Horrible news from Gatestone by Valentina Colombo:

Raif Badawi, a Saudi blogger, has been sentenced to 1000 lashes, ten years in jail and a fine of $270,000 for a blog regarded by Saudi Arabia’s regime as insulting Islam.

The lashing was due to be carried out today, so we are assuming that it was, at least in part. So many lashes have been ordered, the torturer will probably need several sessions to complete his assignment. After which, of course, Reason itself will have learnt its lesson and never dare utter a word in Saudi Arabia again.

Badawi was condemned, according to Amnesty International, for having co-founded a website, “Saudi Arabian Liberals,” and for having written and published on it … as well as on Facebook and Twitter …

He criticized and made fun of Saudi institutions such as the Commission for the Promotion of Goodness and the Prohibition of Vice (also known as “the religious police”), the Saudi Grand Mufti, other Saudi ulema [religious scholars].

The long sentence of the Criminal Court of the district of Jeddah stated that he had undermined the “public order”.

In an interview published in August 2007 by the liberal website Afaaq, Badawi stated that “liberals in Saudi Arabia live between the anvil of State and the hammer of the religious police”.

He also said this:

My commitment is to the advancement of civil society in my country, to reject any repression in the name of religion, to promote liberal* enlightened Saudis whose primary objective is being active in civil society, a goal that we will reach in a peaceful and law-abiding way.

Saudi blogger Raif Badawi (left) and his lawyer Walid Abu al-Khayr

We can only hope that this intelligent and brave young man, a secularist and probably an atheist, survives his appalling ordeal, and his ten years in a notoriously hellish Arab prison.

It would be going too far to hope that his fate will persuade the political leaders of the Western world that Islam is a primitive savage cruel ideology rather than the “beautiful religion” they insistently tell us it is.

* We think and hope he means “liberal” in the true sense of the word: favoring freedom. Not in the contemporary American sense: not favoring freedom.

The weekly magazine Charlie Hebdo laughed at all religions. It mocked religion as such, mercilessly. It dared to mock the nastiest religion of them all, Islam, defying its vengefulness. It was doing a great job for civilization.

Because of the killing of the journalists and cartoonists of Charlie Hebdo yesterday in Paris, we repeat part of our post, Religion and the crippling of the mind – an existential threat (January 2, 2013):

Human survival depends on progress, and progress depends on the criticism of ideas.

Religions are the most dangerous sets of ideas because they are the most dogmatic. Dogma chains and cripples the mind. It denies knowledge and prevents discovery and innovation. The only possible form of argument between opposing dogmas is violence. Religions must be questioned.

Any idea that requires a law to protect it from criticism is ipso facto a bad idea.

The Organization of Islamic Cooperation [formerly the Organization of the Islamic Conference], the United Nations, and the US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, are actively engaged in trying to silence criticism of Islam. If their campaign succeeds it will greatly advance Islam’s jihad, its war to impose universal Islamic rule.

The victory of Islam would put humanity under a death sentence.  

And this is also a good time to repeat an even earlier post, The need to knock Islam (September 3, 2011):

The greatness of the West began with doubting. The idea that every belief, every assumption, should be critically examined started the might of Europe. When those old Greek thinkers who founded our civilization learnt and taught that no one has a monopoly of truth or ever will have, they launched the intellectual adventure that has carried the human race – not without a long interval in the doldrums – literally to the skies.

Socrates taught the utility of suspicion. He is reputed to have said, “The highest form of human excellence is to question oneself and others.” He was not, however, the first to use doubt for discovery. Thales of Miletos, who was born 155 years before Socrates, dared to doubt that religion’s explanatory tales about how the world came to be as it is were to be trusted, and he began exploring natural phenomena in a way that we recognize as scientific. He is often called the Father of Science. With him and his contemporary, Anaximander, who argued with him by advancing alternative ideas, came the notion – for the first time as far as we know – that reason could fathom and describe how the universe worked.

Science is one of the main achievements of the West, but it is not the only product of constructive doubt that made for its greatness. Doubt as a habit of mind or tradition of thinking meant that new, foreign, even counter-intuitive ideas were not dismissed. Europe, before and after it stagnated in the doldrums of the long Catholic Christian night (and even to some extent during those dark centuries), was hospitable to ideas wherever they came from.

Totally opposed to this intellectual openness were the churches with their dogma. Those who claim that the achievements of our civilization are to be credited to Christianity (or in the currently fashionable phrase to “the Judeo-Christian tradition”) have a hard case to make. It was the rediscovery of the Greek legacy in the Renaissance in the teeth of Christian dogmatism, and the new freedom from religious persecution exploited by the philosophers of the Enlightenment that re-launched the West on its intellectual progress, to become the world’s nursery of innovation and its chief factory of ideas.

Our civilization cannot survive without this openness. Critical examination is the breath that keeps it alive. But it is in danger of suffocation. It is more threatened now than it has been for the last four hundred years by dogmatisms: Marxism, environmentalism, religion – above all Islam which absolutely forbids criticism.

The Founding Fathers of the United States perfectly understood the necessity for an open market of ideas. Every citizen of the republic, they laid down, must be free to declare his beliefs, to argue his case, to speak his mind, to examine ideas as publicly as he chose without fear of being silenced.

Islam is now the major threat to the West. Its ideas are the very opposite of those on which the USA was founded. It is an ideology of intolerance and cruelty. It forbids the free expression of thought. By its very nature, even if it were not now on a mission of world conquest (which it is), it is the enemy of the West.

The best way to defeat it is by criticizing it, constantly and persistently, in speech and writing, on the big screen and the small screen, in the schools and academies, in all the media of information and comment, in national and international assemblies.

If the weapon of words is forbidden, the only alternative will be guns. 

The Independent reports:

At least 12 people have been killed in a shooting incident at the Paris office of French satirical weekly Charlie Hebdo, police have said.

Witnesses and police officials said that two or three gunmen were involved, and that they were seen armed with AK47s and pump action shotguns. According to France’s AFP news agency, the men were also armed with at least one rocket launcher.

Four of France’s best-known satirical cartoonists, including the magazine’s editor, were among the dead. A further 12 people were injured, some gravely, in what is the worst terrorist incident in France for 40 years. …

As the gunmen left in a black car, they met with a police car which was part of the permanent protection given to the magazine after it was firebombed in 2011. The attackers got out of their vehicle and opened fire, killing two officers.

Paris has raised its terror alert to the highest setting in the aftermath of the attack, while the gunmen themselves are still reported to be on the run.

Video footage posted to social media showed armed gunmen running through the streets of Paris, shooting with automatic weapons and shouting “Allahu Akbar”. According to an eye-witness, one of the gunmen shouted: “The Prophet is avenged.”

Police confirmed to French media that the dead included the magazine’s editor and chief cartoonist, Stéphane Charbonnier, known as “Charb” and Jean Cabut or “Cabu”, a veteran of several French newspapers and reportedly the highest paid cartoonist in the world.

Charb had previously defended a controversial series of cartoons depicting the Prophet Mohammed in 2012, saying: “Muhammad isn’t sacred to me. I don’t blame Muslims for not laughing at our drawings. I live under French law. I don’t live under Koranic law.”

A year earlier, the magazine’s offices were firebombed after a spoof issue featured a caricature of Mohammed on its cover. The edition “invited” Mohammed to be its guest editor.

According to one report, journalists were discussing a new Islam-themed edition on Wednesday when the gunmen burst in.

The latest post sent by the Charlie Hebdo Twitter account was a picture of the Isis militant group leader, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi.

Our question is – how did they get away with it for so long?

On September 19, 2012, we posted this, under the heading Freedom tested in France:

Reuters reports:

A French magazine ridiculed the Prophet Mohammad on Wednesday by portraying him naked in cartoons, threatening to fuel the anger of Muslims around the world who are already incensed by a film depiction of him as a lecherous fool.

A video film made by a Californian Coptic Christian which mocks  Muhammad and which the Obama administration is absurdly blaming for the Islamic world going up in flames and al-Qaeda murdering a US ambassador in Libya.

The drawings in satirical weekly Charlie Hebdo risked exacerbating a crisis that has seen the storming of U.S. and other Western embassies, the killing of the U.S. ambassador to Libya and a deadly suicide bombing in Afghanistan.

Riot police were deployed to protect the magazine’s Paris offices after it hit the news stands with a cover showing an Orthodox Jew pushing the turbaned figure of Mohammad in a wheelchair.

On the inside pages, several caricatures of the Prophet showed him naked. One, entitled “Mohammad: a star is born”, depicted a bearded figure crouching over to display his buttocks and genitals.

The French government … had urged the weekly not to print the cartoons …

“We have the impression that it’s officially allowed for Charlie Hebdo to attack the Catholic far-right but we cannot poke fun at fundamental Islamists,” said editor Stephane Charbonnier, who drew the front-page cartoon.

“It shows the climate – everyone is driven by fear, and that is exactly what this small handful of extremists who do not represent anyone want – to make everyone afraid, to shut us all in a cave,” he told Reuters.

We like what Charlie Hebdo have done (though we don’t think the cartoons are great). We applaud their courage. But  – only a “small handful of extremists”? Are most of the 1.5 billion Muslims in the world serenely tolerant of criticism?

One cartoon, in reference to the scandal over a French magazine’s decision to publish topless photos of the wife of Britain’s Prince William, showed a topless, bearded character with the caption: “Riots in Arab countries after photos of Mrs. Mohammad are published.”

French Foreign Minister Laurent Fabius criticized the magazine’s move as a provocation.

So much for the Liberté part of the French national motto, Liberté, égalité, fraternité!

“We saw what happened last week in Libya and in other countries such as Afghanistan,” Fabius told a regular government news conference. “We have to call on all to behave responsibly.”

Except Muslims. They can behave as irresponsibly as they like. Because the French government is afraid of them.

Charlie Hebdo has a long reputation for being provocative. Its Paris offices were firebombed last November after it published a mocking caricature of Mohammad, and Charbonnier has been under police guard ever since. …

The French Muslim Council, the main body representing Muslims in France, accused Charlie Hebdo of firing up anti-Muslim sentiment at a sensitive time.

“The CFCM is profoundly worried by this irresponsible act, which in such a fraught climate risks further exacerbating tensions and sparking damaging reactions,” it said.

It is the expression of opinion that must be stopped, you see, not the “damaging reactions”.

Well, that may not be entirely fair:

French Prime Minister Jean-Marc Ayrault said the authorities had rejected a request to hold a march against the Mohammad film in Paris.

We wait to see what will happen to the Charlie Hebdo offices, and to Stephane Charbonnier. We hope for his safety. But the savage war of Islam against the rest of us will go on until the West uses all its weapons, of law, argument, wealth, political and military power, and mockery to crush the murderous Muslim hordes storming out of the Dark Ages.

We were foolish to hope for the safety of anyone in Europe who dares to defy Islam. We know better now.

Islam is as puritanical as it is cruel. A pernickety fastidiousness over minor “moral” infractions lives in the primitive minds of IS [ISIS/ISIL] alongside an insatiable appetite for inflicting pain, terror, and atrocious murder.

This report comes from the International Business Times:

In a grotesque twist of the saying “live by the sword, die by the sword“, an Islamic State executioner in Syria who carried out beheadings for the jihadist group has been found with his head cut off.

The body of the Egyptian man, known to be the deputy emir of the feared al-Hesbah (or Hisbah) force in the eastern province of Deir al-Zor, was recovered near a power plant in al-Mayadeen city, according to the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights.

The corpse showed signs of torture and carried the message “This is evil, you Sheikh” written on it. The severed head had a cigarette in its mouth. … The message was obvious.

Islamic State’s ban on cigarettes is one of its signature polices.It has imposed a strict set of Sharia laws barring the use of drugs, alcohol and cigarettes in the territories it has conquered across a swathe of Iraq and Syria.

IS has declared smoking “slow suicide” and demands that “every smoker should be aware that with every cigarette he smokes in a state of trance and vanity is disobeying God”.

We didn’t know God was a non-smoker. After all, he’s smoked a lot of people in his time. (We did know that he isn’t a vegetarian.)

Hisbah is IS’s religious police who perform the role of enforcing the group’s twisted version of sharia in the self-styled caliphate.

“Twisted version of sharia”? What is the “untwisted” version, we wonder.

Last year, Vice News released a documentary on what life is like under Hisbah in Raqqa during Ramadan. The footage shows how the religious police check on shops and scrutinise produce, while at the same time ensuring their strict rules on women’s appearances are adhered to.

And the Express reports:

“Songs and music are forbidden in Islam as they prevent one from the remembrance of god and the koran and are a temptation and corruption of the heart,” according to a statement issued by Isis.

This state of affairs is just like that of Geneva when Jehan Calvin (1509-1564) was its dictator.

We quote from our own post, Calvin: a chapter in the terrible history of Christianity, April 10, 2010:

“[Calvin] 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. …

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.

If ever the expression “soul-mates” applied to any two people, it surely applies – regardless of the distance of time between them – to Jehan Calvin and Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, leader of IS/ISIS/ISIL.

“Islamism”, “radical Islam”, “Islamic extremism”? They don’t exist. There is only Islam. All Muslims believe that sharia law and its punishments – limb amputations for theft, death for adultery, apostasy, and homosexuality – are the best of all possible punishments. How could any be better, when these have been prescribed by Allah himself?

So says this Norwegian. And almost all the Norwegians in his audience agree with him.

Is that a flight of pigs on the horizon?

Is a crack of light breaking at last into the darkness of Islam?

President Sisi of Egypt, speaking at Al-Azhar University in Cairo, said (translation by Raymond Ibrahim at Front Page):

I am referring here to the religious clerics.   We have to think hard about what we are facing — and I have, in fact, addressed this topic a couple of times before.  It’s inconceivable that the thinking that we hold most sacred should cause the entire umma [Islamic world] to be a source of anxiety, danger, killing and destruction for the rest of the world.  Impossible!

That thinking — I am not saying “religion” but “thinking” — that corpus of texts and ideas that we have sacralized over the years, to the point that departing from them has become almost impossible, is antagonizing the entire world.  It’s antagonizing the entire world!

Is it possible that 1.6 billion people [Muslims] should want to kill the rest of the world’s inhabitants — that is 7 billion — so that they themselves may live? Impossible!

I am saying these words here at Al-Azhar, before this assembly of scholars and ulema — Allah Almighty be witness to your truth on Judgment Day concerning that which I’m talking about now.

All this that I am telling you, you cannot feel it if you remain trapped within this mindset. You need to step outside of yourselves to be able to observe it and reflect on it from a more enlightened perspective.

I say and repeat again that we are in need of a religious revolution. You, imams, are responsible before Allah. The entire world, I say it again, the entire world is waiting for your next move … because this umma is being torn, it is being destroyed, it is being lost—and it is being lost by our own hands.

Daniel Greenfield comments (in part):

The implication is that he’s calling for a departure from texts that promote international holy wars. Obviously he isn’t taking issue with the Koran. But it appears he is calling for a religious framework that invalidates freelance Islamic expansionism of the ISIS kind. That would be a somewhat conservative step. …

And Sisi is “telling Al Azhar’s clergy to take an enlightened perspective and look outside themselves. That is dangerously close to secularism.”

Will Egypt, with the consent of Al-Azhar, become a secular state? There is a precedent in the Turkey of Kemal Atatürk and his immediate successors. (Turkey is reverting now to an Islamic theocracy under the presidency of Recep Tayyip Erdoğan.)

Is it possible that Egypt will persuade Islam to give up its jihad?

And even perhaps – to hazard an even wilder hope – revise sharia law, set women free, tolerate apostasy … ?

Nah! Pigs may figuratively fly, but never very far.

Should our civilization collapse under Islamic aggression – aided by our own political correctness, cowardice, laziness  – the only known place with intelligent life in this universe will be a dark and destroyed planet drifting through space, populated by billions of mostly inbred humans living in total misery, enslaved by the freedom-hating, death-loving, brutal, mind-numbing Sharia. What tragedy could be worse than that? 

We quote from an article at 10news, by Nicolai Sennels:

Islam knows no borders and no mercy, and if our generation does not stop them, the next generation will not even have a chance to make the attempt. Our grandfathers defeated Nazism, our parents’ generation overcame Communism. The great challenge of our time is Islam – an enemy of freedom more present, fanatic and vast in numbers than any totalitarian system before it. This enemy is different than anything we have encountered before: You can not intimidate an enemy who loves death more than life.

Our police is already unable to uphold the law in many of the Muslim ghettos mushrooming everywhere, even in smaller towns. Ever more regular outbreaks of what can best be described as minor incidents of civil war give us a taste of what is waiting for us later this decade (according to Al Qaeda’s prophetic plan made in the 1990s, this will happen in 2016 – Arab governments should be toppled from around 2010 and an Islamic state was planned to be established from 2013 …).

Muslim dominated areas are increasing in numbers and boldness – encouraged by the lack of consequence from Western authorities – and it is only a matter of time before they evolve into permanently warring Muslim enclaves fighting for unconstitutional, religious rights. Through our self-inflicted invasion we are creating our own Gaza Strips, which are already spawning an unending stream of attacks against non-Muslims and the surrounding non-Islamic society. Muslim immigration is crushing our economy, undermining our hard-won safety, attacking free speech and increasingly changing physical areas of our cities into unrecognizable, dangerous no-go sharia-zones.

Muslims believing in jihad are neither extremists, nor a minority. Muslims believing in the obligation to wage jihad to fulfill their religious duty are following mainstream fundamentals of Islam as it is clearly written unambiguously and repeatedly in the Quran and Mohammed’s equally holy life story, the Hadiths. 75 percent of the roughly 56 million Muslims living in Europe believe that the Quran must be taken literally and 65 percent think that the Sharia is more important than democratic laws. 80 percent of young Turks in Holland believe that Jihad against non-Muslims is fine. 27 percent of all French youth and 14 percent of all British youths – presumably including the vast majority of young Muslims in these countries – support the Islamic State. What do these numbers mean? They mean that the countless Muslim ghettos eating up Western towns and cities are populated with hundreds of thousands, maybe even millions, of people supporting the jihadi doctrine. What will happen when they feel strong enough to destroy and overtake our societies? Will they remain passive and peaceful, or will they seize the chance? Many, surely, will do the latter.

Instead of being thankful for the safety and welfare provided by hard working Western tax payers, Muslims in Europe have raised an army of jihadis supporting Islam’s genocidal agenda.

What can we do? Or rather: What must we do, in order to prevail for the sake of humanity and future generations?

Through democratic means, we must mobilize the immense power and organizational talent that lies behind the creation of the most free, rich, and technologically advanced societies in world history and direct it towards our own survival. If we manage to awaken this sleeping giant before our countries are destroyed by barbarians – just like all other high cultures before ours – we will be able to defeat the hordes of inbred fanatics without panic or hate. During this crucial historical period we must not lose our human face and destroy the very values we are trying to protect. We must stay honest, outspoken and engage with realistic means and force, while staying focused on long term win-win solutions. By approaching the problem without fear, but only with mental surplus and a broad overview, we can succeed while creating only a minimum amount of unavoidable harm. Reacting with totalitarian measures such as banning Free Speech to protect “social cohesion” or succumbing to immature emotions for revenge alone will not benefit our cause.

Peaceful societies with social values and a high degree of morality have been exploited to a devastating degree – economically, culturally and demographically – by myriads of Muslim immigrants and refugees.

Modern welfare and decades of peace have put our survival instinct into hibernation. This makes it difficult for us to understand that we will not overcome this historical challenge without the use of real force. A gentle approach that might be affordable under healthy demographic conditions is suicidal when confronted with a weapon of mass-destruction like Islam. We have come to this point because for too long, we have taken freedom for granted. …

We can hate the system, but we can not hate the people. … Muslims are the first victims of Islam, as their system is full of rules and brutal punishments aimed at themselves. Muslims are the real islamophobes: only fear can explain peoples’ submission to such a joyless, unfree and painful system, forcing them to think and behave in ways that creates ever more suffering in their own lives.

Until Muslims free themselves from the chains of sharia, we must make sure that the trouble that their religion brainwashes and forces them to make, happens from a sufficiently safe distance. Therefore we must stop non-Western (Muslim) immigration, and make it as difficult as possible for followers of the religion of submission to live here by banning any kind of Islamization. If they want mosques, halal, prayer rooms, cousin-marriages, and Islamic holidays, they must settle elsewhere. We do not want any mosques or minarets, no public or foreign funding of Islamic organisations or imams.  All Muslims coming to our lands must actively and publicly reject the violent and criminal passages of the Islamic scriptures. Performing or promoting jihad is treason and should result in loss of citizenship. This means that we would probably have to find ways to accommodate large [numbers] of people …  in or near Islamic countries where they do not suffer from living outside their cultural circle. …

In this way can we save humanity from what is probably the greatest catastrophe in the history of mankind: a monstrous weapon of mass destruction that has already killed millions of people and destroyed countless cultures and societies before ours. A system that is robbing its own followers of the most basic human rights and which is forcing them to suppress and kill their own. A system that is aiming at subjugating all human beings – Muslims and non-Muslims – under barbaric, totalitarian laws. A system that calls itself a religion but is so much more than that. A system that praises death more than life. A system that knows no mercy and no borders.

A system whose name means “submission”.

A system that bears the name Islam.

These opinions and prescriptions voiced by a spokesman of a group in Britain are similar to those of rebel groups growing in many parts of Europe. (For just a few of many reports see here, here and here.)

The Left dubs all of them “extreme right-wing” to raise connotations of twentieth century fascist and racist movements, and recalls their anti-Semitism to strengthen its case. Watch, if you have the stamina, this video and hear what the leftist pro-Islam pundits have to say. The irony is that Leftism is now the most virulently anti-Semitic ideology in the world, after Islam itself.

It is true that some of the new movements are fascist and racist and anti-Semitic, but not all of them. They are on the rise because Islam is truly a terrible enemy gaining power in the heart of Europe, and fiercely and insanely protected by European governments. Almost all the main political parties are still choosing to ignore the threat of Islam, or at best to play it down.

If many of the protest rebel groups turn out to be destructive of liberal democracy itself (which 1onews takes care to deny is any part of its own agenda), the establishments will have only themselves to blame. Most Western European countries are still not just allowing but encouraging more Muslim immigration, despite the carnage and crime that members of their present Muslim populations inflict on them continually and increasingly.

Many Europeans are predicting violent uprisings in their countries, and even civil wars – ever more plausibly.

A rise of nationalist sentiment in small nations is adding to the rebellious mood. (Here’s a video about it.)

So the peace that Europe boasts of keeping on its own soil since the end of Word War II – many Europhiles claiming that the European Union has made wars between the states impossible – seems almost certain to be shattered.

If there is little doubt that it will happen, the question is – how soon?

Europe is dying anyway, as its indigenous populations dwindle away. Civil wars will hasten its end in a welter of blood. Then, because of its peoples’ own folly, bleak cruel primitive Islam will inherit the continent, and undertake the holy task of destroying every last vestige of its high civilization.

ISIS is blowing up Shi’a mosques and shrines, and other ancient monuments, the heritage of mankind.

From the Assyrian International News Agency:

ISIS is planning to destroy the walls of Nineveh, the capital of the Assyrian Empire and one of the most important archaeological sites in Iraq. Nineveh was sacked in 612 B.C. when the Assyrian Empire was overthrown.

Residents of the Bab Nergal area of Mosul said ISIS has informed them that it will blow up the walls of Nineveh with the start of operations to liberate Mosul by the Iraqi army.

In the last month ISIS has seized the content of the cultural museum in Mosul as well as destroyed Assyrian monuments in the city, which ISIS claims “distort Islam”.

Assyrians are the the only indigenous people of Iraq, going back to 4750 B.C. In 2003, just before the U.S. invasion, there were 1.5 million Assyrians living in Iraq. Today there are about 500,000 remaining. A sustained, low grade genocide perpetrated by Sunnis, Shiites and Kurds drove hundreds of thousands of Assyrians into exile in Syria, Jordan, Turkey and Lebanon.

On August 7 of 2014, ISIS moved into the Nineveh Plain, the last stronghold of Assyrians in Iraq, forcing nearly 200,000 Assyrians to flee their homes and villages, where they now live as refugees in the Dohuk and Arbel areas.

The remains of the walls of Nineveh in north Iraq

Less to be regretted is that ISIS also plans to blow up the Kaaba, if it manages to capture Saudi Arabia, and if this report – of which we’re somewhat skeptical since ISIS is a Sunni organization and the Kaaba is a Sunni shrine – is true:

Representatives of the Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant (ISIS) stated that they will ruin the Kaaba after capturing Saudi Arabia. …

ISIS member Abu Turab Al Mugaddasi said that they would destroy the Kaaba in Mecca: “If Allah wills, we will kill those who worship stones in Mecca and destroy the Kaaba. People go to Mecca to touch the stones, not for Allah.”

There needs to be a full  and careful investigation into what happened in Benghazi on 9/11/2012, when the representative of the United States, Ambassador Chris Stevens, and four other Americans were killed in an attack by Muslim terrorists.

They could have been saved, but were abandoned to die.

The Democrats are terrified that a full and careful investigation, with full disclosure of all the facts, and a comprehensive report will reveal gross dereliction of duty by President Obama, Hillary Clinton and her State Department, the CIA, and perhaps also a number of military commanders. 

Already it’s known that the administration made up stupid, childish lies to cover up its dereliction of duty.

You might say to us, “But haven’t there been numerous investigations and reports, all of them largely exonerating the administration?”

Yes, and all of them piecemeal, all of them inadequate, all of them poorly conducted, all of them propping up to one extent or another the stupid childish lies of the Obama gang.

And that even includes the last report, conducted by the Republican led House Intelligence Committee.

It makes one fear that even when the Republicans hold majority power in both houses of Congress, as they do from today, they will disappoint the hopes of the electorate who gave it to them by caving in to the bullying demands of the Democrats, and naively, or lazily, or disingenuously pass the lies that their stooges choose to tell.

This is from the Daily Signal by the meticulous journalist Sharyl Attkisson:

It neither “exonerates” nor “debunks.”

It specifically states that it is not the final word on Benghazi.

Yet national press outlets claimed all of the above about the House Intelligence Committee report on Benghazi released on Nov. 21.

The Washington Post stated that “the panel’s findings were broadly consistent with the Obama administration’s version of events,” though many of the administration’s versions of events have been discredited or proven incorrect.

USA Today portrayed the report as a sweeping effort that “cleared the Obama administration of any wrongdoing” and the Associated Press claimed the report concluded “there was no wrongdoing by Obama administration officials,” though it didn’t examine most aspects of the administration’s actions regarding Benghazi. For example, the committee did not attempt to dissect White House actions or decision-making. And it did not generally “assess State Department or Defense Department activities” . 

What the House Intelligence Committee did do was focus on a narrow slice of Benghazi: the intelligence community. As such, the report largely defends the CIA.

It is nothing more or less than another in a series of compartmentalized investigations into the Benghazi debacle.

The House Armed Services Committee focused on actions of the Pentagon, largely serving to defend military interests. The Accountability Review Board focused on actions of the State Department, though it chose not to interview some key players, such as then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.

Each investigation occurred over a different time period amid two years of evolving accounts by Obama administration officials as new information filled in blanks or contradicted previous, official accounts. In some instances, investigations produced findings that contradicted one another or documentary evidence.

And no single investigation on Benghazi to date has heard from all relevant witnesses or had full access to complete information.

So why did some in the news media adopt the spin of Democrats such as Intelligence Committee Rep. Adam Schiff, who claimed the report “completely vindicated” the White House?

Some media even used the charged language of the Obama administration, disparaging those investigating the many contradictions and unanswered questions as “conspiracy theorists”.

The Huffington Post claimed the Intelligence Committee report “torched conspiracy theories.” AP and USA Today claimed it “debunked a series of persistent allegations hinting at dark conspiracies.” Slate likewise stated that the committee had “debunked Benghazi conspiracies.”

The articles advance limited and sometimes inaccurate representations of the committee report. They fail to acknowledge the countless documented instances in which the Obama administration provided false or conflicting information about Benghazi, and hid information entirely from public view.

At times, the committee report — as it defends the intelligence community’s performance during Benghazi — flies in the face of evidence. It relies heavily on witnesses who have previously given inaccurate information or testimony: then-CIA Deputy Director Mike Morell and Director of National Intelligence James Clapper.

1) The committee concluded, “the CIA ensured sufficient security for CIA facilities in Benghazi.” Yet security was insufficient to prevent terrorists from overrunning the CIA Annex, killing two of the four Americans who lost their lives on Sept. 11, 2012.

2) The committee found “no evidence” of a “stand down order.” But that is at direct odds with testimony from some eyewitnesses. Three security operators stated they were given a “stand down” order in the immediate aftermath of the attacks.

3) The committee appeared to focus on technical utterance of the words “stand down” and “order” rather than the spirit of the allegation: that willing responders were delayed or prevented from providing urgent help. For example, the committee acknowledged that CIA Annex team members “wanted urgently to depart the Annex” to “save their State Department colleagues” but that the chief of base in Benghazi “ordered the team to wait” to assess the situation. Also, the committee didn’t address the case of the Foreign Emergency Support Team in the United States, which began “packing its bags” to respond to Benghazi, only to have the State Department block its deployment.

4) The committee found “no evidence” of “denial of available air support” and stated that, “the CIA received all military support that was available”.  But testimony provided earlier to the House Armed Services Committee acknowledged that the military could have launched an F-16 fighter jet and decided against it. …

The president’s principle military adviser, Maj. Gen. Darryl Roberson, previously acknowledged in testimony to another congressional committee that military aircraft could have buzzed the hostile Benghazi crowd to try to scatter it. “So there is a potential you could have flown a show of force and made everyone aware that there was a fighter airborne,” Roberson conceded to the House Armed Services Committee.

Further, there were U.S. military assets in Djibouti that remained untapped. A former U.S. ambassador to East Africa stated, “The [Benghazi] compound was under siege for almost nine hours. The distance of 1,900 miles is within the range of the ‘combat ready’ F-15s, AC-130s and special forces.”

5) The committee found “no evidence of an intelligence failure”. Yet there was obviously an intelligence failure, since terrorists bearing heavy arms and rocket-propelled grenades preplanned and successfully executed multiple attacks on the Benghazi compound and Annex.

Another intelligence failure documented by the committee is the flawed analysis by a Washington, D.C.-based CIA officer who reportedly convinced Morell to advance the YouTube video narrative even though the CIA station chief on the ground in Libya had said that was not the case.

6) The committee accepted Morell’s claim that the talking points were not on the agenda of a Sept. 15, 2012, White House Deputies Committee meeting prior to U.S. Ambassador Susan Rice’s advancing the incorrect spontaneous protest narrative on Sunday TV talk shows. However, internal emails show that Obama Deputy National Security Adviser Ben Rhodes specifically convened the meeting to discuss various agencies’ disputes about the talking points.

7) The committee accepted Morell’s testimony that changes to the talking points were “in no way due to White House political influence” and were just “a reflection of how little we knew at the time”. However, documents show the State Department had voluminous information about terrorist links and had already notified Libya, in no uncertain terms, that Ansar al-Sharia was responsible for the attacks.

Still, this report is better in some respects than the earlier ones. Sharyl Attkisson explains:

Though the Washington Post claimed the committee’s findings were “broadly consistent with the Obama administration’s version of events,” they differed in many substantive respects.

1) The Obama administration initially claimed no security requests were denied. But the committee confirmed the State Department repeatedly denied security requests.

2) The Obama administration initially claimed there was “a robust American security presence inside the compound, including a strong component of regional security officers”.  But the committee found there was a handful of State Department diplomatic security agents who were apparently unarmed when attacked.

3) The Obama administration repeatedly blamed the attacks on a mob motivated by a YouTube video and initially claimed there was no meaningful evidence of terrorist involvement. But the committee stated that all of the Obama administration officials interviewed “knew from the moment the attacks began that the attacks were deliberate terrorist attacks against U.S. interests. No witness has reported believing at any point that the attacks were anything but terrorist acts”.

4) The Obama administration initially claimed, in March 2013, that government press officials made no changes to the Benghazi talking points. But the committee found that CIA public affairs officials made three critical changes to the talking points.

5) Morell initially claimed he had no idea who changed the Benghazi talking points. But the committee confirmed that Morell was directly involved in making and overseeing key talking points changes to remove mention of terrorism and al Qaeda.

6) The Obama administration initially claimed the attacks were an outgrowth of protests. But the committee found “there was no protest”.

Although USA Today claimed the committee “cleared the Obama administration of any wrongdoing,” the actual report makes numerous references to administration officials doing things wrong.

1) The committee confirmed that the Obama administration’s public narrative blaming the attacks on a YouTube video was “not fully accurate”.

Was there any truth in it at all? We think it highly unlikely. What follows confirms our belief:

2) The committee stated that the process to develop the inaccurate talking points was “flawed” and “mistakes were made.

3) The committee found that Morell wrongfully relied on his incorrect analyst in Washington, D.C., instead of his correct chief of station in Libya, who explicitly stated the attacks were “not spurred by local protests”.

No local protests spurring the attack? So the administration’s stupid and childish claim that there were protests against an obscure anti-Muslim video was simply not true.

Furthermore, the “Additional Views” appendix to the committee report, submitted by Chairman Mike Rogers, R-Mich., and three other Republicans, found the following:

4) Morell “operated beyond his role as CIA deputy director and inserted himself into a policy-making and public-affairs role” when he removed references to terrorism from the talking points.

5) Morell provided testimony that was “at times inconsistent and incomplete”.

6) The Obama administration failed to exert “sufficient effort to bring the Benghazi attackers to justice”.

7) The Obama administration’s response to the attacks was marred by “inadequate interagency coordination” and “devoted inadequate resources to this effort and lacked a sense of urgency”.

8) Senior State Department officials, including then-Secretary Clinton, placed U.S. personnel “at unnecessary risk” by dismissing “repeated threat warnings” and denying requests for additional security. 

9) Senior U.S. officials perpetuated the “YouTube” narrative that “matched the administration’s misguided view that the United States was nearing a victory” over al-Qaeda.

10) The administration’s “failed policies continue to undermine the national security interests” of the United States.

11)There was a “failure of senior U.S. officials to provide for the defense of U.S. interests against a known and growing terrorist threat”.

12) The State Department “failed to provide sufficient security for its facility in Benghazi”.

13) The Obama administration perpetuated a “false view of the terrorist threat” that “did not comport with the facts”. 

Even as some news reports stated that Republicans had in essence “exonerated” the Obama administration on all counts, Chairman Rogers attempted to correct the mischaracterizations.

In an op-ed published Dec. 10, Rogers stated, “Some have said the report exonerates the State Department and White House. It does not.”

He went on to state that his committee looked only at narrow questions as they pertain to the intelligence community. For that reason, he said, the committee did not interview key eyewitnesses from the Department of Defense and the State Department.

It remains unclear how so much news reporting could miss the mark as far as it did.

One news article claimed the Intelligence Committee report concluded [UN Ambassador] Rice innocently relied on bad intelligence on Sept. 16 when she advanced the spontaneous protest [on numerous TV channels]. Yet the actual report clearly states that the committee has no idea what the White House communicated to Rice before she presented the talking points.

The “tallking points’ were the stupid and childish lie about the video.

A news article unequivocally stated that “it was intelligence analysts, not political appointees, who made the wrong call” on the nature of the attacks. Yet the report is clear that it did not examine the role of political appointees or figures in the White House, State Department or Defense Department.

In reporting on the House Intelligence Committee’s Benghazi report, numerous news outlets headlined that there have been seven investigations on Benghazi and that an eighth is underway — the House Select Committee on Benghazi.

The implication is that Benghazi has been more than thoroughly examined and those who support continued inquiry are beating a dead horse.

Indeed, eight investigations might be overkill if each had been comprehensive and duplicative, and had turned up no new information. But each has uncovered new facts or different versions of facts as Obama administration accounts have continue to evolve.

The necessity of further investigation isn’t a function of how many probes have been held, but of their depth and quality as well as the contradictions unearthed and the quantity of outstanding questions.

In those respects, one could easily argue there haven’t yet been enough investigations into Benghazi.

So no report has yet done the job. Dare we hope that the  House Select Committee on Benghazi will do it?  The head of it, Trey Gowdy (R-SC], has “vowed to keep digging” until “we have a complete understanding of what happened”.

Maybe – just maybe – the truth about Benghazi will yet be told.