Spengler brings up the question:

..In countries where torture is habitual, unexceptionable and embedded in everyday life, it is foolish to imagine that our armed forces might conduct successful operations without employing torture as a matter of normal practice. That is why we cannot hope to intervene in civil societies in the Middle East. On April 4, the London Times published a video of Taliban soldiers publicly torturing a teenaged girl in Pakistan’s Swat Valley, reportedly for the crime of stepping out of her house unaccompanied. It is hideous; men hold the girl down while one beats her with a leather strap. The girl screams in pain. Around her a large circle of men watch…

…This observation came in Pipes’ recent commentary on a remarkable report of the torture of a businessman by a prince of the United Arab Emirates over a commercial dispute. Videotapes of Sheikh Issa bin Zayed al Nahyan torturing a grain dealer over a $5,000 delivery were aired April 22 on ABC News.

The Sheikh begins by stuffing sand down the man’s mouth, as the police officers restrain the victim. Then he fires bullets from an automatic rifle around him as the man howls incomprehensibly. At another point on the tape, the Sheikh can be seen telling the cameraman to come closer. “Get closer. Get closer. Get closer. Let his suffering show,” the Sheikh says.

Over the course of the tape, Sheikh Issa acts in an increasingly sadistic manner. He uses an electric cattle prod against the man’s testicles and inserts it in his anus. At another point, as the man wails in pain, the Sheikh pours lighter fluid on the man’s testicles and sets them aflame. Then the tape shows the Sheikh sorting through some wooden planks. “I remember there was one that had a nail in it,” he says on the tape. The Sheikh then pulls down the pants of the victim and repeatedly strikes him with board and its protruding nail.

Sometimes ignorance and prejudice reinforce a hostile view of peoples or countries. In the case of the Middle East, the vast majority of Americans have no clue as to the degree of ambient cruelty. Leave aside that between 50% (lowest estimate) and 90% (highest estimate) of Egyptian girls are subjected to genital mutilation, the horror of everyday life in what President Obama calls “the Muslim world” is more than the American mind can absorb.

Which regimes in the Western world have been most notorious for a high level of ambient cruelty? Nazi Germany, Soviet Russia, Castro’s Cuba, etc. What do these regimes have in common? All of them completely suppressed freedom. The only way Sheikh Issa can get away with his monstrosity is because he figures no one would ever find out – at least, no one who can possibly over throw him will find out, because he won’t allow anyone to freely inquire into his doings. So it was with Hitler, Stalin and Castro – these men behaved in the most beastly manner possible towards their fellow human beings, but it didn’t matter because there was no one within their nations who could expose it to the general public and thus provoke a reaction against the barbarism.

Moslems, being people, are no different from any other people, on the whole. Certainly, due to their religious background they have some different view points from us, but the fundamentals of humanity are the same everywhere…Fallen Man is capable of horrific acts of evil, but the nature of evil deeds makes all but the most depraved unwilling to do them before the general public. The reason Issa – or Hitler, Stalin or Castro – can do the horrible deeds is because their societies are unfree, and thus there is no one to call them to account. Thus it goes throughout Moslem-majority areas of the world…outside of Iraq and Afghanistan (and, as yet, very imperfectly, even there), there is no place a Moslem can live in surrounded by Moslems where there is the freedom to criticize the government. And so the government’s are able to act in an unjust manner, and this tends to mean that the most ruthless tend to run the show.

Obama is, indeed, far too starry eyed about Islam – and most Americans also don’t have a full appreciation of the sort of people who run the Moslem nations. But we cannot and must not seal ourselves off from Islam – we must engage, by war and diplomacy, in order to press Islam into becoming free. Once the Moslem people are free, they will take care of their own savages, just as we take care of ours.

A word to you liberals who are mad at us for attacking The One:

Criticism may not be agreeable, but it is necessary. It fulfils the same function as pain in the human body. It calls attention to an unhealthy state of things. – Winston Churchill

The absurd lengths some people will go to in order to keep any mention of God out of the public square:

A professor at the government-funded University of California at Los Angeles (UCLA) has prohibited a graduating student from saying “I want to thank my Lord and Savior Jesus Christ,” in her own graduation speech.

Christina Popa just posted the proof emails on her facebook page, showing how other students are permitted to have their speeches read aloud at a pre-graduation ceremony, and Christina would also be allowed, but only if she didn’t mention Jesus.

Instead, UCLA Biology Professor Dr. Pamela Hurley deliberately censored Christina’s proposed speech, and emailed back to Christina saying: “UCLA is a public university where the doctrine of separation of church and state is observed,” and the professor proposed a censored version of Christina’s proposed speech, deleting any reference to Jesus Christ.

When Christina objected, Dr. Hurley threatened, “If you prefer, Christina, I can read none of what you wrote. I am very sorry that this is a problem for you.”

Dr. Hurley would probably be the first to assert she’s a stout defender of academic freedom…

I mean, you wanted DeLay’s head on a pike for a lot less than this:

Rep. John Murtha, D-Pa., steered millions of dollars in defense work to a campaign donor and the Pentagon went along with it, even though two convicted drug dealers had been deeply involved with the company.

Records filed in U.S. District Court in Pittsburgh starting in 2005 raise questions about whether the government ever checked into the background of William Kuchera of Windber, Pa., a Murtha constituent who has been doing government work for over 20 years.

He’s corrupt, liberals – and he’s your hero. But it is time for you to hold your side to the same standard you hold ours. Unless, that is, you’re just a bunch of chicken-poop creeps.

The army has a video presentation on the battle. As a personal note, my maternal grandfather was there.

Wow:

Labour slumped to a record low in yesterday’s local council elections as it was swept from power in its last four counties.

The party faced losing more than 300 seats as its projected share of the vote plummeted to 23 per cent, leaving it trailing in third place in the last big test of public opinion before a General Election.

Gordon Brown admitted the party had suffered a ‘painful defeat’…

…In one extraordinary snapshot of the anger felt by voters, a Monster Raving Loony Party member trounced two Labour candidates in St Ives, Cambridgeshire.

One wonders if Britain’s ridiculous Liberal-Democrat Party (successor to the Liberal Party, last ran Britain’s government in 1922) might come in second in the upcoming general election?

The headline:

US loses just 345,000 jobs in May, raising hopes

Economy sheds 345,000 jobs in May, a big improvement; jobless past shoots well past 9 percent

Can you imagine anything like this when Bush was President? The news of the day on employment is that the unemployment rate has rocketed to 9.4%, and the AP leads with an absurd concept that since only 345,000 jobs were lost in May, things are looking up! Here’s a sample of economic reporting under Bush:

As Factory Job Losses Rise, So Do Risks to Bush

That is from October of 2003, when we were well into recovery from the Clinton and 9/11 recession…any mention in the first linked article about risks to Obama? Nope, just happy/happy, joy/joy that hopes have been raised because only 345,000 jobs were lost in May. I thought that after a while the MSM would stop being entirely slavishly devoted to Obama, but I think now we can expect that when unemployment rises to 15% that the MSM will say that without Obama, it would have been 20%.

Have at it, dear people – I can’t think of anything to write at the moment.

A bit of an antidote to Obama’s speech yesterday:

Christendom might quite reasonably have been alarmed if it had not been attacked. But as a matter of history it had been attacked. The Crusader would have been quite justified in suspecting the Moslem even if the Moslem had merely been a new stranger; but as a matter of history he was already an old enemy. The critic of the Crusade talks as if it had sought out some inoffensive tribe or temple in the interior of Thibet, which was never discovered until it was invaded. They seem entirely to forget that long before the Crusaders had dreamed of riding to Jerusalem, the Moslems had almost ridden into Paris. – G K Chesterton

Still a long way to go before election day, but heartening none the less:

Fresh from his primary victory over Steve Lonegan, Republican Chris Christie enjoys a double-digit lead over Democrat Jon Corzine in the New Jersey Governor’s race.

The latest Rasmussen Reports telephone survey in the state shows Christie with 51% of the vote while Corzine is supported by 38%.

It will take a lot of hard work and dedication on the part of New Jersey and national Republicans to win this race – Corzine has vast resources and Democrats will pull out all the stops from smears to voter fraud to try and pull out a win. New Jersey was one of the harbingers of 1994, and Democrats are determined that there not be a repeat in 2010. So, get ready for the fight and if you live in New Jersey, go volunteer.