Well, bless their hearts - the creative types in Hollywood certainly know how to spin a good, emotionally provoking yarn don't they? I wonder what they might make of the genuine history of the Crusades? Now that would make a great story!


Here's a half-hour introductory video on the matter.
​Get your popcorn...

>>>>>>>>>
​Were the Crusades an unprovoked act of aggression on behalf of bloodthirsty Christians? Did the First Crusade mark the beginning of close to a millennium of hostility between Christianity and Islam, or did the conflict begin centuries earlier?

Stefan Molyneux takes a closer look at the historical background of the Crusades and presents shocking information that is often hidden from the general population. What is the truth about the origins of the Crusades? Sources: http://www.fdrurl.com/truth-about-cru...

I mentioned the Hindu holocaust the other day and it is really worth reading up on that subject. When I did so a few years ago I found that there are also other issues which - I have to be honest - I had never associated with Islam before I looked at India's experiences under Islamic subjugation.

In my research three points in particular stuck out to me as they were discussed by Indian historians. 

Firstly, the wearing of the charming Sari. This head covering was in fact forced upon Hindu women under Islamic oppression in order that they not be considered "immoral". It seems it started its life not as a lovely feminine cultural symbol but as a symbol of subjugation and fear. We see exactly the same thing happening in suburbs of Paris and in other European areas where Islam takes hold, like Malmo.

Secondly, widow burning or Sati. This practice was instituted because the now accompanied & unprotected woman was open to being degraded in terrible ways by Muslims. In fact I found that the women would rather throw themselves alive onto their husbands funeral pyre than live to be so violated. As such this was not perceived to be an insignificant threat.

Thirdly, child marriage. Again this arose because the Hindu girls would be kidnapped, raped and forcibly converted before they got to a normal marriageable age. We can understand this very well because see the same today in places like Pakistan and Egypt. Rather than risk this for their daughters the family married them off very young in order to protect them.

All 3 practices suddenly make a lot of sense don't they when we see how Islam has historically acted and is now acting in other parts of the world? 

As I keep saying around here: Islam is Sharia and the leopard does not change its spots. Surroundings may ameliorate these religious imperatives and individual Muslims may become more or less Westernised by their contexts (we call them "moderate" Muslims -  where we simply mean cultural or unobservant) and find such practices and beliefs as repellent as the rest of us. But nevertheless Islam teaches the second or third rate status of non-Muslims; the second class status of women and the absolute superiority of the Muslim and of Sharia over any other law. These aspects are unalterable. 

It gives one a lot more respect for what the Hindus and other groups in India suffered over many centuries doesn't it? So much of what they themselves think of as their own authentic culture is nothing more than the result of Islamic imperialism. According to my research, the vast majority of modern Hindus do not even realise this. We have to wonder when the day will come when our descendants look back and assume women wearing head coverings in New Zealand has also always been the custom. We can see those days are coming in some areas of France where, 30 years from now, women will just be used to covering their heads and making sure they don't go out without a male. 

Yes, we see the same pattern repeated in various contexts. I wonder when we'll be ready to discuss the real issues here like grown-ups without being accused of "Islamophobia". Quite apart from the incalculable suffering of their victims and the resultant destruction of their culture - the very thing everyone seems so keen to safeguard these days, among non-European peoples at least - at what point do we declare that we love Muslims enough to challenge them with the whole truth of their Faith and ask them to take responsibility for its teachings in a way that any other adult would?

Or are we likely to remain too polite?
How did that work out in India?

Oh we've learnt quite a few things! Nothing about Islam of course.
But plenty otherwise.

One thing we've learnt is to never associate Islam with the attacks. Islam had nothing whatsoever to do with them. Even though those who perpetrated the attacks claimed absolutely that it did and that they were only acting out on the express commands of the prophet, Qur'an and Sunna. But we've learnt not to take any notice of that. They misunderstood their religion. Even though most of the hijackers were very well educated men, some with doctorates.

​As the New York Times noted in 2005,
           We examined the educational backgrounds of 75 terrorists behind some of the most significant recent terrorist attacks against Westerners. We found that a majority of them are college-educated, often in technical subjects like engineering. In the four attacks for which the most complete information about the perpetrators' educational levels is available -- the World Trade Center bombing in 1993, the attacks on the American embassies in Kenya and Tanzania in 1998, the 9/11 attacks, and the Bali bombings in 2002 -- 53 percent of the terrorists had either attended college or had received a college degree. As a point of reference, only 52 percent of Americans have been to college.
...
The 1993 World Trade Center attack involved 12 men, all of whom had a college education. The 9/11 pilots, as well as the secondary planners identified by the 9/11 commission, all attended Western universities, a prestigious and elite endeavor for anyone from the Middle East. Indeed, the lead 9/11 pilot, Mohamed Atta, had a degree from a German university in, of all things, urban preservation, while the operational planner of 9/11, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, studied engineering in North Carolina. We also found that two-thirds of the 25 hijackers and planners involved in 9/11 had attended college.

Of the 75 terrorists we investigated, only nine had attended madrassas, and all of those played a role in one attack -- the Bali bombing. Even in this instance, however, five college-educated "masterminds" -- including two university lecturers -- helped to shape the Bali plot. ... In fact, two of the terrorists in our study had doctorates from Western universities, and two others were working toward their Ph.D.

Yet all these intelligent and educated men were apparently completely unable to understand the plain injunctions of the Religion of Peace™ to spread that peace. How to explain this?

Well that's another thing we've learnt - we don't ask those questions any more. To interrogate Islam means to hate all Muslims with the perfect hatred of a thousand Suns.

We did investigate Islam in the beginning of course, but that was quickly snuffed out. Some argue that we cannot even understand Islam due to our not being native Arabic speakers raised on the Arabian peninsula. To ask such a question is simply to "other" & dehumanise all Muslims further marginalising by implying that they have anything to do at all with mass murderers. Even though that's not what we're doing.

Our protestations that we can't possibly know what drives the Red Brigade or the Labour Party or Methodists or the Lions if we don't study their writings, charters or vision statements are ignored. We are to simply accept the reassurances of some Muslim leaders that "true Islam" doesn't condone the murder of innocents. Even though some of those Muslim leaders are proven liars, Antisemites and supporters of jihad who preach violence against non-Muslims, the subjugation of women and death for homosexuals. Far from being investigated, such men are often greeted with wide open arms when authorities invite Muslims to bridge-building events.

To the contemporary Western mind - and I use the term loosely - affirmation and acceptance is all that matters. Surely people, underneath it all, believe in the same set of values! Surely we're joined in our common humanity! Surely the biggest threat is from "old white men" in the hierarchy who seek to continue the stale status quo (although this one is often more an unspoken assumption it does more and more pop out into the light).

So we can't understand Islam. We can't hold Muslims accountable for acting out on the plain & historic teachings of Islam. And we're bad people for even wanting to understand the teachings that led to the death of thousands of people on that September day in 2001. According to the Religion of Peace website Islamic terrorists have carried out over 33,783 deadly attacks since 911. Each one of those attacks claimed at least one life and was carried out by individuals basing their actions on core teachings of Islam. But we've learnt that we must not look at such things.

Instead we've learnt that whoever tries to get us to look at such things are the real villains. "If it wasn't for you guys everybody would be happy!" Ah yes, I remember being told this back when a few of us were deeply concerned about the gay paedophile Pastor of our church 20 years ago. The problem was, silencing us & driving us out of the church didn't stop the damage. It didn't help heal anyone involved and it didn't get people to accept reality and make changes for the better. What it did do, for those who believed it, was to drive them into a fantasy world and make them lose their minds and perpetuate the carnage.

So to today - did you see the article about the Christian evangelist Franklin Graham on Jihad Watch?
Newsweek reports that,
            The Muslim Council of Britain (MCB), an umbrella organisation for hundreds of Muslim groups, has lent its support to calls from three members of parliament and thousands of members of the public to deny the preacher a visa for spreading hate speech. 
...
The MCB in a statement to The Guardian said: “In the past the government has banned individuals whom they claim are ‘not conducive to the public good’. Mr Graham’s remarks are on record and clearly demonstrate a hatred for Muslims and other minorities. “We would expect the government to apply its criteria here. If it does not, it will send a clear message that it is not consistent in challenging all forms of bigotry.”

Newsweek then gives us a key phrase that helps us categorise Mr Graham in the "do not listen to" basket:
   A supporter of President Donald Trump, [Graeme: There ya go! Sigh...] Graham has described Islam as “evil” and a “religion of war,” claimed that Barack Obama was “born a Muslim,” ...

Let's check this.
A) "Islam is evil". That's a value judgment, but there is a mountain of evidence to sustain that allegation. For instance, the religion's central figure is a man who: married a 6 year-old and consummated the marriage when she was 9; organised assassinations of political opponents and even those who made fun of him; tortured Kinana b. al-Rabi` with fire in order to find treasure; and led 83 war raids. That man is the perfect example of a life pleasing to Allah. This isn't evil?
B) Islam is "a religion of war". Got any proof for this claim Mr Graham? Heaps. Two-thirds of Christendom was conquered by Islam during its first 400 years. While we keep being told about the terrible evils of the first Crusade which has led to so much ill will among today's Muslims, we never seem to hear about that do we? One Hindu source also notes that because of Islam: "By all known accounts of world history, as pointed out by Koenard Elst in his book the Negationism in India, destruction of about 100 million Hindus is perhaps the biggest holocaust in the whole world history". We don't hear so much about this either. Why might that be?
C) Barack Obama was "born a Muslim". As even Snopes states that Mr Obama's father was born a Muslim, then yes, technically under Sharia any children born to a Muslim man are automatically Muslims. There is no argument about this doctrine. Indeed, Sharia states that every child is born a Muslim and is then often taught a false religion by their parents. Whether he was raised a Muslim or what kind of Muslim his father was is not addressed by Mr Graham.

On all 3 points the Minister is correct in what he says. So what's the problem?

But, since 911, we have learnt that we are to read all sorts of nefarious motives into those who raise legitimate concerns about Islam. If we have learnt all this in just 17 years, one really does have to wonder what we will learn in the next 17. Or 27. Or 37. Just keep ignoring the piles of dead, the masses of raped girls, the no-go zones, the stifling of free speech that offends Islam. It's all so gradual.

But due to endless repetition we seem to be learning our lessons very well.

Here is a first rate review of Raymond's Ibrahim's new book (the arrival of which in my mailbox I eagerly await) Sword and Scimitar. Published by Crisis Magazine and titled, “Islam’s Thousand Year War on Christendom,” Kilpatrick’s review follows. A 9 minute audio of this is also at the link.

Indeed there is nothing new under the sun in the motivation for Islamic warfare in its various guises. Just as there is nothing new in the response of non-Muslims to that threat.

During Tony Blair's time as Prime Minister of Great Britain I bought a 1937 English translation of Bonaparte: Governor of Egypt by F. Charles-Roux. Chapter 5 is entitled "Bonaparte and Islam". In that chapter I saw Bonaparte conduct himself towards Islam in a way very like Mr Blair did. The self-flattery of these two; the inability of the man with a secularist mindset - though Mr Blair claimed to be a Catholic - to understand the power of religion, let alone the great cult-like following the prophet had and has; the belief that such people could be appeased with worldly rewards such as peace and prosperity when in reality nothing can ever substitute for the approval of a god in whose hand is one's eternal destiny.

Here is a very real fear of eternal damnation holding a very definite sway on foreign policy, law making and the entire idea of what constitutes success itself. Obedience - or submission, as the word Islam means - to the prophet and a white hot veneration to the teachings and glory of the eternal Qur'an is ultimately all that matters.

Yet both Bonaparte and Blair remained apparently uncomprehending of all this. As Robert Spencer notes, Bonaparte flattered the Muslims:

     In Egypt, he aggressively courted the Muslim population, saying to one imam: “Glory to Allah! There is no other God but Allah; Muhammad is his prophet, and I am one of his friends…. The Qur’an delights my mind…. I love the prophet.” [Graeme: we have heard very similar words spoken by Tony Blair as he sought a peace with Muslims] He told Egyptian imams that it was “the will of Muhammad” that the Egyptians ally with the French. He denounced the Russians to the Ottoman sultan, saying that they “abhor those who believe in the unity of God, because, according to their lies, they believe that there are three,” an echo of the Qur’an’s warning to Christians to “say not ‘Three’” (4:171), that is, do not profess the faith in the Holy Trinity.

In Bonaparte: Governor of Egypt, Charles-Roux notes, 

         No European colonizer ever met Islam in a more tolerant, even deferential, and sympathetic spirit. No ulterior motive of Christian proselytization, no denominational prejudice influenced Bonaparte against the Mussulmans. They did not occur through their religion either his aversion or his contempt. He was still too thoroughly imbued with the ideas propogated by the French Revolution, too detached from the Catholic church, too prejudiced against the Papacy to think ill of the followers of Islam ...
               Their profound faith, their piety, and the essential dogma of their theology, that of the oneness of God, ran counter to no philosophic opinion of his. He respected their faith; his conception of divinity was closer to the unitarian dogma  [Graeme: interestingly Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain was also a Unitarian who believed in "reason". It may be only a slight oversimplification to note that, being aware of this, Herr Hitler had but to convince Chamberlain that he too was "reasonable" to achieve many of his territorial goals before war became inevitable. A similar widespread degeneration of Christian doctrine in the post-Christian West is evident today. We are ignorant and too unwilling to discuss the thornier issues] of Islam than to the trinitarian dogma of the various Christian confessions. As the founder of a religion, as a lawmaker, Mahomet aroused his admiration.
...
     [In his writing & recorded conversations] there are some of the most impartial and some of the most sympathetic pages ever written on Islam in a Western language. To convince the Mussulmans of Egypt of the benevolence of his intention, genuine as it was; to declare and prove it to them - this was the essence of Bonaparte's religious policy. ...
[He spoke many reassuring words and took concrete steps to ensure compliance with Islamic sensibilities, but] These precautions did not overcome the suspicion and hostility inspired by the French, as infidels, in the majority of the Mussulmans of Egypt.
...
         A war from which few European conquerors in Islamic countries have escaped was preached by the imams and was brewing in Egypt - the Holy War. ... However sincere the declarations, the protestations of friendship of an infidel would always be suspect. The only declarations that had any chance of being listened to by the masses were those of the Mussulman religious leaders, authorizing and ordering obedience to the French. 'We had to convince and win over the muftis, the ulema, the sherifs, and the imams, so that they would interpret the Koran in [our favour].'
...
       Bonaparte sought recognition by [Egypt and all the surrounding Muslim countries] as a friend and protector of Islam. ... 'In Egypt I have reassured the people, and protected the muftis and imams and the mosques. The pilgrims from Mecca have never been welcomed with more friendly attentions than I have shown them; the festival of the prophet has just been celebrated with more splendour than ever'.

All this does sound a lot like the words and actions of the Americans in Iraq and Afghanistan after the recent wars doesn't it? Indeed all over the West our leaders are bending over backwards to accommodate & befriend the "religion of peace" (mustn't offend by saying it's ever been anything but that eh?) and proclaim its eminent compatibility - even superiority - to our own way of life.

But there is nothing new under the sun. Such transparent flattery & appeasement as we see in these days has a long history. It didn't work before. It will not work again. What is worse contemporary Islamist leadership can spot a quisling, a flatterer, a useful fool and the ignorant very easily. Such people may be led by the nose quite well to either a banquet or to a slaughter. Whatever is deemed to advance the temporal goals of Islam while also advancing its eternal goals. And the eternal goals are always paramount.

Not all opposition comes in the form of violent jihad. The most effective, to which we now readily prostrate ourselves, is the "good cop/bad cop" routine being played out before us. "Respect our beliefs (of course - as we respect yours!) or we really cannot be held responsible for what some of our younger men will do about you being so unreasonable." The Islamist leadership need not bother with this charade while our leaders seem very willing to accept any excuse to capitulate.

And if we stubbornly remain uninterested in the details of this religion - its doctrines and history - how will we ascertain what such goals might be? What is worse is that today it is not only us in Muslim lands but Muslims in our lands and the issues simply must be reckoned with at some stage. Surely we should have the upper hand in this struggle to retain our own way of life. Yet to observe our leaders is to believe the opposite.

We should take the warning. But we won't.
Is that too pessimistic of me? 
I really don't think so.

You see, there really is nothing new under the Sun.


>>>>>>>>>>
Islam’s Thousand Year War on Christendom
William Kilpatrick

At a time when Catholic youth are taught that Islam means peace, pilgrimage and prayer, and Catholic adults are under the impression that Muslims are a misunderstood minority who only want to share their values and their baba ghanoush, it’s refreshing to occasionally make contact with reality.

I mean “refreshing” here in the sense that a dive into chilly waters is refreshing. I just finished reading Raymond Ibrahim’s Sword and Scimitar, a history of fourteen centuries of war between Islam and the West, and the effect is similar to the shocked-awake effect of a plunge into cold water.

Not that I didn’t have a general acquaintance with the history, but one tends to forget the details, and the devil, as they say, is in the details. Ibrahim supplies plenty of those. Moreover, the details are so shocking that one is inclined to think that the devil was intimately involved in the centuries-long jihad against Christendom.

Indeed, that’s exactly what many Christians of those times did think. Muhammad and Islam were frequently referred to by popes and peasants alike as “demonic,” “diabolic,” and “satanic.” For their part, Muslims had a particular hatred of Christians. They considered the Christian belief in Christ’s divinity to be a great sin against Allah. Wherever Muslim armies went they desecrated and destroyed churches, broke crosses and statues, and made a particular point of violating nuns and torturing priests and monks.

In short, the violent conflicts between Muslims and Christians were primarily religious wars, not, as many modern historians suggest, wars for resources or national interests. Some historians, it seems, are less interested in past events than in finding ways to fit those events into contemporary narratives. Their primary source is their own subjective “modern” outlook. By contrast, Ibrahim, who reads both Arabic and Greek, lets the Muslim and Christian witnesses to past events speak for themselves. Thus, when speaking of the Janissaries—Christian boys who were snatched from their parents and forced to become soldiers of Islam—Ibrahim, relying on centuries-old manuscripts, recounts the horror of the abductions, the abuse of the boys, and their transformation into Islamic true believers who were then turned loose against their former kin. By contrast, according to modern academics, the indoctrination of the Janissaries was “the equivalent of sending a child away for a prestigious education and training for a lucrative career.”

Despite the passage of more than a thousand years, the Muslim-Christian conflict was marked by certain constants. There is a remarkable continuity of belief and behavior—especially on the part of the Muslims.

One of the recurring themes is that of world conquest commanded by Allah. Muslims justified all of their wars and depredations during this immense stretch of history by referring to the Koran and to the words and deeds of Muhammad. Muslim leaders did not look upon their conquests as simply local affairs, but as stepping stones to subjugating the earth. Thus, two common refrains across the centuries were “we will stable our horses in Constantinople” and “we will stable our horses in Rome”—and this from warlords who may have been more than a thousand miles distant from either Rome or Constantinople. When, in 1786, Thomas Jefferson and John Adams inquired of Tripoli’s ambassador to Britain why the Barbary States preyed on American shipping, they were informed that according to the laws of their prophet, Muslims had a “right and duty” to make war on all nations that did not acknowledge their authority.

Another constant over the centuries is what Ibrahim calls the “win-win” bargain. Whether a Muslim lived or died in battle, he was guaranteed a reward either way. If he survived a raid or battle he would be rewarded with plunder, slaves, and concubines. If he died, all his sins would be forgiven by Allah, and he would be saved from the tortures of hell. In addition, he would be rewarded in paradise with food, drink, and seventy-two “eternally young” virgins (houris). Indeed, Muslim officers and preachers would circulate among the troops before battle, reassuring them of their immortal rewards should they die in battle. Many early chronicles attributed Muslim zeal and fanaticism in battle to the “win-win” incentive.

Still another constant was slavery. One modern historian observes that “the Islamic jihad looks uncomfortably like a giant slave trade.” The number of the enslaved was astronomical. It was not unusual for a campaign to result in the enslavement of 100,000 people. Between 1530 and 1780, the Barbary Coast Muslims enslaved at least a million Europeans. Some three million Slavs—Poles, Lithuanians, Russians, and Ukrainians—were enslaved between 1450 and 1783. Millions more were taken captive by the Muslim conquerors of Spain [Graeme: Ah! The Golden Age of Andalusian tolerance!]. One caliph, Abd al-Rahman III, had 3,750 slaves and 6,300 concubines.

Slaving raids were also carried out in Ireland, England, Denmark, and as far away as Iceland and Scandinavia. Slaves were used for labor, as soldiers, and as concubines. White slaves were highly prized, especially blonde and red-headed girls and women. Black slaves were routinely castrated. Although few Americans are aware of the fact, the Arab and Ottoman slave trade lasted far longer than the Atlantic slave trade and resulted in the loss of many more lives.

Even America did not escape the reach of Islamic jihad. In its formative years, as Ibrahim points out, America was forced to make jizya payments—amounting to 16 percent of the federal budget—to Algeria for the release of captured American sailors. Indeed, America’s first war as a nation was a war against Islam. Over a period of thirty-two years, the American navy fought an intermittent war to put an end to the Barbary States’ attacks on American shipping. That is what is referred to by the “shores of Tripoli” in the Marine Corps hymn.

Sword and Scimitar puts to rest several important myths. One of these myths is that Christians were the aggressors in this long and bloody conflict. This is decidedly not the case. For example, the modern idea that “the crusades were unprovoked wars of conquest” is demonstrably false. As Ibrahim points out, the crusades were a very belated response to 400 years of Muslim conquest. Two-thirds of the Christian world had already been devoured by Muslim armies before Pope Urban II made his appeal to the knights of Christendom. Many regions which are now solidly Muslim were once Christian. All of the twenty-two nations which now comprise the “Arab world” in the Middle East and North Africa were Christian. The same is true of Turkey, whose capital, Constantinople, was once the center of Christendom.

Perhaps the major lesson of Ibrahim’s timely book is that little has changed over the centuries. One of the misleading myths of our time is that al-Qaeda, ISIS, Boko Haram, and other major terrorist groups have perverted the meaning of Islam. They are variously described as having “hijacked,” “distorted,” or “misunderstood” the true message of Islam. History says otherwise. According to Ibrahim, “this book…records a variety of Muslims across time and space behaving exactly like the Islamic State and for the same reasons.” “Muslim hostility to the West,” he observes, “is not an aberration but a continuation of Islamic history.” Against today’s wishful thinking about Islam’s peaceful intentions, Sword and Scimitar documents “what Muslims have actually done to and in the West for centuries.”

The historical record also reveals two perennial weaknesses of the Western response to Islam. One is disunity. There were several cases of Christians failing to come to the aid of other Christians. And there were even cases of Christians taking the side of Islam. Protestant Queen Elizabeth I formed an alliance with the Barbary pirates against Catholic Spain, and Protestant Count Tholky of Hungary actually marched with the Turks against Catholic Vienna. Likewise, some Catholic rulers had more interest in fighting other Christians than in fighting the Turks. According to one historian, King Charles V “would spend more time, money, and energy fighting the French and the Protestants than he ever devoted to the war with Suleiman.” More shamefully, Louis XIV supported the Ottoman siege of Vienna with men, money, and engineers. When Jan Sobieski’s victorious army inspected the field of battle, “a great many French” bodies were found alongside the Turks.

A second Western weakness was indifference. Many Western leaders took little notice of approaching threats until Muslim armies were on their doorstep. As Pope Sixtus IV warned European rulers:
        Let them not think that they are protected against invasion, those who are at a distance from the theatre of war! They, too, will bow the neck beneath the yoke…unless they come forward to meet the invader.

Even though the distance between peoples as measured by days and weeks has shrunk drastically, many in the West today still maintain an attitude of indifference toward the threat from Islam. They think that the persecution of Christians in the Middle East and Africa can’t happen to them. And many in America are unaware of the accelerating Islamization of Europe. They would do well to heed Pope Sixtus IV’s words: “Let them not think that they are protected against invasion.”

Can’t happen in the here and now? As Sword and Scimitar ably demonstrates, what has happened over and over in the past is very likely to happen again.

++++++++++++
William Kilpatrick taught for many years at Boston College. He is the author of several books about cultural and religious issues, including Why Johnny Can’t Tell Right From Wrong; and Christianity, Islam and Atheism: The Struggle for the Soul of the West and The Politically Incorrect Guide to Jihad. His articles have appeared in numerous publications, including Catholic World Report, National Catholic Register, Aleteia, Saint Austin Review, Investor’s Business Daily, and First Things. His work is supported in part by the Shillman Foundation. For more on his work and writings, visit his website, turningpointproject.com

We are always being told that real jihad is an internal spiritual struggle to be a better person aren't we?

Yeah, got a problem with that.

​As the eminent scholar of Islam Robert Spencer has previously said,
     If jihad is simply a spiritual struggle, then why is there an entire chapter of the Qur’an entitled “Booty” or “The Spoils of War” (al-Anfal). What spoils ensue from a spiritual struggle? If jihad is simply a spiritual struggle, how is a Muslim supposed to make Jews and Christians “pay the jizya with willing submission and feel themselves subdued” (Qur’an 9:29) spiritually? If jihad is simply a spiritual struggle, why are there thousands upon thousands of Muslims worldwide who have joined violent jihad groups? Why are there any violent jihad groups at all? Why is this misunderstanding of jihad so widespread?

Again here is what a book of Sharia Law itself says about this idea of Jihad being a spiritual struggle,
             The Shafi’i legal manual (the Shafi’is are a school of Islamic jurisprudence) ‘Umdat al-Salik (Reliance of the Traveller), which has been certified by al-Azhar, the foremost authority in Sunni Islam, as conforming to the “practice and faith of the orthodox Sunni community,” devotes one paragraph to jihad as spiritual struggle and seven pages to jihad as warfare. It makes it quite clear that jihad is warfare against non-Muslims:

Jihad means to war against non-Muslims, and is etymologically derived from the word ‘mujahada’, signifying warfare to establish the religion. And it is the lesser jihad. As for the greater jihad, it is spiritual warfare against the lower self (nafs), which is why the Prophet (Allah bless him and give him peace) said as he was returning from jihad,

“We have returned from the lesser jihad to the greater jihad.”

The scriptural basis for jihad, prior to scholarly consensus is such Koranic verses as:
(1) “Fighting is prescribed for you” (Koran 2:216);
(2) “Slay them wherever you find them” (Koran 4:89);
(3) “Fight the idolators utterly” (Koran 9:36);

and such hadiths as the one related by Bukhari and Muslim that the Prophet (Allah bless him and give him peace) said:

“I have been commanded to fight people until they testify that there is no god but Allah and that Muhammad is the Messenger of Allah, and perform the prayer, and pay zakat. If they say it, they have saved their blood and possessions from me, except for the rights of Islam over them. And their final reckoning is with Allah.”

and the hadith reported by Muslim,
“To go forth in the morning or evening to fight in the path of Allah is better than the whole world and everything in it.'”

So, if we are to trust what the authoritative sources and great scholars of Islam say about the matter, Jihad is primarily warfare of one sort or another against non-Muslims, not a form of spiritual self-improvement. By all means self-improve, but only after the warfare is over.

I'd have thought those statements should carry a lot of weight. Up to you though. Those sources and scholars may just be rampantly Islamophobic eh? 


>>>>>>>>>>>>
Video: Robert Spencer interviewed on CBN about The History of Jihad
On Monday I was at CBN for a wide-ranging interview with Pat Robertson on the 700 Club on my book The History of Jihad From Muhammad to ISIS, which you can order here now.

Just leave your petty bourgeois fears & insecurities behind and trust our professors OK?

Alas, I am in the camp of Dr Daniel Pipes on this one: the professors (one of his "6 P's": politicians, police, prosecutors, professors, the press and yes, priests) are more often part of the problem than the solution.

Here is a fabulously informative article by Bruce Bawer. The seeds of the same issue are present here in New Zealand. Very pertinent.


>>>>>>>>>>>>>
​Then: “Islamic Europe? Ridiculous!” Now: “Islamic Europe? Inevitable – and Terrific!”
European elite changes its tune - to enable surrender.

One week back in 2007, I was paid a not inconsiderable sum of money to fly first class from Oslo to Washington, D.C., on the Tuesday and to fly back on the Thursday, so that I could give a hour-long lunchtime talk on the Wednesday to an audience of American and international diplomats. Given that I had been compensated so well and given, as it was explained to me, that I had been accorded the star spot, the sole solo turn, in the middle of a day-long conference consisting otherwise of panel discussions about Western Europe, I foolishly expected a friendly reception.

My first doubts in this respect began to arise only moments after the event kicked off. Sitting through the morning's panels, I heard one highly credentialed individual after another – professors, politicians, and retired and active diplomats from various countries – join in predicting a glowing future for Western Europe. Socially and economically, they all agreed, prospects looked a lot brighter for Western Europe than for America. Not a single one of the dozen or so panelists diverged from this consensus.

After three or four hours of sunny prophesizing, everybody lined up for the buffet. When they were all back in their seats, I was introduced and, from a lectern up front, proceeded to serve up a condensed version of the argument of my 2006 book While Europe Slept. I described the rise of Islam in Western Europe, the failure of Muslims to integrate, and the consequent increase in gang crime, welfare dependency, forced marriage, sharia-run enclaves, and numerous other ills – the usual litany. Western Europe, I maintained, was undergoing a radical metamorphosis that, unless drastic action were taken, would ultimately bring its liberal democracies crashing down.

It's easy to read an audience. As I spoke, I could feel the snappily dressed, self-impressed-looking crowd growing restive. When I was done and they were invited to ask questions, I didn't get questions but incredibly condescending razzes, remonstrations, and reproaches. A German envoy reacted angrily to my account of some recent incident – I don't remember what – that had taken place in her country. Her colleagues from a couple of other countries had similar bones to pick. “These are just anecdotes!” one diplomat thundered dismissively. I tried to engage them in a reasonable give-and-take, but they weren't having it. 

What made the experience especially striking was that over the course of the previous year or so I'd given a number of talks about the same subject in Europe and North America. The audiences had been composed not of credentialed foreign-policy experts but of ordinary citizens. All of them had recognized that what I was saying was true. During the Q&A sessions, they'd been eager to express their gratitude that someone was talking about these matters, eager to recount their own horrific experiences with the consequences of mass Muslim immigration, and eager to vent their frustration at political leaders who refused to listen to them, to care about their sufferings, or even to acknowledge the plain objective facts.

On that day in Washington, after my lunchtime talk was over, I thought that despite the reception I had received, it would only be polite to stay for the rest of the day's proceedings. I sat there in the audience, then, as the first of the afternoon panel discussions got underway. It began with all of the panelists voicing outrage over my remarks and basically calling me an idiot. One of them, while professing to be astonished at my incomprehensibly buffoonish and offensive views, noted that, remarkably enough, Walter Laqueur – the distinguished elder historian, world-class Europe expert, and sometime professor at places like Harvard, Johns Hopkins, and the University of Chicago – had just published a book (The Last Days of Europe) in which he made arguments that were essentially identical to my own. It didn't occur to that panelist to wonder why, if I was so wrongheaded, Walter Laqueur actually agreed with me.

In any case, once I heard myself being bad-mouthed from the stage, I got up and bolted. I've never been sorry that I went, however. For one thing, it was a nice payday. For another, it opened my eyes big time. This was supposed to be a gathering of some of the world's most knowledgeable people on the subject of contemporary Europe. Yet they were either ignorant of, or in deep denial about, things that ordinary people all over Europe – people whom they would surely dismiss as lowbrows – knew all about. That event sent my opinion of diplomats plummeting to rock bottom. It made me even more cynical than I already was about persons who were considered experts simply because of institutional credentials. Years later, when people started talking about the Deep State, I knew what they were talking about, because I'd been in the room with it that day.

I mention that event in Washington not because it was an outlier in my experience of public discussions about Islam but because it was thoroughly consistent with what was, at the time, the reigning attitude of the Western cultural establishment toward any expression of concern about the topic. I recall, for instance, an omnibus review in the Financial Times of While Europe Slept, Bat Ye’or’s Eurabia, Melanie Phillips’s Londonistan, and Walter Laqueur’s The Last Days of Europe – four books by authors with very different backgrounds but making very similar arguments. How to explain this? Were we all part of some cabal? The reviewer wasn't troubled by that question. Indeed, he wasn't troubled by any of the hundreds of exceedingly troubling anecdotes in any of our books. No, as far as he was concerned, our books were just dystopic jeremiads written by hysterical bigots. Western Europe was in great shape. Islam wasn't about to take over anything.

One more example. In March 2007, Newsweek ran a “special report” on “Europe at 50.” That piece, too, cited a handful of recent books about the rise of Islam in Europe, my own included. Like the Financial Times reviewer, the Newsweek writer was thoroughly dismissive. Citing our worries about Western Europe's Islamization, he wrote: “To most who live in Europe – or have visited lately – all this seems wrong, even absurd.” Far from being in peril of Muslim domination, he asserted, Europe was moving from strength to strength: “50 years after the EU’s march to unity began, it is now Europe, not the United States, that’s held up as a new lamp unto the nations.”

Cut to 2018. As it turns out, it's not Europe but Islam in Europe that's been moving from strength to strength. As the number of terrorist atrocities, mass car burnings, and gang riots and rapes across Western Europe climbs relentlessly, it's harder and harder to hold up Europe as “a new lamp unto the nations.” Consequently, the elite's message about Islam in Europe has begun to shift. Only the day before yesterday, it seemed, they were telling us – and many of them, to be sure, are still telling us – that it's preposterous to suggest that Western Europe's present order is on the verge of being undone. But now at least some of them are starting to sing a different tune. Yes, they admit, Islam is taking over Western Europe – but hey, there's no reason to worry about it!

Case in point: on March 28 of last year, the Dutch newspaper Trouw ran an interview with Maurice Crul, a professor at the Free University of Amsterdam who “has been conducting research on migration and integration for twenty-five years.” Since only every third Amsterdammer under age fifteen is of Dutch descent, noted Crul, ethnic Dutch people will soon be a minority in that city. The same holds for other major Western European burgs. For Crul, the lesson here is obvious: integration “now works in two directions.” Meaning what? Meaning that Western European natives who have been complaining for years about the failure of immigrants to integrate will themselves henceforth be obliged to integrate into the new, multicultural urban landscapes.

“White Dutch people have to get used to this idea,” Crul insisted. Trouw's interviewer neglected to ask him exactly how much of Muslim culture the ethnic Dutch, as part of their integration process, should be expected to accept as majoritarian norms. Forced marriage? Imam-approved school curricula? Honor killing? Should Dutch women who don't want to be raped start wearing hijab? Does Crul, who's been studying this stuff for a quarter century, have any clue that what he's talking about is gradually accepting and accommodating Islamic strictures until all of Western Europe is under sharia law?

Crul isn't alone. This past August 6, the German newspaper Tagesspiegel published a column by Barbara John, a retired 80-year-old politician who belongs to Angela Merkel's Christian Democratic Union Party. John noted that in some major German cities, people with foreign backgrounds already outnumber native Germans. In Frankfurt, for example, 51.2 percent of the population is non-German. This trend, John pronounced, “is irreversible.” It “awakens fears,” she added. “But they are unfounded.” She held up Rotterdam and Amsterdam as examples of immigrant-heavy cities that are doing just dandy. “After all,” she stated, the new majorities in those cities consist of “many immigrant groups, which differ enormously in education, ethnicity, religion, culture and finances,” and are thus divided from one another, and from ethnic Dutch people, in many ways.

Yes, there are people from all kinds of backgrounds in Western Europe's largest cities. But only one of those backgrounds is problematic. At this point, no one needs to be told why. At present, Muslims make up about 17% of the population of Antwerp and Brussels, 22% of Birmingham, 25% of Marseille, 11% of Amsterdam, 13% of Rotterdam, and 13% of Frankfurt. Immigration patterns and demographic trends indicate that those numbers will increase steadily in the years to come, and eventually, I repeat, all of Western Europe will be under sharia law. Or, as John puts it so prettily, “many things will be different and some things will be better.”

Well, she'll be dead and it won't matter to her. But to the children and grandchildren of today's Western European adults –  people who never voted to have their countries turned over to foreigners and, ultimately, governed by Islamic law – it will matter. To read these blithe reassurances from the likes of Maurice Crul and Barbara John is to recognize them as precisely the kind of people who, at that 2007 conference in Washington, mocked those of us who warned that Western Europe was in for an impending transformation of colossal proportions. Now our warnings are beginning to be treated as received truths, even as those of us who issued the warnings continue to be treated as pariahs. For the nature of our perceived offense is starting to shift, too. These days, more and more, the crime isn't predicting a Muslim takeover of Western Europe. The crime is complaining about it instead of humbly and obediently adapting to it.  

I found this excellent scholarly inquiry into the roots of Islam at the Gates of Vienna. 

It is my intention that it remind us (particularly my fellow Christians, who are the best equipped of all people to understand Islam) that we are obligated to treat Islam like any other religion or set of beliefs. We are obligated to scrutinise the origins, teachings & central personalities of the Faith. Muslims should welcome this as Christians have welcomed it. If only...

How does the history of Islam stand up to scrutiny? The answer is: abysmally. It is quite crushed.
One hour. Enjoy!


>>>>>>>>>>
What Mohammed? What Koran? What Mecca?
The following video is an excellent introduction by Dr. Jay Smith to the deconstruction by Western scholars of the Koran, Mohammed, and Islam itself. Using hermeneutics, textual analysis, archaeology, and other modern disciplines, he demonstrates that the three principal elements of Islam could not possibly be factually true in the way they are traditionally expounded:
1. Mohammed                                                           
2. The Koran
3. Mecca
 
The archaeology and relevant historical documents simply do not support the traditions of Islam. Something happened in Arabia between the 7th and 10th centuries, but it certainly wasn’t what is described in the Koran, the Hadith, and the Sira.

A large part of Dr. Smith’s analysis focuses on the qiblas in the oldest mosques, which did not point to Mecca, but to Petra, in what is now Jordan. He explains the likely significance of the switch from Petra to Mecca, which was prompted by the conflict between the Abbasid and Umayyad dynasties in the late first millennium. He also explains the political necessities that likely motivated Abd al-Malik to invent and backdate Mohammed, the Koran, and Islam itself:

>>>>>>>>
Confronting the Spirit of the Age: Concerning the Qur'an and the origins of Islam

"Swedish conditions".
Uh-huh.

The climate is changing there and we are even being told that nothing whatsoever is happening. Even by Snopes. Even by top Swedish politicians. We are being misled. And if you live in Uppsala, Malmo or Rinkeby you will know we are being misled. But who will listen to you?

As an aside: After the treatment of Lauren Southern and Stefan Molyneux I couldn't help but smile at the ludicrous & apologetic treatment surrounding actual reporting - rare as that was during the visit of those two - you'll see what I mean. Our media and many politicians are right up there with Sweden in our ability to make candy-floss castles to live in and then get shocked when the rain washes them away.

It doesn't get much more deluded than that.

I really apologise for the dropping of the "F" bomb in this otherwise well researched and informative 14 minute video. Such language is so commonplace these days I know, but it did nearly cause me not to post this valuable clip. Sorry, lot's of useful information will, I hope, offset this.

How's that mass Islamic migration thing going these days in France? Well it depends to whom one listens. How to navigate through all the disinformation & bias? I hope this 13 minute video will help. When the President of the United States makes a strong statement it should be scrutinised, not merely accepted. So let's scrutinise it.

There is far too much foul language in the clip which, once again nearly caused me not to post it (that's why I used a different viewer, regrettably even the title is crass). But once again there is a lot of useful information in it that needs to be shared.

Growing Antisemitism? Violence? Awful attitudes to women? Crime & drugs? This will help you decide if President Trump's "Paris is no longer Paris" is at all accurate. 

Calculated or uncalculated risk.

I really like this couple. I like their attitude regarding looking for the best in others and expecting to find it. I love their sense of adventure. My own father travelled by motorcycle from England through Europe, the Middle East, Persia (as it then was known), India and Australia to arrive in New Zealand. This is a vulnerable thing to do. One deliberate act of malice and you're left without your material possessions, your health or even your life. It involves genuine risk.

The couple above rode their bicycles with friends through Tajikistan and were run down and then stabbed to death by Sharia compliant Muslims. I'm absolutely certain that on their journey they were blessed by much hospitality and kindness by other Muslims, but it was the Sharia compliant ones - those serious about following their Faith - that ended their lives. 

As I say, I love their attitude, except ... they were also simply too wishful-thinking and unrealistic in their approach. It brings to mind a story from Mark Steyn's book America Alone: The End of the World As We Know It in which he describes a similar person, a young European woman determined to believe in the innate goodness of people who dressed in a wedding dress and hitch-hiked through Europe to the Middle East. Well, actually she got as far as Turkey before being picked up, raped, murdered and having her body left in a ditch. 

There are proper limits which must be put in place around our positivity and altruism. Such limits allow us to continue practising our good will on another day. To deny the imposition of these limits will mean that we have a decided to play Russian roulette with life itself and deny basic human nature and the nature of the world. 

There are bad people out there. There are very, very bad people. We must prepare accordingly while continuing to live in hope and optimism about our ability to change the world. Tragically, this dear couple did not make the distinction and paid the price.

Robert Spencer offers his thoughts on this disaster. Yes he uses what is to us the unhelpful "Left/Right" paradigm language, but I believe his general warning needs to be heard by many of us. Poverty is not the only driver for crime. Welcome all refugees regardless of vetting? To not study the belief systems and worldviews of those who commit crimes en masse (such as Swedish "carbeques" and British Muslim rape gangs) because they are seen to be irrelevant is not good. 

These are disasters waiting to happen and we would be bringing them upon ourselves. I don't want to see any more people make the same mistake as this young couple. May God help us delineate between virtue & folly.


>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
U.S. Couple Murdered by ISIS Fell Victim to Left’s Fantasy World
via PJ Media
The story has invited more derision than sympathy for the victims: a couple that ridiculed the idea that “the world is a big, scary place” was murdered by Islamic State (ISIS) jihadis while biking through Tajikistan. But those who are mocking Jay Austin and Lauren Geoghegan for their naivete are being too harsh.

The responsibility for their deaths lies not just with ISIS, or with this starry-eyed couple, but also with the Leftist world in which they moved and lived. The Left’s leaders constructed a fantasy world, because Leftist ideas are dead on the drawing board without it.

In their fantasy world, Islam is peace. Borders and nation-states are unwelcome relics of a bygone age, because people are good everywhere -- with the exception of Donald Trump and the “far-right.”

Austin, an employee of the Department of Housing and Urban Development, and Geoghegan, who worked at Georgetown University, decided two years ago to leave their jobs and go on a bike ride around the world. They kept a blog about their journey, on which Austin wrote last April:

   You watch the news and you read the papers and you’re led to believe that the world is a big, scary place. People, the narrative goes, are not to be trusted. People are bad. People are evil. People are axe murderers and monsters and worse. 
I don’t buy it. Evil is a make-believe concept we’ve invented to deal with the complexities of fellow humans holding values and beliefs and perspectives different than our own -- it’s easier to dismiss an opinion as abhorrent than strive to understand it. Badness exists, sure, but even that’s quite rare. By and large, humans are kind. Self-interested sometimes, myopic sometimes, but kind. Generous and wonderful and kind. No greater revelation has come from our journey than this.

Yes, Austin and Geoghegan were unwise to carry this Pollyannish philosophy into Muslim Central Asia, but they didn’t originate it. In this sad episode, ISIS is not the only one with blood on their hands.

Where did Austin get the idea that “evil is a make-believe concept? Perhaps in today’s universities, which are saturated with moral relativism, contemptuous of absolutes, and dogmatically convinced that there is no dispute between people that can’t be settled by mutually respectful “dialogue.”

This perspective dominates contemporary culture, and is taken for granted even at the highest level. When Barack Obama and John Kerry entered into negotiations with the Islamic Republic of Iran, they were working upon the assumption that it was wrong to think that people “are not to be trusted” and that “people are evil.” Obama and Kerry were essentially embracing the idea that “evil is a make-believe concept.” That the mullahs were perhaps “self-interested sometimes, myopic sometimes,” but ultimately good-hearted. The Leftist intelligentsia was and still is unanimous in applauding that initiative.

Likewise, it is a matter of dogmatic certainty for the Left that Islam is a religion of peace, and that only racist, bigoted “Islamophobes” think otherwise. Why should Austin and Geoghegan have had any reason to be concerned about bicycle riding through the Muslim-majority countries of Central Asia?

After all, those who don’t believe that “evil is a make-believe concept” are subject to furious and concerted demonization. The Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) -- and the establishment media that treats the SPLC as if it were a reliable source -- sees only one group of genuinely evil people in the world. Those who recognize that there are evil forces in the world that are set against the United States, and who want to protect Americans against Islamic jihadists, criminal migrants, and more, are the only evil ones. Austin and Geoghegan no doubt had nothing but contempt for such “intolerance” and “hate” manifested by foes of jihad terror and unrestricted illegal immigration.

The Left forces people to believe these fantasies, lest they be charged with “hatred” and “bigotry.” The people who filled Austin’s and Geoghegan’s heads with this nonsense bullied them towards their deaths.

The problem with these fantasies is that reality keeps breaking through. Jay Austin and Lauren Geoghegan discovered too late that some people are evil. Will the West rid itself of the Leftist fantasies that led to their deaths before many more end up dead from embracing them?

Peers of the realm are meant to be chivalrous and it's extremely encouraging to find at least one getting involved as they should in these matters. She makes exactly the same allegations many of us do. But as Baroness Cox is not a "football hooligan" (given the etymology of that term isn't it racist to smear all the Irish? Just saying) or any other kind of "Islamophobe", but a lovely & well educated lady, she might get a hearing where the rest of us would not. 

Four minutes from someone who has a well researched understanding of the problems surrounding Islam and can offer a coherent explanation for what she does. Well worth hearing.

Go on, tell me she's racist for being so concerned about Muslim women. 
I dare you.


>>>>>>>>>>>
Jihad Watch's UK correspondent Joshua Winston interviews Baroness Caroline Cox. She discusses her activism and in particular the bill she is trying to pass through Parliament, which would see an end to Sharia courts.

You may have noticed recently that some heavy hitters are starting to knock around people whose opinions they do not like. Overseas examples include Alex Jones, Gavin McInnes, Pamela Geller & Robert Spencer among others. The scholarly Robert Spencer has in particular been given a ridiculously hard time, losing his Patreon account and upon moving to gofundme he's struck similar issues there. Why? He's called far-right, white supremacist and an Islamophobe. Yet he's never said anything racist, his only concern is the threat of Sharia on the world stage and in the West. Is it racist now to stand up for freedom from oppression and for the equality of women?

Here in New Zealand we've beheld something very disturbing happening that led to the abrupt closure of the venue Lauren Southern and Stefan Molyneux were set to use for their one public talk here. Massey University then de-platformed a retired conservative politician who was to speak on the chilling effect PC culture may be having on free speech today. It appears that Massey has a considerable irony deficiency. We could try pointing it out to them but I don't think they'd understand.

All this represents what some of us are afraid is a new effort to control language and information. To reform concepts and to frame arguments in certain set ways which are not open to debate. "You disagree with me on a point? You must be a nationalist/populist/ racist/fascist/Islamophobe - I needn't listen to you. Furthermore you do not deserve to have anyone listen to you and I will do all I can to ensure no-one can. Everyone! Come and help me shut this hater up!"

Now in contrast that does indeed sound a bit fascist doesn't it? Does no-one do any research any more? I mean real research - not a quick look at a Wikipedia article and a couple of videos produced by people whose opinions we historically resonate with.

Below is an article from the Barnabas Fund on the winding back of freedom of religion in Britain. It is very interesting in that it raises the concern that - for the very best reasons according to its proponents of course - freedom of choice, of speech, of association and of conscience are being eroded in our increasingly multi-cultural societies in order that we not upset any minority group.

Indeed, the only group it seems that can be upset is the group deemed singularly deserving of criticism: the majority population and in particular those collectively understood to be responsible for any problems faced by any of the minorities. As this only seems to be a phenomenon of the West that majority group is dominated by the more traditional white males among us.

You know, I don't think this is a good way to go.

We need only look at South Africa today where those considered to have had their own way for far too long are about to lose legal rights - along with their farms. Is this justice? Would you think so if you were one of the farmers about to have their land taken by force? Is racism, nationalism and populism OK when it's not white people doing it? How did we arrive at this point?

Rowan Atkinson's speech in the 9 minute video at the end is from 5 years ago when hate speech laws were trying to be established in British law. It just keeps getting more and more pertinent. How long before this blog is considered "fake news" or "hate speech"? How long before dissenting views make one a social pariah, unable to use a bank account or social media or to keep a job? All these things have already happened to some overseas. 

The more diverse societies become the more we need the safety valve and release of free speech. There will be frictions. Forbidding criticism of the problems - or even expressions that problems exist out of a sense of politeness - will not ameliorate matters it will only build resentment and inevitably make things worse in the long run. If the Muslim rape gangs in Britain had been squarely identified and addressed back around 1975 when they first became known we would not have had all the carnage of destroyed lives and greatly increased community tensions that followed.

Time to relocate our core values I think.
​Before it's too late.


>>>>>>>>>>
The slippery slope: from full freedom of religion back to “toleration”
  Do you know the difference between toleration of religion and full freedom of religion? They sound the same don’t they? But there is a vitally important difference. In countries with religious toleration, Christians are generally allowed to worship but they face restrictions such as not being allowed to do certain jobs, not being allowed to meet for worship or openly preach their faith outside church buildings.

Although Christians in some countries face arrest and outright persecution from the government, in others they are allowed to worship but face serious restrictions. They are excluded from some public posts, may be excluded from attending university, standing for election and have to be very careful about any public display of their faith. In other words, they are tolerated on sufferance.

Repeal of the “Toleration Act” and gradual establishment of religious freedom
For about two centuries the UK had religious toleration, which eventually developed into full freedom of religion in 1888. In 1689 the English and Welsh parliament passed a “Toleration Act” which allowed Nonconformists (Protestants who were not members of the Anglican established church) and Catholics to meet for worship, subject to certain restrictions.

Gradually over the following two centuries those restrictions were repealed, first for Nonconformists, then for Catholics, then for Jews and finally even for atheists. A significant example was the repeal, in 1719, of the law requiring school teachers to affirm publicly the then dominant belief system of Anglicanism.  

During the next 170 years a series of other “Test Acts” were abolished which had excluded non-Anglicans from being lawyers, army officers, magistrates, town mayors, students or academics at Oxford and Cambridge universities or becoming an MP. Restrictions on public expression of non-Anglican forms of belief were also gradually lifted. Importantly, in 18121 the Five Mile Act was repealed which had made it illegal to have a non-Anglican place of worship within five miles of any town sending an MP to parliament.

Slipping back down the slope to mere toleration?
So, in 1888, when the last of these restrictions were lifted and even atheists were allowed to sit in parliament, the UK entered a period of full freedom of religion. However, today there is a real risk that the UK is slipping back down the slippery slope from full freedom of religion to mere toleration, on sufferance. Like the proverbial frog in a saucepan of water that is being slowly brought to the boil, Christians in the West could all too easily become accustomed to this gradual erosion of freedom of religion, not noticing until it is too late.

Let’s take the recent case of Allan Coote, an ordinary Christian from East London who believed God wanted him to read the Bible in front of St Paul’s cathedral. He was arrested while reading the verses from the sermon of the mount which says “Blessed are those who are persecuted because of righteousness, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven” (Matthew 5:10). Since Barnabas Fund first publicised his story on 10 July, it has been carried by national newspapers such as the Mail on Sunday, the Sunday Times, Daily Telegraph and even by the media in countries such as the USA and New Zealand. Yet, what happened to Allan is just further slippage on a slippery slope that began 21 years ago.

Step one on the slippery slope
1997 marked a particular turning point. Until then no street preachers had been arrested since Victorian times. Then, an evangelist Alison Redmond-Bate was arrested after preaching on the steps of Wakefield Cathedral and convicted. However, the High Court subsequently overturned her conviction with Lord Justice Sedley declaring, "Freedom only to speak inoffensively is not worth having.”

He also said that even if a crowd of hecklers are becoming unruly the police cannot order a preacher to stop because, “a police officer has no right to call upon a citizen to desist from lawful conduct."

Since then we have seen literally dozens of arrests of street preachers, with many held in custody for the best part of the day, then either released without charge or bailed, with the Crown Prosecution Service quietly dropping charges weeks later. Even when they do go to court the preachers are often acquitted, sometimes within minutes.

Step two on the slippery slope
In February 2017, during the trial of two street preachers the Crown Prosecution Service lawyer claimed that quoting from the King James Bible, “in the context of modern British society, must be considered to be abusive and is a criminal matter.”

Both preachers were convicted but this was overturned by the Crown Court in a retrial.

Step three on the slippery slope
On Christmas Eve 2017, Roland Parsons was peacefully reading the nativity story from Luke 1:52-68 outside Victoria Underground station in London as he had done every Christmas Eve for the previous 20 years. On this year, however, he was approached by a police officer and ordered to stop. Mr Parsons said:

“As an Open Air Preacher for 34 years I have stood outside Victoria Underground Station in London on Christmas Eve and read the account of the birth of Jesus Christ, usually from Luke chapters 1 and 2. Over the years many weary travellers have come up to my wife and I with great delight at hearing those familiar verses, thanked us. The occasional official has raised his eyebrows, but as soon as they heard the familiar verses that are so beloved within the traditional English Parish church carol service they have let it continue.”

But as from Christmas Eve 2017 this reading has now been stopped.

The slippery slope continues: where we are today
Staff at St Paul’s Cathedral asked police to stop Allan Coote reading from the Bible, even though he was not committing a criminal offence and even though another police officer said there was no offence and it would be “remiss to stop a man reading the Bible in a place of worship”. St Paul’s have claimed they would treat anyone outside the cathedral the same way, but Allan is not the first Christian preacher to be silenced. Two years ago a Methodist minister received similar treatment. However, in 2011 cathedral authorities allowed anti-Capitalism protestors to occupy the area in front of St Paul’s for four months, even though this forced the closure of the cathedral. Then on Christmas Eve 2012 radical Muslims claiming Jesus is not the son of God held a protest there.

It is particularly sad that it is church authorities who have now sought to ban Bible reading in public although, following all the publicity, Allan’s case has now received they have relented and said they will allow it for half an hour a week! However, as Allan points out this is still placing restrictions on Christians reading the Bible in public. "They have allowed me to have half an hour a week to preach there but there should not be a limit,” he said, adding, “If I want to go all week, I should be allowed to do this without interruption.”

In other words, in the course of just 21 years we have moved down the slippery slope from street preachers not having been prosecuted since Victorian times to a point where preachers are regularly arrested and even church authorities seek to restrict the public reading the Bible. We are sliding further backwards from the full “Freedom of Religion” which was achieved 130 years ago to mere “Religious Toleration”, where Christians are still allowed to worship freely but restrictions are placed on other aspects of openly practising their faith.

Barnabas Fund is taking a lead in a UK-wide push back to Turn the Tide against the erosion of religious freedom in the UK. Barnabas Fund’s Our Religious Freedom Campaign and petition calls upon the UK government to introduce a new Act of Parliament to enshrine fully and permanently into law our hard-fought-for religious freedoms, including the freedom to read Scriptures in public.
​
If you have not yet signed our petition calling for this please click here.

We keep hearing how much non-white Muslims suffer from racism from the majority in Western countries, don't we? Here's a 6 minute talk with a chap who left Islam and has a lot to say about being raised as a Pakistani Muslim in England, including how he was taught to be very, very racist.

He also discusses the Muslim rape gangs in Britain, which are often dismissed as cultural manifestations that have nothing to do with the profoundly generous and irenic religion of Islam. But if the problem is cultural then where are the Sikh or Christian Pakistanis doing these things? As our friend states, the role model of Muhammad remains the great stumbling block - as long as he remains the al-Insan al-Kamil, the "perfect man", the ideal example of a pleasing follower of Allah, then abhorrent and pestilential practises such as FGM, rape gangs and racism will persist among Muslims.

I do not believe it is possible to reform this character Muhammad. Honest scrutiny can only lead to him being dismissed altogether. Muslims can only continue to hold him up as a moral example either by ignoring all his foul deeds and statements or by placing them in some convenient, often imaginary context.

That is not good enough. It is dishonest.

For a mere man who continually stated that he was not God to nevertheless be treated as the flawless God is not good. There was only ever one man who claimed to be God who is the centre of a great world religion. Our Pakistani friend below has found him to indeed be the person he claimed to be. He also found Muhammad to be the person he claimed to be. 

The difference was so obvious that he had no choice but to change.
It's time for you to make the change too friend.
You can't go that way any more.

They seem particularly adroit at discerning its presence in the non-Muslim world - many would say even when individuals and groups are nothing of the kind - but how is it that they just can't find any right-wing political parties in the Muslim world? Do they simply not exist there or is something else going on?

Another one of those teeny, tiny blind spots perhaps? Perhaps a matter of unconsciously patronising those considered deserving if ignorant eh? However well intended it doesn't aid accuracy or understanding.
Does it?

This article from the Middle East Forum is very useful I think.


>>>>>>>>>>>>>
Whitewashing Far-Right Parties in the Middle East
Seth Frantzman
The decision to remove “right and “left” from the political landscape of the greater Middle East is partly an Orientalist way of othering the region

When France went to the polls in 2017, CNN described an interview with the “far-right candidate Marine Le Pen.” In March, France24 reported on Italy’s elections as a choice between “the populist Five Star Movement, three-time former prime minister Silvio Berlusconi’s right-wing coalition and the ruling center-left Democratic Party.” Hungary voted in national elections in April and The Guardian wrote about “Gergely Karacsony, the leading left-wing candidate.”
 
Pakistan went to the polls last week and Imran Khan’s Tehreek-e-Insaf came in first. France24 reported that prior to his win there had been a “rotating leadership between the Pakistan Muslim League-Nawaz (PML-N) and the Pakistan People’s Party.” The Guardian reported that the PML-N had complained about the vote. CNN noted that the “Pakistan Muslim League came in second with 64 seats and the Pakistan People’s Party won 43.”
 
Notice the difference. In Pakistan there is no “right” and “left” or “far right.” The closest most Western media came to apply the labels they apply throughout the West to Pakistan was France24 describing the Jamiat Ulema-e-Islam as “religious.” Only Al-Jazeera labeled some of the parties in Pakistan’s elections as “far right” and others as “religious supremacists.”
 
The absence of political spectrum terms “right” and “left” affects every country from Morocco to Pakistan, except for Israel. In Israel elections, major media describes a political spectrum spanning far left to far right. Even though India and Pakistan share similar histories, The Independent described “far-right populism” in India, but not “far-right populism” in Pakistan. If there isn’t “far-right” populism in Pakistan, perhaps there is “far-left populism?” Nope. Neither that. It is as if the greater Middle East exists in an apolitical universe. There are left- and right-wing parties in South America, in sub-Saharan Africa, and in East Asia and Australia.
 
What explains the inability of major media, particularly in the West, to use terms “right, far right, left, far left” or “conservative, liberal” for the Middle East? Hamas and Fatah are not described as “right-wing religious” and “center-right nationalist,” although that’s what they might be called if they ran in Bulgaria or Denmark. There are slight exceptions to this rule. Reuters refers to “Islamist Hamas” and AP refers to Hamas as an “Islamic militant group.”

But what happened to terms such as right-wing, far right, right-wing extremist, far-right conservative?

To erase these terms (and in the process sanitizing and whitewashing most of the politics across dozens of countries), major media even created new terms for some political divides, like that in Iran. In Iran, there are “hardliners and moderates.” That’s it. There are no “right-wing” parties. No centrists. No populists. No alt-right, obviously. Mahmud Ahmadinejad is called a “brash, populist hardliner.” When Roy Moore ran for Senate in Alabama, he was called “reactionary,” a “far-right Republican” and a “controversial conservative” by the same publications that can’t use similar terms for Holocaust-denying Ahmadinejad.
 
Of interest, Turkey tends to get some “right” and “left” descriptions because of its proximity to Europe. BBC described “fiery nationalist Meral Aksener” and “center-left CHP,” the “Islamist-rooted AKP,” the “nationalist MHP” and “pro-Kurdish People’s Democratic Party.” Okay, but actually the AKP is a right-wing party, the MHP is also a right-wing party and the HDP is a left-wing party. It’s not just “pro-Kurdish,” its roots are in left-wing politics. So why can’t Western media say so?

The decision to remove “right” and “left” from the political landscape of the greater Middle East is partly an Orientalist way of othering the region. The argument is that countries from Morocco to Pakistan, primarily Muslim countries, cannot be understood on this spectrum, they are so different. Even when they share a history and political traditions, such as India and Pakistan, one country is devoid of right-left politics.

The second reason for the disappearing descriptions is because of a conscious effort to whitewash the politics of these countries. Pakistan’s politics primarily span the extreme religious right to the nationalist right. Iran’s politics also span the far-right religious conservatives to the extreme far-right religious conservatives. There simply are no left-wing parties in most of these countries. In Pakistan, almost every politician supports the death penalty for blasphemy. If a politician in the US supported the death penalty for blasphemy they would obviously be “extreme far-right religious.” If Le Pen is “far right,” then certainly so is Ahmadinejad, and the AKP and Hamas and Hezbollah and the PML-N and many other parties.

A third reason why the region lacks a political spectrum is that in the West the term “left” generally means “good” in media parlance while right, or far right will be a stand-in for “bad,” “racist,” “nationalist” or “religious conservative.” Throughout the Middle East, almost every party is either nationalist or extreme right conservative. The decision not to label them as such is a way to quietly sanitize them for the reader. There is a deeper agenda here. Hamas and Hezbollah, for instance, are regularly called “religious” but then said to provide “social services.” Then they are quietly moved into the “left-wing” column as providing the “poor” with “social justice.” Of course, the KKK also had “social services,” but it was not a leftist party. Hamas and Hezbollah share more in common with the KKK than Karl Marx. But some people want us to see them as more Marx than murderers.

It’s time to take the gloves off and label politics from Morocco to Pakistan. In a globalized world, the various parties and movements do not exist in a vacuum. Political Islamist parties are right wing. They aren’t “hardliners.” Maybe they are “populists,” but then label them what they are. Nationalists are nationalists. They aren’t just the “leading party” and the “opposition.”

Are there left-wing, secular style parties in this region. Yes, there are. A few. Are there liberals? Yes, there are. Let them be liberal and define the rest of the politics as “conservative,” which is what it is. Stop the charade of calling parties in Israel and India “far right” while labeling Palestinian and Pakistani parties as just their names, without a judgment as to where they sit on the spectrum. End the charade of telling us that Bulgaria and Russia have a political spectrum but not Kazakhstan and Iraq.
 
Seth Frantzman is a fellow at the Middle East Forum and Opinion Editor for the Jerusalem Post.

As I have pointed out several times, Turkey is moving away from its secularist foundation and reverting to its historic Muslim self identification. Mr Erdogan has big big plans, but only in a bad way. 

Dr Daniel Pipes notes,                
        A recent study has found that 60% of German Turks align themselves with Turkey’s Islamist President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, who has funded and built hundreds of mosques throughout Germany led by imams who receive their instructions from Ankara. In Holland and Bulgaria, the creation of Turkish-Islamic political parties has created tensions between the two governments and Ankara, while Denmark is experimenting with the assimilation of migrants through imposed regulations aimed at countering feelings of alienation and marginalization.

Frank Gaffney is also deeply concerned about Turkey's change of direction under the Sharia supremacist President Erdogan and the very real concern this represents for Europe and the Middle East as he develops what Erdogan calls his "new Caliphate" at the expense of Western civilisation and freedom in general.

A Turkish contributor to the Middle East Forum points out yet another disturbing trend in that country:~
​

• 40% of girls under 18 in Turkey are forced into marriage (according to Turkish Philanthropy Funds).
• In January 2018, a government body under President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan's jurisdiction suggested that, according to Islamic law, girls as young as 9 and boys as young as 12 could marry.
• "Low education" means almost all of Turkey: The average schooling in the country is a mere 6.5 years.
• In Turkey you may abuse a 13-year-old and walk free, but you may not tease the president.

So we see there are three realms of degeneration: that of morality inside Turkey, Turkey's influence on its ex-pats and on governments in general in Europe and its expansionist regional agenda under Erdogan.

Certainly a critical factor is Erdogan's own personality and drive for control - a man worthy of the sort of scrutiny so openly given to the current President of the United States - yet the place of Islam in forming the beliefs, laws and priorities of Turkey is regularly overlooked. It shouldn't be. As Dr Pipes notes "In Eastern Europe ... the conversation is mainly about the incompatibility of Christian and Muslim cultures." I pray dear reader that this is where our conversation will be centred in New Zealand.

Certainly there will always be problematic personalities but the crucial issue is, as always, the central place of a Faith which incorporates every aspect of life - including the political - and which clearly delineates in its classical historic form the abyssmal treatment of women, non-Muslims and other minorities.

Should the adherents of Sharia compliant Islam continue to grow in New Zealand we will inevitably face the same problems as so many northern hemisphere countries are now facing. But let's always be clear: the problem is the Sharia compliant belief system of many Muslims, the problem is not all Muslims.

​Do look back to this article I posted last year on an attempt at law reform for women in the equally famously "moderate" Malaysia - it didn't work out well at all did it? If this happened among "moderate" Malaysia's politicians why on earth would anything different be expected elsewhere in the world?

We are being shown in Malaysia and Turkey what always happens when Muslims place Islam first. Islam is an existential threat to us.

Will we take the warning?

This is a long one. I've been away for a few days - I have a bit to make up :)

Freedom of speech is the only hope we have. To stake everything on its preservation really isn't being shrill. It's simply acknowledging reality. New Zealand is following exactly the same path - with exactly the same players in exactly the same roles - taken by our more accessible Western contemporaries.

It's time for us to get engaged.

>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>


Well it has been an odd few days hasn't it?
The visit of Stefan Molyneux and Lauren Southern has done us an invaluable service here in Enzed. Many of us wondered how our news media, academics and politicians would stand up against international standards. Now we know. Media & politicians slot right in there with Sweden, Britain and Canada at the extreme end of the reality deniers. The academics are not doing much better either. As overseas, academics who disagree with our trajectory mostly do not seem to have the courage of their convictions and instead become part of the problem.

Boy are we in trouble.

Enough has been on display from these groups to confirm our worst suspicions: many academics and politicians and the overwhelming number of journalists - the people who have control of information, the means of making laws and of shaping minds - have not the slightest clue what they are doing when it comes to ideas from outside their cosy little fish bowls. They are ideologues, not thinkers. "Islam is a religion of Peace" isn't a concept to be investigated, it's an unimpeachably veracious statement.

Members of our media, academy and politicians can't even agree with the theoretical proposition that people with ideas they disagree with should be allowed to publicly state them.

What?

Can't they hear themselves? Have any of them ever been to a tertiary institute? You deal with understanding new ideas all day there guys. Or at least you're supposed to.

Together, these groups have managed to engender within me what a lifetime of increasing pressure from many sides could not: after observing all this I truly felt ashamed to be a man, to be white and to be a New Zealander.

Presented with ideas backed up with overseas experience and research all so many of our "thought leaders" could thoughtfully lead us into was baseless name-calling:"Racists! Provocateurs!" Cries of "Shut them up! Close them down!" were the most thoughtful and nuanced responses these people could come up with. There was an early interview (which I can't seem to find now) with NZ TV of which we were shown a selected few minutes. Here's the full hour. Watch it and decide for yourself if the Canadians are really so hateful. ​

In all these years I have argued that what has happened "over there" could happen here and now I have my suspicions absolutely confirmed. Just take a look at Tommy Robinson: his torment, his solitary confinement, his weight loss and anguish. The British State did this to him. It is apparent now that our State is just as likely to do it to us should we make the mistake of disagreeing with them and being proved right. This will happen.

Some exceedingly silly arguments also came forth from the general public, such as this beauty: "No one is denying them free speech. They have Youtube channels, anyone can hear them there!" But you're going to do your best to ensure no one can hear them anywhere else aren't you? Would you like me to treat you like that too? Hey it's OK - get a Youtube channel, everyone can hear you there. Just don't show your face around here or there'll be trouble.

Somehow this doesn't strike me as the future free from fascism our fathers envisaged when they stormed the beaches at Normandy.

Thankfully there was a quick response to the initial deplatforming by a group called the Free Speech Coalition. A group of divergent political backgrounds who recognised immediately what was at stake here. Thank God for this. They have however been stigmatised as "rich white men", the fount of all evil - I'm not exaggerating, watching the media this last week shows many influential people really do believe this.

Happily, in the course of this fiasco, I discovered some clever people here in NZ who raised some real issues - often humorously couched. Have a look at this video: "Anti-communists protest alt-Left radicals" and see if you can figure out why the suggested scenario would never take place even though the principles are identical. By the way, our Prime Minister -  the former President of the International Union of Socialist Youth who spoke at the 2009 International Union of Socialist Youth where she addressed her fellows as "Comrades" - is proud of her countrymen for standing against the Canadians: "I think we're hostile to their views . . . They're here because there were no grounds to block them being here . . . I think you'll see from the reaction that they have had from New Zealanders that their views are not those that are shared by this country and I'm quite proud of that."

Uh-huh.

So they weren't saying or doing anything illegal, "we" just don't like what they say. They're here because "we" couldn't find even a tissue paper thin pretense to stop them.

Well that's encouraging.

But fair enough on the "we" thing, I hear politicians all over the world using the "we" when talking about national values & identity. Although . . . doesn't that indicate that "we" have a differing set of values and a different identity than others? How does this not make some of  those others feel lesser and therefore bad? Isn't that wrong? I mean the Saudis still cut a few heads off each week for crimes such as leaving Islam. Does our PM not perceive that her white privilege is offensive to the many Saudis who agree with this practice? Pretty judgmental thing to say isn't it? How dare she?

Some people called the Auckland Peace Action Group were very involved with protesting the visit of our two Canadian friends. What is this Auckland Peace Action Group I hear you say? Well, watch another video of Rachel Poulain's and all will be revealed (spoiler: the name Antifa appears). They have such a nice name, with "Peace" in it, it seems this was enough to stop just about every single journalist from looking them up on Google. Couldn't be a blind spot could it? No? 

And journalists are so offended that people don't trust them. What silly people we are.

Anyway there was a nice "Rally against Straw men" um. . . I mean . . . "Rally against Racism" that provided a cathartic outlet for many people who apparently rely on said journalists for their facts. The media, which routinely call the "racist" speech of these two these two "far right" and "alt right" people (even though those people hate the pair and call them race traitors) conjured up a group of people holding obscene signs calling them fascists (see what you did there journalists? Kind of escalated didn't it?). On the embarrassing Sunday documentary one lady wondered why the pair didn't come down and speak to them so that they could engage in dialogue. She seemed unaware that a) anyone could go to their talks and participate in the Q&A, in fact dissenting voices were encouraged; and b) that being surrounded by a large group of people convinced you were racist fascists might not be the most welcoming environment for a free & open exchange of ideas.

Molyneux & Southern actually did try to chat with some protesters in Australia  (guess how that went - mind the language). Even if they had been up for an open to the non-paying public discussion on their concerns they would have been treated as the problem rather than representative holders of views shared by many of us. All deeply patronising and utterly uncomprehending. 

And speaking of uncomprehending . . . you ain't seen nothing yet!

This "interview" is the most cringe-worthy spectacle I have ever had the misfortune to behold. It leaves the infamous Cathy Newman/Jordan Peterson spectacle in the dust. This interview drew the attention of people from the other side of the planet to our little country it was so awful. Watch this commentary from an Irishman on the Canadian's experiences in Oceania - very funny but so tragic. Bearing in mind his comment on cognitive dissonance, I invite you to read this piece from an experienced  journalist at the NZ Herald on why the Canadians are terrible and shouldn't be allowed to talk. I cannot locate a coherent rationale, can you? As was so often the case it appears that some people just don't want anyone to hear things they find offensive, they can't ratioanlise their position, but they still want it stopped.

So if you haven't watched the interview with Patrick Gower you simply cannot miss it - it's a mind bender. Among many lowlights is the lack of response to Ms Southern's comment about multiculturalism being OK until you're asked to accept something like the culture of [Islamic] women being stoned to death for the crime of being raped. Mr Gower shows not the slightest inkling of comprehension - in fact he goes on another show later to further reinforce his public humiliation. Then he again digs himself deeper into his hole in this article. Three times he demonstrates that he just doesn't get it. I genuinely feel sorry for him, but I feel worse for those who still choose to remain his audience.

Yet he is typical of the people responsible for mediating information to the general public. 

Mr Gower, please read this article - it's from the Guardian so it must be correct right? The Guardian's nice isn't it? The article states that because of Islamic Law - the Hudud ordinances introduced in 1977 as part of a "Shariasation" or "Islamisation" process - up to 80% of Pakistani women are in gaol because they have been raped.

In an effort to more closely follow true Islam the government of a Commonwealth nation brought in laws punishing women for being raped. Let all that sink in. Then go back to the answer Ms Southern gave you. Please. I'm sorry, if you don't do this then I think you are simply not up to the responsibilities of your job. 

Following all this of course was Massey university's decision to ban the ex-leader of the Opposition and Reserve Bank Governor Don Brash. That deplatforming was based on "security threats" and the belief that his opinions got very near to hate speech - a concept that is not even enshrined in NZ law. Sounds a lot like our Prime Minister - we can't legally stop him but boy we tried! It's probably not coincidental that Mr Brash was a big supporter of the Canadian's right to free speech either.

BTW you'll never guess the topic of his talk: "PC culture has gone too far to the point of limiting freedom of speech". 

You. Cannot. Make. This. Stuff. Up.

One of our Universities crushed this event exactly as a Canadian Uni crushed a similar event a year ago. 

This is an example that all over the West we are seeing the silencing of people that governments and other powerful groups disagree with. Given the state of our societies such a situation is to be expected and is unavoidable. It will get worse, not better. We will continue to get shut down, deplatformed and shadow banned (a friend told me he can no longer access IslamAndKiwis from his work computer due to its "offensive" content).

What to do?

Accept reality. This is the deal now. I don't think there's some grand conspiracy to silence us, I genuinely think most people have found themselves in a place where they can't make a reality-based decision because the West is so terribly depleted and has no honest sense of itself, history or the "Other" that we are always being told we need to be more open to.

Too many bad changes are happening too fast around too much of the West right now. You & I have noticed. So you're part of the problem as far as the zeitgeist is concerned. Are you prepared to go the distance on this? You'd better be.

People are being conditioned to expect violence, irrationality and bigotry from you. How will you cope?

My recommendations:

• Be vocal but speak quietly with a smile on your face.
• Don't quarrel.
• Ask the right questions of the people you meet - especially any politicians, academics and media types.
• Build bridges, make friends.
• Be patient.
• Knock it off with the "Right" and the "Left" stuff. In our context this just muddies the waters and we really do have lots of allies on the other side of the aisle. We still have lots of common ground. Remember, 70% of Kiwis wanted Molyneux & Southern to speak.
• The legacy media is apparently four times more "liberal" than the general public. So we may have to bypass the old media.

Many have a deep antipathy to you and what they think are your views because they have simply been misinformed. We can fix that if we're given the room. But we will have to work very, very hard to be permitted the room to make our case. This will take time.

But the only alternative is that our societies will eventually - maybe 50 years from now, maybe sooner - degenerate into anarchy, we'll be at each other's throats and some form of tyranny arises. We can't let that happen and if we can help prevent it by our own personal pain then that's what we need to do. Around 80 years ago our fathers ran at machine guns to stop this happening, now we have a chance to follow their example to prevent the violence.

Commit. Get engaged. Pay the price.
It should be obvious that now is the time.

Dr Daniel Pipes calmly explains why the MEF supports Stephen Lennon.

This is very illuminating. Six Minutes.


>>>>>>>>>>>>
i24NEWS
CLEARCUT | Daniel Pipes, the President of the Middle East Forum, joins i24NEWS' Michelle Makori to discuss the think tank's support of the far-right British activist Tommy Robinson

Democracy demands our participation to work. Challenge these people.

Seven more minutes of things that some people don't think you need to hear.


>>>>>>>>>>>
UK MEP Janice Atkinson on the migrant crime statistics the EU doesn't want you to know about
​Jihad Watch's UK correspondent Joshua Winston interviews UK MEP Janice Atkinson. In this one, she talks about prison populations filled with migrants, 85% of immigrants being economic migrants, and the numbers of people who are waiting to come in.

Who are the ten most influential politicians in Europe at the moment? Daniel Pipes from the Middle East Forum gives his opinion - and they're not who you might think.


>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
Who Are Europe's Most Important Politicians?
"Who is the most important European alive today?" I asked in early 2010. Dutch politician Geert Wilders, came my answer, because "he is best placed to deal with the Islamic challenge facing the continent." I even raised the prospect of his emerging "as a world-historical figure."

In other words, I focused not on run-of-the-mill political leaders – the UK prime minister, French president, German chancellor, or even the Roman Catholic pope – but on the disruptive politician leading Europe's revolt against immigration and Islamization. Conventional politicians optimistically assume that the continent will muddle through, that some form of convivencia (Spanish for "coexistence," a term deriving from medieval Andalusia) will emerge, that multiculturalism somehow will tame the beast of Islamic supremacism.

But as Europe, population 741 million, heads toward cultural crisis, as indigenous birthrates plunge, as Islamist aggression increases, and as the elite made up of the 6Ps (police, politicians, press, priests, professors and prosecutors) myopically insists there is nothing to worry about, this happy talk has little basis in reality.

In 2010, Wilders clearly led those individuals and parties who stand up for traditional Western civilization – what the media inaccurately smears as the far-right but more accurately called civilizationist. Wilders remains a prominent spokesman for civilizationism; but he has not wielded power since 2012 and polls show that a competing Dutch civilizationist, Thierry Baudet, now attracts more voters. In retrospect, it appears that Wilders dwelt overly on the nature of Islam rather than on the dangers of migration.

In his place, a number of civilizationist politicians have emerged who wield actual power, especially in formulating their countries' policies towards migrants and Islam. The key event in their emergence was Angela Merkel's great folly of 2015-16 when, at her invitation, over a million unvetted mostly-Muslim migrants arrived in Germany and elsewhere. Then, to make matters worse, she insisted on other European Union members take a proportion of the migrants, sparking widespread resentment.

Here, in my estimation, are the ten outstanding civilizationist leaders of this moment, in ascending order of importance (to be clear, this is an assessment, not an endorsement):

10. Siv Jensen- Norway's minister of finance who leads an immigration-restriction party.
9. Christoph Blocher- Switzerland's former head of the Federal Department of Justice and Police and still a key figure in the country's anti-immigration politics.
8. Robert Fico- Slovakia's former prime minister and still a behind-the-scenes-strongman, who says "Islam has no place" in Slovakia and has taken steps to prevent mosques from opening.
7. Miloš Zeman- Czechia's president who warns against immigration of Muslims because their integration into Europe is "practically impossible."
6. Markus Söder- Bavaria's premier who demands tougher security along Germany's border with Austria.
5. Heinz-Christian Strache- Austria's vice-chancellor wants to end the "policy of Islamization" (i.e., welcoming Muslim migrants) and instead initiate a "minus-immigration policy."
4. Horst Seehofer- Germany's interior minister who is battling his prime minister (Merkel) to keep illegal migrants out of the country.
3. Matteo Salvini- Italy's interior minister who has made stopping uncontrolled emigration his first priority, to be followed by the far more challenging task of expelling 500,000 illegal immigrants.
2. Jarosław Kaczyński- Poland's former prime minister, now the country's eminence grise, who formed a government by focusing on the immigration and Islamization issues.
1. Viktor Orbán- Hungary's visionary and autocratic prime minister since 2010 who won control of parliament by arguing against uncontrolled Muslim immigration, then battled Merkel and offered a vision for a traditional, Christian Europe.

A few observations about this list: Jimmie Åkesson of the Sweden Democrats might jump on it after Sweden's September elections. Not included are up-and-coming politicians such as Germany's minister of health, Jens Spahn, or Denmark's Morten Messerschmidt. Other than Blocher, Zeman, and Kaczyński, these politicians are relatively young, with potentially long careers ahead of them. Jensen is the odd one out, being the only politician who is not male and not from Central Europe.

After many years of getting nowhere, the opposition to lax immigration controls and multiculturalism has now become a significant force in nine countries, seven of them members of the European Union. I predict that this number will substantially increase before long, perhaps making up half of the European Union's soon-to-be-27 members and changing the direction of Europe as a whole. And one of the figures named here may yet become a world-historical figure.

Mr. Pipes (DanielPipes.org, @DanielPipes) is president of the Middle East Forum. © 2018 by Daniel Pipes. 

Yes he's out for the time being, but when the authorities decided to move him from a prison that was 7% Muslim to the prison with the highest proportion of Muslims the signs were clear: we want to squeeze him.

Nineteen kgs the guy lost in 2 months. Listening to him speak he is obviously physically weakened and, to me at least, he seems to be carrying some other damage from his time inside. This video is of him being reunited with his family when he got home. It's heart warming. The bloke still has such spirit and he didn't deserve the treatment he got.

Choosing not to eat food cooked by Muslim prisoners and not being permitted anything else he lived on 5 tins of tuna and some fruit each week. The days were oppressively hot but he couldn't open his cell windows as excrement would be thrown in. Three times his cell door was left "accidentally" unlocked and at all other times prisoners had access to his door where they shouted abuse during the day.

Don't try to tell me that's fair.

I may have mentioned this before, but a few years ago I was with some dear Iraqi Mandaean friends in a Middle East restaurant in Sydney. We were chatting in normal voices until I asked something about the Shi'a/Sunni divide in Iraq. At this my friend lowered his voice (and his head) and whispered an answer to me. Obviously he did not wish to be overheard in unknown company. But he is in the West. Why did he act like he was back in Iraq? Why do so many Western non-Muslims assume a similar attitude now in discussing problems regarding Islam?

Recently Egypt's Coptic Pope has made an apparently soothing statement on the historic "good relations" between that country's Christians and its Muslim majority. The statement flies in the face of reality. Why did he do it? Only days before one of his Bishops was found murdered in a Monastery. Doesn't he see this?

Raymond Ibrahim explains the phenomena.


>>>>>>>>>>>
The Dhimmi in the Mirror
During a recent ceremony that was attended by more than 50 ambassadors and diplomats, many from Western nations, Egypt’s Coptic Orthodox Pope Tawadros II reportedly said “that Egypt had a long history and civilization and has been a model for coexistence between Christians and Muslims for 14 centuries,” to quote the online website, Egypt Independent (I cannot locate his original speech in Arabic to confirm his precise words).
​
This assertion raises a host of questions, from its veracity, to the reason it was uttered by the representative head of the nation’s indigenous Christians.

As to the claim itself—that “Egypt … has been a model of coexistence between Christians and Muslims for 14 centuries”—this is somewhat literally true: from Islam’s initial invasion of Egypt in the late 630s, to the present, Egypt has indeed been a “model”—a paradigm—of what happens to native Christians when Muslims conquer their territory.  Even the word “coexist,” though connoting living peaceably with others, literally only means to live together (including its Arabic form, ta‘ayush).

At any rate, and as documented in my new book, Sword and Scimitar: Fourteen Centuries of War between Islam and the West, those 14 centuries saw a  continuum of hostility ranging from wholesale persecution (in the worst of times) to mere discrimination (in the best of times) in Egypt.  Much of this is confirmed by the History of the Coptic Patriarchs (which no doubt the latest Coptic patriarch is aware of).  This multivolume account, compiled over the course of a millennium, covers the history of the Coptic Church under Islam till 1894.

Unmitigated Muslim persecution of Christians permeates it pages, including the burning and banning of churches and crosses; the fiscal extortion, slaughter, enslavement, mass rape, and forced conversion of Christians.  Think what the Islamic State (“ISIS”) has been doing to Christians and others but on an exponential scale.  Moreover, the persecutors weren’t “radicals” who have “nothing to do with Islam,” but leading heads of Islamic states, whether Arabs, Fatimids, Ayyubids, Mamluks, or Turks.

Following a brief respite and “golden age” for Christians under colonial rule, when freedom of religion and equality were expected and enforced, the persecution of Egypt’s Copts is back in full force.  Since Tawadros became Pope in late 2012 alone, hundreds of Christians have been massacred in repeated church bombings, monastery attacks, and random killings.  The mere rumor that a church is being renovated or built, or that a home is being used as a church, prompts Muslim mobs to riot and destroy Christian property, often with the support of officials (as happened only recently).  And of course, young Christian girls continue to be targeted for kidnapping, rape, and conversion to Islam.

So why did Tawadros say what he did (whether it was meant as a double entendre or not being irrelevant)?  Because real politick dictates that his speaking the ugly truth would only exacerbate the plight of his flock: most Western diplomats in attendance would at best do nothing, at worst criticize him for being an “Islamophobe.” Either way, he would be left alone to deal with his Muslim overlords; and they would be displeased—and manifest their displeasure in the usual way—because a dhimmi, who is tolerated inasmuch as he meekly submits, dared tarnish Islamic Egypt’s image.

From the start, many in the West have failed to understand this hostage-like relationship.   For example, years before the First Crusade was launched, Peter the Hermit (b. 1050) went on pilgrimage to Jerusalem. When he finally reached the Holy Sepulchre, “he saw many forbidden and wicked things occurring there. . . . [So] he sought out the patriarch of the holy church of Jerusalem and asked why gentiles and evil men were able to pollute holy places and steal away offerings from the faithful, using the church as if a stable, beating up Christians, despoiling pilgrims through unjust fees, and inflicting on them many sufferings.” The frustrated patriarch threw up his hands in exasperation: “Why do you reprimand me and disturb me in the midst of my fatherly cares? I have but the strength and power of a tiny ant when compared to those proud men. We have to redeem our lives here by regular tribute payments [jizya] or else face death-dealing punishment.”

Then and now, not a few Mideast Christians have also had to “redeem their lives” by, among other forms of “regular tribute,” not tarnishing Islam’s image—even as Westerners wonder why they don’t “speak up.”

Which leads to the real question: If Christian minorities living under Islamic authority have little choice but to speak well of their “coexistence” with Islam, why are Western leaders, politicians, and talking heads of all varieties—who are not under Islamic authority—also behaving like cowed dhimmis?

Put differently, if the Coptic pope is hostage to his Muslim masters, exactly who or what is the Catholic pope--who covers up for Islam even more—a hostage to?

Just a couple of days ago I was chatting with an old work mate who expressed an interest in the Bible but recoiled at the idea that God would deliberately subject the Son he loved to humiliation, torture and death. How could any loving parent allow their child to go through that he wondered - let alone the Supreme Being - and especially for the sake of this grotesque, distorted and ungrateful human race?

Ah, that is the old stumbling block. How indeed? What kind of God would love people so much that it defies 'logic'? And if this is the religion that the West is based upon what affect has this astonishing and unique view of God, that we have so taken for granted, had on our history and civilisation?

Tom Holland is a historian who grew up going to Sunday School but - like many of us - drifted away as "better" ideas took hold. Today though he has come to view the Faith he rejected with renewed respect and has a genuine grasp of the debt we all owe it. 

I paste below an article he wrote on his discovery and also a brief clip from an interview he had with the English Evangelical Anglican Bishop N.T. Wright (Tom Wright has visited New Zealand and been interviewed on RNZ National).

If familiarity has similarly bred contempt in you of "Mere Christianity" then I offer you some insights from a man who has trodden the way before you.

And if you hold to the belief that there are "universal" ideas of human rights and freedoms held by Muslims that similarly sprung from their Faith as they did from ours, then I have to say that you really do not understand your own history, the Faith of Islam or the world at all.

From the NewStatesman.


>>>>>>>>>>>>>
​​Tom Holland: Why I was wrong about Christianity
It took me a long time to realise my morals are not Greek or Roman, but thoroughly, and proudly, Christian.

When I was a boy, my upbringing as a Christian was forever being weathered by the gale force of my enthusiasms. First, there were dinosaurs. I vividly remember my shock when, at Sunday school one day, I opened a children’s Bible and found an illustration on its first page of Adam and Eve with a brachiosaur. Six years old I may have been, but of one thing – to my regret – I was rock-solid certain: no human being had ever seen a sauropod. That the teacher seemed not to care about this error only compounded my sense of outrage and bewilderment. A faint shadow of doubt, for the first time, had been brought to darken my Christian faith.

With time, it darkened further still. My obsession with dinosaurs – glamorous, ­ferocious, extinct – evolved seamlessly into an obsession with ancient empires. When I read the Bible, the focus of my fascination was less the children of Israel or Jesus and his disciples than their adversaries: the Egyptians, the Assyrians, the Romans. In a similar manner, although I vaguely continued to believe in God, I found Him infinitely less charismatic than my favourite Olympians: Apollo, Athena, Dionysus. Rather than lay down laws and condemn other deities as demons, they preferred to enjoy themselves. And if they were vain, selfish and cruel, that only served to endow them with the allure of rock stars.

By the time I came to read Edward Gibbon and the other great writers of the Enlightenment, I was more than ready to accept their interpretation of history: that the triumph of Christianity had ushered in an “age of superstition and credulity”, and that modernity was founded on the dusting down of long-forgotten classical values. My childhood instinct to think of the biblical God as the po-faced enemy of liberty and fun was rationalised. The defeat of paganism had ushered in the reign of Nobodaddy, and of all the crusaders, inquisitors and black-hatted puritans who had served as his acolytes. Colour and excitement had been drained from the world. “Thou hast conquered, O pale Galilean,” Swinburne wrote, echoing the apocryphal lament of Julian the Apostate, the last pagan emperor of Rome. “The world has grown grey from thy breath.” Instinctively, I agreed.

So, perhaps it was no surprise that I should have continued to cherish classical antiquity as the period that most stirred and inspired me. When I came to write my first work of history, Rubicon, I chose a subject that had been particularly close to the hearts of the philosophes: the age of Cicero. The theme of my second, Persian Fire, was one that even in the 21st century was serving Hollywood, as it had served Montaigne and Byron, as an archetype of the triumph of liberty over despotism: the Persian invasions of Greece.

The years I spent writing these studies of the classical world – living intimately in the company of Leonidas and of Julius Caesar, of the hoplites who had died at Thermopylae and of the legionaries who had triumphed at Alesia – only confirmed me in my fascination: for Sparta and Rome, even when subjected to the minutest historical inquiry, did not cease to seem possessed of the qualities of an apex predator. They continued to stalk my imaginings as they had always done – like a tyrannosaur.

Yet giant carnivores, however wondrous, are by their nature terrifying. The longer I spent immersed in the study of classical antiquity, the more alien and unsettling I came to find it. The values of Leonidas, whose people had practised a peculiarly murderous form of eugenics, and trained their young to kill uppity Untermenschen by night, were nothing that I recognised as my own; nor were those of Caesar, who was reported to have killed a million Gauls and enslaved a million more. It was not just the extremes of callousness that I came to find shocking, but the lack of a sense that the poor or the weak might have any intrinsic value. As such, the founding conviction of the Enlightenment – that it owed nothing to the faith into which most of its greatest figures had been born – increasingly came to seem to me unsustainable.

“Every sensible man,” Voltaire wrote, “every honourable man, must hold the Christian sect in horror.” Rather than acknowledge that his ethical principles might owe anything to Christianity, he preferred to derive them from a range of other sources – not just classical literature, but Chinese philosophy and his own powers of reason. Yet Voltaire, in his concern for the weak and ­oppressed, was marked more enduringly by the stamp of biblical ethics than he cared to admit. His defiance of the Christian God, in a paradox that was certainly not unique to him, drew on motivations that were, in part at least, recognisably Christian.

“We preach Christ crucified,” St Paul declared, “unto the Jews a stumbling block, and unto the Greeks foolishness.” He was right. Nothing could have run more counter to the most profoundly held assumptions of Paul’s contemporaries – Jews, or Greeks, or Romans. The notion that a god might have suffered torture and death on a cross was so shocking as to appear repulsive. Familiarity with the biblical narrative of the Crucifixion has dulled our sense of just how completely novel a deity Christ was. In the ancient world, it was the role of gods who laid claim to ruling the universe to uphold its order by inflicting punishment – not to suffer it themselves.

Today, even as belief in God fades across the West, the countries that were once collectively known as Christendom continue to bear the stamp of the two-millennia-old revolution that Christianity represents. It is the principal reason why, by and large, most of us who live in post-Christian societies still take for granted that it is nobler to suffer than to inflict suffering. It is why we generally assume that every human life is of equal value. In my morals and ethics, I have learned to accept that I am not Greek or Roman at all, but thoroughly and proudly Christian.

​Tom Holland’s most recent book, “Dynasty: the Rise and Fall of the House of Caesar”, is published by Abacus

Where will this end?

This excellent 30 minute video (note: some foul language) includes examples of double standards from Britain, Australia & Sweden. Several chilling cases are offered - particularly concerning to me was the young lady, a Muslim ex-Police officer of colour, who found "radicalisation" in the London Met and was quietly threatened on multiple occasions not to say anything. 

Nobody in authority will acknowledge this unofficial double standard, just as they refused to acknowledge the potentially one million white and Sikh girls gang raped by Muslim grooming gangs in Britain and the Netherlands. If the only goal is to maintain the equanimity of the wider community then I suppose that it is easiest not to scrutinise the core problem - but surely only for a very short time? If it needs repeating: The core problem here is Sharia and the culture arising among Muslims due to Sharia. The core problem expressly is not the people who notice & complain about all this. 

Lord Carey, former Archbishop of Canterbury, is mentioned in the clip. He noted several years ago:~ "A de facto blasphemy law is operating in Britain today. The fact is that publishers and newspapers live in fear of criticising Islam." The video ends with Christopher Hitchen's prescient warning on the impending loss of the freedom to criticise due to the new double standard. 

The Archbishop and the arch Atheist agree on this. Maybe there's a problem?

This is a thoroughly useful enquiry and highly recommended. Again I'll state that, no, I'm not smart enough to be a lawyer so there may be subtleties to each of these situations that I am missing. But the idea that the law should be transparently & evenly enforced does seem something we should all reasonably expect. "Justice must be seen to be done" I seem to recall hearing years ago. Yet in all these jurisdictions we see similar responses that seem based - help me here - simply on an ignorant and short-sighted fear. Am I wrong?

I would note that the woman seen being arrested early in the piece was not apprehended directly for her work over halting the illegal Muslim prayers but because she said to a gay opponent "have a gay day" as they parted. This is the explanation offered by authorities for her arrest. I'm sure it had absolutely nothing whatsoever to do with her publicly embarrassing the cops into doing their job and enforcing what they termed "discretionary laws".

Nothing at all.

Of all the Scandinavian countries perhaps Denmark is the one with the best track record in human rights. They refused to hand over their Jews to the Nazis during the war and have been the most aware of the menace Sharia compliant (or submissive) Muslims represent to them. Now they are taking some relatively bold steps to curb Sharia.

Unsurprisingly, this is upsetting some people.

Bruce Bawer explains.


>>>>>>>>>>>
Not So Rotten in Denmark?
They're not turning things around, but at least they're trying to slow down the decline. 
​  
On July 1, the New York Times ran a long article by Ellen Barry and Martin Selsoe Sorensen headlined “In Denmark, Harsh New Laws for Immigrant ‘Ghettos.’” How harsh? Henceforth, starting at the age of one, children living in designated “ghettos” – in other words, “low-income and heavily Muslim enclaves” – have to spend at least 25 hours a week receiving instruction in Danish values, “including the traditions of Christmas and Easter, and Danish language.” Parents who refuse to obey may lose their welfare payments.

Given the proven failure (over decades) of innumerable Muslim immigrants in Denmark to learn Danish, find jobs, and otherwise integrate into Danish society – not to mention the tendency of young people who've grown up in those “enclaves” to join gangs, commit violence, and express open hostility to native Danes and their culture – these laws sound eminently reasonable. In fact, anyone aware of the scale of the problem might well pronounce them tame and insufficient. But not the Times. Barry and Sorensen describe the new laws not as a responsible attempt to prevent the kind of social and economic collapse looming in next-door Sweden, and to preserve a free, safe, and solvent Denmark for future generations of ethnic Danes and the descendants of immigrants, but rather as a “tough” and “sinister” expression of the Danish government's “ire.”

One law that the Times writers single out for disdain “would impose a four-year prison sentence on immigrant parents who force their children to make extended visits to their country of origin...in that way damaging their 'schooling, language and well-being.'” Barry and Sorensen plainly find this law unspeakably severe. One wonders if they know what they're talking about. The fact is that countless Muslim parents in Europe send their kids “back home” for years at a time – it's called “dumping” – so that they can attend Koran schools, soak up Islamic codes of conduct, and (most important) be shielded from such abhorrent Western phenomena as individual liberty and sexual equality.

As it happens, this practice has been studied extensively. It represents a profound danger to the children involved – girls especially – as well as to the Western countries to which they eventually return. In her 2001 book But the Greatest of These Is Freedom: The Consequences of Immigration in Europe (2011), Hege Storhaug of Norway's Human Rights Service explained that “girls are sent abroad so that they won't be able to live on equal terms with males and enjoy the right to choose their own spouses”; some of them, moreover, “are sent abroad at puberty to be prepared for marriage – to be prepared, that is, to be good wives who live up to the demands and standards set by men in their families' homeland.” Is a four-year prison sentence too tough a penalty for parents who do such things to their children? No, especially when you consider that Danish prisons could be mistaken for luxury hotels while the madrassas in which these people enroll their kids look like, well, prisons – and the marriages (usually cousin marriages) into which those girls end up being forced are, in all but name, prison sentences.

Barry and Sorensen interviewed two critics of the new laws – a pair of Muslim sisters whom they depict as model citizens and describe as being fluent in Danish (but who are also, bemusingly, on welfare). “Danish politics is just about Muslims now,” one of the sisters complained. “I don’t know when they will be satisfied with us.” Gee, maybe when you stop bleeding the Danish treasury dry? Maybe when the 30,000 or so members of your “community” across Europe who belong to Islamic terrorist cells stop plotting murderous mayhem? Sister #2 griped that “her daughter was being taught so much about Christmas in kindergarten that she came home begging for presents from Santa Claus.” Sounds like a salutary change from what's happening elsewhere in Western Europe, where, as part of nefarious propaganda campaigns, non-Muslim kids are routinely taken on school trips to mosques, shown how to put on a hijab, and taught to recite the shahada – all of which the Times and newspapers like it routinely celebrate. “Nobody should tell me,” Sister #2 added, “whether or how my daughter should go to preschool....I’d rather lose my benefits than submit to force.” Fine. Get a job.

Toward the end of their piece, Barry and Sorensen dutifully quoted a handful of Danes who enthusiastically support the new measures. One woman mentioned her shock at being invited to a wedding only to discover that the guests were separated by sex. Another said, “We pay their rent, their clothing, their food, and then they come in broken Danish and say, ‘We can’t work because we’ve got a pain.’” A third observed: “You could say, of course, parents have the right to bring up their own kids....We would say they do not have the right to destroy the future freedom of their children.” Nevertheless, in classic Times sob-story fashion, the piece concluded with a quote from a Muslim high-school student who warned that the new laws, however well-intentioned, will only serve to bring about the “parallel society” that Danes are “so afraid of.” What malarkey! Those parallel societies already exist all over Western Europe, and the Danish government is doing more than probably any of its counterparts in Western Europe to eradicate them – and thereby save its people, their society, and their values from everything that those parallel societies portend. 

Two days after the Times lambasted the new Danish laws, Time's Amro Ali went even further, comparing Denmark's actions on Muslims to – yes – Nazi Germany's treatment of Jews. “The legislation reads like a 19th century missionary enterprise, a colonial experiment to civilize the brown folks,” groused Ali. No, that missionary impulse was part of the reason why one set of Danish leaders after another, against all reason, persisted in flooding their tiny country with unassimilable hordes from a culture that could hardly more different from their own. As for the bit about “the brown folks,” color has nothing to do with it; Hindus, for example, have proven to be not a burden and a threat but a boon to Europe.

No, the new Danish laws are all about the unique danger that Islam represents, and represent nothing more or less than a noble endeavor to keep a small free country from becoming part of a totalitarian caliphate. In his indictment of Denmark, Ali used pretty much every word one might expect: “divisive,” “illiberal,” “bigotry,” “xenophobic,” “discriminatory,” “exclusionary,” “[h]atred,” “fear.” If Ali sincerely doesn't understand Denmark's actions, he might contemplate his own magazine's' dilemma: the one-mighty Time is now on its last legs, a sad shadow of its former self, precisely because its owners failed to respond competently to the profound challenge posed by the rise of the Internet. Denmark's leaders, too, face a profound challenge – that of Islamization, which threats to bring down their small jewel of a homeland – and they're doing everything they can to try to keep their own little vessel afloat.

To be sure, three weeks before the Times and Time started wringing their hands over Denmark's cruelty to Muslims, the Guardian was on the case, with reporter Richard Orange filing an article headlined “Denmark swings right on immigration – and Muslims feel besieged.” Wrote Orange: “The Social Democrats’ leader, Mette Frederiksen, has called Islam a barrier to integration, said some Muslims 'do not respect the Danish judicial system,' that some Muslim women refuse to work for religious reasons, and that Muslim girls are subject to 'massive social control.'” All true. “She has also called for all Muslim schools in the country to be closed.” Good. All they teach is fanaticism and hate. Orange interviewed one Istahil Hussein, 36, who “says the change in Danish opinion so disturbing that she is thinking of returning to Somalia, the country she left 18 years ago.” Good idea. Don't let the door hit you on your way out. Like his colleagues at the Times and Time, Orange represented Denmark's actions as a product of unfounded prejudice. There was no mention of, say, classrooms full of Danish-born children who don't speak Danish or of imams who preach conquest of Europe.

Speaking of which, on July 24,  Danish prosecutors charged Imam Mundhir Abdallah, who preaches at a mosque in the Nørrebro district of Copenhagen, with delivering a sermon in which he read the following sacred text: “Judgment Day will not come until the Muslims fight the Jews and kill them.” It was the first time the Danes ever prosecuted a Muslim cleric for urging the murder of Jews. It may have been the first time any Western European country ever did such a thing. In reporting this news, France24 further noted that five Muslim hate preachers had been banned from Denmark in May of this year– this, while in the U.K., for instance, the government and media soft-pedal mass Muslim gang rapes and deny entry not to Muslim hate preachers but to critics of Islam.

There's more. As The Local reported on July 11, “people who have lived in Denmark for over three years will have to pay for interpreters if required during medical treatment.” Good. One opponent of this measure “rejected the argument that patients should be expected to understand Danish after three years in the country.” Many people, she argued, “have come here for various reasons and have not been able to learn Danish within the three years.” Yes, that's precisely the problem: it's called a lack of effort. When I moved to Norway, I took language classes, studied hard, and was able to pass an advanced fluency test within a few months. I was over forty – way past the optimum language-learning age. Why should Danes do anything whatsoever for people who don't think a free ride in their country is worth taking that kind of trouble?

On July 26 came another story. These days, it turns out, Denmark is receiving fewer tourists from Muslim countries than its neighbors Germany, Norway, and Sweden. The reason? Partly its ban on face-covering veils, partly its ban on halal slaughter. Why visit such an Islamophobic country, after all, when, as the Resett website pointed out, there are plenty of German and Swiss hotels in which each room's furnishings include a Koran and a compass (so you can figure out the direction to Mecca, of course)?

When it comes to resisting Islamization, in short, Denmark is doing a far more impressive job than most of its Western European neighbors. Still, as much as the mainstream media and the rest of the left may squawk with outrage at its attempts to rein in the advance of Islam within its borders, these attempts may all be too little, too late. In a profoundly bleak talk given last year, Lars Hedegaard, the gutsy and eloquent Danish critic of Islam (who is a survivor of both a jihadist assassination attempt and a hate-speech trial), maintained that “once the Muslim population exceeds, say, five percent, it's game over.” Muslims currently make up about 5.3% of Danish inhabitants. Let's hope he's wrong. The Danes, of all people in Western Europe, deserve for him to be wrong.

That's alright guys, we're used to getting left off world maps.
Go out the door, head towards the rising Sun and veer downhill a bit.

​Can't miss it.


>>>>>>>>>>
An Important Message From Stefan Molyneux and Lauren Southern
​Order Tickets for Stefan Molyneux and Lauren Southern LIVE in Auckland, New Zealand on August 3rd Now: https://axiomatic.events/stefan-molyn...