The blood runs cold

8:54pm

 

The lights are going out on liberal society – and it is the most liberal societies with their fingers on the ‘off’ switch. The thesis of Mark Steyn’s book America Alone, that Europe was succumbing to an Islamist takeover, has been proved spectacularly correct -- in Canada, and with himself as the designated victim. The New York Post reports that both Steyn and Macleans magazine, which reprinted a chapter of his book, are to be hauled before two Canadian judicial panels to answer the charge that they have spread ‘hatred and contempt’ for Muslims. And what was the heinous view Steyn vouchsafed to occasion such a charge?

…the notion that Islamic culture is incompatible with Canada's liberalized, Western civilization.

Well excuse me, but some of us were under the impression that a global war was currently being waged by a section of the Islamic world in order to write the truth of that assertion in blood.

The irony, of course, is that by this action Canada is thus demonstrating that if any culture is incompatible with liberalised western civilisation, it is clearly Canada’s. The idea that certain arguments must not be made, and that to do so is to find oneself arraigned before a judicial tribunal, is the very antithesis of a liberal society. It is a symptom of totalitarianism. It is also doubly ironic that it is the Islamic world, through the Canadian Islamic Congress, that is bringing this action -- since in seeking to suppress the view that the Islamic world is incompatible with liberalism, it is demonstrating with the starkest possible clarity the truth of that proposition.

It is no accident that it is uber-‘liberal’ Canada, which worships at the shrine of human rights law, where this medieval inquisition is taking place. The fact that the British Columbia Human Rights Tribunal and the Canadian Human Rights Commission are to conduct this oppressive hearing is grotesque but not in the least surprising. The belief fundamental to human wrongs law, that minorities are sacrosanct and that to criticise them is proof of rampant prejudice, is part of the mindset which has turned truth, morality and freedom inside out. If a writer who tells the truth about Islamists spreading hatred and contempt for the west is himself hauled before a court charged with spreading hatred and contempt by telling such a truth, then the Orwellian nightmare has well and truly arrived.

As I have said many times before, the real threat to civilisation comes not from acts of terror, appalling though these are; it comes from the fact that Islamists are progressively making slaves out of us in our own countries.

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A voyager writes

12:08am

I am travelling at present, and will post again as soon as I can.

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How deep is the US treachery?

12:23am

An excellent analysis by Dan Diker of the NIE volte-face over Iran — which makes the point, as I noted in an earlier post, that far from cementing a regional alliance against Iran this display of US weakness is pushing ‘moderate’ Arab states to run with the winning Iranian horse – refers to the equally excellent analysis by Simon Henderson of the Washington Institute, who noted:

…the UAE set a precedent in November by impounding an Iranian-bound shipment of undisclosed material banned by UN Security Council Resolutions 1737 and 1747 because of its potential use for nuclear weapons or missile programs. The Washington Institute brief also notes that Bahrain's crown prince for the first time openly accused Iran in a recent interview of seeking nuclear weapons.

The NIE’s assessment that Iran did not restart its nuclear programme after 2003 has now been dismissed with contumely by pretty well every single informed observer. The $64,000 question still remains, however, whether the NIE was simply a freelance piece of treachery by the US intelligence community or whether it was part of a strategic rethink from the President down in favour of appeasement and surrender, in line with the ‘new realism’ doctrine of Baker/Hamilton.

Hopes that the former may be the case were raised when the US Defence Secretary Robert Gates, who had been thought to be part of the Baker/Hamilton axis, made a remarkably hawkish speech after the NIE to a security conference in Bahrain:

Claiming Iran may secretly have resumed efforts to build a nuclear weapon, the US defence secretary, Robert Gates, called for intensified international pressure on Tehran and urged Saudi Arabia and other Gulf states to develop a joint air and missile shield to ward off future threats…

Speaking at a weekend security conference in Bahrain, Gates insisted multilateral defence cooperation was an ‘absolute necessity’. The region faced a ‘truculent’ leadership in Tehran that was ‘bent on confrontation with its neighbours and deeply engaged in subverting stability in Iraq and Afghanistan,’ he said.

‘Everywhere you turn, it is the policy of Iran to foment instability and chaos, no matter the strategic value or the cost in the blood of innocents - Christians, Jews and Muslims alike,’ he said. Gates said Tehran, as well as backing Hizbullah and Hamas, was developing medium-range ballistic missiles that are ‘not particularly cost-effective unless equipped with warheads carrying weapons of mass destruction’.

Gates thus seemed to be going out of his way to counter the ruinous impression created by the NIE that the US was throwing in the towel over Iran. But any hopes that the NIE might have been a one-off blip and not evidence of a major strategic shift have to be set against the dreadful betrayal of Lebanon, where the appointment of a Syrian puppet as president has delivered that country into the hands of its Syrian oppressors. The killing of a senior general in a bomb attack in Beirut on Wednesday is suspected to be the latest in a series of bombings and assassinations at the hands of Syria, which began with the 2005 killing of former Premier Rafik al-Hariri.

This is really awful. Lebanon's 'Cedar revolution', fragile as it was, offered a ray of hope that the wind of freedom might really be beginning to blow through the Middle East. America is thus negating the whole justification for its policy in the Middle East -- the belief that it could breathe life there into the universal yearning for freedom. The reason for this American volte-face is the asinine‘New Realist’ belief that by delivering Lebanon to Syria as a sacrificial lamb, the US will prise Syria away from Iran. But what will now surely happen instead is that Iran, through its puppet Syria, will control Lebanon.

The betrayal of both Lebanon and Israel suggest that, whatever the explanation behind the NIE, the appeasement faction now has the whip hand in DC -- and chaos is the result.

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Reason fights back

10:19pm

While the Bali-hoo plumbs ever greater depths of absurdity (see here, here and here, reason appears to have got its boots on at last. First the Pope denounces the man-made-global-warming prophets of doom for scare-mongering on the basis of dogma rather than science.

It is an irony to be savoured that -- not for the first time – religion is mounting a defence of reason against the modern dogma of scientism, which cloaks irrationality and ideology in the guise of science. Now science itself is fighting back against the abuse of its integrity. More than 100 prominent scientists have sent an open letter to the UN Secretary-General warning that trying to control the Earth’s climate was ‘ultimately futile’:

The scientists, many of whom are current and former UN IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) scientists, sent an open letter to the UN Secretary-General questioning the scientific basis for climate fears and the UN's so-called ‘solutions.’

‘Attempts to prevent global climate change from occurring are ultimately futile, and constitute a tragic misallocation of resources that would be better spent on humanity's real and pressing problems,’ the letter signed by the scientists read. The December 13 letter was released to the public late Thursday.

‘It is not possible to stop climate change, a natural phenomenon that has affected humanity through the ages. Geological, archaeological, oral and written histories all attest to the dramatic challenges posed to past societies from unanticipated changes in temperature, precipitation, winds and other climatic variables,’ the scientists wrote.

‘In stark contrast to the often repeated assertion that the science of climate change is ‘settled,' significant new peer-reviewed research has cast even more doubt on the hypothesis of dangerous human-caused global warming,’ the open letter added…

‘The IPCC Summaries for Policy Makers are the most widely read IPCC reports amongst politicians and non-scientists and are the basis for most climate change policy formulation. Yet these Summaries are prepared by a relatively small core writing team with the final drafts approved line-by-line by ­government ­representatives. The great ­majority of IPCC contributors and ­reviewers, and the tens of thousands of other scientists who are qualified to comment on these matters, are not involved in the preparation of these documents. The summaries therefore cannot properly be represented as a consensus view among experts,’ the letter added.

It is only a matter of time before a new ‘consensus’ develops that that man-made global warming is a scam of the first magnitude.

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The heirs to Chamberlain

8:58am

The American politician Newt Gingrich gave a remarkable speech last month, the text of which has just been sent to me. In it, he gives voice to despair at the tragic failure by America honestly to face up to the nature and scale of the challenge to the free world, and its resort instead to systematic evasion, weakness and incompetence which have effectively left the free world leaderless:

And let's be honest: What's the primary source of money for al Qaeda? It's you, re-circulated through Saudi Arabia. Because we have no national energy strategy, when clearly if you really cared about liberating the United States from the Middle East and if you really cared about the survival of Israel, one of your highest goals would be to move to a hydrogen economy and to eliminate petroleum as a primary source of energy.Now that's what a serious national strategy would look like, but that would require real change.

So then you look at Saudi Arabia. The fact that we tolerate a country saying no Christian and no Jew can go to Mecca, and we start with the presumption that that's true while they attack Israel for being a religious state is a sign of our timidity, our confusion, our cowardice that is stunning. It's not complicated. We're inviting Saudi Arabia to come to Annapolis to talk about rights for Palestinians when nobody is saying, ‘Let's talk about rights for Christians and Jews in Saudi Arabia. Let's talk about rights for women in Saudi Arabia.’

So we accept this totally one-sided definition of the world in which our enemies can cheerfully lie on television every day, and we don't even have the nerve to insist on the truth. We pretend their lies are reasonable. This is a very fundamental problem. And if you look at who some of the largest owners of some of our largest banks are today, they're Saudis.

You keep pumping billions of dollars a year into countries like Venezuela, Iran and Saudi Arabia, and Russia, and you are presently going to have created people who oppose you who have lots of money. And they're then going to come back to your own country and finance, for example, Arab study institutes whose only requirement is that they never tell the truth. So you have all sorts of Ph.D.s who now show up quite cheerfully prepared to say whatever it is that makes their funders happy – in the name, of course, of academic freedom. So why wouldn't Columbia host a genocidal madman? It's just part of political correctness. I mean, Ahmadinejad may say terrible things, he may lock up students, he may kill journalists, he may say, ‘We should wipe out Israel,’ he may say, ‘We should defeat the United States,’ but after all, what has he done that's inappropriate? What has he done that wouldn't be repeated at a Hollywood cocktail party or a nice gathering in Europe?...

What truly bothers me is the shallowness and the sophistry of the Western governments, starting with our own. When a person says to you, ‘I don't recognize that you exist,’ you don't start a negotiation. The person says, ‘I literally do not recognize’ and then lies to you. I mean the first thing you say to this guy is ‘Terrific. Let's go visit Mecca. Since clearly there's no other state except Israel that is based on religion, the fact that I happen to be Christian won't bother anybody.’ And then he'll say, ‘Well, that's different.’

We tolerate this. We have created our own nightmare because we refuse to tell the truth…None of our enemies are confused. Our enemies don't get up each morning and go, ‘Oh, gosh, I think I'll have an existential crisis of identity in which I will try to think through whether or not we can be friends while you're killing me.’ Our enemies get up every morning and say, ‘We hate the West. We hate freedom.

It is the tragedy of our times. Do read it all.

Update: I have now been sent another remarkable speech delivered by Gingrich last September about the the fact that we are in a world war -- and we don't even recognise it for what it is.

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A new grand bargain?

12:19am

More and more people are saying that the NIE which said Iran had stopped its nuclear programme is a load of old bull. At the weekend, the Sunday Telegraph reported that British intelligence believes the NIE’s authors were hoodwinked by disinformation from Iran:

The source said British analysts believed that Iranian nuclear staff, knowing their phones were tapped, deliberately gave misinformation. ‘We are sceptical. We want to know what the basis of it is, where did it come from? Was it on the basis of the defector? Was it on the basis of the intercept material? They say things on the phone because they know we are up on the phones. They say black is white. They will say anything to throw us off. It's not as if the American intelligence agencies are regarded as brilliant performers in that region. They got badly burned over Iraq.’

A US intelligence source has revealed that some American spies share the concerns of the British and the Israelis. ‘Many middle-ranking CIA veterans believe Iran is still committed to producing nuclear weapons and are concerned that the agency lost a number of its best sources in Iran in 2004,’ the official said.

According to Washington and intelligence sources, the first steps of the dialogue were made possible by the US National Intelligence Estimate of Dec. 3 affirming that Iran’s nuclear weapons program had been put on hold in 2003. This public statement effectively took the US military option off the table, as stipulated by Riyadh and Tehran.

The Saudis have been offering to mediate the US-Iranian dispute since the beginning of 2007. In early November, DEBKA-Net-Weekly disclosed, the White House announced it was ready to deal. But first, Tehran must undertake to halt its arms smuggling into Iraq, guarantee non-interference in the election of the next Lebanese president later that month and tacitly approve Syrian participation in the Middle East conference at Annapolis on Nov. 27. Furthermore, Iran must guarantee not to torpedo the conference, to which the administration attached the highest importance, by unleashing its terrorist pawns against Israel.

Shortly after DEBKA-Net-Weekly’s exclusive disclosure, the well-connected Saudi journalist Jihad El-Khazen gave his version of the course of events in the Arab newspaper Al-Hayat : ‘Here is what happened: The rate of violent acts dropped in Iraq; therefore the American intelligence services discovered that Iran had halted its military nuclear program in 2003. This means that the resumption of violence will make American intelligence services find out that there is a secret military program that is different from the peaceful and famous one.’

The Saudi reporter went on to ask: ‘Is there a deal between the Bush administration and Iran? I cannot categorically assert that a deal was concluded between the two parties through direct negotiations; however, there is an understanding resulting in the 2007 national intelligence report.’

Saudi and American sources told DEBKAfile that President George W. Bush used the Annapolis conference as a piece of theater, which presented a sham moderate Arab front against Iran to disguise the intense work underway on a Saudi-mediated accommodation between Washington and Tehran.

The Bush administration appears to be in the midst of developing a new foreign strategy based on five key elements:

1. The halt of Iranian weapons and road bomb shipments into Iraq for use against US forces;

2. An Iranian instruction to Hizballah to open the way for the election of a Lebanese president, in return for which Washington will not interfere with the formation of a new government with a place of honor for the Iranian surrogate militia.

In other words, the Bush administration is not only engaged in a sellout of the Israeli government but also of the pro-Western Lebanese prime minister Fouad Siniora.

3. The cessation of Iranian arms and roadside bombs to Afghanistan.

4. The naming of Saudi Arabia as a channel for arbitrating American and Iranian differences.

5. A US pledge to backtrack on its charges that the Iran is engaged in developing nuclear weapons. This pledge was embodied in the dramatically revised US National Intelligence Estimate compared with its estimate of 2005, and effectively lifted not only the American military axe from over Iran’s strategic and economic infrastructure – and possibly regime - but also tied Israel’s hands.

 

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The war within the west

10:43am

A propos my post below about the three State Department officials who were behind the NIE, this is what the Wall Street Journal had to say about them:

The NIE's main authors include three former State Department officials with previous reputations as ‘hyper-partisan anti-Bush officials,’ according to an intelligence source. They are Tom Fingar, formerly of the State Department's Bureau of Intelligence and Research; Vann Van Diepen, the National Intelligence Officer for WMD; and Kenneth Brill, the former U.S. Ambassador to the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA).

This is what the New York Sun said about one member of this unlovely trio:

Vann Van Diepen, one of the estimate's main authors, has spent the last five years trying to get America to accept Iran's right to enrich uranium. Mr. Van Diepen no doubt reckons that in helping push the estimate through the system, he has succeeded in influencing the policy debate in Washington.

Now the Worldwide Standard reports that the volte-face performed by a second member was even more abrupt than it appears from their report:

Consider that on July 11, 2007, roughly four or so months prior to the most recent NIE’s publication, Deputy Director of Analysis Thomas Fingar gave the following testimony before the House Armed Services Committee (emphasis added):

Iran and North Korea are the states of most concern to us. The United States’ concerns about Iran are shared by many nations, including many of Iran’s neighbors. Iran is continuing to pursue uranium enrichment and has shown more interest in protracting negotiations and working to delay and diminish the impact of UNSC sanctions than in reaching an acceptable diplomatic solution. We assess that Tehran is determined to develop nuclear weapons--despite its international obligations and international pressure. This is a grave concern to the other countries in the region whose security would be threatened should Iran acquire nuclear weapons.

This paragraph appeared under the subheading: ‘Iran Assessed As Determined to Develop Nuclear Weapons.’ And the entirety of Fingar’s 22-page testimony was labeled ‘Information as of July 11, 2007.’ No part of it is consistent with the latest NIE, in which our spooks tell us Iran suspended its covert nuclear weapons program in 2003 ‘primarily in response to international pressure’ and they ‘do not know whether (Iran) currently intends to develop nuclear weapons.’

The proper way to read this report is through the lens of the long struggle the professional intelligence community has been waging against the elected civilian administration in Washington. They have opposed President Bush on nearly every major policy decision. They were against the Iraqi National Congress. They were against elections in Iraq. They were against I. Lewis Libby. They are against a tough line on Iran. One could call all this revenge of the bureaucrats… The bureaucrats may even think they are stopping another war.

It's a dangerous game that may boomerang, making a war with Iran more likely. Our diplomats, after all, hoped to seal this month a deal to pass a third Security Council resolution against Iran. Already on Monday the Chinese delegation at Turtle Bay has started making noises about dropping their tepid support for such a document. Call it the Van Diepen Demarche, since the Chinese camarilla can boast that even America's intelligence estimate concludes the mullahs shuttered their nuclear weapons program more than four years ago.

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The State within the US state

5:35pm

 

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Lyrical la-la lemmingland

4:53pm

 

Is it really normal behaviour not just to possess,

• the al-Qaeda Manual
• the Terrorist’s Handbook
• the Mujahidin Poisons Handbook
• a manual for a Dragunov sniper rifle
• a firearms and RPG handbook
• a document entitled “How to Win Hand-to-Hand Fighting

but to sit at work at Heathrow Airport - where she may have had security clearance to work in 'airside' retail outlets beyond the Customs area - and scribble on a till roll that ‘The desire within me increases everyday to go for martyrdom. The need to go increases by the second.’ It is quite bizarre that any rational person could have a problem with the prosecution and conviction of someone who did such things.

However, what is even more disturbing than Abdul Bari’s observations, which are in keeping with his own often-demonstrated extremism, is the fact that they merely echoed similar sentiments by ostensibly rational people in the wider community. Malik received only a suspended jail sentence after the judge in the case, the Recorder of London Judge Peter Beaumont QC, said Malik's offence was

on the margin of what this crime concerns

.But as a Crown Prosecution Service spokesman said:

Ms Malik was convicted of collecting information, without reasonable excuse, of a kind likely to be useful to a person committing or preparing an act of terrorism. This information included terrorism and poison handbooks as well as military manuals and other material likely to be useful to someone planning terrorist activity.

Yet the Recorder of London, no less, thinks that possession of such material is only ‘on the margin’ of a law designed to protect this country — and sets the criminal free. Nor is he alone. In the past few days, a clamour has arisen that the prosecution was criminalising a silly young woman for writing silly things. The Guardian reported:

Lisa Appignanesi, deputy president of English PEN, said: ‘To make a felon of a girl dreaming and writing behind a bookshop counter would have Byron and Shelley turning in their graves.’

In the Times, Shirley Dent protested that Malik had been convicted

on account of some embarrassing and juvenile fantasies about jihad and beheadings, laid bare to the world.

Ignoring the fact that, as she recorded in her first paragraph,

The evidence against Malik boiled down to various documents harvested from websites, including weapons manuals and The Mujahideen Poisons Handbook,

Dent constructed her entire piece around the complaint that Malik had been prosecuted because

This Government wants to climb inside your head, see what's going on and tell you what's right.

And also in the Times Matthew Parris also claimed Malik had been convicted for writing stupid poems, and went on:

It's about thought crime, isn't it?

No, it’s not. It’s about evidence that a young woman was equipping herself with information that was germane to the perpetration of terrorism, to which she admitted she had a desire that was increasing by the second.

One of the principal reasons why Britain became the hub of the jihad against Europe was that, for many years, its establishment refused to take seriously those who were promulgating and inciting terrorism. The deep frivolity with which such acts continue to be viewed by so many in the higher reaches of our culture is now nothing less than pathological.

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The thousand volt farce

6:09pm

How Iran is laughing. Ahmadinejad declares that yesterday’s US National Intelligence Estimate is

announcing a victory for the Iranian nation in the nuclear issue against all international powers.

Indeed, with this report America has achieved the remarkable feat of dealing a terrible blow to all those fighting to defend civilisation. It has actually strengthened Ahmadinejad, whose grip on power had until yesterday been looking ever more fragile. But then the US handed him a priceless gift in the form of the NIE report which says, in effect, that US intelligence hasn’t got a clue about the Iranian nuclear threat. We can all see from its ludicrously threadbare reasoning — much of merely using guesswork to assess Iran’s intentions, in the absence of reliable information on the ground — that intelligence of any sort is clearly in short supply in the US security world.

The statement by President Bush that the report is

a very important product…

is clearly nonsense. Despite the reforms to the intelligence community which he claims have worked, the US clearly continues to have a major problem with both the competence and good faith of its intelligence services. They must now be considered themselves to represent a threat to the west that they ostensibly serve — and Bush’s pathetic attempt to square the circle of the Iran assessments merely reinforces America’s humiliation.

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