Columnist Diana West has written an open letter to German Chancellor Angela Merkel

…in just about every account of your American trip — biggish news in Europe — it is prominently mentioned that Guantanamo Bay is prominently high on your list of, well, prominent concerns. Trouble spots. Global things you lose sleep over.

This is, with due respect, bizarre. Iran is going nuclear, Europe is going Islamic, Russia is going off the reservation, China is a fearsome thing, and your big concern is sending what is called a “clear message” to Mr. Bush about Guantanamo Bay, the tropical jail where the United States keeps jihadis on ice — and keeps the rest of the world safer as a result. But that’s not what you say. “An institution like Guantanamo can and should not exist in the longer term,” you told the German news magazine Der Spiegel this week. “Different ways and means must be found for dealing with these prisoners.”

I have a suggestion: How about if we ship all these guys — unflushed Korans and all — to Germany? Maybe “72 Virgins” Airlines would cut us a deal. Then you — Germany — can parole them to Lebanon.

That, of course, is just what you did just before Christmas with Muhammad Ali Hammadi, the convicted Hezbollah killer of Petty Officer Robert Dean Stethem. In case you didn’t know, Mr. Stethem is one of our American heroes, a courageous young Navy diver who became an early casualty of the war on Islamic terror. In 1985, at age 23, he was beaten to an unrecognizable pulp by Hammadi and his gang, shot through the head and dumped onto a Beirut runway during the Hezbollah hijacking of TWA Flight 847.

Great article, read on…

So we have Merkel on hand to tell us what to do with the terrorists we have in captivity. It’s pretty sad that the western Euros haven’t yet gotten the message that they are no longer credible enough to tell the United States what to do or how to do it. Their economies are in bad shape and are only worsening, their honesty and dependability as allies have come up wanting between their dubious collective support in the Global War On Terror and the Oil-For-Food scandal and it now seems as though Germany’s been performing the “kiss of shame”, big time, on the Islamofascists in an attempt to get the terrorists to leave them alone.

Fat chance. To al-Qaeda and their colleagues, an infidel is an infidel, period.