When the time comes – is it not coming? – to ask, “Who killed Western civilization?” there will be certain names to speak; names of a few individuals who must be held more responsible than any others.

We quote from an article by Bruce Bawer in the October 2019 issue of Commentary. (The article rewards reading in full). 

On September 24, Donald Trump told the United Nations General Assembly, “The future does not belong to the globalists. The future belongs to the patriots.” Four days later, as if in a rebuke to his assertion, the Great Lawn in New York’s Central Park was the site of the “Global Citizen Festival”.  This event brought together “top artists, world leaders, and everyday activists to take action” (in the words of its website) and offered free tickets to “Global Citizens who take a series of actions to create lasting change around the world”.  Those “actions” included writing tweets and signing petitions affirming their dedication to “changing the world”. …

The Global Citizen Festival was organized by a group called Global Citizen in partnership with firms such as Johnson & Johnson, Proctor & Gamble, and Cisco Technologies. Rarely have so many heavyweight corporations described their activities in such benign language: Verizon stated on the event’s website that “we focus our business and resources to uplift people and protect the planet”. Who knew?

Covering the festival live, MSNBC hosts kept insisting—between interviews with Democratic politicians and recitation of DNC talking points—that it was “not about politics”. Hurricane Sandy, Central American drought, and the fall of Venezuela, we were informed, were all caused by climate change. … Politicians from Norway, Barbados, and elsewhere waved their globalist credentials, while America’s withdrawal from the Paris accords was cited as a sin against globalism and thus against humanity itself. …

In the past decade, the very concept of citizenship has become not only passé but déclassé. We should all be global citizens. …

Ironically enough, the contemporary enthusiasm for global citizenship has its roots in the historical moment that marked the triumph of modern national identity and pride—namely, the World War II victory of free countries (plus the Soviet Union) over their unfree enemies. Citizens of small, conquered nations resisted oppression and, in many cases, gave their lives out of sheer patriotism and love of liberty. As Allied tanks rolled into one liberated town after another, people waved flags that had been hidden away during the occupation. Germany and Japan had sought to create empires that erased national borders and turned free citizens into subjects of tyranny; brave patriots destroyed that dream and restored their homelands’ sovereignty and freedom.

And yet a major consequence of this victory was the establishment of an organization, the United Nations. Its founding rhetoric, like that of Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan, was all about the erasure of borders, even as it hoisted its own baby-blue flag alongside those of its members.

On December 10, 1948, the UN adopted the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. …

Among the UN “rights” are:  the right to food, clothing, medical care, social services, unemployment and disability benefits, child care, and free education. 

Whose duty is it to supply all those goodies? And to what power will those appeal whose “rights” of this sort are violated? 

The chief force behind the Declaration was Eleanor Roosevelt, the chair of the UN’s Human Rights Commission. In a 1945 newspaper column, she had had some interesting things to say about patriotism and what we would now call globalism. “Willy-nilly,” she wrote, “everyone [sic] of us cares more for his own country than for any other. That is human nature. We love the bit of land where we have grown to maturity and known the joys and sorrows of life. The time has come however when we must recognize that our mutual [sic] devotion to our own land must never blind us to the good of all lands and of all peoples.”

So Eleanor Roosevelt, sentimental and manifestly unable to think clearly, was a source of our civilization’s rot.

“Willy-nilly”? “Bit of land”? Didn’t America deserve better than that from its longtime first lady? Didn’t America’s armed forces, who had fought valiantly for their own “bit of land”? One part of Mrs. Roosevelt’s testimony was ambiguous. When she referred to “the good of all lands and of all peoples”, did she mean that Americans should care about what’s best for other peoples? Or was she saying that all lands and peoples are good? She couldn’t possibly be saying that, could she? Hadn’t the Holocaust just proven otherwise? It’s striking to recognize that Mrs. Roosevelt wrote this only months after the bloody end of the crusade to restore freedom to Western Europe—and at a time when our erstwhile ally Joseph Stalin’s actions in Eastern Europe were underscoring precisely how evil our fellow man could be, and just how precious a gift to the world the United States was. …

Another would-be global citizen was Wendell Willkie, who had challenged FDR for the presidency in 1940. In 1943, Willkie published One World, an account of a round-the-world trip he had made and a plea for the nations of that world to accept a single international order. Willkie wanted more than just a UN: he wanted world government, based on the Atlantic Charter. It is said that his book was the biggest non-fiction bestseller in history up to that time, inspiring an international One World movement to which both Albert Einstein and Mahatma Gandhi belonged.

Gandhi, yes, he would. Einstein’s political opinions are irrelevant.

Like Eleanor Roosevelt, Willkie was determined to build a new world founded on specifically American notions of rights and freedoms. Like Mrs. Roosevelt, too, he was convinced that postwar feelings of goodwill toward the U.S. by other governments would lead them to embrace those notions. On his world trip, wrote Willkie, he had discovered that foreigners knew that America had no desire for conquest, and that the U.S. therefore enjoyed their respect and trust—a respect and trust, he argued, that America must use “to unify the peoples of the earth in the human quest for freedom and justice.”

Needless to say, the world didn’t end up with Willkie’s One World. But it got the UN—where, from the outset, there was more talk of peace than of freedom and where the differences between the West and the Soviet bloc were routinely glossed over in order to present a façade of international comity.

Behind the Iron Curtain, captive peoples weren’t citizens, global or otherwise, but prisoners. Yet in the West, the UN’s language of what we now call global citizenship started to take hold, and the UN began to be an object of widespread, although hardly universal, veneration.

In reality, the UN may be a massive and inert bureaucratic kleptocracy yoked to a debating society, most of whose member states are unfree or partly free; but people in the free world who grow starry-eyed at the thought of global citizenship view it as somehow magically exceeding, in moral terms, the sum of its parts.

Sentimentality began the rot and keeps it going.

You can’t discuss the UN and global citizenship without mentioning Maurice Strong.

Christopher Booker wrote in the Telegraph in December 2015:

A very odd thing happened last weekend. The death was announced of the man who, in the past 40 years, has arguably been more influential on global politics than any other single individual. Yet the world scarcely noticed.

What Strong, an extremely rich Canadian businessman, did—almost single-handedly—was to create, out of the blue, the global-warming panic that is now a cornerstone of left-wing ideology.

Although he never was secretary-general of the UN, Strong wielded massive power within that organization and innumerable other international bodies, serving, for instance, as a director of the World Economic Forum and as a senior adviser to the president of the World Bank. He also played pivotal roles in a long list of programs and commissions that were nominally dedicated to the environment—among them the UN Environmental Programme and World Resources Institute, the Earth Charter Commission, and the UN’s World Commission on Environment and Development.

But although he was nicknamed “Godfather of Global Warming”, Strong didn’t really care about climate. His real objective was to transform the UN into a world government—a permanent, unelected politburo composed of elders such as himself.

At first, indeed, climate played no role in his plans. To fund the all-powerful UN of his dreams, in 1995 he proposed a 0.5 percent tax on every financial transaction on earth—a scheme that would have netted $1.5 trillion annually, approximately the entire annual gross income of the United States at the time. When the Security Council vetoed this move, Strong tried to eliminate the Security Council. The failure of such stratagems led Strong to focus increasingly on climate.

By promoting the idea that the planet was in existential peril, he was able to argue that a looming disaster on the scale he predicted could be solved only by vesting in the UN an unprecedented degree of authority over the lives of absolutely everyone on earth.

To this end, Strong concocted Agenda 21. Formulated at the 1992 UN Earth Summit (or Rio Conference), of which he served as secretary-general, Agenda 21 proposed a transfer of power from nation-states to the UN.

Strong opined:

It is simply not feasible for sovereignty to be exercised unilaterally by individual nation states. The global community must be assured of global environmental security.

What kind of regime did Strong wish to establish? Suffice it to say that he disdained the U.S. but admired Communist China, where he maintained a flat—to which, incidentally, he relocated after being implicated in the UN “oil for food” scandal in 2005. Another one of the many financial scandals in which he was implicated (but for which he repeatedly managed to get himself off the hook) involved funneling massive sums to North Korea, of whose regime he was also fond. …

The intention from the beginning of the climate hoax was to use it as a pretext for imposing world communist government.

After the UN came the European Union. As a free-trade zone gradually morphed into a would-be superstate, the EU’s supposed raison d’être was that nationalism had almost destroyed Europe in World War II. But this was wrong. Europe had been torn apart because of two totalitarian ideologies, one based on racial identity and the other on a utopian universalist vision. Communism’s end goal was, indeed, nothing more or less than a kind of global citizenship under which everyone except for a handful of elites would be equally controlled, spied on, and oppressed. …

The concept of global citizenship now pervades our politics.

During her 2016 campaign, Hillary Clinton envisioned a Western hemisphere, and ultimately a world, without borders.

Barack Obama, in reply to a question about American exceptionalism, said that, yes, he saw America as exceptional, but that people in other countries, too, saw their countries as exceptional. The last sentence of his Nobel Peace Prize citation contained the word “global” not once but twice: “The Committee endorses Obama’s appeal that ‘Now is the time for all of us to take our share of responsibility for a global response to global challenges’.” What U.S. president had ever been more global? A Kenyan father, an Indonesian boyhood: his bestselling autobiography conveyed his affection for both of those countries; it was the U.S. for which his feelings were ambivalent. …

Global citizenship is also big at America’s most prestigious colleges. …

The author proceeds to give many examples of universities pushing the idea of globalism hard on their students.

Decades ago, American curricula included a subject called “civics”. Students learned about responsible citizenship—understanding how government worked, knowing one’s constitutional rights, following current affairs, and voting intelligently in elections. Describing these courses was not problematic; students weren’t “invited” or “challenged” to “figure out” what citizenship means. They were told. They were given specifics. They experienced something known as education. Alas, those civics courses have long since disappeared. The contemplation of global citizenship has filled that vacuum. Its apparent purpose is to undo any sense of responsible citizenship that a young person might have acquired and to replace it with a higher loyalty. …

A “higher loyalty”?  To what?

Global citizenship is a luxury of those who’ve reaped rewards earned by the blood of patriots. Global citizens pretend to possess, or sincerely think they possess, a loyalty that transcends borders. It sounds pretty. But it’s not. By the same token, to some ears a straightforward declaration of patriotism can sound exclusionary, bigoted, racist. It isn’t. To assert a national identity is to make a moral statement and to take on a responsibility. To call yourself a global citizen is to do the equivalent of wearing a peace button—you’re making a meaningless statement because you think it makes you look virtuous. …

To be American is to partake in the benefits that flow from American freedom, power, wealth, and world leadership. Very few Americans who call themselves global citizens ever actually back up their proclamation by relinquishing any of these benefits … No, they gladly embrace the benefits of being an American; they’re just too virtuous, in their minds, to embrace the label itself. They’re like young people living off a generous trust fund while sporting an “Eat the Rich” button.

One way of looking at the aftermath of 9/11 is to recognize that many Americans who were simply unable (for very long, anyhow) to dedicate themselves to country were thrust by that jihadist assault into the arms of the only alternative they could imagine—namely, global citizenship. Instead of being usefully dedicated to the liberty and security of their own country in a time of grave threat, they have bailed on America and have found, in global citizenship, a noble-sounding illusion of freedom from patriotic obligation.

And in fact they are floating free, hovering above the earthly struggle between good and evil and refusing to take sides—and, moreover, presenting this hands-off attitude as a mark not of cowardice but of cultural sophistication and moral superiority.

To a large extent, the project of global citizenship is about trying to replace the concrete with the abstract, about exchanging the real for the idealistic. It’s a matter of trying to talk Americans into rejecting the pragmatic and industrious patriotism that, yes, made America great, and pushing on them, instead, yet another pernicious utopian ideology of the sort that almost destroyed Europe in the 20th century.

It’s a matter of endlessly talking up ideas for radical change on every level of society—from ecological measures that would bring down the world economy to a neurotic obsessiveness with hierarchies of group identity that threatens to destroy America’s social fabric—instead of implementing practical reforms that enjoy popular support and would improve everyone’s life.

It’s a matter of trying to persuade ordinary citizens, in the name of some higher good—whether world peace or world health or protection of the planet’s environment—to relinquish their freedom and obey a small technocratic elite.

In the final analysis, global citizenship is a dangerous dream, a threat to individual liberty, and an assault on American sovereignty—a menace not only to Americans but to all humanity, and one that should therefore be rejected unambiguously by all men and women of goodwill and at least a modicum of common sense.

“Should” be rejected, yes, but will it be? All the Democratic candidates for the presidential election in November 2020 call for “open borders” – the first requisite for One World government. If the electorate rejects the “dangerous dream of global citizenship” by not voting the Democrats into power, the rot may be stopped and our civilization may be saved. It will be a decisive election. It will be a decisive battle in “the earthly struggle between good and evil”.

 

PS: Essentially, for the saving of civilization,

the UN must be destroyed!

Germany dominates Europe. Now a new German leader of the EU – selected, not elected – is taking over the presidency of the European Commission, in effect becoming President of Europe.

She has the instincts of a dictator. 

This time the would-be German dictator of Europe is a woman. Gynocracy is the political fashion among the totalitarians.

Bruce Bawer writes at Front Page:

No sane person could have witnessed the coronation this week of the new grand poobah of the European Union without recognizing just how utterly undemocratic – and dangerous – this institution is.

Her name is Ursula von der Leyen, a name that instantly communicates two important facts: (1) she is German; (2) she is a member of a hereditary elite.

To be sure, the “von” is courtesy of her husband, who belongs to an aristocratic family. But her own blood also runs blue. In addition to having a tony Teutonic lineage – she was born into the patrician Albrecht clan – she’s descended from a couple of the biggest slave traders in the American South. Her grandfather, Carl Albrecht, was a psychologist famous for his studies of “mystical consciousness.” Her father, Ernst Albrecht, was one of the very first bureaucrats to tread the corridors of power in what would later become the European Union.

Raised in Belgium, von der Leyen studied in Germany and Britain, and lived for a while in the U.S., along the way picking up degrees in economics and public health and also becoming a gynecologist. But she eventually settled on politics, hitching her wagon to Angela Merkel and climbing the ladder of power in Germany, getting herself elected to the Bundestag and serving in turn as Minister of Family Affairs, Senior Citizens, Women, and Youth; Minister of Labor and Social Affairs; and Minister of Defense.

In the last-named position, she didn’t exactly cover herself in glory: as President Trump has pointed out, Germany has consistently failed to pull its weight in NATO; British journalist Andrew Neil recently referred to her as a “failed” Defense Minister and as “the second most unpopular politician in Germany”.

None of which should come as a surprise, because the top Brussels jobs are routinely the next stop for failed, unpopular European politicians. You don’t need to be competent to get tagged for a leadership position in the EU, and you definitely don’t need to be popular. Von der Leyen got picked to be the most powerful official in the EU – with a population upwards of 500 million – by the twenty-eight members of the Council of Europe.

On Tuesday, the European Parliament got to weigh in on her appointment and to vote to ratify [read “rubber-stamp”] her selection, but it was hardly an exercise in democracy: as in the Soviet Union and other Communist states, it was an “election” with one candidate. …

Consequently, as the EU continues its long metamorphosis from a coal and steel community into a hyperstate, the closest thing it has to a president is a woman who has said that she looks forward to a United States of Europe and is eager to build an EU military. Perhaps one reason for her disastrous tenure in the German Defense Ministry (as Andrew Neil put it: “Sixty percent of their planes can’t fly. A hundred percent of their submarines can’t take to the sea”) was that she wasn’t really all that interested in upgrading her own country’s armed forces and keeping NATO strong – her real goal is to establish the EU as a major military power, effectively replacing NATO.

Before the EU Parliament voted on her candidacy, von der Leyen was given a chance to address its members. Her speech was a cavalcade of clichés about “turn[ing] challenges into opportunities” and “tak[ing] bold steps together”,  not to mention developing “frameworks”, creating “mechanisms”, and introducing new “schemes”. Banal stuff.

But the actual content was frankly scary, even for those of us who are already onto these people’s dark intentions. Speaking in the chamber of the EU Parliament, von der Leyen sounded for all the world like a dictator, calling for her subjects to march in unison, to “move together” in “solidarity”, because “we all share the same destination”. She made it clear that there is something called “the European way”, and she knows what it is – it is now her job to define what it is – and everybody had better get on board pronto and move in lockstep into the golden future time.

She promised a new “European climate law”, a new EU unemployment-insurance arrangement, and a variety of other new laws and regulations.

She vowed to order member states to provide equal numbers of male and female EU commissioners – and she vowed that if they failed to comply, she would reject their nominees and force them to bend to her will.

“The world,” she pronounced, “is calling for more Europe. The world needs more Europe….Europe should have a stronger and more united voice in the world.” Note that “more united” bit – this is a canny way of saying that the duly elected governments of supposedly sovereign EU nations should henceforth be even more obedient to her than they were to her predecessor, Jean-Claude Juncker. Then there was this: “We must have the courage to take foreign policy decisions by qualified majority and to have the courage to stand behind them.” This is a sheer power grab: what she’s saying here is that she plans to compel member states, whatever the will of their citizens, to subscribe to a single foreign policy to be determined by Brussels.

She even compared the EU to a marriage. Nor was it possible to ignore her fondness for the words “strong” and “strength”.

The idea of herself as Führer of a mighty realm stretching from Portugal to Finland, from Ireland to Cyprus, manifestly gets this woman’s juices flowing.

After the European Parliament confirmed her as President of the European Commission, she gave an acceptance speech in which she actually told the legislators that “your confidence in me is confidence in Europe.” Translation: L’État, c’est moi. What is it about the spectacle of a power-hungry German envisioning an omnipotent European empire – with herself at the helm – that sounds so unsettling? Who was it, again, who said “Ich bin Deutschland, und Deutschland bin ich”?

As Nigel Farage commented in the European Parliament on Tuesday, von der Leyen is plainly out “to take control of every single aspect of our lives … she wants to build a centralized, undemocratic, updated form of communism”. The second the word “communism” passed his lips, the hall was filled with cries of outrage. But it was scarcely an exaggeration. (Imagine if he had said “Nazism”!)

Noting von der Leyen’s enthusiasm for an EU military, Farage pointed out that “what is there for defense can also be used for attack”. Indeed, there can be little doubt that one reason von der Leyen and company are itching to build a European army is that they want to prevent any more Brexits: try to pull your country out of the EU a few years from now and, if she has her way, Brussels will do to you what Moscow did to Hungary in 1956 and to Czechoslovakia in 1968.

There is no comfort in prospect for Europeans who prefer freedom. Change will come, but not for the better. It will not be long now – a few decades – before the indigenous European dictators will be replaced by Muslim dictators. They will be even worse. Less likely to be female, but likely to be more savage.

If the British accomplish Brexit, they will save themselves from humiliating subjugation in this solidifying Fourth Reich, aka the EU. But to judge by the way they are trending – inviting in yet more Muslim immigrants, having few children of their own, punishing criticism of Islam – they too will accept Mohammedan supremacy.

For the first time in history (or so it seems to us – if we’re wrong, please tell us the precedent we’re overlooking) a working-class man is leading an angry protest of vast numbers of ordinary people against their country’s rulers.

The working-class man is Tommy Robinson. The people are the English. Probably with Welshmen, Scots and Irishmen among them.

They are angry that the ruling class is handing over their country to a corrupt European oligarchy which is scuttling European civilization by inviting millions of Third World migrants to occupy the continent and the British Isles.

Bruce Bawer, that clear-sighted commentator on the decline of the West, has a view much like ours.

He writes at Front Page:

In the South Yorkshire town of Rotherham … so-called Islamic “grooming gangs” were responsible for the repeated rape of about 1400 non-Muslim girls, mostly from the working classes, from the late 1980s on. Although local politicians, child-protection officials, police, and journalists were aware of the problem, they kept silent about it for decades, partly out of cowardice, partly out of political expediency, partly out of a misguided fear of inciting “Islamophobia,” and partly out of a classist disregard for the victims and their families. As a result, the perpetrators did not begin to be identified, arrested, and prosecuted until earlier in this decade.

We must put in a small correction here. The cowardice is fear of the Muslims who are taking over Britain and Western Europe. Fear of Islam. Not of “Islamophobia”, which does not exist because fear of Islam is entirely rational, as the writer himself goes on to show.

There is nothing unique about Rotherham, of course: it just happens to be the place where the dam burst first. The list of British towns where similar gang activity has been uncovered  continues to grow longer, and the number of perpetrators and victims is increasing apace.

Meanwhile, on July 7, 2005, Muslim suicide bombers killed 52 people and wounded about 700 in London. On May 22, 2013, two Muslims slaughtered a British soldier, Lee Rigby, in Woolwich. On March 22, 2017, on Westminster Bridge, a Muslim behind the wheel of a car mowed down about four dozen pedestrians, four of whom were killed. On May 22, 2017, a Muslim suicide bomber took 22 lives at Manchester Arena. On June 3 of the same year, three Muslims with a van killed eight people on and near London bridge.

In addition, every so often during the past few years, some British newspaper has dared to publish a news story like the one that appeared in the Daily Mail on Saturday: according to a secret government report, more than 48 Islamic madrasas in Britain, all of them run by the Darul Uloom (“House of Knowledge”) network, are staffed by followers of the Deobandi movement, which produced the Taliban.  The students, who are preparing to be imams, are thus “being taught that music and dancing comes  from the devil and that women do not have the right to refuse sex to their husbands”.

Even as all these rapes and terrorist acts have been taking place and all these future imams being schooled in Koranic principles, the Islamic population of Britain has been on the rise, and with it the aggressiveness of the religion’s adherents and the readiness of powerful people in government, the academy, news organizations, cultural institutions, social-media companies – and, not least, Britain’s EU overlords in Brussels – to appease them and harass their religion’s critics. More and more ordinary British citizens feel that their country and their freedoms are slipping away. This is a big part of the reason why they voted three years ago to leave the EU – a decision that both parties in the House of Commons have shamefully conspired to thwart.

Now, in a development that seemed inconceivable the morning after the Brexit vote, the British are preparing to go to the polls on May 23 to elect new members of that Soviet-style rubber-stamp body known as the European Parliament. Two non-establishment parties are vying for the support of “Leave” voters who are outraged at Westminster’s betrayal of Brexit: one of them is UKIP, which led the Brexit campaign in the first place, and the other is Brexit, a new party formed by former UKIP head Nigel Farage. Also running for MEP – as an independent candidate in the North West – is Tommy Robinson, the working-class lad from Luton whose years-long effort to warn his fellow Brits about the dangers of Islam and, in particular, to sound the alarm about the grooming gangs, has won him the admiration of millions and the contempt of the political and media establishment. 

The man who arguably represents that establishment more surely than anyone is Jacob Rees-Mogg, the natty Conservative MP from Somerset who (of course) went to Eton and Oxford, whose father was the editor of the Times of London, and whose accent is so ridiculously posh that it makes the late Sir John Gielgud sound like Andrew Dice Clay. Rees-Mogg voted for Britain to leave the EU, but is such a party loyalist that, until just the other day, he remained rock-solid in his support for Tory Prime Minister Theresa May, a “Remain” supporter who, though she insisted otherwise, was obviously out to sabotage Brexit. In the event, she ended up damaging her own party, which, if the polls and call-in shows can be believed, is set to lose the votes of millions of people who, though loyal Conservatives all their lives, now swear that they feel so betrayed that they will never support the party again.

It must be said that Rees-Mogg, the establishment man par excellence, is immensely articulate and comes off as intelligent and witty. Like most of his fellow MPs, however, he seems not to grasp the scale of what is going on in his country. “Anti-Islamic comments have no place in society,” he tweeted on April 18. Two days later, speaking to BBC Radio 4, today, he expanded on this statement, saying: “Anti-Islam comments are deeply disgraceful….I oppose them, I disapprove of them, I reject them.” He added: “I think that Islam is an important and interesting religion and that people in this country of the Muslim faith are as patriotic as Catholics are.”

It is worth pointing out that while Rees-Mogg has taken the trouble to weigh in against “anti-Islamic comments”,  he has said nothing – nothing! – about the outright threats (not just “comments”) made by violent Muslims and their infidel allies against Tommy Robinson, who announced on Sunday that police had refused to arrest three people who had assaulted him, that South Wales police had “liked a tweet celebrating an assault on me,” and that police were now telling him that “they have credible intelligence that someone is going to attempt to murder me on my campaign route and live stream it.” On the contrary, even as he has rushed to the defense of Islam, Rees-Mogg has consistently put down Tommy Robinson, telling the Express on April 19, for example, that Robinson “reflects a type of politics that is unattractive and not usual in Britain.” In his usual laconic manner, he warned the British electorate against taking the “extremist route”. 

Yes, you read that right: in Britain in 2019, according to Jacob Rees-Mogg, Islam – which has inspired grooming gangs and suicide bombers and intimidated authorities into curbing centuries-old British freedoms – is “important and interesting” and Tommy Robinson, whose life has been threatened repeatedly by Muslims, embodies an “extremist” type of politics that is – horror of horrors – “unattractive and not usual”. 

Rees-Mogg seems blithely unaware of it, but his nation is standing at a historical crisis point that calls for Churchillian resolve – and Churchillian rhetoric. It calls, that is, for rhetoric that is eloquent and stirring and tough – not for deliberately low-key, upper-class utterances of the sort that bring to mind some brandy-sipping Edwardian toff in some Merchant Ivory film. Yes, Islam is certainly “important and interesting.” It is also, like Nazism and Communism, a totalitarian ideology – and an existential threat to a free Britain. (Imagine Churchill, in the 1930s, giving speeches in Parliament in which he blandly referred to Nazism as “important and interesting”!)

And, yes, Tommy’s approach to politics is “not usual”. So are the times in which the people of the UK are now living. The last thing that Britain needs is politics as usual. Asked by an interviewer the other day about the electoral threat that UKIP and Brexit represent to his party, Rees-Mogg replied, “I would  encourage all people at all time to vote Conservative in all elections.” He might as well have said simply, “I always put party ahead of country.”

If Tommy symbolizes a kind of politics of which Rees-Mogg disapproves, Rees-Mogg himself symbolizes exactly what Britain no longer needs: government by Oxbridge snobs who give belligerent Muslims the kid-glove treatment while showing nothing but contempt for their own working-class countrymen. Rees-Mogg is often waggishly referred to as “the member for the eighteenth century”, and he seems to take it as a compliment, a way of saying that he represents time-honored values and traditions. In fact he represents the very worst of English traditions – namely, the matter-of-fact assumption that some people are, by accident of birth, superior to others. It is because of this tradition, which many working-class Brits still reflexively countenance, that people in places like Luton and the East End – people who have had to live with the results of mass Muslim immigration, and who thus understand the challenges facing their country far better than their fellow citizens in Kensington and Knightsbridge – have virtually no influence over the decisions made in their name by the likes of Rees-Mogg.

Tommy Robinson is changing that – or, at least, trying to. Like President Trump in America, he is taking on the establishments of both of his country’s major parties in the name of the people – and, like Trump, he is being vilified for it by a legacy media that is aligned with the political elite and that has convinced millions of low-information citizens that he is a bigot, a fascist, a Nazi. While Trump’s enemies, moreover, sought to take him down by pinning on him baseless charges of collusion with the Russians – even though it’s his #1 enemy, Hillary Clinton, who has the dodgy foreign ties – Tommy’s enemies conspired to send him to prison, supposedly for imperiling a trial of Islamic rapists, when, in fact, he has done more than anyone else in the country to bring Islamic rapists to justice.

Briefly put: Rees-Mogg postures as a champion of British values, but, in his tepid, temperate way, not only refuses to take the bold action required to defend those values but frames Tommy Robinson, who has risked his life to defend them, as their enemy. When he looks in the mirror, Rees-Mogg may think he sees an heir to Churchill, that great Tory PM of the last century; when he looks at Tommy Robinson, he plainly sees an upstart, a guttersnipe, a lower-class council-flats type who has no proper place in the councils of state or, for that matter, in any of the exalted locales where Rees-Mogg lives his life.

In fact, though he may not look or sound the part, Tommy Robinson is the closest thing that today’s Britain has to Winston Churchill. And Rees-Mogg, who looks down his nose at Tommy? He’s Neville Chamberlain. At best.

Islam is horrible. It has nothing good in it: not a moral principle, not a truth, not a consoling thought. It is an evil ideology through and through.

If it is possible for a cult to be worse than Nazism, that possibility is realized in Islam. (The close family resemblance between Nazism and Communism needs always to be kept in mind when either is discussed.)

In both Nazism and Islam there is the aim to: rule over everyone it allows to live; to direct how everyone should live his [generic masculine] life even in small particulars, so no one would be free; to eliminate Jews; to suppress homosexuality; to keep women subordinate; to be served by slaves; to punish dissent with death. In each there is joy in inflicting extreme pain and in killing.

Those are the most important points of similarity between the two evil ideologies.

The Nazis did not, however, want to wipe out every trace of our civilization. Islam does. For instance: while both would destroy books, the Nazis would have preserved many of value; Islam would destroy all but its own. The Nazis did not destroy works of art, paintings and sculpture. They stole them. All pictorial representation of living things is forbidden by Islam. It would destroy the works of the great artists.

It is hard to believe that most European countries are intent on changing themselves into Muslim hellholes. But they are. They really are.

They are replacing their populations with millions of Muslims from backward lands. They are putting a stop to free speech, the essential freedom on which our brilliant, prosperous, knowledgable, life-preserving, powerful civilization has been built, so that the primitive, ignorant, destructive, cruel orthodoxies of Islam can pass uncriticized as “truth”.

Is the West going to let this development continue? Surely it will now take action to stop it? Will it? Can it?

Bruce Bawer writes at Front Page

Last Saturday night, one of the guests on Greg Gutfeld’s evening show on Fox News was a former Marine staff sergeant, bomb technician Johnny “Joey” Jones, who lost his legs when he stepped on an IED in Afghanistan in 2010. … Watching him, I thought: here is a young man who was handicapped for life because, in the wake of 9/11, he was one of those courageous Americans who agreed to risk their lives in foreign lands fighting their nation’s enemy.

But what is that enemy? The unofficial name given to the struggle by the White House under George W. Bush – the War on Terror – avoided answering that question. So, for that matter, did the official name, Operation Enduring Freedom. From the very beginning, in fact, the exact nature of the whole enterprise was swathed in a fog of euphemism and evasion. The men who flew those planes into the Twin Towers and Pentagon were devout Muslims, obeying their religion’s holy book by slaughtering infidels en masse. The Taliban leaders in Afghanistan were also devout Muslims, ruling that nation in strict accordance with sharia law. And yet days after 9/11, even as Bush was planning the Afghanistan campaign, he told the American people that “The face of terror is not the true faith of Islam.  That’s not what Islam is all about.  Islam is peace.”  

In the eighteen years since, the Western political and media establishment have continued to echo that lie. Jihadists have struck Bali, Madrid, Beslan, London, Mumbai, Fort Hood, Paris, San Bernardino, Brussels, Orlando, Nice, Manchester, Barcelona, and New York again – just to name a few of the deadlier and more high-profile incidents. Yet, perversely, the lie about Islam is stronger than ever. Throughout the West, schoolchildren and college students alike have been fed a picture of Islam that’s pure propaganda. Yes, one has the impression that many people are more aware of the reality of Islam than they used to be – but one also has the impression that they feel more cowed than ever into keeping quiet about it.

It‘s certainly harder now to publish a frank book about Islam than it was, say, a decade ago. Prominent individuals who openly criticized the religion a few years back now either stay mum or use the word “Islamism”, which implies that jihadists are motivated by something other than Islam itself.

In Britain and elsewhere, the authorities increasingly harass, and even prosecute, citizens for sharing straightforward facts about Islam on social media.

While the kind of people Hillary Clinton called “deplorables” support sensible policies, such as Trump’s so-called “Muslim ban,” that are designed to protect them from jihad (whether of the violent or “stealth” variety), cultural elites have learned to reflexively condemn such policies as “Islamophobic”. Countless ordinary Brits cheer Tommy Robinson, but has any famous person – any “respectable” figure – in that country dared to stand up for him in the face of official persecution? …

What’s being sacrificed is the truth about Islam itself. It’s the stubborn refusal of the Western establishment to acknowledge this truth that has led to the absurd and, yes, tragic situation in which we now find ourselves: namely, that while the armed forces of the U.S. and its allies have been combating jihadists in Afghanistan for over seventeen years and in Iraq for sixteen years, resulting in a massive loss of life and treasure, we’ve continued to allow barely vetted Muslims to immigrate into our own countries, permitted mosques to proliferate with little or no official oversight of what’s being preached in them, voted more and more Muslims into positions of power, and shrugged indifferently while cities like Dearborn and Hamtramck turned into Muslim strongholds. …

None of it makes any sense: if you’re going to keep the floodgates open to them at home, why send young men into battle against them abroad? Why kill them in southern Asia and vote them into Congress in the U.S.? Why wage endless wars while punishing those who correctly name the enemy? …

There’s no way to rewrite the past. But we can’t keep marching mindlessly down this dangerous road.

We can’t. We shouldn’t. But we are!

There is no god to help us. We must save ourselves.

“Come, fix upon me that accusing eye./ I thirst for accusation.” – W. B. Yeats.

The Left claims moral superiority on the grounds of being “more compassionate than thou”. From before Marx to after Alinsky, those who would organize “the community” so that the state supplies everyone’s needs equally, justify whatever measures they take to achieve that end by reference – explicit or implicit – to human suffering. They are the self-appointed champions and saviors of society’s victims, the servers and protectors of “the common good”. It is not the individual they care for. The interests of the individual must be identical with the interests of the community. Whenever necessary, the individual must be sacrificed for the good of the community.

It is a political philosophy that cannot but cause what it claims to cure – vast human suffering. Since only the individual, not the crowd, can feel pain, he is being sacrificed to an idol. To matter at all, the individual must be a member of a victim group. He must be of an exploited class, a colonized race, an oppressed sect, a minority “gender”. That, and only that, is his role, his dignity, his importance. If you are not one of the exploited, you are one of the exploiters; if you are not one of the oppressed, you are an oppressor. Because you are of the exploiter and oppressor class you can only save yourself from the righteous contempt and active revenge of the victims by taking up their cause. Be a champion and savior of the victim classes. Be a Socialist.

The New Left consisted for the most part of such non-victims who rebelled against their deplorably non-victim class, race, nation, culture. To be white, of European descent, living in the free West, financially well off, educated, heterosexual, was to be wrong, guilty, despicable. If they could find nothing in their condition or family history that would allow them to claim precious inclusion in a victim category, they could at least reject their families, their race and nation, their class, their status. To prove their renunciation of “privilege” each felt it necessary to be more active, more loud, more violent in the cause than the next rebel.

How they envied the real victims. Until they came to the common agreement that they could go further than rebellion; not just reject their race, class, and “gender”, but actually renounce them and “identify as” something different. Even another sex. Even a different color. Sex and color are, they say, “social constructs”. They are not immutable realities. You can be accepted as a member in good standing of the colonized, of the powerless crushed by the powerful. Reach for that happiness. You want it, take it.

To that idealism the Western world has become accustomed.

But now a new and even more astonishing claim has arisen on the Left. At first it might seem too improbable to be true. But on further consideration it could appear to be a logical development of New Left theory. It reverses the movement of the oppressor class to belong to “the wretched of the earth”. Now they – some of them – want to be known as belonging to the oppressor class.

Envy victims no longer, comrades. Envy the victimizers.

The Swedes are leading the way. They are laying claim to being a colonial power, not in the past*, but now. They must make amends, give up their identity, yield their country and culture to others.

Bruce Bawer explains at Front Page:

Back in 2005, Mona Sahlin, who from 2002 to 2004 had served as Sweden’s minister of integration, told an audience at a Swedish mosque that many native Swedes envied them, because, she said, immigrants have real cultures and histories while Swedes have only “silliness” such as the commemoration of Midsummer Night. Later that year, at a debate on integration policy, the Norwegian activist Hege Storhaug asked Lise Bergh, who had succeeded to the post of Swedish minister of integration, whether Swedish culture was worth preserving. Blithely, Bergh replied: “Well, what is Swedish culture? And by saying that, I think I’ve answered the question.”

Those two appalling comments reflect a mentality – one that is shared, unfortunately, by a great many Swedes – that goes a long way toward explaining the breathtakingly self-destructive policies that, over the last few decades, have sent Sweden barreling down the road toward cultural self-annihilation. Of course, other Western European countries are headed down the same road, but they aren’t moving quite so quickly and eagerly, and with such a fatuous, pathetic air of self-satisfaction, toward their grim fate. The difference lies entirely in that Swedish mentality. Even more than most other Western Europeans, Swedes, especially the self-consciously sophisticated urban elites, are possessed of a degree of self-abnegation that is nothing short of pathological.

Consider this. In the U.S., we have “Native Americans”. Canada has the “First Nations”. Australia has its “aborigines”. What all these peoples have in common is that they were there first. In Sweden, the native peoples, the ur-folk, are, needless to say, the Swedes themselves. There are ten million of them, and they’ve been there for millennia. But when establishment journalists and politicians in Sweden refer to their country’s “indigenous people” they’re not talking about themselves. No, they’re talking about the 20,000 Sami (also known as Lapps or Laplanders) who live way up in the far northern reaches of Sweden, tending reindeer and wearing funny red outfits.

Now, the Sami (of whom there are also several thousand in northern Norway and Finland and the neighboring parts of Russia) are no more indigenous to Scandinavia than are the Swedes themselves. The earliest references to both peoples, as it happens, appear in the same work – De origine et situ Germanorum, written by the Roman historian Tacitus and published in A.D. 98. And yet Swedes refer to the Sami people, but not themselves, as “indigenous”. Think of it: it’s as if native French speakers in Paris or Nice or Toulon were to regard themselves as less authentically French than the speakers of Breton or Alsatian, or as if Castilian-speaking Madrileños were to indicate, by word or deed, that Catalan speakers in Barcelona were more genuinely Spanish than themselves.

So it is that Swedes, when it comes to the Sami, have – at least at the highest levels of government, society, and cultural life – embraced, in the name of some thoroughly twisted concept of morality, a bizarre, self-denying lie. And they have, as we well know, done essentially the same thing in regard to immigrants from the Muslim world. In an article published on New Year’s Day, Sweden’s current Minister of Culture and Democracy, a woman by the name of Alice Bah Kuhnke, briefly described a new law that expands minority-group rights, guaranteeing, for instance, the right of foreign-born kindergartners to be taught in their own languages and the right of foreign-born seniors in retirement homes to be taken care of by people who speak their languages.

There is, to be sure, nothing radically new about any of this: the Swedish government has long considered it a priority to ensure that immigrants are able to live out their lives in Sweden without ever having to be contaminated in the slightest degree by anything Swedish.

Apparently by way of justifying the introduction of these new programs – at a time, note well, when native Swedes are already smarting from severe cuts in education, housing, medical care, and the like owing to ballooning government expenditures on Muslim immigrant communities – Bah spent most of her article promoting something that is just as purely the stuff of fantasy as the idea that the Sami are Sweden’s only “indigenous people”: namely, the proposition that Sweden has always been a country of immigrants. “The story of our national minorities and our indigenous peoples,” Bah wrote, “is the story of Sweden….Sweden has always been a place where people with different languages, history and culture meet. It is easy to believe that this is a modern phenomenon….But the diversity that exists in Sweden has a deeper and longer history.”

By any measure, this is an absurd claim. It could hardly be less true. Few countries on earth have been as ethnically and culturally homogeneous for as long as Sweden has been, and for a member of the Swedish cabinet to maintain the exact opposite – and to have her lie ratified by publication in one of the country’s major newspapers, Svenska Dagbladet – is disgraceful even by contemporary Swedish standards. “As recently as 1940,” observed a writer for the Friatider website in a response to Bah’s disingenuous assertion, “only one percent” of Swedish residents were foreign-born. (And the great majority of that one percent, I would wager, were Norwegians, Danes, and Finns.) “The last major immigration wave,” noted Friatider, “occurred during the Bronze Age 3,500 years ago.”

True, all of it. But in Sweden, you challenge the official lies at your peril. The Friatider writer went on to report on one Tomas Åberg, who makes a tidy regular income, at taxpayer expense, by reporting to the Swedish police about Facebook users who, in his view, are guilty of “incitement against ethnic groups” – a term that can include anything from casual bigotry to informed criticism of Islam to reasonable disagreement with Sweden’s immigration rules to expression of frustration with a welfare state that prioritizes everyone else over ethnic Swedes. In 2017-18, Åberg ratted on no fewer than 1,218 people; thanks to him, the number of Swedes convicted of “incitement against ethnic groups” rose tenfold. In gratitude for his efforts, the newspaper Aftonbladet named him a “Swedish hero.” …

Socialists everywhere in the West please note the message from your much admired Sweden: Feel guilty for oppressing Them; blame yourselves, abase yourselves, give Them all you have. They are better than you, and you owe them. It might remind you of something someone is reputed to have once said.

If They take your coat, give them your cloak also. If They smite you on your right cheek, turn to them the other also.

Envy the guilty. Long for accusation.

.

.

*Sweden had some small colonies in Africa in the seventeenth century, each for a few years only. And in the nineteenth century, in the Americas, they colonized three Caribbean islands: Guadeloupe for a year, Tobago for a few months, and Saint Barthélemy, the only possession Sweden held for any length of time – ninety four years, from 1784-1878. New Sweden, which became the state of Delaware, was settled by Swedes for seventeen years from 1638-1655.

To condone evil is to co-author it. To protect those who carry out crimes is criminal. The European authorities who protect Muslims from the law, and even from criticism, are actively assisting Islam to wage war against our Western culture, our civilization. They are as guilty as the jihadis. They are traitors, they are criminals, they are evil.

Bruce Bawer, at Front Page, describes how the Norwegian government condoned the murder of two young women, one Norwegian and one Danish, both students in Norway – in order to protect Islam:

Maren Ueland and Louisa Vesterager Jespersen … planned for their Christmas vacation this year … a hiking tour of the Atlas Mountains of Morocco. …

On Monday morning, December 17, Ueland and Jespersen were found dead in an “isolated area” in the Atlas Mountains of Morocco. … Although neither Ueland nor Jespersen had ever been in Morocco and were not familiar with the territory, they had been backpacking alone. On the last evening of their life, they pitched a tent in which to spend the night. The next morning, a French couple, also tourists, found them dead – one of them in the tent, the other just outside. Both had been subjected to “brutal rape” and then “hacked to death.” One or both of them (sources differ) had been beheaded. The killings have been described as “slaughter” and as having been performed “ISIS style”.

An ID card found in the tent led local police to track down and arrest one suspect in Marrakesh. By late Tuesday, three others had been apprehended in that city. Soon authorities in Morocco and Denmark were suggesting that the culprits were connected to ISIS; by the end of the week their membership in that organization had been established. On Friday afternoon came news that nine more alleged members of the same ISIS cell had been arrested in Marrakesh, Tangier, and other cities. The murders are being treated, at least by Morocco and Denmark, as an act of terrorism – a conclusion supported by videotape of the atrocity that has been circulating on Moroccan social media and that has been certified as authentic by Danish intelligence. In the video, a man says in French: “This is for Syria, here are the heads of your gods.” …

Why … were those two young women so unaware of the dangers they were courting? They seem to have set out on their adventure thinking that the mountains of Morocco were no less menacing than the mountains of Telemark. How can this be? They were in their mid to late twenties, no longer children. They had lived through 9/11 and all the major jihadist acts that have occurred in Western Europe in the years since then. Surely they had heard of ISIS. Surely they knew that Morocco is an Islamic country … And yet they both decided that it was a good idea for them to spend their Christmas holiday hiking, unescorted, in the Atlas Mountains in Morocco and sleeping, just the two of them, unarmed, in a tent, in the middle of nowhere.

To say that these poor young women were ignorant is not to criticize them but to point a finger at the people who shaped their image of the Muslim world. Both of them grew up in countries where, in the wake of every deadly act of jihadist terrorism, news reporters and politicians were quick to avoid, or deny, the connection of those atrocities to Islam. Throughout their formative years, the TV channels available to them were full of upbeat programs, and the newspapers and popular magazines on sale at their grocery-story checkouts full of cheery profiles, celebrating the wonderful contributions made to their societies by Muslim immigrants. …

These were two young women who grew up … being regularly fed the soothing reassurances of politicians such as Norwegian Prime Minister Erna Solberg, who, in her official comments on the double murder, called it “meaningless.” No, it wasn’t meaningless: it was an act of war by Muslims dedicated to the conquest and eradication of infidels.

As it happens, on December 20, the same day Solberg made her statement, the Italian Senate observed a minute of silence in the memory of  Ueland and Jespersen, who were described explicitly as victims of “Islamic terrorism”. But Solberg avoided such language. Even though, by the time of her statement about the murders, a video of the four perpetrators pledging loyalty to ISIS had surfaced online, and Moroccan and Danish authorities had declared the killings an act of terror, Solberg, whose priority in such circumstances is invariably to protect the good name of Islam, refused to do so. Meanwhile, as of Christmas Eve, none of the six major Norwegian party leaders with active Twitter or Facebook accounts had so much as mentioned the murders on their feeds … Evidently, they’re determined to ride this one out in silence. Let that reprehensible fact sink in for a moment.

Erna Solberg, her entire government, all the political leaders, and the Norwegian press are guilty of luring these women to their violent deaths and are accessories to their murder before and after the fact.

The Yellow Jacket protests continue in France, and have spread to Holland, Belgium, Sweden(!), and Britain. 

We hope the uprising will seriously disturb all EU member states, and that its purpose is to overthrow their present governments and permanently destroy the EU itself. We hope it is a case of the peoples of Western Europe finally ridding themselves of the traitors they foolishly elected to govern them, who have used their power to ruin their own countries and the continent as a whole by letting in millions of hostile unassimilable Muslims from the Third World. 

Bruce Bawer, writing at Gatestone, says that is what he thinks and hopes it may be:      

I wondered whether this dramatic sign of popular discontent marked the start of the WesternEuropean public’s pushback against the elites’ disastrous multicultural and globalist project. …

The first thing one notices about the variety of motives cited in the media is that they are not unrelated. Anti-EU sentiment? Opposition to the huge immigrant tide? A major reason for anti-EU sentiment in WesternEurope is resentment at the power of Brussels to force member states to take certain numbers of so-called refugees. Similarly, protesters who are angry over high taxes know very well that a great deal of their money is being used to support immigrants who become welfare clients the moment they enter the country. …

AcrossWestern Europe, ordinary citizens feel ignored and condescended to by their political, business, academic, and media elites. Against the will of most of these citizens, their leaders are gradually surrendering their nations’ sovereignty to the EU, which Macron has frankly admitted wanting to transform into a United States of Europe.

Also against these citizens’ will, their nations have been flooded with Muslim immigrants who embody a major cultural challenge, have caused massive social unrest, and represent a devastating economic burden.

Although it is increasingly obvious that taxpayer-funded Islamization is leading Western Europe down the wrong path, the EU, which stands foursquare behind this disastrous development, refuses to reverse course. Naturally, the powerless man and woman in the street are scared, resentful, and, yes, outraged. Perhaps the question should not be why Western Europeans are rioting but why they did not start rioting a long time ago. 

The media in general, being against nationalism and for Islamization, are of course using their usual smear-labels to discredit the movement. The protestors, they say, are xenophobes, bigots, Nazis. They claim that Nazi banners have appeared among the Yellow Jackets. If they have, we suspect that globalist fans of Islam and the EU planted them there. It’s a common trick of the Left to do  such a thing. We remember when “Nazis” with racist banners were planted among Tea Party protestors in America to discredit the movement.   

So is this the beginning of a war of the Yellow Jackets for Western nationalism against the Black Masks for Islam and globalism? 

What discourages the idea is a sign that the yellow jacket is becoming the symbol of civil uprising as such. In Italy, Muslim immigrants themselves and their globalist allies donned the same yellow jackets to protest the policies of the nationalist government recently elected to oppose Islamization!  

An encouraging sign that the Yellow Jacket uprising is a movement to save  Europe is that it is shaking the arrogant rulers, the globalists in power. It has broken apart the coalition government of Belgium. And President Macron of France has had to abandon a policy of taxing citizens to the bone in order to pay for planetary coolants to be manufactured out of moonbeams.    

As all the world knows, Muslims attacked America on September 11, 2001. They killed 2,977 people and injured more than 6,000. 

A lot of Democrats failed to understand the meaning of 9/11.

Ben Smith reported at Politico in April 2011:

The University of Ohio yesterday shared with us the crosstabs of a 2006 poll they did with Scripps Howard that’s useful in that regard.

“How likely is it that people in the federal government either assisted in the 9/11 attacks or took no action to stop the attacks because they wanted the United States to go to war in the Middle East?” the poll asked.

A full 22.6% of Democrats said it was “very likely.” Another 28.2% called it “somewhat likely.”

That is: More than half of Democrats, according to a neutral survey, said they believed Bush was complicit in the 9/11 terror attacks.

Democrats still do fail to understand 9/11. In July this year (2018), Nancy Pelosi, the erstwhile Democratic Speaker of the House, called it “an incident”.

President Trump understands it.

Bruce Bawer wrote at Front Page on 9/11 this year:

On September 11, 2001, New York – along with Washington, D.C. – was struck by mass death … . It shook the world. Mainstream European commentators attributed the terrorist attacks to legitimate Muslim grievances against America, and breezily dismissed suggestions that Europe might soon be struck as well.

Sweeping aside Osama bin Laden’s claims, President Bush asserted that the attacks had nothing to do with Islam, which he called a “religion of peace”.He then sent armed forces to “liberate” Afghanistan and Iraq, on the premise that the people of those countries, if allowed to vote in democratic elections, would choose a democratic path.

It all turned out to be spectacularly wrong. The European savants were shown up by the horrific attacks on Madrid, Beslan, London, and elsewhere. Their perpetrators put the lie to the “religion of peace” rhetoric, repeatedly announcing that they were committing jihad, a core Islamic concept. …

In Western Europe, this recklessness had an impact well beyond terrorism. Sharia enclaves. Violent crime. A financial burden that has forced welfare states to cut back on education, health care, elder care. While other immigrant groups integrated into European host cultures, Muslims demanded – with increasing success – that those cultures adapt to Islam. …

Bush had massaged the Muslim world with insipid rhetoric about our shared heritage as “people of faith”; Obama had spun outrageous fantasies about Islam, transforming, in his famous 2009 Cairo speech, fourteen centuries of primitive brutality into a glittering parade of moral, cultural, intellectual, and spiritual triumphs. …

Finally, in Donald Trump, America has a president, and the Free World has a top dog, who gets it.

Yes, Trump could go further, in both words and actions, on Islam. But he’s already gone light years beyond his predecessors. He’s certainly gone far enough to outrage bien pensant types everywhere. And he’s gone far enough so that Americans who get it know beyond question that he gets it – and that he’s on their side. And they’re behind him.

As his rock-star reception in Warsaw last year reflected, most Eastern Europeans – who, unlike the editorial board of the New York Times, recognize a champion of freedom and a totalitarian ideology when they see them – are behind him, too, and are giving the finger to EU leaders who demand that they let in a Trojan horse.

Meanwhile, in Western Europe, where the haut monde hates Trump as much as do their stateside counterparts, millions – including those in Germany, France, and elsewhere who are finally rising up in boisterous public protests against their own despised leaders (but, except in Italy, still not casting enough votes for alternative parties to effect meaningful change) – see Trump as a long-awaited truth-teller, a sign of hope, a hero.

His enemies call him a fascist. On the contrary, he’s the first U.S. president since 9/11 who genuinely seems to grasp that Islam is fascism. He’s as far from denial and fatalism as it’s possible to be. He talks sense, he talks tough, and he takes action that’s in America’s interests. He’s crushed ISIS, shown Islamic heads of state who’s boss, and (against the resistance of both major-party establishments and the legislative and judicial branches of the U.S. government) done his best to pull in the welcome mat. While, at this point, most of his counterparts in Western Europe seem to be all about repeating empty multiculturalist slogans and managing a transition to the unimaginable, Trump is manning the barricades.

We applaud him for all that too.

And we add this:

The 9/11 Muslim attack on America was a profoundly religious act.

We wish all our readers, wherever they are, a Very Happy American Independence Day! 

The creation of the United States of America has been good for the whole world.

Twice in the 20th. century, America saved Europe and the world from conquest by evil men obsessed with evil ideas.

The excellent Bruce Bawer writing about this, concludes his article with these passages, in which he recognizes that once again America – not by arms this time but by inspiration – is a source of salvation to Europeans who are threatened again with conquest by evil men with evil ideas: the followers of Muhammad, the warring tribes of Islam.

America may once again help save the Old World. But there’s another contribution that America is clearly making on that front. In President Donald Trump, millions of Western Europeans see a leader who, to a greater extent than the overwhelming majority of politicians on either side of the pond, says it like it is, keeps his promises, and puts his own nation’s citizens first.

Almost every major country in Western Europe is run by Hillary types – establishment hacks who don’t mean a thing they say, who view ordinary citizens as deplorables, and who think that those deplorables should keep their opinions to themselves. Look, for example, at Merkel’s pathological effort to play guardian angel to armies of Muslim thugs – and her utter indifference to the impact of her actions on her own people. Look at the British political class’s appallingly tepid response to grooming gangs – and their obsessive hatred of Tommy Robinson. Look at the cynical attempts by Dutch courts, which mollycoddle Muslim malefactors, to destroy Geert Wilders. Look at the leaders of Finland and Ireland who, apparently more eager to please their EU masters than serve their own people, call for increased Muslim immigration and insist, quite insanely, that it “enriches our cultures and societies”.  

After only a year and a half in power, Donald Trump has already done a great deal for America. But he has also done something crucially significant for Europe: he has opened the eyes of Western Europeans to the possibility of giving their mediocre, pusillanimous, appeasement-happy leaders the bum’s rush and replacing them with strong, smart, genuinely patriotic men and women who might still manage to deliver their continent from evil. Yes, America First, by all means – but that very slogan, that very sentiment, is emboldening people all over Western Europe to raise their own voices to say “France First!” “Germany First!” “Sweden First!” We may yet hope that Western Europe’s salvation is at hand – and if it is, the people of these devastated countries may once again have America to thank for it. 

We heartily concur.

It seems to us that the (unlikely but actual) president of France, Emmanuel Macron, has a crush (decidedly not reciprocated) on President Trump. We do not think that is stupid, just more emotional than is necessary.

Macron came to Washington, D.C., made some speeches, either completely empty – just loose strings of grandiose phrases – or plain nonsensical, and got away unharmed.

Bruce Bawer writes what needs to be said about Macron’s stupidities at Front Page:

Last week, Emmanuel Micron, I mean Macron, visited Washington, had dinner at the White House, and gave a speech on Capitol Hill in which he referred to Hemingway’s memoir A Moveable Feast as a novel, identified the French architect of Washington, D.C., whom Americans know as Pierre L’Enfant, by his middle name, Charles, and attributed a famous line by Ronald Reagan to Teddy Roosevelt. The line in question was the one about how freedom is never more than one generation from extinction.

There was, in fact, a good deal of rhetoric in his speech about freedom – and the threats thereto. Given what’s going on in France these days, that would only make sense. But his approach to his country’s – and the West’s – current travails was, to say the least, curious. On 9/11, asserted Macron, “many Americans had an unexpected rendezvous with death.” How poetic! How French! And how inappropriate a way to refer to thousands of people being evaporated one fine Tuesday morning. He made it sound as if death by jihad had been their divinely ordained destiny – as if the hijackers of those planes had been instruments of some cosmic will.

Macron went on to mention the “terrible terrorist attacks” that have struck his own country in recent years. “It is a horrific price,” he pronounced, “to pay for freedom, for democracy.” Meaning what? In what sense are such attacks the “price” we “pay for freedom”? Did Macron mean something like what London mayor Sadiq Khan meant when he said that living with terrorism is “part and parcel of living in a big city”? I’d say the people who died on 9/11 were paying for American leaders’ blithe indifference to the existential danger of Islam – and that those who’ve died in more recent terror attacks in Europe were paying for their own leaders’ cowardly irresolution (or outright defeatism) on the subject.

Macron might have said something gutsy about his fellow politicians’ culpability in the violent deaths of terrorist victims. But no. Like every other European-establishment political hack, he posed as a hero of freedom. Some hero: he didn’t dare breathe the word Islam or Muslim or even jihad. But what else to expect from a man who … has called for Arabic to be taught in every French high school, for “cathedral mosques” to be built in every major French city, and for enhanced measures to be taken against critics of Islam?

In any event, Macron’s grandiose Gallic gush about freedom – and about the cherished centuries-long friendship between the American and French people (yeah, tell that to the cab drivers in Paris) – was really just throat-clearing before he got around to the Paris climate-change accords, the Iran deal, and trade.

Yes, there was this, somewhat later in his oration: “Both in the United States and in Europe, we are living in a time of anger and fear because of these current global threats, but these feelings do not build anything….Closing the door to the world will not stop the evolution of the world. It will not douse but inflame the fears of our citizens.” Qu’est-ce que c’est? The French claim to love logic. But where’s the logic here? By “current global threats”, Macron presumably meant jihadist violence and Islamization. But what was Macron telling us to do about them? Nothing. Fear is bad. Anger is wrong. And stronger border controls? They won’t work, because they won’t stop the world’s “evolution”. Is evolution his euphemism for Islamization?

Macron proceeded to denounce “extreme nationalism”. Clearly, he wasn’t talking about actual far-right fascists. No, he meant “America first”. He meant Brexit. “Personally, if you ask me,” he said, “I do not share the fascination for new, strong powers, the abandonment of freedom, and the illusion of nationalism.” In short, he was equating “freedom” with rule by the EU and UN (for which he worked in a plug) and indicting ordinary folks who actually think their countries belong to them. During his rant about climate change, Macron proclaimed that we need to save the Earth because, as he put it, “there is no planet B!” Well, I couldn’t help thinking, there’s no France B, either. And the fact is that his own country is going down the tubes – and fast. But if you believed his speech, the only threat to liberté, égalité, et fraternité in the West isn’t Islam but “fake news”. 

Yes, he actually used those words. Unlike Trump, however, he wasn’t referencing the left-wing distortions of CNN, the New York Times, and their European equivalents. Here’s what he said: “To protect our democracies, we have to fight against the ever-growing virus of fake news, which exposes our people to irrational fear and imaginary risks.” Irrational fear? Imaginary risks? Plainly, here was yet another craven European pol who, even as Rome is burning, insists that the problem isn’t the arsonists or the fire but the firefighters. How many of the House and Senate members applauding him on Capitol Hill knew that Macron recently called for a law in France that would summarily close down online sources of “fake news” – by which (he’s made clear) he means news sources critical of Islam?

Macron’s Washington speech, as it happened, came only days after the release of the most comprehensive study yet of Islam in France. Co-sponsored by the Sorbonne, it concluded that the country’s second- and third-generation Muslims, who make up seven or eight percent of its population, are increasingly Islamized. Most have no respect for French law and culture; most approve of the Charlie Hebdo massacre. Researcher Olivier Galland said his results were, “to put it mildly, harrowing” – reflective of community values in stark contrast with those of la belle Republique.

France’s mainstream news media reacted to the study with outrage. Galland and his team, charged Le Monde, were “stigmatizing Muslims”. But for those not interested in whitewashing Islam, the study only affirmed a grim reality that has been reported worldwide for years in what Macron would call “fake news” media – a reality of no-go zones, mass car burnings, large-scale gang riots, police who are scared to arrest Muslims, firefighters who hesitate to enter Muslim neighborhoods, anti-Semitic attacks that are driving Jews from France, historians who feel compelled to write “Islamically correct” textbooks, and high-school teachers who (as Millière puts it) “go to work with a Qur’an in their hands, to make sure that what they say in class does not contradict the sacred book of Islam.” Oh, and a tiny cohort of brave fools who are put on trial for daring to speak the truth about all this.

Another recent document is of interest here. On March 19, Le Figaro published a statement signed by about one hundred French intellectuals, among them Alain Besançon, Pascal Bruckner, Alain Finkielkraut, Bernard Kouchner, Robert Redeker, Pierre-André Taguieff, and Ibn Warraq. “Islamist totalitarianism,” they warned, is gaining ground in France by, among other things, representing itself “as a victim of intolerance.” It has demanded – and received – “a special place” in French society, resulting in an “apartheid” that “seeks to appear benign but is in reality a weapon of political and cultural conquest”. The signatories declared their opposition to this silent subjugation and their wish “to live in a world where women are not deemed to be naturally inferior….a world where people can live side by side without fearing each other … a world where no religion lays down the law.”

On the one hand, it was a powerful manifesto – nothing less than a j’accuse for the twenty-first century – whose power lay in its courageous candor about the real threat facing the Republic of France. On the other hand, my response upon reading it was: Well, good luck with that. Some of these intellectuals have been saying these things for a long time; others have joined the chorus more recently. All praise to every last one of them. But nothing will change in France until public proclamations by intellectuals give way to meaningful nationwide action by ordinary citizens – who, alas, in the second and deciding round of last year’s presidential election, gave Macron, this would-be Marshal Pétain, twice as many votes as the woman who, whatever her imperfections and her unfortunate parentage, is the closest their poor broken country has to a potential Saint Joan.

We are not fans of Saint Joan. But we do think Marine Le Pen would have been the better choice for the presidency of France in this late hour when the Islamic jihad needs urgently to be engaged and defeated and the EU disbanded – as she advocates.