-By Warner Todd Huston

The New York Times is never one to let a good tragedy go to waste when it can turn that sad incident into a bludgeon with which to bash American conservatives, even if the incident doesn't have a thing to do with conservatives, D.C. politics, or even the U.S.A., for that matter. And so, not to disappoint, the Gray Lady incongruously used the terrorist incident in Norway to attack conservatives in America.

Anders Behring Breivik, the killer in Norway, released a manifesto of sorts explaining his actions and in that document he quoted several American bloggers and national security activists such as Islam terror expert Robert Spencer. This, the Times decided, was enough to blame American conservatives for the incident.

Of course, the Times was practically silent about the influence of radical Islam on Major Nidal Hassan who killed 13 U.S. soldiers at Fort Hood in 2009. The Times also did its best to ignore radical Islam in its reports about the Fort Dix six that planned a major terror attack in New Jersey. More recently the Times neglected to mention the radical Islam influence of the pair of homegrown terrorist wannabes arrested in Seattle in June. This is a pattern seen at The New York Times, too. Whenever radical Islam is at the root of a terror attack, the Times routinely fails to note the fact.

Not only did The Times saddle American conservatives with the murderous incident in Norway, but Times writer Scott Shane also brought up the left's favorite shibboleth -- the 1994 Oklahoma City bombing -- and equated it to conservatives.

More broadly, the mass killings in Norway, with their echo of the 1995 bombing of the federal building in Oklahoma City by an antigovernment militant, have focused new attention around the world on the subculture of anti-Muslim bloggers and right-wing activists and renewed a debate over the focus of counterterrorism efforts.

First of all, the incident in Noway has no connection whatever with the 1994 bombing in Oklahoma except in the most vague of ways. Unlike Norway's Breivik, Timothy McVeigh had no complaints about the influence of radical Islam on the national government when he destroyed the Muir Federal building in Oklahoma City. But more importantly, neither today's American conservative movement -- nor yesterday's for that matter -- have any connection whatever to McVeigh's act of domestic terror. Yet, here we have the Times linking McVeigh directly to both the incident in Norway and today's American conservatives.

Shane's next paragraph almost seems to be parody.

In the United States, critics have asserted that the intense spotlight on the threat from Islamic militants has unfairly vilified Muslim Americans while dangerously playing down the threat of attacks from other domestic radicals. The author of a 2009 Department of Homeland Security report on right-wing extremism withdrawn by the department after criticism from conservatives repeated on Sunday his claim that the department had tilted too heavily toward the threat from Islamic militants.

Catch the irony of this statement. While Shane is lamenting that "Islamic militants" are being used to smear all of Islam, and apparently he feels this is a bad thing, he, himself is using the incident in Norway to smear all American conservatives! Talk about obtuseness. Talk about hypocrisy.

Shane wasn't done smearing conservatives, either. He dipped back into the skewed Homeland Security domestic terror report from 2009 that was so far off base that even the left-wing Obama administration had to retract it. Despite the utter lack of proof, Shane relied on that flawed report to warn readers that a Norway-like incident could happen any minute, perpetrated here by American conservatives.

You might recall that the absurd 2009 Homeland Security report claimed that returning U.S. soldiers were likely to become domestic terrorists upon returning home. Obviously we've never seen any proof of such an outrageous claim.

In any case, the irony of the Times' report is that Scott Shane scolds people for using the many thousands of incidents of Islamic terror as a basis to warn about radical Islam yet himself uses the only two terror attacks even remotely connected, no matter how tangentially, to the right as an excuse to warn that conservatives are somehow more dangerous than radical Islamists.

Scott Shane and The New York Times indulged in some amazing hypocrisy with this skewed piece.

-By Warner Todd Huston

Did you know that a suspected Somali terrorist was sneaked into a U.S. criminal court in New York City over the July 4th holiday? Most people don't. While we were all distracted by celebrating our Independence Day President Obama was sneaking foreign terrorists into our civil court system instead of taking him to Guantanamo.

A few weeks ago, Reuters reported that Somali terrorist Ahmed Abdulkadir Warsame was brought to New York City to face criminal charges in our home-based court system on July 4th, yet.

Warsame was captured in April in the Gulf region and was held aboard a U.S. Naval ship until July being questioned by the military and the FBI.

The Obama administration did not tell the American people ahead of time that a terrorist was being placed in our civil court system. This is precisely the situation that Guantanamo facility was created to prevent. Our court system couldn't put murders like Casey Anthony and OJ Simpson away but Obama is going to start bringing terrorists into our homeland and into our deeply flawed courts?

Even left leaning Senator Susan Collins* (R, MA) thought this was a bad idea. "A foreign national who fought on behalf of al Shabaab in Somalia - and who was captured by our military overseas - should be tried in a military commission, not a federal civilian court in New York or anywhere else in our country," Collins said in a statement.

A week after Obama and his Dept. of Justice sneaked terrorist Warsame into New York City, 23 senators registered their alarm by sending a letter to Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta.

“We are very concerned that this policy appears to be a circumvention of the clear intent of many in Congress that terrorists captured abroad under the Authorization for Use of Military Force should not be brought into the United States for trial,” wrote the senators, led by John McCain of Arizona, the ranking Republican on the Senate Armed Services Committee, and Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the Senate Republican leader.

As I said, the Guantanamo Bay facility was created specifically to keep foreign terrorists off American soil yet here is Obama using the cover of a holiday to sneak a terrorist into our civil courts? It truly is an "intolerable situation," as Collins said.

Is this what we are to expect, then? For Obama to start depositing one terrorist after another right on America’s homeland? All without notice to us that this is what he is doing?

Who doesn’t bet that most of these people will be acquitted and then let go free right here in our own backyards? After all, U.S. Criminal courts require a far stricter burden of proof than military trials do. Worse, much of the proof that the CIA or FBI finds on a terrorist will not be allowed in court for fear that it will hurt national security and in that case much of the real evidence will go unsaid in the courtroom.

So, essentially, Obama is setting up a situation where foreign terrorists will be allowed to roam free right here at home because the government will most likely fail to convict them.

First Obama has tried his hardest to destroy our economy. Now he’s bringing terrorists to roam our country at will. Who is this man working for, anyway? It sure as heck ain’t U.S.!

*(As an aside, I find it amusing that most of Maine is so out of touch with high speed Internet service that the Senator's webpage has a welcome page where you can pick which sort of service you have: "high speed," or "low speed." For those unaware, the upper half of Maine may as well be the wilderness. There are few roads, few cell phone towers, heck, even their power comes from the Canadian grid and not our own!)

-By Warner Todd Huston

Obama's is one of the most disastrous foreign policies of any president ever. His latest outrage is the dual absurdities of, on one hand putting Israel on a list of state sponsors of terrorism, while on the other hand opening a dialog with and bestowing diplomatic legitimacy upon the terrorists of the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt.

This is the schizophrenic mess that Obama's anti-western centric foreign policy ideas have created. It shouldn't be much of a surprise, though. Upon becoming President Obama almost immediately launched into a series of one more example of Obama giving Israel the back of his hand.

In 2008, the Bush administration created a list of nations whose citizens asking to visit our country the administration thought needed to be watched. This list contained nations that were determined to be possible state sponsors of terrorism. Nations like North Korea, Yemen, Libya, Turkmenistan, and Syria appeared on this list of nations that, in the State Department’s words, "have shown a tendency to promote, produce, or protect terrorist organizations or their members."

However, the list put out during the Bush years has been altered by the Obama administration. On the 20011 list, North Korea has been removed while Israel has been added. Obama apparently feels Israel is worse than North Korea.

As my friend Jeff Dunetz says: "Only in the twisted world of the Obama Administration, where allies are trashed, and enemies are embraced, could the tiny nation of Israel, on the front lines of the war on terror for decades, be on a list of 36 nations which "have shown a tendency to promote, produce, or protect terrorist organizations or their members.'"

Then, to offset that news, the Obama administration has made another decision as opposite of the one above as possible. Obama and his State Dept. have decided that actual terrorists deserve to be given official diplomatic recognition!

That's right, Obama has decided that the terrorists of the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt deserve to be treated as a legitimate political body, one that official deserves recognition by the USA.

In explanation, an Obama administration official told the media that, "The political landscape in Egypt has changed, and is changing… It is in our interests to engage with all of the parties that are competing for parliament or the presidency."

So, on one hand, Israel, our truest ally in the Mid East, is called a "state sponsor of terror," while an actual terrorist outfit is "in our interests to engage."

Meanwhile, the president himself won't even cross the national mall to go meet with Senate Republicans to discuss the budget. I suppose it won't be long before Obama puts the GOP on the list of state sponsors of terror.

… and Why Liberals are Our Weak Spot

-By Warner Todd Huston

For the online, left-wing magazine Slate, William Saletan thinks he's found something that will damage Osama bin Ladden's reputation in the Islamic world. But what he thinks is such a big deal proves that he doesn't understand radical Islam or even the Muslim world. Worse, it proves why liberals are our soft spot and why they could be the death of us.

Saletan is all excited over the fact that the U.S. found a large cache of pornography in bin Ladden's living quarters. This, Saleton is happy to say, will undermine bin Ladden's reputation as a strictly holy man. This hurts bin Ladden, says Saleton, because, "they're more upset by porn and hiding behind women than by suicide bombing"

Saleton contends that in our fight against bin Ladden, we've found the right "argument" to level against our opponent.

Why is porn such a big idea?

After discussing some polls in Europe, Saleton cites the findings on how Muslims felt about pornography.

On pornography, the pattern was reversed. In France, 43 percent of the general public said viewing pornography was morally acceptable, but only 16 percent of Muslims agreed. In Germany, 58 percent of the general public, but only 18 percent of Muslims, said it was acceptable. And while 35 percent of Brits said it was acceptable, only 1 percent of British Muslims shared that view.

"In sum," Saleton says, "if you're looking for an argument in Western Europe that's more likely to appeal to Muslims than to the general population, pornography is a better bet than civilian casualties."

Saleton goes on to further explore how badly porn is looked upon by devout Muslims and concludes that this is the magic bullet that will undermine the bin Ladden mystique.

Oh, but would it be that simple.

You see, Saleton's problem is that he takes the whole blather about how negatively Muslims feel about porn and accepts prima facia that if Muslims come to believe that bin Ladden was a heavy user of porn that they will turn away in shame from his legacy.

It is simply foolish to believe that radical Islamists will bow to this supposed religious principle. They will not. Worse, it is even absurd to think regular Muslims will turn away from bin Ladden because of this.

We must remember that Muslims are some of the most conspiracy minded people in human history. To believe the lies they swallow whole about Jews and Israel alone takes a Herculean effort to avoid truth. Their nearly universal disbelief in the Holocaust, their penchant to think that the USA and the Jews are behind every bad thing that happens to them, even their belief in the existence of Muhammad himself are all exercises in high fantasy.

Instead of seeing Muslims turn away from bin Ladden because of a porn stash, a million conspiracy theories will be born to excuse it away. Muslims will simply claim that the porn was planted by the great Statan, the USA. They absolutely won't believe that bin Ladden had anything to do with the pornography.

In fact, any violation of religious principle is explained away as ultimately useful for "the cause" of destroying the big and little Satan. If Binnie need a little porn to beat the USA and Israel, well no Muslim will deny him that.

That Saleton was foolish enough to imagine that there are any real religious principles behind the beliefs of radical Islam makes him dangerous. It leads him and liberals like him to the mistaken notion that appealing to Muslims’s religious tenets will help us "understand" Islam and will, in turn, help us figure out a way to turn them to our side -- or at least defuse them enough for this whole thing to fade away.

What Saleton refuses to come to grips with is that religion is only a veneer for radical Islam. Any violation of their religion is acceptable if it leads to killing Jews and Americans. They accept the generally violent leanings of their religion and culture, of course. Violent Jihad is the only principle they won't turn away from. But the little things, like treating women well, accepting others, staying away from drink or pornography, all this is easily ignored for the greater goal of dealing death and destruction in an effort to control the world.

As the saying goes, they "don't sweat the little stuff" in order to achieve success on the "big stuff."

That Saleton thinks that telling Muslims (that won't believe him anyway) that bin Ladden violated some of the little stuff of Islam won't in the least dissuade them from thinking Binnie is the big stuff for his 9/11 success. That Saleton thinks it will shows why folks of his ilk on our side give the enemy the upper hand and puts us all in danger.

-By Warner Todd Huston

Columbia University announced last week that its Graduate School of Journalism is awarding its highest award to America's enemies, Al-Jazeera TV.

The university is awarding Al-Jazeera with its journalism award for the Arab-centric mid eastern "news" it has produced. Al-Jazeera is apparently being recognized for "singular journalism in the public interest."

"Al Jazeera English has performed a great service in bringing the English-speaking world in-depth coverage of the turmoil in the Middle East," said Nicholas Lemann, dean of Columbia's Graduate School of Journalism.

So, once again we have a leftist American university turning its back on America this time to award its top honors to a foreign TV service whose goal includes the daily denunciation of the United States of America.

One has to wonder if there were awards given by American universities for the Nazi Party's newspapers or radio broadcasts during WWII? Were there great American awards given the U.S.S.R.'s Pravda or Izvestia during the Cold War, even? Yet here we are in the middle of a war between freedom, liberty, and democracy and the backwards, oppressive forces of radical Islam that Al-Jazeera represents and our publicly supported university is giving great awards to supporters of our enemy.

This is typical of the vapid thinking of the Democrat Party and America's liberals. To them we are the evil that plagues the world. To them we are the monsters. To liberals our enemies need to be awarded and recognized as the better side of the argument.

Last week, Bill O'Reilly tackled this topic and made some great points.