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Does the First Amendment Protect Warrior Religions?

August 5, 2016

Does the First Amendment Protect Warrior Religions? Front Page Magazine, William Kilpatrick, August 5, 2016

After every Islamic terrorist attack, whether in Europe or the U.S., people ask what can be done to prevent it from happening again. But when the obvious solutions are proposed, they are invariably met with the objection that “you can’t do that,” or “that’s unconstitutional,” or words to that effect.

Some of the obvious solutions are to close radical mosques and radical Islamic schools, to monitor suspected mosques, to deport radical imams, and, of course, to restrict Muslim immigration or ban it altogether. If you dare to say such things, however, it quickly becomes apparent that—for many, at least—only politically correct solutions are acceptable. The trouble is, the politically correct crowd doesn’t have any solutions. In the memorable words of French Prime Minister Manuel Valls, “France is going to have to live with terrorism.”

Catholics are frequently in the forefront of those who object to these “drastic” measures for preventing terrorism in the West. Pope Francis, for example, has made generosity to refugees and immigrants a hallmark of his papacy. Christians, he has reminded us on several occasions, should build bridges, not walls. Others, Catholics among them, have objected that restrictions on Islamic immigration would violate the freedom of religion guaranteed by the Constitution—as would surveillance of mosques and Islamic societies.

Catholics are understandably touchy about the subject of religious liberty. But concerns over Christians being forced to bake cakes for same-sex weddings shouldn’t be allowed to overshadow some other basic questions about religious liberty.

One of the questions is this: does a religion that doesn’t believe in religious freedom for others qualify for First Amendment protection? Another, related question might be framed as follows: Is a religion that calls for the subjugation of other religions entitled to the “free exercise” of that mandate? The underlying issue, of course, is whether or not Islam really qualifies as a religion. As any number of authorities have pointed out, Islam is a hybrid—part religion and part a geo-political movement bent on world domination.

The “world domination” bit, by the way, is not confined to the fevered imaginations of right-wing fanatics. In a recent interview with Religion New Service, Cardinal Raymond Burke said “there’s no question that Islam wants to govern the world.” “Islam,” he continued, “is a religion that, according to its own interpretation, must also become the State.”

Here’s what I had to say about the matter four years ago:

Does this [the 1st Amendment] make the exercise of religion an absolute right to do anything in the name of religion? Should the free-exercise clause be extended to protect suicide cults or virgin sacrifice? The First Amendment also prohibits the establishment of a state religion, but one of the main purpose of Islam is to establish itself as the state religion. It can be argued that Islam’s raison d’etre is to be the established religion in every nation. Hence, another question must be asked: does the First Amendment protect its own abolishment?

Cardinal Burke is a canon lawyer—a profession that requires one to choose words carefully. Hence, when he talks about Islam becoming the State, he should be taken seriously. According to him, “when they [Muslims] become a majority in any country then they have the religious obligation to govern that country.” As we have seen, however, long before Muslims become a majority they begin demanding that their fellow citizens comply with sharia laws regarding diet, dress, and blasphemy. Allowing Muslims the full and free exercise of their faith is tantamount to restricting the freedom of others. Or, as Dutch MP Geert Wilders likes to say, “more Islam” means “more intolerance” for everyone else.

Wilders is referring to the consequences that follow upon the mass migration of Muslims into Europe. Although his was once a lonely voice, numerous polls show that the majority of Europeans now believe along with him that Islam does not belong in Europe. Pope Francis, on the other hand, has been in the habit of chiding Christians for their opposition to accepting more Muslim immigrants. He recently went so far as to warn them that they will have to answer to Christ at the Last Judgment because he (in the guise of the migrant) was homeless, and they did not take him in.

But, although charity is the paramount Christian virtue, there is another virtue that governs the exercise of charity. It’s called “prudence.” And prudence would suggest that spiritual leaders and secular leaders should exercise caution when advocating acts of charity that put the lives of others at risk. In Europe, there are now numerous prudential reasons for slowing or halting the flow of Muslim immigration: the Charlie Hebdo massacre, the Bataclan Theater massacre, the massacres at the Brussels airport and subway, the massacre at Nice, the Munich mall massacre, the axe attack aboard a German train, the bomb attack on a wine bar in the city of Ansbach, and the New Year’s Eve sexual assaults which targeted over 1,200 German women.

The most recent outrage was the slaughter of a French priest, Fr. Jacques Hamel, by two Islamic terrorists who burst into a church in Normandy during Mass and slit his throat. Pope Francis condemned the attack, but on the same day in Krakow he spoke once again about the need to welcome refugees. He called for “solidarity with those deprived of their fundamental rights, including the right to profess one’s faith in freedom and safety.”

But how about the right of Christians and Jews to profess their faith “in freedom and safety?” Fr. Hamel is no longer free to profess his faith, and now that the Islamic State has proclaimed its intention to target more churches in Europe, Christians are going to feel considerably less safe at Sunday service. Jews in Europe already know the feeling. Most synagogues in Europe are now protected by security guards during Saturday services.

But if you really want to see the European future, just look at those nations where Muslims are already a majority. In Nigeria, where Muslims make up about 60 percent of the population, Christians are regularly attacked during church services, and on some occasions entire congregations have been burned alive inside their churches.

All of which prompts a question: should Western nations passively stand by as their own population balance shifts in the direction of Nigeria’s? A curtailment or a moratorium on Muslim immigration is one of the obvious solutions to the problem of terrorism in the West. But, as I’ve suggested above, many Americans think that such a moratorium would be unconstitutional. After all, doesn’t the Constitution forbid a “religious test” in scrutinizing immigrants? Indeed today’s top news story concerns the attack on Donald Trump by the father of a slain Muslim soldier. At the Democratic Convention, Khizr Khan challenged Trump’s proposed ban on Muslim immigration by asking: “Have you even read the U.S. Constitution?”

In fact, the Constitution has no ban on a religious test for immigration. In a recent National Review piece, Andrew McCarthy points out that Article VI of the Constitution states that “no religious Test shall ever be required as a Qualification to any Office or public Trust under the United States.” The clause has nothing to do with immigration and, as our bien pensants like to say, it has nothing to do with Islam.

The McCarran-Walter Act of 1952 actually gives the president wide latitude in restricting immigration:

Whenever the president finds that the entry of aliens or any class of aliens into the United States would be detrimental to the interests of the United States, the president may … suspend the entry of all aliens or any class of aliens as immigrants or non-immigrants or impose on the entry of aliens any restrictions he may deem to be appropriate.

One of the main intents of the act was to prevent communist ideologues from entering the country, but it was also invoked in 1979 by President Jimmy Carter to keep Iranians out of the U.S. And—surprise—according to McCarthy, “under federal law, the executive branch is expressly required to take religion into account in determining who is granted asylum.” As McCarthy notes:

We have a right to require scrutiny of the beliefs of aliens who petition for entry into our country … this includes beliefs the alien may regard as tenets of his faith—especially if such ‘faith tenets’ involve matters of law, governance, economy, combat and interpersonal relations that in our culture’s separation of church and state are not seen as spiritual.

In short, if you believe your religion allows you to execute apostates or subjugate infidels, don’t bother to apply.

When Pope Francis visited Poland for World Youth Day, security in Krakow was at its highest level. Forty thousand security personnel were deployed and, according to The Guardian:

Mobile X-ray devices and metal detectors, as well as dogs trained to detect explosives, are in use at railway and bus stations, major road hubs and venues where papal events are due to take place. Police said that gas tankers and large trucks had been banned from Krakow following the use of a 19-ton truck in a terrorist attack in Nice earlier this month.

Does that suggest anything? Are the officials worried that Protestants or Jews are going to attack the Catholic youth? Are they fearful that Buddhist will attempt to bomb the popemobile? Before the era of mass Muslim immigration into Europe, such precautions would have been deemed as overkill. Now they seem like prudent measures to prevent overkill. The heightened security at World Youth Day and all over Europe is a tacit acknowledgement that Islam differs radically from all other religions. This is a point that Cardinal Burke made in his interview when he criticized Catholic leaders who “simply think that Islam is a religion like the Catholic faith or the Jewish faith.” Just so. It’s well past time to question whether a religion with totalitarian ambitions should be treated like all other religions.

In the Guardian story about the Pope’s visit to Poland, he is described as a “modern pope.” But in some respects he, along with many bishops, seems to belong to an earlier era—an era when it seemed that all people desired nothing more than peace and friendship. At a time when the world is faced with the resurgence of a seventh-century warrior religion, that sixties sensibility no longer seems so modern.

Categories: Donald Trump, Europe, Islam - the religion of war, Islam and human rights, Islam and terrorism, Islamic hatred of others, Islamic immigration, Khzir Khan, Pope Francis
Tags: Donald Trump, Europe, Islam - the religion of war, Islam and human rights, Islam and terrorism, Islamic hatred of others, Islamic immigration, Khzir Khan, Pope Francis

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Europeans Abolished Slavery; Africans/Muslims Still Practice it

August 4, 2016

Europeans Abolished Slavery; Africans/Muslims Still Practice it, Front Page Magazine, Ilana Mercer, August 4, 2016

First he exposed the History Channel’s miniseries “Roots” as root-and-brunch fiction. Now, the courageous epistolary warrior Kunta (Jack) Kerwick has turned his attention to correcting lies about slavery, promulgated in media and scholarly circles.

A point forcefully made by Kerwick is that although a vibrant, indigenous slave trade was conducted well into the nineteenth century in the interior of West Africa, slavery has become the White Man’s cross to bear.

Also omitted, in the course of the “honest” conversation about race directed by our political masters, is that credit for the demise of the slave trade in Africa belongs to Europeans. In his compact study, The Slave Trade, British historian Jeremy Black (London, 2006), highlights the “leading role Britain played in the abolition of slavery [as]… an example of an ethical foreign policy.” Britain agonized over this repugnant institution, failed to reconcile it with the Christian faith, and consequently abolished it.

Professor Black condemns the exclusive focus on the Atlantic—or transatlantic—slave trade to the exclusion of the robust slave trade conducted by Arabs across the Sahara Desert. Or, across the Indian Ocean and the Red Sea to markets in the Middle East. This exclusive focus on westerners as slave owners and traders, notes Black, “fits with the [political] narrative of Western exploitation” of underdeveloped countries and their people.

The greatest development economist to live was Lord P.T. Bauer. As The Economist quipped, Bauer was to foreign aid what Friedrich Hayek was to socialism: a slayer. In his Dissent on Development (London, 1971), Bauer bolstered Black’s point well before the latter made it: “The slave trade between Africa and the Middle East antedated the Atlantic slave trade by centuries, and far outlasted it. Tens of millions of Africans were carried away—north through the Sahara, and from East Africa, by Arab and Muslim slave traders, well before Europeans took up the trade from West Africa.”

Arab affinity for slavery, ethnic prejudice and purges lives on today in the treatment, for example, of blacks in Darfur and Yazidi Kurds in Iraq.

Considering Europeans were not alone in the slave trade, Black, in particular, questions “the commonplace identification of slavery with racism,” given that, like serfdom, slavery was a device (albeit an inefficient one) “to ensure labor availability and control.”

At its most savage, child slavery still thrives in Haiti in the form of the “Restavec system.” Children are kept in grinding poverty and worked to the bone. In the Anglo-American and European worlds this would be considered perverse in the extreme; in Haiti owning a Restavec is a status symbol. (Haiti, incidentally, is another spot on the globe that “Hillary Clinton’s State Department” “helped ruin,” by ensconcing an illegitimate and corrupt leader, with a preference for corrupt NGOs such as … The Clinton Foundation.)

The savagery of the indigenous slave trade in the interior of West Africa owed a lot to the rivalries and relationships between Africans powers. By Black’s telling, “Both Arabs and Europeans worked in collaboration with native polities that provided the slaves through raids and war carried out against their neighbors.”

For the Atlantic slave trade, contemporary Americans and Britons have been expiating at every turn. But more than engendering a cult of apology, the Atlantic slave trade has been instrumental in the effort to control and define the past as an “aspect of current politics,” not least in shaping the historical treatment of the Civil War, the South, and the American Founding Fathers.

Jeremy Black rejects these ritual apologies as empty ploys, which “all too often conform to fatuous arguments about ‘closure,’ resolution, and being unable to move on until we acknowledge the past.” In reality, this bowing-and-scraping, by obsequious Anglo-Americans, to their black political overlords, entails the opposite of all these, and, instead, involves the reiteration and institutionalization of racial grievance.

The cult of apology that has gripped America and Britain is uniquely Western. What other people would agonize over events they had no part in, personally, for damages they did not inflict?

Grievance is leveled at a collective, all whites, for infractions it did not commit: Africans who were not enslaved are seen as having an ineffable claim against Europeans who did not enslave them.

At its core, the argument against racism, at least as it works to further black interests, is an argument against collectivism. You’re meant to avoid judging an entire people based on the color of their epidermis or the conduct of a statistically significant number of them.

It is, however, deemed perfectly acceptable to malign and milk Europeans for all they’re worth, based on the lack of pigment in their skin and their overall better socio-economic performance.

Adapted from Into the Cannibal’s Pot: Lessons for America From Post-Apartheid South Africa (2011) by ILANA Mercer.

Categories: Africa, America, Black Lives Matter, Britain, Europe, History, Human rights, Islam and slavery, Slavery
Tags: Africa, America, Black Lives Matter, Britain, Europe, History, human rights, Islam and slavery, Slavery

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Terror strikes London 11 years after July bombings

August 4, 2016

Terror strikes London 11 years after July bombings, DEBKAfile, August 4, 2016

A woman in her 60s was knifed to death Wednesday night, July 3, in a rampage in London’s Russell Square by a 19-year old man, who injured another six people before police brought him down with a Taser electric shock gun. The site near London University and the British Museum, not far from Oxford Street, was close to the scenes of the July 7 attacks eleven years ago, when Islamist bombers murdered 52 people and injured more than 700 on the London underground rail and a bus.

“Early indications suggest that mental health is a significant factor in this case and that is one major line of inquiry,” London Metropolitan Police Assistant Commissioner Mark Rowley told reporters. “But of course… terrorism as a motivation remains but one line of inquiry for us to explore,” said Rowley, who is Britain’s most senior anti-terrorism officer.

That it is a major line of inquiry was demonstrated by police action Thursday morning to cordon off Russell Square and much of London’s West End.

The killer, described by witnesses as wearing a motorbike helmet and attacking people at random,struck less than 24 hours after the Metropolitan London police announcement of an extra 600 armed marksmen for the streets of London against a terror threat. They attack may well be read as a warning that such precautions would be of no avail in preventing a jihadist attack on the British capital.

While holding back the killer’s identity, British anti-terror squads are no doubt searching his residence and other locations connected to his family and friends.

Tuesday night, shortly before the attack, DEBKAfile carried this report.

Armed police prepare to deploy from Hyde Park, central London, after Scotland Yard announced Wednesday, Aug. 3 that the biggest police force in Britain is to put its first 600 additional armed officers on public patrols on the main streets and landmarks of London, as part of its anti-terrorism plans.

Metropolitan Police chief Sir Bernard Hogan-Howe said that, following the terror attacks in Europe, more marksmen were trained and operationally ready for public patrol up to a total of 1,500 firearms officers.

Although British cops are proud of traditionally not carrying firearms, the Met chief said “I think people understand that where you are going to have people as enemies who’ve got guns, we’ve got to have guns.”

Already, he added, “They pass through airports where we have armed officers, they pass through railway stations where they see firearms, and in some of our big iconic locations, we’ve already got armed patrols – if you look at Parliament, Downing Street – so it’s not entirely new.”

DEBKAfile’s exclusive counterterrorism sources can name the men behind the upsurge of Islamic terror violence in West Europe last month: the Nice attack on July 14, which left 84 dead; the suicide bombing in Ansbach in Bavaria, Germany, on July 24, which left 15 people injured, and the murder of a French priest at a suburban church in Normandy on July 26.

They are two Frenchmen: Amn al-Kharji (ISIS codename: Abu Sulayman al-Faransi), who is head of the Islamic State’s secretive external operations wing and, under his command, Fabien Clain (ISIS codename: Salim Benghalem), a convert to Islam who heads European terror operations.

It was Benghalem who picked the targets of the Paris raids last November 2015, which left 132 people dead and hundreds wounded, and the Nice truck bombing, which murdered 84 victims on July 14, Bastille Day.

This week, he orchestrated the first known jihadist attack on a Christian place of prayer in Europe after instigating the first ISIS attacks in Germany.

Up until recently, Western intelligence services used ISIS as the generic term for any jihadist attacks in a European city, be it Brussels, Istanbul, Nice, Munich, Wurzburg or Ansbach. But no high-profile ISIS executives were ever named, for fear of impairing their efforts to plant agents or informers inside the murderous organization’s operational ranks in Europe and the Middle East.

These efforts have so far got nowhere. These two top maser-terrorists have been agile enough to stay a step or two ahead of Western counterterrorism agencies. The weeks and months ahead are therefore likely to see more terror outrages at unknown locations, executed with assorted weaponry by unforeseen methods.

Europe is therefore on high terror alert, braced for more jihadist attacks. And the streets of London will see armed cops on patrol.

Categories: Britain, Europe, Islamic terrorism, London
Tags: Britain, Europe, Islamic terrorism, London

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A Nuclear-Armed Caliphate?

August 3, 2016

A Nuclear-Armed Caliphate? Front Page Magazine, William Kilpatrick, August 3, 2016

Reprinted from CrisisMagazine.com.

Much has been made of the Islamic State’s claim to the caliphate. But the Islamic State is fast losing ground in Syria and Iraq, and without a territorial claim, its claim to the caliphate is a shaky one. According to some sources, ISIS has already been preparing its followers for the fall of the caliphate.

Meanwhile, an Islamist power with a much better claim to the caliphate has been gathering strength. Whether the failed coup in Turkey was the real thing or whether it was staged, as some have claimed, President Erdogan’s hold over the Turkish nation has been immeasurably strengthened. As a result, he is now one giant step closer to doing what, some say, he has always wanted to do—namely, to re-establish the caliphate.

The last time the Muslim world had a caliphate, it was centered in Constantinople. The Turkish sultan (who was also the caliph) was the head of the Ottoman Empire—an empire that controlled far more territory than ISIS does or is ever likely to. Then in 1923, following the disarray left by the First World War, a secular government under the leadership of Kemal Ataturk came to power in Turkey and abolished the caliphate soon after.

To many in the Muslim world, this was a world-changing catastrophe. It flew in the face of Muhammad’s intention that mosque and state should be united, and it undermined the case for Islamic law. Moreover, the overthrow of the caliphate affected not just Turkey, but all of the Muslim world. In the late 1920s in Egypt, Hasan al-Banna founded the Muslim Brotherhood with the intention of reversing what Ataturk had done. The Brotherhood came close to doing this–at least in Egypt—in 2012 with the election of Mohamed Morsi as president. But Morsi showed his hand too early and was soon deposed by the military under General El-Sisi.

In Turkey, also, it was the military that acted as the guardian of the secular state. And so it remained until the election of President Recep Erdogan in 2002. Even then, Erdogan moved slowly in his efforts to re-Islamize Turkey. He gradually removed top military officers and replaced them with his own men; and he did the same with the police, the judiciary, and other key institutions.

By 2012, some twenty percent of the country’s generals were estimated to be behind bars. Then, with this month’s failed coup, Erdogan moved quickly to arrest some 3,000 members of the military and 3,000 members of the judiciary. In addition, his regime sacked 9,000 workers attached to the Interior Ministry. Within a week of the attempted coup, some 50,000 soldiers, police, judges, civil servants, and teachers had been suspended or arrested.

Erdogan’s power is now nearly absolute—not unlike the absolute power of a sultan. According to some, this has been his goal all along. One indication is that Erdogan has built himself a thousand-room presidential palace that is attended by guards dressed in Ottoman-era uniforms.

If Erdogan does try to establish a caliphate, where does that leave ISIS? Would they go quietly into the dark night of oblivion? Or would they find a place in the new caliphate?

As you may have noticed, alliances in the Middle East are constantly shifting. It’s not inconceivable that ISIS would someday pledge allegiance to a neo-Ottoman caliphate—although such an event might have to be preceded by the demise of their current caliph, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi. The truth is, Erdogan has been something of a friend and benefactor of ISIS. As Caroline Glick observed in the Jerusalem Post:

Erdogan has turned a blind eye to al-Qaida. And he has permitted ISIS to use Turkey as its logistical base, economic headquarters, and recruitment center. Earlier this year, the State Department claimed that all of the 25,000 foreign recruits to ISIS have entered Syria through Turkey.

Turkey is also the gateway between Syria and Europe. It is through Turkey that the bulk of Muslim migrants flow into Europe. This gives Erdogan enormous leverage over the future of Europe—a continent which is already reeling from a flood of migrants and refugees. How is the leverage applied? In March, the European Union reached a deal with Turkey that would in essence turn Turkey into a buffer zone against further immigration. Here’s how Foreign Affairs summarized the bargain:

Turkey has agreed to act as a giant refugee holding center, keeping the millions of migrants fleeing conflict in the Middle East from reaching Europe and accepting those sent back from Greece. In exchange, the EU will pay Turkey three billion euros on top of the three billion pledged last November to help care for the refugees. It will also speed up the approval of visa-free travel to Europe for Turkish citizens and revive stalled negotiations over Turkey’s accession to the EU.

So Turkey will keep the Syrian migrants out of Europe as long as Turkish citizens are allowed almost unlimited access to Europe through visa-free travel. The net result is that the Islamization of Europe will continue. And, of course, there’s nothing to stop Turkey from opening up the refugee floodgate whenever it sees fit. Turkey’s control of Mid-East migration gives it the upper hand in its dealings with Europe.

The other part of the bargain is the revival of negotiations to admit Turkey to the EU. If Turkey is ever successful in that endeavor, it would spell game-over for Europe. If Erdogan wants to re-establish the caliphate, and if he is so keen on union with Europe, it is likely that he envisions Europe as part of the future caliphate. This is something that the Ottoman sultans dreamed of, but were never able to accomplish. But Erdogan might be able to pull it off. There is now a very large contingent of Turks in Germany who seem to bear more allegiance to him than to Germany. And all over Europe there exists a fifth column of active and potential Islamists ready to be activated. As for the other four columns, it’s worth keeping in mind that Turkey has the second largest army in NATO (the U.S. has the largest). And with many of the generals who coordinated with NATO now in jail, Turkey’s loyalty to NATO is very much in question.

There is one other factor to consider. During and after the coup attempt, Erdogan shut down Incirlik Air Base, which is home to 1,500 American soldiers as well as other NATO troops. The Turkish government cut off the base’s electricity supply, temporarily suspended flights, and arrested the base commander, General Ercan Van. The base reportedly houses 50 nuclear warheads. The bombs are controlled by the U.S. forces in Turkey, but could they by means sudden or gradual fall under the control of Turkey? And if they did, would the U.S. dare to do anything about it?

By many accounts, Erdogan is a true believer who, in his own way, is every bit as fanatical as the ayatollahs in Iran. The man who built a thousand-room palace for himself might well believe that a restored caliphate should possess all the weapons that befit a great world power. With Erdogan’s latest consolidation of power, an already dangerous world just became a lot more dangerous.

Categories: Caliphate, Erdogan, Europe, Nukes, Turkey
Tags: Caliphate, Erdogan, Europe, Nukes, Turkey

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A Boot of Tolerance Stamping on a Human Face — Forever

August 2, 2016

A Boot of Tolerance Stamping on a Human Face — Forever

Source: A Boot of Tolerance Stamping on a Human Face — Forever | Gates of Vienna

Those who follow European political affairs may already be familiar with “A Model National Statute for the Promotion of Tolerance” (pdf available here), an OIC-approved framework proposal published by the European Parliament, which seems likely to be implemented across the EU. The proposed law would devise a draconian new form of politically correct “tolerance” and impose it on European citizens and institutions by establishing bureaucratic bodies with the authority to enforce it.

Below is a recent article from Politically Incorrect that examines the implications of this new, improved, totalitarian European Tolerance. Many thanks to JLH for translating this important piece from the German:

Wolfrum in Sheep’s Clothing
By Michael C. Schneider, Esq., Frankfurt am Main

Anyone who speaks and writes about the abrogation of freedom in Europe is accused of being a pathological conspiracy theorist. So it is advisable to be a little more specific, and name names.

The abrogation of freedom in Europe is not occurring naturally, but according to the planning of educated elites, who have been trained to replace civic freedoms — especially those of expression, of the press and of the airwaves — with ideological coercion, and thus smash civil society into microscopic shards, like valuable, defenseless porcelain.

Elites active in this endeavor have established themselves in all areas, including lead positions in science, for instance, the very renowned scholar, Prof. Dr. Dr.h.c. Rüdiger Wolfrum, professor emeritus and one of the directors of the Max Planck Institute on foreign public law and international law in Heidelberg.

Born 1941, study of law in Bonn and Tübingen, doctorate in 1973, post-doctoral qualification (Habilitation) in 1980, professor since 1982, from 1990 on member for several years of the UN commission against racial discrimination, since 1993 director of the Max Planck Institute, showered with countless honors and memberships. This honorable person is also in a dubious think tank, “The European Council on Tolerance and Reconciliation” about which one may find relevant information on the homepage of the president of “The European Jewish Congress ” (EJC), Viacheslav Moshe Kantor. Among other things are those documents which describe the political intentions of the think tank.

A substantial find: A Model National Statute for the Promotion of Tolerance is a political manifesto on the transformation of nations of the EU and beyond, compiled by, among others, Wolfrum in Sheep’s Clothing, under the aegis of the European Council on Tolerance and Reconciliation.

The basic consideration of the document as read are attractive and allow no suspicion to arise — that is if you do not know what EU political-speak means — for instance, “human diversity” standing for the systematic destruction of the autochthonic population and its traditional canon of values. Whereas respect for human dignity is based on recognition of human diversity and the inherent right of every person to be different, etc.

All possible groups are supposed to be protected by this concept of tolerance — just not the majority population. With this policy, minorities are purposefully advanced at the cost of majority cohesion. This splits the society, thereby controlling it better and leading to the final goal. This becomes visible in the typical, EU-wide concept of the protected minority, which is inherently aimed at splitting the society — divide et impera: “Group” is a number of people joined by racial or cultural roots, ethnic origin or descent, religious affiliation or linguistic links, sexual identity or orientation, or any other characteristics of a similar nature. This unlimited “definition” makes it possible to inflate “tolerance” for any social interest or ideological motif to a fighting phrase and deploy it as a universal weapon against possible dissidents.

Undesirable behavior, too, is defined so broadly that freedom of expression, the press, radio, television, art and science and any other communicative freedom can be flushed down the toilet with a loud whooshing sound. It shall be prohibited to make any possibly discriminatory comment against any group against which there may be discrimination — “Group libel” means: defamatory comments made in public and aimed against a group as defined in paragraph (a) — or members thereof — with a view to inciting to violence, insulting the group, holding it to ridicule or subjecting it to false charges. Under such a totalitarian regime as planned here, Mohammed cartoons are just as unthinkable as are objective, scientific observations on any group having to do with its intelligence, its other genetic endowments, its behavior (unless it is described unreservedly positively) for instance, cumulatively occurring deviant or criminal behavior, etc. Even someone who reports that a group of sixty took part in the attack on a German police officer, and none of them was an ethnic German, can thus become a serious criminal. Warning: the persecution of the police officer is not the crime, but the politically incorrect report on it.

It seems almost a question of taste whether to call a regime like the one Wolfrum in Sheep’s Clothing is planning fascist, Stalinist or just plain totalitarian, but its essence is Orwellian. That is to say, what may be thought, and how, is decreed, and since the boundaries of my speech are the boundaries of my world (Wittgenstein), reality itself is thereby defined beyond reality, and regarding this reality as doublethink is strictly forbidden.

Wolfrum has good connections in the Islamic world. Wikipedia writes, “He is presently training the high judges in Afghanistan and Sudan.”

So if you do not want to be crucified by jihadist fanatics but only by the federal president with The Order of Merit of the Federal Republic of Germany, then your tolerance must take the form of latent Islamophilia.

More on the text: For dummies, the draft is accompanied by explanations intended to show its effect in examples — This definition covers “blood libels” and anti-Semitic slurs as well as allegations that, e.g., “gypsies are thieves” or “Moslems are terrorists.”

For Islam explicators in a free, enlightened and scientifically thinking civilization, it is clear that this is meant to impede a measured treatment of the problematics of Islam. And to do so in such a way that any well-founded generalization is branded as criminal stereotyping and will usher the participants in this discussion out of the auditorium and into the jail cell.

To appease the critics, the unavoidable effect of the plan — splitting and ultimately destroying societies through the disproportionate demands of minorities who are impossible or difficult or unwilling to integrate — is concealed in an implausible formula: Promote tolerance within society without weakening the common bonds tying together a single society.

The nations addressed are expected to model future legislation on the goals of the paper, which are in no way inferior to the insipid, naive and unreflective sermons of the petit bourgeois Freemason lodges full of complacent business people, whose creeping dictatorship of tolerance has already taken such a toll on our free, uninhibited and liberal culture of discussion.

The nations of Europe are expected to take specific legislative steps to elevate the goals of the paper to valid law — Take concrete action to combat intolerance, in particular with a view to eliminating racism, colour bias, ethnic discrimination, religious intolerance, totalitarian ideologies, xenophobia, anti-Semitism, anti-feminism and homophobia.

Clarifications that dot the paper leave no doubt of its political thrust: religious intolerance is understood to cover Islamophobia.

The paper is directed not only at executive and legislative bodies or the administration but — as always with totalitarianism — at Everyman. Since the “party” is always right, it is unthinkable that anyone in any walk of life could flee its doctrinal claim of validity. It is important to stress that tolerance must be practised not only by Governmental bodies but equally by individuals, including members of one group vis-à-vis another. So the dissident is confronted not only by the law, but also by custom, morality and social ethos. He does not belong, because he is not “tolerant.”

Naturally, it is within the power of a director of a well-equipped Max Planck Institute to bring dissertations and habilitation papers by the dozen onto the path, and the obedient student authors to influential professorial chairs. And so the cheesy tolerance sermon becomes an obligatory citation in the appropriate quotation pantheon and in one or two decades is confirmed as the dominant opinion in jurisprudence. The highest legal judgment is decisively shaped by this, even if one or the other student is not tactically placed in a high judicial position, whence he can combat Islamophobia by declaring with legal force that it is hate speech and slander of religious beliefs. A Wolfrum in Sheep’s Clothing must not be underestimated. A believer in an ideology sitting at the crucial switch point of the legal system can alter the whole country according to his own thinking, by swimming along with the zeitgeist and honing its intention to an absurd point, so that everything fits together.

Constitutional law as the basis of horizontal legal relationships among citizens must also be made to fit — for instance the laws governing work and rental. If you believe you have the right to refuse employment or residence to a terrorist-sympathizing Salafist, you have another think coming — it is the obligation of the Government to ensure that intolerance is not practiced either in vertical or in horizontal relationships. Which means that you must continue to employ someone who is constantly rolling out his prayer rug instead of working, and you may not resist when the occupant of the space you rented out as a residence becomes a muezzin by legal attack on the rental restrictions, and the proprietor’s flexible tonality in the execution of his profession drives away the other 29 tenants of your 30-residence building so that you can no longer make payments on your loans. The expansion of tolerance in your house must be worth a little private bankruptcy.

The right to be a demographic bomb must also be expressly confirmed: right to acquire nationality based on birth or long-term residence.

The tolerant configuration of education avoids the threat of integration or assimilation, thus assuring social splintering: freedom of education in the language of the group, as well as in accordance with its religious and cultural traditions.

The liberal, bourgeois concept of freedom ends at the point where someone could feel discriminated against, in which case, protection against discrimination replaces the liberal, civil concept of freedom with the state compulsion of an anti-bourgeois, illiberal concept: freedom must not be abused to defame other groups.

The paper expressly confirms that all possible minorities — no more exactly defined — will be inflated to holders of special rights, so that the general principle of equality is destabilized and the state may favor certain groups as it pleases, thus logically disadvantaging the normal, autochthonic population — members of vulnerable and disadvantaged groups are entitled to a special protection, in addition to the general protection that has to be provided by the Government to every person within the State.

The implementation of the universal obligation of tolerance toward everyone and anyone must accompany the creation of a pertinent authority — the building up and not the de-constructing of bureaucracy is, after all, the most important goal of the EU and comparable transnational entities: a special administrative unit in order to supervise the implementation of this Statute […] where no such body exists, it has to be set up. Ultimately, the state is not there for the person, but the person for the state, as totalitarians have always known in a specific Aristotelian interpretation (zoon politikon — the person as a “political organism”).

Of course, it is important that tolerance supervisory boards be above democratic monitoring, because they are on a quasi-equal footing with national administration and are composed of the same oxygen-deprived air as administrative, party, union, church, synagogue, mosque and other bodies representative of the establishment: a National Tolerance Monitoring Commission as an independent body — composed of eminent persons from outside the civil service — vested with the authority to promote tolerance […] external to the Government, acting independently (not unlike a special Ombudsman). The concept “civil service” is to be understood very broadly.

The paper is really gripping in section 7 about penological implementation of ideological guidelines — the following acts will be regarded as criminal offences punishable as aggravated crimes.

It shall be punishable to utter an accurate but undesirable comment about any group in the population, however defined — Group libel as defined in Section 1(b) — so, since practically everyone belongs to some group that can be defined as threatened, e.g., as a woman, a short-sighted person or a person with bad teeth and therefore handicapped, as a happy drunk and therefore as an alcoholic, as an adherent of any belief that is less than 50% of the population and is therefore a minority — which in fact is true of all faiths — then any comment about any person is potentially criminally liable.

All that is needed then is a mob of reporters demanding punishment, a politically correct prosecutor and a politically correct judge and “tolerance” will be intolerantly enforced.

That is how Wolfrum in Sheep’s Clothing is bringing Orwellian conditions down on us.

As a proven legal thinker, he is not doing this by mistake but with malice aforethought and out of deepest conviction.

We should all hold compulsory membership in the lodge of universal tolerance, voluntary or unwilling, and without exception. Anyone who does not play along will be punished. Anyone who doubts is a criminal. Anyone who thinks is a criminal — a thought criminal.

It is important that even at the level of juvenile criminal law, future thought-criminals are targeted, in the best North Korean style, and put into a re-education camp: juveniles convicted of committing crimes listed in paragraph (a) will be required to undergo a rehabilitation programme designed to instill in them a culture of tolerance.

Of course. it must be established that such a political persecution is not aimed at “political” perpetrators, but completely ordinary criminals: crimes listed in paragraph (a) will not be considered political offences for purposes of extradition.

And it is understood that taxpayers must bear all costs which accrue to Salafists from defending themselves legally against the surging, despicable intolerance of society, for instance, police excesses which are standard because there had been individual incidents with forbidden objects: free legal aid will be offered to victims of crimes listed in paragraph (a), irrespective of qualification in terms of impecuniosity.

Naturally, the indoctrination of children in surroundings specifically created for the purpose cannot begin too soon: schools, from the primary level upwards, will introduce courses encouraging students to accept diversity and promoting a climate of tolerance as regards the qualities and cultures of others […] it is very important to start such courses as early as possible in the educational programme […] up to and including universities. This applies to the gender agenda already at work all across Europe, according to which heterosexual men, homosexual (gay) men, bisexual men, heterosexual women, homosexual (lesbian) women, bisexual women, transsexual men with heterosexual tendency as New-Woman, etc. — infinite new sexual identities and orientations, like the much-discussed intersexuality — are lived and preached. The mathematical task for coming generations — if calculation to powers is still used — will consist of calculating the possible combinations (at the moment it could be at least 512), regardless of whether this negatively affects their power or makes them unstable in it. In the end, it is more difficult to find your way in this underbrush than simply to be a “boy” or a “girl.” These concepts, according to the agenda, will be criminal and will soon be forbidden. From kindergarten on, anyone who wishes to integrate politically correctly will have to be at the very least a “goy” or a “birl.”

Wolfram in Sheep’s Clothing and his stooges are convinced that the military and the police — breeding grounds of the worst machismo — must be ideologically fumigated — courses will be incorporated in the training of those serving in the military and law enforcement agencies.

That is not all. Your employer may soon invite you to some compulsory courses to learn not to say “Negro” any more, but “Afro-German,” no more “Gypsy” but “Sinto” or “Roma” (Rats! You don’t know the difference!), and no more “Mohammedan” but “True Believer” — training must be made available as part of continuing adult education. For this re-education to work consistently, effectively and efficiently, you will have to forgo 20 years’ worth of vacation and Christmas pay, and raises in salary you have been dreaming about in your youthful fantasies, because your boss will need every available penny to pay the imams and Roma kings a proper docent’s fee so that you can finally learn to act with tolerance.

And the primary goal of the re-education is the court itself. Judges, prosecutors administrative officers are not yet 100% in line — just 99 %. There is still that invisible Gallic village^[1] of 1% of the jurists who have retained deep within them an impregnable fortress of common sense. This fortress must be ground down: it is especially important to ensure advanced professional training of lawyers (including judges and criminal justice personnel), administrators, police officers, doctors, etc.

A new job description is created. Now the master of every Freemason lodge^[2] is a barren, anti-intellectual leisure-time apostle of tolerance, who instructs humanity to believe that everything is good, even the opposite. The apostle/evangelist of tolerance has a full-fledged professional position with a regulated professional track — instructors will be trained in a manner qualifying them to meet the needs.

And of course, the media, seduced by subsidies — possibly in the billions — will push the total tolerance agenda across Europe (with the possible exception of Hungary) — the production of books, plays, newspapers reports, magazine articles, films and television programmes — promoting a climate of tolerance — will be encouraged and, where necessary, subsidized by the Government.

If the carrot does not work, the stick will help. A media codex will so firmly fold up incorrect sheets like Junge Freiheit or Weltwoche that they will never open up again, in order to…ban the spreading of intolerance and will be supervised by a media complaints commission.

The mainstream media will be able officially to censor the smaller resistance publications, as guaranteed by the composition of the commission — it has to be set up by — and report to — the media themselves, rather than the Government.

The free internet will be gone in short order. That too will be assured by enacting the Wolfrum papers, because…initiatives to bring about a legal regulation of cyberspace are currently debated in a wider context…and we all can imagine what that means. Since some servers can also exist outside the slave-holding EU, an appropriate regulation will be pushed through the UN and the last free servers — like the one that hosts PI — will soon be turned off. Whatever reports you like from PI, download them now and print them out, so that you can remember them when the server is silenced and your guide to the future is purged of all evil content.

That is the brave new world that Wolfrum in Sheep’s Clothing dreams of nightly. No thank you, we don’t want to know where his hands are when he dreams. Are you dreaming along? On my last flight with Lufthansa, I swiped a lot of barf bags. They are on my nightstand, for when the nightmares of Wolfrum and his consorts come to me.

Notes:

1.		Cf. the “resistance” exploits of the Gauls in the comic strips/books about Asterix and Obelix.
2.		I am not sure whence this antipathy for the Masons comes or the characterization as a club for Babbits. It would be entertaining to revive Lessing to a heated debate against Goethe and Mozart on the virtues and ills of that organization, but clearly this still means something to the author beyond my contemporary American perception of guys who learn esoteric rituals and march in parades.

Categories: Uncategorized
Tags: Civil Liberties, Counterjihad, Culture Wars, Enrichment, Europe, Islam, Islamic invasion, Islamic Jihad, Islamic supremacy, Islamic terrorism, Islamisation, Legal action, OIC, PC/MC

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Fearing reprisal from Muslims, French publisher reverses decision to publish book critical of Islam

July 31, 2016

Fearing reprisal from Muslims, French publisher reverses decision to publish book critical of Islam, Jihad Watch, Robert Spencer, July 31, 2016

This is the way the West dies
This is the way the West dies
This is the way the West dies
Not with a bang but a whimper.

This is nothing new, however. Way back in 2002, a French edition of my book Islam Unveiled was canceled for fear of offending Muslims.

“Fearing Islamist reprisal, French publisher revises decision to publish book critical of Islam,” by Vijeta Uniyal, Legal Insurrection, July 28, 2016 (thanks to The Religion of Peace):

A Paris-based publishing house has revised its decision to publish a French version of the German bestseller “Der Islamische Faschismus” (The Islamic Fascism). Written by German-Egyptian author Hamed Abdel-Samad, the book was due to hit the French bookstores in September. Piranha Edition reportedly changed its mind after this month’s ISIS-inspired terror attack in Nice that killed 84 people and injured more than 300.

If the objective of Islamist violence in Europe had been to force the continent into submission, it is well on its way to achieving them.

Piranha Edition justified the decision of not going ahead with the publication by citing the threat of Radical Islam as well its desire of not wanting to strengthen the right-wing French groups critical of Islam. Interestingly, the head office of the Piranha Edition is just within a few minutes of walk from Bataclan, the theatre where 89 people were murdered by Islamic terrorists in November 2016.

Earlier this week, Hamed Abdel-Samad revealed the details of the failed book deal in a German-language blog Die Achse des Guten:

First the publisher changed the title from “The Islamic Fascism” to “Is Islam a form of Fascism?” — in order to avoid unnecessary polarisation. But after the attack in Nice, the publishing house decided not to publish the book at all, as it fearful of the consequence — as stated in [their] email — which could have been deadly. There could be another attack like the one at Charlie Hebdo.

Had the publisher ended the email just there, I could understand, as it is a matter of life and death, and I cannot ask everyone to take the risk that I take with my book.

But then came the second argument why the publication was not possible at this point. The book could benefit the right wing [parties]. [Author’s translation]

Whenever Islamic terrorism strikes somewhere in the West, media commentators and politicians always love to talk about the ‘moderate Muslims’ living among us. We are endlessly reminded of the “voices” of moderation, reason and peace within Islam. Hamed Abdel-Samad is just such one such genuine voice being stifled in the West. And he is not alone; Somali-born women’s rights advocate Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Pakistani writer Ibn Warraq, Bangladeshi novelist Taslima Nasrin are just some of the true Muslim voices of reason and sanity of our times.

These few, but brave women and men are not only forced to live like hunted fugitives in the West by Islamists determined to enforce Fatwa placed on their heads, but driven into silence by leftists enforcing accepted speech codes on college campuses and public arena.

Given the almost omnipresent threat of violence inside the Muslim majority countries, we can give up on our hopes of hearing any substantial criticism of Islamist theology from within the Muslim World. But what is happening to Muslim dissenters in the West is no less sinister. The violent campaign to shut down any opposition in the Muslim World is complimented in the West by the activism of the Left.

On the other hand, the mainstream media is more interested in talking to the representatives of Islam who are eager to talk about ‘Islamophobia’, or the Western guilt, but not about the theology behind the ongoing worldwide Jihad….

Categories: Censorship, Europe, Islam - submission, Islamic integration, Islamic invasion, Islamic supremacy, Islamisation, Islamophobia
Tags: Censorship, Europe, Islam - submission, Islamic integration, Islamic invasion, Islamic supemacy, Islamisation, Islamophobia

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Will Europe Refuse to Kneel like the Heroic French Priest?

July 30, 2016

Will Europe Refuse to Kneel like the Heroic French Priest? Gatestone Institute, Giulio Meotti, July 30, 2016

♦ Go around Europe these days: you will find not a single rally to protest the murder of Father Jacques Hamel. The day an 85-year-old priest was killed in a French church, nobody said “We are all Catholics”.

♦ Even Pope Francis, in front of the most important anti-Christian event on Europe’s soil since the Second World War, stood silent and said that Islamists look “for money”. The entire Vatican clergy refused to say the word “Islam”.

♦ Ritually, after each massacre, Europe’s media and politicians repeat the story of “intelligence failures” — a fig leaf to avoid mentioning Islam and its project of the conquest of Europe. It is the conventional code of conduct after any Islamist attack.

♦ Europe looks condemned to a permanent state of siege. But what if, one day, after more bloodshed and attacks in Europe, Europe’s governments begin negotiating, with the mainstream Islamic organizations, the terms of submission of democracies to Islamic sharia law? Cartoons about Mohammed have already disappeared from the European media, and the scapegoating of Israel and the Jews started long time ago. After the attack at the church, the French media decided even to stop publishing photos of the terrorists. This is the brave response to jihad by our mainstream media

Imagine the scene: the morning Catholic mass in the northern French town of Etienne du Rouvray, an almost empty church, three parishioners, two nuns and a very old priest. Knife-wielding ISIS terrorists interrupt the service and slit the throat of Father Jacques Hamel. This heartbreaking scene illuminates the state of Christianity in Europe.

Father Jacques Hamel was murdered this week, in the church of St. Étienne-du-Rouvray, by Islamic jihadists.

It happened before. In 1996 seven French monks were slaughtered in Algeria. In 2006, a priest was beheaded in Iraq. In 2016, this horrible Islamic ritual took place in the heart of European Christianity: the Normandy town where Father Hamel was murdered is the location of the trial of Joan of Arc, the heroine of French Christianity.

France had been repeatedly warned: Europe’s Christians will meet the same fate of their Eastern brethren. But France refused to protect either Europe’s Christians or Eastern ones. When, a year ago, the rector of the Great Mosque of Paris, Dalil Boubakeur, suggested transforming empty French churches (like that one in Etienne du Rouvray) into mosques, only a few French intellectuals, led by Alain Finkielkraut and Pascal Bruckner, signed the appeal entitled, “Do not touch my church” (“Touche pas à mon église“) in defense of France’s Christian heritage. Laurent Joffrin, director of the daily newspaper Libération, led a left-wing campaign against the appeal, describing the signers as “decrepit and fascist“.

For years, French socialist mayors have approved, in fact, the demolition of churches or their conversion into mosques (the same goal as ISIS but by different, “peaceful” means). Except in the Saint-Germain-des-Prés quarter of Paris, and in some beautiful areas such as the Avignon Festival, France is experiencing a dramatic crisis of identity.

While the appeal to save France’s churches was being demonized or ignored, the same fate was suffered by endangered Eastern Christian being exterminated by ISIS. “It is no longer possible to ignore this ethnic and cultural cleansing”, reads an appeal signed by the usual combative “Islamophobic” intellectuals, such as Elisabeth Badinter, Jacques Julliard and Michel Onfray. In March, the newspaper Le Figaro accused the government of Manuel Valls of abandoning the Christians threatened with death by ISIS by refusing to grant them visas.

Go around Europe these days: you will find not a single rally to protest the killing of Father Hamel. In January 2015, after the murderous attack on Charlie Hebdo, the French took to the streets to say “Je suis Charlie”. After July 26, 2016, the day an 85-year-old priest was murdered in a church, nobody said “We are all Catholics”. Even Pope Francis, in the face of the most important anti-Christian event on Europe’s soil since the Second World War, stood silent and said that Islamists look “for money“. The entire Vatican clergy refused to write or say the word “Islam”.

Truth is coming from very few writers. “Religions overcome other religions; police can help little if one is not afraid of death.” With these words, six months after the massacre at the magazine Charlie Hebdo, the writer Michel Houellebecq spoke with the Revue des Deux Mondes. Our elite should read it after every massacre before filling up pages on “intelligence failures.”

It is not as if one more French gendarmerie vehicle could have stopped the Islamist who slaughtered 84 people in Nice. Perhaps. Maybe. But that is not the point. Ritually, after each massacre, Europe’s media and politicians repeat the story of “intelligence failures”. In the case of the attack in Etienne du Rouvray, the story is about a terrorist who was placed under surveillance.

The “intelligence failure” theory is a fig leaf to avoid mentioning Islam and its project of the conquest of Europe. It is the conventional code of conduct after any Islamist attack. Then they add: “Retaliation” creates a spiral of violence; you have to work for peace and show good intentions. Then, in two or three weeks, comes the fatal “we deserve it”. For what? For having a religion different from them?

We always hear the same voices, as in some great game of dissimulation and collective disorientation in which no one even knows which enemy to beat. But, after all, is it not much more comforting to talk about “intelligence” instead of the Islamists who try, by terror and sharia, to force the submission of us poor Europeans?

Europe looks condemned to a permanent state of siege. But what if, one day, after more bloodshed and attacks in Europe, Europe’s governments begin negotiating, with the mainstream Islamic organizations, the terms of submission of democracies to Islamic sharia law? Cartoons about Mohammed and the “crime” of blasphemy have already disappeared from the European media, and the scapegoating of Israel and the Jews started long time ago.

After the attack at the church, the French media decided even to stop publishing photos of the terrorists. This is the brave response to jihad by our mainstream media, who also showed lethal signs of cowardice during the Charlie Hebdo crisis.

The only hope today comes from an 85-year-old French priest, who was murdered by Islamists after a simple, noble gesture: he refused to kneel in front of them. Will humiliated and indolent Europe do the same?

Categories: Censorship, Christians, Clash of civilizations, Cover-up, Europe, France, Islam - submission, Islam and Christianity, Islam and terrorism, Islam in Europe, Islamic integration, Islamic invasion, Islamic supremacy, Islamisation, Jews, Sharia law
Tags: Censorship, Christians, Clash of civilizations, Cover-up, Europe, France, Islam - submission, Islam and Christianity, Islam and terrorism, Islam in Europe, Islamic integration, Islamic invasion, Islamic supremacy, Islamisation, Jews, Sharia law

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America’s First Major Socialist Party Debuts in Philadelphia

July 30, 2016

America’s First Major Socialist Party Debuts in Philadelphia, PJ Media, Roger L Simon, July 29, 2016

(How different would Hillary be from the late lamented el Thugo down in Venezuela? He and his family got rich and his daughter remains the richest person there. El Thugo was rotten to the core and his anointed successor, Maduro is, if that is possible, even worse. Should she become Obama’s successor, Hillary has much to look forward to. — DM)

Under cover of a sudden profusion of American flags (borrowed from city hall) and staged chants of “USA” ringing out on the final day, a new party was born in Philadelphia.

Gone are The Democrats. Welcome, The Socialists.

Okay, the Democratic Socialists, in deference to Bernie Sanders, whose party it is no matter who was giving the acceptance speech on Thursday. He held the whip hand and will continue to do so to keep his followers on the reservation.

And, yes, there have been more than a few socialist parties in America before – Eugene V. Debs, Norman Thomas, etc. – but never has one of our two major political parties been taken over to such an extent, not even during the days of George McGovern or Jimmy Carter.

I wouldn’t go quite so far as Dan Greenfield, who wrote the following in a compelling column inFrontPage:

Sinclair Lewis famously said, “When Fascism comes to America, it will be wrapped in the flag and carrying a cross”. More accurately, when Communism comes to America, it will be wrapped in the flag and carrying a cross. That’s what the Democratic National Convention was.

So far, as I see it, it’s still socialism. Hillary Clinton (even under the spell of Bernie ) is closer to François Hollande or some other Eurocrat than she is to Chairman Mao. But the situation is bad enough and likely to get worse, if she is elected.

Those who think that she will be the second coming of centrist Bill should have their heads examined – or at least watch the reruns of her speech. Bill was asleep during it. Call it self-preservation of mind or body, he couldn’t take it either way. He knew what was coming and it wasn’t going to be a reprise of his most famous line – “The days of big government are over.” Quite the contrary. The days of big government are coming as never before. So he shut his eyes, and not just from whatever health issue he may be harboring.

They should also reread Hayek’s The Road to Serfdom, written during the rise of the National Socialist Party, for a clear analysis of why socialism inevitably turns totalitarian.

Which leads me to this: Many of you think you have the luxury of debating whether Donald Trump is sufficiently conservative or is really a Republican or will carry out all the things he says he will (more of this in a moment).

Sorry, you don’t. It’s five minutes to midnight for Western Civilization. Europe, in case you haven’t noticed, is on the brink of going Islamic. Twenty-five percent of French teenagers already are. Mohammed has been the most popular baby name in the UK for some time. (Thank God, they passed Brexit.) And Ms. Merkel, despite the constant carnage in her country, is doubling down on Middle Eastern immigration.

Hillary Clinton intends to do the same thing here – in the name of human rights, naturally, when, needless to say, it’s about votes. Economically, if she passes even a third of her proposals, our country will be so far in debt we may never find a way out, ratifying all of Hayek’s predictions as we all become slaves to a desperate state.

Pessimistic, sure. But we can stop it. This is a surprisingly winnable election if we pull together.

So for reassurance, let me tell one story from the Republican Convention. It was, as anyone watching television knows, a mostly uninformative event, as virtually all conventions are. But I did go to a luncheon panel on the economy held by Freedom Works. Larry Kudlow was the moderator. I forget everyone on it, but it was a distinguished panel of conservative economists including Stephen Moore and a man named Harold Hamm I had never heard of. My bad. It turns out Hamm had more to do with the immediate revival, such as it is, of the US economy than anybody – he is the king of fracking, the developer of the Bakken formation and someone with a net worth at least double Trump’s and closer to George Soros’.

All of the panelist had worked closely, some one-on-one, with Trump on his tax plan, This plan is quite in the mainstream of conservative economic policy with lower, simplified rates across the board, particularly for businesses, which Trump puts at 15%. (It currently starts at 39%.) Republicans have been calling for this reduction for years to bring our corporations home and generate jobs.

Anyway, midway into the panel, Kudlow asked a question on everybody’s mind – and probably yours too. Larry wanted to know if the panelists thought Trump would go through with it, if Donald was, to put it bluntly, for real.

The panelists were all emphatic in saying Trump would. They also gave him high marks for listening, of all things.

Now I know you can rationalize this a lot of ways. Rich and powerful as these men were, they clearly wanted to be advisers to a man who could be the most powerful in the world. So factor that in. And factor in that I have been supporting Trump for a while. But then ask yourself if you would rather have Hillary…. and socialism.

And I’m not even going to get into the Supreme Court.

Categories: 2016 elections, Democrat National Convention, Democrat Party, Donald Trump, Europe, Freedom, Hillary Clinton and Islam, Illegal immigration, Islamic immigration, Islamisation, Socialism
Tags: Democrat National Convention, Democrat Party, Donald Trump, Europe, Freedom, Hillary Clinton and Islam, Illegal immigration, Islamic immigration, Islamisation, Socialism

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Trump and NATO

July 27, 2016

Trump and NATO, Front Page Magazine, Bruce Thornton, July 27, 2016

The Never Trump crowd has found another example of The Donald’s disqualifying ignorance: comments he made about NATO. He has said that our contributions to NATO are “unfair,” that they are “costing us a fortune,” that we are “getting ripped off,” and that they are “getting a free ride.” By the way, Obama in his Atlantic interview also called the Europeans “free riders,” but I don’t recall a lot of sneering at the president for his “alarming” and “dangerous” remarks, as one critic put it.

Trump also implied that he would put the European NATO members’ feet to the fire about meeting the 2006 requirement that they spend 2% of GDP on their militaries, and suggested he would negotiate a new contribution schedule. Few NATO members have met that requirement, which is a violation of Article 3 that requires member states to “maintain and develop their individual and collective capacity to resist armed attack.” According to NATO’s own report, only five countries are estimated to meet the 2% requirement in 2016. France, Germany, Italy, and Spain––the first, third, fourth, and fifth largest economies in the EU––are not among them. The richest, Germany, is expected to remain at 1.19%. In contrast, the US will spend 3.9%. As Lord Robertson, NATO Secretary General from 1999-2004, put it, European nations are “military pygmies.”

Critics of Trump are technically correct to say that he exaggerates when he claims that the US pays the “lion’s share” of NATO funding. In fact, the US pays under a fifth (22%). But the complaints about European NATO members, which predate Trump by decades, take into account more salient deficiencies. “Common funding,” of which the US covers a fifth, is “used to finance NATO’s principal budgets: the civil budget (NATO HQ running costs), the military budget (costs of the integrated Command Structure) and the NATO Security Investment Programme (military capabilities),” according to NATO. In other words, mostly institutional bureaucratic infrastructure.

“Indirect spending” covers what each nation voluntarily contributes to an operation. NATO acknowledges the greater share the US spends on indirect spending: “there is an over-reliance by the Alliance as a whole on the United States for the provision of essential capabilities, including for instance, in regard to intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance; air-to-air refuelling; ballistic missile defence; and airborne electronic warfare.” We could also mention transport aircraft, cruise missiles, and other matériel that the European countries simply don’t have much of. For example, in the 2011 NATO bombing of Libya, there were 246 cruise missiles launched. The US fired 228 of them. At $1.5 million apiece, that adds up to $342 million taxpayer dollars spent to destabilize a country and get four of our citizens killed.

This discrepancy in indirect spending and military capability was already obvious in the 1990’s when NATO intervened in Bosnia and Kosovo to stop a vicious war. During the 1999 crisis in Kosovo, the Europeans had to make “heroic efforts” just to deploy 2% of their two million troops, according to the British foreign secretary. Historian William Shawcross writes of the bombing campaign, “The United States flew the overwhelming majority of the missions, and dropped almost all the precision-guided U.S.-made munitions, and most of the targets were generated by U.S. intelligence.”

So Trump’s complaints, as blustering and exaggerated as they may be, are legitimate. Operations conducted by NATO are overwhelmingly American funded and directed, and NATO is a diplomatic fig-leaf for American power.

No more convincing are the reasons critics give for supporting NATO. The alliance has not prevented “major state conflict since World War II,” as a writer at NRO claims. Given that some 40 million people have died in conflicts since WWII, I’m not sure what “peace” we’re talking about. During the Cold War, the peace between the US and the Soviet Union was kept by nuclear “mutually assured destruction” and millions of American troops, not NATO. Nor was Europe in any condition to fight among themselves. The Europeans were, and still are in many ways, burned out after 30 years of warring, and had neither the will, the morale, nor the belief in anything worth dying for to engage in another war. With their security underwritten by the US, they could spend their money on lavish social welfare programs and la dolce vita. Thinking NATO kept the peace is as preposterous as claiming the EU did.

Then there’s Article 5, the pledge that NATO members will fight for any member state that’s been attacked. Much is made of the only time Article 5 has been invoked, after the terrorist attacks on 9/11. Yet all that solidarity and allied good will didn’t stop France and Germany from trying to undermine the US when it tried to get the UN to sanction the war in 2003 on Saddam Hussein, who had violated 16 UN resolutions and the formal terms ending the 1991 Iraq War. Despite the consensus of American and European intelligence agencies that Hussein had WMD stockpiles, France and Germany took the lead in lobbying the Security Council to oppose the authorization to use force against Iraq. Germany’s ambassador to the UN Council pressured members like Mexico and Chile to vote against the US. Worse yet, France and Germany, along with Belgium, formally objected to a proposal for NATO to send defensive equipment to Turkey, which wanted assurances that it would be supported by its fellow NATO members if attacked for supporting the war against Hussein.

This behavior of NATO allies did not reflect principle, but national interests and politics. German Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder was running for re-election, and found reflexive German anti-Americanism and pacifism a convenient distraction from his terrible economic record. France had grubbier reasons in addition to its own ressentiment towards the US––renewing the arm sales to Iraq and oil development contracts it had enjoyed for years before the war, and could resume once the sanctions on Hussein were lifted, something France was actively pursuing. As Shawcross summarized, “The long friendship with Saddam, commercial considerations, the response to le défi Américain, and concern over the reactions of France’s Muslims––all these played a part in [President Jacques] Chirac’s calculations in the summer of 2002.”

The importance put on Article 5 forgets that, as George Washington said, “It is a maxim founded on the universal experience of mankind, that no nation can be trusted farther than it is bound by its interests.” NATO members have made and in the future will make decisions based on each nation’s estimation of its interests. So there’s no guarantee that invoking Article 5 would lead to meaningful NATO member support. And given the weakness of their militaries, just how much actual rather than rhetorical support could the Europeans provide in the event of an attack? How many battle carrier groups does NATO possess? The Europeans can’t even afford cruise missiles.

Finally, the arguments for NATO are predicated on an either-or fallacy. If we don’t have the NATO alliance and the benefits it supposedly brings for collective security, then we’ll have nothing. But of course, if NATO disappeared tomorrow, the US would quickly sign bilateral and multilateral defense agreements with individual countries or groups of countries, including some current NATO members. The argument that without NATO our security would be endangered is as fallacious as the argument of the Remain faction in England that leaving the EU would put the UK in danger. A country as rich and powerful as the US will find no dearth of countries eager to bandwagon with it.

Trump’s critics continue to search for dubious reasons to justify sitting out the election or even voting for Hillary. There may be many reasons not to vote for Trump, but criticizing NATO isn’t one of them.

Categories: 2016 elections, Donald Trump, Europe, European military, NATO
Tags: Donald Trump, Europe, European military, Nato

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Islamism Rises from Europe’s Secularism

July 24, 2016

Islamism Rises from Europe’s Secularism, Gatestone Institute, Giulio Meotti, July 24, 2016

♦ In France, the Socialist government imposed a “secularism charter” in every school, banning Christianity from the educational system. Municipalities have already changed the enrollment form for schoolchildren by eliminating the words “father” and “mother”, replacing them with “legal manager 1” and “legal manager 2”. It is George Orwell’s “Newspeak”.

♦ After two major terror attacks in 2015, France, instead of promoting a cultural “jihad” based on Western values, responded to Islamic fundamentalism with a ridiculous “Day of Secularism” to be celebrated every 9th of December.

♦ This narrow secularism has also prevented France from openly supporting Eastern Christians under Islamist oppression.

♦ The empty 13th century Oude Kerk church in Amsterdam is now used for exhibitions and can be rented for gala dinners. In front of it there is “Sexyland”, offering “Live F*ck Shows”, a coffee shop for drugs and an “Erotic Supermarket” for dildos. For seven euros one can also visit the church.

On October 2000, in the sunny French city of Nice, the 105-member European Convention drafted the Charter of Fundamental Rights of the European Union.

Drawn up by the committee of former French President Valéry Giscard d’Estaing, the document only referred to the “cultural, religious and humanist inheritance of Europe”. The European Parliament had rejected a proposal from Christian Democrat MEPs and Pope John Paul II, to include in the text Europe’s “Judaeo-Christian roots”.

In the 75,000-word Charter there is not a single mention of Christianity. Since then, a wind of aggressive secularism has pervaded all EU policies. The European Court of Human Rights, for example, asked to remove crucifixes from classrooms: they were allegedly a threat to democracy.

The city of Nice — where exactly sixteen years ago Europe’s rulers decided to eliminate the Judeo-Christian roots from the (never approved) EU Constitution — has just witnessed the bloody manifestation of another religion: radical Islam. “Nature abhors a vacuum”: This is the truth to which our élites do not want to listen; Islamism rises from what William McGurn, George W. Bush’s speechwriter, called “Europe’s feckless secularism“.

You can see it not only in Europe’s churches, three-quarters empty, and the boom of Europeans converting to Islam, but also from what is happening in Europe’s schools. The trends do not support Viktor Orbán‘s vision for a Christian Europe.

A few days ago, Belgium, which was recently targeted in terror attacks, decided that religion classes in French-speaking primary and secondary schools will be cut in half starting in October 2016, and replaced with an hour of “citizenship classes“: lessons in secularism. In Brussels, half the children in public schools already choose to take classes in Islam.

In France, the Socialist government imposed a “secularism charter” in every school, banning Christianity from the educational system. That charter is the manifesto of the “révolution douce” (“soft revolution”), France’s extreme secularism. It is an attempt to eliminate any claim of identity. A Jewish yarmulke, a Christian cross and an Islamic veil are treated the same way. This secularism is what has been rightly defined “the Left’s blind spot with Islam“.

It is a secularism that has also gone mad. The Yves Codou elementary school in the village of La Môle, for example, celebrated “Parents’ Day” instead of Mother’s Day, in order not to upset gay couples. Municipalities have already changed the enrollment form for schoolchildren by eliminating the words “father” and “mother”, replacing them with “legal manager 1” and “legal manager 2”. It is George Orwell’s “Newspeak”.

After two major terror attacks in 2015, France, instead of promoting a cultural “jihad” based on Western values, responded to Islamic fundamentalism with a ridiculous “Day of Secularism” to be celebrated every 9th of December.

It is not that this secularism “exacerbated” cultural tensions, as many liberals say. It is that this secularism severed French culture from the very ideals that created the West. Severing it made this culture blind to the incompatibility of Islamism with secular-minded values. A French teacher,Isabelle Rey, after the massacre at the satirical magazine, Charlie Hebdo, wrote that

“many of our students do not share our dismay at the events. We can pretend to have a consensus, but it is a fact that a significant portion of our population believes that the journalists deserved their fate or that the Kouachi brothers [the murderers] died as heroes”.

This narrow secularism has also prevented France from openly supporting Eastern Christians under Islamist oppression. The music group “The Priests” had planned to advertise an upcoming concert in Paris with a banner on a poster that said proceeds would go towards the cause of Christians persecuted in Iraq and Syria — but the company operating the Paris subway system initially banned the ad, saying it considered the banner as a violation of secularism.

Sweden, one of the European countries more infiltrated by radical Islam, is listed as “the least religious” nation in the West. According to Statistics Sweden, just 5% of Swedes are regular churchgoers, and one in three couples that get married chooses a civil ceremony. How did Sweden get there? Many years ago, the Swedish government banned any religious activities in schools except for those directly related to religion classes.

Not only has secularism no answers for terrorism; it also leaves Europeans unsure about what is worth fighting, killing, and dying for. If you believe, as the secularists do, that our values are mere accidents of history and that the highest good is comfort, then you will care nothing for the future of civilization.

The symbol of this Euro-Secularism is the Oude Kerk, dating from the 13th century, and one of the most famous churches in Amsterdam. The empty church is now used for exhibitions and can be rented for gala dinners. In front of it there is “Sexyland”, offering “Live F*ck Shows”, a coffee shop for drugs and an “Erotic Supermarket” for dildos. For seven euros one can also visit the church.

The symbol of Euro-Secularism is the 13th century Oude Kerk in Amsterdam. The empty church is now used for exhibitions and can be rented for gala dinners. In front of it there is “Sexyland”, offering “Live F*ck Shows”, a coffee shop for drugs and an “Erotic Supermarket” for dildos. (Image source: Wikimedia Commons)

Welcome to Amsterdam, where the most practised religion is Islam.

Categories: Christianity, Europe, Islam in Europe, Islamic indoctrination, Islamic integration, Islamic invasion, Islamic supremacy, Islamisation, Judaism, Secularism
Tags: Christianity, Europe, Islam in Europe, Islamic indoctrination, Islamic integration, Islamic invasion, Islamic supremacy, Islamisation, Judaism, Secularism

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