Continuing from the two posts below, we now look at how powerful elements in the intelligence services defy and try to undermine President Trump.

We know that the former head of the FBI, James Comey, by his own confession leaked information through a friend to the leftist media with malice towards the president. (And for the latest revelation of James Comey’s corruption, see here.)

It is reported that the CIA is leaking its discontent with its new director – the president’s ally, Michael Pompeo – because he is trying to to stop the leaks and change their Obama-set agenda.

And this is from an editorial in Investor’s Business Daily:

The remarks made in recent weeks by two former spy chiefs go well beyond anything ever uttered by previous espionage leaders, calling into question the commander in chief’s competence and sanity. In politics, when considering such vituperative criticisms, it’s always wise to consider the source.

Former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper and former CIA Director John Brennan have both weighed in with scathing remarks about President Trump in recent days and weeks. To be blunt, Clapper and Brennan were political partisans of President Obama, and neither did exactly a bang-up job while in their posts.

Speaking on CNN to left-leaning anti-Trump host Don Lemon this week, Clapper said, “I really question his ability, his fitness to be in this office. And I also am beginning to wonder about his motivation for it. Maybe he is looking for a way out.”

“How much longer does the country have to, to borrow a phrase, endure this nightmare?” he asked, suggesting concern over Trump’s access to nuclear codes.

There’s an awful lot to unpack there.

For one, should a former intelligence chief who admitted to lying before Congress about the extent of National Security Agency spying on average Americans be passing judgment on any politician?

And should we trust the judgment of someone who, laughably, claimed that Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood was “largely secular,” as Clapper did, and who predicted during Libya’s civil war that Moammar Gadhafi would “prevail” in the end, just months before his dead body was dragged through the streets?

And yet, we’re supposed to take his criticisms of Trump seriously.

As for also suggesting that Trump is “looking for a way out”, that’s by now an old fantasy peddled and re-peddled by angry Obama-ites.

“It’s shocking that a former director of national intelligence takes the discredited ‘Trump wants out’ theme one step further at this late date,” as Paul Mirengoff of the PowerLine blog put it. “What does Clapper mean when he says Trump may be ‘looking for a way out’ by giving what Clapper considers over-the-top speeches? Does he think Trump, for whom winning means everything, wants to be impeached? That he wants to be institutionalized?”

Or, perhaps, is he just trying to sow more confusion, more anger, more inchoate hatred for the president among those who didn’t vote for him, thus obstructing Trump’s ability to govern?

We’d opt for the latter.

Then there’s former CIA chief John Brennan, who has also stepped out of his supposedly apolitical role as a spymaster to make highly charged political comments about Trump.

After Trump’s comments about Charlottesville, Brennan ripped into Trump for making “dangerous” and “ugly” comments.

He’s entitled to his opinion, of course. But it has long been a part of our tradition of government service that former officials serving in a nonpolitical capacity would leave the criticisms of other administrations to the elected politicians. To ignore this tradition runs the risk of tainting the professionalism of the agencies they once headed, and provides evidence that the heavily politicized, entrenched, progressive “deep state” that many Americans believe poses a danger to our republic really does exist.

By the way, Brennan in remarks made last July that can only be called highly questionable suggested that it’s “obligation of some executive branch officials” to refuse to fire Robert Mueller, who is heading up the open-ended investigation into the Trump campaign’s ties to Russia and its hacking of the 2016 election.

Let’s be clear: Trump, should he want to do so, would be absolutely within his rights as president to seek Mueller’s firing. Whether it would be politically wise to do so is a separate question.

And Brennan’s remarks are incredibly self-serving, since he is the one who initiated the investigation into the Trump campaign’s ties to Russia last summer, in the heat of the campaign. The Obama loyalist did so, apparently, thinking it would fatally damage Trump’s campaign.

“It was then-CIA Director John O. Brennan, a close confidant of Mr. Obama’s, who provided the information — what he termed the ‘basis’ — for the FBI to start the counterintelligence investigation last summer,” wrote Washington Times national security correspondent Rowan Scarborough last May. “Mr. Brennan served on the former president’s 2008 presidential campaign and in his White House.”

Brennan, by the way, also aided in making up the bogus talking points used by the Obama administration to lie about what happened in Benghazi, Libya, where four Americans, including U.S. Ambassador Christopher Stevens, were murdered. Whose interests was Brennan serving?

Far from being a disinterested intelligence official, Brennan is in fact a highly partisan political operative with a far-left background. By his own admission (it came out in a CIA polygraph test administered early in his career), he voted for Communist Party hack Gus Hall for president in 1980.

A mere youthful indiscretion? According to the authoritative Black Book Of Communism, Communist nations in the 20th century slaughtered more than 100 million people around the world. They did so in a (fortunately) failed attempt to impose that inhuman, totalitarian system on free people everywhere. Yet Brennan voted to have that same murderous, totalitarian system imposed on us here in the U.S. And was still given the keys to our nation’s secrets.

Anyone can criticize the president. That’s America. But not everyone should. Neither Clapper nor Brennan have distinguished themselves in recent years, either professionally or politically. America’s intelligence agencies were deeply dysfunctional during the Obama years.

By inserting themselves so dishonestly into a partisan political dispute, Clapper and Brennan have not only damaged the agencies they once headed, but the democracy they once claimed to serve. They serve as Exhibits A and B in why the swamp must be drained, and drained thoroughly.

We continue our discussion, started in the post immediately below, of the Swamp swallowing President Trump, now looking at changes in his avowed foreign policy towards Israel, Egypt, Iran and North Korea.

This is from an article by Ryan Mauro at Clarion Project:

Israel and its supporters in the West are seeing danger signs coming from parts of the Trump Administration. Since taking office, the camp that views Israel as a liability and “root cause” of Islamic extremism has been gaining ground. That camp is at odds with those who view the Islamist ideology as the root cause and believes it must be defeated for there to be peace in the Middle East.

The biggest danger sign for America’s best ally in the Middle East came with the recent release of the State Department’s annual Country Reports on Terrorism. It blamed Israel for sparking terrorism while applauding the Palestinian Authority’s counter-extremism efforts.

The report frames Palestinian terrorism as a response to Israeli misconduct, with no attribution to an Islamist ideology or culture with a genocidal desire to wipe Israel off the map. Palestinian terrorism is essentially presented as a form of “resistance” motivated by legitimate grievances against Israeli actions. In other words, the terrorists are misguided freedom fighters.

The identified “continued drivers of violence” are listed as a “lack of hope in achieving Palestinian statehood, Israeli settlement construction in the West Bank, settler violence against Palestinians in the West Bank, the perception that the Israeli government was changing the status quo on the Haram Al Sharif/Temple Mount, and IDF tactics that the Palestinians considered overly aggressive.” The treatment of the Palestinian Authority, on the other hand, was mostly positive. The report lauded its efforts in combating extremism and claimed that it had minimized the incitement of violence by Palestinian Authority officials and institutions. It went so far as to say that incitement is now “rare” and “the leadership does not generally tolerate it.”

The State Department report undermines President Trump’s position on Israel. …

The report by Tillerson’s State Department is even more hostile to Israel than the one issued under [Obama’s Secretary of State] Kerry, who furiously blasted Israel on his way out of office.

In fact, the State Department report spends more time assigning blame for terrorism to Israel than to Qatar, a massive sponsor of terrorism and extremism. One cannot help but wonder if Tillerson’s pro-Qatar position and business ties to the Qatari regime had something to do with it. …

While the State Department plans a 28% cut in foreign aid to places around the world, State is planning to increase its aid to the Palestinian Authority.

State Department documents leaked to the media in April show it plans a 4.6% increase to the West Bank run by the terrorism-inciting Palestinian Authority and the Gaza Strip run by Hamas. A total of $215 million in aid is allotted for 2018.

The Palestinian Authority uses half of the foreign aid it receives to sponsor terrorism. It is increasing its compensation for terrorists in Israeli prisons by 13% and its financial aid to families of killed terrorists by 4%. The total amount of these two allotments is $344 million. …

On June 1, the Trump Administration backtracked on his vow to move the U.S. embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, at least for the time being. No firm commitment to moving the embassy was made, despite Trump’s campaign promise.

Secretary Tillerson’s influence is widely seen as being responsible for the flip-flop. In May, Tillerson set off alarm bells for friends of Israel by refusing to commit to fulfilling Trump’s campaign pledge. He said that Trump’s promise has to be weighed against the considerations of the parties involved in the peace process. 

The “peace process” that has never advanced one inch towards peace and never could, but has become a ritual ceremony with implications of mysterious magical potency that will produce a sweet splendor at the end of days when a trumpet shall sound, and is not seriously expected by anyone ever to produce a result in reality.

In other words, Tillerson would rather upset Trump’s voters whom he made the promise to than upset Israel’s enemies, who are also America’s enemies.

Tillerson makes it sound as if an Arab government that genuinely gave up its genocidal ambitions would resurrect its genocidal ambitions because of where an American diplomatic facility is positioned. If that’s all it takes to trigger an Arab regime into a genocidal frenzy, then that regime was never truly interested in peace in the first place.

There are also danger signs in the staffing of the State Department.

In June, Tillerson appointed Yael Lempert as the Acting Deputy Assistant Secretary for Egypt and the Maghreb. According to her bio, she was previously in the Obama Administration’s National Security Council from 2014 to May 2017, serving as the Senior Director for the Levant, Israel and Egypt and a Special Assistant to President Obama.

This means that Tillerson’s high-level appointee served as an official involved in the tension between the U.S. and Israel that reached its peak as the Obama Administration came to an end. She also was centrally involved in the Obama Administration’s policy towards Egypt that favored the Muslim Brotherhood.

One report quoted a former Clinton official as saying:

Lempert is considered one of the harshest critics of Israel on the foreign policy far left. From her position on the Obama NSC, she helped manufacture crisis after crisis in a relentless effort to portray Israel negatively and diminish the breadth and depth of our alliance. Most Democrats in town know better than to let her manage Middle East affairs. It looks like the Trump administration has no idea who she is or how hostile she is to the U.S.-Israel relationship.

In December 2014, when Lempert was on the Obama Administration’s National Security Council, she met with anti-Israel activist Michael Sfard. He has been paid by the Palestinian Authority to act as an expert witness in terrorism trials in its defense. He also works in an organization that seeks to put Israeli officials and soldiers on trial for war crimes.

Under Trump, Lempert was involved in putting pressure on Israel to suspend its settlement construction.

Another State Department official to watch is Michael Sfard, who was Secretary of State John Kerry’s consul to Jerusalem. In March, Jordan Schachtel broke the story that Tillerson appeared to have chosen Ratney to oversee the Israeli-Palestinian portfolio.

Ratney is currently the Special Envoy for Syria, so his reassignment either hasn’t happened yet or the administration has changed its mind. He is, however, currently involved in talks with Israel regarding Syria for the Trump Administration.

National Security Adviser General H.R. McMaster was asked twice whether the Western Wall is part of Israel and he refused to answer. He replied, “That’s a policy decision”. 

The peculiar non-answer appears significant in light of how the National Security Council is being staffed as McMaster shapes the office to his liking.

Kris Bauman was chosen in May as the top adviser on Israel for the National Security Council. Tellingly, the person he was replacing was the aforementioned Yael Lempert.

Daniel Greenfield reviewed Bauman’s 2009 dissertation and found highly disturbing content.

He blamed Israel and the West for failing to see “Hamas’s signals of willingness to moderate” and turning Gaza “into an open-air prison” instead of engaging Hamas. He advocated a policy that includes “Hamas in a solution,” dismissing Hamas’ oft-stated pledge to destroy Israel and kill Jews …

Bauman cites The Israel Lobby, a book that purports to disclose how Israel secretly manipulates the U.S. institutions of power from behind-the-scenes. He says the Israel Lobby “is a force that must be reckoned with, but it is a force that can be reckoned with.”

Bauman  … blames the peace process for failing on Israel and the West because each offer “overwhelmingly favored Israeli interests.” Prime Minister Netanyahu is blamed for “inciting Palestinian violence” and deliberately undermining the prospects for peace.

A consistent theme appears in Bauman’s thesis: Israel is the instigator of terrorism. To defeat terrorism, stop Israel. And now he is in a strong position in the National Security Council to try to make that happen.

A cut in aid to Egypt must have been Tillerson’s decision, again apparently out of harmony with President Trump’s preference. (We are against all foreign aid, but if it’s going to be handed out, Egypt under President al-Sisi is a far worthier recipient than the Palestinian Authority which uses it to pay Hamas and imprisoned terrorists.) President Trump is friendly towards al-Sisi –  for the right reasons, that he is against the Muslim Brotherhood – the major jihad promoters whom Tillerson is strongly for! Trump spoke to al-Sisi to re-affirm their friendship, after Tillerson and Jared Kushner had completed their awkward visit to Egypt  and moved on to disturb and dismay the Israelis.

On North Korea, Tillerson contradicts Trump on US policy.

Vox reports:

On Tuesday, President Donald Trump said North Korean threats to respond to a US strike with nuclear weapons “will be met with fire and fury like the world has never seen,” rhetoric that no previous American president has ever used with North Korea. On Wednesday, Secretary of State Rex Tillerson tried to cool things down, saying “nothing that I have seen and nothing that I know of would indicate that the situation has dramatically changed in the last 24 hours”.

“Americans,” the secretary said, “should sleep well.”

That soothing rhetoric lasted all of a day. On Thursday, top Trump aide Sebastian Gorka said … that Tillerson was not actually speaking for White House. Trump’s threats, Gorka said, were deadly serious.

“You should listen to the president,” Gorka said. “The idea that Secretary Tillerson is going to discuss military matters is simply nonsensical.”

Gorka got major reinforcement later in the day from President Trump, who said that his past statement “maybe wasn’t tough enough.”

But Gorka is gone from the White House and Tillerson remains.

On Iran, Tillerson has maneuvered the President into keeping the unsigned agreement that Obama made with that evil regime; the “deal” that allows the mullahs to become a nuclear armed power after a few years. Candidate Trump promised during his campaign for the presidency that he would dismantle it. He has re-certified it, albeit with reluctance.

To be continued …   

Is the  Swamp swallowing President Trump?

Seems so.

Seems he’s being isolated in the White House. His enemies have put a wall round him. They’ve stopped him from reading Breitbart. They take him print-outs of the news they want him  to read. The only person they cannot stop getting close to him is his son Don. They are trying to stop Don taking Breitbart news to him. 

People who should be carrying out his orders are not doing so. They do what they want to do. And what they want to do is the opposite of what he wants them to do.

They have got rid of or blocked everyone who was on his side.

But is the stalwart redoubtable winner Donald Trump so easily held captive? So easily bent to others’ will? Surely not!  

Linda Goudsmit writes at Canada Free Press an open letter to President Trump from which we quote:

Mr. President, your government continues to be informed and advised by Obama legacy staffers who remain in government advancing Obama’s anti-American, pro-Islamic, pro-Iranian, and pro-Muslim Brotherhood agenda. …

Identifying your friends and identifying your enemies in your administration, the military, and among national security staffers is an urgent matter. … Any advisor or staffer who refuses to utter the words radical Islamic terror does not belong in your administration. If staffers embrace sharia law, promote Islam, are apologists for Islam, are members of the Muslim Brotherhood or CAIR and support Obama’s purging of materials that implicate Islam, they are your enemies and must be removed.

You are being surrounded by Obama leftovers who will continue to disinform you so that your decisions will tilt toward Obama’s failed globalist policies.

Mr. President you are being dragged into the swamp you were elected to drain.

H.R. McMaster was recommended for the position of National Security Advisor (NSA) director by #2 swamp creature John McCain. Under McMaster’s leadership the people who have the courage to speak out and expose the existential danger of Islam are being purged from the military and from the national security staff. Those who have the courage to support the initiatives of your America-first candidacy are being eliminated while the Obama globalist leftovers remain.

Trump loyalists Michael Flynn, K.T. McFarland, Ezra Cohen-Watnick, Derek Harvey, Rich Higgins, Adam Lovinger, Steve Bannon, and Sebastian Gorka are all gone. Obama loyalists Dina Habib-Powell, Allison Hooker, Fernando Cutz, Andrea Hall, Rear Admiral David Kriete, Jessica Cox, Stephanie Morrison, Heather King, and Robert Wilson all remain. McMaster’s indefensible defense of Obama loyalist Susan Rice allowed her to retain her security clearance. McMaster claimed Rice did nothing wrong unmasking the identities of Trump transition aides and leaking the transcripts of Mr. Trump’s phone conversations with foreign leaders. REALLY? …

Sixteen years [after 9/11) there is no excuse for illiteracy regarding Islam, yet the national security voices are still trying to deny the connection between Islam and terrorism.

And now former FBI director Robert Mueller is investigating you?? Mueller is another leftover whose past foretells his future. Mueller has been part of the intricate cover-up protecting the Muslim Brotherhood for years.

Judicial Watch has uncovered stunning documentary evidence that Robert Mueller worked with Islamist groups to purge anti-terrorism materials offensive to Muslims while he was FBI director. Offensive to Muslims? Is this the metric for our national security? Candidate Trump promised to reverse Obama’s suicidal policies – President Trump has hired personnel who continue to advance them. …

You and your America-first policies pose an existential threat to the globalist elite and that is why they are determined to destroy you and eliminate any Trump administration personnel who share your vision. H.R. McMaster is part of the insidious swamp battling against you. He is part of the reheated Obama leftovers who are hazardous to your presidency. Candidate Trump’s courageous Americanism and bold America-first policies require President Trump to find fresh ingredients – throw out the leftovers. H.R.McMaster and his gang need to hear: “You’re fired!”

The last and most difficult message I have for you is a personal one. Your daughter Ivanka and son-in-law Jared Kushner are loyal loving members of your family and your administration but you must never forget that they have been educated toward globalism by the prevailing re-education curriculum in American schools. You can be proud of their extraordinary achievements but must never forget that their prism is not your prism. They were raised on John Lennon’s “Imagine.” You were raised on the “Star Spangled Banner” – the difference is Huge.

And Daniel Greenfield writes at Front Page:

The foreign policy deck has been cleared of Islam realists. And it shows.

Secretary of State Rex Tillerson said Sunday that Sebastian Gorka was “completely wrong” in his resignation letter’s assessment of the battle over Trump administration policy.

“Fox News Sunday” host Chris Wallace asked Tillerson about Gorka’s accusations, especially regarding the president’s recent speech on Afghanistan.

“Sebastian Gorka in his resignation letter wrote this about the Afghanistan speech: ‘the fact that those who drafted and approved the speech remove any mention of radical Islam or radical Islamic terrorism proves that a crucial element of the presidential campaign has been lost.’ Is he right?” Wallace asked.

“I think he’s completely wrong, Chris,” Tillerson said. “And I think it shows a lack of understanding of the president’s broader policy when it comes to protecting Americans at home and abroad from all acts of terrorism. The president has charged us to develop policies and tactics, both diplomatically and militarily, to attack terrorism in as many forms wherever it exists in the world and wherever it might present a threat to the homeland or to Americans anywhere.”

“This means that we have to develop techniques that are global in nature. All we want is to ensure that terrorists do not have the capability to organize and carry out attacks,” he added.

Are there any non-Islamic global terrorist threats? What are we fighting in Afghanistan except Islamic terrorism?

Are we at war with Mormons or the Amish in Afghanistan? Who are the Taliban again? Or the Haqqani Network? Or the Islamic State?

Best not to ask. See nothing. Hear nothing. Say nothing. It’s worked brilliantly since 9/11. I can imagine how different things might have been under Secretary of State [John] Bolton. But as Whittier said, “For all sad words of tongue and pen, The saddest are these, ‘It might have been’.”

And now the President’s Keepers are not allowing John Bolton anywhere near him.

Ryan Mauro writes at Clarion Project:

Secretary of State Rex Tillerson opposes designating the [Muslim] Brotherhood as a Foreign Terrorist Organization and is going to bat for Qatar and Turkey. National Security Adviser McMaster is also reportedly opposed, as would be expected from his staunch stance against using terminology like “radical Islam” and his endorsement of a book with the premise that only “militant Islamists” are our enemies, not non-violent Islamists.

Now, we have someone as the new Chief of Staff [John Kelly] who authorized the writing of a thank-you letter to CAIR.

A thank-you letter to an Islamic organization that supports Hamas and its terrorism, preaches the Islamization of America – and approves of the appointment of H. R. McMaster to his powerful position as the President’s chief advisor on national security (which in itself should be a warning to the President).

And this is from an article by Jeff Crouere at Canada Free Press:

President Donald Trump is attacked on a daily basis by his enemies in the media, the political establishment, and the deep state. He is under unrelenting assault, more so than any other U.S. President in recent history.

Usually, even a besieged President can count on support within the ranks of his top advisers. While they may disagree in private, top administration officials have an obligation to present a unified front to the American people. However, when a President starts getting attacked by a member of his own administration, it is time to fire that untrustworthy individual and demand loyalty of everyone else.

If the appointee is not fired, he should have the decency to resign if he cannot publicly support the President. A principled letter outlining the reasons for his resignation is what National Economic Council Director Gary Cohn should have delivered to President Trump.

Cohn, a former Democrat, was dissatisfied with the President’s balanced criticism of “both sides” in the aftermath of the riots in Charlottesville, Virginia. Instead of keeping his complaints private, Cohn gave a controversial and utterly unhelpful interview to the Financial Times blasting the President while inferring his own moral superiority. According to Cohn, “This administration can and must do better in consistently and unequivocally condemning these groups and do everything we can to heal the deep divisions that exist in our communities.”

Of course, Cohn was referring to the KKK, neo-Nazis and white supremacists who attended the initial Charlottesville rally. He is right, the groups must be vigorously denounced, which is why the President condemned them multiple times. How many more times must the President criticize the hateful beliefs of these groups before it satisfies Cohn and the liberal media?

What really upset Cohn and all of the other Trump critics is that the President also criticized the “Alt-Left” groups who participated in a counter-rally in Charlottesville.  In the Financial Times interview, Cohn laughably said “Citizens standing up for equality and freedom can never be equated with white supremacists, neo-Nazis, and the KKK.”

The “Alt-Left” protesters in Charlottesville included people who engaged in a variety of violent activities such as throwing bags of urine and feces and using pepper spray and bats to assault people. They also attacked innocent journalists, a photo journalist for a local TV station and a reporter for The Hill, who were trying to cover their activities.

The “Alt-Left” counter demonstrators in Charlottesville included anarchists, socialists and communists who subscribe to a deadly ideology that has caused the death of untold millions of people around the world. It is an ideology of evil that should be criticized by President Trump and everyone in his administration, including Gary Cohn.

Instead of telling the truth about the “Alt-Left” protesters, Cohn decided to launch a public attack against the President, who has been unfairly criticized by the liberal media since the day he entered the presidential race on June 16, 2015. …

These “Alt-Left” groups are spearheaded by the notorious band of thugs known as Antifa (anti-Fascist). While Cohn and his liberal colleagues in the media and the Beltway think the group is fighting for “freedom”, a growing number of Americans strenuously disagree. In fact, a recent White House petition demanding that the Pentagon label Antifa a terrorist group “on the grounds of principle, integrity, morality and safety” accumulated over 302,000 signatures in only eight days. …

As the President courageously declared, [Antifa’s] violent behavior undoubtedly contributed to the chaos and turmoil in Charlottesville. Sadly, Gary Cohn does not want to admit this reality for he prefers the illusion of political correctness.

Reportedly, in the aftermath of the President’s Charlottesville comments, Cohn was under intense pressure from his Wall Street friends to resign from the administration. He should have done the President and the country a big favor by succumbing to the pressure.

To be continued …

In vivid words of loathing and contempt, this religious Muslim condemns Muslim grooming gangs (rapists, pimps, sex-slavers of underage girls). Good.

He also – even more vituperatively – condemns their victims. They are, he says, trash and the children of trash.

But we think the video is most interesting for the opinion he expresses, with intense scorn and disgust, of his hosts, the indigenous white people of Britain in general.

Why, feeling as he does, he chooses to live in the United Kingdom – or for that matter any Western country whose majority population is white – is an obvious question.

Another obvious question is: why does Britain want to host him and his like-thinkers, any more than the grooming gangs?

(Hat-tip for the video to our Facebook contributor Julie Keogh)

Believe it or not this comes (via Front Page) from the over-the-left-horizon Washington Post:

Black-clad antifa attack peaceful right wing demonstrators in Berkeley

Their faces hidden behind black bandannas and hoodies, about a 100 anarchists and antifa — “anti-fascist” — barreled into a protest Sunday afternoon in Berkeley’s Martin Luther King Jr. Civic Center Park.

Jumping over plastic and concrete barriers, the group melted into a larger crowd of around 2,000 that had marched peacefully throughout the sunny afternoon for a “Rally Against Hate” gathering…

A pepper-spray wielding Trump supporter was smacked to the ground with homemade shields. Another was attacked by five black-clad antifas, each windmilling kicks and punches into a man desperately trying to protect himself. A conservative group leader retreated for safety behind a line of riot police as marchers chucked water bottles, shot off pepper spray and screamed “fascist go home!”

Our commenter Animal has contributed this vision of America in a state of civil war. We thought it vivid and probable enough to post on our front page.

*

Here’s the catch; any 21st century American civil war won’t resemble the 1861-1865 war at all. And not just for technological reasons.

The 1861-1865 war wasn’t really a civil war; it did not involve two factions fighting for control of one nation, as did the two Roman civil wars of the late Republic, or the English civil war. Our war was a war of secession, where one part of the nation tried to break away and form a new country.

It was also a war with clear geographic boundaries, North against South (mostly, the West was a little confused) and mostly fought by established armies in the martial traditions of the time. The tensions of that conflict are still felt today.

Any second conflict will be a true civil war. There will be few geographic boundaries, other than urban v. rural. This will be a conflict that doesn’t involve the military so much as gangs of irregulars; imagine Charlottesville if both sides had come armed and willing to open fire.

And the second civil war will be fought amongst us. Imagine pitched battles on the streets of our major cities; raids into the suburbs when the cities run short of food and water. Imagine a complete breakdown of emergency services in those cities as first responders encounter armed gangs willing to kill them for their vehicles, equipment and medicines. Imagine hordes of refugees fleeing the cities, into the countryside, under the misapprehension that somehow there is plenty of food to be had in the countryside, but having no skills whatsoever to find or grow said food. Imagine rural residents facing rampant theft and trespassing responding by forming their own armed militias to repel the invaders, and thus escalate the conflict into the countryside.

There are only two ways any government could respond to this crisis:

1) Impose martial law and restore order by force. Such force would have to be overwhelming, brutal and merciless. Bear in mind that this option is likely to fail, as a significant portion of our military would likely refuse to exercise brutality on their fellow citizens.

2) Respond weakly and fecklessly, as when Jefferson Davis pleaded with an angry, starving mob in Richmond in 1864, finally turning out his pockets to toss a few coins into the crown. Such a response would be worse than doing nothing at all.

In either case, the United States as we knew it ends at that point.

Real “racism” is discrimination on racial grounds by law. That was the racism of the Democrats who fought for the right to keep people enslaved and later enacted the Jim Crow laws.

But the Democrats and their allies now regard racism as the worst of all crimes, and use the word “Racist”, regardless of its meaning, to brand their political opponents as scoundrels of the worst kind.

From our Leftist Lexicon:

Racist: everyone who does not agree with every current doctrine of the Left.

In the light of that, has the time come to turn the label “Racist” into a badge of honor?

Hillary Clinton called patriotic Americans “deplorables”. Now many Trump voters proudly call themselves “Deplorables”.

And there is a great precedent for turning the insult of a group into a badge of honor for every member of it:

From an article by Carl Chinn at Voices of War and Peace:

The Kaiser was certain that his great army would sweep in to the sea that small force of British soldiers sent to help the French when war with Germany broke out on August 4, 1914. So sneering was he of the British Expeditionary Force that he commanded his forces to ‘exterminate first the treacherous English and walk over General French’s contemptible little army’. … When the veterans of the British Expeditionary Force … banded together [after the Germans were defeated] in associations to remember their fallen comrades they took as their name the derogatory term used by the Kaiser. In so doing these “Old Contemptibles” transformed its meaning. No longer did it signify something shameful; instead it shouted out of men who were brave, patriotic, comradely, self-sacrificing, dogged, and unconquerable.

But no. It would not be possible to do this with the “Racist!” insult. Being racist is not a falsely perceived quality, like being “contemptible” and “deplorable” in the eyes of one’s enemies; it is a falsely perceived belief. And most of those to whom the belief is ascribed – Republicans and conservatives of all ethnicities, and whites in general –  not only are not racists, they abominate racism and have done so for far longer than the Left.

Karl Marx was a vicious racist. It is important to know this. He poured contempt on Jews and Blacks. His anti-Semitism was fierce, though he himself was a Jew by descent. He considered Latins and Slavs to be “inferior races”. The Slavs, he opined, should be wiped out in a revolutionary war. And he was all for the continuation of slavery in America. (See here, where relevant quotations may be found.)

The Comintern, created by Lenin in 1919 to promote world Communism, only decided to stop advocating keeping the blacks down in South Africa in the 1920s. The switch from “class analysis” to “race analysis” (to use Marxist jargon) came in 1928. Until then the  slogan of the Communist Party of South Africa was “Workers of the world unite and fight for a white South Africa”. The change meant that at last the Communist Party took up the cause of the oppressed blacks – and did it much harm, making it easy for the white nationalist government to continue their apartheid policy throughout the Cold War.

But it wasn’t until the advent of the New Left in the late 1960s that Communists in the West finally abandoned their championing of the proletariat as the “revolutionary class” – because the working-classes in the West had become contemptibly and deplorably prosperous and “bourgeois” under capitalism – and substituted other groups that they could call “oppressed”, chiefly the peoples of the Third World.

From then on anyone who did not share their (secular) religion, was a “racist”.

The Racist-in-Chief  in the eyes of the Left is now President Donald Trump.

David Horowitz writes at Front Page:

Let’s start by noticing the obvious. The biggest hate group in America – by a wide margin – is the anti-Trump chorus, which has advanced from calling him “unfit to be president” to accusing him (in the words of CNN’s Ana Navarro) of being “unfit to be human”. In between are malignant accusations that he is a “neo-Nazi,” a “white nationalist” and a “white supremacist” … Nor is the hate confined to Trump alone but includes his aides and supporters. Congressman Jerrold Nadler and other House Democrats have even attacked Trump’s policy adviser Stephen Miller as a “white supremacist” for defending a merit-based immigration reform. The attacks from the anti-Trump left also include the charge that America itself is a “white supremacist” country.

In a nation which for eight years was headed by a black president, had two chief law enforcement officers who were black, has recently had two black secretaries of state and three black national security advisers, and has elected more than 10,000 black government officials; in a nation that has been governed for fifty years by statutes that outlaw discrimination by race and whose national culture is saturated with non-white heroes and icons – in such a nation, people who refer to America as “white supremacist” would normally be dismissed as an oddball fringe, members of a fraternity that includes people who think Elvis is still alive and on the moon. Unfortunately, we live in times that are not normal.

Recent events have turned out crowds in the tens of thousands denouncing “neo-Nazis” and “white supremacists” both real and imagined, who number in the hundreds, if that. Yet the outpouring of righteous rage in a veritable orgy of virtue signaling has extended across both ends of the political spectrum, as though Nazism hadn’t been defeated more than seventy years ago, or racial discrimination outlawed for sixty. The ranks of actual neo-Nazis and white supremacists are so minuscule that besides the universally despised David Duke and Richard Spencer there are no figures on this “alt-right” that even informed observers could actually name.

In contrast to the trivial representatives of organized Nazism, there are – to take one obvious example – tens of thousands of members of the American Communist Party, also a defeated totalitarian foe. Yet no one seems alarmed. There have been “Million Man” marches led by black racists Farrakhan and Sharpton, while “white nationalists”,  and Klan members can’t attract a sufficient number of supporters to even constitute a “march”. Black Lives Matter is an overtly racist and violent group that is led by avowed communists and has allied itself with Hamas terrorists. It is an organization officially endorsed by the Democratic Party and lavishly funded by tens of millions of dollars contributed by Democratic donors like George Soros. But the self-congratulating denouncers of Nazism and white racism find nothing wrong with them.

On any rational assessment, “white supremacy” as a descriptor of American society or American institutions or a significant segment of the American right is loony toons paranoia. Yet on the political left it is now an article of faith, and also a convenient weapon for disposing political opponents. …

Notwithstanding the marginal existence of actual Klansmen and “neo-Nazis” in American culture and institutions, the term “white supremacy” currently turns up 3.7 million references in a Google search – a tribute to its rampant mis-usage. Of these references, 1.2 million are linked specifically – and absurdly – to Donald Trump. The term “white nationalism” turns up 4.2 million references, of which 2.1 million are linked directly to the president. Only a slightly lower number – 1.8 million – link Trump to “Nazi”. The parity of the numbers is easily explained by the fact that in the lexicon of the left they are identical. As a leftwing smear site created by the Southern Poverty Law Center explains, “White nationalist groups espouse white supremacist or white separatist ideologies.”

It is not “supremacism” as such – the dominance by one race over the whole nation – that these liars and calumniators are against; it is only “white supremacism”. The black supremacism constantly shouted for by BLM and other black separatist groups is applauded by the whites on the Left.

The malicious charge that Trump and his supporters are white racists is the central meme of a concerted effort to overthrow the Trump presidency before it has run its course – or before it had even gotten started. …

Obviously the terms “white supremacy and “white nationalism” can’t actually mean what they say. If they did, one would have to conclude that half the country had simply lost its mind and morals. To make sense of the terms one has to understand them as expressions of an ideology that has emerged out of its university incubators to become a dogma of the Democratic Party and progressives generally. This radical perspective, known as “cultural Marxism”, divides society into a white majority that oppresses, and “people of color” who are oppressed, attributing all racial and ethnic disparities to “racism”. …

If eighty percent of corporate executives are white, that is prima facie evidence of what the left calls “institutional racism,” even though there are no racists pulling strings to keep non-white people down. Racism is redefined as defending the invisible system – e.g., the system of standards – that allegedly perpetuates these disparities. But note the hypocrisy. If 95% of the multimillionaires in the National Basketball Association or the National Football League are black, no one regards these as anything but disparities based on merit.

The unexamined premise of the argument that regards white Americans as racists is that statistical disparities are all the result of oppression. But who is oppressed in America? There are an estimated 65 million refugees in the world today fleeing oppression, but not one of them is fleeing oppression in the United States. Why do Haitians and Mexicans risk life and limb to come to America? To be oppressed? They come because in America they have more rights, more privileges and more opportunities than they would in Mexico and Haiti, which have been governed by Hispanics and blacks for a hundred years and more.

The reality that the academic theory of faculty leftists tries futilely to deny is that America is the least racist most tolerant multi-ethnic, multi-racial society in the history of the world. America has outlawed racial supremacies of any kind. …

But this hateful movement is not really about Trump. It is about America. Beyond that it is about the left’s attack on the democratic societies of the West in general, and specifically their foundations in individual rights rather than group identities. This was evident in the reactions to the major foreign policy address Trump delivered in Poland on July 6. His speech was a full-throated and often eloquent defense of the West and its values, and of America’s role in defeating the Soviet Union and the global Communist empire. In a climactic passage, Trump delivered a paean to the values that had inspired the West’s resistance to the totalitarians left and right, to the values that created western civilization. These were the values – above all that of individual freedom – that the wars against Nazism and Communism had been fought to defend. …

On finishing this tribute, Trump issued a call to the people of the West to rally again to the defense of these values in the face of the new totalitarian threats that confront us:

The fundamental question of our time is whether the West has the will to survive. Do we have the confidence in our values to defend them at any cost? Do we have enough respect for our citizens to protect our borders? Do we have the desire and the courage to preserve our civilization in the face of those who would subvert and destroy it?”

Despite, and more likely because of its reaffirmation of American values, Trump’s speech was immediately attacked by the political left.The common theme of these attacks was once again the left’s race war against Trump and the country he leads. Slate.com, an online publication of the Washington Post ran with this headline: “The White Nationalist Roots of Donald Trump’s Warsaw Speech.” The Bernie Sanders’ left at Salon.com repeated the accusation: “Trump’s Alt-right Poland Speech: Time to Call His White Nationalist Rhetoric What It Is.” The respected Atlantic Monthly followed with this: “The Racial and Religious Paranoia of Trump’s Warsaw Speech.” For the left, American patriotism is white nationalism. …

The political left is relentless in its commitment to identity politics, which is a not so subtle form of racism. This animus is rooted in a racial and gender collectivism that is antagonistic to the fundamental American idea of individual rights applied universally and without regard to origins – to race, ethnicity or gender. The war to defend this idea is what created Trump’s candidacy and has shaped his political persona.

An American patriotism – which is precisely not about blood and soil, [and] which is the antithesis of racism and collectivism – is what drives Trump and his presidency. “If we are loyal to our country we will be loyal to each other; if we have patriotism in our hearts there will be no room for prejudice; we are black and brown and white but we all bleed patriot red.” This is the mantra of Trump’s inaugural address; it was the mantra of his announcement of a new strategy to fight the terrorists in Afghanistan; and it is the mantra behind the call to “make America great again”.

Patriotism – a specifically American patriotism – is the loyalty that unites us and makes us equal. It is this patriotism with which the political left is at war, and the reason they hate this president and are determined to destroy him. 

If they succeed, Racism will replace Liberty as the essential value on which the United States of America is established.

Roger Stone, who worked in President Nixon’s Office of Economic Opportunity and was a campaign adviser to presidential candidate Donald Trump, predicts with conviction that if members of Congress vote to impeach President Trump, they will be inciting all-out civil war – and putting their own individual lives at risk:

We think he may very well be right.

Citizens of the Western democracies are being forced to invest in their own defeat and subjugation by Islam.

How?

Sam Westrop, the director of Islamist Watch, a department of Daniel Pipes’s Middle East Forum, is a leading authority on “extremist” Muslim organizations and individuals in the Western world. He is to be believed when he explains how American tax-payers’ money is funding Islamic terrorism. It’s a horrifying fact, and the funding urgently needs to be stopped.

He writes at the National Review:

Extremist movements disguise their activities as schools or charities. In Tuesday’s speech, President Trump denounced the flow of U.S. money to Pakistan while that nation harbors terrorists. South Asian Islamism is an enormous problem, and yet a great deal of the discussion in America surrounding Islamism focuses on the Egyptian-founded Muslim Brotherhood.

But the Muslim Brotherhood is far from the only Islamist network in the United States; it is simply the best known. Other Islamist movements also benefit from government ignorance about the diversity of Islam and Islamism across the globe.

The South Asian Islamist movement Jamaat-e-Islami (JI), for instance, has received millions from the U.S. taxpayer for its powerful network of charities and welfare services, which are designed to obtain external funding as well as legitimize JI as a representative voice of Muslims, in both America and South Asia. Although JI has its own ideologues, literature, and infrastructure, it is often described as the South Asian “cousin” of the Muslim Brotherhood. Qazi Ahmad Hussain, head of JI in Pakistan, has declared: “We consider ourselves as an integral part of the Brotherhood and the Islamic movement in Egypt. . . . Our nation is one.” JI’s history is bloody. During the 1971 Liberation War in Bangladesh, JI fighters helped Pakistani forces massacre hundreds of thousands of Bangladeshis seeking independence from Pakistan. Several JI leaders guilty of these war crimes fled to the West, where they helped establish JI organizations that operated as community leadership groups.

Two western JI leaders have since been sentenced to death in absentia for these killings by a UN-backed war-crimes tribunal.

A tribunal backed by the UN doing the right thing? Look out for pigs in the sky over Turtle Bay!

One of those convicted, Ashrafuzzaman Khan, served as a leading official of the Islamic Circle of North America (ICNA), a prominent American Muslim organization. Twice a year, ICNA jointly hosts a conference with the Muslim American Society (MAS), a leading Muslim Brotherhood institution. Unsurprisingly, these conferences are filled with extremist preachers. Ahmed Taha, an ICNA-MAS official who organized their conference in December, has republished posts on social media stating: “O Muslim, O servant of God. There is a Jew behind me, come kill him.”

Despite its long history of extremism, in 2016 ICNA received $1.3 million of taxpayers’ money as part of a grant awarded by the Department of Homeland Security.

ICNA is not the only JI organization in America. Nor is it the only JI group to have received taxpayer funds. Behind ICNA and other front groups around the world, JI operates an enormous network of registered charities and community organizations. One of the most prominent is the Rural Education and Development (READ) Foundation.

READ manages 374 schools in Azad Jammu and Kashmir, the Pakistani-controlled area of the Kashmir region, as well as in nearby Pakistani rural areas. These schools teach over 100,000 students. Although based in Pakistan, READ has offices in the United Kingdom and a network of representatives in the United States. ICNA and other U.S.-based JI groups describe READ as their “partner”. READ’s own JI links are clear: board member Mohammad Ayub also appears to serve as a leader of the JI branch in Azad Jammu and Kashmir.

As Canadian journalist Sonya Fatah notes, READ is part of a “complex web of organizations” run by JI. These welfare and social-services agencies serve both to “gain converts in poor rural communities” and to “win votes”.  Within this web, READ’s “sister organizations” include the Al Khidmat Foundation and the Ghazali Education Trust, two other Pakistani charities focused on schools and education, which openly identify as JI institutions and also enjoy close partnerships with ICNA. In 2006, JI’s own website announced that Al Khidmat had given 6 million rupees ($100,000) to Hamas for their “just Jihad”.

How many Americans have any idea how deep, how wide, how intricate the web of Islamic subversion is in their own country and the world – let alone suspect that their own money is going towards its support? How many politicians know? Democrats might relish the fact if they knew it. Would Republicans be willing to do anything about it?

At least some of the multifarious groups have been recognized as terrorist organizations:

Officials from both the Al Khidmat Foundation and the Ghazali Education Trust work closely with Syed Salahuddin, the leader of Hizbul Mujahideen, JI’s paramilitary wing. Both Salahuddin and Hizbul Mujahideen have recently been designated as terrorists by the U.S. government.

But –

From 2013 to 2016, the State Department and the U.S. Agency for International Development handed out over $2 million to READ.

If JI’s involvement with acts of genocide, its funding of Hamas, and its continued terrorist links are not enough to suggest these grants were a bad idea, there is also the question of what READ schools are actually teaching their students, subsidized by the American taxpayer.

There is no information publicly available about the textbooks or curricula used in these schools. We do not know what students are taught, and when we asked the State Department, they failed to respond. But a glance at the social-media pages operated by READ schools is not promising. Posts include a homage to Mumtaz Qadri, an Islamic extremist who, in 2011, murdered Punjab governor Salman Taseer in retribution for Taseer’s public support for a Pakistani Christian woman convicted of blasphemy. The READ Facebook post features a portrait of Mumtaz Qadri with a caption that states: “We are all in your debt, O messenger of Allah”.

Tax-payers subsidize the insults and abuse that their enemies hurl at them:

Other social-media postings include text denouncing the “American Secular Terrorists . . . dirty people” who “destroyed Iraq and killed 150,000 Iraqis” on the “instructions of Iran”. 

A number of READ schools have also published photos from school ceremonies in which young children wearing military uniforms and holding guns act out battles — reminiscent of similar events in the Gaza Strip under Hamas.

The U.S. government is not READ’s only publicly listed partner. It enjoys support from a number of Western governments, including grants of over $360,000 in 2012 and 2013 from the British government. …

In the West, READ does not bother to distance itself from hard-line clerics. Speakers at READ events have included Uthman Lateef, an overtly anti-Semitic preacher who has expressed support for convicted terrorists, and Sulaiman Gani, a prominent supporter of convicted al-Qaeda operative Aafia Siddiqui.

In April 2017, the British government’s regulator of charities investigated the READ Foundation after the Times reported it had hosted an event with Yasir Qadhi, an American Salafi preacher who has declared that the punishment for homosexuality is death.

Millions of dollars of American taxpayers’ money have been given to Jamaat-e-Islami organizations. …

The Trump administration is showing interest in addressing the threat posed by the Muslim Brotherhood. A recent review of the Countering Violent Extremism program divested MB groups of government patronage. Now it falls to the administration to understand that Islamism takes many other forms … The government must actively work to confront and defund them all. 

Europe – a term that sometime includes Britain and sometimes does not, and this time does – has gone much further towards voluntary dhimmitude, or even (yikes!) mass conversion to Islam, than pessimistic observers such as ourselves had imagined possible until now.

Dhimmitude? Conversion to Islam? Actually, there is something even worse, and to that European eyes are lifting in rapture.

It is now acceptable to present a TV series that promotes – not just Islam, no … wait for it … ISIS as an ideal society.

Yes, truly. It just happened in Britain.

It’s not acceptable to everyone as this review of the offering by a sane and civilized critic, Christopher Stevens, for the Daily Mail shows:

Pure poison … it’s like a Nazi recruiting film from the 1930s

The State

Channel 4

A really super-cool club. That’s how a young black British doctor describes Islamic State [ISIS] in tonight’s episode of The State, her eyes shining as she records a YouTube message urging other young women to follow her example and defect to Syria.

‘A really super-cool club.’ There’s no irony in her voice. Dr Shakira Boothe (played by Ony Uhiara) is a single mother from London who claims to be part of the first generation of Muslims building a religious paradise on earth.

This, then, is how Channel 4, a publicly owned British broadcaster, depicts Islamic State five days after a terrorist attack in Barcelona that killed more than a dozen people – during a year that has seen British children killed by a suicide bomber at a Manchester pop concert.

Do not assume that the true nature of the Islamic State is concealed, its terrible tortures and appalling executions kept off the screen. No. The atrocities are a feature, a vital part of what commends ISIS as an ideal.

A four-part drama screening on consecutive nights, The State is supposedly based on real events in Syria and Iraq, seen from the viewpoint of several British recruits who fled their homes to join the jihad or Holy War. It showcases graphic footage of torture and dismemberment.

The second episode tonight includes an appallingly callous tableau of dead babies in an incubator ward, after a bomb strike on a hospital.

It is sickening. But it isn’t the gore and scattered limbs that leave a tight knot in the stomach: it is the moist-eyed adulation as The State pleads with us not just to sympathise with the British jihadis but to love them. All the women are elegant but strong – independent heroines making a positive choice to sacrifice their freedom for the sake of their pious religious convictions. Joans of Arc, every one. All the men are sensitive and soft-spoken – driven to fight in God’s army for their love of their families. Everyone is deeply intelligent and multi-lingual, with extensive knowledge of the Koran.

And they are all ridiculously good-looking of course, with the occasional Poldark moment for the boys as they strip off their uniforms to reveal waxed chests with moulded six-packs. The soundtrack is all swelling orchestras and throbbing drums, with moments of sad Spanish guitar when a character dies.

No one will be surprised to discover that the writer and director of The State, Peter Kosminsky, is not a veteran of the civil war in Syria. He did not carry out research missions to Raqqa and Aleppo.

In fact, middle-class film-maker Kosminsky is 61 years old and Oxbridge-educated, the epitome of the London media luvvie who is desperate to demonstrate that he is less racist than anyone else at his Hampstead dinner party. …

The dialogue of The State gives him away at every moment. It’s Dad-speak, a middle-aged man’s failed effort to sound ‘down with the kids’, which parrots comical slang last used in the 1970s by the Bay City Rollers – words such as ‘super-cool’.

In tonight’s opening scene, one fighter waves his AK47 and shouts: ‘This is better than flipping burgers!’ It’s meant to be a victory shout – but instead, the line is fake, patronising and, in its assumption that well-educated British Asians like him are destined to work at McDonald’s, dismissively racist.

Kosminsky’s dead ear for dialogue is matched by his inability to smell out lies. Because all the scenes are based on second-hand research, they mirror the propaganda videos that cascade on to the internet, showing life under Sharia law. Much of the series consists of the director’s attempts to capture the camera angles common in phone videos of battlefields and marketplaces.

It’s baffling that a man who knows how the television world works … seems blind to the crass manipulation of Islamic State’s official videos. Kosminsky believes that the choreographed beheadings and the carefully curated aftermath of bombings are true and accurate depictions of ISIS life.

For fear of imposing his own opinions on viewers (good liberals never do that) he offers no comment on the medieval morality of Islamic State. Racism is endemic: the leading characters soon learn to sneer openly at the pathetic white fighters, who are mostly fat, tearful, closet homosexuals.

All of the characters have left their homes without saying goodbye to their parents, though Kosminsky is at pains to point out that this doesn’t mean they are ungrateful or unloving – it’s just that they didn’t dare risk alerting the forces of government oppression.

The men practise dismantling their assault rifles with their eyes shut, and learn the basics of misogyny: ‘A woman in this life is defective!’

And when the bomb strikes that baby ward, there is no hint that any blame lies with the ISIS cowards using the hospital as their shield. If anything, the fault is with the unseen hand, presumably American, that fired the missile. The only explanation for the characters’ betrayal of Britain is summed up in one line: ‘I ain’t never going back to that kuffar dump, bruv.’ Kuffar, as the constant scroll of Arabic dictionary definitions tells us, means dirty, foreign and unholy.

ISIS is a death cult, and the new recruits are expected by their commanders to die quickly and needlessly. But even if the idealistic characters we met last night are killed off later this week, that does not affect the message of the first two episodes. Many people will watch only the first hour or two, and it’s the initial impressions that count for most. Kosminsky cannot be incapable of understanding how most viewers will regard his perverted vision of ISIS. But he only cares about the opinions of his peers in a deluded bubble. Any decent human being, anyone who has felt despair and heartbreak at the terrorist attacks sponsored by Islamic State, will feel nothing but revulsion for his characters. They are traitors to their families and friends. Society has provided so much entertainment and education to enrich their lives, and they are turning all of it to the most evil uses.

But what if  the “deluded bubble” he lives in includes the entire international Left as well as most of 1.5 or so billion Muslims?

The State is no sort of truthful drama, as it claims to be. This is a recruitment video to rival Nazi propaganda of the Thirties calling young men to join the Brownshirts.

Kosminsky celebrates the camaraderie and sense of purpose that he imagines to be the fuel of ISIS. …

Every frame of this film is a lie. It is poison.

It is poison offered to millions of viewers in Britain and beyond. The decision makers at Channel 4 surely approved it for screening in expectation of its having mass appeal. It is quite likely to be shown in many other countries, including America.

Our civilization is moribund. Too many among us believe that no lives matter; that life itself, human existence, does not matter.

But against what is it measured? There is nothing to compare it with. There is nothing else. Out there is a universe of data, incoherent without the human consciousness to order it and invest it with value and meaning.

And if Western man is giving himself over to a cult of cruelty and death, perhaps the human species is after all an evolutionary failure.