The United Caliphate of Great Britain? 78

As old Charles III, newly crowned king of Britain and its Commonwealth, is afflicted with cancer, his reign will not be long. Will he be succeeded by his son William, Prince of Wales? Or is the Christian monarchy doomed to imminent extinction and the United Kingdom destined by its own folly to become a Muslim tyranny? Perhaps a caliphate?

The United Caliphate of Great Britain?

Bruce Bawer writes at FrontPage:

In 1961, there were 50,000 Muslims in all of Britain and a total of seven mosques. Twenty years later, the Islamic population had increased tenfold and the number of mosques had risen by almost 2000%. Today the official tally is closing in on five million. And the number of mosques? It’s well into the four figures.

What kind of impact has this rampant growth had on Britain? Other statistics help paint the picture. Terrorism? Two examples: the 2005 London bombings killed 52 and injured 784; the Manchester Arena bombing killed 22 and injured 512. Grooming gangs? In the town of Rotherham alone (pop. 265,000), the rapes of 1400 English girls by Muslim gangs have been systematically covered up for decades by police, politicians, social workers, and the media. There’s no reason to believe that the situation isn’t just as bad in cities and towns all over England.

Politicians are no longer safe. In 2021, a Conservative Party MP, David Amess, was murdered by a jihadist at a meeting with constituents – and his pusillanimous colleagues collaborated with the media to turn the focus away from the dangers of Islam to the supposed perils of “online abuse”. Just the other day, another conservative MP, Mike Freer, who is gay and who represents a largely Jewish constituency, announced that he would be leaving the House of Commons in the wake of numerous threats from Muslims.

Members of other non-Western immigrant groups – notably Hindus – have done a spectacular job of integrating peacefully and prosperously into British society. But the record of Muslims in Britain, who outnumber Hindus in Britain by almost four to one, has been drastically different. Instead of assimilating, they’ve formed sharia enclaves where their imams preach hatred of the West.

While their daughters wear hijabs symbolizing subordination and their sons terrorize the schools, the parents demand that those schools purge curricula of material that contradicts their religious teachings.

Fifty years ago, West European leaders agreed to “permit Arab countries to export millions of their populations into all the EEC countries [European Economic Community – forerunner to the European Union], along with their culture and their customs”. (See our post Europe Betrayed here for the events and causes – mostly concerning Europe’s need for Arab oil – leading up to the agreement.) Britain, though it had been hesitant at first to accept the terms demanded by the Arabs, fell into line and was party to the deal.

Civil service boffins kindly explained to the British people that the population of their country was sinking and before long there wouldn’t be enough working people to maintain the welfare-state. So without asking the citizens, they began to bring in a stream of Muslim immigrants. The stream has not stopped; it has become a torrent – swelled not only by increasing numbers of Arabs but by Muslims from just about every Islamic country.

What do these immigrants come for? Not to contribute to the maintenance of the welfare state, but to benefit from it; to get free education, free health care, free housing, and unearned cash. Will Muslims who come for the welfare go to work? No. They’d really rather not and anyway why should they?

Meanwhile the ever-growing number of Muslims who live on the dole – and who’ve never so much as contemplated entering the job market – has placed an ever-growing burden on the British welfare state, necessitating ever more severe cutbacks in other public expenses.

So the purpose of letting them in has not been and will not be realized! Still, British governments will  not be so impolite as to stop them coming.

If they had not come …?  Is a welfare state always a good thing? Does a small population need a welfare state?

Are the Muslim immigrants a boon in any way to their host country?

No. Quite the contrary.

In one city after another, everyday barbarism – machete attacks, acid attacks, and rape statistics that have risen 340% nationwide in the last decade – native Britons feel increasingly unsafe, even as adherents of a faith whose holy book calls for their destruction receive preferential treatment in everything from housing to hiring to higher education.

Hundreds – if not thousands – of native Brits have dared to state the truth about Islam only to be imprisoned for it. And in recent months, as the streets of British cities have filled weekend after weekend with rabid Muslims shouting antisemitic slogans, it has been hard not to imagine them doing to their infidel neighbors what Hamas did to Israelis on October 7. …

For an example of the kind of thinking that, decades ago, set Britain – and the rest of Western Europe – on the road to disaster, consider these passages from an editorial published in a major U.K. periodical: in the West, the editorial warned, “the threat of population collapse” would cause “the welfare state model” to collapse as well, making one thing urgently important above all else – namely, to welcome immigrants in large numbers.

When did this article appear? In 1960? 1970? No. Believe it or not, it appeared in the February 3, 2024, issue of the Spectator (not to be confused with the American Spectator), the flagship publication of the British conservative establishment. Under the headline Who’s Afraid of Population Growth? the Spectator’s editors cited the fast-declining populations of South Korea and Japan as threats to those countries’ economic prospects, and further noted that “in almost every country in Europe the working–age population has already started to decrease”. In Britain, by contrast, “our working-age population is projected to keep rising”.

The Spectator’s editors presented this upward trend as a magnificent accomplishment. Note, however, the failure to distinguish between “working-age population” and working population. Yes, the editors acknowledged that Britain’s years of massive immigration have caused widespread alarm. But they then immediately posed the question: “which is the worse problem to have – too many people or too few?” And they made it clear that for them the answer is undebatable: “too few”.

The real answer, of course, is: it depends. It depends, that is, on which people you’re letting inAre they entering legally – or not? Are they skilled workers and civilized souls in search of better paying work – or are they criminals, freeloaders, barbarians? Do they dream of enjoying the freedom of the West – or are they fierce, unshakable adherents of a religion that’s utterly irreconcilable with Western freedom?

The editors of the Spectator dance around all of these vital questions only to zero in on another. “Newcomers to the UK,” they write, “tend to have larger families, which is the main factor in maintaining our birth rate. Almost a third of all British babies are born to immigrant mothers. In London, it’s closer to 60 per cent. This has not prompted the country to come apart at the seams. Instead, we have created a multi–faith society whose cohesiveness is envied by much of Europe.”

“Multi-faith society”? It’s more accurate to refer to the U.K. as “a society in which Christianity is shriveling [that has been happening for generations – ed.) and virtually every institution has capitulated to Islam.”  [That’s the horror -ed.] “Cohesiveness”? British elites have long since come to understand that when Islam is part of the mix, there’s no cohesiveness except on its own draconian terms. Just look at London, which, as many longtime inhabitants lament, no longer remotely resembles its former self: entire neighborhoods now look like Kabul or Karachi; police arrest critics of Islam but ignore Muslim violence; politicians wink at urban rot while mouthing insipid pieties about “cultural enrichment”; and the mainstream media demonize anyone who dares to speak honestly about what is, in fact, an existential nightmare in the making.

The Spectator editors seem to want their readers to see certain things as being inevitable, set in stone – to see globalism as a fait accompli and revolutionary demographic change as a force of nature. Reading such nonsense, you’d think that there’s no such thing as the possibility of a country – acting upon the wishes of its own people – imposing, and enforcing, sensible immigration controls.

After all, British citizens voted in 2016 to leave the EU so that they might be able to do precisely that. But though the Brexiteers won, both the Tories and Labourites have refused to give them what they wanted on the immigration front. The insane, massive influx has continued – consisting largely of boats packed with young Muslim males who are coming ashore illegally.

And it’s not only on the immigration issue that ordinary voters feel ignored by their major political parties. Largely because of the unending flood of newcomers, young British natives can’t get decent jobs or buy homes, and older folks are denied vitally important medical treatments or are put on long waiting lists for them. Meanwhile illegal immigrants are first in line for many of the goodies.

And the Spectator editors acknowledged absolutely none of this. No, as far as they’re concerned, “[t]he problems arise when more people leave than arrive: a decline in population numbers is what brings crisis”. Full stop. But only a few sentences later the editors conceded that the U.K. does indeed have a crisis – namely, a “welfare crisis”.  Over five million people, they admitted, are collecting “out-of-work benefits during a worker shortage” that’s “drawing in a million migrants a year”. Hmm, food for thought: why are so many people in the U.K. collecting unemployment when there aren’t enough workers to fill the available jobs? Could the explanation be that a great many of the Muslims in Britain have absolutely no interest in finding employment when they can continue to live very well on government handouts? Certainly that’s the case in many other parts of Western Europe. Needless to say, the Spectator editors don’t want to go there.

Approaching their conclusion, the editors offer yet another dishonest touch: “many” of the “current high number of immigrants to the UK,” they maintain, are “highly skilled people who are more likely to work and pay taxes than native Britons”. Ah, the wonderfulness of the word “many”, which can mean ten or a hundred or a few thousand out of, well, a multitude. The editors then slip in a brief-as-possible admission that, yes, “[w]e need to build more homes and manage integration better” – only to add quickly, by way of wrapping up, that “these are issues that arise as a result of the country’s success”.

What to make of this editorial? Think of it this way: it’s just one more proof that while mass immigration has ravaged the lives of many Western Europeans, it has yet to harm the elites who run key institutions like the Spectator – which, I guess, is why they’re able to convince themselves that immigration has actually been a triumph rather than a horror show.

To be sure, drastic population decline is problematic, too. But the kind of population growth that will ultimately transform Britain into a sharia state is something only an Iranian mullah could celebrate. For the editors of the Spectator to cheer this dire development isn’t entirely surprising – plenty of nominally conservative periodicals seem unable to shake the libertarian credo that importing armies of riffraff is always a socioeconomic good – but it’s disappointing, to say the least. Indeed, to read such drivel in the year 2024 is to recognize just how few allies ordinary Western Europeans – people who, with fewer and fewer exceptions, are profoundly alarmed by the course their continent is taking – have among their powerful elites.

Will the powerful elite of Britain welcome living in a caliphate? Will they convert to Islam? Will they submit (which is what “Islam” means)?

Will King Charles III be the last monarch of Britain?

Posted under Arab States, Britain, Europe, Globalism, immigration, Islam, Muslims, Terrorism, United Kingdom by Jillian Becker on Wednesday, February 7, 2024

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Pat Condell tells the truth about this war 255

Posted under Islam, Israel, middle east, Terrorism, Videos, War by Jillian Becker on Monday, October 30, 2023

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A just Arab speaks up against Hamas atrocities 291

A must-watch video:

(Only doubt: that what Hamas is doing is “against Islamic law”.)

Posted under Islam, Israel, Terrorism, Videos, War by Jillian Becker on Saturday, October 14, 2023

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Do you remember the American Republic? 275

Do you remember the USA, the nation that was established by a constitution?

Perhaps you imagine it is still in existence?

It is not.

Glenn Ellmers describes the post-constitutional republic that America has become. He writes at American Greatness:

The constitutional republic created by our founders no longer exists. Most everyone on the Right seems to agree with that—though we differ about how deep the rot is, and whether we are now living under a new regime that is essentially different in kind, not merely degree.

Most of us also agree that we want to restore the American founders’ principles and institutions. …

But how exactly we recover the founders’ constitutionalism is a question no one has been able to answer with any specificity. …

Elections—and therefore consent and popular sovereignty—are no longer meaningful.

This is the big one, and in a way, everything flows from it. It is helpful to break it down into two discrete pieces.

First, even if conducted legitimately, elections no longer reflect the will of the people.

Set aside for the moment any concerns about outright fraud and ballot tampering. The steady growth of the administrative state since the 1960s means that bureaucracy has become increasingly indifferent to—even openly hostile to—the will of the people over the last half-century. A clear majority of Americans, including Democrats (at least until recently), has been demanding and voting for comprehensive immigration reform, including strict control of the border, for decades. The Republican establishment in Congress—which made its peace with the deep state some time ago—has made numerous promises to fix this problem, and broken them all, always finding a reason for “amnesty now, enforcement later.” The decision about who gets to be part of the political community was the basic principle of popular sovereignty in the founders’ social compact theory. To the degree that the elites have simply ignored the American people on this point, neither the United States as a nation nor its citizens can still be considered a sovereign people.

Of course, that is only one obvious example. In thousands of other ways, the federal bureaucracy ignores the deliberate wishes of the American people. The regulators, administrators, and policymakers in the alphabet soup of federal agencies set the rules and impose their collective will as they see fit. Regardless of who the people repeatedly elect to reform the system, those politicians and their agendas come and go; the permanent government persists.

Yet even this has not been enough for the leftist oligarchy. Trump’s election in 2016 scared the establishment into taking even more extreme measures to prevent “unacceptable” electoral outcomes. Which leads to the latest antidemocratic development.

Second, elections now represent “manufactured consent”.

Mollie Hemingway showed in her excellent book, Rigged, that the technically legal though unscrupulous maneuvers undertaken by the Left—including legacy and social media propaganda and censorship, last-minute changes to election laws, and private money poured into partisan “voter education” efforts—were more than enough to alter the outcome of the 2020 election.

This new reality became even clearer this month. The highly manipulative practice of ballot harvesting—which reached new lows of cynicism in the recent midterms—makes a mockery of elections as an expression of popular deliberation and rational will. … The Democrats didn’t beat back the red wave because the voters chose them; they won by choosing their voters. It is hard to see how elections under these circumstances are substantially different from the artificial voting rituals practiced by the “people’s republics”, i.e., communist regimes of the 20th century.

The idea that the founders’ institutional arrangements still obtain is a nostalgic fiction today—especially the idea of checks and balances based on federalism and the separation of powers.

As a treatise on constitutional government, The Federalist is and will always be a classic work of political science, with many enduring insights. … [But] what Publius describes about the functions of the legislative, executive, and judicial branches—as well as the countervailing powers of the states—has almost no connection with current reality.

Congress doesn’t write, the executive does not enforce, and the judiciary does not interpret the laws. Power and wealth have become massively centralized in Washington, D.C. Federalism, judicial review, executive authority, the legislative process, appropriations—none of this remains operational in a way James Madison would recognize. And now, the country’s most powerful corporations are in active collusion with the federal security apparatus to enforce the regime’s authority. That’s practically the definition of fascism.

Political competence, in the traditional sense, is becoming irrelevant. 

Ignore the current spat between Donald Trump and Ron DeSantis. A bitter nomination fight would only benefit the opposition. What’s important to note is that any attempt by a Republican president to control his own (nominal) employees in the executive branch would require talents that neither Trump nor DeSantis has demonstrated. In fact, if confronting today’s administrative state, it isn’t clear how even a Lincoln or a Churchill would have exercised effective statesmanship. We are in a post-constitutional, even a post-political, environment.

For all his flaws, Donald Trump at least recognized that defending the sovereignty of the people (the most fundamental and meaningful definition of Americanism) meant striking at the legitimacy of the administrative state, especially its assumptions of rational expert knowledge. Trump correctly perceived that mockery and derision were effective, if indelicate, tools for challenging this hubris.

But Trump erred grievously in thinking he could accomplish everything he wanted on his own. The art of the deal doesn’t work when the other side holds almost all the cards. Trump underestimated this situation. And he was simply foolish and vain in thinking he could overcome it on the strength of his abilities alone and ignoring his duty to fill every available appointment with people loyal to—and willing to fight for—his agenda.

A DeSantis presidency, meanwhile, would have to recognize that while executive experience as a governor was once the ideal training ground for the Oval Office, this is much less true today. To whatever degree overweening bureaucracy has infiltrated the states, the governor of Florida does not have to deal with a national security machine that sets its own foreign policy, abuses classification rules, and engages in shameless leaking to a compliant national press; a Justice Department that weaponizes the resources and capacities of the FBI to undermine an elected president; and a veritable nation of unfireable (for now) subordinates long habituated to regarding themselves as the true representatives of the public will.

Yet DeSantis has shown better instincts than Trump in backing up his words with actions, especially in his willingness to punish powerful opponents, like Disney, when they needed it.

It remains to be seen how either man could translate his virtues, and overcome his shortcomings, to exercise the power of the presidency creatively, with cunning, subtlety, and ruthless determination, in ways that pursue the goals of constitutionalism even while understanding that the old forms no longer apply.

Moreover, any president seeking to restore constitutional government would need large majorities in both houses of Congress committed to reform far more seriously than the current Republican leadership seems to be. This partnership would not involve traditional legislative log-rolling, but would require an alliance in a quasi-political street fight, probably leading to a constitutional crisis, to bring the bureaucracy to heel. It is a big ask to expect congressional leaders who would even understand how this would occur, let alone have the will actually to do it. Massive challenges await at every turn. …

By carrying on with retail politics and accepting the current situation as normal, people on the Right are now legitimizing and strengthening their enemies. 

This may be the hardest pill to swallow.

Our current woke oligarchy becomes more fanatical every month, yet instead of getting weaker or provoking a popular backlash, it seems to grow ever stronger. In part, this is because the elites have maintained a semblance of institutional normalcy. No matter how extreme its policies—COVID lockdowns, chemical or surgical castration of children, open borders—the ruling class carries on with a kind of constitutional kabuki theater. Citizens (or rather “people”) vote, Congress meets and passes “laws”, the president pontificates and signs documents. It is largely just a performance; it certainly doesn’t resemble government functioning as the founders intended. But it looks close enough to the real thing to persuade many people that the situation, if not perfect, is at least tolerable. There is just enough veneer of Our Democracy™ to keep most citizens from acting on their dissatisfactions and justified fears.

But the longer this goes on, and the more phoniness people are willing to tolerate, the more the whole rotten edifice becomes accepted as legitimate. At some point, the people will have consented, by their acquiescence, to anything the regime decides to do. Soon, one suspects, our left-wing masters won’t find it necessary to keep up the charade.

That’s why I disagree with those who say we should simply go tit-for-tat with the Democrats. Julie Kelly and Scott McKay, among others, believe that Republicans need to adopt the Democrats’ ballot harvesting techniques in order to beat them at their own game. In the same vein, Ned Ryun argues, “If conservatives and Republicans want to win again, we had better adopt the only-ballots-matter approach at least in the short term or die. . . . This is now the modern-day political battlefield in America, the rules of the game. One can either howl at the moon about it or beat the Left at it.”

Look, I get it. Nevertheless, this strikes me as a bad idea—practically, theoretically, and morally.

    • Practically, we can never hope to match the maniacal zeal of the Left, which invests millenarian expectations in politics, and is thus always driven to do whatever it takes to win. Acknowledging this does not mean giving up and letting them win. But it does mean recognizing that in a race to the bottom, the Left will always get there first. And having fought tooth and nail to see who can go lower, what do we do when we reach the bottom?
    • Theoretically, this means we will be participating in altering the essential meaning and purpose of elections. Representative, deliberative democracy will become the technocratic accumulation of votes—a clickbait contest that rewards whichever side can best wage computerized demographic warfare.
    • Morally, we will then lose any claim that we are trying to recover genuine self-government. If the argument is that we need to descend to the Democrats’ level in order to gain power, one might ask, “Why not just cut to the chase and skip the empty, meaningless process?” If power really becomes the only object, and neither side really believes in consent, then the entire pretense will fade away soon enough anyway.

Accepting, even “in the short term”, the regime’s authority to perpetually rewrite the rules of the game is the true surrender. They will always win if we repeatedly acquiesce to their legitimacy, chasing after what they define as normal on their terms. Worse, there won’t be a republic in the long term worth having.

I know that what I am painting here is a pretty bleak picture. But while it reveals a rough road in the short term, I don’t think it necessarily dictates long-term despair, in part because there are certain truths about political life that the Left cannot change.

Ellmers then “offer[s] some ideas about what has not changed, which might provide some grounds for optimism”, including “human nature”! But with that section of his article I disagree. I don’t think human nature or anything else he points to provides grounds for optimism.  Quite the contrary.

An historically valuable archive is lost by a university 236

A University Has Lost an Archive

The University of Leicester has lost the archive of the Institute for the Study of Terrorism (IST).

I founded the Institute for the Study of Terrorism in London in 1984 under the aegis of Alun Gwynne Jones, Lord Chalfont, an erstwhile Minister of Defence. Its archive was built on the foundation of the research I had done for my books on terrorism in Germany and the Middle East: Hitler’s Children: the Story of the Baader-Meinhof Gang and The PLO: the Rise and Fall of the Palestine Liberation Organization. The information I had gathered was augmented and updated continually through the six years of the Institute’s existence. With a team of five, sometimes six or seven, we worked at it in subterranean offices in central London. Our register of terrorists, names of groups and individuals with details of their affiliations, their objectives, and their actions, steadily grew.

We were a registered charity, but also funded ourselves by compiling reports for businesses needing to know what terrorist threats they could be faced with in foreign countries. Foreign contributors kept us posted on terrorist activity in their countries and regions, so quite often we received life-saving information ahead of the news agencies or even the intelligence agencies, Interpol, airport and port authorities, or the military. On one occasion, for instance, we were able to stop the import into Britain of lethal material disguised as wine in bottles with a very plausible label, because we had been tipped off by our contacts in Germany. Among our foreign advising experts was the head of the Small Arms Section of the Smithsonian in Washington, D.C.

The Nature of the Archive

We built, often at grave personal risk to ourselves, a unique and irreplaceable collection of documents and recordings; lists of names of terrorist groups and individuals; photographs of perpetrators, victims, crime scenes, battlefields; descriptions and assessments of weapons and explosives.

The recordings included interviews I held with former terrorists who had served time in prison and wanted not just to return to normal life, but having come genuinely to regret their crimes, wanted to help oppose terrorism as a form of reparation. They would tell me about their organization’s membership, methods, aims, actions and plans. It was easy for them to get in touch with us. Although our address was secret, our telephone number was in the directory. They would call and I’d make an appointment to meet them in a public place, usually a busy hotel.

Our chief archivist, Ian Geldard, was a brilliant researcher with an extraordinary talent for discovery and detection. Once, at the height of the scare of bombs in planes, he packed a suitcase with the apparatus of a time-bomb, including fake explosive, then passed with it through X-ray machines between London’s Heathrow airport and Berlin’s Tempelhof and back again without being stopped, proving how dangerously untrustworthy the “safety measures” were. We informed the media and the airport authority of the experiment and its results. The report was filed in our archive along with many others.

My co-director Bernhard Adamczewski and I traveled across Europe, together and separately, to gather information firsthand. He found a “wanted” German terrorist in Vienna and informed the local police of the man’s whereabouts. We visited battlefields in the Middle East and pulled bloodstained documents from the rubble of bombed terrorist offices and encased them in transparent plastic covers to be photocopied. The copies were translated and filed. I came upon the deserted camp of one west African terrorist organization where, in the rows of desks in the classrooms, there were exercise books in which students had taken down lessons extolling Soviet Communism as the ideal system. The course had been run by graduates of Moscow’s Patrice Lumumba University. Those proofs that the organization was serving the interests of the USSR went back to London with me and entered our archive. 

The Uses of the Archive  

Once we had come into existence, legislators, the press, law enforcement, the transport and travel industries no longer had to rely on the announcements put out by terrorist groups themselves to know what they were doing, what they intended to do, and why. We supplied dependable information to members of Parliament, scholars, news channels, individual reporters and investigative journalists, airport and seaport authorities. We co-operated with the police in Britain, including the terrorist section of Scotland Yard’s Special Branch, and were several times able to give helpful information to law enforcement in other Western and allied countries.

I commissioned experts to write about particular terrorist organizations. We published their work as booklets in distinctive uniform yellow covers.  We co-convened two international conferences, one with the Institute for European Defence and Strategic Studies, one with London University’s Faculty of Laws which was opened by the Home Secretary. All this was done with the aim of promoting a shared understanding among Western policy-makers that terrorism was an inexcusable evil, regardless of the cause, however high, in the name of which it was carried out.

The archive established that almost all the terrorist groups in the First World and its allies between 1969 and 1990 were supported with training, and/or funding, arms, asylum, by Soviet Russia. (A few were affiliated with China.) I called their actions the hot spots of the Cold War.

With the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and the defeat of the USSR in 1991, most of the terrorist wars in the West came to end. And since we had found and reported that most of them were Soviet sponsored, donors to our institute concluded that our usefulness was also at an end. In 1990, donations stopped. Businesses no longer asked for assessments of danger. I warned that the era of terrorism was not over, but few believed me. Hamas, a terrorist branch of the Muslim Brotherhood, was in power in Gaza and using terrorist methods against Israel. The ayatollahs governing Iran were supporting Hezbollah in Lebanon. Though I did not know that Osama bin Laden was just getting started with his organization al-Qaeda (so the colossal atrocity of 9/11 was already in the womb of time), I saw that the mass immigration of Muslims into the West meant that Europe and America could become targets of terrorism in furtherance of Islamic jihad.

Reluctantly, I closed the Institute and sought a permanent home for the archive. Its obvious guardian would be a university. I anticipated that our records, solidly proving the guilt of two Communist regimes for promoting decades of mass murder in the West, would be a permanent resource for historians of the Cold War.

The Archive Bought by a University  

The University of Leicester bought the archive in 1993. There, I thought, it will be safe. In due course the University archivist who had inspected the archive and negotiated the deal to acquire it, invited me and Ian Geldard to see how they were organizing it. They named it, with my approval, “The Becker-Adamczewski Archive of the Institute for the Study of Terrorism”. We were shown that published books were separately accommodated on the shelves of the main library, and that the bulk of the collection was to be kept in a special building, bought and adapted for the purpose of housing special collections. It was called the Scarman Centre for the Study of Public Order and was under the department of Criminology. Our archive was one of the first two to be put in it – the other (we were told or I assumed) was that of Lord Scarman himself, the High Court judge.

I was not entirely happy with the decision of the university to categorize our archive under Crime. I was doubtful  that scholars would look for research material on terrorism under that heading. I would have classed it under Politics, International Affairs, War, or History, but the decision was not mine to make. I trusted that wherever it was kept, our unique and irreplaceable collection of documents, photographs, and recordings would be properly preserved and accessible to scholars.

It was a treasure for a university to possess. 

What Happened to the Archive

In 2007 I came to live in America, where I launched this website, The Atheist Conservative. In 2020, the president of Republican Atheists, Lauren Ell, posted a profile of me on their website. I had mentioned to her that the IST archive had been bought by the University of Leicester. Wanting information about it, she contacted the university – and was told that it could not be found.

As soon as Lauren Ell informed me that the archive was apparently lost, I made my own inquiry and the loss was confirmed. The building in which the greater part of it had been housed was no longer in use by the university and there was no record of where the IST research material had been moved to. However, the Head of Archives and Special Collections, Dr. Simon Dixon, let me know that he was undertaking an investigation of the loss.

Dr. Dixon did all he could to find the archive. He courteously kept me informed of the efforts he made, which were hampered by the lockdowns imposed on the university during the Covid-19 epidemic. In the late summer of 2021 he brought his search to an end. He had failed to find any remnant of the archive except the books which had been placed immediately in the university’s general library – and apparently added to with more printed material some twelve years later.

Dr. Dixon wrote to me in his final letter:

I am very sorry to report that it has not been possible to locate the full archive … My enquiries have included correspondence with current and former members of staff and a physical visit to the former School of Criminology building … [T]he printed material acquired by the University in 1993 was integrated into the Library’s main run of holdings in 2005/6 and has subsequently been managed in accordance with our collections management policies.

The rest of the archive had not been so managed. Only a trace of it – some “correspondence” – had been found:

While the unpublished archival material cannot be located, I have taken steps to ensure that a small amount of correspondence that has been recovered is preserved as part of the Archives and Special Collections for which my team are responsible. I have not given up hope that further records will come to light in future, and any additional material that I am made aware of will be permanently retained in the same way.

I am extremely sorry not to be able to provide you with more conclusive information regarding the archive at this time. …

I believe Dr. Dixon’s apology is sincerely meant, but I have received no apology or expression of regret from the University of Leicester.

If our archive was not relevant to learning, teaching and research at the University of Leicester, it could have been sold or given to some other institution. There are still some academies in America, or faculties within academies that would probably value it and make use of it. It could have been a national treasure. But it was treated as a thing of little or no value.  Why?

If one of the primary purposes of a university is to protect and hand on intellectual heritage, commitment to archive preservation is fundamental to that purpose. Perhaps the reason why the University of Leicester did not protect the IST archive was because it is now committed to erasing the past. An indication of this is in reports that the administration wants to “decolonize” the teaching of English literature by eliminating medieval studies (so Chaucer, inter alia, is to be removed from the curriculum), and “focus on ethnicity, sexuality and diversity”. 

Ceasing to teach something does not necessarily entail the destruction of materials used for teaching it. Is it likely that a university entrusted with documents of national and international importance would deliberately discard them because they are no longer useful to its teaching?  Would it choose to waste the fruits of long, hard, even dangerous effort exerted against a malign force threatening the Western world? Sadly, I suspect it would if it came to believe that the Western world was systemically at fault and needed to be transformed. But if therefore it would no longer protect documents of public importance, should it still be funded with public money?

The loss of an archive, whether by negligence or decision, is a calamity. To lose it by negligence is barbarously callous. To discard it deliberately is an act of intellectual vandalism, the equivalent of book-burning. If, in either case, a university is responsible, the disgrace must leave a permanent stain on its reputation.

Jillian Becker   January, 2022

Posted under education, History, Terrorism by Jillian Becker on Saturday, January 15, 2022

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Islamophobia is good 261

“Islamophobia” means irrational fear of Islam.

There is nothing irrational about fear of Islam. Its terrorists terrify us.

Abigail R. Esman writes (in part) at The Investigative Project on Terrorism:

Even after over 50 Islamist terror attacks in Europe and America since 9/11; and even in the face of the Taliban’s return to power in Afghanistan, a resurgent al-Qaida, and dozens of ISIS fighters about to be released from European prisons, we live with a global media that frequently appears more comfortable condemning counterterror policy and strategy than with criticizing the terrorists themselves.

In other words, they have bought fully into the notion, oft-promoted by Islamist groups, that any criticism of radical Islamist ideology – including even satirical cartoons – is to be reviled as “Islamophobia”.  It’s a notion that translates into a near-hatred of the United States; and if criticism of Islamism is “Islamophobia”, then what we are seeing can only be described as putting forth a form of “Ameriphobia” in its place.

That subversive rag the New York Times says that after 9/11, Muslim women chose to “lean into their Muslim identity”. Abigail Esman comments:

This statement is disturbing. Why is this the “identity” they choose? Why not their American identity? Their careers? Their womanhood? Why not their chance to represent Muslim women who are not covered [do not wear a hijab or burqa], who oppose the patriarchal honor-based systems of conservative Islam, or who work to counteract the violent ideologies of Islamist extremists?

More disturbing: why are these women – the ones who have chosen to identify as Muslim first, and not American, the ones who exalt the principles and values of Islamism and not the Enlightenment –  the “leaders” that the media choose to celebrate?

We quote from our own post When hate is a virtue, November 29, 2017:

If you are liberal in the true meaning of the word – a lover of freedom for everyone; if you are tolerant and broad-minded; if you believe that all persons should be equal before the law; if you believe that individuals should not be judged according to the ethnic group they “belong” to; if you believe that it is of no concern to you how one adult satisfies his or her sexual desires with another willing adult (or adults) in private; if you believe that no one should have his (“he” being the generic masculine for the human species) life taken from him unless he has taken a life; if you believe that torture is wrong;  that slavery is wrong; that depriving a person of his hands and feet as a punishment for theft is wrong; if you believe that no one should be held fast in a hole up to her chest (“her” chest because women are most commonly subjected to this) and have stones thrown at her head until she dies; if you believe in a benign god or if you do not believe that any god exists; it  is not only right and good that you hate the ideology (or religion or cult) of Islam with its sharia laws, it is a moral imperative that it be hated.  

A decent person must hate Islam. Islam cannot be liked by decent people. If a person does not hate Islam, he is not a decent person.

It does not mean that individual Muslims deserve to be hated or subjected to harsh treatment of any kind, verbal, physical, or legal. Most Muslims are born into the cult, and have great difficulty leaving it if they want to, because Islamic law, sharia, prescribes death for those who do. Non-Muslims who convert to Islam deserve contempt but not persecution.

Because …

Islam is supremacist, totalitarian, homophobic, misogynist, murderous, and savagely cruel. 

No one who hasn’t been in a coma for the last twenty years needs proof of it. Who has not been informed that Islam’s jihad is against all non-Muslims, and that wherever Islam rules it oppresses non-Muslims? Who has not seen the photos of men being thrown off rooftops to their deaths because they have been accused of homosexuality?  Who does not know that Islam insists on the subjugation of women to the absolute authority of men? Who genuinely doubts that for the last few decades most acts of terrorism everywhere in the world have been perpetrated by Muslims? Who has not seen at least some of the snuff films put out by ISIS of rows of men having their heads sawn off, caged prisoners being set on fire, human heads on poles along the sides of streets, uncovered mass graves of suffocated women and children, people in  tanks being drowned? And of kids – boys under twelve years old – trained by ISIS to decapitate men? And of women being stoned to death? And of hands being chopped off in a public place watched by a crowd including children? Who hasn’t heard of children being used as bombs?

And who hasn’t heard Western government spokesmen saying over and over again, a thousand times, that all this “has nothing to do with Islam” ?

Yet in Europe and Britain, those who hate – or are even merely suspected of hating – Islam, are punished by the law. British police spend so much time hunting down and charging people suspected of expressing hatred of Islam, they have no time, money or personnel left to pursue criminals. All West European governments are stupidly ready to let Muslims take power, in the name of democracy, which of course the Muslims are only too happy to exploit. When democratic process has brought them to power, they will impose their tyranny. Democracy will end because it can only work for a virtuous people, since “Only a virtuous people are capable of freedom,” Benjamin Franklin said. It’s a regrettable but incontrovertible fact that people who are virtuous can also be abysmally stupid.

In all West European countries, ever more rigorous surveillance of people’s internet communications is urged by governments so they can be arrested, tried, and imprisoned if they tweet or post criticism of the abominable ideology. (We are still free to criticize Islam in the United States, but in almost no other Western country.) They are accused of “Islamophobia”  – an irrational fear of Islam. But it is entirely rational to fear Islam. Making non-Muslims afraid of it is a prescribed religious duty, called jihad. Jihad is holy war against all non-Muslims.

If you are not a Muslim, you are not innocent according to Islamic teaching. Children, even new-born babies, are guilty and deserve severe punishment. If you are not a Muslim, you are a sinner by definition, you offend the Muslim god, and your punishment should be death. Or you can be enslaved. Or you can pay to be allowed to live. Your death can be brought about by any means, however violent, however painful, however cruel. You can be blown into pieces by a bomb. You can be put in a cage and burnt to death. You can be crucified. You can be stoned. You can be drowned. You can be buried alive.  You can have your head sawn off.

Adolf Hitler and Karl Marx believed that people of certain races they considered inferior should be exterminated; Muhammad believed that all people except Muslims should be exterminated.

To condemn all three idealists for advocating mass murder, and in the case of Hitler and Muhammad carrying out mass murder, is obviously the right thing to do.

If for holding that opinion, and saying so, we provoke Muslims and their apologists into calling us “Islamophobic”, then so be it; that is what we are and what everyone should be.

Posted under Islam, jihad, Muslims, Terrorism by Jillian Becker on Sunday, October 10, 2021

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The weakening of America 74

Is it all over for America as the world’s one-and-only, unchallengeable, superpower?

Despairing thinkers on the Right think so.

Roger Kimball writes in part at American Greatness:

“Never forget [9/11].” “We remember.”  The sentiment [is] invariably bolstered with reminiscences of loss and heroism.

The loss and the heroism are real, no doubt, but I am afraid that admonitions about remembering seem mostly manufactured. How could they not? Clearly, we have not remembered …

We spent 20 years and trillions of dollars in Afghanistan—for what? To try to coax it into the 21st century and assume the “woke” perspective that has laid waste the institutions of American culture, from the universities to the military?

Certain aspects of that folly seem darkly comic now, such as our efforts to raise the consciousness of the locals by introducing them to conceptual art and decadent Western ideas of “gender equity”. The explicit cost for such gender programs was $787 million; the real cost was much higher because “gender goals” were folded into almost every initiative we undertook in Afghanistan. …

The dissolution of the British Empire—one of the most beneficent and enlightened political forces in history—took place for many reasons … Part of the reason for its dissolution was inner uncertainty, weariness, a failure of nerve. By the middle of the last century, Britain no longer wished to rule: it wanted to be liked.

The promiscuous desire to be liked, for states as much as for individuals, is a profound character flaw. …

When we ask what nurtures terrorists, what allows them to flourish and multiply, one important answer concerns the failure of authority, which is the failure to live up to the responsibilities of power.

Christopher Bedford writes at The Federalist;

How many are willing to confront the deep, decades-long rot that is the actual reason we lost in Afghanistan?

America is sick. …  If we don’t make the choice to confront [that fact] directly, it will kill us.

In his view the decline has been recent and rapid:

If all of these things — that riot and that disease, and the ever present specter of racism — were to disappear right now never to be seen again, this country would still be very, very sick. The United States — our home — would still be feeble compared to five years ago, let alone 10, 15 or 30.

Mark Steyn said in an address to the Gatestone Institute that China’s “moment” has come, and the “transfer” of superpower status has already begun:

We were told a generation or two back that, by doing trade with China, China would become more like us. Instead, on issues such as free speech, we are becoming more like China.

American companies are afraid of offending China. American officials are afraid of offending China. We are adopting Chinese norms on issues such as free speech and basic disagreements with the government of China. …

Everything we need comes from China. China not only gives us the virus, we are also dependent on China to give us the personal protective equipment ‑ all the masks and everything ‑ that supposedly protect us from the virus. …

We’re living in the early stages of a future that is the direct consequence of poor public policy over the last couple of generations. …

Right now, we are witnessing a non‑stop continuous transfer of power to a country that is serious about using that power. This is China’s moment. My great worry is that actually, the transfer to China has already happened. The baton has already been passed. We just haven’t formally acknowledged that yet.

America has been a benign superpower, as was Britain in the nineteenth century.

Communist China will not be benign.

If America’s decadence, its putrid sentimentality, its self-abasement, its effeminization allow China to become the next world-dominating power, the Leftists, the anti-white racists, the “woke” liars and cheats who now rule America will learn too late what “systemic” oppression really is.

Will the rest find that sufficient compensation for the loss of freedom?

Freedom’s extinction 298

The video in the post below this one ends with a quoted message from President George W. Bush.

But Bush has much to do with the final victory this year, 2021, of the jihadis whose fellow Muslim terrorists perpetrated the 9/11 atrocity.

Bruce Bawer explains why at Front Page:

On 9/11, the world was shown, in one horrific, indelible image, precisely what Islam is all about. Today, to write the previous sentence is to be guilty of Islamophobia. How did that come to be?

It began in the days after 9/11 itself, when George W. Bush – by repeatedly insisting that the cause of the jihadists had nothing to do with Islam – effectively ruled out of bounds any criticism of that religion, or any honest education and open discussion about it. Instead, Bush – who had gotten it into his head that all religions are basically good, and who was manipulated by advisors who wanted to project American power in a part of the world about which they knew very little – used 9/11 as an excuse to rein in Americans’ civil liberties and go nation-building abroad.

It was a massive folly, doomed to failure. Why doomed? Because Islam is utterly irreconcilable with American-style freedom and incapable of reform, at least not without a far more aggressive effort than America was willing to commit to. Unlike America, moreover, Islam has a long memory. Muslims recall their forebears’ foiled attempts to conquer the Christian West at Tours in 732 and Vienna in 1683; the attacks of 9/11 were part of a history of such actions that goes back to Islam’s earliest days. Yet few Westerners know about this history or are aware that 9/11 was part of it.

Indeed, how many Westerners know, even now, that the word Islam means submission? For a long time, America was the ultimate symbol of the refusal to submit: in World War II, we took on powerful enemies on two fronts and won; during the Cold War, we protected the Free World from Communist takeover. But the Muslim wars we entered into after 9/11 were different. We were hobbled by leaders who refused to name the enemy – and by a corrosive victim culture, born in the academy but rapidly spreading into the mainstream, that divided Americans into oppressed and oppressor classes. It was Muslims who had attacked us on 9/11, and had done so in accordance with their prophet’s directives; but even as our armed forces in Iraq and Afghanistan labored to overcome social ills in those countries that were the direct result of Islam’s baleful centuries-long influence, our elites began painting Islam as beautiful and peaceful while casting Muslims in the role of America’s ultimate victims.

So little did Americans understand about Islam as of 2008 that they elected as their president a man who was the son and stepson of Muslims and who’d spent much of his childhood in the Muslim nation of Indonesia, where he’d been registered at schools as a Muslim, taken Koran classes, worn Muslim garb, and attended mosque. … Delivering an address at Al-Azhar University in Cairo shortly after his inauguration, the new president hailed Islam’s purported contributions to human civilization, inventing an entire alternate history that replaced primitive violence with advanced learning and scientific discovery. If Bush had whitewashed Islam, Obama exalted it, shifting the Overton window even further away from candor about Islamic fundamentals in the direction of sheer fantasy – and deference.

The only “misinformation” about Islam that persists in America is the kind served up regularly in places like the New York Times by way of prettifying what is, in reality, an exceedingly poisonous ideology.

By the Times’s highly dishonest standards … it’s an act of vicious bigotry to take Islamic theology seriously, to deal with Islamic terrorism responsibly, or to acknowledge the link between Muslim belief and violent jihad. As for that so-called surge in anti-Muslim violence, it’s as much of a canard as the bogus statistics on campus rape, spread by the Council on American-Islamic Relations and its comrades on the left, none of whom ever dare to speak honestly about the violence (largely anti-Jewish) committed by Muslims in the West – or about the bloodthirsty decimation by Middle Eastern Muslims, during the last two decades, of Christian and Jewish communities in that region. No, Muslims must always be portrayed as victims – and that includes portraying them, unforgivably, as the leading victims of 9/11.

The election to Congress of someone like Ilhan Omar – a vile anti-Semite and America-hater with terrorist ties – is not something to celebrate. …

 In Western Europe … Muslims are approaching 10% of the population [bringing] the rapid spread of no-go zones, the huge rise in violent crime, the destructive force of mass welfare dependency [and] the official persecution (and prosecution) of critics of Islam. [The Times does not] cite any of the many deadly jihadist attacks that have taken place since 9/11 on both sides of the Atlantic. …

In a saner world, needless to say, it would be considered risible for the Times to run an article bemoaning the “fear-based narrative around Islam” at precisely the moment when the Taliban, having retaken Afghanistan, is back in business destroying artworks and musical instruments, beating up journalists, forcing women back into burkas and girls into sex slavery, and beheading apostates (among others) and desecrating their remains in the gruesomest of ways. But the West today is not that saner world in which it would be admirable to speak frankly about such matters; on the contrary, it’s a world that’s been shaped since 9/11 by people like those who call the shots at the Times – a world in which it’s unacceptable to admit that the Taliban’s current actions are thoroughly consistent with the teaching of orthodox Islam, but where it’s obligatory to condemn as racist even a tame effort by Donald Trump to prevent entry into the U.S. by devout Muslims who support the Taliban’s actions.

This is where we stand, 20 years after 9/11: the West is awash in lies and cowardice; while the shady likes of Omar and Rashida Tlaib flex their muscles in Congress, while hustlers … brainwash students at our most prestigious universities, while degraded legacy media like the Times continue to sugarcoat Islam, and while a perfidious pol like British MP Stella Creasy feels obliged to say in the House of Commons that the Taliban’s iniquities are “not Islam”, brave truth-tellers on the topic, like Geert Wilders in the Netherlands and Lars Hedegaard in Denmark, are put on trial, even as another, Robert Spencer, is banned from the U.K., and still another, Ayaan Hirsi Ali, must live with bodyguards around the clock. …

Well, we rained down hell on Afghanistan and Iraq. By force of arms, we repelled the Taliban and ISIS and al-Qaeda, but we then failed in the absurd drive to turn those countries into simulacra of the free society that America had once been but was quickly evolving away from. In the immediate aftermath of the 9/11 attacks, George W. Bush said that the terrorists had lost, because the attacks had brought Americans together. Would Bush say now that the terrorists lost? Twenty years on, under the disgraceful Biden, America feels like a damaged and diminished nation – its power weakened, its alliances shaken, its once-unshakable core beliefs largely shattered, not least by the suicidal compulsion to speak well of Islam (as well as of our enemies in China and of the savage gang members who flood across our Southern border, and whom Nancy Pelosi defended with as much passion – “we’re all God’s children,” she gushed about MS-14 – as Hillary Clinton brought to bear in insulting the “deplorables” of middle America).

To many Americans, especially the young, patriotism now sounds quaint, if not outright offensive; in the view of those who hold the future of America in their hands, saluting the flag and singing the national anthem are for “white supremacists”.

The America that al-Qaeda struck at on 9/11 is no more; and 9/11 itself, and our tragically misguided response to it, are a very big part of the reason why. Islam plays a long game.

President Biden’s indifference to the parents of the thirteen American armed-forces members killed in Afghanistan spoke volumes. All too many of our elites now view GIs who’ve been wounded or killed fighting Muslims as an embarrassment – as relics of a benighted era when we resisted Islam instead of bowing to it.

All those firefighters racing up the stairs of the Twin Towers on 9/11? Todd Beamer shouting “Let’s roll!” as he and some of his fellow passengers on United Airlines Flight 93 rushed the cockpit to foil the Al-Qaeda thugs? In the eyes of many of our most bien pensant types today, these are wince-inducing images – now worn into corny, cloying clichés – that no civilized individual would dredge up any longer except out of sheer Islamophobia.

The other day, when Secretary of State Antony Blinken and CENTCOM commander Kenneth McKinsey actually praised the Taliban for its cooperativeness, it seemed clear that the mantra of “America bad, Islam good” had triumphed utterly over the values that the overwhelming majority of Americans of both parties once shared.

So it is that, after the fall of Kabul, many of us who, not so long ago, considered America almost immune to the ideological plagues of Europe and elsewhere find ourselves nothing less than shell-shocked, haunted by Ronald Reagan’s cautionary words about freedom never being more than a generation away from extinction.

The last generation that valued America and freedom is passing away. The generation of their destruction – led by some still extant but aged pioneers of hatred for both – has now arisen.

Remembering 9/11 117

Posted under Islam, jihad, Terrorism, United States by Jillian Becker on Friday, September 10, 2021

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Muhammad’s savages axe our civilization 0

Could there be a picture that better conveys the primitive savagery of the Taliban than this?

Or that better symbolizes the decline and fall of our civilization?

Image

From Jihad Watch.

Posted under Afghanistan, Islam, jihad, Muslims, Terrorism by Jillian Becker on Friday, September 10, 2021

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