The excellent Bruce Bawer writes at FrontPage:

In the last few days a new chapter has been added to the storied saga of the 41-year-old British activist, author, and citizen journalist Tommy Robinson. On Friday, upon his return to Britain after several weeks abroad, he was taken into police custody – an event he had expected and discussed publicly before flying back home – and charged with several “offenses.” One of the charges, contempt of court, relates to his documentary Silenced, which premiered in July at a screening in Trafalgar Square and has been viewed on X more than 50 million times. In that documentary, Tommy gathered ample witness testimony showing that Jamal Hijazi, a Syrian refugee portrayed in the British media as the victim of bullying at the school he attended in Huddersfield, West Yorkshire, in 2018, was not a victim but was, in fact, himself a bully – and a rather horrible one, at that.

What, then, was Tommy’s crime? He’d been ordered by a judge not to contradict the official narrative about Hijazi – specifically, not to describe him as “aggressive and bullying” or as “threatening,” even if he was aggressive and bullying and threatening. A second contempt-of-court charge was leveled at Tommy for several related “offenses,” such as discussing the Hijazi case in an interview with Jordan Peterson, holding that July screening in Trafalgar Square, and posting Silenced on X and YouTube. In addition to the contempt charges, Tommy was charged under the Terrorism Act for refusing to provide the police with access to the contents of his mobile phone, which include material that would compromise his sources.

On Saturday, supporters of Tommy held a “Unite the Kingdom” rally in London, turning out in such significant numbers that, as the Guardian put it, “the demonstration spilled out from its meeting point around Victoria Station.” The Guardian made sure to point out that the protesters, many of whom were treated to an outdoor screening of his new documentary, Lawfare, were “mostly male, white and middle-aged” (all bad things, of course) and that many of them were waving Union Jacks (that most toxic of items). Meanwhile counter-protesters took part in a rally arranged by a leftist group called Stand Up to Racism.

Aside from his documentaries, Tommy has also written (and self-published) a couple of books. Enemy of the State (2015) is an autobiography that focuses on his demonization by the British government, which finds his determination to expose monstrous Islamic crimes inconvenient, distasteful, and threatening to “community cohesion.” His second book, written with Peter McLoughlin, is entitled Muhammed’s Koran (2017). His newest, Manifesto: Free Speech, Real Democracy, Peaceful Disobedience, also written with McLoughlin, came out on October 4, but when I looked for it on Amazon UK it was identified as being “currently unavailable.” After trying to find some other way of acquiring the book online, I was finally able to secure a copy through the good offices of a friend of mine who is also a chum of Tommy’s. (On October 25, Tommy – or somebody – posted at his X account that orders for the book could be placed at a dedicated website and that new copies would be available this week.)

What to say about Manifesto? Put it this way: the authors show that Tommy’s previous topics – the reality of the Islamic threat and the British government’s determination to crush Islam’s critics – are only two details in a much bigger picture. In the U.S., the MAGA movement is a rebellion against America’s unelected but powerful Deep State, a.k.a. The Swamp, which has its equivalents in pretty much every Western country. And as Tommy and McLoughlin note, it’s been around, at least in the U.K., for a long time. Two centuries ago, the English writer William Cobbett (1763-1835) called it “The Thing”; in America, a century or so later, Jack London (1876-1916), of Call of the Wild fame, coined his own name for it – “The Oligarchy” – in the obscure 1908 novel The Iron Heel. Throughout Manifesto, Tommy and McLoughlin use this term to describe the Deep State of our own day, mostly in the U.K.

To be sure, they do devote a degree of attention to “The Oligarchy” in America and other countries – for example the Netherlands, where Pim Fortuyn, a fierce opponent of the immigration policy of the Dutch establishment, was murdered on May 6, 2002, only days before an election after which he probably would have become prime minister. His killer was routinely identified in the Dutch media as an animal-rights activist, but he also despised Fortuyn’s criticism of Islam, hence the assassination. Shockingly, the killer was released from prison after only twelve years and allowed to take a new name under which he could start a new life. As Tommy and McLoughlin point out, theories about possible Deep State involvement in Fortuyn’s murder – theories not unlike those that have been proffered for decades by researchers into the JFK assassination – are now being served up by Dutch commentators.

But Tommy and McLoughlin’s major emphasis is on The Oligarchy in Britain. One fact of which many Americans have become aware since the beginning of the Trump era is that our own Swamp creatures aren’t exclusively Democrats; on the contrary, Deep State operatives – whether they work on Capitol Hill, or for a think tank, or at the FBI or CIA or DoD or IRS, or as lobbyists, or in the legacy media or military-industrial complex – can be found in both major parties. The same is true in Britain, where the Tories held power from 2010 to 2024 without doing anything significant to reform the scandalously mediocre NHS, to reduce the country’s sky-high immigration levels, to address the Muslim “grooming [i.e. child rape] gangs” that can be found in cities all over England, or to protect critics of Islam from arrest, prosecution, and imprisonment.

Things were, as Tommy and McLoughlin observe, scarcely different a century ago. The playwright George Bernard Shaw (1856-1950), revered, then as now, by Britain’s cultural elite, was nominally a socialist; the politician Oswald Mosley (1896-1980), reviled, then as now, by the same cultural elite, was nominally a fascist. But there was really little in the way of an ideological gap between them. Both admired Hitler and Mussolini; both looked kindly upon the idea of eugenics-based extermination (in 1938, GBS published a newspaper article entitled “Heil Hitler”); both advocated for a welfare state that limited individual rights. In fact both GBS and Mosley were Fabians – members of the organization, established in 1884, that called for a gradual transformation of the U.K. into a hard-core socialist state and that, not incidentally, founded the London School of Economics (LSE).

In other words, both Shaw and Mosley, whether you want to call them fascists or socialists, were at the big-government end of the political spectrum – the spectrum, that is, on which the important distinction lies – and were therefore the ideological forebears of the likes of Tony Blair, who in 2006 unveiled a window at the LSE that openly celebrated the Fabians, including the Hitler–loving GBS. At the other end of that spectrum were people like the brilliant politician and scholar Enoch Powell (1912-1998) – whose brave, prophetic dissent from The Oligarchy’s mass- immigration policy in his 1968 “Rivers of Blood” speech led to his immediate expulsion from the political elite and his labeling as a “fascist.” In reality, Powell was no more a fascist than Donald Trump is – on the contrary, he was, like Trump, a patriot and a populist who was deeply concerned about the deleterious impact of Deep State policies on the native inhabitants of his own country.

Also at the small-government end of the spectrum, needless to say, was Margaret Thatcher, who, Tommy and McLoughlin suggest, was expelled from the prime ministership because she’d started to challenge the growing power of the EU. They also speculate that if Thatcher had managed to triumph over the coup that removed her from power, she might well, within the next few years, have acted upon Powell’s warnings and restricted immigration dramatically – an action that would have made today’s Britain a very different country indeed from the one that is, thanks to The Oligarchy, well on its way to having a minority British population.

Granted, the overall message of Manifesto – about the perils of rule by a globalist, authoritarian elite and the drastic need for a democratic, populist shake-up – will hardly be new to readers of this website. And the voice throughout most of the book, if it matters to you, sounds less like that of Tommy, a plainspoken working-class bloke, and more like that of a historical scholar – in this instance, McLoughlin, who has an academic background and has written a book about Oliver Cromwell and another entitled The Pattern of History and Fate of Humanity. No matter who wrote what in Manifesto, however, the value of this book lies not in its main argument but in its many illuminating specifics – from its perceptive account of the enduring significance of Orwell’s Animal Farm (1945) to the long, highly detailed chapter pondering the relevance of the gold standard, cryptocurrencies, and other economic phenomena to the mechanisms by which the Deep State exercises its control.

But, alas, some of the branches of The Oligarchy – in this case, the publishing houses that refused to put out Manifesto and the bookstores that refuse to stock it – are doing their best to make it difficult for you to get a copy of it. Meanwhile, other branches – namely the police and judiciary – are intent on barring you from being able to hear Tommy. On Monday morning, a court hearing was held to determine whether Tommy – who has previously served long, hellish terms behind bars after “trials” that were models of injustice, and who was most recently arrested this past June in Canada after giving a speech in Calgary – would yet again be sent to prison.

At the hearing, which took place at Woolrich Crown Court in London, the prosecution maintained that this case wasn’t about Tommy’s politics or “even directly a case about freedom of expression,” but rather “about the disobedience to a court order, and the undermining of the rule of law that goes with that” – never mind that the court order itself was preposterous. When the judge [Sir Jeremy Charles Johnson, 53] issued his ruling, he read it, noted Ezra Levant of Rebel News, who was tweeting from the courtroom, “from his computer,” leading Levant to wonder: “How can he do that, given that there was literally no pause at all after the submissions by the lawyers? Did he pre-write this? How does that work?” Good questions.

And what was the ruling? No surprise: Tommy was sentenced to 18 months in prison, of which he will serve half – probably in solitary confinement, given that British prisons are dominated and controlled by Muslim gangsters, who would tear him to bits otherwise. In short, in a country that is scared to properly punish the Muslim rapists he’s exposed, Tommy is essentially being sentenced once again to the Hotel Graybar for telling a truth of which The Oligarchy disapproves. As Levant put it, “In the U.K., the government is now the arbiter of truth.” Of course George Orwell, whom Tommy and McLoughlin discuss in Manifesto, saw all of this coming in 1984, in which the role of Oceania’s Ministry of Truth is to disseminate lies and suppress facts.

Oh, well. Yet another disgraceful day for British justice – and the beginning of yet another season in hell for Tommy Robinson. What can you do? If you haven’t done it already, start by watching Silenced online – and thank Elon Musk for not having taken it down. And what else can you do? Ponder what my friend Valerie Price of Act for Canada wrote to me about Tommy the other day: “He is my personal hero and yet it must be said that all he has done to become heroic is something that we all can do, should do, and must do: he has spoken the truth.”

The leader of the Hamas savages who invaded Israel and perpetrated the atrocities of October 7, 2023, has been killed by Israeli forces. 

Joel B. Pollak writes at Breitbart:

The IDF suspected that Sinwar may have been inadvertently killed after soldiers directed tank fire at a building in which three terrorists had been spotted. Afterwards, infantry soldiers discovered, to their surprise, a body that resembled Sinwar.

The body was taken to Israel for further examination, including dental, DNA, and fingerprint verification. It is unclear how many of these checks were completed before Israeli officials concluded that the dead body was indeed Sinwar’s.

According to Israel’s Army Radio, Sinwar was found with passports on his body, as well as a quantity of cash. He was apparently trying to flee Gaza to Egypt, leaving Hamas and the Palestinian people behind as he attempted to escape.

Sinwar was once thought to have surrounded himself with hostages to prevent Israel from killing him in an airstrike. On Thursday it was revealed that those hostages were the ones executed in a tunnel in late August, including U.S. citizen Hersh Goldberg-Polin, as Israeli soldiers closed in. Sinwar had evidently been on the run ever since.

His body was found next to those of senior Hamas commanders known to be close to him.

The Biden-Harris administration had, just days earlier, threatened Israel with an arms embargo unless it did more to “surge” aid into Gaza and trimmed its military operations there. Harris had also pushed for a ceasefire earlier in the war, even before the release of hostages had been achieved. Other nations, such as France, had called for an arms embargo to stop the war.

Sinwar was killed near the Philadelphi corridor in southern Gaza, on the Gaza-Egypt border, an area from which the Biden-Harris administration had been urging Israel to withdraw for a ceasefire deal.

Israelis are now hoping Sinwar’s death can bring about the release of the remaining 101 hostages, more than half of whom may still be alive. There are also hopes for an end to the war in Gaza.

Israeli defense minister Yoav Gallant declared: “Israel today closed an account of many years’ standing with Yahya Sinwar. The IDF will pursue everyone who harms our people and our forces, and will settle accounts with him.”

One year and ten days after his hellish invasion, the fiend of (secular) SIN and WAR has been killed by Israelis.

A day to celebrate. Annually. 

*

Noah Pollak writes at X:

If you are celebrating the elimination of Sinwar, you should also be celebrating the premiership of Bibi Netanyahu. No other Israeli leader would have stayed in the fight this long and achieved this victory. Since weeks after 10/7, the pressure on Israel from the Democratic Party, Europe, the UN, the media, the western foreign policy and political establishment, etc, to cut a deal, to agree to a “ceasefire,” to surrender, has been unrelenting and enormous. And for a full year, the leader of a tiny and vulnerable country has resisted and outmaneuvered the pressure to stop fighting. It’s a remarkable achievement, and it’s the real reason Sinwar is dead.

Gerard Baker writes at the Wall Street Journal, of which he is an Editor-at-Large:

How will we ever repay the debt we owe Israel?

What the Jewish state has done in the past year—for its own defense, but in the process and not coincidentally for the security of all of us—will rank among the most important contributions to the defense of Western civilization in the past three-quarters of a century.

Having been hit with a devastating attack on its people, beyond the fetid imagining of some of the vilest antisemites, Israel has in 12 months done nothing less than redraw the balance of global security, not just in the region, but in the wider world.

It has eliminated thousands of the terrorists whose commitment to a savage theocratic ideology has claimed so many lives across the region and the world for decades. It has, with extraordinary tactical accuracy, dispatched some of the masterminds of the worst evil on the planet, including most recently Hassan Nasrallah, the Hezbollah leader in Lebanon. It has repelled and then reversed the previously inexorably advancing power of one of the world’s most terrifying autocracies, the Islamic Republic of Iran. It has demonstrated to all the West’s foes, including Iran’s allies in Moscow and Beijing, that our system of free markets and free people, and the voluntary alliance network we have constructed to defend it, generates resources and capabilities of vast technical superiority. Above all, it has provided an unexpected but crucial reminder to our enemies that there are at least some willing and able to pursue and defeat them whatever the risk to our own lives and resources.

The only appropriate responses to Israel’s gallantry, fortitude and skill from us—its nominal allies, especially in the U.S.—are “thank you” and “how can we help?”

Instead, time and again Israel’s supposed friends, including the administration of Joe Biden and Kamala Harris, have, while expressing sympathy over the outrage of Oct. 7 and uttering the usual support for “Israel’s right to defend itself”, repeatedly tried to restrain it from doing just that. Their early, valuable support has been steadily diminished by the way they have too often connived with the anti-Israel extremists in their own party.

Before Israel had even buried its dead last October and as Hamas was busy murdering its hostages, there were calls for Israel to cease fire. For a year we have heard our leaders’ “balanced” condemnations of Hamas and its terror masters on the one hand and the Jewish state on the other, a false equivalence that says more about the moral disorder in our own politics than about Israel’s motives and actions.

In Europe, they have gone even further, as usual, rewarding Hamas and Hezbollah by nominally recognizing a nonexistent Palestinian state and prosecuting Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on bogus war-crimes charges.

Do they not get that in the end we have to make a choice: our ally, on the front lines of defense against barbarism or our enemies, those who literally want to see us all buried?

Fortunately for all of us, it seems Israel is prevailing despite the chorus of hecklers.

Perhaps all this sounds too blithe for skeptical readers; or at least premature given the rising expectation of a much wider conflict to come. And it is true that there has been awful loss of innocent lives in Gaza, Lebanon and elsewhere that undoubtedly fuels the ire of the enemy across the world [for which Israel is NOT to blame – ed.]

What if Mr. Netanyahu and his government’s aggressive prosecution proves a Pyrrhic victory?

But that wider conflict was perhaps always inevitable, given Iran’s stated objectives and its consistent efforts to achieve them. We can say two things tentatively about that long-feared wider confrontation. First, the strategic tactical, intelligence and technological genius Israel has demonstrated over the past year might have done so much damage to Iran’s proxy armies and their military and political leaders that they will be ill-prepared and equipped for the bigger struggle to come, and Israel—and, let’s hope, reliable allies—better placed to defeat its enemies. Second, having observed this Israeli superiority over that time and eagerness not to bring the destruction on itself a wide war would surely bring, perhaps Iran will be deterred.

Never in the field of human conflict has so much been owed by so many to so few, Winston Churchill said of the men of the Royal Air Force after they had repelled Hitler’s Luftwaffe during the Battle of Britain. 

We should echo those words today as we watch in awe what a country smaller in area than New Jersey, with a population less than North Carolina’s and an economy smaller than that of Washington state, has done for all of us.

As Israelis solemnly mark a year since Oct. 7, we should not only redouble our expressions of sympathy and solidarity. We should show them our gratitude, and if we are willing to be really honest, acknowledge a little of our own shame.

Since the purloined election of 2020, there has been NO ONE in charge of the country.

How then does the executive carry on? Easily. The agencies keep running on a fuel that is free and in inexhaustible supply – habit.

The White House is Liberty Hall. Clowning is what goes on in it. Adolescent pranks. Giggling. Everybody on the staff knows that the putative head, “Joe” Biden, is senile and unaware of what’s happening – and that he wouldn’t care anyway. He does what clowning he can himself, when he musters enough energy. Blood-red lighting, soldiers on guard, as a background to a rant of his, was his own idea.

The Cabinet and their highest offices are “manned” by freaks. Preferably women and weirdos and perverts. Preferably not white. A Health Secretary, “Admiral” Richard Levine, the biological father of two children, calls himself Rachel and wears long blond hair, frocks and jewellery. A couple of ministerial transvestites with mustaches, and make-up caked on their faces, wear showy dresses. (One of them steals women’s luggage at airports).

Those “trannies” who disported themselves in the spring on the White House lawn with an “LGBTQ” rainbow flag draped across the front of the grand building (intended originally to be a visible sign of its exalted purpose – to house the headship of the United States’ executive branch of government, the Head of State, representative of the nation), were enjoying a puerile iconoclasm, men showing off bare breasts artificially created to help them pretend they are women.

More freaks in huge wigs, clownish make-up, glittering dresses and high heels – blatantly mocking women – read to small children, in schools and libraries, graphic descriptions of perverse sexual acts. And children are encouraged to demand that their bodies be abused and mutilated with chemicals and surgical operations so that they too can pretend to be the sex they are not. The fact of biological sex is denied. Human beings, the “Democrats” say, are “assigned” a sex at birth and they can change it if they want to.  It is another lie. They traffic in lies.  The Transport Secretary, “Pete” Buttigieg, son of a devout Communist, had himself photographed sitting up in bed with a gadget strapped onto his chest which is filled with milk or baby formula so his adopted child can suck at a “nipple” and “Pete” can feel like a real mother.* To the same ridiculous end he probably has tampons prominently displayed in his bathroom. He is “married” to another man.

Young visitors to the Oval Office turn up in crumpled jeans and sweaty T-shirts. No “bourgeois formality” for them! And as the mood of the White House – turned into a carnival palace at the same time as a sty – spreads wherever “Democrats” are performing, the Senate too has become a playground. Why not – thought one young man – use the Senate building for sexual adventures? He stripped naked, knelt on all fours in a chamber used for solemn meetings and enjoyed a sodomy session which his partner filmed so that it could be – and was – shown to the nation, to the world. (Still the young pervert insists that he would “never disrespect” his workplace. Democrats not only work by habit, they lie by habit too.) Such fun! No stuffy old inhibitions allowed to restrain their liberty. To them liberty is license. Let license ring!

A packet of cocaine was found in the White House. “Joe” Biden’s son Hunter, the depraved  addict, was living there at the time. But dosing himself with illegal substances is the least of his criminal activity. The criminal corruption of the Biden family is public knowledge. Hunter did the hunting; his father the President and other relations shared the catch.

“Joe”, bribed by China, allowed its spy balloon to float all over the USA, sending pictures of military facilities, roads, railways, fields and farms, back to Beijing. Dear old Joe!  He sent billions of dollars to the tyrants of Iran while they screamed “Death to America!” He invited teeming masses from anywhere in the world to walk into the USA from Mexico, and they do. He and his Secretary of Homeland Security continue to assure the nation that the southern border is “secure” while  enemies, petty criminals, slavers, drug dealers, human traffickers, lunatics, blood-thirsty gangs, mass murderers, kidnappers, rapists, from every inhabited continent, pour unhindered into the southern states and thence into every state. Not one of them “vetted”. Millions of them must have infectious diseases, but pour in they may – and did even when US citizens were forced to distance from each other, wear masks, stop going to clinics, churches, school, rallies, sports , restaurants, theaters, shops, hairdressers, clubs … for fear of catching a “new” flu launched across the world  by Communist China.

The United States is again a country of slavery. Hundreds of thousands of kidnapped alien children, brought over the “secure” southern border by slave traffickers, are exploited as forced laborers and sex slaves.**

“Joe” said it was okay for Russia to make a small invasion of Ukraine, so Russia invaded Ukraine. “Joe” sends Ukraine enormous sums of taxpayers’ money so it can keep the war going. At the same time, while he assures Israel that his backing of its security is “iron-clad”, he goes on directly and indirectly paying Muslim terrorists to capture, torture, and kill as many Israelis as they can.

To save the world from burning up (but knowing that it will not) as a result of human beings “polluting the air” by simply carrying on with their lives, “Joe” gave notice of coming bans on gas-powered vehicles, gas stoves, oil-fired heating and cooling systems …

Everyone with any common sense knows that these decisions and actions are not really President Biden’s; they come out of the utopian dreams of his ever more demonic Democratic Party. Its aim is to reduce the population of the world from some 8 billion to 1 billion, by means of abortion, infanticide, “transgendering” treatments including mutilating surgery, homosexual marriage, euthanasia, murderous riot, extortionist taxation, surging national debt.

The outlook is dire, but roughly half the electorate votes for it. Shrinking police forces; permitting theft from stores; releasing prisoners convicted of – or deliberately not charged with – murder, rape, assault, shop-lifting, abduction, torture; tolerating encampments of lunatics and addicts on city streets – even supplying the addicts with free drugs – this is the “Democratic” program to make life for normal citizens intolerable.

The same gleeful destroyers, envious and cruel, run campaigns of anti-Semitism. They label conservatives as terrorists, peaceful protest as insurrection. Real insurrection by their own hordes of arsonists, rapists, murderers, torturers, kidnappers, thieves, they call “peaceful protest”.

Everything they touch, they ruin: education, the media, the arts, the family, childhood, health care, even the military …  At least Secretary of Defense Austin did not join in the danse macabre of ruination. When in this summer of 2024 a gang of lawyers promised the Muslim organizers of mass-murder (some 3,000 killed by Muslim plane hijackers flying into New York buildings and the Pentagon and crashing in a field in Pennsylvania on 9/11/2001) that in return for confessions of guilt they would be spared the death penalty, Austin asserted his authority and cancelled the deal. Appointed all too probably because he is black, he had been ignored and discounted by the (no doubt passionately “anti-racist”) lawyers who did not even consult him about the deal; but he refused to be overlooked. (Will he abide by that decision? Can he redeem the military from “woke” impotence? Does he want to?)

The “Democrats” don’t give a fig for democracy. They suddenly threw away millions of primary votes cast for Biden to be their nominee in the coming election and arbitrarily appointed a black woman, his Vice-President, instead of him. She’s a person of low intelligence, loose morals, alarming ignorance, and a hideous wide-open-mouthed cackle that even they formerly deplored but now – since she’s become their candidate – praise as an expression of  “joy”.  While they insist that they don’t  know what a “woman” is (except as the correct term for “transgered “ men)  they like to appoint women – preferably black – as figureheads: cabinet members, directors of agencies, prosecutors, police chiefs, ambassadors, military top brass, presidents of universities, principals of schools … so why not now one of them – the more ill-informed and incompetent the better since she mustn’t actually make decisions or do anything – as Head of State, Commander-in-Chief, Keeper of the Nuclear Codes?

Will the People let that happen? As former President Trump often says, “We must wait and see.”

And we must vote for him to be our 47th. president.

 

Notes:

*I’ve been told that this photograph was a fake. Okay, but I maintain it told the truth about Buttigieg the way fiction can tell the truth about reality.

**From the New York Post, August 21, 2024:  “The Biden-Harris administration has lost track of more than 320,000 migrant children who crossed the border without parents, according to a shocking new report.”

 

Jillian Becker   August 26, 2024

Photo:Evan Vucci / AP

 

Volumes will be written about the scene in this picture.

Donald Trump was a great man even before a would-be assassin’s bullet hit his ear as he began to speak on Saturday, July 13, 2024, at a campaign rally in Butler, Pennsylvania, attended by tens of thousands of his passionately enthusiastic supporters. If the bullet had hit his head a centimeter further forward, or further back, or further up, it would have killed him. He ducked down, and when he rose again it was to the towering height of a political martyr. He raised his fist high, shouting his defiance, “Fight!”  – and won a permanent place among the greatest men in history. 

Despicable “Democrats” – and Leftists of every stripe – will try to bring him down. Corrupted institutions of the federal state will “investigate” the attempted assassination and find the victim guilty and themselves blameless.

But try as they will they cannot reduce his stature by so much as a centimeter.

*

Excerpts from Mark Steyn’s comment (italics and ellipses in the original):

Let’s cut to the chase – the US Secret Service: In on it? Or just totally crap?

And yet and yet… it’s hard to believe even these guys could be this crap.

A goofball barely out of high school hatched a plan to have Donald Trump’s head explode in close-up on live TV – and, wittingly or otherwise, the world’s most flush money-no-object security state did their best to help him pull it off.

What’s the old line? When seconds count, the police are minutes away? Not at a Secret Service event: even when the police are on site in massive overwhelming numbers, they’re still minutes away.

Not long before shots rang out, rallygoers noticed a man climbing to the roof of a nearby building and warned local police, according to two law enforcement officials.

One local police officer climbed to the roof and encountered Crooks, who pointed his rifle at the officer. The officer retreated down the ladder, and Crooks quickly took a shot toward Trump…

Uh-huh. Actually, over half-a-dozen shots – hitting the target, killing retired fire chief Corey Comperatore, and gravely wounding two others.

Thomas Matthew Crooks took his AR-15 to a political rally. And the reason he was permitted to do so is because he was ‘outside the security perimeter’ …yet still within range of the candidate’s head.

Does that make sense even by the arseholian standards of the federal government?

No. Even in rinky-dink no-account third-rate basket-cases, it’s understood that the first job of a protection detail is to establish where the lines of fire are, and neutralise them.

Can the failure to do that really be accidental?

Yet from the decision to demarcate the easily accessible rooftop as “outside the security perimeter” all else follows. Once it was determined by the Secret Service that the building with the spiffy line of sight was beyond their purview it ceased to be of any interest to them. So that fell to local law enforcement – and a village constable shinning up the ladder.

On Saturday, America came within an inch and a second of crossing a very dark Rubicon. As Trump reveals to Michael Goodwin in The New York Post:

The doctor at the local hospital, which has a trauma center, told him he’s never seen anyone survive getting hit by an AR-15.

Indeed. Because that’s what just happened. In 1981 Reagan was hit by a revolver; forty-three years of ever more extravagant security protocols later, a loser whose greatest accomplishment was a cameo in a BlackRock ad was able to hit the head of a president with his AR-15.

And this startling fact is of less concern to a corrupted American media than the fact that a few “loud bangs” at a Trump rally might provoke, ooh, a violent backlash from the crazy Maga types…

*

Kurt Schlichter writes (in part) at Townhall:

We already know the investigation is going to be a complete cluster because there’s apparently nobody in charge. The FBI is doing some stuff, the state police is doing some other stuff, and the Secret Service seems to be in full CYA [Cover Your Ass] mode. So, we’re not going to get any information about what really happened. We’re going to get lies, and the administration is going to issue some report assuring us that it did the very best job it could, and that Donald Trump was really at fault for getting in the way of those bullets. …

What’s the political effect of this going to be? More cynicism, all of it justified, by the American people. Yet another vaunted institution has failed to perform its job adequately. We’re getting used to it. When institutions are headed by quota queens selected for their adherence to Marxist ideology rather than competence, and when they prioritize their ridiculous ideology over the job the institution is supposed to do – whether it’s the Secret Service, the FBI, the military, the NFL, the DMV … – you’re going to get failure. And we’re tired of failure.

It doesn’t have to be this way. America doesn’t work anymore. That’s why you see social media filled with video clips of people living joyously in the amazing 80s. This nostalgia is because America worked back then, and it does not work now. Joe Biden represents the failed present. The secret of Donald Trump is that he represents both our glorious past and a future where things work, and if you screw up, you hear that “You’re fired.”

And that’s why Donald Trump’s glorious defiance on stage, lifting his fist and refusing to give in, was so inspiring. He is the avatar of our vision of ourselves as Americans. They attempted to kill him, but they really wanted to kill us and, for one of us, they succeeded. It won’t work, though. They can lie about us and create fake scandals. They can try and silence us. They can try to frame us in kangaroo courts. They can try to murder us. But we’re not going to quit. We’re not going to surrender. We’re going to win.

Raise your fists, patriot. America will be great again.

Will Donald Trump’s re-election to the presidency of the United States save us? Save America? Save the world? Or not?

Mark Steyn – in our judgment the best contemporary journalist – makes a case for no, but concludes with a sort of yes.

We quote him in part:

A governing party of a serious nation so indifferent to elementary maxims of prudence that it’s prepared to invent out of whole cloth crimes with which to convict the leader of the opposition is not one you’d want to bank on to keep us from stumbling into, say, a third world war.

The ruinous Democrats invented a crime-without-a-name to charge Donald Trump with, and then declared him guilty of it.

True, “there is a great deal of ruin in a nation”. But not this much.

So … right now there is no law in America, and, in consequence, no politics. So there is no point in pretending you enjoy benefit of either, and in doing so you’re just part of the problem. …

Oh, and I see that “former federal prosecutor” William Otis has just filed a column headlined “Why a Trump Conviction Will Be Reversed”. … [H]is legal reasoning would be fine if America were a land of laws, but unfortunately it’s a land of men …

Meanwhile, back in what passes for reality in the courts of New York, the exciting bit having concluded, we are now back to the leisurely proceduralist folderol: The corrupt Judge Méchant [sic – Steyn deliberately mis-spells Merchan’s name to make the point with the French word that he is wicked – ed] has scheduled sentencing for July 11th. … Let me see now, July 11th is, oh, a mere six weeks away, which torpor is also very familiar to me: my own verdict came down in February,* but the various post-trial motions keep getting kicked down that endless road.

July 11th is also, as it happens, four days before the GOP convention is due to start in Milwaukee. So, at a time when the presidential nominee should be practising his acceptance speech in front of his bedroom mirror, he will be a thousand miles away waiting to hear whether he is to be belatedly taken down.

Thus, Judge Méchant will have once again subordinated the election calendar to the caprices of his filthy courtroom.

In theory, Trump has been convicted of a crime and could be headed to gaol. Also in theory, his term of confinement could be put on hold pending the outcome of his appeal. But they didn’t do that with Peter Navarro, did they? And it seems highly unlikely to me that they would have gone to all this trouble for a fine and a suspended sentence. They want him dead. …

How will the people react to whatever happens on July 11th? Riots in Milwaukee? One can’t help noticing that, since the brutal January 6th prosecutions to the fullest extent of the law and then bulked up with “terrorism” charges by DC judges just as bad as this New York guy, there is little appetite for what Orwell called “turbulence”.

But, either way, Democrats figure that, however Trump supporters react, they can make this work for them …

So, right now, they’re making their plans for July 11th. Is anyone on the other side?

I will add one final thought born of my own experience. I am about to begin my thirteenth year in the foetid septic tank of the District of Columbia courts. My finances are ruined, and so is my constitution. By the latter, I mean my health, not the United States Constitution, which is already dead. By contrast, I’m just about hanging on, although I very much doubt I will live long enough to be vindicated at the Supreme Court. Which is bad news for my heirs and relicts. As one of the lawyers taunted me last year, “This doesn’t end with your death.”

I’m sad about that, and would much prefer to devote the time that remains to playing music and enjoying the sunsets. I am worn out, and bitter about the books I’ll never get to write because of the way American litigation has consumed what should have been my most productive years. I have a theological objection to suicide, but would not be averse to dying in my sleep.

And that’s just with two rinky-dink cases on the go.

Trump, on the other hand, is barraged at all turns – here, there, state, federal, civil, criminal. He has been subjected to all manner of indignities – such as, just this week, having to sit in the crappy courtroom while the jury deliberates, which Judge Irving did not force me to do in DC. …

Yet [the treatment of Trump by the court and the verdict] have … made him noble and heroic.

The mega-rich guy from Mar-a-Lago and Miss Universe and Trump Tower and The Apprentice decided to dedicate his final years to doing something for all those forgotten men in towns no one knows where all the factories got shipped to China and replaced by meth labs. And in return the worthless US establishment – the guys who took America’s post-war dominance and gave it away to the Politburo in return for “ten per cent for the big guy” [Joe Biden] – set about destroying him: a half-billion appeal bond in New York, an eviction from the ballot in Maine, a lawyer forced to cop a plea and turn state’s evidence in Georgia…

As I said, I’ve got just two lousy cases, and I’m ruined by it – because utter ruination is the difference between the American legal system and the rest of the west. I have no idea how Trump withstands the assault – a Gulliver besieged by litigious Lilliputians on all sides.

Much of the United States – certainly the bits that matter – is now institutionally evil, and I am not sure that evil can be reversed, whether we’re talking about the bodily mutilation of middle-school girls or the sacrifice of a generation of a distant nation’s men in the meat-grinder of the Ukraine war. On America’s watch, the entirety of western civilisation is sliding off the cliff, and very fast – which is all anyone will remember about it.

And yet any alternative to the Uniparty consensus is not to be permitted, and must be hunted down and crushed. There is no future in the post-constitutional polity the Democrats are constructing. “Decline” is a choice … America’s death will be bloodier and more convulsive than anything seen in post-imperial Europe. Check back with me in ten years, and see who’s right.

For the moment, the Dems are, as always, three steps ahead. A lot can happen between now and July 11th, and much of it is undoubtedly already underway.

So … It is now absolutely essential that Trump be elected president.

***

 

*The case of Michael Mann versus Mark Steyn can easily be found on the internet.

In Dostoyevsky’s novel The Brothers Karamazov, Ivan, the intellectual brother, famously asks Alyosha, the religious brother, this question:

“Tell me frankly, I challenge you—answer me. Imagine you are granted the task of designing the structure of human destiny so that it would end in the happiness, peace and contentment of all mankind, but to achieve that end it is necessary, absolutely unavoidable, for you first to torture one tiny child to death—the little girl who beat her breast with her little fist, for instance—and found the edifice on her unavenged tears, would you consent to be the architect on those conditions?”

“No, I wouldn’t,” Alyosha replies. He is one of the two saintly characters in Dostoyevsky’s canon. Is he right?

His answer is the one Ivan wants. Ivan is deeply troubled by cruelty, especially when children are the victims. He has earlier related to his brother the heart-wrenching story of the suffering little girl he refers to in his question. Is the tortured agony of just one single child a price too high to pay for the lasting happiness of all mankind?

The Jewish diarist Anne Frank, before she was taken by the Nazis to die at the age of sixteen in the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp, wrote: “In spite of everything I still believe that people are really good at heart.” Was she right?

It is comfortable for us to believe that our fellow human beings are good, kind, merciful. Our language expects it. The word “humane” means it is human to be merciful. But is it?

On October 7, 2023, an invading crowd of Hamas terrorists broke into Israel from the Gaza Strip and set about torturing and killing men, women, and children. Why? Because they were Jewish citizens of the Jewish state of Israel and the invaders wanted them to suffer and die. To serve this cause, one man shut a living babe-in-arms in a heated oven. The tiny child, set down on the red-hot element, was slowly grilled and roasted to death.

The fact of the atrocity must be reported in the simplest terms because the suffering of the baby defies description. There can be no adequate words for it in any language.

Yet millions of people are thrilled by what he did. They are delighted by all the atrocities and gloat over the baby in the oven. One woman joked in a video on Instagram:

“Each time I come across the story of the baby that was put in the oven I wonder if they put salt pepper, did they add thyme, and what [fat] did they roast it in? And what were the side dishes? You don’t ask yourself the question? The side dish to this baby leg was just a classic plate of fries with ketchup and mayonnaise. And we marinated it in salt, thyme, and a barbecue sauce, and paprika. Not bad! I think it’s a rather nice menu!”

In America, Britain, Western Europe, Australia, Hamas admirers have rallied in crowds of hundreds of thousands to celebrate what their heroes did that day. “Kill the Jews,” they roar. “Kill the Jews,” their placards demand. In Washington, D.C., New York, London, Paris, Berlin, Sydney, they howl for the genocide of the Jews. Why? Because “the Jews are genocidal colonialists,” they pretend. “The Jews murder civilians, children, babies,” they lie.

In fact, mass murder and extreme cruelty are not at all untypical of human behavior. For millennia, when armies conquered cities they slew all the inhabitants with fire and sword. Kings and noblemen, east and west, had torture chambers in their castles and never lacked torturers. For centuries in Eastern Europe, Jews of all ages were murdered in pogroms.

About eighty years ago, millions of Jews—babies, toddlers, schoolkids, teenagers and adults—were shut in gas-chambers and gassed to death by the Nazis for no reason but they were Jews. The Jews call that genocidal event in their history the Holocaust. When the world got to know about it after Germany’s defeat in 1945, good people swore, “Never again.”

But even as they swore, mass murder was being perpetrated in Communist Russia—had been since the revolution.

Ten years before the Holocaust began, when Hitler was beginning to rise to power in 1932 and 1933, Stalin deliberately starved millions of Ukrainian peasants to death. Some devoured their own babies. (But—historians say—they preferred to swap their children for a neighbor’s rather than eat their own.) In the Great Terror of 1936 to 1938, about two million people, many of them loyal members of the Communist Party, were executed or sent to hellish labor camps by Stalin’s orders.

In all Communist countries—China, Cuba, Cambodia, North Korea, the Democratic Republic of the Congo (the pre-Communist setting of Joseph Conrad’s story Heart of Darkness) —the people are ruled by fear; torture is routine and massacre common. Mass killings are frequent in almost all African countries, particularly in Chad, Sudan, Somalia, Zimbabwe, Burundi, Mozambique, Mali, Nigeria. Villagers, farmers, are slaughtered by the dozen or the hundreds at a time by governments, or tribal foes, or terrorist bands of religious fanatics. Photos can be found on the internet of Nigerian Christian children and babies lying charred and dead on the ashes of bonfires beside the corpses of their mothers and fathers. The worst bloodbath was in Rwanda in 1994 when for three months, April to June, Hutus killed Tutsis. Some 800,000 Tutsis, including babies, were murdered by their neighbors in an attempted genocide.

The Hamas terrorists’ cruelty to the harmless is not exceptional, nor is their pleasure in it. Gleefully they killed some 1,400 men, women, and children. They tied up their victims and burned them; raped them; hacked off breasts and limbs; took hostages; dragged naked, broken-limbed, blood-drenched, gang-raped young women through the streets to be laughed at and spat on by fellow invaders and their women and children. One of the murderers seized the cell phone of a victim and called his parents to boast excitedly that he had “killed ten Jews” with his “bare hands”, inviting Mom and Dad to be proud of him, to praise him. This they did, lavishly. Like almost all the parents and teachers of Gaza, in obedience to their elected Hamas rulers they raised their children to hate and kill Jews.

Is the world shocked? No. In addition to the Hamas admirers who rally with placards and the flag of an imaginary country called Palestine to celebrate the great deeds of their heroes, there are esteemed sages and experts on ethics who want Israel wiped off the map and Jews off the planet. Numerous Hamas supporters and sympathizers are in positions of power. They dominate the United Nations and its sub-agencies; they head Amnesty International; they govern all but 6 of the 50 Islamic states, and China, Russia, Turkey, and Iran (whose theocratic government helped hatch the plan for the Hamas invasion); they influence Western governments, local councils, political parties, churches; they command urban police forces; they deliver judgment in lawcourts; they direct most American universities and state schools; they control an overwhelming majority of the propaganda media—T.V., radio, film and theater, national and local newspapers; in swarms they affect public opinion with murderous messages on social media— X, Facebook, TikTok, Instagram …

What do we learn about human nature when millions of people exult over Hamas’s torture and murder of Jews? Will the lesson break the belief of bien-pensants that “people are really good at heart”?

Let’s imagine no crowds cheered; the perpetrators killed themselves in remorse; the torturing to death of that one baby so appalled and outraged humanity that a final lasting age of “happiness, peace and contentment for all mankind” began. Is it worth the baby’s suffering?

Alyosha Karamazov is right: the answer is no.

 

Jillian Becker    April 29, 2024

***

This article was first published online in the December 2023 issue of New English Review under the title What Price Human Happiness?

John Daniel Davidson, who often writes interestingly about political issues, has an article at The Federalist in which he attributes the past success and greatness of America to Christianity, and the present decline of the country to the fading away of the faith.

The Federalist title of the article is: America’s Stunning Embrace Of Paganism Signals The End Of This Country As We Know It.

Here are some extracts from it in italics, each followed by my comment:

Recall that ancient pagans ascribed sacred or divine status to the here and now, to things or activities, even to human beings if they were powerful enough (like a pharaoh or a Roman emperor). 

Don’t Christians ascribe divine status – and superhuman powers – to a human being?

They rejected the notion of an omnipotent, transcendent God — and all that the existence of God would imply.

Who did? When? Even before the Roman Empire adopted Christianity as a state religion, some Greek and Roman philosophers had propounded the idea of a godhead as the genesis of the universe.

Western civilization and its accoutrements depend on Christianity, not just in the abstract but in practice. Liberalism relies on a source of vitality that does not originate from it and that it cannot replenish. That source is the Christian faith, in the absence of which we will revert to an older form of civilization, one in which power alone matters and the weak and the vulnerable count for nothing.

Christianity sent Western civilization into a long nightmarish sleep, or death. Why is the Renaissance called by that name – a re-birth? Why is the Enlightenment called by that name – the return of light after darkness? How did the weak and vulnerable fare in the  centuries between the fall of Rome in the West and the Age of Reason? Christians often do not choose to remember the centuries of the terrible Inquisition, its uncountable victims whom it impoverished, tortured,  burned to death at the stake.

What awaits us on the other side of Christendom, in other words, is a pagan dark age.

Worse than the Christian dark age behind us?

Here, in the second decade of the 21st century, we can say with some confidence that this dark age has begun. … The principles Americans have always asserted against this kind of moral and political tyranny — freedom of speech, equal protection under the law, government by consent of the governed — depend for their sustenance on the Christian faith, alive and active among the people, shaping their private and family lives as much as the social and political life of the nation.

The Christian faith fostered freedom of speech, equality under the law, government by consent of the governed? No. O Christian apologist, remember the Inquisition (the Papal one and the Spanish one); remember that Christians kept slaves; remember feudalism. It was the Enlightenment – the intellectual revolution against Christian tyranny – that  “fostered”  those ideas.

The classical liberal order, so long protected and preserved by the Christian civilization from which it sprang, is already being systematically destroyed and replaced with something new.

No, the classical liberal order “sprang” from the Enlightenment, not from Christianity. All the main Cristian churches opposed and punished liberalism, as they opposed free speech, scientific discovery, and tolerance for as long as they had the power to do so.

It was, after all, Christianity that united morality and religion, and without it, they will be separated once more.

The pre-Christian Greeks and Romans thought about morality, philosophized about ethics, established systems of law that were based on moral concepts, but – right! – their gods did not insist on human moral behavior, except towards the divinities themselves. However, Zoroastrianism and Judaism were moral religions before Christianity was invented. St. Paul was against any part of the Jewish law being preserved in his Christianity. He preached that Jesus Christ had superseded the law. After him, there were many other (comparatively short-lived) Christianities in the early centuries C.E. that passionately opposed the moral teachings of the Jews. After St. Paul’s time, Roman Catholic Christianity somewhat reluctantly began to adopt the moral law of Judaism in the second century of our common era.

The new paganism will not necessarily come with the outward trappings of the old, but it will be no less pagan for all that. It will be defined, as it always was, by the belief that nothing is true, everything is permitted.  [To prove this, he quotes a 9^th century Muslim:  “Hasan i-Sabbah, the ninth-century Arab warlord whose group gave us the word “assassins”, summed up the pagan ethos in his famous last words: Nothing is true, everything is permitted.”]

What Greek or Roman philosopher ever taught that “nothing is true”, or that “everything is permitted”? Roman law had much to do with moral right and wrong – and Roman law persisted, in modified form, in some Christian countries in modern times.

[T]he radical moral relativism we see everywhere today represents a thoroughly post-Christian worldview that is best understood as the return of paganism, which, as the Romans well understood, is fundamentally incompatible with the Christian faith. Christianity after all does not allow for such relativism but insists on hard definitions of truth and what is — and is not — sacred and divine.

What is the Christian “hard definition of truth”? When did the numerous Christian sects agree on what is and is not sacred and divine? If they had agreed, would there have been sects?

Without a national culture shaped by the Christian faith, without a majority consensus in favor of traditional Christian morality, America as we know it will come to an end. Instead of free citizens in a republic, we will be slaves in a pagan empire. 

Certainly we are being oppressed by the dictators of another religion – the secular religion of neo-Marxism aka “Wokeism”. Whether their rule is better or worse than that of the old dictators of pre-Enlightenment Christianity is a matter of judgment and opinion.

There was of course spiritual — demonic —power behind the pagan gods [!], but also real political power behind the pagan order. This order achieved its fullest expression in Rome, which eventually elevated emperors to the status of deities, embracing the diabolical idea that man himself creates the gods and therefore can become one.

“Man himself” did indeed invent the gods. Are there any other candidates claiming the invention? The man  from Tarsus who called himself Saul and later Paul created the Christian god from a man.

It is no accident that the worship of the Roman emperor as a god emerged at more or less the exact same historical moment as the Incarnation. Christianity, which proclaimed that God had become man, burst forth into a social world that was everywhere adopting the worship of a man-god, and its coming heralded the end of that world. 

Was the apotheosis of Augustus the inspiration for the apotheosis of Jesus?

… the Christian morality that made humanism possible.

Humanists are inclined to be atheists – usually (unfortunately and unnecessarily) atheists who favor the Left; the Socialist side of our main political division. The humanist principles of tolerance and mercy were surely held by some people long before Christianity began. They are always held by some human beings, including some Christians.

All of that will be swept away, replaced by an oppressive and violent sociopolitical order predicated on raw power, not principle.

As throughout history, including Christian history. And throughout most of the world at any time.

The prevalence of degrading superstition and the disfigurement of reason are hallmarks of the new pagan order, and today are everywhere visible in American society.

Christianity, like every other religion, is superstition, not reason.

Davidson is of course right that the free American Republic is under threat of extinction.

But was its success owed to Christianity?

The Framers of the Constitution were careful not to make special claims for the Christian religion above others. Although they mention “Nature’s God”, “the Supreme Judge of the World”, and “divine Providence”  in the Declaration of Independence, and “the Year of our Lord” in the Constitution, the values they wanted to enshrine were Enlightenment values: tolerance, reason, freedom of speech and conscience; government of, for, and by the people with no branch of it – legislative, executive, or judicial – having unrestricted power. Christians may fancy they discern an influence of their faith in that vision, but votaries of other religions and none have been no less appreciative of it – which is as the visionaries intended.

A resurgence of Christian faith now would be far more likely to intensify rather than reconcile division and conflict.

Isn’t Christian history a chronicle of internecine wars and persecution of sect by sect?

And – I ask you, Christians – didn’t your incarnated god reputedly say that he “came not to send peace, but a sword”?

 

Jillian Becker   April 2, 2024

What does it profit a man if he gain the whole world and lose his own soul?

It profits him the whole world.

___

“Love thy neighbor.”

If you do, the commandment is superfluous.

If you don’t, it’s futile.

___

No one has yet discovered what makes life, or what “life” is. The god explanation is not merely unsatisfactory, it is indefensible.

___

I, me …  this bundle of congenial accidents; this hunger for existence; this dread.

___

Start of a letter to my theoretical biographer: “Dear Avenging Angel …”

___

The Left has become Death, the destroyer of our civilization.

___

Where there is ideology, there will be schism.

___

Often the more you understand the less you forgive.*

___

Christianity was begotten by a vulgarized Hellenism upon a sentimentalized Judaism.

___

Religious persons  say, “If you don’t believe in God you’ll believe in anything.” I say, “If you can believe in ‘God’ you can believe in anything.”**

___

The fatter the government, the thinner the people.

The more generous the government, the more robbed the people.

The more secure the government, the more threatened the people.

___

Justice is elusive but judgment is inescapable.

___

The Roman writer Terence said, “Nothing human is alien to me.” Why can’t I say the same? So much that people do remains incomprehensible to me.

___

There’s an awful lot of condescension in compassion and an awful lot of contempt in condescension.

___

Curse: May you survive to live in the world of your ideals.***

___

Many a belief can survive persecution but not critical examination.

___

A good thing about the Universe and Life is that they have no purpose.

___

Sado-Marxism …

___

Russia cast off the Soviet Union – and revealed itself to be much the same. A wolf in wolf’s clothing.

___

We are more likely to believe what we overhear than what we’re told.

___

Searching for your true self? How do you know which is your true self – the seeker or the sought?

___

Nothing is kept as long and carefully as a grievance.

___

Now in my tenth decade, I ask other old people what they think or feel about dying, and find almost all agree it is not that we will die that troubles us so much as how.

___

To a writer: A reader is a reluctant visitor to your mind. He will not enter your labyrinth unless you bait the path with fascination. His wonder, his curiosity must be aroused, or his amusement.

___

Comes a Marxist, comes twaddle.

___

A writer needs to know that he has weaknesses, vices.

An actor only needs to know that other people have them.

___

Charity is okay, but only when practiced by consenting adults in private.

___

I often feel lonely but seldom want company.

___

Some are born ordinary, some achieve ordinariness, and some have ordinariness thrust upon them. I can’t think of anyone who’s had ordinariness thrust upon him. But I do know lots of people who’ve achieved ordinariness. They were geniuses until they were five and then became ordinary for the rest of their lives.

___

As attractive as a scandal.

As complex as an animal.

As simple as a blow.

___

Wither is what I do, not where I go.

___

It is a sound principle not to do harm. Beyond infancy no one can achieve so impossibly high an aim, but it is good to try.

___

Trying to reason with a Believer is like trying to crack an egg on a pillow.

___

Many “principles” that people hold are not principles but pieties.

___

We find Heaven and Hell on earth. Hell is a collective operation. Heaven depends on private enterprise.

___

We fear that they might do unto us what we would like to do unto them.

___

The value of human life cannot be measured: human life is itself the measure of value. Trying to measure it is like trying to measure the wetness of water.

___

Human life as such has no goal, no theme, no point, no plan, no program, no meaning. History is a soap opera.

___

Whatever a government does it does badly.

___

Anarchism, nihilism, communism. In each case, a feeling in search of a politics.

___

There is no “sin” of greed. There is a “sin” of envy. Let us be free to work for our own maximum profit. Let us have abundance. Let us have feasts, rich harvests, generosity, might, novelty, and splendor.

___

Any idea that needs a law to defend it from criticism is ipso facto a bad idea.

______

Footnotes:

*Quoted by P. J. O’Rourke, from an interview with me by The Times of London, as an epigraph for his book Holidays in Hell.

**Émile Leon Cammaerts (1878-1953) was a Belgian-born writer who lived and died in England, and who, in an essay on G. K. Chesterton, authored the famous quotation often wrongly attributed to Chesterton himself.: “When men choose not to believe in God, they do not thereafter believe in nothing. They then become capable of believing in anything.” 

***P0ssibly plagiarized from a Chinese sage. I’m not sure.

 

Jillian Becker     March 5, 2024

Why is twice-and-forever president, Barack Obama, limitlessly generous, submissive, helpful to the cruel theocracy of Iran?

Why has he helped it become a nuclear power?

Lee Smith writes at Tablet:

[In January, 2024] Kata’ib Hezbollah launched a drone that killed three U.S. soldiers in Jordan. But President Biden didn’t want to retaliate against Iran for fear of collapsing the pro-Iran policy established by his former boss Barack Obama, so U.S. intelligence officials leaked an assessment to the press that Iran doesn’t control the proxy groups it trains, funds, and arms to kill Americans and U.S. allies in the Middle East.

That got Biden off the hook‚ but it’s hard to pose as a global superpower while allowing the servicemen and women you put in harm’s way to be killed with impunity. Biden considered his options, then announced his intentions to hit targets in Iraq and Syria, which gave the Iranians a week to scatter high-value assets and personnel, after which he bombed meaningless targets in those countries. One U.S. official made sure to tell the Iranians through U.S. media that “there are no indications that members of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps were killed as part of the operations.” The U.S. president thereby signaled to the Iranians that they are free to continue directing their Arab assets to kill Americans.

Iran’s proxies and cutouts are successful in this sickening game that puts the lives of hostages and servicemen alike at risk only to the extent that officials in the Biden administration are willing to deny and disguise the regime’s active role in targeting Americans. By contrast, when Donald Trump withdrew from the 2015 U.S.-Iran agreement that legalized the terror state’s nuclear weapons program, he signaled that unlike his predecessor he didn’t see Tehran as a regional partner to replace Israel and Saudi Arabia. Accordingly, when Iranian proxies killed an American contractor and laid siege to the U.S. Embassy in Baghdad in December 2019, Trump cut off the head of Iran’s paramilitary snake by killing Soleimani. The January 2020 drone strike that got the Iranian terror chief also tagged then-leader of Kata’ib Hezbollah, Abu Mahdi al-Muhandis, thereby underscoring the fact that Iran is directly responsible for the actions of its proxies.

In comparison, Biden’s Iran policy is a hall of mirrors designed to hide facts likely to disturb the American electorate while allowing the White House to deepen its relationship with Iran.

All that is manifest or at least probable and credible.

But then Smith writes this:

For Americans, the most repugnant feature of what the Biden team sees as a program of regional integration under the Iranian banner is this: U.S. forces are based in Iraq and Syria to protect Iranian interests in those countries. Under the guise of counterterrorism missions, American troops are detailed to target any Sunni Arab population that the Iranians and their allies designate as ISIS, and thereby risk their lives to secure Iran’s position in countries the Islamic Republic has helped destroy.

America is actively helping Iran wage its battles for supremacy in the Islamic world? A shocking fact if true. It is bad enough that the Obama gangsters incomprehensibly fund the Iranian tyranny with American tax dollars, plead with the mullahs for permission to lick their boots, and pant in vain for their gratitude, but to deploy American forces to fight and die for those genocidal sadists would surely be going too far in using  America as Obama’s own property.

If it is true, why is Iran killing American soldiers?

The Iranians persist in targeting American troops to remind the White House who calls the shots.

Yes, the Iranians have directed more than 160 attacks on U.S. forces since October, but the reason for these attacks is hardly Israel’s post-Oct. 7 military response to Hamas: The Iranians have been launching regular attacks on U.S. troops in the region since Biden took office—starting with an attack against a U.S. airbase in Iraq in February 2021.

The Iranians and their proxies are free to attack American forces because the White House has abandoned them to the mercies of Tehran, effectively turning U.S. soldiers, sailors, airmen, and Marines into a security deposit ensuring that the Biden administration will continue to advance Iranian, rather than American, interests.

“Ensuring that the Biden administration will continue to advance Iranian, rather than American, interests.” 

But why, why, why?  If Obama is a Muslim at heart, does the Democrat Party of America have to put Iran’s interests ahead of its own, and not only ahead of its own but at the cost of its own?

Taking hostages, after all, is how Iran does business. When in its infancy the Islamic Republic seized the U.S. Embassy in 1979 and ransomed 52 Americans, it led the news almost every night, for 444 days. It cost Jimmy Carter the presidency. In the intervening years, the Iranians and their proxies have kidnapped so many people—like Terry Anderson (Hezbollah, 1985-91), Roxanne Saberi (the Iranian regime, 2009), Austin Tice (the Syrian regime, 2012 to the present) and most recently Elizabeth Tsurkov (Kata’ib Hezbollah, 2023 to the present)—that Hamas’s Oct. 7 abductions are just part of the background music of the Middle East. It should shock the world that a nation-state and its proxy forces regularly imprison, torture, and rape innocents until their governments cough up enough money to get them back—or until they are dead. But nearly half a century after the 1979 hostage crisis, the Iranians have acclimated most of the world to the idea that this barbaric practice is just a conventional instrument of their foreign policy.

As president, Obama further normalized Iran’s terms. He helped legitimize hostage-taking as a function of Iranian statecraft by directing his officials to use hostage talks as an entry point that could double as a diplomatic channel …  In 2009, the Iranians kidnapped three Americans who had inadvertently crossed over the Iraq border. Oman mediated U.S.-Iran hostage negotiations, and sure enough the White House used that line of communication for secret talks with Iran to legalize its nuclear weapons program. The nuclear deal, officially known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), was the Obama administration’s top foreign policy priority, with the end goal of turning Iran into a regional hegemon.

Why?

Representing the administration in those secret talks were [the under-devils] William Burns and Jake Sullivan now Biden’s CIA director and national security adviser, respectively.

With the nuclear deal concluded in 2015, Obama went back to the hostage stratagem and gave the Iranians a signing bonus of $1.7 billion, including $400 million in cash, in exchange for four U.S. hostages in January 2016. With that flourish, hostages became an official medium of exchange, which allowed the White House, in the absence of any formal diplomatic agreement or congressional approval or oversight, to ship pallets of cash to Tehran.

Biden loaded his administration with many of the same people who ran Iran policy under Obama, including former Iran envoy Robert Malley, whose security clearances were revoked [in April 2023]  after he was alleged to have mishandled classified information.

Why have we heard nothing more about that? Is (the odious) Robert Malley to be indicted? If not, why not? It’s a puzzle. If he gave classified information to Iran, that would be in line with the Obama agenda. Which may mean that the Biden administration is protecting him from any further punitive action. But if that is so,  who dared to revoke his security clearance? How is he or she to be punished? No doubt very discreetly. Top secretly.

In his role as head of the Washington NGO the International Crisis Group, and then while serving as a U.S. government official, Malley supported and facilitated an Iranian influence operation targeting Western capitals, including Washington itself, and pushed one of its assets, Ariane Tabatabai, into the U.S. government. She, too, appears to be part of the hostage-industry infrastructure. Tabatabai remains chief of staff to the assistant secretary of defense for special operations, a portfolio that includes hostage rescue operations. [Emphasis in original.] Recently her boss posted photos of himself traveling with Tabatabai to visit U.S. troops at the National Training Center at Fort Irwin, California. For Tehran, the pictures signal that no matter what the headlines may say, the understanding with Washington is unchanged.

Which is surely evidence that Obama still reigns.

The hostage-industry infrastructure gives the White House a way to service the unofficial alliance between the two governments, without having to explain why the U.S. is sending money to Iran, or what the Iranians are doing with it. For instance, in August the Biden administration gave Iran access to $6 billion in previously frozen oil revenues in exchange for five Americans. Was any of that money used to fund Hamas’s Oct. 7 massacre? The White House says no. Instead, it claims that according to Qatar, which brokered the deal and parked the $6 billion in its central bank, the Iranians haven’t touched it. The fact that the White House thinks the American public and their elected representatives should take the word of Iran’s bagman is evidence that Qatar’s exertions as an “impartial mediator” have normalized the idea that it’s OK to pay off the Iranians and their proxies for kidnapping and killing Americans and our allies.

This deliberate misdirection is what Obama intended in 2012, when he asked Qatar to establish a channel with Hamas on behalf of the U.S. Given that Doha is one of Hamas’s benefactors—as of 2023, total aid from Qatar to Gaza is believed to be more than $2.1 billion—the official U.S. line is that the Qataris have leverage over Hamas. They must, or why else would they be brokering negotiations to return the Oct. 7 hostages?

(Gaza survives chiefly on the charity of rich states, non-governmental organizations, and the services of UNRWA (the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for “Palestine Refugees” only). Most of the donated money is retained by Hamas who use it to keep up continual violence and periodic warfare against Israel. Hamas is the government of Gaza, elected by the population. Israel supplied Gaza with fuel, food and special medical services, and employed thousands of Palestinian day-workers from Gaza, some of whom exploited their jobs as an opportunity to collect information useful to Hamas for its invasion of October 7, 2023.)

Accordingly, the Netanyahu government and Oct. 7 hostage families believe that since the U.S. has leverage over Qatar, it can compel the emirate to use its power and influence on Hamas. In this view, Qatar should defund the Palestinian terror group and throw its leaders Ismail Haniyeh and Khaled Meshaal out of their luxury hotel suites in Doha and put them in prison until Hamas releases its captives. But the Biden team isn’t going to pressure Qatar for the same reason it hit irrelevant targets in Syria and Iraq: it wants to preserve its relationship with Iran.

Why?

As the world’s go-to goodwill ambassador, Qatar says it’s impartial. But the only party in the region on whose behalf Qatar “mediates” is the one that takes hostages. Qatar works for Iran. It’s ugly, but it makes sense: If your foreign policy is keyed to the money you spend buying foreign elites and their institutions, and the source of that wealth is a giant natural gas field that you share with Iran, you take sides. And it’s not a hard choice: Is it the side that tortures and rapes hostages and kidnapped 28 Qatari royals, or is it the Americans, who won’t even shut down the local bureaus of Qatar’s flagship propaganda arm Al Jazeera, never mind make good on vague threats to move U.S. Central Command’s forward base out of Al Udeid airfield? It is Qatar that holds leverage over the U.S., which it exercises on its own behalf and Iran’s.

Consider the money that Qatar spreads around Washington, D.C. From the $14.8 million check that Obama administration peace processor Martin Indyk cashed as director of the Brookings Institution’s Foreign Policy Program to the billions Doha has spent on Al Udeid to lobby the Pentagon, as well as its massive investments in key American institutions like major universities, Qatar has leverage over nearly all parts of the U.S. government and American elites.

Qatar’s lavish expenditures are meant to show that the rewards for aligning with Qatar are great, while the punishment meted out by Iran’s fixer can be painful.

In 2017 Qatar hired former CIA agent Kevin Chalker to spy on and smear U.S. legislators like Republican Sens. Ted Cruz and Tom Cotton, and Democratic Congressman Ed Royce, who all supported legislation against Hamas. “An attack on Hamas is an attack on Qatar,” Chalker warned in a lengthy document prepared for his Qatari clients.

The ex-agency man also recommended that Qatar target rival United Arab Emirates by “exposing [the] enemy secrets” of the UAE’s well-connected Washington Ambassador Yousef Al Otaiba. Chalker recommended that Qatar call on its media assets, identifying, among others, Max Blumenthal, anti-Israel activist and son of fading Clinton-world influencer Sidney Blumenthal; The Intercept; and The New York Times. Only months after Chalker produced the report, the Times published stories based on hacked Otaiba emails in a campaign intended, as reporter David Kirkpatrick acknowledged, “to embarrass the U.A.E. and benefit Qatar.” From the Pentagon to the capital’s paper of record, Qatar has Washington covered. It’s Iran’s stalking horse.

What happens in Gaza, then, will have consequences throughout the world—for Iran’s hostage infrastructure is built with something grander in mind than just trading human flesh for cash. After Oct. 7, Iran has made it clear that the purpose of its nuclear weapons program was never just to threaten Israel and Saudi Arabia, but also to hold the whip hand in world trade and energy markets. With Biden all but standing down the U.S. Navy, the Houthis, Iran’s proxy in Yemen, have closed Red Sea shipping lanes and forced major container shipping lines to take alternate routes, raising the prices of goods around the world. With a nuclear bomb in its arsenal, Iran’s next hostage is the global economy.

“Its nuclear weapons program was never just to threaten Israel …”  No, indeed not. It is first of all to destroy Israel.  And the only plausible explanation for Obama’s policy, still being pursued by his frontman Biden, of helping Iran become nuclear armed is because he wants Israel to be destroyed. 

Not all the Democrats in positions of authority are anti-Israel. There are even some who are strongly pro-Israel. So a Democrat-led American government could not openly destroy the small embattled country; but it can and does, with unwavering dedication and at enormous price, make it possible for Iran to attempt that truly genocidal operation.