Obama over. Hillary out. Merkel, Juncker, Hollande soon to go. Maduro done for. FIDEL CASTRO DEAD.

It’s over. The terrible century of Socialist idealism in practice, whether just depressingly as in the United States under Obama, or with totalitarian horror elsewhere under Lenin, Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot, is coming to its end.

There are still a few Socialists in power – to mourn the death of the Monster of Cuba. Instead of abominating him as he deserves and condemning his cruel tyranny, they will heap praise on him.

As does the prime minister of Canada:

Statement by the Prime Minister of Canada on the death of former Cuban President Fidel Castro:

November 26, 2016

The Prime Minister, Justin Trudeau, today issued the following statement on the death of former Cuban President Fidel Castro:

“It is with deep sorrow that I learned today of the death of Cuba’s longest serving President.

“Fidel Castro was a larger than life leader who served his people for almost half a century. A legendary revolutionary and orator, Mr. Castro made significant improvements to the education and healthcare of his island nation.

“While a controversial figure, both Mr. Castro’s supporters and detractors recognized his tremendous dedication and love for the Cuban people who had a deep and lasting affection for “el Comandante”.

“I know my father was very proud to call him a friend and I had the opportunity to meet Fidel when my father passed away. It was also a real honour to meet his three sons and his brother President Raúl Castro during my recent visit to Cuba.

“On behalf of all Canadians, Sophie and I offer our deepest condolences to the family, friends and many, many supporters of Mr. Castro. We join the people of Cuba today in mourning the loss of this remarkable leader.”

This punchinello must fall – and will of course.

The Left has nowhere to go but into oblivion. It has proved its own ideas to be disastrously wrong over and over again. It is utterly discredited.

Hundreds of cheers for the death of Fidel Castro!

*

Fabiola Santiago writes at the Miami Herald:

During the six decades of the Castro brothers totalitarian rule, more than two million Cubans fled their beloved island …

One of Castro’s most heinous crimes was the massacre of 41 men, women and children attempting to flee Cuba on a tugboat on July 13, 1994. Cuban authorities sprayed the vessel with water hoses, rammed and sank it. This is not something I read. I interviewed survivors at the Guantanamo Cuban refugee camps months later. The Cuban Coast Guard refused to rescue the drowning, they told me.

There were so many other crimes and human rights abuses, largely ignored or benignly viewed by a world that gave Castro the benefit of the doubt, and only slapped him on the wrist occasionally at some forums like the United Nations.

Fidel Castro, myth and legend to the international left, has died without being brought to justice for his crimes against his people — the passing of the torch and title of president to his brother in 2006 challenged only by brave dissidents who are beaten and detained daily. The Castros have installed their children and grandchildren in government roles, an indication they plan to sustain the family dynasty beyond Raúl’s promised retirement in 2018.

There’s joy, excitement — and hope — at the news of Fidel Castro’s death at 90. I’m skeptical. Castro didn’t govern alone. He had accomplices. …

Still, it won’t be the same without the patriarch. With his death, it feels as if an evil curse — the heaviest of weights — has been lifted on a nation whose children are scattered all over the world. The bogeyman is gone.

At the break of morning, the streets of Havana were deserted. People were told to stay inside, refrain from playing music, close their doors.

Miami never went to sleep, some of the arteries that run through its Cuban heart closed so that people could express the accumulation of 58 years of loss and separation, of disillusionment and never-ending hope.

Cuba sí, Castro no more.

There will be no farewell comandante from us, only a good riddance.

*

CELEBRATING THE DEATH OF FIDEL CASTRO IN MIAMI

*

Here is President-elect Trump’s official statement on the death of Fidel Castro. It deserves applause:

“Today, the world marks the passing of a brutal dictator who oppressed his own people for nearly six decades. Fidel Castro’s legacy is one of firing squads, theft, unimaginable suffering, poverty and the denial of fundamental human rights. While Cuba remains a totalitarian island, it is my hope that today marks a move away from the horrors endured for too long, and toward a future in which the wonderful Cuban people finally live in the freedom they so richly deserve. Though the tragedies, deaths and pain caused by Fidel Castro cannot be erased, our administration will do all it can to ensure the Cuban people can finally begin their journey toward prosperity and liberty. I join the many Cuban Americans who supported me so greatly in the presidential campaign, including the Brigade 2506 Veterans Association that endorsed me, with the hope of one day soon seeing a free Cuba.”

Mark Steyn talks about bad things in a recently published (April 25, 2016) video: environmentalism, Islam, state-created art.

Well worth the 27+ minutes it takes to hear it through.

We like the last few minutes best, starting at about 24.40 when he talks about how lucky we are to be living in a warm period.

It is too late to save Europe from Islamization. In this century, the majority of the population will be Muslim, ruled by Sharia law.

Islam is cruel, supremacist, and totalitarian. Sharia law is inseparable from Islam:

There is no dispute among Muslims that the Qur’an is the basis of the Sharia and that its specific provisions are to be scrupulously observed. The Hadith and Sunna are complementary sources to the Qur’an and consist of the sayings of the Prophet and accounts of his deeds. The Sunna helps to explain the Qur’an, but it may not be interpreted or applied in any way which is inconsistent with the Qur’an.

Sharia is spreading through the West, as land after land is colonized by the Muslims.

This is from Inquisitr:

Supporters of sharia zones have been harassing drinking establishments in Copenhagen, Denmark, to discourage the consumption of alcohol. This creeping phenomenon, which has Danish bar-owners up in arms, is also manifesting itself across Europe, Canada, and the United States.

Appealing to their government for help, bar operators in the Nørrebro suburb of Copenhagen, claim that advocates of sharia zones demand money, and throw stones through windows of targeted establishments. …  Heidi Dyrnesli of Cafe Heimdal recently told local Radio24syv, that some young men just walked into her bar and ordered all guests to leave.

Supporting the propagation of sharia zones to prepare the world for an Islamic caliphate, Iraqi-Canadian Abdul-Adhim spoke at Mohawk College in Ontario, on November 28, 2015, about the need for Muslims to band together under a united Islamic state. During his 40-minute lecture intended to address the Syrian refugee crisis, Abdul-Adhim digressed and instead promoted the building of an Islamic caliphate under sharia law, “the best system that exists on earth”. According to the Toronto Sun, He stated his case from a podium beside the banner of Hizb ut-Tahrir, a symbol of all Muslim countries as one caliphate.

The society (in Syria) has risen up as a society and says that we want Islam as our way of life. And the West will not have it and this is what we are seeing. … And therefore, how do we support the people of Syria? We must send money and help the refugees that are coming here in every way that we can.

In a roundabout way, Abdul-Adhim revealed the oft-repeated pattern of Syrian refugees gaining a foothold with a host country for the establishment of sharia zones, and setting the stage for a caliphate. …

Some American states and a Canadian province have taken measures to protect themselves from Sharia law; but in the United Kingdom, Sharia is now a parallel system with British law.

As of 2014, seven states in the U.S. “banned Sharia law”,  or passed some kind of measure that “prohibits the states’ courts from considering foreign, international or religious law”, although Muslims continue to operate their sharia zones in private. In 2006, the province of Ontario, Canada, banned arbitration of family law disputes under any body of laws except Ontario law, although arbitration under religious laws is said to flourish in Canada’s unregulated Muslim enclaves. In 2014, around 85 “sharia courts” were said to be openly functional in the U.K. under two rival services, Islamic Sharia Council and the Muslim Arbitration Tribunal.

According to U.K.’s The Sun, Abu Izzadeen, the self-styled “Director for Waltham Forest Muslims”, campaigned in 2011 to make London’s Borough of Waltham Forest the first of Britain’s sharia zones. He painted a picture of what it would be like to live under Quranic law.

“Women would have to cover up. It should be forbidden that they are not. Thieves should have their hands cut off.” …

As the Danish people wring their hands, sharia zones proliferate across Europe and other parts of the world.

When Sharia is the predominant  law of Europe:

Sharia forbids the consumption of alcohol, so will not the European wine industry be abolished? Beer prohibited?

Sharia forbids the depiction of the human form or any natural thing. Will the art galleries not be emptied, paintings and sculpture destroyed?

Will the libraries not be emptied, books destroyed?

Will theaters, opera and concert halls not be closed?

Will women not be compulsorily veiled in public?

Will homosexuals not be sentenced to death?

Will there not be polygamy, slavery, child marriage?

Will there not be public amputations, stoning, crucifixion, beheading? 

It would be a mistake to imagine that “most Muslims” will not permit this to happen “because they are moderates”.

From Wikiislam:

A Gallup survey carried out in early 2009 found that British Muslims have zero tolerance for Homosexuality. Not even a single British Muslim interviewed believed that homosexual acts were morally acceptable. Also according to a Zogby International poll of American Muslims taken in November and December of 2001, a massive 71 percent opposed “allowing gays and lesbians to marry legally”. Another worrying statistic to be found among Muslims in the UK, is that although they comprise just 2% of the total British population, they commit 25% of all anti-Homosexual crimes. So, with the rise of Islam in the UK and the rest of the world, we also see the inadvertent return to the morality of seventh-century Arabia, with Muslim gangs on the streets of England carrying out violent attacks on gays and mosques labeled as “moderate” calling for the murder of homosexuals at the hands of their congregation.

What will become of the once great schools and universities of the West?

What will be left of our culture?

What will be left of our civilization?

In this video published December 11, 2015, Ezra Levant, the highly reasonable Canadian who calls himself a “rebel”, argues that Donald Trump’s ideas about stopping Muslim immigration into America are not shocking, not “unhinged”, but perfectly sensible.

In case you need a “trigger warning”, there is one annoying section starting at 8.26 minutes and ending at 9.01 minutes, in which Obama talks bilge about climate change.

The EU – the European Union – is not a democracy. It has a parliament, and people are elected to it by the citizens of the member states, but it has no real power of decision. Members of the European Parliament talk there. Nobody listens. Not even their fellow MEPs.

Unelected bureaucrats decide what the 503 million people of Europe may do, eat, use, buy, sell, and say, and not do, eat, use, buy, sell, and say. In finicky detail. (See for example here and here.)

The bureaucrats compose the Commission. The president of the Commission is appointed by the Council and he appoints the other 27 members.

The Council is composed of the heads of the governments of the member states and the President of the Commission whom they have appointed.

The EU Commission – 28 unelected officials – exercises dictatorial power, and has dictated that Europe shall be terminated; and that slowly – over about three more generations – the continent will become part of the Ummah, the world unity of Muslims, governed by Sharia, Islam’s legal system inseparable from the religion. To this end, the EU is importing millions of Muslims (often under the courtesy name of “refugees”), who will have large families as multiple wives each bear many children.

The Commission’s writ does not officially run in Western countries outside the EU; but this momentous decision, a turning point in the history of mankind, is apparently approved of and being emulated by the political leadership of most Western states, notably Canada, Australia, and even the United States of America.

Or is there a conspiracy among all Western leaders to Islamize their world?

The Big Question is WHY? 

John Griffing writes at American Thinker:

Europe is on fire, in a social and financial crisis of its leaders’ own making. Its public places are now spectacles of the obscene, and its women are sexual objects for a predatory race of invaders. Its social systems are stretched to the breaking point by belligerent “refugees” who are devouring their host countries at will, while Europe’s leaders defend the invaders and blame their own citizens.

Western civilization is under attack, and rational citizens are at a loss to understand why their leaders are allowing the destruction of their societies.

Much has been written about the outrageous acts that have been committed by Muslim migrants, so we need not repeat them here. We can simply agree that the situation in Europe is disastrous, and it’s getting worse. And America is not far behind.

Western leaders are aiding and abetting this insanity with a consistency and single-mindedness of purpose that can only be explained in one way: they must think they have something to gain from the chaos created by this crisis.

What other conclusion can be drawn from the brazen ascendancy of Islam in the western world, and the deafening silence that permits its success?  Clearly, Western leaders think they can use Islam for their own ends, to consolidate their own power.

Whether their motivations are globalist, nationalist, pro-Islam, or merely megalomaniacal, they all seem to hold one belief in common: the belief that they can control Muslim migration to create the chaos necessary to justify their predetermined solutions. …

But they are dangerously underestimating those they presume to use as pawns. …

Islam is now controlling most of Europe, either actively, or passively, due to the absence of any response from local governing authorities – a curious void of law and order. …

Unless Europeans and Americans rise up now to reverse this trend, one of two things will occur. Either those in power will succeed in using this crisis to advance their aims and fundamentally transform their societies, or, more likely, Islam will become dominant in the West past the point of no return.

If those two occurrences are distinguishable from each other.

“The Moors” have come home. The Muslim horde hastily imported into Europe over the cries and screams of voters are living up to the archetypes people in the West have come to fear, especially when cartoons result in lynch-mobs, and when a woman clothed according to western custom is mercilessly raped by “migrants”. …

A majority of Muslims living in Britain say they want full Sharia law, a separate Muslim police force, and death for anyone who speaks against Mohammed.  The same survey revealed a majority percentage also favor terrorist attacks against Britain and the United States.  51 percent of American Muslims also say they want Shariah and the US government to become Islamic.

The Netherlands openly advocates placing Shariah – the desert law which commands death for adulterers, death for gambling, death for leaving the faith (or having no faith), and death for homosexuals – on the ballot.

German courts are already enforcing Shariah when requested, and the impetus for this golden nugget originated in Nuremburg.

France has over 751 “no-go zones”, i.e. areas of land ruled by Islamic law and totally unrecognizable as French.

And where French law is not enforced, the police being afraid to enter them.

This was verified again after the recent French attacks.

The British already have actual Shariah courts in operation all over the United Kingdom.  These “courts” are chaired by a man who thinks amputation for petty crimes is a great idea, something he wants to “offer British society”.

Americans and Europeans need to stop acting surprised when Muslims behave like Muslims.  They are acting according to what the Qur’an says to do. It’s there in plain sight for anyone to read. And its ultimate aim is conquest and complete domination of any other culture but Islam. …

Not only is history repeating, but it is repeating on a crash timetable, and with the perverse backing of the host countries destined to be remade in the image of Islamic hegemony.

Why would any true German, Frenchman or Briton cooperate in their own organized destruction if there were not some goal or elusive purpose to be accomplished by the ever less accountable and more distant governments that make such decisions?

It would only be logical to deduce that French leaders, German leaders and British leaders have determined that there is an acceptable cost to property and lives if the chaos resulting from the indiscriminate welcoming of new migrant hoards can be directed towards an unspoken goal.  This is not out of left field.  Angela Merkel calling her own people “neo-Nazis” and turning water cannons on her own citizens is indicative.

Amazingly, this mindset is evident in every recent action to open the borders of Europe and America to their new visitors.

Controlled chaos is the desired result.

We underestimate the depravity of Western leaders if we think the lives of American and European citizens mean anything more to them than plot points in a narrative, one leading inevitably to the end of national sovereignty.

There’s chaos all right, but where’s the control?

What is that “goal or elusive purpose to be accomplished by the ever less accountable governments”? 

Is it something beyond the destruction of their own nations? Of their continent? Of Western civilization?

Is it some earthly paradise that can only arise out of submission to Islam and Sharia law?

A vision that they alone – the political deciders and dictators who will  not explain their plan – can see?

Is that hellish path the only way to it?

If so, it would be good to be told what it is, and how it will come about, and when.

Or else there is no answer at all to WHY.   

Conservative friends and associates in Britain tell us they despair of saving the Kingdom from becoming an Islamic state.

Even if Britain comes out of the EU – which is highly possible at last if the promised referendum goes the right way next year – it is unlikely to be able save itself from its looming fate.

Mark Steyn writes:

Canadians are dead, and so is satire. Six Quebeckers get slaughtered by Islamic terrorists in Burkina Faso, and to honor their memory Prime Minister Justin Trudeau leads a moment of silence … at a mosque.

Speaking of prime ministers, having spent his entire premiership assuring us that whatever happens in the news headlines is nothing to do with Islam, David Cameron has suddenly discovered a few things that are to do with Islam. The opening paragraph from Mr Cameron’s column in the London Times:

Where in the world do you think the following things are happening? School governors’ meetings where male governors sit in the meeting room and the women have to sit out of sight in the corridor. Young women only allowed to leave their house in the company of a male relative. Religious councils that openly discriminate against women and prevent them from leaving abusive marriages. The answer, I’m sorry to say, is Britain.

Ah, right. And who in Britain bears responsibility for letting a parallel self-segregating society incubate and grow these last 20 years?

Much more than 20 years. Nearer to 50 years. See our post Europe betrayed, February 11, 2010 here, where we give an account of how and why the first twenty million Muslims were imported into Europe. 

Mr Cameron has just noticed that 22 per cent of Muslim women in the United Kingdom speak little or no English, despite having lived there for decades. If you’re a Muslim female, the moment of silence can last for decades.

So what’s Cameron proposing to do about it? Well, that’s all a bit more iffy:

Forcing all migrants to learn English and ending gender segregation will show we’re serious about creating One Nation.

Fifty years ago, aside from a few querulous Scots, Welsh and Ulster Catholics, you didn’t need to “create” One Nation, because you already had one. Anointing the most “gender segregating” culture on earth as your principal source of population growth is why you no longer have “One Nation”, and why you’re back starting from scratch. Good luck with that.

Mr Cameron has no serious intention of slowing the right of entry of masses of primitive misogynists into Britain, but in an hour or so he and his fellow MPs will be debating whether to ban Donald Trump. Like I said, satire is dead.

Do some people in Britain really want to ban a possible future president of the United Sates from entering their country? Yes. Because he suggested it might be a good idea to ban Muslims from entering the US since Muslims are committing acts of terrorism on US soil. Our guess is that most of the petitioners to have Trump banned are Muslims.

And any number of primitive misogynistic Muslims are allowed to enter Britain. Bringing sharia law with them.

As for “gender segregation” in the Muslim world, let’s go back to that Peterborough [Canada] mosque where Justin Trudeau had his moment of silence to dishonor the Canadian dead at Islam’s hands. The mosque is run by Imam Shazim Khan …

Who is all for gender segregation:

“Gender segregation”? Bring it on!

There is no need for her [a wife] to go out. There is no need for her to call anybody. There is no need for her to talk to anybody … She only makes available herself to her husband and she protects herself and she stays away from everything that her husband doesn’t like in order to please him and to make the marriage work …

Incidentally, Trudeau’s imam says that, if David Cameron thinks “gender segregation” is bad now, wait till the hereafter:

The Prophet PBUH said because of this ingratitude [of the wives towards their husbands] that is why most inhabitants of hell are women.

Cameron isn’t serious about “assimilating” the likes of Imam Khan, and Trudeau kisses his ass.

Speaking of European leaders, most of them would dearly like to impose a moment of silence on Milos Zeman, the President of the Czech Republic. Mr Zeman has a different take on all this:

The experience of Western European countries which have ghettos and excluded localities shows that the integration of the Muslim community is practically impossible … Let them have their culture in their countries and not take it to Europe, otherwise it will end up like Cologne.

… referring to the mass New Year’s Eve assaults on women in Germany and elsewhere.

President Zeman is a leftie, but not a suicidal one.

Zeman, Cameron, Trudeau: Which of these guys has a better handle on reality?

It will end up as even worse than Cologne. Much worse. Already hundreds of British girls have been made sex-slaves by Muslim men. The British authorities did nothing whatever to put a stop to it.

Well before the end of this century, Britain and most of Europe will end up like Saudi Arabia and Iran.

Later maybe Canada will too.

Just 68 years ago, Britain still possessed the greatest empire in history.

Now it is submitting to weak, primitive Islam.

The elections in Canada have brought in young Justin Trudeau, an Islam-sympathizing lefty, as Prime Minister. He replaces Stephen Harper, one of the very few statesmen in our darkening world.

A Canadian reader, Marnee, wrote this to us:

I feel like I don’t know my own country. I’m nervous for the future of our grandchildren.  We’ve taken a sharp left turn and we’re now heading down a very dark road – a road that had so many signs warning us not to take this path. Danger! read the signs. Yet the vehicle called Canada has veered left. Veered away from Israel and toward Islam; veered away from open trusting faces and toward suspicious faces hidden behind niqabs; veered away from illicit drugs that were under control and toward young people out of control; veered away from grounded climate scientists and toward “the sky is falling” hysterical scientists; veered away from balanced budgets and toward “We won’t balance the budget” thinking; veered away from the man who guided us safely through the economic crisis and toward the foolish young man that says “…and the budget will balance itself”; veered us toward and has now left us at the very door of the boy with nice hair with not much under it. I look back on the USA before Obama took over and I shudder as I study where it is today – a very tumultuous, deeply divided and different place. A lot of changes can happen in 4 years. Today’s world is filled with dangerous people who have bloody agendas that we only wish were hidden. Sounds like we’ll be making friends with these pre-historic peoples. We’re more vulnerable now with reckless young Justin at the wheel. We’ve taken the Ferrari keys away from “Dad” and tossed them to the “little brother”. We have every reason to fear for our safety and our very good name. Hope time proves me wrong.

Canada veers leftward. One major result of the elections is perfectly summed up in this cartoon:

(Hat-tip to a Canadian reader, Stephen)

Obama’s courting of Castro, Putin, the Ayatollah Khamenei, and the King of Saudi Arabia; his appointment of  policy advisers who are members of the Muslim Brotherhood; his rude eviction of the bust of Churchill from the Oval Office, his bullying of the President of Israel, and his cold-shouldering of Canada over the Keystone oil pipeline are signs that he is – what? Could they be read as indications that he is biased towards Communism and Islam, and is not at all keen on the values and polities of the West?

They could not only be easily read as that; it would be difficult to interpret them any other way.

Yet half the voting population cannot see it. Or if they can see it, they must like it, since they twice voted him into power.

But what are we saying? Half the adult, literate, sane people of the United States of America prefer Communism and/or Islam to their own free republic? Surely that cannot be true?

So what else could account for what happened? Well, perhaps most of them simply paid no attention to Barack Obama’s ideologies – although they could easily have discovered them before his first election to the presidency – and voted him into power for the purely racist reason that he’s black and they wanted (paradoxically) to show they were against discrimination on the grounds of race? And didn’t that prove they were nice people?

Now they’ve seen what a terrible mistake it was not to take his ideas and affiliations into account, they won’t do anything like that again – will they? They won’t again choose a president for such an extremely poor “reason”? A candidate’s race, color, ethnicity, or gender will not be seen as a qualification in itself for supreme power?

And next time they’ll be sure to take a candidate’s ideology into account – right?

We quote from an article at Front Page titled The Arabian Candidate, by William Kilpatrick:

In The Manchurian Candidate, the son of a prominent right-wing politician is captured by the Soviets and brainwashed in a secret Manchurian location. His task is to assassinate a presidential candidate, thus ensuring the election of the demagogic vice-president. …

The film has several parallels to current events. The main difference is that in those days, Americans had to be brainwashed into serving enemy interests by psy-ops teams. Nowadays, they come self-brainwashed with some indoctrinative assist from the American educational system.

In the film, a scary lady with leftist sympathies who looks vaguely like Hillary Clinton manipulates her husband into high political office. In real life, a scary lady with leftist leanings [who is Hillary Clinton] … manipulates herself into high political office.

In her case, teams of brainwashers are not required, since she has brainwashed herself into believing that foreign governments are dumping truckloads of cash into her family foundation because she’s such a charming and intelligent woman. And also because Arab sovereigns like nothing better than to do their part to improve the lives of the poor, the hungry, the environmentally underserved, and kids who need braces — in short, the very causes for which the foundation was founded.

Another similarity is that in the film, the [scary lady] character has some sort of hypnotic power over her son, the unwitting assassin. Whenever it begins to dawn on him that something funny is going on, she flashes a Queen of Diamonds playing card and he falls into a catatonic state of complete obedience. In the present situation [Hillary Clinton] has merely to flash the gender card and, presto, skeptical voters fall back into line.

There are parallels to other movies as well. Today’s Queen of Diamonds has a secret server in her home so that her exchanges with foreign dono- I mean “diplomats” can’t be traced. I’m not sure if the server takes up only one room of the palatial house, or a whole suite of rooms. And who knows what’s in the cavern-like basement? It’s all faintly reminiscent of those James Bond thrillers in which the villain’s remote island estate sits atop a vast underground military-industrial complex.

At some point the analogy breaks down. You could still convince a sixties audience that leftists were willing to sell out the country. We, on the other hand, have convinced ourselves that we live in a brave new world where such things never happen — at least, not in modern Western societies. No one would dare to pull a fast one on us because we’re just too smart. … So if it were discovered that Arabs controlled the White House, we would shrug our shoulders and say, “At this point, what does it matter?”

The Clinton-Arab connection actually goes back to the time when Bill Clinton was governor of Arkansas and worked to secure a hefty Saudi contribution to a Middle-Eastern studies program at the University of Arkansas. But let’s skip all that and fast forward to relatively recent times when Secretary of State Hillary Clinton appointed her longtime aide Huma Abedin as Deputy Chief of Staff at the State Department. When it was discovered that Abedin’s family was deeply involved in the Muslim Brotherhood in Saudi Arabia, very few eyebrows were raised. After all, even President Obama had relatives in the Muslim Brotherhood. So it would have been silly to make something of it.

It’s probably just a coincidence that while working for the Clintons, Huma herself was the assistant editor of the Journal of Muslim Minority Affairs which — you guessed it — is a Muslim Brotherhood journal. Before that, and while still interning at the White House, she was an executive board member of the Muslim Student Association (MSA) at George Washington University. The MSA was the first Muslim Brotherhood organization in the United States and George Washington was the first Muslim president. Well, the latter hasn’t yet been firmly established, but it’s just a matter of time until those Saudi-funded Mid-East studies professors at the University of Arkansas and the Saudi-funded professors at Georgetown (Bill’s alma mater) discover the prayer rug in the attic at Mount Vernon. It’s also probably a coincidence that, like her boss, Huma conducted State Department business using her own personal e-mail address, connected, one supposes, to the same master server that served her master so well … er, mistress.

Abedin also worked until recently for the Clinton Foundation. Again, this is no doubt a pure coincidence and, as the old saying goes, it has nothing to do with Islam. … Today’s government officials seem curiously lacking in curiosity. In 2012, Michelle Bachmann and four other House members wrote letters to the Inspector Generals of several government agencies asking them to conduct an investigation into Muslim Brotherhood penetration of the government. They were particularly concerned about Huma Abedin in view of her family connections and influential position. They noted thatthe Clinton State Department had “taken actions recently that have been enormously favorable to the Muslim Brotherhood and its interests”.

The request was dismissed by numerous congressmen and senators as “offensive”, “insensitive,” and even “hurtful”. By that time the machinery of the “Islamophobia” industry was already in high gear and it was deemed prudent even by Republicans to defend Abedin and to damn her accusers …

Still, the case for an inquiry seemed strong. … Even if Abedin was innocent of any wrongdoing, the State Department’s own guidelines about foreign family connections would disqualify her for a security clearance for such a sensitive position.

But then, again, a lot of people in sensitive positions don’t seem to qualify for a security clearance. For example, if all your closest relatives were leftists or communists, if your chief mentors were, respectively, a member of the Communist Party and a radical left-wing preacher, and if you used to hang out with known terrorists, you probably couldn’t get a job as a night watchman at an auto parts warehouse. On the other hand, if someone with the same background throws his hat into the presidential ring, he can become Commander-in-Chief of the Army and Navy, and get to set foreign policy.

He also gets to appoint Secretaries of State. It shouldn’t be any surprise if they turn out to be the kind of people who can’t be bothered with security checks. Such people seem to live in an ethereal realm that puts them above suspicion and above conflicts of interest. Normally, when a Secretary of State receives tens of millions in donations from countries that support the spread of a radical ideology, it would be a sign that something is terribly wrong. For an analogy, ask yourself if you would keep someone on at your firm if she had access to sensitive trade secrets and yet received huge gifts from rival corporations while conducting company business on her private server.

You would probably get rid of her pronto. But that’s only if you apply the normal rules of logic — which apparently don’t apply to Secretaries of State appointed by President Obama.

Now comes a surprise – or at least, a surprise to us. We did not know that  John Kerry has family connections in Iran. How much does it explain?

If you applied such logic, you might also think there was something awkward about the fact that current Secretary of State John Kerry’s daughter is married to an Iranian who has extensive family ties in Iran. …

The FBI usually won’t grant security clearance to “individuals who are married to nationals of an enemy nation or have family members living in that country, for fear of divided loyalties or, more simply, blackmail”.

Of course, you would have to be some kind of conspiracy nut to think that having vulnerable in-laws in Iran would in any way compromise Secretary Kerry’s negotiations with the representatives of a country whose leaders routinely indulge in “death to America” rhetoric.

Undoubtedly, the President consulted with his senior adviser Valerie Jarrett about the matter. Since Jarrett was born in Iran and spoke Persian as a child, she would, by current standards of expertise, be assumed to have deep insight into the Persian mind. She could have assured the president that “Great Satan” and “Death to America” are typical of the rhetorical exuberance that characterizes the rich and vibrant Iranian culture. Moreover, she could have allayed any concerns about blackmail. Anyone who has studied Cliff Notes on Islam knows that blackmail runs counter to the deeply held beliefs of the mullahs.

Jarretts’ family left Iran when she was five, but apparently those five years were enough to qualify her as an expert on Iranian affairs. According to Discover the Networks, it was revealed in 2012 that for several months, Jarrett “had been leading secret negotiations with representatives of Iran’s Supreme leader … in an effort to normalize relations between the U.S. and Iran”.

The mind spins at the – what’s the word? — the audacity of it all. But the curious thing is not that there are people in high places willing to put self-interest ahead of the national interest. Such people are always with us. The curious thing is that the American people and the American press accept it with such equanimity.

During the Obama-Clinton-Kerry-Jarrett-Abedin years, Russia seized the Crimea, ISIS seized large parts of Iraq and Syria, the Taliban re-established itself in Afghanistan, allies stopped trusting us, enemies were emboldened, the Middle East was set on fire, and the Army was drastically reduced. Oh, and the way was cleared for Iran to have nuclear bombs. Future generations — if there are any — will wonder what we were thinking.

What we were thinking, they may discover, goes something like this (in shorthand brain language): “Mustn’t think that! Mustn’t say that! Not nice! What will people think!” You’d have to go back to the Victorian era to find another society with so much concern for propriety of thought and speech. … A sort of suicidal etiquette that chokes off common sense has grown up in our society. Under the rules of the new etiquette, we aren’t allowed to say that the Emperor has no clothes. We dare not even point out that the Emperor and his ministers appear to be throwing open the gates to the enemy.

Let’s see: The people of the United States elect as president a man they know very little about. When it becomes obvious that he has deep leftist sympathies combined with deep Islamist sympathies, they elect him again. He, in turn, appoints one Secretary of State who is beholden to Arab largesse, and then, after she steps down, he replaces her with a man who … has close family ties with Iran.

This time at last, in the coming election year, the Republican candidates whose broadcast debates will have the attention of millions of voters must take advantage of their opportunity to break through the protective wall the mainstream media have put round the Obama administration and the Democratic candidates. They must make all this – the ideology, the motivation, and the practices of Obama, Hillary Clinton, John Kerry and the rest of the gang – so well known to the electorate that no one who can read, watch TV, listen to radio, attend a political rally, or receive news through any medium, will be able to avoid knowing it. Or avoid knowing how perilous it is to their freedom, their safety, and even their survival.

Then if most voters choose Hillary Clinton for president …

With his usual perception and wit, Mark Steyn writes:

The Islamic State [IS] released a 22-minute video showing Flight Lieutenant Muath al-Kasasbeh of the Royal Jordanian Air Force being doused in petrol and burned to death. It is an horrific way to die, and Flt Lt al-Kasasbeh showed uncommon bravery, standing stiff and dignified as the flames consumed him. And then he toppled, and the ISIS cameras rolled on, until what was left was charred and shapeless and unrecognizable as human. …

Even by the standards of his usual rote cookie-cutter shoulder-to-shoulder shtick that follows every ISIS beheading of western captives, the President could barely conceal his boredom at having to discuss the immolation of Flt Lt al-Kasasbeh:

Aaand it, I think, will redouble [pause] the vigilance aaand determination on the part of our global coalition to, uh, make sure that they are degraded and ultimately defeated. Ummmm. [Adopting a whimsical look] It also just indicates the degree to which whatever ideology they’re operating off of, it’s bankrupt. [Suppressing a smirk, pivoting to a much more important subject.] We’re here to talk about how to make people healthier and make their lives better.

The lack of passion – the bloodlessness – of Obama’s reaction to atrocity is always striking. He can’t even be bothered pretending that he means it. …

Given the general halfheartedness of Obama’s “coalition”, King Abdullah [of Jordan] could have been forgiven for also deciding to head for the exit.

Yet he understood the necessity of action. Obama, by contrast … does nothing. His war against ISIS was supposed to be one in which the US would not put “boots on the ground”, but instead leave that to our allies. The allies have the boots, but they could use some weapons, too. Obama has failed to supply the Kurds or anybody else with what they need to defeat our enemies. It’s becoming what they call a pattern of behavior. …

Obama cannot react to atrocities committed by jihadis because he is emotionally (we cannot say intellectually, because unlike his Democratic fans we do not think he has much of an intellect), on their side; which means that, whether he realizes it or not, he is on the side of evil.

Mark Steyn clearly sees that IS is evil. He goes on to consider why it is that tens of thousands of volunteers go eagerly to join its army and help it carry out its atrocities.

You’ll recall Hannah Arendt’s tired and misleading coinage “the banality of evil”, derived from her observation of Adolf Eichmann at his trial in Jerusalem.

We explain when and why she said it, and why it is misleading, in our post The cultivation of evil, the sickness of  Europe, July 20, 2010.

Mark Steyn quotes an earlier article of his:

Hitler felt obliged to be somewhat coy about just how final the final solution was. As Eichmann testified at his trial, when typing up the minutes of the Wannsee conference, “How shall I put it? Certain over-plain talk and jargon expressions had to be rendered into office language by me.” Even the Nazis were reluctant to spell it out.

The Germans didn’t have social media, but they had newsreels, and Hitler knew enough not to make genocide available to Pathé or “The March of Time”. He had considerations both domestic and foreign. Pre-Wannsee, in Poland and elsewhere, German troops had been ordered to shoot Jewish prisoners in cold blood, and their commanders reported back to Berlin that too many soldiers had found it sickening and demoralizing. So the purpose of “the final solution” was to make mass murder painless, at least for the perpetrators – more bureaucratic, removed, bloodless.

As for foreign considerations, Germany expected to be treated as a civilized power by its enemies, and that would not have been possible had they been boasting about genocide.

Seventy years on, the Islamic State has slipped free of even these minimal constraints. They advertize their barbarism to the world, because what’s the downside? Let’s say the guys who burned Flt Lt al-Kasasbeh are one day captured by Americans. They can look forward to a decade or two of a soft, pampering sojourn in the US justice system, represented by an A-list dream-team that’ll string things along until the administration figures it’ll cut its losses and ship them to Qatar in exchange for some worthless deserter.

As for the upside, “the banality of evil” may have its appeal for lower-middle-class Teuton bureaucrats, but the glamor of evil is a far more potent and universal brand. The Islamic State has come up with the ultimate social-media campaign: evil goes viral! At some level German conscripts needed to believe they were honorable soldiers in an honorable cause, no different from the British or Americans. But ISIS volunteers are signing up explicitly for the war crimes. The Islamic State burned Flt Lt al-Kasasbeh alive not only to kill him but to inspire the thousands of ISIS fanbois around the globe. …

For many of its beneficiaries, modern western life is bland, undemanding and vaguely unsatisfying. Some seek a greater cause, and turn to climate change or LGBTQWERTY rights. But others want something with a little more red meat to it. Jihad is primal in a way that the stodgy multiculti relativist mush peddled by Obama isn’t. And what the Islamic State is offering is Jihad 2.0, cranking up the blood-lust and rape and sex slavery and head-chopping and depravity in ways that make Osama-era al-Qaeda look like a bunch of pantywaists.

Success breeds success. The success of evil breeds darker evil. And the glamorization of evil breeds ever more of those “recent Muslim converts” and “lone wolves” and “self-radicalized extremists” in the news. That’s a Big Idea – a bigger idea, indeed, than Communism or Nazism.

Islam, as we know, means “submission”. But Xtreme-Sports Hyper-Islam, blood-soaked and baying, is also wonderfully liberating, offering the chance for dull-witted, repressed young men to slip free of even the most basic societal restraints. And, when the charms of the open road in Headchoppistan wear thin, your British and Canadian and Australian and European welfare checks will still be waiting for you on the doormat back home. …

As the world burns, Obama, uh, redoubles his, uh, vigilance, uh uh uh… Whatever.

Mark Steyn reminds us that “civilization is a fragile and unnatural state of affairs”. Its would-be destroyers now, in the early twenty-first century, are: the environmentalists; the world-government advocates and all the rest of the collectivists, whatever they call themselves –  progressives or socialists or communists; and, above all, most dangerous, already destroying as much as they can of the heritage of civilization, and winning battle after battle, encountering no effective opposition – Islam.

Obama won’t name it, not even by using the polite form of its name that most politicians and commentators use, “Islamism”.

But be assured that against something or other, he is redoubling his vigilance.