Diana West

Islam outlaws all the things that allow Bloomberg to tolerate it

"We are Americans, each with an equal right to worship and pray where we choose," New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg said this week. "There is nowhere in the five boroughs that is off limits to any religion." Our founding documents guarantee that - and not just in the five boroughs. But the unprecedented furor over plans for a mosque complex at ground zero tells us there is a coalescing sense that Islam is more than a "mere" religion as non-Muslims conceive of "religion." It is becoming clear to people, despite the gag of political correctness, that there's a reason "Islam" means "submission." Islam not only seeks to order the spiritual realm inhabited by a Muslim and Allah, it...

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Dianna West: Mosque near Ground Zero a gateway for Sharia?

Stonings at ground zero - that'll be the day, right? The concept has no manifestation beyond the cold sweat of a dark hours nightmare. Still, there's something worth gleaning from the not-so-free association process that inspired it. It clicked when I read a riveting investigation by Christine Brim at BigPeace.com into scrubbed Web site material of the Cordoba Initiative, the Internet home of Imam Feisal Rauf, he of the ground zero mosque. In this trove of information, curiously deleted from the current Cordoba Initiative Web site, lie key clues to Rauf's long-term program, the Shariah Index Project, whose "goal," as stated in the "hidden" material, is to "define, interpret and implement...

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Russians still obscure Polish airplane crash

It's never been clear what really happened on that foggy morning of April 10 when a Polish airplane crashed on a Russian runway, killing all 96 people aboard, including Polish President Lech Kaczynski, Cabinet ministers, military service chiefs, intelligence officials, the central bank president, parliamentarians and historians, decapitating the conservative government and gutting the country's elite. Given the occasion -- the 70th anniversary of the Soviet Union's long-denied massacre of 22,000 Poles at Katyn Forest -- and given many of the crash victims' dedication to exposing Soviet-era treachery and opposing Putin-era Russian expansionism, was the crash, as reported, an epically...

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Living our values can't change Islamist values

"Live our values," Gen. David Petraeus wrote recently to troops in Afghanistan. "This is what distinguishes us from our enemies." Unfortunately, this is also what distinguishes us from many of our "friends." This culture-chasm is what makes the infidel struggle for hearts and minds across Islamic lands so recklessly, wastefully futile, something I was once again reminded of after reading Time magazine's cover story featuring 18-year-old Aisha. Aisha is a lovely Afghan girl whose husband and brother-in-law, on instructions from a local judge and Taliban commander, sliced off her ears and nose and left her dying to set an example for other wives thinking of running away from abusive...

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Admitting Turkey to EU means Eurabia

Whether to admit Turkey to the European Union seems to be an eternal battle, at least among the EU's rulers. Among the peoples of Europe, when granted the rare chance to go to the ballot box -- increasingly window dressing as far as the EU's soft totalitarians are concerned -- there is little argument. In fact, there is bona fide consensus: NO to Turkey becoming a part of Europe. Why? For one thing, because it is not. Tell that to British Prime Minister David Cameron, who just visited Ankara to present himself as Europe's leading booster for Turkish EU membership (a move the United States has meddlesomely supported), pandering so low a prayer rug could give him cover. Dubbing...

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There are no secrets if everyone has a security clearance

A clarifying bomblet drops in the final paragraph of the opening installment of the big Washington Post series on what is best described as National Intelligence Sprawl: "Soon, on the grounds of the former St. Elizabeths mental hospital in Anacostia, a $3.4 billion showcase of security will rise from the crumbling brick wards. The new headquarters will be the largest government complex built since the Pentagon. ..." National security meets mental hospital: How tragically appropriate. And yes, these inmates will definitely be running the asylum -- some of the Post-estimated 854,000 Americans with top secret clearance now filling massive new government complexes all over the country --...

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Russian spy ring was no joke, but still treated that way

Just how entertaining was that Russian spy ring story that came in with a flurry of late-June arrests and went out with a Russo-American agent swap last weekend? Two thumbs up, judging by the reviews, or was that news coverage? Sometimes it was hard to tell. In fact, something about the way the startling fact that allegedly post-Cold War Russia was running a ring of deep-cover agents in this "reset" era was put over made it seem as though there was little distinction between spy fact and spy fiction. Or, rather, that the main significance to spy fact was its place in our pop cultural attic of spy fiction. "Details of the Russian spy network, outlined in two FBI complaints and a...

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Turning Afghanistan into Iraq won't win

I've sworn off predictions, having guessed wrong that an deeply apologetic Gen. Stanley McChrystal would keep his Afghanistan command. But what about GOP Chairman Michael Steele? So far, at least as I write, he is weathering his own Afghan storm after dubbing the protracted counterinsurgency, President Obama's war -- as though the Obama policy were not in fact an extension and intensification of the Bush administration plan -- and then noting that history tells us war in Afghanistan is unwinnable. But not always, as I learned after consulting Andrew Bostom's invaluable compendium, "The Legacy of Jihad." Turns out Islamized Turkic nomads came out on top, conquering the Hindu kingdom...

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Afghanistan's "Great Society" program debacle

Anyone who believes that Gen. David H. Petraeus plans to overhaul the rules of engagement in Afghanistan because of ROE-caused casualties finally catching Americans' attention just wasn't listening to the general at his Senate confirmation hearing this week. Judging by both senatorial deference on the topic (Petraeus was confirmed 99-0) and a practically missing in action media, that describes a lot of people. Here's the first ROE question, submitted prior to the hearing: "If confirmed, what general changes, if any, would you make to the current ROEs?" In response, Petraeus wrote: "One of my highest priorities, should I be confirmed as Commander of USFOR-A, will be to assess the...

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So what if McChrystal lost his job?

So Gen. Stanley McChrystal lost his job. Does it matter? Aside from the fact that with Wednesday's announcement the nation's capital could finally exhale for the first time since news broke about the profanity-laced Rolling Stone profile in which the now-former Afghanistan commander made disparaging comments about members of President Obama's Afghanistan team (including Obama himself), absolutely nothing of consequence resulted from the whole breathless melodrama. Why not? Half the world by now has read the magazine article describing senior staff behavior more Animal House than conduct becoming the average adult, let alone officers and gentlemen. But despite the scandalous headlines,...

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Turkey, not Israel, should answer for flotilla incident

We may not live in an Islamic world (yet), but we live with an Islamic worldview. Witness the uniformly Islamicized consensus that met Israel's successful if costly defense of its Gaza blockade. The blockade, by the way, is a defensive measure that Israel devised after Hamas terrorists were elected to govern Israel-ceded Gaza in 2005 and -- no surprise to any student of jihad -- decided to continue their charter-commanded war on Israel, raining down nearly 10,000 rockets onto Israeli civilians. The rocketing, of course, was OK with the Islamicized consensus. What wasn't OK happened on the night of May 31 when Israeli commandos, lightly armed with paintball guns and emergency...

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Obama's radical associations matter, but go ignored by press

A reporter from the Christian Science Monitor offered the first response to publicist Maria Sliwa's e-mail queries to news organizations about whether they would like to receive a review copy of "The Manchurian President: Barack Obama's Ties to Communists, Socialists and Other Anti-American Extremists." The answer was "no." But it wasn't just "no." The reporter called the book by journalist-author-WABC radio host Aaron Klein and researcher Brenda J. Elliott -- at the time embargoed and thus unread -- a name for toilet paper I'd rather not print. Reflexively, Sliwa hit the delete button (thus losing the reporter's name for posterity). But when other e-mails started coming back with...

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Islam and the Left share common aims

If what Andrew C. McCarthy calls "the freedom culture" somehow prevails in the West, it will be in great part due to such books as his excellent, ground-breaking new work, "The Grand Jihad: How Islam and the Left Sabotage America." Islam and the left? Since this notion will raise some eyebrows, I asked McCarthy himself to elaborate on this and some other related questions. Q: Why are Islam and the left, as you demonstrate in "The Grand Jihad," not such strange bedfellows? A: "For all their disagreements on matters like women's rights, gay rights, and abortion, Islam and the left are in harmony on big-picture matters: They are authoritarian, totalitarian in the sense of wanting to...

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These Americans deserve Memorial Day clemency

Americans remember not only our fallen soldiers on this Memorial Day weekend, but also soldiers currently fighting in hostile lands under atrocious conditions. But there's another duty upon us as Americans with a debt of gratitude to our armed forces. We must recognize the travesties of U.S. military justice that have tried, convicted, jailed and repeatedly denied clemency to all too many brave Americans, the same brave Americans who have fought our wars only to be unfairly charged with "murder" in the war zone. Readers of this column will recall the crushing conviction of Sgt. Evan Vela, a young Ranger-trained sniper and father of two from Idaho, for executing his superior's order...

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Immigration thrust front and center by Arizona

Good -- no, excellent -- news: Most Americans approve of Arizona's new immigration law. And by wide margins. According to Pew, the overall number is 59 percent. The New York Times poll came in at 60 percent. According to the NBC/Wall Street Journal poll, that overall number is higher still: 64 percent. These solid majorities show stirrings of a surprisingly resilient national survival instinct. I say "surprisingly" because that instinct, which in some cases may be no more than a reflexive urge to hold the line, has been subject to decades of steady, acid corrosion in the "politically correct" re-education camps we know as our nation's school systems. There, we are taught that borders...

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A mosque to mock 9/11's victims and families

The second attack on the World Trade Center is coming. It will stand 13 stories high, cost $100 million dollars and include a mosque. Known as Cordoba House -- the name echoing an early caliphate that, of course, subjugated non-Muslims -- it will be located two blocks away from where our magnificent towers crashed and burned, easy wafting distance for the Islamic call to prayer. How demoralizing is that? Let's step back for some historical perspective. With the U.S. military preparing its assault on the Taliban stronghold of Kandahar, there's a not-too-wild comparison to be made between the mind-blowing reality of New York City approving a mosque at ground zero and the unthinkable notion...

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We need real leadership to put American interests first

There were some big losers in the national guessing game over the identity of the failed Times Square bomber this week. New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg took the booby prize for picking "someone who doesn't like the health care bill or something." That was before Pakistani-born, 2009-naturalized Faisal Shahzad was apprehended Sunday night trying to flee to Dubai. Even after that point, Democratic strategist Bob Beckel was holding out for "a right-wing militia man," while an array of mainstream media commentators, tracked by Newsbusters.com, seized on jihad-alternate theories as the trigger. One favorite: foreclosure rage. It seems, as the AP noted, Shahzad ran out on his home mortgage...

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Media leave 'South Park' creators out to dry

Trey Parker and Matt Stone, the creators of "South Park," get it. They get the free-speech significance of the Danish Muhammad cartoons epitomized by Kurt Westergaard's bomb-head Muhammad. They even get it across. "It's so sad, the whole Muhammad, the whole Danish cartoon thing," said Stone, Parker seated beside him during a joint interview with the entertainment Web site Boing Boing. Don't laugh. Boing Boing here goes where "elite" media fear to tiptoe, let alone tread. The subject was the 200th episode of "South Park," which, in unusually clean if satirical fashion, focused on Islam's fanatical, and, to Western sensibilities, ridiculous prohibitions on depictions and criticism...

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Pulitzer board thumbs nose at founder's aims

Just as the Pulitzer Prizes come around every year, a conservative columnist comes around after them, dusting off the hard fact, as measured in an ever-expanding set of tally marks, that conservatives rarely get to pop a champagne cork over one of their own. Take the Pulitzer Prize for commentary. Since George F. Will won in 1977, William Safire (1978), Vermont Royster (1984), Charles Krauthammer (1987), Paul Gigot (2000), and Dorothy Rabinowitz (2001) have won as well, and good for them. But that's six conservative columnists in 33 years. This year's winner, Kathleen Parker, is sometimes seen as Rightish, but, with a penchant for smacking down social conservatives, she is perhaps too...

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Going native in Afghanistan means losing our culture

A reader emailed me to comment on a column by David Ignatius, who recently accompanied the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Adm. Mike Mullen, to a Shura, or local council meeting, in Marja, Afghanistan. Ignatius wrote: “Given the weakness of the central government in Kabul, U.S. commanders are working to align American power with the most basic political structures, the tribal shuras. `Culturally, this country works,’ says Rear Adm. Gregory Smith, the chief mililtary spokesman [in Afghanistan]. `People sitting down together can solve almost anything.’” Slap a happy-face sticker on the man’s briefing book to commemorate the dopiest spin ever...

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Tehran's jet-setting genocide man

What a heady whirl of a month it has been for Iran's Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the world's most fabulous jihad kingpin and leading proponent of genocide. Everyone seems to want a piece of him, in a good way, of course. American enemies, American "allies" -- they're all palsy-walsy. Where that leaves Uncle Sucker is another matter. First, the enemies. At the end of February, A-jad was off to Damascus -- ah, Damascus in February -- for a joint summit with Bashar al-Assad to denounce the United States and Israel, and then, a group summit, or "war council" as Arab media called it, with both Assad and Hezbollah's Hassan Nasrallah. All three denounced, for variation, Israel and the United States....

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If they get Israel, guess who is next

Mind-boggling how quickly the Jerusalem housing project sent the stars into re-alignment over Israel to shine down now on a new, official U.S. vision of the Jewish state as a drag on American interests in the world, even to the point of endangering the lives of our troops. That was the message Vice President Joe Biden delivered in Israel this month (“What you’re doing here undermines the security of our troops …”) according to Israeli media. The White House denied it. That was the feeling President Obama conveyed in treating visiting Israeli president Benjamin Netanyahu like an international leper this week (no pictures, no press, no statements, no...

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U.S. confusion fogs relationship with Israel

Phew. We can breathe easier now that the Obama administration has taken a tough-as-scimitars line with Israel, whose existentially threatening architectural blueprints for new housing, the administration says, pose a dire threat to U.S. troops and interests. Or, as Vice President Joseph Biden put it, referring to a new housing project in Jerusalem, as reported by Yedioth Ahronoth: "This is starting to get dangerous for us. What you're doing here undermines the security of our troops who are fighting in Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan." In other words, maybe it's not the Muslim-made improvised explosive device planted in the roads of Helmand province that's the problem; maybe it's the...

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Stop Mau Mauing Geert Wilders

When Glenn Beck, Charles Krauthammer and Bill Kristol each from their respective Fox News perches branded Dutch political phenom Geert Wilders as beyond the political pale, it was shocking and outrageously so, and for several reasons. One. I've grown used to Fox News and all other media ignoring not just the Wilders story but also the cultural story of the century, altogether -- namely, the Islamization of Europe, something Wilders, a great admirer of Ronald Reagan and a committed supporter of Israel, is dedicated to halt and reverse. The survival instinct of the Dutch, who earlier this month gave unprecedented electoral victories to Wilders and his party, is a strong indicator that...

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Europeans waking up to threat of the scarves

When the Netherlands Party for Freedom leader Geert Wilders recently addressed voters in Almere, a Dutch city of 200,000 where his party handily won elections this week, he told them what to expect as his once-tiny anti-Islamization party started flexing its new political muscle. Aside from lower taxes and other political staples, his plans for this city not far from Amsterdam include a ban on Muslim head scarves. Wilders' ban would apply to "head scarves in municipal bodies and all other institutions [that] receive even one penny of subsidy from the municipality." He continued: "And for all clarity: This [ban] is not meant for crosses or yarmulkes because those are symbols of religions...

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I voted for John McCain, but I'm glad he lost

My brother and I have a running conversation about whether it is a good thing that Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., didn't become president. We both voted for him, but I decided early on, as much as I oppose every Marx-tinged thing President Obama stands for, I was glad Obama had won and McCain had lost. At least, I was glad McCain had lost. That's because only out of ashes may the phoenix be reborn. The liberal-lite frustrations of a McCain administration would have smoldered on the Right but lit few fires, dampening the possibility of real post-Bush regeneration. From Bush's compassionate conservatism" (read: liberalism) to McCain's compassionate bipartisanship (read: more liberalism),...

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Attack in Little Rock 'like other killings we have'?

Remember last June when President Obama traveled to Saudi Arabia because, as he put it, "It was very important to come to the place where Islam began and seek his majesty's counsel"? I argued at the time, gagging, that rather than visiting "the place where Islam began," the president of the United States should have gone to the place where Islam had just ended the life of a U.S. soldier. I refer to the U.S. Army-Navy recruiting center in Little Rock, Ark., where on June 1, Muslim convert Abdulhakim Mujahid Muhammad fatally shot Pvt. William Long, 23, and wounded Pvt. Quinton Ezeagwula, 18. The two soldiers had been standing outside having a smoke. As usual, the president didn't take...

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No end of follies like COP Keating

Sorry, but this Washington Post headline -- "U.S. commanders in Afghanistan face tougher discipline for battlefield failures"-- misses the point. The story concerns "failures" all right, but the three recently investigated incidents in question are not "battlefield" failures. No, these failures, whose names are Wanat, Ganjgal and Kamdesh, have their provenance in the climate-controlled conference rooms of the White House and the Pentagon. These are failures of U.S. military policy, and it is the top leadership of the current and last administrations, those who have formulated, approved and executed the policy, who are responsible for them -- not the midlevel officers, the squadron...

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We can't decide if Fox doesn't cover it

Should Fox News register with the State Department as a foreign agent -- an agent of Saudi Arabia? First off, is that a far-fetched question? Not when a leading member of the ruling family of the Shariah-totalitarian "kingdom" of Saudi Arabia, Prince Alwaleed bin Talal, has made himself the second-largest shareholder of Rupert Murdoch's News Corp., Fox News' parent company. Just as Steven Emerson believes that American universities using Saudi mega-millions (many from Alwaleed) to set up Islamic studies departments should register as Saudi agents, I believe an American news channel part-owned and part-influenced by the Saudi prince should, too. Alwaleed's long march through U.S....

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U.S. in denial on Iran's influence in Iraq

"The real danger in Iraq is Iran. It controls Iraq with a firm fist." So said Iraqi lawmaker Ayad Jamal Aldin to Bloomberg.com last month in London. "It was through [Grand Ayatollah Ali] al-Sistani that Iran was able to invade Iraq." "Could you please elaborate on that?" I asked Aldin this week in Washington, D.C., where the leader of the new anti-corruption Arahr Party was making the rounds. This point -- that post-Saddam, post-surge Iraq (initially thanks to top cleric and Iranian citizen al-Sistani) is effectively a satellite of Iran -- goes against the victory narrative of the policymakers and pundits who have urged the Obama administration to repeat mistakes the United States made...

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