A long-overdue move

Wait, whut, you telling me they haven’t been already?

‘Needs to happen’: U.S. lawmakers move to designate American Muslim activists as foreign terror organization
The state of Texas already considers CAIR, the Quran-promoting Council on American-Islamic Relations, a terror group.

So do several foreign nations.

Now there’s a move developing in Congress to have CAIR officially labeled as a foreign terrorist group.

A report at the Center Square said the push is coming from key congressional members.

The group has asked the Trump administration to consider designating CAIR, which promotes Islam, as a terror group.

U.S. Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, already had called for that designation.

Now U.S. Rep. Randy Fine, of Florida, is sponsoring a plan to instruct the State Department to determine whether CAIR meets the criteria for an FTO label.

“It is a foreign terrorist organization,” he said in an interview with the Center Square. “I mean, CAIR was founded as an arm of the Muslim Brotherhood. It’s the front for Hamas.”

Hamas is the terror organization that several years ago invaded Israel in an act of war and slaughtered some 1,200 civilians, kidnapping hundreds more.

U.S. Rep. Earl S. “Buddy” Carter, of Georgia, said, “It’s something that needs to happen.”

Sheeeeiit, pal, it’s something that should’ve happened YEARS ago. After 9/11/01, it’s somewhat difficult to fathom how it hasn’t…or why.

UNEXPECTED!©

Gee, who among us saw THIS one coming?

New Crime Stats: Children of Migrants More Likely to Be Criminals Than First Generation
I have been following Danish crime stats because Denmark is one of the few countries that track crime using key demographic variables such as race, religion, country of origin, and immigration status (and their descendants).

For years now, Danish crime statistics tell us what we already can intuit from the data we do have: migrants from Muslim countries commit crimes at a vastly higher rate than native-born Europeans, and the statistics indicate that the rates aren’t even close. They are especially represented in the sexual crime statistics, but in just about every category, the differences are remarkable.

But what most people who support mass migration might be surprised to learn is this: their male descendants are even more likely to commit crimes and are often more likely to be Islamist extremists than their parents. Again, the statistics show the differences aren’t even close.

Here are the basic facts: as first-generation Muslim immigrants have aged, their propensity to commit crimes has decreased somewhat, leading to a slight decline in first-generation crime statistics. They are now only about two times more likely to commit crimes as native-born Danes, which is still pretty bad.

More worrying is that their sons are even more likely to commit crimes than they were; the rate is three times as high, or even higher in some cases, and they are also more likely to see themselves as the natural replacements for a declining population in their adopted countries.

Indisputable confirmation of the essential truth underpinning the hoary old maxim: Invite the Third World, become the Third World.

Western delusion

The New Religious War, same as the Old Religious War. Except that this time, we’ve lost.

Today, it’s easy to see just how naive and shallow Ambrose’s analysis was. The idea that there would be no more major ideological conflicts, or that Western civilization had nothing to fear from competing cultures and peoples, was positively delusional.

But it was a delusion enabled and strengthened by a fundamentally secular worldview that refused to take the claims of religion seriously — claims that precede and give coherence to political claims and ideologies. It was a delusion, in other words, enabled by an Enlightenment philosophy that looked on religion as a quaint relic of a bygone era. The religious conflicts of earlier epochs had naturally given way to the ideological contests of the 20th century, and now those contests were settled. At the dawn of the 21st century, no one could possibly take religion seriously, or think that medieval religious disputes had any relevance in the post-Cold War world that was taking shape.

Then 9/11 happened. But instead of shattering this delusion, great efforts were made to shore it up. This proved difficult (but not impossible) because the leaders of al-Qaida were obviously motivated by religious beliefs, and said so repeatedly. In his November 2002 Letter to America, Osama bin Laden explained his motivations and aims in great detail. Organized as a series of questions and answers, the letter laid out al-Qaida’s reasons for attacking on 9/11 and also stated what al-Qaida wanted from us.

“The first thing that we are calling you to is Islam,” bin Laden wrote. It’s a striking admission. The terrorists’ first priority was not for the U.S. to leave Muslim lands, or halt support for Israel, or stop propping up authoritarian regimes in the Middle East. All of those demands come after what bin Laden says is the first thing he wants for America, which is conversion to Islam: “The religion of the Unification of God … of complete submission to His Laws; and of the discarding of all the opinions, orders, theories and religions which contradict with the religion He sent down to His Prophet Muhammad (peace be upon him).”

Despite such an explicit statement from bin Laden, and others like it from jihadist Muslims around the world, almost no one in the West wanted to acknowledge this reality and its implications, because doing so would undermine the animating idea of the post-Cold War project. If sincere religious convictions could inspire Muslims in the 21st century to carry out attacks like 9/11, then it wasn’t really true that all religions are the same. And if that’s the case, then all peoples and cultures are also not the same, and neither is all labor, and suddenly the entire agenda of creating a borderless world of global free markets is called into question.

So almost immediately after 9/11 our political leaders and most major media outlets scrambled to declare that Islam had nothing to do with the attacks, that there was nothing to fear from Muslims, and that anyone who suggested otherwise was a bad American.

Less than a week after 9/11, as the rubble of the Twin Towers was still smoldering, President George W. Bush gave his now infamous “Islam is peace” speech after meeting with Muslim leaders at the Islamic Center of Washington. “The face of terror is not the true faith of Islam,” he said. “That’s not what Islam is all about. Islam is peace. These terrorists don’t represent peace. They represent evil and war.” The terrorist attacks, he said, “violate the fundamental tenets of the Islamic faith. And it’s important for my fellow Americans to understand that.”

It was an absurd thing for an American president to say (as if Bush knew the first thing about the fundamental tenets of Islam), but it was especially absurd, and indeed offensive, as a response to terrorist attacks that had just killed thousands of Americans. Adding to the insult and absurdity was the fact that Bush was surrounded by Muslim leaders who condemned the attacks on narrow grounds but shared the overall religious worldview of the hijackers and their al-Qaida handlers. But in Bush’s version of the world, those people were no different than any other Americans, and in fact “love America just as much as I do.”

In saying these things, the president was simply expressing the mainstream liberal view, shared by almost all our political and media elite, who were unable to recognize the religious and civilizational nature of the conflict that had erupted. It was inconceivable to them that authentic religious beliefs could ever motivate anyone to commit an act of mass violence like 9/11. After all, religions were all supposed to be fundamentally the same. They all teach the same things, more or less, and they all lead to peace. Evil and cynical people might try to twist religion and use it to justify their crimes or a political agenda, but such people are not — and cannot be — true representatives of religion.

We heard versions of this over and over again in the years after 9/11 — and especially in the lead-up to the Iraq War. All people, we were told, yearn for liberty, hence we would be greeted as liberators in Iraq. All nations should be organized along the lines of liberal democracy, hence we should ensure that Afghan women are able to get degrees in women’s studies and Afghan girls are able to attend school. What’s more, we could import democracy to these places, and it would work because freedom and democracy are what everyone, everywhere, really wants. In his second inaugural address, President Bush stated explicitly that “it is the policy of the United States to seek and support the growth of democratic movements and institutions in every nation and culture, with the ultimate goal of ending tyranny in our world.”

Ending tyranny in the world might sound like a ridiculous thing for a White House administration to tackle, but they were serious about it. I remember a political science professor of mine from Hillsdale being dispatched to Iraq by the State Department in 2004, after we had toppled Saddam Hussein. He was part of a group of scholars the government had tasked with establishing a basis for Western-style rule of law and constitutionalism in the Koran and in Islamic tradition. That such a basis had not yet been established or discovered in the previous 1,400 years of Islam did not dissuade them. They really thought it was possible, and went to great lengths in the attempt, which of course failed.

It never occurred to them that not all religions and cultures are actually the same, and do not produce the same things. It never occurred to them that Christianity, not the act of voting, is why representative democracy created peace and stability in the West. Or that it might not be possible to establish a basis for constitutional democracy in a Muslim nation because of the nature of Islam. Or that not everyone, in fact, yearns for liberty. Some people yearn instead for justice. Some people would rather have vengeance than freedom and prosperity. If you introduce democracy to a place like Iraq, or Syria, or Gaza, the people might not vote for Western liberalism. They might vote for Hamas.

Even if these things did occur to our leadership class, as they might well have, it would have been unwelcome to bring them up at the time. And in fact almost no one said anything along these lines.

Instead, our leaders doubled down on Stephen Ambrose’s version of the world. The cultural mood of the West in the decade before 9/11 was one of breezy optimism and post-Cold War insouciance. After 9/11 this mood transformed into official policy. Not only did we think we could bring Western-style democracy to tribal Muslim peoples, we thought we could bring those peoples here and integrate them into American life.

The multicultural propaganda that had been fed to us in school throughout the 1990s took shape after 9/11, and we began importing Muslims from far-flung countries in record numbers — people from the same countries that had celebrated and danced in the streets when the towers fell. Pew Research estimates the number of Muslims in the U.S. grew from 2.4 million in 2007, the first time it performed such a tabulation, to 5.5 million today (likely a low estimate). The number of mosques has likewise increased during those years, from an estimated 1,200 to 2,800.

For the left, this was only fair. A legacy of colonialism and American meddling in the Middle East was after all to blame for the backwardness and economic depression of the Muslim world, they argued. We owed it to those countries to allow mass immigration to the West, and if Muslims in the Third World harbored resentment against America, they had good reason for it. This is now mainstream thinking among Democrats. New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani has repeatedly defended calls to “globalize the intifada,” for example, and has campaigned with the likes of Hasan Piker, who said that the United States “deserved 9/11.”

For the right, it took the arrival of Donald Trump even to be able to talk about these things. And even now, if you have the temerity to notice that Muslims in America fail to assimilate because they have no interest in assimilating, or that they recreate versions of their home countries and cultures here in America, or that Islam is clearly incompatible with American society, half the country will call you a racist.

That is the real legacy of 9/11. It was the beginning of a religious war that we lost because we refused to recognize the religious nature of it. We were committed instead to a secular account of the world in which religion makes no real claims on its adherents and imposes no real costs on unbelievers.

What we owe the victims of 9/11, all these years later, is to be done with all that nonsense, and to see the world, finally, as it really is.

Yeah, like THAT’S ever gonna happen. Sorry, but I’m afraid we Men of the West just don’t have it in us anymore to look the harsher realities straight in the face without flinching and/or dissembling, same as we can no longer call things by their right names. Our Lords and Masters simply don’t allow that, and we’re Americans: we do as we’re told.

Steyn sampler

Been rummaging through several of Steyn’s old 9/11-remembrance columns from byone years, and it hit me that a collection of sundry quips and quotes from the articles might be a very cool thing. So, without further ado, off we go!

In any war, you have to be able to prioritize:

You can’t win everything, so where would you rather win? Raqqa or Rotterdam? Kandahar or Cannes? Yet, whenever some guy goes Allahu Akbar on the streets of a western city, the telly pundits generally fall into one of two groups: The left say it’s no big deal, and the right say this is why we need more boots on the ground in Syria or Afghanistan. Yesterday President Trump said he was committed to ensuring that terrorists “never again have a safe haven to launch attacks against our country”.

By that he means “safe havens” in Afghanistan. But the reason the west’s enemies are able to pile up a continuous corpse count in Paris, Nice, Berlin, Brussels, London, Manchester, Copenhagen, Stockholm, Orlando, San Bernadino, Ottawa, Sydney, Barcelona, [Your Town Here] is because they have “safe havens” in France, Germany, Britain, Scandinavia, North America, etc. Which “safe havens” are likely to prove more consequential for the developed world in the years ahead?

Who’s winning what turf? After sixteen years of western military occupation, the Taliban control more territory in Afghanistan than at any time since the first US troops went in. On the other hand, after sixteen years of accelerating Islamic immigration, Europe has more no-go zones, more sharia courts, more refugees, more covered women, more Muslim-dominated schoolhouses, more radical mosques, more female genital mutilation, more grooming and gang rape, more Muslim Brotherhood front groups, more Muslim mayors and legislators, more Muslim-funded Middle East Studies programs at universities …and fewer churches, fewer Jews in Toulouse, fewer gays in Amsterdam, fewer unaccompanied women out after dark in German and Swedish cities, fewer historical representations of Mohammed in Continental museums, art galleries and scholarly books, fewer mixed bathing sessions at municipal swimming pools, fewer lessons on the Crusades and the Holocaust in European schools …and less and less free speech in some of the oldest democracies on earth.

In Afghanistan, we’re fighting for something not worth winning, and we’re losing. In Europe, Islam is fighting for something very much worth winning, and they’re advancing. And, according to all the official strategists in Washington and elsewhere, these two things are nothing to do with each other.

To be fair, a lot of the ever increasing restraints on free expression are self-imposed: newspapers decide that it would be “insensitive” to publish certain cartoons, publishers politely decline novels on certain themes, and in Minnesota white progressives agonize that remembering 9/11 is “Islamophobic”. Which is weird – because a space alien visiting the United States for Monday’s ceremonies would have been stunned to discover that Islam had anything to do with 9/11. As I mentioned yesterday, the President forbore to mention Islam at all: Instead, we were attacked by “horrible, horrible enemies” and “enemies like we’ve never seen before”. Well, we’ve seen a lot of them since, and they appear to have certain things in common – things that this President was once not shy about mentioning.

From SteynOnline, September 12th 2017

The NEA warms up with a little light non-judgmentalism by advising teachers not to ‘suggest any group is responsible’ for the, ah, ‘tragic events’. Just because Osama bin Laden and al-Qa’eda boasted that they did it is no reason to jump to conclusions. ‘Blaming is especially difficult in terrorist situations because someone is at fault. In this country, we still believe that all people are innocent until solid, reliable evidence from our legal authorities proves otherwise’ — which presumably means we should wait till the trial and, given that what’s left of Osama is currently doing a good impression of a few specks of Johnson’s Baby Powder, that’s likely to be a long time coming.

Instead, the NEA thinks children should ‘explore the problems inherent in assigning blame to populations or nations of people by looking at contemporary examples of ethnic conflict, discrimination, and stereotyping at home and abroad’.

And by that you mean…?

‘Internment of Japanese Americans after Pearl Harbor and the backlash against Arab Americans during the Gulf war are obvious examples.’

Not that obvious: for one thing, the ‘backlash against Arab Americans during the Gulf war’ is entirely mythical. But you get the gist: Don’t blame anyone. But, if you have to, blame America.

I don’t think the teachers’ union are ‘Hate America’ types. Very few Americans are. But, rather, they’re in thrall to something far craftier than straightforward anti-Americanism — a kind of enervating cult of tolerance in which you demonstrate your sensitivity to other cultures by being almost totally insensitive to your own. The NEA study suggestions have a bit of everything in them: your teacher might pluck out Roosevelt’s ‘Four Freedoms’; on the other hand, she might wind up at the discussion topic about whether it was irresponsible for the media to show video footage of Palestinians celebrating 11 September as this allegedly led to increased hostility toward Arabs. Real live Arab intolerance is not a problem except insofar as it risks inflaming yet more mythical American intolerance.

This stuff went away for a while last October, and some of us were foolish enough to think it might go away for good. That it didn’t has a lot to do with George W. Bush and the strategy that brought him to power. You’ll recall that he campaigned in 2000 as a ‘compassionate conservative’. On his first trip to New Hampshire, he declared, ‘I’m proud to be a compassionate conservative. And on this ground I will make my stand!’ Those of us who ventured on to the ground to stand alongside him found it pretty mushy and squelchy, but figured the bog of clichés was merely a wily tactic, a means of co-opting all the Democrats’ touchy-feely words and thereby neutralising their linguistic advantage.

You can’t say whom we’re at war with, even though, for their part, the other side is admirably straightforward. Just tune in to any Arab TV station for Friday prayers:

‘O God, destroy the Jews and their supporters. O God, destroy the Christians and their supporters and followers, shake the ground under them, instil fear in their hearts, and freeze the blood in their veins.’

That’s Sheikh Akram Abd-al-Razzaq al-Ruqayhi, some hotshot imam live from the Grand Mosque in Sanaa on 9 August on Yemeni state TV. It’s the local equivalent of ‘Thought for the Day’, and even more predictable. Here’s the same dude a week earlier:

‘O God, deal with Jews and their supporters and Christians and their supporters and lackeys,’ he prayed. ‘O God, count them one by one, kill them all, and don’t leave anyone.’

This isn’t some fringe crank sentiment, but what appears to be a standard formulation from the Middle Eastern equivalent of the Book of Common Prayer. Another state TV channel, another mosque, another imam, same script: ‘O God, deal with the occupier Jews for they are within your power,’ said Sheikh Anwar al-Badawi on 2 August live from the Umar Bin-Al-Khattab Mosque in Doha on Qatar Television. ‘O God, count them one by one, kill them, and don’t leave any one of them.’

Same sheikh a week later: ‘O God, destroy the usurper Jews and the vile Christians.’

Hmm. Perhaps we need to call in Bletchley Park. Must be some sort of code. As a matter of fact, you don’t even need to go to the Middle East to catch the death-to-Jews-and-Christians routine. I stayed in the heart of Paris a couple of months back, at the Plaza Athénée, and the eight Arab TV channels available in my room had more than enough foaming imams to go round.

~from The Spectator, August 24th 2002

Exactly a quarter-century ago, I was pottering about the kitchen when the newsman broke into the morning show to say that there were reports that a ‘plane had flown into the World Trade Center. I assumed it was an unfortunate mishap by a Piper Cub from Long Island or some such, switched off the radio and went about my business. So I did not hear that a second ‘plane had hit until twenty minutes later when two of my editors called from London and Toronto to demand instant-reaction columns to events of which I was not aware. I switched on the television to find the familiar New York skyline full of smoke.

I had been expecting delivery of a sofa that morning, and half-an-hour or so later it duly arrived. So I muted the TV and turned to face the chaps to discuss where to set it. When I turned back to the screen a minute or two later, the skyline was no longer there. For a moment, I was too befuddled to comprehend what had happened – and the scale of what America’s enemies had accomplished.

This is my ancient column from that day, composed in the hours that followed, when very little was known. There are passages I would write differently today, and some I would not write at all, but I thought we would re-publish it as is, with the original (Spectator) illustration and headline. It was and is “a war for civilisation”, but in ways I did not fully grasp until six months later, standing across the street from a Viennese maternity shop.

So here we are, a generation later, when no jihadist needs to fly planes into western skyscrapers – because, in New York as in London as in other western capitals, we have handed Islam the keys to those skyscrapers. In the excerpts from the flight manifests that appeared over the next few days, I was struck by the name of Christine Hanson of Groton, Massachusetts, a two-year-old girl sitting between her parents on a doomed flight. She was last heard crying in the background during her father’s telephone call to her grandparents to report that the stewardess had been stabbed. Christine would be approaching thirty now – and I cannot but feel that the intervening years have dishonoured her memory:

~You can understand why they’re jumping up and down in the streets of the Middle East, jubilant in their victory. They have struck a mighty blow against the Great Satan, mightier than even the producers of far-fetched action thrillers could conceive. They have driven a gaping wound into the heart of his military headquarters. They have ruptured the most famous skyline in the world, the glittering monument to his decadence. They have killed and maimed thousands of his subjects, live on TV. For one day they reduced the hated Bush to a pitiful presidential vagrant, bounced further and further from his White House to ever more remote military airports, from Florida to Louisiana to Nebraska by a security staff which obviously understands less about the power of symbolism than America’s enemies do.

There was a grim symmetry in the way this act of war interrupted the President at a grade-school photo-op. The federal government has no constitutional responsibility for education: it is a state affair, delegated mostly to tiny municipal school boards. But one of Bill Clinton’s forlorn legacies is that the head of state and the commander-in-chief of the most powerful nation on earth must now fill his day with trivial initiatives designed to soothe the piffling discontents of soccer moms and other preferred demographics of the most pampered generation in history: programs to connect elementary schools to the Internet, prescription drug benefits for seniors. government ‘lock-boxes’ for any big-ticket entitlement the focus groups decide they can’t live without, and a thousand and one other woeful trivialities.

And so the President was reminded of his most awesome responsibility at a time when he was discharging his most footling. The first charge of any government is the defence of its borders — and, without that, it makes no difference how great your prescription drug plan is. In that sense, Tuesday marked the end of the ten-year-long weekend off that the world’s only superpower has enjoyed since Colin Powell advised against marching on Baghdad. The post-Cold War interlude is over, an era of follies — OJ, Monica — and fatuities, a few of which Tuesday’s horror stories cruelly underlined: employees in wheelchairs, whom Bob Dole’s Americans with Disabilities Act and the various lobby groups insist can do anything able-bodied people can, found themselves trapped on the 80th floor, unable to get downstairs, unable even to do as others did and hurl themselves from the windows rather than be burned alive.

The first named victim I was aware of was Barbara Olson, the wife of the solicitor-general, whom I sat next to at dinner a few weeks ago…She’d postponed her trip to California by a day so she could wish her husband a happy birthday on Tuesday morning, and so found herself on American Airlines flight 11. She had time to call her husband Ted to tell him her plane was being hijacked and that she had been hustled to the back of the cabin with the other passengers and flight crew. By then, the solicitor-general knew that two planes had deliberately crashed into the World Trade Center. He told Barbara what was happening — that she wasn’t in the hands of some jerk who wants his pals sprung from jail and a jet to Cuba but cooler customers with bigger plans. A few seconds later her flight ripped through one side of the Pentagon.

I’m sure that Ted Olson, in the course of the day, saw some of those TV pictures of taxi-drivers, merchants and schoolchildren in Egypt, Lebanon and Palestine passing out candy to celebrate the death of his wife and thousands of others. This is not terrorism — five guys in ski-masks plotting in a basement. This is war, waged in the shadows but openly cheered by millions and millions of people and more covertly supported by their governments, including the smooth, bespoke emissaries of the thug states in Durban last week.

The funniest moment in the early coverage came when some portentous anchor solemnly reported that ‘the United Nations building had not been hit’. Well, there’s a surprise! Why would the guys who took out the World Trade Center and the Pentagon want to target the UN? The UN is dominated by their apologists, and in some cases the friends of the friends of the fellows who did this (to put it at its most discreet). All last week the plenipotentiaries of the West were in Durban holed up with the brutes and treating them as equals, negotiating over how many anti-Zionist insults they could live with and over how abject the West’s apology for past sins should be. Tuesday’s sobering coda to Durban let us know that those folks on the other side are really admirably straightforward; they mean what they say, and we should take them at their word.

This is, as the German government put it, an attack on ‘the civilised world’, and it’s time to speak up in its defence. Those Western nations who spent last week in Durban finessing and nuancing evil should understand now that what is at stake is whether the world’s future will belong to liberal democracy and the rule of law, or to darker forces. And after Tuesday America is entitled to ask its allies not for finely crafted UN resolutions but a more basic question: whose side are you on?

~from The National Post and The Spectator, September 12th/13th 2002

Out of the aftermath, clarity

Lee Smith brings us a seriously gripping account of the frightening progress Pisslam has made apres 9/11, the one I mentioned at the end of the previous post.

Twenty-five years later, the legacy of 9/11 is that there was no 9/11.

Commemorations this week hold that the deadliest attack on the U.S. mainland forever changed the way we live. And that’s true if we mean that for the past 25 years Americans have lived in a collective fugue state from which there seems no exit.

The issue isn’t that nearly a third of the country was born after the attacks or that foreign intelligence services push 9/11 lies into our social media ecosystem. The conspiracy theorists are more shrill a quarter of a century on precisely because our memories of the day, and our reactions to it, have been redirected and erased.

There was never any kind of cover-up; there were no “dancing Israelis” who secretly directed Arab terrorists into the Twin Towers to get American boys to die in the Middle East on behalf of Israel; and there was no controlled demolition of the towers as part of a false flag operation to drive an angry nation to war in the Middle East.

Rather, it was more like the opposite: Elites across the political spectrum blunted the rage of a wounded nation determined to avenge its dead.

By the time of the attacks, New York had been in the crosshairs of Muslim terrorists for decades. The city is the world capital of finance, media, advertising, publishing, and culture, from painting to theater. And much of its success was thanks to the waves of Jewish immigrants that started arriving in the middle of the 19th century. With the United States’ victory in World War II, the human capital that the city had accumulated and augmented for a century turned New York into human history’s new center of gravity.

The serial efforts to bring the city to its knees would require making Western civilization doubt its strength, virtue, and purpose. And how we remember the attacks is proof that these efforts worked.

The whitewash of Sep. 11 was conducted in full view of the public and started almost immediately after the attacks, while aid workers at the World Trade Center were still sorting through the rubble and ashes.

Six days after the Twin Towers collapsed, then President George W. Bush visited the Islamic Center of Washington, D.C., where Muslim leaders joined him onstage. Days earlier, the press attacked him when he described the U.S. government’s planned military response as a “crusade.” So he was eager to show he meant no offense to Muslim sensibilities still smarting nearly a millennium after the conclusion of the last Christian campaign for Jerusalem.

“The face of terror is not the true faith of Islam,” said Bush. “That’s not what Islam is all about,” he continued. And even more remarkably, “Islam is peace.”

Bush’s words had no demonstrable effect on Muslim masses across the world, giddily celebrating bin Laden’s raid. But with the president’s maudlin apologia for a crude belief system that inspired the murders and elevated the causes for which the son of Saudi elites had killed Americans, he unveiled the sentimental underpinnings of the approach that in the post-9/11 period has had disastrous consequences for the country.

Critics of the Global War on Terror argue that the administration’s failure to define a real enemy—rather than a term so abstract that world bodies can safely pretend not to know what distinguishes it from lawful dissent—showed the United States had no coherent strategy to keep Americans safe. But that’s not true: The GWOT had an internal logic. The argument was that we could protect Americans at home and U.S. interests abroad only by first securing the political rights of Muslims in the Middle East.

That’s why U.S. forces righteously focused their fire on those groups and regimes, like Saddam Hussein’s, who seemed to be the obstacle to the democratic aspirations of Muslim citizens. Once these people were free to exercise their civil rights and use their votes to improve their societies, the theory went, young Muslim men would no longer feel compelled to channel their frustrations into terrorism that kills Americans and U.S. allies.

In other words, the GWOT was a U.S. government initiative deploying enormous human, military, and other material resources to shape current-day reality after a fantasy crafted by progressive Middle East academics, Muslim apologists, and idealistic neoconservatives working inside the administration, along with spokesmen for the states and terror groups aiming their guns at Americans.

Agreeing on little else, together these ideological cohorts promoted an ideological fantasy: a culturally rich and politically sophisticated Middle East, like the convivencia of medieval Andalusia, where majority-Muslim polities lived in peaceful and tolerant coexistence with their Christian and Jewish neighbors. America’s post-9/11 mission was the war to restore “moderate Islam”—something that had never existed in the first place.

Washington became the global caliphate of moderate Islam, passing out billions of dollars to virtually anyone who flashed their credentials, as journalists, political activists, and even religious authorities swindled credulous policymakers with the promise that, since they had the ear of the Arab street, they would gladly help turn Muslim opinion in favor of America. It was a massive confidence scheme, gilded more lavishly than any before it and any of those likely to follow. Any Muslim who’d enjoyed even a brief flirtation with “extremism” and then saw the light became an instant Beltway celebrity, invited to lecture at the Pentagon or State Department and testify on Capitol Hill.

The problem was obvious to anyone who visited a D.C. think tank during the period: With so many moderate Muslims giving lectures, writing pamphlets, and doing media appearances, who was left in the region itself to steer Islam in a more moderate direction?

Obviously, no one.

From that heady ascent, Smith moves on along to the name ‘em/shame ’em section of this very lengthy but truly remarkable article. For instink:

The essential question made plain by the Rushdie affair was, What were the stewards of Western civilization prepared to do to protect it? Obviously, artists could be silenced by threats of violence—anyone can. But would the men and women elected to govern the societies that created the novel protect them against societies that played no role in the making of the modern world and were rather intent to destroy the spiritual and political principles, such as freedom of speech, undergirding them?

The answer was soon forthcoming.

A month after (Don DeLillo’s treatise on terrorism and Jurassic media) Mao II was published, Ettore Capriolo, the Italian translator of Rushdie’s book, survived an attempt on his life by a knife-wielding assassin; a week later, Rushdie’s Japanese translator Hitoshi Igarashi was stabbed to death. And then, in 1993, the Norwegian publisher of The Satanic Verses, William Nygaard, was shot three times but survived.

Capriolo’s assailant escaped; Igarashi’s murder remains unsolved; and Norwegian investigators later identified suspects in the Nygaard case, including an Iranian former diplomat and a Lebanese man, but there wasn’t enough evidence for an indictment.

Maybe Khomeini’s agents were lucky to escape three times or, more likely, Tokyo, Rome, and Oslo wanted to avoid the even bigger problems that were likely to ensue had they caught and convicted the assassins. In any case, the Hezbollah-linked attempt on Rushdie’s life in 2022 that left him blind in one eye answered the question once and for all: What were the nations of the West prepared to do to defend it? Nothing.

The global nightmare sparked by the Rushdie affair could have been avoided, said Omar Abdel-Rahman in 1989, “if we had punished Naguib Mahfouz for what he wrote in ‘Children of Gebelaawi,’ then Salman Rushdie never would have dared to write that book.”

Five years later, Mahfouz was stabbed in the neck on a Cairo street by an assailant who said he was inspired to kill the Nobel Prize winner because of Abdel-Rahman’s decree. And it was Abdel-Rahman’s rulings on the permissibility of killing infidels and apostates that made him the leading Islamist religious authority in all Egypt, the so-called spiritual leader of the terror group Gamaa Islamiya.

He also projected power far beyond the Nile. So, when Abdel-Rahman came to America in 1990, he meant to reap what Khomeini had sown.

Egyptian authorities had arrested Abdel-Rahman in 1981 for his part in the assassination of Anwar Sadat for signing a peace accord with Israel. In jail, he met Osama bin Laden’s future lieutenant Ayman al-Zawahiri, then a senior leader of Islamic Jihad, the terror group that partnered with Abdel-Rahman’s gang to kill Sadat. Abdel-Rahman was acquitted by Egyptian courts twice, but the State Department still put him on the terror watch list. Nonetheless, he was granted a visa in 1990 by consular officials at the U.S. embassy in Khartoum. “They didn’t follow the procedures,” said a State Department spokesperson at the time, who called it a “mistake.”

Wrong, Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak said back then: “The visa he got was not issued by mistake. It is because of the services he did.” According to Sadat’s successor, “The sheik has been a CIA agent since his days in Afghanistan.” There’s circumstantial evidence to support Mubarak’s claim.

What surprised U.S. officials most about 9/11 was that Muslims around the world so overwhelmingly supported it. Even after Khomeini had permanently altered the nature of international affairs by calling on the global ummah to kill Rushdie, Washington was still shocked to see footage of Muslims—most famously Palestinians in the West Bank, East Jerusalem, and refugee camps in Lebanon—ghoulishly celebrating the butchering of the main source of their income, Americans.

In that light, there was some logic to Bush’s freedom agenda—after all, you couldn’t wage war against more than a billion Muslims, especially when, as the Rushdie affair had shown, some of them among you were likely to make war on you. The problem was that even as the project to democratize the region faltered, the president and his aides pressed on.

The crucial test came with the 2006 Palestinian elections. Officials and outside experts warned that Hamas was certain to win big, but Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice ignored them. Hamas swept the polls and soon went to war against Mahmoud Abbas’ U.S.-backed Fatah faction, leaving Hamas in charge of Gaza and Fatah ruling the West Bank. The important point is that given a choice, the Palestinians chose the more radical faction, the terrorists.

Just as they always have, and always will. Onwards.

Even as the freedom agenda crashed, the Bush administration admitted millions of Muslim and Arab immigrants to further advance the soft power component of the GWOT. To wit: America was making war against terrorists and bad regimes, not Muslims. The Republican White House was no more racist against Muslims than it was against Blacks, and as Secretary Rice had made clear, Muslims were in the same position Blacks were during Jim Crow, so to prove Americans were not racist, Muslims were invited to make their homes here.

In fact, what Rice and her boss had done was change the lens through which we Americans understand ourselves. In falsifying our collective history by likening it to something to which it bears no likeness, they changed the standard by which we measure the health of our society. America wasn’t healing itself by importing large portions of at least half a dozen shattered and despotic Middle Eastern societies. Rather, we were putting ourselves, our peace and prosperity, in danger.

The countries from which these immigrants came—Lebanon, Syria, Egypt, Iraq, Afghanistan, Somalia, the West Bank, Gaza—were torn by civil wars and Islamist insurgencies. Having failed to remake these broken societies in our image, U.S. officials now opened the borders to people shaped by conflicts fought over ideas promoted in some of the worst places on earth.

Bush hardly deserves all the blame for presiding over the post-9/11 influx of Muslim immigrants. Muslim immigration continued under the presidencies of Obama and Biden, and in important categories—including refugee admissions during Obama’s final presidential year—the numbers rose substantially. President Donald Trump sought to stem the tide in his first term with the ban against nationals from several Muslim-majority nations, but he lost repeatedly in court. Singling out Muslim nations was racist, of course.

Even parts of Trump’s own administration opposed him. If we can’t give Iraqis U.S. visas, complained Secretary of Defense James Mattis, how can I convince Iraqi officials to let us stay in their country to kill terrorists?

Here Mattis was on to something, except in reverse. Mass immigration from the Muslim world conflicted with what Bush officials referred to as the fly-trap theory. “Our men and women in uniform are fighting terrorists in Iraq,” said Bush, “so we do not have to face them here at home.”

What does that mean today? Estimates show that there are now approximately 5.5 million Muslims in the United States, with an estimated 2 million to 2.5 million migrating to the United States since 9/11. According to a recent poll, 44% of Muslims in America favor Hamas. Does this mean Americans will be fighting terrorists at home?

Yes. The next mass terror attack is probably going to look like Oct. 7, and New York is a likely venue for it.

T’is beyond debate, I’d say. Any sensible sort up there that hasn’t fled the Big Rotten Apple already ought to be giving it some serious thought right about now.

The piece goes on from there; quite long, yes. But even so, you really don’t want to miss one word of it, I solemnly assure you with hand over heart.

Second look at secession…?

This time from the UK, not the Damn Yankees, although I very much doubt it’s going to go any better for the seceders this time around than it did the first one.

Zia Yusuf slams ‘lying Labour’ over village which could be ‘ruined overnight’ by migrants
EXCLUSIVE: Piddington is home to just 350 people but under Home Office plans assessments were carried out for 3,510 migrants at a neighbouring ex-MoD base.

Reform UK’s Zia Yusuf has blasted “lying Labour” after it emerged the Home Office had carried out assessments for migrants at a former MoD site, which would have outnumbered villagers 10 to one. Publicly available documents show an Unexploded Ordnance (UXO) risk assessment stating that “the proposed scheme” relates to “accommodation for 3,510 service users” at the ex-military Bicester Site A storage facility.

The shocking figure discovered by worried villagers of neighbouring Piddington, in Oxfordshire, has been refuted by the Home Office, which said it was based on an “outdated estimate” and there was no plan to increase the official figure of 1,256 male migrants they were seeking to put in the base.

Resident and parish councillor Joe Marshall, who has been poring over the papers released as part of the planning ‘consultation’, said the figure remaining in the documents was “misleading” and questioned why the Government had not withdrawn the paper, or updated it.

Reform UK spokesman Zia Yusuf, who became the first mainstream politician to visit Piddington last month, said: “It’s now been revealed the lying Labour Government had assessments carried out based on housing 3,510 migrants in the English village of Piddington, more than double the official figure of 1,256. That would have been 10 illegal migrants for every one resident.

Mr Yusuf dubbed the Oxfordshire village “ground zero” in the migrant crisis as Labour ploughs ahead punishing populations in rural towns and villages by moving thousands of mostly fighting age male migrants into ex-military sites in counties including Essex, Yorkshire, Oxfordshire, Suffolk and East Sussex.

Piddington residents are now on the front line in the migrant crisis battle, and on July 4 villagers voted 96% in favour of a referendum to leave the UK if the migrant camp plans go ahead.

Bold mine, and…well, rotsa ruck with all that, kiddies. (Via Ace)

Forgotten

Remember “never to forget, never to forgive”? Nah, me neither.


I have several friends who were close by the WTC that black morning, and they said the sickening “thump” the bodies of the jumpers made when they hit the pavement, over and over and over again, like some kind of hellish rain, was something they will never really get over. I do not doubt them, nor should you.

Operative word: “dispiriting”

Steyn asks the Big Q.

I’m not sure precisely when the 9/11 era – “The Day That Everything Changed” – became The Day That Everything Changed Back To The Way It Was Before Only Even Nuttier And More Suicidal. But, a quarter-century on, the Taliban are back running Afghanistan, but with more territory than they ever had before; an al-Qaeda guy has been installed with American approval as strongman of Syria; the Christian community in Iraq was extinguished on America’s watch; the Libyan intervention delivered the North African ports closest to Europe into the hands of Isis, with direct consequences for Continental demographics; and – just to confirm the “war on terror” was utterly lost and always misconceived – a Shia Twelver from Uganda who believes in everything the guys we’re droning in Tehran believe is Giuliani’s successor as Mayor of New York City and the new kingmaker of the Democrat Party. If the United States Government had been working for the other side all along, what exactly would it have done differently?

Oh, I’m afraid we all know the answer to that one, only too well: nothing whatsoever.

So, even before the dispiriting observances of the coming week, it’s hard to recall the visceral emotion that in those first weeks and months after September 11th engaged almost every area of American life. With one striking exception, that is. On the eve of the Second World War Irving Berlin’s gift to the nation was “God Bless America”. Across the ocean Hugh Charles and Ross Parker did the same with “There’ll Always Be an England”. But this new war found American songwriters sitting on their hands, the very silence serving as a kind of recessional, for pop culture’s retreat from any aspect of the subject. The short history of American popular music’s contribution to national resolve can be told in two photographs of blockbuster pop stars in military uniform: on the one hand, Glenn Miller, shot down over the English Channel while leading the US Army-Air Force Band, and, on the other, Madonna, who on her world tour a few years back cavorted on stage in a burqa and, when she disrobed, as she inevitably does, was revealed to be wearing army uniform underneath. This was in order to make the highly original point that the Taliban and the Bush Administration were both equally oppressive. Truly, the herd mentality of celebrity “dissent” is indestructible. Would it kill ’em once in a while to dissent from their dissent and try something other than the dreary conformity of celeb cardboard courage?

As for less tediously obvious provocations, as I wrote on the first anniversary of 9/11, “Bruce Springsteen’s blurry equivalist mope of a 9/11 album, The Rising, is a classic example of how even a supposed ‘blue-collar’ icon can’t bring himself to want America to win.”

Well, I mean, y’know, SPRINGSTEIN. If there was ever a bigger phony, a more obnoxiously objectionable Limousine Liberal, than that jerkweed, I’m sure I haven’t heard of him/her/it.

The article veers off in a most unexpected direction from there, which ultimately proves to be even more dispiriting. Which is, y’know, SAYING something.

Update! Lest you think there’s nothing more substantive to this one than le doom et le gloom, hey, it’s Mark Steyn, fercripessake.

Then they rushed the hijackers. Mrs Jefferson kept the line open. A few minutes later, the plane crashed, not at Camp David or the White House or the Capitol, but in a field in Shanksville, Pennsylvania. Jeremy Glick knew that he would never see his three-month-old daughter again, Todd Beamer that he would never know the baby his wife was carrying. But both men understood that they could play their part in preserving a civilization for their children to grow up in. By being willing to sacrifice themselves, the citizen-soldiers of Flight 93 saved thousands, including perhaps the terrorists’ intended target – the highest officeholders in the republic. Flight 93 was the decisive event of September 11th. As Jim Bennett of UPI wrote:

The Era of Osama lasted about an hour and half or so, from the time the first plane hit the tower to the moment the General Militia of Flight 93 reported for duty.

And, for a while, that remained true: as I wrote at the time, “No one will ever again hijack an American airliner with box cutters, or, I’d wager, with anything else — not because of idiotic federal regulations, but because of the example of Todd Beamer and his ad hoc platoon.” Faced with a new and unprecedented form of terror, the latest American technology (cellphones) combined with the oldest American virtue (self-reliance) and stopped it in its tracks in just 90 minutes. When the Air France passengers jumped the Shoebomber and the Delta passengers the Pantybomber, they were acting in accordance not with FAA regulations but with Flight 93 rules.

But the years go by…

I’m not a big Neil Young fan. If I never heard the fey, dopey “Harvest Moon” or “Heart Of Gold” ever again, it wouldn’t be too soon. But I’m glad he wrote this song. For serious Young admirers, and the rock biz in general, it was more problematic, even a mere three months after 9/11. The venerable rock critic Dave Marsh said Young’s politics had “all been downhill since ‘Ohio'” – his song about the Kent State shootings – and dismissed “Let’s Roll” as “jingoistic”. But, if it takes a Canadian rocker to purvey a bit of Yank jingoism, let’s have more of it.

Amen to that, Mark old fellow.

Let’s make a DEAL!

Despite having won it seventy-three (73) times already, according to fucking Trump, we’re not gonna win this Iran thing, are we?

Put this one right on top of the stack of things I don’t understand.


Clue to the willfully, obstinately clueless: THEY DO NOT WANT A DEAL, THEY WILL NOT ABIDE BY ANY “DEAL” YOU DO FINALLY MAKE WITH THEM, AND THEY REGARD YOUR CRAVEN CRAWLING TO THEM BEGGING FOR SOME KIND OF STUPID-ASS DEAL AS A SIGN OF WEAKNESS, YOU STUPID FOOLS. Which it, y’know, IS, actually.

SO, in other words, exactly the same as they’ve been doing for the last, oh, round about fifty fucking years, then.

Bessent has been almost frighteningly effective in fulfilling his promise to collapse Iran’s currency, the rial. As he reminded Fox Business in that clip, the rial stood at 800,000 to the dollar last spring, but as of last week was down to two million.

That’s created real-world hardships for the regime and the Iranian people.

“Small protests occurred outside petrochemical plant and a sugar cane factory where workers were made unemployed but received no salary for last six months,” Peter Baum reported on X today. “One person killed by IRGC outside the sugar cane factory.”

Furthermore, “Academic staff at numerous universities on strike as they too have not been paid for months.”

The trick is to keep asphyxiating the regime until Tehran can’t afford to pay the thugs who keep the people in line with beatings and mass murders as required.

And these are the same theocrats Bessent thinks he can make “want to have a deal?” And that after we let go of their throats, they’ll stick to it?

What I had thought back in March might be a days-long campaign to hurt the regime has gone on too long for a deal — and the stakes are too elevated.

Once you grab somebody by the throat, you’ve got to keep squeezing until the job is done.

I’ve said it before, I’ll say it again: so long as an entity still exists in the Middle East called The Islamic Republic Of Iran, with a bunch of Mad Mullahs firmly in charge of said entity, we have “won” neither Jack nor Shit.

“Is Amazon Suppressing a Book That Criticizes Islam?”

Probably so, yeah. I mean, what the hey, why not?

Yes, I wrote the book in question, but that’s beside the point. If they can do it to me, they can do it to anyone who doesn’t hold the views that the leftist establishment finds acceptable. With Amazon being almost the only source for books now, and by far the largest, that’s a dangerous development for any society that values the freedom of speech.

It’s an odd thing. My latest book, The Tragedy of Islam: it has an Amazon page, and that page seems to be in full working order. You can find it here.

If, however, you didn’t click on that link I just provided, but instead went to Amazon and tried to find the book yourself, if your experience is anything like mine just now, you will see that the book is impossible to find. Search for it every which way, and it does not come up. Is Amazon trying to suppress access to this book? It sure looks as if it is.

I asked several other people to replicate this experiment, and they had the same results: They could find the book by clicking on a pre-existing link, but no matter what they searched for at Amazon, including the book’s specific title, subtitle, and author, it doesn’t come up. If you have a minute, please try it yourself and let me know in the comments what results you get.

I found this out because I needed the link to the book’s sale page, and as I was already at Amazon, instead of going to my website and clicking on the link there, I typed the book’s title into the search bar. What came up for “The Tragedy of Islam” was Imam Mohammad Tawhidi’s book from several years ago of the same name and a host of other books with similar names, but my book The Tragedy of Islam was nowhere to be seen. In fact, my book did not appear on the entire page of results for a search of the exact title of the book.

This is not normal. I typed in the names of a few of my other recent books, and they came right up in the searches, either as the first or second result.

So I started to search for The Tragedy of Islam with more information: by the full title, The Tragedy of Islam: Failure and Excuses, as well as “The Tragedy of Islam Spencer,” “The Tragedy of Islam Robert Spencer,” “The Tragedy of Islam by Robert Spencer,” and even “The Tragedy of Islam: Failure and Excuses by Robert Spencer, Bombardier Books.” Every search turned up another book I had written, or else Tawhidi’s book. None of the searches, not one, turned up the actual book The Tragedy of Islam: Failure and Excuses anywhere on the first page of search results.

Yet the book is offered at Amazon. Apparently, however, you can only get to it by clicking on a link to it you may find somewhere, not by searching at Amazon. This is a new form of censorship I haven’t encountered before. Amazon can say that they are offering the book for sale and that all is well. They’re just hiding it.

I pulled up the Amazon site and tried Spencer’s experiment my own self, with similar yet different results: as the man said, the new book was nowhere to be found, although most or maybe all of his previous works were there listed.

Interestingly enough, you can search for “robert spencer the tragedy of islam” with my preferred search engine, Luxxle, and the first result you get is the Simon & Schuster website page featuring Spencer’s latest, Coming in second you have a link that whisks you right off to Amazon’s page for the Spencer book. Passing strange, no? I confess myself to be stumped here. Spencer seems a bit bemused as well:

But remember the old adage: Just because you’re paranoid doesn’t mean they’re not out to get you. Or maybe the whole thing is just some glitch. Maybe. But my work has been censored in all kinds of ways for years. And it looks as if it’s still going on.

Oh, I’m completely confident of that, at any rate. Nothing else can spark a barking-mad, violent shitfit in Leftwits quite as fast and as thoroughly as whenever some reasonable, sane, intelligent sort says, writes, or publishes anything they don’t like, even slightly. It never changes, and neither do they; at this point, I very much doubt they CAN change, even if thy wantted to…which, they assuredly do NOT. To quote a little dialogue from the immortal classic movie, Easy Rider, which sums the sorry situation up as well as has ever been done, either before or since.

GEORGE: “Oh yeah, they’re gonna talk to you and talk to you and talk to you about individual freedom. But they see a free individual, and it’s gonna scare ’em.”

BILLY: “Yeah, well, it don’t make ’em running scared.”

GEORGE: “No. It makes ‘em dangerous.”

It was all too true back in 1969, and hits home particularly hard today, in a truly gutwrenching way.

“Threaten”? SRSLY?!?

“Threaten,” it says. “Threaten,” forsooth.

If we’re not careful, Islamic extremists threaten to turn us into ‘Americastan’
Over next month’s Labor Day weekend, Michigan Senate hopeful Abdul El-Sayed is to speak at a conference that will platform a rogue’s gallery of Islamic extremists.

The conference in Detroit is the 63rd annual convention of the Islamic Society of North America, a Muslim Brotherhood affiliate that was an unindicted co-conspirator in the 2007-28 Holy Land terrorism-funding trial.

Other speakers among a plethora of Islamists include Siraj Wahhaj, a former ISNA vice-president who was himself an unindicted co-conspirator in the 1993 World Trade Center bombing.

Wahhaj, who has called for the full application of sharia law including amputation, stoning and the execution of gay people, makes no secret of his aim to Islamize America.

He has said: “You don’t get involved in politics because it’s the American thing to do. You get involved in politics because politics are a weapon to use in the cause of Islam.”

Another scheduled convention participant, Zaid Shakir, has said: “If only Muslims were clever politically, they could take over the United States and replace its constitutional government with a caliphate. If we put a nationwide infrastructure in place and marshaled our resources, we’d take over this country in a very short time.”

And now: Question Time.

Apart from El-Sayed’s participation, the question has to be asked how this conference has been able to platform such dangerous extremists year after year. Why are such individuals allowed to run jihadi mosques and other institutions that pose such a threat to the state? How come America has permitted such dangerous extremists to be able freely to promote such jihadi subversion?

As for those “jihadi mosques,” some smart Hun has hit upon the perfect preemptive solution to that thorny issue.

Pieces of pig placed on plot of future mosque in Germany
BERLIN (AP) — Nine wooden spikes topped with parts of a dead pig were planted on a plot of land where Muslims are planning to build a mosque in the eastern city of Erfurt, German police said Monday.

The 1.5 meter-tall (nearly 5-foot) stakes were topped with half of a pig’s head, pig feet, and pig bowels among other things, the German news agency dpa reported. Police say whoever was responsible is unknown.

Pigs are considered unclean by Muslims.

There have been repeated protests against the construction of the Ahmadiyya mosque in Erfurt, including one by protesters who erected large Christian crosses on a neighboring property.

A spokesman for the Erfurt community, Mohammed Suleman Malik, said in a statement to The Associated Press that “while such acts do not make us lose our composure…we find it very sad that people go down to such a level.”

Yeah, fuck you, Mohammed. Shag your ass on back to the ME where you belong, shitstain.

Update! Only tangentially related, I suppose, but this one’s been sitting in an open tab for a while now, and this feels like a pretty good spot for it.

Mosab Hassan Yousef
@MosabHasanYOSEF

The $3.8 Billion Lie: Why Cutting Aid to Israel Would Sabotage America’s Power, Not Save It.

The US federal budget is about $7 trillion. That $3.8 billion to Israel is less than 0.05% of it. The defense budget is around $960 billion. The aerospace and defense industry generates nearly $1 trillion in sales and about $500 billion in economic value. Most of that $3.8 billion goes right back into American companies and jobs.

Israel’s own budget is about $220 billion. This is not charity, and Israel is not dependent on it. If it was just a matter of money, Israel could build its own weapons on its own. It has that capacity. But this is a real partnership, just like any corporate partnership where each side contributes to the project.

Israeli pilots and the Israeli defense establishment operate under constant threat from terrorists, jihadists, and anti-American entities. They make real-time, do-or-die adjustments to equipment developed for both countries.

That is what gives American weapons their edge over Russian, Chinese, and other competition. This is how America builds and maintains power through smart, long-term vision.

Yet the anti-Israel crowd, including figures like Ilhan Omar and Zohran Mamdani, tells the public that cutting this tiny fraction would make everyone rich. It’s not just a lie. It’s ridiculous.

If people with that Robin Hood mindset gain real power, they would sabotage the American way of investing, developing, and staying dominant. At the same time, American Jews, roughly 7.5 million strong, contribute an estimated $250 billion annually to the US treasury through taxes. Their bond with Israel isn’t just strategic; it’s family.

Cutting aid to Israel while pushing to isolate it sends a clear message to this highly productive community: your taxes may fund policies hostile to your family and your values.

These new voices aren’t serving the American people. They’re advancing Islamic and communist agendas, whether funded by China or anti-American Islamic regimes.
This outrage over Gaza is manufactured by the same terrorists and jihadists who dragged Israel and America into this dirty war, using human shields and weaponizing civilians by design to turn Americans against their own government and allies.

Replacing a proven alliance and a successful economic fabric with dependency and foreign interests is a dangerous gamble. The average American needs to wake up.

Boy, you dang sure said a mouthful there, Bubba.

Best argument yet for the death penalty

A prime candidate for Ol’ Sparky, I’d say.


All too much more.

Karmelo Anthony prosecutor reveals trove of evidence jury never saw — including disturbing texts: ‘Low key on the verge’
Karmelo Anthony’s ex-girlfriend reported that he was stalking her hours before he stabbed Austin Metcalf — and he had threatening and violent texts on his phone, the prosecutor revealed at Anthony’s appeal hearing Thursday.

The jury never heard about Anthony’s disturbing history, or about Metcalf’s juvenile criminal record because of a “gentleman’s agreement” with the 19-year-old’s defense ahead of his murder trial, Collin County Assistant District Attorney Bill Wirskye revealed.

He told the court Anthony’s high school girlfriend confided to an assistant principal on April 2, 2025 that Anthony was stalking her after a breakup, and that he was obsessed with fights, guns, and knives, according to local outlets at the hearing.

Anthony also sent a picture of the knife and told his ex-girlfriend, “I’m low key on the verge,” Wirskye said.

“He was spiraling,” the prosecutor added.

The agreement was meant to keep the publicly fraught trial from becoming an even more volatile racial tinderbox, he said.

Anthony was convicted of murder and sentenced to 35 years in prison — but he is appealing the conviction.

This maniac ought never to see the light of day again, outside of a Supermax recreation yard.

If that. “Retrial,” my baggy white ass.

The Plan

Please don’t try to tell me you didn’t know there was one. PLEASE.

For the Muslim Brotherhood in the U.S., Everything Is Going According to Plan
Sure, there are a few dissenting voices. But the left will take care of them.

Before 2007, there were no Muslim in the House of Representatives or Senate at all. The seven Muslim legislators who will be sworn in (on the Qur’an, no doubt) in January will include the four representatives in the 119th Congress: Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.); Rashida Tlaib (D-Mich.); Andre Carson (D-Ind.), and Lateefah Simon (D-Calif.). Joining them will be the nation’s first Muslim senator, Abdul El-Sayed (D-Mich.), as well as Reps. Darializa Avila Chevalier (D-N.Y.) and Adam Hamawy (D-N.J.).

After the November elections, there could be more as well, but El-Sayed, Avila Chevalier and Hamawy are virtually assured of election now, as they have nothing to worry about in November. The left, once in power, generally moves to make opposition to its policies progressively (hah) more difficult. In New York, New Jersey, and Michigan, the left has been in power for a long time, and the Republican Party is moribund.

So the number has gone from zero to four to seven, and many more are to come. “Every election cycle, we see more Muslim candidates — not fewer,” crowed Robert McCaw, the executive director of CAIR Action, the explicitly political arm of the Hamas-linked Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR). “That’s a clear indication of confidence, growth, and belonging,” McCaw exulted, although it would have been more accurate to say that the growth of Muslim political power in the U.S. is a clear indication of a concerted effort being made in the face of near-total ignorance and/or indifference on the other side.

Hamas-linked CAIR top dog Nihad Awad articulated that effort on August 31, 2024 at a convention of the likewise Hamas-linked Islamic Society of North America (ISNA). “Lawmaking,” he stated with equal parts obviousness and ominousness, “is about making laws.” Yes, of course, and that is why Muslims in the U.S. are seeking political power: the idea is to bring Sharia, which is not just religious, but political, supremacist, expansionist and violent, to the United States.

Awad continued: “Today we have 43 State delegates in the United States who are Muslim. If they want to run for Congress, in the next two or four or six years, they can. We may end up, if we are organized, we may end up with about 50 members of Congress in the next six years, if we only plan and put our money where our mouth and our minds are.”

The Muslim Brotherhood articulated the ultimate goal in a captured internal document dating from May 1991, “An Explanatory Memorandum on the General Strategic Goal for the Brotherhood in North America.” It stated that “The process of settlement is a ‘Civilization-Jihadist Process’ with all the word means. The Ikhwan [Brotherhood] must understand that their work in America is a kind of grand Jihad in eliminating and destroying the Western civilization from within and ‘sabotaging’ its miserable house by their hands and the hands of the believers so that it is eliminated and God’s religion is made victorious over all other religions” (p. 7).

The idea that the Westerners would destroy their own civilization “by their hands” comes from the Qur’an: “It is he who has caused those among the people of the book who disbelieved to go forth from their homes to the first exile. You did not think that they would go forth, while they thought that their strongholds would protect them from Allah. But Allah reached them from a place they did not expect, and cast terror in their hearts so that they ruined their houses with their own hands and the hands of the believers. So learn a lesson, O you who have eyes” (Qur’an 59:2).

From zero (0) to fifty (50) in only a few short years, and there’s no end in sight. Disgusting.

Pisslam

There’s a reason I call it that, you know.

El-Sayed Drops the Mask
El-Sayed (ie, Abdul, soon to be the Dem Senator from Michiganistan—M), his backers would have you believe, is a manifestation of America’s glorious “diversity,” a sign of how marvelously multicultural our nation has become, and that, they tell us, should be a cause for celebration for all people except racist, bigoted “Islamophobes.” A recent El-Sayed speech, however, has just come to light (courtesy of the estimable Middle East Media Research Institute) that indicates, for those who give it the attention it deserves, that there is very good reason to be concerned.

Speaking at the Islamic Institute of America’s complex in Dearborn Heights, Michigan, El-Sayed said: “I just want to reflect for a moment on what this mosque represents. Allah tells us in His holy book, the Quran: ‘You are the best nation brought forward for mankind. You enjoin what is right and forbid what is evil, and believe in Allah.’” That’s Qur’an 3:110.

El-Sayed emphasized the central importance of this verse, pointing out that it “doesn’t say ‘you believe in God’ and then you do the other stuff. It starts with enjoining good, forbidding evil, and believing in Allah. So our faith is about action.” So what does El-Sayed plan to do if he becomes a U.S. senator? The answer is clear: he intends to be a man of action, and to work toward enjoining good and forbidding evil, as a member of “the best nation brought forward for mankind” ought to do.

What El-Sayed is saying here is extremely important, but most people will miss its significance. The Qur’an verse he quotes, 3:110, is in the first place a declaration of Islamic and Muslim supremacy. Muslims are “the best nation,” or as another translation has it, “the best of people.” The same Qur’an elsewhere says that unbelievers are “the most vile of created beings” (98:6). They are not even human in any genuine sense: “Indeed, the worst of animals in Allah’s sight are the ungrateful who will not believe.” (8:55)

The Qur’an even says that Allah created some people solely for the purpose of torturing them in hell: “Already we have created many of the jinn and mankind for hell, having hearts with which they do not understand, and having eyes with which they do not see, and having ears with which they do not hear. They are like cattle, no, they are worse. These are the neglectful.” (7:179)

The most vile of created beings. The worst of animals. Like cattle, but even worse. Those are the Qur’an’s description of non-Muslims, while the Muslims are “the best nation brought forward for mankind.” This is one of the principal foundations of Islamic law’s institutionalized discrimination against non-Muslims.

And wait, it gets worse (as is so often the case). Note also that El-Sayed emphasizes that Muslims are the “best nation,” or the “best of people,” within the context of their enjoining what is right and forbidding what is evil. Muslims are quintessentially the best people on earth when they are acting as the lawgivers, dictating to other peoples what is right and wrong — in accord, of course, with the Sharia.

Is that Abdul El-Sayed’s vision for America’s future?

Of COURSE it is—not just his own vision, but every Pisslamist’s, and not just for “America,” but for the entire world. Better get your head wrapped fully and firmly around the idea, because like it or not this is the shape of things to come, and as such we all have some seriously tough choices staring us in the face.

Update! Calls for a rerun of one of yesterday’s memes, I do believe.

REPEL BOARDERS!

The ages-old equation: Actions=Consequences.


Yep, gonna have to rule this uproariously funny clip your Feel-Good Video of the Week.

Update! The cold, implacable reality. Via Ace.


“Show more” workaround:

In this video, I speak to an illegal from Morocco who is getting cash, free healthcare, and more while Spain’s young people continue to not be able to afford homes.

I ask him if I could enter Morocco illegally and he said “no.”

Every illegal migrant I spoke to said they would vote for Sanchez until their death. This was about voting and if you watch the documentary, no other argument can be based in logic.

Nope, it surely cannot.

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