Former secretary of state Madeleine Albright, according to this news story, said:

"There is no doubt in my mind that Muslim countries can be democracies," Albright says. "Turkey is a perfect example of that. It is very evident, and, actually, in my study of religions, in many ways Islam is maybe the most democratic religion because there is nobody between you and God. So I do not think that is something that can be used as reason not to have Muslim democracies."

Robert Spencer has quite properly ridiculed her for being ignorant of the history of Turkey, incredibly failing to know that Turkey has (sort of) been (sort of) a democracy for the past 80 years only because Kemal Attaturk took extroardinary steps to suppress political Islam and forcibly Westernize the country over fierce Islamic objections.  I have noted the facts about Kemal and Turkey frequently in this blog.

But I would also point out that Albright seems not to have even the vaguest idea that there is "nobody between you and God" in Protestant Christianity, either.  Apparently, at no point in her "study of religions" did she hear about the Protestant Reformation and its basic concept of the priesthood of the believer.  Apparently, Ms. Albright is as shockingly ignorant of the history of Christianity as she is of the history of Turkey.  Alas, Albright, educated at Wellesley, Johns-Hopkins, and Columbia, is probably very typical of our governing elites in her mind-numbing ignorance of the most basic tenets of Christianity. 

The Government is pushing ahead with legislation that will criminalise politically incorrect jokes, with a maximum punishment of up to seven years' prison. The House of Lords tried to insert a free-speech amendment, but Justice Secretary Jack Straw knocked it out. It was Straw who previously called for a redefinition of Englishness and suggested the "global baggage of empire" was linked to soccer violence by "racist and xenophobic white males". He claimed the English "propensity for violence" was used to subjugate Ireland, Scotland and Wales, and that the English as a race were "potentially very aggressive".

In the past 10 years I have collected reports of many instances of draconian punishments, including the arrest and criminal prosecution of children, for thought-crimes and offences against political correctness.

Countryside Restoration Trust chairman and columnist Robin Page said at a rally against the Government's anti-hunting laws in Gloucestershire in 2002: "If you are a black vegetarian Muslim asylum-seeking one-legged lesbian lorry driver, I want the same rights as you." Page was arrested, and after four months he received a letter saying no charges would be pressed, but that: "If further evidence comes to our attention whereby your involvement is implicated, we will seek to initiate proceedings." It took him five years to clear his name.

Page was at least an adult. In September 2006, a 14-year-old schoolgirl, Codie Stott, asked a teacher if she could sit with another group to do a science project as all the girls with her spoke only Urdu. The teacher's first response, according to Stott, was to scream at her: "It's racist, you're going to get done by the police!" Upset and terrified, the schoolgirl went outside to calm down. The teacher called the police and a few days later, presumably after officialdom had thought the matter over, she was arrested and taken to a police station, where she was fingerprinted and photographed. According to her mother, she was placed in a bare cell for 3 1/2 hours. She was questioned on suspicion of committing a racial public order offence and then released without charge. The school was said to be investigating what further action to take, not against the teacher, but against Stott. Headmaster Anthony Edkins reportedly said: "An allegation of a serious nature was made concerning a racially motivated remark. We aim to ensure a caring and tolerant attitude towards pupils of all ethnic backgrounds and will not stand for racism in any form."

A 10-year-old child was arrested and brought before a judge, for having allegedly called an 11-year-old boya "Paki" and "bin Laden" during a playground argument at a primary school (the other boy had called him a skunk and a Teletubby). When it reached the court the case had cost taxpayers pound stg. 25,000. The accused was so distressed that he had stopped attending school. The judge, Jonathan Finestein, said: "Have we really got to the stage where we are prosecuting 10-year-old boys because of political correctness? There are major crimes out there and the police don't bother to prosecute. This is nonsense."

 
Wilders is absolutely correct about this.  There is no moderate Islam, as I have noted before.  But what is shocking about this exchange is the pedestrian way, with no comment, in which Jacoby acknowledges that the prime minister of Turkey, Erdogan, is an Islamist.  Turkey was founded by Kemal to be a secularist, Westernized, modern state.  It was Kemal's wish that it always remain so, and the Turkish army is supposed to the guardian and guarantor of Turkish secularism.  Yet despite all of that, the prime minister of Turkey is an Islamist!!!  (And he is, too, as I have written before.)  If there was ever a dire warning that things are currently going very, very wrong in the fourteen centuries-long struggle between Islam and Christendom, it is that Turkey has an Islamist prime minister.

Wilders also makes a hash out of his argument that Islam cannot be reformed in the way that Christianity was.  He says this is so because Muslims take literally their founding documents, whereas Christianity has learned not to take its founding documents literally.  This argument is half wrong and half right.  Christianity is very different from what is was 1000 years ago not because it learned not to take the Bible literally but because the Reformation returned Christianity to the Bible, and the Bible's message is a message of peace.  The "Christianity" of the papal-dominated middle ages was a burlesque on true, biblical Christianity (which is why the Catholic Church made it illegal to own the Bible in the vernacular languages).  The Reformation is what changed Christianity from the mess it was a millenium ago into what it is today. 

Unfortunately, a "reformation" that returns Islam to its founding documents can only make it more militant, becuase the founding documents are themselves militant.  Thus, Wilders is correct when he says that Islam could only be reformed if it learned not to take its founding documents literally (and then it would no longer be Islam).  In fact, I would argue that we are seeing more militant Islam in the last three decades exactly because Islam has undergone something of a reformation and revival during those decades.  I would also argue that the interpretation of Jihad as "inner spiritual struggle", and that such is the "greater jihad," is exactly the type of non-literal interpretation of Islam's founding documents that is necessary to render it less threatening to the Western world.  But, unfortunately, the best educated Muslims know that the "inner spiritual struggle" interpretation of jihad is a recent innovation, not supported in the Qur'an orany of the most reliable collections of ahadith. 

As you read through the interview, you will see that it was exactly Wilders' inability to correctly navigate Jacoby's posited analogy between Christianity and Islam that led Wilders to pointedly reject the idea that Islam is a religion, which brings us back to where we started.    

In something of an about face, the Obama administration is signaling that the $900 million in promised aid to Palestine will be withdrawn unless the Palestinian Authority recognizes Israel's right to exist:

This next paragraph is extremely interesting:

She reportedly told the officials she believed holding new elections was secondary to building the bureaucracy of the Palestinian Authority. The Obama administration is adamant in maintaining the previous U.S. presidential administration's position of boycotting Hamas. Two weeks ago Clinton said lifting the boycott would damage attempts to reach peace in the region.

Why doesn't Clinton think that holding new elections is as important as building the bureaucracy of the Palestinian authority?  It sounds like the Obama administration is quietly backing away from one of President Bush's foremost foreign policy goals: to promote democracy in the Arab world.  

The last election, in 2006, saw Hamas win a sizable majority in the Palestinian parliament.  What happened next is that there was a mini-civil war between Hamas and Fatah, in which Hamas took control of Gaza, but Fatah retained control of the PA in the West Bank. 

Since the the party that the Palestinian people elected controls only part of the Palestinian territory, and the smaller part at that, shouldn't there be another election to clean up the mess, and settle who is in control of the PA?  In theory, there should be.  It appears, however, that the Obama administration does not want to risk another Hamas victory, which would expose the "mideast peace process" as the risible nonsense it really is. 

The whole idea of sending billions of dollars to Gaza to rebuild it, even as the rockets continue to be launched against Israel was, as Daniel Pipes aptly described it, surreal.

What the hell are the donor countries doing, getting in the middle of an on-going war with their high-profile supposed reconstruction effort? My best guess: this permits them subtly to signal Jerusalem that it better not attack Gaza again, because doing so will confront it with a lot of very angry donor governments – including, of course, the Obama administration.

Truly, the whole spectacle is surreal, and I think it was starting to become politcally untenable in the U.S.  Melanie Phillips also had some choice words for this incredible nonsense.

There has never been a situation like this. ‘Surreal’, as Daniel Pipes expostulates, just doesn’t begin to describe what America, Britain and Europe are doing in Gaza. America has pledged $900 million for the ‘rebuilding’ of Gaza; at the ‘donors’ conference at Sharm el Sheikh yesterday, pledges from more than 70 states including Europe and Britain swelled that total to more than $4.4 billion. The beleaguered British taxpayer may be rather surprised to know that bankrupt Britain is throwing £30 million at the place.

These governments all piously intone that the money will not end up in the hands of Hamas. This is utterly absurd. Hamas run Gaza. They control it. Nothing happens there without their say-so. UNRWA, which is apparently supposed to distribute the humanitarian aid, is riddled with Hamas operatives amongst its staff; Hamas won more than 80 percent of the vote in the last election for the UNRWA workers association and the UNRWA teachers association.

To avoid the money going to Hamas, we are told with a straight face, aid is to be funnelled through the Palestinian Authority. But the PA are in the West Bank. They are not in Gaza. Hamas run Gaza. The PA have no more power to stop that money from ending up in the pockets of Hamas than they have of flying to the moon.

Who can doubt that the $4.4 billion will go straight to Hamas so that it can buy yet more rockets and missiles and construct yet more death-dealing factories to enable them to bombard Israel and kill the innocent?

I was looking at Pamela Geller's blog this morning and she had a link to this video, uploaded by someone calling himself "Soldier for Islam", that was shot during a rally by a group called "Islam 4 UK" on Saturday, February 28.  

At around 7:30 into the video, the speaker, yelling into a bullhorn, states, "How can you live in a society where there is so much oppression . . . because of manmade law. . . . because they legislate law after law after law.  In the last 8 years, the government have legislated over 8,000 pieces of law." But under Islam, he notes, everything has already been legislated by Allah, even minor details such as how to use the toilet.  

Under Islam, as I noted on January 24, man does not have the right to make up his own legislation:

Islam does not, however, empower the system of government with the right to absolve or change the legislation of the religion in society, nor does it leave them the right of creation of novel legislations.  Rather, legislation is the right of God alone, and religion must be pivotal in deciding the validity of any new law.

Obviously, these views are utterly incompatible with the U.S. Constitution and with the Ango-Saxon tradition of jurisprudence.  People who hold these beliefs can never be at peace with the American way of life and government.  It remains a mystery why our poltical elites continue to believe that Muslims can safely be incorporated into our society.  The only logical conclusion is that our political elites are either ignorant of our traditional way of life and government, or despise it. 

Did you notice the telling detail that some of the the jihadists speak with accents traceable to a specific region in England.  That means they are not recent immigrants to England; they are native-born Britons who have been radicalized in English mosques.

Brigadier Ed Butler, the former commander of British forces in Afghanistan, said British Muslims were fighting his forces. "There are British passport holders who live in the UK who are being found in places such as Kandahar," he said. "There is a link between Kandahar and urban conurbations in the UK. This is something the military understands but the British public does not."

England has serious problems.  The whole country is eaten through with radical Islam.  No wonder they won't let Geert Wilders into the country; the British civil war might move from Afghanistan to London. 

Now here’s a 2009 headline from The Times :of London Muslim

Population ‘Rising 10 Times Faster Than Rest Of Society’.

A little bit harder for that one to get lost in translation. According to the United Kingdom’s Office of National Statistics, the greatest number of “Christians” (whatever that means in a contemporary Anglican context) is to be found among the over-70s, and the largest number of Muslims is in the cohort aged four and under. Which is Britain’s past and which Britain’s future? No need to ask a “scaremongering fool”. In a land where the head of state is also Supreme Governor of the established church, a quarter of all public elementary schools in England are what are known as “Church of England schools”. In practice, they cannot teach Christianity because many of them, especially in the inner cities, are now overwhelmingly Muslim. In the Blackburn and Dewsbury C-of-E schools, every single pupil is Muslim. At others, the retreating Christian community can still muster up to one per cent of the enrolment. In Bradford, the Church is building a new school for what will be an entirely Muslim student body. “Demographics change,” says the Venerable Peter Ballard, Archdeacon of Lancaster. “There was certainly a Christian population there at one time and, who knows, 20 years from now the Christians might be back.”

Not in 20 years. According to official statistics, of “white British Christian” households 16 per cent have two or more dependent children; among the UK’s “Pakistani Muslim” households, the figure is 50 per cent; “Bangladeshi Muslims”, 58 per cent.

While he had the demographic facts dead on, he underestimated the pull to conversion that a confident religion has, especially when set loose in post-Christian Europe:

In the next few years, Brussels, Antwerp, Amsterdam, Rotterdam will become majority Muslim. Let’s say you work in an office in those cities: One day they install a Muslim prayer room, and a few folks head off at the designated time, while the rest of you get on with what passes for work in the EU. A couple of years go by, and it’s now a few more folks scooting off to the prayer room. Then it’s a majority. And the ones who don’t are beginning to feel a bit awkward about being left behind.

What do you do? The future showed up a lot sooner than you thought. If you were a fundamentalist Christian like those wackjob Yanks, signing on to Islam might (pace Mr Ferrigno) cause you some discomfort. But, if you’re the average post-Christian Eurosecularist, what’s the big deal? Who wants to be the last guy sitting in the office sharpening his pencil during morning prayers?

Funny how quickly it all happened. There was the woman on reception, but she retired. And the guy in personnel who used to say, sotto voce, that Geert Wilders had a point. But he emigrated the year after Wilders did.

 

Mark Steyn is the best columnist in the English-speaking world.  His latest column in National Review Online, "From Islamabad to Bradford" is another example of why.  He has an eye for the odd detail, the little known fact, that reveals so much about what is going on in the world. 

In this instance, the little known fact that unlocks a mystery is that there are four non-stop flights per week from Islamabad, Pakistan, to Bradford, Yorkshire, England.  Those non-stop flights are the connection between Sharia law in Pakistan's Swat Valley and the refusal of the British authorities to admit Geert Wilders, the Dutch Member of Parliament who (quite correctly) compares Islam to Nazism, into their country:

In return for a temporary ceasefire, the Pakistani government agreed to let the local franchise of the Taliban impose its industrial strength version of sharia across the whole of Malakand Region. If “region” sounds a bit of an imprecise term, Malakand has over five million people, all of whom are now living under a murderous theocracy. . . .

But don’t worry about Pakistani nukes falling into the hands of “extremists”: The Swat Valley is a good hundred miles from the “nation”’s capital, Islamabad — or about as far as Northern Vermont is from Southern Vermont. And, of course, Islamabad is safely under the control of the famously moderate Ali Zardari. A few days before the Swat deal, Mr. Zardari marked the dawn of the Obama era by releasing from house arrest A. Q. Khan, the celebrated scientist and one-stop shop for all your Islamic nuclear needs, for whose generosity North Korea and Iran are especially grateful.

From Islamabad, let us zip a world away to London. Actually, it’s nearer than you think. The flight routes between Pakistan and the United Kingdom are some of the busiest in the world. Can you get a direct flight from your local airport to, say, Bradford?

Where?

Bradford, Yorkshire. There are four flights a week from Islamabad to Bradford, a town where 75 percent of Pakistani Britons are married to their first cousins. But don’t worry, in the country as a whole, only 57 percent of Pakistani Britons are married to first cousins.

Among that growing population of Yorkshire Pakistanis is a fellow called Lord Ahmed, a Muslim member of Parliament. He was in the news the other day for threatening (as the columnist Melanie Phillips put it) “to bring a force of 10,000 Muslims to lay siege to the House of Lords” if it went ahead with an event at which the Dutch parliamentarian Geert Wilders would have introduced a screening of his controversial film Fitna. Britain’s Home Secretary, Jacqui Smith, reacted to this by declaring Minheer Wilders persona non grata and having him arrested at Heathrow and returned to the Netherlands.

The piece is full of wit and wisdom, but Steyn saved his best zinger for the end.  In order to appreciate it, you need to know (1) that George Bush had borrowed a bust of Winston Churchill from a British Government art collection for display in the Oval Office, and that Barack Obama, evidently not a fan of Churchill, returned it, and (2) what Churchill said about Islam in "The River War," (for which you can go to my 2/24/2008 blog entry).

Meanwhile, President Obama has removed Winston Churchill’s bust from the Oval Office and returned it to the British. Given what Sir Winston had to say about Islam in his book on the Sudanese campaign, the bust will almost certainly be arrested at Heathrow and deported as a threat to public order.