The Fat Terrorist Will Sing

The protest has been held and the Death of Klinghoffer will go on. The fat terrorist will sing, the media will chant his praises and the old sad story of failed Jewish activism in America will go on.

After the behind-the-scenes lobbying and the ignored letters to the editor, a protest rally fronted by two out of work Republican politicians brought more attention to the Met's pro-terrorist opera without doing anything to actually stop it from going forward.

Rudy Giuliani, the protest's marquee name, wrote an article expressing his admiration for the composer, called the Met's cancellation of HD broadcasts a "harder and more courageous decision than is recognized by those who oppose this opera" and promised to continue patronizing the Met.

And if hard-hitting rhetoric like that doesn't make the Met shake in its boots, I don't know what will.

None of this is a new story. It's the repetition of a very old story.

In 1914, the Gary Plan was the Common Core of its day, a highly controversial radical educational reform that both dumbed down the curriculum and made it ridiculously confusing. Like Common Core, the Gary Plan was backed by major business interests, including the Rockefeller Corporation, liberal newspapers and wealthy busybodies. It was championed by the progressive quasi-Republican mayor of New York, John Purroy Mitchel, the Bloomberg of his day.

The schools targeted by the Gary Plan were primarily Jewish. Among its other charming features, the Gary Plan made it difficult for students from working class families to work part time or obtain a religious education. And it killed their hope of a higher education by dumbing down their classes.

Immigrant Jews took on the liberal establishment. And the liberal establishment ignored them and mocked them.

The Jews formed committees and leagues, attended every meeting, wrote letters to the editor, pleaded to be heard. And for two years the newspapers, including the New York Times, refused to report on the opposition. A coalition of parents associations and chambers of commerce  asked for hearings on the plan and the Board of Education replied that it saw no evidence that the public wanted hearings.

The Jewish establishment had its shot and it failed. It had gone through all the decent motions of democracy and was brushed off by the liberal establishment.

So Jewish students and parents instead began boycotting classes. Thousands of students marched through the streets. School windows were smashed. Board meetings were hijacked by protesters. Police fought students and parents in the street. The opposition could no longer be ignored.

Mitchel lost the election. The Gary Plan disappeared into history. Both are mourned obscurely by progressives for not doing a better job of "messaging".

All that may have happened a century ago, but the lesson has yet to be learned.

The American Jewish establishment's narrow toolbox of meetings, lobbying and letters to the editor utterly failed during the Holocaust. The Nazis were not impressed by them and neither was FDR. It took rogue elements like Hollywood screenwriter Ben Hecht to actually bring the issue to public attention through abrasive and angry rhetoric targeting FDR and the establishment.

The impotent establishment which had written letters and engaged in backdoor lobbying while millions died denounced them for it.

The same thing happened again with Soviet Jewry. For two generations, the Jewish establishment had issued meaningless formal protests when the USSR closed synagogues, shot Rabbis and then went straight to mass murder. Soviet Jews were only truly able to leave once another group of rogue activists hijacked Soviet attempts at detente by vandalizing Soviet embassies and airplanes and releasing mice at Soviet cultural events.

In 1972, when Soviet dancers appeared at the Metropolitan Opera, activists of the Jewish Defense League threw chicken blood at them. "Soviet culture will not be allowed in New York while Soviet Jews languish in concentration camps", their statement said.

In 1986, a Soviet dance troupe's appearance at the Met was emptied out with a tear gas grenade. The Soviet ambassador had to be evacuated from the building with tears in his eyes. By the next show, the Met had to be packed with security, patrons were being all but strip searched and bomb sniffing dogs were circulating through the audience. Going to the Met was now like going into a prison.

The establishment condemned them. Koch called them "the scum of the earth" for making the Soviet ambassador cry. But their tactics worked when those of the establishment had failed.

The same story repeated itself when it came to Israel. Except the left has monopolized militant activism while the Jewish establishment scurries around with reactive responses, defensive editorials and the occasional rally. These tactics are not useful when it comes to people throwing blood at you and they are useless even when opposing the high culture's endorsement of the mass murder of Jews encoded in pro-terrorist events like the Death of Klinghoffer.

American Jewish activism remains rooted in checking boxes. The establishment lobbies, comes away with some sort of compromise, like the ADL's cancellation of the Met's HD broadcast, and declares victory. Angry letters are written. A protest takes place. And nothing changes except for the worse.

The other side knows that activism is meant to lead to something. Our side runs cargo cult activism in which going through the motions of activism is supposed to lead to results without actually having a plan. It's an organizational loop that leads to nothing. We protest to register our protest. These aren't actions. They're comforting rituals.

Protesting to register displeasure is a middle class reflex. It's the response of those who think that the institutions we deal with are basically democratic and just aren't hearing us. It's not a movement of real change. Like the Tea Party, it goes through the middle class motions of democracy without recognizing that the system is fundamentally broken and will not be fixed at that level.

Expecting the rituals of middle class outrage to register against the militants of the left who are now in charge or their useful idiots is a faint hope. It would take far larger numbers to even make a dent in their arrogance and their certainty that their network of media and political support will hold on.

The Death of Klinghoffer protests got some things right, like the wheelchairs, a coalition with the Catholic League and the badges and signs, and some things wrong, like Giuliani, but it made the same basic mistakes that the various pro-Israel and anti-Terrorist protests that I used to attend regularly over the years did. It was protest as catharsis. It had no real objective that it could hope to accomplish except to embed mention of it somewhere in a story. It was registering opposition and moral outrage, rather than forcing change.

And as noble as that is, it's also impotent.

If the Met had decided to put on an opera in which Jews were the victims and Muslims were the villains, activists from the left would have chained themselves inside with bullhorns, they would have poured fake blood on themselves and on the patrons, they would have done their best to disrupt every performance turning the story around from the opera to their message.

And they would have gotten their way.

The left would have looked at such a situation not as another hopeless attack, but as a platform for getting out their message by turning themselves into the victims. Their end goal would not have been to merely disrupt the opera, but to get the Met to give equal time to their agenda by putting on an opera of their own. Not to reassure themselves that they still matter.

Despite how this may sound, I am not criticizing the organizers of the protest. I have been to countless protests like it overseen by very nice and committed people who think that they have succeeded if they can get the City Comptroller or Public Advocate to come on stage and condemn terrorism. Their hearts are in the right place and they are doing their best against the odds.

But the left does not view activism as a middle class ritual. It doesn't protest and expect things to change. It protests to mobilize and radicalize. It has an agenda every bit as developed as that of any corporation, and usually funded by corporations, even if it doesn't seem like it sometimes. Activism to it is a science. A protest rally or a letter is one stage in a comprehensive plan of action.

Our side does not have a plan. We react in outrage to something and we express our outrage with words, with letters, articles and speeches. We fail to effectively change things at the top because there is never anything at stake for an institution like the Met. They have nothing to lose. We do.

The Met is vulnerable through its government funding. And it's vulnerable to disruption. It's an institution with financial problems faced with angry unions and accusations of waste. The left would have had a field day with any of those things. It would not have wasted its money getting Giuliani and Pataki up on stage to cloak the protest in middle class respectability.

Militant tactics aren't the only option, but you either have a goal and a plan for accomplishing it or you're going through the motions of outrage. You're not going to win an argument with the liberal establishment with a protest rally featuring two retired politicians. You're not going to get people to take the murder of Jews by Muslim terrorists seriously by doing the same things that failed when it came to Nazi Germany and the USSR.

Activism is about accomplishing short term goals or using outrage to build a movement. If you're not doing either of these things, then the fat terrorist will go on singing.

The Left's Worst Crime in the Middle East

The left's worst crime in the Middle East has been its support for the region's Arab-Muslim majority at the expense of its minorities. It has supported the majority's terrorism, atrocities, ethnic cleansing and repression of the region's minorities. Very rarely has it raised a voice in their support, and when it has done so, it was in muted tones completely different from their vigorous defenses of the nationalism of the Arab Muslim majority.

The left backed the Arab Spring which rewarded the ambitions of Arabist and Islamist activists at the expense of Coptic, African and other minorities. Its great regional obsession is statehood for the Arab Muslims of Israel, (better known by their local Palestinian brand), but has little to say about the Kurds in Turkey or the Azeri in Iran. The million Jewish refugees and the vanishing Christians of the region never come up in conversation. They certainly don't get their own lefty protest rallies. 

The Africans of Sudan could have used an entire UN organization dedicated to their welfare, which the Arab Muslims who had failed to wipe out the region's Jewish minority are the beneficiaries of. But they had to make do with third tier aid.

Unlike the Arab nationalists and Islamists of Libya, the French, English and American air force did not come to their rescue. It came to the rescue of the Libyans who showed their gratitude in the time honored way of the Arab majority by massacring the African minority and then killing some Americans. But what's a little genocide between friends?

The left embraced Pan-Arabism, a race based nationalism, in line with the Soviet Union's expansionist foreign policy. Pan-Arabism's socialism made it easy for the left to ignore its overt racism along with the admiration of many of its leading lights for Nazi Germany. The same left which refused to see the Gulags and the ethnic cleansing under the red flag, turned an equally blind eye to the contradiction of condemning Zionism for its ethnic basis, while supporting Pan-Arabism, which was ethnically based.

Under Zionism, Israel retained a sizable Arab minority. The Pan-Arabists however drove their Jews out with mob violence, political repression, prisons and public executions. The left's criticisms of Zionism are rendered moot by their own support for Pan-Arabism, and their own longstanding hostility to Jewish national identity, insisting that socialism demands that Jews assimilate into the dominant race, whether in Russia or Western Europe. In the Middle East and North Africa, Arabization has led to repression of non-Arab minorities and the destruction of other cultures through the insistence on unity through race.

As the sun of Pan-Arabism sets, the left has turned its attention to Pan-Islamism with equal enthusiasm. While Pan-Arabism allowed Christian Arabs some representation, Pan-Islamism excludes based on religion. Having endorsed a racial tyranny, the left has fallen so low that it now champions majority theocracies.

The left's fledgling support for Kurdish nationalism has faded as Turkey has gone from a secular ally of the Western powers, to an Islamist tyranny dreaming of empire. This perverse twist of affairs has the left abandoning the national struggles of an oppressed people when their rulers align themselves more closely with the bigoted regional majority.

The War on Iraq, which the left hated, removed a tyrant aligned with the region's Sunni majority and the Libyan campaign, which the left supported, removed a tyrant who had deviated too far from the positions of that majority. So too in Egypt, where Mubarak's excessive tolerance for minorities, led the left to endorse the Pan-Arabist and Pan-Islamist calls for his overthrow. And in Tunisia, where a government tolerant of minorities has been replaced by the Islamists.

The pattern repeats itself over and over again as the left rises in support of racial and theocratic rule. And for all the left's critiques of American and European foreign policy, its own foreign policy which endorses racial and theocratic rule and works to bring it about is a true crime and blot on the region.

It is no coincidence that the one country in the region that the left hates above all else, is neither Arab nor Muslim. Just as it is no coincidence that the Arab Spring replaces regimes tolerant of minorities with Islamists and Arabists. The left's true regional agenda is the racist agenda of its Arab members. The Arab Socialists and the Islamists who have defined its regional positions have turned the left into a vehicle for their racial and theocratic agendas.

For the left to shout racism when Americans empowered the Kurds in Iraq, or when Israeli soldiers stand watch over tiny strips of land where the region's oldest and most frequently oppressed minority finds shelter is the height of hypocrisy. It is the left which is racist. It is the left which backs theocracies and always supports the majority's oppression of the minority.

The idiots in their Keffiyahs eager to give everyone a lesson on the Middle East think the Assyrians vanished in ancient times, have no idea who the Circassians are, or the Arab Gypsies, think the Zoroastrians are a traveling circus, and couldn't begin to tell you anything about the Druze, the Bahai or the Ahmadis-- except that American foreign policy or Israel are probably to blame.

In the meantime they proudly wear a garment associated with the Pan-Arabists and their rejection of Turkish reforms-- while stupidly believing that it's all-purpose garments of revolution. But why should they care that they're endorsing a romanticized neo-feudalism that led to mass murder and the rise of a theocratic reactionary movement disguised as nationalism. Or that these movements have inevitably led to the repression of minorities and the ethnic cleansing and attempted genocide of the region's native inhabitants by their Arab Muslim conquerors.

The left relies on the intellectual laziness of its followers not to notice that the nationalism they support is the nationalism of medieval conquerors and the resurgence of their colonial descendants. The only two nations with any historical roots in the region are Israel and Persia. In North Africa, where the Arab Spring has burned fiercest, the left is cheering the resurgence of an Arab Pretoria, racist regimes turning into even more racist theocracies run by the great-great-grands of the men who invaded the region and destroyed much of its history and culture.

The Arab Spring, with its purges of Coptic Christians and Africans, its outpouring of hostility toward Jews, is as perverse as if the left had suddenly decided that Africa needed proper Boer rule. It's the senseless behavior of racist idiots and totalitarian hypocrites who think that if they call you a "racist" first then they win the argument.

The left has endorsed Arab and Islamic rule over the Middle East, which means that it is in absolutely no position to criticize anyone or anything. It will talk your ear off about Gaza or Fallujah, but it won't have anything to say about Turkish chemical weapons raids into Kurdish areas of Iraq. The tens of thousands of political prisoners in Turkish jails, some there for no other crime than the use of the Kurdish language, don't exist for the left. Erdogan's casual threat to ethnically cleanse the Armenians again doesn't stir their interest.

It is no secret that the left is totalitarian and that it is attracted to totalitarian movements. But few have been willing to say it openly and clearly when it comes to its politics in the Middle East.

The left picked Pan-Islamists over secularists in Iran and Turkey. It picked racialist fascists in Egypt, Iraq and Syria-- and their local Palestinian militias. It backed Islamist and Arabist revolts again in Egypt, Tunisia and Libya. And after backing every totalitarian majoritarian regime that wasn't too closely aligned to the United States-- their one great enemy is the region's only democratic state.

The left's worst crime in the Middle East is its craven love for tyranny, for grand empires built on race and religion, over the national and political rights of the minority. These Apartheid states are all they care about. Their greatest effort has been set not on resolving the stateless problems of the Kurdish minority, on the national borders of Armenia or ending the Turkish occupation and settlement of Cyprus-- but on adding yet another Arab-Muslim state to the region.

Palestine, the cynical project of Pan-Arabist and Pan-Islamist thugs, is the great obsession of the left. Because if there's one thing that the Middle East doesn't have enough of, it's totalitarian regimes built on Arab and Islamist identity. And the one thing it has too much of is democratic state with a non-Arab and non-Muslim majority. And that one thing is what they are committed to destroying.

Friday Afternoon Roundup - Dogs, Tornados and Jews

PARDONS FOR PEDOS

Covering up for Gutman’s sexual abuse of children would have been about more than just the State Department’s usual white wall of silence. Like many European ambassadors in the new administration, Gutman was not a diplomat — he was a donor. A man like Christopher Stevens might be sent to Libya, but positions in European capitals were mostly reserved for major contributors to the Democratic Party.

When it came to money, Howard Gutman, a top Washington lawyer, brought in the cash by raising $500,000 for Obama’s campaign committee and another $275,000 for his inauguration committee.  And Gutman was not just an Obama boy. He had donated the legal maximum to Hillary’s presidential bid.

That was a lot of money. Enough to let a donor molest as many children as he cared to.

Clinton’s Pardons for Pedophiles




Palestinian Authority President’s Advisor: Murderer of American-Israeli Baby is “Heroic Martyr”




COWARDICE AND CRUELTY

ISIS is using the same tactics with America as it did with the Iraqi Army. Beheadings and humiliations of captured prisoners. It is showing its members and its supporters that it is stronger than America.

This is what terrorists do.

ISIS hasn’t won battles against enemies that stood and fought. It broke the morale of its opponents by humiliating them. This is a powerful thing in the Middle East’s honor/shame cultures where fighting forces have poor professionalism and draw their morale from a false sense of confidence. You’ve seen all those videos of Jihadists running out of cover or accidentally blowing themselves up.

This is the attitude that keeps the enemy going. They don’t really follow orders. They don’t really learn how to do things. What unites them is a sense of inevitability. Puncture that by humiliating them and they collapse. Their macho shows are all hat and no cattle. There’s nothing underneath the bravado except cowardice and cruelty.

Why is ISIS Provoking America? To Humiliate It.




Americans just gave every Gazan $200



AN ISIS MAN

In an interview with radio shock-jock Howard Stern, Canadian rocker Neil Young suggested a fight against the Islamic State (ISIS) is not worth the release of greenhouse gases from military vehicles.

“And yet we are fighting what? ISIS…al-Qaeda. And we are fighting these wars against these organizations and their carbon footprint has got to be like 1% of our huge army and our navy and all of this stuff that have with all our big machines. We’re doing more damage to the earth with our wars.”

While Neil Young spoke to a Calgary news conference at the Jack Singer Concert Hall prior to his Sunday night show, five rock star-style motorhomes were left running outside, spewing fumes into the Calgary air, even though they were mostly unoccupied.

Inside the concert hall, the 68-year-old rock ‘n’ roll legend was talking about the “elephant in the room,” which he later explained was man-made global warming. The only elephant I could see was his enormous carbon footprint and his even bigger hypocrisy between his walk and his talk.

Neil Young: Al Qaeda More Moral Than US Army Because of Smaller Carbon Footprint



GOOD CALIPH, BAD CALIPH

Islamic terrorism benefits Muslims directly and indirectly. The direct benefits are obvious. The indirect benefits are more subtle. Whether it’s ISIS and the FSA, Al Qaeda and Saudi Arabia, the “extremist” mosques that openly preach death and the “moderate” mosques that dress it up a little, Islamic violence benefits both sides in the game of “Good Caliph” and “Bad Caliph”.

Islamic “extremism” creates a market for “moderates”. The more bombs go off, the more the affected countries scramble to ally with cooler heads who claim to be able to defuse the anger of the radicals.

Jihadists set off bombs in Boston and the state partners with local mosques. The Taliban kill girls and the United States pumps more money into Pakistan. ISIS massacres non-Muslims and we ally with the FSA.

How the Muslim World Benefits from ISIS




WORKPLACE JIHAD

Obama Says Muslim Terror Attack on Canada is “Senseless Violence”

Canadian Parliament Attacker was Son of Libyan Muslim Jihadist

Muslim NYPD Ax Attacker: “Sit Around and Do Nothing or Jihad in the Cause of Allah”





KEEPING UP WITH THE WARRENS

Actual polling though shows that Warren has twice as much support among the $50,000 and over group than she does at the under $50,000 level. Warren is also least popular with 18-29 year olds. She’s so unpopular with them that even seniors, a traditionally conservative group, like her more than they do.

Class warfare is a game for those with money. The family that is just scraping by doesn’t have the time to worry about how many times their annual salaries a CEO makes. Envying billionaires is the occupation of millionaires. Envying them is the occupation of the upper end of the
middle class.

Instead of being some kind of revolutionary, Elizabeth Warren’s main appeal is to rich white men.

Elizabeth Warren: The Rich White Man’s Candidate




FIRST YOU GET THEM TO PET A DOG, THEN THEY'LL CONVERT

More than 1,000 people attended the “I Want to Touch a Dog” event in the affluent Bandar Utama neighborhood on the outskirts of Kuala Lumpur. But the event’s planner, Syed Azmi Alhabshi, has now been forced into hiding after hard-liners insisted he “should be stoned to death.”

One Facebook user’s comment — as reported by the Malaysian Insider — illustrates the level of paranoia in the hard-line camp. The user said the dog-familiarization event was part of “a Jewish agenda to Christianise Muslim-Malaysians through subtle measures.”

It’s so subtle that I don’t know how this conspiracy is supposed to work.

1. Muslims pet dogs.

2. Then they convert to Christianity.

3. The Jews win?

 Muslims Blame Malaysian Tornado on Petting Dogs, Call for Stoning Dog Lover

...from the comments

truebearing • This is fantastic! If only we'd have known sooner. We now have the solution to Islam...force them to pet dogs, which will turn them into Christians, thereby reducing the Muslim population, and then tornados will wreak havoc on the Muslim countries.

Of course, there are a lot of Muslims, so we'll have to platoon the poor dogs so they aren't petted till bald.

Obama Offers to Let Iran Run Three Times as Many Nuke Centrifuges




THE UNINDICTED PARTY

Among the speakers is Kathleen Rice, who is currently the Nassau County District attorney, and is a Long Island Congressional candidate…

…Ms. Rice is speaking alongside Imam Siraj Wahhaj of the Muslim Alliance of North America. Mr. Wahhaj was named in court papers as an unindicted co-conspirator of the 1993 World Trade Center bombing.

Also he proclaimed in a May 1992 sermon: “I would cut off the hands of my own daughter [if she stole] because Allah stands for Justice.”

Someone should ask Kathleen Rice what she thinks of Allah’s hand-cutting justice. I hope Kathleen Rice is a moderate Democrat and not one of that tiny minority of radical extremist Dems we keep hearing about.

New York Dem Candidate to Appear w/Unindicted World Trade Center Bombing Conspirator




Dem Chief of Staff Mohammed Resigns After Saying “All White People Have a Little Hitler in Them,”




NEW JOB

Petlakh said that as he left the arena with his sons, aged 10 and 14, his way was blocked by protesters yelling “Free Palestine” and “Your people are murderers.”

At that point, one of the protesters — allegedly Shawn Shraeder  — punched him, resulting in a broken nose and a cut above the eye, requiring eight stitches.

Shawn Schrader is an activist with Occupy Wall Street who goes by a number of different names including Shawn Carrié. Shawn had cashed in during the OWS heday by claiming to have been the victim of police brutality.

His Twitter account shows that Schader/Carrie had recently headed to Ferguson to participate in the ugliness there. In an attempt to make money off OWS, he tried to describe Tweeting about OWS as his “full-time job”.

Occupy Wall Street/Ferguson Thug Arrested for Beating Jewish Man at Anti-Israel Protest




Communist Dictator of Cholera-Ridden Country Offers US Help Fighting Ebola




SPEAKING OF COMMUNIST DICTATORS...

When Al Sharpton wants to protest something, then its current mayor supporter of the notoriously anti-Semitic Sandinistas is always on call. But when it comes to Jews taking a stand against terrorism and anti-Semitism, Bill de Blasio is a self-righteous no show.

Mayor de Blasio defended the Metropolitan Opera’s right to show “The Death of Klinghoffer,” and criticized predecessor Rudy Giuliani’s protest against the controversial work.

“I really think we have to be very careful in a free society to respect that cultural institutions will portray works of art, put on operas, plays, that there will be art exhibits in museum,” de Blasio said Monday at an unrelated press conference.

And yet if the Met were saying putting an opera that portrayed black people as apes who deserved to be enslaved, Bill de Blasio would have a thoroughly different view.

Bill de Blasio: Sharpton Rally “Yes”, Rally Against Terrorism “No”




UK Deals w/Muslim Trojan Horse Plot by Asking Jewish 9-Year-Old Girls If They Know Gays




CAPITALISM IS RESPONSIBLE FOR SOCIALISM

The International Marxist Tendency, in a piece whose related articles include Karl Marx is the “Best Scientist of Them All” and Quantum physics, dialectics and society: from Marx and Engels to Khrennikov and Haven (For some folks, the USSR never fell” has an article which claims that “Ebola: an epidemic made in the capitals of Europe and America”.

That must explain the massive Ebola epidemic overrunning London.

“The labour movement must make clear, however, that the whole Ebola problem is not and has never been a medical or a scientific one. It is an issue of under-development and exploitation,” it states.

Well obviously. Marx was the best scientist of them all. And thanks to his wisdom, we know that disease isn’t a medical problem. It can only be solved when we put the Commies in charge.

Just look at Cuba.

“Capitalism is Responsible for Ebola”




Don’t Worry, It’s not a Carbon Tax, It’s a “100 Percent Returnable Emissions Tax”




CLINTON CRIME FAMILY RIDES ON

“Sources close to AdvaMed don’t expect Clinton to come out in favor of eliminating the medical device tax, but her appearance before the group is a key indicator the powerful industry is ready to spend money to derail the tax in the near future and build key bipartisan coalitions.”

We’re talking about a six figure speech. And possibly more of those to come. Reason enough for Hillary to go on playing coy about the pacemaker tax.

Hillary Clinton Cashes In by Refusing to Take Position on Pacemaker Tax




Thomas Friedman Desperately Running Out of Non-Islamic Metaphors for ISIS




HE'S GOT MY VOTE

Undocumented President Omar Gonzalez, a military veteran with more useful career experience than the current occupant, was found incompetent to stand trial after he was expelled from the White House.

Despite a national policy of letting in everyone who wants to enter the country and declaring them merely “undocumented”, President Omar Gonzalez was denied his right to remain in the White House.

But while President Gonzalez may have been found incompetent to stand trial, there is little doubt that he is more competent to run the country than the man on whose behalf he was expelled.

White House Fence Jumper Not Competent to Stand Trial, Might be Competent to be President




QUICK AND DIRTY OR NEVERENDING AND CLEAN

As I wrote in The Great Betrayal, “the number of Afghan civilian casualties caused by American forces had dropped between 2009 and 2011, but civilian casualties caused by the Taliban steadily increased… 2009 proved to be the deadliest year for Afghan civilians with over 2,400 killed… with the Taliban accounting for two-thirds of the total. While the percentage of casualties caused by US forces fell 28 percent, the percentage caused by the Taliban increased by 40 percent making up for American restraint.  This fell into line with the increase in NATO combat deaths which rose from 295 to 520.”

“By 2011, the ISAF forces were responsible for only 14.2 percent of Afghan civilian deaths, while the Taliban were responsible for 79.8 percent of them.”

American soldiers were killing fewer Afghan civilians, but more Afghan civilians were dying. The rules of engagement allowed the Taliban to win which meant that they would be able to kill more civilians. Instead of helping Afghan civilians, we were causing more of them and more of us to be killed.

You Can’t Stop Genocide Without Killing Civilians




Will ISIS be Next to Jump the White House Fence?



LIBERABOLA

This may be the single dumbest article written about Ebola. And that includes anything written by Al Gore blaming Ebola on Global Warming. The unfathomable stupidity of this Rick Hampson piece may actually be worse than Ebola because there’s no cure.

"Once defamed as “the city that killed Kennedy,” this community used the assassination’s 50th anniversary last year to declare its name cleared once and for all. Now Dallas faces a new libel: Ebola capital of the USA."

USA Today Blasts Racist Dallas for Killing JFK, Ebolaphobia




UGH

A woman whose only claim to fame is committing adultery with the President of the United States “survived” the “suffering” of being mocked in newspapers and now wants to use her story to fix our culture.

Lewinsky is acting as if being called “Portly pepperpot” makes her a survivor of something. It doesn’t.

That’s what our “I Feel” culture has forgotten. Some people should be shamed. We can disagree on which people, but I don’t really see there being much of a Monica Lewinsky lobby here.

Monica Lewinsky is a Victim Who Wants to Use Her Suffering to Fix Our Culture




Jewish Girl Converts to Islam, Begins Getting Bad Grades, Plotting to Kill Parents



TROLLNART

Is Beinart really incapable of grasping the difference between self-criticism and external attack?

If Beinart were to call himself a “miserable self-loathing hack”, no one would claim that he’s engaging in personal attacks. But if I were to call him that, I would be engaging in a personal attack.

There’s a difference between Hillary Clinton saying something negative about America and Vladimir Putin or Angela Merkel saying something negative about America.

If Beinart really doesn’t get it, he should try doing Chris Rock’s “Niggas vs. Black People” routine in front of a black audience.

Is Peter Beinart Just a Troll?




Racist Muslim Settlers Attack Black Israeli Soldier in Jerusalem



MENTAL

There’s something seriously wrong when an interview question runs two paragraphs and the response runs a sentence. There’s something even more wrong when the question consists of rants like this from Oppenheimer.

“I’m not someone who, I’m no AIPAC Jew. I’m the person who in many situations is the one saying, you know, there are Palestinians who were thrown out of their homes. And I read your letter and I thought to myself, “That’s not what you want to say.”

In court this is what is known as leading the witness. Also it’s known as the counsel having a mental breakdown. In this case the mental breakdown is caused by Oppenheimer’s pathological self-hatred. “I’m no AIPAC Jew” is a deeply telling phrase, not about AIPAC, but about Oppenheimer’s ghetto state of mind.

Yale Chaplain Ousted for Supporting Hamas, Hating Jews, Claims to Have “Jewish Soul”




THE ROUNDUP


ELEPHANT MAN

Islam, after closer examination, was and still is all about Muhammad. And about nothing else.  You had to take his word for everything he said had happened or will happen. He insisted on it, forcefully. Like a berserker. There isn’t a single totalitarian regime that wasn’t also a personality cult. Islam fits that description. Muhammad is its personality, and Islam is his cult.

He was the Billy Sunday of his time in that region, or if you like, a supreme showman in the way of P.T. Barnum. By the time of his death in July 632 at the age of sixty-two, Muhammad had converted all of the Arabian Peninsula to Islam, by hook, crook, military conquest, banditry, torture, extortion, genocide, terror, and murder. He was born in 570, the “Year of the Elephant,” but very likely had never seen or heard of an elephant. But Islam, especially after his demise and because of the missionary efforts of his successors, spread through the Peninsula and all compass points like scalding coffee through a cheap paper towel.

Another appropriate comparison would be that Muhammad was the Jim Jones of his time, skillful in manipulating the gullible, but his Kool-Aid was Islam, which didn’t poison men, but instead their minds, and turned them into “Walking Dead” zombies.

Or, picture Muhammad as a kind of Rev. Jeremiah Wright, ranting to his congregation about hell and damnation and God-damning the Jews and Christians and all unbelievers, his Koran-thumping eliciting vocal expressions of spontaneous fervor among the flock. That was, more or less, Muhammad’s preaching style. He was a master of working his credulous converts into near hysterics, if not into a revival tent, rolling-on-the-ground lather and foaming at the mouth for salvation.

Edward Cline's take on Mohammed.



KERRY'S EAR

Kerry should have anticipated what he’d hear. Hatred of the Jewish state in varying degrees of ferocity and of flaunted belligerence has consistently been the only glue to hold together the squabbling and mutually destructive sons of Arabia in their various guises and incompatible religious adherences.

Therefore, Kerry – had he actually had even a superficial a smattering of elementary historical comprehension – should have expected precisely such slander. Moreover, had Kerry even a superficial smattering of elementary intellectual integrity, he’d have rejected the crude attempt to reproach Israel for Arab/Muslim barbarities. He could have denounced it as the crass opportunism and as the morally abhorrent copout that it is.

Had Kerry any rudimentary decency in the role of go-between he so fancies, he’d have told his regional interlocutors that they cannot persist in portraying Israel as the source of all evil. Had he possessed a smidgeon of the statecraft he boasts about, he’d have fearlessly stood up to the host of Mideastern dictators and potentates. Instead he lent them his sympathetic ear.

from Sarah Honig...



A MERE SUGGESTION

That is outright religious hatred. He’s not talking about the mosque. He’s talking about the entire Temple Mount. You know, the holiest site in Judiasm. And “suggested”? really? You know what a suggestion is? “Hey, I think you should try putting a purple streak in your hair and see how it looks.” That’s a suggestion.

This? This is outright saying Jews have no right to their own holy place. No right to the site where both Temples stood, where the Ark of the Covenant resided, where Jewish priests blew the shofar on Rosh Hashanah–the site, in fact, where Judaism was practiced for centuries before Islam existed. This is part of the Palestinian strategy to pretend that the area was wholly Muslim and Jews have nothing to do with it. It is, straight out, a lie. And the AP calls it a suggestion.

Meryl on AP bias





BUT IF WE DON'T GIVE THEM WHAT THEY WANT...

What makes the picture even more bizarre is that while a lot of aid is going into ISIS-controlled areas, very little is going into Kurdish areas in northeast Syria where the Kurds are now defending Kobani with the support of U.S. warplanes. Last November, tellingly, Syrian Kurds complained that they were not included in the U.N. polio-vaccination campaign.

A State Department official is reported to fear that if the aid convoys were to be stopped, there would be an humanitarian crisis for which the West would be blamed. We don’t think fear of blame should be of any concern. Why are all these sentimental Western policy makers and executives so afraid of being blamed? It is blame by Muslims that they particularly fear. What is withholding aid from an enemy state compared to what the Muslims of ISIS are doing? It’s an absurd consideration, but it distorts policies, both domestic and foreign, over and over again. 

...from Jillian

You Can’t Reform Islam Without Reforming Muslims

Every few years the debate over reforming Islam bubbles up from the depths of a culture that largely censors any suggestion that Islam needs reforming.

But Islam does not exist apart from Muslims. It is not an abstract entity that can be changed without changing its followers. And if Islam has not changed, that is because Muslims do not want it to.

Mohammed and key figures in Islam provided a template, but that template would not endure if it did not fit the worldview of its worshipers. Western religions underwent a process of secularization to align with what many saw as modernity leading to a split between traditionalists and secularists.

The proponents of modernizing Islam assume that it didn’t make the jump because of Saudi money, fundamentalist violence and regional backwardness. These allegations are true, but also incomplete.

If modernizing Islam really appealed to Muslims, it would have taken off, at least in the West, despite Saudi money and Muslim Brotherhood front groups. These elements might have slowed things down, but a political or religious idea that is genuinely compelling is like a rock rolling down a hill.

It’s enormously difficult to stop.

Muslim modernization in the West has been covertly undermined by the Saudis and the Muslim Brotherhood, but for the most part it has not been violently suppressed.

It suffers above all else from a lack of Muslim interest.

Muslims don’t spend much time fuming over a progressive mosque that allows gay members or lets women lead prayers. Such places occasionally exist and remain obscure. They don’t have to be forcibly shut down because they never actually take off. The occasional death threat and arson might take place and the average ISIS recruit would happily slaughter everyone inside, but even he has bigger fish to fry.

The best evidence that Muslim modernization has failed is that even the angriest Muslims don’t take it very seriously as a threat. The sorts of people who believe that Saddam Hussein was a CIA agent or that Israel is using eagles as spies have trouble believing modernizing Islam will ever be much of a problem.

They know instinctively that it will never work. Instead Muslims are far more threatened by a cartoon mocking their prophet for reasons that go to the heart of what is wrong with their religion.

Islam is not an idea. It is a tribe.

Talking about reforming the words of Islam is an abstraction. Islam did not begin with a book. It began with clan and sword. Even in the modern skyscraper cities of the West, it remains a religion of the clan and the sword.

The left has misread Islamic terrorism as a response to oppression when it is actually a power base. It is not the poor and downtrodden who are most attracted to the Jihad. Instead it is the upper classes. Bin Laden wasn’t a pauper and neither are the Saudis or Qataris. Islamic terrorism isn’t a game for the poor. It becomes the thing to do when you’re rich enough to envy the neighbors. It’s a tribal war.

To reform Islam, we can’t just look at what is wrong with the Koran or the Hadiths. We have to ask why these tribal calls for violence and genocide, for oppression and enslavement, appealed to Muslims then and why they continue to appeal to Muslims today.

The modernizers assume that Western Muslims would welcome a reformation of Islam. They are half right. The reformation that they are welcoming is that of the Wahhabis trying to return it to what it was. It’s hard to deny that ISIS touches something deep within Muslims. The gay-friendly mosques don’t.

Understanding Islam only in terms of the Koran makes it seem as if Muslims are unwillingly trapped by a tyranny of the text, when the text is actually their means of trapping others into affirming their identity.

There is no reforming Islam without reforming Muslims. The reformers assume that most Muslims are ignorant of their own beliefs, but even the most illiterate Muslim in a village without running water has a good grasp of the big overall ideas. He may hardly be able to quote a Koranic verse without stumbling over it, he may have added local customs into the mix, but he identifies with it on a visceral level.

Its honor is his honor. Its future is the future of his family. Its members are his kinfolk. Like him, it ought to have been on top; instead it’s on the bottom. Its grievances are his grievances.

The rest is just details.

The progressive diverse mosque is the opposite of this tribal mentality. It is the opposite of Islam. Its destruction of the tribe is also the destruction of the individual. The Western Muslim who already has only a shaky connection to the culture of his ancestral country is not about to trade Islamic tribalism for anonymous diversity. Islam tells him he is superior. The progressive mosque tells him nothing.

Whether he is a Bangladeshi peasant watching soccer matches on the village television or a Bangladeshi doctor in London, it is the violent, racist and misogynistic parts of Islam that provide him with a sense of worth in a big confusing world. That is how Islam was born.

Islam began in uncertain times as empires were tottering and the old ways were being displaced by strange religions such as Judaism and Christianity, when its originators mashed bits of them together and then founded their own crazy wobbly murderous empire built around a badly plagiarized religion.

It was horrible and terrible for everyone who wasn’t a Muslim man, but it worked.

Islam is less of a faith and more of a set of honor and shame responses. It’s a cycle of oppression and victimhood. It’s the assertion of identity by people who see themselves as inferior and are determined to push back by making themselves superior. The responses are familiar. We saw it in Nazi Germany as the defeated nation became a master race by killing and enslaving everyone else.

But it’s not those at the bottom most driven by such dreams. It’s the desert billionaires who have money, but no culture. It’s the Western Muslim doctor who still feels inferior despite his wealth. It’s a merchant named Mohammed with a lot of grudges who claims an angel told him to kill all his enemies in Allah’s name.

It’s Islam. And it’s Muslims.

The things that we believe, bad or good, reflect the bad or good inside us. When Muslims support killing people, it’s simplistic to assume that they are robotically following a text and will follow any other text slipped in front of their faces, instead of their passions and values. Religions may make people kill, but it starts when people make religions kill.

The good devout Muslim may kill because the Koran tells him to, but he would not do so if the Koran’s justifications of violence did not speak to him on a deeper level. The Nazis were following orders, but they wouldn’t have followed them if Nazism didn’t connect with their fears, hopes and dreams.

The text is only half the problem. The other half is in the human heart.

Reforming Islam is not a matter of crossing out certain words and adding others. Religions carry a powerful set of values that appeal to people on a deep level. To change Islam, we would have to understand why its ugliness still speaks to Muslims. To change it, we have to change them.

When we talk about reforming Islam, what we are really talking about is reforming Muslims.

The Progressive Pajama Boy Era is Over

Obama’s approval ratings and MSNBC’s viewer ratings are in a close race to the bottom of Death Valley. It’s only a question of which set of obnoxious hipsters with a head full of bad policy ideas and no real life experience will be fired first; the Maddow crew or the White House staff.

The progressive pajama boy era is over. The asexual messenger bag toting wonk has met an ISIS Jihadist and run home to its non-traditional family. Liberalism isn’t over, but its contenders are trying to butch up their act.

The second coming of Hillary is accompanied by bellicose rhetoric about Putin and Syria. Leon Panetta, her gnomish errand boy, is sneering at Obama as an egghead too busy dithering about what not to do to be able to actually do anything about ISIS.

Democrats are adjusting to a new reality of less nuance and more centrist politics. So is MSNBC.

If Obama loses the Senate, then his leftist backers also lose their death grip on the Democratic Party. And that’s why they’re panicking so badly. Progressives proved that money and media bias could let them get away with anything. But then they lost in 2010, barely hung on in 2012 and are heading for a beating in 2014. If they can’t buy the Senate now, the Democratic Party will have to correct its course.

A sober analysis of the Big Billionaire Left shows that they were good at getting Obama elected, but not much else. Like the USSR, they could pour a lot of energy and capital into inefficiently getting one big thing done, but they aren’t much good at doing a lot of little things. Their hijacking of democracy ran into trouble the moment they tried to push past the White House. It was only the White House’s hijacking of democracy by trying to function as a unilateral dictatorship of pen and phone that extended their influence beyond their initial defeat in 2010. And that came with its own price in popularity.

Obama’s arrogance isolated him politically. He insisted on running everything and is stuck with the bill. In countless speeches he demanded more power and authority; his sinking approval ratings reflect the growing willingness of even his own supporters to hold him responsible for his unilateral policymaking.

As the election approaches everything that could have gone wrong has gone wrong. Not only did Obama’s aggressive efforts to stoke racial unrest on the border and in Ferguson to turn out the minority voters who generally sit out midterm elections backfire, but the resulting messes deepened the popular impression that he was in over his head. Now instead of pivoting from Global Warming to a minimum wage to some offensive thing that some local Republican somewhere said, the media is stuck in an Ebola-ISIS cycle that reminds Americans on a daily basis that everything really is out of control.

The critiques from even friendly media outlets keep throwing around words and terms like “detached”, “in over his head”, “flailing” and “too smart for his own good”. That word salad adds up to the same message as the one being peddled by Leon Panetta; America needs strong experienced leadership.

And Obama isn’t it.

Obama is already receding into the imagination of liberals as the youthful folly of a political Age of Aquarius when millennials tried to levitate the Pentagon by electing a brash inexperienced community organizer to fix the world. They are writing him off as an act of political naiveté by a war-traumatized generation still unaware of the practical limits of the real world.

And that infuriates and terrifies the left worse than anything else. The left can thrive on hostility, but it hates being dismissed by its fellow travelers as naive idealists who don’t understand the real world.

But that’s the historical revisionism that had been prepped and waiting in the wings all along for Obama. What the right does wrong is always attributed to malice, while the left’s worst atrocities from the Gulags to the killing fields are put down to idealism gone wrong. Obama takes his place somewhere between Mao and Eugene McCarthy as the Democratic Party rushes to reinvent itself as the adult party of serious experienced political leaders like Hillary Clinton. Its message is that it’s time for the Obama pajama boys to grow up and compromise on their progressive politics by voting for Hillary in 2016.

The left has few options left. Money can only buy so many votes. If Obama’s base stays home, then the magical turnout operation starts looking like a lot of political consultants taking credit for the Oprah tilt of black women coming out to vote for Obama. And there is no obvious replacement for Obama.

In New York City, Mayor Bill de Blasio was supposed to inaugurate a new era of progressive politics by pushing so far to the left as to make Obama look like Bob Dole. Instead Bill de Blasio has been tagged by the same progressive incompetent moniker as Obama. The analogy is being drawn explicitly by liberals even in left-of-center publications like the New York Times and the Daily News.

Bill de Blasio didn’t extend the progressive lifespan. He was elected just in time for everyone to be primed to expect the Obama progressive cycle of self-righteous cover-ups, thin-skinned media wars and grandiose policy announcements that go nowhere. The political future of the progressive mayor has been Obamanized off the scene. And that leaves few great hopes for the progressive cause.

Elizabeth Warren still fakes left, but she seems to know her limitations. 2018’s midterm election without a president on the ballot and a different demographic makeup for the electorate could easily topple her. If she tried for the big chair, she would be run over by harder Democrat candidates faking centrist. And without Warren, all that’s left are clown acts like Bernie Sanders and Seattle Socialist Kshama Sawant.

The progressive resurgence was powered by leftist billionaires and non-profits chasing power. They have the money and the organization, but they don’t have the candidates. Six years of Obama produced compelling conservative figures like Ted Cruz, Trey Gowdy and Mike Lee. There’s no equivalent to them on the left. It’s why liberal billionaire election spending is characterized more by the candidates that they are against rather than the ones that they are for. They have spent so much time and money battling the Tea Party that they have failed to build a post-Obama political future for their movement.

The left isn’t going anywhere, but its current incarnation as the party of diversely wimpy progressives who compensate for their lack of experience with their enthusiasm and their political connections is. Obama has done a great deal for the political agendas of the left while doing a great deal of damage to the political ambitions of the Democratic Party. And the Democratic Party won’t forget that. Obama was thinking about transforming America, but the Democratic Party is thinking about the next four years.

The liberal verdict on the age of Obama has been written. It may change with history, but for now the Hope and Change period will be praised for its idealism and its innovative political organizing, but dismissed for its policy incompetence and its inability to listen to voices outside its bubble. It was an elitist phenomenon whose diversity was faked with media imagery and the party will now work to try and recapture its lost position among the rest of the country, particularly among white Democrats.

The progressive will continue to haunt American politics, but his current hipster incarnation is headed for extinction.

The Savage Lands of Islam

The Grand Mufti of Saudi Arabia ruled that ten year old girls can be married off, because in his words, "Good upbringing makes a girl ready to perform all marital duties at that age."

The Grand Mufti

The Mufti, who also called for destroying churches in the Arabian Peninsula, is descended from Mohammed Wahhab who gave birth to Wahhabism and whose descendants have controlled the Saudi religious establishment, and through it Islam around the world.

However for all his power and influence, the Mufti is blind and hasn't seen a thing in the last half century years; an apt metaphor for his entire religion.

Saudi Arabia, the heartland of Islam, still tries and executes witches. What sort of religion can come out of a place that marries off ten year old girls and murders old women on charges of witchcraft? The sort that flies planes into skyscrapers, murders teenage girls for using Facebook and bases its entire society on a ladder with Muslim men at the top, Muslim women a few rungs below and everyone else somewhere at the bottom.

The Saudis are not an aberration, they are Islam in its purest and truest form. That is why Al Qaeda was founded by a Saudi and why Saudis, the wealthy citizens of a wealthy kingdom, are its best recruits. It is not poverty or oppression that moves them to kill, but wealth and privilege.

This is where Islam originated, whose brutality and cunning spread it across the world, whose clans killed each other, then killed or enslaved minority groups, and then embarked on a wave of conquest that destroyed countless cultures and left behind the seeds of hate of the wars we are fighting today.

Unlike Egypt or Syria, they were never colonized by European powers and the impact of Ottoman influence was limited. Oil has brought in massive amounts of money, but it has changed very little. There are limousines instead of camels, the slaves have foreign passports, though they are often still slaves, there is still a brisk trade in imported luxury goods, harems for princes and clans staggering under the weight of their indolent progeny.

Religiously, Wahhabism has done its best to recreate the "pure" Islam of its origins. Economically, oil has allowed the Gulf Arabs to prosper without reform or change. And if Mohammed were to ride out of the desert tomorrow, he would have little trouble fitting in, as soon as he developed a taste for Porsches. Anyone who wants to see the world as it was in Mohammed's day can visit Saudi Arabia and see inbred clans, slave labor, veiled women and thugs enforcing the will of Allah on every corner.

But you don't even need to visit Saudi Arabia because diluted forms of it can be found everywhere from Cairo to London and from Islamabad to Los Angeles. A hundred and fifty years after the United States freed its slaves, Muslim immigrants have brought back slavery, importing young girls to live as their slaves. Ninety years after American women won the right to vote, the ghosts of Islam tread the streets in sheets that hide their personhood and mark them as property.

The religious wars of the desert have not stayed there as the immigration Hegira has brought them here and everywhere. And that is the source of the Clash of Civilizations. Immigration has brought Muslims into closer contact with different cultures and religions who don't defer to them or give Islam the privileged status that its adherents are used to enjoying.

To know the truth of this all you have to do is measure the respective tolerance levels of America  against the average Muslim country. There is no comparison with even the more secular Muslim countries, not in law and not in public attitudes. The sole benefit of the Arab Spring has been to expose the fraud of the moderate Muslim country. Egypt's transition to theocracy reminds us that a moderate Muslim state is a completely unrepresentative dictatorship. The alternative is majority Muslim rule.

The endgame of the Arab Spring and the immigration Hegira is to reduce the entire world to the level of Saudi Arabia. And that means eliminating outside influences in a long march to purification.  Islamists know that they cannot enjoy complete cultural dominance over their own people until their rivals in the West are obliterated. To turn Egypt and Malaysia into Saudi Arabia, and to purify Saudi Arabia, the infidels must be brought down, their religions subjugated and their nations replaced with proper Islamic states.

Islamic leaders are under no illusion that religion is a spiritual matter, they know that it is a numbers game. Wage enough wars, terrorize enough nations, marry enough barely post-pubescent girls and use them to crank out an endless supply of babies, intimidate or trick enough infidels into joining up and you win. That was how Islam took over so much territory and spread around the world, that is how it is doing it again now.

Islam is not a spiritual religion, even its paradise is a materialistic place, a fantasy harem where the physical pleasures of life can be enjoyed without restraint. That gives it an advantage over Judaism and Christianity, just as it gives the Saudis and the Pakistanis an advantage over the Americans and Israelis. There is no angst in Islam, no spiritual seeking and no room for doubt. The marching orders are always clear and individual deeds and thoughts matter less than a willingness to always obey.

Islam came out of the desert and it has never left the desert, instead it has brought the desert with it along with its codes, its deep hatreds, its constant deprivation, its deceptiveness and its nomadic expansionism. Where Islam goes, the desert rises, its tents, its red knives and its insecurities. It was backward even at the time of its birth and it has only become more so, but its singlemindedness is an advantage in an age of effete leftectuals and eurocrats dreaming of a transnational world.

While the leftectuals dream of windmills, the Saudis hire foreigners to pump their oil and then sell it to them, the money goes to fund the Hegira, its mosques in every city from Dublin to Moscow to Buenos Aires and Toronto, the fatwas, the bombs, the websites where the masked faithful hold up AK-47's, the Islamic science courses and sessions on learning to love the Hijab and then the Burqa,

The Saudis just want what everyone wants, for everyone to acknowledge their greatness and live like them. They can hardly be blamed for that when the West spends almost as much money promoting democracy and its own way of life to people who still execute witches and blasphemers. They may be savages, but they fell ass backward into enough black gold to fuel a global religious war, and they're using it cleverly and cunningly to transform our societies and wage war against us even while attending dinners at the White House. It's smoother work than our diplomats are capable of.

You can hardly blame the desert bandits for being what they are, but you can blame the apostles of reason for preaching about a golden age of tolerance and enlightenment from every purloined pulpit and then turning away the heartland to a religion that is nakedly brutal and intolerant at home.

An honest look at Saudi Arabia, at its cruelty, its slaves, its intolerance of other religions and even of women, should be enough to tell even the dimmest Eton or Harvard grad exactly what the West is in for. No matter how many specialists in Muslim tolerance show up at universities, there is the Grand Mufti explaining that Mohammed commanded the eradication of Jews and Christians from the Arabian Peninsula, and therefore there can be no churches allowed there.

Even few apologists for Islam will defend Saudi Arabia for the simple reason that it is indefensible. The media will run the occasional story about the House of Saud's commitment to reform, much as Charles Manson keeps committing to becoming a better person, but even they don't really believe it. Yet even though Saudi Arabia is the heartland of Sunni Islam, and its fortunes shape and control mosques and teachings around the world, they insist on treating Islam and Saudi Arabia as two separate things.

It is brutally telling that the two centers of Islam, Saudi Arabia for the Sunnis and Iran for the Shiites, are genuinely horrifying places. Neither can remotely be associated with tolerance or human rights. It is simple common sense that the spread of Islam will make Western countries more like Saudi Arabia and Iran, rather than less like them.

If Saudi Arabia is not an example that we wish to emulate, then why must we bodily incorporate the religion of Mecca and Medina into London and Los Angeles? What other possible outcome do we imagine that there will be but fewer rights and more violence, dead women, abused children, bomb plots and polygamy?

There are two Islams. The real Islam of the Grand Mufti of Saudi Arabia and an imaginary Islam that exists only in the mosques of air and card table Korans of academics apologists and political pundits who have decided that Islam cannot be bad, because no religion can be bad, not even one which kills and kills, it must just be misunderstood.

But then why not tell the Grand Mufti that he has misunderstood his own religion, the religion that he and his ancestors have dedicated themselves to purifying and reforming back to its roots? Telling him that would be a dangerous thing on his own turf, but it would also be foolish. The Grand Mufti's controversial statements contain nothing that Mohammed had not said.

Can the founder of a religion misunderstand his own teachings?

Islam is savage, intolerant, cruel and expansionistic, not due to a misunderstanding, but an understanding of the worst aspects of human nature. It is what it is and no amount of wishing will make it otherwise.

We have opened the door to the desert and a hot wind blows through into the northern climes. Either we shut the door or get used to living in the Saudi desert.

The End of Columbus Day is the End of America

Columbus may have outfoxed the Spanish court and his rivals, but he is falling victim to the court of political correctness. The explorer who discovered America has become controversial because the very idea of America has become controversial.

There are counter-historical claims put forward by Muslim and Chinese scholars claiming that they discovered America first. And there are mobs of fake indigenous activists on every campus to whom the old Italian is as much of a villain as the bearded Uncle Sam.

Columbus Day parades are met with protests and some have been minimized or eliminated.

In Seattle, Columbus Day became Indigenous People's Day, which sounds like a Marxist terrorist group's holiday.

The shift from celebrating Columbus' arrival in America to commemorating it as an American Nakba by focusing on the Indians, rather than the Americans, is a profound form of historical revisionism that hacks away at the origins of this country.

No American state has followed Venezuela's lead in renaming it Día de la Resistencia Indígena, or Day of Indigenous Resistance, which actually is a Marxist terrorist group's holiday, the whole notion of celebrating the discovery of America has come to be seen as somehow shameful and worst of all, politically incorrect.

Anti-Columbus Day protests are mounted by La Raza, whose members, despite their indigenous posturing, are actually mostly descended from Spanish colonists, but who know that most American liberals are too confused to rationally frame an objection to a protest by any minority group.

About the only thing sillier than a group of people emphasizing their collective identity as a Spanish speaking people, and denouncing Columbus as an imperialist exploiter is Ward Churchill, a fake Indian, who compared Columbus to Heinrich Himmler. Ward Churchill's scholarship consists of comparing Americans in past history and current events to random Nazis. If he hasn't yet compared Amerigo Vespucci or Daniel Boone to Ernst Röhm; it's only a matter of time.

The absurdity of these attacks is only deepened by the linguistic and cultural ties between the Italian Columbus Day marchers and the Latino Anti-Columbus Day protesters with the latter set cynically exploiting white guilt to pretend that being the descendants of Southern European colonists makes them a minority.

If being descended from Southern Europeans makes you a minority, then Columbus, the parade marchers, the Greek restaurant owner nearby and even Rush Limbaugh are all "people of color."

Italian-Americans are the only bulwark against political correctness still keeping Columbus on the calendar, and that has made mayors and governors in cities and states with large Italian-American communities wary of tossing the great explorer completely overboard. But while Ferdinand and Isabella may have brought Columbus back in chains, modern day political correctness has banished him to the darkened dungeon of non-personhood, erasing him from history and replacing him with a note reading, "I'm Sorry We Ever Landed Here."

But this is about more than one single 15th century Genoan with a complicated life who was neither a monster nor a saint. It is about whether America really has any right to exist at all. Is there any argument against celebrating Columbus Day, that cannot similarly be applied to the Fourth of July?

If Columbus is to be stricken from the history books in favor of ideological thugs like Malcolm X or Caesar Chavez, then America must soon follow. Columbus' crime is that he enabled European settlement of the continent.

If the settlement of non-Indians in North America is illegitimate, then any national state they created is also illegitimate.

It is easier to hack away at a nation's history by beginning with the lower branches.

Columbus is an easier target than America itself, though La Raza considers both colonialist vermin. Americans are less likely to protest over the banishment of Columbus to the politically correct Gulag  than over the banishing America itself, which was named after another one of those colonialist explorers, Amerigo Vespucci. First they came for Columbus Day and then for the Fourth of July.

The battles being fought over Columbus Day foreshadow the battles to be fought over the Fourth of July. As Columbus Day joins the list of banned holidays in more cities, one day there may not be a Fourth of July, just a day of Native Resistance to remember the atrocities of the colonists with PBS documentaries comparing George Washington to Hitler.

These documentaries already exist, they just haven't gone mainstream. Yet.

We celebrate Columbus Day and the Fourth of July because history is written by the winners. Had the Aztecs, the Mayans or the Iroquois Confederation developed the necessary technology and skills to cross the Atlantic and begin colonizing Europe, the fate of its native inhabitants would have been far uglier. The different perspectives on history often depend on which side you happen to be on.

To Americans, the Alamo is a shining moment of heroism. To the Mexicans who are the heirs of a colonialist empire far more ruthless than anything to be found north of the Rio Grande, the war was a plot to conquer Mexican territory. And neither side is altogether wrong, but choosing which version of history to go by is the difference between being an American or a Mexican.

A nation's mythology, its paragons and heroes, its founding legends and great deeds, are its soul. To replace them with another culture's perspective on its history is to kill that soul.

That is the ultimate goal of political correctness, to kill America's soul. To stick George Washington, Patrick Henry, Jefferson, James Bowie, Paul Revere, Alexander Hamilton, John Adams, Benjamin Franklin and all the rest on a shelf in a back room somewhere, and replace them with timelier liberal heroes. Move over Washington, Caesar Chavez needs this space. No more American heroes need apply.

Followed of course by no more America.

This is how it begins. And that is how it ends. Nations are not destroyed by atomic bombs or economic catastrophes; they are lost when they lose any reason to go on living. When they no longer have enough pride to go on fighting to survive.

The final note of politically correct lunacy comes from a headline in the Columbus Dispatch about the Columbus Day festival in the city of Columbus, Ohio. "Italian Festival honors controversial explorer with its own Columbus Day parade".

Once the great discover of America, Columbus is now dubbed "controversial" by a newspaper named after him, in a city named after him .And if he is controversial, how can naming a city after him and a newspaper after the city not be equally controversial?

Can the day when USA Today has a headline reading, "Some cities still plan controversial 4th of July celebration of American independence" be far behind?

Liberal Islamophiles

"We’re liberals! We’re liberals. We’re not crazy tea-baggers," Bill Maher protested after his televised argument with Ben Affleck about Islam.

 "We are not bigoted people. On the contrary, we’re trying to stand up for the principles of
liberalism!" Maher added. "I think we’re just saying we need to identify illiberalism wherever we find it in the world, and not forgive it because it comes from [a group] people perceive as a minority."

But despite Maher’s protests, the majority of liberals would agree with Affleck that criticizing Islam is racist. Liberals claim that the Islamic State is Un-Islamic. It would be more accurate to state that liberals are illiberal. Liberalism, even the form that was in common usage not too long ago, is as dead as Lenin.

Ben Affleck isn’t a liberal. He’s an enthusiast of revisionist Communist historian Howard Zinn. The modern liberal of today is uninterested in identifying “illiberalism” since he is an illiberal man of the left. The most significant difference between the two is not simply political, but psychological. Liberals used to think about issues. Leftists respond to ideological cues while operating on a purely tribal wavelength.

Affleck’s assertion that criticizing Islam is racist is impossible to argue with. It’s completely wrong on multiple levels, but it’s not an argument. It’s a denunciation. It doesn’t advance an argument; it rejects the argument and the arguer as illegitimate. And it’s an ideological cue telling everyone else to follow.

Leftists don’t debate issues. That would be a liberal thing to do. Instead they seek to affirm a consensus. The consensus is reinforced by in-group flattery which convinces members that they are empathetic and enlightened people, while those outside the consensus are subjected to constant contempt and abuse. The denunciation places the target outside the consensus. Calling Maher a “racist” makes him a Tea Party member no matter how much he clings to a liberal identification. It makes him an outsider.

The USSR was every bit as “illiberal” as ISIS, but critics of it were damned as “red-baiters” and McCarthyists. Now critics of Islam are denounced as racists even though Islam is not a race.

Why are Stalin and Mohammed part of the consensus, but their liberal critics weren’t? The answer tells us a good deal about what the consensus really is and what it isn’t.

The things that Maher and Harris criticize Islam for, a lack of freedom, sexism and homophobia are not part of the consensus. Not when the flagship party of liberalism was also the party of segregation, the leading members of the golden family of liberalism were serial abusers of women and Bill, Hillary and Obama were against gay marriage before they were for it. Islam is sexist, bigoted and totalitarian, but so was the Soviet Union. Their liberal defenders are utterly unconcerned, no matter how much they run their mouths about Republican racism and sexism.

Nearly every Muslim country locks up gay men, but so did nearly every Communist country.

Do you think that Ben Affleck is bothered by the fact that Doha and Dubai, whose film industries he has become entangled with, are built and run by slave labor? Or that homosexuality is criminalized? The same Hollywood leftists who put on their indignant faces over Proposition 8 shut up when they’re partying in one of the pleasure cities of the Gulf Muslims who do a lot more than refuse to recognize gay marriage. They’re not just hypocrites; they were never committed to gay rights.

Gays, feminists and Muslims are a means to the left. They are not the reason why the left does things.

The left builds coalitions of disruption with interest groups. It doesn’t care about those groups. It’s just using them to get what it really wants which is a totalitarian state in which the consensus can implement all of its horrible ideas without any interference. Muslims are the newest coalition member and their disruption skills are impressive. Just look at how they managed to turn the Bush Administration around.

That doesn’t mean that the left cares about Muslims. It would toss them under the bus before they could shout “Allah Akhbar” if it suited the consensus. The liberal defenders of Islam have chosen not to read the Koran. They know next to nothing about Islam except that it’s a minority group. And that’s how they like it. That way they can shout down any criticism with cries of “Racism” because they’re too lazy to even bother stringing enough letters together to shout “Islamophobe”. That’s how little they care.

All of this has as much to do with liberalism as Obama has to do with Andrew Jackson. There’s nothing liberal about the honor killing and the hijab, but there’s also nothing liberal about trying to turn America into a totalitarian state. Maher, who has been known to identify as a libertarian, doesn’t seem to have grasped that the liberals who defend Islam do so because they share its totalitarian mindset.

Lenin wasn’t fighting so that the peasants would have land, bread and peace. Today’s liberals aren’t fighting for equality of income, gender, race or any other kind. They are fighting to suppress any and all opposition to their policies by disrupting and destroying the existing American system at every level.

That’s exactly what Islam is doing.

Leftists don’t value equality, they value disruption. If they can disrupt by promoting equality, they will do it. If they can disrupt by promoting inequality, they will do that. If they can disrupt by promoting gay marriage, promoting Islamists, promoting the environment, promoting unregulated industry, promoting freedom of speech or promoting hate speech laws, they will do those things in order of opportunism.

Their underlying goal is to replace existing ideas and systems with their own. Anything that serves that purpose is good. Anything that maintains the existing order is bad.

The very concept of universal standards that Maher is appealing to is foreign to the modern liberal. He doesn’t believe that there is a universal standard. He views the world as tribally as a Taliban. He can’t see behaviors as good or evil in isolation, but only in relation to ideological cues. He derives his heroes and villains from the tribal affinities of the left, not from the things that they actually do.

That’s why he wears a Che t-shirt while calling Rush Limbaugh unpatriotic for opposing Obama. Or why he thinks that liberal billionaires underwriting political campaigns is a good thing, but conservative billionaires doing it is bad for democracy. He has no concept of standards. He only understands power.

This isn’t liberalism. It’s a leftist Jihad that has displaced and hijacked liberalism. The modern liberal has nothing to do with liberalism and it’s useless to expect him to be upset by Islamic illiberalism.

The Progressive Missionaries of Unhappiness

There is no one that the left hates more than a man who does not hate, who goes through the day without outrage and who does not spend his life stewing with vindictive resentments.

Leftists call it “privilege” now. They have called it apathy, escapism and a hundred other things.

They will find a thousand other names for it as they march through the future centuries grinding their teeth and cursing their country for its backwardness, their people for their provincialism and their culture for its mercantilism. But privilege is simply freedom from resentment.

To be of the left is to confuse perpetual outrage with righteousness. The professional leftist believes that the path to utopia on earth lies in constantly denouncing thought criminals until they have all been unthought so that only their kind of ethical and empathetic people walk the earth.

Like most utopians, they plan for a utopia that they could never actually live in.

Leftists without grievances are like an army without guns. That is why leftist experiments in communes dissolved into denunciations, power grabs and authoritarian rules as soon the drugs ran out. Often even before. The leftist isn’t seeking freedom from capitalism, religion, nationalism, racism, sexism, office dress codes, bar codes and any of the other great evils of the moment. These are just the outrage fuel of the willfully outraged whose resentment has become both culture and religion.

What he wants is to express an egotistical grievance at a world that is not built around him. His resentments came before his ideology. They are in a very real sense his ideology. The idealistic leftist is a passing phenomenon. He is useful for getting the actual work done while everyone else shouts. Unless he is very dim, he eventually realizes that and heads off to volunteer in Africa. The core is the aggrieved leftist whose grievances merge with his storytelling skills into the compelling narrative of a narcissist.

The perpetually aggrieved deeply resent those who are oblivious to their anger. It is the theme that dominates the literature, the music and the political writings of an infuriated left throwing its anger at a mindless mass that is perfectly happy collecting paychecks, living in the suburbs and watching television. It is not their prosperity that the left hates, but their uncomplicated happiness.

It is this uncomplicated happiness that the left sets out to ruin at all costs.

Leftist activism is drama. It is deliberately destructive and disruptive. It glories in taking the happy lives of ordinary people and wrecking them. It plays the part of the troubled sibling, the one who is driven to destroy the happiness of the rest of the family out of his or her own willful unhappiness.

Happiness is a choice. It is not dependent on the condition of the individual, but on his state of mind. The essence of enduring happiness is a state of stability. Leftist politics are instability incarnate; the opposite number of happiness. That is why the left acts as the destroyer of happiness.

The left does not think that anyone should be happy. It is not unhappy because it is personally enmeshed in suffering. The ideological leaders of the left tend to come from the upper classes. They know no hunger except when they are dieting. They experience so few material shortcomings that they treat poverty as a lifestyle; slumming in poor areas and showily living on a few dollars a day.

It is the happiness of others that makes the left unhappy. It is convinced that this happiness is unearned and illegitimate because it does not take into account how unhappy this happiness makes the left.

Privilege is the accusation that the very lack of resentment and grievance, neurotic responses to simple phrases and a cloud of free-floating anger, represents an ignorant oppression. The happy are only happy at the expense of the unhappy and must recognize the unhappy privilege of their happiness.

Leftists are missionaries of unhappiness. Their creed is salvation through anger. Their governing philosophy is to make others miserable in order to teach them how they have overlooked the misery of others. They are forever spreading misery around the world for the sake of the greater good.

If the left sees anyone being happy, it must immediately set out to ruin the fun. The simple joy of others turns out to be only a cover for monstrous abuses that they are determined to make everyone else see. If it’s an object, it was made by oppressed workers. If it’s a social group, it’s discriminatory. If it’s food, it makes you sick. If it’s a sport, it’s abusive. If it’s art, then it’s escapism from the misery the left creates.

It is straightforward happiness that the left hates most of all. It is unable to appreciate anything directly unless it is medicated. It likes things only askew. It says that it likes bad art and ugly fashions because it is being ironic. What it really means is that it is only capable of liking something as a commentary on the absurdity of the thing and the emotion of liking it. Even its happiness is a critique of happiness.

Its joys are as sour as the rest of its nature.

The left views simplicity as dishonest. It is full of secret agendas and projects this in paranoid fashion. It is always finding the subtext in everything because it brings the subtext to the table. It is forever carrying around Rorschach inkblots in its head and shouting about all the terrible things it sees around it.

Deriving its happiness from the unhappiness of others, the left must see the destruction of happiness as moral and its victims as immoral. Happiness is selfish, it insists, while the awareness of how many evils are hidden beneath the simplistic façade of happiness is ethically enlightening. And yet its own obsession with destroying the happiness of others is the selfish way in which the left finds its happiness.

The left is only truly happy when it is destroying something. Its sublime transcendent moments are revolutionary. Their joy is derived not from what is being created, but from what is being destroyed. Every leftist revolution from the reign of Madame Guillotine to Obama’s election was full of vicious glee at things coming undone. Under the banner of equality, the left inaugurates inequality. Through calls for peace, it brings war and with cries of prosperity, it ushers in an age of terrible poverty.

Unable to create, the left ultimately only destroys. Its creative energies spring from bitterness. It glories in subversively undermining the happiness of others, directly and indirectly, but once all the things that it sought to destroy have been banished, it has nothing more to offer. Its hatred is sterile. It poison can be artfully disguised as idealism, humor and passion, but when there is nothing left to attack or subvert, it shows its true viral form by dying, as every virus that kills its host must inevitably do.

When the left finally triumphs, its first order of business is a total ruthless purge of its own professional dissenters because without such a purge, it would remain in the same dysfunctional state.

The left is satanic in its original sense of ‘antagonist’. It represents the darker side of human nature. It is the ideology of those who cannot let their anger go, who gain a perverse enjoyment from their grudges and define themselves less by what they are for than by what they are against. Its followers are motivated by an endless resentment that cannot be appeased because the resentment is their purpose.

It is impossible to meet the left halfway or to compromise with it because it is not seeking the stable balance that so many conservatives are. It finds its true purpose in the chaos of conflict. It gains its meaning in opposition not in co-existence. To compromise with the left is to rob it of its purpose. And the left pushes back against any such efforts through renewed bursts of radicalism.

Conservative parties lose when they fail to come to terms with this antagonistic dynamic and assume their opponents on the left also seek a stable state that they can find common ground on. Stability is the enemy of the left. Stability is privilege. Stability is happiness. Stability is everything that the left despises.

The left has learned to cloak its animosity and destructive aims in positive rhetoric. It destroys economies, families and freedoms in the name of equality. Its cheering mobs realize too late that its cause is not the equality of opportunity, happiness or liberty, but poverty, misery and slavery.

The left does not redistribute wealth. It redistributes want. It does not want everyone to share in the happiness of others, but to be burdened with a larger burden of their miseries.

No compromise can be had with the missionaries of unhappiness. Happiness can be shared without diminishing its quality, but the division of misery is the aim of the professionally miserable.

The left has suffered its worst defeats at the hands of the happy warriors of the right. Its greatest vulnerability is its meanness of spirit. Its defeat comes when its malaise is contrasted with happiness, when its deep suspicion of humanity is met with patriotic optimism and when its alarmist crises are met with laughter.