A university is no longer a place of free speech where, among other scholars, and under the guidance of the erudite, you gain knowledge, learn to think, acquire skills through the training of your brain and in some disciplines your hands, so you can make a contribution to the world and be rewarded with the wherewithal to live a good life. No.

It is a place you pay a vast sum of money to attend in order to shiver and quake and weep, and gnash your teeth, and shriek at your instructors, and parade your weaknesses with pride and your color with arrogance or apology depending on what it is: white with apology, other with arrogance.

Is it worth paying that vast sum of money just to perform acts of desperate suffering, shrink away in specially protected corners, crow over others or be crowed over?

Well, maybe the crowing over others is good fun. But at such expense? Couldn’t you do it back home, now and then, for nothing?

When it comes to choosing illustrations of terror-and-grief performances and speech censorship at universities, we have an embarrassment of riches. But they are hardly needed. Everyone who watches TV and scans a newspaper on line has surely seen the screaming acts on campuses, the invasions of quiet libraries by noisy aggressive mobs, the wild attacks in lecture halls on persons non grata, and read about the revisions of the English language by which deranged administrators struggle to ameliorate the noisy sorrow of the “students”.

Here are a few items of university news cited by John Hawkins at Townhall:

“Vote Trump” Written In Chalk On The Sidewalks Of College Campuses

We’ve now reached the point where liberal students have become so sheltered that merely seeing support for a candidate that they don’t like sends them into a tizzy.

Just hours before four bombs ripped apart two transportation systems in Europe, Emory students were dealing with their own supposed terror situation. … Someone had the audacity to scribble “Trump 2016″, “Vote Trump”, and “Trump!!!” with a writing utensil preferred by toddlers. The erasable chalk around the campus, with a simple political message, was all it took for these easily offended people to completely lose it, suffering emotional unrest that officials were forced to deal with.

The campus publication, The Emory Wheel, actually took this “chalk situation” seriously, seemingly siding with the crybaby college students who demanded to know how someone could rape their “safe space” with a candidate’s last name. Rather than walking over the words, or simply wiping away the words instead of their tears, 40 students banded together to protest this sidewalk “terrorism” inside the administration building.

“I’m supposed to feel comfortable and safe here,” one female student said. “But this man is being supported by students on our campus and our administration shows that they, by their silence, support it [sic] as well … I don’t deserve to feel afraid at my school.”

Calling America “A Land of Opportunity”

The University of California sent a handout to faculty recently that includes a list of offensive statements. According to the handout, “America is the land of opportunity” will be banned from campus. … A University of California faculty leader-training handout instructed professors not to say that “America is the land of opportunity” because that’s a racist, sexist microaggression.

According to the handout, called Tool: Recognizing Microaggressions and the Messages they Send, the statement asserts that race and gender do not play a role in life successes — despite the fact that saying opportunities exist and saying that opportunities are more easily attainable for some people than others are not mutually exclusive assertions.

Other microaggressions listed on the document include asking, ‘Where are you from or where were you born?” (because it suggests that the person you’re asking is “not a true American”); asking a post-doctoral minority student whether he or she is lost in the halls of a chemistry building (because it “makes the assumption that the person is trying to break into one of the labs”); and having students fill out forms on which they have to check a box indicating whether they’re male or female.

The school will now ban the phrase, “America is the land of opportunity”.

The Word “Man” Being Too Much For Students At Princeton

The Princeton University HR department has largely wiped the word “man” from its vocabulary.

The relatively new policy in effect at the Ivy League institution spells out the directive in a four-page memo that aims to make the department more gender inclusive.

Instead of using “man”, employees are told to use words such as human beings, individuals or people.

The memo goes on to list a variety of occupations that typically include the word “man” in them and offers replacements: business person instead of businessman, firefighter instead of fireman, ancestors instead of forefathers, and so on.

In a statement to The College Fix, John Cramer, Princeton’s director of media relations, said the guidelines “reflect the university’s initiative of fostering an inclusive environment”.

Princeton’s LGBT Center also offers a guide on various gender pronouns for those who identify as “transgender, genderqueer, and other gender-variant”, suggesting “ze, zie and hir”, “they and theirs’, and “Ey, em, eir and emself”.  

The Name “Lynch”

Students are demanding that … Lebanon Valley College administrators remove or modify the name of the “Lynch Memorial Hall” — not because the man it was named after was a racist, but because these students cannot handle the word “lynch”.  Lynch, of course, is a term that means to put to death (as by hanging) by mob action without legal sanction.

The hall was named after Clyde A. Lynch, who served as president of the college during the Great Depression and raised more than $500,000 for the physical education building that bears his name.

Just a few urgent changes in the process of totally transforming the land of the free and the home of the brave into a country safe for crybullies and ignoramuses.

To vote for Hillary Clinton and side with the Democratic Party is to side with America’s worst enemy – Islam.

Donald Trump made this clear in the speech he gave yesterday in Ohio.

Frank Gaffney writes at Breitbart:

Yesterday in Youngstown, Ohio, Donald Trump delivered the best speech of his campaign to date. Newt Gingrich rightly called it the most important since Ronald Reagan left office.

In fact, in many ways, it was very Reaganesque. After all, long before he became president, Mr. Reagan warned that every generation faces an existential threat to freedom. Mr. Trump made clear that he recognizes the threat to freedom in our time, which he explicitly characterized as “Radical Islam” and its guiding, supremacist ideology, Sharia.

The GOP nominee also channeled President Reagan by espousing a comprehensive strategy highly reminiscent of the one the Gipper formally adopted in his National Security Decision Directive 75 and employed to defeat freedom’s last existential threat: Soviet communism. Mr. Trump recognizes that now, as then, we must bring decisively to bear all instruments of national power – economic, military, intelligence, information and ideological.

The last element, which was emphasized repeatedly in the Trump speech, reflects an essential understanding that has eluded past administrations of both parties and some of the candidate’s most vociferous critics, Democrats and Republicans alike: Jihadists who seek the destruction of our country, its Constitution, and people employ different tactics – including violence, migration, material support for terrorism, recruitment, indoctrination, conversions and stealthy subversion. But they are all motivated by the same ideology: Sharia. Donald Trump declared yesterday that if you embrace that supremacist doctrine, you must seek to supplant our Constitution and, therefore, you are not welcome here.

Specifically, the speech adopted a basic principle: As a foreign national and would-be immigrant to this country, you must share our values to gain admission. That filter has for too long been absent and has greatly contributed to the ominous demographic trends facing not just Europe, but this country, as well: growing numbers of transplanted and inherently hostile populations, most of whom have no interest in assimilating and, rather, insist that freedom-loving Americans accommodate their demands and, ultimately, submit to Sharia.

Finally, the Republican candidate to be our next Commander-in-Chief spoke of a reality that can no longer safely be ignored: There are “networks” in America that support “radicalization”. In so doing, he recognized another hard lesson from Europe’s experience. Violent jihadists rely upon and exploit the infrastructure (including Islamist mosques, societies, cultural centers, front groups, influence operations, etc.) that has been systematically put into place in the West over the past fifty years by Islamic supremacists, notably those associated with the Muslim Brotherhood. …

Much encouraged by President Obama, who has numerous Muslim Brothers advising his administration – to what ends we have seen in Egypt, Iraq, Syria, Libya …

We have no choice but to identify, designate and roll-up such operations. …

At no point since 9/11, and arguably for thirteen years before, has there been a better articulation of what’s at stake and what needs to be done to secure freedom, namely by seeking and achieving Victory over Jihad. We desperately need more such visionary and collaborative leadership.

The other candidate for the Presidency, Hillary Clinton, wants to import many more Syrians – that is, many more devotees of Sharia – into the US. (According to Politifact, 550% more.) She is being massively helped to achieve her aims with funds by billionaires who do not understand that they, along with all non-Muslims, will be the victims of her pro-Islam policy.

Investor’s Business Daily reports:

A massive hack of socialist billionaire George Soros’s Open Society Foundations suggests that his various nonprofit organizations are little more than fronts for his many political activities. His growing closeness to Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton should be a warning to all.

The hack by a group called DC Leaks, includes 2,576 files from various Soros groups from 2008 to 2016. The DC Leaks website says the attack was “launched by American hacktivists who respect and appreciate freedom of speech, human rights and government of the people.”

Apart from the ease with which the Soros group’s computer system was breached, what we’re learning so far fills in the troubling details of how Soros goes about his business. No doubt, in coming days, more revelations will emerge as researchers comb through the thousands of documents.

But what’s emerged so far is eye-opening. In one of the purloined memos from 2011, titled “Extreme Polarization and Breakdown in Civil Discourse”, a nonprofit Soros group proposes conducting opposition research on a number of highly prominent American critics of radical Islam, including Pamela Geller, Frank Gaffney and Robert Spencer. It also targeted conservative activists and intellectuals David Horowitz, Daniel Pipes, Cliff May and former Vice President Dick Cheney’s daughter, Liz Cheney. All of them are strongly pro-Israel and have warned about the threat of radical Islam.

The memo suggests that the research was outsourced to the Center for American Progress (CAP), a leftist think tank that has “received millions of dollars in grants from Soros’s groups”… 

Oh yes, CAP also happens to have been founded by John Podesta, Hillary’ Clinton’s campaign chief. One of many close ties between Soros and Clinton.

Meanwhile, the Jerusalem Post notes that some of the hacked emails show that the Soros Open Society Foundations’ stated goal was “challenging Israel’s racist and anti-democratic policies,” in part by “questioning Israel’s reputation as a democracy”.  This is an old Soros trick: He spends money to delegitimize governments and others with whom he disagrees. It’s not about debate, and certainly not “open”, as his groups’ names all suggest. It’s political subterfuge in service of a far-left agenda.

So remember the next time Hillary postures as a pro-Israel Democrat – her campaign has ties to groups that actively undercut the Jewish state, our only real ally in the Mideast. 

But it goes well beyond just Israel. In yet another revelation from the doc-dump, a memo called the “List of European Elections 2014 Projects” details the elaborate efforts of Soros’ well-funded global network to manipulate election outcomes in Europe. The memo includes over 90 Soros projects in Europe to influence election outcomes. Now, through Hillary, he wants to do the same here. And Soros has the clout. …

Happily, he does not always succeed. He tried to influence the British referendum on withdrawal from the European Union, hoping to keep Britain in that corrupt bureaucratic dictatorship, and he failed. 

Fox News reports that Soros has given an estimated $9 million to Hillary-favoring super PACS in 2015 and 2016, more than anyone else. But he’s not Hillary’s only billionaire. Not by a long shot. “Within the past year,” Fox News reported earlier this month, “a total of 24 billionaires have donated more than $42.5 million to two Clinton campaign arms and three allied super PACs”. 

So while Soros and other billionaires fund Clinton’s campaign and other left-wing causes, the Clinton Family Foundation focuses on extending the Clintons’ political clout both here and abroad by trading political access for cash. The Clintons have together pulled in more than $240 million since leaving the White House “dead broke”, as Hillary once put it. Now the Clinton Foundation reportedly is under federal investigation for its questionable fundraising practices.

“It’s a way, effectively, to get around those campaign laws,” noted Peter Schweizer, author of the extensively documented book Clinton Cash, in a recent interview. “Hillary Clinton running for president in 2008, if you’re a foreign oligarch, you can’t give to her campaign, but you can have Bill Clinton give a 20-minute speech for half a million dollars, or you can make a $5 million donation to the Clinton Foundation, and you’ve got access every bit as much as if you had raised money for their political campaign. That’s really what the Clintons have done.”

As the saying goes, between the fire and the fire engine you cannot be neutral.

The fire is Islam, stoked by Soros, Podesta, the Clintons …

The fire engine is manned by Donald Trump, Pamela Geller, Frank Gaffney, Robert Spencer, David Horowitz, Daniel Pipes, Cliff May, Liz Cheney …

Milo explodes – with good reason – at one who says he will vote for Hillary.

The Democrats want felons to have the vote because they’re sure that criminal types will vote for them.

What that says about their party, they don’t seem to care.

They want to import jihadis because they too will vote Democratic. Until, that is, they take over the government of the country one day. But that can never happen as long as someone as experienced and qualified and skilled as, say, Hillary Clinton heads the executive branch. So they believe.

Jihadis? Actual, potential and would-be jihadis, yes.

This is from PowerLine, by Scott Johnson:

Minnesota’s large and ever increasing Somali population is the ultimate protected minority in our left-wing utopia. The Somalis are black. The Somalis are Muslim. The Somalis vote Democratic. Enough said.

This past fall Governor Mark Dayton instructed “white, B-plus, Minnesota-born citizens” to suppress their qualms about immigrant resettlement in Minnesota. If they can’t, they should “find another state”, he advised. …

The Somalis may be retrograde in their treatment of women and their related attitudes toward them. They may not share the liberal faith in homosexuality and abortion. They may have problematic enthusiasms in other respects. But we generally agree not to look too closely, or to avert our eyes.

We don’t even have a handle on how large the community is. The official estimate (there is no official number) is something like 40,000, but the United States Attorney’s Office here used an estimate of 100,000 in its formal written agreement with Somali Community leaders to undertake the so-called Building Community Resilience program. …

In Minneapolis the Somali community has become a coveted voting bloc. When I sat down with (Republican) Hennepin County Sheriff Rich Stanek for an interview late last year, Stanek bristled when I asked him about security issues raised by the Somali community. Why was I doing that? I referred to the House report recognizing Minnesota’s contribution of 26 percent of the American fighters joining ISIS. “I just came from an FBI briefing this morning,” Stanek said. “They told me we’re 20 percent.”

Not too bad, then?

I was referring to the September report of the House Homeland Security Committee task force on combating terrorist and foreign fighter travel. According to the report, Minnesota leads the country in contributing foreign fighters to ISIS. Reviewing the public cases of 58 Americans who had joined or attempted to join ISIS, the task force found that 26 percent of them came from Minnesota. When it comes to exports to ISIS and ISIS wannabes, we’re number one.

This is not a recent development. The Somali community has required the intense scrutiny of law enforcement for the past 10 years. The Department of Justice acknowledges that since 2006, “overseas terror organizations” have targeted Twin Cities residents to join al Shabaab (an al Qaeda-allied group in Somalia) and ISIS. Over nearly ten years ending in 2015, the FBI’s Operation Rhino targeted al Shabaab recruiting in Minnesota and resulted in the indictment of some 20 individuals.

Since 2013, according to the Department of Justice, ISIS has targeted “Twin Cities residents” (i.e., Somalis). The Minneapolis division of the FBI and local law enforcement authorities devote substantial resources to deterring and interrupting the recruitment of Minnesota Somalis.

In a presentation to Minnesota’s National Security Society that I attended in November, FBI Minneapolis chief division counsel Kyle Loven conveyed the impression that his office is devoting substantial resources to terrorism-related issues. “We have four national security squads working this thing,” he said.

One could see just about every element of the issue raised by the continuing Somali influx to Minnesota in the terrorism trial that concluded on June 3 with convictions against the three defendants contesting charges against them. …

Donald Trump has noticed the Somalis of Minnesota.

On Friday Donald Trump took up the case of the Somali influx (to both Minnesota and Maine) on the campaign trail. The Star Tribune’s Mila Koumpilova rises to the defense of the Somali community in the supposed news article “Trump’s comments about Minnesota Somalis met with outrage, satisfaction.” …

Follow the link and read the article, here. It is a chilling example of the Left’s deliberate blindness to the Islamic threat that is now the chief problem of our time.

Trump referred to the security threat raised by the Minnesota’s Somali community. Here Koumpilova wasn’t entirely sure what Trump was talking about: “Trump appeared to be alluding to the recent convictions of nine young Somali-Americans in what the FBI described as a plot to leave the country and join the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant in Syria.”

Could be!

As far as the Obama administration is concerned, there is no “security threat” raised by the Minnesota’s Somali community. They are the most trustworthy, loyal, patriotic Americans you could find anywhere. So much so, they can be entrusted with knowing how security is ensured at an international airport. 

They must be so trusted to prevent their feelings being hurt, you see?

Judicial Watch reports:

The Obama administration gave Somali Muslims behind-the-scenes tours at a major U.S. airportafter the group complained to Homeland Security Secretary Jeh Johnson about feeling harassed and profiled, government records obtained by Judicial Watch reveal.

The special security tours not offered to any other group occurred at the Minneapolis-St. Paul International Airport after Department of Homeland Security (DHS) roundtable meetings with local Somali leaders to obtain feedback for “modifications to practices that would allow for operations to be more culturally sensitive”. 

On at least two occasions — December 18, 2014 and February 18, 2015 — federal authorities granted the unprecedented excursions of the facility’s sterile and secure areas, according to Transportation Security Administration (TSA) records obtained by Judicial Watch.

The DHS agency that conducted the expeditions, Customs and Border Protection (CBP), provided the Muslim participants with “an in-depth, on-site tour and discussion of CBP’s airport, including both inbound and outbound passenger processing”, the TSA files state. Besides multiple roundtable meetings between CBP and Somali community leaders including imams, the records show that a luncheon and “cultural exchange and educational brief” also took place between December 2014 and February 2015 so that attendees could ask about the agency’s “specific practices” at the airport.

The roundtable events and airport tours were organized by Abdirizak Farah, who is identified in the records as a policy advisor in the DHS Office of Civil Rights and Civil Liberties (CRCL). …

The Minneapolis-St. Paul International Airport is the nation’s 17th busiest in terms of passenger traffic, according to the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA). It gets more than 35 million passengers annually and nearly 200,000 metric tons of freight.

The region has a large Somali Muslim community and Somalia is a terrorist nation that’s largely controlled by the extremist group Al Shabaab. In June three Somali-American pals from Minneapolis were convicted by a federal jury of conspiring to commit murder in Syria on behalf of the terrorist group Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) and to provide material support to the designated foreign terrorist organization. Six of their buddies pleaded guilty and one was charged in absentia, presumed dead in Syria. Back in 2013 a mainstream news outlet reported that the Al Qaeda affiliate that terrorized a Kenyan shopping center and murdered scores of innocent people included Somalis from Minnesota. Among them was 22-year-old Ahmed Mohamed Isse of St. Paul and 24-year-old Abdifatah Osman Keenadiid of Minneapolis.

The FBI and Congress have launched probes into the radicalization of the Somali American community in Minnesota. Al Shabaab recruits young men in local mosques and ships them off to train and fight in Somalia. Last fall the area’s largest newspaper published a story confirming that Minnesota leads the nation in the number of people who have left or sought to leave the country to fight with terrorists aligned with ISIS. An attorney who attended the June trial of the convicted Somali-Minnesotans explains in a newspaper column that the broader terrorist ring consists of young first-or-second-generation Somali-Americans who freely took advantage of educational and employment opportunities in the Twin Cities. Their social lives centered on local mosques, they supplemented their education with Islamic studies, are observant Muslims and want to live under the caliphate declared by ISIS.

“They yearned to wage jihad and to die as Islamic martyrs,” the column states, adding that “they hate the U.S.”.

Many of them traveled through Minneapolis-St. Paul International Airport while pursuing terrorist causes.

So everyone else who travels through that airport can feel perfectly safe.

This is from Investor’s Business Daily:

At the recent Democratic National Convention, the party of the donkey worked overtime at remaking Hillary Clinton’s image from one of an ethically challenged political operator to one of a caring champion of children and families. But as new revelations about her shady dealings with Russia emerge, it may all be for nought.

New revelations from Peter Schweizer, the author of the meticulously documented book “Clinton Cash,” and Stephen K. Bannon, executive chairman of Breitbart, show that Hillary’s campaign Chairman John Podesta “sat on the board of a small energy company alongside Russian officials that received $35 million from a Putin-connected Russian government fund.”

Making things worse, Podesta never fully disclosed the relationship, as the law requires. But of greater concern than Podesta is what it says about Clinton’s strange and mutually beneficial relationship with Russia that led to Clinton lending a hand in helping Vladimir Putin build Skolkovo, a high-tech community meant to be “the Russian equivalent of America’s Silicon Valley.”

This is not some sort of free-enterprise experiment. As the authors detail in a study published by the Government Accountability Institute, some 30,000 workers toiled in the state-of-the-art tech hub “under strict governmental control.” While Clinton was in charge at the State Department, the U.S. recruited a bunch of U.S. high-tech powerhouses — including Google, Cisco and Intel — to take part in the project.

Of the 28 companies from the U.S., Europe and Russia that took part, 17 were donors to the Clinton Foundation or paid for Bill Clinton to give speeches.

It’s yet another stunning example of the Clinton Foundation’s growing list of conflicts of interest, suggesting that Hillary used the State Department’s offices to line her family’s pockets through the Clinton Foundation. Don’t forget that, with her email carelessness on her home-brew server during her tenure as secretary of state, Hillary has already exposed the United States’ most secret information to the Russian government. As radio talk show host and law professor Hugh Hewitt noted Monday: “Hillary is already a Putin pawn.”

This was no accident. Nor was it innocent. FBI Assistant Special Agent Lucia Ziobro in 2014 sent a letter to several U.S. corporate participants in the project warning: “The (Skolkovo) foundation may be a means for the Russian government to access our nation’s sensitive or classified research development facilities and dual-use technologies with military and commercial application. … The FBI believes the true motives of the Russian partners, who are often funded by the government, is to gain access to classified, sensitive, and emerging technology from the companies.”

Which brings us back to Podesta. He sat on the board of a tiny energy company named Joule Unlimited, write Bannon and Schweizer. A mere two months after he joined the board, Rusnano, founded by Vladimir Putin in 2007, invested $35 million in the company. Podesta sat on three separate boards of Joule-affiliated corporate entities, but only reported two.

Moreover, Podesta’s own leftist think tank, the Center for American Progress, got $5.25 million from a group called the Sea Change Foundation in the four years ending in 2013. Sea Change, in return, had received what the authors call “a large infusion of funds from a mysterious Bermuda-based entity called ‘Klein Ltd.'”, which appears to have Russian ties.

This puts Clinton’s actions while in office under deep suspicion – including her enabling a “reset” with Russia that seems to have led to a resurgent Russia expanding its military, diplomatic and economic power in Eastern Europe and the Mideast.

In a wide-ranging interview with Chris Wallace on Fox News Sunday, Hillary suggested that Donald Trump “has shown a very troubling willingness to back up Putin, to support Putin, whether it’s saying that NATO wouldn’t come to the rescue of allies if they were invaded, talking about removing sanctions from Russian officials after they were imposed by the United States and Europe together, because of Russia’s aggressiveness in Crimea and Ukraine, his praise for Putin which is I think quite remarkable.”

Anyway much remarked upon, with pretense of shock and horror, by the US media. Whereas her commercial collaboration with Putin, and her exposing of state and military secrets to his government hackers, is unlikely to be remarked upon at all. In any case, such things make no difference to her followers and fans. They gave up caring about the character, morals, criminal behavior, and treachery of their present candidate for the presidency long ago; from the very beginning of her “political career” as the wife of a governor.

A Muslim, Khizr Kahn, spoke at the Democratic convention last week of his son’s death in Iraq serving as a US soldier, implying that he, the father, has thus made a “sacrifice”. He leveled a strange accusation at Donald Trump, saying “you have sacrificed nothing and no one” for the U.S..

By viewing his soldier son’s death in combat as his “sacrifice”, this father turns an honorable death – that of a soldier doing his  job, fulfilling his promise, doing his  duty –  into a religious martyrdom. Such a view accords with a meretricious calibration of praiseworthiness: an unlucky, or weak, or not well enough trained soldier is wounded in action or is taken prisoner: he becomes a “hero”. That in itself is taking his praise a little too far. (He may bear his wounds or captivity heroically.) Another soldier is killed and he becomes a “sacrifice”, a “martyr”?  Fighting for one’s country – if it is a civilized country – must be done by rational men who know their job is to kill, who are willing to kill, and who want to survive. Bravery may be part of their character, but is trained into becoming a lethal aggression – not love of death. 

Suicide-bombers are self-sacrificers and “martyrs”. They are not rational people. They are not fighting for civilization.

With the view of combat deaths as “sacrifices”, the war itself becomes mystical. But it is not. If an army were trained to think of war in mystical terms – a ritual blood-letting –  it would diminish the soldiers’ will to win, to return victorious after having got the job – the job of killing – done. 

As “sacrifice” arises in the Khan versus Trump matter, it is particularly disgusting. There is no question that Khan is using the death of his Muslim soldier son to make a political point that there is no Islamic threat. And that is shameless grief-mongering, because his son was killed by Iraqis in a war started by Islamic terrorism.

If his death is to be considered a sacrifice at all, it can only be so in the general context of the terrorist-denying, enemy-denying, rules of engagement imposed by the “win-hearts-and-minds” policy of a decadent America happy to sacrifice its warriors on the altar of “nation-building”. Captain Humayan Khan died when he approached a vehicle that blew up. Had his orders been to shoot on sight at any vehicle breaking the barricade, he might have saved himself, the two Iraqi civilians who were also killed by the explosion, and his men who were injured. But he had been trained to regard civilians as friends although they were in enemy territory.

During his three months in Iraq, Khan helped put Iraqi civilians to work for $5 an hour patrolling the streets of Baquba under the U.S. Army, his father said.

The political point Khan was making was: had there been Trump’s moratorium policy in place when he wanted to come to America, his family (from Pakistan and UAE) would not have been able to make their sacrifice, and his son would not have been here to fight for America. By exactly the same logic, had those policies been in place for Major Hasan’s parents (from “Palestine”), Hasan would not have killed American soldiers at Fort Hood. Were Hasan’s victims “sacrifices”?  Yes, to the see-no-Islam, speak-no-Islam, hear-no-Islam policies in all government branches, which allowed a Muslim officer who openly declared his hatred of America and its military to carry on as one of America’s finest. 

Khan’s son’s death should be – as it has been – acknowledged as an honorable death. He got medals. To regard his death as a martyrdom in the Muslim style – and for political purposes! – does not become acceptable just because it is wrapped in the American flag.

The parents of Major Hasan’s victims are entitled to have their sons and daughters acknowledged as dying in combat against the same Islamic enemy as Khan died fighting. They too should get their medals – as they did, at last. 

Robert Spencer writes at Front Page:

The mainstream media is wild with enthusiasm these days over Khizr Khan, the father of a Muslim soldier, Humayun Khan, who was killed fighting in Iraq in 2004. Khizr Khan, brimming with self-righteous anger, spoke at the Democratic National Convention, where he delivered what the Washington Post dubbed a “brutal repudiation of Donald Trump”. … There’s just one catch: Khizr is using his son’s memory not to advance the cause of the United States, as his son apparently died trying to do, but to advance a quite different cause: that of the global umma.

The well-heeled and powerful backers of the global jihad – those who have enabled the Islamic State (ISIS), al-Qaeda, and other jihad groups to grow as powerful as they have today — are enraged at Donald Trump. They are deeply worried by his call for a temporary moratorium on Muslim immigration into the United States, as that will make it much more difficult for jihadis to get into this country. They are anxious to stigmatize any and all resistance to jihad terror – and so, happily enough for them, is the Democratic Party, which has eagerly signed on to the longtime strategy employed by Islamic supremacist advocacy groups in the U.S., to demonize all effective measures against jihad terror as “bigoted” and “Islamophobic”. 

So it was that Khizr Khan, in the full fury of his indignation at the DNC, trotted out a straw man, falsely claiming that Trump wanted to “ban us from this country”.  Trump has said nothing about banning Muslim citizens of the U.S. from the country, only about a temporary moratorium on immigration from terror states.

Coming clean: we advocate the deportation of all Muslims living in a Western state who will not renounce jihad and sharia. We like Trump’s “temporary moratorium” on more Muslims coming into the US as a step in the right direction.

 Even worse, all the effusive praise being showered on Khizr Khan in the last few days overlooks one central point: he is one man. His family is one family. There are no doubt many others like his, but this fact does not mean that there is no jihad, or that all Muslims in the U.S. are loyal citizens.

Khizr Khan is enraged at Donald Trump, but is Trump really the cause of his problem? Jihad terrorists, not Donald Trump or “Islamophobes”,  killed his son in Iraq. And if Donald Trump or anyone else looks upon Muslims in the U.S. military with suspicion, it is with good reason: does any other demographic have as high a rate of treason as Muslims in the U.S. military? In 2003, a convert to Islam, Sgt. Hasan Akbar, murdered two of his commanding officers in Kuwait. In 2009, Major Nidal Malik Hasan murdered 13 Americans at Fort Hood.

Other than those attacks, a Muslim in the U.S. Navy discussed sniper attacks on military personnel. A Muslim U.S. naval engineer allegedly gave an Egyptian agent information on how to sink a U.S. carrier. In 2015, a Muslim National Guard soldier in Illinois planned an Islamic State jihad attack against a U.S. military base. Last February, a U.S. Army enlistee who vowed to “bring the Islamic State straight to your doorstep” pleaded guilty to attempting to detonate a car bomb at Fort Riley military base in Kansas. Just days ago, a U.S. Air Force veteran was convicted of trying to join the Islamic State.

Then there is the U.S. Muslim who gave the Islamic State U.S. military uniforms, combat boots, tactical gear, firearms accessories, and thousands in cash. Where are those uniforms now?

It is good that there are Muslims in the U.S. military who are loyal. But can we have a discussion about those who aren’t, and why they aren’t, and what can be done about it? Such a discussion is vitally necessary, but it wouldn’t serve the classic objective of the global umma, to increase the dar al-Islam (house of Islam) at the dar al-harb (house of war). Nor would an open discussion of Khan’s Sunday morning assertion on Meet the Press that terrorists “have nothing to do with Islam”. 

We constantly are told this, but the repetition doesn’t make it true. In the first place, jihadis repeatedly make clear that they think what they’re doing has everything to do with Islam …

Spencer quotes seven Muslims, six terrorists and a scholar, whose declarations amply prove his assertion. And he follows that with twelve of “many passages of the Qur’an exhorting Muslims to commit acts of violence”.

Finally he asks:

How does Khizr Khan explain all that? He doesn’t — and he knows that no one in the mainstream media will ask him to. All this disinformation and obfuscation he is perpetrating serves the interests of the global umma – but not in any sense those of the United States.

It needs to be known that Khizr Kahn is a passionately devoted member of, and agent and propagandist for, the Muslim Brotherhood. He works zealously to import Muslims and change America into an Islamic State.

Find more about him in our next post.

United against Hillary …

Dennis Prager writes at Townhall:

One of the many remarkable traits of the progressives is their lack of self-awareness.

This trait was on display last week in the media and Democratic Party’s characterization of Donald Trump’s acceptance speech – and the entire Republican National Convention – as “dark”.

For the left to dismiss other Americans as having a dark view of America is preposterous.

Because no one – not Trump, not the Republican Party, not any conservative – has nearly as dark a view of America as does the left.

Across the board – from the universities to the media to the Democratic Party – the left, around the world and in America, has an unremittingly dark view of the United States.

Here’s a brief glimpse.

• Racism “is part of our (American) DNA”, President Barack Obama said in 2015. Is there anything Trump said in his acceptance speech that is as dark about America as that?
• On July Fourth weekend, Vox published a long column arguing “3 reasons the American Revolution was a mistake”.
• The most widely read historian in American high schools and colleges, the late left-wing professor Howard Zinn, was asked (by me) whether he thought the United States had done more good or more bad in the world. “Probably more bad than good,” he answered.
• The left regularly characterizes the United States as a sexist, intolerant, xenophobic, homophobic, Islamophobic, racist and bigoted country.
• Our wars are wars for imperialist expansion, driven by material greed.
• The top 1 percent relentlessly exploits the other 99 percent.
• America is rigged against blacks, Hispanics and the 99 percent.
• Cops kill unarmed blacks proportionately more than they kill unarmed whites because so many cops are racist.
• About 1 in 5 female college students are sexually assaulted on campus.

Is there anything in Trump’s speech that can match any of those left-wing views of the United States for “darkness”?

Moreover, every one of those leftist critiques of America is false.

Nevertheless, we are in a dark time in America. In fact, Trump didn’t make the case for America’s darkness nearly effectively enough.

• Our universities – outside of the natural sciences – are being destroyed as learning institutions. They close minds, censor speech and indoctrinate rather than educate.
• Blacks have more anger toward whites and America than at any time since the civil rights era.
• American students are learning less while being indoctrinated more. They graduate high school barely able to write a coherent essay with proper sentence structure, grammar and spelling. But they know all about the existential threat allegedly posed by fossil fuels.
• According to a recent Gallup Poll, fewer young Americans than at any time since polling began are proud to be Americans.
• A greater percentage of Americans are dependent upon government for their income and even for food than at any time in American history.
• The American national debt is the highest it has ever been. And it is increasing at a rate that can only lead to an economic implosion.
• A smaller percentage of Americans are married than at any time in American history.
• Americans are having fewer children than ever.
• Fewer businesses in proportion to the general population are being started than ever before.
• Sectors of major American cities are essentially killing zones.

Is that dark enough?

And the list is only a partial one.

Moreover, every one of those dark facts is the result of left-wing policies, left-wing politicians, left-wing writers, left-wing professors and the left-wing party, the Democratic Party.

If all Donald Trump did between now and November were to delineate the darkness created by the left and the Democrats, he could potentially win in a landslide. But, for reasons that elude me, he won’t, just as no Republican presidential candidate since Ronald Reagan has. In the same way that Democrats won’t identify America’s international enemy – Islamic terror – Republicans won’t identify America’s domestic enemy, the left.

And until Republicans do, the darkness won’t recede.

We agree with his diagnosis –  except for one item we removed from his own list of truly dark facts about contemporary America. We removed it because it is not a dark fact at all.

It is this:

Fewer Americans than ever before believe in God, go to church or affirm Judeo-Christian values, the basic moral code of America’s founding and of Western civilization.

The basic moral code of America’s founding was NOT that two-headed chimera “Judeo-Christian values”. The Constitution of the United States embodies the values of the Enlightenment.

Jewish values and Christian values are essentially different. Judaism holds justice to be the highest value. (Which was a good idea; only exactly what those men of old who wrote the Bible considered just was often not good at all.)

Christianity holds love to be the highest value. Love granted unconditionally. Even to the sinner; even to those who do evil to others; so mandating hypocrisy – which provides cover for every imaginable cruelty. And it is the opposite of justice.

Furthermore, Christianity brought a thousand years of darkness down on Europe; a darkness that was only finally dispelled by the Enlightenment.

The Enlightenment set reason above faith, and enshrined liberty as the highest value. Protecting the freedom of each individual became the duty of the state. Under the rule of law, “justice” applied to the individual; only to the individual.

It is real progress if “fewer Americans than ever before believe in God and go to church”.

The churches did a terrible job when they had power. Let’s have no more priests ordering our lives. How about electing a businessman to lead us?

No matter what he says for political convenience – Donald Trump is not a religious man. And for us that is a definite plus.

He believes in his own ability to bring new opportunity for wealth and joy to all Americans.

He is a capitalist. Wherever true free-market capitalism flourishes, freedom flowers and happiness becomes visible.

His speech was not dark. It was a promise of a new dawn.

A promise he might fulfill if he becomes the next president of the United States.

Political parties in the Western world are undergoing dramatic and permanent change.

In America, Donald Trump has changed the Republican Party. It will not go back to being what it was before he became its most popular candidate for the presidency.

The Democratic Party was always a racist cabal, and now it’s a criminal racket under the dictatorship of the Clintons. They have been “nudged” towards the wilder shores of Leftism by the surprising popularity of the  “democratic socialist” Bernie Sanders, who stood against Hillary Clinton for the presidential candidacy – but was not allowed to win, of course.

The Libertarian Party’s support is growing. There is even talk of it replacing the Republican Party. In any case, the Libertarians want the two-party system to fade away and new parties – chiefly their own – to enter the competition for power with a fair chance of winning.

Gary Johnson, the Libertarian Party’s nominee for the presidential elections, says: “I think 30 million people here are up for grabs that are probably Libertarian; it’s that they just don’t know it.”

In Europe, new parties are emerging and old ones re-emerging in new forms and with new policies, in response to the governing elites’ disastrous immigration policies, by which millions of Muslims have poured into the continent from the Third World, bringing their customs of violence and misogyny with them.

In Britain, the established political parties are showing signs of disintegration and possible re-alignment.

Our British contributing associate, Chauncey Tinker*, writes:

Jeremy Corbyn, the present unpopular leader of the Labour Party, will cling on to power until he feels a suitable loony leftie has appeared who can replace him. Corbyn is not having a great time being the leader but he cares about the loony left’s future in politics and he is not going to hand power back to the centrist Blairite arm of the party in a hurry. He repeatedly says he has the mandate of the “party membership”, and he actually really seems to feel duty bound not to disappoint them. I do think winning general elections is not the biggest priority in his mind, its much more about representing the real loony left. 

The former leader, Ed Miliband, made a disastrous decision to open the membership to anyone with £3 to spare, so changing the party membership, allowing the proper lefties to take over (and there are suggestions that some mischievous Tories also pitched in) and I don’t think they can easily undo this, without splitting the party in two. They are still joining at an astonishing rate apparently, even though the membership fee has been increased to £25 to try and stop this. But it looks as if it will ensure a majority vote for Corbyn.  

Could the party split in two? There has been quite a lot of speculation about it. The Blairite / loony left ideological split has been going on since Tony Blair arrived on the scene.  However I can’t help feeling that the Blairites have just lost faith in their own cause. Corbyn’s chief rival for the leadership, Owen Smith, seems in many respects to be not really that far away from Corbyn; but – so far at least –  without the tendency to seem like a supporter of Islam. And I have yet to hear him suggest that the government should print money and give wads of it to poor people. As such he maybe doesn’t deserve to be thought of as a loony leftie, just a normal leftie. There’s a short clip of him talking in the Telegraph (see here). He would certainly win the votes of the “always voted Labour, always will” types, and might even stand a chance in a general election – although apparently he has hinted in favour of a second referendum on Brexit, which might well be a vote loser considering at least 52% voted to leave the European Union.   

If they did split Labour it would be a huge breath of fresh air for UK politics, and give the United Kingdom Independence Party (UKIP) a chance to get a foot in the door with more MPs. I think UKIP’s chances right now would be good if it were not for the fact they are also in disarray. Nigel Farage has resigned the leadership, and I don’t find the frontrunner Steven Woolfe impressive. But maybe he will improve.  

Overall its just deeply uninspiring on all fronts, and the new Conservative Prime Minister, Theresa May,  looks almost unshakeable with this rabble of an opposition.

It seems possible that she could even reunite the Conservative Party after the deep divisions within it over Brexit. But for how long?

—

* Chauncey Tinker was a computer programmer for many years.  He writes: “I had always had a keen interest in current affairs but around 2012 my interest turned to real alarm.  I began to read about the Islamic religion and became increasingly troubled by what I learned, especially in view of the ever increasing presence of Islam in the West.  By 2013 I was beginning to realize just how much the mainstream media is dominated by a certain warped and narrow way of thinking (far away from my own fairly libertarian views), how freedom of speech was being eroded and stifled by “political correctness”.  More alarmingly still I also began to notice how governments were beginning to pass laws that could actually criminalize views that dissented from theirs. Determined to challenge this trend, I left my computing career and began to study current affairs full time. I began my blog late in 2015.”

Milo Yiannopoulos on Trump:

We don’t entirely share his views on Marco Rubio, but with everything else he says here we heartily agree.

But here he rants against atheists – only reason given, they have no sense of style. More of this conversation is taken up with his disgust with fellow male homosexuals (“Lesbians don’t exist,” he says) who are unkind to Christians:

Needless to say, we don’t agree with him at all about atheists and atheism, but we find what he says, as always, entertaining.

None of us here at The Atheist Conservative, by the way, looks or dresses or behaves the way he describes the appearance and behavior of his typical atheist. But we all laugh with him at the picture he draws.

Milo is a Jewish Catholic.