Pictures of the charming (?) outfits worn at the frivolous “Women’s March” against Donald Trump’s presidency – aka the”anti-pussygrab” protest – January 21, 2017:

Picture of the FGM hat that needs to be worn for a real pussy-grab protest:

The surgeons who mutilate girls’ genitals – as they customarily do in Islam – are the real pussy-grabbers.

A delightfully rib-tickling true story this, a farce in which half a dozen religions are involved.

The setting is a grand place sacred to Christians – a cathedral in Scotland.

The date of the farce is January 6, the twelfth night of the Christmas season. It is traditionally a night for joking, at least in the Anglophone world. Shakespeare has a bunch of naughty characters playing practical jokes in his play Twelfth Night. (Forbidden reading though  – “boko haram” – in the English departments of American universities, because Shakespeare is dead, white, and male, and could you think of any better reasons than those?)

Christians call January 6 “Epiphany”. The  Roman church decided sometime in the 4th century that “Jesus” was baptized by John the Baptist on that date.

It was also, Christians say, the date on which Three Magi (Zoroastrian priests) came to pay homage to the newly born “Baby Jesus”. (Which just goes to show Zoroastrians that Christianity wins – so there!)

Now the cathedral wasn’t just any old cathedral. It was St. Mary’s Episcopal Cathedral in Glasgow, and (says the Washington Times) “on its website the cathedral touts that it adheres to ‘liberal theology’ and engages in ‘ministry which is affirming, inclusive, open and non-judgemental’.”

So already we have four religions in play: Protestant Christianity of the British kind, the reigning sovereign being its head; Zoroastrianism, long since capitulated; and Marxism as coupled to Catholic Christianity in Latin America, under the name “liberation theology”.

Enter religion number five:

On that day holy to Christians, right there in the cathedral, a Muslim woman – on the invitation of the clergy – “read a passage from the Quran denying the divinity of Christ“.

It might be expected that the head of the faith in the United Kingdom of England and Scotland would and should raise an objection, call it an outrage, summon those responsible to explain why they did it and stand reproved if not condemned.

And, indeed, one of the Queen’s chaplains did object, in strong terms.

Breitbart reports:

The Scottish cathedral that allowed a girl to read a passage from the Quran denying the divinity of Christ should apologise to Christians “suffering dreadful persecution at the hands of Muslims”, the Queen’s chaplain has said. …

A [Muslim] girl sang Surah 19, which specifically denies that Jesus was the Son of God and says He should not be worshipped, during a service to St Mary’s Episcopal Cathedral in Glasgow.

Now the Rev Gavin Ashenden, one of the chaplains to Queen Elizabeth II, has said the reading could be described as “blasphemy”. …

In a letter to The Times, Rev Ashenden says:

Quite apart from the wide distress (some would say blasphemy) caused by denigrating Jesus in Christian worship, apologies may be due to the Christians suffering dreadful persecution at the hands of Muslims in the Middle East and elsewhere. To have the core of a faith for which they have suffered deeply treated so casually by senior Western clergy such as the Provost of Glasgow is unlikely to have a positive outcome. There are other and considerably better ways to build “bridges of understanding”.

He also wrote in a post for the Archbishop Cranmer blog that it was highly unlikely a Christian would be invited to proclaim the divinity of Christ at Friday prayers in a mosque.

There was no dialogue in the Epiphany Eucharist; only a refutation of what Christians hold most dear and upon which salvation depends. In over 30 years of interfaith conversations, I have never yet come across a Muslim community which allowed those passages in the Gospels acclaiming the divinity of Christ to be read in Friday prayers.

As outrage grew over the reading, the head of the Scottish Episcopal Church [David Chillingworth] said he was “deeply distressed at the widespread offence”, saying Christians cannot offend their own religion in the name of inter-faith dialogue.

He declared:

We approach others with open hearts but we stand in the truth of the gospel of our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ.

However, the cathedral’s provost, Kelvin Holdsworth, was unrepentant and even suggested that those who were offended were actually attacking him because he is gay.

So here now is the sixth religion: Political Correctness, affirming its doctrine of “anti-sexism”.

Kelvin Holdsworth wrote:

Having a recitation from the Qur’an in a Christian cathedral in worship is not a new thing. So it has indeed come as something of a surprise to find accounts of last week’s service appearing online and stirring up the most incredible pot of hatred I’ve ever encountered. This same Qur’anic reading has been given before in services and no outcry has happened. Is it because this is in a cathedral run by a gay man? Is it because the recitation was given by a young woman? Clearly those things are factors as they feature in some of the abuse.”

Oh yes, “clearly” that’s what this was all about! Not about Christianity, and not about the everlasting jihad of Islam against all who do not submit to its god. It was about being inclusive, open, and non-judgemental. Kelvin Holdsworth is not judging those who see a clash of doctrine in the event – which in any case should not be condemned for the decisive reason that it has happened before –  merely reproaching them for blasphemy against his religion.

So did the Established Church judge, or reproach, or reprove, or even just gently correct Mr. Holdsworth?

Not on your nelly, as the British used to say.

The Established Church of the United Kingdom fired the Queen’s chaplain.

Though they didn’t put it quite like that. They put it like this:

A Buckingham Palace spokesperson said: “Dr. Gavin Ashenden has tendered his resignation from the honorary position of Chaplain to The Queen. The Royal Household has accepted the resignation with immediate effect.”

You couldn’t make this stuff up. And you gotta laugh.

In general, American women are the most free, privileged, protected, cared-for, amply-fed, well-housed, choicely arrayed, luxury-supplied, opportunity-rich group of human beings that has ever existed. They are not excluded from any career. Wealth and power are available to them, and many women achieve both.

Yet millions of American women are discontented with their lot. It’s hard to imagine what they need but haven’t got. However, they invent sad tales of not getting paid as much as men, and complain that they themselves must pay for  their own aids and devices to prevent them conceiving children, and for children they do conceive being aborted. They want the state to pay for all that. This, they say, is one of their “rights”. They want to be wards of the state. They do not care to be free.

This was made apparent by the Women’s March for … Well, what it was for was not made clear. But it was certainly against the presidency of Donald Trump, who had been inaugurated the previous day. They hate him, and they wanted to show him, and show the world, that they hate him. That at least can be said with confidence about the purpose of the March.

It was not only an unintelligent affair, reflecting not at all well on the women’s ability to think, it was also a hideous and obscene sight. Many of the women dressed themselves up as giant vaginas. Some carried banners promoting love, as for instance “Love trumps Hate”. But the celebrity women who addressed the multitudes rather contradicted that. One of them, the rock-star Madonna, spoke of “blowing up the White House”.

Linda Sarsour was a chief organizer of the March. She calls herself a “racial justice & civil rights activist”. She is a director of the Arab American Association of New York, and a passionate advocate for sharia law. She tweets about how good it is – eg. “shariah law is reasonable and once u read into the details it makes a lot of sense.” 

So her remedy for the discontent of American women is to live as Muslim women do in those countries where sharia law is applied. 

What would this mean in practice?

A Pakistani woman, a professional writer, Khadija Khan, describes at Gatestone what Muslim women endure:

A bitter truth, often glossed over in the name of “tradition”, is the religious teachings and the responsibilities of a Muslim woman. Most glossed over is the violence that men are still allowed to inflict on their women in the name of their religion and culture on such a massive part of the planet.

This brutality not only takes place in ISIS-held territory but across most Muslim societies. All around you, you see women killed, molested, imprisoned, maimed and incarcerated while their men sugar-coat the abuse as “modesty”, “honor”, “divine law” or even “justice”.

In addition to warning would-be ISIS recruits of the horrors that await them if they jump onto the bandwagon of terrorist organizations, let us take a look into “normal” Muslim societies.

Women in Saudi Arabia, in the name of laws and “traditions”, are kept effectively non-existent. They are forced, outside the house to wear full-body covering, abayas. Most full coverings for women are black, which absorbs heat, and are made of non-porous cloth — not cotton — in the scorching heat.

Women are also not allowed to drive, they cannot leave the house without a male guardian, they are liable to be flogged, stoned to death or beheaded if found guilty of even the smallest infractions, and often, as in being raped, even if they are factually innocent. …

In Iran, women are forced to cover themselves and need a guardian to step outside the home, if they want to be “protected”. Bicycling is prohibited.

Women are also forced to live with an abusive husband, as dictated by abusive marital laws and social taboos.

Moral brigades by the name of Gasht e Ershad (“guidance patrol”) coerce females to behave “decently”. Now Sharia patrols and curbs against women also exist in England and France – an indication where these extremists want to drive the West.

In parts of France, women cannot go out onto the street “unaccompanied” or even enter a café. “Here,” men tell them, “we do things like in our home countries!”

In a province of Indonesia, Aceh, a woman, accused of being intimate with her boyfriend, is caned in front of a jeering crowd. Later, a photograph of the screaming woman is published as a token of pride for the men who had just exacted this “justice” – on her; no consequence for the boyfriend. It was a lesson to remind women to submit to their place in society.

Under the newly proposed Sharia laws, women are also forced to be accompanied by a male guardian to “protect” them. Banda Aceh also banned women from entertainment venues after 11pm unless they are accompanied by a male family member. Aceh district has also banned unmarried men and women from riding together on motorbikes.

Turkey last year presented a bill for tackling its widespread child-marriage issue: the Turkish government introduced a bill that pardons a rapist if he marries his victim. The victim is not consulted. After the rage of the masses, the bill was withdrawn – at least for the time being.

Turkish Prime Minister Binali Yildirim said at a news conference in Istanbul:

We are taking this bill in the parliament back to the commission in order to allow for the broad consensus the president requested, and to give time for the opposition parties to develop their proposals.

The government seems determined to bring it back after making some minor changes.

Many Muslim countries follow similar restraints, effectively keeping women under house-arrest. All forms of exploiting women are presented as divine law, sharia, in which women have no say, which they are unable to use in their own defense, and which they are forced to accept as their fate. …

In Pakistan, the hudood ordinance, promulgated in 1979 to curb outside-of marriage-sex, has actually turned out as a monstrosity for female rape victims.

The ordinance demands, under sharia law, that a rape victim be grilled in a court of law as if she is the perpetrator. She is asked to produce four male witnesses to prove her case or else she is booked as having committed adultery and having already confessed to the crime.

These are countries where men are not only permitted, but invited, to consider woman a pet to be killed, [or] burned with acid … to preserve a family’s “honor”.

These laws, put in place by the governments and the clergy, provide a safe escape for criminals, such as those who kill their women and claim it is in the name of “honor”.

A killer can be pardoned in court by the victim’s next of kin, who, thanks to much clan intermarriage, is usually a family member of the assailant as well. The judge, with the stroke of a pen, therefore lets these criminals walk free. …

Afghanistan remains perhaps the most brutal country in terms of women’s rights violations.

Farkhanda Malikzada, for instance, a 27-year-old seminary student accused by a fortune teller, a custodian of a shrine, of burning a Quran, was simply thrown to a hound-like mob of men who beat and burned her to death – in front of a number of police officers and cameras in broad daylight. Most of the identifiable assailants were never punished, while the fortune teller who unleashed this horror had his death sentence commuted. Investigators also revealed that Farkhanda might have questioned sexual orgies by the shrine’s custodians, who were later found inside the holy place with condoms and Viagra. …

Being covered in black, non-porous cloth in the desert heat; being stoned to death or beheaded; being confined to a house as a brood-mare and servant, effectively enslaved, unable to leave or earn an independent living, are the reality that millions of women are made to suffer every day – supposedly for their “protection”. …  These discriminations are imposed by the mullahs as religious obligations. …

The deeper horror is that all these abuses – child marriage, confinement, genital mutilation, rape, torture, and legal discrimination – have accomplices. These enablers are often well-meaning people from the West, “multiculturalists” who are reluctant to pass judgement on other people’s customs no matter how brutal they might be. What they are really doing, however, is providing crucial support for savage injustices either by sweeping them under the carpet or by defending barbarism as “cultural norms”.

Madonna – she who spoke of “blowing up the White House” (the implication being that this would destroy President Trump) – is an admirer of Fidel Castro.

So is the criminal professor, Angela Davis, another leading light of the discontented marching woman.

So they would like to live under a Castro government?

Humberto Fontova, writing at Townhall, depicts the life of women under Castro:

Rock-star Madonna — who headlined the Women’s March while surrounded by women, blacks, and especially black women – has often expressed her affection for Che Guevara. Her fondness for the co-founder of a totalitarian regime that outlawed rock music while jailing and torturing the most blacks and women in the modern history of the Western Hemisphere included Madonna’s tweeting the psychopathic mass-murderer and war-monger a “Happy Birthday!”  last year. …

Vintage Stalinist Angela Davis also headlined the Women’s March. Her devotion to the war-mongering mass-murderers  Fidel Castro and Che Guevara dates back decades — back to the Peace & Love years , when so many other  “peace-niks” and “flower-children” were similarly smitten.

She declared:

Fidel is the leader of one of the smallest countries in the world, but he has helped to shape the destinies of millions of people across the globe.

And another woman famous in the world of popular music also addressed the marchers:

Yoko Ono – famous peace-nik, women’s rights activist and Beatle-wife — also made the scene at Women’s March. Here you’ll find her worshiping the co-founder of a regime that  tortured the most women political prisoners in the modern history of the Western hemisphere, that brought the world closest to nuclear war, and that criminalized Beatles music. …

The regime co-founded by the idols of Women’s March headliners jailed and tortured 35,150 Cuban women for political crimes, a totalitarian horror utterly unknown—not only in Cuba—but in the Western Hemisphere until these icons of American “Women’s Rights Activists” assumed absolute power. …

Their prison conditions were described by former political prisoner Maritza Lugo. “The punishment cells measure 3 feet wide by 6 feet long. The toilet consists of an 8 inch hole in the ground through which cockroaches and rats enter, especially in cool temperatures the rat come inside to seek the warmth of our bodies and we were often bitten. The suicide rate among women prisoners was very high.” When suffering their tortures most of these women were in their 20’s. …

Thousands of Cuban women have drowned, died of thirst or have been eaten alive by sharks attempting to flee the horrors imposed on the Cuban people by the icons of the Women’s March.

But the marching women would prefer to live under the dictatorship of Castro than under democratically-elected Donald Trump?

Why yes. That is the only sense that can be derived from what they say so passionately.

They are used to getting what they want. They have everything the cornucopia of America can pour out for them, but their spokeswomen say that they’d be better off under sharia law, or in Cuba.

So why should they not have life under sharia law? Life under the Castro regime in Cuba?

And of course they can.

Nothing is  preventing them from going to live under sharia law –  in Pakistan, for instance. Nothing is stopping them from moving to Cuba.

We say: go, girls, go!

Only you will have to pay for your own passage to these utopias. Cruel President Trump will not allow the state to give you your fares.

What a shame! What a disgrace! What an oppression! What a tragedy!

Trump seems determined to fight radical Islamic terrorism, the greatest threat to the dignity and freedom of women all around the world. That already shows his commitment to liberty – especially liberty for women. Radical Islamic ideology is a universal threat. Wherever it is weakened or defeated, this helps liberate victims in other parts of the world, as well. 

To so many persecuted peoples in the Middle East, Trump’s presidency represents hope for a positive change.

From Gatestone, by Uzay Bulut:

On January 21, some women’s rights groups organized “Women’s Marches” in many cities across the Unites States and around the world. The rallies largely targeted recently-inaugurated U.S. President Donald Trump.

There were many speakers and participants. One, the actress Ashley Judd, read a poem in Washington D.C. that asked why “tampons are taxed when Viagra and Rogaine are not”.

As Ms. Judd talked about her devastating tragedy, thousands of Yazidi children and women were being forced into sexual slavery in Iraq and Syria at the hands of Islamic State (ISIS), and [made] available for purchase at sex-slave markets.

See our post, Who are/were the Yezidis, here. (The name can be transliterated as either “Yezidi” or “Yazidi”.)

ISIS attacked the Yazidi homeland of Shingal in Iraq on August 3, 2014; more than 9,000 Yazidis were killed, kidnapped, or sexually enslaved. Yazidis are a historically persecuted religious minority in the Middle East.

The Islamic State has institutionalized a culture of rape and sex-slavery. ISIS is waging a literal war against women. It has even published a “price list” of Yazidi and Christian girls – as young as one to nine years of age.

Picture via The Religion of Peace, where it is captioned:

The plight of Yazidi sex slaves and migrant rape victims was
overlooked by the recent “Women’s March” on Washington
– an ironic protest against Trump, partly for his views on
Sharia (which supports slavery) and Muslim migration.

Middle East scholar Raymond Ibrahim wrote about one Yazidi girl enslaved when she was 15 years old and endured months of captivity before she managed to escape:

I remember a man who looked at least 40 years old coming and taking a ten-year-old girl. When she resisted him, he beat her severely, using stones, and would have opened fire on her if she had not gone with him. Everything against her will. They used to come and buy the girls without a price, I mean, they used to tell us Yazidi girls, you are sabiya [spoils of war, sex slaves], you are kuffar [infidels], you are to be sold without a price,” meaning they had no base value. Some Yazidi girls were sold for a few packs of cigarettes. Every day I died 100 times over. Not just once. Every hour I died, every hour. … From the beating, from the misery, from the torture.

Mirza Ismail, founder and chairman of the Yezidi Human Rights Organization-International, said in his speech at the U.S. Congress:

According to many escaped women and girls to whom I spoke in Northern Iraq, the abducted Yazidis, mostly women and children, number over 7,000. Some of those women and girls have had to watch 7-, 8-, and 9-year-old children bleed to death before their eyes, after being raped by ISIS militia multiple times a day. ISIS militias have burned many Yezidi girls alive for refusing to convert and marry ISIS men. Why? Because we are not Muslims …

In December 2015, reports disclosed that ISIS was selling Yazidi women and children in the southeastern city of Gaziantep (or Antep), Turkey. Gaziantep has come to be known for the widespread Islamic State activities in the city.

Turkey, it needs to be mentioned, is a member of NATO.

However, this and many other threats did not stop women’s rights defenders in Gaziantep from protesting the Turkish government’s inaction in the face of IS activities.

An activist from the group “Gaziantep Democratic Women’s Platform”, Fatma Keskintimur, read a statement to the press, which said in part:

That the jihadi gangs fighting in Syria has received the biggest support from Turkey and that the cell houses they use… [are] known by everybody. Given what kind of a danger this situation creates for those who live in Antep, the uneasiness of people is intensifying every day.

Even under these conditions, women’s rights defenders in Turkey — particularly Kurds — kept struggling and protesting the government.

Last year, for example, the “Yazidi Women’s Assembly” commemorated August 3rd as “the day of international action against massacres against women and genocide”. Members of the pro-Kurdish Peoples’ Democratic Party (HDP) organized protests in many cities across Turkey to condemn the Yazidi genocide and show solidarity with the victims.

Safak Ozanlı, a former MP from the HDP, said that ISIS still held 3,000 Yazidi women as sex slaves:

ISIS sees women in Shingal and Kobane as war booty. The women who remain alive are sold to Arab sheikhs. We – as women – will stand united against ISIS and all dictators.

Members of the Alevi religious minority also supported the protest in Mersin. Zeynep Kaya Cavus, a leading Alevi activist, said that the Yazidi women are “kidnapped and enslaved as war booty and exposed to systematic sexual assaults and this is genocide against women”.

There are a few Americans, too, who are doing their best to help Yazidis, such as Amy L. Beam, a human rights activist who has been living with and advocating for Yazidis full time since 2014. Her book The Last Yezidi Genocide, is to be published shortly, and she is the executive director of “Amy, Azadi and Jiyan” (AAJ — “Friend, Freedom, and Life”), a humanitarian organization in Iraqi Kurdistan.

From which this is quoted:

Thousands of Yezidis have a long list of dead or missing family members under ISIS control in Iraq or Syria. Their psychology is very bad as they see very little international help on the one-year anniversary of the attack. Yazidi girls and women with their children … are subjected to repeated beatings and rape by ISIS fighters who each was given one girl as a war trophy. …

“One wishes that the women activists in the U.S. would raise their voices against the genocidal attacks on Yazidi women and children. But they have not. Women’s rights groups in the U.S. have not supported the women in Iraq and Syria who really are oppressed, kidnapped, and raped,” Beam told Gatestone.

Some of the participants of the women’s march in Washington claim that Trump will “take away their rights” – an accusation that many women who suffer under Islamist governments or organizations would find laughable. They are worried about being able to get an abortion … But it is not ayatollahs that have come to power in the U.S. Moreover, Trump seems determined to fight radical Islamic terrorism, the greatest threat to the dignity and freedom of women all around the world. That already shows his commitment to liberty – especially liberty for women.

Radical Islamic ideology is a universal threat. Wherever it is weakened or defeated, this helps liberate victims in other parts of the world, as well.

To so many persecuted peoples in the Middle East, Trump’s presidency represents hope for a positive change.

On November 7, the Yezidi Human Rights Organization-International issued a public statement titled “Yezidis look forward to a Trump presidency to help them wipe out ISIS”.

A Yazidi woman in Iraq has recently named her newborn baby boy “Trump”.

The Women’s March … violated the core principle of human rights: “The worst first”.

Sadly, many of the organizers and participants of the march chose to stand by and ignore women being tortured and exterminated by Islamic terrorists, and in other parts of the world, not being able to receive an education or even leave the house without the permission of a male.

If only these women felt as motivated to protest about the enslavement, rape and torture of Yazidi women and children, as about the cost of tampons.

Acting like self-serving, delusional fanatics, whose sheer hatred of an elected president blinds their eyes to the real problems of the world, does not help anyone. There have been just as many people who might have hated other presidents.

Let us with our actions remind women in the Middle East that we take their plight to heart.

No feminist will ever do that. They are narrow-minded self-pitying persons who defend Islamic practices and sharia law when they are asked why they don’t speak up for the appalling treatment most Muslim women endure. They apparently don’t have the imagination, the character, the heart, or the intellect to take notice of what Islam is doing to Yezidi  and Christian women.

American women are the most privileged group of people who have ever existed. Yet hundreds of thousands of them marched, the day after President Trump’s inauguration, to protest their fate! They invent complaints. They pretend they are victims.

They are despicable.

We wrote yesterday that a century of Leftism is coming to an end. (See the post immediately below, End of an atrocious era). The death throes can be seen in France, where the Socialist Party is about to lose power.

This is from PowerLine, by Paul Mirengoff:

The French Socialist party held its primary [on January 22] in the race to succeed Francois Hollande as the party’s standard bearer. Hollande’s presidency has been such a disaster that he declined to stand for re-election.

Former education minister Benoit Hamon came in first with around 36 percent of the vote. He will face former prime minister Manuel Valls, who captured around 31 percent of the vote.

Hamon is a left-winger. He represents what the BBC calls “the angry, radical wing of the Socialist party.” Apparently, his central policy idea is a guaranteed minimum income.

Valls is a centrist by French Socialist standards, anyway. As prime minister, he tried to implement a somewhat pro-business agenda. He also declared that France is at war with radical Islam and stated that if Jews flee France in large numbers, “France will no longer be France” and “the French Republic will be judged a failure.”

Unfortunately, Hamon has a very clear edge in the run-off. The third-place finisher, left-winger Arnaud Montebourg, is backing him. Combined, Hamon and Montebourg received more than 50 percent of the primary vote.

Valls has characterized the run-off as a choice “between an assured defeat [in the general election] and possible victory”. He’s right, I think, that defeat is assured if Hamon is the Socialist candidate. But it is probably a reach to say that victory is possible under Valls.

The big question is whether the Socialist candidate can finish second in the general election and thus make the runoff against against Francois Fillon, the closest thing to a Reagan-Thatcher conservative, at least when it comes to economic policy, ever nominated by a major party in France. Standing in the way is Marine Le Pen of the National Front party, a right-wing ultra-nationalist outfit. As far as I can tell, most observers expect that it will be Fillon vs. Le Pen in the runoff.

The bigger story here may be the collapse, at least for now, of socialist parties throughout Europe.

So Mirengoff cautiously allows for a resurrection of Socialism. We concede that its specter may haunt the world for ages yet, but we do not foresee it reigning again.

He quotes an article by Alissa Rubin in the New York Times:

The collapse of the establishment left in France is hardly a unique phenomenon. Across Europe, far-right populist parties are gaining strength, including in France, while the mainstream left, which played a central role in building modern Europe, is in crisis.

From Italy to Poland to Britain and beyond, voters are deserting center-left parties, as leftist politicians struggle to remain relevant in a moment when politics is inflamed by anti-immigrant, anti-European Union anger. …

In Italy, constituencies that used to routinely back the center-left Democratic Party are turning to the new anti-establishment Five Star Movement, which is Euroskeptic and anti-globalization …

Rubin quotes a professorial view:

“Wherever you look in Europe the Socialists are not doing well, with the exception of Portugal,” said Philippe Marlière, a professor of French and European politics at University College London. …

And Mirengoff comments, “Europe is in a state of tremendous flux and possibly a state of crisis.”

It is definitely in a state of crisis. At this critical moment in their history, Europeans have to choose between letting the socialist parties (a category that includes the parties calling themselves “conservative”) continue in power, which means the preservation of the European Union and the Islamization of the continent; or saving their nation states, their identity, their culture, their law, their heritage, their traditions, their liberty – in short, their civilization – by supporting the populist parties indiscriminately labeled “far-right” by the establishment and the media.

The outlook is brightening for the populist parties since Donald Trump won the US presidency. His success has invigorated them. Chances are they will soon win power in France, the Netherlands, Germany, Italy … and eventually even in Portugal.

End of the Marxist Left. 100 years. 1917-2017.

We date the century of Marxism from the Russian Revolution in 1917 to the success of the American counter-revolution in 2017, because we see Donald Trump’s election to the presidency of the United States – the most powerful position in the world – as the coup de grâce for the atrocious era.

The idea that people should be organized by governments and that the collective is more important than the individual has proved in practice to be a bad one. The experiment took the lives of hundreds of millions of individuals.

The Marxist Left has failed. The ideology that energized it is discredited. There will be no new Communist states.

Those who still believe that their lives should be ordered and sustained by government – regardless of the high price that must be paid by the loss of their freedom – are sure to find the change hard to accept.

However, Donald Trump’s movement is spreading. It has inspired and encouraged new political parties in Europe, and they are gaining strength. They want a “Europe of nations and liberty”.

     A meeting of the leaders of populist European parties

The parties still in power see that a change is happening, fear it, but do not understand it. They had a vision of a united states of Europe – which they tried to implement through the creation of the disastrous European Union – and ultimately a united states of the world. They wanted to abolish nations. They wanted a mingling of peoples. They invited the Third World, in particular Muslims, to come to Europe.

And all round them rebellious voices, growing ever louder, are demanding a return to nationhood, to secure borders, to self-determination, to individual freedom – to resisting the encroachment of Islam.

It seems that just one European politician in power “gets it”:

Breitbart reports:

German Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier says U.S. President Donald Trump’s election marks the end of an era, and Berlin will move quickly to secure “close and trusting trans-Atlantic cooperation based on common values” with the new administration. Steinmeier wrote in Bild newspaper on Sunday that “with the election of Donald Trump, the old world of the 20th century is finally over” and “how the world of tomorrow will look is not settled.” He says with any power change there are “uncertainties, doubts and question marks”, but a lot more is at stake “in these times of a new global disorder”.  Steinmeier says he will promote free trade and joint efforts against extremism with Washington. He added he’s certain Germany will “find interlocutors in Washington who know big countries also need partners”.

He will go to President Trump. He will speak of partnership and trade. But what he will really be seeking is enlightenment. And unless he is truly willing to yield power to the people, he will hear nothing for his comfort.

The “Women’s March”, organized to protest against Donald Trump’s rise to power, is glaring proof that the Left no longer knows what it is for.

Most of the marchers could only name what they were against: “Trump”.

Who funded the march? Some 50 of the participating groups are funded by the subversive George Soros.

Only one of the organizers of the American march knew exactly what she wanted.

The Gatestone Institute says of her:

Linda Sarsour [is] a self-described ‘Brooklyn-born Palestinian-American-Muslim racial justice and civil rights activist’, who serves as “the Executive Director of the Arab American Association of New York, co-founder of Muslims for Ferguson, and a member of Justice League NYC”,  her march bio relates.

She is working for the establishment of Sharia law in America. She tweeted:

Her following carried this banner:

And wore hijabs made out of the American flag:

But as yet Islam is not a serious threat to America itself. The Islamic State needs to be destroyed, and President Trump has declared his intention to crush it.

In Europe, the rulers of the old order will be overthrown and replaced. Europe will return to being a continent of nation states. Then the new leaders must deal with Islam, the enemy the Left let in.

As the Marxist Left was the terror of the last century, Islam will be the terror of the 21st. century. It is a barbarism that must be opposed and defeated by Western civilization – now recovering its strength and self-confidence.

The great Pat Condell on the subject of Evil HQ, aka the United Nations:

THE UN MUST BE DESTROYED!

The scurrilous “intelligence” dossier on President-elect Donald Trump, claiming that he did disgusting, low, disreputable things on a visit to Russia (which he never made) –  the alleged antics being on film and in the possession of Russian snoop officials, so the Putin government has a hold on him forever (and that’s why Putin wanted Trump to win the election and therefore wrecked poor Hillary’s otherwise perfect campaign) – was concocted by an erstwhile MI6 agent, now having even more fun running his very own espionage company. His name is Christopher Steele.

He has been accused of lying! And he feels so got-at that he’s gone into hiding.

Which is – we are to understand – awfully unfair, because, you see, the information in the dossier never was intended to be TRUE. Good grief! TRUE? When was “intelligence” ever intended or expected to be TRUE?

A corrective to so naive an expectation comes from an article by Tom Burgis in the Financial Times of January 14, 2017. We quote from the print version:

[Intelligence agents] argue that the rush to shoot the messenger [Christopher Steele] represents a misunderstanding of what intelligence is, whether amassed by state agencies or private companies. It does not deal in true or false, they say, but in shades of confidence in sources. “When you are in the corporate intelligence world, everyone knows that, in every report you get, not everything is true,” says a British investigator who knows Mr Steele.

So in every report you get, there are falsehoods. In every report you get, everything may be false, nothing true. There is no way of knowing.

Now you’ve been educated, now you know that trade secret, how do you feel about your country’s intelligence services? Confident in them? Safer?

No intelligence service detected signs that the 9/11 terrorists attacks on New York and the Pentagon were coming. Nor subsequent mass killings by Muslim terrorists in the US, Britain, France, Germany, and Spain.

However, US intelligence has uncovered many violent plots and prevented them. They have found, or stumbled upon, the truth very often. So it is possible for them to find out what is really happening, has really happened, is going to happen. They surely  do strive for accurate information. They are a vital part of the defense of the nation. They cannot take that responsibility as lightly as the colleagues of Christopher Steele insouciantly brag that they do.

The important point about the dossier on Donald Trump in Russia is that it was a work of pure fiction, of cruel malice, of witless irresponsibility. It was extremely unintelligent.

And the chiefs of the US intelligence services knew that it was all those things. Yet they “leaked” the tainting lies to media hostile to the president-elect. That is distressing and horrible to contemplate.  

We expect President Trump’s appointees to the headship of the intelligence services – in which many persons of integrity do labor for the truth –  to be better and to do better.

We continue commentary on the article we discussed yesterday in our post How to defeat Islam (immediately below):  

In his well reasoned article recommending that Iran be treated as an enemy of the US – and the world – and utterly defeated, John David Lewis argues:

Given that we should win, how then must our government confront Islamic Totalitarianism? Let us call again upon the defeat of Japan in 1945 as a valid, and vital, historical precedent. …

The basic similarities between the two conflicts begin with the ideas that motivated the attacks. The Japanese were motivated by a politicized religious ideology — Shintoism — that posited an all-powerful deity, indoctrinated their children, infected every aspect of their culture, and drove them to suicidal military actions that killed millions.

Islamic jihad is motivated by just such a “politicized religious ideology”. It too posits an “all-powerful deity” in whose name Islam “indoctrinates its children” with its aggressive, supremacist, totalitarian ideology that “infects every aspect” of Muslim culture, and “drives them to suicidal military actions”.

An educational rescript of 1890 — an Imperial decree, and one of the most influential documents in Japanese history — built this “mytho-religious ideology” into the classroom, making worship of the Emperor and duty to the State into the primary goals of education. Japanese people memorized its tenets, and were inculcated with what one Japanese scholar called “socialization for death’. A Japanese civilian remarked how, when she heard that the Emperor was going to address his people — an unprecedented event — the words she had memorized as a child rose in her mind: “Should any emergency arise, offer yourself courageously to the State.” Such ideas, deeply internalized and mandated by law, motivated suicide bombers — kamikaze — to throw themselves fanatically against superior U.S. forces, and gave them hope for a final battle over weak-willed Americans. This kamikaze fire was extinguished by the crushing American offensive of 1945.

The key to extinguishing this fire, I submit — the sine qua non required to end the spiral of indoctrination, jihad, and suicidal attacks on the West — is to do what was done against Japan: to break the political power of the state religion. State Islam — Totalitarian Islam — rule by Islamic Law — must be obliterated.

He describes how this was done in the case of Japan:

Waves of bombers obliterate dozens of enemy cities. His food is choked off, his military is decimated, his industry is bombarded, his ships are sunk, his harbors are mined — his people are psychologically shattered. In a single night, a hundred thousand civilians die in a firestorm in his capital. Americans drop leaflets telling the enemy population which cities could be next. …

When they face starvation, we remind them that their miseries are their own fault. We charge them for many of the costs of the occupation. Not one dime of aid arrives until they demonstrate their complete surrender, in word and in action, including their repudiation of the militaristic ideology that motivated their attacks.

We agree with him that “State Islam — Totalitarian Islam — rule by Islamic Law — must be obliterated”. And we agree that war on Iran, the utter defeat of the Iranian Islamic theocracy, would go a long way to achieving that end.

But there is an important difference between Japan then and Iran now.

He makes it clear that the Japanese people were heart and mind, unquestioningly, with the Emperor; with his government and his military in wanting to make war on America and the world.

In the case of Iran, however, it is apparent that the people are not in agreement with the tyrants who rule them. It is not their will that war – ultimately nuclear war – should be waged on America and the world. 

The Iranian people rose in rebellion against the regime in 2009. The uprising was called “the green revolution”. [Nothing to do with environmentalism.] Much regret has been expressed that President Obama did not help the protestors. Had he helped them, the reasoning goes, the regime might have been toppled.

But Obama did not want regime change. He wanted to make friends with the Ayatollahs. Why remains a matter of conjecture. The explanation given by his administration was that negotiating a “deal” with the Iranian government would stop the development of Iranian nuclear bombs. But that is belied by the terms of the “deal” itself, which allows Iran to become a nuclear armed power in little more than ten years after the date of the agreement.

To want regime change is to want to save the Iranians from their oppression.

To want regime change is to want the defeat of the Ayatollahs – but not of Islam.

And Lewis’s whole point is that the defeat of Iran would effect crushing defeat on Islam as a whole. It would prove that Islamic state totalitarianism would not be tolerated. It would be a severe deterrent to jihad.

In which state is Islam most solidly linked with political power, dedicated to the violent spread of Islamic rule, and infused with hatred of America? What state is founded on these ideas, and their practice, as a matter of principle? There is a clear answer, which is known, admittedly or not, by almost everyone today. The political centerpiece of Islamic Totalitarianism today — the state in which Islam is most militantly welded to political power and contempt for America and the West — the world leader in the violent spread of Islam — is Iran. …

The road to the defeat of Islamic Totalitarianism begins in Tehran. America, acting alone and with overwhelming force, must destroy the Iranian Islamic State now. It must do so openly, and indeed spectacularly, for the entire world to see, for this is the only way to demonstrate the spectacular failure and incompetence of the Islamic fundamentalist movement as a whole.

So by his well-reasoned argument, war on Iran – not regime change – is essential. War and total defeat.

And the methods he advocates – the methods used on Japan, now capable of being much more quickly applied, including the deployment of nuclear weapons before Iran has them to retaliate with – could achieve the objective.

But unlike the Japanese in the Second World War, the Iranian people are not deserving of retribution. So war cannot be waged on Iran as it was waged on Japan.

The bombing would need to be targeted on nuclear facilities. And Obama stopped Israel doing just that in 2014 with threats of forcefully intercepting Israeli bombers. He would have ordered Israeli planes to be shot down before they could reach their target, according to credible reports (which were neither officially confirmed or denied by the US or Israel).  

Lewis makes a strong case that the devastation of Japan, the starvation of the people, the use of nuclear bombs was morally justified, and so too would be the devastation of Iran.

Only after we understand that we should defeat these enemies, can we ask how. This point is vital, for the question of moral rightness is logically and psychologically prior to any question of strategy or tactics. If we do not understand that we should defeat them — if we think that we are as bad as they are, or that they have legitimate grievances that justify their attacks, or that we have created a situation that morally demands that we compensate them — then our lack of moral self-confidence will undercut our motivation to fight. But the facts do not warrant such a conclusion. We are morally right and the Islamic Totalitarians are evil — not merely in their methods, but, more fundamentally, in their values and goals. We have a moral responsibility to defeat them …

But would it be morally right to kill millions of Iranians whose “values and goals” are not those of their government? If not, then only something less than total war would be morally justified.

Iran’s nuclear facilities are now deeper underground and so much harder to destroy. Still, they must be destroyed. Iran must be kept from becoming a nuclear power. May President Trump find a way to achieve that end!

The destruction of Islam will be even harder.

Waves of bombers obliterate dozens of enemy cities. His food is choked off, his military is decimated, his industry is bombarded, his ships are sunk, his harbors are mined — his people are psychologically shattered. In a single night, a hundred thousand civilians die in a firestorm in his capital. Americans drop leaflets telling the enemy population which cities could be next. …

One of our generals announces his personal goal: to “kill the bastards”. … A force of overpowering magnitude amasses on the enemy’s borders, as thousands of American bombers pulverize his cities. …

We call upon the enemy to proclaim now the unconditional surrender of all armed forces, and to provide proper and adequate assurances of their good faith in such action. The alternative is prompt and utter destruction.

[Finally] atomic bombs are dropped on [the enemy’s] cities. He surrenders, thus acknowledging the reality of his defeat and making a political decision to cease fighting. …

We tell them, pointedly and publicly, that they are defeated, and that we have no obligations to them. When they face starvation, we remind them that their miseries are their own fault. We charge them for many of the costs of the occupation. Not one dime of aid arrives until they demonstrate their complete surrender, in word and in action, including their repudiation of the militaristic ideology that motivated their attacks.

That’s how America responded to Japan when it attacked Pearl Harbor.

The quotation comes from an article by John David Lewis, adapted by the author from a lecture he presented at an Ayn Rand Institute’s conference on October 21, 2006, published January 2017 by The Objective Standard.

The author urges that Islam, the “militaristic, religious-political ideology that values war as a demonstration of loyalty to a deity, demands obedience to its spokesmen, and imposes its edicts over millions of people” – and that attacked America on 9/11/2001 – be responded to in the same way, the specific Islamic country to be counter-attacked being Iran. 

Here is more from the article:

Ayn Rand, in her essay on the nature of government, observed a vital relationship between man’s right to life and his right to self-defense:

The necessary consequence of man’s right to life is his right to self-defense. In a civilized society, force may be used only in retaliation and only against those who initiate its use. All the reasons which make the initiation of physical force an evil, make the retaliatory use of physical force a moral imperative.

If some “pacifist” society renounced the retaliatory use of force, it would be left helplessly at the mercy of the first thug who decided to be immoral. Such a society would achieve the opposite of its intention: instead of abolishing evil, it would encourage and reward it.

These words ring especially true in the war against Islamic Totalitarianism. The consequence of our failure to respond forthrightly to these attacks has been precisely to encourage and reward this movement. We have granted it a safe haven, allowed it to claim victory through continued existence, appealed to its apologists who spread anti-American venom, and emboldened those who wish to take up the fight against us. The solution is to renounce altruistic appeasement and pragmatic compromise, to recognize our own value, and to defend our lives by right. We must defeat these enemies, and we can.

Only after we understand that we should defeat these enemies, can we ask how. This point is vital, for the question of moral rightness is logically and psychologically prior to any question of strategy or tactics. If we do not understand that we should defeat them — if we think that we are as bad as they are, or that they have legitimate grievances that justify their attacks, or that we have created a situation that morally demands that we compensate them — then our lack of moral self-confidence will undercut our motivation to fight. But the facts do not warrant such a conclusion. We are morally right and the Islamic Totalitarians are evil — not merely in their methods, but, more fundamentally, in their values and goals. We have a moral responsibility to defeat them — if we want to live. We can and must approach this war with the moral self-confidence of those fighting for civilization itself … because that is precisely what is at stake. …

[T]he sine qua non required to end the spiral of indoctrination, jihad, and suicidal attacks on the West — is to do what was done against Japan: to break the political power of the state religion. State Islam — Totalitarian Islam —rule by Islamic Law — must be obliterated.

A vital point about politics and government must be remembered here. Government holds a legal monopoly on the use of force in a geographic area. Governments do not make suggestions — they pass and enforce laws. They must do this in order to protect our freedom to think and speak — but within proper limits, defined by the principle of individual rights and codified in a constitution that is the nation’s fundamental law. The purpose of a proper government is to protect the rights of its citizens — each citizen’s freedom to think and act on his own judgment — by using retaliatory force as necessary against criminals and foreign invaders.

A government that turns its force against its own citizens, especially to impose an ideological doctrine on them, subordinates the rights of individuals to the demands of the State. This is statism — the elevation of the State over the individual, and the inversion of the very purpose of government. Statism is the greatest killer in history — dwarfing all attacks by criminals — precisely because it is motivated by some form of mystical political ideology. Because statists claim an authority that is above the rights of man — whether the Fuehrer’s master race, the communists’ dialectic, or the theocrat’s God — they do not recognize the principle of individual rights or the self-ownership of men on earth; rather, they claim the right to rule men, and to kill with impunity anyone who disobeys the ideology or regime. …

[T]here is no recognition of individual rights, no legitimate constitution, and thus no freedom, under religious law in any form.

The all-encompassing, totalitarian nature of Islamic Law — its claims to divine origin, its commitment to uphold “Allah’s” will, and its ultimate goal of making everyone on earth submit to it — leaves no room for individual rights or freedom. This code is barbaric and tribal, frozen in time for over a thousand years, not open to rational scrutiny but only to unquestioned obedience … To impose this primitive code by force is to inject religion into every aspect of human thought and action — which is the ultimate goal of Islamic Totalitarianism.

To begin to enshrine the inviolability of individual rights as the central principle of government, clerics of all kinds must be stripped of political power. There can be no freedom of thought and speech if those with claims to mystically derived ideas can enforce them coercively. Only by breaking the link between state power and religious belief can the state become a protector of each person’s right to worship or not worship as he wishes; only complete separation of religion and government can enable the government to serve its proper function: to protect each person’s right to think, speak, and act as he chooses. …

Individual religious belief is to be left alone … [but] Totalitarian Islam, an ideology that merges state power with religious belief, must go.

But proponents of Islamic Totalitarianism have political power, to some extent, in dozens of nations. Should we attack them all, immediately? No. We need to aim for the political, economic, and ideological center of this movement — the core that embodies its naked essence and that fuels it worldwide. This does not mean finding the particular people who organized the 9/11 attacks. The question is: In which state is Islam most solidly linked with political power, dedicated to the violent spread of Islamic rule, and infused with hatred of America? What state is founded on these ideas, and their practice, as a matter of principle? There is a clear answer, which is known, admittedly or not, by almost everyone today. The political centerpiece of Islamic Totalitarianism today — the state in which Islam is most militantly welded to political power and contempt for America and the West — the world leader in the violent spread of Islam — is Iran. …

The conclusion is inescapable. The road to the defeat of Islamic Totalitarianism begins in Tehran. America, acting alone and with overwhelming force, must destroy the Iranian Islamic State now. It must do so openly, and indeed spectacularly, for the entire world to see, for this is the only way to demonstrate the spectacular failure and incompetence of the Islamic fundamentalist movement as a whole. …

We must not seek legitimacy for the removal of the Iranian Islamic State beyond the principle of our right to defend ourselves. To pretend that something more than this principle is needed would be to deny the sufficiency of the principle. To base our reasons on the alleged good of others, especially on any alleged benefits to the people of the Middle East, would be to accept a position of moral dhimmitude: the moral subordination of our right to life and self-defense to an allegedly higher principle. …

To remove this cancerous Islamic State loudly and forthrightly will have immediate benefits. We would avenge the thousands of American terror victims since the 1960s. We would reverse the pitiful image we projected when Iranians stormed our embassy in 1979, and when we fled from Mogadishu and from Lebanon — actions that the Islamic Totalitarians claimed as evidence of our weakness. We could even reverse a tremendous injustice by un-nationalizing the oil companies in Iran — stolen from their owners in 1951 — and placing them back into private hands, under government protection. … The pipeline of money into Islamic jihad would be cut.

Most importantly, by ousting the regime in Iran, we would send a clear message to the world: Political Islam is finished. Weaker states and groups would cringe in terror — as they did briefly after 9/11 — and would literally retreat into holes in the ground. Anti-totalitarian forces across the world would be emboldened by the sight of a real defense of life and liberty. Allies we never knew existed would raise their heads with confidence and join the cause of freedom. The land of the free — rejuvenated as the home of the brave — would rejoice as the nation of the secure. …

The Muslim world must be made to understand that any government that provides economic support to jihadists will be summarily destroyed. … Only the clear threat that “you will be next” can break the entangled network of Islamic economic support for jihad that masquerades as “economic development’. There can be no more playing games with Saudi apologists who speak smooth English and describe their work as “charity.” … Such “charity” means raising money to spread the ideas, and tactics, of Totalitarian Islam. It must end. …

America needs a Commander-in-Chief today who can understand and state this simple truth: In war, there is no “right” to free speech on behalf of an enemy. The string of obviously false, contrived, and manipulated “news” by the supporters of jihad — the staging of civilians crying when a home is destroyed, and the throwing about of children’s dolls when a terrorist’s safe house is wrecked — are all part of the enemy’s war effort. In war, the psychological disarmament of the enemy, including the inculcation of terror through vicious propaganda, is part of the fight. American unwillingness to quash such propaganda is seen, by our enemies, not as respect for freedom of speech, but rather as a lack of will and as evidence of weakness. In the present situation, Americans must forcibly prohibit the dissemination of militaristic ideology and propaganda anywhere it rises. To make the point clear, Al-Jazeera — the fountainhead of Muslim taqiyya, or deception — must be shut down. …

This is not a clash between civilizations; it is a clash between civilization and barbarism. Until civilized people assert themselves with a depth of moral confidence exceeding that projected by those who submit to the “will of Allah”, America will remain permanently on the defensive, in a state of moral dhimmitude, and the war will continue to its logical conclusion: a mushroom cloud over America. …

In relative terms, the physical forces facing America and her allies in 1941 were far more formidable than those we face today, and America then was far weaker militarily. In our own day, the technological and industrial superiority of the U.S. over the Middle East is staggering. Islamic warriors can shoot an AK-47, but they cannot build one; all of the arms possessed by Islamic countries come from outside those countries. They are pathetically weak; the American army ended the regime of Saddam Hussein in three weeks, after Iran could not beat him in eight years. Our overwhelming material advantage, however, will be of no help if we lack the will to drop a bomb — or if we use our forces to strengthen our enemies. As it was for Germany and Japan in the 1930s, so it is today: The power of the Islamic Totalitarians grows every day that we wait. The strategic balance will shift — the Islamic Totalitarians will have the capacity as well as the will to bring about the nuclear Armageddon that they so deeply crave — if Iran acquires nuclear bombs. It is not a kindness to wait, knowing that our response will have to be even more lethal after a mushroom cloud rises over American soil. To wait, in light of that knowledge, is irrational — criminally irrational.

We recommend the reading of the whole thing. The author has not revised his article to take account of President Obama’s submission to Iran – his surreptitiously forcing the American tax-payer to pay tribute to that evil regime, and his assisting it to become a nuclear power. These circumstances, into which the worst president in American history has put his country, make the action against Iran which Mr. Lewis recommends all the more urgently necessary.

[Hat-tip to our very valuable commenter, liz, for telling us about the article]