Now we know why Swiss cheese is full of holes

Whatever happened to Switzerland?

In a craven exhibition of kowtowing, it has secured the release of an innocent Swiss engineer, Max Goeldi, who has been held hostage by Moammar Gadhafi for two years in return for “normalization” of its relations with Libya.

Switzerland has been the subject of Gadhafi's call to jihad that started with the Swiss arrest of Gadhafi’s son and daughter-in-law on assault charges in 2008, and escalated when the Swiss people voted to ban the building of further minarets earlier this year.

The Gadhafis bought off the maid who made the assault complaint and charges were dropped. But, apparently, the police mug shot of his son got circulated on the Internet. So, in addition to getting the release of the hostage the Swiss government is also paying about $1.5 million in compensation to Gadhafi’s son.

It is hard to believe that 70 years ago this was the same country that Hitler was afraid to invade. He was prepared to invade Great Britain and he had no problem invading Russia and the rest of Western Europe and North Africa. He declared war on the United States. But Switzerland gave him pause.

Switzerland is an economically successful state with a mixed economy and few natural resources bolstering its high GDP.

Libya is a two bit little country with nothing but oil propping it up, but the triumph of Islam marches on, as another successful holy war is brought to a satisfactory conclusion with the Swiss paying the jizya and being permitted to continue their dhimmitude.

It also appears that Switzerland had help from the other weak-kneed European states in bowing before the barbarous Berber of the Barbary Coast, as this news story indicates.

It is Libya that launched the United States' navy to combat Muslim sea-going commerce raiders who were capturing American seaman and enslaving them. When the Muslim potentate of the day refused to be bought off, Congress approved a naval bill and the U.S. marines were sent to Tripoli (they still sing about it).

Unfortunately, the Obama administration has forgotten the words of the Marine Corps' anthem (actually, I think he calls it the Marine Corpse in what is perhaps a freudian slip). An American diplomat who mildly commented that declaring holy war on Switzerland might not be the best option was made to apolgize for this insult to Gaddafi.

And, as events have shown, what did he know anyway?

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Picture This

I have seen quite a few funny pictures of American protestors holding up signs with misspelled words over the years. Most of these were pictures taken at conservative rallies and circulated by liberals whose under-text was that conservatives are not very educated.

I have also see a lot of commentary on how the far left (the really educated) and the Islamists make common cause.

Well, if that is the case, I hope some of those liberal fellow-travellers will give the chap in the picture above a spelling lesson. He is Carlos Almonte, the religious zealot from New Jersey who was recently arrested trying to go to Somalia to fight in the jihad. The picture was taken in New York City at some Islamist street protest in 2008.

Thanks to: http://www.jihadwatch.org/

My kind of guy -- off with the mask and down with the gauntlet

International wars sometimes start in strange ways.

World War I started with the murder of a member of the Austrian nobility by a Serbian nationalist, which was followed by a declaration of war amongst the major European powers of the day. Nobody really saw that one coming.

Franklin Roosevelt tried to interfere with Japan’s takeover of Manchuria and pretty much guaranteed that Japan would eventually attack the United States, end its neutrality and ensure its entry into World War II. It is arguable that most Americans didn’t really see that one coming either.

Nineteen Muslim airline hijackers sent the American military into Afghanistan and Iraq. Saddam Hussein was as surprised as anybody when the U.S. tanks and aircraft rolled into his country.

There is a new conflict brewing and it receives almost no attention in North America. It also started with an innocuous beginning.

In 2008, Hannibal Gaddafi, the son of Libyan dictator, Muammar Gaddafi, was arrested in Geneva, Switzerland for allegedly assaulting two of his servants. The old man erupted, arresting two Swiss businessmen in Libya for violating “residency” rules.

According to the February 26, 2010 edition of the Wall Street Journal:

Then, last November, Swiss voters approved a referendum to ban the construction of minarets on mosques. Some analysts in Switzerland said they believed the strong vote in favor of the ban—58% of voters supported the referendum—stemmed in part from resentment in Switzerland over the issue of the businessmen in Libya. Soon after the election, Libya's government-controlled news agency Jana branded the vote "racist."

But while the vote raised the ire of political and religious leaders in the Muslim world, it hasn't generated violence or a backlash against Swiss interests abroad, as the Swiss government had originally feared.

After the vote, Swiss efforts to convince Tripoli to release the men failed, and political observers said Libya's continued refusal to release them was in reaction to the minaret vote. Earlier this week, Libya freed one of the men after a court overturned his conviction on appeal, and he has returned to Switzerland. The other man, Max Göldi, the country head in Libya for Swiss engineering group ABB Ltd., has begun a four-month prison sentence in Libya.

Bern has restricted the granting of Swiss visas to Libyan citizens. That, in turn, has prompted Tripoli to block the entry of some European citizens into Libya. Tripoli has stopped issuing visas to citizens of the Schengen passport-free zone, which includes most of the European Union as well as Switzerland.
On Thursday, Italy said Libya may renege on a deal to help control the flow of undocumented immigrants into the EU because of the visa spat with Switzerland. Libya is often used as a departure point by such immigrants for southern Europe, particularly Italy.

Italy, which has close business links with Libya, has accused Switzerland of misusing the Schengen agreement and taking its members "hostage" by instituting the ban, which had forced other Schengen nations to bar travel by Libyans as well.
Italian Interior Minister Roberto Maroni said the quarrel put the Schengen zone at risk and could further strain relations with Libya. Swiss Justice Minister Eveline Widmer-Schlumpf met with EU ministers on Thursday to discuss possible solutions to the travel situation.

But the issue has escalated beyond mere visa and passport fiddling.

In February, 2010 Gaddafi called for “jihad” (holy war) against Switzerland:

We will not give up Jihad, because it is a religious duty. Jihad constitutes a religious duty and self-defense. It is the defense of the religion, fighting for the sake of Allah, defense of the Prophet Muhammad, of the Koran, of the mosques. … Whoever destroys the mosques of Allah before the eyes of the Muslims is worthy of having Jihad launched against him. If Switzerland were situated on our border, we would fight it, for destroying the mosques of Allah. Jihad against those who destroy the mosques of Allah and their minarets is [true] Jihad, and not terrorism. … Switzerland is an infidel and sinful country which destroys mosques. Jihad, with all possible means, should be declared against it.

Any Muslim who buys Swiss products is an infidel. Let Muslims all over the world know this. There are people here from all over the Islamic world. Any Muslim anywhere in the world who deals with Switzerland is an infidel against Islam, Muhammad, Allah, and the Koran. If you continue to have dealings with Switzerland, and the people who portrayed the Prophet Muhammad in the most abominable way in their newspapers. … If you continue to have dealings with them, to buy their products, to support them, to accept their tourists, to accept their planes, to accept their ships, and to host their embassies — you are not Muslims. Any Muslim must boycott them.

Boycott Switzerland, its products, its planes, its ships, and its embassies. Boycott this sinful infidel community, which attacks the mosques of Allah. The Muslim masses must head towards all the airports in the Islamic world, and prevent any Swiss plane from landing. They should head to the ports, and prevent any Swiss ship from coming in. They should comb the shops and markets and remove the Swiss products. Allah said: “Let them find harshness in you.”

This might pass for the normal, fatuous, ravings of a megalomaniac dictator except:

Qaddafi’s government has cut its oil supplies to Switzerland, withdrawn Libyan capital from Swiss banks, and moved to close all Swiss companies active in Libya — Swiss Air having already been shut down. And within a week, by Thursday, March 4, Qaddafi’s call for jihad against Switzerland — manifested as economic jihad, for now — was endorsed by Arab League ministers meeting in Cairo. Ministers from Somalia, Sudan, Egypt, Morocco, Mauritania, Algeria, Djibouti, Syria, Yemen, Bahrain, Kuwait, the UAE , Jordan, Oman, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and Tunisia each signed a document in support of Libya’s actions, which also denounced Switzerland as “racist.”

Qaddafi’s jihad-sanctioning diatribe and its endorsement by the Arab League ignore the Swiss electorate’s legitimate concerns expressed through their political leadership, notably the Swiss People’s Party (SVP). These actions towards the Swiss and Western Europe in general by Qaddafi, his Arab League supporters, and other Muslim political and religious leaders illustrate simultaneous denial and imperialistic threat — archetypal Islamic behaviors toward infidel civilizations.

The Swiss plebiscite did not disenfranchise any Muslims from worshipping or building centers of worship, it was only aimed at the architectural adornment of a minaret, and did not deal with those that have already been built.

It is possible that Gaddafi’s call to jihad may do more to unite Europe against the world of Islam than a 100 Geert Wilders ever could.

If your knowledge of Gaddafi is somewhat scant, go to this website for a more intimate look.

Rachel's requiem for the world's most famous libel tourist

Dr. Rachel Ehrenfeld

The Serial Libel Tourist is Dead; But Libel Tourism is Alive and Well

Libel Tourism is so effective, that the Western media apparently fears even to report the serial suer Khalid bin Mahfouz's death.

By Rachel Ehrenfeld & Millard Burr

Saudi billionaire Khalid bin Mahfouz died in Jeddah last Saturday. The 60 year old former owner of the Saudi National Commercial Bank, and banker for the Royal family, also owned a charity, the Muwafaq (blessed relief) Foundation, that funded al-Qaeda and Hamas, to name but a few. He should be remembered not only because of his involvement with the shady Bank for Commerce and Credit International (BCCI) aka “banks for crooks and criminal,” and the illegal purchase of the First American Bank in Washington, DC, but mostly because inadvertently he led Americans to better protect their free speech rights.

Using British libel laws that allow foreigners to sue other foreigners in British courts, a practice known as libel tourism, Mahfouz became a serial suer. He, sometimes together with his sons, sued more than 40 writers and publishers - mostly Americans - because he did not like their critic. Single handedly, on behalf of his royal masters made libel tourism a multi million dollars industry for the British Bar, and Mahfouz made London the “Libel Capital” of the world.

Many will miss him. In Riyadh, he will be missed by the ruling members of the royal family who once used his National Commercial Bank as their own piggy bank, and often used him and his family members as fronts for their business and to fund their favorite organizations and terrorist groups. Likewise, those shady characters who ran the Saudi funded Muslim World League, the International Islamic Relief Agency and the Rabita Trust of Pakistan will miss him.

The Georgetown alum (1968) Prince Turki bin Faisal, former Saudi ambassador to the U.K. and the U.S. and director of Saudi Arabia’s General Intelligence Department from 1977 until ten days before 9/11, and responsible for the Saudi financial aid of the jihad in Afghanistan, will have lost an old friend.

Bin Mahfouz will certainly by missed by a circle of notorious Saudi plutocrats who make an appearance in the annual Forbes list of the world's wealthiest citizens, many are defendants in the lawsuits filed by the victims of the 9/11 attacks. There are the Raji, the Bin Laden, the Al Amoudi, and such other disreputable individuals as designated terrorist Yassin al Qadi, who run some of Mahfouz’s business and charity – the Muwafaq foundation, that funded al-Qaeda and Hamas, to name but a few.

Al Qaeda, Hamas and Taliban leaders must be grief stricken and worried; would his sons be as generous as he was?

It is supposed that Mahfouz retained a powerful friend in Washington in James A. Baker, III. Baker, who served as chief-of-staff to Ronald Reagan and Secretary of State under George H. W. Bush, joined Mahfouz during the roaring seventies when Houston was known as Riyadh-west. They worked together through the heady days and even through the bankruptcy of the second-largest banking organization in Texas, MCorp, in the late nineteen eighties. During the dark days of the Bank of Credit and Commerce International (BCCI), Mahfouz could count on Baker, his man in the White House, to keep him out of jail, no matter how persistent the pressure applied by New York District Attorney Robert Morgenthau.

Obviously, the ruling family of Abu Dhabi will be thinking different thoughts as they recall the $596 million they paid for the privilege of purchasing Mahfouz’s shares in BCCI, and were then left holding the bag as the bank went under.

Irish politicians, particularly the disgraced former prime minister Charles Haughey will recall those wondrous days in 1990 he received $85,000 from Mahfouz, so that Mahfouz and nine members of his family would paying $1 million each, would obtain an Irish passport -- thus allowing easy commercial entree to the European market.

Surviving members of the Hunt family of Texas likely have mixed feeling on the death of Mahfouz. Bunker Hunt, scion of one of the world's richest men had used John Connally, former Governor of Texas and Secretary of the Navy, as his go-between in an effort to entice Mahfouz to join in his play to corner the market in silver bullion. Mahfouz then induced member of the Saudi royal family to join in, and they, like Mahfouz, would lose a fortune. Nearly driven to suicide, Mahfouz was comforted by Salem Bin Laden, perhaps his closest friend ever.

On the West Coast, Boeing directors must recall with fondness the 5% they paid Mahfouz, the fixer, to win perhaps their largest contract ever. And the middlemen in Saudi Arabia who also benefited from their involvement with Mahfouz in clinching the deal must be reminiscing.

As for Osama bin Laden, wherever he is, the al Qaeda leader probably remembers with some affection the days spent with his brother, Salem bin Laden and Khaled bin Mahfouz at their jointly-held River Oaks estate in Houston, TX. With Mahfouz gone, Osama’s “golden chain” of wealthy Saudi funders, has been reduced by a link.

The international law firm, Akin Gump Strauss Hauer & Feld, must be sad to have lost this wealthy and most litigious client. Likewise, the English Bar must be shedding crocodile tears, especially those lawyers who represented Mahfouz.

Justice David Eady would surely miss Mahfouz. The cases he brought before Eady whose judgments made both both Mahfouz and the Justice (in)famous for making Libel Tourism a weapon to silence critics of Saudi Arabia the world over. Even the U.N. Human rights commission warned Britain last year that its libel tourism industry has become a tool to suppress the media’s free speech rights and endangers national security.

The serial Libel Tourist Khalid bin Mahfouz is dead. But the jihad against the West he helped fund together with the pernicious British libel tourism practices, are alive and well. Unfortunately, the U.S. has done nothing to stop his activities on either front when he was alive. New York State, Florida and Illinois have already passed anti- libel tourism laws, and it is just passed unanimously by the California legislature.

A federal law to protect Americans’ free speech is a legacy Mahfouz never intended to leave behind. Indeed, he was so successful in his efforts to intimidate reports about him that amazingly the Western media refrained from reporting of his death. However, his libel tourism led to the Free Speech Protection Act 2009, now pending in the Senate. One hopes the bill passes as soon as Congress reconvenes so that the instigative journalists and researchers can expose others like him before they do us harm.


Rachel Ehrenfeld’s book Funding Evil, and Millard Burr’s Alms for Jihad, were banned in the U.K. after Mahfouz’s libel tourism hobby was rewarded, as many times before, by Justice Eady’s ruling against them in London’s High Court.

Short Biography of Dr. Rachel Ehrenfeld

Rachel Ehrenfeld, author of three books and hundreds of articles on terror financing and corruption. Her latest book Funding Evil: How Terrorism is Financed – and How to Stop It led to the Libel Terrorism Protection Act, known as "Rachel's Law" in NY State, and to a new national bill for Free Speech, now pending before U.S. Congress.

She is the Director of the New York based American Center for Democracy (ACD). She is currently working on several projects, including Financial Jihad, Shari'a financing and Islamic banking, and the Islamic penetration of the US and Western economies, and terror financing. Dr. Ehrenfeld is on the Board of Advisors of American Congress for Truth, and a member of the Board of Directors of the Committee on the Present Danger (CPD), together with James Woolsey, and George Shultz.

George Jonas: "Jihad rules! Jews suck!"

A lady who once worked for me as an executive assistant and who is now in her early fifties came to Canada from the Ukraine when she was two years of age. She speaks Ukrainian (poorly by her admission) and English excellently. Her mother, who has now resided in downtown Toronto for half a century, does not speak a word of English. She has never had to learn it. She lives in a largely Ukrainian neighbourhood and can get virtually any service in her native language. Occasionally when she had to see a non-Ukrainian medical specialist, her daughter would accompany her to translate.

In this part of Canada, the story of this unassimilated woman is not unique.

I mention this because for some time now there has been a hue and cry raised over the state policy of multiculturalism. We have had this in Canada as official policy since the 1970s. The anguish about multiculturalism is that there is no incentive for ethnic pockets to assimilate with the general population. Questions regarding inter-ethnic strife, human rights, and general loyalty to the country are raised within the umbrella of the multicultural policy.

However, my Ukrainian example goes back to the 1950s, long before the so-called multicultural mosaic was identified as a cultural phenomenon and then subsequently embraced by the polity as policy. I don’t believe for a second that my friend’s mother would have lived a different life whether there was a state policy regarding her culture or not, except for one that might have discriminated against her for not assimilating.

Ukrainians, for the most part, belong to the Eastern Orthodox Christian church, the remnant of the old Byzantine Empire, which, in turn, was the remnant of the eastern half of the old Roman Empire. My executive assistant used to take days off work to celebrate “Ukrainian Christmas” and “Ukrainian New Year”, which arrived later in the calendar than the national statutory holidays of Christmas and New Year.

Except for this departure, I would never have identified her culture as being religiously determined. Ukrainians have distinctive native costumes, peasant wear, which they trot out during Ukrainian cultural festivals. Generally, however, in dress and conduct they are indistinguishable from the great mass of other Canadians.

This brings me to a rather misleading column by the otherwise excellent journalist, George Jonas, in today’s National Post.

Jonas is commenting on the published e-mails that passed amongst the female relatives and friends of the famous “Toronto 18”. These are the alleged wannabe Islamic terrorists who were supposedly plotting to blow up the Toronto Stock Exchange, CSIS (Canada’s anti-terrorist organization), and storm the Parliament buildings and behead the Prime Minister.

He is struck by the fact that the hatred of the women towards Canada and some members of the Canadian community, namely homosexuals, are expressed primarily in idiomatic English.

The remarkable thing was seeing their admiration and hatred posted, not in a foreign language, not in misspelled, broken English, but in the colloquial idiom of soccer moms in Toronto's bedroom community of Mississauga.

He then extrapolates from this the following conclusion.

By offering the views of Wahhabist Islam on homosexuals in words she borrowed directly from our culture, Ms. N was demonstrating that acculturation, a much-touted remedy for the risk of fragmentation in immigrant societies, isn't all that it's cracked up to be.

I don’t want to sound to picky, but I have always considered English to be nothing more than a language, a language of convenience, if you like, when you live in a county where 90% the population converses in it and where it is an official language by law.

I never thought of it as being “culturally distinctive” such that its use by an Arab would be considered remarkable. To be sure, within the confines of the language, there are cultural markers – expressions used to describe things that would be associated with someone from Canada rather than someone from England or Australia or the United States. But that is not what Jonas is talking about.

What he is on about is how a cultural norm, in this case Arabic, survives long after someone has been swimming in the deep end of the cultural pool of Canada.

Our great-grandfathers assessed matters more accurately. They had taken it for granted that integration is a process of considerable complexity that occurs over historic time. It isn't achieved by a quick immersion in another culture, even when the immersion is … superficially complete. Our generation not only overestimated the effects of such cultural silver-plating, but tried reducing it even further by the imposition of multiculturalism.

Cultural silver-plating may not achieve much beyond teaching al-Qaeda idiomatic English anyway, but multiculturalism makes it stick even less and wear off even quicker. Cultural silver-plating may produce amusing incongruities, like jihadists with pre-nuptial agreements and Wahhabi feminists who retain their maiden names after marriage. But computer-literate fundamentalists take us no closer to a harmonious society. They only illustrate how ultra-liberal policies, slogans and practices confuse and alienate vulnerable youngsters of foreign ancestry and increase the number of our solitudes.

I don’t believe multicultural policies and practices have anything to do with alienation of these young women.

This is because they do not have a culture distinct from their religion, unlike my Ukrainian examples. Islam determines their culture, on everything from defecating rituals, to eating habits, to attitudes towards non-Muslims, and so on. I am surprised that Jonas would overlook this cultural influence and chalk up assimilation failure to the straw man of multicultural policy.

It is the religion, dear boy, and that is what you should be targeting.

Why does everything look so small and far away with these binoculars?

Our good friend in The Toronto Star, Haroon Siddiqui, for whom the sun only shines out of Muslim backsides, has penned one of his patented “end of era” stories about how the recent, long-planned departure of American soldiers from Iraq shows the whole adventure to be a huge imperialist failure. They were “yanked” out of the cities, says Siddiqui.

He is right about the failure, of course, just not about the empire. He is like a man who looks through the wrong end of binoculars and notes that everything seems so small and far away.

The U.S. military forces destroyed the much vaunted Iraqi military in approximately a month after its invasion, and finally put an end to Saddam Hussein’s dreams of empire (seizing territory from Iran and annexing Kuwait). Then just about every jihad fighter in Islam descended on Iraq, spurred on by Osama bin Laden’s vision of a worldwide Caliphate and the Islamic conquest of the entire globe. There were 4 years of vicious fighting, and more than 4,000 U.S. casualties, but Islam was hammered into the ground, to the point that America feels it can safely withdraw its troops.

To take a conceit from Siddiqui’s story, nowhere does he mention the 300,000 plus Iraqis that Hussein murdered or the nearly one million Iranians who died from his war. Nowhere does he mention that the vast majority of the bloodshed in post-invasion Iraq came from Muslims killing each other, contrary to the dictates of the Koran.

All sustaining liberal democracies were born from conflict, but as Benjamin Franklin once said to a citizen outside the chambers where the American constitution was being debated, “We have given you a Republic, if you can keep it.”

I am not anticipating it will fail, but if Iraq should fail as a liberal democracy after this, it will be the responsibility of the Iraqis to shoulder the blame, not the United States. And if it is Islam that dooms the fledgling democracy then I suppose we will have our answer to the question of whether Islam can truly be compatible with democratic values. Who then will Siddiqui blame for Iraq’s troubles?

Militarily, there is no way Islam can defeat the west, even when armed with the weapons of the west. That has been the case for the past four centuries. However, the peaceful invasion of Islamic immigrants to western societies may have better outcomes for dreams of Islamic empires.

Al-Takeyya

I previously wrote about a disturbing aspect of Islam, that it religiously sanctions deceit and lying. Here is one of the clearest essays on this subject I have seen. The author is Raymond Ibriham. This is a piece about him from his biography on his website.

It was at the Library of Congress that Mr. Ibrahim discovered hitherto unknown al-Qaeda tracts and treatises written in Arabic which he went on to translate and annotate into the well received The Al Qaeda Reader (Doubleday, 2007). Based solely on al-Qaeda’s own words, this collection of translations, according to Mr. Ibrahim, “proves once and for all that, despite the propaganda of al-Qaeda and its sympathizers, radical Islam’s war with the West is not finite and limited to political grievances—real or imagined—but is existential, transcending time and space and deeply rooted in faith [p. xii].”
Mr. Ibrahim is author to dozens of articles, essays, and translations on radical Islam, appearing in a variety of publications, including the Chronicle of Higher Education, Middle East Review of International Affairs, Jane's Islamic Affairs Analyst, and Middle East Strategy, Harvard; Los Angeles Times, Washington Times, Washington Post, New York Times Syndicate, United Press International, and Financial Times; National Review, Weekly Standard, Pajamas Media, American Thinker, and FrontPage Magazine. (Links to all his writings can be found at www.raymondibrahim.com.)

How much easier just to surrender and avoid the conflict

A useful run-down on western dhimmitude at this site.