The Left is obsessed with what it considers the disadvantaged conditions of being non-white and/or non-male.

Envy consumes it. It contrives remedies that will have no effect on the realities of race and sex, such as victimizing people who are white and/or male.

Recently, the search-engine company Google dismissed one of its most skilled and highly qualified engineers, James Damore, because he wrote and published a memo pointing out that there are differences between men and women that cannot be changed by company policy.

Steven Crowder energetically endorses the memo and rebukes the company.

The mainstream media are aghast at President Donald Trump’s comments on North Korea as he promises “fire and fury” and warns that American military solutions are “locked and loaded”.

-So Joel B. Pollak writes at Breitbart.

Of course the mainstream media are aghast at the prospect of the US using its military might. They are on the side of America’s enemies. May those enemies be even more aghast!

Pollack goes on to defend the President’s rhetoric – as a substitute for military action?

The political elite, and the foreign policy establishment, oscillate between bitter scorn and sheer panic at his tactics. But one does not have to be convinced of Trump’s rhetorical genius to note that he has already re-framed the conflict in a way that is advantageous to the U.S.

First, Trump has radically changed the costs of a potential conflict, for both sides. The dominant paradigm of nuclear face-offs is mutually assured destruction (MAD), which is why the Soviet Union and the U.S. never attacked each other during the Cold War. Most of the discussion about North Korea has followed the same pattern, because of the threat of ICBMs to the U.S. mainland. After Trump threatened to annihilate North Korea, however, Kim Jong-un threatened to attack … Guam. Trump doubled down, indicating that a North Korean attack on Guam would trigger an attack against the regime. That shifted the costs of a war radically in our favor and against theirs.

Second, it is noteworthy that the North Korean threat to Guam did not refer to nuclear weapons, but rather hinted at conventional missile strikes. There is no way to know for sure that the regime would not use nuclear weapons, if indeed the North Koreans can miniaturize them, but a conventional attack is certainly less serious than a nuclear one. In threatening the most violent possible attack, Trump elicited a response that is significantly less threatening.

Third, Trump diverted attention away from North Korea’s more vulnerable neighbors, South Korea and Japan. Of course the North Koreans could attack them if the U.S. launched a war. But instead of talking about the potential deaths of millions of people in densely-populated areas, the world is now talking about the qualms felt by a few people on a remote island. That makes Trump’s words look less scary, and eases pressure for the U.S. to back down.

Update: Fourth, the Chinese government is now indicating that it will not defend North Korea from a retaliatory strike if the regime attacks the U.S. (which includes Guam). The Global Times, which reflects the view of the Chinese government, indicated that China would stop the U.S. from trying to overthrow the North Korean regime but would not defend North Korea if it struck the U.S. first. That is a significant change from the status quo ante.

The situation remains unstable, and could escalate. But Trump’s rhetoric is not as former Obama adviser Susan Rice claims, the problem. In fact, it is part of the solution. It has, at the very least, restored some of our deterrence.

But is deterrence what is needed?

What is needed is the destruction of the Communist regime of North Korea and the total destruction of its nuclear warheads and missiles. 

And even that would not be enough. It is also – and far more urgently – necessary to destroy the nuclear facilities of Iran. Which the United States can do by using its deep bunker-buster bombs that no other power has.

The precision-guided, 30.000-pound GBU-57A/B Massive Ordnance Penetrator (MOP) would destroy Iran’s underground nuclear installations however deep in the earth they may be.

Little North Korea could do some serious damage on its own with its nuclear warheads, but it is unlikely to use them because that would be inviting its own destruction.

But Kim Jong-un, the Communist dictator of North Korea, is working with the ayatollahs who rule Iran to launch nuclear war, and Iran is far more dangerous to the United States and the world.

The co-operation between North Korea and Iran has become closer in recent days.

The New York Daily News reports:

On Aug. 3, the No. 2-ranking official in North Korea, president of the Supreme People’s Assembly Kim Yong Nam, arrived in Tehran for a 10-day visit, longer than many honeymoons and suspected to be chock-full of meetings on how the two can widen cooperation in a range of fields and battle sanctions hand-in-hand.

Pyongyang just opened an embassy in Tehran to, as the state-run Korean Central News Agency declared, “boost exchanges, contacts and cooperation between the two countries for world peace and security and international justice.”

[Iran and North Korea] already had a share-and-share-alike relationship when it comes to missile technology, with Iran’s Shahab-3 intermediate-range ballistic missile capable of striking Israel almost mirroring the North Korean No Dong 1 — and Pyongyang, in the line of nefarious hand-me-downs, likely borrowed their engine technology from Russia.

Iran was an investor in the No Dong before it even went to the testing ground. This long-running “you do the research, we provide the cash” marriage is basically tailored for a post-P5+1 deal world: Iran rakes in the dough from lifted sanctions, continues their ballistic missile program that wasn’t included in the deal, and has extra cash from above board or under the table to send North Korea’s way for continued nuclear development and testing that will be shared with Tehran in the end.

To avert a potentially devastating conflict, the State Department is dangling the offer of conditional talks with North Korea. And Iran would be an invisible yet powerfully influential presence in the negotiating room.

Yes, Kim Jong-un would be speaking for an anti-America North Korea-Iran-Russia axis.

Talks would achieve nothing. There has been far too much talk for far too long.

It is time NOW to use force against North Korea and Iran.

… or conformity in diversity.

This is an extract from Google’s Ideological Echo Chamber:How bias clouds our thinking about diversity and inclusion, by James Damore, July 2017: 

I hope it’s clear that I’m not saying that diversity is bad, that Google or society is 100% fair, that we shouldn’t try to correct for existing biases, or that minorities have the same experience of those in the majority. My larger point is that we have an intolerance for ideas and evidence that don’t fit a certain ideology. I’m also not saying that we should restrict people to certain gender roles; I’m advocating for quite the opposite: treat people as individuals, not as just another member of their group (tribalism).

It is, as the extract shows, an intelligent discussion of the ideas with which it is engaging. The author’s conclusions, of which the extract is a part, seem to us to be straightforward common sense.

The complete text may be found here.

James Damore was an employee of Google. His memo criticizes Google’s insistence that all its employees hold unquestioningly a certain set of opinions – all of them ideas of the Left – having to do with “diversity and inclusion”.

A set of opinions requiring unanimous unquestioning acceptance, is an orthodoxy.

Damore challenged the orthodoxy.

But orthodoxies by definition do not allow criticism.

A challenge to an orthodoxy is blasphemous and heretical.

With the publication of his criticism, Damore became a blasphemous heretic.

So, of course, he was fired.

Is it a wise policy for a commercial company to require religious conformity of its employees? Would it harm the business if some employees held different opinions?

The company directors’ answer to those questions is plainly “yes”.

What is delightful about this story is that the Google executives want conformity of opinion on the desirability of diversity.

Could a connoisseur of irony find a better collector’s piece than that?

Well, yes, actually. There are some at least as good – in the universities:

Interviewed by Professor Jordan Peterson, James Damore said:

Google is run like a religious cult. Conform and carry out the rituals, and you’ll be rewarded and praised; ask any uncomfortable questions or offend the wrong people, and the threats and public shaming will be swift and ruthless. The religion in this case is a kind of intersectional feminism, its central tenets are Diversity and Inclusion, its demonic enemy is Bias, and its purifying rituals include humiliating forms of “training” that resemble Maoist struggle sessions.

This might sound crazy to a lot of your readers, but college students should understand, since it’s a similar culture.

Reuters reports:

One in every three California residents supports the most populous U.S. state’s peaceful withdrawal from the union … The 32 percent support rate is sharply higher than the last time the poll asked Californians about secession, in 2014, when one-in-five or 20 percent favored it … The concept has even earned a catchy name – “Calexit”.

California is not likely to secede from the union. But if it did, what sort of country would it be?

Robert Laurie writes at Canada Free Press:

If the United States wants to be a successful powerhouse, we should follow the example set by one of the worst regimes on the face of the Earth.  That’s the message from California Governor Jerry Brown, who seems to be enraptured with the way Chinese President Xi Jinping is getting things done:

I met with president Xi for almost an hour. This is a very determined man. He’s building roads and high-speed rail and not just in China, but all over the world. Washington can’t even build roads and bridges in our own country, much less spreading the American dream all around the world. If we’re going to be the great power we all want to be, we’re going to have to start rolling up our sleeves, raising some revenue and getting the job done.

Well, it sounds like Governor Moonbeam has a new hero. … And all he had to do was ignore the fact that Xi Jinping is the iron-fisted ruler of a fascist, one-party, communist state with a list of human rights abuses long enough to choke an elephant.

I mean, seriously, just how stupid must one be to make a claim like the one Jerry Brown is making?  Is the Governor of California unaware that much of China’s economics-free approach to expansion is built on the backs of slave labor? Does he not know about the horrors of the “reform through labor” system that was created by Mao and still exists to this day?

In 2014, at the National Review, Josh Gelernter described the horrors:

China’s Communist dictators operate more than a thousand 1,000 slave-labor camps.

The camps are called “laogai,” a contraction of “láodòng gǎizào,” which means “reform through labor”. They were conceived under Mao; unlike Stalin’s gulags, they never closed — though the CCP [Chinese Communist Party] has tried to abolish the name “laogai.” In the Nineties, it re-designated the camps “prisons”. The conditions, though, don’t seem to have changed.

Our picture of life in the laogai is murky, but here’s what has been reported: The prisoners are given uniforms and shoes. They have to purchase their own socks, underwear, and jackets. There are no showers, no baths, and no beds. Prisoners sleep on the floor, in spaces less than a foot wide. They work 15-hour days, followed by two hours of evening indoctrination; at night they’re not allowed to move from their sleeping-spots till 5:30 rolls around, when they’re woken for another day of hard labor. Fleas, bedbugs, and parasites are ubiquitous. The prisoners starve on meager supplies of bread, gruel, and vegetable soup. Once every two weeks they get a meal of pork broth.

We do not doubt that the prisoners are very badly treated, but we doubt that that description is accurate. Grown men could not survive on such a diet, especially if they do hard physical labor for 15 hours a day. Bedbugs where there are no beds? Well, possibly. No washing? Hmmm.

The camps currently billet between 3 and 5 million convicts — real criminals along with thought criminals guilty of opposing Communism, promoting freedom, or practicing religion — though the process doesn’t wait on [judicial] conviction; Chinese law permits the police to hold anyone for four years before judicial proceedings. At any given time — according to the Laogai Research Foundation — 500,000 Chinese citizens are in “arbitrary detention”. If a prisoner does get a hearing, he enters a legal system controlled, capriciously, by the Communist Party.

The laogai camps are estimated to have held between 40 and 50 million prisoners since they opened in 1949. Which is about the population of South Korea. Between 15 and 20 million of those prisoners died or were killed. Which is two or three times the population of Hong Kong. Or to put it another way: Between 50 and 300 thousand people were murdered during Japan’s rape of Nanking. China’s Communist Party has inflicted between 50 and 400 Nanking massacres on the country it dominates. According to an article published in Human Events by a man named Michael Chapman, a large proportion of Chinese exports originate in the camps — a quarter of China’s tea, tens of thousands of tons of grain.

Prisoners mine asbestos and other toxic chemicals with no protective gear, work with batteries and battery acid with no protection for their hands, tan hides while standing naked in vats filled three feet deep with chemicals used for the softening of animal skins, and work in improperly run mining facilities where explosions and other accidents are a common occurrence.

They stand naked in vats filled with chemicals used for softening animal skins? And their own skins are not dissolved?

And that work finds its way into American and European stores. A quick Internet search will yield photos of notes slipped into Chinese products on sale everywhere from Kmart to Saks. Notes begging for help, signed by Chinese slaves. One that turned up in Northern Ireland says, “We work 15 hours every day and eat food that wouldn’t even be fed to pigs and dogs.” It was written in Chinese. One that turned up in Oregon was written in English. “People who work here have to work 15 hours a day without Saturday, Sunday break and any holidays. Otherwise, they will suffer torturement.” …

The writer of that note identifies himself as a worker in the Masanjia labor camp. Former Masanjia inmates have been interviewed by the New York Times. …

The New York Times? Prepared to give a Communist regime adverse publicity? A flying pig moment!

… They described “frequent beating, days of sleep deprivation, and prisoners chained up in painful positions for weeks on end.” One told the Times, “Sometime the guards would drag me around by my hair or apply electric batons to my skin for so long the smell of burning flesh would fill the room.” …

Chained up in painful positions for weeks on end? Living flesh subjected to burning for long periods? Again, hmmm. Human beings are frail. Especially if they’re starving. How likely is it that even strong healthy men could survive such treatment? The article says that many don’t. But it also suggests that some do, at least long enough to write notes and slip them into exported goods.

 And remember: The camps’ prisoners are just the formal slaves. In a more general sense, all of China’s one and a third billion people are slaves … 

That we know to be true.

Even if this description is full of exaggeration or outright falsehoods, it is true that Communist China is a vile country governed by a cruel regime. Communism is never anything but cruel. It cannot ever be anything but cruel. And if this description deters California from emulating it under the leadership of Jerry Brown, may it be widely read in his state.

We have posted many articles in praise of Ayaan Hirsi Ali; praise of her campaign – in the teeth of vicious opposition – for the freedom of women in Islam and wherever else they are subjugated and oppressed; and praise for her courage, intelligence, and values. And – of course – we appreciate her atheism.

We have also posted many articles in praise of Geert Wilders, who has dared to oppose the Islamization of the Netherlands in particular and Europe in general, has stood staunchly for freedom of speech, and has been prosecuted and condemned by his own government for doing so.

So naturally we are disheartened to learn that Ayaan Hirsi Ali is denigrating Geert Wilders, accusing him of being “radically right-wing” – the implication of the words always being “therefore fascist”.

From the Daily Caller by Diana West:

If there’s one thing that 31,065 deadly Islamic terror attacks since 9/11 teach us, it’s that there is no way to foster a fact-based discussion of Islam in the halls of Western power.

That’s right — I said fact-based discussion of Islam. After 15-plus years since our Twin Towers burned and collapsed, I am still not talking about “Islamofascism,” “Islamism,” “Islamist extremism,” or any other figleaf-word made up by blushing Westerners to cover up the embarassingly appalling facts about Islam: its defining laws which can be as revolting as they are repressive; its history of violent conquest and “radical” religious and cultural cleansing; its totalitarian goals to apply “sharia” (Islamic law) everywhere to eradicate freedom of conscience, speech, other religions, and, oh yeah, rule the world.

In other words, exactly the things the Powers That Be will not talk about since even before George W. Bush rebounded from the shock of the Islamic attacks of 9/11 to realize that Islam was a “religion of peace.” In the land of the free and the home of the brave, Islamic blasphemy law rules.

Last week’s Senate hearing — even the title of last week’s Senate hearing — was more of the same.

Co-chaired by an affable Sen. Ron Johnson and an angry Sen. Claire McKaskill, the hearing was called: “Ideology and Terror: Understanding the Tools, Tactics, and Techniques of Violent Extremism.”

Notice no official mention of Islam. Or, more to the point, no official interest in Islam — except to protect it. Sen. Johnson, the “good guy” of the hearing for allowing that there might possibly be some teeny tiny slightly Islamist-ic thing about jihad (not that I heard the word), actually commended the two Muslim-born witnesses on the panel for “bending over backwards” to avoid tarring Islam with a truthful brush (or words not quite to that effect).

Meanwhile, the four Democrats on Team Violent Extremism, all women, ignored the Muslim born witnesses — ex-Muslim Ayaan Hirsi Ali and Muslim reformer Asra Nomani, asking neither witness a single question. Instead, they focused obsessively on the non-sense of Mr. See-No-Islam, former NCTC director Michael Leiter (whom we last met here). Perhaps the Democrats saw the two women of Islamic heritage as impediments to the indoctrination in the “Ideology” of “Violent Extremism” that causes “Terror.”

But did the Democrat senators really have that much to fear? I ask this after having read the op-ed Hirsi Ali and Nomani wrote for the New York Times about their dismal experience; also after having then watched much of the hearing. I cannot now un-notice their obvious determination to avoid speaking forthrightly about Islam — same as the Left.

Hirsi Ali and Nomani write:

What happened that day [before the committee] was emblematic of a deeply troubling trend among progressives when it comes to confronting the brutal reality of Islamist extremism ...

Here goes, one more time: This “brutal reality” they write about is a consequence of the laws of Islam. It is neither “Islamist,” nor is it a form of “extremism” within Islam. This brutal reality is all part of Islamic Normal.

The women note their own personal suffering growing up in “deeply conservative Muslim families”: genital mutilation, forced marriage, death threats for their so-called apostasy.

Despite any and all “ists” or “isms,” such horrors and more are part of mainstream Islam.

Then they point out:

There is a real discomfort among progressives on the left with calling out Islamic extremism…

OK, but there is real discomfort in these two women when it comes to calling out the extremism of mainstream Islam. Just look how confused their discussion becomes on acknowledging fundamental conflicts between “universal human rights” and  “Islamic law,” and on listing a series of what they call “Islamist ideas” which, nonetheless, come straight out of any authoritative Islamic law book:

The hard truth is that there are fundamental conflicts between universal human rights and the principle of Shariah, or Islamic law, which holds that a woman’s testimony is worth half that of a man’s; between freedom of religion and the Islamist idea that artists, writers, poets and bloggers should be subject to blasphemy laws; between secular governance and the Islamist goal of a caliphate; between United States law and Islamist promotion of polygamy, child marriage and marital rape; and between freedom of thought and the methods of indoctrination, or dawa, with which Islamists propagate their ideas.

In sum, whether it’s Claire McCaskill or Hirsi Ali, discussion and education about Islam is completely off limits. “Political Islam,” “Islamism,” “Medina Islam” and Violent Extremism become interchangeable threats to the world community, including the pink bunnies and buttercups that make up The Real McCoy Islam. The only problem, all agree, are those dwedful extwemists.

Such gibberish is nothing new; it is not, however, what Hirsi Ali became known for when she first found international fame as a name on an Islamic hit list stabbed into the dead body of Theo van Gogh, killed in broad daylight by a Muslim acting out the sharia on an Amsterdam street in 2004. Another soon to be internationally famous name on that same hit list was Geert Wilders.

At the time, both Hirsi Ali and Wilders were Dutch parliamentarians; Hirsi Ali was also a colleague of the murdered van Gogh, with whom she had made a short film about the Islamic treatment of women called Submission whose script was entirely composed of verses of the Koran.

In those days, Hirsi Ali was still known for a clarity of mind which, I think it is fair to say, would have found this Senate panel discussion of -isms and -ists quite absurd. Multiple Islams? “No, that is an erroneous idea,” she said a dozen or so years ago. “If one defines Islam as the religion founded by Muhammad and explained by the Koran and later by hadiths, there is only one Islam that dictates the moral framework.”

That was then. Now she wades through the same bog of euphemism Western civilization has mired itself in, moving ever farther away from forthright talk of Islam.

But it seems to be even worse than that. There was something Hirsi Ali said in her testimony that tells me we see things even more differently than I might have thought, even as we both have been i.d.’d as public enemies by the vicious Leftist hate group, SPLC.

In stressing to the committee that we have yet to define the enemy, that our little programs here and there are meaningless next to the rising tide of “Islamists”, Hirsi Ali made it plain that she did not think the Senators understood the urgency of the matter. Well, neither do I. But after she turned to Europe, noting that France has been in a state of emergency since November of 2015, for example, she began to lament the rise in Europe of “radical right wing groups”, which, she said, “are on the rise as they have never been.”

In the split second before she completed her thought I wondered what exactly concerned her — neo-Nazi groups? Golden Dawn…? Was she possibly referring to Marine Le Pen …?

I was wrong on all counts.

Hirsi Ali continued:

“I have lived in Holland for 14 yrs and when I came there was a very small radical right wing group and today it’s the second largest party…”

Geert Wilders’ Party for Freedom is the Netherlands’ second largest party.

I replayed her statement to make sure I had understood it correctly. I had. Ayaan Hirsi Ali is sounding the alarm on Europe by warning in part against the rise of “radical right wing groups” — namely, the brilliant and courageous Geert Wilders’ PVV, the most successful political movement to emerge in the West with a clear program to begin to reverse the process of Islamization in the West, which ultimately spells cultural extinction, as any historical map of the Islamic world reveals.

A racist rant in a Scottish national art gallery:

From The Participator by Chauncey Tinker, our British associate:

The impression that the video left me with is that this black “Young Father” wants us to know that whitey is dying out and that virile young black men are here to replace us (better move aside whitey). This virile strong young black man with his shirt off wants our country for himself, and he thinks its OK to use threatening behaviour to intimidate us. …

No doubt the people who worship at the false altar of “political correctness” will interpret the video very differently. No doubt they will see an oppressed black man who is rising up against the terrible crime of slavery that white people should feel guilt about forever, and therefore no doubt they will see his aggressive posturing as entirely justified.

The truth however is that this particular black man has never been oppressed, he has been pampered and spoiled in a modern free society. His victim mentality has been pandered to and the result is an angry young man who is full of misguided hatred of people who have treated him very well in fact. For example he was given a chance (at the expense of Scottish taxpayers) to have a work of his video art displayed in a prestigious national gallery.

Instead of thanking whitey for their attempts to create a society where all people of all races have equal rights, and thanking them for the generosity of free education and free healthcare etc., and for allowing one of his band-mates (from Liberia) to come and live in this country, he has instead used the chance to attack and insult that society. The country that his parents originate from is renowned for hilariously amateurish financial email fraud, political corruption, some piracy, cruelty to children who are accused of witchcraft and not much else as far as I can make out.

In the video he says to the dusty old paintings of centuries dead white men “your posterity is a cartoon, evidence of a vain stupidity while my own monument is the living”, yet this young man is clearly living in the past himself, he has a very unhealthy obsession with it. Quite what justification he has for accusing these very dead men of “vain stupidity” is beyond me, I doubt if he really knows very much about them (more about that in a moment).

This group have also won major music awards and performed at the Royal Festival Hall (which is in quite large part funded by the national lottery): …

This is a Scottish gallery and these are some notable dead white Scots: Thomas Stevenson pioneering designer of lighthouses and father of the famous author Robert Louis Stevenson. James Watt inventor who enhanced design of steam engines – pivotal in the industrial revolution. Lord Kelvin scientist whose name is immortalized in the Kelvin measure of absolute temperature …

Quotation:

A Mercury Prize-winning band has suffered a racist backlash after complaining that British art galleries are full of images of privileged white people.

What??? A “racist” backlash? We complain about a video that is screaming naked racism at us and that makes us racists ourselves? Are the Glozi fools in the MSM really so confused? Is it even possible that they are so confused?

You will note there that the group ALSO won a Mercury prize. This isn’t the first award they have won either.

Quote from a BBC article “Who are the Young Fathers?“:

The Mercury Prize isn’t their first accolade. In June, the group won Scottish Album of the Year.

So these oppressed unappreciated youths have won two very high profile non-racist music awards! …

The ideology of multiculturalism was built on some very shaky foundations indeed – on the notions that “racism is the white man’s disease”, that “diversity is strength”. These obvious lies have persisted only because of the relentless saturation and suppression techniques of the so-called “cultural Marxists” who wish to destroy all national identities and create a new world order.

Only as long as mainstream media was nearly completely controlled by those favouring this new world order could these lies be maintained. That monopoly is now fortunately being broken. …

It really seems as if the multi-cultural society we live in today is becoming more and more divided as it becomes more diverse – I am beginning to think we might more accurately say that “diversity is division” in fact. The current elite are certainly doing their level best to encourage division in our society, that’s for sure, by promoting racist, divisive garbage like this. …

My first reaction to this video was one of outrage and anger. I was about to sit down and write a stern letter of disapproval to the “National Galleries Scotland” and insist they remove the video. However on further reflection I am glad that the “Young Fathers” have released this powerful and provocative work of racist video art. It may be garbage in artistic terms, but as a work of expression it may have great value to us as a wake-up call. What it should do is remind us that racism is not only the “white man’s disease”, but actually its quite universal. By abandoning our own “in-group preference” the white European people are now coming under attack from groups who still have a strong sense of their own identity. They exploit our guilt complex about the slavery and colonialism of the past. Our own rich powerful elite also exploit this. This rich powerful white elite have become a class of traitors to their own group. …

More than anything else I hope this video will awaken us apathetic self-obsessed white Europeans to the fact that we are dying out, just as the racist black supremacist in the video said that we are. We are not in-bred today as the black racist suggested, but as our numbers continue to dwindle we eventually will be. Our governments are increasingly anxious to suppress statistics that would reveal how very quickly this is happening as well. The UK birth rate may be 1.89 overall (relatively high) but a large proportion of this is driven by first/second/third generation immigrants having much larger families than we do (often thanks to the generosity of the welfare state).

It’s time to address the madness of limitless welfare. Even more importantly it’s time to have some more children white people as well and return to a sustainable replacement rate. It looks increasingly likely we cannot expect to be well treated if we become a minority in our homelands, we are already being treated as second-class citizens even now.  

The article is well worth reading in full here.

From Jerusalem: The Biography by Simon Sebag Montefiore, a description of what the Crusaders of the First Crusade did when they reached Jerusalem in 1099:

The fighting raged there for hours; the Franks went berserk, and killed anyone they encountered in the streets and alleyways. They cut off not only heads but hands and feet, glorying in the spurting fountains of cleansing infidel blood. Although carrying out a massacre in a stormed city was not unprecedented, the sanctimonious pride with which the perpetrators recorded it possibly was. “Wonderful sights were to be seen,” enthused one eyewitness, Raymond of Aguilers, the Count of Toulouse’s chaplain: “Our men cut off the heads of their enemies, others shot them with arrows so that they fell from the towers, others tortured them longer by casting them into the flames. Piles of heads, hands and feet were to be seen on the streets. It was necessary to pick one’s way over the bodies of men and horses.”

Babies were seized from their mothers, their heads dashed against the walls. As the barbarity escalated, “Saracens, Arabs and Ethiopians” — meaning the black Sudanese troops of the Fatimid army — took refuge on the roofs of the Dome of the Rock and al-Aqsa. But, as they fought their way towards the Dome, the knights hacked a path across the crowded esplanade, killing and dicing through human flesh until “in the Temple [of Solomon, as the Crusaders called al-Aqsa], they rode in blood up to their bridles. Indeed it was a just and splendid judgment of God that this place should be filled with the blood of unbelievers”.

The Jews sought refuge in their synagogues, but the Crusaders set them on fire. The Jews were burned alive, almost a climactic burnt offering in Christ’s name. Godfrey of Bouillon took off his sword and with a small entourage circled the city and prayed, before making his way to the Holy Sepulchre.

A ghoulish delight was taken in the dismemberment of the victims, which was treated almost as a sacrament. “Everywhere lay fragments of human bodies, headless bodies and mutilated limbs, strewn in all directions.” There was something even more dreadful in the wild-eyed, gore-spattered Crusaders themselves, “dripping with blood from head to foot, an ominous sight that brought terror to all who met them.” They searched the streets of the bazaars, dragging out more victims to be “slain like sheep”. Each Crusader had been promised possession of any house marked by his “shield and arms”: consequently the pilgrims searched the city most carefully and boldly killed the citizens, culling “wives, children, whole households”, many of them “dashed headlong to the ground” from high windows.

On the 17th [July], the pilgrims (as these slaughterers called themselves) were finally sated with butchery and “refreshed themselves with the rest and food they greatly needed”.

The princes and priests made their way to the Holy Sepulchre where they sang in praise of Christ, clapping joyously and bathing the altar in tears of joy, before parading through the streets to the Temple of the Lord (the Dome of the Rock) and the Temple of Solomon. Those streets were strewn with body parts, decaying in the summer heat.

The Crusaders of the Fourth Crusade, Venetians and Franks, attacked the Christian capital of the Eastern Roman Empire, Constantinople, in April, 1204. Here’s a brief description of what happened from A Short History of Byzantium by John Julius Norwich:

Once the walls were breached the carnage was dreadful. … Not for nothing had the Franks waited so long outside the world’s richest capital. Now that the customary three days’ looting was was allowed them, they fell on it like locusts. Never since the barbarian invasions had Europe witnessed such an orgy of brutality and vandalism; never in history had so much beauty, so much superb craftsmanship, been wantonly destroyed in so short a space of time. Among the witnesses was Nicetas Choniates:

They smashed the holy images and hurled the sacred relics of the Martyrs into places I am ashamed t mention, scattering everywhere the body and blood of the Saviour … As for their profanation of the Great Church, they destroyed the high altar and shared out the pieces among themselves … And they brought horses and mules into the Church, the better to carry off the holy vessels, and the pulpit, and the doors, and the furniture wherever it was to be found; and when some of these beasts slipped and fell, they ran through them with their swords, fouling the Church with their blood and ordure.

A common harlot was enthroned in the Patriarch’s chair, to hurl insults at Jesus Christ; and she sang bawdy songs, and danced immodestly in the holy place … nor was their mercy shown to virtuous matrons, innocent maids or even virgins consecrated to God …

“And these men,” he continues, “carried the Cross on their shoulders, the Cross upon which they had sworn to abstain from the pleasures of the flesh until their holy task was done.”

It was Constantinople’s darkest hour – even darker, perhaps, than that which was to see the city’s final fall to the Ottoman Sultan. But not all its treasures perished. While the Franks abandoned themselves to a frenzy of destruction, the Venetians kept their heads. They too looted – but they did not destroy. They knew beauty when they saw it. All that they could lay their hands on they sent back to Venice – beginning with the four great bronze horses which, from their high platform above the main door of St. Mark’s, were to dominate the Piazza for the next eight centuries. …

The Fourth Crusade … surpassed even its predecessors in faithlessness and duplicity, in brutality and greed. By the sack of Constantinople, Western civilization suffered a loss greater than the sack of Rome in the fifth century or the burning of the library of Alexandria on the seventh – perhaps the most catastrophic loss in all history, Politically, too, the damage was incalculable. Byzantium never recovered any considerable part of its lost dominion. Instead, the Empire was left powerless to defend itself against the Ottoman tide. There are few greater ironies in history than the fact that the fate of Eastern Christendom should have bean sealed by men who fought under the banner of the Cross.

(Hat-tip to Cogito for the Montefiore quotation)

Why did President Trump appoint H. R. McMaster to head the National Security Council?

President Tump wants to “drain the swamp” – the agencies and bureaucracies of government filled with anti-American, pro-Islam, pro-illegal-immigration, pro-Iran, globalist, anti-Israel, Leftist denizens who had their heyday, glorying in the slime of treachery, under the Obama administration.

But then he goes and appoints H. R. McMaster?

Daniel Greenfield writes at Front Page:

Derek Harvey was a man who saw things coming. He had warned of Al Qaeda when most chose to ignore it. He had seen the Sunni insurgency rising when most chose to deny it.

The former Army colonel had made his reputation by learning the lay of the land. In Iraq that meant sleeping on mud floors and digging into documents to figure out where the threat was coming from.

It was hard to imagine anyone better qualified to serve as President Trump’s top Middle East adviser at the National Security Council than a man who had been on the ground in Iraq and who had seen it all.

Just like in Iraq, Harvey began digging at the NSC. He came up with a list of Obama holdovers who were leaking to the press. McMaster, the new head of the NSC, refused to fire any of them.

McMaster had a different list of people he wanted to fire. It was easy to make the list. Harvey was on it.

All you had to do was name Islamic terrorism as the problem and oppose the Iran Deal. If you came in with Flynn, you would be out. If you were loyal to Trump, your days were numbered.

And if you warned about Obama holdovers undermining the new administration, you were a target.

One of McMaster’s first acts at the NSC was to ban any mention of “Obama holdovers.”

Not only did the McMaster coup purge Harvey, who had assembled the holdover list, but his biggest target was Ezra Watnick-Cohen, who had exposed the eavesdropping on Trump officials by Obama personnel.

Ezra Watnick-Cohen had provided proof of the Obama surveillance to House Intelligence Committee Chairman Devin Nunes. McMaster, however, was desperately working to fire him and replace him with Linda Weissgold.

McMaster’s choice to replace Watnick-Cohen was the woman who helped draft the Benghazi talking points which blamed the Islamic terrorist attack on a video protest.

After protests by Bannon and Kushner, President Trump overruled McMaster. Watnick-Cohen stayed. For a while. Now Ezra Watnick-Cohen has been fired anyway.

According to the media, Watnick-Cohen was guilty of “anti-Muslim fervor” and “hardline views”.  And there’s no room for anyone telling the truth about Islamic terrorism at McMaster’s NSC.

McMaster had even demanded that President Trump refrain from telling the truth about Islamic terrorism.

Another of his targets was Rich Higgins, who had written a memo warning of the role of the left in undermining counterterrorism. Higgins had served as a director for strategic planning at the NSC. He had warned in plain language about the threat of Islamic terrorism, of Sharia law, of the Hijrah colonization by Islamic migrants, of the Muslim Brotherhood, and of its alliance with the left as strategic threats.

Higgins had stood by Trump during the Khizr Khan attacks. And he had written a memo warning that “the left is aligned with Islamist organizations at local, national, and international levels” and that “they operate in social media, television, the 24-hour news cycle in all media and are entrenched at the upper levels of the bureaucracies”. ”

Like Harvey and Ezra Watnick-Cohen, Higgins had warned of an enemy within. And paid the price.

McMaster’s cronies had allegedly used the NSC’s email system to track down the source of the memo. The left and its useful idiots were indeed entrenched at the upper level of the bureaucracy.

Higgins was fired.

Like Harvey and Watnick-Cohen, Higgins had also become too dangerous to the Obama holdovers. Harvey had assembled a list of names and a plan to dismantle the Iranian nuclear deal. Watnick-Cohen had dug into the Obama surveillance of Trump officials. And Higgins had sought to declassify Presidential Study Directive 11. PSD-11 was the secret blueprint of Obama’s support for the Muslim Brotherhood.

Pete Hoekstra, the former Chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, linked PSD-11 to the rise of ISIS and called for its declassification.

Replacing Harvey is Michael Bell. When the Washington Post needed someone to badmouth Dr. [Sebastian] Gorka, they turned to Bell: the former chancellor of the College of International Security Affairs at the National Defense University.  Bell suggested that Dr. Gorka was an uneven scholar. And Dr. Gorka was accused of failing to incorporate other perspectives on Islam.

The pattern has never been hard to spot.

McMaster forced out K.T. McFarland from her role as Deputy National Security Advisor. Slotted in was Dina Habib-Powell.

McFarland was an Oxford and Cambridge grad who had worked at the Pentagon for the Reagan administration. Dina Habib-Powell had no national security background. She was an Egyptian-American immigrant and former Bush gatekeeper whose pals included Huma Abedin and Valerie Jarrett. …

K.T. McFarland had written, “Global Islamist jihad is at war with all of Western civilization.”

It’s not hard to see why McMaster pushed out McFarland and elevated Habib-Powell. …

But that is typical of the McMaster revamp of the NSC. It’s populated by swamp creatures who oppose the positions that President Trump ran on. And who are doing everything possible to undermine them.

President Trump promised a reset from Obama’s anti-Israel policies. McMaster picked Kris Bauman as the NSC’s point man on Israel. Bauman had defended Islamic terrorists and blamed Israel for the violence. He had urged pressure on Israel as the solution. Ideas like that fit in at McMaster’s NSC.

Meanwhile Derek Harvey, who had tried to halt Obama’s $221 million terror funding prize to the Palestinian Authority, was forced out. …

When Adam Lovinger urged that “more attention be given to the threat of Iran and Islamic extremism,” his security clearance was revoked.  Robin Townley was forced out in the same way.

Meanwhile, McMaster sent a letter to Susan Rice, Obama’s former National Security Adviser, assuring her that the NSC would work with her to “allow you access to classified information.” He claimed that Rice’s continued access to classified information is “consistent with the national security interests of the United States.”

Why does Susan Rice, who is alleged to have participated in the Obama eavesdropping on Trump people, need access to classified information? What national security purpose is served by it?

The same national security purpose that is served by McMaster’s purge of anyone at the NSC who dares to name Islamic terrorism, who wants a tougher stance on Iran, and who asks tough questions.

And the purge of reformers and original thinkers is only beginning.

The latest reports say that McMaster has a list of enemies who will be ousted from the NSC. And when that is done, the NSC will be a purely Obama-Bush operation. The consensus will be that the Iran Deal must stay, that Islam has nothing to do with Islamic terrorism, that we need to find ways to work with the aspirations of the Muslim Brotherhood, and that Israel must make concessions to terrorists.

If you loved the foreign policy that brought us 9/11, ISIS, and billions in funding to terrorists from Syria to Libya to the West Bank, you won’t be able to get enough of McMaster’s brand new NSC.

And neither will America’s enemies.

The swamp is overflowing. The National Security Council is becoming a national security threat. 

Caroline Glick writes on her Facebook page:

The Israel angle on McMaster’s purge of Trump loyalists from the National Security Council is that all of these people are pro-Israel and oppose the Iran nuclear deal, positions that Trump holds.

McMaster in contrast is deeply hostile to Israel and to Trump. According to senior officials aware of his behavior, he constantly refers to Israel as the occupying power and insists falsely and constantly that a country named Palestine existed where Israel is located until 1948 when it was destroyed by the Jews.

Many of you will remember that a few days before Trump’s visit to Israel, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his advisers were blindsided when the Americans suddenly told them that no Israeli official was allowed to accompany Trump to the Western Wall. What hasn’t been reported is that it was McMaster who pressured Trump to agree not to let Netanyahu accompany him to the Western Wall. At the time, I and other reporters were led to believe that this was the decision of rogue anti-Israel officers at the US consulate in Jerusalem. But it wasn’t. It was McMaster. And even that, it works out wasn’t sufficient for McMaster. He pressured Trump to cancel his visit to the Wall and only visit the Yad Vashem Holocaust memorial — ala the Islamists who insist that the only reason Israel exists is European guilt over the Holocaust. …

The thing I can’t get my arms around in all of this is why in the world this guy hasn’t been fired. Mike Flynn was fired essentially for nothing. He was fired because he didn’t tell the Vice President everything that transpired in a phone conversation he had with the Russian ambassador. … Flynn had the conversation when he was on a 72 hour vacation with his wife after the election in the Caribbean and could barely hear because the reception was so bad. He found himself flooded with calls and had no one with him except his wife.
And for this he was fired.

McMaster disagrees with and actively undermines Trump’s agenda on just about every salient issue on his agenda.

He fires all of Trump’s loyalists and replaces them with Trump’s opponents, like Kris Bauman, an Israel hater and Hamas supporter who McMaster hired to work on the Israel-Palestinian desk. …

And he not only is remaining at his desk. He is given the freedom to fire Trump’s most loyal foreign policy advisers from the National Security Council.

One source claims that Trump’s political advisers are afraid of how it will look if he fires another national security adviser. But that makes no sense. Trump is being attacked for everything and nothing. Who cares if he gets attacked for doing something that will actually help him to succeed in office? Why should fear of media criticism play a role here or anywhere for this president and this administration?

Finally, there is the issue of how McMaster got there in the first place. Trump interviewed McMaster at Mara Lago for a half an hour. He was under terrible pressure after firing Flynn to find someone.

And who recommended McMaster? You won’t believe this.

Senator John McCain.

That’s right. The NSA got his job on the basis of a recommendation from the man who just saved Obamacare.

Obviously, at this point, Trump has nothing to lose by angering McCain. …

If McMaster isn’t fired after all that he has done and all that he will do, we’re all going to have to reconsider Trump’s foreign policy.

Because if after everything he has done, and everything that he will certainly do to undermine Trump’s stated foreign policy agenda, it will no longer be possible to believe that exiting the nuclear deal or supporting the US alliance with Israel and standing with US allies against US foes — not to mention draining Washington’s cesspool – are Trump’s policies.

How can they be when Trump stands with a man who opposes all of them and proves his opposition by among other things, firing Trump’s advisers who share Trump’s agenda.

BUT  …

An article by James Carafano of the (powerful and usually admirable) Heritage Foundation contradicts all this; and so contradicts the entire conservative – and President Trump approving – ethos of the Heritage Foundation itself:

For months, there have been reports of strong disagreements in the White House.

There’s nothing wrong with that. In our view, that’s often the best way tough decisions get made.

In national security adviser H.R. McMaster, the president has a leader of the National Security Council who has made a career of fighting for national security interests that involve very real sacrifice.

McMaster is someone who can make the tough calls. He is the right leader for a tough, determined president who only wants the best for the American people.

Americans need an alternative to the mainstream media. But this can’t be done alone.

Here are five reasons why we think the president is already on the right track with his team.

1. When the going gets tough, the tough get going.

What’s wrong with demanding winning policies and not accepting anything less? Grit and resolve were elements of character that used to be admired in Washington.

The recently released film Dunkirk resonated with many Americans for a reason. It’s not just fine filmmaking. It is a reflection of what we see in ourselve — the strength and resilience to persevere.

McMaster gets that. Throughout his career, he has worked for leaders who demanded more — and he delivered. He will do so for this president.

2. Politics end at the water’s edge.

If anything has plagued the White House’s national security and foreign policy decision-making over the past eight years, it’s that tough decisions got filtered through a political lens that put politics before the needs of the nation.

In the toughest times, the toughest presidents — Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Harry Truman, Ronald Reagan — never did that.

Likewise, the instincts of President Donald Trump’s team are to put the nation’s needs ahead of politics. Such instincts are the glue that helps hold this National Security Council staff together.

McMaster shares their instincts, and that is how he leads his staff.

3. There is war to be won.

America is at war with al-Qaeda, its affiliates, and the Islamic State, also known as ISIS. It faces daunting challenges from Russia, Iran, North Korea, China, and transnational criminal networks.

It’s time to settle on a team and get on with the business of winning. Now is not the time to make big changes in the national security and foreign policy team.

4. Count on character.

When it comes to national security, Trump’s Cabinet officials — as well as his vice president, chief of staff, director of national intelligence, CIA director, new FBI director, and senior officials at the National Security Council — all share a core of character, competence, and the capacity for critical thinking and decision-making.

These are the essence of strategic leadership. They are the building blocks of a great team of leaders. No one exemplifies those traits more than McMaster.

5. Leadership is a team sport.

What makes a foreign policy and national security team great is the capacity to work together in trust and confidence — regardless of the degree of difficulty or disagreements. McMaster is a team builder, not a divider or splitter.

There should be tough, tense moments in the White House. A president is ill served by yes men, and the country is ill served by a president who doesn’t demand the very best for the American people.

The finest steel comes from the hottest fire. The president and his team have an opportunity to prove this axiom is as valid as ever.

The White House needs to deliver a solid, actionable plan in Afghanistan that leaves no quarter for ISIS and al-Qaeda; that shows Russia, Iran, Pakistan, India, and the Taliban that we are winners, not quitters; and honors the sacrifices made by our military after 9/11.

We need a team that will consistently show resolve in the face of Russian aggression, patience and determination in the Middle East, support for allies in Europe and Latin America, and staying power in Asia.

In these tasks, the president will find no more a selfless servant than McMaster.

James Carafano is WRONG.

His article, in addition to being mostly bombast, is a piece of sycophancy worthy of Obama’s media toadies.

“A president is ill served by yes men “?  He’s  even worse served by no men – men who want to reverse the president’s foreign policies.

‘The finest steel comes from the hottest fire” – and the ashes of a president’s foreign policy come from any fire it’s consigned to.

McMaster must go! 

Trends in immigration suggest what can only be termed, a self-imposed European death wish. …

Of the 7.5 billion people presently on this earth, the vast majority, mostly in the Southern hemisphere, and who are generally poor and backward, are trying to get to the Northern hemisphere, where there are greater opportunities and overly generous welfare states.

In recent polls 7 out 10 people from these lands say, given the chance, they want to flee their plight.

The last decade has seen more refugees, migrants and economic immigrants than at any point in human history: tens, if not hundreds of millions. …

Human trafficking is big business. The International Organization for Migration estimates that more than 1,000,000 migrants arrived in Europe by sea in each of the last three years, and tens if not hundreds of thousands more, by land. 

The numbers are astounding and only increasing.

Some 5,000 new migrants arrive on the shores of Italy alone every day. 

The U.S. estimates it is now populated by millions of illegal and undocumented immigrants. In fact, about one-fourth of the 42.4 million foreign-born people living in the United States today are illegal immigrants – this amounts to roughly 10.5 million, according to an objective study by the Center for Immigration Studies.

Geostrategists cannot comprehend billions (yes, potentially billions) of people moving from South to North. They can’t comprehend the risk or the total effects of this — a world without borders. Yet it is something that globalist political leaders and flat worlders actually seek and actively endorse. 

So writes Ted Malloch at Breitbart.

By far the most of the immigrants are ill educated if educated at all, and have beliefs and customs wholly antithetical to our own. Many will try to maintain the way of life they are used to.

They will soon be a majority in Europe, and eventually in the whole pan-European world.

The Left encourages this as a highly desirable development. The Left insists that any complaint or resistance to it is that worst of all possible crimes – Racism.

The Right sees it as the destruction of our civilization.

What it certainly means is that our world is becoming something entirely new.

.

THE HUMAN FLOOD

The Democrats were the party of slavery and segregation.

The Republicans were the party of freedom and integration.

The Democrats were and are the racist party.

The Republicans were and are the anti-racist party.

The Democrats’ claim that the two parties switched their positions on race, is a myth.

In this excellent video, Professor Carol Swain explains: