The decision to release the Libyan terrorist Abdelbaset Ali Mohmed Al Megrahi from a Scottish prison has caused much anger in the United States.  (Megrahi was convicted for his part in the bombing of Pan Am Flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland, on December 21, 1988, which killed a total of 270 people.)  Indeed, many Americans believe that his release “on compassionate grounds” was authorized by the British government.  American anger was intensified by the fact that Megrahi was given a hero’s welcome by an Arab mob on his return home to Libya and by the suspicion that Britain had engineered his release out of self-interest.

Britain does indeed want something from Libya, and it isn’t just oil; she wants a cessation of illegal immigration from Africa to Italy and Malta, each of which serves as a launching pad to Britain.  The Libyans are hinting that they will pay compensation to the victims of IRA terrorists in Britain and Ulster killed by weapons they supplied.  It is still much resented in Ulster that among those who helped to fund the decades of IRA terror were citizens of Massachusetts and New York who gave money to front organizations whom they knew full well were not really the charities they pretended to be.  Thus, sadly, on September 11, 2001, many in Belfast were saying, “Serves them right; now they know what it feels like to be attacked by terrorists.”  It was also observed in Ulster that 3,000 of their people had lost their lives to terrorism out of a population of 1.5 million, which is a far greater percentage than those who lost their lives on September 11 in New York.  Qadaffi’s offer may be an attempt to rekindle that British sense of resentment at America’s failure to do anything effective at either the state or the federal level to cut off funds going to the IRA.

However, the decision to free Megrahi, who is suffering from terminal prostate cancer, was not made in Belfast, nor even in London, but in Edinburgh by Scotland’s Justice Secretary Kenny MacAskill on behalf of the Scottish government.  That government is run by the Scottish Nationalist Party, which is deeply committed to Scotland’s full independence from Britain.  The decision lay with Mac-Askill because Megrahi had been convicted under Scots law.  Scots law and the Scottish legal system have always been entirely separate (and different) from the English Common Law and courts.  In addition, Scotland now has her own parliament, elections, and executive.

Only after Megrahi had set off for Libya did the Scottish government ask the Scottish parliament to endorse the decision to release him as being “consistent with the principles of Scottish justice.”  However, the Scottish Nationalists have only 47 seats in the 129-member parliament, and the government lost the vote.  An amendment condemning the justice secretary and his decision, proposed by the opposition Conservative, Liberal Democrat, and Labour parties, passed 73 to 50.  Given that so many had been killed in little Lockerbie itself, as debris fell from the smoldering aircraft, it is surprising that the censure didn’t receive more votes.  The Scottish Nationalist government is now thoroughly discredited, and a former Scottish first minister “yell’d out like syllable of dolour” that “the reputation of the Scottish legal system has been tarnished for years to come.”  Scotland’s leading Conservative, David McLetchie, commented that they “could have had a judgment of Solomon.  Instead we got a judgment of MacAskill.  That judgment is a miscarriage of justice which shames Scotland.”

“Alas, poor country!  Almost afraid to know itself.”

But why did “puir wee MacAskill” come to such a wrong and foolish decision?  It has been suggested that it was part of a deal to encourage Arab investment in Scotland after a meeting in Qatar.  In light of the fact that Scotland is hopelessly in debt following the collapse of her major banks and can now never become fully independent, that suggestion is plausible, but MacAskill is far too honest and far too stupid to make such a deal.  He genuinely believes he did the right thing, showing mercy where it was required.  But why was mercy extended in this case when in others it might not have been?  The answer lies not with any particular institution or individual but in the culture of political correctness that has Scotland in its grasp.  Megrahi is African, Arab, and Muslim, and so qualifies for special treatment.  This mentality may well have influenced MacAskill’s advisors.

Muslims in Scotland are treated with extreme deference, with results that sometimes (as in the Megrahi case) offend our sense of justice but more often, in trivial contexts, merely provide an affront to common sense.  In Scotland tragedy alternates with farce as these wretched people are appeased, however much this angers the ordinary decent Scot.

The most absurd recent example occurred in 2008 when the Dundee Muslims forced the Tayside police to withdraw a postcard with a puppy on it and publicly apologize for offending them by making such use of a hated, polluted, najis (impure) beast.  The police had issued a postcard depicting a police-dog puppy sitting on a distinctively Scottish policewoman’s hat next to a telephone with the message “Tayside Police has a new number for non-emergency calls.”  The card was sent to local shopkeepers to display.  Everyone in Scotland, as in America, loves man’s best friend.  But a Muslim shopkeeper, not content to refuse to display the card (which was well within his rights), complained to a Muslim member of the local council, who was also a member of the police board.  Soon, Muslims were crying that they had been insulted and that no dog should ever have been put on an official Scottish postcard.  It had, of course, not occurred to the honest Scots officers that Muslims hold to the primitive and un-Scottish view that to display a photograph of a dog is a moral outrage.  Muslims argue that the angels of Allah hate all pictures and dogs.  A picture of a dog is thus doubly defiling.

Scotland, unlike any Muslim state, is a proudly free country.  If the Muslims wish to believe this piffle, which is utterly repugnant to our Western sensibilities, then they are welcome to do so.  Any Scot who learns that Muslims hate dogs will think that they are crazy and possessed of a mentality alien to his own, but no Muslim is ever going to be forced to hug a Scottie, stroke a Cairn terrier, or come into contact with any of the many charming and lovable breeds of dog for which Scotland is famous.  No one would have ever considered forcing the whingeing Muslim to put up the postcard of the dog in his shop.  All he had to do was say, “No, thank you”—or say nothing at all and simply throw it in the garbage.  He could even have asked a Presbyterian or Catholic or Jewish neighbor to cut out the bit with the dog on it and just leave the phone and phone number.  If he would have liked a postcard with a different design on it for his own use, he could have done what a Dundee Hindu or Jew or Sikh or Parsee with qualms about images would have done and quietly spoken to someone in the police poster department.

But that is not the Muslim way.  They have to organize, assert that they are superior, show their power, and force the indigenous majority to abase themselves by the sly use of every trick of political correctness.  The Scottish police duly apologized for offending Muslims and for “not seeking advice from the force’s diversity adviser” before publishing and distributing the postcards.  Political correctness is Muslim power, and they know it and exploit it at the expense of the wishes, preferences, and self-respect of the people in whose country they have settled.

Their hatred of all things canine has its practical side, too.  Both in England and in Scotland, police dogs, including sniffer dogs, now have to be fitted with booties before searching any Muslim home or building.  This ruling will prove very helpful to Britain’s numerous Muslim drug dealers who import drugs via their native Pakistan.  You can imagine an officer in hot pursuit saying, “Now, Rover, Police Dog 83, I know you can smell something and are straining at the leash to go in, but we have to stop to put your cumbersome booties on first.”  Meanwhile, guess who has escaped by the back door, taking the stuff with him?  It is just a matter of time before dogs are forbidden to sniff Muslims at airports when they are bringing gifts to Lockerbie.

Perhaps Kenny MacAskill’s otherwise inexplicable idiocy over the Megrahi case is now a little easier to understand.