A Liberal is speaking up for the President on the Dubai Ports World deal. Richard Cohen of the Washington Post says Bush is right to speak out against the bigotry that is fueling at least part of the resistance to the deal. Of course, not all the resistance is based on bigotry. Some of it is about the secret review process of CFIUS, the committee that approved the deal initially. Frank Gaffney seeks to reform the process, and has some very real concerns not, I think, based on bigotry, but, rather, based on the very real concerns about security when dealing with a country where the 9/11 attacks were planned and financed. I hope, after the 45 day review, there will be a real push to better secure our ports in general. Personally, I would also prefer that port operations in the U.S. be held by American companies as a security matter (meaning no Chinese or Brits, as well as Arabs).

I found this article through Instapundit. Douglas Murray was invited to speak at a conference in Holland about Islamist violence. His experience there is a chilling example of how the Islamists are winning the war.

Holland — with its disproportionately high Muslim population — is the canary in the mine. Its once open society is closing, and Europe is closing slowly behind it. It looks, from Holland, like the twilight of liberalism — not the “liberalism” that is actually libertarianism, but the liberalism that is freedom. Not least freedom of expression.

All across Europe, debate on Islam is being stopped. Italy’s greatest living writer, Oriana Fallaci, soon comes up for trial in her home country, and in Britain the government seems intent on pushing through laws that would make truths about Islam and the conduct of its followers impossible to voice.

Those of us who write and talk on Islam thus get caught between those on our own side who are increasingly keen to prosecute and increasing numbers of militants threatening murder. In this situation, not only is free speech being shut down, but our nation’s security is being compromised.

Since the assassinations of Fortuyn and, in 2004, the film maker Theo van Gogh, numerous public figures in Holland have received death threats and routine intimidation. The heroic Somali-born Dutch MP Ayaan Hirsi Ali and her equally outspoken colleague Geert Wilders live under constant police protection, often forced to sleep on army bases. Even university professors are under protection.

Europe is shuffling into darkness. It is proving incapable of standing up to its enemies, and in an effort to accommodate the peripheral rights of a minority is failing to protect the most basic rights of its own people.

The cult of multiculturalism, which teaches that all belief systems are equal, creates the perfect atmosphere for a vibrant, aggressive belief system to hack its way through the masses of a people no longer willing to defend their own culture. Much in the same way that the Nazis were able to hack their way through the weakened social structure of Germany in the 1920s and 30s. The major institutions of Germany at that time were either weakened or discredited by the horrors of the First World War and, in the end, could not stand up to a man and his followers who were willing to commit any outrage in order to win. Today, the major institutions of Europe are similarly weakened and discredited, not by defeat in war, but by the adoption of the mutlicultural mindset, which robs them of the ability to defend themselves. After all, if their belief system is really no better than anyone else's, why should any energy, much less life and limb, be expended to defend it?