Here's the scoop:

 

More than half the people with Turkish and Moroccan backgrounds in the Netherlands say they would consider leaving the country due to the growing popularity of anti-Islam politician Geert Wilders. A third say they would definitely like to emigrate, according to a survey published on Monday. The current affairs TV-programme Netwerk commissioned the survey in response to the success of Wilders' populist Party for Freedom (PVV) in the recent European parliamentary elections. Research bureau Motivaction interviewed 319 Turkish and Moroccan people asking them about their feelings about the Netherlands in general and Wilders in particular. A large majority (70 percent) of Dutch Muslims have either Turkish or Moroccan roots.

Bottom line in this poll on feelings? Aside from feeling like heading back to Dar al-islam (land of Islam), most Muslims in Holland feel "less comfortable" (57 percent) due to Wilders' success, and nearly 75 percent said " they thought Wilders had intensified negative feelings towards Musims among the Dutch public."

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Finally, a Supreme Court decision on Ricci v. Destefano, the racial discrimination case in which the city of New Haven refused to promote  firemen who passed a 2003 managerial test because of the color of their skin -- white. In a vote of 5-4, the court reversed lower court rulings, including one signed onto by Supreme Court nominee and "wise Latina" Sotomayor, upholding New Haven's discriminatory practices. From the Wash Post:

"Fear of litigation alone cannot justify an employer's reliance on race to the detriment of individuals who passed the examinations and qualified for promotions," Justice Anthony Kennedy said in his opinion for the court. He was joined by Chief Justice John Roberts and Justices Samuel Alito, Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas.

In dissent, Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg said the white firefighters "understandably attract this court's sympathy. But...

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The title of this post is taken from the title of a front page article in today's Washington Post that talks on (and on) about all the "hope" kindled by protesting women in Iran, all the "inspiration" drawn from protesting women in Iran without ever specifying what the object of that hope or the source of that inspiration is. (This will comes as no surprise to Ruth King, who has highlighted this glaring omission.)

Oh, sure, there is mention of "demanding the rights that have been stolen from us," and  "women [fighting] for their rights,"  but there is no further mention of what those...

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Via Michelle Malkin.

Check out the sass and punch of this letter to Fox that a reader shared with me this morning:

Hey, FoxNews.  Mr. Murdoch. All of you:   I see that Michael Jackson is still your headline story today.   How is it that you're not concerned that the House voted yesterday to pass the largest tax increase in American history and no one in Congress (yet again) even read the bill before voting on it?  How about the 300 pages that the Dems dumped into the bill yesterday at 3:00 a.m., and that there was not a House Republican who actually had a copy in his hands as the bill went to a vote?  Not interested?   But let's all get back to this freak of nature Michael Jackson - he's the real story here - the pillar of our Republic - the one who made this nation what it is - ah, yes, let's hear some more - for the next month or so as we wait breathlessly for the toxicology reports to come back.   I give up on you people.  The last beacon...

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Over at Family Security Matters, Ruth King tells it like it is ... to women. She writes:

I am dismayed by a number of stylish, well coiffed, décolleté and manicured “feminists” in America, including Iranian expatriates, who urge the courageous women of Iran to continue their bloody struggle against the regime in Iran without naming the real enemy….Sharia. It is like telling them to die in vain.   The poster-boy for the rebellion is Moussavi and he and his “reformist” wife, who dresses in hijab, utter not a single word of opposition to Sharia, the cruel, misogynist Islamic law that oppresses women and reduces them to the status of animal.   ...   Revolution cannot be successful if sacrifice brings more Islamic repression and degradation with another face and a new set of Ayatollahs. Their jail is Islam and changing the warden from one thug to another will not set them free....

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Over at Pajamas Media, Ed Driscoll kindly cites The Death of the Grown-Up in his news-round-up-cum-obit for Michael Jackson, who, in case you inhabit Pluto, died yesterday. Driscoll takes the long view here to illustrate changing establishment ("overculture") attitudes, then and now, on passing pop stars. Once upon a time 40 years ago, Jimmy Hendrix died at 28 of a drug overdose and the event was covered as a curious news item; now, Michael Jackson suffers a fatal heart attack at 50 and garners wall-to-wall media genuflection. Driscoll writes:

Flashback: For a look at how the culture has transformed in the last forty years, which ties in with Diana West’s...

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This week's column examines the Green Pundit Rush to Judgment that "the Persian street" is filled with Our Kind of People: anti-Khomeini, anti-sharia, anti-Islamic Revolution, anti-regime, anti-nuke, pro-West, pro-Israel, pro-secular masses yearning to "free"--  in the specifically Western sense, which emphasizes the rights and will of the individual, and nothing to do with the Islamic sense, which speaks to a "perfect enslavement" to Allah. This would necessarily mean that most of the protestors do not support the opposition candidate Mousavi, who, having spent his early political career advancing jihad against the West (US), has made his current intentions to restore Iran to "the pure principles of the Islamic Revolution" quite clear.

Is it possible most protestors are motivated by political beliefs wholly separate from Mousavi's candidacy? By the available evidence, It doesn't seem likely. The point is, though, the...

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In a riff off "The Spirit of '79," Andrew Bostom points out for anyone still wondering that the protestors in Tehran are actually saying "Allahu Akbar," not -- as those who see a secularist behind every headscarf seem to think -- "I Want a Clark Bar."

Along more serious lines, Bostom goes on to respond to the Mousavi speech contained in my earlier post, a speech that stands as a paean to the noxious Ayatollah Khomeini and ends with Mousavi's stated intention to return Iran to "the pure principles of the Islamic Revolution." Bostom writes:

This depressing closed Islamic circle mindset—which still holds sway—was elucidated a century ago (in 1909) by the scholar W.H.T. Gairdner, while his candor and wisdom are  absent among our contemporary elites, most` notably those suffering from Soylent Green Revolution Derangement Syndrome:

...

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Below is the text of statement attributed to Mousavi. I have seen it reproduced or referenced at blogs of The Atlantic, The Guardian, Michael Ledeen's Pajamas Media blog and elsewhere, but no Old Media.** There doesn't seem to be any way to verify its provenance for sure, but it merits consideration as very possibly the Real McCoy. I have posted it below in its entirety to allow readers to see for themselves what is apparently Mousavi's reverence for and devotion to the 1979 Islamic revolution that brought Ayatollah Khomeini to power, ultimately turning Iran into a sharia-guided, jihadist sponsor of global terror. If this statement is for real, it tells us (again) that Mousavi isn't about to take Iran into the future;  he's all about turning the clock back to 1979--as he puts it, "to the Islamic revolution as it was."

**UPDATE: I have since found a June 20 Reuters story datelined Tehran that quotes from this Mousavi speech, sourcing it to Mousavi's website--I'm guessing Kalameh, a Farsi language news portal linked at the bottom of this post. It wasn't the imprimatur of Old Media I was after; just some credible attribution to anchor the online appearance of the text itself. I'm satisfied it's his words.

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Went to Mousavi's website and found this under "Policies" : "An effective foreign policy agenda that enhances the county's [sic] world image is undoubtedly in the best interests of the people."

But that's all it says. Maybe the site is still under construction. Also on the page, beneath a curiously placed ad for getting a "master of arts in diplomacy" from one Norwich University in Vermont (huh?), is a Youtube featuring an Al Jazeera interview with Mousavi in which he makes three points: in the future, "direct talks with the United States will be possible" (big whoop), and that under no circumstances will Iran halt its nuke program (duh). The most interesting question was about Israel:

Al Jazeera: There is fear in the West among many right-wing extremist groups...

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Photo: The WSJ calls him "Iranian reformist clergyman" Mohsen Kadivar.

Ahistorical and illogical things have been been written by many observers of the Iranian election protests who, looking at what the evidence to date suggests is little more than an intra-Islamic power struggle, see a glorious revolution of liberty-loving secularists ready to propel Iran into the heart of the Western world. Maybe it's the blue jeans that confuse them. Anyway, I think we have a winner in this dubious category: Bret Stephens of the Wall Street Journal. His column begins this way:

It isn't always that the words Allahu Akbar sound this sweet to Western ears.

I'm actually going to let "Allahu Akbar" sounding so "sweet to Western ears" pass because there is so much more....Stephens continues:

It's a muggy Friday afternoon and I'm standing curbside right outside Iran's Permanent Mission to the U.N. in New York City. Preaching in Farsi is a turbaned Shiite imam named Mohsen Kadivar. Hours earlier, in Tehran, Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei had delivered a bullying sermon at Tehran University, warning the opposition that they would be "responsible for bloodshed and chaos" if they continued to march. Mr. Kadivar's sermon -- punctuated by the Allahu Akbars of 20 or so kneeling worshippers -- is intended as a direct riposte. Allahu Akbar has also become the rallying cry of the demonstrators in Iran.

...

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In a New York Daily News op-ed, Fred Gedrich reports something shocking that I am sure most Americans do not know: The State Department, from Bush to Obama, has never designated the Taliban a Foreign Terrorist Organization (FTO).

Given that the Taliban is foreign, terrorist and an organization, what gives?

Gedrich writes:

Neither the Bush nor Obama administrations has articulated the reasons for failing to designate the Taliban as an FTO, and congressional overseers haven't publicly asked them why. The most reasonable assumption is that administration officials were hopeful that nonlisting would eventually facilitate rapprochement with "reconcilable" Taliban elements.

To date, the facts prove this option...

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Today's NYT carries an observation that should give us further pause before assuming the Iranian protest movement is a movement of "freedom fighters."  UC Irvine's Roxanne Varzi, described as a cultural anthropologist "who has studied the way the [Iranian] government spreads its ideology," says, as the paper puts it, "The strength of the protests is that they have remained within religion." That would be Islam, natch. It is her view that "the opposition movement adopted the whole Islamic discourse." She says: "It is not meant to something anti-Islamic, even for those who are secular in their practices. Because they have kept inside that structure, it is hard for the government to justify clamping down on them."

Well, if the opposition movement is not meant to be anti-Islamic, it's not meant to be anti-sharia, either. So, poof, there goes the...

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Today's lead Page One article in the Washington Post -- three columns wide down the top middle -- is headlined "A Personal Touch in Taliban Fight." It features two photographs of US Army Capt. Michael Harrison, described in the headline as "a company commander [who] strives to gain the trust of frustrated villagers."  Besides the main picture of the captain with a villager, which is available online, there is a secondary picture, which is not available online. Maybe that's because it was taken by the writer of the piece, Greg Jaffe, and not a Post photographer; I don't know. This smaller photo shows the American officer, on duty, in a war zone, dressed in a sky-blue salwar-kameeze, the native Afghan dress US soldiers refer to as "manjammies." The caption reads: "Harrison, dressed in a salwar-kameez to seem less like a foreigner, talks with an Afghan family after meeting with villagers."

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Having been in transit during the start of the Iranian election protests, I've taken a little time to come up to speed on the issue. Scanning English-language (UK) papers in airports, I will say that my initial reaction to the euphoria I saw breaking out all over the West -- especially the US? -- to the obtusely labeled "green" revolution was, Why should we be so happy about Mousavi? When I learned that Mousavi was Mullah Rafsanjani's boy, that A-jad was Mullah Khameini's boy, my wonder deepened, as in: What's the diff? When I read John Bolton's piece at Politico noting that nobody runs for president in Iran without the express approval of the mullahs, my gut reaction was bolstered by some real facts. Here is Bolton's cheat sheet rundown:

First, only candidates screened and approved by the mullahs in the...

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Photo: Iran's Rafsanjani (Mousavi's mullah) with Iraq's Maliki, March 2009.

Off the wires:

BAGHDAD, June 20 (Xinhua) -- Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki said Saturday that the U.S. troops' withdrawal from Iraqi cities and towns by the end of this month would be a "great victory" for Iraqis.

"It is a great victory for Iraqis as we are going to take our first step toward ending the foreign presence in Iraq," Maliki said during a conference in Baghdad for leaders of ethnic Turkmen minority.

So, Maliki is claiming a "great victory" in "ending the foreign presence in Iraq" as US troops withdraw from Iraqi cities. "Ingrate" doesn't begin to describe this creep -- or, as Bush loyalists still prate, "our ally."

More than 4,000 US troops died defending...

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This week's syndicated column:

COPENHAGEN, Denmark -- I am being patted down by a female Danish security officer in the basement of the parliament building in Copenhagen and I have a thought. I have just triggered the metal detector -- my heels, I'm sure -- en route upstairs to the Landstingssalen, formerly the parliament's upper house. There, I am scheduled to deliver a speech at the invitation of the Danish Free Press Society, or Trykkefrihedsselskabet. (Say that three times fast -- or slow.) Indeed, I am holding the text of my 20-minute address inside a folder in one of my hands, now rigidly outstretched as I am...

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On Sunday, June 14, I joined (from L to R) Ann Fishman of the Liberty Legal Project, Wafa Sultan, author of the upcoming "A God Who Hates," Mrutyuanjai Mishra of the Danish Free Press Society, and Dutch parliamentarian Geert Wilders in the Danish parliament for a daylong conference sponsored by the Danish Free Press Society on "Free Speech and Islam."

My topic was "The Impact of Islam on Free Speech in the US." Here is the written text:     Americans are proud, and rightly so, of the First Amendment in the Bill of Rights, which, among other things, protects speech from government control. The Amendment says in part: “Congress shall make no law abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press.”

Increasingly, however, Americans seem content to regard the First Amendment not as the fundamental working tool of democracy, but as a national heirloom, a kind of antique to admire rather than put to use. I don’t think...

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Pick one:

"Columns like Diana West’s don’t belong in the newspaper"

or:

"Newspaper needs more columns like Diana West’s"

Hmmm....

Now, I'm really off the page till next week....

One more thing: I appreciate the Cumberland Times-News in Western Maryland for publishing both sides of this burning question!

No column this week, folks. Back next weekish.

Photo of Hezbollah: Petraeus thinks they have "justifications"

I've never been a huge fan of Gen. David Petraeus due to 1) his elevation as an advisor of David "Accidental Guerilla" Kilcullen (whose Islam-free war analysis blinds the US to this day), 2) his PC reliance on "hearts and minds" (at one point in Iraq, he ordered posters hung in every barracks asking, "What Have You Done To Win Iraqi Hearts and Minds Today?"), and, not least, 3) his abject failure to force the belligerency of Iran into the national debate over US strategy in Iraq. Talk about Vietnam Redux: Ignoring Iranian (and Syrian) safe havens for anti-American fighters has led to I don't even want to think of how many US casualties. Meanwile, I still don't see "the surge" as more than stolid police work -- as in, put more men on the streets, crime goes down -- assisted...

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Photo: B. Hussein O. in the Cairo al-Bully Pulpit

Frank Gaffney has beaten me to it, darn it, in an excellent column in which he makes the apt point that if Bill Clinton is nicknamed our "first black president" (so dubbed admiringly by Toni Morrison) for pandering to black special interests, then Barack Hussein Obama should surely be recognized as our first Muslim president for advocating, lobbying and even preaching on behalf of Islam. Here is the Gaffney column, along with a final point of my own:

During his White House years, William Jefferson Clinton — someone Judge Sonia Sotomayor might call a "white male" — was dubbed "America's first black president" by a black admirer. Applying the standard of identity politics and pandering to a special interest that earned Mr. Clinton that distinction, Barack Hussein Obama would have to be considered America's first Muslim...

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This week's column argues that the President of the United States should have addressed the Muslim world from Little Rock, where Pvt. William Long was killed in a jihad attack on Monday--not "the land where Islam began"....

One additional point: the pathetic acknowledgment of the attack that finally came out of the White House on Wednesday afternoon was only released to Arkansas media in response to their requests for a statement. I have never heard of a state-specific statement like that. Guess the White House didn't want anyone outside Arkansas (as in Cairo) to find out about it?

Here's the column:

The last thing...

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My friend Paul Belien analyzes the "unofficial results" of yesterday's elections in the Netherlands today at Brussels Journal. They indicate:

the Freedom Party PVV of Dutch opposition leader Geert Wilders has won at least 4, maybe even 5, of the 25 Dutch MEP seats in the first European elections in which the PVV has ever participated. The party, founded by Mr Wilders two years ago, became the second largest party in the Netherlands, after the governing Christian-Democrat CDA of Prime Minister Jan-Peter Balkenende, which wins 5 seats. In studying the Dutch electoral map, Paul also observes that the results reveal that "the PVV appeals to the whole spectrum of the Dutch indigenous population, from the right to the left, with its program against the Islamization of Europe, its outspoken support for Israel, and against the transformation of the European Union into a European superstate."

Mark the use of the phrase "indigenous...

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GREAT news on the first day of European elections.

In PVV's very first run for European Parliament, the anti-immigration, anti-EU party of Geert Wilders is running huge--so far looking as if it will have started out on Election Day with zero seats and ended up with four of the Netherlands' 25 seats--the second largest bloc of Dutch seats. 

One of PVV's policies is to oppose Turkish accession to the EU. As Wilders puts it:

"Should Turkey as an Islamic country be able to join the European Union? We are the only party in Holland that says, it is an Islamic country, so no, not in 10 years, not in a million years," he said.

The clarity. The forthrightness. If I hadn't already said goodbye to Mitt, I would urge him to take copious notes.

According to The Telegraph: "The three main Dutch parties all lost seats on the first day of voting across the 27-country European...

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Never seen anything quite like this: an American president on a receiving line with his hand hanging out...unshaken. The power attraction here is the Saudi King.

UPDATE: Mystery explained--not quite. The prez-dissers are Obama's very own David Axelrod and Valerie Jarrett. Guess they get enough of the boss at home. Or maybe the allure of "His Majesty" was so overwhelming that they forgot The (mere) One ....

Via Debbie Schlussel:

While the 44th al-POTUS has traveled to Saudi -- "the place where Islam began ...  to seek seek his majesty's counsel," as Obama put it (insert air sickness bag here) -- and has "Holy Koranned" his way through his Cairo dawa, it is my regrettable task to report that Beau Romney appears to have been been drinking out of same oasis. Lawrence Auster has the bad news:

Asked by Dan Gilgoff of U.S. News & World Report if his repeated references to "jihad" in a speech at the Heritage Foundation this week characterized Islam in sinister terms, Mitt Romney surprised Gilgoff with this reply: 

 

I didn't refer to Islam at all, or to any other religion for that matter. I spoke about three major threats America faces on a long term basis. Jihadism is one of them,...

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Dick Morris and Eileen Gann describe the real Saudi bow now in motion as Al-POTUS touches down in "The Kingdom" on Magic Carpet One  -- (hey, I'm just getting into the Islamo-spirit of Barack Hussein Obama's extremely delusional and/or extremely hopeful? statement of yesterday calling these United States "one of the largest Muslim countries in the world"). There, he is  utterly dissing our kindred ally Israel with the Big By-Pass, determining that Israeli babies are the gravest threat to Middle East peace, reaching out to Iran, and now this:

But as he goes to Saudi Arabia, the United States State Department, headed by Mrs. Hillary Clinton, has announced that it has accepted the ground rules for media coverage of the Obama visit to the royal family and its domain. Reporters will only be allowed to cover the actual meetings...

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From the AP:

In a new overture to Iran, the Obama administration has authorized U.S. embassies around the world to invite Iranian officials to Independence Day parties they host on or around July 4th....

So, we'll bring the sparklers, they'll bring the centrifuge....? Sounds like, er, fun. (Insert raucous peals of inappropriate Hillary laughter here.) Meanwhile, in a distinctly less congenial frame of mind, Obama is telling the Israelis not to have any more babies.

Maybe this is all part of Obama's new "good role model" offensive. As he told the BBC on the almost-eve of his foreign trip (first bow, I mean, stop, Saudi Arabia), ...

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If Nero got a bad rap just for fiddling while Rome burned, what will happen to the Obamas for jetting off to "date night" in the Big Apple amidst economic gloom, just as once-mighty GM was preparing to file for bankruptcy and lay off some 21,000 workers?

Nothing. The media, the political elites see nothing even the slightest bit amiss, let alone unseemly, about the Obamas taking three planes, some helicopters and a motorcade -- courtesy the US taxpayer -- to get them to dinner and a show in NYC because the prez "promised" this to Michelle during the campaign for "when it was all over."

Well, just because the man was elected doesn't mean "it's all over." Indeed, the hard presidential work has hardly begun. Meanwhile, flitting off to a night on the town in NYC is a thing of Boom, not Bust times, no? It was left to the RNC to wonder what was wrong with the presidential box at the Kennedy Center if the Prez and First Lady wanted a night out -- not (never) the media.

...

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Peggy Noonan has decided that "standing for principles" and not voting for them is ... "grown-up."

Having written a book like this, them's fightin' words. Avoiding consequences, taking shortcuts, shirking responsibilities -- all comprise the m.o. of the hopelessly immature, a category fit for any US senator who, believing Justice should be blind and not a perpetual grievance avenger, votes to confirm Sonia Sotomayor. This remains true no matter how many soothing adjectives -- "serious," "calm," "judicious" -- Noonan intones  to cloak such undutiful irresponsibility.

What she and others such as Charles Krauthammer are advocating is nothing less than Taxidermy Conservatism--all stuffed shirts, hot air and no action. No blood, either. Just plenty o' "calm" as Peggy's GOP votes itself into an airless and dusty oblivion.       

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Good news from the Thomas More Law Center about its extremely important lawsuit accusing the US government of using taxpayer money to promote Islam and sharia (Islamic law) through its AIG bailout:

In his well-written and detailed analysis issued yesterday, Judge Zatkoff denied the request by the Obama administration’s Department of Justice to dismiss the lawsuit.  The request was filed on behalf of Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner and the Federal Reserve Board – the named defendants in the case.  In his ruling, the judge held that the lawsuit sufficiently alleged a federal constitutional challenge to the use of taxpayer money to fund AIG’s Islamic religious activities. Richard Thompson, President and Chief Counsel of the Thomas More Law Center, commented, “It is outrageous that AIG has been using taxpayer money to promote Islam and Shariah law, which potentially provides support for...

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...and the moral of this week's Sotomayor column is, Please, Conservatives, don't Roll Over and Play Dead.

This week's syndicated column

Frank Ricci is "just" a fireman, and not, like Supreme Court Justice nominee Sonia Sotomayor, a federal judge. He is "only" a white male, and not, like Sotomayor, a "Latina." And while he works in New Haven, Conn., he certainly didn't attend Yale Law School as Sotomayor did. For one thing, he's dyslexic. That's why Ricci spent more than $1,000 to pay an acquaintance to make recordings of the educational materials Ricci needed to master in order to pass a 2003 test that was specially drawn...

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The Washington Post's Dana Milbank found Obama spokesman Robert Gibbs' tongue-tie-ups over questions about Sonia Sotomayor's supremacist race theories -- namely, that the "rich experiences" of the "wise Latina woman" make her a better judge than the "white male" -- worth reporting more or less verbatim. The questions carommed off Newt Gingrich's contention that the Supreme Court nominee should withdraw.

Milbank writes:

Former House speaker Newt Gingrich joined the chorus. "A white man racist nominee would be forced to withdraw," he wrote on his blog. "Latina woman racist should also withdraw."

Yesterday afternoon, the matter spilled into the White House briefing room. "Are you familiar with Newt Gingrich's blog?" asked CBS News's Chip Reid.

White House...

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From Defeating Political Islam by Moorthy Muthuswamy, some excellent new, concrete ideas about fighting global jihad.

My favorite: Dump our supposed "allies" from what Muthuswamy calls the Axis of Jihad -- namely, Saudi Arabia and Pakistan (the other A of J country is Iran) -- and decisively bond with our natural allies already fighting jihad such as India and Israel. While we have good relations with the latter countries, we minimize their roles, or even exclude them altogether, from openly aiding in "war on terror" out of fear of offending Islam. (This is part of our wholly misguided, if so far regrettably victorious War on Muslim Alienation.)

Here is my book review, which ran in yesterday's Washington Times:

...

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"I would hope that a wise Latina woman with the richness of her experiences would more often than not reach a better conclusion [as a judge] than a white male who hasn't lived that life." -- Judge Sonia Sotomayor, in her Judge Mario G. Olmos Law and Cultural Diversity Lecture at the University of California (Berkeley) School of Law in 2001.

BH Obama has nominated a race- and sex- supremacist to the Supreme Court.

Marriage is on the rocks. And I'm not talking about the Supreme Court, acts of Congress, "civil union," or Miss America. By personal fiat, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton just sounded yet another death knell for what we must now categorize as "traditional marriage" by extending benefits reserved for the spouses of State Department employees "to all unmarried domestic partners -- both same-sex and heterosexual." 

These include, according to yesterday's A6 Washington Post story, "paid travel to and from overseas posts, shipments of household effects, visas and diplomatic passports, emergency travel to visit ill or injured partners, and evacuation in case of a security emergency or medical necessity."

Since when does the Secretary of State legislate domestic...

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I don't who gets to play the Dotty Lamour part, but this has got to be a buddy movie/road picture in the making. What laughs! What chemistry!

Only problem is, of course, four's a crowd. That is, there's no room for the US in this story. The points of this love triangle -- Hamid-Mahmoud-Ali -- are all clearly taken.

Which is a good thing. If Hamid hearts Mahmoud hearts Ali, this is one foreign affair the US should keep its men and $$$ -- its tens of thousands of men and it billions and billions of $$$ -- out of. Get it?

Had lunch with a Marine officer who has served three tours in Iraq. He remains extremely disturbed about the ROE (rules of engagement), which he said grew increasingly constricting. He talked, for example, about the insanity of repeatedly arresting and releasing (and arresting and releasing again) enemy fighters, and noted "you can't shoot someone setting an IED...."

Why not? Why couldn't the US have announced that IED-booby-trappers would be shot? The message could have been broadcast in mosques, through leaflets, the works. It seems like the grossest act of US civilian and US military negligence not to have done so, particularly looking back on all  our (Iranian-made) IED casualties in Iraq. Such a common-sense policy, however, isn't PC, and PC always comes first.

My Marine friend thinks if...

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1. When Obama says, "We're out of money," what is he really doing? View from the Right ventures a good guess.

2. How do you explain California's crack-up without mentioning illegal immigration? Answer: You don't. Nicholas Stix explains.

3. The London Telegraph may find the British National Party "comical," but I'm starting to doubt they're going to feel like laughing come Election Day.

AP Photo: Afghans railing against a January 2009  U.S. strike that killed 15 Taliban forces "but," as the AP caption put it, "village elders who quickly traveled to speak with government officials said the dead were all civilians." Shakedown time? Joint Chiefs Chairman Mullen says these are the people whose "trust" our troops need to win. As I wrote earlier, how's about if he goes first? ---

This week's column examines the mindless logic of pursuing "victory" in Afghanistan through waging what is looking more and more like a "war on civilian casualties." Our leadership, military and civilian, has decided that eliminating Afghan civilian casualties (bogus or not) is the surefire way to win Afghan hearts and minds. They don't say "hearts and minds," of course; they say "trust." But it's the same darn, stupid thing....

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This is a photo of Moaz Esther, an Israeli outpost that was demolished by Israeli security forces this morning at the behest, media say, of Barack Obama.

This, apparently, is only the first of many. As Haaretz reports (via IMRA):

Ministers, including those from Likud, said Wednesday that Netanyahu probably promised United States President Barack Obama in their meeting that Israel would dismantle outposts soon....

Evacuating illegal outposts in the West Bank is expected to be the Netanyahu government's first gesture toward Obama and the Palestinian Authority.

What next? Self-immolation? This is part of the "price" Netanyahu paid Obama in exchange for the latter's statements about Iran's nuclearization, the sources said.

...

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AP Photo: Some of the thousands of Afghans who protested an American strike on the Taliban/"civilian casulaties," East of Kabul, in January 2009. Admiral Mullen has ordered US forces to win their "trust." Idea: How's about if he goes first?

--- Afghanistan is already dubbed "Obama's War," but there's another possible father to this misbegotten conflict: David Kilcullen, the Australian former aide to Gen. Petraeus in Iraq.

(Kilcullen, of course, is infamous for the following, utterly mindless, equal parts stupid and putrid comment: "If I were a Muslim, I'd probably be a jihadist. The thing that drives these guys -- a sense of adventure, wanting to be part of the moment, wanting to be in the big movement of history that's happening now -- that's the same thing that drives me, you know?")

Kilcullen popped up in today's NYT, toward the end of yet another appalling story about US officials, including the new US ambassador to Afghanistan LTG Eikenberry (ret.), who have been snookered into going to war in Afghanistan ... in order to avoid "civilian casualties." You thought it was to "defeat" the Taliban and win one for our great ally in counter-jihad, the Afghan people (harhar)? Even that idiotic idea is now beside the point.

...

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Photo: See Rotterdam and see ... the largest mosque in Eurabia

Via Sandro Magister's Chiesa, a website that reports on the Catholic Church and Islamic matters, a horrifying travelogue through the Islamicized, sharia-compliant heart of islam's European capital, Rotterdam.



Photo: "Muslim women in Rotterdam." It is from an exhibition in 2008 by the Dutch photographers Ari Versluis and Ellie Uyttenbroek.

The article was first printed in the Italian newspaper Il Foglio on May 14, Magister notes, the second in a major seven-part survey on Holland....

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I just read Mark Steyn's Commentary piece, "Israel Today, the West Tomorrow," which surveys the ghoulishly vicious and rising anti-Semitism in Europe that is correlated to the continent's burgeoning Islamic populations. This poison serves to corrode further Europe's support for Israel.

Missing, however, is an explanation for Islamic anti-Semitism that goes deeper than what is commonly misperceived as a mere territorial dispute. In other words, even in the flagship publication of the American Jewish Committee, there is no indication that Islamic anti-Semitism is in fact sacralized within Islam by a copious body of foundational documents that essentially commands Muslims to hate and kill Jews -- and drive the former dhimmis-restored-to-glory...

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This week's column weighs in othe Great Cheney Debate: Are we less safe under Barack Obama? Dick Cheney has been decrying the national security policies of the Obama administration -- closing Guantanamo Bay, ending enhanced interrogations of captured jihadists, even preparing to release some into the United States -- because the former vice president says they leave this country more vulnerable to a terrorist attack. "That's my belief," Mr. Cheney told CBS' "Face the Nation" this week. "I think to the extent that those (Bush-era) policies were responsible for saving lives, that the administration is now trying to cancel those policies ... means in the future we're not going to have the same safeguards we've had for the last eight years." I agree the new policies make...

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In a triumph for  "Palestinianism" -- which Bat Ye'or thumbnails as "a replacement theory whereby Palestine replaces Israel" (her complete definition here) -- Pope Benedict wholly swallowed and regurgitated the PA narrative in his disgracefully contextless lamentation over the separation fence Israel built to keep PA suicide bombers from exploding in Israel's grocery stores, cafes and buses.

"Just yards from the barrier separating Israelis and Palestinians,"  as the New York Times put it, the Pope "expressed solidarity on Wednesday with `all the homeless Palestinians who long to be able to return to their birthplace, or live permanently in a homeland of their own.' "

Sounds as if the pontiff is pushing the Israel-finisher of so-called  "right of return" to boot....

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Photo: From "Make Me a Muslim," an old credit of the BBC's new religious director Aaqil Ahmed.

The BBC has a new religious programming director, and he is a Muslim. An undercurrent of not-quite-articulated consternation seems to flow through many Brit media accounts of this "first," most of which exempts the new director, Aaqil Ahmed, himself. This main line of argument sticks to the plain statistical fact that Britain remains a Christian country, with 70 percent of the population C of E, and only 2 to 3 percent Muslim -- so why should the Beeb put such a post in Muslim hands? The main exception is a piece titled "Hire a Muslim, Just Not This Muslim," but even this piece is a little oblique as to Ahmed's career. That is, what has Ahmed actually done...

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