Here are the main points of the Charter of Hamas.

Hamas is a terrorist organization, a branch of the Muslim Brotherhood, and it has the covert support of most Western governments and the overt support of the mainstream media everywhere.

Its Charter, or Covenant, is its manifesto. It can be read in full here.

THE COVENANT OF THE HAMAS – MAIN POINTS

The Covenant of the Islamic Resistance Movement, aka the  Hamas, was issued on August 18, 1988.

The following  are  excerpts  from the HAMAS Covenant:

Goals of the HAMAS:

The Islamic  Resistance  Movement  is  a  distinguished  Palestinian movement, whose allegiance is to Allah, and  whose  way  of  life  is Islam. It strives to raise the banner of Allah over  every  inch  of Palestine.

(Article 6)

 

On the Destruction of Israel:

Israel will exist and will  continue  to  exist  until  Islam  will obliterate it, just as it obliterated others before it.

(Preamble)

 

The Exclusive Moslem Nature of the Area:

The  land  of  Palestine  is  an  Islamic  Waqf  [Holy   Possession] consecrated for future Moslem generations until Judgment Day. No one can renounce it or any part, or  abandon  it  or  any  part  of  it.

(Article 11)

Palestine is an  Islamic  land…  Since  this  is  the  case, the Liberation of Palestine  is  an  individual  duty  for  every  Moslem wherever he may be.

(Article 13)

 

The Call to Jihad:

The day the enemies usurp part of Moslem land,  Jihad  becomes the individual duty of every Moslem. In the face of the Jews’ usurpation, it is compulsory that the banner of Jihad be raised.

(Article 15)

Ranks will close,  fighters  joining  other  fighters,  and  masses everywhere in the Islamic world will come forward in response to  the call of duty, loudly proclaiming: “Hail to  Jihad!” This  cry  will reach the heavens and will go on being resounded until liberation  is achieved, the invaders vanquished and Allah’s victory  comes  about.

(Article 33)

 

Rejection of a Negotiated Peace Settlement:

Peace  initiatives,   and   so-called   peaceful   solutions  and international conferences are in contradiction to the  principles  of the Islamic Resistance Movement… Those conferences are no more than a means to appoint the infidels  as  arbitrators  in  the  lands  of Islam… There is no solution for the Palestinian problem  except  by Jihad. Initiatives, proposals and international conferences are but a waste of time, an exercise in futility.

 (Article 13)

 

Condemnation of the Israel-Egypt Peace Treaty:

Egypt was, to a great extent, removed from the  circle  of  struggle [against Zionism] through the treacherous Camp David  Agreement. The Zionists are  trying  to  draw  other  Arab  countries  into  similar agreements in order to bring them outside  the  circle  of  struggle. …Leaving the circle of struggle against Zionism  is  high  treason, and cursed be he who perpetrates such an act.

(Article 32)

Anti-Jewish Incitement:

The Day of Judgment will not come about until Moslems fight Jews and kill them. Then, the Jews will hide behind rocks and trees, and  the rocks and trees will cry out, “O Moslem, there is a Jew hiding behind me, come and kill him.”

(Article 7)

The enemies have been  scheming  for  a  long  time  …  and  have accumulated huge and influential material wealth. With  their  money, they took control of the world media… With their money they stirred revolutions in various parts of the globe… They  stood  behind  the French  Revolution,  the  Communist  Revolution  and  most   of   the revolutions we hear about… With  their  money  they  formed  secret organizations – such as the Freemasons, Rotary Clubs and the Lions  – which are spreading around the world, in order to  destroy  societies and carry out Zionist interests… They stood behind World War I  ..and formed the League of Nations through which they  could  rule  the world. They were behind World War II, through which  they  made  huge financial gains… There is no war going  on  anywhere  without  them having their finger in it.

(Article 22)

Zionism scheming has no end, and after Palestine,  they  will  covet expansion from the Nile  to  the  Euphrates  River.  When  they  have finished digesting the area on which they have laid their hand,  they will look forward to more expansion. Their scheme has been  laid  out in the’Protocols of the Elders of Zion.

(Article 32)

The HAMAS regards itself the  spearhead  and  the  vanguard  of  the circle of struggle against World Zionism… Islamic groups  all  over the Arab world should also do the same, since they are best  equipped for their future role in the fight against  the  warmongering  Jews.

(Article 32)

From Instapundit:

 

Hamas spokesman: “The illegitimate Zionist entity must be forced to end its occupation of all of Palestine, from Tel Aviv to Jericho.”

Western Reporter: “So what you’re saying is that you support a peaceful 2-state solution.”

 

Hamas spokesman: “We will kill the sons of pigs and apes like the great Hitler.”

Western reporter: “So what you’re saying is that you object to right-wing Israeli politicians like Netanyahu.”

 

Hamas Spokesman: “We want an Islamic state governed by sharia.”

Western reporter: “Democracy, one-person, one-vote, religious freedom for all. Got it.”

 

Hamas Spokesman: “We thank our great friends in Iran for their money, missiles, and bombs.”

Western Reporter: “Hamas insists on being a grassroots Palestinian movement not dependent on foreign support.”

… and in doing so co-author terrorism, war, oppression and mass murder.

Almost all news reporting is false. Almost all of it is propaganda. Most of the press, all over the world, is the tool of terrorists, Communists, Islamic religious fanatics, and their useful idiots.

Matti Friedman, a rare truth-telling reporter of Middle Eastern affairs, writes (in part) at The Atlantic (which is woke, so well done Matti Friedman for getting it in there!):

To make sense of most international journalism from Israel, it is important first to understand that the news tells us far less about Israel than about the people writing the news. Journalistic decisions are made by people who exist in a particular social milieu, one which, like most social groups, involves a certain uniformity of attitude, behavior, and even dress (the fashion these days, for those interested, is less vests with unnecessary pockets than shirts with unnecessary buttons). These people know each other, meet regularly, exchange information, and closely watch one another’s work. This helps explain why a reader looking at articles written by the half-dozen biggest news providers in the region on a particular day will find that though the pieces are composed and edited by completely different people and organizations, they tend to tell the same story.

Foreign activists are a notable feature of the landscape, and international NGOs and numerous arms of the United Nations are among the most powerful players, wielding billions of dollars and employing many thousands of foreign and local employees. Their SUVs dominate sections of East Jerusalem and their expense accounts keep Ramallah afloat. They provide reporters with social circles, romantic partners, and alternative employment—a fact that is more important to reporters now than it has ever been, given the disintegration of many newspapers and the shoestring nature of their Internet successors.

In my time in the press corps, I learned that our relationship with these groups was not journalistic. My colleagues and I did not, that is, seek to analyze or criticize them. For many foreign journalists, these were not targets but sources and friends—fellow members, in a sense, of an informal alliance. This alliance consists of activists and international staffers from the UN and the NGOs; the Western diplomatic corps, particularly in East Jerusalem; and foreign reporters. There is also a local component, consisting of a small number of Israeli human-rights activists who are themselves largely funded by European governments, and Palestinian staffers from the Palestinian Authority, the NGOs, and the UN. Mingling occurs at places like the lovely Oriental courtyard of the American Colony hotel in East Jerusalem, or at parties held at the British Consulate’s rooftop pool. The dominant characteristic of nearly all of these people is their transience. They arrive from somewhere, spend a while living in a peculiar subculture of expatriates, and then move on.

In these circles, in my experience, a distaste for Israel has come to be something between an acceptable prejudice and a prerequisite for entry. I don’t mean a critical approach to Israeli policies but a belief that the Jews of Israel are a symbol of the world’s ills, particularly those connected to nationalism, militarism, colonialism, and racism—an idea quickly becoming one of the central elements of the “progressive” Western zeitgeist, spreading from the European left to American college campuses and intellectuals, including journalists. In this social group, this sentiment is translated into editorial decisions made by individual reporters and editors covering Israel, and this, in turn, gives such thinking the means of mass self-replication.

Many freshly arrived reporters in Israel, similarly adrift in a new country, undergo a rapid socialization in the circles I mentioned. This provides them not only with sources and friendships but with a ready-made framework for their reporting—the tools to distill and warp complex events into a simple narrative in which there is a bad guy who doesn’t want peace and a good guy who does. This is the “Israel story,” and it has the advantage of being an easy story to report. Everyone here answers their cell phone, a d everyone knows what to say. You can put your kids in good schools and dine at good restaurants. It’s fine if you’re gay. Your chances of being beheaded on YouTube are slim. Nearly all of the information you need—that is, in most cases, information critical of Israel—is not only easily accessible but has already been reported for you by Israeli journalists or compiled by NGOs. You can claim to be speaking truth to power, having selected the only “power” in the area that poses no threat to your safety.

Many foreign journalists have come to see themselves as part of this world of international organizations, and specifically as the media arm of this world. They have decided not just to describe and explain, which is hard enough, and important enough, but to “help.” And that’s where reporters get into trouble, because “helping” is always a murky, subjective, and political enterprise, made more difficult if you are unfamiliar with the relevant languages and history.

Confusion over the role of the press explains one of the strangest aspects of coverage here—namely, that while international organizations are among the most powerful actors in the Israel story, they are almost never reported on. Are they bloated, ineffective, or corrupt? Are they helping, or hurting? We don’t know, because these groups are to be quoted, not covered. Journalists cross from places like the BBC to organizations like Oxfam and back. The current spokesman at the UN agency for Palestinian refugees in Gaza, for example, is a former BBC man. A Palestinian woman who participated in protests against Israel and tweeted furiously about Israel a few years ago served at the same time as a spokesperson for a UN office, and was close friends with a few reporters I know. And so forth.

International organizations in the Palestinian territories have largely assumed a role of advocacy on behalf of the Palestinians and against Israel, and much of the press has allowed this political role to supplant its journalistic function. This dynamic explains the thinking behind editorial choices that are otherwise difficult to grasp, like the decision to ignore a report about an Israeli peace offer to the Palestinians in 2008, or the idea that Hamas’s development of extensive armament works in Gaza in recent years was not worth serious coverage despite objectively being one of the most important storylines demanding reporters’ attention.

When the UN released its controversial Goldstone report on the Gaza fighting, we at the bureau trumpeted its findings in dozens of articles, though there was discussion even at the time of the report’s failure to prove its central charge: that Israel had killed civilians on purpose. The director of Israel’s premier human-rights group, B’Tselem, who was critical of the Israeli operation, told me at the time that this claim was “a reach given the facts”, an evaluation that was eventually seconded by the report’s author. “If I had known then what I know now, the Goldstone Report would have been a different document,” Richard Goldstone wrote in The Washington Post in April 2011. We understood that our job was not to look critically at the UN report, or any such document, but to publicize it.

Decisions like these are hard to fathom if you believe the foreign press corps’ role is to explain a complicated story to people far away. But they make sense if you understand that journalists covering Israel and the Palestinian territories often don’t see their role that way. The radio and print journalist Mark Lavie, who has reported from the region since 1972, was a colleague of mine at the AP, where he was an editor in the Jerusalem bureau and then in Cairo until his retirement last year. (It was Lavie who first learned of the Israeli peace offer of late 2008, and was ordered by his superiors to ignore the story.) An Indiana-born Israeli of moderate politics, he had a long run in journalism that included several wars and the first Palestinian intifada, and found little reason to complain about the functioning of the media.

But things changed in earnest in 2000, with the collapse of peace efforts and the outbreak of the Second Intifada. Israel accepted President Bill Clinton’s peace framework that fall and the Palestinians rejected it. Nevertheless, Lavie recently told me, the bureau’s editorial line was still that the conflict was Israel’s fault, and the Palestinians and the Arab world were blameless. By the end of Lavie’s career, he was editing Israel copy on the AP’s Middle East regional desk in Cairo, trying to restore balance and context to stories he thought had little connection to reality. He wrote a book, Broken Spring, about his front-row view of the Middle East’s descent into chaos, and retired disillusioned and angry.

I have tended to see the specific failings that we both encountered at the AP as symptoms of a general thought pattern in the press, but Lavie takes a more forceful position, viewing the influential American news organization as one of the primary authors of this thought pattern. This is not just because many thousands of media outlets use AP material directly, but also because when journalists arrive in their offices in the morning, the first thing many of them do is check the AP wire (or, these days, scroll through it in their Twitter feed).

Journalistic hallucinations occur when reporters are not granted the freedom to write what they see but are rather expected to maintain a “story” that follows predictable lines. For the international press, the uglier characteristics of Palestinian politics and society are mostly untouchable because they would disrupt the Israel story, which is a story of “Jewish moral failure”.

Most consumers of the Israel story don’t understand how the story is manufactured. But Hamas does. Since assuming power in Gaza in 2007, the Islamic Resistance Movement has come to understand that many reporters are committed to a narrative wherein Israelis are oppressors and Palestinians passive victims with reasonable goals, and are uninterested in contradictory information.

Hamas is aided in its manipulation of the media by the old reportorial belief, a kind of reflex, according to which reporters shouldn’t mention the existence of reporters. In a conflict like ours, this ends up requiring considerable exertions: So many photographers cover protests in Israel and the Palestinian territories, for example, that one of the challenges for anyone taking pictures is keeping colleagues out of the frame. That the other photographers are as important to the story as Palestinian protesters or Israeli soldiers—this does not seem to be considered.

In Gaza, this goes from being a curious detail of press psychology to a major deficiency. Hamas’s strategy is to provoke a response from Israel by attacking from behind the cover of Palestinian civilians, thus drawing Israeli strikes that kill those civilians, and then to have the casualties filmed by one of the world’s largest press contingents, with the understanding that the resulting outrage abroad will blunt Israel’s response. This is a ruthless strategy, and an effective one. It is predicated on the cooperation of journalists. One of the reasons it works is because of the reflex I mentioned. If you report that Hamas has a strategy based on co-opting the media, this raises several difficult questions, like, What exactly is the relationship between the media and Hamas? And has this relationship corrupted the media? It is easier just to leave the other photographers out of the frame and let the picture tell the story: Here are dead people, and Israel killed them.

In previous rounds of Gaza fighting, Hamas learned that international coverage from the territory could be molded to its needs, a lesson it would implement in this summer’s war. Most of the press work in Gaza is done by local fixers, translators, and reporters, people who would understandably not dare cross Hamas, making it only rarely necessary for the group to threaten a Westerner. The organization’s armed forces could be made to disappear. The press could be trusted to play its role in the Hamas script, instead of reporting that there was such a script. Hamas strategy did not exist, according to Hamas—or, as reporters would say, was “not the story”.  There was no Hamas charter blaming Jews for centuries of perfidy, or calling for their murder. [There is.] This was not the story. The rockets falling on Israeli cities were quite harmless; they were not the story either. [It is.]

Hamas understood that journalists would not only accept as fact the Hamas-reported civilian death toll—relayed through the UN or through something called the “Gaza Health Ministry,” an office controlled by Hamas—but would make those numbers the center of coverage. Hamas understood that reporters could be intimidated when necessary and that they would not report the intimidation; Western news organizations tend to see no ethical imperative to inform readers of the restrictions shaping their coverage in repressive states or other dangerous areas. In the war’s aftermath, the NGO- UN-media alliance could be depended upon to unleash the organs of the international community on Israel, and to leave the jihadist group alone.

When Hamas’s leaders surveyed their assets before this summer’s round of fighting, they knew that among those assets was the international press. The AP staff in Gaza City would witness a rocket launch right beside their office, endangering reporters and other civilians nearby—and the AP wouldn’t report it, not even in AP articles about Israeli claims that Hamas was launching rockets from residential areas. (This happened.) Hamas fighters would burst into the AP’s Gaza bureau and threaten the staff—and the AP wouldn’t report it. (This also happened.) Cameramen waiting outside Shifa Hospital in Gaza City would film the arrival of civilian casualties and then, at a signal from an official, turn off their cameras when wounded and dead fighters came in, helping Hamas maintain the illusion that only civilians were dying. (This too happened; the information comes from multiple sources with firsthand knowledge of these incidents.)

Colford, the AP spokesman, confirmed that armed militants entered the AP’s Gaza office in the early days of the war to complain about a photo showing the location of a rocket launch, though he said that Hamas claimed that the men “did not represent the group”.  The AP “does not report many interactions with militias, armies, thugs or governments,” he wrote. “These incidents are part of the challenge of getting out the news—and not themselves news.”

This summer, the Western press corps showed up en masse to cover the conflict. It was deliberately fought from behind Palestinian civilians, many of whom died as a result. Dulled by years of the “Israel story” and inured to its routine omissions, confused about the role they are meant to play, and co-opted by Hamas, reporters described this war as an Israeli onslaught against innocent people. By doing so, this group of intelligent and generally well-meaning professionals ceased to be reliable observers and became instead an amplifier for the propaganda of one of the most intolerant and aggressive forces on earth. And that, as they say, is the story.

President Trump achieved a remarkable development in the Middle East with the “Abraham Accords”, bringing peace, trade, and –  even more amazing – good will between Israel and several Arab states. A new era had dawned, in which a settlement of the Palestinian problem was for the first time in a hundred years genuinely possible.

Then along came the crooked “Biden administration” and undid all the good President Trump and his envoy Secretary of State Pompeo had done. “Biden” gave billions to the terrorist group Hamas, and released billions to the mullahs of Iran, who fund not only Hamas but terrorist attacks everywhere in the region.

It was not just encouragement to Hamas to make war on Israel, it was a signal to do so. The Democrats’ anti-Israel White House did everything it could to undo the Trump achievements and return to the disastrous policies of Obama, with greater intensity.

And it is Israel who is blamed for the war! As usual.

Richard Kemp writes at Gatestone:

During an operation in Gaza last week, the Israel Defence Forces attacked a Hamas tunnel complex with 12 squadrons of 160 combat planes striking over 150 targets with hundreds of bunker-busting JDAMs [Joint Direct Attack Munitions] in less than an hour. Although the battle damage assessment is still underway, the raid destroyed perhaps the most critical element of Hamas infrastructure, wiping out vast stocks of munitions and likely killing dozens if not hundreds of fighters. This was a hammer blow to Hamas and may prove to be a turning point in the conflict. It also sent a powerful message to Iran and Hizballah, foretelling the consequences of an assault on Israel with their arsenal of tens of thousands of missiles in southern Lebanon.

The IDF operation was a carefully coordinated combination of intelligence, surveillance, knowledge of enemy tactics, deception, surprise and precisely targeted, overwhelming force. Of all these, deception and surprise were key. Surprise is a principle of war in the American, British and many other forces, defined in the US Army Field Manual as “striking the enemy at a time or place or in a manner for which he is unprepared’. The manual goes on to say: “Deception can aid the probability of achieving surprise”. Throughout the history of warfare, surprise achieved through deception has led to many stunning military victories — often against the odds.

Last Thursday, the IDF massed tanks, artillery and infantry combat vehicles on the Gaza border. The build-up was observed by Hamas and widely reported in international media as an imminent ground invasion. Hundreds of Hamas fighters rushed to take shelter inside the “metro” tunnel network. Built by Hamas after the 2014 conflict to house command facilities, store weapons and facilitate protected movement, these tunnels covered dozens of kilometres beneath the Gaza Strip. There the fighters were trapped as JDAM after JDAM thundered in from above. Emerging to fight the invasion that never came, the surviving anti-tank teams and mortar squads were then also hit from the air.

This masterpiece of tactical synchronisation, with all its complex elements, symbolises the IDF’s precision attacks during this campaign, Operation Guardian of the Walls, which have already inflicted damage from which Hamas will not recover for years. The IDF learnt many lessons from previous engagements in Gaza and since 2014 have vigorously collected intelligence and worked to develop battle plans and technological solutions to deal with Hamas and their Palestinian Islamic Jihad bedfellows.

Hamas is no match for the IDF and could be quickly and much more cheaply defeated by blunt and crushing military force were it not for one thing — the Israeli need to minimise loss of civilian life. Hamas know that. They know they cannot prevail over the IDF and have no intention of trying. Their entire strategy is to attack Israeli population centres using rockets, kamikaze drones and tunnels, aimed at luring IDF counter attacks that will kill their own civilians in order to vilify and isolate Israel around the world and gain international support for their cause. With human shields as the fundamental element of every operation, Hamas are the first “army” in history to use the lives of their own civilian population as weapons of war.

Their strategy has been woefully successful. Over many years of conflict in Gaza, the majority of the world’s media have enthusiastically reported the deaths of Palestinian civilians as though they were the deliberate object of Israel’s callous and uncaring way of war. This blatantly false propaganda has been taken up by Hamas supporters and “useful idiots” in the West. In the US, Britain and Europe, last week we have seen hundreds of anti-Israel demonstrators brandishing Palestinian banners, burning Israeli flags, spitting out their hate for the Jewish state and screaming about IDF baby-killers. Hamas’s calumny is a prime motivator among Israel-loathing academics in Western universities and high schools who have mined their false allegations as rich seams of material to indoctrinate generations of students.

Human rights groups around the world have been doing the same. There have been dozens of anti-Israel resolutions at the UN, often drawing on Hamas’s narrative, twisting every aspect of the conflicts in Gaza. The prize has been the International Criminal Court’s decision this year to launch a full investigation with the hope of dragging Israeli soldiers, officials and politicians into the dock at The Hague.

I have taken part in every UN Human Rights Council evidence session and emergency debate on Gaza conflicts in the last 15 years. The wilful ignorance combined with malice has always been breathtaking. Every commission of inquiry determined Israel’s guilt before it even met for the first time. Every debate and vote has overwhelmingly and of course falsely affirmed Israel’s supposed war crimes and crimes against humanity. Meanwhile Hamas’s actual multiple war crimes have been brushed aside.

The reality is very different from the lies emanating from these modern-day Towers of Babel. The IDF attack on the “metro” tunnels this week depended on lightning action and the coordination of 160 planes attacking a small area in a very short space of time. Alongside these awesome complexities, the IDF did all they could to ensure minimum loss of civilian life by selecting targets where the lowest levels of innocents would be harmed, such as empty roadways under which tunnels ran, and maintaining close surveillance to confirm a bus load of civilians didn’t suddenly appear. The IDF have so far destroyed several high-rise buildings containing critical Hamas military infrastructure as well as civilian offices and apartments. Remarkably all of these have been smashed down without any reported civilian casualties.

As in previous conflicts in Gaza the IDF has made radio broadcasts in Arabic, sent SMS messages and even phoned civilians inside the Strip to warn them of impending strikes, where to go for their own safety and which routes to take.

When civilians do not leave an intended target building, the IDF sometimes drop specially designed low-power munitions (“knock on the roof”) to encourage them to get out. With careful surveillance of target areas, the Israeli air force frequently aborts planned sorties if there is a risk of civilian casualties.

In a conflict designed by Hamas to maximize civilian deaths, some are inevitable. It is too early to accurately assess casualty figures or ratios of civilians to fighters killed, but current assessments suggest the IDF have been even more successful in minimizing civilian casualties during this campaign than in previous engagements in Gaza. Many in the media, human rights groups and international bodies have rushed to characterize all civilian casualties (other than those inflicted by Hamas, of course) as war crimes. But the Geneva Conventions disagree. Inflicting civilian casualties is not illegal provided a military operation is necessary for the prosecution of a war, they are not disproportionate to the planned military gain and that combatant commanders do not intentionally target civilians while doing all they can to avoid hitting them.

The media takes reports from the Gaza health ministry as authoritative and objective. That is disingenuous and they know it. The health ministry is controlled by Hamas and follows their every order. For example, of around 2,000 rockets fired so far by Hamas during this conflict, approximately 400 have fallen short, landing inside Gaza. Some of these have killed civilians and the health ministry has attributed all of them to IDF action.

Counterintuitively, the most effective means of saving Gazan civilian lives has been Israel’s Iron Dome anti-missile system. Despite Hamas efforts to overwhelm it, Iron Dome has had a 90% success rate in preventing missiles from Gaza hitting their targets. Not only has this saved the lives of countless Israeli civilians but it has also meant the IDF campaign can be more deliberate, discriminating and precise. If hundreds of Israelis were dying under Hamas rockets, the IDF would have no choice other than to strike Gaza with much greater ferocity and ground forces would already have entered the Gaza Strip, unavoidably inflicting vastly more civilian casualties than we have seen so far.

Despite all of this, as the media unceasingly show us, the real victims in this campaign have indeed been Gaza civilians. But they usually get the cause wrong. Every one is due to Hamas’s unprovoked aggression against Israel. None would have occurred without it. Once this round of fighting is over, Hamas will work to build back better for next time — that is, to regenerate their military capability rather than civilian infrastructure. If Western governments, international bodies and human rights groups are genuinely interested in avoiding suffering in Gaza, they should start now, striving to end Hamas’s reign of terror rather than support it by parroting their baleful narrative.

Sometimes even we are tempted to believe that there is a god – a just god.

Here’s an example of an event that does this strange thing to us:

Authorities in the Islamic Republic attempted to burn the Israeli flag, as they usually do. But this time, karma got them and they ended up burning themselves.

Meanwhile unlike the regime, ordinary Iranians increasingly refuse to burn or walk on Israeli and American flags. pic.twitter.com/flOKCA44wn

— Masih Alinejad 🏳️ (@AlinejadMasih) May 9, 2021

DebkaFile reports:

The attack on Iran’s nuclear center at Natanz on April 14 totally destroyed two of its three uranium enrichment halls operated by advanced centrifuges. Even the remaining third of centrifuges have been put out of action by the cutoff of a steady power flow.

The explosive material which caused the blast was planted there two years ago and awaited a remote signal to detonate. Contrary to Iranian President Hassan Rouhani’s claims on Monday that the attack caused only minor damage and just disrupted the old centrifuges, our sources disclose a different reality. Iran is now unable to move enrichment up to the 60pc grade as Tehran boasted because most of the advanced IR-6 centrifuges with that capability were wrecked in the blast.

This serious setback has caused a major rift in the Tehran regime, including the Revolutionary Guards leadership. Atomic energy chief Ali Akbar Salehi, who is close to supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, is being bombarded with angry accusations. He is blamed for failing to seriously address the security aspects of the nuclear program’s key facility and abandoning it to hostile penetration. How did a large explosive charge come to be planted in the heart of the facility and, moreover, be allowed to repose there unnoticed for two years, he is asked. How could this happened just nine months after the first hit on Natanz wrecked the main centrifuge produce hall?

Have Joe Biden, John Kerry, Barack Obama sent their condolences?

The Jerusalem Post reports this good news:

Israel has attacked Iran’s Natanz nuclear facility. The target was an electrical substation located 40 to 50 meters underground.

The attack was carried out through an explosive device that was smuggled into the facility and detonated remotely. It took out both the primary and backup electrical systems. The initial explosion set off secondary explosions, causing of course even greater damage.

The head of Iran’s Parliament Research Center announced in a television interview today on Tuesday (April 13, 2021) that thousands of centrifuges had been destroyed, damaging most of the enrichment facilities.

The attack by Israel last July –  its damage still not fully repaired – was also carried out with explosives that were smuggled into a centrifuge assembly facility at the site, the explosives being embedded in a heavy table that was brought into the facility.

The Biden Administration was given no advance notice about the attack. The White House said on Monday that it was not involved.

As the “Biden administration” is hostile to Israel, is gifting enormous sums of money to its Palestinian enemies, and wants to revive the nuclear deal with Iran that President Trump cancelled, that is no surprise.

Karl Popper and Friedrich Hayek were two great 20th century thinkers who argued for freedom. They differed on one point: Popper held freedom to be in itself the highest value; Hayek thought freedom is valuable, indeed essential, because it enables innovation.

Innovation comes from the minds of individuals. A government controlled society in which the individual’s only – and enforced – duty is to serve the collective, does not allow origination. The organized mass is sterile. It cannot invent. That’s why it’s wrong to call socialism, communism, any shade of leftism,”progressive”. A socialist society cannot advance. It can only stagnate.

That’s why Communist China has had to steal new ideas and devices from countries in which free thought and its expression are permitted.

What many people who live in countries that are still comparatively free find attractive about socialism is that it promises “free stuff”. Vote the socialists into power and you will get free school, free health care, free housing, free strawberries with free cream. Well, okay, maybe not the cream. And maybe also not the strawberries. And maybe you will have to share a house. And the health panel will decide whether you may live or must die. And what you’ll be taught will be adherence to doctrine not search for truth. But still – it will all be free. At the time it is dispensed to you, whatever it is, you will not have to pay for it. The rest of your time you’ll be working for it.

Natan Sharansky was born in Soviet Russia and lived the first decades of his life there. He eventually escaped to live in freedom in Israel.

He writes about the torture of the mind in the prison of Communism:

My father, a journalist named Boris Shcharansky, was born in 1904 in Odessa, the cultural and economic center of the Pale of Settlement, where the Russian empire stuck most Jews. He studied in the Jewish Commercial Gymnasium, because most other gymnasiums accepted very few Jews, if any. By the time he was 16, he had already lived through the Czarist Regime with its anti-Semitic restrictions, the “February” Socialist Revolution, the “October” Bolshevik Revolution, and the years of civil war when power in Odessa seesawed back and forth from faction to faction, as hunger, pogroms, and destruction decimated the population.

When the Soviets finally emerged from the chaos, therefore, my father was hopeful. The Communists promised that a new life of full equality was dawning, without Pales of Settlement, without education restrictions, and, most important, with equal opportunities for all. Who wouldn’t want that? … [He]  was excited about building a world of social justice and equality closer to his home. …

Lucky for him, Odessa was emerging as a center for a new cultural medium—cinema. As silent Charlie Chaplin-type movies started evolving into more scripted sketches, my father put his storytelling talents to work. …

Of course, to succeed in his career as a screenwriter, he had to follow certain rules. His scripts, like every other work of art, had to follow the script of the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution, seeing the world through the lens of class struggle and class exploitation. As Karl Marx argued, and the Bolsheviks now decreed, “the history of all hitherto-existing societies is the history of class struggles. Freeman and slave, patrician and plebeian, lord and serf, guild-master and journeyman, in a word, oppressor and oppressed, stood in constant opposition to one another, carried on an uninterrupted, now hidden, now open fight”.

Thankfully, in its final stage of class struggle, following Karl Marx’s teaching, the proletariat had seized power from its masters, establishing a dictatorship of the proletariat who would build a classless society of equals. So-called bourgeois freedoms, minor matters like civil liberties and human rights, were nothing more than facades for exploiting others. The old world and its retrograde values had to be destroyed in order to bring forth social justice. Today, such a singular vision might be called Critical Class Theory—or maybe The 1917 Project.

Everything had to serve Communist ideology: every institution, every medium, every art form. Lenin particularly appreciated the propaganda potential of movies, declaring, “Cinema for us is the most important of the arts.” So while all creative artists had to subordinate plot, character, and complexity to advancing the Bolshevik political agenda, movie-makers endured extra scrutiny. The term “politically-correct“, which is popular today, emerged in the late 1920s, to describe the need to correct certain deviants’ thought to fit the Communist Party Line. Any positive characters with bourgeois origins had to eventually check their privilege, condemn their past as oppressors, and publicly take responsibility for their sins.

At first, True Believers who championed the Revolution’s noble aims easily accepted these restrictions. But as the Red Terror grew … the number of True Believers kept shrinking …

I was born … in 1948. My father had fought as a soldier in the Red Army in World War II for four years, and had returned a hero. … (Our] family which had lost so many friends and relatives in the Holocaust, then watched so many friends suffer during Josef Stalin’s political and anti-Semitic purges …

Every day, my father went to work [as a journalist] …  seeking interesting stories. But, when it came to writing them up, his imagination had to shrink, his mouth had to be wired shut, his hand had to clamp tight, as he produced what the Party required. He knew the handicapped journalism he created was not true journalism, the art that resulted was not true art, the thoughts triggered were not real thoughts and the conversations surrounding it all were not real conversations. Yet my father remained a storyteller at heart—and now he had an audience—my older brother by two years and me.

When my father came home from work, he could leave the suffocating grey false universe he helped to create behind, and welcome his beloved family into a full-color world. From the time we were very young, he would tell us stories on three levels—explaining to us what the author said, what the author wished to say, and what the author could not say. When we started, from a very young age, our ritual of weekly outings to the movies, he would recreate the movie for us on the way home, filling in what the screenwriter probably wanted to write, and explain what he could not write. …

No [professional writer] was ever quite sure what would be permitted or not, what red line they might cross tomorrow; what “macro-aggression” or “micro-aggression” they might suddenly be found guilty of committing. To be a man of letters in a sea of fear was to worry about drowning constantly. …

Looking back at the history of Soviet literature, it’s hard to find any of the thousands of writers [who conformed] … who wrote anything worth reading or remembering. Their books, published on a massive scale—often selling millions—simply disappeared. … Eventually, their lies consumed both the characters and their authors, leaving nothing behind.

By contrast, the works that lasted defied Stalinist orthodoxies in the service of truths, both immediate and internal. Stalin killed some of these honest writers, like the poet Osip Mandelstam. Some killed themselves, like the poet Marina Tsvetaeva. Some lived daily with the fear of arrest, or under the shadow of purges, like Anna Akhmatova. Some, like the novelist Mikhail Bulgakov, accepted the fact that their books would go unpublished in Russia—his classic The Master and Margarita didn’t see the light of day for decades. Others, like Boris Pasternak, who smuggled Dr. Zhivago to the West, sought readers elsewhere and paid the price back home ….

By my generation there were few True Believers left. Your field of vision had to be very narrow indeed to still see the crumbling society around us as some kind of Communist paradise. …

I spent my high school years as an academic grind, drowning in problem sets, working around the clock to amass five out of fives in mathematics and physics. Because I knew that I had to follow a very specific script to get the character reference I needed from the local Komsomol authorities, I also spouted the right slogans, participated in the right youth activities, and sang the right songs. Yet even after I fulfilled my young dreams and made it to MFTI—Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology, the Soviet equivalent of MIT—the scrutiny continued. We math and science students had to keep paying lip service to the Soviet gods, like everyone else. We kept taking tests on Marxist doctrine every semester, even when studying at the postdoctoral level. …

Our professors subtly encouraged us to brush such annoyances aside. We were the elite, they kept telling us, racing toward a golden future. It was all worth it. I was luxuriating in the sanctuary of science, an asylum protected from the daily insanity the Soviets imposed on nearly everyone else. I decided that the deeper I was into my scientific career, the less stressful this double life would be.

It was a comforting illusion—until I read Andrei Sakharov’s manifesto.

Sakharov was our role model, the number one Soviet scientist sitting at the peak of the pyramid each of us was trying to climb so single-mindedly. In May 1968, this celebrity scientist circulated a ten-thousand-word manifesto that unleashed a wrecking ball which smashed my complacent life. “Intellectual freedom is essential to human society,” Sakharov declared. Bravely denouncing Soviet thought-control, he mocked “the ossified dogmatism of a bureaucratic oligarchy and its favorite weapon, ideological censorship.”

Sakharov warned that Soviet science was imperiled without “the search for truth”. … At the time, there were few who could understand the depths of this critique. The Soviet Union wasn’t just relying on its scientific wizards to develop nuclear weapons; we now know that the research ran in tandem with an elaborate spying operation that stole as many of America’s atomic secrets as it could.

The message was clear for us. Sakharov helped us realize that the Soviet restrictions on free thought ran deep. You not only have to control your political opinions, but every interaction with your colleagues, every new insight, has to be checked and rechecked, for fear of ideological implications that could destroy a career in this world where even entire fields of inquiry were cancelled for being politically incorrect. Soviet scientists spent so much time looking over their shoulders and in their rear-view mirrors that they could not plunge ahead and catch up with their Western peers.

Long before most others, Sakharov saw in the Soviet scientific community the equivalent of the literary mediocrity we all saw in Soviet Realism. … Life in a dictatorship offers two choices: either you overcome your fear and stand for truth, or you remain a slave to fear, no matter how fancy your titles, no matter how big your dacha.

Natan Sharansky made the decision to stand for truth.

He applied to emigrate to Israel.

As a result of both decisions, he was jailed for nine years.

Once I had done it, once I was no longer afraid, I realized what it was to be free …

And that was why, during nine years in prison, when the KGB would try tempting me to restore my freedom and even my life by returning to the life I once had, it was easy to say “no”. …

Over the last three decades in freedom, I have noticed that … the feeling of release from the fear … is universal across cultures. This understanding prompted the Town Square Test I use to distinguish between free societies and fear societies: Can you express your individual views loudly, in public, without fear of being punished legally, formally, in any way? If yes, you live in a free society; if not, you’re in a fear society. …

[Today] nearly two-thirds of Americans report self-censoring about politics at least occasionally … despite the magnificent constitutional protections for free thought and expression enshrined in the Bill of Rights

To preserve our integrity and our souls, the quality of our political debate and the creativity so essential to our cultural life, we need … a test [that] asks: In the democratic society in which you live, can you express your individual views loudly, in public and in private, on social media and at rallies, without fear of being shamed, excommunicated, or cancelled?

A lot of American voters – even if not as many as the socialist Democratic Party claimed in order to seize power –  recently voted against freedom. They voted for the political party that promised free stuff. And already masters of the social media, most of them politically correct social justice warriors, refuse to let opinions they disagree with be expressed on their forums. Free speech is deeply unpopular with the Leftists now in power in America. Freedom itself is not valued. Those “magnificent constitutional protections for free thought and expression enshrined in the Bill of Rights” are being swept aside.

You will not be free – and the stuff you get from government won’t be free either.

Anything that costs you your freedom, costs too much.

These comments were made to us by email or on this website on the election disaster, with suggestions as to what might be done about it.

An astute observer of the political scene, retired academic Alexander Firestone, emailed us on what to expect of a Biden administration’s domestic and foreign policy:

 This is Obama 2.

Biden has in fact been elected by a bigoted psychotic-left media and this country will suffer horribly for it.

The question now is, how do we get out of it?

Re domestic policy I have no answers: Janet Yellin and the other self-appointed “experts” will return to hyper-inflation, endless bailouts for corrupt and degenerate democratic cities and states, massive deficits, much higher taxes, plainly racist affirmative action programs, etc., etc., ad nauseam. A republican controlled senate may be able to forestall some of that crap, but a lot of it is bound to get through. 

Re foreign policy, we can expect a very pro-China administration. The Bidens are already all bought and paid for. Nothing to be done here. If that annoys the Russians, so much the better. Russia and China are already positioning themselves for conflict if not war in Central Asia. We can do nothing here. If an emboldened China,  green-lighted by Biden, goes too far and there is real shooting between China and Russia, we can only cheer from the sidelines.

In the absolutely critical Middle East we can only hope that the psychotic Mullahs of Iran, humiliated by the recent assassination of their chief nuclear scientist as well as Saudi Arabia and the Gulf States (except Qatar) defection to a quasi-alliance with Israel, will recklessly start a war. That will destroy the crackpot pro-Iran policy of the Obama administration and of people like Ben Rhodes, Martin Indyk, Valerie Jarrett (born in Isfahan), Jake Sullivan, John Kerry, Hillary Clinton, and the traitors of J-street, JVP [Jewish Voices for Peace the leading Jewish anti-Zionist organization in the US] and the ADL [Anti Defamation League – constantly defaming Israel]. Fascist Turkey may also escalate its war against Greece, Armenia, and the Kurds beyond the point of no return and create a new war with Russia.

The idea (excluding action): Letting our enemies at home fail by their own efforts, and those abroad destroy each other.   

This was a comment by our regular commenter/contributing writer Liz on the massive fraud that gave Biden a majority, and a possible reaction:

It seems to me that, so far, [Sidney] Powell and the other lawyers have presented evidence that is going to be hard to ignore or refute.

They have it on record from the makers of the [vote counting] Dominion machines themselves that they can be easily hacked and/or set up to produce fraudulent results, and the results themselves are extremely incriminating, being mathematical impossibilities.

Plus testimony by experts like Dr. Navid Keshavarz-Nia, and eyewitnesses.

If this can all be ignored, then justice, and government by the people, is truly dead.

If Biden is allowed to be our next pretend president, Trump voters just may have to form a Confederacy and secede from the Left coasts.

The idea (in extreme exigency): Form a new Confederacy and secede.  

And this comment was made by Jeanne Shockley on our Facebook page asking the right questions about where we go from here:

This is the dilemma. Civil protest and petitions seem to gain little. We try overwhelming all State Legislatures and Congress with conservatives, which seems an impossible task no matter what the people try to do. We have rallies and marches and petitions, which are ignored by media or downplayed to the extent that there is no truth in the reporting. Without doubt, there are plans for 2022 and 2024 already in the works, but there is still the problem of electoral fraud. So, we await the legal process of Trump’s team dealing with that.

We could go Galt. We could plot revolution. We could resist all compliance to authority that is Harris/Biden. We could “roil the waters”. We could start a civil war. All these are such serious tactics that would destroy our lives and possibly our country. Should we hang on and wait for 2022? Should we rally to a call to arms? Should we go Galt?

How far into the Great Reset are we? How much resistance is there around the globe to the Globalists? Are they waiting for the Americans to show up? Should Donald Trump call for the support of patriots? Would we answer that call? What then?

I have stood up before for minor things, and called for the support that I had in private circles, and ended up standing alone, then defeated because I stood alone. Revolution is not a minor thing.

The idea (tentative): We contemplate revolution or civil war, and their consequences.  

We found more suggestions for what we might do about the disaster in two articles at American Greatness: –

First, one who signs himself Bradford H. B., writes that what we should do is melt our enemies’ hearts with descriptions of our sentiments regarding hearth and home, ancestral custom, attachment to the native soil. He calls these “moral arguments”, but they have much more to do with emotion than morality:

What the conservative elite has long failed to understand is that the Left views itself more than just a pusher of human progress. It’s actually more grandiose than this. To them, they’re locked in a Manichean battle between good and evil. …

Many of us see it that way too.

Instead of approaching the Left as the strident moral crusaders they are, the Republican elite traditionally has written them off as amoral, nihilistic, and godless relativists.

We too see them as amoral and nihilistic, but don’t, of course, hold “godlessness” against them.

This is dangerously naïve. Conservative scholar Paul Gottfried recently skewered this tendency when he reminded conservatives that it’s the Left which is the “more fervent and more activist side in our culture wars”; the side that routinely “expresses itself in rage”. “It would be unimaginable,” he wrote, “if the Left was not driven by its own morality.”

For the “more fervent” side then, engagement with them on non-moral terms will be futile. That is, demands for fairness, charges of inconsistency, or practical arguments on issues of public policy won’t bring a single one onside. On illegal immigration, for instance, appeals to the rule of law will generally fall flat every time. For the Left, laws against allowing the free movement of “impoverished victims of historic U.S. imperialism” are heartless, unjust, and illegitimate. …

Moral arguments have to be met with competing moral arguments. …

Traditional conservatives or the Old Right … treat traditions and customs as not only just, but sacrosanct. … They take pride and find guidance in long-cherished traditions, ancestral ties, and historical distinctions. It’s what makes people special. For the Left, however, these links must be broken. This is exactly what they do when they topple statues, “decolonize” history and the arts, and deplatform those who defend their in-group interests. Same with accusing America-Firsters of “hate speech” or calling for open borders and “refugee justice”.  It’s all a way to destroy peoples’ unique value and cut their ties to ancestry and posterity, and it must be called out in precisely these terms.

On illegal immigration then, the GOP shouldn’t lead with a law-and-order argument, but instead forcefully say that it hurts communities which the American people love and cherish. By killing labor standards and disrupting local cultures and customs, illegal aliens uproot communities which people have built up for years and have a moral right to keep as they are. Illegal immigration isn’t just wrong because it’s illegal; it’s wrong because it dispossesses people and destroys a way of life.

To the extent equality absolutism—the essence of Marxism – flattens cultural differences and crushes meaning and value for people, it’s amoral. …

Normal people, it turns out, love their communities and don’t feel the need to permanently change them. But to the egalitarian extremist, no one is special …  For this, they can and should be made to feel embarrassed and ashamed. …

Defending tradition, heritage, posterity, and group customs and values is absolutely a moral good. To seek its erasure is evil.

This is the position the Right must take to counter the ascendant hard-Left …

What Bradford H.B. is actually doing, is putting the nationalist case to the anti-nationalists – aka globalists, world-government advocates, communists, redistributionists, militant  proselytizing religions. But he is doing it in terms of emotion that simply beg the answer, “That’s how you feel, it is not how we feel.” There is nothing wrong with having an emotional attachment to one’s country and way of life, but it is hard to see it is a clinching argument against the Left’s ideal of breaking those very ties.

The idea: Pleading one’s love of country and local community, custom and rootedness.

We don’t think it will make Leftist idealists feel embarrassed or ashamed. (The appeal of nationalism can be put – and has been put on this website – in more cerebral terms.)

Next, Stephen Balch writes that the answer is to make our protest gatherings match or outdo those of the Left in clamor, frequency, and persistence. 

Do we make a stand or nervelessly surrender our rights? Do we affirm ourselves citizens—an historically rare and noble title—or do we accept becoming subjects, the fate of most humankind? …

We face something altogether new, a genuine effort at revolution. …

What is to be done? Whatever that is, it must depart from politics as usual …

An audacity is now called for, a willingness to stretch institutional bonds to a degree that genuinely alarms our conniving subverters. At this late stage in our political degeneration nothing less will suffice.

President Trump and his allies have rightly taken their case into the courts. But more needs to be accomplished, and with swift and dexterous versatility, in the courts of public opinion. …

Our strategy must buttress legal arguments with formidable public acts.

Jurists are mortals—as are legislators whose ultimate support we’ll need more than the courts. Both are cowed by the pressure of elite opinion. To do the correct thing, both will need to be steeled by countervailing forces. They fear, correctly, that adhering to the law will bring out the rioters and streetfighters. They must be brought to see that vast numbers of peaceful but equally angry citizens won’t accept cowardly skulking when the nation is in danger.

… The president must now lead his followers into America’s streets and squares. They must especially flock to the capitol complexes of all the critical states and register indignant protest. They must do the same under the media’s noses in Washington, New York, and Los Angeles, creating a clamor that broadcast agitprop can’t drown out. This has already begun, but its intensity must greatly ratchet up, becoming incessant and overwhelming. …

In the face of their literal coup, let ours be a counter-coup de théâtre. If the president and his attorney general believe they have the federal goods on individual malefactors, let them convene grand juries, bring in indictments and make midnight (and televised) arrests of top perps. Why shouldn’t we take instruction from our foes?

And don’t just petition the jurists, have the president and his lawyers lay their case before a joint session of Congress. If House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) won’t give him House leave, provide the Senate with an exclusive. You say nothing like that has ever been tried? Then no better reason for doing it now. The proceedings would be an educational spectacle the networks, and the president’s traducers, couldn’t ignore. And its grand show would suit the occasion.

The courts won’t call the election for Trump. They shouldn’t. The best that can be expected is a vacating of the results in those states where misdeeds have been particularly egregious.

Since there’s no time for reruns, the state legislatures will then have to grasp the nettle. They could throw their electoral votes to Trump or, much more likely, find some way to withhold them, or perhaps pick electors who’ll abstain or vote for some stand-in.

If, in consequence, neither Trump nor Biden have an electoral majority, the choice will devolve upon the newly elected House, with the constitutionally prescribed delegation-by-delegation voting system strongly favoring the president. The (probably) Republican Senate will re-elect Vice President Pence.

Should state legislators fail to show sufficient spine, or should there be rival electoral ballots submitted, there is a final ditch to fall back upon. The Republican Senate could raise objections to accepting dubious electoral votes. Something like that happened in 1876, the last time rampant corruption caused official tabulations to be formally challenged. Possible end games in a scenario like that are too tangled to assess, but the battle could be won. …

And if we fail? We fail—but not without forever having branded this election as the leprous thing it was. And in doing so we will have laid the necessary foundation for a continuing unconventional struggle, one that explores the outer boundaries of our Constitution’s resources to trap “His Fraudulency” and friends in the snares they themselves have laid.

The idea: We could make ourselves more threatening, more frightening, than the Left – but without becoming violent.

So: Passive observation and hope? Secession? Revolution or civil war? Attempt to shame our enemy into concession or even capitulation? Unremitting protest calculated to frighten while remaining nonviolent?

Or … ?

On the left, the concept of objective truth is increasingly deemed a form of white supremacy.

From time to time, staunchly and admirably conservative Dennis Prager writes in defense of what he (along with many others) likes to call “Judeo-Christian” values. We generally reject the term for reasons we give here. But we accept its use in the article below because he gives it a definition which makes it palatable to reason.

He writes at the Daily Signal:

All of my life, I have said that the left’s moral compass is broken. And all of my life, I was wrong.

Why I was wrong explains both the left and the moral crisis we are in better than almost any other explanation.

I was wrong because in order to have a broken moral compass, you need to have a moral compass to begin with. But the left doesn’t have one.

This is not meant as an attack. It is a description of reality. The left regularly acknowledges that it doesn’t think in terms of good and evil. Most of us are so used to thinking in those terms—what we call “Judeo-Christian”—that it is very difficult for us to divide the world in any other way.

But since Karl Marx, the left (not liberalism; the two are different) has always divided the world, and, therefore, human actions, in ways other than good and evil. The left, in Friedrich Nietzsche’s famous words, has always operated “beyond good and evil.”

It all began with Marx, who divided the world by economic class—worker and owner or exploited and exploiter. To Marx and to Marxism, there is no such thing as a good or an evil that transcends class. Good is defined as what is good for the working class; evil is what is bad for the working class.

Therefore, to Marxists, there is no such thing as a universal good or a universal evil. …

By which is meant that –

Whether an act is good or evil has nothing to do with who committed the act—rich or poor, male or female, religious or secular, member of one’s nation or of another nation. Stealing and murder are morally wrong, no matter who stole or who murdered.

That is not the case for Marx and the left.

As Marx put it in “Das Kapital”:

Right can never be higher than the economic structure of society and the cultural development thereby determined. We therefore reject every attempt to impose on us any moral dogma whatsoever as an eternal, ultimate, and forever immutable moral law.

Fifty-three years later, Marx’s foremost disciple, Vladimir Lenin, architect of the Russian Revolution, proclaimed:

We say that our morality is entirely subordinated to the interests of the class struggle of the proletariat. … We do not believe in an eternal morality. … We repudiate all morality derived from non-human (i.e. God) and non-class concepts.[Address to the Third Congress of the Russian Young Communist League, Oct. 2, 1920.]

As professor Wilfred Cantwell Smith, director of Harvard University’s Center for the Study of World Religions, wrote in 1957:

For Marxism there is no reason … for not killing or torturing or exploiting a human person if his liquidation or torture or slave labor will advance the historical process.

This is how Marx’s ideological heirs, today’s leftists, view the world—with one important difference: Morality is not determined only by class, but by race, power, and sex as well.

In Left-think, racism is wrong – as it is in reason. But only for some people, not for all – a position reason rejects.

It is left-wing dogma that a black person cannot be a racist. Only whites can be racist. And, indeed, all whites are racist.

It is increasingly a left-wing position that when blacks loot, they are only taking what they deserve, or, as the looters often put it, looted goods are “reparations”. A Black Lives Matter organizer in Chicago, Ariel Atkins, recently put it this way:

I don’t care if somebody decides to loot a Gucci or a Macy’s or a Nike store because that makes sure that person eats. That makes sure that person has clothes. That is reparations. Anything they want to take, take it because these businesses have insurance.[Chicago Tribune, Aug. 17, 2020.]

Another non-moral left-wing compass concerns power. Just as right and wrong are determined by class (worker and owner/rich and poor) and race (white and people of color), good and evil are also determined by power (the strong and the weak).

Power is wrong – unless of course it is in the hands of the Left.

That’s why leftists protest and riot whenever a confrontation between a police officer and a black person ends with the death of an unarmed black person. … The death is automatically deemed murder.

And causes the world over are right or wrong according to that criterion:

That explains much of the left’s hatred for two countries in particular—America and Israel. America is wrong when it does almost anything in the world that involves weaker countries—assassinates the most important Iranian terrorist, builds a wall between itself and Mexico, opposes unlimited immigration. It is wrong because it is much stronger than those other countries.

The left’s antipathy to Israel derives from both the power compass and the race compass. Because Israel is so much stronger than the Palestinians and because Israelis are classified as white (despite the fact that more than half of all Israelis are not white), the left deems Israel wrong.

So, when Israel justifiably attacks Gaza for raining rockets over Israel, the world’s left vehemently attacks Israel—because it is so much stronger than the people of Gaza and because whites have attacked people of color.

In Left-think, rape is wrong – as it is in reason – but only for some people.

When a woman accuses a man of sexually harassing or raping her, the left’s reaction is not, “Let us try to determine the truth as best we can.” It is, “Believe women.” One must automatically “believe women” …

Unless, as we have seen lately, the accusation is brought against a leading Democrat, such as Joe Biden, the Left’s candidate for the presidency. In his case the woman must not be believed.

… because, on the left, it is not only morality that doesn’t transcend race, power, class or sex; truth doesn’t either.