“I was ordered to fight all men until they say ‘there is no god but Allah‘.” With these farewell words the Prophet Muhammad summed up the international vision of the faith he had brought to the world. As a universal religion, Islam envisages a global political order in which all humankind will live under Muslim rule as either believers or subject communities. In order to achieve this goal it is incumbent on all free, male, adult Muslims to carry out an uncompromising struggle “in the path of Allah”, or jihad. This in turn makes those parts of the world that have not yet been conquered by the House of Islam an abode of permanent conflict (Dar al-Harb, the House of War) which will only end with Islam’s eventual triumph. In the meantime, there can be no peace between these two world systems, only the temporary suspensions of hostilities for reasons of necessity or expediency. … [The caliphs] were, of course, extremely proud of their religion and convinced of its superiority over all other faiths. Yet this did not prevent them from appropriating the intellectual property of other cultures and religions …  [T]he largest source of borrowing by a wide margin came precisely from that part of the world with which the House of Islam was supposedly locked in a deadly civilizational confrontation – the West.

So Efraim Karsh, in his book Islamic Imperialism*, explains the unceasing aggression towards the West, and the simultaneous cultural appropriation from it by Islam in its early history.

As Islam still has not conquered the world – though it is making rapid progress towards that goal – there has been no change.

Yesterday (Friday, December 7, 2019) a Saudi Arabian jihadi, enrolled at Naval Air Station Pensacola, Florida, to be trained as a military pilot, killed three “infidels” and wounded several more.  

Why does the United States train its enemies in the techniques of war?

We agree with Mark Steyn that it is a stupid thing to do.

He writes:

Sometimes a society becomes too stupid to survive.

Back when President Trump was Candidate Trump, he famously proposed a soi-disant “Muslim ban” on entry to the United States “until our country’s representatives can figure out what the hell is going on”.

Which was a rationale to which I was rather partial – because a failure to “figure out what the hell is going on” is a big part of why we’re where we are a generation after 9/11. Mohammed is now in the Top Ten boys’ names in America, which means it will sooner than you think be, as it is in Europe, among the Top Five boys’ names, and eventually the Number One.

Well, the “Muslim ban” never happened, after being struck down by judges and filleted into meaninglessness by the lawyers of the permanent bureaucracy. But you would think, given the mountain of corpses piled up on 9/11, that at the very minimum Saudi nationals would no longer be being given pilot training in Florida. After all, fifteen of the nineteen 9/11 hijackers were Saudis, and half of those who flew the planes received their lessons in the Sunshine State.

Yet today Americans pick up their papers to read:

PENSACOLA, Fla. — A Saudi Arabian military pilot training in the United States opened fire Friday morning at Naval Air Station Pensacola, leaving three people dead and several others wounded before Florida sheriff’s deputies shot and killed him.

Or as The New York Times headlined it:

Florida Shooting Updates: Authorities Say It’s Too Early to Know if It’s Terrorism

We know it’s a Saudi national gunning down Americans, but it’s “too early to know” if it’s terrorism. Could be just “mental health issues” or “workplace violence” or “pre-traumatic stress disorder” or “involuntary self-radicalization” or whatever. Nothing to worry about and always remember … that “Allahu Akbar” is Arabic for “Nothing to see here”.

On “the day that everything changed” [9/11] nothing changed – except the rate of Muslim immigration to the west, which doubled. A US immigration bureaucracy … cannot stop itself admitting Saudi trainee pilots to kill Americans.

Recently, I marked (under the headline Diversity unto Death) the tenth anniversary of the Fort Hood slaughter – the first mass murder in American history in which the perpetrator gave a PowerPoint presentation on what he intended to do, and to a roomful of military and mental-health professionals to boot. Some of whom felt a little queasy about what they heard, but not enough to prevent him going ahead and murdering everyone. …

No matter how many times Islamic terrorists strike in the West, few dare speak of “Islamic terrorism”. In Europe, speaking or writing that phrase can land you in jail.

And in America –

We will admit more Saudi would-be pilots (for no district judge would countenance an end to the program) but also order up more bollards for US military bases, and longer security lines and more sophisticated latex gloves. And, whatever happens, it won’t ever be anything to do with Islam, and not even anything to do with terrorism unless you’re going to a dead-drop in the park to collect your orders from Isis High Command.

Oh, and even the “Muslim ban” guy is back to the usual “the Saudis are our friends” bollocks:

The King said that the Saudi people are greatly angered by the barbaric actions of the shooter, and that this person in no way shape or form represents the feelings of the Saudi people who love the American people.

Yeah, sure. Aside from the three other Saudis who filmed the attack as it was in progress.

The flaw in Trump’s “Muslim ban” was its conditionality on us “figuring out what the hell is going on”. Actually, what the hell’s going on isn’t so difficult to figure out. But, as events at Fishmongers’ Hall and the Pensacola Naval Air Station both underline, most of the western world would rather do anything than confront honestly “what the hell is going on”.

And so the hell will go on …

The likes of today’s perp and last Friday’s perp are able to do this to us because we’re willing to have it done to us. We have not the will to resist even the most absurd provocations.

What is the nature of such weakness? What has happened to the West?

Can it be said that it has been emasculated? Feminized?

Induced to hate itself? Its self-esteem defeated by the weird alliance of two grotesque ideologies, the Left and Islam?

Yes.

But why did we let it happen? What is the flaw in our magnificent civilization that its enemies have insidiously exploited?

What can it be but what Mark Steyn bluntly says it is – stupidity?

*Islamic Imperialism: A History by Efraim Karsh, Yale UniversityPress, pp.62-64

London, capital of England and Great Britain, and for centuries the hub of the greatest empire in all history, has elected a Muslim named Sadiq Khan to be its mayor.

He advocates tolerance of terrorism. That is to say, Islamic terrorism.

And he will not tolerate criticism of Islam. So he has formed a special police force, under his personal command, to sniff out “Islamophobes”. He calls it his “Hate Crime and Hate Speech”  unit. We call it the Islamic Stasi. It does not confine its operations to London, but goes stalking far afield.

Our British associate, Chauncey Tinker, sent us this account of the London Islamic Stasi going about its oppressive business, by one of its victims. Not surprisingly, a Jewish victim. His website is titled Fahrenheit211.

On Tuesday the 22^nd October, at approximately 07:15, whilst I was getting my four year old child ready for school, there was a rather aggressive knock at my front door. I opened the door and found a whole bunch of police officers who wanted me to come out and ‘talk to them’. Knowing what the modern day British police are like in too many cases, which is thuggish and dishonest, I shut the door in their faces. The police do not turn up mob handed merely to have ‘a chat’. Instead I picked up the handset for my entryphone, which is remotely recorded, and spoke to the officers via that method.

I politely requested that they state the reason why they were at my front door and they said ‘we just want to talk’ and ‘you must come outside to speak’. They refused my request that I would speak to them via the window and insisted that I come out. Whilst this was going on I was watching what was happening on CCTV, the footage of which is now secured off site. I could see at least six police officers swarming around my front garden and to my back garden to which they had gained access. There were, I observed, four officers in the front and two in the back.

The officer who appeared to be leading this mob of officers, kept saying ‘we want you to come outside so we can talk to you’. Of course I refused. This is because I know from other cases of a similar nature where the police have said this that this is a ruse to gain entry to a property so that they can later say that the occupier ‘invited’ them in. The lead officer, whom I later found out was PC Choudhury of Sidcup who is attached to Sadiq Khan’s ‘Hate Crime and Hate Speech’ unit, became ever more threatening and aggressive in his tone and refused to state exactly why he and the rest of the officers were there. He and the other officers kept shouting through the door that if I did not open the door then they would break it down. Because I did not want my son exposed to what the police were obviously going to do I sent him upstairs with my wife.

After about five minutes or so of these officers banging on the front door and issuing threats to break it down and officers menacingly patrolling my back garden, an officer brought up what looked like a battering ram. The officers were shouting through the door ‘we are going to break the door down now’.

As the officers said they would, they smashed the lock on my front door causing approximately £100 worth of damage. At least three officers, one of whom was PC Choudhury, rushed into the house and into the kitchen at the back of the house. PC Choudhury then cautioned me, arrested me for ‘malicious communication and racial and religious hatred’ and put me in handcuffs. They guided me out into the front garden where they searched me and then put me in the back of a police van and took me to the local police station. Whilst I was being searched in the front garden my son escaped from his Mum and ran downstairs to the front door, saying his Daddy is being searched and taken away by police. I turned to my son and said to him, ‘Don’t worry, it will be all right, Daddy loves you’. He’s been asking me, ‘Are the policemen going to come back again?’ I will never forgive or forget the trauma that these officers put my child through.

Before I was put in the police van I noticed that a considerable amount of police resources had been put into this arrest and there were at least two police cars present along with the van. I found out later that PC Choudhury and his Met Police civilian assistant had traveled up the night before, distance of 150 miles and had stayed, at the taxpayers expense, in one of my city’s poshest hotels at a roughly estimated cost including meals of at least £150 per night. It’s good to know that Sadiq Khan’s ‘Hate Crime and Hate Speech’ unit is spending Londoners’ money so sensibly isn’t it? Maybe the Met has run out of real crime? Do I need a sarcasm sign here, no I don’t think so.

The police then searched my property and took away all my IT equipment including phones in order to examine them to see if they were related to the ‘offence’ that I had been arrested for. They also took my wife’s computer which is more than little annoying as she needs this machine for her work.

When we got to the police station I was booked in under the catch all and increasingly misused ‘Malicious Communication and Racial and Religious Hatred’ acts, searched again and put in a cell. The custody sergeant, who incidentally said that I was one of the most polite detainees he had had in a long time, furnished me with paper copies of my rights whilst detained and a requested copy of the Bible, which I used in the cell to meditate upon Psalm 35, a psalm that was appropriate for this situation. I was removed from the cell, photographed, fingerprinted and had DNA taken. I was put back in the cell to await questioning and the arrival of the duty solicitor.

Before questioning by PC Choudhury I consulted with the duty solicitor, who luckily turned out to be far better than many who perform this function, and I told him that I was not going to answer any questions that the police put to me, as is my right. I also gave the police a written statement that I was merely exercising my right to speak freely. I was offered food but I refused on the grounds that the food is unlikely to be Kosher but I was offered and accepted hot drinks as there’s not much you can do to instant coffee that would make this item not Kosher or Treyf.

Eventually I was brought, along with my solicitor, to an interview room for questioning under caution. I gave the officer my pre-prepared statement about speaking freely and the interview commenced. Of course I answered nearly all questions with ‘no comment’ and refused also to identify the vast majority of the items that the police alleged that they had removed from my home. The police also claimed that they had in possession written correspondence that they believed was between me and others who have challenged both Islam and ‘hate speech’ laws and certain organizations.

Although I did not answer any questions, the questions themselves gave me an inkling into what the arrest was all about. From what I could gather both Mr Mughal, who is the founder of the Tell Mama organisation and London’s Mayor Sadiq Khan had complained about memes mocking them that the police allege they saw on the Fahrenheit211 website. They also asked me about an allegation made by Mr Mughal that I questioned the narrative surrounding the ‘punish a Muslim day’ case in which doubt was cast on the idea that this was the work of an organised group and rather, as it turned out, the work of a lone and deranged nutcase. The police asked me if I was an ‘Islamophobe’ to which I replied ‘no comment’. They also asked me to disclose my passcodes for the machines that they claimed they had seized to which I replied ‘no comment’.

Incidentally, if you want further information about some of the criticisms that have been levelled against the Tell Mama organisation and those involved in it along with the sad state of freedom of speech in the UK, then I can highly recommend that you read Nick Monroe’s article ‘Escape from Big Mother” It is an article that makes for illuminating and indeed frightening reading, especially for those who live in nations that, unlike the UK, have a greater respect for freedom of speech and freedom of expression. It should encourage those in places like the USA to hold on tight to their First Amendment, because without it the average citizen may suddenly find that a whole load of subjects that they may wish to discuss are now ‘forbidden’.

I got the distinct impression that the police were trying to get me to make their job of prosecuting me for ‘hate speech’ easy by having me answer questions. This, knowing the parlous state of UK police forces, was not something that I was prepared to do. Basically, the Met are trying to prosecute me for memes and for criticism of those groups who are in receipt of vast amounts of public money, resources to which I and others do not consider them entitled.

After discovering that I was not going to answer any of the police’s questions, I was released without charge on unconditional bail pending investigation. I suspect that this case will go the way of many other similar cases of ‘malicious communication’ and ‘hate speech’ where the long drawn out process of investigation is the punishment or part of the punishment and also a way of intimidating those who engage in ‘wrongthink’.

I would like to take this opportunity to thank all the many people who have contacted me both privately and publicly to offer their support and those associates who have contacted various online ‘influencers’ in order to gain publicity not just for my case but also to support the cause of free speech in general. I have been truly heartened by those who have voiced their support and especially to those in the United States who are encouraging a letter writing campaign aimed at the British Embassy in Washington DC. I would also like to thank those (you know who you are) who have given me facilities to work ‘off site’ which is why I’m able to continue writing.

This case is likely to run and run, a bit like the West End play The Mousetrap, although hopefully not as long as that particular production. I have also been questioned by another government entity that has the misfortune to share initials with a security organisation that was operating in Germany between 1933 and 1945. This I believe is standard practice when a person who is arrested has children. But I have told this organisation the truth. That is that I am a centre rightist Jewish conservative who believes in equality between races, equality between men and women between different sexualities, along with civic nationalism, British values and who is not a member of any extreme party or political grouping. The last party that I was a member of was the Conservative Party who in no way could be called ‘extreme’ by any reasonable person.

This incident will not discourage me from standing up for the idea of freedom of speech, which includes freedom of speech for those with whom I vehemently disagree. I am also not discouraged in my view that ‘hate speech’ legislation has no place in a society that considers itself to be free as not only do ‘hate speech’ laws have a chilling effect on a citizen or subject’s speech, but also because they create a two tier system where one group is given virtually carte blanche to say what they want but others do not have this right. If I’m not fighting here, I will be fighting this fight elsewhere and I would encourage others to peacefully and politely protest against both the removal of free speech rights for Britons, but also the damaging and all too easily abused categories of ‘hate speech’ and ‘hate crime’ legislation. In these matters we should be treated as equals no matter what our skin colour or belief system, something that the plethora of ‘hate crime’ legislation does not do. I’m going to fight this case as hard as I possibly can as it’s not just my fight but the same fight as everyone who wants freedom of speech and the repeal of the increasingly hated ‘hate speech’ and ‘hate crime’ laws.

So though the battle is lost and the capital of the country has fallen, some fight on.

The struggle is heroic, but is there any chance it can succeed?

… is to torture and murder and enslave.

Nothing Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi did, or caused to be done by his followers, was against Islamic doctrine. Its torturing and mass murdering and enslaving are not just permitted but positively commanded by Islam. The Washington Post meant to annoy President Trump and the half of the nation that supports him with its obituary headline calling al-Baghadi “an austere Islamic scholar”. But in fact it was telling the truth. Al-Baghdadi was “an austere Islamic scholar”. Unintentionally, it was condemning the man with an exact, though incomplete, description. The Left constantly claims that ISIS and other Muslim terrorists have “nothing to do with Islam”. The Washington Post contradicted that. It would have been telling the whole truth if it had said that al-Baghdadi was an Islamic scholar and therefore a terrorist, a jihadi, a torturer, a mass murderer, and an enslaver.

Muhammad the founder of Islam said:

I have been made victorious through terror.

Aerial photograph of a victory over Islam

The Daily Mail reports:

Once al-Baghdadi was confirmed dead, U.S. forces grabbed every computer, every phone, every bit of paper they could find before retreating. The last action was to call in an airstrike by US drones, reducing Baghdadi’s hideout to rubble, wiping it from the face of the Earth and covering their tracks.

ISIS has other leaders. But how safe will they feel now?

President Trump announced in an address to the nation today (October 27, 2019) that US Special Operations Forces have killed – or, more accurately, have forced the death of – Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, the leader of ISIS.

ISIS had declared him “the Caliph of all Muslims and the Prince of the Believers”.

We quote our favorite part of what the President said about his death, slightly shortened from Breitbart’s report:

He died after running into a dead-end tunnel, whimpering, and crying, and screaming all the way. The compound had been cleared by this time, with people either surrendering, or being shot and killed. Eleven young children were moved out of the house, and are uninjured. The only ones remaining were Baghdadi in the tunnel, and he had dragged three of his young children with him. They were led to certain death. He reached the end of the tunnel, as our dogs chased him down. He ignited his vest, killing himself and the three children. His body was mutilated by the blast. The thug who tried hard to intimidate others spent his last moments in utter fear, in total panic and dread, terrified of the American forces bearing down on him. Baghdadi was vicious and violent, and he died as a coward, running and crying. A brutal killer has violently been eliminated. He will never again harm another man, woman, or child.

ISIS, which until recently occupied territory it called the Islamic State and the Caliphate, is intensely, relentlessly, unremittingly cruel. These devout Sunni Muslims have killed thousands of people, many by the most torturous methods they could devise; burning them, boiling them in oil, burying them alive, sawing their heads off …

Nothing they do is against the doctrine of Islam. Their actions and their aims are profoundly religious.

And the organization is a Hydra: no sooner is one head cut off than another will spring up to replace it.

But at least this one is dead and gone.

Thank you, President Trump!

An illuminating article. For us, lifelong students of Communism and the modern history of Russia, almost as full of surprises as of affirmations.

Angelo M. Codevilla writes at CRB:

What 21st-century Russia is in itself, to its neighbors, and to America flows from the fact it is no longer the Soviet Union. As the red flag came down from the Kremlin on Christmas Day 1991, Russian president Boris Yeltsin, when asked what he thought of Communism, nearly wept as he replied: “I wish it had been tried somewhere else.” Vladimir Putin, who famously said that the USSR’s collapse had been a tragedy, nevertheless shares the Russian people’s consensus that their country was Communism’s first and foremost victim, and that no one knows how long it may take to live down its dysfunctions. To its neighbors, this Russia is a rebudding tsarist empire. To Americans, it is a major adversary despite the lack of clashing geopolitical interests.

After Communism

The Revolution of 1917 was possible because socialists, in Russia and throughout the Western world, believed that “present-day society”, as Karl Marx put it, is a jumble of “contradictions”, which could be resolved only by tearing down the pillars of the house. Once that was done, history would end: man and woman, farmer and industrial worker, producer and consumer, intellectual and mechanic—heretofore at odds—would live harmoniously, freely, and prosperously ever after.

Because they really believed in this utopian dream, the socialists gave absolute power to Lenin and Stalin’s Communist Party to wreck and reorganize—to break eggs in order to make a delicious omelette. But Communism, while retaining some of Marxism’s antinomian features (e.g., war on the family and on religion), became in practice almost exclusively a justification for the party’s absolute rule. For example, the economic system adopted by the Soviet Union and by other Communist regimes owed precisely zero to Marx, but was a finely tuned instrument for keeping the party in control of wealth.

The Leninist party is gone forever in Russia because, decades after its leaders stopped believing in Marxism, and after Leonid Brezhnev had freed them from the Stalinist incubus that had kept them loyal to the center, they had learned to make the party into a racket. That, and the residual antinomian features, made Russia into a kakotopia. Russian men learned to intrigue and drink on the job rather than work. Shunning responsibility for women and children, they turned Russian society into a matriarchy, held together by grandmothers. In a thoroughly bureaucratized system, each holder of a bit of authority used it to inconvenience the others. Forcing people to tell each other things that both knew not to be true—recall that “politically correct” is a Communist expression—engendered cynicism and disrespect for truth. The endless anti-religion campaigns cut the people off from one moral system and failed to inculcate another. Alcohol drowned unhappiness, life expectancies declined, and fewer Russians were born.

Religious morality? Communism not a religious morality? Not the same religious morality in certain vital respects? All red capes waving at us bulls!  But for the sake of what’s to come, we’ll only stand and paw the ground – and give a snort or two.

The Russian people rejected Communism in the only ways that powerless people can—by passivity, by turning to anything foreign to authority, and by cynicism. Nothing being more foreign to Communism than Christianity, Russians started wearing crosses, knowing that the regime frowned on this feature of the Russia that had pre-existed Communism, and would survive it.

A louder snort. But on:

No sooner had the USSR died than Russia restored the name Saint Petersburg to Peter the Great’s “window on the West”. Even under Soviet rule, Russians had gone out of their way to outdo the West in Western cultural matters—“nekulturny” (uncultured!) was, and remains, a heavy insult in Russia. Moscow let countless priorities languish as it rebuilt in record time its massive Christ the Savior cathedral to original specifications. As the Russian Orthodox church resumed its place as a pillar of the Russia that had been Christianity’s bastion against the Mongol horde as well as against the Muslim Ottomans, golden domes soon shone throughout the land. Whatever anyone might think of the Russian Orthodox church, it anchors the country to its Christian roots.

Few Americans understood Vladimir Putin’s rise to power at the close of the 20th century as the reassertion of a bankrupt, humiliated, resentful people looking to make Russia great again. Since then, Putin has rebuilt the Russian state into a major European power with worldwide influence. Poverty and a resource-based economy notwithstanding, it is on a sounder financial basis than any Western country. Corruption is within historical limits. The leadership is appreciated by the vast majority, whose national pride and solidarity dwarf those of Western publics. Nearly all Russians approve strongly of its absorption of Crimea. Russia effectively controls Ukraine’s eastern end, and has exposed the West’s incapacity to interfere militarily in the former Soviet empire. In the Middle East, Russia is now the dominant force.

In sum, the Russian bear licks its deep wounds as it growls behind fearsome defenses.

The Neighborhood

Russia’s Westernism is neither imitation nor love of the West. It is the assertion that Russia is an indispensable part of it. The Russians saved Europe from Napoleon, and from Hitler, too. That they did the latter tyrannically, as Soviets, does not, in their minds, disqualify them from their rightful place in Europe, or justify Europeans, much less Americans, trying to limit Russia’s rightful stature. Today’s Russian rulers are not gentler or nicer than the emperor who shook off the Mongol yoke—who wasn’t known as Ivan the Nice Guy. Like their forebears they are calculating Russia’s stature in terms of the limits—primarily in Europe—set by their own present power as well as by that of their immediate neighbors.

Russian writing on international affairs focuses exclusively on the country’s role as a member of the European system. By the 2030s, if not sooner, the Russian government will have filled such territory, and established such influence, as befit its own people’s and its neighbors’ realities, and will be occupied with keeping it. More than most, Putin is painfully aware of Russia’s limits. Its declining population is less than half of America’s and a tenth of China’s. Despite efforts to boost natality, its demography is likely to recover only slowly. Nor is its culture friendly to the sort of entrepreneurship, trust, and cooperation that produces widespread wealth. What, then, are Putin’s—or any Russian leader’s—national and international objectives?

As always, Ukraine is of prime interest to Russia because it is the crux of internal and external affairs. With Ukraine, Russia is potentially a world power. Without it, it is less, at best. But Putin’s pressures, disruptions, and meddlings have shown him how limited Russia’s reach into Ukraine is, and is sure to remain. Hence, Russia’s conquest of Ukraine east of the Don River signifies much less the acquisition of a base for further conquest than the achievement of modern Russia’s natural territorial limit in Europe. The 20th century’s events forever severed Ukraine and the Baltic states from Russia; even Belarus has become less compatible with it. Modern Russia is recognizing its independence, even as the Soviet Union at the height of its power effectively recognized Finland’s. As the Russian Federation’s demographic weight shifts southeastward—and Islamism continues to gain favor there—the Russian government will have to consider whether to shift its efforts from keeping the Muslim regions within the federation to expelling and building fences against them.

As the decades pass, post-Soviet Russia will have to work harder and harder to cut the sort of figure in Europe that it did under the tsars. That figure’s size is the issue. The Russian empire’s size has varied over the centuries according to the ratios between its and its neighbors’ national vigor and power. In the past, Poland, Sweden, Turkey, the Hanseatic powers, Germany, all have shrunken or swollen Russia. Borders and spheres of influence have varied. There is no reason why this should not be so in the future. Russia will neither invade Europe nor dominate it politically because its people lack the political will, and its state the capacity, to do either. During Soviet times, this will and this capacity were the product of the national and international Communist Party apparatus, now gone forever.

A glance back at this gargantuan human structure reminds us of how grateful we should be that it now belongs to history. The Communist faction that resulted from the 1918 split in the international socialist movement—like the rump socialist faction that ended up governing Europe after 1945, but unlike the fascist one—already intended to conquer the world. (Fascism, Mussolini’s invention, recalled some of ancient Rome’s peculiar institutions and symbols—the fasces was the bundle of punishing rods carried by the consuls’ lictors—and added governing Italy through business-labor-government councils. It was not for export.) Communists worldwide came under the firm control of the Soviet Party’s international division run by formidable persons like Andrei Zhdanov and Boris Ponomarev, disposing of virtually unlimited budgets and, after 1929, of the services of countless “front organizations.” These, the party’s hands and feet and its pride and joy, reached out to every imaginable category of persons: union members, lawyers, teachers, journalists, housewives, professional women, students, non-students. Each front organization had an ostensible purpose: peace, through opposition or support of any number of causes. But supporting the “Soviet line” was the proximate purpose of all. Through tens of thousands of “witting” Communists, these fronts marshaled millions of unwitting supporters, helping to reshape Western societies. Soviet political control of Europe was eminently possible, with or without an invasion, because the Soviet domestic apparatus had marshaled Soviet society, and because its international department and front organizations had convinced sectors of European societies to welcome the prospect.

The tools that today’s Russia wields vis-à-vis Europe are limited to commerce in natural gas, and to the opportunities for bribery that this creates—witness Russian Gazprom’s employment of former German chancellor Gerhard Schröder. Not only do European governments not fear being invaded by Russia, they refuse to diversify their sources of natural gas, and generally oppose American sanctions imposed on Russia because of its actions in Ukraine. The notion among European ruling parties that the voters who are in the process of rejecting them for various “populist” and nationalist options, are pining for Russian-style governance or tricked by Russian wiles is a baseless attempt to sidestep the ruling parties’ own failures.

The Lefty globalists think that? There’s a surprise! Whatever makes them think so? We see the populist movements as being unequivocally towards conservative nationalism, self-determination, personal liberty, not … neo-tsarism.

Europe’s rulers know that Russian military forces are not built to conquer the continent, because these forces lack the wherewithal for large-scale projection of power. Instead, they possess formidable capacity for what soldiers call “area denial”. This fits Russian leaders’ strategic goals, the people’s sentiments, and material constraints. The wars that today’s Russian military are built to fight are in areas that today’s Russian military sees most threatened by the U.S. and NATO, on its borders with Poland and Lithuania (where Russia crushed the Wehrmacht in 1944-45), and in Ukraine, north of Crimea. Russia’s military posture has ever been, and gives every sign of remaining, strategically defensive but operationally offensive. Now as before, when war seems imminent Russia’s operational doctrine calls for taking the initiative in a preemptive manner.

Although Russian strategy would be to surround and seal off foreign troops by air and ground, for the first time in Russia’s history, military manpower is scarce and precious. Economizing manpower is one reason why the country has fully integrated nuclear weapons in ordinary military operations, recalling nothing so much as President Dwight Eisenhower’s doctrine in the 1950s of “more bang for the buck”. To seal off the airspace, and to provide an umbrella for their ground forces, the Russians would use the S-400 air-missile defense system—the world’s best, which is now deployed around some 300 high-value locations. Strikes (or the threat thereof) by the unique Iskander short-range missile would preclude the foreign forces’ escape, as Russian troops moved in with Armata tanks, which carry the world’s best reactive armor.

Possession of perhaps the world’s best offensive and defensive strategic forces—comparable to America’s and far superior to China’s—is why Russia is confident that it can contain within limited areas the wars that it needs to fight. Because Russia has nothing to gain by military action against America or China, this arsenal is militarily useful only as insurance against anyone’s escalation of border disputes, and as the basis for Russia’s claim to be a major world player.

Priorities and Collusion

Russia loomed small in U.S. foreign policy from the time of the founding until the 1917 Bolshevik coup, because the interactions between America’s and Russia’s geopolitical and economic interests were few and mostly compatible. Given that these fundamentals have not changed, it would be best for both countries if their policies gradually returned to that long normal.

But for both countries, transcending the past century’s habits is not easy. The essential problem is that neither side’s desires, nor its calculus of ends and means, is clear to the other, or perhaps to itself. It seems that the main thing Putin or any other Russian leader might want from America is no interference as Russia tries to recreate the tsars’ empire. Thus Russia’s continuing relations with anti-U.S. regimes in Latin America can only be understood as Cold War inertia—the almost instinctive sense that what is bad for America must somehow be good for Russia. The U.S. government, for its part, while largely neglecting Russia’s involvement in the Western hemisphere, tries to limit its influence in Europe while at the same time reaching agreements concerning strategic weapons—a largely Cold War agenda. The soundness of these priorities on both sides is doubtful.

Both Russia and the U.S. fear China, and with good reason. The crushing size of contemporary China’s population and economy frightens the Russians. The fact that some Russian women marry Chinese men (disdaining Russian ones) embarrasses them and has made them more racially prejudiced than ever against the Chinese. Yet Russia aligns with China internationally and sells it advanced weapons, paid for with American money—money that China earns by trading its people’s cheap labor for America’s expensive technology. With these weapons as well as its own, China has established de facto sovereignty over the South China Sea and is pushing America out of the western Pacific. Nonetheless, the U.S. treats Russia as a major threat, including “to our democracy”. For Russia and America to work against one another to their common principal adversary’s advantage makes no geopolitical sense. But internal dynamics drive countries more than geopolitics.

Nowhere is this clearer than with the notion that Russia interfered in the 2016 U.S. election—a charge which has roiled American public life for the past two years and counting. Interference in American life? That is what the Soviet Union was all about. By contrast, current concerns about Russia are a tempest, albeit a violent one, in a domestic American teapot.

In America, the Soviets worked less through the Communist Party than they did in Europe. Here [in America], they simply seduced and influenced people at the top of our society. Even in America prominent persons in the Democratic Party, academia, media, and intelligence services (or who would become prominent, e.g., future Democratic presidential candidate Bernie Sanders and CIA Director John Brennan), were Communists more or less openly. Far more important to the Soviets were persons convinced that Soviet and American interests were identical. Harry Hopkins, for example, who ran the U.S. government on President Franklin Roosevelt’s behalf, considered Stalin’s objectives to be so indistinguishable from America’s that the KGB considered him to be effectively Stalin’s agent. By contrast, Alger Hiss, an important State Department official, was one of many controlled Soviet agents within the U.S. government. But the compatibility between Hiss’s views and those of many in the U.S. ruling class was striking. For example, even after Soviet archives confirmed Hiss’s status as a Soviet agent, Robert McNamara, secretary of defense under Presidents John Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson, like many of his class, angrily insisted on Hiss’s innocence.

The comradeship of American liberals and Soviet Communists lasted to the Soviet Union’s end. In May 1983, for example, in an incident widely reported at the time and confirmed by Soviet archives, former U.S. senator John Tunney visited Moscow and, on behalf of his friend and classmate—and prospective Democratic presidential candidate—Senator Edward Kennedy, proposed to KGB director Viktor Chebrikov that Kennedy work with Soviet dictator Yuri Andropov to “arm Soviet officials with explanations regarding problems of nuclear disarmament so they may be better prepared and more convincing during appearances in the USA” because “the only real potential threats to Reagan [in the 1984 election] are problems of war and peace and Soviet-American relations”. Kennedy promised “to have representatives of the largest television companies in the USA contact Y.V. Andropov for an invitation to Moscow for the interviews”. Collusion, anyone? Today, with the Soviet Union gone, its moral-intellectual imprint on our ruling class remains.

The contemporary notion of Russian interference, however, owes nothing to Russia. It began when, in June 2016, the Democratic National Committee (DNC) tried to explain how a trove of e-mails showing its partiality for Hillary Clinton over Bernie Sanders got into the public domain, alleging that they had been hacked from its server by Russian agents. To this day, there is zero evidence for this, the DNC not having allowed access to that server by any law enforcement agency or independent party.

Throughout the rest of the 2016 campaign, this narrative merged with one from CIA Director John Brennan and other leaders of U.S. intelligence, who were circulating a scurrilous dossier, paid for by the Clinton campaign, that alleged Trump’s connections with Russia. The Obama Administration used the dossier as the basis for electronic and human surveillance of the Trump campaign. Together, these narratives prompted a two-year investigation by Special Counsel Robert Mueller, which found no basis for the dossier, or for a relationship between Russia and the Trump campaign. Nevertheless, the assertion of Trump’s indebtedness to Russia became the pretext for #TheResistance to the 2016 election’s result, led by the Democratic Party, most of the judiciary, the bureaucracy, and the media.

In Europe as well as in America, the establishment’s protagonists have pointed to Russia to allege that their rejection by the voters is somehow “undemocratic”. Larry Diamond in the Wall Street Journal, following Robert Kagan in the Washington Post, wrote that “in one country after another, elected leaders have gradually attacked the deep tissues of democracy—the independence [from sovereign voters] of the courts, the business community, the media, civil society, universities and sensitive state institutions like the civil service, the intelligence agencies and the police.” Voting against the establishnment, you see, is undemocratic!

What Are Our Interests?

Making impossible a rational public discussion of U.S. policy toward Russia is the very least of the damage this partisan war has wrought. American liberals believed the Soviet Union’s dissolution was impossible; conservatives flattered themselves that they caused it. Few paid attention to what happened and how. Once the Soviet Union was gone, the West in general and Americans in particular presumed to teach Russians how to live, while helping their oligarchs loot the country. Russians soon got the impression that they were being disrespected. At least as Soviets, they had been feared. The Clinton Administration was confident that Russia would become a liberal partner in the rules-based international order. At the same time Clinton tried to load onto Russia the hopes that the U.S. establishment had long entertained about global co-dominion with the Soviets. In the same moment they pushed NATO to Russia’s borders—a mess of appeasement, provocation, and insult. Long-suffering Russians, who had idolized the West during the Soviet era, came to dislike us.

As the George W. Bush Administration fumbled at the new reality, it tried to appease Russia by continuing to limit U.S. missile defenses in fact, while publicly disavowing the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty; it formally objected to Russia’s dismemberment of Georgia, while effectively condoning it. The incoming Barack Obama Administration tried to go further along the same self-contradictory line by withdrawing anti-missile support from eastern Europe, and quietly promising even more restraint. But when, in 2014, Putin seized Crimea, Obama imposed serious economic sanctions and agreed to place NATO and American troops in Poland and the Baltic States. Then, for the most tactical of domestic political considerations, the Obama Administration, and hence the U.S. establishment, decided to try explaining the course and results of the 2016 U.S. election campaign as “Russia’s attack on our democracy”.

What are the American people’s interests in Eurasia, and how big are these interests? Although today’s Russia poses none of the ideological threats that the Soviet Union did—and despite the absence of geopolitical or any other clashing interests—Russia is clearly a major adversary in Europe and the Middle East. Its technical contributions to China’s military, and its general geopolitical alignment with China, are most worrisome. What, other than Soviet inertia and wounded pride, motivates the Russians? The U.S. maintains economic sanctions on Russia. To achieve precisely what? From both sides’ perspective, it is difficult to see what good can come from this continued enmity.

Today’s triangular U.S.-Russia-China calculus is not comparable to the Soviet-Chinese military confrontation of the 1970s and ’80s, when both the U.S. and China feared Soviet missiles, and the U.S. best served its own interests by implicitly extending its nuclear umbrella over China. Today, the problems between Russia and China stem from basic disparities that U.S. policy obscures by treating Russia as, if anything, more of a threat than China. The best that the U.S. can do for itself is to say nothing, and do nothing, that obscures these disparities. Without backhanded U.S. support for close Russo-Chinese relations, the two countries would quickly become each other’s principal enemies.

Ongoing U.S. anxiety about negotiations with Russia over weaponry is nothing but a legacy of the Cold War and a refusal to pay attention to a century of experience, teaching that arms control agreements limit only those who wish to limit themselves. Russia violated the 1987 Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty by developing the Iskander missile; the U.S. was right to withdraw from the agreement, but mistaken in ever expecting another country not to arm itself as it thinks best. In that regard, Americans should not listen to, never mind accommodate in any way, Russia’s (or any other country’s) objections to U.S. missile defenses. These are in our clear and overriding interest. Defending America as best we can—against missiles that might come to us from anywhere, for any reason—is supremely our business.

What then are America’s legitimate, realizable demands on Russia?

Putin’s Russia, by its 2015-18 intervention in Syria and its management of Turkey, achieved the tsars’ historic desire for a warm water port. Although the former conquest is firm, keeping Turkey friendly to Russia must ever be troublesome. Absent a friendly Turkey, Russia’s renewed control of Crimea and even the Syrian bases will be of very limited worth for any but defensive purposes. Whatever else might be said of its role in the Middle East, Russia has brought more stable balance to local forces than ever in this young century. Only with difficulty will American statesmen regret that our old adversary now deals with some of the problems that bedeviled us for a half-century.

The U.S. would be more secure geopolitically were Russia merely one of several European powers. But it has always been an empire, whose size has varied with time. An independent Ukraine has always been the greatest practical limitation on Russia’s imperial ambitions. That is very much a U.S. interest, but is beyond our capacity to secure.

U.S. relations with Russia regarding Ukraine are analogous to U.S. relations with Europe 200 years ago. Our overriding interest then was to prevent the Europeans from holding any major part of the Western hemisphere. By stating America’s intention to guard its hemispheric interests while forswearing meddling in European affairs, the U.S. encouraged them to face that reality. Today’s Russia realizes it cannot control Ukraine except for its Russian part, nor the Baltics, never mind the Visegrád states. The U.S. could lead Russia to be comfortable with that reality by reassuring it that we will not use our normal relations with Ukraine or with any of Russia’s neighbors to try to define Russia’s limits in Europe. We should realize that our setting such limits is beyond America’s capacity, and that it undercuts the basis for fruitful relations.

The U.S. prefers the Baltic States, and especially Ukraine, to be independent. But we know, and should sincerely convey to Russia, that their independence depends on themselves, and that we regard it as counterproductive to make them into American pawns or even to give the impression that they could be. Ukraine’s independence—and hence Russia’s acceptance of it as inevitable—depends on Ukraine retrenching into its Western identity, rejecting the borders that Stalin and Khrushchev had fixed for it, and standing firmly on its own feet—as, for example, by asserting its Orthodox church’s independence from Russia’s.

Wise U.S. policy would remove sanctions that previous administrations placed on Russia on behalf of Ukraine. Fruitless strife has been these sanctions’ only result. For example, they emboldened Ukraine to suppose it had U.S. support for presuming it had the same right to navigation in the Sea of Azov, passing under a Russian bridge, as it does in the Atlantic Ocean.

But in accord with the Monroe Doctrine, we should be willing to wage economic war on Russia—outright and destructive—on America’s own behalf, were the Russians to continue supporting anti-U.S. regimes in the Western hemisphere. If you want economic peace with America, we would say, stop interfering in our backyard. We Americans, for our part, are perfectly willing to stop interfering in your backyard.

In sum, nothing should be geopolitically clearer than that the natural policy for both America and Russia is not to go looking for opportunities to get in each other’s way.

The Left is now a political pantomime donkey. It has a Social Justice Warrior in the front and a Muslim in the back, and they  are starting to pull in opposite directions.

For one thing, the Left and its SJWs say that men can become women. Muslims say they can not.

AP reports:

Valentina Sampaio has become the first openly transgender model hired by Victoria’s Secret …

Here “she” is modeling their underwear

The Left also believes it is “liberating” for women to wear a hijab.

Daniel Greenfield writes at Front Page:

When Banana Republic faced a 3% decline in sales, it decided to go all the way back to the 7^th century. Hoping to tap into the lucrative market of concealing bruises and strangulation marks, Banana Republic rolled out a line of hijabs for the discerning woman who knows better than to leave home without the permission of a male guardian.

While women in Iran were being beaten and imprisoned for taking off their hijabs, Banana Republic decided to celebrate the courageous spirit of those women who want to live as second class citizens.

But if the Gap brand thought that displaying some garments of female subjugation between its ugly purple purses and its eighteen-dollar scrunchies would win over Islamists, it had another think coming.

Modern lefties iconize hijabs without having the faintest idea of what they mean or what they’re for. All they know is that to properly display diversity, you need to add a woman in a hijab between the gay guy, the Black Lives Matter guy, and the militant #resistance member ready to storm Starbucks; even though a hijab is as much a symbol of human liberation as a case of female genital mutilation.

But since Banana Republic couldn’t figure out how to market female genital mutilation to sophisticated urban consumers, it had to settle for trying to sell them hijabs. A hijab, BR execs thought, is just a 72×26 shmata  [piece of cloth]. Our Vietnamese slave laborers can make one a minute before passing out from the toxic fumes. And we can sell them for 20 bucks while getting a diversity award from CAIR for our wokeness. …

But the plan was not a success.

Instead of being cheered from Algeria to Afghanistan, Banana Republic was accused of cultural appropriation and insensitivity. The failing retailer had made an obvious and tragic error. Their model may have had every lock of hair encompassed by the fashion forward follicular prison, but she was showing off her elbows in a short-sleeved shirt. What’s the point of locking up the hair after the elbows are already out there? Does Banana Republic, despite its name, understand nothing about Islam?

“There are guidelines to hijab outside of just covering hair,” the founder of Haute Hijab warned.

The guidelines of Islam cover women’s hair, elbows, sometimes faces and even one eye. The hijab is the most distinctive sign of subjugation, because hair is even more offensive than elbows.

The Islamic Republic of Iran’s first president, Abolhassan Bani-Sadr, warned that women’s exposed hair emits rays that drive men mad. It’s unknown if women’s elbows also emit rays, but Islam approves of women’s elbows no more than it approves of their hair.

And Banana Republic soon repented.

The model in the black rectangular hijab print and the short sleeves vanished from Banana Republic the way she had from the republics of Afghanistan, Iran and ISIS. The very woke company replaced her provocative elbows with a cropped shot in which she no longer has elbows, arms or hair.

Just the way Allah intended.

But Muslim critics pointed out that the model in the blue soft satin square hijab has an exposed neck. And Allah is no more fond of the sight of women’s necks than he is of their hair and their elbows. Meanwhile the model in the unconvincing leopard print hijab is not only showing her neck, but has the first two buttons of her shirt open. The only thing more offensive would be is if she were also driving. …

An American brand that claims to tap into the liberating power of fashion bet big on subjugation and discovered that no amount of subjugation is ever enough. …

The question is where do the loyalties of the huge corporations which collude in the oppression of women lie? Is it with the women risking their lives to defy oppression or those who collude with it?

Banana Republic tried to collude with a theocracy of rape and discovered that no amount of erasing women is ever enough. And that’s a tough lesson for an American clothing retailer to absorb.

But when BR next relaunches its line of oppressive headgear, it’ll bring in CAIR advisers who will make sure that none of the models are showing any ankle, elbow, neck, or hair. And then the media will cheer. And there will be awards and an ad campaign. Because we all live in a banana republic now.

When Victoria’s Secret sells nothing but burkas, and Banana Republic has transgender models wearing nothing but lacy underwear and hijabs, we’ll believe that Islam and the Left can rule the world in amicable partnership.

It would be gratifying to know that most Americans at last, after patience, tolerance and good-will have all been worn out, are doing the decent thing and allowing themselves to hate Ilhan Omar, the spiteful Somalian Congresswoman who hates them with passion.

We like what George S. Bardmesser writes at American Greatness:

I am an immigrant.

I want Representative Ilhan Omar (D-Mogadishu) to go back to the shithole country she came from.

And I want her to stay there.

I spent some time on the Internet looking for even one positive thing that Omar has said about America—but my search was in vain. Omar hates and despises her adoptive country unequivocally and unconditionally. She hates everything about America today, and she hates everything about the America of yesterday.

Omar hates white people. Omar hates Jews—and she is not shy about letting everyone know it (“It’s all about the Benjamins baby”). Omar hates our ally Israel (“Israel has hypnotized the world, may Allah awaken the people and help them see the evil doings of Israel”).

Ilhan Omar is a one-woman hate factory.

Maybe I missed a public statement where Omar praised America. But after looking through countless webpages and many gigabytes, I think I am on solid ground when I say: Ilhan Omar hates everything and everyone around her, except possibly her brother, whom she married, and perhaps the 9/11 terrorists who killed 3,000 people (“some people did something”—no biggie).

As an immigrant from the no-longer-with-us USSR, I believe I have as much moral authority as anyone to tell Omar: you should return to the country you represent and take up permanent residence there.

America can never measure up to Omar’s high standards—but no doubt Somalia will. Omar need not suffer in our land of toxic xenophobia, Islamophobia, racism, sexism, lookism and speciesism—because she can live out the rest of her life amidst the tolerance, understanding, and mutual respect that Somalis are famous for.

(For those interested, Somalia today is still a land mostly of anarchy, fundamentally not all that different from what you probably saw in “Black Hawk Down,” with a civil war, Islamic terrorists slaughtering civilians, corruption, hunger, poverty, torture, rape, refugee camps, and all the other usual things associated with that jewel of East Africa.)

This past week, President Trump once again detonated the brains of the Left, when he tweeted (without even naming names) that those who came here and enjoyed all the benefits of this country, but had nothing good to say about America, can go back to their original countries. The reaction from the Left was instantaneous and explosive: Racist! Sexist! Nativist! Islamophobe! Bad Man! Really Bad! Trump is Hitler! Trump is Mussolini! Trump is a Dictator! Trump is Satan! We hate Trump!

As an immigrant, I would like to tell Ilhan Omar: I love America. America gave my family and me opportunities I never would have had anywhere else. Unlike you, I am proud to call myself an American. America is incredible and special. My family has never asked for a handout—but what my parents and I have, we have because we grasped the opportunities offered and protected in our new country. For these opportunities, we are eternally grateful. …

As an immigrant, I can assure native-born Americans that Ilhan Omar does not speak for immigrants. Not for Russian-Jewish ones like me, not for (I am quite confident) Latinos, Asians or Europeans. Omar and the vitriol she constantly spews is not typical of immigrants who come here legally. So I salute President Trump for once again sticking a fork in the eye of the leftist PC crowd, and saying publicly what millions of people are thinking privately. Republicans agree with him. Independents agree with him. In fact, Trump just gave us all even more reasons to vote for him in 2020. And if Democrats don’t agree—who cares?

… and possible violent death.

We received the report from Ezra Levant of The Rebel:

Tommy Robinson has been sent back to prison — for the second time, for the same “crime” of live-streaming his political commentary outside the trial of a rape gang in Leeds in 2018.

That political broadcast was deemed “contempt of court” even though it did not disrupt the trial, which successfully convicted the rapists.

Dame Victoria Sharp sentenced Tommy to six months in prison. She also activated a previous suspended sentence against him, by a court in Canterbury back in 2017.

That was nine months imprisonment in all.

By law, Tommy’s sentence will be reduced to take into account the time already served. In the end, the judge calculated, he’ll be sent to jail for 19 weeks, and let out half-way.

Two months, then. If they will be like the months he served for the same non-crime last time, he will be beaten and terrorized.

He often had feces mixed into his food so he had to skip meals and lost weight drastically the last time he was sent to a Muslim-majority prison for doing nothing but telling the truth about Muslim rape gangs. The prison guards were on the side of his persecutors – the Muslims inside the prison and the government outside.

This time, it is reported, he will be sent to Belmarsh prison. In 2016, a former Muslim inmate of Belmarsh said, “There were so many would-be jihadists in there I felt like an intruder at a jihadi training camp. Terrorists were very popular, had enormous influence, and were treated like celebrities by the other inmates. Non-Muslims accused of insulting Islam were at risk of having their cells broken into and being subject to serious assaults. I watched how prison officers took no action, leaving new inmates like myself with the impression that the real people in charge were not the warders but a terrifying group of radical Islamists known as ‘the Brothers’ or ‘the Akhi’, which is Arabic for brothers.”

Tommy says: “Genuinely, hand on heart, I believe I’ll be killed in this prison sentence. I was imprisoned for over 2.5 months in solitary confinement, held against my categorisation, moved to the highest Muslim population Category C prison, subjected to mental torture and constant threats and abuse and had all of my rights removed in the interest of ‘prison safety’.”

He  believes his treatment by the courts and the state is political persecution.

It is.

He has appealed to President Trump to grant him political asylum in the US. We hope he will be granted it.

The judge, Dame Victoria Sharp, was sworn in last month as president of the Queen’s Bench Division. She is the first female to occupy the position. (The Western World is becoming one big gynocracy, much to its detriment.)

Dame Victoria Sharp, smugly smirking

Judge Victoria Sharp solemnly declared: “We are in no doubt a custodial threshold is passed in this case. Nothing less than a custodial penalty would reflect the gravity of the conduct.”

The gravity of reporting what was happening outside a court where rapists  of underage girls were on trial!

No other reporters who were there doing the same thing were charged. Tommy was arrested and summarily sentenced to prison, then released by the Lord Chief Justice of England and Wales on appeal. But the lust of the establishment to punish Tommy for telling the truth about the Muslim rapists (who were allowed to be active for years) was not appeased. The police arrested him again on the same trumped-up charge and he has been tried again and sent back to prison – a  maximum security prison, where the most dangerous violent prisoners are sent.

Which is why it is full of Muslims – some of whom sometimes actually do get tried and punished for their hideous crimes in Dame Victoria Sharp’s Britain.

But on the whole, most judges, the police, members of parliament, the governing “Conservative Party”, and the media are much happier when Tommy Robinson is imprisoned and tortured for telling the truth they don’t want to hear.

Tommy Robinson after being sentenced to prison again

Anjuli Pandavar is a British atheist who was raised a Muslim in South Africa.

She was recently shut out of (misnamed!) Free Thought Blogs because, they say:

We have  been receiving complaints [about Anjuli Pandavar] from readers and other bloggers for months — and recent posts [by her] praising Fox News and blaming black Americans for racism were the final straw. … We are skeptics and critics of dogma and authoritarianism, and in addition, we recognize that the nonexistence of deities entails a greater commitment to human values, and in particular, an appreciation of human diversity and equality.”

Pompous nonsense! And dogmatic. And wrong. There is absolutely nothing about atheism that requires one to “appreciate” Lefty dogma about “diversity” and “equity”.

They go on:

We are for feminism, against racism [except when it is against Whites], for diversity, against inequity.

It’s a general sentiment, but if you can’t meet any of it, you don’t belong here. We’ve been agonizing over rejecting Anjuli Pandavar all summer long, and the consensus of the active members of the FtB community was that her continued presence was a betrayal of our principles.

You’ve gotta feel sorry for them. They went through agonies before kicking out a black woman for calling anti-White racism what it is.

Anjuli Pandavar writes cogently and incisively at Jihad Watch:

Thursday was 4 July 2019, the 832^nd anniversary of the Battle of Hattin, arguably the most symbolic, if not the most fateful, of Christian follies, when the stage was set for the Kingdom of Jerusalem to lose the very city that gave it its proud name, and for jihad to subdue Christian mediaeval backwardness under the yoke of Islamic pre-medieval backwardness. The Crusaders had taken the Cross and by virtue of that fact alone, most believed themselves invincible. Considerations of practicalities such as water, terrain or supply lines, or indeed, Salah ad-Din’s battle plans, were secondary at best, blasphemous at worst. The Crusaders had God, but they lost. It was inconceivable to them that Salah ad-Din, too, had God, and by virtue of that fact alone, the Muslims, too, believed themselves invincible. Relying on God in war is truly a gamble in which the odds are even.

Eight hundred and thirty-two years later, the unholy trinity of the Occident is secular: the god of political correctness; the god of multiculturalism; the god of diversity. Different gods purportedly wielded against the same jihad, except this time straining to subdue modern Judeo-Christian enlightenment under the same Islamic pre-mediaeval backwardness with which it confronted the Crusaders. On this year’s 4 July, we find ourselves in the midst of transition from the jihad of incessant victimhood, incessant taking of offence and incessant demands for special treatment, to the jihad of violent attacks and brutal enforcement of Shari’a by any Muslim, whether obviously “fighting in the way of Allah” or not. The voices that have been warning of this for so long now face more than just shrill denunciations for the blasphemies of “racism”, “fascism”, “intolerance” and “Islamophobia”, and for the heresy of being “far-right”. In chilling enactment of George Orwell’s 1984, they are being erased, and all levels of society are complicit in their erasure. Exactly how bad things have to get before such voices are taken seriously remains to be seen.

Gut-feel and all evidence of what jihad has managed to get away with in the West so far, strongly suggest that these voices of warning and truth will never be listened to. It seems that some of what were once Western societies will be defending Islam even as all manifestations of Christianity, Judaism, Hinduism, Sikhism and all other religions are destroyed, even as all democracy and all freedoms are obliterated, even as slavery is reinstated … , even as young white girls are shipped off en mass for sale in the Islamic heartlands, even as those who refuse dhimmitude and those who have left Islam are rounded up and publicly beheaded or crucified, even as married women see their husbands murdered before their eyes and are themselves dragged off to be raped, as per Muhammad’s excellent example, they will still be insisting that Islam is a religion of peace, is just like any other religion, and that Muslims are victims who have to be protected from “Islamophobia”.

And what of the God that the Enlightenment had relegated to a personal choice? I disagree with my Christian friends that we find ourselves in this worsening madness because “we have abandoned God”, and must return to him if we are to save ourselves from jihad. We owe our freedom, our equality and our democracy to our ousting God from his throne and lodging him instead in the hearts of those who will have him. God as free choice is the greatest achievement of the Enlightenment and one of the foundation stones of individual autonomy. Christian ideologues … seem not to realise that they argue directly against individual freedom when they seek to re-elevate God to a cosmic imperative. … Do not the perpetrators of jihad account for their own people’s troubles in exactly the same terms as Christian ideologues do? The ummah languishes in backwardness and misery in the face of infidel prowess, according to Qutb, Al-Banna, Maududi, Al-Qaradawi and others, precisely because Muslims have abandoned Islam and must return to it. Inter-religious squabbles over who has God and who hasn’t have always been the one-sided blindness on which religious exceptionalism, not to say arrogance, floundered. That way lies tragedy. … This is not the time for Christians to be stoking turf wars with atheists.

Just to be absolutely clear, I am an atheist … Not only that, I think religion erodes our innate sense of ethics, and that faith can diminish our humanity. But I also accept that belief is a central component of the way many people’s heads work. That, in and of itself, does not make them bad people. My head, though, does not work in that way. I could not function if there were something that I had to accept without question. The problem before us right now is Islam and I do not care if someone leaves Islam to become a Bible-basher or a Hari-Krishna chanter or an atheist. All I care about right now is that as many Muslims as possible leave Islam, that we support the victims of Islam, wherever they are in the world, and that we roll back jihad, by whatever means necessary. Muslims are already raping our daughters and we are already complicit in their deeds. The situation is dire.

We are helpless in face of the jihad onslaught because we have abandoned ourselves. We are no longer the human beings that the Enlightenment created.

We are not even the human beings who vowed to go on to the end, to fight in France, to fight on the seas and oceans, to fight with growing confidence and growing strength in the air, to defend our island, whatever the cost may be, to fight on the beaches, to fight on the landing grounds, to fight in the fields and in the streets, to fight in the hills; to never surrender. Where are those heroic people now? If they are still with us, it is perhaps the greatest tragedy that they will live to see that they have died for nothing.

We became complicit when we substituted political correctness and identity politics for our common human decency and respect for human life and human freedoms, as if what wasn’t broke needed fixing. We drank from the poisoned chalice of “groups” and “communities” having rights that supersede the rights of individuals and entitlements to protection over the protection of individuals. Britain’s Muslim rape gang crisis stems not solely from Islamic sanction of such behaviour and jihad insistence on it, but from those Muslims who would be inclined to rape finding themselves in the enabling environment created by multicultural Britain. It is both dishonest and dishonourable to refer to Muslim rape gangs as either “Asian” or “grooming gangs”. They are distinguished not by being “Asian” or even “Pakistani”. They are Muslim, and they rape because they are Muslim (anyone with a fully-functioning capacity for language will immediately recognise that this in no way implies anything about Muslims not involved in gang rape). … In 80s and 90s Britain, there was widespread fear of social workers who seized children from parents at the slightest sign of anything that could indicate child abuse. Now social workers aid and abet paedophilia. Then, the residents of entire council estates physically drove paedophiles from their houses. Now, they won’t touch them. Is that because the white paedophile rings of the 80s and 90s did not have a 1.6 billion-strong religion behind them? Is it because then, “racism” still meant “racism,” and those who knew they weren’t racist had no fear of those who would call them that?

It has been a small step from identity politics to so-called “oppressed and oppressor groups”, to “all whites are racist”, to the denial of Muslim women’s oppression, to infidels taking offence at critique of Islam, to our own schools indoctrinating our own children to favour an ideology intent on enslaving them, and of course, to denial of the Muslim rape gang crisis.

In London, the setting of 1984, on 4 July 2019, a trial opened in the Central Criminal Court of England and Wales, otherwise known as “the Old Bailey”. It was no ordinary trail, but one in which the British state, by means foul and fouler, once more attempted to turn an innocent man into a criminal, after having failed several times before. A farce played out behind a noble injunction carved in stone over the heads of all who enter upon that august place: Defend the Children of the Poor and Punish the Wrongdoers. The man on trial was Tommy Robinson, and he was on trial for doing exactly that: defending the children of the poor and attempting to have the wrongdoers punished. Robinson, in his own naivete, still believes that the British state observes the rule of law, and fails to understand why mainstream journalists are happy to see the state abuse him. The wrongdoers, as it turned out, were not only the gangs of Muslim men who raped tens or hundreds of thousands of poor infidel girls up and down the land, but the many and varied arms of the state itself, who not only failed to punish the wrongdoers, but went out of their way to protect them and continue to protect them. The Ministry of Truth has shown that just because something is written in stone, doesn’t mean it’s true forever. Right before sending this essay off for publication, I learnt that Tommy Robinson had been “found guilty”. 

And now, in the ultimate ignominy, the pinnacle of our civilisational accomplishment, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, is to be subjugated to the strictures of Shari’a, a barbaric seventh-century affront to humanity and decency, with the full support of many who would themselves be destroyed by such a folly. For folly it is to believe that self-righteous appeasement of Muslim powers can win over to coexistence and mutual respect adherents of an ideology that holds at its core the certainty of its own supremacy and a sacred, unshakeable hatred of all others, others whom it must, by divine order, kill, convert or subdue, and that employs the vilest and most deceitful of means to attain its end … This coup is taking place at the United Nations complex in New York, where, in the now non-existent shadow of the now non-existent twin towers, those who survived jihad’s greatest-ever single carnage to date and those who came after, do their best to celebrate The 4^th of July. On this day, 243 years ago, they declared their land the protector of the freedom and equality of all human beings, and that from that day forth, no god shall meddle in their affairs.

Doing jihad’s dirty work for it has become an infidel virtue. … By the time the future Antifa Youth gets around to reporting on, denouncing and killing their own parents, there’ll be no one left to listen to the warning voices, for a Dark Age will once again be upon us. All the social, moral and ethical gains so hard-won over the centuries will be abolished overnight, reducing civilisation to that of brutal seventh-century Arabia, a foretaste of which is the Islamic State, Boko Haram, Al-Qaida, Al-Shabaab, the Taliban, Hamas, Hezbollah and a spectacularly long list of others. It is most telling that, once brought into extensive contact with Western society and culture, especially at the height of colonialism, the Muslim middle classes, for whom the benefits were not only obvious but also accessible, adopted Western values and habits with some enthusiasm, there being no question in their minds about which was the superior culture. Many tried to do so without jettisoning Islam. Today they still recognise this, but must pretend not to, under pressure both from jihad, that insists that Islam is superior, and from the Western handmaidens of jihad, who insist that all cultures are good.

Parts of Britain already belong to Islam. No action is being taken by the government to preserve the British nation. The United Kingdom is going the way of the Kingdom of Sweden.

https://youtu.be/vXpkOwJkTcQ