From PowerLine

As was promised (see the post immediately below), yesterday Congress heard the IRS lawyer Carter Hull reveal that William Wilkins, head of the IRS chief counsel’s office, launched the policy of keeping Tea Party groups from acquiring tax-exempt status, and so keeping them from functioning.

What more of William Wilkins? He is an Obama appointee, and is known to have attended numerous meetings at the White House. He and Lois Lerner, head of the IRS office that deals with tax-exempt applications, worked the plot, the skulduggery, against the conservative Tea Party movement.

The Tea Party’s cause is chiefly fiscal responsibility. It is the most effective opposition to redistributive socialism in America, and would have been even more effective – perhaps to the extent of  tipping the balance against Obama in the 2012 election –  had it not been  sabotaged by a government department.

Now we know: the campaign of sabotage by the IRS was started in Washington, D.C. and directed from Washington, D.C.

Peggy Noonan writes in the Wall Street Journal:

The IRS scandal was connected this week not just to the Washington office — that had been established — but to the office of the chief counsel.

That is a bombshell …  And Democrats know it. Which is why they are so desperate to make the investigation go away. They know, as Republicans do, that the chief counsel of the IRS is one of only two Obama political appointees in the entire agency.

To quickly review why the new information, which came most succinctly in a nine-page congressional letter to IRS Commissioner Daniel Werfel, is big news:

When the scandal broke two months ago, in May, IRS leadership in Washington claimed the harassment of tea-party and other conservative groups requesting tax-exempt status was confined to the Cincinnati office, where a few rogue workers bungled the application process.

Lois Lerner, then the head of the exempt organizations unit in Washington, said “line people in Cincinnati” did work that was “not so fine.” They asked questions that “weren’t really necessary,” she claimed, and operated without “the appropriate level of sensitivity.” But the targeting was “not intentional.” Ousted acting commissioner Steven Miller also put it off on “people in Cincinnati.” They provided “horrible customer service.”

They were lying. And they really seemed to think they’d get away with their lies.

House investigators soon talked to workers in the Cincinnati office, who said everything they did came from Washington.

Elizabeth Hofacre, in charge of processing tea-party applications in Cincinnati, told investigators that her work was overseen and directed by a lawyer in the IRS Washington office named Carter Hull.

Now comes Mr. Hull’s testimony. And like Ms. Hofacre, he pointed his finger upward. Mr. Hull — a 48-year IRS veteran and an expert on tax exemption law — told investigators that tea-party applications under his review were sent upstairs within the Washington office, at the direction of Lois Lerner. …

Michael Seto, head of Mr. Hull’s unit, also spoke to investigators. He told them Lois Lerner made an unusual decision: Tea-party applications would undergo additional scrutiny — a multilayered review.

Mr. Hull told House investigators that at some point in the winter of 2010-11, Ms. Lerner’s senior adviser, whose name is withheld in the publicly released partial interview transcript, told him the applications would require further review:

Q: Did [the senior adviser to Ms. Lerner] indicate to you whether she agreed with your recommendations?

A: She did not say whether she agreed or not. She said it should go to chief counsel.

Q: The IRS chief counsel?

A: The IRS chief counsel.

The IRS chief counsel is named William Wilkins … one of only two Obama political appointees in the IRS.

What was the chief counsel’s office looking for? …  The counsel’s office wanted, in the words of the congressional committees, “information about the applicants’ political activities leading up to the 2010 election.”

It’s almost as if … the conservative organizations in question were, during two major election cycles, deliberately held in a holding pattern.

Almost as if? They were “held in a holding pattern”.

So: What the IRS originally claimed was a rogue operation now reaches up not only to the Washington office, but into the office of the IRS chief counsel himself.

These findings were confirmed at the House Oversight Committee Hearings yesterday, and other “big things still got said”, as Peggy Noonan puts it.

Ms. Hofacre of the Cincinnati office testified that when she was given tea-party applications, she had to kick them upstairs. When she was given non-tea-party applications, they were sent on for normal treatment. Was she told to send liberal or progressive groups for special scrutiny? No, she did not scrutinize the applications of liberal or progressive groups. “I would send those to general inventory.” Who got extra scrutiny? “They were all tea-party and patriot cases.” …

Rep. Trey Gowdy, a South Carolina Republican … [described] what he called “the evolution of the defense” since the scandal began. First, Ms. Lerner planted a question at a conference. Then she said the Cincinnati office did it — a narrative that was advanced by the president’s spokesman, Jay Carney. Then came the suggestion the IRS was too badly managed to pull off a sophisticated conspiracy. Then the charge that liberal groups were targeted too — “we did it against both ends of the political spectrum.”

But that was also untrue.

… [T]he inspector general of the IRS said no, it was conservative groups that were targeted. …

So there it is in all its shabbiness – this low dishonest administration.

The  directive to the tyrannical Internal Revenue “Service” to make it hard for conservative and pro-Israel organizations to get the tax-exempt status they apply for, came down from the White House? From Tyranny Central? So we assumed. And so it now seems.

This is from PJ Media, by Ed Driscoll:

“Top IRS officials in Washington, D.C. planned and oversaw the agency’s improper targeting of conservative groups, according to the 72-year old retiring IRS lawyer who will testify Thursday before the House Oversight Committee,” the Daily Caller reports.

That’s today these revelations are promised us.

The Daily Caller goes on:

Retiring IRS lawyer Carter C. Hull implicated the IRS Chief Counsel’s office, headed by Obama appointee William J. Wilkins, and Lois Lerner, the embattled head of the IRS’ exempt organizations office, in the IRS targeting scandal and made clear that the targeting started in Washington, according to leaked interviews that Hull granted to the Oversight Committee in advance of Thursday’s hearing.

Treasury Inspector General J. Russell George will return to Republican chairman Darrell Issa’s committee Thursday along with two central characters in the IRS saga: Hull and Cincinnati-based IRS employee Elizabeth Hofacre, who previously gave Hull’s name to congressional investigators, fingering him as her Washington-based supervisor.

Hull is naming names.

“In April 2010, Mr. Hull was instructed to scrutinize certain Tea Party applications by one of his superiors in Washington. According to Mr. Hull, these applications were used as ‘test’ cases and assigned to him because of his expertise and because IRS leadership in Washington was ‘trying to find out how [the IRS] should approach these organizations, and how [the IRS] should handle them’ … According to Hull’s testimony, Ms. [Lois] Lerner … gave an atypical instruction that the Tea Party applications undergo special scrutiny that included an uncommon multi-layer review that involved a top advisor to Lerner as well as the Chief Counsel’s office,” according to Oversight Committee documents.

As Ace noted last week, “Lerner Embraces Theory That The Process Is The Punishment” — and does so quite publicly and cavalierly:

1 March, 2010 – IRS officials start targeting organizations with “tea party”, “patriot”, and “9-12;” in their names. …

17 November, 2011 – Lois Lerner, Director of Exempt Operations, tells Businessweek that receiving a thick questionnaire from the IRS is a “behavior changer.”

The “behavior”. In the eyes of this petty tyrant – a type of woman who in past times would have been a household termagant – a difference of opinion is “bad behavior”.

… Lois Lerner … embraces the notion that people can and should be punished and compelled into acting the way she prefers, not after Due Process has found them blameworthy, but before anyone even thinks to file charges.

She’s decided that the process itself can and should be a tool of state coercion. She doesn’t need a finding from a legal tribunal to impose burdens on freedoms and to compel what she considers “correct” behavior — she’ll serve as judge and jury herself, and impose the punishment of a “thick questionnaire” as a tool of “behavior change.”  …

And just as a reminder, in 2009 President Obama “joked” about siccing the IRS on his enemies.

The local police, the FBI, special prosecutor Angela Corey,  and the prosecutors in court tried their utmost to find George Zimmerman “guilty of racism”. They were pressed to do so by the Obama administration – chiefly through the “Justice” Department. They failed.

They brought him to trial on insufficient evidence to prove that Zimmerman – who is of Hispanic and black descent – had murdered a black delinquent named Trayvon Martin, who attacked him and whom Zimmerman shot in self-defense, and that he did it because he hated blacks. They failed again.

The Attorney General Eric Holder will not accept the verdict. He is going on with his campaign to sniff out a race hater in George Zimmerman; to find whatever grounds he can, or trump them up, for another trial.

Eric Holder wants the shooting to have been a crime motivated by race-hatred – and so to stir up as much real race hatred as he possibly can.

Well, his evil plan has started working.

This is from the Baltimore Sun:

Baltimore police say they are investigating a witness account that a group of black youths beat a Hispanic man near Patterson Park Sunday while saying, “This is for Trayvon.” …

Real estate agent Christina Dudley said she was walking to her car just before 9 p.m. when she saw several young black males and two black females chasing [someone who was later identified as] a 37-year-old Hispanic man west on North Linwood Avenue past East Fairmont Avenue.

“One of the boys had a handgun out and it was pointed at the back of him,” Dudley said in an interview.

They caught up to the man at the corner of Fairmount and N. Streeper Street, and the male with the gun beat the victim with what appeared to be his gun while others kicked and stomped him, Dudley said.

“They were just yelling and calling him names as they ran after him, but once they were hitting him and after that they started yelling, “This is for Trayvon, [expletive],” said Dudley, who heard the chant repeated multiple times.

Dudley and a woman walking her dog across the street told the group to stop and warned that they were calling 911. The group scattered before police arrived. Police have made no arrests …

Dudley, who lives in the neighborhood, said she worries about her Hispanic neighbors … Patterson Park has one of the city’s highest concentration of Latinos and is home to the city’s annual Latino Fest.

Pleased with how it’s going, Barack and Eric?

Hat tip: Our Facebook reader and commenter Timothy Cla.

It should not need to be said, but – no, not all American blacks think that George Zimmerman should have been found guilty of killing Trayvon Martin.

Our interest is always in what a person thinks and says, not in his or her race or color. But President Obama (we think we must be having a bad dream every time we write those two words!), Attorney General Eric Holder, their sycophants in the media, and the Left in general have made George Zimmerman’s trial for second-degree murder (or failing that, manslaughter), and his acquittal, a race issue. And the media are presenting the story as though the man’s acquittal – on solid grounds, in a case that should never have brought to court anyway – has been taken as an outrageous miscarriage of justice by Black America as a solid whole (as if there were or could be such a thing).

But here are the opinions (some slightly shortened by us) of several black conservatives, members of the Project 21* black leadership network, who dissent from that opinion:

Horace Cooper – co-chairman of Project 21, is a former law professor and former congressional leadership staff member:

While I’m thrilled with this outcome, it should never have come to this. This case should never have been brought forward. The grand jury should never have been bypassed and Judge Nelson should never have allowed this case to get this far. There’s a reason the investigating officer refused to support an arrest, there’s a reason the state’s attorney refused to prosecute and there’s a reason the grand jury was bypassed. There was no substantial evidence corroborating the state’s case and a whole heck of evidence supporting Mr. Zimmerman. The rush to arrest and indict Zimmerman merely to appease the media or race-based interest groups not only jeopardized Mr. Zimmerman’s rights and liberty, but the precedent suggests that all of our rights could be infringed.

Darryn “Dutch” Martin –  a member of Project 21 and a former member of the American diplomatic corps:

… It needs to be understood that the case against George Zimmerman for the death of Trayvon Martin was not supposed to be about race. It was always about self-defense. Zimmerman’s defense team proved this and the jury concurred. Justice has been served. …

Lisa Fritsch – a member of Project 21, tea party activist, author and talk radio host:

Despite a not guilty verdict, we must remember that George Zimmerman is not truly free. This trial will forever remain in his mind for his remaining days. Our hope should be that this trial and verdict will unite the Florida community and this country and be a healing testimony to what happens when we think the worst of one another first. In this case, it felt as if our very country were on trial for racial prejudice. The not guilty verdict should make us reflect on what it means to give the benefit of the doubt before judging harshly and deciding one’s actions are racially motivated. The final question for every community is how we can protect our youth from a system of violence and a lifestyle that nearly guarantees they will find trouble. Zimmerman, Trayvon Martin’s family and more urban Americans will hopefully use this case and verdict as an opportunity to correct that system.

Hughey Newsome – a Project 21 member, financial expert and the Washington representative for the Move-On-Up.Org black political organization:

Everything about the verdict can be wrapped up by considering the post-verdict comments of Zimmerman attorney Mark O’Mara. While many may feel that O’Mara’s comment about charges not being filed against Zimmerman if Zimmerman were black may seem insensitive … his subsequent comments about the need for a civil rights discussion in regards to African-American males are timely despite his feeling it is irrelevant to this case. Those saying the value placed on an African-American male is diminished in today’s society must now ask themselves, if this is believed to be true, what is causing this phenomenon? So many in the media and entertainment industries seem to profit off perpetuating the image of the African-American male as violent and sexual animals, but this is then ignored in order to complain about overt racism that is mostly marginalized in today’s society. This gets us no closer to solving the problem at hand.

Emery McClendon  – a Project 21 member and tea party activist:

We must stop looking at issues from a racial context and stand together as one America …  To use a familiar phrase these days, let’s not stay ‘stuck on stupid’ and move on to heal our land. We have so much to be thankful for. For too long, people such as the NAACP’s Ben Jealous and Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson have spoke out in hate and ignorance and found placement in the media. It’s time to stop the madness. We must turn the tide. If we put as much time into restoring our Constitution as we did into the Zimmerman trial, America would be a better place for all of us.”

*From the same source:

Project 21 was formed in 1992 when the riots following the verdict in the Rodney King case revealed a need to highlight the diversity of opinion within the black community. For over 20 years, the volunteer members of the Project 21 black leadership network have provided conservative and free-market perspectives that, until that time, were largely unknown or ignored by the establishment media.

Continuing our series on contemporary Gnosticism, here is the second essay under the title The Darkness of This World. The first can be found here.

*

The Darkness of This World

essays on

Our Gnostic Age

2

The Gnostic in ancient, medieval, and modern times, rejects “this world”.

To the Gnostic of the early centuries C.E., “this world” was the physical earth and everything on it, all created by an inferior god. He knew that somewhere, elsewhere, there was something immeasurably better, purely good, because he had a minute spark within him – gifted to him by a higher source of existence who was Goodness itself – which informed him through his intuition that it was so. This inner spark was his Gnosis (Knowledge). Having it, he was on to the scam that nature and the ignorant mass of mankind tried to put over on him. So he fought against the world, a saintly warrior for the Good. He fought against nature by defying it – refusing to beget children; and against civilization by reversing its values – declaring everything commonly believed good to be evil, and everything commonly believed evil to be good. His reward lay beyond and above this world. [1]

To the Gnostic of the Middle Ages, “this world” was not only this earth but also the Catholic (Universal) Church. Informed by that same Gnosis which guided the Gnostic of antiquity from within, he fought against Catholic doctrine and practice with the same refusals and reversals. To him everything the Church believed and did was evil; its priests were the servants of Hell. The Church would sniff him out, hunt him down, destroy his body with fire, but he would rise after death to the realm of the Good. [2]

To the Gnostic of our era, “this world” is the political-economic system of the Western nation-state. As a warrior for a never-yet-realized reign of the Good on this earth, he fights against the established order in theory and practice. He holds the values honored by custom and defended by law to be evil; the values they abhor to be good. He does not want to reform or improve the system; he wants it wholly overthrown. He is a revolutionary. He feels passionately that “this world” needs to be transformed.

Recently commentators have been writing about traditional Western values being inverted.

We live in a backwards world in which the decent are regarded as indecent, defenders of western institutions are considered as terrorists, correct naming is derogated and often prosecuted as slander and “hate speech”, violence is justified if committed by our enemies, unseasonable cold weather is interpreted as an infallible sign of global warming … It is a world in which Iran[3] chairs the UN Conference on Disarmament; and Syria [4] was recently a member of the United Nations Human Rights Committee. … We have, for the most part, colluded in an agreement that upside-down down is right-side-up, backwards is forwards, and madness is sanity … [5]

In the essay quoted, David Solway cites a book by Melanie Phillips (whom I much admire for her courageous and percipient defense of many a just cause). It is titled The World Turned Upside Down. [6] She believes that the topsy-turviness – which she deplores – results from a loss of faith in “God” and detachment from the West’s “Judeo-Christian roots”. I have no doubt that Europe is becoming less religious. But I do not think Christianity (which is what is generally meant by “Judeo-Christian roots”) was good for the West, or its values ideal. Nor are they the values that are being inverted. The values that the Gnostic revolutionary scorns are those of the Enlightenment.

Enlightenment thinking was rational, skeptical, and humane. Gnostic ideology is emotional, dogmatic, and cruel.

Daniel Greenfield – the editor and writer chiefly responsible for the sustained excellence of Front Page Magazine – comments on a Time Magazine article typical of topsy-turvy thinking among media pundits:

News coverage has nothing to do with reality. Instead it is a deliberate inversion of reality in which the murderers are the heroes and the greatest threat comes from their victims. The bad guys are the good guys. The good guys are the bad guys. The slavery of Islam is freedom. The freedom of America and Israel is slavery because it has to be defended against the slavery of Islam. [7]

Such defiance of civilized values arose as a significant historical factor with the Romantic movement around the middle of the 18th century. The Romantics hated the Industrial Revolution, its “dark satanic mills”, its noise and ugliness. They did not care if it made life better for most people – which it did, however ugly and squalid living conditions were at first for the workers in the industrial cities. The Romantic movement was a backlash against the Enlightenment, against scientific and technological advance, against capitalism, against reality. Romantics dreamt of utopias: beautiful societies consisting of ideal human beings who would live for the happiness of their fellow creatures and share all material goods. And all they had to do to win such a world was, they believed, to destroy the world they lived in. Merciless brutality to living people would be justified by the creation of a heaven on earth inhabited by imaginary angelic beings.

Socialism, Communism, Nazism, Alinskyism, Environmentalism … all revolutionary ideologies spawned by the Romantic rebellion against the Enlightenment.

How do the revolutionaries know that after vast destruction their beautiful new world will be born? They know it. They are the Gnostics of the modern age.

They made revolutions in the twentieth century, whether by constitutional process or by violence. They took the reins of power and set about creating their new worlds, which lasted for years here and decades there; and wherever their utopias were, and in the name of whichever ideology they were governed, they stand out as exceptionally marked by terror, pain, cruelty, despair and death.

But the idealists learnt no lesson from the failure of their terrible experiments. The dreamers did not lose their faith. Instead of fading away, withered by disgust and contempt, the faith spread, and is becoming so prevalent that some observers – I among them – see it now as characterizing the West.

The Gnostics who dream on of destroying our civilization should not be ignored. What have they said and done? What are they saying now? We must pay attention. They mean it.

Jillian Becker   July 14, 2013

NOTES

1.These are the essays on ancient Gnostic sects in the The Atheist Conservative: How a rich shipowner affected Christianity, January 2, 2010 (on Marcion); Erotic religion, January 24, 2010 (on Carpocrates and Epiphanes); The father of all heresy, February 23, 2010 (on Simon Magus and Menander); 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. See also Gnosticism: what is it?, March 3, 2013.

2. These are the essays on Gnosticism in the Middle Ages: Hot in the land of Hum, October 14, 2010 (on the Bugomils); The heretics of Languedoc, May 1, 2011 (on the Cathars). In the Bugomils’ case, their resistance was maintained against both the Catholic Church and the Orthodox Church.

3. Iran is working to become a nuclear-armed power, and has threatened Israel with total destruction.

4. The Syrian dictator Bashar Assad, like his father before him, is notorious for the oppression, torture, and mass killing of tens of thousands of his own people.

5. David Solway, Living in a Backwards World, frontpagemag.com, July 2, 2013.

6. The World Turned Upside Down: The Global Battle Over God, Truth and Power, by Melanie Phillips, Encounter Books, New York, 2010.

7.  Daniel Greenfield, Time Mag: Muslim Terror No, Buddhist Terror Yes, in The Point, frontpagemag.com, July 11, 2013.

This video is the shorter version of an anti-jihad film titled The Third Jihad, made by a loyal American who is himself a Muslim, Dr. M. Zuhdi Jasser.

The Commissioner of the New York Police Department, Ray Kelly, appears in it. It was shown to the officers of the NYPD.

Watch it, and see if you think anything in it is untrue. See if you think its content should not be widely known, and known to police officers in a city where thousands have been killed, maimed, widowed and orphaned by Muslim terrorists.

Its showing to the New York police so annoyed Muslims who support terrorism, and their ignorant or stupid or wicked allies, that in coalition as the Shoulder-to-Shoulder Campaign they worked to get the New York City Council to pass bills “stopping the abuses of the NYPD”. The New York City Council obliged. It is heavily leftist, remember: out of 51 members, 46 are Democrats.

What these bills actually do is hamper the ability of the NYPD to fight crime effectively and weaken it as a counter-terrorist force.

But the Mayor of New York – yes, that same Mayor Bloomberg whom we have derided for wanting to treat the citizens as children (for instance by forbidding them to buy sodas in a certain large cup size) – has declared that he will veto the bills.

For this we praise him. The bad news is that his veto may not suffice to quash them.

For details of this lamentable story, we quote from an article by Ryan Mauro at Front Page:

The Shoulder-to-Shoulder Campaign, an interfaith coalition allied with the Islamic Society of North America (ISNA), is praising the passage of two bills by the New York City Council aimed at stopping the alleged abuses of the NYPD. Mayor Bloomberg says he will veto the bills, even though they passed with enough support to override [the veto].

The passed bills, the End Discriminatory Profiling Bill and NYPD Oversight Bill, outraged Mayor Bloomberg and NYPD Police Commissioner Ray Kelly.

The latter bill requires the overseeing of the NYPD by an independent Inspector-General.

The former opens the door for the NYPD to be sued in state court for policies that disproportionately affect certain ages, genders, sexual orientations or housing statuses.

Mayor Bloomberg considers the bills to be a matter of “life and death” vows to “not give up for one minute.”

“The bill would allow virtually everyone in New York City to sue the Police Department and individual police officers over the entire range of law enforcement functions they perform,” [Police Commissioner] Kelly explained.

He said the result will be skyrocketing liability costs, the unnecessary use of resources and an overall decrease in effectiveness.

When asked about the so-called problem of NYPD racial profiling, Bloomberg dismissively said, “Nobody racially profiles.”

He made perhaps the most politically-incorrect statement of his career in defense of the NYPD:

They just keep saying, ‘Oh it’s a disproportionate percentage of a particular ethnic group.’ That may be, but it’s not a disproportionate percentage of those who witnesses and victims describe as committing the murder. In that case, incidentally, I think we disproportionately stop whites too much and minorities too little. … The numbers clearly show that the stops are generally proportionate with suspect’s descriptions.

Well said, Mr Mayor!

The bills were aggressively supported by the New York chapter of the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), joined by the American Civil Liberties Union.

The ACLU has often allied itself with the U.S. Muslim Brotherhood network that CAIR and ISNA belong to.

CAIR’s chapter in New York is among its more radical ones.

Are some branches of this terrorist-supporting organization less “radical” than others? Are there some who do not like jihad or the method of terrorism? Who do not collect funds to send to the Middle East to aid active terrorists?

Former CAIR-NY director Cyrus McGoldrick has sent out tweets with anti-law enforcement rhetoric and support for Hamas, the Muslim Brotherhood and the destruction of Israel.

CAIR-NY board president Zead Ramadan refused to condemn Hamas in December 2011 and has portrayed American Muslims as a brutally-repressed minority on Iranian state TV. Another board member, Lamis Deek, has praised Hamas, supports the elimination of Israel and claims that the NYPD has a secret alliance with Israel to target Muslims.

And the New York City Council believes him? Apparently, yes.

Deek also supported the Muslim Brotherhood takeover of Egypt as a blow to American “imperialism.”

The Shoulder-to-Shoulder Campaign, an interfaith political coalition that includes ISNA as a member, celebrated the bills’ passage. ISNA is so proud of its work in putting together the coalition that it highlighted it as a crowning achievement when it met with Turkish Prime Minister Erdogan in May.

What ignorant or stupid or wicked organizations have joined in this conspiracy?

Among the Campaign’s members are these:

American Baptist Churches USA

The Episcopal Church

The Evangelical Lutheran Church in America

The Presbyterian Church (USA)

The United Church of Christ

No surprises there. But also:

The Jewish Council for Public Affairs

The Jewish Theological Seminary of America

You may recognize the members of these last two organizations in any crowd. They will be the people going about without noses, which they’ve cut off to spite their faces.

Muslims are already treating Britain as their own territory, encountering no effective resistance from a native population enfeebled by “politically correct” leftist dogma.

This is from Gates of Vienna, by Beth Baron:

Yasser al-Habib, the Shia “hate Sheik of the Home Counties”, has set up a power base in a quaint and pretty Buckinghamshire village named Fulmer …

In an empty, barn-like building previously owned by the Plymouth Brethren (a Christian Evangelist movement) and now the Al Muhassin Mosque, the Sheikh has established Fadak TV, a satellite channel that broadcasts his hate-fuelled and divisive messages to his followers around the world.

Sheikh al-Habib has a chequered past. He was imprisoned in Kuwait in 2003 for verbally attacking Sunni leaders and advocating extreme views which strongly criticized the Sunni sect of Islam … He has been in Britain since 2004 after his Kuwaiti citizenship was revoked. …

The Sheikh has no immediate plans to make any structural or cosmetic changes to the building, but he has stated that he may apply to “Islamify” it at a future date. His ambitions, however, do not stop there  … he [encourages] believers to make the effort to …  help transform [Fulmer] into a “true Islamic village”.  … Efforts are being made to establish an Islamic Shia school and seminary of traditional Islamic learning in the future. …

Where all this will leave the present community of 500, their church, the Black Horse Pub, the tiny primary school and the life of the village — which has frequently won the award for “Best Kept Village”, and holds regular events such as the annual village fete with pub BBQ and a Christmas party, as well as boasting its own cricket team — [is] unclear. [But it appears] from what “his Eminence”  has said the indigenous inhabitants with their long history, culture and traditions (dating back to 1198) are … an impediment to his plans, and like a conqueror of old he is ready to sweep them away and impose an entirely new and alien identity on the village.

Al-Habib has made no secret of his plans; his public declarations of his intentions should have set alarm bells ringing. However, Pauline Vahey, Chairman of the Parish Council, has unreservedly welcomed the newcomers, their mosque, the hate Sheikh and his contentious and potentially dangerous satellite TV channel into her sleepy and vulnerable village. …

I hope that Pauline Vahey and her colleagues on the Parish Council will be held personally responsible for their foolish and suicidal capitulation in the name of political correctness, and especially for their lack of due diligence. From the get-go the Islamic newcomers will demand small accommodations. Such accommodations will automatically be acquiesced to by the Council in the name of ‘diversity’ and ‘community cohesion’. As their numbers grow, polite requests for small accommodations will turn into vocal and aggressive demands for special privileges which will steamroller over the wishes of the original inhabitants and will change forever the nature, culture and landscape of these few square miles of precious traditional England.

This insidious process of invasion, an Islamic land-grab, is no longer confined to English towns and cities. Village by village, street by street, the UK is being systematically colonized, and it is only a matter of time before all the dots join up. It is no exaggeration to say that at the current rate of Islamic demographic growth coupled with uncontrolled immigration, within 50 years or perhaps less we will have little or no country left to call our own. …

The following comments … from Ms Vahey are contradictory, and the people of Fulmer deserve better from their leader:

They are a sect of Shia Islam who encourage and preach peace amongst all Islamic groups. To that end, during the week there will be six members on the premises daily, from which they hope to broadcast on two satellite channels in Arabic and French. … They have every right to be there and every right to worship in the mosque. But we have all sorts of people who are showing concern. They are not concerned that they are worshipping here, but that what they are doing appears to have managed to upset all sorts of other Muslims. What we are seeking is to avoid any inter-sectarian disputes affecting Fulmer, however that might manifest itself.  …

“I just don’t understand why they have decided to come here,” said Jess Harasimow, a 24-year-old barman in the village pub. “Fulmer is in the middle of nowhere and it does not have a big Muslim community. In fact, all there is in Fulmer is the pub, a little infants school, a church and the village hall. I just don’t know why they haven’t gone somewhere where there is a greater population of Muslims … ”

But that is just the point, Jess. This is their modus operandi. They target an area … that manifestly has no need for a mosque. They purchase or lease a building, convert it into a mosque or Islamic centre (old churches or places of worship are particularly attractive and harder for locals to defend) and create a bridgehead, This is followed by the purchase of local properties, assisted by instantly available sharia mortgages (the fifth column of Sharia finance is much loved by our bankrupt and treacherous government) and the process is then repeated over and over again with military precision until the last local family has moved out.

Anecdotal evidence suggests that if resistance is encountered, intimidation, bullying, threats of violence and bribes are successful tactics commonly used to rid an area of the last stubborn Kafir. …

There are concerns amongst some local residents about the … controversial broadcasts by [the mosque’s] satellite TV station. It is understood that Dominic Grieve, the Local MP and Attorney General, has been contacted [in complaint about them], and there have been informal talks with Thames Valley Police. …

In the local town of Stoke Poges, opposition to the mosque has resulted in petitions being circulated … The opposition by the residents there appears to be generated not by the mosque itself but by the contentious teachings of its leader.

Why the heck don’t they find out what the mosque religion is all about? They would find it rich with contentious teachings.

If Sunni v Shia violence is visited upon Fulmer, and from what we have already seen in London there is no reason to assume that it will not, then great suffering and unimaginable chaos will be inflicted on the inhabitants of this well-ordered village. These unfortunate souls appear to be facing a “double whammy”: the possible loss of their village to the expansionist “hate Sheikh” and his Shia sect, and …  inter-sectarian violence such as we have recently seen in Syria and other war-torn parts of the world. The economic and psychological fallout for homeowners, families, children and the elderly would be enormous. If all this comes to pass I hope the residents will remember the words of their leader Pauline Vahey, her dhimmitude and her willful ignorance. It is safe to say that the fallout would not be confined to Fulmer; the wider area would be unable to resist the tensions. Indeed the violence could spread to areas where there are large Muslim populations, in other words, across much of the UK especially London and the major cities.

All this inevitably leads me to believe that affluence and privilege do not automatically go hand in hand with common sense, courage or a healthy interest in current affairs and factual history. Even rarer is a sense of self-preservation and patriotism.

The poisonous tentacles of the cultural Marxists via the educational system, the mainstream media and the Common Purpose shock troops in local government appear to have reached into places where you would least expect to find them, and where well-heeled but clueless residents have the most to lose.

With this in mind I fear it will be left to the rest of us to show courage and unflinching resolve. Village communities must follow suit, unite and educate themselves about the realities of Islamic expansionist ambitions. They must be prepared to fight applications for new mosques and Islamic centres, and push back against this invasion without fearing censure from the left-leaning minority.

In other words, to bravely stand our ground and defend our nation again in her new hour of peril. This must be done if we wish to pass our country and culture on to those who come after us and whose future is currently in the most extreme jeopardy.

But it may be already too late.