It is seldom that a news story from the Arab Muslim world has a happy ending. Here’s one that has. The bad guys get what they deserve.

Raymond Ibrahim reports:

Members of the Islamic group “Promotion of Virtue and Prevention of Vice” in Suez, Egypt … took to whipping an Egyptian woman … because of her clothing — only to receive a sound thrashing at the hands of the citizens of Suez.

This is how they looked when justice had been done.

Reality to Feminists: Give up, go home, stay close to the marital bed and the kitchen.

According to this report, tens of thousands of Western women are converting to Islam because they long to submit themselves  – to a husband and to Allah. It comes from Radical Islam, by Abigail R. Esman:

The first thing the Dutch girl did once she’d converted to Islam was change her name – to Soumaya, she says, because “she was the first martyr. She was prepared to die for Allah.”

Soumaya …  is one of a wave of tens of thousands of Westerners who convert to Islam every year, more than 75 percent of whom, astonishingly, are women. Equally surprising is the fact that most of these women gravitate to conservative Islamic groups – the more misogynistic and oppressive ones – insisting all the while that they feel “liberated” and “free.”

Reading through dozens of stories of such women, one can’t help but notice the similarities among them. All claim to have embraced Islam of their own free will; yet an overwhelming majority, like Soumaya (whose story was profiled in the Dutch newspaper Het Parool), converted only after dating (or wedding) a Muslim man, usually – interestingly enough – a Moroccan (even in countries like England, where Moroccans do not form the majority Muslim population).

Others speak of “finding themselves” after years of wild drink and drugs – a pattern similar to that found in male prison converts, who often are convinced by other Muslim inmates to seek salvation through Allah. They repeat, as if by rote, the same rhetoric about escaping the sexual objectification of women by adopting the hijab or full-body abaya …

Hilariously, Soumaya, along with all the other young women profiled, appears photographed in hijab and a full face of makeup – which, of course, is what women wear in order to appear more beautiful to men. In so doing, they ignore … the very essence of what such coverings in fact represent: The notion that a woman is nothing but a sexual object, and therefore must be kept hidden … 

Young female converts speak of wanting to be a good Muslim and a good wife; the two become equated, acted out in a life of feminine submission, first to her husband and then, by extension, to Allah.

(Video from LiveLeak)

This religious act was carried out by Jabhat al-Nusra.

From Wikipedia:  Jabhat an-Nusrah li-Ahl al-Sham … “The Support Front for the People of Syria”, is an Islamic group of militant rebels operating in Syria. The group announced its creation on 23 January 2012 during the Syrian Civil War. It is described as “the most aggressive and successful arm of the rebel force“. … The group is generally described as being made up of Sunni Islamists and Jihadists. Its goal is to overthrow the Assad government and to create a Pan-Islamic state under sharia law and aims to reinstate the Islamic Caliphate. It has been claimed that al-Nusra Front is affiliated with al-Qaeda in Iraq.  

Our question: Would they be an improvement on Bashar Assad as rulers of Syria, d’you think?

Pat Condell talks about the attack by Islam on free speech.

The big threat hanging over the human race and Western civilization is Islam (not “climate change”).

Is it possible that the threat was totally ignored at this year’s Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC)?

Robert Spencer,  one of the best exponents and opponents of Islamic ideology, was shut out of the event.

So was the most urgent issue of the time totally ignored?

Fortunately not totally. We quote a National Review report:

Freshman Arkansas congressman Tom Cotton, a rising GOP star and an Iraq War veteran, criticized today the idea that the U.S. is fighting a “war against terror.”

“We’re fighting one war and it’s a war against radical Islamic jihad,” Cotton said at the Conservative Political Action Conference. “It’s not a war against terror alone. Terror is a technique or a tactic . . . It’s a war against specific people, radical Islamic jihadists, who are trying to using terror to defeat the United States.

“Iraq and Afghanistan, as much as we might see those as distinct, are just two battle fronts in that war,” added Cotton, a former Army officer. …

Obama [he said] thought the United States was involved in a “law-enforcement campaign,” not a war.

He brought up the case of Sulaiman Abu Ghaith, Osama bin Laden’s recently captured son-in-law.

“Did we send him to Guantanamo Bay for interrogation, and ultimately, for a military trial? No. We read him his Miranda rights, and we sent him to federal district courts in New York City.

“The president … is returning us [to] a law-enforcement construct, the kind that prevailed in the 1990s before the 9/11 attacks.”

Yes, because Obama, who is pro-Islam, wants us to believe that there is no war being waged against us: that 9/11 was a crime rather than the act of jihad which it was. He also wants us to believe that al-Qaeda – the piece of Islam that perpetrated the attack and which he is prepared to pursue for reasons of political expediency – has been almost defeated by the killing of Osama bin Laden and other of its leaders. He would have us believe that al-Qaeda alone was the threat, and the rest of Islam is no danger to us at all.

The truth is that the cohorts of al-Qaeda are more numerous than ever; that it is much stronger than it was in 2001, and is the foremost fighting force of Islam. It was behind the attack in Benghazi – a fact the Obama and his henchmen do not want known, which is no doubt the main reason why they refused to send military aid to the ambassador and soldiers at the mission; why they pretended that the violence was an outburst of spontaneous civilian indignation over some video no one in Libya had even seen; and why they persist in playing down the rout as an event of very little importance. (“What difference does it make at this point?” Secretary of State Hillary Clinton asked some months after the attack occurred.)

Tom Cotton was right to raise the subject at CPAC, but he understated the threat. The war is not being waged only by “radical Islamic jihadists” but by Islam as such, and not only by violent means but by infiltration and subversion.

That is what Robert Spencer would have been able to explain to the Conference if he had not been excluded by pro-Islamic members of the organization – chiefly Grover Norquist and his close Muslim associate Suhail Khan.      

At his website Jihad Watch, Robert Spencer himself writes that he’s glad Tom Cotton “enunciated these truths”; but he points out that at the same time –

Cotton endorses the misadventures in Afghanistan and Iraq, despite their manifest failure. How much American blood and treasure does he expect the U.S. to commit to the futile effort to bring “democracy” to those countries?

The West will not win the war with Islam on the battlefields of Iraq and Afghanistan. Not now. While every new violent act should be punished with violence – with drone attacks, with the capture and execution of jihadis whenever possible – the war will ultimately only be won by defeating the ideology itself. That means the religion of Islam must be subjected to criticism. It must be attacked and destroyed by words. By argument, by contempt, by mockery.

Muslims know that words are the greatest danger to the survival of their religion; that criticism is the strongest defense against their war of conquest – which is precisely why they are doing their utmost to make such criticism a crime.

Islam must become as universally scorned as Nazism, which it closely resembles. 

Religion – we contend – is the paramount man-made cause of human suffering.

Death, pain, terror, despair are the worst afflictions, and religion – after nature itself – is the super-generator of them all.

If a religious person were to concede that truth, he would probably qualify it by saying that religion also brings comfort and joy to many people too. That also is true. But so does heroin, and it doesn’t make it a Good Thing.

Besides which, the joy of the religious seems to lie all too often in inflicting death, pain, terror and despair on the adherents of another religion.

Here’s a recent example from Pakistan, where Muslims enjoyed an exciting binge burning Christian homes. This is from an AP report at Yahoo! News:

Hundreds of people in eastern Pakistan rampaged through a Christian neighborhood Saturday, torching dozens of homes after hearing reports that a Christian man had committed blasphemy against Islam’s prophet.

Blasphemy is a serious crime in Pakistan that can carry the death penalty but sometimes outraged residents exact their own retribution for perceived insults of Islam’s Prophet Muhammad. Pakistan is overwhelmingly Sunni Muslim and people of other faiths, including the nation’s small Christian community, are often viewed with suspicion.

Suspicion is not too bad. It’s the murderous hatred that does the worst harm.

The incident started Friday when a young Muslim man accused a Christian man of committing blasphemy by making offensive comments about the prophet, according to Multan Khan, a senior police officer in Lahore.

A large crowd from a nearby mosque went to the Christian man’s home on Friday night, said Khan. Police registered a blasphemy case against the man after the crowd gathered and demanded action, the officer said.

Fearing for their safety, hundreds of Christian families fled the area overnight.

Khan said the mob returned on Saturday and began ransacking Christian homes and setting them ablaze. …

But Akram Gill, a local bishop in the Lahore Christian community said the incident had more to do with personal enmity between two men — one Christian and one Muslim — than blasphemy. He said the men got into a brawl after drinking late one night, and in the morning the Muslim man made up the blasphemy story as payback.

He said the Christian community handed over to police the accused man, identified by police and Gill as Sawan Masih, when police came to the neighborhood to investigate.

But they knew that was not enough to propitiate the offended Muslims.

Then the Christians all locked up their houses and went to relatives in other areas. He said the mob was armed with hammers and steel rods and broke into houses, ransacked two churches and burned Bibles and crosses.

“Poor people were living here. They have lost all of their belongings,” he said. “Where can they go now?”

The scene was chaotic. An Associated Press reporter said roughly 150 homes were torched.

One man was seen carrying a dog and some puppies from a burning house. Refrigerators, washing and sewing machines, cooking pots, beds and other household goods were ripped from homes, smashed and burned in the streets. …

These pictures of the thrilling rampage are from PowerLine:

Whoopee!

And not only is it fun, it’s also good because they’re doing it for God the Merciful.

Ed Driscoll interviewed Monica Crowley, whose book What the (Bleep) Just Happened Again was recently published. You can find the whole interview on video and in transcript here at PJ Media.

Monica Crowley’s opinions of Obama and his policies are very close to our own. So we are posting some extracts from the transcript, letting her speak for us, while we nod in the background – only  interjecting a few words.

On transforming America:

I really believe that Obama’s objective from the beginning — and it’s not just him, it has been the objective of the far left for a very long time — … is to change the very nature of America. America, the gift that the Founding Fathers gave to us  … a nation that was exceptional because it was based on an idea. And the idea, instead of being based on the ambitions of men …  was centered on the concept of limited government and individual freedom.

And those two things are deeply interrelated. You can’t really have tremendous individual freedom when you have a big government. The idea of the last few decades has been to try to transform that fundamental Americanness, that great American idea that has given us tremendous prosperity and tremendous power, [and made] America into a great nation [and] a good nation. … The far left has been on this mission to strip away both … the limited government part and the individual liberty part.

And for many years they had success in putting up these big, huge entitlement pillars, dependency pillars, pillars that would change the way the government related to the individual; big redistributionist pillars like Social Security and like Medicare, like Medicaid. But they were never able to sort of put the whole thing together and do a dramatic socialist overhaul of the country until they found their perfect marriage of man and mission in Barack Obama.

And so from the beginning, and from day one of his first term, Obama and the far left set out to change the very nature of America, to change our character. And by that I mean strip away the self-reliance that underpins limited government and individual freedom. Strip that away and replace it with massive dependency; dependency on government.

So over the last four years, what they have done, and they have largely succeeded, is change the balance between the government sector and the private sector, change the relationship between the government and the individual, and created and expanded this massive dependency society. …

Obama and the far left have had enormous success in changing the character of this country. …

On the state of the GOP today:

I think over the next four years, certainly, we are going to see — we’re going to see federalism come to the fore. We’re going to see that Tenth Amendment rise.

And the reason is … Republicans now control thirty out of fifty governorships. We control the vast majority of state houses across the country. And it’s been a very interesting phenomenon to watch, because those offices are closer to the people than the presidency and then Washington, Congress, the Senate, and so on.

So when people have a choice, when they think that their vote will actually matter to their direct lives, meaning governor, state houses, they’re going more conservative. They’re going toward conservative governors, not even just Republican governors, but conservative governors, in most states. …

And so what I think you’re going to see is a real tension — and we already see this tension now, but I think it’s going to increase — between Washington, the federal government, and the states. And we’re going to see the states, as they’re starting to do now, on gun control, on immigration, … on a whole range of issues, you’re going to see the states pushing back and asserting their rights on behalf of the people that put them into office.

Taking on the federal government is a really tough thing, especially now, because it’s so big and it’s so powerful under Obama. But I think you’re going to see an increase in states going forward with their own agendas and pushing back on Washington. …

On foreign policy:

I actually believe [Obama] wants Iran to get a nuclear weapon. He has done nothing to stop Iran. Those sanctions that his administration put into place are toothless. The Iranians have found every way to get around them.

He has done nothing but stall. And the Iranians have used that time to go ahead and a) slaughter their own people in the streets when they revolted in 2009; and b) try to acquire a nuclear weapon. And they are getting there with every passing hour … This president has done nothing to stop them, on purpose.

I would also say on the Arab Spring, this is a man who wants to see the rise of the Islamists. He wants to see the rise of the Islamists across the board, and that is why he threw over a long time ally of the United States, Husni Mubarak in Egypt. That is why he paved the way for Muammar Gaddafi, who yes, was a longstanding terrorist, but over recent years Gaddafi was trying to reach out to the United States and providing us with crucial intelligence on the movements of Al-Qaeda and the Muslim Brotherhood across Northern Africa. And now we see what a problem that is. This president then went to facilitate his overthrow as well.

Why hasn’t he moved in Syria, where you have, what, upwards of maybe 40,000 people slaughtered under the Assad regime? Well, it’s because he’s been waiting for the Muslim Brotherhood to be poised and ready to take control there as well.

This is a man who knows exactly what he is doing. It is incredibly dangerous. It is completely antithetical to American interests. And now here we are. And we see it with China. He hasn’t taken on China. China continues to be a currency manipulator, getting very aggressive along the Pacific Rim, with very close allies of ours, like Japan and South Korea. Obama hasn’t lifted a finger. North Koreans just tested another nuclear weapon. No consequences from the United States. …

Yes. Obama wants victory for Islam in the world as much as he wants victory for socialism in America. A big step towards Islamic victory would be the defeat, and so the destruction, of Israel. He has to seem to be somewhat supportive of Israel, somewhat even-handed in the – totally defunct – “peace process” ostensibly still taking place between Israel and the Palestinians. But meanwhile he lets Iran build a nuclear arsenal because the quick and reliable way to destroy Israel would be by nuclear attack.

This president came into office with a far left ideology of wanting to take down America a notch or two or ten abroad, because we are not worthy. America’s full of sin from the past, and we have had our way around the world, and now it’s time we pay the price.

So I would argue, and I argue in this book, that his whole philosophy is all being carried out and it’s all deliberate and it’s all on purpose. There is no incompetence. There’s no naivete. It’s being carried out exactly as he’d like to see it. …

On the collusion of the media:

The philosophy of the Obama administration is we will do what we want, Constitution be damned. And we know that nobody’s really going to cover the bad stuff, because they’re all out to protect us. They’re with us ideologically. They’re never going to allow the first black president to get into any real trouble. They will protect us. So therefore, we will get away with everything.

And they have. And like I said, with a few exceptions of certain news outlets that have covered Fast and Furious, it really hasn’t gotten covered. And they believe that when the bad stuff happens, whether it’s Fast and Furious or Benghazi or any of the range of unconstitutional maneuvers this president has done, that they can just wait it out, because it doesn’t get covered. So they wait it out, they stonewall, they don’t give any explanations. They continue to smile, and the story blows over. …

These scandals [the Fast and Furious gun-running scandal, and the scandal of the Benghazi murders] under Barack Obama actually have an American body count. Watergate, nobody died. So you tell me which one is the more serious. They have covered up these scandals. They go as high as Eric Holder, possibly the President of the United States, and still, no sense of curiosity from the mainstream media. It’s astonishing. And they ought to be ashamed. …

On how badly Obama is wrecking America:

Assuming he does leave in 2017… I think the extent of the damage we don’t even know yet. I think we have a sense of the extent of the damage, but we really have no idea [of]the destruction that he has wrought and is wreaking on this country.

This is a man who spoke in 2008 about his dream of the fundamental transformation of the nation — his words, not mine — the fundamental transformation. He also talked about remaking America — again, his words, not mine.

And he would invoke the phrase “a more perfect union.” And you know, part of his genius [or Alinskyite training – ed] four years ago was, in allowing those statements to kind of float out there on their own, and allowing the American people to hear those statements and assign to them their own meaning, what they thought he meant by those phrases.

What I argue in the book is, don’t pay attention to what you think he meant. Pay attention to what he meant by it. Now we have four years of evidence as to what he meant by the fundamental transformation of the nation. And that is he intends to change us and is changing us, very quickly, into a European-style socialist state.

The result of that is, as we see in Western Europe, after decades of socialism, we see stubbornly and permanently high unemployment. We see sovereign debt crises that are imploding nations, if not the entire continent of Europe. We see immigration policies out of control, where these nations have lost their very identities, because they have been overrun by all kinds of different ethnicities, including radical Muslims that have taken over a lot of these countries, or at least exerting a lot of influence there.

So you see the results that are absolutely devastating in Western Europe. No economic growth. We see that now here. We have seen it. All of those results of decades of socialism building up in Western Europe, that is imploding all of those once-great nations. We see it happening here on a much more accelerated scale, because this economy is so much bigger, this country is so much bigger than any country in Western Europe.

So it’s happening a lot faster here. And when he leaves office, I do think that this country — the tentacles of redistributionism that he has wrapped around every major pillar of this economy, from the industrial base, to the financial sector, to the energy sector to the healthcare sector, those tentacles will be wrapped so tightly after eight years, that it will be almost impossible to unwind without great, enormous economic pain and dislocation. I think that’s where we’re heading. …

The laws of economics will kick in, and everything will come to a screeching halt.

Inflation, interest rates going up, higher taxes, no jobs. You’re seeing it happening across Western Europe. The debt crisis will kick in and it will be brutal, and it will affect every single person.

You can’t spend the last four or five years — actually longer than that, with the easy money policy from the Fed — you can’t spend all this time pumping trillions of dollars down into the system and not expect inflation to kick in big time. That is actually — massive inflation is actually a tax that affects the middle and lower classes more than anybody else. That is coming. …

We have had brave Republicans like Paul Ryan put out budget after budget and plan after plan saying, guys, this is foreseen. We can see this coming. And here’s how we fix it before the crisis hits. But people don’t want to hear it. People vote them out. People — people take the courageous folks and throw them out on their ears. And they don’t listen until they have to. And by that point, the pain so intense that it is going to be an absolute nightmare.

Can it be repaired? Yeah. But I fear, I really worry, that we’re going to have to hit rock bottom before we even get to that point. I hope that’s not the case. But I fear that it may be.

Most reasonable, educated people not born to Muslim parents, who took a little trouble to find out what Islam is all about – by reading the Koran, for instance – would surely find it not only full of nonsense but also morally abominable.

Secretary of State John Kerry, however, says that Islam is “a beautiful religion”.

From this video we learn about five women being buried alive in accordance with the law of Islam. Others, some cruelly disfigured, seek and bestow beauty in ways not related to the religion that oppresses them.

Perhaps Kerry also thinks that Islam is a source of accurate information:

Each section of the Koran, except the first, has a title. One section is called The Jinn. 

This is from an enlightening article by David P. Goldman (aka Spengler) at PJ Media:

The leading ideologue of Turkish Islamism, Fethullah Gulen … presides over a business empire worth tens of billions of dollars and a system of Islamist schools that stretches from Central Asia to charter schools in the United States. The Gulen organization took control of Turkey by infiltrating its security services in a patient march through the institutions over the past two decades. Gulen’s pan-Turkic mysticism views Turkey as the center of a new caliphate uniting the Muslim world. He preaches a “Turkish renaissance” with a modern spin “to ensure that religion and science go together and that science penetrates not only individual lives, but also social life.”

 What Gulen means by science is of an entirely different order than the Western understanding. This “imam from rural Anatolia,” as his website describes him, inhabits the magical world of jinns and sorcery. Science is just a powerful form of magic of which Turks should avail themselves to enhance their power, as he writes in his 2005 book The Essentials of the Islamic Faith:

“Jinn are conscious beings charged with divine obligations. Recent discoveries in biology make it clear that God created beings particular to each realm. They were created before Adam and Eve, and were responsible for cultivating and improving the world. Although God superseded them with us, he did not exempt them from religious obligations.  

As nothing is difficult for God almighty, he has provided human beings, angels and jinns with the strength appropriate for their functions and duties. As he uses angels to supervise the movements of celestial bodies, he allows to humans to rule the Earth, dominate matter, build civilizations and produce technology. 

Power and strength are not limited to the physical world, nor are they proportional to bodily size … Our eyes can travel long distances in an instant. Our imagination can transcend time and space all at once … winds can uproot trees and demolish large buildings. A young, thin plant shoot can split rocks and reach the sunlight. The power of energy, whose existence is known through its effect, is apparent to everybody. All of this shows that something’s power is not proportional to its physical size; rather the immaterial world dominates the physical world, and immaterial entities are far more powerful than material ones.” 

He goes on to warn about sorcery and the danger of spells; he allows that it is meritorious to break spells (for evil witches are everywhere casting spells), although a good Muslim should not make a profession of this, for then he might be mistaken for a sorcerer himself.

The notion that “wind” and “energy” are “immaterial” forces exudes the magical world view of an Anatolian peasant; the miracles of technology are the secret actions of jinn, just as the planetary movements are the actions of angels. When Gulen talks about the union of religion and science, what he means quite concretely is that the magical view of jinns in the Koran aids the believer in enlisting these “immaterial” forces to enhance the power of Islam. Science for Gulen simply means the management of jinn. By our standards he is mad as a march hare.

Gulen is a shaman, a relic of pre-history preserved in the cultural amber of eastern Anatolia.

The present Prime Minister of Turkey, Recep Erdogan, is a follower of Fethullah Gulen. And with him President Obama feels as much at ease as he feels irritated and uncomfortable with Israel’s Prime Minister Netanyahu.

Last year Obama [said] … that the “friendships and the bonds of trust” that he forged with Erdogan (whom he named among five foreign leaders) is “precisely, or is a big part of, what has allowed us to execute effective diplomacy.”

“Bonds of trust” with an Islamic leader who –

 … is given to lurid, sometimes bloodthirsty outbursts. During a February 2008 visit to Germany, Turkey’s most important European trading partner, Erdogan scandalized his hosts when he told an audience of 20,000 Turks that assimilation into German culture was “a crime against humanity.”

Germany, after all, knows a thing or two about crimes against humanity. German opinion was outraged, and Turkey’s chances for membership in the European Community — a pillar of Turkish diplomacy for a generation — fell to negligible. Erdogan ignored the uproar, and told the Turkish Parliament upon his return to Ankara, “I repeat… assimilation is a crime against humanity . . . . We can think differently from (Chancellor Angela) Merkel about this, but that is my opinion.”

The German attitude towards its Turkish minority has swung from multicultural outreach to pessimism about their future in German society. In October 2010, German Chancellor Angela Merkel told a gathering of her political party that Germany’s attempt to create a multicultural society has “utterly failed.”

A few days ago Erdogan declared that Zionism too is “a crime against humanity”.

What could the president’s friend have meant by that? Erdogan said exactly what he believes. The Turkish leader is a holdover from the enchanted world of rural Anatolia, in which Jewish conspiracies swirl in the night air along with jinn and witches. That is not an exaggeration, but an objective report … No-one should be surprised. Lunatics have run better countries than Turkey in living memory.

But, Goldman sensibly observes –

 American presidents would do well to find a better class of friends.

First a story about a little English boy who was so tormented and terrified by Muslim school fellows that he committed suicide.

Next the story of a Norwegian boy and his puppy, told in an article titled Europe: A Continent in Flight by Bruce Bawer at Front Page:

Danish Christians and Jews are being bullied by Muslim thugs into checking out of their neighborhoods and moving to safer locales. French Jews are taking it on the lam from Paris to settle in marginally less dangerous parts of London. Londoners are leaving their increasingly dodgy city and, literally, heading for the hills. East Oslo is being drained of ethnic Norwegians. And all of them are running scared for one reason, and one reason only: they’re terrified of getting beaten up by primitive thugs with a primitive religion who, at these European taxpayers’ expense, have been imported from some of the most primitive parts of the world.

Years and years ago these cultural hooligans, these religious autocrats, these would-be enforcers of sharia, were welcomed to Europe by clueless, spineless political leaders, and – although the reality of “creeping jihad” has long since set in – they continue to be celebrated by most of those leaders … for purportedly enriching European culture. And all the while, as a result, European culture is quickly going down the tubes.

For a step-by-step account of just what those clueless spineless political leaders did to bring about the Muslim conquest of Europe by immigration, see our post Europe betrayed, February 11, 2010.

When you’re discussing such large-scale phenomena such as this one – hundreds of thousands of Muslims occupying this or that part of this or that city, hundreds of thousands of native Londoners relocating hither and thither in consequence – it can be hard to grasp it all, to reduce the big picture to a comprehensible, human scale. …  The other day the Norwegian newspaperAftonbladet reported on [a] European boy who found himself in the jihadist crosshairs and was forced to flee. …

On the evening of February 16, a boy – whose named has been withheld, whether because of his age, or to protect him from reprisals, or both – got on a bus in the town of Egersund in western Norway. He was headed back home to Stavanger, fifty or so miles away, and was carrying his puppy. Upon boarding the bus, he checked with the driver to make sure it was OK to take the dog onboard. The driver said yes: he had no problem with it. Unfortunately, three other passengers, whom Aftonbladet identifies as being “of foreign origin” (another source actually dares to use the word “Muslim”), did have a problem. One of the men walked up to the driver and expressed his strong objection to the presence of the pet; another approached the boy and informed him that if he did not get off the bus with his dog at once, they would beat him up.

What happened next is in dispute. According to the boy, the driver, afraid not to cave in to the men’s demands, pulled the bus over and ordered the boy and his dog off the bus. The driver, for his part, claims that he knew nothing of the tensions between the boy and the Muslims, and insists that the boy left the bus of his own accord. In any event, the undisputed fact is that the boy exited the bus at a spot on the highway that was smack dab in the middle of nowhere. The temperature was below freezing; the time, just before midnight. Fortunately he had a cell phone, and was able to phone a friend to pick him up. When she finally got there, some time later, she said, “he was cold and still and it was plain that the incident had had a powerful impact on him.” The national railway system, which operates the bus, has chosen to accept the driver’s account and will not investigate the boy’s complaint.

Whatever the specific details of the story, the narrative’s main point is clear – as is its larger import. The story of that boy and his dog, simply put, is the story of today’s Europe in miniature – the story of a continent whose natives are increasingly being tormented by Koran-wielding tyrants, and increasingly in flight.