There's a bit of a fuss about Gillette's latest Ad, or at least I think that's what they'd call it. 

Gillette have taken the time to make the oh-so-difficult moral stand in encouraging men to do a better job being men and in raising their boys. Well OK, good show, nice effort. Trouble is they did a rather hamfisted job of it. This is not merely my feeling as they have felt the need to remove many thousand "dislikes" and negative comments flat out for the last 48 hours. So a lot of blokes have a few problems with how exactly the message was conveyed - the sometimes not terribly subtle misandry and even racism in the clip. We also have a problem with the identification of simple manly traits as being intrinsically harmful (or "toxic" as the current vernacular has it).

This is particularly so after the American Psychologists Association indicated just a few days ago that they now consider traditional masculinity - which involves stoicism, struggle, adventure and risk-taking - is problematic in itself. As Boston25News reports:~

         Traditional masculinity, as the APA defines it, refers to masculinity cognitions “that have held sway over large segments of the population, including: anti-femininity, achievement, eschewal of the appearance of weakness, and adventure, risk, and violence.” These behaviors are often influenced by social, cultural and contextual norms, whether that’s socialization by friends, imitating parent behavior or adopting media portrayals.

Very odd. I know we men have problems seeking medical help at appropriate times but isn't this all rather over-stating the case? Adventure, risk and achievement are now bad? I think you rather spectacularly fail to understand men here APA. That's a problem.

However my biggest problem with the Gillette ad is what it represents in the larger picture.

In taking this terribly principled moral stand they are deliberately ignoring the one group of men who are perhaps most in need of hearing this message today. That would be a large proportion of Muslim men. These men, and the women languishing under the influence of Islam, are in their sorry state because of the teachings of their prophet and because of Sharia law. FGM, rape gangs and the inequality of women before the (Sharia) Law are genuinely huge issues. But they remain unseen.

The wonderful Islamic reformer Imam Tawhidi has something pertinent to say on this topic, which David Wood has helpfully passed on to us. An avoidance of real issues and real oppression because we turn a blind eye to a minority is a problem. 

​This is the problem of so much thinking around most of the criticism of the doctrines & history of Islam. Actions follow beliefs. It would be beneficial to also focus on Islam's role in genuine oppression of women and minorities. If only so many of us weren't so one-eyed about it all...


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Gillette recently posted a short film titled "We Believe: The Best Men Can Be."

This Gillette commercial promotes anti-bullying and anti-harassment movements and draws inspiration from the "Me Too" campaign. While social justice warriors (SJWs) and feminists are cheering Gillette's condemnation of "toxic masculinity," critics point out that the commercial is yet another attack on men and masculine traits. In an interesting tweet, Imam Tawhidi blasts the video for not targeting the most notorious source of toxic masculinity. David Wood discusses the issue.
WEBSITE: http://www.acts17.net 

Well here's an interesting exercise. An atheist ex-Muslim goes into Lakemba in Sydney. Lakemba is the "highly religious" suburb that Police stopped Lauren Southern from entering last July to ask people about Islam. That simple fact raises a few issues, first among them for me is why the Police feared that there would be a "breach of the peace" as they said, when someone begins asking Muslims to defend aspects of their Faith that are troubling to a non-Muslim.

We are constantly told Islam means "peace". However, as Dr Mark Durie explains it means something quite different:~ 
       While there is a link in Arabic between salam, a word often translated ‘peace’, and Islam, the real connection is found in the idea of safety. The word Islam is based upon a military metaphor. Derived from aslama ‘surrender’ its primary meaning is to make oneself safe (salama) through surrender. In its original meaning, a muslim was someone who surrendered in warfare. Thus Islam did not stand for the absence of war, but for one of its intended outcomes: surrender leading to the ‘safety’ of captivity. It was Muhammad himself who said to his non-Muslim neighbors aslim taslam ‘surrender (i.e. convert to Islam) and you will be safe’.


​
​The start of the entry for s-l-m from Lane's Arabic-English Lexicon



​
Nevertheless the authorities, disingenuously in my observation, maintain that Islam does indeed mean "peace" and is a peaceful religion. But if so why should the Police expect violence when difficult questions are asked of Muslims? I mean if Ms Southern were to go into a Christian part of town and challenge people on some aspects of Christianity that she found troubling nobody would expect any problems would they? Even from "highly religious" Christians - you know, the ones who have dedicated their whole lives to closely following God - like Nuns and Bible teachers and ordained ministers.

So there seems to be a serious level of self deception when the Police say that Islam is peaceful while they act on their real belief that these people should not be challenged or they will probably get violent. Despite the talk, by their actions the Police obviously believe the latter to be the truth.

So I like the following video for several reasons:

• it encourages respectful dialogue which can build relationships and diffuse tension & misunderstanding. The interviewer encounters problems both with a language barrier and with the varying intelligence of the Muslims he meets - everyday problems;
• It identifies the opportunity to identify genuinely open Muslims who are pretty happy to discuss contentious issues, but as Mr Navabi shows;
• it also helps us identify the Sharia compliant among our new friends and see for ourselves their closed minded intransigence;
• it also demonstrates someone reasoning about a better Idea and hopefully, use common ground which may lead eventually to gently challenging our new friend about the person of the prophet.

Note how one man believes completely in Sharia and that it is appropriate for Mr Navabi to be put to death for leaving Islam. Note how this man takes the opportunity to try to bring the apostate back into the fold (exactly as Dr Durie explained, he offers a way to have "peace") by shouting him lunch for a chat and even gets his brother the Sheikh to talk to him. In the end though, the Sharia instructions for death for the apostate remain supreme. 

Note also the excuses proffered for taking offence at criticism of the prophet or Sharia by comparing such to mocking one's mother. The point seems to be lost that while I may indeed be temporarily hurt when my mother is insulted, it is entirely up to me how I choose to respond and violence is by no means the unavoidable answer - at least for a thinking person.

This does not seem to weigh at all in these Muslims' calculations though. So for this I can't help but think much less of these men. They place themselves on the same level as a dumb dog that simply has to bite if its tail is stood on. This is demeaning to their dignity as men. Furthermore what may be justifiable criticism from my perspective could be taken as severe mocking by them. How do I know where the line is? I am aghast that Muslims would follow a prophet who had sex with a little girl. yet my Muslim friend is angry at my protestations and punches me in the mouth. Things have only gotten worse. This seems to be the major reason our governments are doing all they can to silence any criticism of Islam rather than encourage genuine, mature public discussion. 

Consider also if were we to change the object of severe criticism from the prophet to something such as "the Jews". A group which, based largely on religious superstition, is widely reviled and stigmatised in the Muslim community. Why is such bigotry & hatred acceptable to so many Muslims while genuine fact-based criticism of Islam is taken as an insult? Why the obvious double standard? If the authorities don't allow us to talk to them about such issues how can this help us all live together?

This isn't dialogue and the sooner some of us realise that some Muslims take seriously the teachings of their Faith to fight those who criticise the prophet & kill apostates then the sooner we'll be able to engage in meaningful communication. That would be really worthwhile dialogue.

If only our governments trusted their people and if only those religious leaders responsible for formal dialogue engaged in really meaningful dialogue on the real issues of substance.

​If only.

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Asking Muslims If We Can Criticize Islam - Sydney, Australia with Armin Navabi (18 minutes)
Armin Navabi - Director of Media at Pangburn Philosophy - goes to Lakemba in Sydney, Australia to ask Muslims if it's okay to criticize Islam.

It's a brand new year! Woo-hoo! Yeah!! Massive eh?!
Things are going to be awesome this year right?

I just love the naivety of children.

Meanwhile back on the Reality Ranch ... let's take a quick look at what sort of jihad attacks have been going on during the last few weeks of good ole twenty-eighteen. With 95% of these attacks being organised efforts by Al Qaeda or ISIS & only 5% being genuine "lone wolf" our media has no doubt been working flat out to keep everybody accurately informed surely?

Oh you didn't hear about them all? And you weren't aware that only a couple were really lone wolf attacks?  I wonder why the news media hasn't keep us all up to speed on this eh? Here's a 14 minute clip to catch you up.

As usual I find it regrettable that the video refers to "Leftists" refusing to cover genuine news. Overall I'm not sure this helps clarity in our context, but those dreadful right wing outfits do seem to be pretty much the ones simply passing on this information don't they? A bit of self-examination might not be amiss in the media as a whole (again, see my last post) but what do I know?

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Today's Boring health update:
A week ago I came down with a cellulitis in my bad leg - it still hasn't forgiven me for smashing it to bits 37 years ago and attempts to kill me every so often - which, on top of the ongoing Chronic Fatigue Syndrome is not improving my mood. Especially when I had planned to be doing Round 1 of the NZ Superbike champs this weekend. The course of antibiotics will be finished soon and I can get back to being sick with only the one ailment. Ah well, next year I shall go to the Ball...

No further comment from me.

​Just watch this and marvel.


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The woman being interviewed referred to the following song in the video:

The "Song of the Party" (German: das Lied der Partei), also known as "Die Partei hat immer recht" (English: The Party is always right) was the party song of the Socialist Unity Party of Germany, the ruling party of East Germany. It was written by composer Louis Fürnberg. It is best known by the first line of its chorus: Die Partei, die Partei, die hat immer recht (English: The Party, the Party, is always right). 

Justin Trudeau and Jacinda Ardern have a great deal in common. This should worry us, especially when it comes to matters surrounding Islam, unwise immigration and the multi-culturalist worldview. Can you really "have it all" and maintain the very things that make your country a place people want to live in?

Prime Minister Trudeau is keen to move his country into a more evolved understanding of its national identity. The problem with his vision is that it virtually deconstructs Canada's historic self-understanding, which is in no way an insignificant matter. This recent 6 minute video clip features several people - including two Westernised Muslims - who are strident critics of this new phase of Canada's evolution.

​There may be a lesson for us in this.

Most people haven't heard of Pallywood, but it is important as this deceptive industry plays a major part in how we in the West view the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

A glaring example comes to mind for me. A couple of years ago I saw a TV news item by Orla Guerin of the BBC. She did a voice-over of a scene where a nice young Palestinian bloke was showing an Arab camera & sound crew around a damaged area after a battle during Operation Cast Lead, when the Israeli Defence Force entered Palestinian areas to fight Hamas.

The nice young man was filmed showing the crew some damage when we are told a shot from an Israeli sniper rang out. The young man is then shown lying on the ground and waving weakly for help. We do not hear the shot, we do not see him go down, nor see any blood. The crew withdraws and another piece of footage shows the now dead body of the nice young fella lying still. We are told he was shot again, fatally this time, by the same Israeli sniper. Despite the camera being apparently trained on him we do not see him get shot, we do not hear the shot, we do not see any blood. 

Ms Guerin simply trusted her Palestinian crew to provide reliable footage and information. I'm sorry but I simply don't believe this story. What kind of sniper would carefully shoot an unarmed civilian with a camera crew only feet away? Would we expect a new Zealand soldier to commit such a crime? There are plenty of ex-IDF Israelis travelling around our country this time of year. Having got to know a few I find it no more likely that they would perform such an act than one of our fellas would. So why do we so easily swallow this story?

Remember Mohammed Al Dura, the little boy who was "shot" by "Israeli soldiers" in 2000 as he hid behind a barrel with his father? That whole episode may not be at all as it was portrayed to us. This 14 minute video will present some unsettling information for you.

Watch the Palestinian cameraman's explanations surrounding the infamous  affair - because this may very well be how a Palestinian looks when he performs taqiyya.

Have you noticed how often men become quiet when they hear another man talk about his difficult relationship with his father? I watched the recent film on Winston Churchill, The Darkest Hour, the other day. In it Churchill was asked about what his father was like. His answer may strike a nerve with some, especially of the older generation: "My father," he said "was like God. Occupied elsewhere."

How commonly the distant, disinterested father somehow unconsciously imprints upon us a similar picture of God. How distressing for us. How distressing for God. Especially in this broken world where pain and loss of meaning seem to compose so much of our lot. He knows that we need to know that we matter.

Yesterday I also watched a chat by Rev Andrew White, the "Vicar of Baghdad". He mentioned a time when ISIS came to one of his Arab Christian congregants and told him they would kill his children if he did not renounce Christ and repeat the Shahada. To the man's grief he felt he had to do so in order to save his children (alas study of the bitter realities of such situations leads me to the conclusion that doing such a thing is never a useful expedient or the lesser of two evils) - he thought they were all free.

However the next day ISIS found his 5 children and directed them to renounce Christ or die. But the children said that they loved Jesus, that they talked to him and he talked to them and that they would not renounce him. So the jihadis did what they have so often done throughout history. Based on the Sunna of the prophet, they killed the children and cut off their heads. Knowing they were about to die the children sang one of the only English language songs they'd been taught, Jesus loves me this I know, for the Bible tells me so. Then they were cut down.

Was God occupied elsewhere?

A short time later Rev White states that two of the other children he had pastoral care for both had a dream the same night where they saw the children dancing with Jesus in heaven. Dancing! No, God was not occupied elsewhere.

One of the daily emails that lands in my inbox is from a group started by the late Chuck Colson, one of President Nixon's corrupt cohorts in the Watergate affair who famously came to Christ before being sentenced to prison for his part in the scandal. Recently they wrote:

         Chuck Colson and his friend Richard John Neuhaus used to remind people that despair is a sin. Now if you define “despair” as extreme sorrow or grief, then calling it a sin seems cruel and unfeeling.

But that’s not really what despair is. In the Christian view, despair is the opposite of hope. Thomas Aquinas wrote that despair “is due to a man’s failure to hope that he will share in the goodness of God.” For Aquinas, despair was more dangerous than even unbelief or hatred of God because “by hope we are called back from evils and induced to strive for what is good, and if hope is lost, men fall headlong into vices, and are taken away from good works.”

For Aquinas, “nothing is more execrable than despair. For he who despairs loses his constancy in the daily labours of this life, and what is worse, loses his constancy in the endeavour of faith.” As the sixth-century theologian Isidore of Seville put it, “to commit a crime is death to the soul; but to despair is to descend into hell.”

There is one Christmas carol that always touches me. It is God Rest ye Merry, Gentlemen, and it is because of these lines:

God rest ye merry gentlemen
Let nothing you dismay
Remember Christ our Saviour
Was born on Christmas Day
To save us all from Satan's pow'r
When we were gone astray
Oh tidings of comfort and joy
Comfort and joy
Oh tidings of comfort and joy

There are some Christian songs the words of which I cannot sing because they are too raw for me and the words above always have this affect on me. I can't repeat them as I sing the carol, neither can I read them without tearing up. Because I remember too well going astray and being in Satan's power - the horror of it, the agony of it, the despair of it. I also remember receiving the Word of Life into the centre of my being and finding him to be true and powerful. How he fought for me and freed me from that wretched state.

And now I have these "tidings of comfort and joy" for everyone who, as I was, is held fast in the merciless fist of an enemy too strong for them. There is real hope in the living God. ​So remember the five children, hold fast, there's a bright morning ahead. Do not give in to dismay or despair.  Our God is with us and he is keenly interested in our predicament. Talk to him about it. He is not occupied elsewhere. 

To modify the the words of King Theoden at his death, where he had looked forward to joining his fathers, we can now say: 
I go to my five small brothers and sisters from Baghdad,
in whose mighty company
I shall not now feel ashamed.

​We will yet dance.

Merry Christmas.

Jewish American academic Dr Daniel Pipes offers some comments on the resistance in Europe and the rise of nationalism, which so many of our media, academics & politicians tell us is most definitely a very bad thing. Once again we find ourselves asking, "are you sure about that?"

Dr Pipes coins the phrase "civilisationist" to describe the response many Western Europeans have to seeing their nations transformed without their permission. He has had quite a bit to do with the "far right" European parties so often singled out for criticism and has useful insights for us including the role of Antisemitism and of Mr Putin in such countries; whether such parties are fascist; the inability of Europe in its current state to assimilate this large Islamic influx; the fetters of political correctness; and his opinion of somebody named George Soros.

Via the Middle East Forum this article will I hope help bring some balance and perspective to the issue.


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Europe Wake Up!
Controverso Quotidiano (Italy)
December 15, 2018

Interview conducted by Niram Feretti. Original Italian title: "Europa svegliati."

Controverso Quotidiano: You have written much recently about Europe's nativist-nationalist-populist-far-right parties, which you call civilizationist. Why do you use this term?
Daniel Pipes: Because none of the other words you used describes these parties precisely; their focus is on preserving Western civilization, making civilizationist most accurate.

CQ: Some important civilizationist parties – the National Rally in France, Freedom Party in Austria, Fidesz in Hungary, and the Alternative for Germany – retain an antisemitic element. Is this permanent or transitory, growing or decreasing?


Doris von Sayn-Wittgenstein, expelled from the Alternative für Deutschland.

DP: That element is undeniably present but most civilizationist parties are making an effort to expunge it. For example, the Alternative for Germany just expelled Doris von Sayn-Wittgenstein due to her connections to Verein Gedächtnisstätte, a Holocaust-denying organization. It's a constant battle but, over time, the parties appear to be less antisemitic. One cannot expect too much, however, for what political party in Europe is not to some extent Europe antisemitic?

​CQ: Clear ties exist between Putin's Russia and such civilizationist parties as the National Rally, Fidesz, and Italy's League: how much should this worry us?
DP: Plenty. Putin is taking advantage of the civilizationists' isolation and financial neediness to win influence over them. The solution lies not in further marginalizing them but in bringing them into legitimate politics, so they don't feel the need to turn toward an external dictator.
​
CQ: What do you think of Hungarian-born George Soros, an outspoken advocate for immigration into Europe, who last year bestowed $18 billion on his Open Society Foundation to build an "open society" without borders?
DP: Given that Soros funds personal attacks on me, I naturally have a very dim opinion of him. The anonymous website dcleaks.com in August 2016 released a confidential file from Soros' Open Society Foundations (OSF) that included an internal 2011 memo, "Extreme Polarization and Breakdown in Civic Discourse," which discussed a $200,000 OSF grant to the Center for American Progress (CAP) to "research and track the activities" of the Middle East Forum and other NGOs combating Islamism. Later in 2011, CAP published a 138-page report, Fear, Inc.: The Roots of the Islamophobia Network in America, which characterized me as a "misinformation expert" whose "alarmist rhetoric" encourages anti-Muslim stereotyping, charges that a follow-up report repeated in 2015. ​Beyond this personal reason, I see Soros' goal of a borderless society, via what is humorously known as his "Open Borders Foundation," as a perfect vehicle for the destruction of Western civilization.

CQ: Please comment on this statement by Peter Sutherland, UN Special Representative for International Migration: "Sovereignty is an absolute illusion that has to be put behind us. The days of hiding behind borders and fences are long gone. We have to work together and cooperate together to make a better world. And that means taking on some of the old shibboleths, taking on some of the old historic memories and images of our own country and recognizing that we're part of humankind."
DP: Peter Sutherland should work for Soros. It's a match made in heaven.

CQ: And comment on this statement by Douglas Murray in The Strange Death of Europe: "The world is coming into Europe at precisely the moment that Europe has lost sight of what it is. And ... while the movement of millions of people from other cultures into a strong and assertive culture might have worked, the movement of millions of people into a guilty, jaded and dying culture cannot."
DP: I emphatically agree. I have pursued this same angle in a blog (which quotes Murray) begun in 2005, "British Culture – Worth Saving?"

CQ: Outspokenness takes a toll. For example, Thilo Sarrazin, a Social Democrat, published Deutschland schafft sich ab ("Germany Abolishes Itself") in which he argued that low German birth rates and high levels of Muslim immigration are fundamentally transforming German society; for this, he had to resign from the Bundesbank's executive board. Renowned French historian Georges Bensoussan said that antisemitism is a permanent cultural feature of Islamic culture and was dragged into court on charges of racism. These and many other instances raise the question: How much does political correctness serve the Islamist agenda?
DP: A lot. The Rushdie Rules, the Islamist crackdown on the open discussion in the West of Islam and related topics, began with Khomeini's notorious edict on Salman Rushdie in 1989. At that time, the Left stood quite robustly with Rushdie. (Norman Mailer, the American novelist: "It is our duty to form ranks behind him, and our duty to state to the world that if he is ever assassinated, it will become our obligation to stand in his place. If he is ever killed for a folly, we must be killed for the same folly.") Thirty years later, the Left would not offer this solidarity. Its rejection of the open discussion of Islam neatly complements that of the Islamists.

CQ: How are we to fight political correctness?
DP: By encouraging more conservatives to become intellectuals.

CQ: The Left regularly accuses the leaders of civilizationist parties of fascism. For example, Matteo Salvini, the leader of Italy's League and the interior minister who has made it his priority to stop uncontrolled immigration, is depicted as heir to Benito Mussolini. Is there any truth to this charge or is it ridiculous?
DP: It's ridiculous. With its emphasis on state power as a living faith, fascism destroys Western civilization while Salvini and other civilizationists want to save it. Clever, those leftists: they accuse someone of wanting the opposite of what he actually wants. I too have experienced this; a recent example was my being characterized as far-right by, of all people, the descendants of Nazis in the German and Austrian media.
​
CQ: How serious is the risk of Islamization in Europe?
DP: Very serious. It is inevitable unless civilizationists manage to control the borders and integrate Muslims.

CQ: What are the remedies for Islamization?
DP: Europeans waking up and voting to take the necessary steps.

A spokesperson for the Organisation of Islamic Cooperation has stated that Europe needs Muslim migrants to prop up its dwindling population and provide for elderly Europeans in the years to come. This despite the fact that migrants have proven to be an overall drain on the economies of their host countries in recent years. As Christine Douglass-Williams notes:~

     What is missing from the OIC’s argument is the common-sense measure of differentiating between immigrants. Europe needs immigrants who will work and pay taxes. Out of the 1.2 million migrants who flooded into Germany in 2016, only “34,000 or 2.8% have found a job,” while only one-third of 1% found jobs in Sweden. In Britain, migrants were found to be “a net drain…on the order of between £115 and £160 billion.” Still, Akeel makes a broad sweep and accuses “right wing parties” of lying about immigration “from the third world.”

      Europe needs immigrants who are skilled, law-abiding, loyal to its countries, and respectful of its constitutions, under which human rights for all and equal rights for all are protected. This includes gays, women, apostates, infidels and anyone else, regardless of creed or race. Unfortunately, Islamic supremacism and jihad attacks have played a central role in increasing opposition to Muslim mass immigration into Europe. This opposition has nothing at all to do with being anti-immigrant or anti-Third World. It has everything to do with preserving Western civilization.

Europe’s new "far-right" should admit that Muslim migrants can benefit the continent eh? Hmm... here we have once again those who have legitimate concerns over Islamic migration being automatically stigmatised as "far-right" but we should be well used to this tactic of mis-labeling and guilt by association by now shouldn't we?

Meanwhile, there are some voices of rationality.

Lord Pearson is interviewed below by Carl Benjamin (he who was recently kicked off Patreon) and covers some extremely urgent considerations for all countries that have a growing Islamic population. The first (very interesting) 10 minutes is on Brexit and the EU but from 10:20 on focuses on the Islamic issue, which covers 26 minutes or so. It also covers the part education has played in preparing much of the population to accepting sub-optimal (as Jordan Peterson might say) outcomes in our larger society.

So what about the concerns of those who have problems with observable realities and the continuation of historic trends and doctrines in our own Western sphere? What about the quarter of a million Sikh, Hindu and white girls raped by predominantly Muslim gangs in Britain in the last 15 years? What about the very real plans Lord Pearson mentions of many Muslims, we could also go back for example to 2006 by Colonel Qaddafi, to dominate and change European countries by having more kids and dominating the ballot box?

​This is an encouraging and informative discussion.

BTW, the clip mentions Muhammad's marriage to Aisha when she was 6 but neglects the larger issue around this. Even if Muhammad was following common practise of his day by doing so, the bigger issue is that because Muhammad is the example in this - as he is for everything else - Islam as it stands will forever defend and copy his behaviour which is at odds with our own very dim view of paedophilia. That's the big problem here.

Boring bit: first a word on my health (and my ongoing inactivity). I had a CAT scan and consulted a specialist and we now know that there's nothing terribly amiss with the brain (contrary to popular opinion!) but we still don't know what the problem really is. Chronic Fatigue Syndrome is a blanket term for things doctors can't diagnose and I was advised to watch my diet and given a couple of options for medication. 

While I think I am slowly improving my health fluctuates a lot. Yesterday after what was for me a great night's sleep (7 hours) I got up, had breakfast and felt like going back to bed by 9AM. The day was pretty much a write-off. Today I feel a bit better and thought I'd do a post while I could. Tomorrow who knows? After nearly 4 months of sitting and watching life go on without me it is beginning to become a little tedious - I have things I want to accomplish, contributions I hope to make. But I take comfort in the fact that no suffering (or death) is meaningless in our Lord's sight.

Jesus had three disciples that were closer to him than the others, Peter, John and John's brother James. I'm encouraged when I read that James - who had spent 3 years living closely with the Saviour & knew him well - was the first apostle to be martyred and this only a matter of weeks after Jesus' ascension (Acts 12.2). When I read that I wonder at the apparent waste of such a great man - what an amazing influence he could have had on history had he lived. Yet God had other ideas. (It is common at such moments to quote Isaiah 55.8 "for my thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are my ways your ways" declares the Lord. However this is to rip the verse from its context, which is God reprimanding his people and demanding that they live their lives in a way that reflects his nature). So I simply rest in the knowledge of God's love for me and that he sees things I don't. It's not over 'til it's over and I can't see the end from here.

Now onto today's brilliant short video from Dr Wood on the motivation of the Strasbourg jihadi...

Let's look at one of those hadith that jihadis so frequently base their actions on:~
Sahih al-Bukhari 2796: "The prophet said, 'A single endeavour (of fighting) in Allah's Cause in the afternoon or in the forenoon is better than all the world and whatever is in it.'"

If you try really hard & squint your eyes just right & use lots of imagination you might be able to see how someone could just possibly misunderstand this peaceful verse to mean that it is better to engage in killing Allah's enemies than to possess the whole world can't you?

Of course your average reader would never manage to twist this perfectly irenic hadith into such a malformed and hateful thing, but there seem to be a large number of people - lone wolves and often with mental problems to be sure, millions of them in fact - who for some reason manage to totally misunderstand the peaceful nature of this statement attributed to Islam's "perfect man".

I mean you'd have to suffer from mental problems or take this out of context or contort it well beyond its natural reading to get a commendation from Allah to be violent from this verse wouldn't you? Wouldn't you?

Good grief. It's so simple a child can understand it, but counter-terrorism chiefs just find the whole thing impenetrably dense. The problem isn't "radicalisation" the problem is the sacred scriptures of Islam. The problem is the central person in Islam: Muhammad.

​If you refuse to look there you simply have no idea what is going on or how to respond. None.


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On December 11, 2018, a young Muslim named Chérif Chekatt shouted "Allahu Akbar" as he opened fire at a Christmas market in Strasbourg, France, killing three, leaving one brain-dead, and wounding many more. On the evening of December 13, Chekatt was killed by French police. David Wood discusses the issue.
WEBSITE: http://www.acts17.net

Having just completed Raymond Ibrahim's new book Sword and Scimitar I can highly recommend it - as I do all his work - and I hope you can find time to watch this brief discussion of the book.

To go to the approximately 10 minute interview click here.


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Video Interview: “Is Islam a Religion of War or Peace?” The Historic Evidence
​Gary Lane, the host of CBN News’ “Global Lane,” recently interviewed me about my new book, Sword and Scimitar, in the context of current events. The video follows; our 11-minute segment — titled “Is Islam a Religion of War or Peace?” — begins around 12:35.  (My earlier interview on the 700 Club with Pat Robertson can be viewed here.)

The lady you can see below is an Iranian Baha'i sports champion wrongfully arrested this past Sunday.

The 6 minute video below gives some details of the human rights abuses she and her family are going through and here is the link to the page where you may sign a petition to protest her treatment and remind the Iranian regime that someone is watching them - even if the Heritage media choose not to. The blurb below is also from the petition web page.

Any international attention to such people will do some good, as we saw concerning the persecution of Asia Bibi in Pakistan.

It just takes a minute to help or you could choose to decline - and what a decline that may be.
​

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Demand for Immediate & Unconditional Release for Jailed Female motocross champion​

​Target: Antonio Guterres, Javaid Rehman, Michelle Bachelet, OHCHR , HRW
Region: Iran
Website: www.icbhr.com

Iran: Female motocross champion arrested over her her faith
ICBHR: The female motocross champion Shahrzad Nazifi was arrested by security agents in Tehran on Sunday, November 18, 2018.

Agents transferred Shahrzad to Tehran Evin prison, according to ICBHR quoted by HRANA. They raid her house after the arrest, and seized her personal belongings, including books, cell phone, and lap top during an inspection which lasted about 5 hours.

She, the women’s motocross champion and coach, was arrested because of her faith in Baha’i. In recent months, IRI’s authorities have brought pressure upon Baha’I community across the country, which led to arrest dozens of Baha’I citizens.

"Shahrzad Nazifi, her husband Mehrshad Naraghi and their daughter Noora Naraghi are all motocross champions of Iran. Both mother and daughter are pioneers of women’s motocross in the country", says Iran Wire.
Iran judiciary has experienced to lash out heaviest sentences against members of the community.

WHEREAS: Shahrzad Nazifi has been arrested on Sunday, November 18, 2018 for unknown reasons;
AND WHEREAS: Her imprisonment is therefore ILLEGAL under Articles 5, 8, 9, 10, 11, 16, 18, 19, 20 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights;
AND WHEREAS: Her unclear situation is also ILLEGAL according to the Articles which are pointed above;
THEREFORE: We, the undersigned, demand that the international community bring all possible pressure to bear upon the Islamic Republic of Iran to honor its binding human rights by IMMEDIATELY and UNCONDITIONALLY releasing Shahrzad Nazifi from jail, canceling her ILLEGAL suspended detention and dropping all equally ILLEGAL charges against her.

There's a life-saving rule known to us old motorcyclists that I have found applicable to life in general. British Police stats show that 70% of all single vehicle fatal motorcycle accidents in the UK came about because the rider stopped looking where he wanted to go when he got into difficulties. If the pilot had engaged his self-control, dragged his eyes away from the section of fence he was about to plough through and forced his eyes to look where he needed to go in order to safely negotiate the turn - he would have got round just fine two out of three times.

A significant majority of such disasters would have been averted by this one act discipline and application. Never taking your eyes off the goal is half the secret of any success. The poster below relates to motorcycling but just substitute the word "Life" for "motorcycling" and you have a very useful philosophy for living - insofar as any of us can have control over anything in life. Life is intended for adults, not human sheep. It does not reward inattention, ignorance, incompetence or stupidity. It rewards participation, engagement and application. We aren't mere passengers.



​Where are the moderate Muslims?
So we have this idea of the "great majority" of "Moderate Muslims" widely propagated among us. But is it true? And if it is true then why are they so remarkably quiet in condemning political or violent Islam? Why can't they publicly condemn Sharia if they are so Western - so very much like us?

Jihad Watch noted today that no less a person than the Grand Mufti of Egypt, Shawki Ibrahim Abdel-Karim Allam, emphasized “that granting women and men equal inheritance rights violates Islamic Sharia…the concept of gender equality in inheritance is against Islam’s teachings….All inheritance laws are detailed in Quran in a clear way.” 

Jihad Watch also noted that almost 300 million Christians are persecuted worldwide and their religious freedom is restricted in 22 Muslim countries.

Where are the great majority of moderate Muslims condemning all this? How many have you heard criticising this very illiberal state of affairs? Very few I'd bet.

Well I've have found one of the few moderate Muslims who does condemn this sort of thing. Hussein Aboubakr, as the 5 minute video notes, was raised in an Egyptian Muslim family and offers some really troubling questions for Muslims and their unhelpfully ignorant Western apologists to consider. To give you an idea here's a snip of an article he wrote a few years ago:~

      Many parts of the Muslim world are intolerant towards free speech, criticism and reform. Human rights are not observed in most of the Muslim world; women’s rights, homosexual rights, minority rights, freedom of speech, freedom of expression, freedom of belief..etc. are things that the majority of non-violent Muslims do not observe. Execution of apostates, women who are not allowed to drive, sexual segregation, persecution of liberals and journalists, homosexual imprisonment, and persecution of non-Muslim minorities are all common themes almost in all Muslim countries. Many Muslim countries use public beheadings, hangings, lashings, stonings and chopping of limbs  as an accepted form of punishment.

While the vast majority of Muslims may frown upon ISIS and Al Qaeda and may be horrified by their acts, they will still approve of many human rights abuses. The majority of the world Muslim population believe that the cartoonists who ridicule Muhammad should be prosecuted. Many Muslim countries carry death penalties for any similar heresy action because they simply do not believe in freedom of speech. There is a Muslim consensus that any acts of violence against Israel, including suicide bombers in buses, are justified if not encouraged. Our acceptance or denial of those facts does not affect the reality we are all living; the Muslim world is dominated by bad ideas and bad beliefs. The majority of Muslims have no principle objections to application of extreme violence, subjection of women and minorities, prosecuting if not killing homosexuals and confiscating personal freedoms.

My argument is, we are using the label “moderate” for everyone who is not trying to kill us regardless of that person’s actual views. We are in a very bad situation to the extent that we have confused moderation with self-interest. The majority of the Muslim world may not be moderate, but rather acting in its daily life from a purely self-interested point of view. This is a very good thing. We should encourage all Muslims to act and preserve their self-interests. But we should not lie to them about the nature of their religious ideas.

One of my other concerns regarding moderate Muslims is their response to Islamic terrorism. Whenever the issue of Islamic extremism arises, the first reaction of moderate Muslims is not to start an honest debate and reform in their religion but to defend Islam and Muslims. Moderate Muslims are obsessed with slogans like “the religion of peace” more than they care about facing the terrorists emerging from their own communities. Moderate Muslims rush to warn about Islamophobia and unjust western prejudice against Muslims. Almost in every single occasion that Islamic terrorism is mentioned, Muslims’ first action is to defend their faith. They assert over and over how peaceful and beautiful Islam is. They are obsessed with their religion and care about it more than they care about stopping murder in its name. It should be clear that this kind of obsession is just another form of fundamentalism. The time has come to talk about how unhelpful and unhealthy their constant obsession with Islam is.

Those Muslims need to know that it is more important right now to direct their efforts inside their communities to battle extremism than to polish the image of a faith soaked in blood. Constantly using the rhetoric of Islamophobia and defending their faith as if it was under attack does not help us to promote peace but actually makes the job of terrorist recruiters easier.

Hmm... so says an honest Muslim capable of self reflection and of changing his direction as he sees a better way to go. It can be done.

Please, my moderate Muslim friends, stop looking at where you are going and start looking where you need to go. Life is not one unalterably set trajectory. You can change it. 

Just ask yourself that question: Where do I want to go?

​You may not be able to reform all of Islam, but you can certainly change your own direction.

Transcript:
After every new Jihadist attack against the West, politicians reassure us that the atrocity does not represent the true nature of mainstream Islam. Of the 1.6 billion Muslims in the world, they constantly reassure us, the overwhelming majority are as law abiding as any members of any other monotheistic faith. Only a tiny fraction engage in terror. And Islam is a religion of peace. Furthermore, we are told, the great majority of Muslims hold moderate views.

But what does that mean? How moderate are moderate Muslims? Given the threat of radical Islam, it would seem to be a fair question. Let me start to answer it by telling you something of my own story.

I was raised in a middle class Muslim home in Cairo, Egypt. Growing up, I was told, among many other things, the following: That every day that passes on the Islamic nation without a caliphate is a sin. That the failures and miseries of the Muslim world started the moment we Muslims gave up conquests and wars against the infidels. That our prosperity depended on conquering new lands and converting new believers. That anyone who leaves the faith must die. And I also remember how my teachers and my mosque imams reacted to the news of 9/11 when it happened: joy.

My experience was typical, and there is data to prove it: According to the Pew Research Center, 88% of Muslims in Egypt, 62% in Pakistan, 86% in Jordan and 51% in Nigeria believe that any Muslim who chooses to leave Islam should be put to death. Similar, if not identical, numbers are in favor of stoning people who commit adultery, severely punishing those who criticize Muhammad or Islam, and chopping off hands for theft.

All of these practices are a part of the penal code of Islamic law, which is known as Sharia. And 84% of Muslims in South Asia, 77% in Southeast Asia, 74% in the Middle East and North Africa and 64% in Sub-Saharan Africa support Sharia as the law of the land. Less drastic, yet significant, percentages are to be found even among Muslim communities in the West.

So, too, most of the world's Muslims believe that any acts of violence against Israel, including suicide bombers in buses and restaurants, are justified. Now, does any of this sound moderate to you? Yet if anyone raises these inconvenient truths here in the West, he is sure to be called an Islamophobe, a hater of Islam. Again, my own story is instructive.

In February of 2015, I was yelled at, cursed at, and successfully prevented from speaking at Swarthmore College by students and others who did not agree to what I was saying. Some of them were Muslim women who fit the image of the unveiled, perfect English-speaking, moderate Muslim young woman. Other seeming “moderates” tried and failed to do the same during my speech at Temple University the next day. Some of them, sadly, were students of journalism.

It is not Islamophobic to note the tragic fact that, at this time in history, the Muslim world is dominated by bad ideas and bad beliefs. That is why millions of so-called moderate Muslims do not rise up to denounce Islamist terror – because the word “moderate,” as we understand it, doesn't really apply. If moderation means you tolerate freedom of speech, freedom of religion, freedom of the press, women's rights and gay rights, moderate Muslims are a distinct minority. Of course, they exist. Millions of them. But among believing Muslims, they do not represent anywhere near a critical mass.

The values of the West and the values of Islam as practiced in the Muslim worlds of the Middle East, North Africa and South Asia, and more and more in Europe, are not compatible. Western politicians can deny this, but this denial does not change the reality.

It is these bad ideas and beliefs that provides the soil in which radical Islam grows. Ignoring this only prevents us from effectively fighting Islamist terror, and at the same time it hurts those heroic Muslims who really are moderate.

Until we begin to tell the truth about Islam – always in respectful language – the only solution to Islamist terror will never take place. That solution is Islam reforming itself. 

I do believe that reform is possible. It can, of course, only be done from within Islam.  The West can be a part of that reform, but only if it faces – and tells – the truth.

The sooner it does so, the better – for all of us.

A crisis you say?
What crisis might that be?

That would be the ongoing crisis. The one involving Islamic aggression lo these last 1400 years and the one involving the hollowing out of the West going back to WW1 when the great Loss of Faith in our way of life began to really take hold. 

Like to fix things? Well that will take some application.
However, I have nothing better to do.
How about you?

Andrew Harrod at Jihad Watch gives a review on a very useful book.


>>>>>>>>>>
Catholic Book Awakens Sleeping Church to Islam

“Islam is a totalitarian ideology bent on world domination, masquerading as a religion,” writes Admiral James A. Lyons in a forward to the new book, Islam and the Suicide of the West: The Origins, Doctrines, and Goals of Islam. The author, Luiz Sergio Solimeo from the American Society for the Defense of Tradition, Family, and Property (TFP), documents this conclusion in an insightful Catholic critique of Islam just as many Catholic shepherds have gone astray.

Solimeo declares that the claim that “Islam as a ‘religion of peace’ is pure fantasy,” like the “Enlightenment fabrication” of a “culturally refined Arab world” facing a “barbaric and uncultivated Christian Europe” during the Crusades. Jihad, a “military offensive aimed to impose the Islamic religion and dominion throughout the world,” is “at the very core of Islam’s history.” Meanwhile, the oft-maligned Crusades “countered and blocked Islam’s centuries-old offensive” of “pillaging and massacring of populations throughout the Mediterranean basin.”

In the current era, “Muslim hordes arriving in Europe…appear more like occupation troops than peaceful immigrants,” Solimeo notes. A book section analyzes Islam’s totalitarian “Affinity with Communism and Nazism,” as shown by historical figures including Adolf Hitler and Carlos the Jackal. Like-minded political extremists today often “find in Islam an ally for the destruction of what remains of Christian civilization.”

“Unfortunately, very few Catholic bishops raise the alarm, urging the faithful to defend the faith and remnants of Christian civilization,” Solimeo laments. This quiescence reflects the fact that following the Second Vatican Council’s end in 1965, “relations with non-Catholics were no longer directed toward converting them to the Faith, by logical persuasion.” Rather, the emphasis shifted to dialogue, supposedly “something of a talisman or charm capable of resolving all disputes with non-Catholics, even communists.”

“Dialogue with Muslims was flawed from the outset because it was based on extremely ambiguous statements in Second Vatican Council documents,” Solimeo observes. Here the Islamophile Louis Massignon exercised heavy influence. Pope Pius XI in 1934 had jokingly called Massignon a “Muslim-Catholic.”

“Dialogue has become an end in itself, the vapid occupation of some professionals,” Solimeo accurately notes. Yet “Islam has no hierarchical authority to impose doctrinal conclusions and decisions and, therefore, interfaith summit meetings will never have practical consequences for other Muslims.” Not surprisingly, “Catholic-Muslim dialogue has not served to alleviate any persecution of Christians and their forced diaspora from their homelands in the Middle East.”

Solimeo observes that Catholic clergy have “silenced and declared non-Catholic,” under “dialogue’s disarming mindset,” accurate portrayals of “Islam’s historical reality,” particularly its “1,400-year war on Christendom.” Catholic bishops have prohibited Islam experts such as Robert Spencer from appearing at Catholic institutions due to their alleged “Islamophobia.” Yet, says Solimeo, “‘Islamophobia’ exists only in the minds of Islamic propagandists,” and “functions like the concept of ‘anticommunist,’ used by communists for fifty years to prevent any criticism of communism.”

Solimeo sees little agreement forthcoming from such dialogue, for, as Lyons writes, the “myth that Christians and Muslims worship the same God is nonsense.” Islamic canons deny the Blessed Trinity as “idolatrous, polytheist and punishable by death,” and treat Jesus merely as a prophetic predecessor to Islam’s prophet Muhammad, Solimeo observes.  Thus the

     Koran and Islamic traditions vilify and blaspheme Our Lord Jesus Christ the Word Incarnate and our Redeemer. There is nothing in common between what our Faith teaches us about Him and His grotesque and sacrilegious caricature as presented by Islam.

Solimeo finds little to recommend Islam’s scripture, the Koran. Unlike the well-ordered Bible, the “Koran is utterly confusing. Suras [chapters] are arranged by size, from longest to shortest,” while “continuous repetition of ideas, stories, and narratives, makes both reading and understanding difficult.” Additionally, the “Koran is full of fantasies” (e.g. King Solomon speaking with birds), making it “more like children’s fairy tales than divine revelation.”

Solimeo also states that the “Muslim heaven resembles very much that of ancient mythology,” whose “inhabitants would indulge in sensible pleasures, especially those of the flesh.” Saint Alphonsus Liguori (1696-1797), a Doctor of the Church, correspondingly described Islam’s heaven as “only fit for beasts.” Contrastingly, the “joy a Christian expects to have in heaven is above all the fullness of sanctifying grace, the light of glory (lumen gloriae)” in God’s presence.

In this world as well, Solimeo notes that Christian and Islamic moral conceptions radically differ, given the “Koranic conception of a God entirely aloof from His creatures, a God Who is not the Supreme Wisdom but acts capriciously.” Therefore “what determines the goodness or wickedness of an act is not its nature but rather the arbitrary will of God.” Orthodox Muslims blindly obey; indeed, the “very name of Muhammad’s religion” is Islam, “meaning submission.” “Islamic morality as a whole represents a giant step backward from that of the Gospel” on matters such as polygamy and divorce.

Solimeo and his collaborators reject the claim that they have “any personal animosity towards Muslims.” The authors hedge their concerns about Islam with the accurate observation that “not all believers of a religion follow every one of its precepts all the time.” Thus “it would be blatantly untrue for us to affirm that every Muslim is a jihadist and a terrorist.”

Solimeo’s book is a much-needed wake-up call concerning Islam at a time when Catholic clergy complacency leads to a stark choice:

       Will the West follow the example of the Prodigal Son and choose to return to the Father’s House, to a Christian civilization inspired by the “philosophy of the Gospel,” or will it submit to an Islamic totalitarianism that highly resembles communist ideology?

Like death for unrepentant male apostates.
That simply cannot be "re-interpreted".

Dr Warner explains in 4 minutes.


>>>>>>>>>>>
Interpretations of Sharia—Does It Matter?
Apologists for Islam use desperate methods to make Islam look more attractive. For instance, some support Sharia by saying that Sharia has a long history of reinterpretation and so can be reinterpreted today so it is more compatible with Western law.

Another argument is that there are different schools of Sharia. There are six different schools of Sharia, but all the schools agree on the vast majority of rulings, particularly in dealing with the Kafir.

The problem is that every interpretation must be based on Koran and the Sunna (found in the Sira and the Hadith). For instance, jihad is a large part of the Koran, Sira and Hadith so no matter how many times you reinterpret the Sharia it must include jihad, the jihad of war against the Kafir. Nothing will remove wife beating, FGM, deception of the Kafir, hating the Kafir, and cruel punishments.

We don’t need to reinterpret Sharia; we need to leave it behind.

A  Far Left French politician warns of imminent secession, Balkanisation or even (as I noted a couple of years ago) Civil War - "five years from now the situation could be irreversible". Birmingham has vigilante groups defending locals as trust in the authorities evaporates. Germany has some 200 elite troops planning assassinations of those deemed to have brought the country to the brink of ruin when social order finally breaks down.

The German military types are of course being called neo-Nazi and far-right, but they may not be - the media has a hard time restraining themselves from calling anyone "far right" or a Nazi that simply stands up for their civilisation. Nevertheless - do I really need to say this? - murder is not OK and they are wrong to take this action. The salient point here that I wish to draw your attention to is the wording: "when" law & order breaks down, not "if". "When" is the common theme across all three countries - and I'm sure more besides those in Europe - a growing number of people are genuinely expecting that order will break down.

Why is all this happening?

Well firstly the Global Financial Crisis of 2008 was not the end of the line for a complete financial breakdown. The experts that I found nearly a decade ago were saying back then that the real crash is still to come and that simply creating vast amounts of currency to buoy up stock markets and house prices is not the same as fixing a problem that hasn't been fixed, but merely postponed and indeed exacerbated. Meanwhile our social welfare burden continues to grow and Western European nations bring in hundreds of thousands of migrants (mainly Muslim) who do not wish to assimilate. Those aware of the situation are concerned at what the future holds and why their leaders are allowing this future.

Secondly, divergent opinions or stories are not encouraged. People are being harassed, publicly shamed, losing their incomes and jobs and even being imprisoned for daring to speak out their concerns. Social media giants are shutting down voices they do not like and the main heritage media outlets are staffed almost exclusively by people with a common ideological worldview which ensures they view events, trends and prominent persons pretty uniformly. There is no legitimate alternate perspective and anyone whose is deemed out of line - I'm looking at you moderators of the Stuff comments section - is simply not given any oxygen.

Thirdly, politicians are becoming more distant from their constituents and prefer ideology to helping them. Simply put, they and the larger government bureaucracy are losing touch with the people.

That is why the totally predictable backlash is happening. 

I've thought for a few years now that the real perfect storm for us might involve three key elements:

• Muslim migration (those who want to come and change to be pretty much like us are welcome, those who wish not to integrate but live by Sharia are the problem); 
• the demographic burden of aging Baby Boomers on various governments which makes us particularly vulnerable for the next 30 years or so at which time the pressure will abate. This is our window of vulnerability;
• and the arrival of the real Global Financial Crisis,

all will provide a moment of vulnerability unique to our generation. We have to be in a position to pull together should major problems arise, not fall apart.

How to stop the nightmare scenario? Couple of ideas:

• The media stigmatise and silence those who think differently. Get some diversity in the news room. Encourage ordinary people to express their feelings, views and experiences. The news in this country has been so eviscerated, so 'dumbed down', that it is not worth listening to any more.
• Pressure politicians. Politicians who are looking no further than the next couple of years until the next election can't be expected to do anything about all this if we don't push them to. 

None of us wants to see what is happening in Birmingham, France and Germany happen where we live. But it most certainly will if wrong-think is not done away with and we can't speak freely about reality. Some of us are trying our best to talk about issues in order to prevent "Day X".

Why are we being persecuted for this?


>>>>>>>>>>>>
The video uploader has helpfully provided his research articles here.

I love the following article by Stephen Kirby that was posted on Jihad Watch recently. This kind of thing is right up my alley. A person understood to be an expert on Islam has presented her own nicer, kinder make-believe Islam for nearly two decades at an extremely high level of the US intelligence community - and nobody knows enough about the subject to have her sacked. 

This shows how willing Westerners are generally to believe the best of people and of a religion even to the point of dismissing verifiable facts, the history of that religion's advance and the historically agreed-upon doctrines of all the main schools of that religion. How easily we are duped by someone telling us what we want to hear.

It's a long article that continues below the fold but I highly recommend it. Such is the state of affairs today that people like the author who quote Qur'an, Hadith and Sira are considered not to understand the "real" Islam while someone who concocts an imaginary Islam via distortion and cherry-picking all the nice stuff is considered the "expert".

Stephen Kirby carefully dissects such topics covered by this CIA analyst, including:

• Women in Jihad;
• abrogation;
• the 2008 Mumbai attack;
• Islam means "peace" (yes, again);
• Heaven "lies at the feet of mothers";
• the meaning of "Allahu Akbar";
• Islam "is built on the tenets of Judaism & Christianity" (this would come as a shock to Muhammad);
• "Suicide bombers";
• Muhammad preached peace, love and mercy (again, a rich source of humour);
• Muhammad's last sermon of "equality and inclusion";
• why the IS burned people alive;
• the fact  that 72 virgins are not mentioned in the Qur'an (so this belief can't have any authority right?);
• and women being "equal to men in the eyes of Allah".

The laughs keep coming! That someone could actually have standing as an expert in Islam while displaying such an appalling bias and lack of knowledge should scare every one of us. Islam's sacred texts and how they have been historically understood for many hundreds of years apparently carries no weight at all with such "experts". How many of these fakes are there guiding the policies of various governments around the world? And why are they left unchallenged? They need to be out of a job on Monday for the sake of everyone.

As Stephen Kirby so correctly notes:
How can you use the term radical without first identifying the norm?  Normative Islam is based on the unabrogated commands of Allah in the Koran, and the examples and teachings of Muhammad (the Sunnah).  If the Koran and the Sunnah support a Muslim’s actions, that Muslim is not radical, he is devout.

But of  course I would say that wouldn't I?
Everyone knows I'm a racist, bigoted Islamophobe.


>>>>>>>>>
An “expert” analyst stayed in the CIA to prove Islam was a religion of peace​

Farhana Qazi recently wrote a book titled Invisible Martyrs: Inside the World of Female Islamic Radicals.[1]  The focus of this book was on identifying the forces that drove women to become terrorists willing to strap on a bomb and kill themselves along with others.  It was based on information Qazi learned during her years as an analyst with the CIA’s Counterterrorism Center.

In the Preface Qazi wrote that in October 2000 she became the first American Muslim to work as a counterterrorism analyst at the Counterterrorism Center.  At the Center some had labeled her “the Islam expert,” and analysts and managers had asked her questions about Islamic Doctrine.  She was involved in piecing together intelligence assessments for the President’s Daily Briefing and in reporting to other senior government officials.  And she was involved in training the military and others in our government about Islam.

On its website the CIA talks about the high quality of its analysts, and points out that “what truly makes their contributions outstanding is the integrity and objectivity [my emphasis] they bring to it.”[2]
With this in mind, here is what Qazi wrote on p. xix:

While serving my country, I had a more personal reason for staying in the center: I wanted to prove that Islam is a religion of peace, mercy, and compassion…

And her feelings about Islam have not changed.  On p. 157 of Invisible Martyrs, Qazi wrote:
After nearly twenty years of teaching Islam, I have discovered that Islam is a simple, practical, and peaceful religion.

Qazi’s understanding of Islam has apparently not changed since her time as a counterterrorism analyst when she was intent on proving that Islam was a religion of peace.  So let’s examine some of what Qazi wrote about Islam in Invisible Martyrs.

2008 Mumbai terrorist attacks
We’ll start off with a curious omission, especially for a former analyst whose position would have required accurate, thorough reporting.

On p. 36 Qazi mentioned the November 2008 Muslim terrorist attacks on various locations in Mumbai, India.  She wrote:  “The reign of terror killed more than 150 Indians.”

Actually 166 people were killed in the three-day assault by the terrorists.  And of those 166, six were non-Indian Jews who were tortured and killed at the Chabad House: Rabbi Gabriel Holtzberg and his wife Rivky, who was five months pregnant; Rabbi Aryeh Leibush Teitelbaum, Rabbi Benzion Korman, Norma Shvartzblat Rabinovich and Yocheved Orpaz.[3]

It is curious that Qazi wrote that only “Indians” were killed and left out the fact that six non-Indian Jews were also killed.

Islam means peace
On p. 115 Qazi wrote that “Islam is the Arabic word for “peace”.”  But that is simplistic and not accurate.  Qazi might want to look at the definition of Islam on the website for The Embassy of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia in Washington, DC:

The Arabic word ‘Islam’ simply means ‘submission’, and derives from a word meaning ‘peace’.  In a religious context it means complete submission to the will of God.[4]

Allahu Akbar
On p. 33 Qazi noted that Allahu Akbar meant “God is great.”  One might expect such a mistranslation from a non-Muslim who knows little about Islam, but as a Muslim who taught government officials about Islam, Qazi should have known that Allahu Akbar means Allah, the god of Islam, is the greatest and is above all else.[5]

Islam is built on the tenets of Judaism and Christianity
On p. 22 Qazi wrote:

In my lectures, I say that Muslims believe that Islam completes the circle of all monotheistic religions, and therefore Islam is not a new but a “borrowed” religion, building on the tenets of Judaism and Christianity…

Here we have Qazi claiming that the doctrines of Islam are built on the doctrines of Judaism and Christianity.  So let’s look at some of what Islam teaches about Judaism and Christianity.

Just by looking at the Koran we find that Allah:  1) curses the Jews and Christians (9:30);  2) states that the Jews are among the worst enemies of Muslims (5:82);  3) states that the Jews and Christians are among the worst of creatures who “will abide in the fire of Hell” (98:6);  4) forbids Muslims from being friends with Jews and Christians (5:51);  5) commands Muslims to fight the Jews and Christians (9:29);  and 6) undermines the basis of Christianity by stating that it was an impostor, not Jesus, who was crucified (4:157-158) and states that those who believe that Jesus was the Son of God commit the one unforgiveable sin in Islam, Shirk (4:48 and 4:116), and are specifically cursed for that belief (9:30).

And Muhammad, who spoke for Allah, said that Jews and Christians who did not believe in Islam would go to Hell:
It is narrated on the authority of Abu Huraira that the Messenger of Allah (SAW) said: By Him in whose hand is the life of Muhammad, he who amongst the community of Jews or Christians hears about me but does not affirm his belief in that with which I have been sent and dies in this state (of disbelief), he shall be but one of the denizens of Hell-Fire.[6]

For Qazi to claim that Islam is built on the tenets of Judaism and Christianity is theological nonsense.

“Suicide Bombers”
Qazi regularly referred to the female terrorists she had dealt with or learned about as “suicide bombers” (e.g. pp. 49, 56, 58, 143) and repeatedly stated that suicide was prohibited in Islam (e.g. pp. 11, 25, 133).  But what she and many others fail to understand is that these “suicide bombers” are not committing suicide.

It is true that Islamic Doctrine prohibits suicide, and Muhammad said that those who commit suicide would go to Hell.  However, Muhammad also talked about the importance of intentions and said that a person would be rewarded according to what he had last intended.  Muhammad stated that if a person intended to fight in the Cause of Allah (to make Islam superior) and died with that intention, that person died as a martyr and would be rewarded with Paradise.

So if Qazi had wanted to gain a deeper understanding about the motives for terrorists blowing themselves up, she should have been asking the following two questions:

Were such attackers seeking to die because they were uncomfortable or in pain, and therefore committing suicide?  Or were they following the commands of the Koran and the teachings of Muhammad, and seeking death in order to become martyrs in Allah’s Cause?

For a more in-depth look at this issue, see my article Suicide or Paradise.[7]

Muhammad preached peace, love and mercy
On p. 9, Qazi wrote that female terrorists had chosen “a perverted version of Islam” that “dilutes the principles of peace, love and mercy preached by the Prophet of Islam.”

I’m not sure what “Prophet of Islam” Qazi was writing about.  For the record, the 7th Century Muhammad bin ‘Abdullah was the “Prophet of Islam,” and this Muhammad: 1) ordered and allowed the torture and killing of non-Muslims;[8]  2) supervised the beheading of 600-900 captured Jewish post-pubescent males (including combatants and non-combatants);[9]  3) bought and sold slaves;[10]  4) allowed captured non-Muslim females to become the sex slaves of their Muslim captors;[11]  and 5) forced the tribes on the Arabian Peninsula to convert to Islam at the point of the sword.[12]

And here are some interesting hadiths about this Muhammad’s “peace love, and mercy”:

Narrated Abu Hurairah:  Allah’s Messenger said, “I have been sent with the shortest expressions bearing the widest meanings, and I have been made victorious with terror (cast in the hearts of the enemy), and while I was sleeping, the keys of the treasures of the world were brought to me and put in my hand.”[13]

Narrated Abu Qilaba: Anas said, “Some people of ‘Ukl or ‘Uraina  tribe came to Al-Madina and its climate did not suit them.  So the Prophet ordered them to go to the herd of (milch) camels and to drink their milk and urine (as a medicine).  So they went as directed and after they became healthy, they killed the shepherd of the Prophet and drove away all the camels.  The news reached the Prophet early in the morning and he sent (men) in their pursuit and they were captured and brought at noon.  He then ordered to cut [off] their hands and feet (and it was done), and their eyes were branded with heated pieces of iron.  They were put in Al-Harra [a place of stony ground in Medina] and when they asked for water, no water was given them.”  Abu Qilaba added, “Those people committed theft, murder, became disbelievers after embracing Islam (Murtadin) and fought against Allah and His Messenger.”[14]

It was reported from Al-Hasan, from Samurah bin Jundab who said: “The Messenger of Allah said: ‘Kill the old polytheist men, but spare their children.’”[15]

Ibn ‘Abbas said that the Messenger of Allah said, “Whoever you catch committing the act of the people of Lut (homosexuality), then kill both parties to the act.”[16]

This is the 7th Century Muhammad bin ‘Abdullah, the “Prophet of Islam,” and there is no peace, love and mercy here.  One can only wonder who Qazi’s “Prophet of Islam” is.

Burning alive the Jordanian Air Force Pilot
On p. 46 Qazi wrote that the burning to death of a captured Jordanian Air Force pilot by ISIS (the Islamic State) in 2015 was a “barbaric act” that “had never been tried before.”  What Qazi apparently was not aware of was the fact that this “barbaric act” was supported by Islam Doctrine and that the idea of burning people alive was not uncommon during Muhammad’s lifetime and during the Wars of Apostasy immediately after he died.

In my February 2015 article “Islam and Burning People Alive” I went into detail about the Islamic Doctrinal and historical support for burning people alive.[17]  It is interesting to note that the February 2015 edition of Dabiq, the Islamic State’s online magazine, later came out with an article about this incident in which they also showed the Islamic Doctrinal and historical support for their action against the “Jordanian crusader pilot.”[18]
There is certainly nothing un-Islamic about burning people alive.

72 virgins not in the Koran
On p. 40 Qazi wrote dismissively about the “concept of male and female virgin martyrs in Heaven” and stated: “The number seventy-two is not mentioned in the Koran…”

She is correct that the idea of 72 virgins waiting in Paradise for a martyr is not in the Koran, but by leaving it at this she implied that the “number seventy-two” has nothing to do with Islam.  In reality, Muhammad talked about that exact number in terms of one of the rewards for martyrs in this authoritative hadith:

Al-Miqdam bin Ma’diykarib narrated that the Messenger of Allah said: “There are six things with Allah for the martyr…he is married to seventy-two wives among Al-Huril-‘Ayn of Paradise, and he may intercede for seventy of his close relatives.”[19]

Is Qazi not aware of this hadith?

Women are equal to men in the eyes of Allah
On p. 167, Qazi wrote: “…women are equal to men in the eyes of God.”

But what did Allah himself have to say about that?  In 2:282 of the Koran, Allah stated that when it came testifying to property matters in court it was preferable to find two men; but if you could not find two men, then find one man and two women:

…And get two witnesses out of your own men.  And if there are not two men (available), then a man and two women, such as you agree for witnesses, so that if one of them (two women) errs, the other can remind her…
So Allah stated that two women were needed in case “one of them errs.”  In other words, because they are both women it is highly likely that one will forget and need to be reminded/corrected by the other.

Allah’s attitude toward women was emphasized by what Muhammad, who spoke for Allah, told a group of Muslim women:

“…I have not seen anyone more deficient in intelligence and religion than you.  A cautious sensible man could be led astray by some of you.”  The women asked, “O Allah’s Messenger!  What is deficient in our intelligence and religion?”  He said, “Is not the witness (evidence) of two women equal to the witness of one man?”  They replied in the affirmative.  He said, “This is the deficiency in her intelligence”…[20]

Muhammad even said that it required the freeing of two female slaves to equal the virtue of freeing one male slave:
Abu Umamah, and other than him from the Companions of the Prophet, narrated that the Prophet said: “Any Muslim man who frees a Muslim man, then it is his salvation from the Fire [of Hell] – each of his limbs suffices for a limb of himself.  And any Muslim man that frees two Muslim women, they are his salvation from the Fire – each of their limbs suffices for a limb of himself.”[21]

In terms of inheritance, a female would receive only half of what a male would get (Koran 4:11-12).  Along that line, according to the four major Sunni schools of Sharia Law, the indemnity for the death or injury of a woman is one-half of that paid for a man.[22]

According to 2:221 of the Koran, Muslim women are prohibited from marrying non-Muslim men; however, 5:5 allows a Muslim man to marry Jewish and Christian women, and 4:3 allows him to have up to four wives; Muslim women can have only one husband.

And here are a couple of interesting comments by Muhammad:

A man should not be asked why he beats his wife…[23]

If I were to command anyone to prostrate before anyone, I would have commanded the wife to prostrate before her husband, because of the enormity of his right upon her.[24]

In spite of Qazi’s claim, it would appear that Allah and the prophet who spoke for Allah did not see any equality between men and women.

Distorting other teachings of Muhammad

Melanie Phillips pens this article on the travesty of the virtual abandonment of Asia Bibi by Western powers. While she discusses the shameful state of a Commonwealth country imprisoning a person in solitary confinement for 8 years on such idiotic grounds (blasphemy) her larger point is the spineless capitulation of British elites to the imagined results of upsetting their own Muslim minority.

One of her books Londonistan was well ahead of its time when she wrote it and provides many valuable insights now. Ms Phillips is a secular Jewess with whom I have exchanged emails with her a few years ago - she and I didn't quite see eye to eye on Stephen Lennon - and she is extremely well apprised of the Islamic problem. Why not sign up for her articles?

I can only agree that failure to stand up to Islam as its adherents advance its agenda is exactly the same as Spain or the Byzantine Empire failing to respond and counter-attack as the violent jihad advanced against them.

​We really cannot afford to give an inch on any of this.


>>>>>>>>>>>
The shameful abandonment of Asia Bibi

It is hard to think of a more deserving case for asylum than Asia Bibi.

A Christian in Pakistan, Asia Bibi has been freed after eight years in solitary confinement on death row for committing blasphemy, a crime of which she has now been acquitted by Pakistan’s supreme court.

The accusation against her was a travesty. As she picked berries with other Punjabi farmworkers in June 2009, a quarrel developed with two Muslim women after she was asked to fetch water and they said they wouldn’t drink from a vessel touched by a Christian. The women later alleged to a village mullah that Asia Bibi had insulted Mohammed, accusations which the supreme court said were “concoction incarnate”.

The acquittal prompted thousands of violent demonstrators to take to the streets calling for Asia Bibi to be hanged and threatening the supreme court judges with death. The leader of the Islamist party Tehreek-e-Labbaik Pakistan threatened that if she left the country there would be war.

She is now in hiding for her life in Pakistan after the new prime minister, Imran Khan, succumbed to the pressure and allowed a petition against the court decision as part of a deal to halt the protests. Several commentators have said the refusal to allow her to leave Pakistan effectively signed her death warrant.

It is, of course, astounding that the prospect of freedom for one woman, acquitted of a monstrously unjust claim of blasphemy, can have provoked this murderous hysteria. Apart from illustrating once again the sheer derangement of Islamic fanaticism, it illuminates two other things: the Islamists’ fear that Pakistan may be on the verge of becoming more open and loosening up Islamic law, and Imran Khan’s actual spinelessness in the face of an opportunity to do so.

A UK campaign group in touch with Asia Bibi’s family said the British government was working to help her but had stopped short of offering asylum.

This is apparently because it is afraid that granting her asylum would cause unrest among British Muslims and violence against British embassies within the Muslim world.

As Wilson Chowdhry of the British Pakistani Christian Association said, Britain would have been one of Asia Bibi’s first choices for asylum. “It was a bit of a kick in the teeth.”

To put it mildly. Britain’s attitude is utterly spineless and disgraceful. Western governments have a moral duty to offer Asia Bibi asylum not just to save her life – important though that is – but also to show the Islamic world that its fanaticism will be fought and defeated. Instead, as so often before, Britain has led the way in showing that the west will take the path of least resistance.

It believes that by doing so it will protect itself from further Islamist attack. This is not only spineless but stupid, for the contrary is true: that such weakness incites jihadists not just in Pakistan but across the Islamic world to redouble their attacks in the certain knowledge that these will merely elicit yet further surrender to religious terror.

Britain has been appeasing this evil for years. While it doesn’t lock people up for blasphemy as prescribed by the Islamic world, it inflicts social, professional or political disapproval against those who draw attention to the dangers inherent in Islamic doctrine and the refusal by too many British Muslims to accept the superior claims of Britain’s culture and laws.

When Boris Johnson called niqabs and burqas “oppressive and ridiculous”, he was widely denounced for bigotry and accused of “fanning the flames of Islamophobia” for political gain; there were calls for the police to take action against him for hate crime (which it declined to do); and his own Conservative party, instead of standing up for the freedom to criticise oppressive or intimidating religious practices, investigated him instead.

This cultural cowardice by Britain does far more than abandon Asia Bibi. For she is but one of countless Christians who are being persecuted in Pakistan and across the world by Islamic jihadis determined to exterminate Christianity itself.

As documented in this article, recent attacks against Pakistani Christians included an attack on a church in Quetta in December 2017 that killed 9 people; a suicide attack targeting Christians celebrating Easter in March 2016 at a Lahore playground and which left 70 dead; two bomb blasts at churches in Lahore in March 2015 that killed 14; a twin suicide bomb attack at a Peshawar church in 2013 which left around 80 dead, and nearly 40 houses and a church burned by a mob in 2009, in the town of Gojra in Punjab, with eight people burned alive. Last March, a Pakistani court acquitted 20 people of being part of a mob that burned alive a Christian couple who had been falsely accused of “blasphemy”. The Christian couple were tortured and their bodies incinerated in a brick kiln.

By so shamefully refusing asylum to Asia Bibi, Britain is sending out an even bleaker message: that it is deaf to the cries of persecuted Christians worldwide; that it is also abandoning those Muslims who are themselves the victims of oppressive Islamic practices, not least in Britain; and that, through signalling surrender to religious intimidation, it is actively undermining the desperate struggle now under way to defend civilisation itself.

The quote above is from the book The Quranic Concept of War written by Pakistan's Brigadier S.K. Malik. Indeed the preparation is most important - and there are various methods of warfare - but any enemy of ours right now must be rubbing their hands together in anticipation at the totality of our weakness.

We won't even try to put up a fight if we're convinced that we're wrong to do so. And there's a lot of such convincing going on continually, almost imperceptibly, every day.

We no longer view ourselves or others as we all are and such unrealistic views are mostly merely absorbed quite uncritically. Time to take a good long look at ourselves in the mirror, don't you think?


>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
​Mass Migration and the Failure of Civilizational Nerve
The fatal incoherence of globalism.
Bruce Thornton, Frontpage.

   The people spoke on election day, and they decided that they like divided government, handing the House to the Democrats and strengthening the Republican hold on the Senate. This means that many pressing issues needing attention will languish in political limbo for another two years, even as the nation’s dysfunctions worsen. One of the longest and more serious is our broken immigration system, at a time when mass movements of peoples into Europe and the U.S. threaten the identity and core principles of Western Civilization.

Seven thousand migrants from Central America are still making their way through Mexico on their way to the U.S. These “caravans” appear to be organized and funded by the international left. In recent years such vast movements of people have become more common in Europe, which has been enduring such exoduses from the Middle East and North Africa for years.  They accelerated in 2015 after German Chancellor Angela Merkel issued an open invitation to migrants. More recently they have been coming not on foot, but mainly on boats sailing across the Mediterranean. So far this year, nearly 100,000 have reached Spain, Italy, and Greece from North Africa and the Middle East. Both here and in Europe, these migrations have created logistical nightmares and increased security threats, and more importantly have empowered nationalist and patriotic political movements with a potent weapon to use against globalist establishments.

This is an existential crisis the West should have seen coming, because it was predicted by French travel-writer Jean Raspail’s 1973 novel The Camp of the Saints. The book’s danger to the transnational progressive assault on national identity is suggested by its inclusion on the hard-left Southern Poverty Law Center’s index librorum prohibitorum, and the knee-jerk dismissal of the novel as “racist” by bad readers. For Raspail doesn’t just tell a compelling story. He also lays out the West’s fashionable self-loathing and failure of civilizational nerve that create this disaster.

Raspail’s novel begins when millions of Third World peoples simultaneously start hijacking ships and sailing for Europe. Once there, the migrants swarm the villas and resorts of the Côte d’Azur while the French flee in panic to the north. One reason for the failure of the French to resist the invaders is the fashionable civilizational guilt over alleged Western crimes like racism, colonialism, and imperialism. This weakness emboldens the invaders. In India, where the mass migration starts, the French consul scolds a Catholic bishop who approves of the migration and is proud to be “bearing witness” to it. The consul retorts,

               Bearing witness to what? To your faith? Your religion? To your Christian civilization? Oh no, none of that! Bearing witness against yourselves, like the anti-Western cynics you’ve become. Do you think the poor devils that flock to your side aren’t any the wiser? Nonsense! They see right through you. For them, white skin means weak convictions. They know how weak yours are, they know you’ve given in.

Raspail also links this failure of nerve in the face of existential assault to the increasing secularization of European culture, the abandonment of the Judeo-Christian creed upon which its civilization and cherished principles––political freedom, human rights, rule by law––were in part founded. At novel’s end, after Europe is lost to the hordes streaming northward, the narrator wonders: “Who knows how things might have worked out if the peoples of the West, in similar straits, had put their faith in God.” For in the struggle between different cultures with conflicting religions and mores, “One still believes. One doesn’t. The one that still has faith will move mountains. That’s the side that will win. Deadly doubt has destroyed all incentive in the other. That’s the side that will lose.”

Our own times obviously reflect the same self-loathing and fashionable cynicism about our civilization that has created historically unprecedented levels of freedom and prosperity for billions of people. The Leninist demonization of imperialism and colonialism, an idea communism weaponized in order to undermine the free West, still functions to justify the criticism of the West on the part of its sleek beneficiaries. So too the Marxist denigration of free-market capitalism and bourgeois virtues, another charge in the indictment of the West. Critics like today’s millennial champions of socialism, their existence possible only in a liberal democratic, free market society that produces surplus wealth, have turned biting the hand that feeds them into a status symbol signifying their greater sophistication and cosmopolitanism.

These attitudes are decades old, appearing earlier in Edwardian England and persisting during the twenty-year armistice between the World Wars. In 1933 Churchill called it a “mood of unwarrantable self-abasement” and “the acceptance of defeatist doctrine.”  The obvious wages of such ideas in the disastrous appeasement of Nazism were not enough to school the West on the corrosive power of despising one’s own country.

Other cultural developments added bad ideas that encouraged sacrificing the national interest to transient emotions. Cheap sentimentalism and the therapeutic sensibility that privilege feeling over practical wisdom and principle have become the filters through which we understand the non-West. Poverty and squalor beamed into our homes 24/7 turn the tragic constants of human existence––the suffering, exploitation, irrational superstitions, cruelty, and tribal hatreds that have ever marked much of the world and its peoples––into entertainment commodities. Like fictional images of death and suffering, we consume global poverty as we do our favorite Netflix shows, enjoying the superficial feelings of compassion, pity, and sympathy just as we do the suspense and fear of thrillers. Of course, this reduction of human beings to the market value of their suffering is dehumanizing. As social critic Christopher Lasch said, it reduces compassion to the “human face of contempt.”

Ideological blind-spots matter.
We need to see things as they are not as we wish them to be or the nature of reality will elude us.

In engineering the integrity of a component relates to its ability to continue to do the job for which it was designed. Is it up to the task or has it lost its integrity? The news media combined with the ideologically blinkered massive social media platforms are very busy making content they disagree with almost impossible to find. They have lost integrity.

Facebook just banned an ex-Muslim who has received untold death threats via Facebook - which FB has refused to act on by the way - for saying that "only Hitler is Hitler" and that to compare anyone today with that man is to do a disservice to the millions who died under him and his doctrine.

So my only question now regarding all this is: is our system of communicating genuine, unalloyed news in order to necessarily inform an engaged population about to completely fail or has this already happened? Is it too late to save it? How can you speak to another person underwater? How can you write a letter in the dark? No-one can hear you. No-one can read what you've written. It doesn't matter how truthfully or skillfully you've communicated. 

You're a tree crashing in the forest but no-one is there to hear you.


>>>>>>>>>>>
Robert Spencer: The Jihad in Michigan That No One Noticed
A Muslim migrant named Amor Ftouhi is on trial now for his June 2017 stabbing of police officer Lt. Jeff Neville at Bishop International Airport in Flint, Michigan. The case has, unsurprisingly, received hardly any establishment media attention, and that may be because it is such a quintessential example of jihad: Ftouhi screamed “Allahu akbar” as he stabbed Neville in the neck (as commanded in Qur’an 47:4, “When you meet the unbelievers, strike the necks”) and has since then made numerous statements making it abundantly clear that he stabbed Neville because of his Islamic faith. Hard to ascribe this one to “mental illness.”

At Ftouhi’s trial on Thursday, according to MLive, FBI Special Agent Shadi Elreda, one of the agents who interrogated Ftouhi, testified: “He asked us if the officer was dead. I responded with ‘I didn’t know.’ He put his head down and was crying. He said his intention was to kill the officer….He said that he was here for his mission — his mission was to kill a United States government employee. His mission was to kill and be killed. He said his mission was not over. He said he would have a better chance of success and enter into heaven. He said they needed to act against the enemies of Allah. He blamed the United States government for their support of Israel.”

He cried because he failed. “His mission was to kill and be killed.” Why was that his mission? Because the Qur’an promises Paradise to those who kill and are killed: “Indeed, Allah has purchased from the believers their lives and their properties, for that they will have Paradise. They fight in the cause of Allah, so they kill and are killed.” (9:111)

He didn’t kill, and he wasn’t killed, so he failed doubly. He did, however, try to fix one aspect of that: “Elreda told the court that Ftouhi asked Elreda to kill him multiple times during the interrogation.”

Elreda also recounted that Ftouhi “said there was significance in an international airport — that the whole world would see what he did. He wanted all the Muslims to see what he did — to not be afraid and to act against the enemy.”

MLive further reported that “Ftouhi told investigators he visited a few mosques in Flint before heading to Bishop Airport.” What? He visited mosques? But…jihad violence has nothing to do with Islam! Isn’t that what the “experts” always tell us?

Ftouhi also “wrote in the will that he has loved his wife for 20 years, but his love for Jihad was stronger. ‘This is what a Muslim is born for,’ Maryse Robert, a federal investigator with the Royal Canadian Police said Ftouhi’s will stated. ‘You have been a good wife for more than 20 years. My love for God Almighty and the jihad for his sake is greater. I suggest that you use the life insurance policy to return to Tunisia.’”

Where did Ftouhi get the idea that a Muslim was “born” in order to try to kill Infidels? Are “moderate Muslims” in Michigan going to visit him in prison and explain to him the true, peaceful Islam?

In reality, of course, what Amor Ftouhi believes is taught in numerous mosques all over the world. All the mainstream Islamic sects and schools of jurisprudence teach the necessity for Muslims to wage war against and subjugate unbelievers. Amor Ftouhi’s beliefs are not eccentric and didn’t spring from nowhere, but no Western authorities want to face the implications of that.

Ftouhi, MLive also tells us, “grew up in Tunisia and told federal agents he was in the North African country and celebrated following the Sept. 11, 2001 terrorist attacks in the United States.” When he was admitted to the United States, no one would have dared ask him what he thought of 9/11. The Hamas-linked Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) would have immediately initiated an “Islamophobia” lawsuit, and the responsible official would have been publicly humiliated and probably lost his or her job.

And so those charges of “Islamophobia” were avoided and Ftouhi was admitted into the country, only to join the ever-lengthening list of Muslim migrants who have committed acts of jihad violence in their land of refuge. A few examples: Somali Muslim migrant Mohammad Barry in February 2016 stabbed multiple patrons at a restaurant owned by an Israeli Arab Christian; Ahmad Khan Rahami, an Afghan Muslim migrant, in September 2016 set off bombs in New York City and New Jersey; Arcan Cetin, a Turkish Muslim migrant, in September 2016 murdered five people in a mall in Burlington, Washington; Dahir Adan, another Somali Muslim migrant, in October 2016 stabbed mall shoppers in St. Cloud while screaming “Allahu akbar”; and Abdul Razak Artan, yet another Somali Muslim migrant, in November 2016 injured nine people with car and knife attacks at Ohio State University. 72 jihad terrorists have come to the U.S. from the countries listed in Trump’s initial immigration ban.

A migrant. “Allahu akbar.” Striking the neck. Crying that his victim wasn’t dead. Wanting to leave an example for Muslims worldwide. Celebrating 9/11. Visiting mosques before his jihad attack. Saying a Muslim was born to commit acts of jihad violence. No wonder the establishment media won’t tell you about Amor Ftouhi.

Yeah, about that. There's been a problem. I've been crook for nearly 3 months now. I've been able to do little of anything in most of that time. My posts have been rather prosaic and I've mainly just reposted other people's material, especially videos because they're easy to do. I've started many posts but not been able to complete them. Some days I don't get out of bed until late morning and am back into bed by early afternoon.

The good news is after 35 years or so of putting up with these spells (often, as now, lasting several months) I finally got a diagnosis. The bad news is it's ME, or what we call around here Tapanui Flu.

Oh terrific. They don't know how you get it and they don't know how to fix it. All you can do is learn how to manage it. It seems it's brought on by times of physical exertion and stress. This presents a problem: I hunt in the hills; I ride motorcycles long distances because I like the physical challenge of a 12 hour day in the saddle criss-crossing the Alps; I race a motorcycle against mostly much younger men; I exercise with a rowing machine and weights from 5-7:30 AM 3 days a week; I help run a church and I do this website. It's not exactly like I avoid physical exertion, risk and stress. So managing this is going to require some application. 

Today is quite a good day so I'm writing this while I feel OK. I don't know what tomorrow will be like though, but I'll do my best. I was going to write a bit on hyper-Calvinism and the role of God in personal suffering and grief but now that I come to it I haven't got it in me. 

Wherever you are I hope you enjoy the sunshine and make the most of the day

​God bless.

Shock! Horror! A politician actually speaks the truth about the makeup and the cultural worldview of the men in the British rape gangs! But the British media - who don't mind the odd bit of sensation and supposedly are there to inform the public - sure seem dead scared of reporting this fact don't they? 

But it is simply the truth and it's their job to tell us the truth. Around 84% of the offenders in these gangs are Muslims. This is the starting point for our enquiries as to why these gangs even exist.

​Just deal with it OK?


>>>>>>>>>>
Robert Spencer: UKIP's Batten dares to note that Muslim rape gangs are made up of Muslims
Jihad Watch director Robert Spencer discusses how UKIP leader Gerard Batten recently grasped the third rail of politics in the West, venturing where no other British or American politician has yet dared to go. According Sky News, Batten “linked Islam to the ‘industrialised sexual exploitation’ of girls across the country.” This connection is blazingly obvious, but few dare point it out.

If the answer is 'yes' then what else might Islam be? Ah, there's the rub...


>>>>>>>>>>
Robert Spencer: The ‘Disturbing Trend’ of Treating Islam as ‘Not a Religion’​
Jihad Watch director Robert Spencer discusses a recent New York Times article decrying the fact that an increasing number of people are realizing that Islam is a political and social system, as well as a religion.

Things have come to a pretty pass when we are actually celebrating the fact that a Commonwealth country has decided not to sentence to death a mother of 5 for drinking water from a vessel used by Muslims. Eight years it took for Pakistan to find the judges and leaders required to throw out this unsubstantiated & ludicrous charge against a dirt poor member of a minority group. This is brilliant news, but eight years?

One only hopes that this lady and her family are welcomed into a safe Western country where they can tell their story. Of course, knowing our NZ media, it is quite another thing as to whether anyone will broadcast her story or even ask her. After all, that wouldn't reflect well on the terribly "oppressed" Muslims in the West would it? Doubtless it would only feed the running dog Islamophobes among us. While media pressure brings attention to governments and NGOs it seems some things are kept from the sight of ordinary people. As I said, on the popular level we strain out gnats but swallow a camel... 

So reluctantly and at enormous cost one Commonwealth country has done something that all of us would have expected be done immediately. But even this is an unexpected and isolated incident made possible only by the amount of international media coverage it engendered and the embarrassment Pakistan's government was made to feel on the larger stage. I do wonder though if while Pakistan has been brought grudgingly but significantly closer to the norms of Western justice the West isn't also gradually moving closer to allowing Sharia compliance a place it should not have in our own countries. See the case of Elisabeth Sabaditsch-Wolf.

So another question arises for me: what if there were no "safe Western countries" for such people to migrate to? What if the West - which perhaps we might understand as the "Christian homelands" these days, despite being very post-Christian in many cases - gets to the stage where it does not recognise genuine suffering under Islam? What if, for purposes of "tolerance" and "reconciliation", we reject the very notion that people like Asia Bibi were wronged? As Dr Wood alludes below, we have already seen such things  - quite a few Western countries refuse to recognise persecuted minorities, even those under the threat of genocide, if those minorities happen to be Christian. See my last post on this.

The sense of justice of a group - even a large group like a nation - can change over time. It is changing now. As we see more and more the leadership of many Western countries denying the beliefs of the bulk of its citizenry we should also expect to see this continued inversion of the concepts of mercy and innocence. Even in NZ I've heard of a Christian leader who tried to persuade a government minister that a convert from the Middle East be permitted asylum here because to return home would be a death sentence. The response: "well, he shouldn't have converted then should he?" The man was ejected from our country.

Yet people have the right to change their Faith and if they are brave enough to risk everything for that decision we should, at least, protect them to the best of our abilities. But all around us we can see that this discussion doesn't even rate any more of a mention than the trials of this poor woman and her family. 

Sadly, these genuine victims amount to nothing more than an embarrassment for so many of our politicians, academics and media.

​
>>>>>>>>>>
Pakistani Christian Asia Bibi (Aasiya Noreen) was convicted of violating Sharia blasphemy laws after drinking out of a bucket used by Muslims. Bibi was sentenced to death. After spending eight years on death row, the Supreme Court of Pakistan overturned the conviction. Due to ongoing threats of violence, Bibi and her family must now seek asylum outside of Pakistan.
WEBSITE: http://www.acts17.net

It will soon be Armistice Day. On the 11th November we remember when the guns fell silent at the end of the Great War, the war to end all wars. If only. 

I would love you to read the whole of the following article. There are some very chilling aspects to it, not least the recurrence yet again of the power of Islam to turn ordinary, nice people into the kinds of people who would murder and brutalise for their god and prophet. No it doesn't make for pretty reading, but to ignore this very clear pattern in history is not going to prevent the brutality, only pave its way.

Note the part played by leading Muslim clerics in all this. Once again we have to ask how it is possible that these intelligent, educated men can so misunderstand their peaceful religion? Come on, brace yourself and look into the whirlpool that has dragged in so many before us. Look in so that you or your children won't have to go in.

"Never again" doesn't come about by mere wishful thinking...


>>>>>>>>>>>>>
The Annihilation of Iraq’s Christian Minority
Raymond Ibrahim

“Another wave of persecution will be the end of Christianity after 2,000 years” of it in Iraq, one Iraqi Christian leader recently declared.

In an interview earlier this month, Chaldean Archbishop Habib Nafali of Basra discussed how more than a decade of violent persecution has virtually annihilated Iraq’s Christian minority.  Since the 2003 U.S.-led invasion, the Christian population has dropped from 1.5 million to about 250,000--an 85 percent reduction.  During those 15 years, Christians have been abducted, enslaved, raped, and/or slaughtered, sometimes by crucifixion; about one church or monastery has been destroyed every 40 or so days—meaning about 135 Christian houses of worship, said the archbishop.

While it is often assumed that the Islamic State was the source of the persecution, since that terror group’s retreat from Iraq, the situation for Christians has marginally improved.  As the archbishop said, Christians continue to suffer from “systematic violence” designed to “destroy their language, to break up their families and push them to leave Iraq.”

Why this is comes out clearly in the “World Watch List 2018” report, which ranks the fifty worst nations in which to be Christian.  According to it, Christians in Iraq—the eighth worst nation in the world in which to be Christian—are experiencing “extreme persecution,” and not just from “extremists.”

Although “Violent Religious Groups” (such as the Islamic State) are “Very Strongly” responsible, two other societal classes seldom associated with the persecution of Christians in Iraq are also “Very Strongly” responsible, says the report: 1) “Government officials at any level from local to national,” and 2) “Non-Christian religious leaders at any level from local to national.” Additionally, three other societal groups--1) “Ethnic group leaders,” 2) “Normal citizens (people from the general public), including mobs,” and 3) “Political parties at any level from local to national”—are all “Strongly” responsible for the persecution of Christians in Iraq. 
In other words, virtually everyone is involved.

The report elaborates:

Violent religious groups such as IS and other radical militants are known for targeting Christians and other religious minorities through kidnappings and killings. Another source of persecution are Islamic leaders at any level [including governmentally sponsored], mostly in the form of hate-speech in mosques. Government officials at all levels are reported to threaten Christians and “encourage” them to emigrate. Also, normal citizens in the north have reportedly made remarks in public, questioning why Christians are still in Iraq.

Several regional Christian leaders confirm these findings.  According to Syriac Orthodox bishop, George Saliba:

   What is happening in Iraq is a strange thing, but it is normal for Muslims, because they have never treated Christians well, and they have always held an offensive and defaming stand against Christians….  We used to live and coexist with Muslims, but then they revealed their canines [teeth]….  [They don’t] have the right to storm houses, steal and attack the honor of Christians.  Most Muslims do this, the Ottomans killed us and after that the ruling nation-states understood the circumstances but always gave advantage to the Muslims.  Islam has never changed.

Father Douglas al-Bazi—an Iraqi Catholic parish priest from Erbil who still carries the torture scars he received nine years earlier—makes the same observations:

    I’m proud to be an Iraqi, I love my country. But my country is not proud that I’m part of it. What is happening to my people [Christians] is nothing other than genocide. I beg you: do not call it a conflict. It’s genocide… When Islam lives amidst you, the situation might appear acceptable. But when one lives amidst Muslims [as a minority], everything becomes impossible…. Wake up! The cancer is at your door. They will destroy you. We, the Christians of the Middle East are the only group that has seen the face of evil: Islam.

The Iraqi government is complicit—when not actively participating—in the persecution.  As one Christian man explained after being asked why Christians in Iraq do not turn to governmental authorities for protection, “Contacting the authorities forces us to identify ourselves [as Christians], and we aren’t certain that some of the people threatening us aren’t the people in the government offices that are supposed to be protecting us.”  When Christians do take the risk of reaching out to local authorities, police sometimes rebuke them with comments like, “[you] should not be in Iraq because it is Muslim territory.”

The government has only helped foster such anti-Christian sentiments.  For instance, in late 2015 it passed a law  legally forcing Christian and all other non-Muslim children to become Muslim if their fathers convert to Islam or if their Christian mothers marry a Muslim.

Similarly, although they are by far the most native citizens of Iraq—which was Christian centuries before its seventh century conquest by Islam—government sponsored school curricula presents indigenous Christians as unwanted “foreigners.”  As a Christian politician involved in the Iraqi Ministry of Education explained, “There’s almost nothing about us [Christians] in our history books, and what there is, is totally wrong [meaning negative].  There’s nothing about us being here before Islam.  The only Christians mentioned are from the West.  Many Iraqis believe we moved here.  From the West.  That we are guests in this country.”

Little wonder that “If the [Christian] children say they believe in Jesus” in school, notes one report, “they face beatings and scorn from their teachers.”

Perhaps most telling of all, the Iraqi government hires and gives platforms to radical clerics whose teachings are nearly identical to those of the Islamic State.  During a televised interview with Grand Ayatollah Ahmad al-Baghdadi—one of the nation’s top Shia clerics—he explained the position of non-Muslims living under Muslim rule:

            If they are people of the book [Jews and Christians] we demand of them the jizya—and if they refuse, then we fight them.  That is if he is Christian. He has three choices: either convert to Islam, or, if he refuses and wishes to remain Christian, then pay the jizya [and live according to dhimmi rules]. But if they still refuse—then we fight them, and we abduct their women, and destroy their churches—this is Islam!…This is the word of Allah!

Considering that Muslims in Iraq are indoctrinated by such an anti-Christian rhetoric from youth on up—starting in the schoolrooms and continuing in the mosques—it is unsurprising that whenever the opportunity presents itself, many Muslims turn on neighboring Christians.

In one video, for example, a traumatized Christian family from Iraq narrates how their young children were killed and burned alive, “simply for wearing the cross.” The mother explained how the “ISIS” that attacked and killed her children were their own Muslim neighbors, whom they ate with, laughed with, and even provided educational and medical service to—but who, once the opportunity presented itself, turned on them.

Similarly, when asked who exactly threatened and drove Christians out of Mosul, another Christian refugee responded:

       We left Mosul because ISIS came to the city. The [Sunni Muslim] people of Mosul embraced ISIS and drove the Christians out of the city. When ISIS entered Mosul, the people hailed them and drove out the Christians….  The people who embraced ISIS, the people who lived there with us… Yes, my neighbors. Our neighbors and other people threatened us. They said: “Leave before ISIS get you.” What does that mean? Where would we go?…  Christians have no support in Iraq. Whoever claims to be protecting the Christians is a liar. A liar!”

Iraq’s Christians are on the verge of extinction, less because of ISIS, and more because virtually every rung of Iraqi society has been, and continues to be, chipping away at them.

“If this is not genocide,” said Chaldean Archbishop Habib Nafali towards the end of his recent interview, “then what is?”