New York City submits to Islam.

This is from an article by Benjamin Weingarten at the excellent City Journal:

As part of a recently announced legal settlement with representatives of the Muslim community, the NYPD has agreed to purge materials critical to understanding the threat to New York City from domestic Islamic terrorism.

The plaintiffs in Raza v. City of New York and Handschu v. Special Services Division charged that the NYPD had targeted Muslims for surveillance solely because of their religious affiliation. Among other things, the settlement stipulates that the NYPD must remove from its website a comprehensive 2007 report authored by senior analysts Mitchell D. Silber and Arvin Bhatt.

Radicalization in the West identified homegrown Islamic terrorism as the primary extremist threat to New York City. As then-police commissioner Ray Kelly noted in a preface, the report’s aim was to assist policymakers and law enforcement officials around the country by providing a thorough understanding of the danger posed by domestic terrorists. It also sought to help intelligence and law enforcement agencies better understand the radicalization process. Based on a rigorous analysis of almost a dozen jihadist plots across the U.S. and Europe, the report identified the enemy’s ideology on its own terms. The report didn’t say that jihadism had nothing to do with Islam; nor did it suggest that Islam was a “religion of peace”. Its sole concern was assessing the jihadist threat, not undertaking an Islamic exegesis.

From the day the report was released, Muslim groups pounced. “By afternoon, American-Muslim organizations had issued press releases criticizing the report,” Time noted in 2007. “The Council on American-Islamic Relations said it cast suspicion on all U.S. Muslims, even though the report repeatedly stresses that there is no obvious way to profile would-be terrorists.” What did they find so objectionable? According to the complaint filed in Raza, the report provided the “analytic underpinnings” for the NYPD’s Muslim Surveillance Program. The plaintiffs asserted that the program “stigmatizes an entire faith community and invites discrimination. It specifically singles out Muslims for profiling and suspicionless surveillance because of their religious beliefs and practices”.  The Raza plaintiffs sought to have the program shut down, arguing that it operated on “a false and unconstitutional premise: that Muslim religious belief and practices are a basis for law enforcement scrutiny”.

They are, of course.

Now, the NYPD has agreed not only to remove Silber and Bhatt’s report from its website, but the terms of the settlement also require the NYPD to assert that it does not, has not, and will not rely upon the report to open or extend investigations.

Within 24 hours of the settlement, however, events conspired to underscore the danger it potentially presents. In Philadelphia, a self-identified jihadist attempted to assassinate a policeman. Edward Archer fired 13 shots at Officer Jesse Hartnett, striking him with three. Archer reportedly told investigators while in custody that he “follows Allah, and that is the reason he was called upon to do this”. Further, according to Philadelphia police captain Richard Ross, Archer “believed that the police defend laws that are contrary to the teachings of the Quran”. In 2012, Archer allegedly traveled to and spent several months in Egypt. According to his mother, he was a devout Muslim who had practiced the faith for an extended period of time. Despite Archer’s words and actions, and the reports of Philadelphia law enforcement officers involved in the investigation, the city’s mayor [Jim Kenney] declared during a press conference, “In no way, shape or form does anyone in this room believe that Islam or the teaching of Islam has anything to do with what you’ve seen on the screen.”

Tragic as it nearly was, the Philadelphia shooting couldn’t have been timelier. Archer fits the exact profile that Silber and Bhatt sketched in their report — as do most examples in recent memory of American jihadists.

Religious ideology is not incidental to jihad; it’s central. For Islamists, jihad is an intrinsic part of a pious Muslim’s religious duties. All Muslims are not jihadists, but all jihadists are self-identified Muslims.

Well, it might be more accurate to say every Muslim if true to the commands of his faith is a jihadi, though not necessarily a violent one.

Yet, New York mayor Bill de Blasio appears willing to pursue the see-no-Islam policy preferred by Philadelphia’s mayor. And, according to a 2013 report from Judicial Watch, a similar purge of materials linking Islamic ideology to jihad has already occurred at the federal level, with apparently disastrous consequences, given the mushrooming domestic jihadist threat.

More than any other area of government, national security and defense must be insulated from political correctness. To remove analyses that might give us insight into our enemies represents a dereliction of duty by our political representatives. Political correctness can and will get Americans killed. If we are to defeat the threat from Islamic terrorism, we must dispense with euphemisms, take off our blinders, and see our enemy clearly.

Sheer common sense. So what possible reason can there be for the federal government – from which the lesser powers in the land take their cue – to “purge materials linking Islamic ideology to jihad”? 

We can think of no reason other than that the Obama administration is on the side of the violent jihadis. If it is not that, there can only be excuses such as unpardonably deliberate ignorance, or disqualifying stupidity, or certifiable insanity.

The “reply” to President Obama’s State of the Union address could have been a contradiction of his false claims and a denunciation of his idle boasts.

But South Carolina Governor Nikki Haley, speaking for the Republican opposition, preferred to use the platform she had, from which she could reach multitudes of voters, to denounce her own party’s front runner, Donald Trump.

Mark Steyn, commenting on Hayley’s speech at some length and particularly noting her attack on Trump and other Republican presidential candidates, points out how foolish it was for the Republican Party …

… to use what’s meant to be a rebuttal to the President as a rebuttal to their own leading candidates and the two-thirds of their voters who support them. Truly this is the dumbest political party on the planet.

Seems so.

Yet, what the Democratic Party did on the occasion of Obama’s last State of the Union address was surely even more stupid. It acted in extreme contempt for the opinion of an even greater part of the electorate, a majority of the American people.

Stupid is bad. But there’s worse. What the Democrats did was evil.

Democrat reps Zoe Lofgren (CA) and Alcee Hastings (FL) hosted two representatives of the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) at the president’s State of the Union address.

Lofgren brought Sameena Usman from the San Francisco CAIR office, and Hastings brought Nezar Hamze from the Florida branch.

This is from Investor’s Business Daily:

Normally, suspected terrorists wouldn’t get within 100 feet of Capitol security. But Democrats asked police to stand down and let operatives from a Hamas front group to attend, of all things, the State of the Union.

Two representatives of the Council on American-Islamic Relations were invited as guests of honor at the urging of Democratic National Committee Chairwoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz — and with the consent of the White House.

In a letter to lawmakers, Wasserman explained that inviting these and two dozen other Muslim guests to the president’s speech would show “the world that we will not be intimidated by fear into discrimination” against Muslims in the wake of last month’s massacre by Muslim terroristsin San Bernardino.

CAIR, which represented the family of the terrorists, gloated over its invitation in a press release.

The statement was posted one day after CAIR called for the release of 100 terrorist prisoners from Gitmo to protect them “from the abuses of indefinite detention”.

Such terrorist appeasement in the middle of a war on Islamic terrorists is beyond outrageous. It’s downright treasonous.

It’s tantamount to inviting the Nazi diplomatic corps to House chambers as guests of FDR’s State of the Union during the height of WWII.

Make no mistake: terror-tied CAIR is considered so dangerous that the FBI has formally banned it from agency outreach.

In a 2007-2008 terrorism trial against a Muslim charity, FBI agents testified that CAIR was a “Hamas front”, and U.S. prosecutors subsequently designated CAIR as an unindicted co-conspirator in the case. It remains on that Justice Department list today, despite CAIR protests.

As a result of evidence that emerged from the case, the FBI headquarters issued a directive to all 56 of its field offices to cut off ties to CAIR until it can resolve questions regarding its own ties to the Hamas terrorist group.

In a letter to Congress — the same body that invited CAIR officials into House chambers — an associate FBI director warned: “Until we can resolve whether there continues to be a connection between CAIR or its executives and Hamas, the FBI does not view CAIR as an appropriate liaison partner.”

CAIR is a turnstile for terrorist suspects and convicts, including a senior communications officer from its Washington headquarters who is now serving time in federal prison. The officer, Ismail Royer, and more than a dozen other CAIR officials have been convicted or deported on terrorism-related charges.

According to recently declassified FBI documents, longtime CAIR national board member Nabil Sadoun was deported in 2010 because of his “connections to Hamas, Hamas leader Mousa Abu Marzook, and Hamas front organizations”. 

The case files also connect CAIR’s co-founders, Omar Ahmad and Nihad Awad, directly to the Palestinian terrorist group’s U.S. wing, the Palestine Committee, and its parent — the radical Muslim Brotherhood, a worldwide jihadist movement based in Egypt.

And one much favored by Obama, who has members of it as advisers in the White House. (See our post Man with a mission, February 9, 2011.)

What’s more, the NSA recently monitored CAIR’s executive director for terrorist communications.

Why in the world would Congress host this clear threat to homeland security? …

These are among the worst people possible to put in seats of national honor.

We are not alone in blaming Bill Clinton for letting the North Koreans become a nuclear-armed power. (See our post immediately below.)

Presidential candidate Ted Cruz says the same. And he too draws the analogy between Clinton’s deal with North Korea and Obama’s with Iran.

This is from the Washington Post:

Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Tex.) reacted to news of the alleged hydrogen bomb test by North Korea with an indictment of two decades of Democratic foreign policy, warning that any president who didn’t “tear up” the nuclear agreement with Iran would risk attacks on American and Israeli cities.

“This underscores the gravity of the threats we are facing right now, and also the sheer folly of the Obama-Clinton foreign policy,” Cruz told reporters … “When we look at North Korea, it’s like looking at a crystal ball. This is where Iran ends up, if we continue on this same misguided path. It’s worth remembering, we’re here because of the Clinton administration. The Clinton administration led the world in relaxing sanctions against North Korea. They used the billions of dollars that flowed into North Korea to develop nuclear weapons. Now we’re facing a megalomaniacal manic who may potentially have a hydrogen bomb.”

Cruz also derided the Obama administration for giving a job in the State Department and a role in the Iran negotiations to North Korea negotiations veteran Wendy Sherman– “the one person on Earth who has already messed this up. And sadly, they negotiated essentially the same deal.”

Asked how a Cruz presidency would respond to North Korea, the candidate said he would pressure China to “cut off their client state”, and “to continue to isolate North Korea, to continue to cut off North Korea, to raise the costs of their belligerence.” But he warned that “every bad actor would get worse” until Obama was replaced.

“For the remainder of President Obama’s term, we’re essentially in a Hobbesian state of nature, like ‘Lord of the Flies’,” he said. … “We saw last night the consequences of this deal if it is allowed to go forward. Iran’s nuclear test may not be underground, measured by an earthquake. It may be above the skies of Tel Aviv, or New York, or Los Angeles.”

Wendy Sherman is a trained social worker. Busied herself with child welfare. So President Clinton thought her admirably qualified to negotiate with North Korea, to keep that vicious Communist dictatorship from getting nukes. And after that triumph, President Obama judged her to be the ideal person to negotiate with Iran to the same end …

Oh no, wait! Obama saw her usefulness in failing to stop an enemy of the US acquiring nukes …

North Korea claims to have successfully tested a hydrogen bomb – a nuclear fusion bomb many times more destructive than a nuclear fission bomb. What’s more, the North Koreans claim to have miniaturized the weapon so it can be dispatched as the warhead of a missile.

President Clinton did a deal with North Korea in 1994 which, like the deal Obama believes he has done with Iran, was purported to save the world from the threat of a dangerous nuclear-armed enemy.

Here is a video of Bill Clinton speaking on 21 October, 1994, on the “good deal” he has made with North Korea. Listen to him saying that the deal will make it “much harder for them to produce nuclear weapons”.

Why do any Americans who are not totally insane, or longing for the destruction of their country and Western civilization, ever put responsibility for their survival in the hands of Democrats?

Today we have posted the last essay, number 18, in the series by Jillian Becker titled The Darkness of This World. 

Find it in full under Pages in our margin.

Here is part of it:

18

Conclusion

America the Last Best Hope?

A multitude of enlightened Europeans cultivated reason, and built a culture that was innovative, prosperous, powerful, and humane. Other Europeans wanted to destroy all that, and succeeded. Rebels from and against the prosperous educated classes – philosophers and poets, artists and politicians – taught generations to intoxicate themselves with fantasies of destruction, spoliation, and atrocity that could, and at times did, inspire real events of vast horror, suffering, and death. From each of them Europe seemed to recover for a while. But at the time of this writing, the rebels have triumphed. The dark vision prevails. Europe is rotten. Multitudes of Europeans, seeing nothing in their culture worth preserving and no point in its survival, reluctant even to beget children, are yielding to immigrating hordes of aliens from the Third World who lust for conquest and are governed by laws devised in the deserts of the Arabian Peninsula in the Dark Ages.

So must the greatness of Europe be altogether lost? Surely not! Surely in the states of America, united on Enlightenment principles of liberty, reason, tolerance, and participatory government, European civilization will be preserved and enhanced? There where every citizen is free to pursue his own happiness, to hold property securely, to have his say in a government of limited powers, the United States will continue to prosper and advance? America, it is said, is a forward-looking “can do” society – innovative, prosperous, powerful and humane. “The last best hope of earth.” [As President Lincoln said of his country in a message to Congress on 1 December, 1862.]

And for a while yet it may continue to be so. But the seed of the evil flowers of the culture – Marxism, political sadism, and most potently poisonous of all, the political philosophies of the New Left – have found as fertile soil in America as in Europe.

The mainly bourgeois “anti-bourgeois” terrorist groups that rose with the “sixty-eight” protest movement in America, did evil just as intentionally as their European counterparts. And went in for the same posturing and frivolity. The US was at war in Vietnam, and the anti-draft demonstrations on university campuses gave a serious aspect to the American rebellion, but the war and the draft were pretexts rather reasons for it, as two leaders of the young radicals, Peter Collier and David Horowitz, confessed years later in their book – the best I have found on the subject – Destructive Generation: “The war in Vietnam was a gift of chance that allowed radical leaders to convince others of a need for a social apocalypse and of the necessity for their destructive strategies.”

These authors, long since cured of the romantic radicalism of their youth, look back   and “wince” at the “homemade hankerings for Armageddon”. The Sixties, they write, was a time of “monumental idealism”, when “dewy-eyed young people in the throes of a moral passion … sought only to remake the world”. They would do this by destroying “the evil empire of ‘Amerika’” and freeing “the captive peoples of the world”. It was a time, they say, “when innocence quickly became cynical “ and “when a gang of ghetto thugs like the Black Panthers might be anointed as political visionaries”.

The Black Panthers and many of the “dewy-eyed” rebels intended to do what they fully recognized as evil in pursuit of their ideals. For instance, a man known as J. J. – a member of the white middle-class group that became the terrorist organization called Weatherman and later Weather Underground – was notable for “his [drug augmented] high energy, his nonstop, almost demonic chatter, his ability to carry listeners with him by the sheer force of his words rather than their depth”. And J. J.’s idea “was not to create a perfect state operating by the clockwork principles of Marxist law but to promote a chaos that would cripple America and ultimately cast it into a receivership that would be administered by the morally superior Third World. Unafraid to pursue his theme to its logical end, J. J. would add that people shouldn’t expect the revolution to achieve a Kingdom of Freedom ; more likely, it would produce a Dark Ages.” J. J. “[laid] out the ‘White Devil’ theory of world history. ‘We’re against everything that’s “good and decent” in honky America. … We will loot and burn and destroy. We are the incubation of your mother’s nightmares!’”

As in West Germany, France and Italy, the terrorist bombers of America demanded their rights under the law that they broke, mocked, and abominated. “Despite their incessant complaints of police brutality, Sixties radicals lived for the most part in a no-fault system, demanding their constitutional rights at the same time as they were abusing and denouncing the Constitution. They knew they had the option, which many of them ultimately used, of diving back into the System [and their comfy bourgeois lives] when they tired of being extrinsic. (For this reason New Leftism, although discredited in politics, continues to thrive in the ‘academic work’ of former radicals who returned for postgraduate degrees to the universities they had earlier tried to destroy.) It was an example of the cynicism that marked the decade – counting on the fact that America was exactly the sort of flexible and forgiving society they were condemning it for failing to be.”

The evil was done not only to shock their bourgeois parents, as their drugs, promiscuous sex, and bombs were meant to do and did, but for a very much higher good, of course. The very much higher good: “social justice”; “ending oppression” in the forms of “ racism”, “sexism”, “homophobia”, “classism”, “imperialism”, “colonialism”; all of which required the destruction of “the capitalist system”.

Most of them did not, however, describe themselves as Communists. Without reading the works of Marx, or of Marxists, Trotskyites, or New Left political philosophers, they all – in harmony with their European counterparts – looked forward to a political apocalypse; a revolution that they considered themselves to be hastening, that would change everything and replace the earthly Hell of oppression and social injustice with a Heaven of … something yet to be defined.

Collier and Horowitz write of   “the decade’s transcendental conviction that there was something apocalyptic lurking behind the veil of the ordinary, and that just a little more pressure was needed to pierce the last remaining membrane – of civility, bourgeois consciousness, corporate liberalism, sexual uptightness, or whatever else prevented us all from breaking through to the other side”. And: “Again it was that hunger to reach the apocalypse just beyond, the essential act that would make them real revolutionaries.” And “the Weatherpeople, like all parvenus, spent considerable time working on a genealogy that would connect them with noble [sic] forbears: Russian narodniki and European anarchists, Cuban fidelistas and Vietnamese guerrillas.”

A work of fiction that impressively conveys the real evil of the 60s rebels is American Pastoral by Philip Roth. A percipient discussion of it and the issues it raised was published in Commentary magazine by Carol Iannone. I summarize the plot and quote her most illuminating comments relevant to my theme:

An only child – cheerful, affectionate, charming as a little girl – of a business man who in his youth had been an athlete and a Marine, and his beauty queen wife, grows up to be “overtaken by the 60s”, sets a bomb in a post office and kills a local doctor. She goes underground and kills three more people in another bombing.

“In his manly way” (Carol Iannone writes) the father “ tries to see where his own responsibility lies for what has happened to his much loved daughter … only to be forced again and again to confront the blazing chaotic irrationality of it all. What he cannot understand … is her hatred of America. ‘How could she “hate” this country when she had no conception of this country? How could a child of his be so blind as to revile the “rotten system” that had given her own family every opportunity to succeed? To revile her “capitalist” parents as though their wealth were the product of anything other than the unstinting industry of three generations …’”

“The 60s, in brief, are not just about the bomber young and their war with ‘Amerika’; in the 60s, ‘the indigenous American berserk’, have entered the living room, the dining room, the kitchen, touching everything and everyone with their ‘mockery of human integrity, every ethical obligation destroyed’.”

It entered the academies, and through them the mind of the nation, until the counter-culture has become The Culture. Collier and Horowitz write: “[N]owhere is the entrenchment of the Sixties mentality more complete or more destructive than in the university. That the Left should now dominate the academy involves a savage irony, of course. It was only after failing in their intent to burn down the university in the Sixties that radicals decided to get on the tenure track in the Seventies. Unimpeded in their long march through these institutions by fair-minded centrists of the sort they themselves now refuse to hire, these Leftists have brought a postmodern Dark Age to higher education – “deconstructing” objective truths to pave the way for chic academic nihilism: creating a curriculum of contempt for American history and culture; and transforming many classrooms into chambers of inquisition and indoctrination.”

The demonic achievements of the rebels were crowned by the election, in 2008, to the presidency of the United States of one of their own: Barack Hussein Obama, the son of a 60s counter-culturist mother and an African father who was both a Communist and a Muslim; and was associated eventually in the son’s mind with “colonial and imperial oppression” of his ancestral land, Kenya, when it was under British rule.

President Obama acceded to the White House with all his ideological baggage intact: the credo of the New Left plus admiration of Islam. And this at a time when Islam was becoming the main enemy of the Western world, practicing terrorism on a large scale, waging open warfare in the Middle East, and launching a migrant invasion of Europe that European governments allowed, encouraged, and all too willingly submitted to. Obama’s policies facilitated the European calamity, and he took steps to help Islamic Iran, which constantly reiterates its intention to destroy America and conquer the non-Muslim world, to become a nuclear power. He has lowered America in the eyes of the world. He and his minions treat the Constitution with contempt.

In the universities the counter-culture has become the orthodoxy. A majority of instructors indoctrinate students rather than educate them, teaching them what to think rather than how to think. Some Leftist representatives in Congress have passed a resolution to curb free speech. And the spirit of free enterprise, which made America rich and mighty, has been all but crushed by tyrannical regulation. Wealth has been taken from those who have earned it and given to those who have not. In short, the New Left has triumphed – though without attaining its heaven on earth.

Can the harm it has done be undone? At present the dark stream of unreason flows strongly. The resistance to it should be the vigorous self-interest inherent in human nature, the desire in most of us to succeed; and the lure of science, technology, all they give us for the betterment of our lives. Only as long as free personal endeavor and innovation continue to characterize America, will there be hope – if not the last, certainly the best – for our splendid civilization to survive in this, our only world.

Now it is wonderfully revealed that no Muslim suicide bomber, according to their own lore, has made it to paradise.

Here’s why, from Newsfoxes:

Ted Nugent just brought to light one important detail that I guarantee none of these Islamic terrorists have even considered. In the Islamic religion, pork and pork products are forbidden because the pig is considered an impure animal. In a Facebook post Ted writes …

Percy the pig makes for an extremely interesting read. …

Every Muslim who has ever handled TNT, Nitro, Bullets, High Explosive Bombs, Rocket Launchers or been treated for cuts injury requiring stitches, or taken antibiotics, or Vitamin Capsules, has been contaminated with Pig Products.

The ironical part is that when a Suicide Bomber blows himself up his body parts are impregnated with Gelatine and Glycerine from the explosive. Both Gelatine and Glycerine are manufactured from Pigs worldwide. Ergo, they will never be accepted by Allah.

Some makers of cigarettes use haemoglobin from pig’s blood in their filters. Apparently this element works as a sort of ‘artificial lung’ in the cigarette so, they claim, “harmful reactions take place before the chemicals reach the user” …

Pig bone gelatine is used to help transport gunpowder or cordite into the bullet.

[Also] insulin [and] the blood-thinning drug heparin [use pig products] …  

The complex workings of the global food and processing industry have ensured that it is impossible to avoid pig altogether.

There is no legal obligation for manufacturers to specify whether the gelatine they use is from a pig or another animal. When it is specified, it is often confusingly referred to as Suilline gelatine.

This information needs to be spread world-wide so it reaches as many Muslims as possible.

(Hat-tip to our Facebook commenter Libby Lael)

Is there a war on Christianity?

In Islamic countries, in Arab countries in particular, there is. In the Islamic State it is a war of annihilation. And the Christian Powers do nothing to save the victims. There does not even seem to be any emotion about it among Christians in Europe or America.

Is there a war on Christianity in America itself? Some say there is, and a lot of emotion has been aroused over it.

Jay Michaelson writes at the Daily Beast:

Why try to understand complicated things like demographics for the decline of your faith when you can blame gays and liberals for waging a “war on religion”?

Among the Christian Right, and most Republican presidential candidates, it’s now an article of faith that the United States is persecuting Christians and Christian-owned businesses —that religion itself is under attack.

Religion has been under attack for a very long time. But are Christians under serious threat? Now? In the United States?

“We have seen a war on faith,” Ted Cruz has said to pick one example. “His policies and this administration’s animosity to religious liberty and, in fact, antagonism to Christians, has been one of the most troubling aspects of the Obama administration,” he said.

Well it is true that the Obama administration does not seem to like Christians. It is reluctant to admit Christian refugees from the wars in the Middle East, while it insists on bringing in tens of thousands of Muslims. But is it against religious liberty?

The writer thinks the very idea that Christianity is under assault is a “bizarre myth”. But he also thinks it is true “in a way”:

Why has this bizarre myth that Christianity is under assault in the most religious developed country on Earth been so successful? Because, in a way, it’s true. American Christianity is in decline — not because of a “war on faith” but because of a host of demographic and social trends. The gays and liberals are just scapegoats.

The idea that Christians are being persecuted resonates with millennia-old self-conceptions of Christian martyrdom. Even when the church controlled half the wealth in Europe, it styled itself as the flock of the poor and the marginalized. Whether true or not as a matter of fact, it is absolutely true as a matter of myth. Christ himself was persecuted and even crucified, after all. So it’s natural that Christianity losing ground in America would be seen by many Christians as the result of persecution.

According to a Pew Research Report released earlier this year, the percentage of the US population that identifies as Christian has dropped from 78.4 percent in 2007 to 70.6 percent in 2014. Evangelical, Catholic, and mainline Protestant affiliations have all declined.

Meanwhile, 30 percent of Americans ages 18-29 list “none” as their religious affiliation (the figure for all ages is about 23 percent). Nearly 40 percent of Americans who have married since 2010 report that they are in “religiously mixed” marriages, which means that many individuals who profess Christianity are in families where not everyone does.

These changes are taking place for a constellation of reasons: greater secular education (college degrees), multiculturalism, shifting social mores, the secular space of consumer capitalism and celebrity culture, the sexual revolution (including feminism and LGBT equality), legal and constitutional changes (like the banning of prayer in public school, and the finding of a constitutional right to same-sex marriage), the breakdown of the nuclear family, the decline of certain forms of family and group identification, and the association of religion in general with nonsensical and outdated dogmas. The Pew report noted Americans are also changing religions more than in the past, and when they do so, they are more likely to move away from Christianity than toward it.

While we like to hear talk of “nonsensical and outdated dogmas”, the rest of that paragraph needs critical examination. Quite a few of the impersonal causes listed are in fact the result of liberal policies: multiculturalism, the legal and constitutional changes, the breakdown of the nuclear family. Feminism is a leftist cause. And the Left has promoted “LGBT equality” for political rather than moral reasons.

So while changes in public morals regarding women and LGBT people (and how the law treats them) are part of the overall shift, they are only one part of an immensely complicated set of factors — and I’m quite sure I’ve left out some of the most important ones. Probably the never-ending stream of sex scandals, from the Catholic clergy  to the Duggar mess, haven’t helped either.

But no one likes a “constellation of reasons” to explain why the world they grew up in, and the values they cherish, seem to be slipping away. Enter the scapegoat: the war on religion, and the persecution of Christianity.

It’s much easier to explain changes by referring to a single, malevolent cause than by having to understand a dozen complex demographic trends. Plus, if Christianity is declining because it’s being attacked, then that decline could be reversed if the attack were successfully repelled. Unlike what is actually happening — a slow, seemingly irrevocable decline in American Christianity — the right’s argument that “religious liberty” is under assault mixes truth and fantasy to provide a simpler, and more palatable, explanation for believers.

We think he is right that there’s a “constellation of reasons” for the decline of religion. While we think a decline in religion is highly desirable, we cannot help but notice that Leftist intolerance is among the reasons for it. 

Take, as an example, Christmas. The weird idea that there is a “War on Christmas” orchestrated by liberal elites — Starbucks cups in hand — is, on its face, ridiculous, even if it is widely held on the right. Shop clerks saying “Happy Holidays” aren’t causing the de-Christianization of Christmas — they’re effects of it. Roughly half of Americans celebrate Christmas as a cultural, not a religious, holiday: Santa Claus and Christmas trees, not baby Jesus in a manger. So that’s what businesses celebrate. It’s capitalism, not conspiracy.

And long may it flourish!

Unfortunately, even if the war on religion is fictive, the “defense” against it is very real and very harmful. This year alone, 17 states introduced legislation to protect “religious freedom” by exempting not just churches and religious organizations (including bogus ones set up to evade the law) from civil rights laws, domestic violence laws, even the Hippocratic Oath, but also private individuals and for-profit businesses. Already, we’ve seen pediatricians turn children away because their parents are gay, and wife-abusers argue that it’s their religious duty to beat their spouses, and most notoriously that multimillion-dollar corporations like Hobby Lobby can have religious beliefs that permit them to refuse to provide health insurance to their employees on that basis.

Meanwhile, the “war on religion” narrative appears to be gaining ground.

The fining of Christian business men and women for refusing to bake cakes or supply floral decoration for gay weddings makes the “narrative” plausible enough. (See eg. here and here.)

According to data from the Public Religion Research Institute, 61 percent of white evangelicals believe that religious liberty is being threatened today. (Only 37 percent of non-white Christians believe this, suggesting that what’s really happening is an erosion of white Christian hegemony; the “browning of America” goes hand in hand with the de-Christianizing of America.) They believe they have lost the culture war, and even that LGBT people should now pity them.

In other words, “religious liberty” is not merely a tactic: it is a sincerely held belief among the religious right, which, not coincidentally, feeds into the belief that we are living in the End Times — something an astonishing 77 percent of American evangelicals believe.

We shouldn’t think of Kim Davis and her ilk as motivated by hate. Actually, they are motivated by fear, which is based in reality but expressed in fantasy. Christianity is, in a sense, losing the war — but the fighters on the other side aren’t gay activists or ACLU liberals but faceless social forces of secularization, urbanization, and diversification.

There’s not really a villain pulling the strings of social change, but like the God concept itself, mythic thinking creates a personification of evil who is fighting the war on religious liberty, the war on Christmas, the war on Christianity. These malevolent evildoers are like a contemporary Satan: a fictive embodiment of all of the chaotic, complex forces that threaten the stability of religious order.

Leftists really do have “a sincerely held belief” that they are on “the right side of history” – as Obama likes to say he is. History itself, according to Marxist dogma, is a force moving inexorably towards global collectivism. Leftism is itself a religion. (See our much read essay Communism is Secular Christianity, January 14, 2015, listed under Pages in our margin.) How many adherents does it have world-wide? For all we know, they outnumber the 1.6 billion Muslims, and the 2.2 billion Christians.

Jay Michaelson believes that inexorable forces determine the direction of human affairs; that human agency has little or nothing to do with it.

He “mixes truth and fantasy”. Christianity may well be a declining religion. We hope it is. It did much harm in its time, and we cannot see that its fading away is a regrettable loss to humankind. And the fading away of Islam would be an enormous boon. An abandonment of old religious beliefs generally would remove a major cause of conflict. But other than Islam, they no longer pose a serious threat.

The serious threat comes from the Left. The Left is in power in most of the institutions of the West, most notably and dangerously in the media, the academy, and above all the executive branch of government of the United States. The Left, in the person of journalists and educators teach and preach statism and collectivism, and the Obama administration forces its will on the nation by executive order.

They are “pulling the strings of social change”. Many of them may believe – just as Christians and Muslims do – that what they are doing is to achieve good ends. They may not all be malevolent in intention. But they are doing much harm nonetheless, by making war on personal liberty.

Donald Trump is not the sort of steady conservative we hoped would be the Republican front runner for the presidency.

But he does say, loud and clear, one thing after another that urgently needs to be said. (And he is not overly religious,)

So while we cannot help laughing as he destroys Leftist taboos in his swaggering manner, we seriously welcome much of what he says.

We are in agreement with what David Horowitz writes about him at Front Page:

Presidential candidate Donald Trump has called for a moratorium on Muslim immigration until we can figure out why Islamic terrorists have been able to enter our country and devised ways to protect ourselves. This has caused the left and right establishments to dogpile on Trump. Echoing the sentiments of virtually all Democrats and many Republicans, a Washington Post editorial has declared that Trump’s proposal disqualifies him as a candidate because in the Post’s view what he recommends is unconstitutional and therefore un-American. But President Obama has issued executive orders – as it happens orders that sabotage our borders – that he himself has called unconstitutional (“I don’t have the authority to stop deportations”).  Has the Post editorialized that this is un-American and disqualifies him for the presidency? Has it called for Obama to be impeached? Have Democrats ridiculed Obama for his un-American prescriptions?

Consider the nature of the threat. A 2009 “World Opinion” survey by the University of Maryland showed that between 30% and 50% of Muslims in Jordan, Egypt and other Islamic countries approved of the terrorist attacks on America and that only a minority of Muslims “entirely disapproved” of them. ISIS has acknowledged its plans to use refugee programs to infiltrate its terrorists into the United States and other infidel countries. In Minneapolis we have a Somali refugee community many of whose members have returned to Syria to fight for ISIS. Other Muslim immigrants like Major Hassan and Tashfeen Malik have carried out barbaric acts of terror here at home. Today Muslim terrorists are using assault rifles and pipe bombs, but we know they have Sarin gas and other chemical weapons which they might use tomorrow.

The terrorists inexorably arrive along with the other immigrants, no one in authority apparently knowing who’s who. Who, then, in his right mind does not think that Muslim immigration poses a serious security threat to us?

The outrage against Trump should properly have been directed at our president who refuses to identify the enemy as Islamic terrorism, who has opened the door to nuclear weapons and ballistic missiles to the Islamic America-haters in Iran, whose policies have created the vacuums that ISIS has filled, and who even after Paris and San Bernardino is determined to bring 100,000 immigrants from Syrian war zones to our unprotected shores. This outrage is missing and it is precisely because it is missing that Trump’s unconstitutional* proposal resonates with so many rightly concerned Americans. When the man in charge of our security is by general consensus out to lunch in regard to fighting the war on Islamic terror, or protecting us at home, a proposal like Trump’s, which at least recognizes the threat, is going to resonate with the public.

In middle of a crisis of national security, the Democratic Party seems to think that climate change and especially gun ownership are greater threats to our survival than the one that comes from hundreds of millions of Muslims who think America should be attacked and who believe the whole world should be put under medieval Islamic law. In the face of this threat, the Democratic Party and its leaders seem to have no problem with the fact that we have more than 350 “Sanctuary Cities” that are dedicated to sabotaging our immigration laws; that we have no southern border and as a result have 179,000 illegal alien criminals and who knows how many terrorists in our country today.

Once again we have Trump to thank for changing the surreal conversation about whether having a border at all is compatible with American values, and forcing people to focus on the dangers we face. Republicans are generally defenders of this country, but not in this controversy over Donald Trump. Would that they would use the same ridicule and outrage over the Democrats’ many betrayals of our country and its citizens through proposals to expose us to our enemies as they do over a proposal to protect us from them. Trump’s idea may be unconstitutional* and unworkable, but it springs from a desire that is honorable and patriotic. The appropriate response would be to propose alternatives that recognize the same dangers and serve the same ends but do so within constitutional limits.

Donald Trump’s great contribution is saying the unsayable; putting things on the table that would otherwise be buried; calling a spade a spade in a time when political correctness has made us unable to discuss things that have to do with our basic national survival.  This is the crux of the issue.  Every time he creates a controversy like this he also tells this country that its emperors, Republican and Democrat, have no clothes. That they prefer propriety over defending the country.  That they are dedicated only to keeping the lid on a cauldron of threat and challenge they have allowed to boil over.

The 2016 election will be a referendum on the defense of this country and its survival. Let’s see who answers the call.

* It would not be unconstitutional to bar Muslims from entering the United States.

The law says:

“Whenever the President finds that the entry of any aliens or of any class of aliens into the United States would be detrimental to the interests of the United States, he may by proclamation, and for such period as he shall deem necessary, suspend the entry of all aliens or any class of aliens as immigrants or non-immigrants, or impose on the entry of aliens any restrictions he may deem to be appropriate.”

We quote Paul Sperry’s article at Investor’s Business Daily, titled Can America Survive Obama’s Pro-Muslim Bias?:

In a new NPR interview, President Obama complains that “strains in the Republican party suggest that somehow I’m different, I’m Muslim, I’m disloyal to the country, which unfortunately is pretty far out there”.

Is it?

While there’s no evidence to suggest Obama is a practicing Muslim, there is plenty to suggest he is disloyal. He not only shares Muslim hatred for America and Israel, but actually sympathizes with the endless anti-Western grievances lodged by Muslim terrorists.

The reason the president won’t engage this enemy is because he sides with it, not because he can’t see it or understand it. It is not a matter of incompetence. It is a matter of bias.

If this sounds like betrayal, that is because it is.

Here is a bill of indictment:

Count 1:In 1995, in his first memoir, Obama shares the “rage” of his Kenyan Muslim grandfather who he claims was tortured by British colonizers, while exalting his Muslim-convert brother Roy, who swore off “the poisoning influences of European culture,” as “the person who made me proudest of all”.

Count 2:In 2004, in a little-noticed preface to his re-released memoir, the newly elected senator implied that America was punished for past wrongs on 9/11, writing that “history returned with a vengeance” on that terrible day.

Count 3:In 2006, in his second memoir, Obama vowed that he “will stand with” Arab and Pakistani Muslims to protect “their sense of security” should their community be implicated in another terror attack on America.

Count 4:In 2009, Obama in his first foreign speech apologized to world Muslims for the War on Terror, inviting banned Muslim Brotherhood leaders to sit on the front row of his Cairo address, while declaring “Islam is not part of the problem” and demanding that Israel give Palestinians “a state of their own”. 

Count 5:That same year, Obama stopped cold a major investigation of terror-supporting Muslim Brotherhood front groups and mosques following the successful prosecution of Brotherhood charities by U.S. attorneys.

Count 6:Then he ordered the FBI and Homeland Security to delete “jihad” from counterterrorism manuals and fire all trainers who linked terrorism to Islam.

Count 7:Obama vowed to close the Guantanamo Bay military prison and bring 9/11 terrorists to America, where they would enjoy full rights, including habeas corpus, in civilian courts.

Count 8:As Obama kicked off a two-day summit on combating generic “violent extremism”, he argued that Muslim terrorists have “legitimate grievances” that must be addressed.

Count 9:He also asserted that “the Muslim world has suffered historical grievances”, and blamed the rash of global terrorism in part on “a history of colonialism” in the Mideast, Africa and South Asia.

Count 10:At the National Prayer Breakfast, Obama told Christians to get off their “high horse” about Muslim terrorism and “remember the terrible deeds in the name of Christ” committed by Crusaders 1,000 years ago.

Count 11: He credited Muslims with “building the very fabric of our nation” and “the core of our democracy”.

Count 12:The president boycotted January’s world march against terrorism in Paris following the slaughter of anti-Islamist cartoonists by two French Algerians, in a shocking move that would have made Obama’s late hero, Algerian mujahedeen Frantz Fanon, proud.

Count 13:Obama agreed to release five Taliban commanders for a POW who he knew was a deserter and who may turn out to be a traitor.

Count 14: Obama removed sanctions on Iran’s ballistic missile program, despite overwhelming evidence by Israeli and U.S. intelligence showing that Tehran is developing nuclear weapons to wipe our closest and most trusted Mideast ally off the map.

Count 15:Obama broke his promise to 9/11 families to release the 28 pages documenting Saudi Arabian and other foreign Muslim sponsorship of the 9/11 attacks.

Count 16: The president insists on calling ISIS “ISIL” — which stands for the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant — because it includes “Palestine”, a slap at Israel.

Count 17: Despite his entire security team warning that such Muslim immigrants cannot be screened for terrorist ties and evidence that ISIS has infiltrated their ranks, Obama stubbornly insists on bringing another 10,000 Syrian refugees to the U.S.

Count 18: In the heat of the San Bernardino attacks, as bodies were being removed from the scene, Obama called a high-level security meeting to keep a lid on the Muslim connection.

Count 19: In his prime-time terrorism speech, the president spent half his time warning Americans not to blame Muslims.

Count 20: Obama insists on emptying Gitmo of terrorist prisoners, even after one of his earlier releases re-emerged as a leader of al-Qaida in the Arabian Peninsula.

Count 21: The Obama regime has invited members of Hamas and Muslim Brotherhood front groups to serve in the Homeland Security and State departments, and meet regularly with the attorney general, as well as the president and his security advisors in the White House.

Obama is hellbent on shuttering the detention camp and is queuing up for release another 17 dangerous al-Qaida terrorists, earlier classified as “forever detainees” due to the high threat they pose to America.

Americans should know that if we are attacked again in a major way in his remaining 13 months in office, Obama “will stand with” Muslims over Americans, meaning that he will continue to back off radical mosques, refuse to connect terrorism to Islam and continue to hold open the floodgates to mass Muslim immigration.

This president, who had Pakistani roommates in college, is more concerned about “their sense of security” than non-Muslims threatened by Muslim terrorism like the massacre carried out by the two Pakistani Muslims who attacked San Bernardino.

What if the enemy of the state is actually the head of state?

The bill of indictment, long and bad as it is, is incomplete. It does not, for instance, include Obama’s instruction to NASA to concentrate on reaching out to Muslims rather than to outer space; nor his close friendship with President Erdogan of Turkey; nor his persistent persecution of Israel; nor his long refusal to allow the assassination of Osama bin Laden and his reluctance in finally permitting it; nor – worst of all –  his fanatical wooing of Iran, in the course of which he has given the regime everything it has demanded, and swept away every impediment to its becoming a nuclear armed power.    

Sperry’s list is more than sufficient, however, to make the case. As we have been saying for years: Yes, the enemy of the state is actually the head of state.

Increasingly in recent years, European governments, NGOs, universities, and media organizations have been handing over positions of power to Muslim immigrants and their children …

So writes Bruce Bawer, who lives in Norway, in an article at Front Page on Norway’s conquest and colonization by Islam. It is conquest by invitation. Has such a thing ever happened before?

And this is from Breitbart, by Virginia Hale:

Sweden prides itself on being a “humanitarian superpower”, and it displays and polishes its halo via granting asylum, almost no questions asked, to anyone who claims to be from dangerous parts of the world. The country, with a population of eight million, is now taking more than 100,000 refugees per annum and it’s rising 20% year on year.

The country has a zero-tolerance attitude towards any scepticism of the country’s masochistic levels of immigration and politicians constantly denigrate native Swedes and their culture.

Mona Sahlin, a former leader of the currently ruling Social Democrats said she hated anything Swedish and that Swedes were jealous of immigrants because they have “a culture, an identity, a history” and that Swedes don’t, and Sweden’s previous Prime Minister Fredrik Reinfeldt said, last December, that Sweden belongs to immigrants, and not to Swedes.

Well, in less than 10 years, that will be literally true.

Multicultural Sweden is very different from the rainbow paradise Sweden likes to pretend, but the debate on immigration is so toxic that to criticise or question any aspect of it is toattract the attention of the violent “anti-fascist” thugs AFA and the self-proclaimed “Swedish Stasi”, Researchgruppen.

Sweden’s insanely thuggish “anti-fascist” organisations carry out their punishments of supposed “intolerant” and “hateful” people – basically anyone who questions Sweden’s current immigration policies, and members of the Sweden Democrats party which is just so obscenely fascist and offensive its immigration policy is to suggest it be brought in line with the rest of Scandinavia.

After AFA invaded an SD candidate’s home, beat him and carved a swastika on his forehead with a knife, ex-Prime Minister Reinfeldt said SD supporters “should not be surprised when things like this happen” because of their politics.

What is particularly bizarre is that even SD supporters and critics of Sweden’s immigration policy who are not ethnic Swedes are not immune to this kind of brutality either. Sweden Report, a blog by an American writer living in Sweden, gave an example of  this ludicrosity – that “anti-fascists” beat Nima Gholam Ali Pour, a politician of foreign descent, because of his membership of the Sweden Democrats party. He describes the incongruous scene:

Let’s just pause there for a second and ponder a very simple scene: A group of masked young white Swedes are kicking a dark-skinned man lying on the ground. But this is not a hate crime. In fact, it’s quite the opposite. The masked white Swedes are doing a good and noble thing for the antifascist cause, because the dark-skinned man on the ground is a contemptible racist.

Native Swedes tend to live in areas away from areas inhabited by migrants and so are removed from the fact that their immigration policies are actually harming the people – genuine asylum seekers fleeing persecution in the Middle East – they say they’re wanting to help.

Conservative newspaper Svenska Dagbladet carried a guest column by Swedish-Assyrian journalist Nuro Kino, who has won awards for his reporting on human rights issues highlighting the plight of minorities in Iraq and Syria. In his article he describes a trip to a Syrian man’s hairdressing salon where the hairdresser and other men in the salon, Christian Syrians and Assyrians who had fled religious persecution, voice passionate opposition to the Swedes’ policy of giving refugees purporting to be from Syria automatic permanent residency.

The men brandish an iPhone playing a video of the funeral of a religious leader, a black Islamic flag being flown by a man in the procession who vows, “We will do our utmost to fulfil your dream of an Islamic State!” and express horror that this is happening in Sweden.

One of the men recounts his cousin bumped into the al-Nusra member who killed his brother, in a nightclub in Sweden.  One asks “What’s with the Swedes? Why does not the government do anything? Why are these people not in jail? Will they really get to threaten us and get away with it? Anyone wishing for an Islamist state in Sweden will also demand that we all bow down to Islam or die, whether you are a Muslim who refuses to follow the extremists, Christian or atheist. That’s what we have fled!”

Another unfortunate incident, reported by Swedish daily newspaper Borås Tidning and translated by blogger Swedish Surveyor, took place in a Swedish language school for immigrants at the end of last month. Emergency services had to be called because a Muslim student told students to be quiet because “Allah forbids us from laughing.” Having given this glimpse of the sort of diversity he was going to be enriching the country with he proceeded to point at a woman and tell her, “You are a Christian, that is not good. Here everyone shall be Muslim and wear a veil.” … It emerged that the student had behaved in this way for some time, and though he was investigated by police and Sweden has incredibly stringent “hate crime” laws, the politically correct Swedish police decided that his actions did not constitute a crime.

The Swedes’ ever universalist outlook means they have kidded themselves to think they can allow huge swathes of people from war-torn countries to live in Sweden, indiscriminately, and that people will come to enjoy the illusory paradise of a multicultural society rather than bringing their wars and poverty to Sweden with them.

Their fear of being accused of Islamophobia has resulted in a system in which extreme behavior goes unchallenged, which has led to their job agency’s “assimilation guides” being found to be recruiting for ISIS, and their multicultural centre’s “expert on Islamophobia”, an Islamic convert, going on to defect to the Islamic State.

It may not be absurd to ask: how long will it be before ISIS takes over the government of Sweden? Of Norway? Of Western Europe? …