Mark Steyn explains with brilliant clarity that what is wrong with the motion M-103  recently passed by the Canadian parliament is that it is a lie. It is now an official parliamentary resolution that claims there is “a climate of hate and fear” of Islam among the general population of Canada.

There is no such thing – though there ought to be, and it ought to be strong enough to make it impossible to pass such a resolution.

Hate and fear are only being preached, urged, promoted, and induced by Muslims themselves, with sermons and acts of terrorism. They even call for genocide. And their right to do so will not be in the least diminished by this stupid lying resolution. On the contrary, M-103 protects Muslim hate-mongers and terrorists.

“We are taking refuge in official lies as our civilization crumbles,” Mark Steyn says at the end of the video.

We can only save our civilization if we start now seriously hating and fearing Islam, actively engaging its war against us with all we’ve got, and defeating it.

A plan for the US administration:

Pass a resolution that acknowledges that North Korea and Iran have declared war on America. Not being a direct declaration of war, it keeps America’s response ambiguous, but establishes the legality of military response. It also frees us from thinking of the Iranian and North Korean populations as hostages of the regimes – and keeps lawyer-committees from second-guessing operations. It also trumpets the end of strategic patience – a masterpiece of empty diplomatic virtue-signaling.  Then be prepared to:

1. Load up on anti-missile missiles around Iran and North Korea.

2. Fire them on any test missile launched by either state.

3. At the next launching of a missile by Iran, unilaterally cancel the Iran deal.

4. Reimpose sanctions; impose boycott. Russia, China, Germany, UK, France can choose between trade with US or trade with Iran (and North Korea). Interdict all “suspicious” shipping. Blockade?

5. Notify that any aggressive action by Iranian or North Korean navy vessels will bring down fire upon them.

6. Let Israel take out Iran’s proxy terrorists without crying “foul”. Decouple Israel from any settlement with Arab or Muslim adversaries in the Middle East. (Israel’s sovereignty is not a bargaining chip.) Send special forces to combat all Islamic terror franchises throughout Africa. Wipe out Boko Haram along with AQ, ISIL, and the Yemeni lot. Upgrade our spy and infiltrator game. (Stop hiring spies and special ops. according to race and gender quotas. Loyalty, ruthlessness and competence to do the job should be qualifications.)

7. Launch new cyber weapons against Iran’s government operations and its nuclear program – and keep ’em coming. (What’s the hold-up? Or have we already lost our tech edge?).

8. Find other means to sabotage the nuclear program – like bunker busting the nuclear sites in Iran – if 7 doesn’t work.

9. Work for regime change in both North Korea and Iran. Send out assassins, foment sedition and riots. Dust up on dirty tricks. (Yep, this had better be “who we are” or we will be sitting ducks.)

10. Defund the UN.

C. Gee   March 30, 2017

Except in Western institutions of education, the socialist Left is a spent force.

Where it has had absolute power it stands in the midst of the ruin it has made (Cuba, Venezuela); or it has conceded that only capitalism brings prosperity (China); or it screams absurdly that it will destroy the West and fires dud missiles over the ocean (North Korea). No new such states will be established in the foreseeable future.

Where it has had to share power it is seen by voters as standing for nothing worth voting for.

The British Labour Party is decaying – even according to its own members.

“The Dutch Labour Party (PvdA) has suffered the worst result in their history after losing more than three-quarters of their parliamentary seats in [the recent] general election.”

The French Socialist Party is “heading for implosion “ in the forthcoming elections.

The Democratic Party in America (yes, it is a socialist party) is a sad rump. The president is a Republican and the Republicans control the House of Representatives and the Senate. The Supreme Court will most likely be dominated by conservative justices for a long time to come.

Even pro-Democrat CNS News, however reluctantly, reports:

Republicans are now in control of a record 67 (68 percent) of the 98 partisan state legislative chambers in the nation, more than twice the number (31) in which Democrats have a majority … In 24 of the 32 states with Republican-controlled legislatures, voters have also elected Republican governors. In contrast, Democrats have a “political trifecta” in just six states.

The country was not excited by the prospect of a leadership consisting of senile Nancy Pelosi, dishonest whiny Harry Reid, and crooked Hillary Clinton.

Of course the dark side is going down fighting. Its militant cohorts consist of black-clothed thugs who mob-attack Republicans and anyone else they don’t like with with fire, clubs, fists, and boots.

Elected Democrats, the unhappy few, are doing their utmost to destroy the Trump presidency, chiefly by pretending with a great deal of faux outrage that President Trump is in league with the Russian government!

Leftists want power for power’s sake. They want one-party rule – their own perpetually. They try to buy votes by offering “free stuff”. The Venezuelans fell for that, and now they are sans food, sans medicine, sans hope, sans everything.

But the fight is on. In America it is a kind of civil war.

Daniel Greenfield writes at Front Page:

A civil war has begun.

This civil war is very different than the last one. There are no cannons or cavalry charges. The left doesn’t want to secede. It wants to rule. Political conflicts become civil wars when one side refuses to accept the existing authority. The left has rejected all forms of authority that it doesn’t control.

The left has rejected the outcome of the last two presidential elections won by Republicans. It has rejected the judicial authority of the Supreme Court when it decisions don’t accord with its agenda. It rejects the legislative authority of Congress when it is not dominated by the left.

It rejected the Constitution so long ago that it hardly bears mentioning.

It was for total unilateral executive authority under Obama. And now it’s for states unilaterally deciding what laws they will follow. (As long as that involves defying immigration laws under Trump, not following them under Obama.) It was for the sacrosanct authority of the Senate when it held the majority. Then it decried the Senate as an outmoded institution when the Republicans took it over.

It was for Obama defying the orders of Federal judges, no matter how well grounded in existing law, and it is for Federal judges overriding any order by Trump on any grounds whatsoever. It was for Obama penalizing whistleblowers, but now undermining the government from within has become “patriotic”.

There is no form of legal authority that the left accepts as a permanent institution. It only utilizes forms of authority selectively when it controls them. But when government officials refuse the orders of the duly elected government because their allegiance is to an ideology whose agenda is in conflict with the President and Congress, that’s not activism, protest, politics or civil disobedience; it’s treason.

After losing Congress, the left consolidated its authority in the White House. After losing the White House, the left shifted its center of authority to Federal judges and unelected government officials. Each defeat led the radicalized Democrats to relocate from more democratic to less democratic institutions.

This isn’t just hypocrisy. That’s a common political sin. Hypocrites maneuver within the system. The left has no allegiance to the system. It accepts no laws other than those dictated by its ideology.

Democrats have become radicalized by the left. This doesn’t just mean that they pursue all sorts of bad policies. It means that their first and foremost allegiance is to an ideology, not the Constitution, not our country or our system of government. All of those are only to be used as vehicles for their ideology.

That’s why compromise has become impossible.

Our system of government was designed to allow different groups to negotiate their differences. But those differences were supposed to be based around finding shared interests. The most profound of these shared interests was that of a common country based around certain civilizational values. The left has replaced these Founding ideas with radically different notions and principles. It has rejected the primary importance of the country. As a result it shares little in the way of interests or values.

Instead it has retreated to cultural urban and suburban enclaves where it has centralized tremendous amounts of power while disregarding the interests and values of most of the country. If it considers them at all, it is convinced that they will shortly disappear to be replaced by compliant immigrants and college indoctrinated leftists who will form a permanent demographic majority for its agenda.

But it couldn’t wait that long because it is animated by the conviction that enforcing its ideas is urgent and inevitable. And so it turned what had been a hidden transition into an open break.

In the hidden transition, its authority figures had hijacked the law and every political office they held to pursue their ideological agenda. The left had used its vast cultural power to manufacture a consensus that was slowly transitioning the country from American values to its values and agendas. The right had proven largely impotent in the face of a program which corrupted and subverted from within.

The left was enormously successful in this regard. It was so successful that it lost all sense of proportion and decided to be open about its views and to launch a political power struggle after losing an election.

The Democrats were no longer being slowly injected with leftist ideology. Instead the left openly took over and demanded allegiance to open borders, identity politics and environmental fanaticism. The exodus of voters wiped out the Democrats across much of what the left deemed flyover country.

The left responded to democratic defeats by retreating deeper into undemocratic institutions, whether it was the bureaucracy or the corporate media, while doubling down on its political radicalism. It is now openly defying the outcome of a national election using a coalition of bureaucrats, corporations, unelected officials, celebrities and reporters that are based out of its cultural and political enclaves.

It has responded to a lost election by constructing sanctuary cities and states thereby turning a cultural and ideological secession into a legal secession. But while secessionists want to be left alone authoritarians want everyone to follow their laws. The left is an authoritarian movement that wants total compliance with its dictates with severe punishments for those who disobey.

The left describes its actions as principled. But more accurately they are ideological. Officials at various levels of government have rejected the authority of the President of the United States, of Congress and of the Constitution because those are at odds with their radical ideology. Judges have cloaked this rejection in law. Mayors and governors are not even pretending that their actions are lawful.

The choices of this civil war are painfully clear.

We can have a system of government based around the Constitution with democratically elected representatives. Or we can have one based on the ideological principles of the left in which all laws and processes, including elections and the Constitution, are fig leaves for enforcing social justice.

But we cannot have both.

Some civil wars happen when a political conflict can’t be resolved at the political level. The really bad ones happen when an irresolvable political conflict combines with an irresolvable cultural conflict.

That is what we have now.

The left has made it clear that it will not accept the lawful authority of our system of government. It will not accept the outcome of elections. It will not accept these things because they are at odds with its ideology and because they represent the will of large portions of the country whom they despise.

The question is what comes next.

The last time around growing tensions began to explode in violent confrontations between extremists on both sides. These extremists were lauded by moderates who mainstreamed their views. The first Republican president was elected and rejected. The political tensions led to conflict and then civil war.

The left doesn’t believe in secession. It’s an authoritarian political movement that has lost democratic authority. There is now a political power struggle underway between the democratically elected officials and the undemocratic machinery of government aided by a handful of judges and local elected officials.

What this really means is that there are two competing governments; the legal government and a treasonous anti-government of the left. If this political conflict progresses, agencies and individuals at every level of government will be asked to demonstrate their allegiance to these two competing governments. And that can swiftly and explosively transform into an actual civil war.

There is no sign that the left understands or is troubled by the implications of the conflict it has initiated. And there are few signs that Democrats properly understand the dangerous road that the radical left is drawing them toward. The left assumes that the winners of a democratic election will back down rather than stand on their authority. It is unprepared for the possibility that democracy won’t die in darkness.

Civil wars end when one side is forced to accept the authority of the other. The left expects everyone to accept its ideological authority. Conservatives expect the left to accept Constitutional authority. The conflict is still political and cultural. It’s being fought in the media and within the government. But if neither side backs down, then it will go beyond words as both sides give contradictory orders.

The left is a treasonous movement. The Democrats became a treasonous organization when they fell under the sway of a movement that rejects our system of government, its laws and its elections. Now their treason is coming to a head. They are engaged in a struggle for power against the government. That’s not protest. It’s not activism. The old treason of the sixties has come of age. A civil war has begun.

This is a primal conflict between a totalitarian system and a democratic system. Its outcome will determine whether we will be a free nation or a nation of slaves.

We see the Left totalitarians losing the war. Nasty as their fight is and will continue to be for quite some time, it is not them we have to fear but their terrible foster-child, Islam. 

That is the totalitarian force that is gathering strength – and in Europe it is winning.

Pat Condell on how Islam “has nothing to do with Islam”:

And this is from an article  in the The Participator by Chauncey Tinker, titled Terror Attack in the Heart of London:

Following this week’s attack in Westminster, the subject of extremism is back once again on the front pages.

The purpose of the UK’s “Prevent” strategy is not to deal directly with these kinds of terrorist attacks. “Prevent” is only one “work stream” of four in the UK’s larger counter-terrorism strategy called “CONTEST“. “Prevent” is supposed to stop people from becoming “radicalized” in the first place, by challenging those promoting “extremist” ideologies, and intervening early to influence those at risk of becoming “radicalized” away from “extremist” ideas.

IS THE PREVENT STRATEGY HAVING ANY EFFECT AT ALL?

The Independent reported in November last year on “an extremist group with links to 140 Isis fighters active in UK”. Here the Independent show pictures of the group openly selling Korans in Oxford St., London. Quote from the article:

Members of an extremist group banned in Germany for inspiring more than 140 Isis fighters with its “violent” ideology are active in the UK and seeking to recruit followers in Britain’s largest cities, The Independent can reveal.

It seems quite extraordinary does it not that over a decade after the “Prevent” strategy was first introduced, things like this are still going on openly in a busy street in the heart of the capital. However, this is just the tip of a very large iceberg of course.

In an effort to reassure the Muslim population that the “Prevent” strategy was not exclusively targetting members of their faith, the authorities recently publicized their work to “de-radicalize” a 14-year old boy in Yorkshire:

He was saying that Muslim women shouldn’t be allowed to wear the niqab and he had his head filled with nonsense that Muslims were trying to take over the country.

Nonsense perhaps that has also been expressed by Muslims as well, for example a Muslim caller on a BBC Asian Network program recently said:

Sooner or later Islam is going to be taking over anyway.

I would also like to cast readers’ minds back to a speech given by the UK’s first Muslim government minister, Shahid Malik, where he expresses the view to a large Muslim audience that:

At this rate the whole parliament will be Muslim.

He then adds (with a big smirk):

… but just to say, in case there are journalists here today, that is not my objective.

Has Mr. Malik been de-radicalized by the “Prevent” strategy yet, I wonder? During his time in government he held a number of posts including Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Justice. Surely the extremist view of a prominent politician (indistinguishable from that schoolboy’s view) is far more in danger of radicalizing impressionable youngsters than the rants of a lone schoolboy in a school playground?

During Mr. Malik’s time as “Cohesion Minister”, he was accused of “going soft on Muslim youths in the war against extremism”. According to an article in the Daily Express, Mr. Malik may in fact have been personally responsible for the original change in direction of the policy that led it to target this young schoolboy in Yorkshire. Strange then, that his own views are so very similar. They both seem to believe that Muslims are taking over the country.

Cohesion Minister Shahid Malik said the £45 million-a-year “Prevent” strategy would also work in deprived white areas rather than concentrating on Muslim youths.

Its also odd that this young boy was targeted by the Prevent strategy when many others including prominent politicians have expressed similar views about the more extreme forms of Islamic dress, for example from the Daily Telegraph:

MP calls for burkas to be banned in Britain

I wonder if Mr. Hollobone (Conservative MP for Kettering) is currently being “de-radicalized” by the “Prevent” strategy as well?

I would describe what is going on here as state bullying of a minor, nothing more dignified than that. The authorities imagine that by bullying the odd hapless schoolchild here and there they can hoodwink the UK public into thinking that they are getting tough on real extremism. By real extremism I mean direct and credible incitement to violence, not merely suggesting that the niqab should be banned, or simply projecting current population trends into the not so distant future. …

The hypocrisy of the UK’s current “leadership” is truly breathtaking to behold.

As is the same hypocrisy of the leaders of almost every country in the West  – President Trump being the most important of the rare exceptions.

He insists that the acts of terrorism carried out by Muslims are “Islamic” – and saboteurs among his White House staff try to remove the word.

From the Washington Free Beacon:

In one instance, Trump administration officials found evidence that the administration’s executive order banning travel from certain Muslim-majority nations had been selectively altered to bring it more in line with Obama-era talking points.

Several hours before the orders were set to be signed by Trump, officials noticed that language concerning “radical Islamic terrorism” had been stripped from the order and replaced with Obama-era language about countering “violent extremism”.

Because although the terrorist acts are carried out by Muslims in the name of their religion, to fulfill the Islamic religious duty of jihad, they still have

“NOTHING TO DO WITH ISLAM“

In the West, since the Enlightenment, the university is an institution for the exploration of the infinite realm of ideas. It is a convention of many members all dedicated to the perpetual quest for truth. They will  learn, imagine, search, examine, invent, experiment, discover, reflect, reason, conjecture, theorize, test, propound, doubt, criticize, argue, challenge, revise, triumph and fail. There can be no dissent that is unwelcome, no novelty barred out, no mystery preserved from exploration. It is an open field for thinkers.

If a university adopts any set of ideas as an orthodoxy, if it refuses to allow an idea to be expressed, it ceases to be a university. It has become a church.

A church is an institution for the protection of unproven belief, the propounding of dogma, the performance of mystical rites and rituals, the enforcement of strict ideological conformity, the exclusion of doubt, the punishment of dissent, the scorn of reason. It insists that it owns the truth. Its doctrine is apodictic. To challenge it is heresy, and heretics are shamed and silenced. It is a stuffy home for the gullible.

The university and the church are as opposed to each other as are fire and water.

Here is a video about a university becoming a church.

Nebraska Democrats welcome Muslim “refugees” – some of them, opines this spokeswoman, “with skills”, such as those who have been “leaders of political parties” – with “comfort baskets”  that include voting registration forms.

Note 1: There is no Islamic political organization in any of the countries the Muslim “refugees” are coming from  – chiefly Syria and Iraq – that is not supremacist and totalitarian. There are no middle eastern Muslim political leaders who would allow women to be equal to men.

Note 2: US law does not permit an immigrant to vote until he/she has been in the US for 5 years and has then applied for, and been granted, citizenship.

This is pure “virtue-signaling”.

“We are such nice generous people,” is this woman’s message. “See how nice I am, how nice we Democrats are.”

They are not nice. They are either ill-informed and foolish, or deliberately subversive.

George Soros is an evil man. Go here, to Discover the Networks, to read about the evil he does, the many subversive and insurrectionist movements he funds.

From the days of his early youth spent helping the Nazis implement the Holocaust, to his sponsoring now in his old age the Muslim-organized marches of (pathetically stupid) women to protest the election of President Trump in America, he has unwaveringly pursued his satanic aim – the wrecking of Western civilization.

But the news agency Reuters likes him and his works.

We emphasize examples of their bias in the story they tell of how the Hungarian government’s effort to ward off the flood of Muslim immigrants* –  now overwhelming western Europe – is being impeded by George Soros.

Reuters reports and opines:

When his government lost a lawsuit in the European Court of Human Rights last week over its detention and expulsion of two migrants from Bangladesh, Hungary’s rightwing prime minister blamed the usual suspect: a billionaire in New York.

“The usual suspect”  is of course a reference to the famous line of dialogue in the film Casablanca, in which the French police chief gives orders to his men to  “round up the usual suspects” in order to deceive the Nazi occupiers of the French territory that he is serving them when he isn’t. The “usual suspects” are innocent of the crime they are being rounded up to answer for. The use of the phrase by Reuters conveys their belief in George Soros’s innocence.

“It is a collusion of human traffickers, Brussels bureaucrats and the organizations that work in Hungary financed by foreign money,” Viktor Orban told public radio on Friday.

“Let’s call a spade a spade: George Soros finances them.”

Yes, it is such a collusion, and Soros is financing it.

Across former Communist states of east and central Europe, leaders with a hardline bent have turned their wrath in recent months against Soros, a Hungarian-American financier who funds liberal charities and non-governmental organizations worldwide through his Open Society Foundations (OSF).

A more Orwellian use of the phrase “open society” could not be devised by the author of 1984 himself.

The campaign against Soros in countries formerly dominated by Moscow appears to follow a template set by Russian President Vladimir Putin, whose own crackdown on foreign-funded charities drove Soros’s foundation out of Russia two years ago.

Reuters would have us weep for poor Soros and his foundation. And, they imply, if he’s a victim of Putin, he must be a good guy.

And now, with President Donald Trump in the White House, anti-Soros campaigners in Eastern Europe say they have also drawn inspiration from the United States, particularly from rightwing U.S. media like the website Breitbart, which has long vilified Soros as a liberal hate figure.

A nice, good, liberal person, just “vilified” out of sheer spite and reasonless hate – in the opinion of Reuters.

Breitbart’s former chairman Steve Bannon now serves as a senior White House adviser to Trump.

“Our inspiration comes from the United States, from the American conservative organizations, media and congressmen with the same views, especially the new administration of President Trump,” said Cvetlin Cilimanov, the editor of the main state news agency in Macedonia, who co-founded a group called Operation Stop Soros in January.

Macedonia, a former Yugoslav republic north of Greece, has been embroiled in a political crisis that began two years ago with street demonstrations and forced nationalist prime minister Nikola Gruevski to resign last year after a decade in power. Gruevski, who still controls the biggest bloc in parliament and is expected to return to power, blames Soros for his downfall.

So now, despite the acid tones and slanted reporting of Reuters, we begin to get a glimpse of what Soros has actually been up to:

“Soros turns Macedonian NGOs into a modern army,” he [Gruevski] told local magazine Republika in January. “They crush you. They make you a criminal, a thief, traitor, idiot, a monster, whatever they want. Then you have to go to elections.”

“He doesn’t only do that in Macedonia but in a great number of countries.”

In Romania, ruling Social Democrat party leader Liviu Dragnea told a TV interviewer in January that Soros and “the foundations and structures that he has funded since 1990 have financed evil in Romania”.

Soros has also been attacked by members of Poland’s ruling Law and Justice party and politicians elsewhere in the region.

And according to Reuters they are all wrong; they speak purely out of malice; they are lying.

… Hundreds of groups worldwide have accepted [OSF]  money over the years, allowing conspiracy theorists and other foes to paint Soros as the center of a vast web.

He is the center of a vast web.

 In countries like Hungary, so many human rights groups have sought OSF grants at some point that politicians can use the association with Soros to attack whole swathes of civil society.

The “whole swathes” are Soros funded organizations out to destroy the nation-state of “countries like Hungary”:

“Fake NGOs of the Soros empire are sustained to suppress national governments in favor of global capital and the world of political correctness,” Szilard Nemeth, a deputy leader of Orban’s ruling Fidesz party, said in January.

“These organizations must be repressed by all means and I think they must be culled altogether. I think there is an international opportunity to do that now.” …

Opposition to immigration has been the core of  Orban’s political message since 2015, when more than a million migrants and refugees entered the EU through the Balkans. Hungary was initially their main entry point into the bloc’s border-free zone, although nearly all proceeded on to Germany and other countries further north. Orban built a fence to keep them out.

Meanwhile, Soros prioritized support for charities that help migrants and asylum seekers. At the height of the flow in 2015, his OSF put out a statement saying: “The Hungarian crisis demonstrates the dangers radical populist regimes pose not only to the hundreds of thousands of refugees, but also to the values of Europe and to the humanity of the local populations.”

But Orban’s message still hammers home the need to keep out migrants, and he portrays rights groups as part of a plot to abolish nation states and flood Europe with foreigners.

Hungary’s Helsinki Committee, a rights group founded in 1989 that has accepted Soros funding, helped defeat the government in court in Strasbourg. It argued that two Bangladeshi migrants had been unlawfully detained at a makeshift transit zone on the Hungarian-Serbian border and expelled with no regard to their future safety, in violation of their rights.

Orban has proposed new rules governing asylum due to take effect in coming days that his opponents say ignore the principles of the Strasbourg ruling.

Helsinki co-Chair Marta Pardavi says she expects to file many more cases on behalf of migrants who are in similar positions, which could generate a systemic intervention by Strasbourg and a tooth-and-nail fight with the government.

“Our position, which Orban has called ‘pretty human rights nonsense’ has just won in Strasbourg,” she said. “If I were the Hungarian government I would be considering the necessary legislative amendments now.”

Pardavi said her organization, made up mainly of lawyers, would not be intimidated by a government crackdown, but other groups were likely to be less resilient, and the crackdown could deter activism in the country more broadly.

*Yesterday, in our post (immediately below) Western feminists are for the subjugation of women, we approved the Thomson Reuters Foundation’s opposition to the Islamic jihad, in particular in Nigeria. It seems that the two organizations – Reuters the news agency and the Thomson Reuters Foundation – do not have consistently matching principles and policies.

Western women want to wear hijabs. Western women are “moved” by the chant of “Allahu Akbar”.

From the Daily Wire:

[In January, 2017] hundreds of thousands of women protested President Donald Trump just hours after he was officially sworn into office because … they didn’t vote for him and love abortion, or something.

The protests spilled over into other Western nations, too, like Germany, where non-Muslim feminists wore hijabs and shouted “Allah[u] Akbar”. …

Feminists in the crowd are clearly moved by the chant, one women zoomed in on is visibly crying. Other women, just as American women did in Washington, sported hijabs, or religious head coverings, allegedly in “solidarity” with Muslim women. 

The protest was co-organized by a hijab-wearing Muslim woman, Linda Sarsour, who openly campaigns for sharia law in America.

And this is from Gatestone, by Khadija Khan:

The notion that a hijab … is a matter of choice for Muslim women might sound sympathetic to Westerners. It is not. In reality, there is no choice. The supposed choice is, in fact, a one-way street from which trying to exit can cost a woman her life. …

Many liberal women … seem to love wearing hijabs supposedly “in solidarity”; what they do not understand is that for millions and millions of Muslim women, who dare not say so, it is not a symbol of freedom and “protection” … but of repression and imprisonment. It is forced upon women, now even in the West, and, worse, with the wholehearted complicity of the West.

Let’s look at just one Islamic country’s way of treating women, and how a woman is punished for saying she doesn’t like it.

From The Investigative Project On Terrorism, by Abigail R. Esman:

On a warm day last April, Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe dressed her toddler Gabrielle, kissed her parents goodbye, and set off to catch her flight back home to London.

She never made it.

Instead, Islamic Revolutionary Guards apprehended the then-37-year-old at Tehran’s Imam Khomeini airport and transported her to Iran’s infamous Evin prison, where prisoners are routinely tortured and women subjected regularly to sexual abuse and rape.

In September, the dual British-Iranian citizen, who had been visiting her parents in Tehran before being apprehended, was sentenced to five years imprisonment on vague “national security charges”.

To date, no evidence has been produced to substantiate the charge. Her family believes it stems largely from her work as an executive with the Thomson Reuters Foundation whose mission, to “stand for free independent journalism, human rights, and the rule of law,” is not wholly compatible with the Iranian regime. Employees of charitable organizations are also a frequent target of Iranian officials, who often accuse them of being spies. …

The Thomson Reuters Foundation does humanitarian work in the Third World.

The name Reuters rouses our suspicions because we have found Reuters, the news reporting agency whose foundation this is, to be Left-biased.

But they appear to be generally on the right side of the Jihad v. Rest-of-the-world war. They are prepared to expose the hypocrisy of the UN. Go here to see their article on the harm that UN “peacekeepers” are doing in Nigeria. And here to see that they strongly oppose the atrocious Boko Haram organization of Muslim mass-killers.

Their declared aims – as Abigail Esman implies by her understatement – are wholly incompatible with the Iranian regime:

The Thomson Reuters Foundation stands for free, independent journalism, human rights, women’s empowerment, and the rule of law.

We play a leading role in the global fight against human trafficking and modern-day slavery.

We use the skills, values, and expertise of Thomson Reuters to run programmes that trigger real change and empower people around the world, including free legal assistance, journalism and media training, coverage of the world’s under-reported stories, and the Trust Women Conference.

We tackle global issues and achieve lasting impact.

The “lasting impact” is probably more a description of an ambition than an achievement.

We like the rule of law. We hate human trafficking and slavery. We like free, independent journalism – but it is hard to find.

Human rights are bones of political contention.

“Women’s empowerment” is a great aim if it is being pursued in Islamic countries. It is likely that the Iranian theocracy’s fear that she was talking about it in Iran is what landed her in their hellish prison.   

For nine months, she [Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe] withstood agonizing conditions in solitary confinement …

Prison conditions for women, who endure the same forms and level of torture as male prisoners, can be even more horrific. They are raped, groped, and subjected to other forms of sexual abuse. …

Evin, where most political detainees are incarcerated, is in every other way far worse than most other prisons. Women are thrown immediately into solitary confinement, where they will remain for months before being released into an overcrowded, vermin-infested women’s ward. And it is at Evin that some of the most horrifying torture takes place, particularly against political prisoners. The NCRI [National Council of Resistance of Iran] report describes women detainees hung by their hands and feet, subjected to repeated cigarette burns, and suffering beatings severe enough to cause internal bleeding. They may be threatened with rape or execution and, as at all Iranian prisons, denied communication with family or even an attorney. …

Despite the disease, the abuse, and the injuries that result, political prisoners – male or female – are generally denied access to medical care. …

Iran has a long history of abusive treatment of women prisoners, reaching back to the 1980s when virgins were routinely raped before being executed, a practice that became “systematic,” according to the British Foreign Policy Centre. Often, such rapes were justified on religious grounds, based on Quranic verses that describe virgins as inherently innocent. …

Moreover, the misogynistic nature of Iranian society makes women especially vulnerable to psychological torture. The Foreign Policy Centre report describes a history of women forced to choose between “confessing” to promiscuity, describing often invented details of their sex lives to their families or even on television, or serving sentences for political crimes they had not committed. Given the possible repercussions women can face for sexual promiscuity – honor killings among them – many have chosen prison. Those who do not, frequently now live, even after their release, in continued fear of the vengeance of family and community.

Yet even these kinds of choices do not seem to have been made available to Zaghari-Ratcliffe, whose husband provides continuing reports online on her condition. Moreover, because Iran does not recognize her British citizenship, she has had no access to UK consular services, and the British government can do little to help her. Diplomatic pressures may not matter anyway. In 2011, Iran executed a Dutch-Iranian woman despite assurances to the Dutch government that her life would be spared. …

If an American or German anti-Trump feminist were to read that, would she be “moved” enough to stop wearing a hijab and chanting “Allahu Akbar”?

It’s a silly question. Feminists don’t read such articles.

All we are doing by quoting it, they would say, is disseminating Islamophobic propaganda.

Well, we are rationally terrified by Islamic terrorism, as the Muslims who perpetrate it intend us to be.

And we want to spread hatred of the terrifying totalitarian supremacist woman-enslaving ideology whose name is Islam.

We are irresistibly “moved” to do it. With zeal.

AP reports: 

The Islamic State group [ISIS] claimed responsibility Thursday [March 22, 2017] for an attack by a man [Khalid Masood], who plowed an SUV into pedestrians on a crowded London bridge and then stabbed a police officer to death on the grounds of Britain’s Parliament.

The attacker was born in Britain and known to authorities who had once investigated him for links to religious extremism … 

The Islamic State group said through its Aamaq News Agency that the attacker was a soldier of the Islamic State who “carried out the operation in response to calls for targeting citizens of the coalition” of countries fighting IS in Syria and Iraq. …

Theresa May, the prime minister of Britain mirabile dictu, informed the world that the murderous attack (March 22, 2017) with a car on dozens of people on London’s Westminster Bridge and with a knife on a policeman in the precincts of Parliament, was “NOT AN ACCIDENT”. The world was not stunned to hear it. Who could disagree?

She called it “Islamist terrorism”, yet declared “it would be wrong to describe the attack as Islamic extremism”.

Because, she announced, “Islamist terrorism” is “A PERVERSION OF A GREAT FAITH”.

Is it?

From Jihad Watch, by Robert Spencer:

How is “Islamist terrorism” a “perversion of a great faith”? The learned imam Theresa May did not bother to explain. For her and her ilk, it is self-evident.

Yet one might get the impression that violence against unbelievers is not at all a perversion of Islam from the authoritative sources in Sunni Islam, the schools of Sunni jurisprudence (madhahib):

Shafi’i school: A Shafi’i manual of Islamic law that was certified in 1991 by the clerics at Al-Azhar University, one of the leading authorities in the Islamic world, as a reliable guide to Sunni orthodoxy, stipulates about jihad that “the caliph makes war upon Jews, Christians, and Zoroastrians … until they become Muslim or pay the non-Muslim poll tax.” It adds a comment by Sheikh Nuh Ali Salman, a Jordanian expert on Islamic jurisprudence: the caliph wages this war only “provided that he has first invited [Jews, Christians, and Zoroastrians] to enter Islam in faith and practice, and if they will not, then invited them to enter the social order of Islam by paying the non-Muslim poll tax (jizya)…while remaining in their ancestral religions.” (‘Umdat al-Salik, o9.8). …

Hanafi school: A Hanafi manual of Islamic law repeats the same injunctions. It insists that people must be called to embrace Islam before being fought, “because the Prophet so instructed his commanders, directing them to call the infidels to the faith”. It emphasizes that jihad must not be waged for economic gain, but solely for religious reasons: from the call to Islam “the people will hence perceive that they are attacked for the sake of religion, and not for the sake of taking their property, or making slaves of their children, and on this consideration it is possible that they may be induced to agree to the call, in order to save themselves from the troubles of war”.

However, “If the infidels, upon receiving the call, neither consent to it nor agree to pay capitation tax [jizya], it is then incumbent on the Muslims to call upon God for assistance, and to make war upon them, because God is the assistant of those who serve Him, and the destroyer of His enemies, the infidels, and it is necessary to implore His aid upon every occasion; the Prophet, moreover, commands us so to do.” (Al-Hidayah, II.140)

Maliki school: Ibn Khaldun (1332-1406), a pioneering historian and philosopher, was also a Maliki legal theorist. In his renowned Muqaddimah, the first work of historical theory, he notes that “in the Muslim community, the holy war is a religious duty, because of the universalism of the Muslim mission and (the obligation to) convert everybody to Islam either by persuasion or by force.” In Islam, the person in charge of religious affairs is concerned with “power politics,” because Islam is “under obligation to gain power over other nations”. 

Hanbali school: The great medieval theorist of what is commonly known today as radical or fundamentalist Islam, Ibn Taymiyya (Taqi al-Din Ahmad Ibn Taymiyya, 1263-1328), was a Hanbali jurist. He directed that “since lawful warfare is essentially jihad and since its aim is that the religion is God’s entirely and God’s word is uppermost, therefore according to all Muslims, those who stand in the way of this aim must be fought“.

This is also taught by modern-day scholars of Islam. Majid Khadduri was an Iraqi scholar of Islamic law of international renown. In his book War and Peace in the Law of Islam, which was published in 1955 and remains one of the most lucid and illuminating works on the subject, Khadduri says this about jihad:

The state which is regarded as the instrument for universalizing a certain religion must perforce be an ever expanding state. The Islamic state, whose principal function was to put God’s law into practice, sought to establish Islam as the dominant reigning ideology over the entire world. … The jihad was therefore employed as an instrument for both the universalization of religion and the establishment of an imperial world state. (P. 51)

Imran Ahsan Khan Nyazee [is] Assistant Professor on the Faculty of Shari’ah and Law of the International Islamic University in Islamabad. In his 1994 book The Methodology of Ijtihad, he quotes the twelfth century Maliki jurist Ibn Rushd: “Muslim jurists agreed that the purpose of fighting with the People of the Book … is one of two things: it is either their conversion to Islam or the payment of jizyah.” Nyazee concludes: “This leaves no doubt that the primary goal of the Muslim community, in the eyes of its jurists, is to spread the word of Allah through jihad, and the option of poll-tax [jizya] is to be exercised only after subjugation” of non-Muslims.

All this makes it clear that there is abundant reason to believe that violence against unbelievers is not a perversion of Islam. It would be illuminating if Theresa May or someone around her produced some quotations from Muslim authorities she considers “authentic”,  and explained why the authorities I’ve quoted above and others like them are inauthentic. While in reality there is no single Muslim authority who can proclaim what is “authentic” Islam, and thus it would be prudent not to make sweeping statements about what “authentic Islam” actually is, clearly there are many Muslims who believe that violence against unbelievers is not a perversion of Islam.

One might also get the impression that violence against unbelievers is not a perversion of Islam from these Qur’an verses:

2:191-193: “And kill them wherever you come upon them, and expel them from where they expelled you; persecution is worse than slaughter. But fight them not by the Holy Mosque until they should fight you there; then, if they fight you, kill them — such is the recompense of unbelievers, but if they give over, surely Allah is All-forgiving, All-compassionate. Fight them, till there is no persecution and the religion is Allah’s; then if they give over, there shall be no enmity save for evildoers.” …

4:89: “They wish that you should disbelieve as they disbelieve, and then you would be equal; therefore take not to yourselves friends of them, until they emigrate in the way of Allah; then, if they turn their backs, take them, and kill them wherever you find them; take not to yourselves any one of them as friend or helper.”

5:33: “This is the recompense of those who fight against Allah and His Messenger, and hasten about the earth, to do corruption there: they shall be slaughtered, or crucified, or their hands and feet shall alternately be struck off; or they shall be banished from the land. That is a degradation for them in this world; and in the world to come awaits them a mighty chastisement.”

8:12: “When thy Lord was revealing to the angels, ‘I am with you; so confirm the believers. I shall cast into the unbelievers’ hearts terror; so smite above the necks, and smite every finger of them!”

8:39: “Fight them, till there is no persecution and the religion is Allah’s entirely; then if they give over, surely Allah sees the things they do.”

8:60: “Make ready for them whatever force and strings of horses you can, to strike terror thereby into the enemy of Allah and your enemy, and others besides them that you know not; Allah knows them. And whatsoever you expend in the way of Allah shall be repaid you in full; you will not be wronged.”

9:5: “Then, when the sacred months are over, kill the idolaters wherever you find them, and take them, and confine them, and lie in wait for them at every place of ambush. But if they repent, and perform the prayer, and pay the alms, then let them go their way; Allah is All-forgiving, All-compassionate.”

9:29: “Fight those who believe not in Allah and the Last Day and do not forbid what Allah and His Messenger have forbidden, and do not practice the religion of truth, even if they are of the People of the Book — until they pay the jizya with willing submission and feel themselves subdued.”

9:111: “Allah has bought from the believers their selves and their possessions against the gift of Paradise; they fight in the way of Allah; they kill, and are killed; that is a promise binding upon Allah in the Torah, and the Gospel, and the Qur’an; and who fulfills his covenant truer than Allah? So rejoice in the bargain you have made with Him; that is the mighty triumph.”

9:123: “O believers, fight the unbelievers who are near to you; and let them find in you a harshness; and know that Allah is with the godfearing.”

47:4: “When you meet the unbelievers, smite their necks, then, when you have made wide slaughter among them, tie fast the bonds; then set them free, either by grace or ransom, till the war lays down its loads. So it shall be; and if Allah had willed, He would have avenged Himself upon them; but that He may try some of you by means of others. And those who are slain in the way of Allah, He will not send their works astray.”

There are some tolerant verses in the Qur’an as well — see, for example, sura 109. But then in Islamic tradition there are authorities who say that violent passages take precedence over these verses. Muhammad’s earliest biographer, an eighth-century Muslim named Ibn Ishaq, explains the progression of Qur’anic revelation about warfare. First, he explains, Allah allowed Muslims to wage defensive warfare. But that was not Allah’s last word on the circumstances in which Muslims should fight. Ibn Ishaq explains offensive jihad by invoking a Qur’anic verse: “Then God [Allah] sent down to him: ‘Fight them so that there be no more seduction,’ i.e. until no believer is seduced from his religion. ‘And the religion is God’s’, i.e. Until God alone is worshipped.”

The Qur’an verse Ibn Ishaq quotes here (2:193) commands much more than defensive warfare: Muslims must fight until “the religion is God’s” — that is, until Allah alone is worshipped. Ibn Ishaq gives no hint that that command died with the seventh century.

The great medieval scholar Ibn Qayyim (1292-1350) also outlines the stages of the Muhammad’s prophetic career: “For thirteen years after the beginning of his Messengership, he called people to God through preaching, without fighting or Jizyah, and was commanded to restrain himself and to practice patience and forbearance. Then he was commanded to migrate, and later permission was given to fight. Then he was commanded to fight those who fought him, and to restrain himself from those who did not make war with him. Later he was commanded to fight the polytheists until God’s religion was fully established.”

In other words, he initially could fight only defensively — only “those who fought him” — but later he could fight the polytheists until Islam was “fully established”. He could fight them even if they didn’t fight him first, and solely because they were not Muslim.

Nor do all contemporary Islamic thinkers believe that that command is a relic of history. According to a 20th century Chief Justice of Saudi Arabia, Sheikh Abdullah bin Muhammad bin Humaid, “at first ‘the fighting’ was forbidden, then it was permitted and after that it was made obligatory.” …

Here again, obviously there is a widespread understanding of the Qur’an within Islamic tradition that sees it, and Islam, as mandating violence against unbelievers. And we see Muslims who clearly understand their religion as mandating violence against unbelievers acting upon that understanding around the world today.

So will Theresa May defend her claim? Of course not.

So there will be more terrorist attacks and more lethal violence carried out on in the name of Allah in Britain.

Why should British Muslims, faithful to their creed, hold back?

They have their instructions from “the authoritative sources in Sunni Islam, the schools of Sunni jurisprudence”, and from the Qur’an itself.

And Prime Minister Theresa May will exonerate their ideology.   

A new internet magazine called The Participator has been launched by our British associate and political like-thinker, Chauncey Tinker. (The title intentionally calls to mind the long-established journal The Spectator.)

The first article was published yesterday and may be found here

It is about Islam punishing blasphemy – which is what Islam considers any criticism of Islamic belief to be. As Islam is trying to make criticism of itself a punishable crime the world over, the topic is of universal interest and importance. It could be summed up as “Islam versus free speech“. In Europe, Islam is winning. Is it winning in Britain too?

These are extracts from the article:

On a BBC Asian Network program, the Muslim presenter Shazia Awan posed the question “What Is The Right Punishment For Blasphemy?”. The question is obviously loaded with the implication that there SHOULD be a punishment for blasphemy. … There have been a great many articles written about this radio program already, but so far they all seem to have missed the fact that the BBC have committed a criminal offence under current UK law by airing it. …

(We posted commentary on the program two days ago. See Where stands the BBC on blasphemy?, March 20, 2017.)

Examples of what callers to the program gave as answers to the question include these:

The second caller … was a man called Wajid Ali (Burki?) from Birmingham – a city in the UK. This caller supported the principle of a death sentence for blasphemers under Islamic law in Muslim majority countries, but he seemed confused about whether blasphemers in non-Muslim countries should also be killed. For example he said he was upset that Salman Rushdie had not yet been killed. Rushdie does not live in a Muslim Country, he has lived in the US since 2000 before which he was living in the UK under very necessary police protection. Shazia pressed the caller on his view, asking “do you not think that the death penalty is a step too far?”. By the phrasing of this question we might even suspect that Shazia herself thinks that there should in fact be a punishment for blasphemy, but that the death penalty would be excessive. The caller responded saying that the punishment should be determined by the law of the land, so we can only conclude from all this that he was disappointed that Salman Rushdie had not been murdered by a private citizen. At the very least this is inescapably a very grossly offensive point of view, at the worst it might almost be considered an incitement to murder.

A caller called Ishaan from Cardiff … said: “sooner or later Islam is going to be taking over anyway”, a statement that was surely grossly offensive to all the non-Muslims in the UK who do not wish to live in an Islamic state. …

Surprisingly, blasphemy was still a statutory crime in the United Kingdom until as recently as 2008, when it was finally abolished. But the last time anyone was prosecuted for committing it was in 1843, in Scotland. Will it now make a come-back when sharia law – already in use as a parallel legal system in Britain – becomes the only law of the land?

The context of the question was not current law in the UK (which abolished the blasphemy law in 2008), but the current law in Pakistan, where the punishment is currently the death penalty. In the case of Asia Bibi, who has been on death row for 7 years in appalling conditions, the authorities there are clearly hoping that she will die in prison and save them from the worldwide outrage that would necessarily result if they carried out the sentence.

Please read our post on Asia Bibi – whose right name is Aasiya Noreen. It is titled Thirst: a story of religious injustice, and may be found here.

At some point the BBC woke up to the fact that the question it was asking implied that there should be some punishment for blasphemy.  So it sent out a tweet:

We never intend[ed] to imply Blasphemy should be punished. Provocative question that got it wrong.

OK, now they are getting it. …

By now I think any “reasonable ordinary person” would agree with me that views were aired on this program that were at the very least grossly offensive. Under current UK law (Communications Act 2003) it is illegal to broadcast a communication on an electronic network that is “grossly offensive”.

The program may have been broadcast live (making it impossible to know exactly what would be said), but by the phrasing of the question the producers of the program have actively encouraged such sentiments to be expressed. At least one of the callers who expressed grossly offensive views was a regular caller on the show, and the producers will have been well aware of what sort of reactions to expect. As a UK Muslim herself, the presenter will also have been well aware that those views expressed are scarcely uncommon among Muslims in the UK today (polls have shown this to be the case as well). In short, the makers of this program knew full well what to expect.

All this considered then I think it is quite reasonable to suggest that the producers deliberately sought these grossly offensive opinions in order to create a sensational program and that therefore by broadcasting the program they are wilfully in contravention of the Communications Act. …

The question is then posed: “What is the right punishment for the BBC?”

So readers, I wish to ask you, what do you think would be an appropriate punishment for the BBC, for this criminal act? Unfortunately when the BBC is fined it is those who pay the licence fee who have to foot the bill. Therefore, fining the BBC will only serve to punish those who are already suffering from the BBC’s poor quality and wildly biased output.

I think that an appropriate punishment for the BBC would be that it should be privatized in totality. I believe that the BBC should also lose all their rights to broadcast TV channels and FM radio programs on the airwaves, and instead be forced to compete on the internet with everybody else. This is not a harsh punishment, certainly I am not calling for any BBC operatives to be beheaded or even to receive milder punishments such as flogging. All I am asking for is a level playing field, let the BBC compete in the free market. The BBC should also be renamed as it cannot be said to represent the views of most British people.

This will take a while to accomplish of course – it will require some legislation to be put forward in parliament. In the meantime the BBC Asian Network should sack the producers and the presenter. …

If we lived in a country where equality before the law was upheld then I think a 12 month community order and 1 month’s forced labour for the producers and the presenter of this show, and the callers who expressed grossly offensive opinions, would most certainly be called for (at the very minimum). However, personally I would prefer to hear all these grossly offensive opinions, so that we know what people think.

An opinion with which we heartily agree. It is the essence of the case for free speech.

We recommend The Participator to our readers.

We also recommend blasphemy. Against all religions, all deities, all “sacred things”, and most especially and particularly – considering the threat Islam poses to us all – against Muhammad and “Allah”.

We urge our readers to blaspheme purposefully, publicly, and often, as we try to do ourselves.*

*Of course this is addressed only to readers who live in countries where it is safe to blaspheme – which is to say, no Islamic or European country.