“It is not our business what happens in Syria,” some of our commenters have written on these pages and on our Facebook page. “We are not the policeman of the world.” “Let them kill each other.”

Many of our regular readers are libertarians. The big fault in the thinking of American libertarians is their preference for isolationism. As if what happens in the rest of the world has no effect on America.

But not all the commenters who want President Trump to do nothing about the gassing of civilians in Syria are libertarians. A few are conservatives who are well aware of the danger in isolationism, but who do not see Assad himself as a significant threat to any but his own people.

While Barack Obama stood back from interfering in Syria, refused to be the policeman of the world, and let Assad kill half a million of his own people, Russia crept up to become the dominant power in the Middle East. And not only by adopting Assad as its pet dictator on the Mediterranean, but far more dangerously by becoming Iran’s best friend – a position Barack Obama coveted. He begged for it, he groveled for it, he paid for it, but while the reigning mullahs accepted everything he gave them, they continued to treat him with the contempt he all too well deserved.

Under Russia’s protection, Iran has projected its destructive power into Iraq, Yemen, and Lebanon – from where it is mounting a growing threat to Israel.

The anti-America axis formed by Russia, Iran, and Iran’s nuclear partner North Korea, needs to be broken up. Sending the Russians home from Syria would be a good start.

We quote from an article at the National Interest by Matthew RJ Brodsky:

Last week the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, Nikki Haley, said that when it comes to Syria, “Our priority is no longer to sit there and focus on getting Assad out.” That expression of U.S. policy came the same day that Secretary of State Rex Tillerson intimated that Assad’s future would “be decided by the Syrian people”.

The Syrian people have tried to do precisely that since March 2011, but they were met by the regime’s snipers, tanks, aircraft, barrel bombs, chemical weapons, torture, mass graves and war crimes. Leaving Assad’s fate to the people matches the language espoused by Damascus, Tehran and Moscow, meaning Assad isn’t going anywhere. …

Secretary Tillerson had said, “Russia and Iran will bear moral responsibility,” but later added that he knew Assad was behind the attack. However, in the words of White House Press Secretary Sean Spicer, “There is not a fundamental option of regime change.”

Unfortunately, the lesson is that this is what happens when the U.S. telegraphs that vicious dictators who use chemical weapons against their own people can remain in power. It sends a message to North Korea and Iran, one that will not be lost on Hezbollah in any upcoming conflict with Israel.

Despite the wishes of some in the West, Bashar al-Assad is not a solution for Syria, nor should he be a solution for the United States. The overwhelmingly compelling moral reasons for such a decision are manifest at this point. Going beyond humanitarian considerations, the fabric of Syrian society is irreparably torn. [A] social compact provided the modicum of legitimacy necessary for the thirty-year reign of Bashar’s father until his death in 2000. Without it, Bashar lacks the legitimacy to rule anything beyond his own family or the Kalbiyya tribe from which he hails. Indeed, having turned on the Sunni population who represent 75 percent of the country, Bashar now stands as a great magnet to which jihadists of all stripes are attracted, and that pull will continue as long as he is in power.

There’s also the problem of strength — a necessary trait in Middle East leaders. Bashar doesn’t have the military capability to regain, hold and consolidate control over Syria even if such an outcome were desirable. …

Assad, who is currently conscripting old men and underage women to serve in his military, is wholly reliant on outside powers with interests directly opposed to those of the United States. In early 2013, the first critical moment came when Assad risked losing what was left of his power but Iran and Hezbollah intervened, bolstering the regime. The respite they provided proved to be temporary and their resources inadequate to the ultimate resolution of the conflict. Assad was once again on the ropes by September 2015, but was revived by Russia’s entry into the conflict. Even their considerable military assistance wasn’t enough to win decisively.

The fact that Assad and his backers have resorted to the repeated use of chemical weapons and the continuous targeting of hospitals and schools demonstrates the weakness of their combined conventional military strength.

Simply put, to advocate for Bashar to remain in power is to acquiesce in Russian president Vladimir Putin’s role as Syria’s kingmaker. [Putin’s] purpose in Syria is to keep Assad in power, provide security for [Russia’s] Iranian client and increase the Russian threat to NATO’s southern flank by upgrading and expanding its Mediterranean base in Tartus, making its presence a permanent feature in the Middle East.

Working to boost Assad also means strengthening Iran in their long pursued and nearly completed task of creating a Shia land corridor from Tehran to the Mediterranean Sea, running through Iraq and Syria. … [This] will greatly add to [Iran’s] corrosive power before the key provisions of the nuclear deal fall away, greatly enhancing [its] position in the coming years. …

Sending Bashar al-Assad a military message that there are certain levels of barbarity that the world will not tolerate is a beginning. But ultimately, [Assad] needs to pay the price for his actions in a manner that will resonate loudest among the rogue regimes of the world that would consider the use of weapons of mass destruction. That will mean ensuring that the ruling Assad dynasty comes to an end in Syria.

Or America can run down its defenses, spend more on social security, open its borders, abolish its police forces, hide its flag, concentrate on learning new pronouns to cover as many sexual preferences as can be thought up in the safe play-rooms of the universities and the smelly streets of San Francisco and endlessly debate what bathrooms each pronoun can use, cover the land with bird-mincing windmills to provide a little energy now and then, fund the growing movement to humiliate white men, turn the public schools into madrassas, elect some corrupt narcissistic commie, preferably female, to lead the country, appoint judges who will rule according to their feelings, and die.

Kassem Eid, who was a victim of one of Assad’s gas attacks, thanks President Trump for his cruise missile strikes on Syria.

Not what treacherous CNN had expected and hoped for.

.

“How cool is that – to actually make the Chinese Politburo sit [dining with President Trump] through a night of American targeted bombing?” Mark Steyn exclaims, as he comments, cogently and wittily as always, on Thursday night’s strike by the US on Syria.

The bombing was a praiseworthy act of “tactical ruthlessness”, which now needs to be “matched with strategic clarity”.

In regard to the Russians, who keep Assad “on his throne” in Syria, the strike – says Mark Steyn – was “A REAL AMERICAN RESET BUTTON”.

And in  the course of this recorded flow of apt observations delivered on Fox News next morning, he remarks: “Obama mistook the sidelines for the moral high ground.”

Which should be Obama’s epitaph. Or one of them.

Last night the US Department of Defense put out this statement through Pentagon spokesman Capt. Jeff Davis:

At the direction of the president, U.S. forces conducted a cruise missile strike against a Syrian Air Force airfield today at about 8:40 p.m. EDT (4:40 a.m., April 7, in Syria).  The strike targeted Shayrat Airfield in Homs governorate, and were in response to the Syrian government’s chemical weapons attack April 4 in Khan Sheikhoun, which killed and injured hundreds of innocent Syrian people, including women and children.

The strike was conducted using Tomahawk Land Attack Missiles (TLAMs) launched from the destroyers USS Porter and USS Ross in the Eastern Mediterranean Sea.  A total of 59 TLAMs targeted aircraft, hardened aircraft shelters, petroleum and logistical storage, ammunition supply bunkers, air defense systems, and radars.   As always, the U.S. took extraordinary measures to avoid civilian casualties and to comply with the Law of Armed Conflict. Every precaution was taken to execute this strike with minimal risk to personnel at the airfield.

The strike was a proportional response to Assad’s heinous act. Shayrat Airfield was used to store chemical weapons and Syrian air forces.  The U.S. intelligence community assesses that aircraft from Shayrat conducted the chemical weapons attack on April 4.  The strike was intended to deter the regime from using chemical weapons again.

Russian forces were notified in advance of the strike using the established deconfliction line.  U.S. military planners took precautions to minimize risk to Russian or Syrian personnel located at the airfield.

We are assessing the results of the strike.  Initial indications are that this strike has severely damaged or destroyed Syrian aircraft and support infrastructure and equipment at Shayrat Airfield, reducing the Syrian Government’s ability to deliver chemical weapons.  The use of chemical weapons against innocent people will not be tolerated.

We applaud President Trump for keeping his word that he would act after the gassing of civilians in Khan Sheikhoun, and for acting decisively and effectively.

The strike sends a message to Russia, Iran, and North Korea that this president does what he says he will do, and he is willing to use the military might of the US against aggressors.

But questions arise:

The libertarian view is that the US should not have struck Syria because the US itself was not attacked. Is there merit in this view?

It needs to be asked: if Bashar Assad is deposed – as Secretary of State Tillerson has indicated is now a policy aim of the Trump administration- what will come after him? Is there anyone ready to succeed Assad who will govern the country any better?

Will chaos and violence prevail in Syria after Assad has gone, as it has in Libya ever since the death of its dictator Colonel Muammar Qaddafi?

Could any country possibly be in a worse, a more unstable, a more chaotic state, than Syria is now and has been for years?

Unless –

Will Assad’s going make it easier for ISIS to take over the whole country?

If ISIS did that, would President Trump – with the necessary approval of Congress – declare war on Syria?

What will happen to the Christians in Syria who have been protected by Assad if he goes? ISIS policy is to convert or enslave or destroy them.

We invite readers’ answers to these questions, or any others which this dramatic turn in world affairs gives rise to.

… or so we ardently hope.

With special regard to the post immediately below, we ask:

Will Hungary and Poland leave the undemocratic, pro-Islam, deeply corrupt European Union?

Christine Williams writes at Jihad Watch:

France and Germany, along with a host of up to 21 other countries, are set to demand Hungary and Poland either accept migrants under the quota system or leave the European Union.

The European Union is set to be a fragmented jumble, plagued by crime and broken economies, and it is all due to the reckless leadership of corrupt politicians who flung open the doors of their borders to unvetted Muslim refugees, at the expense of their own citizens. … Thee leaders of Hungary and Poland …  appear to be ready to thumb their noses at the EU and leave it.

Hungary has been detaining migrants and sending them back. Hungarian leader Viktor Orban angrily lashed out at Angela Merkel, warning her that the Muslim migrant crime problem in Germany would spill over into neighboring countries, and stating that Hungary would not pay for Merkel’s error.

Hungary also recently opened a military base at its border to stop migrants; Orban has declared 2017 “a year of rebellion” to “make Hungary great again,” and has rightly stated that “Europe is not free” because “freedom begins with speaking the truth.”

And in Poland:

Poland’s conservative Law and Justice Party (Prawo i Sprawiedliwość – PiS) swept to victory in 2015, partly due to voter anger over the previous government agreeing to take [Muslim] migrants under the quota system.

Hungary can be said to have been geopolitically great when it shared an imperial crown with Austria – a state of affairs that ended with the First World War.

And Poland had its “golden age” from the 15th to the mid-18th century.

If they only follow Britain out of the EU, and President Trump in re-establishing the strong nation-state in principle and in fact, they can be “great again”.

This is bad, very bad.

Yet again we have German authoritarianism, this time in the interests of totalitarian supremacist Islam.

What they say – “Kill the infidel” (Koran 9:5), “Enmity and hate shall reign between us until you believe in Allah alone” (Koran 60:4)  – is called “free speech”.

What we say – “let every idea be critically examined” – is absurdly called “hate speech”.

Robert Spencer writes at Jihad Watch:

Death of free speech: Germany approves bill imposing massive fines for online “hate speech” and “fake news”.

German Justice Minister Heiko Maas said that the companies offering such online platforms are responsible for removing hateful content. He said the new bill would not restrict the freedom of expression, but intervene only when criminal hatred or intentionally false news are posted.

What is “criminal hatred”? Clearly what German authorities mean is not just incitement to violence, but opposition to their suicidal policies regarding Muslim migration: “the issue” of this online censorship “has come to the fore amid the recent influx of migrants to Germany, which has sparked a backlash among some Germans including a rise in online vitriol.” German authorities apparently define “vitriol” as including any opposition to the Muslim migrant influx, no matter how reasoned, and to their supine attitude regarding jihad terror 

Facebook and Twitter have already blocked 90% of their daily referrals from Jihad Watch, and the site is blocked by many Internet service providers in the UK and Europe. The government of Pakistan says that Facebook is doing its bidding and removing content that violates Sharia blasphemy laws.

The concept of “hate speech” is subjective. I don’t think that what I do constitutes “hate speech,” but Leftist and Muslim groups insist that it does, and they have all the power. “Hate speech” laws are tools in the hands of the powerful to silence the powerless and quell their dissent. But the increasingly authoritarian character of the political elites is in the final analysis a sign of their desperation. They didn’t see Brexit or Trump coming. They are rapidly moving to delegitimize and silence all those who dissent from their globalist internationalist agenda. But our numbers are growing. This ain’t over. And they will not succeed in silencing us.

That is optimistic talk, and we hope he is right.

His source for the bad news? He quotes AP (which is generally on the side of the speech suppressors and the Muslim totalitarian supremacists):

Germany’s Cabinet on Wednesday approved a new bill that punishes social networking sites if they fail to swiftly remove illegal content such as hate speech or defamatory fake news.

Chancellor Angela Merkel’s Cabinet agreed on rules that would impose fines of up to 50 million euros (53.4 million dollars) on Facebook, Twitter and other social media platforms.

German Justice Minister Heiko Maas said that the companies offering such online platforms are responsible for removing hateful content. …

“Just like on the streets, there is also no room for criminal incitement on social networks,” Maas said.

“The internet affects the culture of debate and the atmosphere in our society. Verbal radicalization is often a preliminary stage to physical violence,” he added.

The minister pointed out that social networks don’t delete enough punishable content, citing research that he said showed Twitter deletes just 1 percent of illegal content flagged by users, while Facebook deletes 39 percent.

Maas also said that measures to combat hate speech and so-called fake news will ultimately have to be taken at the European level to be effective.

And Judith Bergman writes at Gatestone:

Germany has formally announced its draconian push towards censorship of social media. On March 14, Germany’s Justice Minister Heiko Maas announced the plan to formalize into law the “code of conduct”, which Germany pressed upon Facebook, Twitter and YouTube in late 2015, and which included a pledge to delete “hate speech” from their websites within 24 hours.

“This [draft law] sets out binding standards for the way operators of social networks deal with complaints and obliges them to delete criminal content,” Justice Minister Heiko Maas said in a statement announcing the planned legislation.

“Criminal” content? … “Hate speech” has included critiques of Chancellor Angela Merkel’s migration policies. To be in disagreement with the government’s policies is now potentially “criminal”.

Social media companies, such as Facebook, are supposed to be the German government’s informers and enforcers – qualified by whom and in what way? – working at the speed of light to comply with the 24-hour rule.

Rule of law, clearly, as in North Korea, Iran, Russia or any banana-republic, has no place in this system.

Maas is not pleased with the efforts of the social media companies. They do not, supposedly, delete enough reported content, nor do they delete it fast enough, according to a survey by the Justice Ministry’s youth protection agency. It found that YouTube was able to remove around 90% of “illegal” postings within a week, while Facebook deleted or blocked 39% of content and Twitter only 1%. The German minister, it seems, wants more efficiency. …

There also appears to be no differentiation made between primary-source hate speech, as in many religious tenets, and secondary-source hate speech, reporting on the former. …

Germany does not want these measures to be limited to its own jurisdiction. It wants to share them with the rest of Europe: “In the end, we also need European solutions for European-wide companies,” said Maas. The European Union already has a similar code of conduct in place, so that should not be very hard to accomplish.

Facebook, for its part, has announced that by the end of 2017, the number of employees in complaints-management in Berlin will be increased to more than 700. A spokeswoman said that Facebook had clear rules against hate speech and works “hard” on removing “criminal content”.

If Facebook insists on operating under rules of censorship, it should at the very least aim to administer those rules in a fair manner. Facebook, however, does not even pretend that it administers its censorship in any way that approximates fairness. Instead, Facebook’s practice of its so-called “Community Standards” – the standards to which Facebook refers when deleting or allowing content on its platform in response to user complaints – shows evidence of entrenched bias.

Posts critical of Merkel’s migrant policies, for example, can get categorized as “Islamophobia”, and are often found to violate “Community Standards”, while incitement to actual violence and the murder of Jews and Israelis by Palestinian Arabs is generally considered as conforming to Facebook’s “Community Standards”. …

It is only a small step from imposing censorship on social media companies to asking the same of email providers, or ordering postal authorities to screen letters, magazines and brochures in the event that citizens spread supposed “xenophobia” and “fake news”. There is ample precedent for such a course of action on the continent: During the Cold War, people living behind the Iron Curtain had their private letters opened by the communist authorities; those passages deemed to be out of line with the communist orthodoxy, were simply blacked out.

Who would have thought that more than a quarter of a century after the fall of the Berlin Wall (1989), Western Europe would be reinventing itself in the image of the Soviet Union?

All this helps Islam to conquer and colonize Europe. All this is done in order to help Islam conquer and colonize Europe.

If the peoples of Europe want to survive, they must overthrow their present rulers, the suigenocides who are doing this, and rid themselves of the Muslim invaders very soon.

It may already be too late. But they must try to make their countries independent, secular and great again.

US President Trump shows them the way.

About that fake “Trump in league with the Russians” story put out by the Democrats to illegitimize this presidency: it seems the Democrats commissioned a crooked cyber company to impersonate Russian hackers.

And what is more, that crooked cyber company has links to none other than the earthly satan, George Soros.

William Craddick writes at Disobedient Media:

The cyber firm Crowdstrike has been one of the main proponents of allegations that Russia interfered in the 2016 American presidential elections using their cyber capabilities. The analysis performed by Crowdstrike was relied on almost exclusively by the Democratic National Committee (DNC) to establish their claims of “Russian hacking”. 

It has subsequently been revealed that Crowdstrike has in the past both misrepresented data in an attempt to frame the Russian governmentfor cyber attacks and also failed to account for known capabilities of third parties which enable them to impersonate Russian hackers.

The founder of Crowdstrike is also tied to the Atlantic Council, a think tank supported by George Soros which has been accused of accepting funds in exchange for support of favored policy positions as well as promoting disinformation and propaganda attacks against anti-establishment figures.

On June 14, 2016, Crowdstrike published a study commissioned by the DNC, in which they accused the Russian government of breaching the DNC’s computer systems. The DNC’s choice to rely on Crowdstrike exclusively was incredibly controversial. CNN reported that the DNC actually refused to grant the FBI access to their servers despite the agency’s explicitly stating that they could conduct a satisfactory investigation if they were forced to rely on third party data. The report by Crowdstrike stood as one of the first definitive authorities which [claimed to have] found evidence of Russian cyber infiltration or electronic meddling in the 2016 elections. Rather than confirm the notion that Russia interfered in American elections, a number of other developments since Crowdstrike’s report have cast increasing doubt on their claims and in fact have suggested that they may be part of a widespread attempt to push disinformation for financial gain and benefit to the groups clients and affiliates.

Alarming indicators that Crowdstrike may have been promoting the idea of “Russian hacking” out of ulterior motives began to emerge almost immediately after their report was released. On July 28th, 2016, The Washington Post reported that Crowdstrike was one of a number of cyber security firms making a large profit thanks to widespread fears about Russian hackers. …

Crowdstrike’s analysis also ignored known capabilities, since publicized by Wikileaks in their Day Zero and Marble releases from the Vault 7 series, … that allow programmers to mask the identity of their malware and masquerade it as belonging to foreign intelligence agencies and mimic their online attack methods. They have also shown that many programmers have the ability to create an appearance of  “false attribution” which gives the impression that the malware was created by another country, even mimicking the native language of the host country they intend to attribute the attack to.

On December 22nd, 2016, Crowdstrike ran another report, alleging that Russians hacked into a Ukrainian artillery app, resulting in heavy losses of howitzers in Ukraine’s civil war with Russian-backed separatists. The report was intended to buttress its claims of Russian hacking in the presidential election. The report was immediately contested by Yaroslav Sherstyuk, maker of the Ukrainian military app in question, who called the company’s report “delusional”.

On March 23rd, 2017, Voice of America(VOA) ran a damning piece, citing British think tank the International Institute for Strategic Studies (IISS) which stated that CrowdStrike erroneously used IISS data as proof of the intrusion. Furthermore, the IISS disavowed any connection to the CrowdStrike report. The Ukrainian Ministry of Defense also claimed that the combat losses and hacking never happened, meaning that Crowdstrike had apparently fabricated facts and details in the report completely.

Crowdstrike told VOA that they stood by their findings. But the next day VOA noted that Crowdstrike had altered their report, deleting key assertions they had made in the report about Ukrainian army losses, claims that a malware infection contributed to artillery losses and a link to IISS data which they had cited. The humiliating redactions apparently came after Crowdstrike had spoken with an IISS research associate for defense and military analysis.

The apparent misrepresentation of data which had been intended to support Crowdstrike’s claims of Russian hacking creates serious questions about the merits of their claims that Russia was behind alleged hacks of the DNC’s computer systems earlier that year.

Further investigation has revealed that Crowdstrike has deep ties to a think tank which has a history of pay-to-play practices and a track record of seeking to foment confrontation between the United States and Russia.

Crowdstrike founder Dmitri Alperovitch acts as a Senior Fellow for the Atlantic Council. In February, Disobedient Media reported that the Atlantic Council has a troubling history of taking money from foreign special interest groups and government agencies in return for pushing propaganda to support various initiatives around the globe. …

In May 2016, a report by the Associated Press identified the Atlantic Council as one of a number of think tanks which had received funding from the Ploughshares Fund, which was a major player in efforts to sell the Iranian nuclear deal to the American public. The Ploughshares Fund is financed by George Soros’ Open Society Foundation. …

The organization has also promoted unsourced and unfounded claims that Russia was responsible for “hacking” the 2016 U.S. presidential elections despite the fact that this conspiracy theory has been resoundingly debunked by various authorities in the intelligence community and by multiple media sources. The Atlantic Council, unfazed by the evidence that their claims of hacking were false, have continued to promote these falsehoods in the aftermath of the election in what appeared to be a possible effort to undermine American democratic institutions.

The tight relationship between Crowdstrike and a think tank which also has a long track record of promoting unproven claims about Russian hacking, their failure to account for false attribution techniques commonly used by programmers to frame other countries for hacking attacks and their history of making factually untrue and misleading claims about Russian hacking creates concerns about their ability to objectively report on whether or not the DNC’s servers were breached by a foreign actor during the 2016 elections.

Their association with the DNC comes at a time when the party has been attempting to craft a narrative of alleged Russian hacking to support their election bids in the upcoming 2018 U.S. midterm elections and delegitimize the victories of their political opponents in 2016.

The Atlantic Council’s past relationship with George Soros is also problematic given that Soros has deep financial ties to groups organizing resistance movements as part of an attempt to enact regime change in the United States.

As former CIA Director Michael Morell, James Clapper and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence have all clearly stated that there is not, nor has ever been any evidence that Russian hacking affected any election results in the 2016 U.S. Presidential Elections, the efforts of Crowdstrike to promote claims to the contrary raises serious questions about their research as well as the intentions of the DNC in preventing neutral federal regulatory agencies from examining their servers firsthand to verify the claims.

So the Democrats paid a gang of known cyber crooks, with a chief who has a history of being paid by George Soros, to fake “evidence” that Russia hacked the 2016 elections in order to help Donald Trump win the presidency.

Such is the murky depth to which the Democrats – and their toady media which spread the fake claims – have sunk.

Except in Western institutions of education, the socialist Left is a spent force.

Where it has had absolute power it stands in the midst of the ruin it has made (Cuba, Venezuela); or it has conceded that only capitalism brings prosperity (China); or it screams absurdly that it will destroy the West and fires dud missiles over the ocean (North Korea). No new such states will be established in the foreseeable future.

Where it has had to share power it is seen by voters as standing for nothing worth voting for.

The British Labour Party is decaying – even according to its own members.

“The Dutch Labour Party (PvdA) has suffered the worst result in their history after losing more than three-quarters of their parliamentary seats in [the recent] general election.”

The French Socialist Party is “heading for implosion “ in the forthcoming elections.

The Democratic Party in America (yes, it is a socialist party) is a sad rump. The president is a Republican and the Republicans control the House of Representatives and the Senate. The Supreme Court will most likely be dominated by conservative justices for a long time to come.

Even pro-Democrat CNS News, however reluctantly, reports:

Republicans are now in control of a record 67 (68 percent) of the 98 partisan state legislative chambers in the nation, more than twice the number (31) in which Democrats have a majority … In 24 of the 32 states with Republican-controlled legislatures, voters have also elected Republican governors. In contrast, Democrats have a “political trifecta” in just six states.

The country was not excited by the prospect of a leadership consisting of senile Nancy Pelosi, dishonest whiny Harry Reid, and crooked Hillary Clinton.

Of course the dark side is going down fighting. Its militant cohorts consist of black-clothed thugs who mob-attack Republicans and anyone else they don’t like with with fire, clubs, fists, and boots.

Elected Democrats, the unhappy few, are doing their utmost to destroy the Trump presidency, chiefly by pretending with a great deal of faux outrage that President Trump is in league with the Russian government!

Leftists want power for power’s sake. They want one-party rule – their own perpetually. They try to buy votes by offering “free stuff”. The Venezuelans fell for that, and now they are sans food, sans medicine, sans hope, sans everything.

But the fight is on. In America it is a kind of civil war.

Daniel Greenfield writes at Front Page:

A civil war has begun.

This civil war is very different than the last one. There are no cannons or cavalry charges. The left doesn’t want to secede. It wants to rule. Political conflicts become civil wars when one side refuses to accept the existing authority. The left has rejected all forms of authority that it doesn’t control.

The left has rejected the outcome of the last two presidential elections won by Republicans. It has rejected the judicial authority of the Supreme Court when it decisions don’t accord with its agenda. It rejects the legislative authority of Congress when it is not dominated by the left.

It rejected the Constitution so long ago that it hardly bears mentioning.

It was for total unilateral executive authority under Obama. And now it’s for states unilaterally deciding what laws they will follow. (As long as that involves defying immigration laws under Trump, not following them under Obama.) It was for the sacrosanct authority of the Senate when it held the majority. Then it decried the Senate as an outmoded institution when the Republicans took it over.

It was for Obama defying the orders of Federal judges, no matter how well grounded in existing law, and it is for Federal judges overriding any order by Trump on any grounds whatsoever. It was for Obama penalizing whistleblowers, but now undermining the government from within has become “patriotic”.

There is no form of legal authority that the left accepts as a permanent institution. It only utilizes forms of authority selectively when it controls them. But when government officials refuse the orders of the duly elected government because their allegiance is to an ideology whose agenda is in conflict with the President and Congress, that’s not activism, protest, politics or civil disobedience; it’s treason.

After losing Congress, the left consolidated its authority in the White House. After losing the White House, the left shifted its center of authority to Federal judges and unelected government officials. Each defeat led the radicalized Democrats to relocate from more democratic to less democratic institutions.

This isn’t just hypocrisy. That’s a common political sin. Hypocrites maneuver within the system. The left has no allegiance to the system. It accepts no laws other than those dictated by its ideology.

Democrats have become radicalized by the left. This doesn’t just mean that they pursue all sorts of bad policies. It means that their first and foremost allegiance is to an ideology, not the Constitution, not our country or our system of government. All of those are only to be used as vehicles for their ideology.

That’s why compromise has become impossible.

Our system of government was designed to allow different groups to negotiate their differences. But those differences were supposed to be based around finding shared interests. The most profound of these shared interests was that of a common country based around certain civilizational values. The left has replaced these Founding ideas with radically different notions and principles. It has rejected the primary importance of the country. As a result it shares little in the way of interests or values.

Instead it has retreated to cultural urban and suburban enclaves where it has centralized tremendous amounts of power while disregarding the interests and values of most of the country. If it considers them at all, it is convinced that they will shortly disappear to be replaced by compliant immigrants and college indoctrinated leftists who will form a permanent demographic majority for its agenda.

But it couldn’t wait that long because it is animated by the conviction that enforcing its ideas is urgent and inevitable. And so it turned what had been a hidden transition into an open break.

In the hidden transition, its authority figures had hijacked the law and every political office they held to pursue their ideological agenda. The left had used its vast cultural power to manufacture a consensus that was slowly transitioning the country from American values to its values and agendas. The right had proven largely impotent in the face of a program which corrupted and subverted from within.

The left was enormously successful in this regard. It was so successful that it lost all sense of proportion and decided to be open about its views and to launch a political power struggle after losing an election.

The Democrats were no longer being slowly injected with leftist ideology. Instead the left openly took over and demanded allegiance to open borders, identity politics and environmental fanaticism. The exodus of voters wiped out the Democrats across much of what the left deemed flyover country.

The left responded to democratic defeats by retreating deeper into undemocratic institutions, whether it was the bureaucracy or the corporate media, while doubling down on its political radicalism. It is now openly defying the outcome of a national election using a coalition of bureaucrats, corporations, unelected officials, celebrities and reporters that are based out of its cultural and political enclaves.

It has responded to a lost election by constructing sanctuary cities and states thereby turning a cultural and ideological secession into a legal secession. But while secessionists want to be left alone authoritarians want everyone to follow their laws. The left is an authoritarian movement that wants total compliance with its dictates with severe punishments for those who disobey.

The left describes its actions as principled. But more accurately they are ideological. Officials at various levels of government have rejected the authority of the President of the United States, of Congress and of the Constitution because those are at odds with their radical ideology. Judges have cloaked this rejection in law. Mayors and governors are not even pretending that their actions are lawful.

The choices of this civil war are painfully clear.

We can have a system of government based around the Constitution with democratically elected representatives. Or we can have one based on the ideological principles of the left in which all laws and processes, including elections and the Constitution, are fig leaves for enforcing social justice.

But we cannot have both.

Some civil wars happen when a political conflict can’t be resolved at the political level. The really bad ones happen when an irresolvable political conflict combines with an irresolvable cultural conflict.

That is what we have now.

The left has made it clear that it will not accept the lawful authority of our system of government. It will not accept the outcome of elections. It will not accept these things because they are at odds with its ideology and because they represent the will of large portions of the country whom they despise.

The question is what comes next.

The last time around growing tensions began to explode in violent confrontations between extremists on both sides. These extremists were lauded by moderates who mainstreamed their views. The first Republican president was elected and rejected. The political tensions led to conflict and then civil war.

The left doesn’t believe in secession. It’s an authoritarian political movement that has lost democratic authority. There is now a political power struggle underway between the democratically elected officials and the undemocratic machinery of government aided by a handful of judges and local elected officials.

What this really means is that there are two competing governments; the legal government and a treasonous anti-government of the left. If this political conflict progresses, agencies and individuals at every level of government will be asked to demonstrate their allegiance to these two competing governments. And that can swiftly and explosively transform into an actual civil war.

There is no sign that the left understands or is troubled by the implications of the conflict it has initiated. And there are few signs that Democrats properly understand the dangerous road that the radical left is drawing them toward. The left assumes that the winners of a democratic election will back down rather than stand on their authority. It is unprepared for the possibility that democracy won’t die in darkness.

Civil wars end when one side is forced to accept the authority of the other. The left expects everyone to accept its ideological authority. Conservatives expect the left to accept Constitutional authority. The conflict is still political and cultural. It’s being fought in the media and within the government. But if neither side backs down, then it will go beyond words as both sides give contradictory orders.

The left is a treasonous movement. The Democrats became a treasonous organization when they fell under the sway of a movement that rejects our system of government, its laws and its elections. Now their treason is coming to a head. They are engaged in a struggle for power against the government. That’s not protest. It’s not activism. The old treason of the sixties has come of age. A civil war has begun.

This is a primal conflict between a totalitarian system and a democratic system. Its outcome will determine whether we will be a free nation or a nation of slaves.

We see the Left totalitarians losing the war. Nasty as their fight is and will continue to be for quite some time, it is not them we have to fear but their terrible foster-child, Islam. 

That is the totalitarian force that is gathering strength – and in Europe it is winning.

Pat Condell on how Islam “has nothing to do with Islam”:

And this is from an article  in the The Participator by Chauncey Tinker, titled Terror Attack in the Heart of London:

Following this week’s attack in Westminster, the subject of extremism is back once again on the front pages.

The purpose of the UK’s “Prevent” strategy is not to deal directly with these kinds of terrorist attacks. “Prevent” is only one “work stream” of four in the UK’s larger counter-terrorism strategy called “CONTEST“. “Prevent” is supposed to stop people from becoming “radicalized” in the first place, by challenging those promoting “extremist” ideologies, and intervening early to influence those at risk of becoming “radicalized” away from “extremist” ideas.

IS THE PREVENT STRATEGY HAVING ANY EFFECT AT ALL?

The Independent reported in November last year on “an extremist group with links to 140 Isis fighters active in UK”. Here the Independent show pictures of the group openly selling Korans in Oxford St., London. Quote from the article:

Members of an extremist group banned in Germany for inspiring more than 140 Isis fighters with its “violent” ideology are active in the UK and seeking to recruit followers in Britain’s largest cities, The Independent can reveal.

It seems quite extraordinary does it not that over a decade after the “Prevent” strategy was first introduced, things like this are still going on openly in a busy street in the heart of the capital. However, this is just the tip of a very large iceberg of course.

In an effort to reassure the Muslim population that the “Prevent” strategy was not exclusively targetting members of their faith, the authorities recently publicized their work to “de-radicalize” a 14-year old boy in Yorkshire:

He was saying that Muslim women shouldn’t be allowed to wear the niqab and he had his head filled with nonsense that Muslims were trying to take over the country.

Nonsense perhaps that has also been expressed by Muslims as well, for example a Muslim caller on a BBC Asian Network program recently said:

Sooner or later Islam is going to be taking over anyway.

I would also like to cast readers’ minds back to a speech given by the UK’s first Muslim government minister, Shahid Malik, where he expresses the view to a large Muslim audience that:

At this rate the whole parliament will be Muslim.

He then adds (with a big smirk):

… but just to say, in case there are journalists here today, that is not my objective.

Has Mr. Malik been de-radicalized by the “Prevent” strategy yet, I wonder? During his time in government he held a number of posts including Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Justice. Surely the extremist view of a prominent politician (indistinguishable from that schoolboy’s view) is far more in danger of radicalizing impressionable youngsters than the rants of a lone schoolboy in a school playground?

During Mr. Malik’s time as “Cohesion Minister”, he was accused of “going soft on Muslim youths in the war against extremism”. According to an article in the Daily Express, Mr. Malik may in fact have been personally responsible for the original change in direction of the policy that led it to target this young schoolboy in Yorkshire. Strange then, that his own views are so very similar. They both seem to believe that Muslims are taking over the country.

Cohesion Minister Shahid Malik said the £45 million-a-year “Prevent” strategy would also work in deprived white areas rather than concentrating on Muslim youths.

Its also odd that this young boy was targeted by the Prevent strategy when many others including prominent politicians have expressed similar views about the more extreme forms of Islamic dress, for example from the Daily Telegraph:

MP calls for burkas to be banned in Britain

I wonder if Mr. Hollobone (Conservative MP for Kettering) is currently being “de-radicalized” by the “Prevent” strategy as well?

I would describe what is going on here as state bullying of a minor, nothing more dignified than that. The authorities imagine that by bullying the odd hapless schoolchild here and there they can hoodwink the UK public into thinking that they are getting tough on real extremism. By real extremism I mean direct and credible incitement to violence, not merely suggesting that the niqab should be banned, or simply projecting current population trends into the not so distant future. …

The hypocrisy of the UK’s current “leadership” is truly breathtaking to behold.

As is the same hypocrisy of the leaders of almost every country in the West  – President Trump being the most important of the rare exceptions.

He insists that the acts of terrorism carried out by Muslims are “Islamic” – and saboteurs among his White House staff try to remove the word.

From the Washington Free Beacon:

In one instance, Trump administration officials found evidence that the administration’s executive order banning travel from certain Muslim-majority nations had been selectively altered to bring it more in line with Obama-era talking points.

Several hours before the orders were set to be signed by Trump, officials noticed that language concerning “radical Islamic terrorism” had been stripped from the order and replaced with Obama-era language about countering “violent extremism”.

Because although the terrorist acts are carried out by Muslims in the name of their religion, to fulfill the Islamic religious duty of jihad, they still have

“NOTHING TO DO WITH ISLAM“

George Soros is an evil man. Go here, to Discover the Networks, to read about the evil he does, the many subversive and insurrectionist movements he funds.

From the days of his early youth spent helping the Nazis implement the Holocaust, to his sponsoring now in his old age the Muslim-organized marches of (pathetically stupid) women to protest the election of President Trump in America, he has unwaveringly pursued his satanic aim – the wrecking of Western civilization.

But the news agency Reuters likes him and his works.

We emphasize examples of their bias in the story they tell of how the Hungarian government’s effort to ward off the flood of Muslim immigrants* –  now overwhelming western Europe – is being impeded by George Soros.

Reuters reports and opines:

When his government lost a lawsuit in the European Court of Human Rights last week over its detention and expulsion of two migrants from Bangladesh, Hungary’s rightwing prime minister blamed the usual suspect: a billionaire in New York.

“The usual suspect”  is of course a reference to the famous line of dialogue in the film Casablanca, in which the French police chief gives orders to his men to  “round up the usual suspects” in order to deceive the Nazi occupiers of the French territory that he is serving them when he isn’t. The “usual suspects” are innocent of the crime they are being rounded up to answer for. The use of the phrase by Reuters conveys their belief in George Soros’s innocence.

“It is a collusion of human traffickers, Brussels bureaucrats and the organizations that work in Hungary financed by foreign money,” Viktor Orban told public radio on Friday.

“Let’s call a spade a spade: George Soros finances them.”

Yes, it is such a collusion, and Soros is financing it.

Across former Communist states of east and central Europe, leaders with a hardline bent have turned their wrath in recent months against Soros, a Hungarian-American financier who funds liberal charities and non-governmental organizations worldwide through his Open Society Foundations (OSF).

A more Orwellian use of the phrase “open society” could not be devised by the author of 1984 himself.

The campaign against Soros in countries formerly dominated by Moscow appears to follow a template set by Russian President Vladimir Putin, whose own crackdown on foreign-funded charities drove Soros’s foundation out of Russia two years ago.

Reuters would have us weep for poor Soros and his foundation. And, they imply, if he’s a victim of Putin, he must be a good guy.

And now, with President Donald Trump in the White House, anti-Soros campaigners in Eastern Europe say they have also drawn inspiration from the United States, particularly from rightwing U.S. media like the website Breitbart, which has long vilified Soros as a liberal hate figure.

A nice, good, liberal person, just “vilified” out of sheer spite and reasonless hate – in the opinion of Reuters.

Breitbart’s former chairman Steve Bannon now serves as a senior White House adviser to Trump.

“Our inspiration comes from the United States, from the American conservative organizations, media and congressmen with the same views, especially the new administration of President Trump,” said Cvetlin Cilimanov, the editor of the main state news agency in Macedonia, who co-founded a group called Operation Stop Soros in January.

Macedonia, a former Yugoslav republic north of Greece, has been embroiled in a political crisis that began two years ago with street demonstrations and forced nationalist prime minister Nikola Gruevski to resign last year after a decade in power. Gruevski, who still controls the biggest bloc in parliament and is expected to return to power, blames Soros for his downfall.

So now, despite the acid tones and slanted reporting of Reuters, we begin to get a glimpse of what Soros has actually been up to:

“Soros turns Macedonian NGOs into a modern army,” he [Gruevski] told local magazine Republika in January. “They crush you. They make you a criminal, a thief, traitor, idiot, a monster, whatever they want. Then you have to go to elections.”

“He doesn’t only do that in Macedonia but in a great number of countries.”

In Romania, ruling Social Democrat party leader Liviu Dragnea told a TV interviewer in January that Soros and “the foundations and structures that he has funded since 1990 have financed evil in Romania”.

Soros has also been attacked by members of Poland’s ruling Law and Justice party and politicians elsewhere in the region.

And according to Reuters they are all wrong; they speak purely out of malice; they are lying.

… Hundreds of groups worldwide have accepted [OSF]  money over the years, allowing conspiracy theorists and other foes to paint Soros as the center of a vast web.

He is the center of a vast web.

 In countries like Hungary, so many human rights groups have sought OSF grants at some point that politicians can use the association with Soros to attack whole swathes of civil society.

The “whole swathes” are Soros funded organizations out to destroy the nation-state of “countries like Hungary”:

“Fake NGOs of the Soros empire are sustained to suppress national governments in favor of global capital and the world of political correctness,” Szilard Nemeth, a deputy leader of Orban’s ruling Fidesz party, said in January.

“These organizations must be repressed by all means and I think they must be culled altogether. I think there is an international opportunity to do that now.” …

Opposition to immigration has been the core of  Orban’s political message since 2015, when more than a million migrants and refugees entered the EU through the Balkans. Hungary was initially their main entry point into the bloc’s border-free zone, although nearly all proceeded on to Germany and other countries further north. Orban built a fence to keep them out.

Meanwhile, Soros prioritized support for charities that help migrants and asylum seekers. At the height of the flow in 2015, his OSF put out a statement saying: “The Hungarian crisis demonstrates the dangers radical populist regimes pose not only to the hundreds of thousands of refugees, but also to the values of Europe and to the humanity of the local populations.”

But Orban’s message still hammers home the need to keep out migrants, and he portrays rights groups as part of a plot to abolish nation states and flood Europe with foreigners.

Hungary’s Helsinki Committee, a rights group founded in 1989 that has accepted Soros funding, helped defeat the government in court in Strasbourg. It argued that two Bangladeshi migrants had been unlawfully detained at a makeshift transit zone on the Hungarian-Serbian border and expelled with no regard to their future safety, in violation of their rights.

Orban has proposed new rules governing asylum due to take effect in coming days that his opponents say ignore the principles of the Strasbourg ruling.

Helsinki co-Chair Marta Pardavi says she expects to file many more cases on behalf of migrants who are in similar positions, which could generate a systemic intervention by Strasbourg and a tooth-and-nail fight with the government.

“Our position, which Orban has called ‘pretty human rights nonsense’ has just won in Strasbourg,” she said. “If I were the Hungarian government I would be considering the necessary legislative amendments now.”

Pardavi said her organization, made up mainly of lawyers, would not be intimidated by a government crackdown, but other groups were likely to be less resilient, and the crackdown could deter activism in the country more broadly.

*Yesterday, in our post (immediately below) Western feminists are for the subjugation of women, we approved the Thomson Reuters Foundation’s opposition to the Islamic jihad, in particular in Nigeria. It seems that the two organizations – Reuters the news agency and the Thomson Reuters Foundation – do not have consistently matching principles and policies.