After writing my piece on the American primaries this week -- it's on the Debate page, 'Okey-dokey: Palin power surges across America' -- I had this note from Dr James Lucier, a former US Senate Foreign Relations Committee Staff Director and a veteran of many decades on Capitol Hill. As always, the experienced Dr Lucier is worth listening to on American politics -- and just now on what he calls 'the Palin romp across the deadwood Republican establishment.' Here is what he said: 'In the beginning they said that she was a girl and didn't know how to throw a ball. Over the past few weeks most of the candidates she endorsed either won outright against the establishment or came so close that they are still mopping their brows.' 'Tuesday's apparent victory against Lisa Murkowski by a Palin-endorsed candidate, Joe Miller, was especially significant because nobody in Alaska had ever heard of him either. The final margin of victory was 1,688 votes. There are still some absentee ballots, but a lot are Democrats and a huge chunk of the rest are military votes that always vote for the most conservative candidate. (Standard polling of the Military shows that there are no Democrats in fox holes.)' 'It is important to understand that the Palin-Murkowski rivalry goes back to the days when she was leading the reform against the big oil companies, against the wishes of the dominant Alaskan establishment, including Lisa Murkowski's father, former US Senator Frank Murkowski, and at the time Governor of Alaska. Sarah-can't-throw-a-ball-properly-Palin knocked Frank Murkowski out in the next Republican primary and then became the next Governor and the rest is history.' 'The Lisa Murkowski camp had assembled a war chest to air a blitz of TV ads featuring endorsements by the late US Senator Ted Stevens, considered by some to be the Father of Alaska (he was an Alaskan leader before it became a state), and considered by others to be the Godfather of Alaskan Pork Barrel politics.' 'Tragically, Stevens died in a plane crash two or three weeks ago, and the endorsements were never used. Graciously, Palin used her post as a regular TV commentator to praise Stevens for his positive role in Alaska, without once mentioning the Klondike Rush corruption that came with frontier politics. Yet, as the Murkowski defeat shows, it was Palin who brought that era to an end as effectively as the granite mountainside which was Steven's grave.' A couple of us sat in one of the cafés at the Grand Sablon here in Brussels yesterday and found particular amusement in an article in the Financial Times by one of the paper's euro-enthusiast commentators, Gideon Rachman. Gideon, a Brussels veteran, is greatly frustrated that public opinion across the EU member states just isn't going to let Turkey 'join Europe.' The problem is, 'as long as Turkish membership raises the prospect of mass emigraton to the rest of the EU, it will be impossible to sell it to western European voters.' He proposes instead to offer Turkey membership of the EU -- that is, give it huge weight in framing European law, give it lavish financial and structural aid, give it unfettered access to the European single market and the rest -- only explain that under this deal Turkish citizens would not get the automatic right to work anywhere in the EU, a right which is guaranteed for all citizens of of the present member states (though with some delay for citizens of a couple of the most recent members). Unlike the citizens of the other 27 member states, all Turks could expect is easier travel. One British Brussels wag looked up from his coffee long enough to suggest that Gideon might like to offer the same deal to Israel and see what kind of reaction he would get. Me, I didn't need to say much. I just said I recognised the reasoning behind the plan. So, Abdul, welcome aboard the Euro-bus. Just remember your place: right at the back. Today in Saudi Arabia, the richest and most influential Islamic state in the world, a Saudi man who was convicted in court of paralysing a fellow countryman is being threatened by the judicial authorities with having his spinal cord cut as an official punishment. It is Islamic law and Saudi Arabia enforces it: an eye for an eye. As I write this, the case judge in the north-western province of Tabuk is waiting for replies to the letter he has sent out to several hospitals asking for their advice on whether it is medically possible to slice the spine. Is the judicial mutilation going to happen? We will have to wait and see. But we do know that ten years ago an Egyptian worker had an eye surgically removed in a Saudi hospital as punishment for disfiguring a fellow worker in an acid attack. I mention all that because I am going to write about two dust-ups going on in America now, both of them tied to Islam and what Americans are supposed to make of the Muslims in their midst. Dust-up one is the question of whether a foreign-financed campaigning group of Muslims will be allowed to build a £65m mosque just two blocks from Ground Zero. Dust-up two is the continuing question of whether or not President Obama is actually a Christian. A poll last week showed that one in four Americans believe he is not. They think he is a Muslim. Now, the first response from people in this country to either of these issues is predictable. On the question of the mosque, the response is: ‘A mosque is a place of worship and to deny a place of worship to a religion because of a group of terrorists’ links to Islam is offensive. Islam is a religion of peace and mercy. Bin Laden does not represent Islam. He espouses a warped interpretation of Wahhabism.’ ‘Warped?’ What, unlike the Wahhabism embraced by the Saudi state? See first paragraph. That ‘unwarped’ interpretation of Wahhabism enforces mutilation and beheading of criminals, execution of homosexuals, stoning of adulterers and violent suppression of all other religions. Sweet mother of Jesus, you’d be hard-pushed to spot just where the line is crossed between warped and unwarped if that sort of barbarity is okay. We’ll leave that question for the moment and get on to Barack Hussein Obama and whether or not he is a Christian and whether it ought to matter anyway. The first response to that question by most people in this country is to mock what they believe are the religious obsessions of the American rightwing. Here’s the problem with that response. It is not the American right who have been making the most influential arguments that Mr Obama is Muslim. They don’t need to. All they have to do is point to arguments which have come instead from powerful Muslims such as President Muammar Gaddafi of Libya, and from intellectuals such as Dr Edward N Luttwak, a military specialist and historian writing in the Democrat New York Times. The sheer frustration of the White House in all of this is shown in their determination to show that instead it is leading right-wingers such as the broadcaster Rush Limbaugh who are making the accusations. Which leaves Mr Limbaugh laughing. He has challenged the White House to find any instance in which he said the President was a Muslim. Problem is the President’s staff can’t find a single instance. No, the closest Mr Limbaugh has come is simply reading out on his national radio show what President Gaddafi said on June 11, 2008, when the Muslim leader called for ‘all the people in the Arab and Islamic world’ to applaud Barack Obama because he is ‘a Muslim.’ This is the kind of celebrity endorsement the White House isn’t looking for. Nor is this, in the Democrat New York Times. A month before the Libyan president declared that Mr Obama is ‘a Muslim,’ Dr Littwak wrote: ‘As the son of the Muslim father, Senator Obama was born a Muslim under Muslim law as it is universally understood… Of course, as most Americans understand it, Senator Obama is not a Muslim. He chose to become a Christian…His conversion, however, was a crime in Muslim eyes.’ The crime was apostasy. Recommended punishment under Islamic law: beheading at the hands of a cleric. You may remember that in 2006 a convert from Islam to Christianity in Afghanistan only escaped execution because his lawyers managed to have him declared insane, after which he managed to flee to Italy. Peace, mercy, and run for your life. The Drudge Report last week put Dr Luttwak’s article on its website, which gets 27m hits a day. No, the White House doesn’t need it. And while I welcome any discomfort in the West Wing, I wish the American right would stay out of the issue. Whenever they start fretting whether the President is a Christian, they start getting into muddled history about how the United States were founded on Christian principles. They weren’t. Men such as George Washington, Benjamin Franklin and above all Thomas Jefferson looked to Providence, not Christ. All these men, and others who led the revolution and established the Constitution, were Deist, or call them Unitarian if you like. The early symbols they chose for the new republic were Roman and Masonic. No crosses, no Trinities. Which doesn’t stop me enjoying the squirming of President Obama over the question of whether he is a Christian. Especially not now, when Americans are divided over the question of whether an Islamic outfit ought to be allowed to build a mosque only a few yards from the spot where mostly-Saudi Wahhabi terrorists committed mass murder in the name of Islam. The people supporting the mosque are trying to frame the argument as one of freedom of religion. It isn’t. It is a question of whether to allow a somewhat suspect Islamic agitator to cock his leg on a sacred American site. I mean the Imam Feisal Rauf, described best as ‘the project’s sharia-touting sponsor’ and a man who famously refuses to consider Hamas a terrorist organisation. One of the best men on the imam and his followers is Andrew C McCarthy, now the head of the Centre for Law and Counterterrorism in Washington, but for 18 years an assistant United States attorney in the Southern District of New York. From 1993 through 1995, Mr McCarthy led the terrorism prosecution against the ‘Blind Sheikh’ Omar Abdel Rahman and eleven others in connection with the 1993 World Trade Center bombing and a plot to bomb New York City landmarks. Following the 9/11 attacks, he supervised the Justice Department’s Command Post near Ground Zero. And on it goes. The man is one of the leading experts on American law and terrorism. McCarthy sees the real question of the Ground Zero mosque as, ‘Which Islam will prevail in America?’ Writing this week in the conservative journal National Review Online he says it is sadly ironic that ‘our public debate presents the mosque proponents as the partisans of liberty… wittingly or not, when they champion this mosque and its sponsors, it is the agenda of an alien and authoritarian Islam they champion – an Islam against which many American Muslims chafe.’ He says American Muslims who crave religious liberty and Western enlightenment have been abandoned to the ‘sharia-mongers’ by the elites from President Obama to New York Mayor Bloomberg. It is the foreign-financed Muslim Brotherhood, not American Muslims, who are insisting that this Islamic monument must be imposed on this sacred spot. Mr McCarthy characterises the Muslim Brotherhood as ‘the Saudi-backed saboteurs whose American operatives boldly promise to “eliminate and destroy Western Civilisation from within.”’ The American political elite who want this mosque at Ground Zero are nothing but the latest generation of useful idiots. There are already 100 mosques in New York. No one in America is denying any Muslim a place to worship. It is just a question of, ‘Not here.’ -- this is my column from today's Irish Daily Mail He found this for me from the Madrid newspaper Imparcial by the author, journalist, and political thinker Luis Maria Anson. Kiko calls Anson 'the pre-eminent writer and philosophical leader in Spain.' He is also member of the Royal Academy of the Spanish Language. Here is a translation of just what European intellectuals such as Anson really think of the Obamas. Keep in mind that in America, the Democrat elite want Americans to think that while the the aloof Ivy League lawyer Obama is rapidly losing support among the plain people of America, those sophisticates over in Europe admire him. Not quite, according to Anson. Oh, and by the way, Anson opens with nice things to say about David Cameron following the Tory leader's recent low-key holiday in Spain. This will certainly be the first and is most likely the last time this blog will say anything good about the Tory leader in a post with 'Europe' in the headline, but here is how the prime minister looks in this article from La Razon: 'With genuine natural behaviour, without fanfare of body guards, the British Prime Minister, David Cameron, spends his vacation in a small Spanish village, integrating himself into the village life. He plays cards, visits the bars, visits with the neighbours and comports himself naturally and without fanfare. He is the Chief of a Monarchy that ruled the largest empire in the history of the world and that today is a model of democracy and modernity with respect for the old traditions and protocol. A ten, for sure, to David Cameron.' 'The presence in Spain of the British prime minister, who carries the democratic representation of the United Kingdom, contrasts with the bragging and fanfare of the "nouveau-riche" wife of the president of the United States. With the worst style of a dictator/king of the middle east, Mrs Obama has settled herself in Spain with the "howl" of almost a hundred body-guards, an endless caravan of automobiles, besides reserving fifty rooms in one of the most expensive hotels in the world.' 'We are embarrassed for her. In the middle of the crisis, caused by the economic errors of the American Capitalism, the wife of the American president enjoys herself on the most insulting, lavish waste. This is without mention of the offence to Spain that she refused to accept Spanish security, which has been proven exceptional at the highest international meetings. ' 'Mrs Obama has treated us as if we were a colony of the empire. Caesar remains in Washington while she "lords" herself in Spanish territory.' Sounds like the Spanish are just about ready to start shouting that line the Central Americas used to shout during official visits by Vice-President Nixon in the 1950s, 'Yanqui, go home!'28 August 2010 12:40 AM
Palin romps across the deadwood Republican establishment
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25 August 2010 10:30 AM
Back of the bus, Abdul
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23 August 2010 3:05 PM
A mosque at Ground Zero: not here, not ever
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Europe admires the Obamas? Not quite: 'We are embarrased for Michelle'
Sunday, 29 August 2010
But then, I am familiar with the
diagram of the bus used in the infamous 1955 case against Rosa Parks in Alabama, when the 'colored' Mrs Parks was prosecuted for refusing to give up her seat at the front of the bus to a white man. 'Coloreds' were supposed to sit at the back of the bus.
Islam is a religion of peace and mercy, part 47.
Thanks go to my right-thinking Cuban friend, Kiko Villalon -- with whom I shall one day sail into a free Havana -- who keeps an eye on the Spanish press for me.
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