The word of the CIA 35
The CIA has concluded in a secret [!?] assessment that Russia intervened in the 2016 election to help Donald Trump win the presidency, rather than just to undermine confidence in the U.S. electoral system, according to officials briefed on the matter.
(Words taken from the Washington Post whose report is to be found here.)
Donald Trump dismissed CIA claims that Russian hacks on Democratic emails were intended to help him win the presidency as “ridiculous”. He told Fox News Sunday that it was “another excuse” for Democrats and said he believed that rival politicians had spread the news. He’s not the only one with doubts – in a secret Capitol meeting last week, a senior FBI official refused to back the CIA’s claim. Russia has been named as the culprit in a number of hacks during the election that saw Democratic emails being leaked. But the FBI says there isn’t enough evidence to confirm Russia was pro-Trump, rather than just causing interference with the election.
(Words taken from the Daily Mail whose report is to be found here.)
The Obama man heading the CIA is John Brennan.
That great resource, Discover the Networks, reveals the following (inter alia) about John Brennan:
In September 2012, Brennan was involved in crafting the false talking points that then-Secretary of State Susan Rice gave regarding the 9/11/12 terrorist attack against a U.S. diplomatic mission in Benghazi, Libya. Specifically, Rice claimed that according to the “best information at present”. the deadly attack was not premeditated, but rather, a “spontaneous reaction” to “a hateful and offensive video that was widely disseminated throughout the Arab and Muslim world.”
On January 7, 2013, President Obama nominated Brennan for the position of CIA director. …
At a May 21, 2013 CIA ceremony honoring the Agency officials killed in the September 11, 2012 terrorist attacks in Benghazi, several CIA officers who had survived those attacks were asked to sign non-disclosure agreements (NDAs) — despite the fact that they were: (a) leaving government service, and (b) still bound by previous NDAs which they had signed. Both before and after the May 21st NDAs, intelligence officials adamantly denied that anyone affiliated with the CIA had been asked to sign nondisclosure agreements regarding the events in Benghazi.
Perhaps the most notable of those denials came in a September 3, 2013 letter from CIA director Brennan to House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence chairman Mike Rogers, in which Brennan responded to several specific questions that Rogers had previously posed (in a letter dated August 2, 2013) regarding whether or not the CIA officers who survived the Benghazi attacks were subsequently subjected to polygraphs or required to sign NDAs. Posing and answering several questions as a means of responding to Rogers’ queries, Brennan wrote:
Has any officer, either staff of contractor, been forced to undergo any polygraph because of their presence or their participation in any activity related to Benghazi attacks? Response: No.
Has any officer, either staff of contractor, been required to sign any non-disclosure agreement because of their presence at Benghazi or their participation in any activity related to the Benghazi attacks? Response: No.
According to sources familiar with the NDAs that were presented to the Benghazi survivors at the May 21, 2013 memorial service, the documents did not specifically mention the Benghazi attacks and thus were technically consistent with Brennan’s letter. But as a Weekly Standard analysis notes:
That’s a generous interpretation. The new NDAs were presented to Benghazi survivors after they had flown in from around the country (or world) to attend a CIA memorial for the Benghazi fallen at CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia — where the attacks in Benghazi were the focus of the day. It’s hardly a leap to imagine that these NDAs, perhaps not even necessary, were intended to remind CIA officials a little more than six months removed from their service in Benghazi that the U.S. government would prefer that they not discuss what happened there.
In March 2014, Senator Dianne Feinstein — the head of a Senate Intelligence Committee that was involved in a multi-year probe (begun in 2009) of the CIA’s use of harsh interrogation measures on suspected terrorists during the Bush Administration — went to the Senate floor and angrily accused Brennan’s CIA of having hacked into the computers of her Committee staffers. In response, Brennan expressed dismay that “some members of the Senate” were making “spurious allegations about CIA actions that are wholly unsupported by the facts”. Moreover, he demanded an end to “outbursts that do a disservice to the important relationship that needs to be maintained between intelligence officials and Congressional overseers”. And he told NBC’s Andrea Mitchell:
As far as the allegations of the CIA hacking into Senate computers, nothing could be further from the truth. We wouldn’t do that. I mean, that’s just beyond the, you know, the scope of reason in terms of what we do.” Brennan likewise told the media that “a lot of people who are claiming that there has been this tremendous sort of spying and monitoring and hacking will be proved wrong.
But according to the findings of a CIA inspector general’s report released on July 31, 2014, it was actually Brennan who was proved wrong. The report indicated that five CIA employees — two attorneys and three computer specialists — indeed had surreptitiously and unlawfully searched files and emails on the computers of the aforementioned Senate investigators. In response to the report, Brennan apologized to Senate Intelligence Committee leaders.
Committee members were infuriated, however. Senator Mark Udall (D-Colorado), for example, called for Brennan’s resignation, citing “the unprecedented hacking of congressional staff computers”, damaging leaks about the Committee’s investigations, and Brennan’s “abject failure to acknowledge any wrongdoing by the agency”.
By contrast, White House press secretary Josh Earnest said that President Obama continued to support Brennan and had “not at all” lost faith in the CIA leader’s credibility. …
In a May 2012 teleconference, Brennan revealed some highly sensitive information that, in turn, was relayed to the press by one of the other parties to the call — Richard Clarke, former chief of counter-terrorism in the Clinton White House. This highly serious intelligence leak blew the cover of secrecy off of an active counterterrorism operation in which the British and Saudi intelligence agencies had successfully placed an operative deep inside al Qaeda’s organization in the Arabian Peninsula. Consequently, the initiative had to be terminated immediately, enraging America’s foreign intelligence allies.
… CNN reporter Tal Kopan found a striking admission from CIA Director John Brennan. When he first applied to join the CIA, and received his polygraph test, he was asked this standard question:
Have you ever worked with or for a group that was dedicated to overthrowing the US?
Remarking on this last week during a panel discussion at the Congressional Black Caucus Foundation’s annual conference, Brennan said: “I froze…. This was back in 1980, and I thought back to a previous election where I voted, and I voted for the Communist Party candidate.” Brennan was responding to a question about barriers to recruiting diverse candidates for the intelligence agencies, including whether past records of activism could hurt someone applying for a clearance later in life.
Brennan called his support of the Communist Party a mere “indiscretion”, and reminded his audience that the Constitution grants free speech. He then remembered that he said to himself he could either lie and the polygraph machine would “go wacko” or tell the truth and face the consequences, including possibly being rejected for employment. He told the audience he voted for Gus Hall because while in college he was unhappy “with the system” and saw the “need for change”.
It is relevant to mention that John Brennan probably converted to Islam. (He has not confirmed this.) He is certainly highly protective of Islam.
In a March 2015 speech at the Council on Foreign Relations, Brennan refused to refer to the Islamic State (ISIS, a.k.a. ISIL) terror group as an “Islamic” entity. Said the CIA director: “Quite frankly I am amused at the debate that goes on [that] unless you call it what it is [Islamic terrorism], you don’t know what you’re fighting. And let’s make it very clear that the people who carry out acts of terrorism, whether it be Al Qaeda or the Islamic State of Iraq and Levant [ISIS], are doing it because they believe it is consistent with what their view of Islam is. It is totally inconsistent with what the overwhelming majority of Muslims throughout the world [believe]. And so by ascribing it as a Muslim terrorism or Islamic extremism — I think it does really give them the type of Islamic legitimacy that they are so desperately seeking, but which they don’t deserve at all. They are terrorists, they’re criminals. Many of them are psychopathic thugs, murderers, who use a religious concept and masquerade, mask themselves, in that religious construct. And I do think it does injustice to the tenets of religion when we attach a religious moniker to [ISIS]. The Muslims I know … The people I’ve worked with throughout the Middle East most of my career find just disgraceful that these individuals present themselves as Muslims.”
Considering all this, we would concede that John Brennan’s trustworthiness may be a little higher than Hillary Clinton’s.
And the reliability of reports that come out of John Brennan’s CIA may sometimes rise to the level of Susan Rice’s statements about the Benghazi attack.
Vile bodies 86
This month, December 2016, Amnesty International sponsored a rally in Brussels, where Muslim speakers celebrated the 9/11 attacks, denied the Holocaust, and demonized gays and Jews.
Amnesty International, founded in Britain in 1961 to help political prisoners wherever they may be, became long ago – close on forty years ago by our reckoning – an anti-humanitarian, terrorist-supporting, often communist-led, anti-West institution.
It is quite as bad, though much smaller in size and effect, as the United Nations with its many iniquitous sub-agencies.
Among our posts exposing the extreme turpitude of the UN, and especially of its Human Rights Council (UNHRC), are these: The UN curbs freedom of speech, June 20, 2008; America begs, August 26, 2010; Beyond outrageous, Sept 1, 2010; A contumelious farce, March 2, 2011.
And see the excellent articles by Claudia Rosett, a great authority on the appalling UN.
In September 2015, the Obama administration welcomed the appointment of Saudi Arabia – one of the most oppressive regimes in the world – to head a United Nations Human Rights Council panel.
Why are these monstrous international organizations suffered to exist?
It is a disgrace that the UN – Evil HQ as we call it – stands on American soil. It would fade away if the United States stopped hosting it and providing about a quarter of its revenue.
The UN must be destroyed!
A world-wide populist movement 179
President-elect Trump said yesterday in his “Thank-you” speech in Fayetteville, North Carolina, that the movement he leads is spreading world-wide.
It is. And although the left-biased press wants to depict it as a “far-right” organized threat, it is in fact a genuine grass-roots movement against the all-too-established globalist ruling elite.
Among the ideas that the various groups which make up the populist movements stand for there are – and are sure to be – some that we do not agree with. There are even things President-elect Trump seems to favor that we do not agree with – eg. minimum wage, and letting his daughter Ivanka almost bring Al Gore back into respectability by chatting with him about “man-made climate change”. But if the movement stops the invasion of the West by Islam – which requires the overthrow of the ruling elites of Europe, the reinstatement of the nation-state as an ideal, the disintegration of the EU, and ultimately the destruction of the UN – we will regard the occasional ideas and actions we don’t like as side-issues and complaint about them as nit-picking.
In Italy even groups on the Left are rising against the tyranny of the EU and the government that connives with it.
Chris Tomlinson writes at Breitbart:
Following the results of the Italian referendum Sunday night, hundreds of protesters took to the streets of Rome demanding that Italy leave the European Union.
Left wing protesters gathered outside the parliament of the Eternal City after it was confirmed that the No vote had defeated the government of Prime Minister Matteo Renzi and their plans to reform the Italian Senate. Protesters held banners telling the government to respect the vote …
Many of the protesters also demanded the resignation of the Prime Minister, who at a press conference after the announcement of the result, said he would tender his resignation to Italian President Sergio Mattarella explaining, “When you lose, you cannot pretend that nothing has happened and go to bed and sleep. My government ends here today.”
The result of the referendum could lead to snap elections as early as February and the growing popularity of the Eurosceptic Five Star Movement* has many worried the Italians could vote to leave the political bloc as Britain had done earlier in the year.
Tensions heated up between protesters and police stationed outside the parliament and ultimately the authorities decided to shut the protest down. Three individuals were taken into custody by police as other demonstrators yelled “shame on you” to the officers.
One of the student leaders of the protest, 27-year-old Michele Sugarelli, said:
Brexit was not a vote against Europe, it was a vote against the EU, which takes power from the people and makes decisions against their interests. We want the same thing. We want change in Italy and in Europe. We want opportunity for young people, and we want the EU to finish.
Another protester named Pietro described the police tactics saying: “They are being violent because they are afraid. Now is a moment when the elite could fall. People don’t want any more economic sacrifices while the government preserves the interests of the banks and big corporations.”
A student named Lorenzo, who spoke at the protest said: “Everyone talks about young people, but when we actually raise our voice, this is the result.” He went on to note: “I don’t think the EU will survive the next few years. In Italy, everyone hates this thing called the EU. It is falling apart and we hope it happens quickly.”
*From Wikipedia:
The Five Star Movement – Movimento 5 Stelle (M5S) – is populist, anti-establishment, environmentalist, anti-globalist, and Eurosceptic. Its members stress that the M5S is not a party but a “movement” and it may not be included in the traditional left-right paradigm.
We cheer it on, even though we do not like its environmentalism.
Islam victorious? 330
It is a common belief among conservatives that the democracies of the West are proof against attack by hostile ideologies; cannot be damaged, let alone destroyed by them, because they can absorb them simply by allowing them free expression. This was true when the threatening ideology was Communism in the last century. Internally, no democracy was mortally harmed by Communist movements. Only formidable (though not supreme) military power, surrendered to by profoundly immoral diplomacy, delivered Eastern European countries freshly liberated from Nazism into the mailed fist of the Soviet Union.
But Communism was not an alien ideology. It was European. It was built on the same foundations that liberal democracy itself had in part been built on – an aspiration to make society fair, kind and good according to definitions inherited from Christianity. Liberal democracy discarded dogmatic orthodoxy, and welcomed secular doubt. But Communism, like Christianity itself, pursued its aspiration with the utmost arrogance, injustice and cruelty.
Now the Western democracies are under attack from a very different enemy: Islam. It shares no moral principles with liberal democracy. Despite claiming to be related to the “moral religions” of Judaism and Christianity, and despite having the word “merciful” in its description of its god, it is not a moral religion. It simply demands total submission to the god’s commandments, as they were issued through the mouth of an illiterate warlord of the 7th century. The commandments are frankly cruel and merciless.
And they are obeyed. Obedient Muslims will offer us Westerners a choice between conversion to Islam, or underdog status bought with tribute, or death. They reject freedom of speech because it allows us to criticize them and their creed. From their point of view, everything that can and must be said about the way human beings should live has been said – by their god through the mouth of his “prophet”. It can only be repeated, never questioned. If you challenge it, if you mock it – you’ll die.
Against such an enemy, our democracies are not proof. We are losing to it. Islam is winning. We are being subjected to Islam.
From Gatestone, by Giulio Meotti:
In the summer of 2005, the Danish artist Kåre Bluitgen, when he met a journalist from the Ritzaus Bureau news agency, said he was unable to find anyone willing to illustrate his book on Mohammed, the prophet of Islam. Three illustrators he contacted, Bluitgen said, were too scared. A few months later, Bluitgen reported that he had found someone willing to illustrate his book, but only on the condition of anonymity.
Like most Danish newspapers, Jyllands-Posten decided to publish an article about Bluitgen’s case. To test the state of freedom of expression, Flemming Rose, Jyllands–Posten’s cultural editor at the time, called twelve cartoonists, and offered them $160 each to draw a caricature of Mohammed. What then happened is a well-known, chilling story.
In the wave of Islamist violence against the cartoons, at least two hundred people were killed. Danish products vanished from shelves in Bahrain, Qatar, Yemen, Oman, the UAE and Lebanon. Masked gunmen stormed the offices of the European Union in Gaza and warned Danes and Norwegians to leave within 48 hours. In the Libyan city of Benghazi, protesters set fire to the Italian consulate. Political Islam understood what was being achieved and raised the stakes; the West did not.
An Islamic fatwa also forever changed Flemming Rose’s life. In an Islamic caricature, his head was put on a pike. The Taliban offered a bounty to anyone who would kill him. Rose’s office at the newspaper was repeatedly evacuated for bomb threats. And Rose’s name and face entered ISIS’s blacklist, along with that of the [subsequently] murdered editor of Charlie Hebdo, Stéphane Charbonnier.
Less known is the “white fatwa” that the journalistic class imposed on Rose. This brave Danish journalist reveals it in a recently published book, De Besatte (The Obsessed). “It is the story of how fear devours souls, friendships and the professional community,” says Rose. The book reveals how his own newspaper forced Rose to surrender.
“The drama and the tragedy is that the only ones to win are the jihadists,” Flemming Rose told the Danish newspaper Weekendavisen.
The CEO of Jyllands–Posten, Jørgen Ejbøl, summoned Rose to his office, and asked, “You have grandchildren, do not you think about them?”
The company that publishes his newspaper, JP/Politikens Hus, said: “It’s not about Rose, but the safety of two thousand employees.”
Jorn Mikkelsen, Rose’s former director, and the newspaper’s business heads, obliged him to sign a nine-point diktat, in which the Danish journalist accepted, among other demands, “not participating in radio and television programs”, “not attending conferences”, “not commenting on religious issues”, “not writing about the Organization of the Islamic Conference” and “not commenting on the cartoons”.
Rose signed this letter of surrender during the harshest time for the newspaper, when, in 2010-2011, there were countless attempts on his life by terrorists, and also attempts on the life of Kurt Westergaard, illustrator of a cartoon (Mohammed with a bomb in his turban) that was burned in public squares across the Arab world. Westergaard was then placed on “indefinite leave” by Jyllands-Posten “for security reasons.”
In his book, Rose also reveals that two articles were censored by his newspaper, along with an outburst from the CEO of the company, Lars Munch: “You have to stop, you’re obsessed, on the fourth floor there are people who ask ‘can’t he stop?'”.
Rose then drew more wrath from his managers when he agreed to participate in a conference with the equally targeted Dutch parliamentarian, Geert Wilders, who at this moment is on trial in the Netherlands for “hate speech”. Rose writes:
He starts yelling at me, “Why the f*ck did you say yes to appear on stage with this terrorist target, are you stupid? Do you have a secret death wish? You have grandchildren now. Are you completely out of your mind? It’s okay if you want to die yourself, but why are you taking the company though all this?”
Jyllands-Posten also pressured Rose when he decided to write a book about the cartoons, Hymne til Friheden (Hymn to Freedom). His editor told him that the newspaper would “curb the harmful effects” of the book by keeping its publication as low-key as possible. Rose was then threatened with dismissal if he did not cancel two debates for the tenth anniversary of the Mohammed cartoons. …
After the 2015 massacre at Charlie Hebdo, Rose, no longer willing to abide by the “diktat” he was ordered to sign, resigned as the head of the foreign desk of Jyllands-Posten, and now works in the US …
Rose writes in the conclusion of his book: “I’m not obsessed with anything. The fanatics are those who want to attack us, and the possessed are my former bosses at Jyllands-Posten.”
Rose’s revelations confirm another familiar story: Jyllands-Posten‘s surrender to fear. Since 2006, each time its editors and publishers were asked if they still would have published the drawings of Mohammed, the answer has always been “no”. This response means that the editors had effectively tasked Rose with writing the newspaper for fanatics and terrorists thousands of kilometers away. Even after the January 7, 2015 massacre at the weekly Charlie Hebdo in Paris, targeted precisely because it had republished the Danish cartoons, Jyllands-Posten announced that, out of fear, it would not republish the cartoons:
We have lived with the fear of a terrorist attack for nine years, and yes, that is the explanation why we do not reprint the cartoons, whether it be our own or Charlie Hebdo’s. We are also aware that we therefore bow to violence and intimidation.
… Is democracy lost? The headquarters of Jyllands-Posten today has a barbed-wire fence two meters high and one kilometer long, a door with double lock (as in banks), and employees can only enter one at a time by typing in a personal code (a measure that did not protect Charlie Hebdo). Meanwhile, the former editor, Carsten Juste, has withdrawn from journalism; Kurt Westergaard lives in hiding in a fortress, and Flemming Rose, like Ayaan Hirsi Ali, fled to the United States.
Much, certainly, looks lost. “We are not living in a ‘free society’ anymore, but in a ‘fear society'”, Rose has said.
Of course, no Western democracy has tried very hard – or at all! – to resist the Islamic onslaught. Governments have invited Muslims into their countries in large numbers. And protected them from criticism.
But that appalling – and inexplicable – state of affairs may be about to change. Perhaps democracy is not lost. Perhaps now that America is about to be led by a man who does not contemplate the possibility of defeat, this most horrible of all possible enemies may be halted, repelled, and discouraged from any renewed attempt at conquest, whether by infiltration or arms, for a very long time.
We hope so.
Indicting Islam 7
“Donald Trump is the most pro-gay presidential candidate in electoral history”, says Milo Yiannopoulos.
And he plainly states that what is to blame for Islamic terrorism is Islam.
Not “Islamism”; not “Islamic fundamentalism”; not “a perversion of Islam”; not “a tiny minority of Muslims”; not people who are driven to extreme actions by insanity, or poverty, or persecution, or President Bush.
Islam.
And so we find this video a pleasure to watch:
End of an era 212
The year 2017 approaches, and with it the centennial of the Russian revolution that first brought Marxists to totalitarian power.
For the last hundred years Marxism has been destroying human life, liberty and happiness on a vast scale. Far from ushering in paradise on earth as the Marxists proclaimed they would do, they used power wherever they acquired it to create earthly hells.
By reasonable reckoning, 23 Communist regimes had killed (at least) 149,469,610 people by 2006. R. J. Rummel, who was professor of Political Science at the University of Hawaii, is the authority most cited for the statistics of deaths caused by Communist governments by means of executions, deliberate mass starvation, and forced labor. For mass slaughter of this sort, he invented the word “democide“.
In one of his papers titled How Many Did Communist Regimes Murder?, Professor Rummel wrote:
How can we understand all this killing by communists? It is the marriage of an absolutist ideology with absolute power. Communists believed that they knew the truth, absolutely. They believed that they knew through Marxism what would bring about the greatest human welfare and happiness. And they believed that power, the dictatorship of the proletariat, must be used to tear down the old feudal or capitalist order and rebuild society and culture to realize this utopia. Nothing must stand in the way of its achievement. Government – the Communist Party – was thus above any law. All institutions, cultural norms, traditions, and sentiments were expendable. And the people were as though lumber and bricks, to be used in building the new world.
To many communists, the cause of a communist utopia was such as to justify all the deaths. The irony of this is that communism in practice, even after decades of total control, did not improve the lot of the average person, but usually made their living conditions worse than before the revolution. It is not by chance that the greatest famines have occurred within the Soviet Union (about 5,000,000 dead during 1921-23 and 7,000,000 from 1932-3) and communist China (about 27,000,000 dead from 1959-61). In total almost 55,000,000 people died in various communist famines and associated diseases, a little over 10,000,000 of them from democidal famine. This is as though the total population of Turkey, Iran, or Thailand had been completely wiped out. And that something like 35,000,000 people fled communist countries as refugees, as though the countries of Argentina or Columbia had been totally emptied of all their people, was an unparalleled vote against the utopian pretensions of Marxism-Leninism. …
But communists could not be wrong. After all, their knowledge was scientific, based on historical materialism, an understanding of the dialectical process in nature and human society, and a materialist (and thus realistic) view of nature. Marx has shown empirically where society has been and why, and he and his interpreters proved that it was destined for a communist end. No one could prevent this, but only stand in the way and delay it at the cost of more human misery. Those who disagreed with this world view and even with some of the proper interpretations of Marx and Lenin were, without a scintilla of doubt, wrong. After all, did not Marx or Lenin or Stalin or Mao say that. . . . In other words, communism was like a fanatical religion. It had its revealed text and chief interpreters. It had its priests and their ritualistic prose with all the answers. It had a heaven, and the proper behavior to reach it. It had its appeal to faith. And it had its crusade against nonbelievers. …
[A]t the extreme of totalitarian power we have the greatest extreme of democide. Communist governments have almost without exception wielded the most absolute power and their greatest killing (such as during Stalin’s reign or the height of Mao’s power) has taken place when they have been in their own history most totalitarian. As most communist governments underwent increasing liberalization and a loosening of centralized power in the 1960s through the 1980s, the pace of killing dropped off sharply.
Communism has been the greatest social engineering experiment we have ever seen. It failed utterly and in doing so it killed over 100,000,000 men, women, and children, not to mention the near 30,000,000 of its subjects that died in its often aggressive wars and the rebellions it provoked. But there is a larger lesson to be learned from this horrendous sacrifice to one ideology. That is that no one can be trusted with power. The more power the center has to impose the beliefs of an ideological or religious elite or impose the whims of a dictator, the more likely human lives are to be sacrificed.
We contend that the recent death of Fidel Castro, the Communist dictator of Cuba, marks the end of the terrible Marxist era. Cuba will continue for a while yet to be under the cruel Communist regime he established. And North Korea is still under Communist dictatorship. But no new such regimes are arising. Democracy is replacing dictatorships in South America. And with the defeat in 2016 of a second* Alinskyite presidential candidate nominated by the Democratic Party of the United States, the grip of Marxist ideology through government is loosening everywhere and – we contend – unlikely to strengthen again.
It is still, however, dominant in the academies of the Western World. What can be done about that rottenness in higher education?
With this question, Robert Conquest, one of the greatest historians of Communist Russia, was concerned. In a review of his book Reflections on a Ravaged Century in the American Spectator Online, Josh London wrote:
The clearest picture to emerge from these pages is that the history of Communism is, at its simplest, little more than the history of an all-out assault on society by a series of conspiratorial cliques. These groups have, invariably, been led by excruciatingly cruel dictators who were revoltingly drunk on their own foolish ideology and power. …
Nobel Laureate F.A. Hayek pointed out over fifty years ago that “Socialism has never and nowhere been at first a working-class movement. It is by no means an obvious remedy for an obvious evil which the interests of that class will necessarily demand. It is a construction of theorists, deriving from certain tendencies of abstract thought with which for a long time only the intellectuals were familiar; and it required long efforts by the intellectuals before the working classes could be persuaded to adopt it as their programme.” Though unquoted by Conquest, Hayek’s insight is exactly what worries him most about the 20th century and the prospects of life in the 21st century. Conquest’s work in this section constitutes an inquiry into the intellectual’s temperament and, in particular, the intellectual ingenuity required to go on believing when all is lost.
There follows an excellent and absorbing chapter on what is happening in education: A great many just swipes are taken at the academic intelligentsia who subvert it. Conquest reviews the rise of pseudo-science, and the application of quantitative methods and measurements in social science. Conquest also laments the influence of half-baked, trashy European ideas in Western, specifically American, academic thought: “At a recent seminar on the much resented influx of certain American movies in France, my old friend Alain Besancon remarked that a hundred soft-porn products of Hollywood did less harm in his country than a single French philosopher had done in the United States.” …
[Robert Conquest] laments the academic unwillingness to be seen to criticize colleagues or step outside of the many and varied leftist solidarities rampant throughout academia. …
As Conquest’s essays demonstrate, we, the victors of the Cold War, have thrown away a great part of what should have been a victory for Western values. The Cold War has been won, but the ideas that produced Communism still go marching on in their well-organized, corrupting way, even though the people advocating them are a minority.
The Historian Edward Gibbon once wrote that “There exists in human nature a strong propensity to depreciate the advantages, and to magnify the evils, of the present times.” Yet, standing from his vantage point at the end of the 20th century, surveying the history of the last 100 years, Conquest is probably right to end his book, as he soberly does, with a warning. Although we are now living through an exceptionally optimistic historical moment, he reminds us that the “past is full of eras of progress that ended in darkness.” We should not fool ourselves: “The power of fanaticism and of misunderstanding is by no means extinct.”
Nor will it ever be as long as humanity exists. Chriss W. Street, writing at Breitbart, warns that the Marxist aim of imposing Communism on the whole world is still being pursued with fanatical resolve:
Donald Trump winning the presidency based on his promise to torpedo globalism came exactly 27 years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, and represents the second leg down for “World Socialism”.
Although U.S. history books declare capitalist United States the victor in World War II, it was World Socialism that ended up dominating most of the globe. [The] Soviet Union and China carved out massive communist states, India adopted extreme socialism, and communist insurgencies were ascendant in Southeast Asia, Africa and South America.
Socialist governments controlled Western Europe and the idea that the state should play some kind of role in economic life was not seen as strange or unusual. Socialists differed on just how extensive the role of the state should be, but all agreed that “natural monopolies” like the railroad, phone service, health and electricity should be nationalized.
Paul Samuelson’s Economics was the top selling U.S. economics textbook from the 1960s through the 1980s. It proclaimed world socialism’s more efficient use of resources would allow the Soviet Union’s Gross National Product to pass the U.S. economy by 1984.
But mainstream economists failed to recognize that President Ronald Reagan’s policies of doubling down on capitalism through tax cuts and strangling the regulatory state in the 1980s would end the West’s inflationary spiral that had allowed communist resource-based economies to flourish. After the Berlin Wall fell on November 9, 1989, Russia was forced into a U.S. bailout and China adopted “Capitalism with Chinese Characteristics”.
But rather than accept a permanent home in the “dustbin of history”, socialists in Western Europe passed the Maastricht Treaty, which formed the 27 nation European Union. Meanwhile, Democrat President Bill Clinton signed the North American Free Trade Agreement and gave Most Favored Nation status to China.
Robert Wolfe, in the book SocialistGlobalization, calls this “internationalist movement”, a system of planning and production that transcends the boundaries of the individual nation-states:
The goal of socialist globalization should be the treatment of the entire world as a single economic unit within which the provision of necessary goods and services would be maximized and the [alleged man-made] damage to the environment minimized.
Leftist economist Joseph Stiglitz in January 2015 announced that “The American Century” had ended and “The Chinese Century” had begun, following the ‘World Bank’s International Comparison Program’ declaring China’s gross national product surpassed the U.S in 2014.
Stiglitz stated that the “rise of China also shines a harsh spotlight on the American model, due to capitalist economic and political “systemic deficiencies — that are corrupt”. He demanded that America must “pivot” to accept that the economic interests of China and the U.S. are now “intricately intertwined” in the new global order.
China would boast that it played a “crucial role” in formulating a new global development pact called “Agenda 2030,” which was signed by 193 members of the United Nations on September 28, 2015. The world socialist and corporatist pact aimed at re-engineering civilization through that imposition of 17 “Sustainable Development Goals” and setting 169 accompanying targets in what was referred to as a “Great Leap Forward”.
China said that to “combat inequality domestically is simply not enough — international socialism is needed to battle inequality even among countries”.
But, like us, the writer thinks that the election of Donald Trump to the US presidency marks a turning-point; that the zealots for international socialism are aware that their path to world domination, for so long all too smooth, could now be made impassable.
The election of Donald Trump now represents an existential threat to World Socialism across the planet.
Socialists know that when President Reagan went rogue with his muscular capitalist policies, communism quickly imploded. Trump has already torn up the Trans-Pacific Partnership, which would have internationalized the law covering $28 trillion in trade and investment, about 40 percent of global GDP.
Trump seems determined to destroy “Socialist Globalization” with the same capitalist tax cuts and regulatory relief that President Reagan used to destroy communism.
Though not yet dead, Marxism/Communism/International Socialism has had its day. Its era is over. It will not go quietly. It will howl, it will grumble, it will whimper – but it will go. Perhaps as a minority secular religion it will linger, but as a power in the world it is done.
The Marxist professoriate remains to be muzzled. Agenda 2030 must not only be stopped, but the damage it has already done (under the name originally given to it by its parent the UN, “Agenda 21”) needs to be reversed. The prophets of doom by human beings overheating the planet need to be discouraged to the point of despair, because they are using “climate change” as a pretext for imposing world socialist government. But the Age of Marx is over.
That does not mean that “the power of fanaticism” – to use Robert Conquest’s words – is “extinct”. As we have said, it never will be.
We face another enemy of mankind. Islam.
As Marxism was to the last century, Islam will be to this century. Islam is an equally crippling totalitarian ideology, another mass killer and bringer of darkness.
Will a new era of American greatness save the world from it?
Footnote: * Barack Obama was the first Alinskyite to stand – in his case successfully! – for election to the US presidency.
Will the stupid and vicious inherit the earth 28
… blessed by the governing elites of Europe and the United Nations?
The supremacist and totalitarian movement called Islam, whose declared intent is world conquest, has become an extremely serious threat.
Its unarmed armies of believers are marching into Europe without encountering the least resistance. Democratically elected European governments have actually invited them in. In Europe they will proliferate, while the indigenous populations shrink, and before long they will be majorities in all western European countries, able to use the democratic process to take over government. Once that has been achieved, there will be no more democracy.
This movement of conquest and total subjugation is passionately encouraged by the UN.
Virginia Hale reports and comments at Breitbart:
The incoming Secretary-General of the United Nations (UN) told a room of policymakers in Europe on Wednesday that “migration is not the problem but the solution”, and said politicians should ignore voters.
Speaking in Lisbon at the Vision Europe Summit, António Guterres said European nations have no right to control their borders and that they must instead take in floods of the world’s poorest people.
“The idea that management of migration is a matter of national sovereignty is extremely limited.”
An idea cannot be “extremely limited”. He means that in his opinion the power of sovereign nations to control who comes into their territory ought to be – not just “extremely limited” but – non-existent.
“The truth is that in the meantime, the real controllers of international mobility are the smugglers and criminal organisations. It must be recognised that migration is inevitable and will not stop,” the socialist told the crowd of policymakers and researchers.
Regarding priorities for the UN, when he takes over from South Korean Ban Ki-moon as Secretary-General, Guterres said he already has “several items to put on the discussion table to drive positive developments” with regards to the goal of making Europe accept more migrants.
This will take place in the form of “develop[ing] legal migration opportunities as the only way to fight against criminal networks”, he hinted.
Guterres insisted that every European Union (EU) nation must be forced to “share the burden” of mass migration.
Despite having used the word “burden” to describe giving residence to large numbers of aliens, the 67-year-old went on to declare: “We must convince [Europeans] that migration is inevitable and that it is the multiethnic societies which are multicultural and multireligious who are building wealth.”
The UN’s next head acknowledged he is “not convinced that it will be easy, given the state of [public] opinion”. Calling for politicians to put “tolerance” and “reason” at the heart of their decision making, Portugal’s former prime minister urged lawmakers to prioritise “values” over respecting voters’ wishes.
He stated: “When elected officials hesitate to choose between values and the next election, I would advise them to choose values. If they go for short term [electoral gain] they will lose both, because there will always come a time when they lose an election At that point, it becomes very hard to recover the values that have been abandoned.” …
What “values” would those be? Just one. And not so much a value as a sentiment. PITY. The sentiment at the heart of Christianity – which ruled half the world with utmost cruelty for a thousand years.
And wherever did he get the idea that where the Muslim hordes have poured into European countries, those countries are “building wealth”? What is actually happening is the exact opposite, as the author points out:
Far from being linked to wealth, data from different European countries support the idea that non-European migrants are a net cost to nations’ treasuries. In the Netherlands, 65 per cent of non-European migrants who arrived during the 1990s are still living on welfare.
And Virginia Hale goes on to quote a professor who dares to say that the Muslim populations which are replacing the indigenous Europeans are mentally inferior. He doesn’t use that term. He calls it “lower intellectual competence”, but the two phrases mean the same thing.
The research of University College London psychology professor Dr. James Thompson shows Europe is being harmed by mass migration from poorer countries, as on average the newcomers’ intellectual competence is much lower than that of natives.
Partly as a result of their culture and partly due to genetics, he notes that the difference in intelligence results in migrants having “lower status, lower wages and higher resentment” at perceived differences.
“On the latter point, if the West cannot bear to mention competence differences, then differences in outcome are seen as being due solely to prejudice,” Thompson warns.
Being made poorer and stupider are two of the ways in which “Europe is being harmed” by the immigration of millions from the mainly Muslim parts of the Third World. The vast increase in crime, especially rape, is not mentioned. Nor the appalling terrorist attacks carried out by the Muslim warriors of jihad.
Enforced conformism, harsh subjugation of women, floggings and amputations and stonings to death, all the horrors of totalitarian enslavement are still to come.
About all of which the incoming Secretary-General of the UN, António Guterres, and the current crop of European leaders such as those of Germany, France, Holland, Sweden, Austria, the EU, are either in denial or unperturbed.
Since America, in its recent elections, rejected the sort of thinking on migration those persons represent, Europeans may be encouraged to use their democratic right, while they still have it, to vote their betrayers out of power.
And after that the Western nations – led, we ardently hope, by President Trump – will destroy the UN.
The management of savagery 574
Islam’s renewed campaign against our civilization is inspired, directed, and carried out by the Muslim Brotherhood and the groups it has spawned.
Barack Hussein Obama, astoundingly elected President of the United States in 2008, did what he could to empower the Brotherhood, insisting that the organization, banned in Egypt, have pride of place in the audience of his first address abroad as president, in Cairo. He did his utmost to support the Brotherhood when revolution brought it to power in Egypt, and objected furiously when it was overthrown. He went so far as to appoint Muslim Brotherhood personnel as his advisers. The disastrous US policy towards the Middle East, causing war, civil war, displacements of millions, the catastrophic flooding of Europe by Muslim migrants, the death by drowning of thousands in the Mediterranean, the enslavement and mass murder of Christians and Yazidis, is the manifest result of their advice.
What a conjuring act it has been for Obama – to use his power to help the Muslim Brotherhood attain its ends at the same time as having to seem to be the chief guardian of Western civilization and liberty!
The two theorists on whose writings the Muslim Brotherhood was founded were Hasan al-Banna and Sayyid Qutb. ISIS, al-Qaeda, their terrorist activities in Europe and America, all spring from the Muslim Brotherhood, the organization that Obama protected, promoted, indulged, and abetted.
Writing in the Guardian, Robert Manne – emeritus professor of politics and vice-chancellor’s fellow at La Trobe University in Melbourne – explains how the Muslim Brotherhood and its “Qutbism” launched the jihad that is being waged against us. We quote his article in part:
During the period of my research, the Islamic State published in several languages, including English, a quarterly online magazine called Dabiq. …
In Dabiq, no theme was more important than the Islamic State’s desire to destroy those it regarded as its historical and current enemies – especially the Shia Muslims, the Rafida; their Syrian cousins, the Alawites or Nusayris; the fallen apostate peoples, the Yazidis and the Druze; the Christian west, the “Crusaders”; and the eternal enemy of the Muslims, the Jews. Despite its intellectual sophistication, each issue of Dabiq contained eschatological articles, concerning, for example, the nature of the Dajjal (the Rafida equivalent of the Antichrist) or the coming battles at the End of Days, from whose prophesied battleground, the town of Dabiq, the magazine took its name.
The magazine had several regular features. Each issue provided details of the military triumphs of the Islamic State and its affiliates, including both the planned operations and the lone-wolf attacks on its Crusader enemies in the west. (It was, however, conspicuously silent about the setbacks.) Each issue contained gruesome photos of the enemies it had dispatched – the beheaded western or Japanese hostages, the immolated Jordanian pilot, and dozens showing the corpses of the captured enemy troops and of the Shias, Alawites or Yazidis it had slaughtered.
Each issue told the story of the noble mujahideen “martyrs”, under the rubric Among the Believers Are Men. In a regular column called From Our Sisters, questions concerning women were discussed – the benefits of polygyny; the merits of sexual slavery; and the mothers’ indispensable role in providing a suitable education for the “lion cubs” – the next generation of soldiers. One of Dabiq’s preoccupations was the horror of life in the infidel (kuffar) societies of the west and the religious obligation of Muslims around the world to undertake migration to the Islamic State (hijrah) now that the caliphate had been established. …
Dabiq contained a regular feature it called In the Words of the Enemy. Here, special pleasure was taken in the comments of leading US generals, politicians or journalists expressing anxiety about the growing strength of the Islamic State and the danger it posed.
The pages of Dabiq express a remarkably consistent and internally coherent ideology, no less consistent and coherent than the Marxism–Leninism of the Soviet Union during the era of Stalin; more consistent and coherent, in my view, than the ideology of Nazism. As one can assume that Dabiq represents the official world-view of the Islamic State, it is surprising how little it has been analyzed by specialist scholars. It has been my primary source for an understanding of the mind of the current leadership of the Islamic State. …
The ideology of the Islamic State is founded upon the prison writings of the revolutionary Egyptian Muslim Brother Sayyid Qutb, in particular some sections of his commentary In the Shade of the Qur’an, but most importantly his late visionary work Milestones, published in 1964.
Qutb argued that the entire world, including the supposedly Muslim states, had fallen into a time of pre-Islamic ignorance, jahiliyya, or pagan darkness. He called upon the small number of true Muslims to form a revolutionary vanguard to restore the light of Islam to the world. …
So powerful was Qutb’s vision that several scholars have termed the ideology that provided the foundation of the Islamic State “Qutbism”. …
The first answer to the question about what was to be done by those who hoped to implement Qutb’s vision came a decade and a half after the master’s death, with The Neglected Duty, the underground revolutionary working paper of an Egyptian electrical engineer, Muhammad Abd al-Salam Faraj. Faraj called upon Muslims to fulfil their religious obligation of jihad – which he, like Qutb, interpreted as violent struggle in the service of God – and to lay the foundation of a truly Islamic state. His favoured method was assassination of the most important contemporary enemy of the Muslims, the apostate “Pharaoh”, a clear reference to the president of Egypt, Anwar Sadat.
Faraj regarded the “near enemy”, the Egyptian state, as a more strategically significant target than the “far enemy”, the Crusader Americans and the Zionist Jews. In 1981 Faraj’s group succeeded in their plot to kill Sadat. As a consequence, Faraj’s life, like Qutb’s, ended on the gallows. His pamphlet nonetheless represented the beginning of a 20-year era during which Egyptian jihadi revolutionaries, under the spell of Qutb’s prison writings, conducted a prolonged, bloody and ultimately unsuccessful revolutionary struggle against the “near enemy” – with plots to assassinate the apostate leaders, the taghut; to stage military coups; to incite popular uprisings.
A more influential answer to the question of what was to be done to implement the Qutbist vision was provided shortly after Faraj’s death by the Palestinian Islamic scholar Abdullah Azzam. After the 1979 Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, Azzam moved to Peshawar and established an office for the organisation of Arabs who had journeyed to Afghanistan to support the local jihadi fighters, the mujahideen.
In remarkably eloquent speeches, in the articles of his magazine, al-Jihad, and especially in two of his short books, Defence of the Muslim Lands and Join the Caravan, Azzam called upon Muslims across the globe to defend their nation, the umma, which was now under direct threat. Azzam insisted that defence of the umma through jihad, in the face of the infidel invader, was not a collective but an individual duty for each Muslim, as obligatory as one of the five pillars of the faith, such as praying and fasting. Azzam was assassinated in 1989, nobody knows for certain by whom. But by the time of his death, he had convinced a generation of revolutionary Muslims that the Afghan and Arab mujahideen had been responsible, through God’s grace and through their glorious martyrs’ deaths, for crippling the military might of the Soviet Union in Afghanistan.
Moreover, he saw in the triumphant struggles of the mujahideen in Afghanistan a portent of a worldwide Islamic revival – in the jahili Muslim lands of the present; in his homeland, Palestine, and all other Muslim lands that had been conquered by the Crusaders; eventually across the entire globe.
In Afghanistan, Azzam had worked for a time with a wealthy Saudi of Yemeni background, Osama bin Laden. …
Having absorbed both Qutb’s vision and Azzam’s triumphalism and ambition … in 1988 Bin Laden created in Afghanistan an organisation he called al-Qaeda, which was eventually to become the first global army of jihadis.
In 1996, upon his return to Afghanistan, Bin Laden set his sights on the destruction of the only remaining superpower, the United States. In his view, the US was under the control of the Jews. It had been responsible for inflicting upon the Muslims the cruellest wound, the creation of a Jewish state at the very heart of the umma. It was also the indispensable patron and protector of the taghut regimes throughout the supposedly Muslim world. Perhaps worst of all, since 1990, by invitation from the Saudi royal family after Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait, the US had occupied the land of the two holiest cities of Islam, Mecca and Medina. In 1998 al-Qaeda called upon the mujahideen to kill Americans and Jews.
One of the signatories of Bin Laden’s fatwa was the most influential Egyptian Qutbist revolutionary of the past 20 years, Ayman al-Zawahiri. In mid-2001 Zawahiri led a part of his group, al-Jihad, into al-Qaeda. Their union was consummated with a double conversion. Zawahiri adopted Bin Laden’s concentration on the far enemy. For his part, Bin Laden adopted the tactic that Zawahiri and other Egyptian Islamist revolutionaries had long embraced: suicide bombings, or what the Qutbists now called “martyrdom operations” – a vital tactic in technologically unequal, asymmetrical warfare. The first fruit of their union was 9/11, the attack on the twin towers in New York and the Pentagon.
By this time, Zawahiri was responsible, most comprehensively in his 2001 memoir, Knights under the Prophet’s Banner, for systematising the political ideology founded on the vision of Sayyid Qutb.
The ideology had not yet reached its latest and perhaps final destination. One consequence of 9/11 was the March 2003 US-led invasion and occupation of Iraq. As it happened, one leader of the Sunni resistance was a Jordanian revolutionary jihadi, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, who had established his own training camp in Afghanistan in 1999 at Herat and then, after the US invasion of Afghanistan and attack on the Taliban, had moved to Iraq via Iran in preparation for the generally anticipated US invasion.
Zarqawi was responsible for adding several new elements to the political ideology inspired by Qutb and systematised by Zawahiri. Zarqawi injected into its heart a sectarian and exterminatory hatred of the Shia.
Drawing upon the strategic theory of Abu Bakr Naji, the author of The Management of Savagery, and the theology of a jihadi scholar, Abu Abdullah al-Muhajir, the author of a work most commonly known as The Jurisprudence of Blood, Zarqawi extended vastly the purpose, the method and the permissible scope of killing. He conducted public beheadings of hostages. He greatly expanded the role of suicide bombings, with increasingly callous theological justifications, targeting not only the occupation forces and their Iraqi allies but also innocent Shia civilians and politically unfriendly Sunnis, earning for himself the well-deserved title of “the sheikh of the slaughterers”.
Before Zarqawi, the creation of an Islamic State, and even more the re-establishment of the caliphate, had been distant dreams of the Qutbists. With Zarqawi they became pressing items of a current political agenda. Before Zarqawi, too, the thought of the Qutbists had been largely unaffected by the eschatological or apocalyptic undercurrents of Sunni Islam. Under Zarqawi these began to rise to the surface. Zarqawi was killed in 2006. Nonetheless, his two successors, Abu Omar al-Baghdadi, who was killed in 2010, and Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, the first caliph of the Islamic State, embraced fully and even extended the anti-Shia sectarianism, the strategic and jurisprudential savagery, the immediate Islamic state-building ambition, and the apocalyptic dimension that Zarqawi had injected into the political ideology that had grown from the vision of Qutb.
A supporter of the Islamic State, thought to be the Yemeni journalist Abdulelah Haider Shaye, captured with admirable precision in a single sentence its ideological genealogy: “The Islamic State was drafted by Sayyid Qutb, taught by Abdullah Azzam, globalised by Osama bin Laden, transferred to reality by Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, and implemented by al-Baghdadis: Abu Omar and Abu Bakr.”
The good news is that the days when the Muslim Brotherhood could bask in the patronage of an American government are coming to an end. President-elect Trump has said that he will ban it.
November 8: day of triumph or disaster for the Muslim Brotherhood 1
As far as Islam is concerned, Barack Obama is a Muslim because his father was a Muslim. We don’t think Obama is religious (though for many years he attended the church of Jeremiah Wright who called for the damnation of America), but we couldn’t help noticing that he is strongly sympathetic to Islam. In addition to helping Iran become a nuclear power, he has given significant help to the Muslim Brotherhood to advance its agenda of world conquest.
Nonie Darwish writes at Gatestone:
The goals of U.S. President Barack Obama in the Middle East ended the rule of most of the “secular” Arab leaders in the area. …
The goals of the Muslim Brotherhood happened to be in tune with Obama’s goals in the Middle East. Obama’s first major presidential speech took place in Cairo before a large number of Islamic sheikhs and members of the Muslim Brotherhood. They were empowered and given legitimacy by Obama. A scorned Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak did not attend; thus, with the blessing of the United States, the Muslim Brotherhood’s rise to power in Egypt was begun. Today, ordinary Egyptians link the ascendancy of the Muslim Brotherhood directly to the Obama administration. Cairo was about to become the capital of the new Islamic Caliphate if Egyptians had not, after a year, come out in the millions to stop it. …
After Egypt took down the Muslim Brotherhood, the goal of establishing the Islamic Caliphate in Egypt simply moved to Syria, the only Arab nation where a secular Muslim leader had survived the Arab Spring.
Promoting Islam also seems to have been a major factor in Obama’s equation for America. Before Obama started to implement his promise to “change America as we know it”, he first had to change the Middle East as they knew it. Many of the changes over which he presided were in harmony with the goals of the Muslim Brotherhood.
Its motto is:
Allah is our objective; the Prophet is our leader; the Quran is our law; Jihad is our way; dying in the way of Allah is our highest hope.
But while the Muslim brotherhood has been made illegal in Egypt, the Obama administration still refuses to label the Muslim Brotherhood a terrorist organization.
Under Obama, Islam became untouchable, not open to any kind of criticism. He even claimed that “Islam has been woven into the fabric of our country since its founding.”
Secretary of State Hillary Clinton followed suit, and hosted several closed-door conferences in Washington and London on “Defamation of Religion”, to suppress free speech and internationally criminalize any criticism of Islam with fines and prison.
Even in a recent debate, Clinton stated, “Islam was always part of American history — even since the Revolutionary War.”
She would rather blame terrorism on free speech than on the violent tenets of Islam.
Only a person from the Middle East could understand the immense value of such a gift to the goals of Islamic jihadists in America.
It is unfortunate that many Americans apparently still do not know that Islamists rewrite history in order to claim that any land they wish to conquer was originally Islamic or founded by Muslims – even though historically Islam did not exist until the seventh century, hundreds of years after Judaism and Christianity.
Today, Muslims have re-written their history books to claim that Muslims originally built the ancient Jewish Biblical sites, and the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) has bowed to the wishes of Qatar and the Organization of Islamic Cooperation (OIC) – a bloc of 56 Islamic nations plus “Palestine” – to back up this fiction. UNESCO recently passed resolutions obscenely declaring ancient Jewish Biblical monuments – such as Hebron’s Cave of the Patriarchs, Rachel’s Tomb in Bethlehem and Jerusalem’s Temple Mount, home of the great ancient Jewish Temples – Islamic sites.
Which country will be next?
This escalating subversion should be reason enough for all Western democratic countries permanently to part company with the United Nations. Its history of corruption is neither new nor surprising, or that it is run anti-democratic “club of dictators” whose interests are opposite to ours.
Jihadists today are stating that they also have a claim over Italy, Greece, and Spain — and now America. Obama and Hillary Clinton actually just solidified such claims for future Muslim history books about who actually built America.
Americans have a choice: they can either keep on empowering Islam, and helping extremist Muslims infiltrate into the American system – even as there is a resolution in the House of Representatives to shut down all criticism of Islam – or they can end the gamble of the current administration, which seems bent on changing America forever by allowing the worldwide empowerment of Islam. They can continue the Islamist “Arab Spring” revolution to change “America as we know it” or preserve the freedoms of the American republic.
It has recently become clear through WikiLeaks that the American system is indeed rigged and that Washington DC has turned into a swamp; or more accurately an “Arab Spring” swamp.
Egypt, on a much smaller scale, had to face such a choice in 2012-13, between life under the values of the Muslim Brotherhood or a life under a sliver of hope for a democracy, which Islam, under its laws, can never allow.
Both Egyptians and the West sorely need to understand that Islamic law, sharia, does not permit anything other than an Islamic government under the rule of Islamic law. Consequently, only military force can stand against sharia tyranny. The Muslim Brotherhood had proven once again that the only way out of Islamic theocracies is through military dictatorships.
A head-on collision over the future of America is underway. Many Americans still do not understand the magnitude of what is at stake, but many Islamists do: they are lying in wait, hoping to return to their budding.
If Hillary Clinton were to become president of the US (unbearable thought!), the process of Islamizing the world – by all and any means including violence – would continue and intensify. Her election would be a triumph for jihadists everywhere, and in particular for the Muslim Brotherhood. Her Middle East policy as US Secretary of State was the Muslim Brotherhood’s policy. That would not change if her power became even greater.
If Donald Trump becomes president, there is a good chance that the process will be slowed, possibly halted. At least for a few years. The Muslim Brothers will be flushed out of the White House. Hillary’s close aide and adviser, Huma Abedin – whose family is a pillar of the Muslim Brotherhood – will exit the political stage with the Clintons. (And ideally go to prison with Hillary.) It is possible that the frightful wars in the Middle East will die down; that Iran will even at this late hour be prevented from making nukes; that ISIS and Boko Haram will be crushed; and Islam’s invasion of the West turned back.
“Shut-up!” the Democrats explain 136
This insightful essay by Malcolm MacKinnon, retired Professor of Sociology at the University of Toronto, was forwarded to us by our reader and commenter Cogito.
We quote it in full with permission of the author:
Unlike conservatives, progressives will stick with their side even when they profoundly disagree, or more likely appear to disagree with that side on core issues. Witness progressive Kirsten Powers who recently wrote a book (The Silencing) that was heavily critical of the progressive onslaught on speech freedom. Shortly after that book was published she left FNC and went to work for the Clinton News Network (world headquarters of Newspeak) [aka CNN] where she professes daily her undying loyalty to Hillary Clinton who, in turn, is a dedicated opponent of the First Amendment.
And if gentile progressives are tied at the hip to the Dem Party, just consider the case of Jewish progressives. They will support the Dems with big money and big votes even when the progressive party is anti Jew and anti Israel. Take the case of Bill Maher. A few months back Breitbart News could hardly hide its jubilation when Bill Maher sternly criticized “liberals” for their undying support of Islam, and that in so doing – in Maher’s words – they are in violation of their own most deeply held principles of equality.
Fast forward six months and we have two candidates running for the presidency: Progressive Hillary Clinton and conservative Donald Trump.
Hillary has has made no bones about it that she wants the First Amendment changed to reflect and protect progressive interests, and apparently this is just fine with Kirsten Powers. Progressives have gone to extraordinary lengths to paint Trump as an enemy of the First Amendment but this is the classic case of “the pot calling the kettle black”. The greatest threat to speech today comes from political correctness which is the attack arm of progressivism, used to silence critics of progressive policies. It’s worth recounting that political correctness is a term born under communist regimes where it was used by dissidents but also by party die hards and apparatchik to depict the absolute authority of the Party to dictate reality. Now, reality may profoundly disagreed with the party’s version but this disconnect can never be stated. Dissidents were of course appalled while apparatchiks by way of resignation had to deal with the bureaucratic problems created by the Orwellian lie. The point is that it’s progressives in today’s world who champion political correctness and it’s only natural that Hillary Clinton heads that charge. When Trump says that illegal immigration brings with it crime and drugs he’s told in no uncertain terms that he can’t say this. What Trump states may be true, says the progressive apparatchik when you’r not listening, but you can’t say it because when you start presenting reality as it exists, instead of the reality proposed by the Party, that’s a threat to our power and we won’t allow it!
As for Trump, he isn’t an apparatchik he’s a dissident. He will state reality as it exists despite the howls of protest those that promote party lines. And for stating reality as it exists Trump is called a “racist” much in the same way that communist dissidents were called “bourgeois reactionaries” or “enemies of the people.”
What’s a bourgeois reactionary?
“Someone who’s winning an argument with a communist.”
“What’s a racist?”
“Someone who’s winning an argument with a progressive.”
Like the dissident, Donald Trump presents reality as we apprehend it. He makes no bones about his distaste of political correctness and has attacked it at every turn which is why progressives evince such a visceral loathing towards him; for without the “battering ram” of political correctness (Lenin writes on using the proletariat as a battering ram), modern progressivism would be cut off at the knees. Thus it’s the Donald who’s the friend of open expression, of telling people what the world is really like, rather than hewing to the party line backed by progressives die hards and apparatchiks.
When progressives cast Trump as an enemy of the First Amendment they are doing exactly what Marx recommended:
“Slander your class enemy with your own worst sins.”
Like Kirsten Powers, Bill Maher is another example of the progressive apparatchik. Maher is Jewish and recently said that he doesn’t care if Hillary is corrupt, he doesn’t care if she’s a criminal, and he doesn’t care if she murdered Jonbenet Ramsey, he will still vote for her: “Anything but Trump!” Further, Maher will vote for Hillary despite the fact that Maher has serious misgivings about Islam while Hillary, in the starkest of all possible contrarieties, is a stout defender of Islam and all its works. Hillary tells us that she will import hundreds of thousands undocumented Muslim refugees from the war torn Middle East, events that Hillary as Secretary of State helped cause with that precipitous withdrawal of America forces from Iraq, an untimely withdrawal that created a power vacuum into which a marauding ISIS marched.
As a progressive die hard, Hillary naturally toes the party line when it comes to Islam. Indeed she wrote the book on it. As such, her politically correct line is completely divorced from reality. Over and over she states that “terrorism has nothing to do with Islam” and “that Islam is religion of peace.” What’s going on here is that the ultimate source of such gross misrepresentations is political power, that Islam is a big financial supporter of progressivism, wedded to the fact that Muslims represent a solid voting block for progressive parties. Progressives ape their communist exemplar when imposing a version of things at odds with reality which has become the stock in trade of today’s progressives. Make no bones about it, they will go to the wall to defend their unreality.
Meanwhile dissident Trump will have none of it. He has told Christians, gays and women that he will be their protector from the Muslim threat, inasmuch as that is what Islam is all about: It’s a threat to democracy and equality. How do we know this? Because Islam tells us so! And not only does Islam tell us so, it acts on its convictions, the results of which are repeatedly manifest in the grossest scenes imaginable. Dissident Trump further tells us that he will either halt, or place insuperable roadblocks in the way of Muslim immigration.
As for the equally tawdry case of Bill Maher, stooge, flunky, apparatchik of the progressive party line – whatever! Maher can’t vote for Trump yet Trump, unlike Hillary, isn’t corrupt, he isn’t a criminal, he doesn’t murder little girls and he tells us the truth on Islam. None of these matters to Maher, who is, in the last resort, not opposed to the game plan of Islam but is, in actuality, one of the sponsors of it.
What to make of progressives like Kirsten Powers and Bill Maher who for a brief and fleeting moment raise voices of protest against the sacred cows of progressives, but who, in the long run, come back to the bosom of the party based on speech restriction and the unreality of Islam narrative? both – I might add – profoundly at odds with their previously held positions? One is almost tempted to think that Powers and Maher are following party orders to make “us” seem less illiberal than we really are on free speech, and to be not so manifestly stupid as we appear to be with our other worldly – nay “phantasmagorical” – depictions of Islam.
Speculation is one thing and reality another. In the end, Powers is actually not a defender of free speech but its enemy. Maher isn’t a critic of Islam but an apostle of Islam. Ominous here is the larger undertow, that speech suppression is ineluctably linked to selling implausible versions of the world. You can’t have the second without the first which is precisely why progressives will go to the wall on speech suppression because you can’t make concocted versions of reality stick, when you have dissidents like Trump with speech protection walking around telling people the truth.
Thus a word to the wise for conservatives: Don’t start celebrating next time you hear a progressive criticizing fellow progressives. Hence closer to home, when the Toronto Star criticizes the UN for refusing to certify Rebel Media for an upcoming UN conference on the climate, don’t start clapping your hands with glee that the other side has miraculously come around to your way of thinking as defender of free speech. Progressives care most about the power that comes with winning elections and if supporting freedom of expression here and there obtains that end, then they will say and do what it takes. When was the last time you heard the Toronto Star criticizing the University of Toronto for restricting the speech rights of Professor Jordan Peterson?
This is the progressive mantra on free expression: “We believe in free speech, BUT ….