POLITICS

We may have done the impossible: finding a professor more contemptible than Ward Churchill. It's a neck-and-neck race, but this guy might be worse.

the "Global War" blog of Associate Professor Julio Pino – a Muslim convert who teaches at Kent State University. The heading for the site used to read "The Worldwide Web of Jihad: Daily News from the Most Dangerous Muslim in America." Now it reads "Are You Prepared for Jihad?" IN THE NAME OF OBL. 2007: THE YEAR OF ISLAMIC VICTORY!"...

Pino began his morning of not going into his office at Kent State by penning a post under the title “Frightened British Crusaders Rush More Troops to Occupied Afghanistan.” Using terms like “occupation” and “Crusaders” it isn’t really necessary to read these posts in order to ascertain who this employee of the State of Ohio is rooting for in the War on Terror.

But, just in case you were curious about the purpose of this site, it is provided in the upper right corner: "We are a jihadist news service, and provide battle dispatches, training manuals, and jihad videos to our brothers worldwide. All we want is to get Allah’s pleasure. We will write ‘Jihad’ across our foreheads, and the stars. The angels will carry our message throughout the world." ...

Under the entry "Sister Detonates Herself to Eliminate Shia Traitors" there is a description of a female suicide bomber who recently killed 41 people. Just in case you wondered how the host of the site feels about the suicide bomber, the next line tells you: "Now she lies on the Golden Couch of Paradise."...

Many people believe that Julio Pino deserves to be fired because of his public statements about the War on Terror. I disagree. A simple firing is too light a punishment.

Dr. Julio Pino, for his decision to "provide battle dispatches, training manuals, and jihad videos to our (enemies) worldwide" deserves to be arrested and sent to an island off the coast of North America, striped naked, interrogated, and, if necessary, tortured to ascertain the extent of his involvement in assisting our enemies.

If this is not behavior worthy of charges of treason, I don't know what is. Freedom of speech is one thing, but providing training manuals and promoting recruitment for jihadists is active support for our enemy.

It is in the news, and NRO is blowing a gasket over it - the story is that the United States is going to enter into negotiations with Iran and Syria...and, of course, this means we're surrendering in the War on Terrorism and other gloom-and-doom scenarios on the right.

Looking that the State Department press briefing, however, I just don't see that - Iraq has called for a regional conference (two of them, actually) at which Iran and Syria will be present along with other nations concerned, including the United States. We don't rule out sitting down to talk one on one, but that is also not something that is scheduled or will actually happen...it is just leaving the door open, depending on circumstances, for us to talk and see if there is any way to work a deal...and it is good to keep in mind that Iran is broke, and under increasing internal strain. They might be ready to quit - especially if they feel that we're getting closer and closer to the end of our patience and are about to unleash military strikes. This is just real diplomacy - which, lefties, is always backed up by a willingness to use force.

Seems like a bit of wisdom to me. I think I'll trust President Bush and Secretary Rice on this one as opposed to pundits who have no responsibility for the lives and safety of Americans.

UPDATE: Now that I've had some hours to think about this, I'd like to ad the following:

Iran's government has been going flat out for nukes, improved weaponry and supporting terrorism in Iraq, Lebanon and elsewhere. This is all rather expensive, and Iran is not in good fiscal health. Additionally, the Iranian people are restive under a repressive regime which can't even provide some hope for improvement down the road. All too often, American observers either overly downplay a threat, or play it up too much - one needs to stop thinking in terms of good or bad fantasies.

The mullahs in Iran are our enemies and will remain so - as I've said, the case for an American war with Iran is strong, and I don't see much way for us to avoid a fight with Iran at some future point UNLESS things change in a major way...and they might he changing. While people who wish to criticise the Bush Administration will always seek to put the worst possible spin on things - the left saying Iran is no threat at all, the critics on the right saying its Godzilla-like in proportions - it should be borne in mind that the United States is overwhelmingly more powerful than Iran (and, yes, we do retain sufficient military power to deal death blows to Iran even with our committments to Iraq) and while there is a strain of messianic insanity in the Iranian leadership, there could very well be some in that leadership who know that challenging us is suicidal.

While it appears that the lunatics are in the saddle, there is just that chance that the non-lunatics are in a position to gain the upper hand, and we'd be worse than fools to not at least take a look at it. Maybe we'll have some one on one talks, and maybe after they are done President Bush will get a report which says the Iranians are determined on a challenge. Fine and dandy - if war is what they want, war is what they'll get...but lets not have a war just to adhere to some pure ideal of how to deal with tryannical States.

Yesterday, President Bush met with the President of El Salvador - an ally in the War on Terrorism.

For those of you too young to remember, back in the early 1980's, communists were attempting to take over El Salvador and turn it into another Cuba. When Reagan sent aid to the El Salvadorans so they could defend themselves, Democrats were opposed. Democrats said it was a civil war, that the "insurgents" were entirely native and only wanted foreign interference to be removed. Democrats said there was no way to prevail militarily over the "insurgents"...

Had Democrats got their way, we'd have an enemy regime in El Salvador, rather than an allied democracy.

You think about that.

One of the most pernicious and underreported trends today is the creeping influence of international law and the commensurate erosion of national sovereignty. The nightmare scenario of remote, unaccountable bureaucrats, with no moral authority, much less democratic legitmacy, is steadily becoming more visible. Europe is far ahead of America in this slide away from government by consent of the governed, but there are elements in America who would like nothing more than to subject us all to the whims and wishes of foreign busybodies.

Consider what is happening in Germany to home-schoolers:

Earlier this month, a German teen-ager was forcibly taken from her parents and imprisoned in a psychiatric ward. Her crime? She is being home-schooled.

On Feb. 1, 15 German police officers forced their way into the home of the Busekros family in the Bavarian town of Erlangen. They hauled off 16-year-old Melissa, the eldest of the six Busekros children, to a psychiatric ward in nearby Nuremberg. Last week, a court affirmed that Melissa has to remain in the Child Psychiatry Unit because she is suffering from "school phobia."

Home-schooling has been illegal in Germany since Adolf Hitler outlawed it in 1938 and ordered all children to be sent to state schools...

Six decades after Hitler, German politicians and church leaders still do not understand true freedom: that raising children is a prerogative of their fathers and mothers and not of the state, which is never a benevolent parent and often an enemy.

Hermann Stucher, a pedagogue who called upon Christians to withdraw their children from the state schools which, he says, have fallen into the hands of "neo-Marxist activists," has been threatened with prosecution for "Hochverrat und Volksverhetzung" (high treason and incitement of the people against the authorities). The fierceness of the authorities' reaction is telling. The dispute is about the hearts and minds of the children...

While it is disquieting that Europeans have not learned the lessons from their dictatorial past — upholding Nazi laws and sending dissidents, including children, to psychiatric wards, as the Soviets used to do — there is reason for Americans to worry, too. The United Nations is also restricting the rights of parents. Article 29 of the U.N. Convention on the Rights of the Child stipulates that it is the goal of the state to direct the education of children. In Belgium, the U.N. Convention is currently being used to limit the constitutional right to home-school. In 1995 Britain was told that it violated the U.N. Convention by allowing parents to remove their children from public school sex-education classes.

Last year, the American Home School Legal Defense Association warned that the U.N. Convention could make home-schooling illegal in America, even though the Senate has never ratified it. Some lawyers and liberal politicians in the states claim that U.N. conventions are "customary international law" and should be considered part of American jurisprudence.

No doubt those lawyers and liberal politicians would love to decide who sits on Americas courts. What distinguishes America from most of the rest of the world, including our "allies" in Europe, is that we still value fundamental individual rights while they place a higher value on the state's authority. This basic philosophy, enshrined in our Declaration of Independence, that our rights are endowed by our Creator and not granted by government is something that we often lose sight of.

The Republican Party should elevate this theme in its rhetoric and policymaking and should emphasize the significant difference between it and the Democrats on this issue. We need the GOP to stand for the prerogatives of the individual because there is a plethora of groups advocating a greater role for government in all aspects of our lives. If one of the GOP candidates for President would talk about this grand theme (and relate it to judicial nominations), it would separate him from the pack and attract tremendous admiration. The alternative is to have buffoons like Prince Charles dictating our lives to us.

It really does seem that they won't stop until we have government-funded suicide centers in every town:

�Choice� my foot: If the new bill to legalize assisted suicide in California (A.B. 374) becomes law, Catholic nursing homes will be legally required to permit assisted suicide to be committed within their premises, even though doing so would be a profound violation of Catholic moral teaching. In-patient hospice facilities would be similarly coerced, despite assisted suicide being a direct affront to the hospice philosophy and the medical standards under which programs operate. Other California medical facilities and group homes could also be forced to comply. Only acute-care hospitals escape the proposed tyrannical duty to cooperate in ending patients� lives.

We shouldn�t be surprised. Assisted-suicide advocates are a voracious lot. They claim that their policy goals are modest, a mere tweaking, if you will, of medical ethics and protocols. Being zealots, however, they often try to sneak coercive provisions into their various legalization proposals. A.B. 374 is patterned generally after the law in Oregon, though the coercion about which I write is not found in the current Oregon law or a concurrently introduced assisted-suicide legalization bill in Vermont, and is an attempt to force most medical and nursing facilities to cooperate in the assisted-suicide regime.

Of course, this can't be tolerated - for this Catholic, death is preferrable to assisting in the murder of a fellow human being. I can't speak for anyone else, but I'll bet that most believers of whatever stripe are in general agreement with me. Heck, even most athiests who have an ounce of compassion in them are likely to be disgusted by a law forcing people to do that which they find morally objectionable. But the Culture of Death doesn't care about that - so far down the road to perdition are they, that in order to still the voice of their own conscience, they are pressing harder and harder for everyone else to sign off on their moral error. It is a matter of instead of getting yourself off the booze, you determine to get as many people as possible drunk right along with you.

We must resist this - we must, that is, fight back and expose the death-mongers for what they are: the sirens of despair, the purveyors of hopelessness. We were made to live and to hope, not to despair and die. Once upon a time, the fact of rising suicide rates was considered a big issue - something we had to tackle in order to help the poor people who were trying to kill themselves...we don't hear much about that crusade anymore...and that should tell us all something - something very disturbing.

Our good blog-friend, Dean Esmay, will no longer put up with Islamophobes:

You can be an Islamophobe, or you can contribute to Dean's World. You cannot do both.

This is meant for front-page contributors, submitters, or even commenters. It is time for you to make a choice, and to live by that choice. Because I certainly intend to.

Simply put, you must agree with all of the following assertions:

1) Islam does not represent the forces of Satan or the Anti-Christ bent on destruction of the Christian world.

2) There is no 1,400 year old "war with the West/Christianity" being waged by Muslims or anyone else.

3) Islam as a religion is no more inherently incompatible with modernity, minority rights, women's rights, or democratic pluralism than most religions.

4) Medieval, anachronistic, obscure terms like "dhimmitude" or "taqiyya" are suitable for polite intellectual discussion. They are not and never will be appropriate to slap in the face of everyday Muslims or their friends.

5) Muslims have no more need to prove that they can be good Americans, loyal citizens, decent people, or enemies of terrorism than anyone else does.

Is this a test of "ideological purity?"

Why yes. Yes it is.

If you cannot accept, wholeheartedly, all of the above 5 assertions--without exception or weasel-wording--then if you are a front page Dean's World contributor you should turn in your keys and say goodbye.

I'll have to be in agreement with Dean here - too often these days there is too much of a "kill 'em all, let God sort 'em out" mentality. This in contrast to the other side of the argument which can't see anything wrong with Moslems blowing up innocent people, as long as there's a chance an American soldier will be killed as well.

Make no mistake about it, we are in a war and a war, moreover, which is to the death - one side or the other will survive, the other will die. Period. But this is not a war between Islam and the West, and we dare not think of it as such.

Call the enemy what you will (my preference is the "Islamo-fascist" moniker), but he does have a general worldview and in this worldview not only are non-Moslems at risk, but most Moslems are as well - the enemy being certain that most Moslems are apostates due to the fact that most Moslems don't want to blow up children. While our enemy does base himself upon a singular view of Islam, they are no more representative of the normal run of Islam than obscure, hateful groups who claim to be Christians are representative of the normal run of Christianity.

At bottom, the problem we face is a spiritual one - and we here in the West aren't excused from this basic problem. Here in the West, our fundamental problem is the post-modern (if you will) problem...we've somuch disconnected ourselves from the eternal verities that we are confused and unsure of ourselves. In Islam, their long-term oppression, poverty and disconnect from the main currents of modern times has made them fearful and also unsure of themselves. We need to get back to basics, they need to understand that the basics and modernity are compatible. In our struggle against the common enemy, the Islamo-fascists who pervert the verities and condemn modernity, what we must do is mutually improve each other. In Iraq, with Americans and Iraqis fighting side by side, we see this in action - and the results are encouraging, even if there is very clearly a long way to go.

Blanket condemnations of Islam are as foolish as the blanket condemnations of Judeo-Christian civilization we get not only from our foreign enemies, but from our domestic dimwits. The key to victory - the key to peace - is to understand that we are all human beings, created by the same God. We must set ourselves to the stern task of fighting a cruel enemy, but while we do this we must keep in our hearts and minds the love, charity and justice which we want, and the people of the Moslem world want.

Democrats only a few days ago were talking tough about revoking the authorization for the Iraq war, but coincidentally after reports of Joe Lieberman leaving open the possibility of caucusing with Republicans, they are backing away from their Iraq plan.

Do they still want to cut 'n run and deliver a victory for the terrorists? Yes. But the last thing they want to do is entice Joe Lieberman to hand the Republicans a majority in the Senate again.

I don't think this waffling of the Democrats has anything to do with "divisions in their ranks," as the story says. It has to do with Joe Lieberman. They know that in order to hold on to their majority status in the Senate, they need to start supporting the troops and supporting victory in Iraq. Otherwise, they can kiss their majority in the Senate goodbye.

Last July, I asked all of our readers here at B4B to keep my girlfriend Beth in their thoughts and prayers when she had Chiari decompression surgery. Tomorrow Today, (Wednesday) morning at 8 am ET she will be having her second surgery. This one is called microvascular decompression surgery, and this is for trigeminal neuralgia, a nerve condition that causes really bad facial pains. Normally, she would have had this second surgery shortly after recovering from the first one, but the facial pains went away for some time, and only recently came back, thus making the second surgery a necessity.

I'd like to ask everyone to keep her in your thoughts and prayers again. You are welcome to leave a note here and I will pass it along to her. Please leave political comments out of this thread. Thanks.

UPDATE, 10:51 a.m. ET: Beth is out of surgery now and it went well.

It wasn't too long ago that a strategy document of Guiliani's campaign was leaked to the media, now a PowerPoint presentation, allegedly from within the Romney campaign has been leaked to the Boston Globe, with some equally revealing suggestions and questions within it.

Interestingly enough, virtually everything revealed by the Globe is not secret information and the observations within have been observed for quite some time.

The Boston Globe, however, does not cite a source for the presentation, or explains how they obtained it. The Guiliani memo was reportedly leaked by a political adversary and had been written by staff members. No such information on the Romney PowerPoint presentation was given, nor does the provide graphic suggest that the document was actually official.

These stories about campaign leaks are disturbing. At this point, for anything to be leaked by a "political adversary" means by the campaign of an opponent of the same party. Primaries should be about candidates telling us why we should choose them, not about candidates telling us about why we shouldn't choose their opponents. All Republican candidates should remember not to break Reagan's 11th Commandment.

Jason gives us some samples of left wing reactions to the news that Cheney was the intended target of an attack at Bagram, Afghanistan, and its disgraceful.

Meanwhile, the Huffington Post seems to be itching to blame Cheney for the 20 deaths that resulted from the attack, headlining the story, "Over 20 Die In Attack Aimed At Cheney."

I can imagine what the liberal talking points might be: Blame Cheney, Bush, and other Bush administration officials for "putting the lives of soldiers at risk for the sake of a photo-op" or something like that. Of course, members of both parties make trips to Afghanistan and Iraq. Democrats in particular have used these trips to give the appearance that they, all evidence to the contrary, support out troops.