The House Select Committee’s report on the lethal attack by Muslim terrorists on the US mission in Benghazi on 9/11/12, now released, is a damning indictment of the Obama administration, exposing its mendacity, incompetence, and callousness.

The whole document is a must read.

Everything in it needs to become common knowledge.

We select a section that seem to us particularly interesting and yet have seen no mention of elsewhere.

The report is titled:

Citizens’ Commission on Benghazi June 29, 2016

Betrayal in Benghazi: A Dereliction of Duty

We quote from pages 52 – 55:

Right around 8:00 p.m. Eastern time [on the night of the attack], Tripoli DCM (now Acting Chief of Mission) Greg Hicks spoke by phone with Secretary Clinton and her aides, telling them in no uncertain terms that it had been a terrorist attack and that the “Innocence of Muslims” YouTube video was a “non-event” in Libya …

A State Department “Call Sheet” stamped with the 11 September 2012 date states clearly as well that “Armed extremists attacked U.S. Mission Benghazi on September 11, setting fire to the Principal Officer’s Residence and killing at least one [of the] American mission staff, Information Management Officer Sean Smith … ”

Further, Secretary Clinton was personally in contact with foreign leaders, including Libyan General National Congress President Mohammed Yousef el-Magariaf and Egyptian Prime Minister Hesham Mohamed Qandil. At 6:49 p.m. Eastern time the night of 11 September, Clinton was on the telephone with Magariaf, discussing the attack and frankly discussing with him the Ansar al-Shariah claim of responsibility for it.

Nevertheless, Secretary Clinton spoke with President Obama around 10 p.m. Eastern Time, and shortly thereafter (at 10:08 p.m.) issued a formal State Department statement that blamed the attack on the YouTube video. The statement read, in part: “Some have sought to justify this vicious behavior as a response to inflammatory material posted on the Internet.” This State Department statement was coordinated with the White House. “Per Ben [Rhodes’] email below, this should be the USG comment for the night” …

Then comes a fact that seems to have been overlooked by commentators, but which makes it absolutely clear that the video story was concocted as a deliberate lie to mislead the public:

The cover-up in fact had begun even earlier, kicked off apparently while the battle was still raging in Benghazi, by a White House attempt to “reach out to U-tube to advise ramifications of the posting of the Pastor Jon Video”,  referring to a video by Oregon-based Pastor Jon Courson, entitled “God vs Allah”. 

The administration had already (by 9:11 p.m. Eastern Time, 11 September/ 3:11 a.m. Benghazi Time, 12 September) decided to blame an online video for the attack, but hadn’t quite settled on which video.

Ponder that. They hadn’t “quite settled” what video they would claim was responsible for provoking the attack in Benghazi!

Again, there was no question that Secretary Clinton knew it was an Islamic terror attack: she’d emailed her daughter Chelsea at 9:12 p.m. Eastern Time to tell her that an “Al Qaeda-like group” was responsible.

As the administration response to the Benghazi attack was taking shape, the one question never specifically asked by anyone seems to be about where Hillary Clinton, [Defense Secretary] Leon Panetta, General David Petraeus and President Barack Obama actually were throughout the night of 11-12 September 2012. In 2014, former national security spokesman Tommy Vietor told Fox News’ Bret Baier that President Obama was not in the Situation Room that night, but somewhere else in the White House. But aside from hints that emerge from various timelines and emails pried years after the fact from government databases, we still don’t know for sure where any of them, especially the President, were that night, or what they were doing.

The next morning, on 12 September, President Obama did appear and spoke in the White House Rose Garden about the Benghazi attack, saying “No acts of terror will ever shake the resolve of this great nation, alter that character, or eclipse the light of the values that we stand for.” Nevertheless, he refused to call the Benghazi attack forthrightly a terror attack, a pattern that would persist for weeks. 113 That same day, CBS’s Steve Kroft asked the president directly, “Mr. President, this morning you went out of your way to avoid the use of the word “terrorism” in connection with the Libya attack. Do you believe that this was a terrorist attack?” And Obama refused to answer the question directly, saying instead, “Well, it’s too early to know exactly how this came about, what group was involved, but obviously it was an attack on Americans.”

CBS sat on this exchange, refusing to air it even after the infamous moment in the 16 October presidential debate between Obama and Governor Mitt Romney. At that time, moderator Candy Crowley interjected to wrongly say that Obama had called the Benghazi attack an act of terror on 12 September. Then, on the afternoon of 12 September 2012, Clinton spoke by telephone with Egyptian Prime Minister Qandil. According to the official State Department record of that call (obtained by Judicial Watch), Clinton clearly told him, “We know that the attack in Libya had nothing to do with the film. It was a planned attack — not a protest.” After PM Qandil replied back to her in a redacted segment, Clinton added, “Your [sic] not kidding. Based on the information we saw today we believe the group that claimed responsibility for this was affiliated with al Qaeda.”

Despite knowing that the attack at Benghazi was a pre-planned Islamic terror attack by a group affiliated with al-Qa’eda, the Obama administration decided to lie about it and tell the American people that the attack was the result of a video. Statements over the following days from Jay Carney, the White House spokesman, and from Clinton herself continued to push the narrative that the attacks were because of the YouTube video. On 14 September, Clinton attended the transfer of remains ceremony for those killed in Benghazi at Andrews Air Force Base. According to handwritten notes that Charles Woods, father of Tyrone Woods, kept, Clinton told him, “We are going to have the filmmaker arrested who was responsible for the death of your son.” …

She said the same to the mother of Sean Smith, whose coffin was also being carried behind her as she spoke.

And on 15 September, Nakoula Basseley Nakoula, the filmmaker who produced “Innocence of Muslims”, was duly arrested in California, accused of violating his probation, and ultimately sentenced to one year in jail on unrelated charges. This looks to many like a clear case of official U.S. government submission to the Islamic Law on slander.

It was precisely that.

Of course the actual events in Libya were the most atrocious part of the story. They were caused by the foreign policy of President Barack Obama and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. Neither of whom gave a damn for the hell that broke out in Benghazi that night, for the suffering and death of their ambassador, or of the men who died trying to protect him and the US mission.

Obama and Hillary Clinton cared only to save their own political reputations and stay in power. They deserve no power. Their reputations should be mud for all time.

For us, the arguments against Britain’s membership of the European Union are strongly persuasive. They are political arguments: for British self-determination; for the continuation of the nation state as a good in itself; for throwing off the burden of dictatorship by corrupt bureaucrats.

But what of the economic arguments? Is it better for Britain to remain in the EU or to leave? Is it better for the world economy for Britain to be in or out?

George Freidman, who founded the private intelligence firm Stratfor, and is internationally recognized as an authority on world affairs, writes at Mauldin Economics:

In looking at Friday’s market decline, it is clear that the investment community was surprised at the outcome of the referendum in the U.K. What is most surprising is that they were surprised. There were two competing views of the EU. One view regarded the European Union as essential to British economic well-being. The other saw the European Union as a failing institution, and saw Britain being pulled down if it remained.

The European Union has been caught in long-term stagnation. Eight years after the financial crisis it is still unable to break out of it. In addition, a large swath of Europe, especially in the south, is in depression with extremely high unemployment numbers. An argument could be made that these problems will be solved in the long run and that Britain should be part of the solution for its own sake. The counterargument is that if the problems had been soluble they would have been solved years ago.

For a financial community, there is a built-in desire for predictability. It can make money in good or bad markets and economies. It has trouble making money in uncertainty. Therefore, the financial community was inherently biased toward Britain remaining in the EU because it gave them predictability. There was a subconscious assumption that everyone had the same bias toward maintaining the status quo. This was not just the view of the global financial community. It was one shared with other elites – political, journalistic, academic and the rest.

Someone I know, who has many friends in Britain, told me that she didn’t know anyone who favored a British exit. That was true. As the graduate of an elite college she is in touch with similar people around the world. This enclosure has profound social indications to consider, but in this case it created a psychological barrier to anticipating what was coming. When everyone you know thinks an idea is rubbish, it is hard to imagine that there is a majority out there that you haven’t met that doesn’t share your views.

There was also a sense of contempt for the opponents. The leaders, like UKIP leader Nigel Farage, were odd from the elite point of view. Their rhetoric was unseemly. And their followers by and large did not come from the places in London where the elite did. Their views were not the liberal, transnational views of the supporters of the EU. They led much narrower, harder lives and did not know the world as the pro-EU people did. So they were discounted. There was an expectation that the elite, who had governed Britain for so long, were dealing with an annoyance, rather than a peaceful rising against them. Thus, in spite of the polls indicating the election would be extremely close, the “remain” supporters could not believe they would lose.

The reporters of leading British media were talking to their European and American counterparts. The politicians were doing the same. And the financial community is on the phone daily with colleagues around the world.

The challenge that was posed in the U.K. referendum is present in many countries around the world, albeit in different forms.

What has become universal is the dismissive attitudes of the elite to their challengers.It is difficult for the elite to take seriously that the less educated, the less sophisticated and the less successful would take control of the situation. The French Bourbons and the Russian Romanovs had similar contempt for the crowds in the streets. They dismissed their lack of understanding and inability to act – right to the moment they burst into the palaces.

The analogy should not be overdone but also should not be dismissed. The distance between what I will call the technocratic elite and the increasingly displaced lower-middle and even middle class is becoming one of the major characteristics of our time. This elite did not expect “leave” to win because it was clear to them that the EU would work itself out. They didn’t know anyone who disagreed with them – a measure of how far out of touch they had become with the real world. And above all, they were dismissive of the kind of people who led their opponents.

Not understanding their own isolation and insularity; not grasping the different world view of “leave” supporters or that they couldn’t care less if the financial institutions of the City moved to Frankfurt; not grasping the contempt in which they were held by so many, the elite believed that “leave” could not win. …

In the end, the financial decline on Friday resulted from the lack of imagination of the elite. And it is that lack of imagination that led them to believe that the current situation could continue. That lack of imagination, the fact that the elite had no idea of what was happening beyond their circle of acquaintances, is a far greater crisis in the West than whether Britain is in the EU or even if the EU survives.

We are living in a social divide so deep that serious people of good will and a certain class have never met anyone who wants to leave the EU or who supports blocking Muslim immigration or perhaps even who will vote for Donald Trump. …

No one had the right to believe that this couldn’t happen. No one should believe that it will be confined to Britain. No one should believe that it won’t happen again. The days when the elite could assert that the EU is going to be just fine in the face of evidence to the contrary are over.

This new wave in politics, this force arising directly from the “silent majority”, is transforming the political scene not only in Europe but throughout the West.

As it is a movement that favors capitalism, it will bring greater prosperity to greater numbers of individuals if it continues to succeed. The next victory needs to be the election of Donald Trump to the presidency of the United States.

Dire predictions that Britain will suffer economically for leaving the EU are not likely to be true.

It is far more likely that the EU will be the worse off for the divorce.

Matthew Lynn, financial columnist, writes at The Spectator (UK);

Share prices in freefall. Pension funds obliterated. A sea of red ink across trading screens. Billions wiped off the value of leading companies. And brokers, or at least the automated trading algorithms that have replaced them, contemplating throwing themselves out of the window, or whatever exactly it is that an algorithm does when it has a really bad day at the office. That is surely an accurate description of the City of London this morning.

Except, er, is isn’t really. In fact, as the financial markets wake up to an outcome they had planned for but never really expected, something far more interesting is happening. True, the FTSE-100 has taken a hit, and bank shares look about as popular as Jean-Claude Junker at a UKIP rally, but on the whole the losses in London have been fairly modest. It is Madrid, Milan, Paris, and Frankfurt that are tanking. The reason? While there will be a short-term hit to the British economy, it will be the rest of Europe that suffers far more from this than us – and investors have already figured that out.

Just take a look at the figures. The predictions were that the London market would go into meltdown if we voted to leave the EU. It would be Lehman Brothers all over again, except probably far worse. The index could lose 20 per cent or 30 per cent of its value we were told. In fact, by lunchtime the FTSE had lost 260 points, or 4.2%. That’s a nasty hit. But it’s only fallen back to its level of, er, last Friday. In effect , a week of gains have been lost. It is still up on the beginning of February. You need a very fevered imagination to describe that as a catastrophe.

The really heavy losses are on the other side of the English Channel. Madrid’s IBEX 35 is down by 12.5 per cent. Milan’s MIB is down by 11 per cent. In Paris the CAC-40 is off by 8.4 per cent and even Germany’s mighty DAX is off by 7 per cent. In short, the losses across Europe are far worse than ours. That is, to say the least, a bit odd. After all, Brexit is meant to be an economic catastrophe for us, not for our neighbours, who have all been wise enough to stay in the EU, and will carry on enjoying all its wonderful economic benefits.

So what’s up? The explanation is simple. In reality, the EU doesn’t make much difference to the UK economy one way or another. We export less and less to it every year, and the Single Market, while valuable in some ways, was never much use for the kind of high-end services we sell abroad. By Christmas, we will have sorted out our political problems, and be growing again.

But Europe faces a real challenge. If the British can come out, why not the Spanish, with youth unemployment of more than 50 per cent? Why not the Italians, with an economy that is now smaller than it was in 2000? Why not the French, who have lost competitiveness relentlessly against Germany, and are stuck in permanent recession? If a relative successful prosperous economy, with lots of jobs, votes to leave, so might others. In fact, the rest of the EU could now face a rolling series of populist revolts, and many of them will be successful, and that will put constant pressure on the euro, and their economies. Our trauma will be over quite quickly but the EU’s has just begun. The markets have worked that out – and investors are quite rightly getting out while they still can.

The ruling elites will do their utmost to reverse the decision of the majority of British voters to take their country out of the corrupt dictatorship of the European Union.

So we learn from the great writer Theodore Dalrymple, whom we asked to comment on Brexit. This is what he told us:

When you read the French newspapers, which mostly air the opinion of the French political class or elite, you realise that the whole European project as they call it is about being large and powerful. It has nothing to do with the welfare of the people or even economic efficiency. It is megalomania pure and simple (and the Germans don’t want to be Germans any more). The result in Britain was a slap in the face for the elite, who never really expected it, and will now set about reversing the result. There are moves afoot to nullify the referendum. 

It has yet to be revealed what moves those are. But it is a certainty that the powers, the principalities, the rulers of the darkness of this world will do their utmost not to let the British decision stand. They know that “the population got it wrong”, as Theodore Dalrymple sums up their stunningly arrogant belief.

Which side will win the battle, now growing hotter in Europe and America, between the common man and the dark powers?

Full of dread, but not devoid of hope, we back the common man.

Donald Trump’s statement on Britain’s EU referendum:

The people of the United Kingdom have exercised the sacred right of all free peoples.

They have declared their independence from the European Union, and have voted to reassert control over their own politics, borders and economy.

A Trump Administration pledges to strengthen our ties with a free and independent Britain, deepening our bonds in commerce, culture and mutual defense.

The whole world is more peaceful and stable when our two countries – and our two peoples – are united together, as they will be under a Trump Administration.

Come November, the American people will have the chance to re-declare their independence.

Americans will have a chance to vote for trade, immigration and foreign policies that put our citizens first.

They will have the chance to reject today’s rule by the global elite, and to embrace real change that delivers a government of, by and for the people.

I hope America is watching, it will soon be time to believe in America again.

Tomorrow Britain holds a referendum on whether to remain a member of the undemocratic and irredeemably corrupt European Union, or leave it.

Those who want to leave it are already calling 23rd. June UK Independence Day.

President Obama went to Britain to tell the British not to leave the EU.

The excellent conservative historian Andrew Roberts comments on this impertinence. He writes at the Wall Street Journal:

On June 23 the British people will be going to the polls to choose whether they want to continue with the present system whereby 60% of British laws are made in Brussels and foreign judges decide whether those laws are legitimate or not, or whether we want to strike out for independence and the right to make all of our own laws and have our own British judges decide upon them.

It’s about whether we can recapture the right to deport foreign Islamist hate preachers and terrorist suspects, or whether under European human-rights legislation they must continue to reside in the U.K., often at taxpayers’ expense. The European Union is currently experiencing migration on a scale not seen since the late 17th century—with hordes of young, mostly male Muslims sweeping from the southeast into the heart of Europe. Angela Merkel invited them in and that might be fine for Germany, but why should they have the right to settle in Britain as soon as they get a European passport?

Surely — surely — this is an issue on which the British people, and they alone, have the right to decide, without the intervention of President Obama, who adopted his haughtiest professorial manner when lecturing us to stay in the EU, before making the naked threat that we would be sent “to the back of the queue” (i.e., the back of the line) in any future trade deals if we had the temerity to vote to leave. Was my country at the back of the line when Winston Churchill promised in 1941 that in the event of a Japanese attack on the U.S., a British declaration of war on Japan would be made within the hour?

Was Great Britain at the back of the line when America was searching for allies in the Korean War in the 1950s?

When America decided to liberate Kuwait from Saddam Hussein in the Gulf War in the early 1990s, was Britain at the back of the line when we contributed an armored division that fought on your right flank during Operation Desert Storm?

Were we at the back of the line on 9/11, or did we step forward immediately and instinctively as the very first of your allies to contribute troops to join you in the expulsion of the Taliban, al Qaeda’s hosts, from power in Afghanistan?

Or in Iraq two years later, was it the French or the Germans or the Belgians who stood and fought and bled beside you? Whatever views you might have over the rights or wrongs of that war, no one can deny that Britain was in its accustomed place: at the front of the line, in the firing line. So it is not right for President Obama now to threaten to send us to the back of the line.

Britain is the largest foreign investor in the U.S. — larger even than China— so it makes no economic sense for you to send us to the back of the line. Yet quite apart from your economic or strategic best interests, it also makes no moral sense for America to treat your genuine friends (you also see this phenomenon in the case of Israel, of course) as though they are your enemies, while all too often you treat your rivals and enemies — Cuba, China, Venezuela and others — as though they’re your friends. In what sane world does America put Iran at the front of the line for trade deals, while sending Britain to the back?

President Obama might be very clever intellectually …

Oh? What evidence is there for that? Andrew Roberts is just being kind, we guess.

… but he hasn’t grasped the central essence of American foreign policy over the centuries, which is the honorable one of being a strength and beacon to your allies and a standing reproach and constant source of anxiety to your enemies and to the enemies of freedom.

Fortunately, the best kind of Americans instinctively understand that truth, and outside the Obama administration nobody seems to want to relegate my country to the back of the line. Anglo-American friendship is far stronger than any one administration or government. I’ve lost count of the number of times that I’ve read the obituaries of people who have written the obituary of the Special Relationship. It survives because it lives on in the hearts of our two peoples — who have so much more in common than that which separates us — rather than just in the pages of venerable treaties and history books.

The good news is that the British people don’t seem to have taken much notice of President Obama — indeed, on the day he left the U.K., the Leave campaign actually saw a 2% increase in the polls. (As it’s neck and neck at the moment, perhaps we should invite him back?)

The endless threats about trade deals and GDP per capita from the EU and the IMF and the World Bank and the OECD, instead of cowing the British people, seem merely to have excited their bloody-mindedness. They recognize that they might indeed take a short-term financial hit, but there are some things more important than money.

Imagine if a bunch of accountants had turned up at Valley Forge in that brutal winter of 1777 and proved with the aid of pie-charts and financial tables that Americans would be better off if they just gave up the cause of independence. George Washington would have sent them off with a few short, well-chosen words on the subject — probably derived from the Anglo-Saxon.

Winston Churchill was warned repeatedly by the Treasury that it was bankrupting Britain to continue her lonely and seemingly doomed struggle against the power that utterly dominated the entire European Continent in 1940 and 1941, but he treated all such warnings with his characteristically coruscating ire. That is what people do who love their country, and that is what I hope my countrymen will do on June 23.

And if we do vote to leave the EU on Thursday, I hope that Americans with a sense of history, Americans with a sense of tradition who honor friendship past and future, above all Americans who know what self-government means to a free people, will rally to the cause of an independent Britain.

*

In the leftist Guardian, George Soros the Evil – Obama’s friend – has an article desperately trying to stop Britons voting to leave the EU, on the spurious grounds that the country will experience a disastrous economic crash if they succeed. That should be the final signal to Britain that leaving is definitely the right thing to do.

Newspapers are losing money and many are struggling to survive.

What a relief it will be if most if them don’t make it.

Kurt Schlichter explains why at Townhall:

What’s super sad is that when I started counting all of the mainstream media reporters I respect I didn’t run out of fingers. Most of them are just what Glenn “Instapundit” Reynolds memorably labeled “Democrats with Bylines“. And that’s literally true – something like 90% of them are, in fact, Democrats. And they act like it. So when Trump refuses to play nice with them, or I hear about another round of lay-offs, the best I can summon up, if I’m in a generous mood, is a half-hearted “Meh”.

The MSM, of course, wants to have it both ways. It wants to be hailed as an institution composed of crusading truth-tellers whose integrity and willingness to speak truth to power make them the cornerstone of a free society. Except most of them are really partisan hacks who lie endlessly for the liberal politicians they suck up to. Their relationship with Democratic politicians is less speaking truth to power than sexting their masters. When it comes to covering for their progressive pals, it’s “50 Shades of Newsprint” and the MSM eagerly chomps down on its ball-gag.

They don’t even bother hiding their agenda – apparently they noticed that no one believed their protestations of objectivity anyway and decided it wasn’t even worth the effort to fake it anymore. …

Though Schlichter is no fan of Donald Trump, he notes how the MSM hacks “misreport and misrepresent” him:

When [Trump] – quite correctly – suggested that there was something weird about Obama’s inability to place the blame for radical Muslim terrorism on radical Muslim terrorists, this became “Trump Says Obama Supports Terrorists”. When he pointed out some troops (Trump says he was referring to Iraqi troops) in the Middle East were corrupt (sadly, some were), this became “Trump Calls All American Soldiers Thieves”. If Trump says he inhales oxygen, the headline will be “Trump Admits He’s Just Like Hitler”.

But with Hillary or Obama, it’s the reverse. At best, they report on facts that manifestly demonstrate her guilt of multiple felonies and misdemeanors, yet make sure to undercut their own reporting by asserting she can’t possibly be indicted.

The media can’t shut up about Trump U, but the $16 million the Bill and Hillary Graftatron 2016 nabbed from Laureate U? Apparently all the news isn’t fit to print.

The MSM is shameless. For example, when some gay Democrat radical Muslim slaughters LGBT clubgoers and then Anderson Cooper attacks the (Republican) Florida attorney general for not being sufficiently open to same sex marriage, it’s pretty clear whose team CNN is on. …

So we’re supposed to bewail the travails of these people? We’re supposed to get all fussy when Trump stands up to them and pulls their credentials? Note that’s “pull their credentials”,  not “bar them from his rallies”.  … Ewwww. This is the greatest atrocity in all of human history – Trump denying his active opponents a back stage pass to facilitate their lying about him.

But what really, really grates about these ardent defenders of the First Amendment is their ardent hypocrisy when it comes to the First Amendment. They … bemoan the fact that Trump thinks it should be easier to sue journoliars who lie about him because the MSM feels the First Amendment should allow them to lie about him with impunity  …  Apparently these things set us firmly on the road to fascism.

But what doesn’t the MSM think sets us firmly on the road to fascism? Liberal attorneys general persecuting and prosecuting people for “denying” the leftist lie about global warming. The IRS targeting Obama’s political enemies for advocating against liberal policies. The abusive sham government investigation of people speaking out for Governor Scott Walker. These actual campaigns of very real government suppression of dissenting speech are apparently cool with the MSM because the targets are on the MSM’s enemies list.

And how about the media cheerleading for the repeal of Citizens United. At the end of the day, Citizens United allows the government to put people in jail for criticizing politicians – the case involved the government’s ban on a movie talking smack about Hillary Clinton. Of course, the ban on free speech that Citizens United found unconstitutional – because it was a ban on free speech – excludes one key group.

Want to guess who?

Media companies.

Yeah, the MSM thinks the government being able to jail other people for speaking out is terrific as long as this constitutional catastrophe doesn’t apply to itself. The MSM is happy to defend only its free speech, and to the last drop of other peoples’ blood. …

But what do you expect from the kind of people who join the MSM? Instead of the colorful ink-stained wretches of the past, today’s journalists are social justice twerps whose daddies can shell out north of $59,000 to get a degree in what old school reporters learned on the job – though old-school reporters didn’t have the dubious benefit of leftist indoctrination and diversity seminars. Today’s cloistered creeps utterly missed the anger among normal Americas that led to Trump, but then they don’t think much of normal Americans. …

No wonder public regard for journalists hovers somewhere between “Raw Sewage” and “Herpes”, yet they still assume they are better than everyone else. …

Sure, technology is causing disruption in the industry, but the MSM would be better able to weather the storm if everyone didn’t hate it and want to lock it out of the tornado cellar. Trump being mean to you? Aw, poor babies. …

Last Sunday a Muslim, Omar Mateen, committed mass-murder in a gay club in Orlando, Florida. He was the son of an Afghan immigrant who supports the Taliban. And he was a registered Democrat.

He had been under investigation by the FBI for “ties to terrorism”.

He had regularly visited the club and had dated men there, so obviously he was not personally prejudiced against homosexuality. But as Islam teaches that homosexuals should be killed, he was being a good Muslim by killing people in a club for gays. He shot 102 people, killing 49 of them.

And he encountered no resistance. 

We do not often agree with the opinions of Geraldo Rivera, the Fox News talk show host and reporter, but with this we do agree:

The Daily Beast reports:

“When you’re in that situation and you have no weapons, you have two choices,” Rivera said of the men and women caught by surprise on a dark dance-floor late into the night. “If you can’t hide and you can’t run, there are two choices. You stay and die, or you fight.  … Fight back,” he urged … “There’s a hundred people that he murdered [49 murdered – ed] with one weapon that he reloaded,” Rivera continued … “When he reloaded, they must — people must — America must understand, we are at war with Islamic terror, with these terrorists. We’ve got to stop them in Raqqa, we’ve got to stop them in Mosul, and we’ve got to stop them in the Pulse in Orlando.”

Rivera has been much reviled for daring to say all that. But he is right!  One shooter against hundreds of people! Admittedly unarmed people – unarmed because there’s an absurd sentiment prevailing in America that to own a gun to protect oneself is immoral (regardless of the Second Amendment). Call it “gunphobia”. And when shooting attacks happen, the gun-phobics blame the gun instead of the shooter.

The shooter paused not only to reload, but to use his cellphone to text his wife, and to look up Facebook – hoping to see comment on what he was doing. While he was thus distracted, couldn’t some of those hundreds of people have rushed him? They were unable to escape and they were facing death. Their choice then was to die passively or take action for a chance of survival. There were strong men there. There may have been women who are in the army, and perhaps many who believe women should be eligible for front-line military service. If even just a few people had tried to tackle him, they may have saved many lives including possibly their own. Yet they did nothing at all to defend themselves against a lone gunman.

By way of contrast, we recall a time when some other Americans had the choice of dying passively or taking a risk that might kill them –  but which they considered worth taking anyway to stop the victory of evil.

Nearly 3,000 people lost their lives during the 9/11 attacks, a number that would almost certainly have been significantly higher if not for the actions of those aboard Flight 93. …

United Airlines Flight 93, a regularly scheduled early-morning nonstop flight from Newark, New Jersey, to San Francisco, California, departed at 8:42 a.m., just minutes before the first hijacked plane struck the World Trade Center. The flight’s takeoff had been delayed for nearly 45 minutes due to air traffic at Newark International Airport. The plane carried seven crew members and 33 passengers, less than half its maximum capacity. Also on the flight were four hijackers who had successfully boarded the plane with knives and box cutters. The plane’s late departure had disrupted the terrorists’ timeline for launching their attack; unlike the hijackers on the other three planes, they did not attempt to gain control of the aircraft until nearly 40 minutes into the flight. …

At roughly 9:28 the terrorists successfully infiltrated the plane’s cockpit, and air traffic controllers heard what they believed to be two mayday calls amid sounds of a struggle. At 9:32 a hijacker, later identified as Ziad Jarrah, was heard over the flight data recorder, directing the passengers to sit down and stating that there was a bomb aboard the plane. The flight data recorder also shows that Jarrah reset the autopilot, turning the plane around to head back east.

Huddled in the back of the plane, the passengers and crew of Flight 93 made a series of calls on their cell phones and the in-flight Airfones, informing family members and officials on the ground of the plane’s hijacking. When they learned the fate of the three other hijacked flights in New York City and Washington, D.C., the passengers realized that their plane was involved in a larger terrorist plot and would likely be used to carry out further attacks on U.S. soil.

After a brief discussion, a vote was taken and the passengers decided to fight back against their hijackers, informing several people on the ground of their plans. One of the passengers, Thomas Burnett Jr., told his wife over the phone, “I know we’re all going to die. There’s three of us who are going to do something about it. I love you, honey.” Another passenger, Todd Beamer, was heard over an open line saying, “Are you guys ready? Let’s roll.” …

At 9:57 the passengers and crew aboard Flight 93 began their counterattack, as recorded by the cockpit voice recorder. In response, the hijacker piloting the plane began to roll the aircraft, pitching it up and down to throw the charging passengers off balance. Worried that the passengers would soon break through to the cockpit, the hijackers made the decision to crash the plane before reaching their final destination. At 10:02 a voice was recorded saying, “Yes, put it in it, and pull it down.” Several other voices chanted “Allah is great” as the plane’s controls were turned hard to the right. The airplane then rolled onto its back and plowed into an empty field in Shanksville, Pennsylvania, at 580 miles per hour. Flight 93’s intended target is not known, but it is believed that the hijackers were targeting the White House, the U.S. Capitol, the Camp David presidential retreat in Maryland or several nuclear power plants along the Eastern seaboard.

Has something changed America? Oh, yes. Obama promised to change it, and he has.

Paul Weston, chairman of the political party Liberty GB and parliamentary candidate, talks about Islam, the religion of war and subjugation.

He challenges Prime Minister David Cameron and other Western leaders to stop being cowards, stop appeasing Islam, declare its true nature, and save the West while it still can (perhaps) be saved.

Update: The video did exist. It has been removed by the publishers to protect Islam from criticism.

(Hat-tip Ivan M. Lang)

Islam does its utmost to make us infidels afraid of it – and then complains of our “Islamophobia”, our (irrational!) fear of Islam. If we do not fear it, we haven’t been paying attention. We are wise to fear it. We are wise to hate it. It is an evil creed.

Still, it ought not to be silenced by law.

We quote from our post, It’s better to be free to hate than to be free of hatred (April 30, 2014):

When Britain was a free country (ah, yes, I remember it well!), you could insult anyone as much as you pleased short of slander (such as accusing him of a crime). It was called “common abuse”, and there was no law against it. Nor should there have been. Now, in Britain, it’s okay for you to insult white males as much as you like. And Jews. If you insult them loudly and often enough you may get a grant to do it professionally. But if you insult Muslims you will be arrested and charged with a “hate crime”.

It should not be the business of the law to monitor and censure personal opinion.

It is precisely when someone says something you don’t agree with – something you consider stupid, abominable, ugly, offensive, wrong – that you must uphold his right to say it. Argue with him, call him a cretin and a villain; despise him, hate him … But do not call for him to be gagged.

Allowing people to say what you don’t like and don’t agree with is the whole point of constitutionally guaranteeing free speech.

The idea of “hate crime” is at the root of this nonsense. Nobody can know what another person feels. If a person  commits a crime, punish him for the crime, not  for the supposed emotion behind it. Such an arrogantly puritanical concept as “hate crime” was  bound to distort the law and threaten liberty. As it does. …

People must be free to be petty, to be prejudiced, to be malicious, to be insulting. They cannot be stopped by the law. To make a law against bad behavior won’t change it, and can only make a mockery of the rule of law itself. …

Now that vast bureaucratic tyranny, the European Union, decrees that what it judges to be expression of hate on the social media is to be illegal, and punishable.

Although it insists that “freedom of expression is a core European value which must be preserved”, it also insists that if you say something it doesn’t like, you must be gagged and punished. And it is co-opting “social media platforms” to assist in its policy of repression:

The Framework Decision on Combatting Racism and Xenophobia criminalises the public incitement to violence or hatred directed against a group of persons or a member of such a group defined by reference to race, colour, religion, descent or national or ethnic origin. This is the legal basis for defining illegal online content. …

In order to prevent the spread of illegal hate speech, it is essential to ensure that relevant national laws transposing the Council Framework Decision on combating racism and xenophobia are fully enforced by Member States in the online as well as in the offline environment. While the effective application of provisions criminalising hate speech is dependent on a robust system of enforcement of criminal law sanctions against the individual perpetrators of hate speech, this work must be complemented with actions geared at ensuring that illegal hate speech online is expeditiously reviewed by online intermediaries and social media platforms … [Our emphasis]

The real, unspoken, pathetic purpose of the ruling is to protect Islam from criticism. It is not likely that a Muslim will be censored, let alone prosecuted, for publishing such typical statements as these:

“The Jihad for Allah is the way of the truth and the way for salvation and the way which will lead us to crush the Jews.”  (Yasser Ghalban, Hamas leader, in 2006.)

“The Jews deserved their annihilation by Hitler.” (Dr Wafa Musa, psychologist, in 2009.)

“Jews are bacteria, not human beings.” – (Al Aqsa TV, Deputy Minister of Religious Endowments, Abdallah Jarbu, in 2010), and “The Jews are the most despicable and contemptible nation to crawl upon the face of the earth.” (‘Atallah Abu al-Subh, in 2011.)

And (we repeat), nor should they be censored or prosecuted! Indeed, it would be an excellent thing if the media of every kind displayed such statements prominently as often as they were made (which is every day). Muslims might be pleased at first. But after a while the effect on public opinion could be to provoke contempt and hatred of Islam. And then they’d raise their habitual noisy and violent objections, calling the display of their own words a manifestation of “Islamophobia”, of course.

The following comes from an article at Spiked, by its editor, Brendan O’Neill:

Hatred is an emotion, and the state has no business policing emotion.

“The internet is a place for free speech, not hate speech.” This spectacularly Orwellian comment was made last week by EU commissioner Vĕra Jourová, as she unveiled a new EU code to tackle hatred on the internet. Following three or four years of agitation by officials, politicians, hacks and feminists, all of whom insist that hateful “trolling” online is turning the internet into a cesspool of foul ideas and rotten comments, the EU has decided to take action. It has got web giants YouTube, Facebook, Twitter and Microsoft to sign a promise that they will hunt down and extinguish illegal hateful commentary, especially racist and xenophobic comments.

Which is to say, they will “hunt down and extinguish” criticism of Islam, warnings of its jihad, objection to the spread of its cruel sharia law – as some have already started doing with zeal.

Some have responded to the new code by asking if it represents overreach. There’s a danger, they say, that angry speech, or just zany speech, will be swept up in the clampdown on hate speech. This will no doubt happen. But we should take our critique of this new code, and of 21st-century censorship more broadly, a step further. We shouldn’t only say “relatively normal speech might be destroyed alongside hate speech” — we should call into question the whole idea of “hate speech”. The category of hate speech is as ridiculous, and abominable, as the idea of thoughtcrime. It represents the criminalisation, not only of racism and xenophobia — which would be bad enough — but of certain ideas, moralities and beliefs. We should bristle and balk as much at the idea of “hate speech” as we do at the idea of thoughtcrime.

Hate-speech codes are an ideological tool disguised as a force for moral good. Consider the recent history of the idea of hate speech … After the Second World War, the keenest proponents of controls on “hate speech” were the Soviets. There were various international gatherings in the 1940s and 50s to hammer out postwar international treaties, and at these the Soviets pushed for a global commitment to repressing “hate speech”, in particular far-right speech. They wanted stipulations against “hatred” and “incitement to hatred”. Amazingly, the West resisted. Eleanor Roosevelt represented the Western powers at some of these debates. She argued that it would be “extremely dangerous” to outlaw hate speech, since “any criticism of public or religious authorities might all too easily be described as incitement to hatred”. Indeed.

Eventually, the Soviets won out. In 1965, the UN Convention on the Elimination of all Forms of Racial Discrimination was adopted, and it included a proposal to criminalise “ideas based on racial superiority”. The keyword here was ideas. From the outset, treaties and laws against hate speech were about controlling ideas: obnoxious ideas, yes, but ideas nonetheless. It was clear very early on that the category of hate speech was an ideological tool for the repression of bad ideas, of certain convictions. Post-1965, Western countries introduced into their national laws this new commitment to repressing ideas based on racial thinking.

What’s more, the category of hate speech is an extremely elastic tool for the repression of ideas. It has spread from curtailing ideas of racial superiority to suppressing expressions of religious hatred. Some Scandinavian countries want to outlaw misogynistic speech. On campuses there are clampdowns on transphobic speech. Anyone who says that a person with a penis is a man can now be branded a “hate speaker” and find himself No Platformed. So even saying ‘men are men and women are women’ has been encapsulated in the ideological category of hate speech.

Normal, widely held beliefs are casually rebranded “hatred”. Criticise religion too harshly and you’ll be accused of religious hatred; oppose gay marriage and you’re homophobic; doubt gender dysphoria and you’re a “transphobe”. Shouting “that’s hatred!” has become the preferred means for suppressing beliefs we find difficult or uncomfortable. That’s thanks to hate-speech laws. They have sanctioned this rush to rebrand beliefs as hate and to try to crush them. Once you accept that some ideas are beyond the pale … then ultimately no idea is safe …

Under the banner of tackling “hate speech”, people are being punished for their moral convictions. … We should feel as angry about state restrictions on hate speech today as we would have done about the Soviet Union’s arrest of political dissidents 40 years ago, because in both cases the same thing is happening: people are punished, not for anything they’ve done, but for what they think.

Hatred is an emotion. … And when we allow figures of authority to control emotion, to fine people for their emotions, to imprison people for their emotions, then we enter the realm of tyranny. It completes the state’s control of the individual. It expands state power from the public sphere of discussion into the psychic sphere of thought and feeling. It invites policing not only of political sentiment but of deep feeling. It is a profound assault on the freedom of the individual.

It’s time to get serious about freedom of speech. It is unacceptable to repress the expression of ideas. It is unacceptable to repress the expression of hatred. “Hate speech is not free speech!”, people say. But it is.

By its very definition, free speech must include hate speech.

Speech must always be free, for two reasons: everyone must be free to express what they feel, and everyone else must have the right to decide for themselves whether those expressions are good or bad. When the EU, social-media corporations and others seek to make that decision for us, and squash ideas they think we will find shocking, they reduce us to the level of children. That is censorship’s greatest crime: it infantilises us. Let us now reassert our adulthood, our autonomy, and tell them: “Do not presume to censor anything on our behalf. We can think for ourselves.”