A very pessimistic post 10
Of course nobody can stop the collapse of Western civilization.
What do those of us who speak and write in favor of that colossal achievement and cry out warnings that it is under threat, think we are achieving?
Persuading multitudes to resist the flood? Can we? Can they?
Perhaps, at most, a few among us – Nigel Farage, Donald Trump – can try putting a finger in the dyke.
Mark Steyn defines “the larger forces at play in the developed world that have left Europe too enfeebled to resist its remorseless transformation into Eurabia and call into question the future of much of the rest of the world”.
“The key factors” he lists are these:
i) Demographic decline;
ii) The unsustainability of the social democratic state;
iii) Civilizational exhaustion.
And here’s our abstract of his article:
Between 1970 and 2000, the developed world declined from just under 30 per cent of the global population to just over 20 per cent, and the Muslim nations increased from about 15 per cent to 20 per cent. Is that fact less significant to the future of the world than the fate of some tree or the endangered sloth hanging from it? In 1970, very few non-Muslims outside the Indian sub-continent gave much thought to Islam, but in little more than a generation the world is utterly altered. By 2020, it will be impossible to compare statistics between “the Muslim world” and the West because Islam is currently responsible for most population growth in English, French and German cities, and the principal supplier of immigrants to Canada, and already 25 per cent of the population of the European Union’s capital city, Brussels. September 11th 2001 was not “the day everything changed”, but the day that revealed how much had already changed. We’re seeing one of the fastest population transformations in history, whereby an aging ethnic European population is being replaced by a Muslim population. And the Muslims understand that, in fact, Europe, as they see it, is the colony now. I think the average Muslim does, in some basic sense, when he immigrates to the Netherlands, when he immigrates to the United Kingdom, when he immigrates to Canada or Michigan, want eventually to live in a Muslim society in those places. I am not saying he wants to fly planes into buildings, but his expectation is that the host society will assimilate with him rather than the other way around. This is the biggest story of our time, and the West’s leaders still can’t talk about it to their own peoples, not honestly. And they’re increasingly disinclined to let you talk about it.
Civilizational decline: whatever its causes – and the reluctance of Europeans to have children is certainly one of them – it is a fact.
You cannot miss it. It is here in America.
It is in the universities which have largely been transformed from institutions of disinterested learning into fortresses of Orthodox Thought.
It is in the schools, where text books teach that Islam is a beautiful pacific religion, not the primitively superstitious creed of a ruthless warlord which is what it really is.
It is in the media, which defend Orthodox Thought, the advance of Islam, and the dissolution of the West, with passionate pertinacity.
It is in the failure of conservatives to accept that it is happening at all, so they cry out against the last hope America has of holding back that tide for a little while at least – the possible presidency of Thumb-in-the-dyke Donald Trump.
Acolytes of the Left like to say that they are “on the right side of history”. Whether it is the right side or not, they are on the side of what is happening. The side of civilizational decline, of Muslim colonization, of the dissolution of borders, of Orthodox Thought.
Hillary Clinton, the Left’s candidate for the presidency, wants to increase Muslim immigration into the United States; wants “open borders”; wants to forbid the criticism of Islam. Hillary Clinton is on the side of civilizational decline.
Conservatives complain that Donald Trump is immoral in that he talks boastfully of his sexual conquests as most men do. But they seem not to have noticed that far more important moral principles are being discarded – to widespread popular indifference. At least half the voting citizens of America do not give a toss that Hillary Clinton is a corrupt, venal, lying scofflaw. Not that they don’t know she is all that – it’s just that they don’t care about her immorality. They see her as the right person to be president of the United States at this time.
And is she not? Isn’t she perfectly suited to the time?
Lock Islam out 164
One rare brave voice raised for freedom in Europe is that of Geert Wilders. Over and over again he breaks the law of his country and the European Union by speaking for freedom against the encroaching tyranny of Islam.
He writes at Gatestone:
The great Ronald Reagan once said that “Freedom is never more than one generation away from extinction.” These wise words are more true today than ever before. We are the free men and women of the West.
Freedom is our birthright. But if we fail to defend it, we are bound to lose it. And, sadly, that is exactly what is happening today.
2016’s Black Summer of Jihad, with terror attacks all over the free world, teaches us that the enemies of freedom are already among us. The ruling elites all over the Western world have accepted millions of people into our countries without demanding that they assimilate.
Many of these immigrants acquired our nationality. But some do not care for our country at all. They do not love it. They do not respect it. Nor do they respect us and our values.
They carry our passports, but they do not belong to us. They spit on our identity and behave like conquerors.
This is particularly true of many immigrants with an Islamic background. That is not surprising. Islam is a totalitarian ideology aimed at establishing tyrannical power over non-Muslims.
Islam commands its followers to make all nations submit to Islamic Sharia law, if necessary through the use of violence and terror.
Last week, we had an important debate in the Dutch Parliament. We discussed the future of our country. I pointed out that we will have no future if we do not de-islamize the Netherlands. Our time is a time for action.
Islam is an existential threat to our survival as a free nation. It violates all the basic principles and freedoms of our Constitution. It discriminates against non-Muslims, who have no rights under Islamic Sharia law.
It discriminates against women, who according to the Koran are worth only half a man. There is no freedom of religion under Islam. Apostates deserve the death penalty, the Koran tells Muslims that Jews are pigs and monkeys, and Christians have to submit or die.
There is no freedom of speech in Islam either. Criticism of Allah or Muhammad is punishable by death. There is no right to personal integrity. Islam advocates cruel corporal punishments, such as whipping, amputations, stoning, beheading. There is no right to live in peace and dignity. Islam orders war until the whole world has been submitted to Allah.
Some seem to think that by allowing freedom to the enemies of freedom, we prove that we stand for freedom. The opposite is true. By refusing to draw boundaries to our tolerance, we are handing away our freedom. If we continue being naive we will lose everything.
By depriving Islam of the means to destroy freedom, we are not violating freedom; we are preserving it. We should not turn freedom into a snake eating its own tail. Freedom requires a democracy willing to defend itself.
We need a political freedom agenda. It looks like this.
We must end all immigration from Islamic countries. There is more than enough Islam in our countries already.
Eurostat, the European Union’s statistical office, expects 77 million immigrants to enter Europe in the next half century. Most of them are Islamic.
If we do not stop them, we will be facing a catastrophe. We will be colonized and Islamized. We will cease to exist. We can already see how disruptive relatively small groups are. Research by the University of Amsterdam showed that 11% of the Muslims in the Netherlands are prepared to use violence for the sake of Islam. This is more than 100,000 people.
The more Islam we get, the more dangerous and less free our society becomes. Let us keep our countries safe. And lock the door to Islam.
We must also stimulate voluntary remigration of those who are already here. And those who stay must adopt our values; they must assimilate and integrate.
It is not extremist to demand that Muslims, who want to live in our midst, renounce the hateful doctrine and texts of Islam and abide by our laws. If they commit crimes, act against our laws, impose Sharia law, or wage jihad, we must expel them. My party wants to strip all criminals with dual nationalities of their Dutch nationality and expel them to the country of their other nationality.
These measures are part of our de-islamization plans and have been on our party platform for over ten years.
And, finally, in order to remain free, we must honor our freedoms by using them. That is why I will never give up my freedom of speech. Not in parliament nor anywhere else.
I have been dragged to court for asking party members at a meeting whether they want more or fewer Moroccans in the Netherlands. 65% of Dutch Moroccan youths have been suspected of criminal activities. They are six times as often suspects of violent crime as indigenous Dutch, and 22 times as often of hold-ups and street robberies. They also constitute almost 80% of the Dutch jihadis traveling fighting in Syria for IS. Just last week, a Dutch Moroccan was arrested in Rotterdam for supplying French jihadis with Kalashnikovs and explosives. Nevertheless, according to the public prosecutor, asking Dutch voters whether they want more or less Moroccans in the Netherlands is a criminal offense.
But no matter the outcome of the trial, I will keep speaking. No judge will ever be able to silence me. And no jihadist will succeed either. For twelve years already, I have been on the death list of several Islamic terror organizations, from al-Qaeda to IS and the Taliban. I am under 24/7 protection by the police. I live in a safe house, am driven around in armored cars, have to wear bullet proof vests in public, and have to stand trial in converted bunkers. But I will never shut up.
The more they try to do so, the louder I will speak.
It is time to raise our voices. Let them sound like thunder: Freedom has a price. The price is to always defend it, no matter the consequences. To be brave and let no-one bully us into submission.
So, let us do our duty and ensure that Reagan’s warning never becomes a reality: Extinction is not an option!
Freedom or Islam. You cannot have it both ways. There is no middle way.
Muslims guilty but not Islam; Islam guilty but not Muslims? 80
If a person is a Muslim, and he carries out a terrorist attack, he cannot be a “lone wolf” – unless he states that he is doing it for some cause other than his religion, such as vegetarianism or Catalonian independence, which no Muslim has thus far been known to have espoused. If a Muslim performs a violent act against a non-Muslim, or a member of what his sect regards as an heretical sect, he is doing what he has been taught is the right thing to do ever since he entered the misery of the madrassa as a tiny tot.
Andrew McCarthy is of the same opinion on that point. But he does not think, as we do, that the ideology of Islam compels aggressive action – whether or not in the form of terrorism.
So we are partially in agreement with Andrew McCarthy, and partially skeptical of what he asserts, when he writes this at PJ Media:
Some time ago, the invaluable Patrick Poole coined the term “known wolf”, sharply shredding the conventional Washington wisdom that “lone wolf” terrorism is a major domestic threat.
Pat has tracked the phenomenon for years, right up to the jihadist attacks this weekend in both the New York metropolitan area and St. Cloud, Minnesota.
Virtually every time a terror attack has occurred, the actor initially portrayed as a solo plotter lurking under the government’s radar turns out to be — after not much digging – an already known (sometimes even, notorious) Islamic extremist.
The emphases are his, with some of our own added from now on.
As amply demonstrated by Poole’s reporting, catalogued here by PJ Media, “lone wolves” – virtually every single one – end up having actually had extensive connections to other Islamic extremists, radical mosques, and (on not rare occasions) jihadist training facilities.
The overarching point I have been trying to make is fortified by Pat’s factual reporting. It is this: There are, and can be, no lone wolves.
The very concept is inane, and only stems from a willfully blind aversion to the ideological foundation of jihadist terror: Islamic supremacism.
The global, scripturally rooted movement to impose sharia – in the West, to incrementally supersede our culture of reason, liberty, and equality with the repressive, discriminatory norms of classical Islamic law – is a pack. The wolves are members of the pack, and that’s why they are the antithesis of “lone” actors. And, indeed, they always turn out to be “known” precisely because their association with the pack, with components of the global movement, is what ought to have alerted us to the danger they portended before they struck.
This is willful blindness, because of the restrictions we have gratuitously imposed on ourselves. The U.S. government refuses to acknowledge the ideology that drives the movement until after some violent action is either too imminent to be ignored or, sadly more often, until after the Islamic supremacist has acted out the savagery his ideology commands.
The U.S. government consciously avoids the ideology because it is rooted in a fundamentalist, literalist interpretation of Islam. Though it is but one of many ways to construe that religion, the remorseless fact is that it is a mainstream construction, adhered to by tens of millions of Muslims and supported by centuries of scholarship.
Oh, please Mr. McCarthy, tell what are the other, the “many ways” to “construe” Islam? No one who makes that statement ever gives examples or demonstrates the differences.
I say “the U.S. government” is at fault here because, contrary to Republican campaign rhetoric that is apparently seized by amnesia, this is not merely an Obama administration dereliction — however much the president and his former secretary of State (and would-be successor) Hillary Clinton have exacerbated the problem.
Since the World Trade Center was bombed in 1993, the bipartisan Beltway cognoscenti have “reasoned” (a euphemism for “reckless self-delusion”) that conceding the Islamic doctrinal roots of jihadist terror — which would implicitly concede the vast Islamist (sharia-supremacist) support system without which the global jihadist onslaught would be impossible – is impractical.
But how could acknowledging the truth be impractical?
Especially given that national security hinges on an accurate assessment of threats?
Bipartisan Washington “reasons” that telling the truth would portray the United States as “at war with Islam”. To be blunt, this conventional wisdom can only be described as sheer idiocy.
We know that tens of millions of Muslims worldwide, and what appears to be a preponderance (though perhaps a diminishing one) of Muslims in the West, reject Islamic supremacism and its sharia-encroachment agenda.
Do we know that? How do we know it?
We know that, by a large percentage, Muslims are the most common victims of jihadist terror.
That we certainly know. It is manifestly true.
We know that Muslim reformers are courageously working to undermine and reinterpret the scriptural roots of Islamic supremacism – a crucial battle our default from makes far more difficult for them to win.
Why is it taking them so long? It must be a very hard task. Is it perhaps impossible?
We know that Muslims, particularly those assimilated into the West, have been working with our law enforcement, military, and intelligence agencies for decades to gather intelligence, infiltrate jihadist cells, thwart jihadist attacks, and fight jihadist militias.
Glad to hear it.
None of those Muslims – who are not only our allies, but are in fact us – believes that America is at war with Islam.
So why does Washington base crucial, life-and-death policy on nonsense?
Because it is in the thrall of the enemy. The “war on Islam” propaganda is manufactured by Islamist groups, particularly those tied to the Muslim Brotherhood.
But if packs of Muslims are at war with us in the name of Islam, then OUGHT we not to acknowledge the war and fight it?
While we resist study of our enemies’ ideology, they go to school on us. They thus grasp three key things:
(1) Washington is so bloated and dysfunctional, it will leap on any excuse to refrain from strong action;
(2) the American tradition of religious liberty can be exploited to paralyze our government if national defense against a totalitarian political ideology can be framed as hostility and persecution against an entire religious faith; and
(3) because Washington has so much difficulty taking action, it welcomes claims (or, to be faddish, “narratives”) that minimize the scope and depth of the threat. Topping the “narrative” list is the fantasy that the Islamist ideological support system that nurtures jihadism (e.g., the Muslim Brotherhood and its tentacles) is better seen as a “moderate”, “non-violent” partner with whom we can work, than as what it actually is: the enemy’s most effective agent. The stealth operative that exploits the atmosphere of intimidation created by the jihadists.
We agree with all that: only we would add that the present government is full of people – including and above all the President himself – who are strongly pro-Islam.
In other words, in proceeding from the premise that we must do nothing to convey the notion that we are “at war with Islam” – or, in Obama-Clinton [and characteristically Leftist -ed] parlance, in proceeding from the premise that we need a good “narrative” rather than a truth-based strategy – we have internalized the enemy’s worldview, a view that is actually rejected by our actual Islamic allies and the vast majority of Americans.
The delusion comes into sharp relief if one listens to Hillary Clinton’s campaign bombast. …
[W]e know that a lot of the rhetoric we’ve heard from Donald Trump has been seized on by terrorists, in particular ISIS, because they are looking to make this into a war against Islam, rather than a war against jihadists, violent terrorists, people who number maybe in the tens of thousands, not the tens of millions, they want to use that to recruit more fighters to their cause, by turning it into a religious conflict. That’s why I’ve been very clear. We’re going after the bad guys and we’re going to get them, but we’re not going to go after an entire religion and give ISIS exactly what it’s wanting in order for them to enhance their position.
Sheer idiocy.
Right.
Our enemy is not the mere “tens of thousands” of jihadists. (She’s probably low-balling the number of jihadists worldwide, but let’s indulge her.) It is not merely ISIS, nor merely ISIS and al-Qaeda – an organization Mrs. Clinton conveniently omits mentioning, since it has replenished, thanks to Obama-Clinton governance and despite Obama-Clinton claims to have defeated it, to the point that it is now at least as much a threat as it was on the eve of 9/11.
ISIS and al-Qaeda are not the sources of the threat against us. They are the inevitable results of that threat.
The actual threat, the source, is Islamic supremacism and its sharia imposition agenda.
Right again.
The support system, which the threat needs to thrive, does indeed include tens of millions of Islamists, some small [? – ed] percentage of whom will inexorably become violent jihadists, but the rest of whom will nurture the ideological aggression and push the radical sharia agenda – in the media, on the campus, in the courts, and in the policy councils of government that they have so successfully influenced and infiltrated.
Obviously, to acknowledge that we are at war with this movement, at war with Islamic supremacism, is not remotely to be “at war with Islam”. After all, Islamic supremacism seeks conquest over all of Islam, too, and on a much more rapid schedule than its long-term pursuit of conquest over the West. Islamic supremacism is not a fringe movement; it is large and, at the moment, a juggernaut. But too much of Islam opposes Islamic supremacism to be confused with it.
For which, what is the evidence?
Moreover, even if being at war with Islamic supremacists could be persuasively spun as being “at war with Islam” – i.e., even if we were too incompetent to refute our enemies’ propaganda convincingly – it would make no difference.
The war would still be being prosecuted against us. We have to fight it against the actual enemy, and we lose if we allow enemies to dupe us into thinking they are allies. We have to act on reality, even if Washington is too tongue-tied to find the right words for describing reality.
Not “too tongue-tied”; too pro-Islam.
The enemy is in our heads and has shaped our perception of the conflict, to the enemy’s great advantage. That’s how you end up with inanities like “lone wolf”.
So Andrew McCarthy acknowledges, indeed insists, that we are “at war with Islamic supremacism”.
Is not Islam essentially a supremacist ideology?
If it is, then we are, or OUGHT to be at war with it.
If it is not, demonstrate to us that it is not. No one has done that. Simply stating that “tens of millions of Muslims worldwide, and what appears to be a preponderance (though perhaps a diminishing one) of Muslims in the West, reject Islamic supremacism and its sharia-encroachment agenda” doesn’t cut it. If Islam demands conquest and total world domination, and if there are millions of Muslims who reject that, it only means those millions are not observing their religion.
And Islam DOES demand conquest and total world domination.
Three Islamic holy commandments out of many:
From the Koran.
Sura 8.39: And fight with them until there is no more unbelief and religion is all for Allah.
Sura 61.9: He it is who hath sent His messenger with the guidance and the religion of truth, that He may make it conqueror of all religion however much idolaters may be averse .
From the Hadith (“sayings of Muhammad”):
“Fight everyone in the way of Allah and kill those who disbelieve in Allah.” – Ibn Ishaq/Hisham 992
If one denies that this is Islamic orthodoxy, isn’t one endorsing the false “narrative” of successive US governments?
Islam is at war with us. Do we fight that war or not? If we do not …. what then?
An equal and opposite reaction 22
Newton’s Third Law of Motion states: For every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction.
The Left in power has been brutal. Throughout the West, in government, in the media, in the academy, in the law courts, in society generally, wherever the Left is dominant, it is aggressive, dishonest, unjust, discriminatory, uncivilized. It is dour, it is harsh, it is smug, it is solemn, and with all that it is also boring.
The unmannerly Left has given rise to the unmannerly Alt Right.
These are extracts from a speech by Milo Yiannopoulos, telling the clucking old women of both sexes and all ages who want to get rid of the mocking Alt Right what they must do to achieve that end:
Now, various media and political figures have tried to define the alt-right, with varying degrees of accuracy, over the past few weeks. Which is to say no accuracy at all.
Hillary Clinton, just before reading out some of my headlines, called the alt-right an “emerging racist ideology”. Of course, she also constantly hallucinates about a “vast right wing conspiracy” …
According to Vox, the alt-right is “a movement lurking in Reddit and 4chan threads and in community blogs and forums, a movement of right-wingers who openly argue that democracy is a joke”.
This is typically nonsensical bilge from Vox, given that the alt-right were also apparently responsible for the outcome of the Brexit referendum.
Salon is more succinct. “The alt-right, also known as white nationalism.” …
Almost everything you read about the alt-right is wrong. It isn’t just white nationalists. … And the movement certainly isn’t led by me — although the media seems determined to crown me its queen. …
Just to be clear, I don’t consider myself a member of the alt-right. …
Of course, to the mainstream media, reporting accurately on the alt-right, and understanding the movement’s nuances instead of just shrieking “RACISTS”, is tantamount to leading the movement. …
Yes … there are racists in the alt-right — but the movement is much bigger than just them.
The left’s motivations in branding the alt-right as skinheads with Twitter accounts are easier to understand when you realize that the left is responsible for creating it in the first place, as I’ll explain in a moment.
The problem is, they’re smearing an entire political generation as racist, and they don’t care who gets hurt in the process.
The inability of the establishment right to decipher the movement is slightly different — they just don’t get it. I don’t think any of the people at National Review are bad people — they just don’t understand what they’re seeing. They don’t get cultural politics, they don’t get Millennial politics, and thus they don’t get the alt-right. The only tools they have to understand the movement are those handed to them by the political left. …
The media desperately wants to define the alt-right by the worst 5 percent of its members. They take the genuinely anti-semitic racists … and use them to define the whole movement. The left is obsessed by white supremacy, which in reality makes up an infinitesimally small number of people.
I see two primary motivating factors behind the rise of the alt right.
The first is a millennial generation that’s fed up with identity politics and its hypocrisies.
I see old-school conservatives who have had enough of mainstream politicians ignoring their concerns about immigration and cultural politics. I see intellectuals desperate to discuss dangerous, forbidden ideas as the left tries to make the overton window narrower and narrower.
And millennials are proving phenomenally talented at converting their parents, who might be disaffected republicans or tea partiers with Alt-Right thinking. …
The second is anti-white racism.
Progressives in America today believe that you can’t be racist unless you’re white, or unless you have what they call “prejudice plus power”. This argument, dreamed up in gender and African studies departments, does nothing more than give people an excuse to attack others for their gender, their sexual orientation, or the color of their skin, in the same way that eugenics gave people an excuse to view others as subhuman nearly a century ago.
Ironically so-called white privilege is the privilege to be discriminated against.
The idea that women and minorities, who have advocates for their special status in every university, every political party, and every media organization don’t have power behind their prejudices is also, frankly, absurd.
Racism is everywhere in America today. So is sexism. It’s in our university faculties.
But it’s not the racism you think.
It’s on the pages of the Washington Post. It’s on the pages of The Guardian. It’s in Hollywood. It’s on MSNBC.
Let me read you some statements which highlight the sort of casual racism and sexism that is deemed acceptable by the establishment today.
“The Beginning Of The End For Angry White Males.”
“Feminists Don’t Hate Men, But It Wouldn’t Matter If We Did.”
“When Whites Just Don’t Get It”
“As A White Man, I’m Surprised More Women Aren’t Tweeting The Hashtag #KillAllWhiteMen”
“Women Should Speak First In Class, Says SMU Professor. Really, Do Men Have To Speak At All?”
These are headlines from The Guardian, The New York Times, The Independent, The National Post, and the Chicago Tribune.
The key question behind all this is: are we going to have identity politics for everyone, or identity politics for no-one?
At the moment, we have identity politics for everyone except white men. If you advocate for men’s issues, The Guardian will call you a misogynist and a sexist. If you advocate for whites, The Guardian and National Review, and everyone else will call you a racist.
Meanwhile, other groups – women, gays, blacks, Muslims – are not only allowed to advocate for their group’s interests, but allowed to be openly racist and sexist towards white men.
When they do so, they receive support from the Silicon Valley’s tech giants, who manage an increasing share of our lives. When a parody group called the Feminist Software Foundation tried to create a browser extension that took all instances of “white men” in articles and changed them to “Jews” — making Guardian articles read like Mein Kampf — the extension was banned from both Chrome and Firefox.
Not for antisemitism, you understand. But for showing the Left up as racists.
I’d prefer we had no identity politics at all and that we judged people, as someone once said, not by the color of their skin but by the content of their character. But if you’re going to have identity politics, you have to have them for everybody.
You might not like the result.
The younger, millennial members of the alt-right are, for the most part, not white nationalists. But they’re being pushed toward racial humor by the progressive left.
The left is responsible for me. The left is responsible for the rise of Donald Trump. The left created the alt-right.
If you’re on the Left, and you’re looking out at the alt-right with horror, and want to destroy it, guess what? You probably can.
Here’s the bad news: your current tactics aren’t working, and are in fact having the opposite of their intended effect. Name-calling, public shaming, and tearing your hair out over Pepe the Frog* is simply ineffective and is enlarging the ranks of the troll army every day you continue to do it.
Here’s the good news: there are a few simple things you can do to nuke the movement.
I’m happy to tell you what they are, because I know you’re not going to do any of them.
But I want to you to listen, because I want you to understand how your actions created this phenomenon.
The first thing you have to do is stop being hypocrites.
Double standards are everywhere in coverage of the alt-right. Whenever confronted with a left wing or minority- radical movement, the Establishment will wring its hand about addressing the “root causes”. But they accuse anyone who does the same for the alt-right as necessarily endorsing the worst of its proponents.
Just look at the media’s coverage of Black Lives Matter, and how it gives a pass to horrifying behavior, behavior that goes far beyond what the alt-right does on Twitter. Oh, someone with an anime avatar tweeted a racial caricature at you? That’s nice — Black Lives Matter has killed police officers.
And they’re still being championed by the mainstream press. Is it any wonder that people sympathize with the alt-right, when they’re at the losing end of such a blatant double standard?
And again you push older people to the alt-right. Who do you think stopped giving millions of dollars to Mizzou following their Black Lives Matter protests? Here is a hint — it wasn’t jobless gender studies majors, or young engineers whose job was replaced by an H-1B visa holder, it was established donors ranging in age from 40-65.
It’s double standards that are at least in part fuelling the alt-right, and not Donald Trump. If you think the alt-right is going to evaporate with the God Emperor, think again.
The genie is not going back in the bottle. And I don’t care if I just appropriated the culture of some Arab country by saying that, or infringed on a Disney company trademark for that matter.
Here’s one for Hillary Clinton: you gotta stop calling half the country racists.
Establishment columnists argue that responding to racism with racism is wrong, but this is an oversimplification of what’s going on with the alt-right. …
The millennials in particular are simply responding to real racism with trolling, as a means to expose the double standard. When the double standard disappears, I expect this “performative racism” if you like, will too.
Performative racism doesn’t mean racism-lite. It means memes. It means jokes. It means 19 year old boys saying stuff to get a reaction. …
What I do see is a lot of young people trying to get a reaction. That’s the Troll Manifesto: find something that a person in power is sensitive about, rightly or wrongly, and joke about it relentlessly until they acknowledge you. …
People ask why the alt right has to be so mean and why I make mean remarks about people.
Because it’s fun! And progressives made it fun by finger wagging.
The Left has demonized and censored people who speak about taboo issues respectfully and seriously. … If you’re going to get ostracized for having un-PC views no matter how you present them, why not be an asshole about it?
To stop the mayhem, the establishment needs to do one very simple thing: stop punishing people for jokes. Stop punishing people for ideas. And stop other people from doing so as well. The bigger of a taboo you make something, the more attractive it is for young pranksters.
I’m going to read out a quote from early alt-right intellectual, the Jewish entrepreneur and writer Curtis Yarvin:
“If you spend 75 years building a pseudo-religion around anything – an ethnic group, a plaster saint, sexual chastity or the Flying Spaghetti Monster – don’t be surprised when clever 19-year-olds discover that insulting it is now the funniest thing in the world. Because it is”
The establishment has done exactly that. They’ve built a religion around left-wing identity politics, complete with blasphemous words and excommunication. And, surprise surprise, shattering those quasi-religious taboos has become hilarious for a huge section of the youth.
The thing I most hate about the Left is that they want to stop us laughing – to prescribe which jokes are okay and which are not okay to make in public and to draw artificial lines around certain subjects. I find all sorts of inappropriate things funny. Islam, trannies, AIDS.
These are all innately hilarious things. Now and again I even enjoy a good rape joke — especially if I’m the butt of it. Telling me I’m not allowed to laugh at something does not make it unfunny. …
Sir Tim Hunt, a British chemist … was working on the cure for cancer before he abruptly became the target of a feminist sting operation.
They deliberately and maliciously took a section of his speech to a room of female South Korean scientists out of context, in which he jokes about women in laboratories “falling in love and crying all the time”. The comment was meant to mock outdated sexist attitudes, but it was presented by feminists as a serious claim on the part of Tim Hunt.
The lie was swallowed by the academic establishment, which forced Hunt to resign from his position at University College London. It took months and months of relentless efforts from conservatives and moderates to clear his name. ..,
There are countless others. … There was also Razib Khan, a geneticist who lost an opportunity at the New York Times over his views on human biodiversity, and now writes for the alt-right Unz Review.
These are the people being driven into the arms of the alt-right by the excesses of the left.
As well as jokes, there’s something else that establishment elites need to stop demonizing as racism: national pride. During the 2015 election in England, a left-wing candidate for parliament called people who fly the English flag “simpletons and casual racists”. And this is nothing compared to some of the things said by university academics about displays of national pride.
The globalist elites, who assemble in places like Dubai, Davos, and whatever unfortunate country hosts the Bilderberg Conference, don’t have a nation.
Whether they’re from Istanbul, London, or Beijing, global elites tend to dress the same, act the same, talk the same, and think the same. They look at what’s different and unique about their home countries, and squirm in embarrassment.
We don’t.
If you want to draw people away from the alt-right, this has to stop. If you want to identify with the jet setting, cosmopolitan, nationless elite, that’s fine. I like being rich and powerful too.
But stop looking down on people who want to stay true to their roots, and remember the national values and traditions that made our progressive, globalized civilization possible. Because for every national flag you take down to replace it with the faceless and sinister logo of the European Union, the International Olympics Committee or the United Nations, ten more will fly upwards in protest.
This is what and who we are.
Leftists will insist that racism underpins national pride, but this couldn’t be further from the truth. Most members of the alt-right, even the serious ones, will agree that they want everyone to have national pride, not just western countries.
And they’re right — the instinct for belonging, for a sense of common identity, is universal. The global elite’s foolish quest to suppress this instinct is one of the reasons why the alt right, as well as the populist nationalist right, have gained so much ground so quickly.
Millennials have grasped an issue that the globalists have been ignoring for a long time: that immigrants should come to America from hellholes to better their family, not to turn America into the hellholes they fled from.
If there’s one thing that fuels anti-establishment sensibilities of all kinds, it’s the idea that the truth is being suppressed.
Sometimes the alt-right gets accused of flirting with conspiracy theories. Sometimes they do, mostly with a nod and a wink.
But other times they are right to be suspicious.
Straight white men have been lied to and lied about in this country for decades, whether it’s the wage gap myth or the hysterical witch hunts and kangaroo courts on campuses that police sexual misunderstandings between horny teenagers.
The politically correct establishment suppresses the facts.
Just look at the way the media behaves after a terrorist attack. Witness the desperation with which they avoid mentioning the name and backgrounds of the attackers, who are nearly universally Islamic. That’s if they can be bothered to interrupt an Obama speech to cover terrorist attacks in the first place.
America just suffered three terror attacks in 12 hours this weekend. Hillary couldn’t decide if it was a bombing, Bill de Blasio wouldn’t call it terrorism, and no one other than right-wingers were willing to label it “Islam”. Once again, everyone but the right look ridiculous.
Meanwhile, these are the same people who call white men racists and rapists without any evidence. …
And, of course there are those truths that are increasingly impossible to ignore. Like the fact that all cultures are not equal. Some are homophobic, anti-semitic. Some, as the German city of Cologne and the English town of Rotherham tragically found out, are rape cultures. And unlike college fraternities, it’s actually real this time.
I am of course referring to the fact of Muslim culture, which as it stands today is utterly incompatible with western liberal values. It amazes me that so many otherwise-sound libertarians and conservatives fail to grasp this simple fact, or brand it racist.
If you want to preserve capitalism, it’s probably unwise to let a million hardline bolsheviks into your communities. Likewise, if you want to preserve what the Left claims are the best things about western culture — tolerance, women’s rights, gay rights, religious freedom — it’s time to close the door on Muslim immigration. There is no gray area.
Everyone’s heard the old cliche: when you attempt to suppress something, you drive it underground. Well it’s true. But it’s even worse when you drive talented, skilled people underground. Because then they find each other. And they start building a rebel army. Everyone fired from their jobs, or suspended from their university, or kicked off social media becomes another soldier in their ranks.
The alt-right is a cultural rebel army. …
The good news is, the alt-right in its broadest definition isn’t in fact to any degree traditional white nationalist …
A huge proportion of the alt-right today are millennials, ranging from teenagers up to the younger members of Generation X. Primarily white, but also consisting of increasing numbers of minorities. Jews fed up with the pro-Islam attitudes of elites. Asians who are now being penalized by affirmative action. Black groups like the Hoteps, fed up with Black Lives Matter.
These aren’t white nationalists — they’re drawn to the alt-right because of the hypocrisies of identity politics, and by the joy breaking the rigid taboos of the establishment. …
White males are responsible for everything that the left have advocated for in the past: gay rights, women’s rights, civil rights, tolerance, the abolition of slavery, the establishment of the welfare state, and so on and so on.
They are right to be confused at being named Satan by the progressive left. …
I’m under no illusions that the left will abandon what have become some of its core operating principles. … What motivates the left now is anti-white hatred, particularly of straight men. …
“Systemic racism and “white privilege” are bullshit, unfalsifiable and bonkers pseudoscientific concepts designed to disempower white men in the societies and civilization they’re primarily responsible for creating.
Unless the left abandons this insane hatred – and as I say, I doubt they will – the alt right will continue to grow, and in the future we can expect to hear more and more about the horrors of cartoon frogs*.
*See the Wikipedia entry on Pepe the Frog. Extract: “The campaign website for Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton released an article stating that Pepe was associated with white nationalism.”
Sweden dissolving 11
Chris Menahan reports at Information Liberation on a Swedish charity organization “IM” calling on Swedes to create “Det Nya Landet” – “The New Country”:
Here’s a text from the website of the video makers. Like the commentary that goes with the video, it is typical of Eurothought in all its disastrously sentimental silliness:
There is no turning back. Sweden will never be what it was before. It is an understanding of what the world actually looks like – that Sweden is needed as a safe place for people who need refuge. Some yearn back to how it used to be. It’s okay to miss the past and it’s okay to talk about it – but we have to seek ways forward, and find a way for everyone to live together. Because now we have a Europe and a Sweden that is what it is: in a state of change.
It’s time to realise that new Swedes will take up room with cultures, languages and customs, and it’s time we see this as a positive force. The new country is about shaping a new future. Being Swedish needs to be about more than skin color and place of birth. It needs to be you, me and everyone together.
It’s not just new Swedes who need to integrate. Everyone needs to be integrated, established Swedes too. Integration does not mean that one party should adapt to the other, or that everyone should think, do and feel the same. Integration is about meetings, and real meetings are built on reciprocity.
Let us create a future based on both realism and vision, in equal measure. Let’s formulate a greater sense of “we” and let’s build a country where we put hatred and fears aside. We all have the new country within us; in our views, thoughts and actions. The time has come to build a country that is proud, inclusive and sustainable – something new.
The new country.
This picture illustrates Menahan’s article:
Bill Clinton’s third term? 129
The Democratic Party is trying to pretend there’s nothing seriously wrong with Hillary Clinton’s health. But there obviously is. She is very ill, and could not fulfill the onerous duties of a president of the United States.
She is also widely disliked, hopelessly incompetent, deeply dishonest, disreputable, corrupt, and dangerous to the security of the nation.
So why is the Democratic Party prepared to do and say anything to keep Hillary campaigning for the highest office when they could find a healthier candidate?
We suspect the idea is that Hillary must win the election FOR BILL. They may speak of substituting Joe Biden or Tim Kaine for Hillary as the Democratic candidate if it is absolutely necessary, but they are fervently hoping it won’t be. Neither Biden nor Kaine would do at all, because they won’t get Bill back in the White House. (Apart from the fact that neither Biden nor Kaine can be sure of the votes of the multitudes of silly women who want “the first woman president”.)
Bill (in our supersensitive hearing): “Just get there, Hill, and I’ll do the rest.”
She has already said that she would put the economy in his hands.
In fact, he will do the whole job.
Sick as she is, she must drag herself on to get elected. Once back in the White House, he’ll take over. She may sit at the Oval Office desk when she can sit upright, but he will be the power.
They see themselves, and the Democratic Party sees them, and about half the electorate sees them, as the natural rulers of “progressive” America. Never mind all their character faults. Never mind their corruption. Never mind that they are thieves. Never mind that he is a rapist.
They will carry on where Obama has to leave off. They will proceed with the enlargement of government and the augmenting of federal power; the weakening of the military; the humbling of the nation in the eyes of the world; confiscatory and punitive taxation; the alliance with the Muslim Brotherhood; the aid to Iran to become nuclear armed; the importation of millions of Syrian Muslims and Latin American migrants; central government economic planning; strengthening the power of the United Nations in the name of saving the earth from catastrophic “man-made global warming”; stealthily putting an end to individual liberty, objective justice, and freedom of speech; abandoning the Constitution.
Clintons rule, okay?
Hate crimes 2
A person’s emotions and unrevealed thoughts, though they might be suspected, can seldom be proved.
And however aggressive thoughts and emotions may be, they are not in themselves criminal. They may be “sinful” to a Christian, but a crime and a sin are not the same thing. A crime is a deed done; a sin of thought is at worst only a potential crime. Sin is defined by faith, not reason, and faith does not – cannot – subject its dogma to the rigorous examination practiced in secular courts of law.
When a crime is committed, its perpetrator should be punished regardless of what emotions or thoughts motivated him. (Self-defense is an exception as the desire to live and not be harmed is assumed to be universal.)
Some crimes, it’s true, having no obvious or discoverable motive (such as gain), can plausibly be attributed to hate, jealousy, fear, or revenge. And a perpetrator might say that he was driven by the force of an emotion. But still, traditionally it is what he actually did that brings him before the judgment of society and its law.
Yet codes of law do exist that allow strong emotion to be taken into account – as a mitigating not an aggravating circumstance. In France, for instance, the crime passionel – a crime committed out of strong feeling such as, and usually, jealous love – is allowed special consideration for lighter punishment or none. It may be charming to find a place for sentiment in law, for love, or compassion, or “empathy”; but to esteem passion more highly than personal responsibility is to undermine the dependability of the law. The law must be dependably impersonal, objective, impartial, neutral, even-handed or it is not just.
Must be? Increasingly, the political Left – the side of the emotions – favors the idea of treating a defendant leniently if he is “underprivileged”, harshly if he is “privileged”. Obama and his Supreme Court pick Sonia Sotomayor have expressed a preference for “empathetic” judgment – finding according to the personal feelings of the judge. If judges always or often did that, it would be the end of the rule of law. If people permit them to do it, they’re demolishing the house that shelters them.
Some seem to think a judge is right to find for someone with whose opinions he agrees, and against someone whose opinions he dislikes, regardless of the merits of their cases. A British judge, for example, let off vandals who had been proved guilty, because they said they were doing it against the state of Israel which they deemed oppressive, and in sympathy with Palestinians whom they deemed victims of Israeli oppression. Because the judge shared their opinions of Israel and the Palestinians, he acquitted them. If all judges made their judgments on such grounds of personal preference, it would clearly be the end of justice and the rule of law.
Most if not all “hate crime” is attributed to “racism”. As “racism” is an attitude of mind that taints the individual, it is a sin rather than a crime. If it prompts a crime, it is the crime that is wrong, not the attitude of mind or depth of feeling behind it.
But almost everywhere in the Western world, the attitude and feeling are now regarded as more important, more to be condemned, than the actual crime. Since the rise to power of the New Left in politics, education, and the mass media, “racism” tops almost every other offense.
And yet … It appears that in practice the gravity of the “racist’ offense depends on which “race” is carrying out the attack on which other “race”. Some – like the vandals in Britain – are given a pass on the grounds that they are the more unfortunate. (An extension of the crime passionel idea.)
What is “racism”?
“Racism” has come to mean dislike of a race, a nation, or a religious group. It is not applied – though it applies logically – to a group defined by occupation; say lawyers, or bankers, or the executives of corporations, all of whom are subjected to hate as an entire class.
The FBI has defined a hate crime as a “criminal offense against a person or property motivated in whole or in part by an offender’s bias against a race, religion, disability, sexual orientation, ethnicity, gender, or gender identity.” But that motivation remains guesswork, dependant on opinion and prejudice, which makes its even application impossible.
If a rule against racism were to be applied evenly, the defendants in the British case would not have been acquitted – and the judge would have been seen as committing a hate crime himself.
But to apply such a rule evenly would be to return to dependably impersonal, objective, impartial, neutral, even-handed justice.
That such real justice looks outdated, signifies that the Left has won.
*
We have said that judgment needs to be of the crime itself, regardless of its motive.
But are there some crimes for which the only discoverable or imaginable motive is “hate”?
Certainly there are.
And is the hatred motivating the perpetrators of such crimes sometimes a hatred of the race, or nation, or religion of their victims?
Certainly it is.
The worst hate crime in this century – worst in numbers, method, and effect – was what has come to be called simply “9/11” – the bombing of the World trade Center twin towers in New York on September 9, 2001. It was obviously motivated by religious hatred.
We argue that the motive does not excuse the crime. The motive does not make a crime less or more criminal.
But the Left holds that the motive of hate, however it is detected, does make a crime worse.
Any crime done out of hate is worse because of the hatred?
Well, no – comes the reply – not any crime. To conclude that would be logical, reasonable, Rightist.
In the case of 9/11, the argument goes, the hate was justified, because the crime and the hatred were in retaliation for prior crimes of hate committed by “the United States”, and/or “capitalists” involved with trade whose headquarters actual and/or symbolic were the World Trade Center, and/or President George W. Bush, and/or the Right in general.
In fact, many Leftists – or “social justice warriors”, SJWs – go so far as to argue that nothing done by the Left against any of those villains, even if done in a spirit of hate, can be classed as a hate crime, because it is always justified revenge. So the Left and its allies cannot commit a hate crime. For instance, a blow against a Muslim because he’s a Muslim is a hate crime, yes; but a blow by a Muslim against a non-Muslim because he’s a non-Muslim, is not a hate crime. Because Muslims are oppressed, strikes by Muslims are never morally wrong. The same argument applies if the striker is Black, or identified with any group they define as “oppressed”. The chief oppressors are always the United States, capitalists, white men, Israel, conservatives and Republicans.
All “oppressed” perpetrators of avenging attacks are justified by their victimhood. They cannot be accused of hate crimes. They are the eternal victims of hate crime.
And who are the “oppressed”? They are who the SJW’s say they are.
Extreme corruption: why Hillary Clinton protected Boko Haram 208
A Christian child – one of many thousands – burnt to death in Nigeria by Boko Haram
The Nigerian Muslim group Boko Haram (meaning “book-learning – ie Western education – is forbidden”) is as savage as ISIS, of which it has declared itself an affiliate.
While she was secretary of state, Hillary Clinton blocked all attempts to designate Boko Haram a terrorist organization. Why?
Patrick Poole writes at PJ Media:
In January 2015, I was one of the first to report on a massive massacre by Nigerian terror group Boko Haram in Borno State in northwest Nigeria, with reportedly thousands killed. Witnesses on the ground reported that bodies littered the landscape for miles as towns and villages had been burned to the ground, their populations murdered or fled.
By that time, Boko Haram had already become the most lethal terrorist organization in the world, now responsible for tens of thousands of deaths. …
And yet, as Boko Haram began to ramp up its terror campaign in 2011 and 2012, Hillary Clinton obstructed the official terror designation of the group over the objections of Congress, the FBI, the CIA and the Justice Department.
Why did Hillary Clinton’s State Department drag its feet on the terror designation in the face of near unanimous opposition from the rest of the U.S. government?
A recent series of reports exposes that a close Clinton family confidante — and Hillary campaign bundler — profited from Nigeria’s lucrative oil fields. He engaged in multiple illegal deals throughout Africa.
Also, other donors to the Clinton Global Initiative are deeply involved in Nigeria’s corrupt oil industry.
Were they the motivation behind Hillary’s inexplicable position on Boko Haram?
As PJ Media’s Bridget Johnson has previously asked, is Boko Haram Hillary Clinton’s biggest scandal? … Why is no one in the media talking about Hillary and Boko Haram?
It is worth nothing that Congress had to drag a reluctant State Department kicking and screaming to get Boko Haram designated in November 2013, after Hillary Clinton had left office.
Hillary Clinton’s willful obstruction in the matter is easy to document:
Members of Congress discovered in 2014 that the Clinton State Department intentionally lied and downplayed the threat from Boko Haram, and worked to kill bills in both the House and the Senate calling for their designation in 2012.
As Reuters reported, the Justice Department’s National Security Division strongly urged the State Department to designate Boko Haram, but then a group of 21 American academics rallied to the State Department’s aid by sending a letter to Hillary Clinton strongly arguing against Boko Haram’s designation.
The letter offers weak arguments. Our suspicion is that it was solicited.
We also now know that the Obama administration was sitting on intelligence — obtained as a result of the Bin Laden raid — that revealed Boko Haram’s direct connection to al-Qaeda and the international terror network in 2011 and 2012. In other words, Hillary’s State Department was arguing that Boko Haram had no such connections, that it wasn’t a transnational terror threat, even though the Obama administration — and likely Clinton herself — knew that was false.
And Mindy Belz and J. C. Derrick, writing at WORLD, answers Patrick Pool’s question. They find that – yes, “donors to the Clinton Global Initiative” who are “deeply involved in Nigeria’s corrupt oil industry” were indeed “the motivation behind Hillary’s [otherwise] inexplicable position on Boko Haram”.
The attacks on Jan. 20, 2012, began not so much as an explosion but as an earthquake.
“Whole buildings were shaking,” said secondary school vice principal Danjuma Alkali. “There was so much vibration that some people collapsed from it.” When the jolts stopped, with smoke rising and fire igniting all over the city of 10 million, it became quickly apparent the Islamic terrorist group Boko Haram had pulled off the unthinkable.
In coordinated bombings at 23 separate locations in the city of Kano, including police headquarters and military barracks, the group left one of Africa’s largest cities in disarray and panic. The January attacks killed more than 185 people — Africa’s worst terrorism since the 1998 al-Qaeda attacks on U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania. …
Boko Haram leader Imam Abubakar Shekau took responsibility for the Jan. 20 attacks in a video posted on YouTube …
It would be difficult for Washington to look away: Nigeria at the time was the third-largest source of U.S. crude oil imports. Further, the same day, American Greg Ock was kidnapped in Niger Delta, and Boko Haram announced “an arrangement” to kidnap 22 other Americans.
The next day, Jan. 21, the U.S. Embassy warned U.S. citizens “to review personal security measures”, and it prohibited government personnel from traveling to northern Nigeria. But tracking and cutting off the insider flow of funds propping up Boko Haram was what was needed—and the Kano attacks presented one more overwhelming reason the United States should have designated the group a Foreign Terrorist Organization, or FTO.
A strong chorus rose in Washington for FTO designation — from bipartisan members of Congress to Pentagon officials (including then-head of U.S. Africa Command, Gen. Carter Ham) to a coalition of faith-based human rights groups. At the State Department, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton continued to resist it and other rudimentary steps against the terror group.
Meanwhile, Boko Haram often showed up better equipped than the Nigerian military: “Boko Haram was extorting even government officials in the north, state and local officials, and certainly the military,” said an American working in the area for more than a decade, who spoke to WORLD and is not named for security reasons. “Very wealthy Muslim businessmen totally have been backing Boko Haram. There was huge money involved. Money used to purchase arms — it was crazy.”
Where were the funds and support coming from? In part from a corrupt oil industry and political leaders in the North acting as quasi-warlords. But prominently in the mix are Nigerian billionaires with criminal pasts — plus ties to Clinton political campaigns and the Clinton Foundation, the controversial charity established by Bill, Hillary, and Chelsea Clinton in 1997.
The Clintons’ long association with top suspect tycoons — and their refusal to answer questions about those associations — takes on greater significance considering the dramatic rise of Boko Haram violence while Hillary Clinton was secretary of state. Did some Clinton donors stand to gain from the State Department not taking action against the Islamic terrorist group?
Perhaps the most prominent Nigerian with ties to the Clintons is Houston-based Kase Lawal. The founder of CAMAC Energy, an oil exploration and energy consortium, Lawal had a long history with Bill Clinton before becoming a “bundler” for Hillary’s 2008 presidential bid, amassing $100,000 in contributions and hosting a fundraiser in his Houston home—a 14-room, 15,264-square-foot mansion. Lawal maxed out donations to Hillary’s 2016 primary campaign, and his wife Eileen donated $50,000—the most allowed—to President Obama’s 2009 inaugural committee.
Lawal describes himself as a devout Muslim who began memorizing the Quran at age 3 while attending an Islamic school. “Religion played a very important role in our lives,” he told a reporter in 2006. “Every time you finish a chapter they kill a chicken, and if you finish the whole thing, a goat.”
Today the Houston oil exec — who retired in May as CEO but continues as chairman of the board of CAMAC, now called Erin Energy — tops the list of wealthiest Nigerians living in North America. His firm reports about $2.5 billion in annual revenue, making it one of the top private companies in the United States.
In Africa, Lawal has been at the center of multiple criminal proceedings, even operating as a fugitive. Over the last decade, he faced charges in South Africa over an illegal oil scheme along with charges in Nigeria of illegally pumping and exporting 10 million barrels of oil.
In the Democratic Republic of Congo, Lawal arranged a 2011 plot to purchase 4 tons of gold from a rebel warlord, Bosco Ntaganda, linked to massacres and mass rapes. Ntaganda was on a U.S. sanctions list, meaning anyone doing business with him could face up to 20 years in prison. Lawal contacted Clinton’s State Department, and authorities in Congo released his plane and associates in the plot. He never faced charges in the United States, and he remains a commissioner for the Port Authority of Houston.
Lawal’s energy firm holds lucrative offshore oil licenses in Nigeria, as well as exploration and production licenses in Gambia, Ghana, and Kenya, where he operates in a conflict-ridden area largely controlled by Somalia’s al-Shabab militants.
The firm also has held contracts in Nigeria for crude oil lifting, or transferring oil from its collection point to refineries. Until last year, when newly elected President Muhammadu Buhari began an effort to reform the process, contracting for lifting has been awash in kickbacks, bribes, and illegal activity.
Overland lifting contracts often involve partnership with the North’s past and present governors, including those who serve as quasi-warlords with ties to Boko Haram and other militants.
Lawal’s enterprises have long been rumored to be involved in such deals, as have indigenous oil concerns like Petro Energy and Oando, Nigeria’s largest private oil and gas company, based in Lagos and headed by Adewale Tinubu, another controversial Clinton donor.
In 2014, Oando pledged 1.5 percent of that year’s pre-tax profits and 1 percent of future profits to a Clinton Global Initiative education program. This year, Adewale gained notoriety when the Panama Papers revealed he holds at least 12 shell companies, leading to suspicion of money laundering, tax evasion, and other corruption.
In 2013 Bill Clinton stood alongside Adewale’s uncle, Bola Tinubu, while attending the dedication of a massive, controversial reclamation project called Eko Atlantic. Critics call Bola Tinubu, leader of the ruling All Progressives Congress party, Nigeria’s “looter in chief”. A Nigerian documentary says that when the billionaire landowner was governor of Lagos State (1999-2007), he funneled huge amounts of state funds — up to 15 percent of annual tax revenues — to a private consulting firm in which he had controlling interest.
In the United States, where he studied and worked in the 1970s and ’80s, Tinubu is still a suspect in connection with a Chicago heroin ring he allegedly operated with his wife and three other family members. In 1993 Tinubu forfeited $460,000 to American authorities, who believe he trafficked drugs and laundered the proceeds.
About the time of the Kano bombings, a lucrative potential for new oil opened up in Nigeria’s North — precisely in the Borno State region where Boko Haram has its headquarters.
Between 2011 and 2013, the Nigerian government allocated $240 million toward oil and gas exploration in the Lake Chad Basin, a petroleum reserve stretching from western Chad across Nigeria, Niger, and Cameroon. Largely unexplored until recently, oil production hit 100,000 barrels a day in 2013 on the Chad side of the basin.
On the surface Boko Haram violence halted exploration in Nigeria. Despite the millions it was investing, Nigeria’s government geologists and technical staff fled the region in fear of their lives. Using verified incidents provided by the Nigeria-based Stefanos Foundation and other sources, WORLD documented 85 separate terrorist attacks between 2011-2016 in the Lake Chad Basin areas of Nigeria.
The attacks ranged from market bombings that killed half a dozen to the January 2015 Baga attacks, which killed an estimated 2,000, destroying Baga plus 16 other towns and displacing more than 35,000 people (while the world fixated on Paris after the Charlie Hebdo attack).
Beneath the surface … Boko Haram was making it possible for illicit operators to lay claim to the area for their own purposes, and to pump oil from Nigeria’s underground reserves to Chad. Using 3-D drilling, Chad operators can extract Nigerian oil — without violating Nigerian property rights — to sell on open markets. One benefactor of the arrangement is Ali Modu Sheriff, a leading politician in the North, Borno State governor until 2011, and an alleged sponsor of Boko Haram, who is close friends with longtime Chad President Idriss Déby.
The very terrorism that seems to be deterring oil exploration in reality can help illicit extraction, forcing residents to flee and giving cover to under-the-table oil traders. In 2015, a year when overall oil prices dipped 6 percent, Lawal’s Erin Energy stock value skyrocketed 295 percent — the best-performing oil and gas stock in the United States.
The more unstable an area is, the more such traders can control supply and pricing, explained an oil analyst who asked not to be named for security reasons: “Terrorism is the poor man’s weapons of mass destruction. You want the land and what might be beneath, not the people, so you kill them.” …
Christians are the predominant victims of Boko Haram in Borno and surrounding states. Among 85 documented attacks in a five-year period, Boko Haram killed at least 11 pastors and destroyed more than 15 churches. They also destroyed about five mosques. In all, Boko Haram and its affiliated militants have killed an estimated 6,300 people and displaced 2 million in the Lake Chad Basin area since 2011.
The 2014 kidnapping of 276 girls from a Chibok Christian school catapulted Boko Haram into the international spotlight and sparked first lady Michelle Obama’s #BringBackOurGirls social media campaign.
Hillary Clinton once again demonstrated her superhuman ability to exonerate herself from blame for something for which she was eminently responsible:
Hillary Clinton called the mass abduction “abominable” and “an act of terrorism”. Clinton said “It really merits the fullest response possible, first and foremost from the government of Nigeria.”
Critics argue it was Clinton herself who has led the way on U.S. indifference, spurning the standard FTO designation (issued 72 times since 1997) that could have bolstered U.S. efforts against Boko Haram years before the infamous kidnappings.
While it’s become increasingly clear that oil and corruption are fueling Boko Haram, the full story will take a serious U.S. investigation. Yet even now there is no evidence it’s happening. The Chibok girls, for example, are known to be in the Sambisa Forest with Boko Haram, but authorities have not pursued them. …
“Besides military intervention, the United States has many tools for aiding Nigerian authorities. The Treasury Department’s Office of Foreign Assets Control — the unit tasked with enforcing key aspects of FTO designations — purportedly doesn’t have enough staff to focus on Boko Haram financing. The administration maintains that Boko Haram raises its funding through local means, such as robbing banks and pillaging villages, even though WORLD obtained evidence the militants have access to international bank accounts.
“There has not been an investigation that has had any positive consequences,” said Rep. Chris Smith, R-N.J., chairman of the House Africa subcommittee. He said he plans to convene a hearing to find out why U.S. inattention persists: “It’s time to have people come up and testify.”
How likely is it that the truth about the Clintons’ protection of Boko Haram will become known to the American public?
Will people come and testify before the House Africa subcommittee?
If they do, will they tell the truth?
If they tell the truth, will the media report what they say?
If the media report the truth, will Hillary Clinton have to answer for her part in the story?
No. Whether or not Hillary becomes president of the United States, she will remain powerful enough for the rest of her life to evade any attempt to bring her to justice, because she is the leader of the Good People, the ones who care about the underdogs of the world, the poor, the persecuted, the oppressed …
The Clintons and Islam 257
If ever the US waged an unnecessary war, it was Bill Clinton’s in ex-Yugoslavia.
Joseph Klein writes at Front Page:
A Hillary Clinton presidency would likely continue along the pro-Islamist foreign policy arc that both her husband’s administration and the Obama administration have developed.
President Bill Clinton committed U.S. military resources to help Muslims during the so-called “humanitarian” intervention in Bosnia. However, he chose to turn a blind eye to the genocide that swamped Rwanda during his administration. As G. Murphy Donovan wrote in his American Thinker article How the Clintons Gave American Foreign Policy its Muslim Tilt, “Muslim lives matter, Black Africans, not so much.” Noting that “it was Muslim unrest that precipitated Serb pushback, civil war, and the eventual collapse of Yugoslavia”, Donovan added, “Bosnians are, for the most part, Muslims with a bloody fascist pedigree.”
Nevertheless, with no strategic U.S. national interest at stake, Bill Clinton tilted American foreign policy in favor of the Muslim side in the Bosnia conflict. We are now reaping the lethal consequences of that tilt.
Donovan points out in his article that, on a per capita basis, Bosnia Herzegovina is the leading source of ISIS volunteers in all of Europe.
That Obama loves Islam, and has been an immense help to the Muslim Brotherhood, and to Iran with its ambition to become a nuclear power, can be accounted for. He is the son and step-son of Muslims, and lived among – and was schooled with – Muslims in Indonesia.
But why do the Clintons zealously woo, employ, aid and coddle the bellicose enemies of the USA and Western civilization?
President Obama, along with then Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, took the side of Islamist “rebels” against the secular authoritarian regimes in Egypt, Libya and Syria that had managed to keep the lid on jihadist terrorism for many years. These Islamists included members of al Qaeda as well as the Muslim Brotherhood.
In Libya, Hillary Clinton was the leading voice pressing for military intervention against Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi’s regime. She did so, even though, according to sources cited in a State Department memo passed on to Hillary by her deputy at the time, Jake Sullivan, in an e-mail dated April 1, 2011, “we just don’t know enough about the make-up or leadership of the rebel forces.” In fact, as subsequently reported by the New York Times, the only organized opposition to the Qaddafi regime that had developed underground during Qaddafi’s rule were the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group, a terrorist group, and the Muslim Brotherhood. The author of the State Department memo had acknowledged the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group’s terrorist past but said they “express a newfound keenness for peaceful politics”. Was Hillary Clinton relying on such assurances of a reformed “peaceful” Islamic group fighting against Qaddafi, even though it had been on the State Department’s terrorist list since 2004 and one of its leaders, Abdel-Hakim al-Hasidi, praised al Qaeda members as “good Muslims” in a March 2011 interview? If so, that is just another indication of her bad judgment.
As for Egypt, Hillary was informed by her outside adviser and confidante Sid Blumenthal, in an e-mail dated December 16, 2011, that the Muslim Brotherhood’s intention was to create an Islamic state. Moreover, the relationship between the Muslim Brotherhood, al-Qaeda and other radical groups was “complicated”, Blumenthal quoted a source “with access to the highest levels of the MB” as saying. Blumenthal also reported, based on a confidential source, that Mohamed Morsi, who was then leader of the Muslim Brotherhood’s Freedom and Justice Party, believed that “it will be difficult for this new, Islamic government to control the rise of al Qa’ida and other radical/terrorist groups”.
Radical terrorist groups, that is to say, which were in rivalry for hegemony with Morsi’s own group. (The MB claims to be non-violent in pursuing its jihad – but it launched the terrorist organization Hamas.)
Nevertheless, the Obama administration supported the Muslim Brotherhood in its bid to seek power in Egypt through a shaky electoral process. After Morsi’s election to the presidency, Hillary visited Egypt where Morsi warmly welcomed her and she expressed strong support for Egypt’s “democratic transition”.
However, the only real transition Morsi had in mind was to impose sharia law on the Egyptian people, the very antithesis of true democratic pluralism. Yet the Obama-Clinton gravy train of military aid to the Muslim Brotherhood-backed Islamist regime continued without any preconditions. Hillary Clinton herself and her State Department referred to the importance of the U.S.’s “partnership” with the Muslim Brotherhood-backed regime.
When Morsi was removed from power, after millions of Egyptians had taken to the streets to protest the increasingly theocratic regime, the Obama administration decided to suspend aid to the more secular successor military regime. The “partnership” was no more once the Islamists were swept out of office.
There were close ties between the Clinton Foundation and Morsi and his MB:
While Morsi was still president, the Clinton Foundation, which has taken millions of dollars in donations from Muslim majority governments and affiliated groups and individuals, invited Morsi to deliver a major address at the Clinton Global Initiative. This invitation was extended just a month after an individual named Gehad el-Haddad, who was working simultaneously for the Muslim Brotherhood and the Clinton Foundation in Cairo, left his Clinton Foundation job to work for Morsi and the Muslim Brotherhood full time. Fortunes changed for this individual, however, when, after Morsi was overthrown, Haddad was arrested for inciting violence and given a life sentence.
Hillary Clinton was willing to find a way round the First Amendment in her eagerness to please Islamic powers:
The Obama administration, while Hillary Clinton was Secretary of State, also cooperated with the 57-member Organization of Islamic Cooperation (OIC) to pass and implement a United Nations resolution that was intended to curb speech considered Islamophobic. Clinton, in full spin mode, insisted that the new UN resolution was totally consistent with the free speech protections of the First Amendment, as opposed to the “defamation of religions” resolutions that the OIC had sponsored in the past but was willing to have replaced. The truth, however, is that all we were seeing was old wine in new bottles. To make sure that the OIC was comfortable regarding the Obama administration’s intentions, Clinton assured the OIC that she was perfectly on board with using “some old-fashioned techniques of peer pressure and shaming, so that people don’t feel that they have the support to do what we abhor”. She was trying to publicly assure American citizens that their First Amendment rights to freedom of speech and press were safe, while working behind the scenes with her OIC partners to find acceptable ways to stifle speech offensive to Muslims.
The signs of Hillary Clinton’s Islamist tilt as she runs for president include the sweepingly general and demonstrably false assertion in her tweet last November that Muslims “have nothing whatsoever to do with terrorism”. She has obviously learned nothing from her disastrous tenure as Secretary of State. Neither is she willing to acknowledge that the terrorists whom she has called a “determined enemy” are jihadists animated by an ideology rooted in core Muslim teachings of the Koran and the Hadith …Is there something about the word “Muslim” in the Muslim Brotherhood and “Islamic” in the Islamic State that she is having problems understanding?
Perhaps, it is Hillary’s close association with Huma Abedin, her top campaign aide and confidante, who has had questionable links to Muslim Brotherhood-affiliated organizations, which explains Hillary’s denial of the truth. If someone as close to Hillary as Huma Abedin, whom she apparently trusts with her life, is a Muslim, then how could any Muslim possibly have anything to do with terrorism?
Then again, perhaps Hillary’s willingness to give Islamists the benefit of the doubt is [explained by] all the money that the Clintons have received over the years from foreign donors in Muslim majority countries, including the Saudi government and affiliated groups and individuals. Hillary Clinton has also reached out for campaign donations from a pro-Iranian lobby group, the National Iranian American Council. Whatever human rights abuses are inflicted on people in these countries, it would be counterproductive to bite the hand that feeds you, in the Clintons’ way of thinking.
Finally, the Democratic Party itself has moved much further to the Left since the days of Bill Clinton’s presidency, which has led to the broadening out of the pro-Islamist bias that began to take shape with Bill Clinton’s intervention in Bosnia. As David Horowitz wrote in a January 8, 2016 article published by National Review:
Leftists and Democrats have also joined the Islamist propaganda campaign to represent Muslims — whose co-religionists have killed hundreds of thousands of innocents since 9/11 in the name of their religion — as victims of anti-Muslim prejudice, denouncing critics of Islamist terror and proponents of security measures as “Islamophobes” and bigots. Led by Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama, Democrats have enabled the Islamist assault on free speech, which is a central component of the Islamist campaign to create a worldwide religious theocracy.
And perhaps it is through both sentiment and venality that Hillary Clinton has helped and would continue to help Islam pursue its “holy war” against the USA and our civilization.