“Nudging” the nation towards acceptance of unfreedom is the declared plan of the Obama gang.

Now comes an idea of how to “nudge”  Americans towards accepting state-controlled news and comment.

This is from an editorial in Investor’s Business Daily:

The FCC [Federal Communications Commission] has cooked up a plan to place “researchers” in U.S. newsrooms, supposedly to learn all about how editorial decisions are made. …

As if illegal seizures of Associated Press phone records and the shadowy tailing of the mother of a Fox News reporter weren’t menacing enough, the Obama administration is going out of its way to institute a new intrusive surveillance of the press, as if the press wasn’t supine enough.

Ajit Pai, a commissioner with the Federal Communications Commission, warned this week in a Wall Street Journal op-ed that a plan to dispatch researchers into radio, television and even newspaper newsrooms called the “Multi-Market Study of Critical Information Needs” is still going forward, despite the grave danger it presented to the First Amendment.

Pai warned that under the rationale of increasing minority representation in newsrooms, the FCC, which has the power to issue or not issue broadcasting licenses, would dispatch its “researchers” to newsrooms across America to seek their “voluntary” compliance about how news stories are decided, as well as “wade into office politics” looking for angry reporters whose story ideas were rejected as evidence of a shutout of minority views.

Pai questioned if such a study could really be voluntary, given FCC’s conflict of interest (and, he might have added, the Obama record of going after political opponents).

The origin of the idea is a recrudescence of the Fairness Doctrine, inoperative since 1987 or so, to provide equal time to leftist points of view in broadcasting and other media that otherwise wouldn’t have a willing audience in a free market.

It’s an idea so fraught with potential for abuse it ought to have news agencies screaming bloody murder. The very idea of Obama hipsters showing up in newsrooms, asking questions and judging if newspapers (over which they have no jurisdiction), radio and TV are sufficiently diverse is nothing short of thought control.

The FCC now says it will be “closely reviewing the proposed research design to determine if an alternative approach is merited,” as a result of Pai’s warning. Adweek actually reported that as a “retreat.”

It’s because of this don’t-rock-the-boat attitude that Reporters Without Borders said the U.S. had “one of the most significant declines” in press freedom in the world last year, dropping 13 places to a wretched 46th in its newly released global ranking.

If the FCC has its way, it can drop even further.

Could this menacing move wake up the media toadies of the Left at last? Will they now rise in fury against the spreading tyranny of the Obama government?

Seems not –

The reaction from the National Association of Broadcasters was mealy-mouthed. The FCC “should reconsider” “qualitative” sections of its study, it wrote.

So the Fourth Estate will squirm a little and then lie back and think of Cass Sunstein, Saul Alinsky, and – ah! – Barack Obama.

Though cowards flinch and traitors sneer, they’ll keep the Red Flag flying here.

Ex-New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin’s conviction on corruption charges leaves little doubt the Katrina disaster would never have unfolded as fatally as it did had there not been Third World-style mismanagement in that city.  The mayor who was so critical of President Bush for not doing more to prevent the disaster and help New Orleans after the levees broke, even demonizing him as a heartless racist, was mismanaging funds and operations that could have reinforced the levees and saved lives. Instead of building up the levees, he was building up his own personal fortune.

This is from Investor’s Business Daily:

A federal jury on Wednesday found Nagin guilty of bribery, fraud and money-laundering during his two terms as mayor of New Orleans from 2002 to 2010. The Democrat spent lavishly on personal parties, private-jet rides and first-class airfare for a Nagin family shopping spree in Manhattan that totaled more than $500,000. …

Nagin led a chorus of Democrat boos over the Bush administration’s handling of the 2005 hurricane, which took more than 1,500 lives and left tens of thousands homeless. But his record of corruption lends credence to Republican arguments that local Democratic officials in Louisiana were to blame for the post-storm debacle.

Indeed, a confidential and independent report commissioned by the Defense Department found that “corruption and mismanagement within the New Orleans city government diverted money earmarked for improving flood protection.”

The leaked 2005 report, which was commissioned by the Office of Secretary of Defense as an “independent and critical review” of what went so wrong, details how taxpayer money earmarked for flood control was diverted “to other, more vote-getting, projects.”

On Nagin’s watch, public funding was spent on Mardi Gras parties, marinas and gambling operations instead of levee maintenance. Had it not been for the failure of the levees protecting New Orleans from flooding, Katrina wouldn’t have killed as many or caused the damage it did. The National Hurricane Center ruled in December 2005 that Katrina was a mere Category 3 when it slammed ashore the Gulf Coast.

“Past mayors and governors gambled that the long-expected Big Killer hurricane would never happen,” the report said. “That bet was lost with Hurricane Katrina.”

Dare we hope that voters will fully grasp the fact that the rule of Democrats caused the ruin of both New Orleans and Detroit? And then keep the Democratic Party out of power?

Nah. Won’t happen. People who vote Democratic obviously don’t recognize facts and don’t like to think.

An olympus of politically clueless billionaires, notably the unscrupulous George Soros, fund archipelagos of organizations that work for the undoing of America. But when an intelligent billionaire prefers to fund Republican and conservative organizations and support the campaigns of pro-American candidates, the Left shrieks “Foul!”

The Left is Hypocrisy Central, so it’s good to find an article like this from PowerLine, by Steven Hayward:

As I eagerly await the daily announcement from the media and the organized Left about the latest purported outrage of the Koch brothers spending money on politics, it is worth taking in the data compiled by the lefty Center for Responsive Politics about the top donors to political campaigns. The data on campaign spending from 1989-2014 show that all of the lefty talk about “corporate money” in politics is a smoke screen: the largest donors are labor unions and left-leaning grassroots groups. In fact, the number one donor is Act Blue, which hasn’t been around all that long.

The screen cap below shows the top 15 political donors. Eleven of the 15 tilt Democratic while none tilt Republican, and nine of them are labor unions, with the second largest political donor being the giant public employee union, AFSCME. Koch Industries comes in way down at 59th place on the list.

Pretty clear that all of the noise about the Koch Brothers and corporate money in politics generally has one objective in mind: force out any money that might even marginally detract from the drive for liberal power. Act blue indeed.

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We have had a “pingback” from this site, which displays the whole chart. Koch industries are at the bottom of the list – having donated the least.

The chart also shows that the Democrats have received far more money in donations from corporations, industry and business than the Republicans have.

Among the ancient Dead Sea Scrolls there is one titled The War of the Children of Light  and the Children of Darkness.

It is a perpetual war: Good against Evil.

It is fought in most of the world’s mythologies, and in almost all of them Good will win in the end. (The exception is that of the Norsemen. They foresaw the triumph of Evil.)

Dennis Prager, writing at Townhall, describes how the two sides of the conflict appear to him now:

In both personal and public life, you can know a great deal about a person or a group if you know what most bothers them – and what doesn’t bother them.

A news item this past week made this point with glaring clarity. It reported a meeting that the United Nations Assistant Secretary-General for Human Rights had on Friday. Before revealing the subject of that meeting, let’s review for a moment what is happening in the world …

North Korea continues to be an affront to the human species. That North Korea, whether or not it had nuclear weapons, is not a central concern is an indictment of humanity.

That the West, with the noble exception of Canada under Stephen Harper, is appeasing the dictators of Iran, is an indictment of the West.

Add to this list the U.N.’s and the world’s ignoring of the Chinese government’s continuing suppression of all dissent and its decades-long violent eradication of Tibet’s unique and ancient culture.

Then add the slaughter of millions in Congo over the last decade, the 100,000-plus killed in Syria just last year, most of them civilians killed by their own government, and the blowing up, burning alive, and throat-cutting of untold numbers of innocent people by violent Islamists on a daily basis.

In other words, if what bothers you most is evil – the deliberate infliction of cruelty on people by people – North Korea, Congo, China, Syria and radical Islam will bother you more than anything else on the world scene.

So, then, what was the subject of the meeting convened Friday by the United Nations Assistant Secretary-General for Human Rights?

The alleged racism of the name of the National Football League’s Washington team, the Redskins.

That’s right. All these horrific evils are happening as you read this, and … the United Nations had a meeting about the name Washington Redskins.

The U.N. is not alone in paying undue attention to the Redskins’ name. The left in the United States is nearly obsessed with it. President Barack Obama has spoken out against it. The Washington Post editorial board has demanded that the team drop the name. In the herd-like way that governs media, innumerable columnists and sports writers have written passionate columns against the name, and increasing numbers of sports writers have vowed to never again write or speak the name.

This left-wing obsession with a non-evil exemplifies the left’s moral universe. That universe is preoccupied with lesser evils while nearly always ignoring the greatest evils.

Preoccupation with real evil is the greatest difference between right and left. The right was preoccupied with fighting Communism while the left … was preoccupied with fighting anti-Communists.

The right today is preoccupied with fighting Islamism; the left is preoccupied with fighting “Islamophobia.”

One way of putting it is that the right is preoccupied with fighting evil and the left is preoccupied with fighting those who fight evil.

The right is preoccupied with defending Israel against those who wish to annihilate it. The left is preoccupied with Israeli apartments on the West Bank.

This difference was made manifest last week in the address given by the one world leader to exemplify the right’s preoccupation with evil, Canada’s prime minister, Stephen Harper. Talking about all the condemnations of Israel, Harper said:

“Think about the twisted logic and outright malice behind that: a state, based on freedom, democracy and the rule of law, that was founded so Jews can flourish as Jews, and seek shelter from the shadow of the worst racist experiment in history, that is condemned, and that condemnation is masked in the language of anti-racism. It is nothing short of sickening.”

Yes, but the writer does not go nearly far enough. The Left is not merely preoccupied with fighting those who fight evil, it is occupied with doing evil. The Left  is in alliance with Islam. Its (bewilderingly unintelligent) intelligentsia invent a fake need to “save the planet” from “climate change” as an excuse to advance their own tyrannical rule, reduce population, and impoverish and destroy civilization.

And where are our warriors of the Right to stop them? Let’s see: there’s Stephen Harper and … Well, a few more names may spring to mind. And we do have the immense power of Reason on our side.

Which side is winning, would you say?

The Democrats sweep on to establish their tyranny over every aspect of our lives, and the Republican “opposition” flaps in the breeze.

This commentary comes from Investor’s Business Daily:

As Republicans watch from the sidelines, pinning their hopes on 2016, the president and his radical troops are storming local school and zoning boards in an unprecedented federal invasion.

Last week, after the attorney general and education secretary jointly announced an alarming new witch hunt against local school officials over allegedly racist disciplinary policies, we watched with keen interest Republican reaction. Disappointingly, barely a whimper was registered from the opposition party. …

We can’t imagine a more important kitchen-table issue — one that will directly affect middle class families — than school discipline.

By demanding schools suspend suspensions of school thugs, the administration’s race-mongers are threatening the safety and security of classrooms across the nation. They’re also threatening learning for white and minority students alike.

See our post, The Obama administration promotes race discrimination in schools, January 13, 2014 (two days ago).

You’d think this new policy, which ties compliance to education funding, would warrant endless debate on the airwaves. It’s already having real consequences, with dozens of school districts coming under federal investigation, and many others proactively easing punishment for even the most violent students.

Has the Republican Party to all intents and purposes given up opposing the Democrats in power? Or do Republicans not understand the gravity of what Obama and his cohorts are doing?

On another vital matter – housing – the Republicans seem equally quiescent.

There’s also been a TV blackout on what federal housing officials are doing to commandeer local zoning, another huge kitchen-table issue.

The administration claims building codes in the suburbs erect racist “barriers” to the mobility of urban minorities. A new HUD regulation demands city officials remove them or lose federal funding and face prosecution for discrimination.

They want to reduce regulations on building? They’d even do that in the interests of “diversity”? Truly leftism trumps all!

And is the sub-prime disaster starting all over again?

These policies will impact schools, crime and home values for years to come, yet the big media are not covering them. And Republicans are not raising a fuss.

There’s no talk of the housing bubble the administration’s social engineers are dangerously re-inflating, either, thanks to their quiet loosening of mortgage underwriting standards amid “financial reform” hype.

Average Americans are in the dark, under-informed and ill-served by not just the talking heads paid well to inform them, but also by the officials elected to represent their interests in Congress.

Regulation by regulation, rule by rule, executive order by order, consent decree by decree, this radical regime is quietly gaining increasing power over state and local policies, effectively ending federalism.

Under the Constitution, power to govern is shared between national and state governments, but this administration is trying to grab powers reserved for the people. It’s trying to control everything from school discipline to suburban development to even the location of grocery stores.

These same control freaks are micromanaging private business and financial affairs. The attorney general, housing secretary and Obama’s new credit czar know nothing about the qualifications of car and home loan applicants yet are acting like the nation’s loan officers.

They’re literally rewriting lending policies through consent orders. And few in Congress are questioning their authority.

All these court-approved decrees will remain in force, and the next crew will have to enforce them whether they like it or not (assuming Republicans can even get back into the White House).

So will all the regulations they’re packing into the Federal Register. The next administration would have to rescind every one of them, one at a time.

That won’t be easy even if they had the political will to do it. Obama’s embedding radicals in the federal bureaucracy who will make a career of fighting to keep those rules in place.

If Republicans think the only battle that matters is 2016, they are sorely mistaken.

The radical policies Obama’s pushing through now, with little resistance, will outlast his regime. The battle that should be joined is the battle right now.

Obama has threatened to veto any legislation that would keep sanctions on Iran until and unless the threat of it becoming nuclear-armed is lifted. Could it be any clearer that Obama wants Iran to become nuclear armed? Do we hear protest from the Republicans? Are they launching campaigns to inform the public, to rouse awareness, indignation, protest? Not that we’ve heard.

Democrats are urging Obama – not that he needs much urging – to bypass Congress and rule by executive order. Republican outcry?

In the middle of last year, Attorney General Eric Holder was held in criminal contempt by the House for refusing its demands to turn over documents relating to his “Fast and Furious” gun-running operation. He still hasn’t complied. Are the Republicans letting him get away with it?

Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius – she who is in charge of making the implementation of the “Affordable Care Act” go so smoothly – has been stonewalling a congressional investigation. Are the Republicans  letting her get away with it?

Have the Republicans decided to do nothing until it’s time for another one of their insipid number to stand – if a wobbly stance on all issues can be called “standing” – for the presidency in 2016?

What would a Republican do if he got into the White House? Who knows?

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This is part of our Facebook summary of an article by Thomas Sowell on the need for Republicans to SPEAK:

The first time I saw New Jersey Governor Chris Christie on television, a few years ago, my first reaction was astonishment: “A talking Republican!” It would scarcely have been more astonishing if there had been a talking giraffe. For reasons unknown, most Republican leaders seem to pay very little attention to articulation – certainly as compared to leading Democrats, who seem to pay little attention to anything else. Governor Christie is in a class by himself when it comes to Republicans who can express themselves in the heat of political battle. When it comes to policies, I might prefer some other Republican as a 2016 presidential candidate. But the bottom line in politics is that you have to get elected in order to have the power to accomplish anything. It doesn’t matter how good your ideas are, if you can’t be bothered to articulate them. The fact that Christie is the current frontrunner for the Republican presidential nomination in 2016 – and is ahead of Hillary Clinton in the polls – makes him a target for a partisan media. Given that blatant partisanship, the need for a Republican candidate in 2016 who can make his case to the public, in spite of the media, is especially acute – even though it is much too early to try to predict who that candidate will be. At least Governor Christie has provided an example of the kind of articulation that is needed – indeed, imperative – if the Republicans are to have any chance of rescuing this country from the ruinous policies of the past few years.

The attorney-general Eric Holder infamously refused to prosecute Black Panther intimidators at a polling place in 2008,  and became irritated when questioned about his leniency. Defending them, he called them “my people”.

“His people” – by which he means black people – must not, it seems, be held as responsible for breaking the rules as other people.

That a US attorney-general should favor discrimination under the law, and practice it, is outrageous.

There was too little outrage, apparently, over the Black Panther incident to make him reconsider. Now he wants black children to be treated differently from others when they break the rules or behave intolerably at school.

This is from National Review, by Roger Clegg:

The Education and Justice Departments of the Obama administration today issued extensive joint guidance to K–12 schools on student discipline and, in particular, on how the administration will determine if school-discipline policies are discriminatory on the basis of race or ethnicity. …

On the grounds of needing to make sure that punishment is not meted out unfairly, the DOJ is asking for punishment to be meted out unfairly.

Predictably, the administration promises to be extremely aggressive in using the “disparate impact” approach to its civil-rights enforcement — that is, in ensuring that school-discipline policies that have disproportionate results across races are severely scrutinized.

It’s a fair question whether the federal government in 2014 needs to be micromanaging schools to ensure there is no actual discrimination, but certainly it’s a bad thing that the administration is going to be insisting on racial proportionality. …

Which is to say, even if black students misbehave more than others, they should not be punished more than others.

The idea is absurd, preposterous, STUPID.

The fact of the matter is that not all racial and ethnic groups (not to mention boys versus girls) are equally likely to be discipline problems. There are a variety of reasons for this, but I will just note here what is probably the main one. There are huge differences among groups in out-of-wedlock birthrates — more than seven out of ten African Americans, six out of ten Native Americans, and five out of ten Hispanics, versus fewer than three out of ten non-Hispanic whites and two out of ten Asian Americans are born to unmarried women — and children growing up in homes without fathers are much more likely to get into all kinds of trouble, including at school.

If schools are pressured to “get their numbers” right in this area, they will either start disciplining students who shouldn’t be or, more likely, will not discipline some students who ought to be.

We anticipate that both those measures will be taken.

If unruly students are not disciplined, the kids who will lose out the most will be well-behaved students in classes with undisciplined classmates, and those well-behaved students are themselves likely to be poor black or Latino kids. Somehow the Left always forgets about them in its eagerness to show compassion. …

It is true that there are difficult issues in the school-discipline area … But it profits nothing to view these problems through a racial lens.

Now look and listen for outrage, for protest, for reminders that the worst form of racism is discrimination under the law. It may be a long vigil.

This trailer of a forthcoming documentary by Ben Howe, Bankrupt: How Cronyism and Corruption Brought Down Detroit, gives a tantalizing glimpse of a story that is to the extreme discredit – thoroughly deserved – of the Democrats and their central planning.

Detroit has been ruined by Democrats. What happened to Detroit is what can happen to the whole country if Democrats are allowed to stay in power for long enough.

Steven Hayward comments at PowerLine:

I especially like the item about how people are actually having deceased family members disinterred to be reburied outside the city.  Things are really bad when it’s thought unfit for even dead people to stay inside city limits.

We sympathize. We wouldn’t care to be stuck in Detroit, alive or dead.

And our reader and commenter Frank sends us this video which, as he says, takes a more in-depth view of the same subject:

The picture and the following text by Roger L Simon come from PJ Media:

Whether they know it or not, Republicans, conservatives, libertarians, center-right folks, all those who favor smaller government and increased freedom, do have a principal enemy. But … it’s no longer Barack Obama. He is over. He was already a lame duck when Obamacare plucked most of his remaining feathers. The damage he can do may still be serious, but most of it will be reparable.

The principal enemy for the right and the center-right is now Hillary Clinton, the vastly favored frontrunner for the 2016 Democratic presidential nomination. She is so far in front, in fact, that her competitors are not even in hailing distance. Hillary is the one who can consolidate and solidify the “gains” of the Obama era in a way Obama himself never could because she is much more politically savvy — Obama was only savvy about getting elected, not governing — and has the backing of her even more politically savvy husband. Hillary is the one who can fully remake the United States into some version of Western Europe or, yet more frighteningly, China, a permanently stratified state capitalism governed by quasi-totalitarian bureaucrats.(We can call this system Soros Marxism, meaning a ruling clique of increasingly rich corporate czars employing a propagandistic veneer of socialist equality to keep the power and wealth for themselves.) …

The New York Times (the very model of that propagandistic veneer) already knows their bread is buttered with Hillary, not Obama. They demonstrated that … with their revisionist article on Benghazi, bent on taking that scandal (Hillary’s Achilles’ heel) off the table for the coming elections or at least seriously defusing it.

For the New York Times’s special pleading on this issue, and criticism of its spurious case, see our post, Signs of Democrats’ desperation over the scandalous tragedy of Benghazi, December 29, 2013.

Republicans would do well to redouble their efforts to make sure this particular obfuscation does not succeed by doing the proper research and communicating the results to the public — succinctly and repeatedly.

If the Republicans could do anything so sensible it would be mighty nice!

Benghazi could be used to bring Hillary down permanently. It wouldn’t even be difficult. It would take nothing more than the resolution to accuse her of dereliction of duty, extreme incompetence, and the callous sacrifice of American lives, day after day, at every possible opportunity, through every available medium, loud and clear.

But will they do it? Or will they McCain the issue ? Which is to say, politely overlook it. Or Romney it? Which is to say, touch on it ever so lightly and immediately let it go.

Maybe one of the younger bolder men of the party – Ted Cruz perhaps? –  will seize the hammer of Benghazi and flatten Hillary with it.

“Racism” – an infinitely elastic term – is by far the very worst crime any human being can commit according to the Left.

There is one exception, however. Essential as it is to strive (hopelessly if you’re a white person, not too hard if you’re anything else) not to be racist, it is compulsory to hate Jews. Though you mustn’t call them that. You must call them Israelis or Zionists. And hating them isn’t enough. You must work actively for their destruction.

Why, you ask? Isn’t it obvious? Because Israel is an apartheid state, Israelis are Nazis who colonized the long-established independent state of Palestine, and  Jews are carrying out savage acts of terrorism on every inhabited continent, and threatening to take over Europe and the world. While the Muslims – pacific and tolerant even though they’ve been horrifically persecuted for hundreds of years – are making huge contributions to humanity, especially through Science, so winning Nobel Prizes out of all proportion to their tiny number.

This is from Front Page, by Caroline Glick:

The main foreign policy issue that galvanizes the passions and energies of the committed American Left is the movement to delegitimize Israel’s right to exist.

This week has been a big one for the anti-Israel movement. In the space of a few days, two quasi academic organizations – the American Studies Association [ASA] and the Native American and Indigenous Studies Association – have launched boycotts against Israeli universities. Their boycotts follow a similar one announced in April by the Asian Studies Association.

These groups’ actions have not taken place in isolation. They are of a piece with ever-escalating acts of anti-Israel agitation in college campuses throughout the United States.

Between the growth of Israel Apartheid Day (or Week, or Month) from a fringe exercise on isolated campuses to a staple of the academic calendar in universities throughout the US and Canada, and the rise of the boycott, divestment and sanctions (BDS) movement to wage economic war against the Jewish state, anti-Israel activism has become the focal point of Leftist foreign policy activism in the US and throughout the Western world.

Every week brings a wealth of stories about new cases of aggressive anti-Israel activism. At the University of Michigan last week, thousands of students were sent fake eviction notices from the university’s housing office. A pro-Palestinian group distributed them in dorms across campus to disseminate the blood libel that Israel is carrying out mass expulsions of Palestinians.

At Swarthmore College, leftist anti-Israel Jewish students who control Hillel are insisting on using Hillel’s good offices to disseminate and legitimate anti-Israel slanders.

And the Left’s doctrinaire insistence that Israel is the root of all evil is not limited to campuses.

At New York’s 92nd Street Y, Commentary editor John Podhoretz was booed and hissed by the audience for trying to explain why the ASA’s just-announced boycott of Israel was an obscene act of bigotry.

Many commentators have rightly pointed out that the ASA and the NAISA are fringe groups. They represent doctorate holders who chose to devote their careers to disciplines predicated not on scholarship, but on political activism cloaked in academic regalia whose goal is to discredit American power. The ASA has only 5,000 members, and only 1,200 of them voted on the Israel- boycott resolution. The NAISA has even fewer members. It would be wrong, however, to use the paltry number of these fringe groups’ members as means to dismiss the phenomenon that they represent. They are very much in line with the general drift of the Left. … While the ASA and its comrades are on the fringes of academia, they are not fringe voices on the Left. The Left has embraced the cause of Israel’s destruction. 

Rejecting Israel’s right to exist has become part of the Left’s dogma. It is a part of the catechism. Holding a negative view of the Jewish state is a condition for membership in the ideological camp. It is an article of faith …

Consider the background of the president of the ASA. Curtis Marez is an associate professor in the Ethnic Studies Department at the University of California, San Diego. His area of expertise is Chicano Film and Media Studies. He doesn’t know anything about Israel. He just knows that he’s a Leftist. And today, Leftists demonize Israel. Their actions have nothing to do with anything Israel does or has ever done. They have nothing to do with human rights. Hating Israel, slandering Israel and supporting the destruction of Israel are just things that good Leftists do.

And Marez was not out of step with his fellow Leftists who rule the roost at UCSD. This past March the student council passed a resolution calling for the university to divest from companies that do business with Israel. Why? Because hating Israel is what Leftists do. …

Challenging the likes of Marez, or the Swarthmore students … to a reasoned debate is an exercise in futility. They do not care about human rights. They do not care that Israel is the only human rights-respecting democracy in the Middle East. … Being hypocrites doesn’t bother them either. 

You can talk until you’re blue in the face about the civilian victims of the Syrian civil war, or the gender apartheid in Saudi Arabia and the absence of religious freedom throughout the Muslim world. But they don’t care. They aren’t trying to make the world a better place.

Facts cannot compete with their faith. Reason has no place in their closed intellectual universe. To accept reason and facts would be an act of heresy.

The religion of Christianity began by plundering and anathematizing the religion of Judaism, and became a menace to the Jews. The religions of Islam and Socialism plundered and anathematized both, and menace all of us.

Religion is a self-imposed curse on humankind.