We who counted ourselves luckier than the general run of humankind because we live in the United States of America are no longer standing on firm ground but on shifting sands.

What accustomed ways, what assumptions on which we’ve always relied, what expectations we’ve long held, what values we’ve taken for granted, are not being interrogated anew?

Customs, values, standards, principles – the elements that cement civilization – are being let go, one after another, at ever increasing pace as we are moved away from liberty into serfdom.

Have you relied on custom? On long accepted moral norms? On the probity of public servants? On high standards of medical practice? On the intellectual openness of universities? On the integrity of scientists? On the solidity of old established institutions? On common values of decency, civility, and honesty?

You, we, can do so no longer. The wrecking crew is out. The fundamental transformation of America is underway.

Immense progress in science and technology will not help us because all invention will come under the ever-expanding control of the government and its ideological army of wreckers.

Over what part of our lives, even the most intimate, is government not taking control?

Our freedom of speech has been qualified by political correctness. Certain words are taboo, and it is widely accepted that they ought to be, on the grounds that some might take offense if they hear them.

In almost everything we commonly do, in almost every sphere of normal activity, we find ourselves in a state of uncertainty. So multitudinous are the regulations continually heaped upon us by government that we could be unknowingly breaking the law every hour of every day, in our businesses, our professions, our leisure, our shopping, our travel, or while simply breathing inside our own homes. The hand of government is on our thermostats. Its scolding tongue lashes us if we use more water than it deems necessary to our survival. It tells us what we ought to eat and drink; what we must do with our garbage; what we may not carry on a plane; what we may not move from one state to another. If we unintentionally break an obscure business regulation, we can be raided by an armed SWAT team and heavily fined. If we gather people together at regular intervals in our home to share a common interest we can be sentenced to a term in prison. (The example our link leads to concerns a bible-studying group. We would hate to attend it ourselves, but we defend the freedom of everybody.)

Do not expect the money you earn, save, or invest to keep its value. Our currency is being continually debased. We cannot even be sure that our cash will be safe in a bank. It’s all too possible that government will summarily confiscate it. What happened recently to private deposits in Cyprus banks could happen here – a blatant act of government theft:

According to in-house memos now circulating, the DHS has issued orders to banks across America which announce to them that “under the Patriot Act” the DHS has the absolute right to seize, without any warrant whatsoever, any and all customer bank accounts, to make “periodic and unannounced” visits to any bank to open and inspect the contents of “selected safe deposit boxes”.

We can  no longer rely on our title deeds to protect our property tenure. On the grounds of “eminent domain” any real estate, including your own home, can be snatched away by government and handed over to someone else who wants to change its use for his own benefit. In the case of land, the government can declare it subject to environmental laws that make it impossible for its owners to use it as they choose.

Government agencies which many or even most considered irreproachably honorable (if also terrifyingly powerful) – such as and chiefly the Internal Revenue Service  – have turned out to be rotten with corruption.

We are surveyed by government all the time. We have come to expect that we cannot make a phone-call 0r send an email that government doesn’t know we made or sent. And government can look at what we said in them at any time it chooses. Under “Obamacare” we cannot have an ingrowing toenail, a terminal disease, a deformity, an embarrassing whatever that untold numbers of persons will not be informed about.

In the matter of our health and “Obamacare”, we do not know how we will pay for medical consultations and treatment in future; what insurance we may have, at what price, or what it will cover.

The political principles on which the Republic was founded are no longer the bedrock of the American nation.

The values our civilization was built on – which are not in any religion but in pre-Christian classical antiquity and the Enlightenment – are no longer esteemed. Worse, they are despised, mocked, and discarded.

Mark Steyn, recognizing the rot, writes of a recent momentous day in the decay of America – June 26, 2013:

First thing in the morning, Gregory Roseman, Deputy Director of Acquisitions (whatever that means), became the second IRS official to take the Fifth Amendment, after he was questioned about awarding the largest contract in IRS history, totaling some half a billion dollars, to his close friend Braulio Castillo, who qualified under a federal “set aside” program favoring disadvantaged groups — in this case, disabled veterans. For the purposes of federal contracting, Mr. Castillo is a “disabled veteran” because he twisted his ankle during a football game at the U.S. Military Academy prep school 27 years ago. How he overcame this crippling disability to win a half-billion-dollar IRS contract is the heartwarming stuff of an inspiring Lifetime TV movie. …

The so-called comprehensive immigration reform is so comprehensive it includes special deals for Nevada casinos and the recategorization of the Alaskan fish-processing industry as a “cultural exchange” program, because the more leaping salmon we have the harder it is for Mexicans to get across the Bering Strait. While we’re bringing millions of Undocumented-Americans “out of the shadows,” why don’t we try bringing Washington’s decadent and diseased law-making out of the shadows?

Just when you thought the day couldn’t get any more momentous, the Supreme Court weighed in on same-sex marriage. When less advanced societies wish to introduce gay marriage, the people’s elected representatives assemble in parliament and pass a law. That’s how they did it in the Netherlands, Belgium, Spain, Norway, Sweden, Portugal, etc. But one shudders to contemplate what would result were the legislative class to attempt “comprehensive marriage reform,” complete with tax breaks for Maine lobstermen’s au pairs and the hiring of 20,000 new IRS agents to verify business expenses for page boys from disparate-impact groups. So instead it fell to five out of nine judges, which means it fell to Anthony Kennedy, because he’s the guy who swings both ways. Thus, Supreme Intergalactic Emperor Anthony gets to decide the issue for 300 million people.

As Spider-Man’s Uncle Ben so famously says in every remake, with great power comes great responsibility. Having assumed the power to redefine a societal institution that predates the United States by thousands of years, Emperor Tony the All-Wise had the responsibility at least to work up the semblance of a legal argument. Instead, he struck down the Defense of Marriage Act on the grounds that those responsible for it were motivated by an “improper animus” against a “politically unpopular group” they wished to “disparage,” “demean,” and “humiliate” as “unworthy.”

What stump-toothed knuckle-dragging inbred swamp-dwellers from which hellish Bible Belt redoubt would do such a thing? Well, fortunately, we have their names on the record: The DOMA legislators who were driven by their need to “harm” gay people include notorious homophobe Democrats Chuck Schumer, Pat Leahy, Harry Reid, Joe Biden, and the virulent anti-gay hater who signed it into law, Bill Clinton. …

In his dissent, Justice Scalia wrote that “to defend traditional marriage is not to condemn, demean, or humiliate those who would prefer other arrangements, any more than to defend the Constitution of the United States is to condemn, demean, or humiliate other constitutions.” Indeed. With this judgment, America’s constitutional court demeans and humiliates only its own. …

As I say, just another day in the life of the republic: a corrupt bureaucracy dispensing federal gravy to favored clients; a pseudo-legislature passing bills unread by the people’s representatives and uncomprehended by the men who claim to have written them; and a co-regency of jurists torturing an 18th-century document in order to justify what other countries are at least honest enough to recognize as an unprecedented novelty. Whether or not, per Scalia, we should “condemn” the United States Constitution, it might be time to put the poor wee thing out of its misery.

Hayek warned us that an over-mighty state would put us on “the road to serfdom”. Well, we’ve arrived. We’ve passed the sign at the side of the road saying “Welcome to Serfdom” and we are now in Serfdom itself. It is built on a quagmire of erroneous theory. Serfs may console themselves with an illusion of security, but serfs are not secure; they exist at the whim of their masters.

By the time Islam takes over and imposes sharia law over the whole of North America, we’ll hardly notice any difference.

*

Afterword: One of our readers and commenters, Roger, laments the drop in standards of personal presentation among his professional colleagues with this description. (Please note we make no judgments of a person by his taste or appearance. We quote this comment because it conveys how some American citizens feel they have strayed into an alien world.)

Yes, our society is changing. I attended a construction “kick-off” meeting yesterday, at which all of the construction “professionals” were present as well as the major trades. This project is for the renovation of a very high end residence, if I mentioned the Client’s name many of you would know the person. The Architect wore an ill fitting suit that looked like it had been piled into a corner of the utility room for weeks, bare feet and flip-flops (on a construction site!) The project manager wore a loose undershirt of the type colloquially known I believe, as a “wife beater”. His entire upper body was covered in multicolored tattoos depicting what seemed to be scenes from robot wars featuring children’s Saturday morning cartoon characters. The representative of one of the mechanical trades wore a patched and worn out dungaree overall and sported a bone through his nose. [They all] wore various metal items in different parts of their faces; earrings, nose rings, lip rings, etc. None seemed in the least bit surprised at the attire of the others. I admit my concentration suffered as I wondered when it was exactly that I had been abducted and brought to this planet, and when the hell could I go home.

Is this the ultimate secret about the Benghazi attack on 9/11/12 that Obama is trying to cover up?

A conspiracy is a part of it, and conspiracies are hard to plot if they involve many people; harder to carry out; and hardest of all to believe.

Yet the story is plausible.

Raymond Ibrahim reports:

According to a Libyan intelligence document, the Muslim Brotherhood, including Egyptian President Morsi, were involved in the September 11, 2012 terrorist attack on the U.S. consulate in Benghazi, where several Americans, including U.S. ambassador to Libya, Chris Stevens, were killed.

On Wednesday, June 26, several Arabic websites …  quoted the intelligence report, which apparently was first leaked to the Kuwaiti paper, Al Ra’i. Prepared by Mahmoud Ibrahim Sharif, Director of National Security for Libya, the report is addressed to the nation’s Minister of Interior.

It discusses the preliminary findings of the investigation, specifically concerning an “Egyptian cell” which was involved in the consulate attack.

“Based on confessions derived from some of those arrested at the scene” six people, “all of them Egyptians” from the jihad group Ansar al-Sharia (“Supporters of Islamic Law”), were arrested.

According to the report, during interrogations, these Egyptian jihadi cell members “confessed to very serious and important information concerning the financial sources of the group and the planners of the event and the storming and burning of the U.S. consulate in Benghazi…. And among the more prominent figures whose names were mentioned by cell members during confessions were: Egyptian President Mohamed Morsi; preacher Safwat Hegazi; Saudi businessman Mansour Kadasa, owner of the satellite station, Al-Nas; Egyptian Sheikh Muhammad Hassan; former presidential candidate, Hazim Salih Abu Isma’il”.

The information that these particular people were involved in an anti-American action is not in itself surprising. All of them, including Mohamed Morsi, are known to be fanatical anti-American jihadists.

Prominent Brotherhood figure Safwat Hegazi … publicly declares the Brotherhood “will rule the world”; Saudi Mansour’s hate-mongering, pro-Brotherhood TV station repeatedly aired footage of the YouTube Muhammad movie inciting violence around the Muslim world; popular Sheikh Muhammad Hassan holds that smiling to non-Muslims is forbidden, except when trying to win them over to Islam; and Sheikh Hazim Abu Ismail is simply an openly anti-freedom, anti-infidel religious leader.

The report quotes a video which fell into the hands of “Libyan intelligence”. Was it made by one of the attackers? Or did it come from the US drone which was filming the incident? If the latter, its contents must be known to US intelligence. And if it is known to US intelligence, why hasn’t the American public been told about it?

As for President Morsi, a video made during the consulate attack records people speaking in the Egyptian dialect: as they approach the beleaguered U.S. compound, one of them yells to the besiegers, “Don’t shoot—Dr. Morsi sent us!”

Did Barack Obama, whose administration has taken great pains to keep facts about the Benghazi assault concealed, know that the Muslim Brotherhood was involved in the attack, perhaps from the very beginning by planning and financing it?

If Obama and his henchmen and henchwomen have known all along that the terrorist raid was a Muslim Brotherhood operation, would that be surprising?

The awful thing is, it should not be: not if it is seen in the context of Obama’s relationship with the Muslim Brotherhood.     

The following is a summary of an article by Clare Lopez (formerly of the CIA):

With the June 13, 2013 confirmation by senior Obama administration officials that the president has authorized sending weapons directly to Syrian rebels, the trend can no longer be ignored. This is the third country and the third instance in which Barack Obama has leapt into the fray of revolution to the defense of al-Qa’eda and Muslim Brotherhood forces within days of an explicit call for action by Yousef al-Qaradawi, the senior jurist of the Muslim Brotherhood. In each instance — Egypt, Libya, and now Syria — it is completely clear that the United States is backing people who hate it.

The U.S. leadership is deliberately and proactively enabling the self-declared forces of Islamic jihad and shariah, who make no secret of their enmity and loathing for the U.S. and Western civilization in general, to come to power in country after country of the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region.

The results have been disastrous. … Strict shariah enforcement is spreading across the region. Since the fall of Qaddafi in October 2011, weapons have been flowing out of Libya in all directions, some of the weapons apparently with the active assistance of the former Benghazi U.S. mission, closed since the al-Qa’eda attack of 11 September 11, 2012.

According to a Libyan intelligence official, speaking to a reporter in a May 2013 interview, Libya has now become the main MENA base for Al-Qa’eda in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM).

Barack Obama has hugely helped the Muslim Brotherhood to achieve its terrible aims. And he is still doing so.

Arnold Ahlert writes at Front Page:

In yet another remarkable display of Obama’s determination to secure the Middle East for Islamofascists, 400 U.S. troops will reportedly be deployed to Egypt to augment the police force of Islamist President Mohamed Morsi. They will be part of a 13-country force stationed in Egypt in anticipation of protests, scheduled for June 30th, calling for the removal of Morsi. … [Having thrown] former Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak under the bus in 2011, the White House is now eager to defend the regime of Morsi, who, like his Muslim Brotherhood sponsors, is well on his way to imposing the Saudi Arabian model of governance on Egypt. …

There is a burgeoning standoff between liberal secular Egyptians on one side, and dedicated Islamists on the other. One that could precipitate widespread violence in four days. And President Barack Obama has sent American troops to Egypt – to stand with the Islamists.

Adding to the spectacular absurdity …

We would say iniquity …

… of U.S. troops protecting Morsi’s thuggish regime – and by extension a Muslim Brotherhood that spawned al Qaeda and Hamas – is the reality that some of the troops deployed there come from the same military base where another Islamist, Maj. Nidal Hasan, killed 13 and wounded 32 of his fellow soldiers in 2009. That attack was labeled “workplace violence” …

rather than “terrorism in the name of Islam”, which it was.

As is often the case with the “most transparent administration in history”, the White House has maintained silence regarding American troops being deployed into a potential nation-wide firestorm. Egyptian military spokesman Ahmed Ali insists that media reports regarding the deployment are inaccurate and that American troops will be nothing more than part of “the periodical renewal routine for the US faction of the 13-state multinational force deployed in Sinai since the peace treaty”. He further insisted the MFO “is not armed with military operations gear”. …

In the meantime … Egyptians are stocking up on food, fuel and cash in anticipation of protests that “many fear will be the most violent and disruptive this year”. Furthermore, the U.S. embassy announced it would be closed on June 30, and warned Americans in Egypt to get enough supplies to make it through an “extended period of time”.

Last month, Secretary of State John Kerry released $1.3 billion in U.S. military aid to the Morsi regime, despite a law that requires him to certify that the Egyptian government “is supporting the transition to civilian government, including holding free and fair elections, implementing policies to protect freedom of expression, association and religion, and due process of law”. Kerry waived that restriction …

In the year since he has come to power, Egyptian President Mohamed Morsi has done virtually everything in his power to undermine a more inclusive democratic process and the strengthening of key democratic institutions. Yet the beat goes on for a president and an administration so desperate to maintain its Arab spring narrative, nothing remotely resembling reality intrudes.

The Muslim Brotherhood has deeply penetrated the US government, and exerts extraordinary influence on the Obama administration. For how such a deplorable state of affairs came to be, see this article, also by Clare Lopez.

If it is true that the raid on the US mission in Benghazi on 9/11/12 was planned and financed by the Muslim Brotherhood, and if Obama knew it was, and if he wants to see the Muslim Brotherhood achieve its objectives –  as his actions towards it signal that he does –  everything is explained: the refusal to provide adequate and reliable protection for the Ambassador; the refusal to allow US forces to go to his aid or the aid of the men fighting at the CIA annexe; the pretense that the armed assault grew spontaneously out of a protest demo; the failure to find any of the raiders and bring them to justice; the evasion of questions from Congress about what happened before, during and after the disaster, and why; the intense irritation of then Secretary of State Hillary Clinton when she was caught out in her lie about a movie-provoked demo …

But even if it proves to be true, is it an explanation that Americans could bring themselves to believe?

Today the Supreme Court has overturned the Defense of Marriage Act’s definition of marriage as a union between a man and a woman, on the grounds that it violates the rights of gay couples by denying them government benefits.

Will the legalization of same-sex marriage rescue the institution itself from obsolescence, or hasten its terminal decline?

The decline is a fact.

From Pew research, December 2011:

Barely half of all adults in the United States — a record low — are currently married, and the median age at first marriage has never been higher for brides (26.5 years) and grooms (28.7), according to a new Pew Research Center analysis of U.S. Census data.

In 1960, 72% of all adults ages 18 and older were married; today just 51% are. If current trends continue, the share of adults who are currently married will drop to below half within a few years. Other adult living arrangements—including cohabitation, single-person households and single parenthood—have all grown more prevalent in recent decades.

The Pew Research analysis also finds that the number of new marriages in the U.S. declined by 5% between 2009 and 2010, a sharp one-year drop that may or may not be related to the sour economy. …

Public attitudes about the institution of marriage are mixed. Nearly four-in-ten Americans say marriage is becoming obsolete, according to a Pew Research survey in 2010.  Yet the same survey found that most people who have never married (61%) would like to do so someday. …

The decline is particularly dramatic among the less educated.

From the Population Reference Bureau, September 2010:

Marriage rates have dropped among all major racial/ethnic groups and for both men and women. However, there are substantial differences in marriage trends by level of education. CPS data show that those with only a high school diploma (or less) have experienced a steep decline in marriage during the past decade. In contrast, marriage rates have held fairly steady for those with at least a bachelor’s degree.

Forty percent of all births are now to unwed mothers:

From The Atlantic, March 18, 2013:

58 percent of first births in lower-middle-class households are now to unmarried women. Meanwhile, two in five of all births are to unwed mothers, an all-time high, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Marriage has changed. Once upon a time, the typical marriage … involved special roles for the husband and wife. He would work. She would stay home. It was an efficient arrangement where opposites attracted. Men who wanted to be executives would marry women who wanted to be housewives. And, since almost half of women had no independent earnings 40 years ago, there were a lot of women who just wanted to work at home and raise a family.

Several factors mussed up this traditional union. Today women expect to work much, much more than they used to – and they do. They make up the majority of new college graduates and their labor participation rate has soared over 60 percent. Since 1950, hours of work by married women have increased by roughly a factor of three …

Now that women are better educated, with greater control over both their fertility and their earnings, modern marriage has changed from an arrangement where men marry for a housewife to a “hedonic” model where both partners can be the breadwinner. …

Think of marriage like any other contract or investment. It’s most likely to happen when the gains are big. So we should expect marriages among low-income Americans to decline if women perceive declining gains from hitching themselves to the men around them.

That’s precisely what we’ve seen…

Low-skill men have had a rough two generations. The evaporation of manufacturing work has gutted their main source of employment, while globalization has held down their wages. Marriage has declined the most among men whose wages have declined the most. …

It is relatively easier to raise a child and keep up a home with modern household innovations. The connection between Lunchables, detergent and marriage rates is not often made. But perhaps it should be. The development of time-saving technologies – cheap prepared foods, cheap clothes, machines to wash, dry, and vacuum – has not only encouraged more women to seek work, but also made it relatively easier for single parents to raise a child. Put starkly, technology makes it cheaper and easier than ever to be single.

While marriage becomes less attractive, divorce remains popular.

From McKinley Irvin family law blog:

Around 50 percent of marriages in the United States end in divorce. The number is similarly high in many other developed nations.

When you break that down by number of marriages [in the US]:

• 41 percent of first marriages end in divorce.
• 60 percent of second marriages end in divorce.
• 73 percent of third marriages end in divorce.

Nearly three quarters of all African-American children are born to unwed mothers.

From NBC News November 7, 2010:

Seventy-two percent of black babies are born to unmarried mothers today, according to government statistics.  …

The black community’s 72 percent rate eclipses that of most other groups: 17 percent of Asians, 29 percent of whites, 53 percent of Hispanics and 66 percent of Native Americans were born to unwed mothers in 2008, the most recent year for which government figures are available. The rate for the overall U.S. population was 41 percent.

Ideally, we would like to see the institution of marriage as a union between one man and one woman – historically, customarily, and generally for the purpose of raising children – to continue. Conservatives should – and many do – strive to preserve it. And we hold to the view that it affords (of course not invariably) the best circumstances for children to be well provided for, educated, kept in good health, and launched into adult life.

Marriage is not always – or even very often in our experience – an easy relationship. But a marriage needs to be endured when it cannot be enjoyed at least until children born into it reach young  adulthood.

Our inclination is to be for the survival of traditional marriage. But it seems to us to be a lost cause.

The very fact that a union which cannot possibly produce children because it joins two people of the same gender is now called “marriage”  is a clear proof that the ancient institution is not just fading but over and done with.

If the only requirement for a marriage to be sanctioned by the state is the wish of the contracting parties to enter into it, then not only individuals of the same sex, but groups of both (or various) sexes should be able to marry. Expect the legalization of polygamy in America and other Western countries in the not too distant future.

What will marriage then mean? Nothing really. It will give certain legal benefits to the parties, but other than that? Any different from just living together? Will it engage exceptional loyalties, devotion, duty, pertinacity, the sharing of responsibilities and rewards more than if the parties cohabited without the ceremony and documentation of marriage?  Could do. Possibly. Sometimes. Maybe as often as old marriage did? No, probably not.

Of course, if Islam conquers the West the fun will be over anyway. Sure, men will be able to have more than one wife each and as many concubines as they like. Men will be able to divorce their wives with the greatest of ease, and keep their children. But women will be married off, perhaps when they’re still pre-pubescent children themselves, to older men, and will not easily be able to divorce their husbands. Men will only be doing their religious duty if they beat their wives. Adulterers – the  females at least – will be stoned to death. Homosexuals will be executed.

So women, men, and all others – gather ye rosebuds while ye may.

Liberty and Justice.

They depend on each other.

These are the burblings of a thoroughly deluded, or deliberately deceived, in any case totally untruthful Catholic primate – via Creeping Sharia:

Cardinal Timothy Dolan, the archbishop of New York, made his first visit to a mosque in New York City [June 20, 2013] and it was the Albanian Islamic Cultural Center in Tompkinsville where he met with Muslim and other faith leaders.

The cardinal spent more than two hours touring the mosque and the Miraj Islamic School and having lunch with about 40 clergy and laity.

“I thank God that this day has arrived,” the cardinal said. “I thank you for your welcome, I thank you for making me feel like a friend and a member of a family.”

The cardinal asked questions about the Muslim faith and emphasized throughout his visit how much the two religions and their members have in common.“You love God, we love God and he is the same God,” the cardinal said of the Muslim and Roman Catholic faiths.

We would dearly like to hear the Cardinal explicating the likeness between The Trinity and Allah! Even better, to hear an imam do so.

Cardinal Dolan stressed that Catholics and Muslims have a mutual love of the United States and of the religious freedom that this country affords, especially the ability to meet with people of different beliefs that would not be possible in some other nations.

Meet with them in New York, Fort Hood, Boston …

“Your love of marriage and family, your love of children  …

Who can be raised to be suicide bombers. Or, if they are girls in Afghanistan (for example), married before puberty to mercilessly cruel, lascivious, devout old men.

… your love of freedom — religious freedom particularly …

“Kill the infidel” commands the Koran, which also declares over and over again that Christians and Jews are the enemy, and condemns apostates from Islam to death.

…  your defense of life …

“We love death as you love life”, said Osama bin Laden,  and many other devout Muslims between the 7th and the 21st centuries.

… your desire for harmony and unity and your care for others, your care for God’s creation and your care for those who are in need,” the cardinal said, were Islamic values also shared by Catholics and areas where there could be mutual cooperation.

Harmony and unity with the infidel? Harmony and unity between Sunni and Shia? Such harmony and unity as we have been observing for a few years now in the Arab states?

Care for “others”? Which others?

Are the bombs, rockets, burnings, internecine battles good for “God’s creation” – ie. the natural world?

How are the extremely needy Christian Copts in Egypt being cared for – with abductions, forced conversions, and killings?

Now for a glimpse of Muslim-Christian relations in the real world.

The MailOnline reported last December:

Syrian rebels beheaded a Christian man and fed his body to dogs, according to a nun who says the West is ignoring atrocities committed by Islamic extremists. …

Taxi driver Andrei Arbashe, 38, was kidnapped after his brother was heard complaining that fighters against the ruling regime behaved like bandits.

[The nun] said his headless corpse was found by the side of the road, surrounded by hungry dogs. He had recently married and was soon to be a father. …

There have been a growing number of accounts of atrocities carried out by rogue elements of the Syrian Free Army, which opposes dictator Bashar al-Assad and is recognised by Britain and the West as the legitimate leadership. …

“Rogue elements”? Isn’t the rebel force composed of rogues? Just like the army of the dictator Bashar Assad?

An estimated 300,000 Christians have been displaced in the conflict, with 80,000 forced out of the Homs region alone …

Many have fled abroad raising fears that Syria’s Christian community may vanish – like others across the Middle East …

Why aren’t the Muslim non-rogue elements “defending life” and promoting “harmony and unity” and “caring for others”? If Cardinal  Dolan by some amazing chance gets to hear what’s going on in Syria – and throughout the Muslim states of the Middle East – he’ll be put to some pretty hard head-scratching, we guess.

The very courageous Melanie Phillips, one of the few people in Britain who dare speak publicly about the threat of Islam to the West, writes about a brutal experience she had on a BBC television show. In addition to enduring the howls of a hostile audience, she came up against the obdurate willful blindness and determined foolishness of the British establishment:

For a distressing snapshot of how Britain is steadily sliding into irrelevance and indeed civilisational defeat, take a look at this week’s edition of BBC TV’s Question Time where I was on the panel. My statement that Iran currently posed the greatest threat to the UK and the west provoked a display of truly shocking ignorance amongst the political class, as well as venomous imbecility and resistance to truth-telling amongst the public.

There was booing and general outrage and disbelief at my remarks that Iran was a mortal threat to the west, that it was working to get a nuclear bomb in order to carry out its threat to exterminate Israel and ratchet up its war against the free world, and that it was impossible to negotiate with the religious fanatics ruling Iran, people who believe that producing an apocalypse will hasten the return to earth of the Shia ‘messiah’, the Mahdi, or ‘hidden Imam’.

All these statements, however, are true.

There are countless references, in books, articles and scholarly journals, to the grip of the “Twelver” sect – the most extreme proponents of the Mahdi belief – on the Iranian ruling elite. Here are just a few.

A former Iranian diplomat who defected to Norway in 2010 warned:

“If Iran is given more time, it will acquire the knowledge necessary to build a nuclear bomb within a year.” Asked whether it would use the bomb against Israel, he said: “If Iran gets to the point where it has an atomic bomb, it will certainly use it, against Israel or any other [enemy] country.”

…“They are busying themselves with ideological preparations for the arrival of the hidden Imam and are preparing the ground for that in a practical way; for this purpose, they are willing to spill much blood and destroy many countries.”’

The grip of “Twelver” fanaticism on the Iranian Revolutionary Guards is described here:

Ayatollah Mesbah Yazdi, whose journal deals with the return of the Mahdi; in 2005 it wrote that the Koran calls on Muslims “to wage war against the unbelievers and prepare the way for the advent of the Mahdi.” A Yazdi disciple has given the religious justification for the use of nuclear weapons. Yazdi was a teacher at the Haqqani School which trained senior officers in the Revolutionary Guards and the Iranian intelligence services. He continues to appear in various events sponsored by the Revolutionary Guards.

This video, which surfaced in 2011, claims that Iran is destined to rise as a great power in the last days of the world to help defeat America and Israel and usher in the return of the Mahdi. And it makes clear the Iranians believe that time is fast approaching.

In 2012, the representative of Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khamanei urged action to provoke the reappearance of the Mahdi. …

Despite all this, London Mayor Boris Johnson – in reply to an Iranian woman in the audience who tried to draw a disgusting parallel between the desirability of taking action against genocidal Iran and its putative victim, Israel – came up with the staggering claim that Iran was not trying to manufacture nuclear weapons and was no threat to the west.

This despite the fact that Iran has been conducting acts of terror against western interests since the Iranian revolution in 1979; that it waged war against and caused the deaths of countless British and western forces in Iraq; and that its centrifuges are spinning in order to equip itself with nuclear weapons to carry out its infernal aims, a purpose attested by every western intelligence agency and even by the International Atomic Energy Authority, which said in 2011 that Iran has carried out tests “relevant to the development of a nuclear explosive device”.

Then there was the view expressed by another panel member, the Energy Secretary Ed Davey, that the new Iranian President Hassan Rohani was a moderate whose election gave hope for a solution to the Iranian crisis. But Rohani is not a moderate at all, merely a wily operator who poses as such in order to dupe western gulls such as Ed Davey. A former nuclear negotiator, Rohani has previously boasted that he enabled Iran to make critical progress with its nuclear programme even while negotiations were proceeding.  … Rohani is neither moderate nor a reformer … The Argentine government has said that Rohani was connected to the 1994 terrorist bombing of the Jewish community centre in Buenos Aires which killed 85 people and injured 300:

Iranian President-elect Hassan Rohani was on the special Iranian government committee that plotted the 1994 bombing of a Jewish community center in Buenos Aires, The Washington Free Beacon reported, citing an indictment by the Argentine government prosecutor investigating the case. According to a 2006 indictment, the decision to launch the attack in Argentina was made within a special operations committee connected to the powerful Supreme National Security Council in August 1993. According to the report, former Iranian intelligence official Abolghasem Mesbahi testified in 2006 that Rohani was a member of the special committee, as he was then serving as secretary of the council. With regard to the committee’s role in the decision to carry out the AMIA attack, Moghadam stated that this decision was made under the direction of Ali Khamenei, and that the other members of the committee were [then-Iranian president Ali Akbar Hashemi] Rafsanjani, Mir Hejazi, Rohani, Velayati and Fallahijan …

The oafish idiocy and worse of the Question Time audience was bad enough … But the ignorance about matters so vital to the security of the free world, displayed by both a Cabinet Minister and the politician considered by many to be the best future hope of leading the Conservative party to victory, was simply terrifying as an indication of Britain’s now apparently terminal decline.

 The Darkness of This World

essays on

Our Gnostic Age

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French philosophers in the last century advocated the deliberate doing of evil. Why? Maybe they were helpless instruments of the Zeitgeist. Maybe they were insane.

There was a time long ago when dozens of philosophers, or mystics, or religious teachers, did the same: they taught that this world is evil, and the moral thing to do in an evil world is disobey its moral laws.

Their cults arose and flourished in the 1st and (mostly) the 2nd century C.E., and their doctrine came to be called “Gnosticism” by post-Renaissance historians. [1] It may not be the best name for it. It is derived from their belief that some human beings are capable of escaping this evil world and entering an eternal sphere of pure goodness by being blessed with an inner knowledge of the otherwise unknowable Godhead who dwells there. This intuitive knowledge they called, in Greek, the Gnosis.

The reversing of conventional values so characterized the old Gnostics that they might be called “reversalists”. It was their reversal of values, not their doctrine of intuitive knowledge, that made them dangerous in the ancient world. And as certain recent thinkers propound just such a reversal of values, the word Gnostic is applied to them. Modern Gnostics (or “post-modern” as many of them prefer to call themselves) have had a significant and baneful influence on our age.

In this series of essays we will be looking with a hard and critical – not to say merciless – eye at a selection of influential Gnostics, including French philosophers, Austrian actionist artists, Teutonic terrorists, English entertainers, and American academics.

Jillian Becker   June 23, 2013

NOTES

1. See our posts on some of these Gnostic cults:

The father of all heresy, February 23, 2010 (on Simon Magus, and Menander)

How a rich shipowner affected Christianity, January 2, 2010 (on Marcion)

Erotic religion, January 24, 2010 (on Carpocrates and Epiphanes)

Mani and Manicheism, May 9, 2010

Valentinus, February 14, 2011

Holy snakes, March 24, 2013 (on the Ophites)

The sinning Jesus, the laughing Christ, and the Big Bang of Basilides, April 6, 2013

Also see:

Gnosticism: what is it?, March 3, 2013

Do not expect a Republican majority Congress or a Republican administration – or even both together if they should ever occur at the same time – to make any significant difference to the baneful advance of Islam in America and the world.

We learn from an article in the Orlando Sentinel that Professor Jonathan Matusitz, of the University of Central Florida, was “disinvited” to speak at a Republican Party event in Pinellas County earlier this month because the topic of his speech, “which was to focus on the Islamic threat to America”, was considered by Republican Party members to be too “sensitive”.

Who got at them?

You guessed it. That nefarious terrorism-supporting and altogether disgusting Muslim organization called CAIR.

The Florida chapter of the Council on American-Islamic Relations is accusing a UCF professor of teaching anti-Muslim bigotry.

Officials with the group sent a complaint to the University of Central Florida asking it to review the content of professor Jonathan Matusitz’s courses.

Matusitz, 36, has taught several communication classes at UCF, including one called Terrorism and Communication and another on intercultural communication. He wrote a book titled Terrorism & Communication: A Critical Introduction that was published last year.

The council points to a YouTube video of Matusitz as an example of his sharing “Islamophobic” views with students that it says are inaccurate, biased and over-generalized. UCF says that video, which appears to have been taped in a classroom, actually features an “outside-of-the-classroom presentation” that took place in January. …

In the video, Matusitz stresses the link between terrorism and Islamic culture.

He also suggests countries should resist the global spread of Islam.

“Why do so many Muslims, relative to other religions, want to kill us?” he asks in the video. “The answer is easy, very easy. It is seven letters: culture.”

He also explains that Islam cannot be changed.

“How can you change a movement in which you have 1.5 billion members? It’s impossible,” he says. “We just have to resist it and just elect people who are willing  just to resist it and just be true American. That’s the only answer. We’re not going to change Islam.”

Whom shall we elect who is “willing just to resist” Islam? They are certainly not to be found in the Democratic Party. Nor have we heard from any Independents with the courage to do it, or even the understanding that they should. And in the GOP? Are there ten such people? Five? One?

There is Professor Jonathan Matusitz, but the GOP is unlikely to nominate him for election even if he were willing to stand.

Matusitz … was given an award by UCF last year for outstanding performance.

But Thursday, he appeared on a South Florida radio show to talk about being “disinvited” to speak at a Republican Party event … [and]  said on the show that he refuses to be “politically correct just to please everybody”.

“I think that in academia, I’m sure a lot of people don’t share my views,” he said. “But I also think that a lot of people share my views, but they’re not as open as I am.”

The state chapter of the Council on American-Islamic Relations worries that UCF students are being led to believe that all Islamic societies are violent and create terrorists.

If they are, it’s about time!

In another YouTube video, Matusitz shares his negative opinion of Islam during a recent panel discussion on U.S. national security.

He cites a statistic that indicates the vast majority of victims of terrorism were victims of Islamic terrorism.

“So when my colleagues tell me that Islam is a religion of peace, I tell them that Islam is a religion of pieces: piece of body here, piece of body there,” he says in that video.

A truthful man – and witty too.

Ever since Mitt Romney, standing for election to the presidency in 2012, kept telling Obama in TV debates “I agree with you …”, we knew there was no sense in looking to the GOP for rescue from the advancing barbarians or from any other of the many evils now besetting America.

We view state welfare as bait on the hook of totalitarianism.

Michael Ramirez sees it that way too.