A Muslim, Khizr Kahn, spoke at the Democratic convention last week of his son’s death in Iraq serving as a US soldier, implying that he, the father, has thus made a “sacrifice”. He leveled a strange accusation at Donald Trump, saying “you have sacrificed nothing and no one” for the U.S..

By viewing his soldier son’s death in combat as his “sacrifice”, this father turns an honorable death – that of a soldier doing his  job, fulfilling his promise, doing his  duty –  into a religious martyrdom. Such a view accords with a meretricious calibration of praiseworthiness: an unlucky, or weak, or not well enough trained soldier is wounded in action or is taken prisoner: he becomes a “hero”. That in itself is taking his praise a little too far. (He may bear his wounds or captivity heroically.) Another soldier is killed and he becomes a “sacrifice”, a “martyr”?  Fighting for one’s country – if it is a civilized country – must be done by rational men who know their job is to kill, who are willing to kill, and who want to survive. Bravery may be part of their character, but is trained into becoming a lethal aggression – not love of death. 

Suicide-bombers are self-sacrificers and “martyrs”. They are not rational people. They are not fighting for civilization.

With the view of combat deaths as “sacrifices”, the war itself becomes mystical. But it is not. If an army were trained to think of war in mystical terms – a ritual blood-letting –  it would diminish the soldiers’ will to win, to return victorious after having got the job – the job of killing – done. 

As “sacrifice” arises in the Khan versus Trump matter, it is particularly disgusting. There is no question that Khan is using the death of his Muslim soldier son to make a political point that there is no Islamic threat. And that is shameless grief-mongering, because his son was killed by Iraqis in a war started by Islamic terrorism.

If his death is to be considered a sacrifice at all, it can only be so in the general context of the terrorist-denying, enemy-denying, rules of engagement imposed by the “win-hearts-and-minds” policy of a decadent America happy to sacrifice its warriors on the altar of “nation-building”. Captain Humayan Khan died when he approached a vehicle that blew up. Had his orders been to shoot on sight at any vehicle breaking the barricade, he might have saved himself, the two Iraqi civilians who were also killed by the explosion, and his men who were injured. But he had been trained to regard civilians as friends although they were in enemy territory.

During his three months in Iraq, Khan helped put Iraqi civilians to work for $5 an hour patrolling the streets of Baquba under the U.S. Army, his father said.

The political point Khan was making was: had there been Trump’s moratorium policy in place when he wanted to come to America, his family (from Pakistan and UAE) would not have been able to make their sacrifice, and his son would not have been here to fight for America. By exactly the same logic, had those policies been in place for Major Hasan’s parents (from “Palestine”), Hasan would not have killed American soldiers at Fort Hood. Were Hasan’s victims “sacrifices”?  Yes, to the see-no-Islam, speak-no-Islam, hear-no-Islam policies in all government branches, which allowed a Muslim officer who openly declared his hatred of America and its military to carry on as one of America’s finest. 

Khan’s son’s death should be – as it has been – acknowledged as an honorable death. He got medals. To regard his death as a martyrdom in the Muslim style – and for political purposes! – does not become acceptable just because it is wrapped in the American flag.

The parents of Major Hasan’s victims are entitled to have their sons and daughters acknowledged as dying in combat against the same Islamic enemy as Khan died fighting. They too should get their medals – as they did, at last. 

Robert Spencer writes at Front Page:

The mainstream media is wild with enthusiasm these days over Khizr Khan, the father of a Muslim soldier, Humayun Khan, who was killed fighting in Iraq in 2004. Khizr Khan, brimming with self-righteous anger, spoke at the Democratic National Convention, where he delivered what the Washington Post dubbed a “brutal repudiation of Donald Trump”. … There’s just one catch: Khizr is using his son’s memory not to advance the cause of the United States, as his son apparently died trying to do, but to advance a quite different cause: that of the global umma.

The well-heeled and powerful backers of the global jihad – those who have enabled the Islamic State (ISIS), al-Qaeda, and other jihad groups to grow as powerful as they have today — are enraged at Donald Trump. They are deeply worried by his call for a temporary moratorium on Muslim immigration into the United States, as that will make it much more difficult for jihadis to get into this country. They are anxious to stigmatize any and all resistance to jihad terror – and so, happily enough for them, is the Democratic Party, which has eagerly signed on to the longtime strategy employed by Islamic supremacist advocacy groups in the U.S., to demonize all effective measures against jihad terror as “bigoted” and “Islamophobic”. 

So it was that Khizr Khan, in the full fury of his indignation at the DNC, trotted out a straw man, falsely claiming that Trump wanted to “ban us from this country”.  Trump has said nothing about banning Muslim citizens of the U.S. from the country, only about a temporary moratorium on immigration from terror states.

Coming clean: we advocate the deportation of all Muslims living in a Western state who will not renounce jihad and sharia. We like Trump’s “temporary moratorium” on more Muslims coming into the US as a step in the right direction.

 Even worse, all the effusive praise being showered on Khizr Khan in the last few days overlooks one central point: he is one man. His family is one family. There are no doubt many others like his, but this fact does not mean that there is no jihad, or that all Muslims in the U.S. are loyal citizens.

Khizr Khan is enraged at Donald Trump, but is Trump really the cause of his problem? Jihad terrorists, not Donald Trump or “Islamophobes”,  killed his son in Iraq. And if Donald Trump or anyone else looks upon Muslims in the U.S. military with suspicion, it is with good reason: does any other demographic have as high a rate of treason as Muslims in the U.S. military? In 2003, a convert to Islam, Sgt. Hasan Akbar, murdered two of his commanding officers in Kuwait. In 2009, Major Nidal Malik Hasan murdered 13 Americans at Fort Hood.

Other than those attacks, a Muslim in the U.S. Navy discussed sniper attacks on military personnel. A Muslim U.S. naval engineer allegedly gave an Egyptian agent information on how to sink a U.S. carrier. In 2015, a Muslim National Guard soldier in Illinois planned an Islamic State jihad attack against a U.S. military base. Last February, a U.S. Army enlistee who vowed to “bring the Islamic State straight to your doorstep” pleaded guilty to attempting to detonate a car bomb at Fort Riley military base in Kansas. Just days ago, a U.S. Air Force veteran was convicted of trying to join the Islamic State.

Then there is the U.S. Muslim who gave the Islamic State U.S. military uniforms, combat boots, tactical gear, firearms accessories, and thousands in cash. Where are those uniforms now?

It is good that there are Muslims in the U.S. military who are loyal. But can we have a discussion about those who aren’t, and why they aren’t, and what can be done about it? Such a discussion is vitally necessary, but it wouldn’t serve the classic objective of the global umma, to increase the dar al-Islam (house of Islam) at the dar al-harb (house of war). Nor would an open discussion of Khan’s Sunday morning assertion on Meet the Press that terrorists “have nothing to do with Islam”. 

We constantly are told this, but the repetition doesn’t make it true. In the first place, jihadis repeatedly make clear that they think what they’re doing has everything to do with Islam …

Spencer quotes seven Muslims, six terrorists and a scholar, whose declarations amply prove his assertion. And he follows that with twelve of “many passages of the Qur’an exhorting Muslims to commit acts of violence”.

Finally he asks:

How does Khizr Khan explain all that? He doesn’t — and he knows that no one in the mainstream media will ask him to. All this disinformation and obfuscation he is perpetrating serves the interests of the global umma – but not in any sense those of the United States.

It needs to be known that Khizr Kahn is a passionately devoted member of, and agent and propagandist for, the Muslim Brotherhood. He works zealously to import Muslims and change America into an Islamic State.

Find more about him in our next post.

These are the Five Pillars of Islam, the commandments that every Muslim must obey:

• Declare “There is no God but Allah and Muhammad is his prophet.”
• Pray five times daily at set times.
• Give charity (to Muslims only).
• Fast from dawn to sunset every day in the month of Ramadan.
• Make a pilgrimage to Mecca.

Muslims could live in the West and do all those things without danger to non-Muslims.

But Muslims also have the obligation of jihad – holy war, which could be called a sixth pillar. Every Muslim must actively fight the jihad or support those who actively fight it.

If a Muslim wants to live in the West he should obviously abjure the obligation of jihad.

And then there is sharia, “the infallible law of Allah”. Traditionally it has been inseparable from Islam. It is wholly incompatible with British common law, the US Constitution, and the legal systems of Europe and all other Western countries.

So Muslims who want to live in the West would need to renounce sharia as well as jihad.

Those are the reforms of Islam that are needed if the terrorist war is to end.

If Muslims already living in Western countries could not be persuaded to renounce jihad and sharia, they would have to be coerced.

How can that be done? Terrorize all who carry out or support jihadist terrorism and its aim, the spread of sharia.

David P. Goldman (aka Spengler) writes at the Asian Times:

Yet another criminal known to security services has perpetrated a mass killing, the Tunisian Mohamed Lahouaiej-Bouhlel. Why did the French police allow a foreign national with a criminal record of violence to reside in France? Apart from utter incompetence, the explanation is that he was a snitch for the French authorities. Blackmailing Muslim criminals to inform on prospective terrorists is the principal activity of European counter-terrorism agencies. Every Muslim in Europe knows this.

The terrorists, though, have succeeded in turning the police agents sent to spy on them and forcing them to commit suicide attacks to expiate their sins. This has become depressingly familiar; as Ryan Gallagher reported recently, perpetrators already known to the authorities committed ten of the highest-profile attacks between 2013 and 2015.

The terrorists are adding insult to injury. By deploying police snitches as suicide attackers, terrorists assert their moral superiority and power over western governments. The message may be lost on the western public, whose security agencies and media do their best to obscure it, but it is well understood among the core constituencies of the terrorist groups: the superiority of Islam turns around the depraved criminals whom the western police send to spy on us, and persuades them to become martyrs for the cause of Islam.

These attacks are designed to impress the Muslim public as much as they are intended to horrify the western public. In so many words, the terrorists tell Muslims that western police agencies cannot protect them. If they cooperate with the police they will be found out and punished. The West fears the power of Islam: it evinces such fear by praising Islam as a religion of peace, by squelching dissent in the name of fighting supposed Islamophobia, and by offering concessions and apologies to Muslims. Ordinary Muslims live in fear of the terror networks, which have infiltrated their communities and proven their ability to turn the efforts of western security services against them. They are less likely to inform on prospective terrorists and more likely to aid them by inaction.

The terrorists are winning the intelligence war, because they have shaped the environment in which intelligence is gathered and traded. But that is how intelligence wars always proceed: spies switch sides and tell their stories because they want to be with the winner. ISIS and al-Qaeda look like winners in the eyes of western Muslim populations after humiliating the security services of the West.

As a result, western European Muslims fear the terrorists more than they fear the police. The West will remain vulnerableto mass terror attacks until the balance of fear shifts in the other direction. …

Destroying ISIS, al-Qaeda and other Muslim terror groups is not particularly difficult … It simply requires doing some disgusting things. Western intelligence doesn’t have to infiltrate terror groups, tap phones, mine social media postings and so forth (although these doubtless are worth doing). Muslim communities in the West will inform on the terrorists. They will tell police when someone has packed up and gone to Syria, and when he has returned. They will tell police who is talking about killing westerners, who has a suspicious amount of cash, who is listening to broadcasts from Salafist preachers.

They will tell western security services everything they need to know, provided that western security services ask in the right way. … The West does not have to be particularly clever. It simply needs to understand what kind of war it is fighting. …

The way to win the war is to frighten the larger community of Muslims who passively support terror by action or inaction – frighten them so badly that they will inform on family members. Frightening the larger Muslim population in the West does not require a great deal of effort: a few thousand deportations would do. Western intelligence services do not even have to deport the right people; the wrong people know who they are, and so do many of their neighbors.

The ensuing conversation is an easy one to have. “I understand that your nephew is due for deportation, Hussein, and I believe you when you tell me that he has done nothing wrong. I might be able to help you. But you have to help me. Give me something I can use – and don’t waste my time by making things up, or I swear that I’ll deport you, too. If you don’t have any information, then find out who does.”

This approach to quashing insurgency has worked numerous times in the past. It is not characteristic of peacetime life in western democracies, to be sure. … We prefer to think about winning hearts and minds. Winning the hearts and minds of a people, though, isn’t difficult once they fear you.

Actually, we’re not at all sure that that degree of pressure would be effective. Seems rather too mild to us. Much stronger threats would probably need to be made. But we agree that threats must be made – and carried out.

Islam itself tells us the method of intimidation the West should use. It is an “honor” cult. Muslim men fear humiliation. So humiliate the offenders. The US military guards at Abu Ghraib (punished when they should have been rewarded!) showed the way.

This needs to be known.

It needs to be known in Orlando, San Bernardino, Chattanooga, Washington, New Jersey, Oklahoma, Boston, Little Rock, Fort Hood, Seattle, Los Angeles – every place in the United States where people have been murdered and maimed by jihadis.

It needs to be known by all Americans.

Ryan Mauro reports at Breitbart:

Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton’s newly-announced running mate, Virginia Senator Tim Kaine, has a history of embracing Islamists. He appointed a Hamas supporter to a state immigration commission; spoke at a dinner honoring a Muslim Brotherhood terror suspect; and received donations from well-known Islamist groups.

Appointing a Muslim Brotherhood Front Leader Who Supports Hamas

In 2007, Kaine was the Governor of Virginia and, of all people, chose Muslim American Society (MAS) President Esam Omeish to the state’s Immigration Commission. A Muslim organization against Islamism criticized the appointment and reckless lack of vetting.

Federal prosecutors said in a 2008 court filing that MAS was “founded as the overt arm of the Muslim Brotherhood in America.” …  Convicted terrorist and admitted U.S. Muslim Brotherhood member Abdurrahman Alamoudi testified in 2012, “Everyone knows that MAS is the Muslim Brotherhood.”

According to Omeish’s website, he was also President of the National Muslim Students Association (click there to read our profile about its Muslim Brotherhood origins) and served for two years on the national board of the Islamic Society of North America (ISNA), which the Justice Department also labeled as a U.S. Muslim Brotherhood entity and unindicted co-conspirator in a Hamas-financing trial.

His website says he was Vice President of Dar al-Hijrah Islamic Center, a radical mosque known for its history of terror ties including having future Al-Qaeda operative Anwar Al-Awlaki as its imam and being frequented by two of the 9/11 hijackers and the perpetrator of the Fort Hood shooting. Omeish’s website says he remains a board member.

It says he was chairman of the board of Islamic American University, which had Hamas financier and Muslim Brotherhood spiritual leader Yousef Al-Qaradawi as chairman of its board until at least 2006. Omeish was also chairman of the board for the Islamic Center of Passaic County, a New Jersey mosque with heavy terrorist ties and an imam that the Department of Homeland Security wants to deport for having links to Hamas.

Omeish directly expressed extremism before Kaine appointed him. He claimed the Brotherhood is “moderate” and admitted that he and MAS are influenced by the Islamist movement. In 2004, Omeish praised the Hamas spiritual leader as “our beloved Sheikh Ahmed Yassin”. Videotape from 2000 also surfaced where Omeish pledged to help Palestinians who understand “the jihad way is the way to liberate your land” (he denied this was an endorsement of violence).

When a state delegate wrote a letter to then-Governor Kaine warning him that the MAS has “questionable origins”, a Kaine spokesperson said the charge was bigotry. …

Omeish resigned under heavy pressure …

In September 2011, Kaine spoke at a “Candidates Night” dinner organized by the New Dominion PAC that presented a Lifetime Achievement Award for Jamal Barzinji …  a founding father of the U.S. Muslim Brotherhood.

He first came on to the FBI’s radar in 1987-1988 when an informant inside the Brotherhood identified Barzinji and his associated groups as being part of a network of Brotherhood fronts to “institute the Islamic Revolution in the United States”.

The source said Barzinji and his colleagues were “organizing political support which involves influencing both public opinion in the United States as well as the United States Government” using “political action front groups with no traceable ties”.

Barzinji had his home searched as part of a terrorism investigation in 2003. U.S. Customs Service Senior Special Agent David Kane said in a sworn affidavit that Barzinji and the network of entities he led were investigated because he “is not only closed associated with PIJ [Palestinian Islamic Jihad]…but also with Hamas”.

Counter-terrorism reporter Patrick Poole broke the story that Barzinji was nearly prosecuted but the Obama Justice Department dropped plans for indictment.

Barzinji played a major role in nearly every Brotherhood front in the U.S. and was vice president of the International Institute of Islamic Thought, which came under terrorism investigation also. Barzinji’s group was so close to Palestinian Islamic Jihad operative Sami Al-Arian that IIIT’s President considered his group and Al-Arian’s to be essentially one entity.

The indictment of Al-Arian and his colleagues says that they “would and did seek to obtain support from influential individuals, in the United States under the guise of promoting and protecting Arab rights”. 

The quotes about Brotherhood operative Barzinji’s aspirations to use civil rights advocacy as a means to influence politicians are especially relevant when you consider that video from the event honoring Barzinji shows Kaine saying that it was his fourth time at the annual dinner and thanked his “friends” that organized it for helping him in his campaign for Lieutenant-Governor and Governor and asked them to help his Senate campaign.

Barzinji’s organization, IIIT, donated $10,000 in 2011 to the New Dominion PAC, the organization that held the event honoring Barzinji that Kaine spoke at. The Barzinji-tied New Dominion PAC donated $43,050 to Kaine’s gubernatorial campaign between 2003 and 2005. That figure doesn’t even include other political recipients that assisted Kaine’s campaign.

The PAC has very strong ties to the Democratic Party in Virginia, with the Virginia Public Access Project tallying almost $257,000 in donations.

This likely explains why Barzinji’s grandson served in Governor McAuliffe’s administration and then became the Obama Administration’s liaison to the Muslim-American community.

The Middle East Forum’s Islamist Money in Politics database shows another $4,300 donated to Kaine’s Senate campaign in 2011-2012 by officials from Islamic Society of North America (ISNA) and the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR). Another $3,500 came from Hisham Al-Talib, a leader from Barzinji’s IIIT organization.

It’s worth noting that Barzinji’s IIIT donated $3,500 to Esam Omeish’s 2009 campaign delegate campaign, tying together the cadre of Muslim Brotherhood-linked leaders who got into Kaine’s orbit. …

Clinton’s choice of Kaine is widely seen as a way of strengthening her campaign’s national security credentials.

How can you trust a candidate on national security who appoints a Hamas supporter to their immigration commission and speaks at a dinner honoring a Muslim Brotherhood terror suspect?

And how can you trust a candidate who picks such a person as their “strong on national security” running mate?

A rebel group in Syria cut off the head of a poor, emaciated, hungry, sick boy named Abdullah Issa, aged between eleven and thirteen.

They claimed he was a “spy”, but they most likely seized him in order to make their gleeful snuff-film (which you can watch here if you have the stomach for it).

The group has been lavishly supported by Obama.

When questioned about the official reaction to the atrocity, the State Department spokesman expressed indignation that such groups (in that chaotic bloodbath!) were  ”not obeying the laws of armed conflict”.

From the (pacifist) New American, by Alex Newman:

As if Americans needed another reason to rein in the out-of-control government in Washington, D.C., jihadist Syrian “rebels” backed and “vetted” by the Obama administration and neocons in Congress beheaded a 12-year-old boy. The barbaric beheading of the impoverished child was perpetrated on video that surfaced this week, with smiling jihadists funded and armed by the U.S. government shouting “Allahu Akbar” as they sever the child’s head. According to the Obama-backed terror group behind the horror, the boy was suspected of being a “spy” for the government. The group, which received heavy military equipment and funding from Obama, claimed it was “investigating” the gruesome child beheading.

The latest atrocity perpetrated by Nobel Peace Prize Laureate Obama’s allegedly “moderate” Syrian rebels, one faction in the globalist-fueled civil war, follows years of similar horrors. … Obama-backed jihadists have engaged in … a seemingly never-ending stream of horrific war crimes. …

The specific group behind the latest beheading of a child, which sparked a global outcry and headlines worldwide, is known as Nour al-Din al-Zenki. … The U.S. government supplied the terror group with American tax dollars and even BGM-71 TOW anti-tank missiles … As many as 1,000 Zenki jihadists were reportedly on the payroll of the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency …

The writer points out that the group was approved as “part of the ‘well-vetted’ jihadist alliance” by Senator John McCain (R-Ariz.) and Senator Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.).

The terror group also worked closely with the self-styled “Free Syrian Army”, the jihadist umbrella group loudly promoted by Obama  … It was also reportedly a regular ally of al-Qaeda’s Syrian affiliate, known as Jabhat al-Nusra. …

According to the terrorist group, the 12-year-old boy from a poor family was originally arrested near Aleppo for serving as an alleged “spy” for al-Quds, a group that supports the Syrian regime. The accusation led the jihadist group to decapitate the boy using a small knife on the back of a pick-up truck. The video of the murder, which was posted online, has caused a worldwide uproar. It shows the apparently prepubescent boy laying down in the truck surrounded by five adult jihadists with huge smiles on their faces. In the beheading footage, one of the men can be seen severing the boy’s head … [and then] holding the head up in triumph. …

As the beheading of the child and the Obama administration’s links to it became a global scandal, the John Kerry-led State Department was forced to respond. “We strongly condemn this type of barbaric action, no matter what group is responsible,” the State Department was quoted as saying. “We do not comment on which groups are funded by the United States. We do, however, routinely vet the groups we work with and support and their human rights record figures prominently in that. We do not support groups that condone this sort of barbarity, period.”

State Department spokesperson John Kirby noted that “al-Zenki has identified some of its own members as being responsible for this appalling act”. He also said that, according to a statement, the terror group had supposedly arrested those allegedly responsible for the beheading. “We encourage al-Zenki to investigate the incident and expect all parties to comply with their obligations under the law of armed conflict,” Kirby was quoted as saying by the far-left Daily Beast. “Regardless of who may be culpable, we strongly condemn what appears to be the brutal murder of a minor.” Other reports suggested that Obama had recently stopped funding the terror group, reportedly less than a year ago.

As The New American has documented extensively, however, the Obama administration has been lawlessly showering funds and weapons on practically every faction involved in the conflict — including the Shia militias out of Iraq fighting alongside Assad’s forces …  Other factions benefiting from American largess include multiple terror groups officially designated as terrorist organizations by the U.S. State Department. … There appears to be no warring faction that has not at some point been receiving U.S. government aid — a major violation of federal law, which does not provide exceptions for government officials in criminalizing support for terror groups.

Numerous observers of the failed coup in Turkey – including some of our own readers – suspect that Erdogan staged the event in order to crack down on opponents of his Islamization agenda.

Rick Moran at American Thinker concludes in an article titled Did Erdogan Stage The Coup To Crack Down On His Opponents?, which explores the accusation:

The small number of troops involved, the incompetent prosecution of the coup, and the apparent lack of planning by the plotters suggest an extremely amateur attempt to overthrow Erdogan. But might Erdogan’s agents have goaded the plotters into taking action? It’s a seductive theory that has no evidence to back it up.

Even if there was an Erdogan plot, there must have been many participants in the uprising who knew nothing of it and strove sincerely for success.

What is certain is that Erdogan gained a significant victory, not just for himself but also for our enemy, Islam.  

Ralph Peters writes at Fox News Opinion:

Friday night’s failed coup was Turkey’s last hope to stop the Islamization of its government and the degradation of its society.  Reflexively, Western leaders rushed to condemn a coup attempt they refused to understand. Their reward will be a toxic Islamist regime at the gates of Europe.

Our leaders no longer do their basic homework.The media relies on experts-by-Wikipedia. Except for PC platitudes, our schools ignore the world beyond our shores. Deluged with unreliable information, citizens succumb to the new superstitions of the digital age.

So a great country is destroyed by Islamist hardliners before our eyes—and our president praises its “democracy”. 

That tragically failed coup was a forlorn hope, not an attempt to take over a country. Turkey is not a banana republic in which the military grasps the reins for its own profit.  For almost a century, the Turkish armed forces have been the guardians of the country’s secular constitution. Most recently, coups in 1960, 1971 and 1980 (with “non-coup” pressure in 1997) saw the military intervene to prevent the country’s collapse.

Erdogan will use the coup as an excuse to accelerate the Islamization of his country and to lead Turkey deeper into the darkness engulfing the Muslim world. His vision is one of a neo-Ottoman megalomaniac.

Each time, the military returned the government to civilian rule as soon as that proved practical. …

Friday night, mid-grade officers led a desperate effort to rescue their country again. They failed. The West cheered. Soon enough, we’ll mourn.

The coup leaders made disastrous mistakes, the worst of which was to imagine that the absence of President Erdogan from Ankara, the capital, presented the perfect opportunity.  Wrong.  In a coup, the key is to seize the leaders you mean to overthrow (as well as control of the media).  Instead of fleeing into exile, Erdogan was able to return in triumph.

So who is the man our own president rushed to support because he was “democratically elected”? Recep Tayyip Erdogan is openly Islamist and affiliated with the Muslim Brotherhood, which President Obama appears to believe represents the best hope for the Middle East. But the difference between ISIS, Al Qaeda and the Muslim Brotherhood isn’t one of purpose, but merely of manners: Muslim Brothers wash the blood off their hands before they sit down to dinner with their dupes.

With barely a murmured “Tut-tut!” from Western leaders, Erdogan has dismantled Turkey’s secular constitution (which the military is duty-bound to protect).  His “democracy” resembles Putin’s, not ours. Key opposition figures have been driven into exile or banned. Opposition parties have been suppressed. Recent elections have not been held so much as staged.  And Erdogan has torn the fresh scab from the Kurdish wound, fostering civil war in Turkey’s southeast for his own political advantage.

Erdogan has packed Turkey’s courts with Islamists.  He appointed pliant, pro-Islamist generals and admirals, while staging show trials of those of whom he wished to rid the country.  He has de facto, if not yet de jure, curtailed women’s freedoms.  He dissolved the wall between mosque and state (Friday night, he used mosques’ loudspeakers to call his supporters into the streets).  Not least, he had long allowed foreign fighters to transit Turkey to join ISIS and has aggressively backed other extremists whom he believed he could manage.

And his diplomatic extortion racket has degraded our own military efforts against ISIS.

That’s the man President Obama supports.

And the leaders of the ill-fated coup? What did they stand for?  Mustafa Kemal Ataturk’s legacy and a secular constitution.  One of the great men of the last century, Ataturk (an innovative general by background) pulled Turkey from the wreckage of World War One, abolished the caliphate, suppressed fanatical religious orders, gave women legal rights and social protections, banned the veil, promoted secular education for all citizens of Turkey, strongly advocated Westernization and modernization … and promoted a democratic future.

The officers who led the collapsed coup stood for all those things. President Obama and Secretary of State Kerry opposed them.

By Saturday morning, it was clear that the mullahs and mobs behind Erdogan had won. Erdogan will use the coup as an excuse to accelerate the Islamization of his country and to lead Turkey deeper into the darkness engulfing the Muslim world. His vision is one of a neo-Ottoman megalomaniac.

NATO, which operates by consensus, will find itself embracing a poisonous snake.  New crises will reawaken old fears in southeastern Europe, which western European states will dismiss condescendingly, further crippling the badly limping European Union.  Syria will continue to bleed.  And educated, secular Turks will find themselves in a situation like unto that of German liberals in the 1930s.  We may see new and unexpected wars.

A desperate, ill-planned coup has failed in Turkey. Here comes the darkness. 

Yes – unless the West starts fighting back under new American leadership.

A nationwide curfew was imposed as a section of the armed forces claimed to have taken the country over. The coup leaders seized national television and the phone network. Gunfire was heard in Ankara and military jets flew low over Ankara and Istanbul where the bridges over the Bosphorus were blocked. In Istanbul, Turkish Gendarmerie and soldiers blocked entrances to bridges over the Bosphorus while tanks blocked Ataturk airport. A TV announcer read out a statement saying that a “peace committee” had taken over the country against autocratic rule and will write a new constitution restoring democracy, whose institutions have been eroded by autocratic rule, and restore secular law.

It was a great aim, a brave attempt – but it failed.

Now Turkey is less likely to be secular and democratic. 

DebkaFile, which we quoted above, assesses the event and analyses why the attempted coup failed:

The Turkish armed forces’ attempt to overthrow the authoritarian rule of President Tayyip Erdogan was largely extinguished Saturday morning July 16 after less than 24 hours – due to three major miscalculations:

1. They first seized the country’s power centers and state television when their first priority should have been to immobilize Erdogan who was out of the capital on vacation.

2. Although out of control in Ankara and Istanbul, he used his mobile phone to reassert his authority through a private television station and called on the people to take to the streets in protest against the plotters. Civilians responded by surrounding the tanks and tying them down until loyal troops moved in.

3. They relied too heavily on the air force to cow the regime, the jets zooming low over the two main cities while the two main airports were closed.

It was soon evident that control of Turkey’s skies was no guarantee of control of the ground. Indeed, the coup leaders did not prevent him from landing at Ataturk airport and declaring immediately that he was in charge, demonstrating that he was on top of events.

In the clashes that followed, Gen. Umit Dundar, the newly appointed acting chief of the general staff, said more than 190 people died in clashes: 41 police officers, two soldiers, 47 civilians and 104 people described as ‘‘coup plotters”. Dundar said officers from the Air Force, the military police and the armored units were mainly involved in the attempt.

At the same, the attempt by part of the Turkish armed forces to topple Erdogan in the name of democracy and the return of “secular law” was impressive and evidence of social and political malaise under his rule. It was led by at least half a dozen generals, as may be judged the arrest of Gen. Memduh Hakbilen, the chief of staff of Turkey’s command for the important Aegean region, among the more than 1,500 alleged plotters and the suspension of another five generals.

That elements of the air force joined the attempted uprising is unprecedented in Turkey, whose army is NATO’s second largest.

Erdogan will no doubt want to know why his MIT intelligence failed to scent the conspiracy afoot.

He will certainly lose no time in executing a massive purge of Turkey’s armed forces, and especially the air force and intelligence arms, after accusing the coup leaders of treason.

Erdogan has been steadily taking steps to re-create an Islamic state. He wants to reverse the modernizing reforms that Kemal Ataturk effected after Turkey, as an ally of Germany, was defeated in the First World War. He dreams of reviving the Ottoman Empire, perhaps seeing himself as Sultan (who was also titled Caliph). He has built himself a new palace in Ankara, and announced that it will be the center of government.

Predictably, President Obama is on the side of the would-be dictator against the side that reached for democracy. 

Erdogan’s new presidential palace in Ankara

President Erdogan in his new palace

President Erdogan among guards dressed in the uniforms of Ottoman soldiers

Europeans are at last growing angry with their ruling elites and forming groups of resistance.

Feeling themselves and their power seriously threatened, the elites – politicians, academics, media people, all of them on the left even if some of them call themselves conservatives – label the groups “far-right”.

Many voices are prophesying civil war.

We quote from an article at Gatestone by Yves Mamou, titled France: The Coming Civil War:

“We are on the verge of a civil war.”

That quote did not come from a fanatic or a lunatic. No, it came from the head of France’s homeland security, the DGSI (Direction générale de la sécurité intérieure), Patrick Calvar.

He has, in fact, spoken of the risk of a civil war many times. On July 12^th, he warned a commission of members of parliament, in charge of a survey about the terrorist attacks of 2015, about it.

In May 2016, he delivered almost the same message to another commission of members of parliament, this time in charge of national defense. “Europe,” he said, “is in danger. Extremism is on the rise everywhere, and we are now turning our attention to some far-right movements who are preparing a confrontation.”

What kind of confrontation? “Intercommunity confrontations”,  he said – polite for “a war against Muslims”. “One or two more terrorist attacks,” he added, “and we may well see a civil war.”

In February 2016, in front of a senate commission in charge of intelligence information, he said again: ” We are looking now at far-right extremists who are just waiting for more terrorist attacks to engage in violent confrontation”.

No one knows if the truck terrorist, who plowed into the July 14^th Bastille Day crowd in Nice and killed more than 80 people, will be the trigger for a French civil war, but it might help to look at what creates the risk of one in France and other countries, such as Germany or Sweden.

The main reason is the failure of the state.

France is the main target of repeated Islamist attacks; the more important Islamist terrorist bloodbaths took place at the magazine Charlie Hebdo and the Hypercacher supermarket of Vincennes (2015); the Bataclan, its nearby restaurants and the Stade de France stadium, (2015); the failed attack on theThalys train; the beheading of Hervé Cornara (2015); the assassination of two policemen in Magnanville in June (2016), and now the truck-ramming in Nice, on the day commemorating the French Revolution of 1789.

Most of those attacks were committed by French Muslims: citizens on their way back from Syria (the Kouachi brothers at Charlie Hebdo), or by French Islamists (Larossi Abballa who killed a police family in Magnanville last June) who later claimed their allegiance to Islamic State (ISIS). The truck killer in Nice was Tunisian but married with a French woman, three children together, and living quietly in Nice until he decided to murder …

At each of these tragic episodes, the head of state, President François Hollande, refused to name the enemy, refused to name Islamism – and especially refused to name French Islamists – as the enemy of French citizens.

For Hollande, the enemy is an abstraction: “terrorism” or “fanatics”. Even when the president does dare to name “Islamism” the enemy, he refuses to say he will close all Salafist mosques, prohibit the Muslim Brotherhood and Salafist organizations in France, or ban veils for women in the street and at university. No, instead, the French president reaffirms his determination for military actions … abroad: “We are going to reinforce our actions in Syria and Iraq,” the president said after the Nice attack.

For France’s head of state, the deployment of soldiers on the national ground is for defensive actions only: a dissuasive policy, not an offensive rearmament of the Republic against an internal enemy.

So confronted with this failure by our elite … how astonishing is it if paramilitary groups are organizing themselves to retaliate? …

The civil war began sixteen years ago, with the second Intifada. When Palestinians invented suicide attacks in Tel Aviv and Jerusalem, French Muslims began to terrorize Jews living peacefully in France. For sixteen years, Jews — in France —were slaughtered, attacked, tortured and stabbed by French Muslim citizens supposedly to avenge Palestinian people in the West Bank.

When a group of French citizens who are Muslims declares war on another group of French citizens who are Jews, what do you call it?

For the French establishment, it is not a civil war, just a regrettable misunderstanding between two “ethnic” communities.

Until now, no one has wanted to establish a connection between these attacks and the murderous attack in Nice against people who were not necessarily Jews – and name it as it should be named: a civil war.

For the very politically correct French establishment, the danger of a civil war will begin only if anyone retaliates against French Muslims; if everyone just submits to their demands, everything is all right. Until now, no one thinks that the terrorist attacks against Jews by French Muslims; against Charlie Hebdo’s journalists by French Muslims; against an entrepreneur who was beheaded a year ago by a French Muslim; against young Ilan Halimi by a group of Muslims; against schoolchildren in Toulouse by a French Muslim; against the passengers on the Thalys train by a French Muslim, against the innocent people in Nice by an almost French Muslim were the symptoms of a civil war. These bloodbaths remain, still today something like a climatic catastrophe, a kind of tragic misunderstanding.

In France, who most complains about Muslim immigration? Who most suffers from local Islamism? Who most likes to drink a glass of wine or eat a ham-and-butter sandwich? The poor and the old who live close to Muslim communities, because they do not have the money to move someplace else.

Today, as a result, millions of the poor and the old in France are ready to elect Marine Le Pen, president of the rightist Front National, as the next president of the Republic for the simple reason that the only party that wants to fight illegal immigration is the Front National.

Because, however, these French old and poor want to vote for the Front National, they have become the enemy of the French establishment, right and left. What is the Front National saying to these people? “We are going to restore France as a nation of French people”. And the poor and the old believe it – because they have no choice.

Similarly, the poor and the old in Britain had no choice but to vote for Brexit. They took the first tool given them to express their disappointment at living in a society they did not like anymore. They did not vote to say, “Kill these Muslims who are transforming my country, stealing my job and soaking up my taxes”. They were just protesting a society that a global elite had begun to transform without their consent.

In France, the global elites made a choice. They decided that the “bad” voters in France were unreasonable people too stupid, too racists to see the beauties of a society open to people who often who do not want to assimilate, who want you to assimilate to them, and who threaten to kill you if you do not.

The global elites made another choice: they took the side against their own old and poor because those people did not want to vote for them any longer. The global elites also chose not to fight Islamism, because Muslims vote globally for the global elite. Muslims in Europe also offer a big “carrot” to the global elite: they vote collectively.

In France, 93% of Muslims voted for the current president, François Hollande, in 2012. In Sweden, the Social Democrats reported that 75% of Swedish Muslims voted for them in the general election of 2006; and studies show that the “red-green” bloc gets 80-90% of the Muslim vote.

If the establishment does not want to see that civil war was already declared by extremist Muslims first – if they do not want to see that the enemy is not the Front National in France, the AfD in Germany, or the Sweden Democrats – but Islamism in France, in Belgium, in Great Britain, in Sweden – then a civil war will happen.

France, like Germany and Sweden, has a military and police strong enough to fight against an internal Islamist enemy. But first, they have to name it and take measures against it.

If they do not – if they leave their native citizens in despair, with no other means than to arm themselves and retaliate –  yes, civil war is inevitable.

Last night, with Sean Hannity on Fox News, Newt Gingrich said what needs to be said: “We are in a war …”

He spoke after the news came of the latest jihad atrocity: a Muslim killing more than 80 people and injuring many more by running them over with a truck and shooting them in the French coastal town of Nice, where thousands were out celebrating Bastille Day.

He will not accept that “Western civilization is helpless in the face of a group of medieval barbarians”.

The “group” is very large. It is Islam.

He proposes steps that need to be taken to defeat the jihadis, including, “Frankly, just kill them.”

The mosques and madrassas, he says, must be monitored.

He urges the deportation of every Muslim who believes in sharia law. As sharia is inseparable from Islam, such a measure would effect the suppression of Islam in America – which is long overdue.

The only thing he says that we disagree with is “Islam is not necessarily evil”. It is.

No sooner was one battle apparently won by a majority of the British people when their vote brought them out of the EU, than a new leader is elected who will continue to do the fatal damage that the EU was doing to Britain.

In this video, the person who is about to become the Prime Minister of what used to be the free kingdom of Great Britain, Theresa May, tells a series of lies about Islam, so preparing the way for further capitulation to the primitive, oppressive, cruel Muslim colonists who are gradually taking over control of the country.

The Lies

ISIS’s ideology “has nothing to do with Islam”. It has everything to do with Islam. (See here.)

“Let there be no compulsion in religion” – a sura that was abrogated by later suras. (See here.) Islam prescribes the punishment of death for apostasy.

The ideology of ISIS is “rejected by the vast majority” of Muslims. It is not. (See here and note the chart titled Support for Sharia.)

“Islam is a religion of peace.” It is a religion of war. (See here.)