Two incidents, one in Germany and the other in Canada, made me think.

Ezra Levant reports that 175 people came out in the bitter Calgary cold to protest Israel's action in Gaza and support Hamas. In a heavily Jewish neighborhood, one protester waved an Israeli flag--and he wasn't even Jewish.

At one point, the police told that counter-protester that if he didn't leave, he'd be arrested for "inciting civil disorder". I'm not making that up -- the lone pro-Israeli protester was told that, not the 175 people trespassing on the parking lot of a private mall. Maybe that's why the cops were too busy to station someone inside.

Muslims in Germany are similarly volatile, threatening riot at the mere sight of an Israeli flag.

Today, 10.000 people demonstrated against Israel here in my hometown Duisburg (Germany) and to express their solidarity with Hamas. So, my girlfriend and me put two Israel flags out of the windows of our flat in the 3rd floor. During the demonstration which went through our street the police broke into our flat and removed the flag of Israel. The statement of the police was to de-escalate the situation, because many youth demonstrators were on the brink of breaking into our apartment house. Before this they threw snowballs, knifes and stones against our windows and the complete building. We both were standing on the other side of the street and were shocked by seeing a police officer standing in our bedroom and opening the window to get the flag. The picture illustrate this situation. The police acquiesced in the demands of the mob.

I've lived in both countries, and they are very different from the U.S., particular with respect to the concept of individual rights. That concept simply doesn't exist in a way Americans would understand it. They instead emphasize some bizarre, nonsense concept of "collective" or community rights. Its not clear how a community exercises its rights, but usually its some "leader" who is empowered to act on their behalf. Thus Muslims, acting collectively to protest Israel, have the right to make a ruckus, but lone individuals are subject to arrest.

Man I love this country...

Stroll with me down memory lane to the darkest days of The Bush Tyranny. In 2006 Judge Anna Diggs Taylor ruled that:

President Bush's warrantless wiretapping program is illegal and ordered the National Security Agency to shut it down, issuing a sweeping rebuke of the once-secret domestic-surveillance effort the White House authorized following the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.

Anthony Romero, executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union, which brought the lawsuit, hailed the ruling as a victory for the ``rule of law."

``Today's ruling is a landmark victory against the abuse of power that has become the hallmark of the Bush administration," Romero said. ``Government spying on innocent Americans without any kind of warrant and without congressional approval runs counter to the very foundations of our democracy."

The Obama administration fell in line with the Bush administration Thursday when it urged a federal judge to set aside a ruling in a closely watched spy case weighing whether a U.S. president may bypass Congress and establish a program of eavesdropping on Americans without warrants.
In a filing in San Francisco federal court, President Barack Obama adopted the same position as his predecessor.

CNN speaks approvingly, comparing the inauguration to the Hajj. 'The Saudis have so much to teach us'...
P.S. Are Christians allowed at the hajj? Just asking.

Grandparents are told they are too old to raise their grandchildren, who are taken from them against their will, then given to a gay couple. Assuredly this is the death knell to any effort to get them back. Peter Hitchens:

If I never again had to read or write a word about homosexuals, I would be very happy. I really don't want to know what other people do in their bedrooms. But these days they really, really want us all to know. And, more important, they insist that we approve. No longer are we allowed to keep our thoughts to ourselves, while being polite and kind.

We are forced to say that we think homosexuality is a good thing, that homosexual couples are equal in all ways to heterosexual married couples. Most emphatically, we are compelled to agree that homosexual couples are just as good at bringing up children as the children's own grandparents. Better, in fact.

Isn't it amazing to reflect that this campaign began in the name of tolerance?

I disliked reading Anne's 'This is the way a society dies'. As a Briton I find these things so shameful that I avert my eyes. I thought that America would stay self-reliant, then came Obama. Truth is stranger than fiction. The standard model of politics is that the pendulum will swing back, but this time liberals may engineer prolonged power. Let's face it, Obama's domestic agenda is mostly Bush's compassionate conservatism on steroids + disdain for unborn children.

'1984' hit the zeitgeist in 1948, still in the age of Hitler and Stalin, but the negative utopia of 'Brave New World' better describes present trends: hatcheries, conditioning, vaccination-workers, embryo-workers, psychotherapists, counsellors and so on. Were distopian Islamism prematurely to pursue total war before the West has hollowed itself out, then the West would be forced to a moral re-armament. Liberals realize that war breeds virility. Virility + American history = live free or die....soooo 18th century. The deep, sometimes subconscious motive for hating the Iraq war wasn't hatred of war, but fear of the politics of martial virtue. Hence both liberals and subtle Islamists will avoid all-out war, but rely on the ease with which a pacified, passified, dependent society can be switched from Brave New World to 1984 and Big Brother may be an Ayatollah. It's not a conspiracy, it's a co-incidence of interests.

So where's hope? Where's change? Well, events, dear boy, events.

The greatest terrorist threat to America comes from my country, Britain. Political correctness and security budget incorrectness mean that the danger from British Islamists is out of control:

Jonathan Evans, the director general of MI5, admitted in January that the Security Service alone does not have the resources to maintain surveillance on all its targets. "We don't have anything approaching comprehensive coverage," he said.

Tho I am a frequent beneficiary of the visa waiver program, it makes no sense without serious profiling as opposed to the resources spent randomly searching my wife for half an hour when she left London for Newark a week ago.

This lady is not my wife.

The US should suspend the visa waiver program until Britain gets serious.

Gitmo meets Geneva code. And the usefulness of skunks.

Washington Times. The Guantanamo Bay detention center for high-risk terrorist suspects meets the humane treatment standards laid out by the Geneva Convention for conventional, uniformed combatants.

Reaction at HotAir, NRO. Most Americans oppose closing Gitmo.So much for the left's hysterical assertions on "torture".

One of the community groups I belong to met the other day. We were talking about dog meets skunk,

Action:

These are dark days in American politics. Disgusting people run the country with disgusting deeds and disgusting words. Nothing I can do about it and I don't have much that's fresh to say, so concentrate on other things. But permit a small cry of pain on the subject of 'torture'. I wholly approve what the Bush administration did in relation to Al Quaeda detainees, except that they may not have done enough of it. This thought suffices: imagine you're Pinch Sulzberger, who runs the New York Times. The government believes a detainee may have actionable intelligence of a suicide attack against your skyscraper in Manhattan. But the detainee won't talk. He sniggers. So each day you watch your employees come to work and you know and they don't know that each day may be their last. You see their family photos on their desks, you talk about the future. So Obama rings you up and the call goes like this:

Obama: Hey thanks for all the help. I know you endorsed Hillary, but I understand the ethnic scene in NYT. Hey, Pinch, my people can lean on the terrorist COO a little. Maybe we can tickle him bad enough to to make him squawk. No bruises, we'll call it "processing". But we might save hundreds of lives, your people.

Pinch : It's torture, sir. It's unAmerican. Banning the use of torture would not jeopardize American lives; experts in these matters generally agree that torture produces false confessions.

Obama: The CIA tells me that we averted a specific attack on an LA building by waterboarding a terrorist COO. My DNI says we obtained valuable intelligence by scaring the bejesus out of a couple of these guys. What should I do?

Pinch: Sir, it's better that my staff die than that we 'torture' people who want to destroy America. We are men of principle, aren't we?

Obama: Fine. Let's see how that plays. I'll leave open the possibility of prosecuting the lawyers who justified the waterboarding. So long and tell your staff how much this administration values them.

Update: I add Liz Cheney's fine refutation of the liberal mythology:

As Obama scrupulously suspends judgement over the possible motive of the Fort Hood mass murderer, another enigma, the DC sniper, John Allen Muhammad, was gently put to sleep last night. He died peacefully, "calm and stoic, defiant to the end." His motives are a mystery too:

Answers to why he and a teenage accomplice methodically hunted people going about their daily chores, why he chose his victims, including a middle schooler on his way to class, and how many there were went to the grave with him.

Muhammad was a member of Nation of Islam, whose head, Minister Louis Farrakhan points out:

if it were in fact a Black-White hate thing, why would he shoot five persons of color--one an Indian and four Blacks and one a child?

1. A principle motive was "Jihad", Islamist war on infidels. His accomplice says so and there's ample evidence in Muhammad's history.
2. Most of the media are lying about it thru suppressio veri, partly from motives of avoiding a backlash against innocent muslims, partly as reflexive propaganda to support a "social justice" narrative about who is victim, who is oppressor.
3. The US government, whose first duty is the safety of America, is lying about it to avoid having to discriminate against a thought system that wants to overthrow Western, Christian, Enlightenment inspired society in favour of Islam. That was so with Bush as well as Obama.
4. Obama is a special case. Tho he is a conscious socialist, his affinity to Islam is less direct. He is acculturated to Islam, the son of a muslim, the stepson of a muslim, educated in an Islamic school, fiercely supported by American muslims, especially Louis Farrakhan. Furthermore Obama is a product of the Frankfurt/Alinsky/Gramsci school of re-modelling human society. Islam and the Left apparently are antithetical, but actually are natural allies embodied in Barack Hussein Obama. They have the same goal - to command speech, thought and family life; and the same enemy - us.

More Ralph Peters - "At some point you just need to knock off the BS":

2. Air travel will plummet.

Would you board a plane with this man?

Subject is:

• Male
• Well-educated
• Islamic name
• Close association with US domestic terrorist
• Suppresses basic biographical documents
• Refuses to wear US flag accessory after 9/11
• 20 years attending services by radical preacher, motif - 'God Damn America.'
• Representative quotes:
• "We do not consider ourselves a Christian nation" *
• "If you actually took the number of Muslim Americans, we'd be one of the largest Muslim countries in the world." *
• "Part of my responsibility .. is to fight against negative stereotypes of Islam wherever they appear."

Review subject's motives and background.

* From a 2008 American Religious Identification Survey 76% of Americans self-identify as Christian and 0.6% (1.35 million) as Muslim.