One of the most dangerous lunacies of the Left is its paranoid obsession with “global warming”. The attempts to stop civilization in order to “save the planet” would be funny if they weren’t so threatening.

If the climate lunatics – such as Obama – get their way, our lives will be (as Thomas Hobbes put it) “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short”.

From Investor’s Business Daily:

Activists are warning that the upcoming United Nations climate conference is the last chance to save the world. Fair enough. So if no deal is reached at the meeting, can we please stop hearing about global warming?

The 21st session of the Conference of Parties to the U.N.’s Framework Convention on Climate Change starts Nov. 30 and will ponderously drag on until Dec. 11. Call it the “Last Chance in Paris”, because that’s what the fearmongers, from the Vatican to Prince Charles, believe it is.

Of course we’ve heard all this before.

It seems as if every time there’s a U.N. climate conference, we hear the warnings: It’s the final opportunity to save Earth, the “last chance”.

• In 2001, Time magazine said the U.N.’s Bonn conference was “a global warming treaty’s last chance“.
• Four years later, activist Mark Lynas wrote in an open letter that the Montreal climate summit represented “a last chance for action“.
• Before the 2007 meeting in Bali, Tony Juniper of Friends of the Earth declared that the conference “could be the last chance to avoid the worst effect of global warming“.
• Australian environmental scientist Tim Flannery said in 2008 that the Poland “round of negotiations is likely to be our last chance as a species to deal with the problem“.
• Then before Copenhagen in 2009, European Union Environment Commissioner Stavros Dimas said that conference was “the world’s last chance to stop climate change before it passes the point of no return“.

We could go on. The warnings have continued every year since without fail. So it’s unlikely we’ve heard the last of the “last chance” warnings, even if no agreement is reached in Paris.

But we should have.

There’s a growing stack of evidence that contradicts the alarmists’ warnings and refutes the scientific “consensus” that man is overheating his planet with carbon-dioxide emissions.

Start with NASA’s recent finding that Antarctica is actually gaining ice, not losing it, and the fact that the North Pole has not been ice-free in any summer although climate extremist Al Gore claimed it would be by now.

Then move on to the global warming models used to predict climate calamity. They have been about as accurate as wild guesses.

Why has this happened? Maybe because, as Australian electrical engineer David Evans discovered through mathematical calculation, CO2 is not as strong a greenhouse gas as the U.N. says it is. Evans found that it’s about “a fifth or 10th” of what activists claim it is …

Related to the flawed models is the measured reality that Earth hasn’t warmed in 16 to 18 years.

Other events and circumstances that hurt the warming narrative include: doctored data used by alarmists; admissions by former activists that they either overestimated temperature increases or were simply altogether wrong; and the work of credible scientists that goes hard against the warming claims. [Eg. see here.]

None of these counter-examples will move the activists from their position. They will continue to agitate for government-enforced limits on CO2 emissions and lecture us about how we live.

Their last chance should have come long ago, but now it looks as if they will never run out of them.

A woman student reports that she cannot bear it.

“Let’s shred it,” say the authorities at Vassar College.

This video is published today, November 3, 2015.

The video makers punctiliously correct an error.

CORRECTION: We incorrectly identified Colleen Cohen as being affiliated with Oberlin College. In fact, she is the Faculty Director of Affirmative Action and a Professor of Anthropology at Vassar College.

(She’s the one in the video who says she cannot use her shredder so must wait to shred the Constitution “when my secretary gets back”.)

So, Colleen Cohen, we fearmongers who think the US Constitution is the greatest document ever written, know where you live!

Let’s start with a quotation from the New York Times – not an organ we often go to for support of our arguments:

SUMTE, Germany — This bucolic, one-street settlement of handsome redbrick farmhouses may for the moment have many more cows than people, but next week it will become one of the fastest growing places in Europe. Not that anyone in Sumte is very excited about it. In early October, the district government informed Sumte’s mayor, Christian Fabel, by email that his village of 102 people just over the border in what was once Communist East Germany would take in 1,000 asylum seekers.

His wife, the mayor said, assured him it must be a hoax. “It certainly can’t be true” that such a small, isolated place would be asked to accommodate nearly 10 times as many migrants as it had residents, she told him. “She thought it was a joke,” he said.

But it was not. Sumte has become a showcase of the extreme pressures bearing down on Germany …

What is happening in Sumte is just one small instance of what is happening all over Germany.

Muslim immigration into the European states had been going on for decades, sending crime rates up, and draining national treasuries as welfare support was lavishly granted to the newcomers. The Muslims were not expected to become Europeans. They were not required to learn the language of the people they settled among. They could have their own law courts and enforce their own laws, which were not only different from those of the host countries, but entirely incompatible with them. They formed states within the states. And it was the native populations who were expected to adapt to the values and customs of the foreigners.

This strange development in European history was called “multiculturalism”.

At last, in October 2010,  one European leader – the one whose voice carried most weight in the European Union –  the Chancellor of Germany, Angela Merkel, dared to say that it was not good for her country. Addressing an audience of her own party, the conservative Christian Democratic Union (CDU), she declared that the multiculturalist project had “utterly failed”.  “The concept,” she said, “that we are now living side by side and are happy about it does not work.” Immigrants should integrate and adopt Germany’s culture and values.

That statement should have resounded through the continent. It should have launched a change of policy throughout the EU. The mass immigration of Muslims should have stopped.

But none of those things happened.

And a few years later, in 2015, Angela Merkel changed her mind, reversed her judgment.

It is largely due to Chancellor Angela Merkel that a huge tidal wave of Muslims is now flooding over Europe.

The immigrants are now called “refugees”, and though they come from many miserable Islamic countries in Asia and Africa, the pretense is that they are victims of the warring factions in Syria.

Again just one leader of a European nation can clearly see the Muslim invasion for what it is, as he tries to keep it out of his country. This time it is the Prime Minister of Hungary, Viktor Orbán, who dares to speak out in defense of European civilization.

We quote from Gatestone, where Soeren Kern writes:

Speaking at an October 22 [2015]  gathering of the European People’s Party in Madrid, Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán warned of the consequences of Merkel’s immigration policies. He said:

We are in deep trouble. The migration crisis has the potential to destabilize governments, countries and the whole European continent. … What we have been facing is not a refugee crisis. This is a migratory movement composed of economic migrants, refugees and also foreign fighters. …

I also want to underline that there is an unlimited source of supply of people, after Syria, Iraq, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Africa is now also on the move. The dimension and the volume of the danger is well above our expectations. …

Neither the German, Austrian nor the Hungarian way of life is a basic right of all people on the Earth. It is only a right of those ones who have contributed to it. Europe is not able to accept everyone who wants a better life. ….

We cannot avoid speaking about the quality of our democracies.

Democracies, he reminds them, in which freedom of speech has long been an essential value; and a value the media have exploited and betrayed by trying to hide the truth about the invasion rather than revealing it to the public.

Is it freedom of information and speech when the media usually show women and children [as “refugees”], while 70% of the migrants are young men and they look like an army? How could it happen that our people feel that their opinion is not being taken into consideration? And we have to address the question of whether our people want what has been happening. Did we get authorization from them to allow millions of migrants to enter our continent? … No, distinguished delegates, we did not.

He puts the blame squarely on “the European left” – though Merkel’s government is a conservative coalition, and other conservative governments have acquiesced in the policy of admitting unlimited numbers of the “refugees”:

We cannot hide the fact that the European left has a clear agenda. They are supportive of migration. They actually import future leftist voters to Europe hiding behind [the excuse of] humanism. It is an old trick but I do not understand why we have to accept it. They consider registration and protection of borders as bureaucratic, nationalist and against human rights. They have a dream about the politically constructed world societywithout religious traditions, without borders, without nations. They attack core values of our European identity: family, nation, subsidiarity and responsibility.”

To all of which Chancellor Angela Merkel remains purposefully deaf.

Most of the invaders want to go to Germany. And Merkel wants them to be warmly welcomed there.

According to the president of the Bavarian Association of Municipalities, Uwe Brandl, Germany is now on track to have “20 million Muslims by 2020”. The surge in Germany’s Muslim population represents a demographic shift of epic proportions, one that will change the face of Germany forever, “but we are just standing by, watching it happen”. 

Addressing an expo in Nuremburg on October 14, Brandl warned that untrammeled migration will entail heavy costs for German taxpayers and may also lead to social unrest. He said:

A four-member refugee family receives up to 1,200 euros per month in transfer payments. Plus accommodation and meals. Now go to an unemployed German family man who has worked maybe 30 years, and now with his family receives only marginally more. These people are asking us whether we politicians really see this as fair and just.

Brandl said this also applies to the electronic health card, which provides asylum seekers with the same benefits as Germans who have paid into the health insurance system for many years. To criticize this as unfair has “nothing to do with racism or right-wing extremism”.

“Racism” and “right-wing extremism” are what any protestor against the invasion is accused of, as we’ll demonstrate below.

Brandl’s concerns are echoed in a leaked intelligence document, which warns that the influx of more than one million migrants from the Muslim world this year will lead to increasing political instability in Germany.

The document – portions of which were published by Die Welt on October 25 – reveals growing alarm within the highest echelons of Germany’s intelligence and security apparatus about the consequences of Chancellor Angela Merkel’s open-door immigration policy.

The so-called non-paper (the author of the document remains anonymous) warns that the “integration of hundreds of thousands of illegal migrants will be impossible given the large numbers involved and the already-existing Muslim parallel societies in Germany”. The document adds:

We are importing Islamic extremism, Arab anti-Semitism, national and ethnic conflicts of other peoples, as well as a different understanding of society and law. German security agencies are unable to deal with these imported security problems, and the resulting reactions from the German population.

An unidentified high-ranking security official told Die Welt:

The high influx of people from other parts of the world will lead to the instability of our country. By allowing this mass migration, we are producing extremists. Mainstream society is radicalizing because the majority does not want migration, which is being forced by the political elites. In the future, many Germans will turn away from the constitutional state.

But to all this Merkel still remains deaf.

And most of the German media try to keep all such warnings from the public.

Why? Why is Merkel doing this? What changed her mind? Why is she – a conservative – being helped to destroy Germany by the left-leaning media?

It is from Spiegel Online that we get an answer, and a very telling answer it is.

The article begins:

Even as an image of a Germany taking great pains to welcome hundreds of thousands of refugees has bolstered the country’s image abroad … [Our emphasis]

So the important news magazine Spiegel (once the German eqivalent of Time magazine, deliberately designed to resemble it, and now still flourishing when its model has long since grown specter-thin and almost died), assumes, and delights in its assumption, that by letting in the Muslim hordes it is bolstering Germany’s image abroad.

The Spiegel article is chiefly concerned with accusing any individual or group  expressing opposition to Merkel’s policy, of being guilty of  “racism”, “xenophobia”,  and “right-wing extremism”, even finding shreds of evidence (for instance among comments on certain blogs) that such opposition is an incipient revival of Nazism.

As more and more Germans express their fear, disgust, anger, whether emotionally or rationally, the Spiegel can only see them as in the grip of pitiless, inhumane, even cruel impulses, which might negate the claim Germany now feels entitled to make on the world’s admiration of it as a compassionate nation.

This reaction to the Islamic invasion – not the invasion itself – is what the Spiegel sees as the problem:

… it has also been accompanied by a wave of hatred that cannot be played down.

At the center of this second, disturbing narrative is Patriots against the Islamization of the West, or Pegida, a xenophobic grassroots movement that has manifested itself with demonstrations each Monday mostly in Dresden in the east, but also in other parts of Germany. But Pegida is only one part of a much larger problem …

Germany these days, it seems, is a place where people feel entirely uninhibited about expressing their hatred and xenophobia. Images from around the country show a level of brutalization that hasn’t been witnessed for some time, and attest to primitive instincts long believed to have been relegated to the past in Germany. The examples are as myriad as they are shocking, and include … the mock gallows for Angela Merkel and her deputy Sigmar Gabriel carried by a demonstrator at a Pegida rally in Dresden on Oct. 12,  [and] the abuse shouted at the German chancellor when she visited a refugee hostel in Heidenau near Dresden in August, where she was called a “slut” and other insults, [and] the placards held aloft by demonstrators on the first anniversary of the Pegida rallies listing the supposed “enemies of the German state” – Merkel, Gabriel and their “accomplices”. …

So the Spiegel sees the “myriad” protests. But so what, it implies, if they are spontaneous expressions by ever-growing numbers of Germans against the invasion of their country by a very dark force? The popular will is evil, it echoes Germany’s evil past, it cannot be allowed.

As the authorities will not listen to popular protest, some Germans are resorting to violence against the invaders:

There have been more than twice as many attacks on refugee hostels during the first nine months of this year as in the whole of 2014.

So now the rising tide of protest – called by the Spiegel a “rising tide of hatred” – is at last getting the attention of the politicians:

The rising tide of hatred is now reaching the politicians many hold responsible for the perceived chaos besetting Germany.

Those evil protestors “perceive” chaos. The implication is that chaos is not really there – the Spiegel denying it even as it describes it.

The national headquarters of Merkel’s conservative Christian Democratic Union party in Berlin fields thousands of hate mails every week. As the architect of the “we can do it” policy of allowing masses of refugees into the country, Chancellor Merkel is their primary target. …

The article includes many individual examples of expression of protest, or “hate”, aimed at the policy and those who are responsible for it. It all amounts to a a spreading, deepening resistance of very large number of Germans. But to the Spiegel it has no legitimacy. It is wrong.

The hatred comes in many forms. It’s expressed on the streets and on the Internet. Sometimes it’s loud. Other times it’s unspoken. It eminates from every class and every section of society. According to studies conducted by Andreas Zick, the respected head of the Institute for Interdisciplinary Research on Conflict and Violence at the University of Bielefeld, who has been researching German prejudices against different groups for many years, almost 50 percent of Germans harbor misanthropic views. Zick warns of a shift in norms that will be difficult to get back under control.

So it is prejudice. And there has been “a shift in norms”. No recognition that the normal has been changed radically.

How does the Spiegel think the politicians in this so-called democracy should respond? By changing the policy that “almost 50 per cent” of Germans don’t like? Absolutely not.

Politicians need to find a way of dealing with rampant hatred. Dialogue and compromise – the bedrock of Germany’s culture of debate – no longer appear to be working at the moment. It’s hard to get through to people who have been consumed with a hysterical degree of hatred.

Hatred for which the Spiegel, and Merkel, and the Left can see absolutely no good reason!

Rather than heed the voice of the people, get the security agencies on the job. Revive the Stasi. Or import the Saudi Arabian idea of a Moral Police Force.

The country’s security agencies also need to take a decisive stance. Are they once again being too slow in monitoring and clamping down on this new radical scene?

Because you see, it is just like the rise of Nazism all over again.

And so it is. But the Nazi-like thinking is not on the part of the protestors – it is on the part of Spiegel, Merkel, and the Left.

Happily, there is a sign of some moral health in the German states, in that not all the forces of law and order look at what’s happening in the same way:

In most states, Germany’s domestic intelligence agency is not keeping tabs on Pegida. Theoretically, however, police and public prosecutors do have the tools to take action to squash troublemakers. …

Even as the organized far-right is exploiting public unease about the refugee crisis and frustrated citizens are venting their anger in hate mails, the authorities’ response has been astonishingly weak. Interior Minister Thomas de Maizière might describe Pegida’s leaders as “hard-core right-wing extremists” but the domestic intelligence service he oversees states that it isn’t even monitoring the movement — so far, it says, there has been insufficient reason to do so.

Gordian Meyer-Plath, president of the Saxony branch of the Office for the Protection of the Constitution, also seems reluctant to take on the increasingly radical movement. “We’re not watching it,” he says, because the argument that it is harmless has so far prevailed. Its organizers distanced themselves from violence, for example. “People held up pictures of Merkel in an SA uniform at the demonstrations,” says Meyer-Plath. “Real neo-Nazis would never do that.” So far, he maintains, it’s a “populist far-right movement rooted in anger but not a threat to German’s freedom and democracy.”

“We cannot label every anti-asylum-seeker protest as being far-right,” he says.

So sense is prevailing in places where it counts.

But not everywhere. The Spiegel is happy to find that in some of the states the intelligence services share its view:

But intelligence services in other states beg to differ. Pegida movements in Duisburg, Düsseldorf and Thuringia are officially being watched, with authorities concluding that the majority of organizers and speakers belong to the far-right scene.

And now comes the most revealing paragraph in the whole article. Revealing of the mental acrobatics the Left has to put itself through in order to find some evidence in the real world for its preferred version of reality:

The authorities were even stymied by the blog Politically Incorrect, deciding that although it propagates anti-Islamic and often racist propaganda, “it does not use typical far-right argumentation” – as the authorities put it in response to an inquiry from the Left Party. The authors of the blog have so far managed to out-manoeuver the authorities by using two simple tricks. Firstly, its stance is overtly pro-American and pro-Israeli, which appears to confuse the German bureaucrats, who assume that to be a neo-Nazi is to be anti-Semitic. Secondly, the most egregious expressions of vitriol appear in the comments, for which the blog’s authors cannot be held responsible.

So there is a blog, encouragingly called Politically Incorrect (PI), which is anti-Islamic, and pro-Israeli, and pro-American – views that are “typically far-right” in the Spiegel’s view. And according to the Spiegel, it says it is pro-American and pro-Israel, not because it is, but only as a trick, to throw dust in the eyes of the Spiegel-Merkel School of Pro-Islam Thought. These bloggers are disguising their neo-Nazism by pretending not to be anti-Semitic so they will cunningly deceive the naive bureaucrats into believing they are not neo-Nazi!

For the Left, all opposition to the Muslim mass immigration must be neo-Nazi.

These wicked pro-America and pro-Israel bloggers have been under surveillance for a couple of years now:

In 2013, the Bavarian intelligence service became the first to start observing PI, a move prompted by the blog’s industrious Munich chapter, headed up by the rabidly anti-Islamic Michael Stürzenberger, a frequent speaker at Pegida rallies. …

To be anti-Islam is to be rabid. Mad like a rabid dog. What sane person can possibly find cause to take an unfavorable view of Islam?

To the Spiegel’s regret, even some politicians close to Merkel are beginning to sense that her policy of opening the door to unlimited numbers of Muslims might have its down side.

But now, as if a different writer were taking over at this point in the article, a new picture emerges:

After months of attacking critics of Merkel’s immigration policies as right-wing xenophobes, Vice Chancellor Sigmar Gabriel and Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier conceded that the migration crisis risks tearing German society apart. In a joint essay published by Der Spiegel, the two wrote: “We cannot indefinitely absorb and integrate more than one million refugees each year.”

One million! Each year! That’s a small number?

Bavarian Finance Minister Markus Söder said: “We need to be clear that there must be limits and quotas for immigration — we cannot save the whole world. The refugee influx will not be stopped unless we secure our borders and send a clear signal that not everyone can come to Germany.”

Former Interior Minister Hans-Peter Friedrich described Merkel’s immigration policy as an “unprecedented political blunder” that will have “devastating long-term consequences”. He said the job of politics is to think beyond the present and make decisions for the future. In view of the massive flows of migrants into Germany without any police checks, Friedrich concluded: “We have lost control.” He added:

It is totally irresponsible that tens of thousands of people are flowing into the country uncontrolled and unregistered, and we can only unreliably estimate exactly how many of them are Islamic State fighters or Islamist sleepers. I am convinced that no other country in the world would be so naive and starry-eyed to expose itself to such a risk.

Except perhaps the US under Obama.

CDU lawmaker Michael Stübgen said: “The disagreement [with Merkel] is fundamental. Our capacities are exhausted and there is concern that the system will implode if we do not regain control of our borders. But the chancellor disagrees and so the conflict is unsolved.”

On October 21, more than 200 mayors in North-Rhine Westphalia signed an open letter to Merkel, in which they warned they were no longer capable of taking in any more migrants. The letter states:

We are seriously concerned for our country and the cities and towns we represent. The reason: the massive and mostly uncontrolled flow of migrants to Germany and our cities and towns. All available housing possibilities are exhausted, including tents and shipping containers. Managing the migrant shelters is so time intensive that our personnel can no longer attend to other municipal responsibilities.” …

So is Merkel defeated? Has she blown it? Is her time over?

In an October 26 column for the Financial Times, titled The End of the Merkel Era is Within Sight, Gideon Rachman wrote:

The refugee crisis that has broken over Germany is likely to spell the end of the Merkel era. With the country in line to receive more than a million asylum-seekers this year alone, public anxiety is mounting — and so is criticism of Ms. Merkel, from within her own party. Some of her close political allies acknowledge that it is now distinctly possible that the chancellor will have to leave office, before the next general election in 2017. Even if she sees out a full term, the notion of a fourth Merkel administration, widely discussed a few months ago, now seems improbable… The trouble is that Ms. Merkel’s government has clearly lost control of the situation. German officials publicly endorse the chancellor’s declaration that “We can do this'”. But there is panic just beneath the surface: costs are mounting, social services are creaking, Ms. Merkel’s poll ratings are falling and far-right violence is on the rise.

So, although this journalist records that the voters will probably reject Merkel’s re-election because she has done this catastrophic thing to Germany, the violent reaction is still to be called “far-right”.

As the placid surface of German society is disturbed, so arguments about the positive economic and demographic impact of immigration are losing their impact. Instead, fears about the long-term social and political effect of taking in so many newcomers — particularly from the imploding Middle East — are gaining ground. Meanwhile, refugees are still heading into Germany — at a rate of around 10,000 a day. (By contrast, Britain is volunteering to accept 20,000 Syrian refugees over four years.)…

Some voters seem to have concluded that Mutti [“Mummy” – Merkel’s affectionate nickname] has gone mad — flinging open Germany’s borders to the wretched of the earth...

The refugee crisis marks a turning point. The decade after Ms. Merkel first came to power in 2005 now looks like a blessed period for Germany, in which the country was able to enjoy peace, prosperity and international respect, while keeping the troubles of the world at a safe distance. That golden era is now over.

Merkel has made her case for opening the floodgates of Germany  – and of Europe – to a hostile and destructive force on the grounds of “humanitarian concern”. (The leftist British newspaper The Guardian sets out the case here.)

Let’s assume they really are refugees. And let’s accept that what European leaders like Merkel want to do is extend humanitarian assistance to them. Is there no other way of doing that than by letting them come and live in Europe?

Prime Minister Viktor Orbán said in his Madrid speech: ” Our moral responsibility is to give back these people their homes and their countries. It can’t be our objective to provide them with a new European life. Right to human dignity and security are basic rights [so] we have to help them to get back their own lives with dignity and we have to send them back to their own countries.”

But that idea made no impression on Angela Merkel. “Humanitarian concern” is plainly her motive. She has given no other reason. Her need to do this would not be satisfied by returning the “refugees” to their countries of origin. She needs to do far more than help them regain “dignity and security”. She needs to embrace them, take them into Germany, and lavish loving care on them.

The Spiegel (the “Mirror”) reflects this need when it claims that letting in the Muslim masses is good for “the country’s image abroad”.

Why should a need to show “humanitaran concern” with such hospitality override all other considerations?

Why should a German leader need to show, as a paramount cause, that her country is humane?

Do we need to ask? Germany was a prime mover in the wildly unrealistic scheme of creating a united Europe, and the reason why was its need to dissolve its guilt for the Holocaust by becoming part of a larger entity. And it seems that a fog of guilt or shame still hangs over the German psyche. Or over the psyches of many Germans.

Show the world how compassionate we really are. Wipe out the stain of the Holocaust. Import millions of “refugees” from the Third World, and maybe we will at last be forgiven – or forgive ourselves – for  having massacred our Jewish citizens and attempted genocide throughout Europe. Is that what is moving Angela Merkel?

But what Merkel and Spiegel and all the rest of the bien pensants who are putting on their haloes may not have intended, may not have let themselves foresee, is that their self-serving action must destroy Germany.

And Europe – its union of nations and the nations themselves.

But if national suicide is a just penance for Germany, is it just  – you might ask – that Germany should destroy the rest of Europe too?

And we might reply: Well, didn’t most of the rest of Europe collaborate with them in their genocide?

Now we do not think that Europe should destroy itself because it became too morally atrocious to deserve to survive.

But there are those who are murmuring that the great goddess Nemesis – in whom of course we do not believe – seems to be of a different opinion.

For some fun on a Friday and Saturday, here’s a borrowing from a website dedicated to debunking all the legends of “Jesus Christ”. It is written by Kenneth Humphreys, and is a site well worth visiting.

He quotes a story told by the Jewish philosopher and theologian, Philo of Alexandria, and suggests that one of the stories of the martyrdom of Jesus derives from it.

Philo was a contemporary of the alleged “Jesus Christ”. He was a prolific writer, closely connected with the powers in Jerusalem, and fully aware of current events in Judea. Yet he never mentions Jesus of Nazareth.

Philo says not a word about Jesus, Christianity nor any of the events described in the New Testament. In all this work, Philo makes not a single reference to his alleged contemporary “Jesus Christ”, the godman who supposedly was perambulating up and down the Levant, exorcising demons, raising the dead and causing earthquake and darkness at his death.

With Philo’s close connection to the house of Herod, one might reasonably expect that the miraculous escape from a royal prison of a gang of apostles (Acts 5.18,40), or the second, angel-assisted, flight of Peter, even though chained between soldiers and guarded by four squads of troops (Acts 12.2,7) might have occasioned the odd footnote. But not a murmur. Nothing of Agrippa “vexing certain of the church” or killing “James brother of John” with the sword (Acts 12.1,2).

Actually, these events were alleged – by St. Paul and his friend Luke – to have happened at times that came after the death of Philo in 50 C.E. But the general point holds: that nothing Jesus or his followers did was of sufficient importance or interest to attract the attention of Philo or any other writer or leader at the time.

Strange, but only if we believe Jesus and his merry men existed and that they established the church. If we recognize that the Christian fable was still at an early stage of development when Philo was pondering the relationship of god and man, there is nothing strange here at all.

Here’s the story:

The Works of Philo Judaeus – Flaccus, VI.(36) There was a certain madman named Carabbas … this man spent all this days and nights naked in the roads, minding neither cold nor heat, the sport of idle children and wanton youths;(37) and they, driving the poor wretch as far as the public gymnasium, and setting him up there on high that he might be seen by everybody, flattened out a leaf of papyrus and put it on his head instead of a diadem, and clothed the rest of his body with a common door mat instead of a cloak and instead of a sceptre they put in his hand a small stick of the native papyrus which they found lying by the way side and gave to him;(38) and when, like actors in theatrical spectacles, he had received all the insignia of royal authority, and had been dressed and adorned like a king, the young men bearing sticks on their shoulders stood on each side of him instead of spear-bearers, in imitation of the bodyguards of the king, and then others came up, some as if to salute him, and others making as though they wished to plead their causes before him, and others pretending to wish to consult with him about the affairs of the state.(39) Then from the multitude of those who were standing around there arose a wonderful shout of men calling out Maris!; and this is the name by which it is said that they call the kings among the Syrians; for they knew that Agrippa was by birth a Syrian, and also that he was possessed of a great district of Syria of which he was the sovereign;

Matthew27:26 Then released he Barabbas unto them: and when he had scourged Jesus, he delivered him to be crucified.27:27 Then the soldiers of the governor took Jesus into the common hall, and gathered unto him the whole band of soldiers. 27:28 And they stripped him, and put on him a scarlet robe. 27:29 And when they had platted a crown of thorns, they put it upon his head, and a reed in his right hand: and they bowed the knee before him, and mocked him, saying, Hail, King of the Jews!

 

“It’s time for the people of Europe to claim asylum from the European Union,” Pat Condell says at the end of this video in which he talks about the Muslim invasion of Europe.

The US secretary of state, John Kerry, blames the victims for the stabbing attacks on Israelis by Palestinians.

No surprise there.

Here’s another opinion:

It is painful to hear the phrase “lone wolves” applied to the handful – and perhaps tomorrow the dozens and then the hundreds – of killers of Jews “liked” by thousands of “friends”,  followed by tens of thousands of “Tweets,” and connected to a constellation of sites (such as the Al-Aqsa Media Center and its page dedicated to “the third Jerusalem intifada”) that are orchestrating, at least in part, this bloody ballet.

So writes the French philosopher Bernard-Henri Lévy (translated by Steven B. Kennedy).

It is equally painful to listen to the refrain about “Palestinian youth no longer subject to any control” after seeing the series of sermons opportunistically placed online by the Middle East Media Research Institute, in which preachers from Gaza, facing the camera, dagger in hand, call upon followers to take to the streets to maim as many Jews as they can, to inflict as much pain as possible, and to spill the maximum amount of blood; doubly painful to hear that refrain having heard Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas himself, at the outset of this tragic chain of events a few weeks back, describing as “heroic” the murder of the Henkins in the presence of their children and then expressing indignation at seeing the “dirty feet” of Jews “defiling” the “Esplanade of the Mosques”, and, in the same statement, declaring “pure” “each drop of blood” shed by “each martyr” who dies for Jerusalem.

Not only painful and intolerable, but also inapplicable, is the canned phrase about “political and social desperation” that is mouthed to explain – or excuse – criminal acts, when everything we know about the new terrorists, their motives and the pride their relatives take in converting, post-mortem, crime into martyrdom and infamy into sacrifice, is, alas, much closer to the portrait of the robotic jihadist who yesterday would take off for Kashmir and today turns up in Syria or Iraq.

It is highly doubtful that “intifada” is the right term to apply to acts that bear more resemblance to the latest installment of a worldwide jihad of which Israel is just one of the stages.

Doubtful that erudite disquisitions on occupation, colonization and Netanyahu-esque intransigence still explain much about a wave of violence that counts among its favored targets Jews with sidelocks – that is, those Jews who are the most conspicuously Jewish, those whom their killers must consider, I imagine, as the very image of the Jew and who, by the way, are often at odds with the Jewish state when not in open secession from it.

Doubtful that the very question of the state, the question of the two states, and thus the question of a negotiated partition of the land – which is, for moderates on both sides, the only question worth posing – has anything at all to do with a conflagration in which politics has given way to fanaticism and to theories of vast conspiracy, one in which some decide to stab random others as they pass by because of a vague rumor reporting a secret [and utterly false -ed] plot to deny Muslims access to Islam’s third-most-holy site.

We do not agree that there should be yet another Arab state. 80% of “Palestine”, as the territory was called under the British mandate, was given by the British, in defiance of their own Balfour Declaration, to one of their Hashemite allies, to establish the Emirate of Transjordan (later the Kingdom of Jordan). So there is already an Arab state of Palestine. All Palestinian Arabs ought to be able to become citizens of it without question. The rest of the territory, from the Jordan to the Med, should be one state, the State of Israel. It is on King Andullah of Jordan that the pressure of the geat powers should be brought to solve the “Palestinian problem”.

But we do agree that the “bloody ballet” is jihad, not an expression of Palestinian “frustration”, as John Kerry has claimed.

Doubtful, in other words, that the Palestinian cause is being helped in any way by the extremist turn. On the other hand, it is absolutely certain that the cause has everything to lose by it, that the reasonable heads within the movement will be the ones who wind up flattened by the wave, and that the last proponents of compromise, along with what remains of the peace camp in Israel, will pay dearly for the reckless condemnations of the imams of Rafah and Khan Younis.

Intolerable and inapplicable, too, is the cliché of the “cycle” or “spiral” of violence, which, by putting the kamikaze killers and their victims on the same footing, sows confusion and amounts to an incitement to further action.

Intolerable, for the same reason, are the rhetorical appeals “for restraint” and disingenuous pleas “not to inflame the street”, which, as with the “spiral of violence”, reverse the order of causality by implying that a soldier, police officer, or civilian acting in self-defense has committed a wrong equal to that of someone who chooses to die after spreading as much terror as he possibly can.

Strange indeed, the tepid condemnations of the stabbings of innocent passers-by, the rammings of bus stops, condemnations that I have to think would be less half-hearted if the acts had occurred on the streets of Washington, Paris, or London.

More than strange – disturbing – is the difference in tone between the equivocal reaction to the recent killings and the unanimous and unambiguous international outpouring of emotion and solidarity elicited by the fatal hatchet attack on a soldier on a London street on May 22, 2013, a scenario that was not very different from those unfolding today in Jerusalem and Tel Aviv.

Intolerable, again, that most of the major media have paid the grieving Israeli families only a fraction of the attention they have paid the families of the perpetrators.

Intolerable, finally, the minor mythology growing up around this story of daggers: The weapon of the poor? Really? The weapon one uses because it is within reach and one has no other? When I see those blades I think of the one used to execute Daniel Pearl; I think of the beheadings of Hervé Gourdel, James Foley and David Haines; I think that the Islamic State’s videos have clearly gained a following and that we stand on the threshold of a form of barbarity that must be unconditionally denounced if we do not want to see its methods exported everywhere.

And I mean everywhere.

Donald Trump repeated several times, a few days ago, that he was Presbyterian. His tone suggested he was proud of it. “That’s down the middle of the road,” he said.

The Presbyterian church is Calvinist.

When Jehan Calvin was dictator of Geneva, Calvinism was at least as fanatically and cruelly enforced as any religion has ever been.

Today, October 27, is the 462nd anniversary of the day on which Calvin had Miguel Servetus burned slowly to death chained to a stake, for disagreeing with him on a point of Christian doctrine.

We very much doubt that Trump knows anything about it. But he ought to.

Here’s the story as Jillian Becker has told it before on this website, quoting the famous book by Stefan Zweig, The Right to Heresy:

*

Beyond a certain point it is hardly possible to discern degrees of evil or degrees of cruelty. And yet I think it may be said of Jehan Calvin, dictator of Geneva in the sixteenth century, that he was more appallingly cruel and more intensely, intrinsically, through-and-through evil than other great persecutors, dictators and mass murderers of history. Hitler, Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot, Torquemada are the very names of evil, so what was it about Calvin that can distinguish him as specially terrible in his own nature than even any of these?

He oppressed the subjects of his dictatorship unremittingly and mercilessly; but so, you say, did the others. Not content with killing his enemies, he prescribed extreme tortures for them while they survived to suffer them; and yes, so did the others. But – and here we come to the nub of the case – Calvin was different in that he (often, if not always) personally specified the torments for the particular victim. He gave thought to the minutiae of their sufferings. All the others, even Catholic Inquisitors like Torquemada, issued general orders for terrorizing, torturing, killing. Calvin gave a personal service, tailoring his cruelty to his individual prey.

And that’s not all that distinguishes him among human monsters. Consider this: he was squeamish. He could not stand the sight of blood. He was afraid of pain. He felt horror at the thought of physical suffering – so he made thinking about it into a spiritual exercise, to strengthen by self-inflicted agony, as a monk does with a hairshirt, his resolve to do what was hardest for him in the service of his God. He ordered the infliction of agony, then meditated on the process, imagining it as fully as he could. He nourished his spirit on visions of torture.

This he did in private. The spiritual discipline he forced himself to undergo did not impel him to the prison and the public square to witness the torments and killings that he prescribed. He never attended a racking, a flogging, a breaking on the wheel, a burning to death. That far in the service of his God he would not push himself.

This grooming of his soul by inflicting suffering on others, did not replace general orders of oppression. He gave those too. He instituted a totalitarian reign of terror. He was as convinced a collectivist as Hitler, Stalin, Mao and the rest. He would allow “no liberty, no freedom of the will, for [a] man could only misuse such privileges. … [He, Calvin] must frighten him … until he unresistingly accepts his position in the pious and obedient herd, until he has merged in that herd all that is individual within him, so that the individual, the extraordinary, vanishes without leaving a trace.”

So wrote Stefan Zweig in his devastating dissection of Calvin and Calvinism, The Right to Heresy. He goes on:

“To achieve this draconian suppression of personality, to achieve this vandal expropriation of the individual in favour of the community, Calvin had a method all his own, the famous Church ‘discipline’. A harsher curb upon human impulses and desires has hardly been devised by and imposed upon man down to our own days [pre-Second World War]. From the first hour of his dictatorship, this brilliant organizer herded his flock … within a barbed-wire entanglement of … prohibitions, the so-called ‘Ordinances’; simultaneously creating a special department to supervise the working of terrorist morality … called the Consistory [which was] expressly instructed to keep watch upon the private life of every one in Geneva. … Private life could hardly be said to exist any longer … From moment to moment, by day and by night, there might come a knocking at the entry, and a number of ‘spiritual police’ announce a ‘visitation’ without the citizen concerned being able to offer resistance. Once a month, rich and poor, the powerful and the weak, had to submit to the questioning of these professional ‘police des moeurs’. “

The moral police poked into every corner, examined every part of every house, and even the bodies of those who lived in it. Their clothes and shoes, the hair on their heads, was inspected. Clothes must be dark and plain; hair must not be artificially curled.

“From the bedroom they passed on to the kitchen table, to ascertain whether the prescribed diet was not being exceeded by a soup or a course of meat, or whether sweets and jams were hidden away somewhere.”

They pried into bookshelves – only books approved by the Consistory were permitted.

“The servants were asked about the behaviour of their masters, and the children were cross-questioned as to the doings of their parents.”

Visitors to the city had their baggage examined. Every letter, in and out, was opened. Citizens could not write letters to anyone outside the city, and any Genevan permitted to travel abroad was watched in foreign lands by Calvin’s spies.

Spying became universal. Almost everyone, in fear of being thought heretical in the least degree, and to prove himself clean and upright, spied on everyone else.

“Whenever a State inaugurates a reign of terror, the poisonous plant of voluntary denunciation flourishes like a loathsome weed … otherwise decent folk are driven by fear to play the part of informer. … After some years, the Consistory was able to abolish official supervision, since all the citizens had become voluntary controllers.”

As far as he could, Calvin put an end to pleasure. Music – except for what Calvin deemed to be sacred – was forbidden. So was dancing, skating and sport. Theaters and all other public amusements including popular festivals, were prohibited. Wheeled carriages were not allowed. People had to walk to wherever they needed to go. Guests at family celebrations, even weddings and baptisms, were limited in number to twenty. (The names parents could give their children had to be from an approved list.) The red wine of the district could be drunk in small quantities, but no other alcohol. Innkeepers were not allowed to serve their guests until they had seen them saying their prayers, and had to spy on them throughout their stay and report on them to the authorities.

Punishments included imprisonment in irons, hanging, decapitation, burning to death.

“Everything was forbidden which might have relieved the grey monotony of existence; and forbidden, of course, was any trace of mental freedom in the matter of the printed or spoken word.”

“The first thought,” Stefan Zweig declares, “of any one of dictatorial temperament, is to suppress or gag opinions different from his own.”

One man who dared to argue with Calvin was a Spaniard named Miguel Servetus. A child of the Reformation, he innocently thought he could express his own boldly Protestant opinions. He thought Calvin was the very man to hear him expound his personal interpretations of Holy Writ. He could not have been more mistaken. For having the effrontery to send them to him, Calvin had the man thrown into prison. “For weeks … he was kept like a condemned murderer in a cold and damp cell, with irons on his hands and feet. His clothes hung in rags upon his freezing body; he was not provided with a change of linen. The most primitive demands of hygiene were disregarded. No one might tender him the slightest assistance.”

Finally, for daring to disagree with Calvin, Servetus was condemned to death by the dictator’s order. The death Calvin chose for him was “roasting with a slow fire”.

‘The prisoner was brought out of prison in his befouled rags. … His beard tangled, his visage dirty and wasted, his chains rattling, he tottered as he walked. … In front of the steps of the Town Hall, the officers of the law … thrust him to his knees. The doomed man’s teeth chattered with cold … In his extremity, he crawled on his knees nearer to the municipal authorities assembled on the steps, and implored that by their grace he might be decapitated before he was burned, ‘lest the agony should drive me to repudiate the convictions of a lifetime’. This boon was denied him. Relentlessly, ‘the procession moved on towards the place of execution. … The wood was piled round the stake to which the clanking chains had been nailed. The executioner bound the victim’s hands. … The chains attached to the stake were wound four or five times around it and around the poor wretch’s wasted body. Between this and the chains, the executioner’s assistants then inserted the book and the manuscript which Servetus had sent to Calvin under seal to ask Calvin’s fraternal opinion upon it. Finally, in scorn, there was pressed upon the martyr’s brow a crown of leaves impregnated with sulphur. … The executioner kindled the faggots and the murder began.

“When the flames rose around him, Servetus uttered so dreadful a cry that many of the onlookers turned their eyes away from the pitiful sight. Soon the smoke interposed a veil in front of the writhing body, but the yells of agony grew louder and louder, until at length came an imploring scream: ‘Jesus, Son of the everlasting God, have pity on me!’”

Needless to say, neither Jesus nor an everlasting God did anything to relieve the roasting man.

‘The struggle with death lasted half an hour. Then the flames abated, the smoke dispersed, and attached to the blackened stake there remained, above the glowing embers, a black, sickening, charred mass, a loathsome jelly, which had lost human semblance. …

“But where was Calvin in this fearful hour? … He was in his study, windows closed. … He who had really willed and commanded this ‘pious murder’, kept discreetly aloof. Next Sunday, however, clad in his black cassock, he entered the pulpit to boast of the deed before a silent congregation, declaring it to have been a great deed and a just one, although he had not dared to watch the pitiful spectacle.”

To this day, Jehan Calvin is regarded as a great Christian whose teaching continues to shape the lives of millions of citizens in the Western world through the Presbyterian and various “Reformed” churches. People are no longer burnt to death for disagreeing with the master. But dictatorship, in the name of similarly dogmatic collectivist faiths, is not absent from the modern world, not even from America now, in 2010. A much vaster community has fallen under an organizer of dictatorial temperament. His consistory has made it plain that they wish to control what you eat, how you live in your homes, and what you say. Children are being urged to impress the leader’s messages on their parents. The names of those who disagree with him are blackened, and the silencing of broadcast dissent is openly advocated.

What should be done about it? There are conservative voices maintaining that the way to resist incipient totalitarianism is to “return to Christian values”.

Our hope is that this reminder of how Christian values affected life in the past may serve not only as a cautionary tale against collectivism and dictatorship, but also as a rebuttal of the idea that Christianity can be a counterforce against them.

A Muslim preaches his religion’s message of peace:

Islam is invading Europe and will conquer it without firing a shot.

European political leaders not only refuse to resist the Islamization of their countries, increasingly they positively encourage it. Add to this a high Muslim fertility rate and a very low rate among indigenous Europeans, and you may be certain Muslims will become a majority on the continent in this century unless something – civil war, perhaps – interrupts the processes already set in motion.

From Gatestone, by Guy Millière:

The flow of illegal migrants does not stop. They land on the Greek islands along the Turkish coast. They still try to get into Hungary, despite a razor wire fence and mobilized army. Their destination is Germany or Scandinavia, sometimes France or the UK. Some of them still arrive from Libya. Since the beginning of January, more than 620,000 have arrived by sea alone. There will undoubtedly be many more: a leaked secret document estimates that by the end of December, there might be 1.5 million.

Journalists in Western Europe continue to depict them as “refugees” fleeing war in Syria. The description is false. According to statistics released by the European Union, only twenty-five percent of them come from Syria; the true number is probably lower. The Syrian government sells passports and birth certificates at affordable prices. The vast majority of migrants come from other countries: Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Eritrea, Somalia, and Nigeria.

Many do not seem to have left in a hurry. Many bring new high-end smartphones and large sums of cash, ten or twenty thousand euros, sometimes more. Many have no passports, no ID, and refuse to give fingerprints.

Whenever people flee to survive, the men come with whole families: women, children, elders. Here, instead, more than 75% of those who arrive are men under 50; few are women, children or elders.

As Christians are now the main targets of Islamists (the Jews fled or were forced out decades ago), the people escaping the war in Syria should be largely composed of Christians. But Christians are a small minority among those who arrive, and they often hide that they are Christians.

Those who enter Europe are almost all Muslims, and behave as some Muslims often do in the Muslim world: they harass Christians and attack women. In reception centers, harassing Christians and attacking women are workaday incidents. European women and girls who live near reception centers are advised to take care and cover up. Rapes, assaults, stabbings and other crimes are on the rise.

Western European political leaders could tell the truth and act accordingly. They do not. They talk of “solidarity”,  “humanitarian duty”, “compassion”. From the beginning, Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany said that illegal migrants were welcome: she seemed to change her mind for a moment, but quickly slid back. In France, President François Hollande says the same things as Angela Merkel.

After the heartbreaking image of a dead child being carried on a Turkish beach was published, thousands of Germans and French initially spoke the same way as their leaders. Their enthusiasm seems to have faded fast.

The people of Central Europe were not enthusiastic from the beginning. Their leaders seem to share the feelings of their populations. None spoke as explicitly as Viktor Orbán, Prime Minister of Hungary. He said out loud what many of his countrymen seemed to think.

Orbán decribed the “massive and brutal” entry of the migrants into his country as an “invasion”, and  said that “a country has the right to decide who is allowed to enter its territory, and to guard its borders”. He also dared to point out that the invaders are from a “different culture”, and that Islamic values “might not be compatible” with European values.

To which Western European leaders reacted with predictable (and surely irrational or even insane) fury.

Western European political leaders harshly condemned his remarks and the attitude of Central Europe in general. They decided to take a hard line approach, including: forcing recalcitrant countries to welcome immigrants, setting up mandatory quotas that define how many immigrants each EU country must receive, and threatening those countries that declined to obey. Martin Schulz, President of the European Parliament, said that Europe was built in a spirit of “burden sharing”, and that EU breakup was a risk that could not be excluded.

An acute division, in fact, is emerging between the leaders of Western Europe and the leaders of Central Europe. Another division is growing between the populations of Western Europe and their leaders. …

Any criticism of Islam in Europe is treated as a form of racism, and “Islamophobia” is considered a crime or a sign of mental illness.

Islam … is creating increasingly distressing problems that are almost never brought to light. Muslim criminality across Europe is high. Consequently, the percentage of Muslims in prisons in Europe is high. In France, which has the largest Muslim population in Europe, the prison population is 70% Muslim. Many European prisons have become recruitment centers for future jihadis.

Muslim riots may occur for any reason: police upholding the law, a Soccer League celebration, or in support of a cause.

Populations of Western Europe increasingly think that … their leaders speak and act as if they have no awareness of what is happening.

Central European leaders and their people, who have directly experienced authoritarian rule, seem to be thinking that entering the European Union was a huge mistake. When the Soviet Union collapsed, they became members of the EU to join what was called then the “free world”.  They do not seem willing to be subjected again to coercive decisions made by outsiders.

After living under the Soviet yoke, they preserved their desire for freedom and self-government, and evidently will not now agree to give them up. They know what submission to Islam could mean. Bulgaria and Romania were occupied by the Ottoman Empire until 1878. Hungary was under the boot of Ottoman rule for more than a hundred and fifty years (1541-1699).

Polls show that a majority of Muslims living in Europe want the application of sharia law and clearly reject any idea of assimilation.

Hundreds of thousands of Muslims living in Europe have joined fundamentalist Islamic organizations. Thousands have joined jihadist movements and are now fighting in Syria or Yemen. Many have returned and are ready to act against Europe.

Illegal Muslim migrants are likely to join the Muslims already living in Europe; and they will remain Muslim. They will live on social benefits until the bankruptcy of welfare states. They will reside in the “no-go zones,” and the “no-go zones” will continue to grow. Their occupants come from countries where Christians and women are mistreated; in Europe, they are already mistreating Christians and women.

They come from countries where Western civilization is despised and where hatred of Jews is inescapable — and this remains so among Muslims already living in Europe. For more than two decades, almost all assaults against Jews in Europe were committed by Muslims. …

A project to overwhelm Europe by a huge wave of migration was described by the Islamic State in documents discovered this February. It is hard to rule out that the Islamic State plays a role in what is happening. Turkish authorities are ignoring the massive departures taking place from their coast. If they really wanted the current process to stop, they could stop it. That is clearly not what they do. The Islamic State could not survive without Turkish help. Daily flights on Turkish Airlines bring illegal migrants to Istanbul; they continue unhindered to Europe. …

In all 28 countries of the European Union, birth rates are low and the population is aging. People under thirty account for only 16% of the population, or 80 million people. In the 22 Arab countries, plus Turkey and Iran, people under thirty account for 70% of the population, or 350 million people.

Jews are fleeing Europe in increasing numbers. “Native” Europeans are starting to flee as well.

In 1972, in his book The Camp of the Saints, French writer Jean Raspail described flooding Europe with Muslim migrants crossing the Mediterranean. At the time, the book was a work of fiction. Today, it is reality.