Andrew C. McCarthy's Blog, page 28

Obama Tries to Resume Redistributing Wealth to UNESCO & 'Palestine'

The Obama budget is surely the gift that keeps on giving. Last fall, Ambassador John Bolton noted here that, after a Palestinian Authority power-play to obtain statehood by U.N. recognition rather than by honoring its commitments to negotiate with Israel, UNESCO had admitted "Palestine" as a member. In both his terrific book, Surrender Is Not An Option: Defending America at the United Nations and Abroad, and an instructive Weekly Standard article, John pointed out that when Yasser Arafat tried this sort of thing in the Eighties, the Bush 41 administration stopped the PLO cold by threatening to pull funding, among other things.

Naturally, the Obama administration's "no" vote and show of protest at the Palestinian gambit were so half-hearted that, as John explained here, several of our key allies either voted with the Palestinians (France) or abstained rather than opposed them (Britain and Japan). Obama would no doubt have let the Palestinians slide entirely except that federal statutes dating from the Bush 41 era required a full cutoff of U.S. funding, which John suggested, "Congress should insist occur immediately," along with rejecting any administration efforts to weaken or eliminate the cutoff.

Our friend Scott Johnson of Powerline notes that the U.S. contribution is a big chunk of change, 22 percent of UNESCO's budget. (The government website says, "The U.S. contributes close to $3.7 million dollars in extra-budgetary funds to UNESCO each year in addition to its assessed dues.) Scott's also been reading JTA -- it being hard to get news about Obama shenanigans from the American press. Turns out that, buried in a footnote in the administration's voluminous $3.8 trillion budget proposed a few days ago, is an announcement that "The Department of State intends to work with Congress to seek legislation that would provide authority to waive restrictions on paying the U.S. assessed contributions to UNESCO."

Thankfully, Representative Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, a top-notch Florida Republican who chairs the House Foreign Affairs Committee, is on the case, vowing to fight the White House on the waiver. As she puts it, "Any effort to walk back this funding cutoff will pave the way for the Palestinian leadership's unilateral statehood scheme to drive on, and sends a disastrous message that the U.S. will fund U.N. bodies no matter what irresponsible decisions they make." This will no doubt upset the Muslim Brotherhood, and whatever upsets the Muslim Brotherhood tends to upset the White House -- and perhaps even the new Senate GOP friends the Brothers are cultivating. Hopefully, however, the House will hold the line.

Obama Tries to Resume Redistributing Wealth to 'Palestine'

The Obama budget is surely the gift that keeps on giving. Last fall, Ambassador John Bolton noted here that, after a Palestinian Authority power-play to obtain statehood by U.N. recognition rather than by honoring its commitments to negotiate with Israel, UNESCO had admitted "Palestine" as a member. In both his terrific book, Surrender Is Not An Option: Defending America at the United Nations and Abroad, and an instructive Weekly Standard article, John pointed out that when Yasser Arafat tried this sort of thing in the Eighties, the Bush 41 administration stopped the PLO cold by threatening to pull funding, among other things.

Naturally, the Obama administration's "no" vote and show of protest at the Palestinian gambit were so half-hearted that, as John explained here, several of our key allies either voted with the Palestinians (France) or abstained rather than opposed them (Britain and Japan). Obama would no doubt have let the Palestinians slide entirely except that federal statutes dating from the Bush 41 era required a full cutoff of U.S. funding, which John suggested, "Congress should insist occur immediately," along with rejecting any administration efforts to weaken or eliminate the cutoff.

Our friend Scott Johnson of Powerline notes that the U.S. contribution is a big chunk of change, 22 percent of UNESCO's budget. (The government website says, "The U.S. contributes close to $3.7 million dollars in extra-budgetary funds to UNESCO each year in addition to its assessed dues.) Scott's also been reading JTA -- it being hard to get news about Obama shenanigans from the American press. Turns out that, buried in a footnote in the administration's voluminous $3.8 trillion budget proposed a few days ago, is an announcement that "The Department of State intends to work with Congress to seek legislation that would provide authority to waive restrictions on paying the U.S. assessed contributions to UNESCO."

Thankfully, Representative Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, a top-notch Florida Republican who chairs the House Foreign Affairs Committee, is on the case, vowing to fight the White House on the waiver. As she puts it, "Any effort to walk back this funding cutoff will pave the way for the Palestinian leadership's unilateral statehood scheme to drive on, and sends a disastrous message that the U.S. will fund U.N. bodies no matter what irresponsible decisions they make." This will no doubt upset the Muslim Brotherhood, and whatever upsets the Muslim Brotherhood tends to upset the White House -- and perhaps even the new Senate GOP friends the Brothers are cultivating. Hopefully, however, the House will hold the line.

McCain & Graham [Heart] the Muslim Brotherhood

Senators John McCain and Lindsey Graham have taken time off from helping install an Islamist government in Libya (mainly the Muslim Brotherhood, with some help from al Qaeda) and calling for the arming of the Syrian "rebels" (mainly the Muslim Brotherhood, with some help from al Qaeda) to heap praise on the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt.

The post-Mubarak regime for which democracy project enthusiasts like McCain and Graham clamored is poised to try Americans they have taken prisoner. This is a particular blow for the senators because they sit on the board of one of the NGOs at the center of the crisis -- the International Republican Institute, a progressive endowment that is a clearinghouse for channeling millions of American taxpayer dollars for "civil society development" across the globe. The IRI has served as a McCain fiefdom since he was given control of it 20 years ago. It is one of the organizations whose members have been accused of violating Mubarak-era Egyptian laws that bar NGOs from receiving foreign funding -- laws that the Muslim Brotherhood opposed because they made it harder for the Brothers to rabble-rouse under the guise of "promoting democracy."

The Brotherhood, of course, actually seeks an Islamic state ruled by repressive sharia law. From the organization's founding in the 1920s to this very day, its motto has remained, "Allah is our objective, the Prophet is our leader, the Koran is our law, Jihad is our way, and dying in the way of Allah is our highest hope. Allahu Akbar!" Only a few days ago, its Supreme Guide in Egypt reaffirmed that the Brotherhood's goal is to establish an Islamic caliphate. Its chief sharia jurist, Sheikh Yusuf Qaradawi, who explains that secular democracy is anathema for an Islamic society, has prescribed a gradual transition to sharia. Just three years ago, the Brotherhood's leadership explicitly called on Egyptian youth to prepare for jihad -- "raising young people on the basis of the principles of jihad so as to create mujahideen who love to die as much as others love to live, and who can perform their duty toward their God, themselves, and their homeland."

The Brothers, furthermore, have unmitigated contempt for the West and seek the eradication of Israel. Qaradawi promises that Islam will conquer America and Europe and has issued fatwas approving suicide bombings in Israel and against American troops in Iraq. The terrorist organization, Hamas, is the Brotherhood's Palestinian branch. The Brotherhood's agents in America have written that their mission here is a "grand jihad" to eliminate and destroy Western civilization from within by sabotage. 

But why should any of that preclude warm words from the ummah's favorite Republicans? As the Wall Street Journal reports:

Mr. McCain (R., Ariz.) and his delegation of four other senators, three of them Republicans, also hinted at warming relations between conservative American lawmakers and the Muslim Brotherhood, an Egyptian Islamist group whose triumphant performance in parliamentary elections rattled U.S. nerves among U.S. policy makers.

The warm comments mark a climbdown from previous threats by congressmen from both parties that the prosecution of American NGO staff will endanger the $1.3 billion in aid that Washington has given Egypt's military each year since 1987....

Muslim Brotherhood leaders in Egypt's newly elected Parliament also told the lawmakers that they would redraft a restrictive NGO law that the deposed regime of President Hosni Mubarak used to repress civil-society organizations.

"After talking with the Muslim Brotherhood, I was struck with their commitment to change the law because they believe it's unfair," said Sen. Lindsey Graham (R., S.C.), who was traveling with Mr. McCain. Mr. Graham and other lawmakers praised the Brotherhood, whose Freedom and Justice Party won a plurality of nearly 50% of the seats in Parliament, as a strong potential partner for the future of U.S. relations with Egypt.

That marks a dramatic change from several months ago, when some Republican politicians reacted warily to the Brotherhood's rising clout. In April 2011, Mr. Graham said he was suspicious of the Brotherhood's "agenda," and that "their motives are very much in question."

"I was very apprehensive when I heard the election results," Mr. Graham said on Monday. "But after visiting and talking with the Muslim Brotherhood I am hopeful that ... we can have a relationship with Egypt where the Muslim Brotherhood is a strong political voice."

Well, isn't that just ducky! Not that we should be surprised, given that the senator has echoed the Brotherhood on everything from the purported need to close Gitmo to suggesting that First Amendment free speech should be curbed to avoid offense to Muslims. Never mind that even the Islamophilic New York Times is less delirious than Graham about the prospects that the Brothers will help resolve the NGO impasse. The Gray Lady notes that while the senator "praised the moderation of the Muslim Brotherhood officials the delegation met," a spokesman for the Brotherhood "warned the United States against trying to interfere in Egypt's justice process. 'Would America allow any foreign agenda of country to interfere in its affairs like this?'"

Well they probably would if they were as dependent on American taxpayer billions as Egypt is. Which reminds us: Why is our country, which is $16 trillion in debt and sinking deeper by the second, giving a dime to Islamist countries that despise us? We can't afford it. Plus, the more we spend on the region, the more anti-American the region becomes. And why is that? Because, though we may realize that outfits like IRI (and its Democratic counterpart, the National Democratic Institute for International Affairs) are outrageously overfunded sinecures for apparatchiks who are between government gigs, mainstream Muslims perceive them as a Trojan Horse designed by the West to corrupt Islamic values and undermine Islamic civilization.

Meantime, as he steers the GOP toward Obama's goal of cozier relations with Egypt's Islamists, we are again reminded of how lucky we are to have elected to the senate a real statesman like John McCain -- as opposed to one of those rightwing whackjobs like J.D. Hayworth, who clearly lack the foreign-policy depth and nuance to appreciate how moderate the Brotherhood truly is.

Don’t say you weren’t warned. Back in 2008, I argued that McCain’s reputation as a tower of national-security strength is a myth, that “in reality, a McCain presidency would promise an entirely conventional, center-left, multilateralism” -- i.e., “the same agonizing over European and Islamic perceptions of America; the same doctrinaire commitment to the alchemy of democracy promotion; and the same fondness for heaping more unaccountable bureaucratic sprawl atop the already counterproductive agencies and multinational institutions that frustrate the United States at every turn” that are staples of Democratic party dogma, and that were on display in the second Bush term.

We did not get the McCain presidency, but we have gotten the McCain foreign policy where truckling to Islamists is concerned. When it comes to the Muslim Brotherhood, it turns out that mavericks and community organizers are on the same page.

Romney's 'Policy Position' on the Debt Ceiling?

If Romney loses the nomination, this debt ceiling line of attack on Santorum could be Exhibit A of what caused the Republican base to look for another candidate. Katrina's post, addressing the irony that Santorum is being attacked for voting to raise the debt ceiling by Romney surrogates who also supported raising the debt ceiling, concludes: "This isn't the first time there's been a discrepancy between Romney's policy views and his surrogates' past stands." But Romney didn't have a policy view against raising the debt ceiling.

Those of us who took a strong stand against raising the ceiling -- and heard the party establishment's grousing about it -- would have loved some support from Mitt. But he characteristically laid low in the tall grass. Here, for example, is a report from ABC's "The Note," detailing how then-Romney competitor Tim Pawlenty and Obama mouthpiece David Axelrod were openly poking fun at Romney for being AWOL on the debt ceiling debate.

Just as when he failed to support Ohio governor John Kasich's effort to rein in the government-employee unions until goaded into it, the negative criticism at Romney's craven stance on the debt debate finally pushed him into taking a luke-warm position: He said he wanted to cut and cap federal spending while putting a balanced budget amendment in place -- a pointless suggestion (it would take years to put a balanced budget amendment in place) that told us nothing about whether, failing that, he'd cave in to Obama's demand for another $2.4 trillion in spending authority (as Republicans ultimately did).

The cynicism inherent in lashing opponents who took accountable positions in controversies he tried to duck, and in recruiting surrogates who are willing to make a mockery of their own records in order to carry his water, speaks volumes about what is happening to the Romney campaign. People do notice these things.

First the Ahmadi, Then Everybody Else

Their crime? These Muslims have the temerity to suggest that Mirza Ghulam Ahmad, an Indian who died in 1908, was the promised Mahdi -- the redeemer of Islam -- and not one of the false prophets about whom Mohammed had warned. They compound their offense with condemnations of violent jihad, maintaining that man’s inhumanity to man is ultimately conquered by love and kindness. So, of course, the Ahmadi Muslims have to die.

They are killed in Muslim Pakistan. They are killed in Muslim Bangladesh. They are killed in Indonesia, the world’s most populous Islamic country and, putatively, its most moderate. It was there, in a village in West Java last year, that hundreds of Muslims wielding machetes, sharpened sticks, and stones set upon on an Ahmadi home, brutally murdering three men and maiming several others. True to form, Islamic clerics raced to the fore to rationalize the savagery as being provoked by Ahmadi heresy. The ringleaders were sentenced to less than six months’ imprisonment, with the country’s minister of religious affairs callously explaining that religious freedom was certainly not freedom to “modify” Islamic beliefs -- and equating Ahmadi preaching, which is banned, with flag-burning.

#ad#The barbaric treatment of religious minorities in Islamic countries, and its roots in Islamic law, is undeniable#...#unless we choose not to see it. So, true to form, we are choosing not to see it.

Ayaan Hirsi Ali, the intrepid humanitarian and former Muslim, struggles to pull the world’s head from the sand, demanding that we finally bear witness to what she aptly describes as the “rising genocide” Muslim-majority countries are waging against Christians. How tragic that, right at this moment of clarity, American law enforcement has opted to blind itself in craven submission to the Muslim Brotherhood.

Under a barrage of protest by the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) and its media stooges, the New York City Police Department has now apologized for showing hundreds of recruits The Third Jihad, a 72-minute video about radical Islam. Concurrently, after badgering by the likes of CAIR, the Islamic Society of North America (ISNA), and the Muslim Public Affairs Council (MPAC), the FBI has just agreed to purge its training materials of information that elucidates the obvious -- the direct nexus between mainstream Islamic doctrine, supremacist Muslim attitudes, and jihadist terror.

The Third Jihad ought to be required viewing. Don’t take my word for it. You can watch it yourself, on this website. In addition to the video, the site sheds light on the campaign against the counterterrorism strategy that has kept New Yorkers safe for the last decade despite their city’s continuing status as the jihad’s bull’s-eye in the West.

If you only read the New York Times and listened to its media echo chamber, you would think the video is a hate-dripping smear. It is anything but: Narrated by M. Zuhdi Jasser, a devout Muslim and indefatigable foe of Brotherhood ideology, and featuring interviews with Ms. Hirsi Ali, Bernard Lewis (the West’s most renowned scholar of Islam), former New York City mayor Rudy Giuliani, former Homeland Security secretary Tom Ridge, former CIA director Jim Woolsey, the inimitable commentators Mark Steyn (author of Lights Out: Islam, Free Speech and the Twilight of the West) and Melanie Phillips (author of Londonistan), and NYPD commissioner Ray Kelly -- who, for some reason (no doubt related to the city’s sniffling mayor) has donned sackcloth and ashes over the great crime of admitting on camera that the city is worried about jihadists with nukes.

#page#The demagogues have to slander the film because the only real objection to The Third Jihad is its minimization of the threat. It opens with a disclaimer: “This is not a film about Islam. It is about the threat of radical Islam. Only a small percentage of the world’s 1.3 billion Muslims are radical.” The last sentence may be true, but only because the real “radicals” in the ummah are sects like the Ahmadi#...#and we see what happens to them.

It is simply a fact that what the video is so careful to call “radical Islam” is entirely mainstream. It is not al-Qaeda that’s killing the Ahmadi in Indonesia -- it is Indonesian Muslims. It is not al-Qaeda that’s mass-murdering Coptic Christians in a transparent effort to drive them out of Egypt, just as Jewish inhabitants have been driven out of Egypt -- the culprits are Egyptian Muslims. The cashiering of Mubarak gave them the opportunity for self-governance, and the first things they did were to elect Islamic supremacists and intensify the rule of sharia, guaranteeing the persecution of religious minorities.

#ad#Nor is that an Egyptian phenomenon. In 2003, the United States liberated Iraqis from the tyranny of Saddam Hussein, began a campaign that ultimately routed al-Qaeda, and helped draft an Iraqi constitution that elevated sharia as fundamental law. Since then, as Ms. Hirsi Ali recounts, 900 Christians have been slain in Baghdad alone, 70 churches have been torched, and more than 500,000 Christians have fled the country, reducing the number remaining in Iraq to less than half of the Saddam-era population.

To the contrary, though The Third Jihad is forthright about the tenets and practices of “radical” ideology, it shrinks from acknowledging how widely this ideology is endorsed by influential Muslim clerics and accepted by compliant Muslim masses. We learn of the cruel death sentences meted out for apostasy and homosexuality; the legally codified abuse of women and honor killings against those who shame their families by flouting sharia strictures; the inculcation of hatred for Western society through Muslim education systems; the veneration of Hamas, Hezbollah, and the culture of jihadist martyrdom. What goes unmentioned is how readily foreseeable these consequences are as a society becomes more Islamic.

It is obvious enough why CAIR hates the video. The Third Jihad does not merely lay bare Brotherhood ideology, including the internal organizational memoranda that discuss its master plan to destroy the West from within by sabotage, as I recount in The Grand Jihad. The film also exposes CAIR’s Brotherhood roots and its deceptive Brotherhood practices -- such as purporting to condemn “acts of terror” but refusing to condemn Hamas and Hezbollah. (Allow me to let you in on the code: In Brotherhood ideology, “terrorism” is the unjustified killing of Muslims, while Hamas -- the Brotherhood’s Palestinian branch -- and Hezbollah are deemed heroic resisters against terrorism.)

What is not so obvious is why the NYPD has decided to surrender, and why the FBI is allowing itself to become a marionette whose strings are pulled by such groups as ISNA (like CAIR, cited as an unindicted co-conspirator in the Justice Department’s prosecution of the Holy Land Foundation for financing Hamas) and MPAC (an organization with a history of praising the Brotherhood and Hezbollah -- and of suggesting that Israel was behind the 9/11 attacks).

Spoken truth is an increasingly rare commodity. But truth is plain to see. Radical Islam is not very radical -- it is Islamic doctrine strictly applied. Where Muslims are a tiny minority, and where countervailing cultural forces are robust enough and unapologetic enough to hem in Islam’s supremacist ambitions, Islam can be moderate and its adherents solid citizens. Where sharia is permitted to spread its wings, liberty is strangled. And where Muslims are a majority turned loose to enforce sharia, it is, as The Third Jihad puts it, a “human-rights disaster.”

You can call that Islamophobia, if you’re suffering from factophobia.

-- Andrew C. McCarthy, a senior fellow at the National Review Institute, is the author, most recently, of The Grand Jihad: How Islam and the Left Sabotage America .

The Mandate Is an Attack in the Left's War, Not a Solution to a Real Problem

To continue on the points that there is no access problem when it comes to birth control, and that this hard-Left administration issued the mandate because they consider themselves in a "war" with believing Christians (to quote Commissar Sebelius). In that same Ed Morrissey post that Mark referenced yesterday,  “Mandate a cure in search of a disease," Ed argues:

Why is this mandate necessary in the first place? Is there some great crisis of access to contraception and abortifacients among employed people that only employers can solve?  In my column for The Week, I look at the CDC’s in-depth survey of contraception use and find out that the question of access never even comes up as a barrier:

Employers still have to provide coverage — at no cost, not even copays — for contraception and abortifacients such as “ella” and Plan B, as well as IUDs. Here’s a question few are asking: Why? Obama and his administration insist that women need better access to contraception and abortifacients, but few women have problems accessing them. The CDC reported in 2009 that contraception use wasn’t exactly lacking: “Contraceptive use in the United States is virtually universal among women of reproductive age: 99 percent of all women who had ever had intercourse had used at least one contraceptive method in their lifetime.” Of all the reasons for non-use of contraception in cases of unwanted pregnancy, lack of access doesn’t even make the CDC’s list; almost half of women assumed they couldn’t get pregnant (44 percent), didn’t mind getting pregnant (23 percent), didn’t plan to have sex (14 percent), or worried about the side effects of birth control (16 percent). In fact, the word access appears only once in this study of contraceptive use, and only in the context of health insurance, not contraception.

I'll repeat what I argued over the weekend: Obama is not doing this because there is a problem he believes must be solved; he is doing it because he believes he can get away with it. And if Obamacare is not repealed, he's likely to be proved correct.

No Free Lunch . . . But It's Still a Cheap Lunch

Jonah is right, of course, that there are neither free lunches nor free abortifacients, and that it is infuriating to have our intelligence insulted by the Left's incessant claims about "free" medical coverage. But I want to focus on a different aspect of cost because, as I've said any number of times over the years, once you lose the language battle, the substantive policy defeat is sure to follow. In the debate over the mandate, we are losing the language battle in two critical areas.

First, the Left is getting away with saying that religious organizations want to deny coverage for birth control. That is sheer idiocy. As I contended in last weekend's column, contraceptives and abortifacients are cheap, cheap, cheap in this country. If there were enough months in the year, you could have two second-trimester abortions for less than I spend on pizza -- to say nothing of flat-screen TVs, iPods, X-boxes and the scores of other extravagances that the "poor" in America manage to score without government mandates. What we are talking about here is not walling people off from birth-control -- condoms will still be free in New York City, the pill will still set you back less than $4 per week, and so on. The issue is whether people who have moral objections to abortion and contraception should be extorted by state power into paying for other people's abortions and contraceptives. But that hardly means the latter will be denied.

Second, how dare the administration propose compromises and safe-harbors for "religious organizations"? I imagine they dare because the usual useful idiots (see, e.g., Michael Gerson, cited in Ramesh's post Tuesday) are, as ever, warning conservatives not to "overreach" -- this time, for exemptions that extend beyond corporate religious entities. The Bill of Rights, however, protects individual liberty from abusive government action. The First Amendment does not merely protect the religious liberty of groups of people who formally organize as a religious enterprise. It protects the individual believer, who has as much right as the Archdiocese of New York to resist government compulsion that violates his conscience. Under the Left's First Amendment, we're supposed to be deferential to every Saudi alien Islamic supremacist whack-job who wants to replace the Constitution with sharia, but an American citizen who personally objects to abortifacients should pipe down and pay up unless he's the CEO of Catholic Charities? I don't think so. 

There is no denial of birth control: Birth control will be readily accessible at cheap prices for anyone who wants it, and the issue is not religious organizations but individual liberty -- a matter on which there can be no compromise consistent with the Constitution. When it comes to "constitutional" rights that progressive judges have invented out of whole cloth, Leftists never compromise. Why should we be goaded into a compromise regarding rights that are expressly, undeniably part of the social compact? 

Romney's Debt Ceiling Attack on Santorum

I'm inclined to agree with Bill Kristol that Romney's attacks on Santorum are lame, but mainly because it is Romney who is making them. I cannot imagine Mitt voting against any of the things he (or the Romney super PAC) now chastises Rick for voting yea on -- which is why trying to zing Santorum over them results in such embarrassments as Romney-backer Jim Talent blasting Santorum for voting in favor of the Bush prescription drug entitlement . . . just like Talent did. For much of the time Rick was in Congress, Mitt was in his progressive incarnation, and a big part of Romneycare involved figuring out how the make Uncle Sam pick up the tab for Massachusetts's medical costs -- the sort of thing that drives up federal spending, which, in turn, creates pressure to raise the debt ceiling.

I deeply disagree with Brian's "double-dipping" argument, though. As he put it, "Yes, you can fault Santorum for voting in favor of big-spending programs such as No Child Left Behind and Medicare Part D. But it’s hard to blame him for voting for legislation that honored the obligations the government had already incurred."

I don't think it's hard to blame him at all.

To be sure, the debt limit ought to encourage politicians not to over-spend in the first place. Nevertheless, voting for profligate, under-funded entitlement programs, or any other huge federal expenditure, is not an implicit agreement that the debt-ceiling has to be raised. It ought to be understood as saying, "Despite the credit limits we've established, I now believe X expensive federal program is a priority; if X pushes us to our credit limit, that means we need to cut or eliminate programs that are not as pressing a priority so that we stay within our credit limit." If a politician cannot come up with the cuts, that is a reason to vote against X unaffordable program, not to raise the debt limit.

The double-dipping rationale is how we got to our present untenable straits. It is also classic Washington. We see it, for example, in the foreign policy realm, too: Presidents make absurd commitments ("X dictator must go . . . even though he was our valuable ally ten minutes ago," or "We'll gladly spend a trillion dollars and thousands of lives to turn your basket-case country into a sharia-democracy that continues to work with America's enemies against America's interests"); all manner of right-of-center pols and analysts then rally to back the president, reasoning that "America's credibility is now at stake" so we must honor the commitment no matter how foolish (or even unconstitutional) it may have been. 

Mistakes are always going to be made. If our logic of governance is that making Mistake No. 1 dictates that I must make Mistake No. 2, and so on down the line, then we can never fix our monumental problems. What ever happened to the notion that, if you find yourself in a hole, step one should be: stop digging? 

I'm a Rick fan. Whatever he may have been thinking at the time -- which, as Brian points out, was many trillions of debt-ceiling dollars ago -- I hope he would now say that hitting the debt limit is an occasion for revisiting and repealing irresponsible spending, not for green-lighting more irresponsible spending.

Highway Boondoggle Vote Delayed

It appears that House conservatives are bucking GOP leadership, which -- the Hill reports -- does not have the votes to pass its Obama Lite transportation bill that would add tens of billions in stimulus spending. (See here and here.) This is very encouraging, but it is important to keep an eye on this one. As Daniel Horowitz explains at Red State, there is reason to worry about procedural shenanigans. That is, Boehner & Co. could try to split the bill into pieces that would allow members to claim they voted against the irresponsible parts and in favor of the good parts, which might be enough (with Democrats joining in on the irresponsible parts) to get all the pieces passed. The pieces could then be sewn together and sent to the Senate, after which the good parts will be sliced out in the eventual conference committee and we will be left with the boondoggle.

That would be fraudulent, but let's hope things don't go that way. So far, so good.

Have You Heard about the Saudi Journalist Who Faces a Potential Death Sentence under Sharia?

You probably haven't, at least if you've been watching FoxNews.

Hamza Kashgari, as Nina Shea and yours truly have noted in recent days, is a Saudi journalist and blogger who took the occasion of Mohammed's birthday to tweet some uncomplimentary things about Islam's founding prophet. The Daily Beast recounts the three offending tweets: 

“On your birthday, I will say that I have loved the rebel in you, that you’ve always been a source of inspiration to me, and that I do not like the halos of divinity around you. I shall not pray for you,” he wrote in one tweet.

“On your birthday, I find you wherever I turn. I will say that I have loved aspects of you, hated others, and could not understand many more,” he wrote in a second.

“On your birthday, I shall not bow to you. I shall not kiss your hand. Rather, I shall shake it as equals do, and smile at you as you smile at me. I shall speak to you as a friend, no more,” he concluded in a third.

Doesn't sound too terrible, especially if you compare it to the sort of things the Obama Left has been saying about faithful Christians. Yet, it is a profound sin under classical sharia law, which happens to be the law of Saudi Arabia. The 23-year-old's tweets instantly touched off a firestorm. Kashgari desperately tried to delete the posts within six hours, but it was too late: the damage was done as Saudi clerics and thousands of Saudi citizens started baying for his blood.

Kashgari attempted to flee to New Zealand. But Saudi authorities issued a warrant for his arrest on blasphemy charges. In fact, the Daily Beast reports that the kingdom's leading news site says the warrant was issued by King Abdullah himself. Reportedly with the assistance of Interpol, Kashgari was apprehended in Malaysia and swiftly extradited to Saudi Arabia. In an interview with the Daily Beast prior to his arrest, Kashgari explained, "I view my actions as part of a process toward freedom. I was demanding my right to practice the most basic human rights -- freedom of expression and thought." These rights may be unalienable in Western thought, but they are unrecognized in sharia. Kashgari could well be executed. 

As I've related before, Reliance of the Traveller -- A Classic Manual of Islamic Sacred Law, is an authoritative translation of sharia that has been endorsed by, among others, the Islamic Research Academy of al-Azhar University in Cairo (the ancient seat of Sunni jurisprudential scholarship) and the International Institute of Islamic Thought, an influential Muslim Brotherhood think-tank. The manual instructs that, under sharia, the penalty for apostasy from Islam is death. (See, e.g., Sec. o8.1, "When a person who has reached puberty and is sane voluntarily apostatizes from Islam, he deserves to be killed.) The apostasy section goes on to describe "Acts that Entail Leaving Islam" (Sec. o8.7), and these include, "to speak words that imply unbelief"; "to revile Allah or His messenger [viz., Mohammed]"; to mock or deny faith; or to deny "scholarly consensus." In Islam, the consensus is that Mohammed is the perfect example whose life is to be emulated, not questioned or disparaged.

Mr. Kashgari's tweets have thus placed him in grave peril under the Saudi sharia system. Given the palpable jeopardy this poses for free speech globally -- particularly in light of Interpol's reported involvement in issuing a "red notice" based on the Saudi blasphemy charge, and the Obama administration's strange 2009 move to expand Interpol's legal immunity (see here, here and here) -- one would think his plight would be a big deal. But my friend Diana West has discovered that it is not a big deal on FoxNews. A word search for "Kashgari" on the Fox website turns up no hits.

As I mentioned a few weeks back, the number two shareholder at Fox (after NewsCorp) is Alwaleed bin Talal, a member of the Saudi royal family whose bottomless pockets back various American projects designed to cast sharia law in a favorable light -- such as Islamic studies programs at Georgetown and Harvard. In 2006, Accuracy in Media reported that Prince bin Talal had pressured Fox into downplaying the Muslim role in rioting in France. And it just so happens that, late last year, bin Talal plunked down $300 million for a stake in Twitter, the social media service that published the tweets that have Mr. Kashgari in such dire straits.

Probably just a coincidence.