… gravely endangering national security.

Debbie Wasserman Schultz, erstwhile chairperson of the Democratic National Committee, employed Imran Awan, a Hezbollah-connected Muslim from Pakistan, as her information technology aide. She only fired him this week, the day after he was arrested at an airport just before boarding a plane to Lahore last Monday (July 24, 2017).

From Conservative HQ by George Rasley:

Imran Awan, the House Democrat’s information technology staffer … has been apprehended at Dulles Airport trying to flee to his native Pakistan. …

FBI agents seized smashed computer hard drives from the home of Florida Democratic Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz’s information technology (IT) administrator …

Yet another crook associated with the gang was welcomed by Democrats to deal with their political secrets:

And it is very interesting how the car dealership’s finances were strangely interwoven with those of the U.S. House of Representatives. A car-dealing associate who was owed money by the brothers, Rao Abbas, also a Muslim, was placed on the congressional payroll.

Abbas is listed as the IT professional for former Democratic Representative Patrick Murphy, a then-member of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence and its Subcommittee on Department of Defense, Intelligence and Overhead Architecture and (irony alert) Subcommittee on the NSA and Cybersecurity.

Their lender of funds, Dr. Ali Al-Attar was also a crook and a link to Hezbollah:

Philip Giraldi, a former Central Intelligence Agency officer, wrote that Dr. Ali Al-Attar “was observed in Beirut, Lebanon conversing with a Hezbollah official” in 2012–shortly after the loan was made. …

In  2009, his medical license was suspended by Maryland for separate instances of billing patients and insurance companies for unneeded services.

While practicing medicine in Maryland and Virginia he allegedly defrauded Medicare, Medicaid and insurance companies by billing for non-existent medical procedures. The FBI raided his offices in 2009 and the Department of Health and Human Services sued his business partner in 2011.

In November 2010, the Maryland State Board of Physicians brought charges of “unprofessional conduct in the practice of medicine and failure to cooperate in a lawful investigation”.

Attar was indicted in March 2012 on separate tax fraud charges after the IRS and FBI found he used multiple bank accounts to hide income. He fled back to Iraq to avoid prison …

The Awan brothers worked for more than 30 House and Senate Democrats, as well as Rep. Debbie Wasserman-Schultz. The substantial scandal has raised questions about who may have been passed data which the Awans had access to, given Pakistan’s history of collaborating with a number of foreign countries that have demonstrated past willingness to influence U.S. politics.

But here’s where it gets scary.

Gets scary? We are already spooked, and now dig our nails into our palms:

These Muslim staffer’s services were so important to the Democrats, that on March 22, 2016, eight Democrat members of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence issued a letter, requesting that their staffers be granted access to Top Secret Sensitive Compartmented Information (TS/SCI). Of those that signed the letter were representatives Jackie Speier (CA) and Andre Carson (IN), the second Muslim in Congress, both of whom employed the Awan brothers.

The brothers were also employed by members of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence and the House Committee on Foreign Affairs, such as: Jackie Speier (D-CA), Andre Carson (D-IN), Joaquín Castro (D-TX), Lois Frankel (D-FL), Robin Kelly (D-IL), and Ted Lieu (D-CA).

Lieu has since openly called for leaks by members of President Trump’s administration despite the fact that he may until recently have been under surveillance by a foreign entity …

It’s the old story: the Left accuses the Right of whatever wrongs they are themselves committing. Their accusations are a sure sign of their own guilt.

One bombshell that has been all but ignored by the main stream media is that Imran Awan had access to Debbie Wasserman Schultz’s iPad password, meaning that the brothers also had direct access to the notorious DNC emails.

Why has none of this made the front page of The Washington Post, New York Times or the lead segment of the ABC, CBS, NBC or CNN evening news? ..

We know why. Those “news” reporters will cover up any and every crime committed by the the Democratic Party.

The House of Representatives, and especially the Capitol Police whose job is generally viewed as protecting Members from embarrassment, not counter-espionage, cannot be trusted to conduct a full and politics-free investigation of this national security disaster.

It is time this investigation moves beyond bank fraud and laptop theft to became a national security investigation with the FBI and counterintelligence agencies replacing the politics-tainted Capitol Police as the lead agency investigating how House Democrats handed over the backdoor to the House computer network to a Hezbollah and ISI connected cell that was paid some $5 million by the US government and then laundered the money through a car dealership and a crooked Iranian doctor.

Maybe when the FBI finishes looking for evidence that President Trump  – did what? – danced on a bed in a Russian hotel with Vladimir Putin and a bunch of micturating whores or something like that while the two of them plotted to make Hillary Clinton lose the election last November, they will get round to looking into this HUGE POLITICAL SCANDAL.

.

.

Imran Awan with a Democrat friend

…. is that people have no issue.

People of Europe, people of the West in general, and people of Japan, have no children.

“The people who built our modern world are going out of business – voluntarily,” Mark Steyn tells all who will listen, in this video published yesterday (July 23, 2027).

He impresses on his listeners that he is speaking of present fact, not making a prediction.

On the bad side, the Muslims migrating into Europe and the West (not into Japan which is dying as a purely Japanese nation) are having many children.

“This demographic transformation and substitution” is the most important issue of our time.

And, as Mark Steyn says, the media don’t – won’t – even mention it. (In America, the media prefer to concentrate on making up ludicrous scandals involving President Trump, in the hope of destroying his presidency. Meanwhile, however, President Trump himself is aware and concerned that our civilization is under threat, as he showed in his great speech in Warsaw.)

.

So most of the more knowledgable, more enlightened, more inventive nations of the world are choosing to die.

No children! It is an overwhelmingly bleak thought. Could any prospect be more desolate? Could there be a greater loss? It means, of course, the loss of our civilization.

A couple of lines from an old song (composer unknown), The Maidens’ Song, come to mind, hauntingly:

Tell me now what beauty’s for,

What is the use of the cradle?                                                                                             

The free exercise of any religion is not a license to break existing laws. The free exercise of religion is not a free pass to commit treason or subversion or sedition. The Constitutional guarantee of the free exercise of a religion does not allow the adherents of that religion to commit violence in its name and in accord with its teachings. When they crafted the First Amendment, the Founding Fathers did not envision a religion that mandated warfare against and the subjugation of unbelievers; nor did they intend to lace the Constitution or Bill of Rights with time bombs that would ultimately destroy the republic they were trying to create.

Robert Spencer writes at Jihad Watch:

By nine votes, 217 to 208, the House of Representatives on Friday [July 21, 2017] voted down a proposal to identify “Islamic religious doctrines, concepts or schools of thought” that jihad terrorists use.

Twenty Republicans joined the solid Democratic bloc to vote down this measure, which Muslim Representative Keith Ellison (D-MN) termed “wrongheaded” and fought hard to defeat. It’s hard to believe that there would be 217 votes against understanding the ideology that motivates and incites jihad violence, but that testifies to the power of the “Islamophobia” victimhood lobby today.

The measure would have directed the Defense Department to carry out:

… strategic assessments of the use of violent or unorthodox Islamic religious doctrine to support extremist or terrorist messaging and justification.

There is nothing “unorthodox” about jihad violence in Islamic law and doctrine. Yet even though this specification that the Islamic doctrines to be studied were “unorthodox” allowed for support from those who hold that jihad terror is a twisting and hijacking of the religion of peace, that wasn’t good enough. According to Politico:

[The proposal received] heavy criticism from Muslim lawmakers serving in Congress, Muslim interest groups and the American Civil Liberties Union, who say the proposal would unfairly target Muslims.

Ellison added:

If you have an amendment that says we’re going to study one religion and only one, we’re going to look at their leaders and put them on a list – only them – and you are going to talk about what’s orthodox practice and what’s unorthodox, then you are putting extra scrutiny on that religion.

Yes, you are.

And there is a reason for that: 30,000 jihad attacks committed in the name of Islam and in accord with its teachings since September 11, 2001.

No one religion has anything approaching that kind of record of death and destruction. So why shouldn’t we put extra scrutiny on that religion?

The Muslim Brotherhood-linked Ellison also claimed that the measure was “abridging the free exercise of that religion”. 

Yes, again – insofar as the free exercise of that religion involves bombs, AK-47s, machetes, and the like. The free exercise of any religion is not a license to break existing laws. The free exercise of religion is not a free pass to commit treason or subversion or sedition. The Constitutional guarantee of the free exercise of a religion does not allow the adherents of that religion to commit violence in its name and in accord with its teachings. When they crafted the First Amendment, the Founding Fathers did not envision a religion that mandated warfare against and the subjugation of unbelievers; nor did they intend to lace the Constitution or Bill of Rights with time bombs that would ultimately destroy the republic they were trying to create.

Nor does studying the motivating ideology of jihad terrorists restrict the practice of Islam by peaceful Muslims in any way.

If these peaceful Muslims are as appalled by jihad terrorism as Islamic groups in the U.S. profess to be, why wouldn’t they welcome an attempt to address this alleged misuse of their religion, and support this proposal?

The sponsor of the measure, Rep. Trent Franks (R-AZ), noted correctly:

Right now, there is a certain spectrum within the Islamist world that is at the root of the ideological impulse for terrorism. … Ironically, Muslims are the prime targets of these groups. To suggest that this is anti-Muslim is a fallacy, and I think that anyone who really understands it knows that. … We’ve worked very hard to protect the religious freedom for everybody. But it is important that we empower America to identify those heroic Muslims within the world that will help us begin to delegitimize this ideology of global jihad.

His appeal was to no avail. Ellison would not number himself among the “heroic Muslims” who would “help us begin to delegitimize this ideology of global jihad”. He said of Franks and his measure:

This is the wrong way to do what he’s trying to do.

He didn’t offer any specifics about what the right way might be.

With Ellison leading the way, 217 members of the House of Representatives, including 20 Republicans, chose denial and willful ignorance instead of knowledge of the beliefs, motives and goals of the jihadis who have vowed to destroy us. That’s just asking to be defeated.

We regret that this proposal was turned down.

The passionate opposition to it on the part of Keith Ellison shows how afraid Muslim leaders are of non-Muslims getting to know the truth about Islamic ideology: that it is supremacist, totalitarian, misogynistic, homophobic, anti-Semitic, and cruel.

Muslims are the chief victims of Islam. They are greatly to be pitied. 

To be born a female into Islam is to be born to endless suffering – for millions, along these lines: genital destruction; the harsh “education” of the madrassa; living much of her waking life concealed inside a tent; forced marriage; no rights over her children; liable to be divorced by a mere statement of repudiation. If she suffers the violence, pain and humiliation of rape, she is likely also to suffer being stoned to death or buried alive, because her rape “dishonors” her family; not because she is guilty of wrong-doing, but because she is a walking sexual organ which has been made impure.

Western feminists – who complain bitterly if (that ever rarer thing) a male partner inflicts suffering on them by not helping them enough with household chores – see nothing to criticize in all that.

In Europe, citizens outraged by the horror of Islamic doctrine, have been penalized for quoting passages from the Koran.

The Koran proves that  Islam is supremacist, totalitarian, misogynistic, homophobic, anti-Semitic, and cruel.

There is no peaceful Islam. Muslims who live peacefully are not doing their religious duty. Jihad – taking action to conquer the non-Muslim world – is commanded.

There is no reforming Islam.  As the ex-Muslim Armin Navabi says, “The only way to reform Islam is to get rid of Islam“.

If there is an ideology that can reasonably be argued to be even worse than Nazism, that ideology is Islam. It is certainly at least as bad.

The more people know about Islam, and the more about Islam they know, the more likely they are to resist its advance and save our civilization from it.

That’s why a proposal that federal lawmakers learn something about it should have been accepted.

As usual, a bunch of useful political idiots did the dumb thing and turned it down.

They will go on chanting in mindless chorus, “Islam is a religion of peace.”

And it will not trouble them in the least that the First Amendment is being outrageously exploited to ends entirely opposite to those envisaged by the Founders.

How did the West become so stupid?

… to worthier tribes?

On Christmas Eve 2014, a former Prime Minister of Sweden, Fredrik Reinfeldt, said on Swedish TV that Sweden belongs to “the immigrants”, not to the Swedes.

We quote a report by Speisa (Sweden):

The former prime minister now claims that Sweden’s borders are fictional and that Sweden belongs to the immigrants who come here – not the Swedes. …

– It is a choice of what country Sweden should be, Reinfeldt told TV4.

– Is this a country that is owned by those who have lived here for three or four generations [sic!] or is Sweden what people who come here in mid-life makes it to be? he asked rhetorically.

– For me it is obvious that it should be the latter and that it is a stronger and better society if it may be open, said Reinfeldt. …

He went even further, claiming that Sweden’s borders are only imaginary.

– What is Sweden? Is this country owned by those who lived here for four generations or those who invented borders? he said condescending[ly].

Then he said that the Swedes are uninteresting as an ethnic group and that it is instead the immigrants that create the new Sweden.

He may be right that “the Swedes are uninteresting as an ethnic group” – unexpected as it is to hear a leader of them say so. No boring old patriotism for him! Patriotism? What is patriotism in the West these days but xenophobia, bigotry, racism, and – considering which immigrants in particular he is talking about without putting a name to them – “Islamophobia”?

But is being “uninteresting” a reason for the Swedish nation to wipe itself out?

What makes a people “interesting”? Fredrik Reinfeldt seems to think the Islamic religion does the trick. So “interesting” in this context means primitive, savage, cruel, intolerant, misogynistic, homophobic, supremacist, and totalitarian.

Nice liberal values à la mode, Mr. Reinfeldt!

Recently (July 16, 2017), Angela Merkel, Chancellor of Germany, doomed the country she leads to self-extinction by the Swedish method.

From Deutsche Welle (Germany’s public international broadcaster) online:

German Chancellor Angela Merkel refused to place an upper limit on refugees that the country accepts, speaking in an annual interview broadcast on Sunday.

Distancing herself from the position of her conservative Bavarian sister party, the Christian Social Union (CSU), Merkel, who leads the Christian Democratic Union (CDU), said placing a limit on refugees was not the way forward.

“As far as an upper limit is concerned, my position is clear: I will not accept it,” she said …

Reinfeldt, Merkel, and almost all the other European political leaders believe that to let their countries go to the Muslim invaders is the height of moral virtue.

The international Left, including the Democratic Party of the US – and of course Islam – agree with them.

So why would anyone be surprised that they despise the patriotic leader, President Trump, for wanting to make America great again?

A Canadian Muslim traitor, Omar Khadr, has recently been awarded $10.5 million “compensation” by the government of the country he betrayed, which is led at present by the Islam-loving leftist, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau.

The award was given sneakily in an out-of-court settlement. Determined to do this evil thing, while being fully aware that it was evil, the government avoided the publicity of process in open court.

We posted our article about this shocking case, Reward for treason, on July 5, 2017.

We now quote from an article at Gatestone by Ruthie Blum, which brings more information about the Muslim traitor to light. It shows that far from his having been “tortured” – the alleged abuse for which it is said he deserves compensation – he was given extremely expensive medical treatment and nursed like a baby at Guantanamo.

His father too was a traitor to Canada, and another Canadian leftist Prime Minister saved him from punishment in Pakistan and brought him back to safety in the country he had betrayed.  

The Khadr family is obviously very wealthy. How much of Omar Khadr’s gift from the Canadian tax-payer of $10.5 million will go –  as much of the family wealth has already gone – to funding Islamic terrorism?  

Khadr is the son of a Palestinian mother and an Egyptian father (Ahmed Khadr), who had strong ties to the Muslim Brotherhood, and became one of Osama bin Laden’s loyal lieutenants. After 9/11, Ahmed Khadr was placed on the FBI’s most-wanted list in relations to the attacks. He was arrested in Pakistan in 1995 on suspicion of financing the suicide bombing at the Egyptian Embassy in Islamabad, in which 16 people were killed. Protesting his innocence, he went on a hunger strike, and the Canadian government, then headed by Liberal Prime Minister Jean Chrétien, rallied behind him.

While on a trade mission to Pakistan, Chrétien appealed to Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto, and a few months later, Ahmed was released from prison and sent back with his family to Toronto. However, according to the New York Post, the Khadr clan soon returned to Pakistan, where Ahmed Khadr resumed his connections with al Qaeda and the Taliban. Young Omar Khadr not only met with the leaders of these terrorist groups, but lived with his parents and siblings in the bin Laden family compound, attending al Qaeda training camps, which his father — who was killed in 2003 — partly funded.

The report continued:

A month before he joined an al Qaeda cell in 2002, Omar was sent by his father for private instruction in explosives and combat… [where he] learned to launch rocket-propelled grenades and became skilled at planting improvised explosive devices that were used to blow up US armored vehicles in Afghanistan.

In his interrogation about the incident that led to his arrest and subsequent incarceration at Guantanamo, Omar Khadr said he had been on a suicide mission “to kill as many Americans as possible”.

This did not prevent the U.S. military from flying an ophthalmologist to the Bagram Air Base – where was being treated for wounds he sustained while fighting American and Canadian soldiers – to save his eyes and keep him from going blind.

That can bear repeating. While Omar Khadr, the al-Qaeda terrorist whose mission and accomplishment was to kill Canadians and Americans, was being held at Guantanamo, the U.S. military flew an ophthalmologist to where he was being treated for wounds that he sustained while fighting American and Canadian soldiers, “to save his eyes and keep him from going blind”.

Is that a definition of torture? Saving the enemy’s eyesight?

It is bitterly ironic in the light of the fact that one of Khadr’s victims, the American soldier Layne Morris, was blinded by Khadr with a grenade.

Nor did it cause Omar to experience gratitude on the one hand, or remorse on the other. On the contrary, as military court documents revealed, when he was informed that [the American soldier he had attacked, Wayne Speer] had died, he said he “felt happy” for having murdered an American. He also said that whenever he remembered killing Speer, it would make him “feel good”. 

And now, this monster, on whom undeserved benefits have already been heaped, is further rewarded for his treachery and murder by being made richer; and again made “very happy” by having the government of Canada, representing the people of Canada, humbly apologize to him. For what?

This is a miscarriage of justice so egregious, so destructive of the very idea of justice, that it can burn the mind of every decent citizen of every country under the rule of law, if any such country with such citizens still exists.

Is Canada in uproar about it?

The Muslim traitor’s victims were American soldiers.

Are United States citizens in uproar about it?

Have the people of the West, whose ancestors built our powerful, rich, brilliant civilization on the idea of the rule of law protecting the liberty of every individual, now become quivering infants when faced by the world’s bully, Islam?

Pat Condell, in this video released July 11, 2017, tells Muslim immigrants into Europe how contemptible, stupid and disgusting they are. His description is accurate. But then he says that the politicians who allowed them to come and rape Europe will – at last! – be voted out of power and Europe will be saved.

We very much appreciate and agree with most of what he says – but who and where are these politicians who will save Europe?

It will not be long now before the women (of both or all sexes) who govern Europe will be replaced by men.

No, not men who are so wicked as to be white.

These men –

The women are letting them take over.

American Muslims who declare themselves to be against “white supremacists” of the “far right” need to answer a question:

In what do they differ from Islam?

They are both supremacist movements.

They both hate homosexuals.

They both hate Jews.

They both look down on Blacks.

They both demote women.

They are both intolerant of opposing opinion.

They both use violence as a first resort.

The only difference between them is in their numbers and consequent seriousness of threat. One counts its members as a billion plus, the other in … tens? One threatens the whole world, the other an occasional individual or small group.

They sing the same song.

Yesterday (July 6, 2017) President Trump said in the speech he gave in Poland:

The fundamental question of our time is whether the West has the will to survive. Do we have the confidence in our values to defend them at any cost? Do we have enough respect for our citizens to protect our borders? Do we have the desire and the courage to preserve our civilization in the face of those who would subvert and destroy it? 

Our citizens did not win freedom together, did not survive horrors together, did not face down evil together only to lose our freedom to a lack of pride and confidence in our values. We did not and we will not. We will never back down. 

Giulio Meotti writes at Gatestone:

In a historic speech to an enthusiastic Polish crowd before the meeting of the G20 Summit leaders, US President Donald Trump described the West’s battle against “radical Islamic terrorism” as the way to protect “our civilization and our way of life”.  ,,,

After an Islamist suicide-bomber murdered 22 concert-goers in Manchester, including two Poles, Poland’s prime minister, Beata Szydło, said that Poland would not be “blackmailed” into accepting thousands of refugees under the European Union’s quota system. She urged Polish lawmakers to safeguard the country and Europe from the scourges of Islamist terrorism and cultural suicide:

Where are you headed, Europe? Rise from your knees and from your lethargy, or you will be crying over your children every day.

A few days later, the European Union announced that it would begin proceedings to punish Poland, Hungary and the Czech Republic for their refusal to accept [Muslim] migrants …

These Central- and Eastern European countries know that Western Europe’s multiculturalism has been a recipe for terror attacks, for a start.

As Ed West of The Spectator noted:

Central Europe, chiefly Poland, Hungary and the Czech Republic, remain largely safe from the terror threat … It is precisely because the reasons for this are so obvious that they cannot be mentioned. Poland is 0.1 percent Muslim, most of whom are from a long-settled Tartar community, Britain is 5 percent, France 9 percent and Brussels 25 percent, and those numbers are growing.

What is presumably “obvious” here is that Poland and Hungary are not hit by Islamic terror attacks because they have very few Muslims, while Belgium and UK it is the reverse. Europe would probably [no, certainly – ed] have been safer if it had followed Eastern Europe’s example.

Eastern Europe not only shows a greater understanding of Western culture than Western Europe does; these Eastern countries have also been far more generous to NATO, the bulwark of their independence and security. Culture and security go hand-in-hand: if you take your own culture and civilization seriously, you will be ready to defend them.

A brief look at the NATO’s members’ military spending as a percentage of GDP shows that Poland meets the 2% target, unlike all the Western European countries. Only five of NATO’s 28 members – the U.S., Greece, Poland, Estonia and the U.K. – meet the 2% target. Where is France? And Belgium? And Germany? And The Netherlands? …

Poland – unlike Belgium, Italy and other European countries – is not a “free rider” but a trustworthy partner to its US ally. Poland showed loyal support to the United States both in Afghanistan and Iraq, where its troops fought the Taliban and helped to topple Saddam Hussein.

Which is why –

… President Trump selected Poland, a country that fought both Nazism and Communism, to call on the West to show a little willingness in its existential fight against the new totalitarianism: radical Islam.

The international Left is not against totalitarianism. It never has been. The Democratic Party is now a party of the far left.

The existential fight for our civilization, the defense of it “at any cost” that President Trump has called for, is a fight not only against “radical Islam”, but against the Left.

In America, the fight for our civilization is a fight against the Democratic Party.

For centuries in Europe the Christian idea that everyone should love everyone else, forgive any and all offense, was honored more in the breach than the observance. The doctrine of pity, mercy, humility and self-denial was taught by the Catholic and Protestant churches, while they oppressed, imprisoned, tortured, and burnt to death countless men, women and children. For a thousand years and more Europe practiced blatant, official, Christian hypocrisy.

Now, according to recent (April 2017) research by The Telegraph, fourteen of the 23 least religious countries in the world are European. Poland “stands out against the rest of Europe, with 86 per cent answering ‘yes’ to the question “do you feel religious?” Only “around three in 10 Britons feel religious” (while “56 per cent of Americans” do).

But now, when Europe no longer preaches the doctrine, it is at last officially practicing it.

Almost the entire continent is martyring itself.

Giulio Meotti writes at Gatestone:

September 2015. Thousands of Syrian migrants crossing the Balkan route were heading toward Germany. Chancellor Angela Merkel was on the phone with Interior Minister Thomas de Maizière, talking about a number of measures to protect the borders, where thousands of policemen were secretly located along with buses and helicopters. De Maizière turned for advice to Dieter Romann, then head of the police. “Can we live with the images that will come out?” de Mazière asked. “What happens if 500 refugees with children in their arms run toward the border guards?”

De Maiziére was told that the appropriate use of the measures to be taken would have be decided by the police on the field. When de Maizière relayed Romann’s response to the Chancellor, Merkel reversed her original commitment. And the borders were opened for 180 days.

“For historical reasons, the Chancellor feared images of armed German police confronting civilians on our borders,” writes Robin Alexander, Die Welt’s leading journalist, who revealed these details in a new book, Die Getriebenen (“The Driven Ones”). Alexander reveals the real reason that pushed Merkel to open the door to a million and a half migrants in a few weeks: “In the end, Merkel refused to take responsibility, governing through the polls.” This is how the famous Merkel’s motto “Wir schaffen das” was born: “We can do it.”

According to Die Zeit:

Merkel and her people are convinced that the marchers could only be stopped with the help of violence: with water cannons, truncheons and pepper spray. It would be chaotic and the images would be horrific. Merkel is extremely wary of such images and of their political impact, and she is convinced that Germany wouldn’t tolerate them. Merkel once said that Germany wouldn’t be able to stand the images from the dismal conditions in the refugee camp at Calais for more than three days. But how much more devastating would images be of refugees being beaten as they try to get to Austria or Germany?

Merkel’s refugee policy was not a masterpiece of humanitarian politics; it was dictated by the fear of television images spread all over the world. In so many key moments, it is the photograph that dictates our behavior: the image that dishonors us, that makes us cringe in horror.

Now, the main German sentiment that seems to be driving public opinion and politics is a dramatic sense of guilt. It is a “secular sin”, according to a new book by German sociologist Rolf Peter Sieferle that is topping the German bestseller list, “Finis Germania“.

The behavior of Germans during the current migrant crisis, however, is symbolic of a more general Western condition. On April 30, 1975, the fall of Saigon was part of a war fought and lost by the United States as much on television as in the Vietnamese forests and rice paddies. It ended with the the escape of helicopters from the rooftop of the US embassy.

In 1991, the imagery of the “highway of death” of Saddam Hussein’s bombed army of thugs fleeing a plundered Kuwait also shocked the public in the West, and led to calls for an immediate cessation of the fighting in Iraq and Kuwait. The result was that Saddam Hussein’s air force and Republican Guard divisions were spared; during the “peace” that followed, it was these troops who butchered Kurds and Shiites.

The photograph of a dead American soldier dragged through the streets of Mogadishu after the “Black Hawk Down” incident pushed President Bill Clinton to order a shameful retreat from Somalia. That photograph also led the US Administration to rethink and cancel plans to use US troops for United Nations peace operations in Bosnia, Haiti and other strategic points. General David Petraeus would describe America’s engagement in Afghanistan as a “war of perception”.

Even the suffering of our enemies disturbs us, in the humanitarian culture of the West. We are therefore increasingly amenable to policies of appeasement, censorship and retreat, in order not to have to face the possibility of such horribleness and actually having to fight it.

That is why radical Islam has been able to horrify the West into submission. We have paralysed ourselves. We censor the cartoons, the graphic photos of the terrorists’ victims and even the faces and names of the jihadists. The Islamic terrorists, on the other hand, are not publicity-seekers; they are soldiers ready to die and kill in the name of what they care about.

This week, the German media was shocked by the revelation that the German air force will probably come under fire during its Syrian mission. “Endangering German soldiers!” — with an exclamation point – wrote Bild, the largest-selling newspaper in Germany. The statement exposed the anxiety of what John Vinocur of the Wall Street Journal called a “country where the army and air force basically do not fight”. A pacifist Germany is now a source of trouble also for its own neighbors, such as Poland. “For centuries, our main worry in Poland was a very strong German army”, said former Polish Defense Minister Janusz Onyszkiewicz. “Today, we’re seriously worried about German armed forces that are too weak.”

The Western establishment censors images of our enemies’ crimes while giving prominence to our “guilt”. The French government censored the “gruesome torture” of the victims at the Bataclan Theater, who were castrated, disemboweled and had their eyes gouged out by the Islamist terrorists. It was a mistake: it was in the public interest to know exactly what enemy we are facing.

The FBI and Department of Justice released a transcript of the Orlando jihadist’s 911 call, but omitted all reference to the terror group ISIS and to Islam. These authorities did not want the public to know that Omar Mateen identified himself as an “Islamic soldier”.

The European Commission against Racism and Intolerance then told the British press it should not report when terrorists are Muslim.

The CEO of Twitter, Dick Costolo, suspended accounts that showed photographs of the beheading of John Foley, along with other Islamist beheadings and savagery. But Twitter did not mind being flooded by images of a little dead boy, Alan (Aylan) Kurdi on a beach.

The mainstream media in the US fought hard to lift the photo ban on military coffins during the war in Iraq. Its goal, apparently, was to humiliate and intimidate the public, to lower the support for the war.

Images, as in Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib, are published only if they amplify the West’s sense of guilt and turn the “war on terror” into something even more dangerous than the jihad causing the war.

Amnesty International’s Secretary General, Irene Khan – referring to concentration camps in the Soviet Union, where millions of people perished – infamously called Guantanamo “the Gulag of our time”. The result is to erase our enemy from our imagination. This is how the “war on terror” has become synonymous with lawlessness throughout the West.

Ten years ago, after the brave surge in Iraq, US soldiers discovered Al Qaeda’s torture chambers. No one – not ABC, not CBS, not the New York Times – published one photo of them; they just filled our eyes with naked bodies at Abu Ghraib.

We are utopian technophiles and, contrary to the traditional Western view that we are flawed human beings in a tragic world. We now believe in Mark Zuckerberg’s brave new world where no one should ever suffer and everyone should be happy and peaceful all the time. That is an exorbitant dream. For a short time we can afford it, as with Angela Merkel and Europe’s migrant crisis. Unfortunately, that fantasy will not last. The conflicts at our gates, together with our aversion to making hard choices, will exact a far higher price.