States really have in common with a culture and civilization which in the main denies human and political rights to women; has little respect for democratic government;  where, in places such as Saudi Arabia, Iran and even Kuwait,  an accusation of thievery can result in the amputation of hands;  where a woman accused of adultery has a 70% chance, regardless of her innocence, of being stoned to death;  where human rights activists such Egypt’s own Ayman Nur and other dissidents have spent years rotting in jail for the expressions of their political beliefs?

In the Cairo speech, nearly every historical allusion was nonfactual or inexact: the fraudulent claims that Muslims were responsible for European, Chinese, and Hindu discoveries; the notion that Christian Cordoba was an example of Islamic tolerance during the Inquisition; that the Renaissance and Enlightenment were fueled by Arab learning; that abolition and civil rights in the United States were accomplished without violence.

Then there were the other statements made by Obama which simply deny reality:

What to make of Obama’s statement that “ regardless of race, religion, or station in life, all of us share common aspirations — to live in peace and security; to get an education and to work with dignity; to love our families, our communities, and our God.”

It seems that Obama was coloring in the picture of the Islamic world  from his own palette of multicultural experience. That the two civilizations do not share “common aspirations” in  that the Muslim family unit differs fundamentally from the Western model  - was one of the more egregious mistakes.  The kind of patriarchal structure that exists in the Muslim world, with its emphasis on honor, its absorption with shame and the apotheosis of the family head, precludes respect for individual rights and needs within the  family circle.

Also why, exactly, is it Barak Obama’s responsibility, as President of the United States, “to fight against negative stereotypes of Islam wherever they appear.”  Once again the comparison to Wilson is appropriate – the self appointed guardian of righteousness vowing to protect the rights and dignity of the disenfranchised. Wilson’s utopianism came to grief on the shoals of political and cultural realities. Obama should prepare himself for a similar outcome.

And what about this:  “And America will not turn our backs on the legitimate Palestinian aspiration for dignity, opportunity, and a state of their own.”

Oh, if only Palestinian leaders had ever felt the same way.  The struggle for Palestinian self determination has left behind it a blood soaked trail of demagoguery, absence of statesmanship, graft, venality and terrorism.  But more than that, there has never emerged in the Palestinian intellectual narrative very much support for the idea of a nation state with its own cultural and political identity.  That idea is largely a Western one, foisted on Palestinians in the name of national dignity. 

Today Palestinian nationalism, such as it is, largely revolves around the elimination of another state, rather than the creation of a new one. There is nothing in Palestinian circles that approximates the kind of intellectual energy which was dispensed by the founding fathers of either the United States or Israel in detailing the institutions necessary to maintain the superstructure of a new democratic state capable of living in peace with its neighbors.  Nor is there is any debate or discussion of these issues.

When talking about dignity, Mr. Obama might have also referred to the demand that any people wishing to join the family of nations should be required to express dignity in their  struggle for independence. Perhaps Mr. Obama and his advisors should ask themselves what have the Palestinians done to warrant statehood? Have they demonstrated a willingness to forswear violence, alter their founding documents to reflect the desire for peaceful coexistence or build institutions that would safeguard individual rights?  What have they done other than strewn the streets of their neighbor with the wreckage of exploded city buses accompanied by the burning flesh of their occupants?

Obama, like many American presidents, likes to deal with complicated issues through orotund expressions of moral symmetry.   The penchant for finding moral, political and cultural equivalence between competing national narratives however leads to gross distortions of historical fact.  In Obama’s case it is the conflation of the Jewish people’s suffering through centuries of persecution with the so-called denial of rights to Palestinians.  It is in the moral comparisons of the construction of Israeli West Bank settlements to the Palestinians’ incessant campaigns of suicide bombing; it is in drawing parallels between the extraordinary growth of highly organized civil societies such as Japan and South Korea with the chaotic and often dysfunctional economic structures of the Arab world.

When we think of other great presidential speeches abroad, we remember that they were tethered to an idea of American exceptionalism – the concept that America stood for freedom and against tyranny. John  F. Kennedy’s and Ronald Reagan’s Berlin speeches were examples of unintimidated American leaders willing to talk down to brutal regimes who exhibited no respect for human rights or the principles of Western freedom. They set the high watermark of American leadership abroad and its resolve to confront evil.  There was no evidence in Obama’s speech that anyone in the Arab or Muslim world has anything to fear by failing to abide by civilized norms.  Rather, he imparted the strong sense that there would be no more punishment for violations of civilized conduct than mild expressions of tough love.

The United States might well need the help and support of the Muslim world in stymieing Iran’s nuclear ambitions.   But that does not need to mean that the United States should accept or support the abuses of civilized conduct , driven by Islamic teachings, that are found  rampant in the Muslim world.  In the struggle between these two civilizations, where one will and must ultimately predominate, Obama has undoubtedly given our adversaries  a helping hand.

PAYING TRIBUTE TO HEROES

For anyone paying close attention, a historic event occurred this week in Europe.  As we go to press, polls reveal that Geert Wilders’ party, the Party for Freedom, has won a sweeping victory in the Dutch section of the European electorate coming in second and  swamping its nearest rival by nearly 20%. 

Today’s elections to the European Union parliament are vitally important.  The European parliament in its next session is likely to vote on a number of issues which could affect  trade alliances, the sovereignty of its constituent states and the Trans- Atlantic Alliance. 

How has Geert Wilders, labeled by his enemies a racist and bigot, whose pronouncements against Muslim extremism are widely reviled by the European intelligentsia, media and political class, won such an extraordinary level of popularity?  

The answer is that Wilders reflects a profound disenchantment with those elites – men and women who are blindly leading that continent to catastrophe.   A willingness to hide behind multicultural slogans and politically correct nostrums, has led to a continent wide rise in anti-Semitism, incipient violence and a vicious anti-democratic movement, led by an empowered Muslim minority. 

Wilders recognizes both the serious of the threat and the depth of the disenchantment and it is for this reason his popularity has soared.  He is courageously spearheading a movement, at great risk to his own life, to alert his corner of the world to the perils of accommodating fundamentalist Islam. 

Across the English Channel another man similarly toils against great adversity and the similar willing denial of the deep problems his country faces from appeasement to Muslim demands.   Alan Craig, a councilman in one of London’s inner suburbs, is fighting a successful campaign to force a secretive fundamentalist Muslim group to bend in its plans to construct a mega mosque near the heart of the still- under-construction 2012 Olympic village.   Craig’s pertinacity, not just in the face of Tablighi Jamaat’s campaign of vilification but in defiance of his many of his political adversaries, is a case study in courage and determination.  There are few men of his caliber today in England who state plainly what all can see – that British identity and national character is in a state of free fall and that no less than national survival is at risk if something is not done to rescue that country from the grip of its multicultural swoon. 

These two men exemplify the spirit of the hero of conscience – unafraid to speak plainly and unashamedly that they are sons of the enlightenment and will resist any attempt to deny that legacy.  

For that reason the American Freedom Alliance is proud to offer both men its 2009  Heroes of Conscience Awards. This year’s annual dinner,  to be held on Sunday, June 7, at the Reagan Library and Museum in Simi Valley, will offer us the opportunity to pay tribute to their commitment to Western values and to celebrate with  them the glory of our heritage.  

We hope you can join us.