Edward Cline's Blog, page 13

A Last Great Hope

What follows is an especially articulate and unedited endorsement of Donald Trump, who, following the primaries, has become the Republican Party’s de facto nominee for President. Trump’s statements fly in the face of the political establishment’s policy of stealth socialism and submitting America to “global” priorities and agendas. Trump is an outsider not beholden to the socialist GOP, and his statements and positions are already eviscerating the “Grand Old Party” and sending its flock of status-quo hens and chickens fleeing hither and yon like headless chickens in the Washington barnyard. We know, however, given the GOP’s caliber, and also as the “Me, Too” party that takes its lead from the looting, welfare state Democrats, that members of the GOP are conspiring to block Trump’s nomination by fair means and foul.  But, a clearer and more accurate policy statement you won’t find in the news media or from any other former or prospective candidate.  Edward Cline

Why Trump Deserves to Win the American Election
by Olivia Pierson  April 28, 2016

"My foreign policy will always put the interests of the American people, and American security, above all else. That will be the foundation of every decision that I will make. America first will be the major and overriding theme of my administration."  Donald J Trump.
If Americans still care about the legacy they once wrought out of a raw but magnificent continent, if they still give a damn about prosperity, security and freedom, then Trump ought to be their man.

Watching from a far off country gives one a certain measure of objectivity when viewing the American Presidential elections, but one thing is indisputable: love him or hate him, Trump oozes the All-American spirit of advancement, achievement and strong familial ties.
Since 2008 and the election of President Obama, the world has watched America slide backwards.  Grownup politics has been replaced by a revolting imposter – Social Justice Warrior politics.  I’ve often thought Obama looks like a guy who cares more about just getting an approving hug from any random stranger than he does about the success of his own country; a country which in many respects has always played an impossibly important part in helping to forge the future of the whole world. Obama has been a boy playing at being a president, with dangerous results.
In direct contrast to the current president, Trump is a real man, and a real achiever.  He’s the stuff of gruff charm and hard-out competence, whose appeal largely has its roots in the appeal of the classic Alpha male. He’s big, bold, brash and boastful, at least he is when he’s locked in a competition – and given that the competition to become a president is outrageously difficult, that’s exactly the sort of spirit I want to see win.
But apart from these personality impressions, I feel a sense of relief when I hear him state some of his policies.  I didn’t realize how much I’d given up on ever hearing a presidential hopeful say the things which are now going to go down in history as Trumpisms.
1. A temporary ban on Islamic immigration into the United States. 
This is way beyond important. It should have been an imperative straight after the perpetrators of 9/11 wreaked their terrible murder on US citizens one clear and beautiful morning. This was a profound act of war, but its soldiers were hiding.  It doesn’t matter if many Muslims might be innocent, so long as they are the adherents of a bloody and backward superstition which is hostile to the West, whose holy-book not only allows for, but actually calls for acts of murder, they should be viewed with rational suspicion by anyone who claims to care about having a developed society. The safety and security of American citizens needs to be upheld first, second and last by their president. The United States is not automatically responsible for being the benefactor of all peoples who live in foreign lands – even if they do just want to go to Disneyland.
Now that Trump has laid out his Foreign Policy, a policy which is basically a return to "no foreign entanglements" that are not within the self-interest of the United States (unless they are paid handsomely for the privilege), Americans can rest assured that if he should become President Trump, they will have the hardest of fighters, the toughest of negotiators and a man of immense instinctive talent representing their foreign interests.
2. The building of The Wall (which Mexico is going to pay for).
As Carly Fiorina pointed out many times in the primary debates, the stemming of illegal immigration into the States through the southern border has been talked about and debated, with only half-ass measures being enacted for about 30 years.  Action to actually stop this flow has been pitiful.  We now know that  ISIS can and have sent operatives straight through that border.  Are people under the illusion that the Mexican government is going to extend big efforts to put a stop to this? They don’t even stop their own people (good and bad) from crossing.  So now a nominee who has a spectacular history of building huge, complicated projects is stating that he’s going to build a wall across this rogue border.  Amen!  The safety and security of American citizens needs to be upheld first, second and last by their president. The United States is not automatically responsible for being the benefactor of all peoples who live in foreign lands – even if they do just want to go to Disneyland.
3. Rethinking NATO.
It has become typical now of the news media to shriek and spit every time Trump says something sane.  His desire to rethink NATO is a classic example of this. As it now stands, NATO consists of: Albania, Belgium, Bulgaria, Canada, Croatia, Czech Republic, Denmark, Estonia, France, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Iceland, Italy, Latvia, Lithuania, Luxembourg, Netherland, Norway, Poland, Portugal, Romania, Slovakia, Slovenia, Spain, Turkey, United Kingdom, United States.
NATO’s stated purpose is this (taken from the official NATO website): the Alliance’s creation was part of a broader effort to serve three purposes: deterring Soviet expansionism, forbidding the revival of nationalist militarism in Europe through a strong North American presence on the continent, and encouraging European political integration.
Not only has Soviet expansionism into Ukraine and Crimea occurred without any backlash from NATO, the whole world has watched Europe staunchly uphold its weak-spirited commitment to fashionable cradle-to-grave socialism and unlimited “tolerance.” In so doing, their commitment to multiculturalism has been totally paramount.  They have allowed unprecedented Islamic immigration into its respective countries, (some more than others) culminating recently with the Islamic Immigration Crisis; welfare dependent Muslims which Germany is forcing all other countries in the EU to accept, whether they want them or not.  EU hopeful, Turkey, is negotiating this flood of people, who are most assuredly not just coming from war-torn Syria!  Deeply hostile to Russia, who he accuses of intensifying the conflict and resultant refugees into his land (an accusation I have no doubt is true), Erdogan threatens to further flood Europe with many more millions of Muslim refugees.  Read here about the next coming Immigration Crisis.
Turkey is a deeply Islamic nation which refuses to make war on ISIS but would happily bomb the Kurds to oblivion.  They are no longer the Turks of Kemal Ataturk’s liberal imperatives. President Erdogan is the devout Muslim who states that, “there is no such thing as moderate or immoderate Islam: Islam is Islam, and that’s it!” (And here is the West trying to sort Islam out into nice, neat, palatable categories – that which is lethal, that which is peaceful, that which is in between.) We should take Erdogan at his word – he knows a thing or two about that of which he speaks.  Peaceful, violent, latent, nominal or radical, Islam is all one ideology.  The differing sects (among them Shia & Sunni are just the narcissism of small difference – similar to a Methodist arguing with a Jehovah’s Witness, except neither the Methodist nor the JW will shed each other’s blood over their differences).  Those who kill in Islam’s name are the ones who take their religion literally.  They are the ones whom their prophet would call “Good Muslims.”

A return to Nationalism and a breaking away from the EU may just be the only way for these small countries to protect their cultures from being swamped and Islamicized (under orders from multicultural-obsessed Brussels) – yet one of NATO’s stated reasons for existence is to forbid Nationalist militarism.  Can you see a poisonous dilemma brewing here which America will be pulled into? Trump can; hence his wariness on NATO and his bold statement to rethink it all.  It will take a mighty heart and diplomatic brain to sort through the mess that is NATO, especially with Russia fanning the flames with its dangerous bedfellows ie: Iran and Syria. The safety and security of American citizens needs to be upheld first, second and last by their president.  The United States is not automatically responsible for being the benefactor of all peoples who live in foreign lands – even if they do not want to go to Disneyland.

 4. Enough with the PC Feminazi Nonsense! (Okay, not technically a policy)
When Megyn Kelly, in the first Fox-hosted Primary debate, asked the awful question of Trump...

    “You’ve called women you don’t like fat pigs, dogs, slobs and disgusting animals... For the record, it was way beyond Rosie O’Donnell... Your Twitter account has several disparaging comments about women’s looks. You once told a contestant on the Celebrity Apprentice it would be a pretty picture to see her on her knees. Does that sound to you like the temperament of a man we should elect as president? And how do you answer the charge from Hillary Clinton – that you are part of the war on women?”

...it caused a furore which went on for months and months, and to which Donald Trump remained admirably unapologetic.  He knew he was being hit hard by the Humourless-Harriet; politically correct feminist nonsense which has emasculated men for several generations now.  Frankly, Kelly was dealing with the wrong type of man, and has suffered Trump’s contempt ever since; a thing which has hurt her as the top darling of the Fox News Channel in a contentious election, more than it has hurt Trump.  She may as well have asked him, “When did you stop raping your wife?”   Trump was rightly galled that this was considered to be "good moderation" from the nation's best journalists.
This is where even Trump’s foibles are All-American in their essence.  He is a lover of beautiful women, of which Kelly is one, but if women try this emasculation shit out on the likes of him, especially drawing on examples of his alleged behaviour from his life as a non-political businessman, they’re toast.  He subsequently refused to be interviewed by her, he verbally hammered her in public and he even declined to attend a debate which she was to moderate.  The ongoing nature of the feud was devastating to Kelly, so much so that she recently said she was thinking about not renewing her contract with Fox because it had been hard, not only on her, but also on her boss Roger Ailes.
It is so typical of the feminist mindset to want to play hardball with the men, then run and cry to other men to take a stand to defend you.  Kelly made the comment that she was disappointed her colleague, Bill O’Reilly, didn’t make more of an effort to defend her.  Why would he?  She had been warned by her co-moderators Brett Baier and Chris Wallace, when they were running over the questions before the fatal debate, that if she persisted in that kind of questioning, there would be a lot of pushback (their male instincts were right on cue).  She insisted on having her way. Well, she didn’t just get pushback, she managed to alienate a potential future president from her network (which since seems to have resolved itself, no thanks to Megyn's own charms).
Kelly then invited the disgusting, sneering, morbidly obese, even uglier than Rosie O’Donnell, Marxist lowlife, Michael Moore, on to her show to bottom -feed with her about Trump’s decision to skip the next debate. Michael f**king Moore!!  A man who is militantly hostile to Western values and everything America has traditionally stood for.  They giggled and indulged in words of admiration with each other - enough to make a grown-girl hurl.  Suddenly Trump’s insults about Megyn’s being a “bimbo” and “overrated” started to make an awful amount of sense. 
It has now come to light that in order to calm this feud, Kelly has reached out to Trump personally and gone to Trump Tower for a meeting.  The result is an upcoming one-on-one interview with Trump on Fox, scheduled for May 17th. We’ll see how that works out, but I’m betting Grandma’s creamiest pearls that Kelly will conduct herself with a renewed sense of respect, and for that Trump will reward her with his time and attention.
Trump won by not fawning over an uppity little femme with a fashionably gratuitous absorption in resentment of the opposite sex (the feminist agenda).  If this is going to be typical of what is in store for Hillary should he win the nomination, I can’t wait.  Especially considering that hiding in Hillary’s filthy feminist closet are toe-curling stories about her own personal war on the women who  allege that they were sexually assaulted by her own husband, and then systematically besmirched and threatened by Hillary in the Clintons’ long ascent to attain the Whitehouse.  If she thinks Trump is going to go easy on her because she’s choosing to build her campaign around playing the “woman” card, then she is in for the ride of her life.  One I believe she will lose, because some part of me still actually believes that while scum often does rise to the top, it can be blown away by the vim of a powerful challenger with right on his side.  I hope America proves me right.
BIG EDIT:I'm just going to add right here that I have noticed many, many Right-leaning people and above all, Libertarians, suffer from a massive snob-factor in holding on for dear life to their Trump Derangement Syndrome. People who consider themselves "intellectuals" take issue with his apparent lack of smarty-man clever talk about The Constitution and Individual Rights, forgetting that the human quality of AUTHENTICTY trumps, and should trump cleverdickness on any day of the week in human affairs. People of aesthetic sensibility take issue with his Liberace hair do, his Nouveau Rokoko palatial, gold-drenched residence and white piano.
People who only care about the Free Market forget that they have never lived in one, but somehow Trump is this radical, unusual newcomer who is going to rob them of it (forgetting America does business everyday with countries who do not observe anything close to a free market standard). There are also those who take issue with Trump's wanting to ban Islamic immigration, totally dropping context of the fact that America has been in a war since 9.11 with Islam - that Islam has declared and America has pretended to be oblivious to. I am so disgusted with these people for pretending to have such "great judgment" yet are not able to see their own shocking propensity for context dropping, despite their self-proclaimed intellectual prowess.
They, in their various critiques, get to feel superior to Trump in some f**ked up way - and that is the only emotion which carries them along in their criticism and Derangement Syndrome. I hope they have the good grace to let me know when they have created a family fortune of 10 billion plus, have the heart, guts and competence to want to save their country from becoming a "once was" civilization. I hope they let me know when they have 2 ex-wives as good friends, along with five high-functioning kids who absolutely adore them - and, more importantly, want to learn from them. I won't hold my breath.

http://www.oliviapierson.org/blog/why...
 

Islam by a Thousand Cuts

Lingchi língchí; ling-ch'ih, alternately transliterated ling chi or leng t'che), translated variously as death by a thousand cuts, (shā qiān dāo/qiāndāo wànguǎ), the slow process, the lingering death, or slow slicing, was a form of torture and execution used in China from roughly AD 900 until it was banned in 1905. It was also used in Vietnam  In this form of execution; a knife was used to methodically remove portions of the body over an extended period of time, eventually resulting in death.
Death, in the context of this column, means Islam. Islam is a death worshipping cult. Death is the end of Islam for anyone who encounters it, Muslim or non-Muslim. One exists and lives for the sole purpose of dying to meet Allah in Paradise. Allah owns your life and it is your duty to obey his every command and whim, even if it means….death.
Celebrating Death: Shia Muslims love self-flagelation
“Death to America!” is the familiar chant of Muslim demonstrators, from New York City to London to Berlin and Cologne, from Cairo to Gaza to Damascus, from Kuala Lumpur to Sydney and Kabul. Death is what is intended by the Muslim Brotherhood. It states that quite explicitly in the 1991 Explanatory Memorandum on the General Strategic Goal of the Brotherhood in North America. Here is what it says:
·         In order for Islam and its Movement to become "a part of the homeland" in which it lives, "stable" in its land, "rooted" in the spirits and minds of its people, "enabled" in the live [sic] of its society and has firmly-established "organizations" on which the Islamic structure is built and with which the testimony of civilization is achieved, the Movement must plan and struggle to obtain "the keys" and the tools of this process in carry [sic] out this grand mission as a "Civilization Jihadist" responsibility which lies on the shoulders of Muslims and – on top of them – the Muslim Brotherhood in this country.
·         The process of settlement is a "Civilization-Jihadist Process" with all the word means. The Ikhwan must understand that their work in America is a kind of grand Jihad in eliminating and destroying the Western civilization from within and "sabotaging" its miserable house by their hands and the hands of the believers so that it is eliminated and God's religion is made victorious over all other religions. Without this level of understanding, we are not up to this challenge and have not prepared ourselves for Jihad yet. It is a Muslim's destiny to perform Jihad and work wherever he is and wherever he lands until the final hour comes, and there is no escape from that destiny except for those who chose to slack. But, would the slackers and the Mujahedeen be equal.
So, how is Islam “eliminating and destroying Western civilization from within”? By working every little gambit to dissolve Western institutions, principles, traditions, and norms, and replace them with Islamic ones, first as “co-equals,” and eventually as the dominant ones
By applying a thousand little, barely noticed and hardly earth-shattering concessions by the West to Islamic demands for “respect” or the enforcement of Islamic religious observation or deference to Muslim sensibilities and prejudices, the Brotherhood agenda is on schedule. There will always be the spectacular, headline-grabbing massacres to remind us that Islam declared war on the West long, long ago and that the bombings and beheadings and stabbings are not forgotten as the end-all of life for infidels and those who do not submit to Islam. Islam means, after all, submission.
But it isn’t those which are rotting the West “from within.” The West is definably “miserable” because it will not stand up for itself, will not take the steps necessary to preserve its existence as a life-loving as opposed to a death-worshipping political system. Whose hapless “hands” are aiding and abetting the incremental assaults? They are many and legion. CAIR simply advises the EEOC of a case rich in conflict, presumably because it knows that CAIR in an unindicted co-conspirator with terrorist organizations and refuses to condemn Hamas. Better these stupid Americans give other Americans the hot foot.
We can start with the Equal Employment and Opportunity Commission (EEOC), which works hand in glove with the Council on American Islamic Relations (CAIR) to ensure that employers conform to Muslim expectations and prejudices, and also inures American employers to Islamic religious dress “codes.” The EEOC will agree with CAIR that a Muslim has been “discriminated” against and penalized (either fired or not hired) because of his “religion.” Case in point: Abercrombie & Fitch vs. a Muslim woman who wanted to violate the store’s dress code for employees by wearing her hijab.
The Muslim teen worker who scored a legal victory in an anti-discrimination suit against Abercrombie & Fitch, which cited its dress code in insisting she not wear a hijab to work, says the retailer’s policy is “very unfair.”
A federal judge issued the ruling last week that Abercrombie & Fitch discriminated against Hani Khan, 18, when she was fired from its Hollister store in San Mateo, Calif., in 2010 because she refused to remove her head scarf on the job…..
The U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission filed a lawsuit on Khan's behalf in 2011. A trial on the company's liability and punitive damages is scheduled for Sept. 30.
Another nijab case went to the Supreme Court. In June 2015, the High Bench ruled in favor of the Muslim and against Abercrombie & Fitch. The Guardianreported:
The US supreme court on Monday ruled in favor of Samantha Elauf, a Muslim woman who was denied a job at an Abercrombie & Fitch clothing store in Oklahoma because she wore a headscarf for religious reasons.
The justices decided the case, which united Christian, Muslim and Jewish and other religious organizations, with an 8-1 vote, ruling in favor of the federal Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC), which sued the company on behalf of Elauf.
“The EEOC applauds the Supreme Court’s decision affirming that employers may not make an applicant’s religious practice a factor in employment decisions,” said EEOC chair Jenny Yang, in a statement.
“This ruling protects the rights of workers to equal treatment in the workplace without having to sacrifice their religious beliefs or practices.”
Next comes the Islamic assault on The Citadel, a military school in South Carolina with a strict dress code for its cadets, on and off school grounds. A Muslima applied to the school and insisted that she be able to  wear her nijab with her uniform. On April 22, the Washington Post reported:
When news spread that The Citadel was considering the first-ever exception to its strict uniform requirements to allow an admitted student to wear a hijab in keeping with her Muslim faith, reaction was intense. Some welcomed the possibility as an important symbol of religious freedom, but for many in the tight-knit community of cadets and alumni, the very idea of an exception was anathema because the ideals of loyalty, uniformity, and corps-before-self are so central to the storied public military college’s mission and traditions….
On Friday, Brett Ashworth, a Citadel spokesman, said the school is considering two specific requests from the student: That she be allowed to wear a hijab and that she be allowed to cover her arms and legs.
The school is still mulling over whether or not  to grant the Muslima’s wishes (the hijab in uniform, her own separate room, special clothing during physical exercises, etc.; I wonder if she gets to break classes and drill to bow to Mecca and has special meals prepared for her in the mess hall). The cadet who leaked the story to the press, was punished.
Citadel Cadet Nick Pinelli, the cadet who leaked the story of the school’s consideration of a Muslim student’s request to wear a hijab, was reportedly punishedwith 33 hours of marching according to a post on Jihad Watch….
According to an article in thePost and Courier The Citadel spokesman, Col. Brett Ashworth, declined to confirm whether or not Cadet Pinelli was being punished over leaking the story citing FERPA (Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act).
Next up is our court system. CAIR issued a press release about a Louisiana traffic court judge who ordered a Muslima to leave the courtroom unless she removed her nijab. The Florida Family Association reported in late April:  CAIR issued the following press release: 
CAIR Asks Louisiana Judge to Ensure that Courtroom Hijab Ban Not Be Repeated

(WASHINGTON, D.C., 4/28/16)– The Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), the nation's largest Muslim civil rights and advocacy organization, today called on a Louisiana judge to ensure that the recent removal of a Muslim woman from court because she wears an Islamic head scarf, or hijab, not be repeated.
CAIR said the Muslim woman, who does not want to be identified, says she removed from Jefferson Parish Traffic Court on Tuesday after a bailiff asked her to remove her hijab and she refused. The woman stated: "I started to cry because I felt so embarrassed and humiliated." Judge Raylyn  Beevers, who admitted that she asked the Muslim woman to leave the courtroom, now says she did not realize the head covering was worn for religious reasons.
It is not known if Judge Beevers relented and allowed the Muslima into the courtroom wearing the nijab. The CAIR letter to the judge implies that she regretted her decision to ask the woman to leave, and hoped the “misunderstanding” was not repeated.
Next up, the Muslim truckers. On June 2nd, Daniel Greenfield reported in “Obama Inc Sues Trucking Company for Firing Muslim Drivers Who Refused to Deliver Alcohol” from the DougRoss@Journal:  Star Transport, Inc., a trucking company based in Morton, Ill., violated federal law by failing to accommodate two employees because of their religion, Islam, and discharging them, the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) charged in a lawsuit filed today.
The lawsuit alleged that Star Transport refused to provide two employees with an accommodation of their religious beliefs when it terminated their employment because they refused to deliver alcohol.
Greenfield commented:
A trucking company may be obligated to accommodate religious observance by providing time off for holidays or prayers. It is not obligated to excuse employees from doing their actual job. And delivering alcohol is part of what being a truck driver means. If it's against your religion, find a job that doesn't involve delivering large quantities of foods and beverages.
In fact there is no actual prohibition that bars Muslims from driving a truck full of alcohol. There are prohibitions on drinking alcohol. Every Muslim corner store I have ever seen sells alcohol, alongside smuggled cigarettes and lottery tickets. Many Muslim countries allow the sale of alcohol.
And, the Muslim truckers won the suit. The Washington Post reported on October 23rd:
One more data point on the “When does your religion legally excuse you from doing part of your job?” question — like it or not, under American law, employers sometimes do have to excuse employees from tasks that the employees find religiously objectionable. Tuesday, two Muslim truck drivers who were fired for refusing to deliver shipments containing alcohol were awarded $40,000 in compensatory damages and $200,000 in punitive damages by the jury in their discrimination claim.
The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission brought suit on their behalf (EEOC v. Star Transport Co., Inc. (N.D. Ill.)), arguing that the employer had failed to provide “reasonable accommodations” to the employees — i.e., accommodations (including an exemption from job duties) that could be provided without “undue hardship” to the employer or others. The court noted that Star Transport had indeed often “swap[ped]’ loads between drivers,” and Star Transport conceded that it could have easily accommodated this request, too, but argued (unsuccessfully) that it shouldn’t be liable for punitive damages.
It’s now doubtful if the Muslim non-truck-drivers will ever collect their award. The Post article concludes:
But as the Peoria Journal Star (Andy Kravetz) notes, “Whether the men collect their money is another story. Star Transport went out of business earlier this year and it’s unknown who is now responsible for the judgment….
To underscore the assertion that Islam is a death cult, Daniel Greenfield also writes about what Muslim women who hanker for Paradise can expect upon expiration of their worldly existence. They would be no contest with “90 Foot Islamic Virgins” awaiting the male Jihadist “martyrs.”
The 90-foot-tall transparent creature with visible bone marrow and none of the functions of life is a giant skeleton. The love that Muslim terrorists have for it is a love for death. 
ISIS is recreating the Islamic paradise on earth by capturing and handing out girls of “tender age” to the Jihadists. It forces them to take contraceptives and conducts forced abortions so that, like the 72 virgins, the captured girls will never actually have children. It even conducts reconstruction surgery after the rapes so that their victims will more closely resemble the eternal virgins of Islamic paradise.
The Islamic State isn’t just Islamic. It’s a hellish attempt to create an Islamic heaven on earth.
Finally, there is this unkind cut from our House of Representatives, as first reported on Gates of Vienna December 29, 2015 and reprinted in the Counter Jihad Report on the 30th, “HR 569: CAIR’s Standard Operating Procedure” for applying the scalpel to America.
The author of the Gates of Vienna piece argues that HR 569 will not pass; the numbers are against it. After reprinting the pious language of the Resolution, he remarks:
Once again, this will notpass. However, the fact that 82 Democrats have co-sponsored it will be used to validate the Muslim Brotherhood (CAIR, ISNA, MPAC, etc. etc.) claim that hate crimes have increased (and of course they haven’t for Muslims, although they may have increased against Jews in America, who are historically identified in FBI statistics as victimized in hate crimes five to ten times more frequently than Muslims in America)….
So it won’t pass, but it’s still useful to the Muslim Brotherhood to validate their claims among their own constituency, as well as to the media and the Low Information Voters, or those who just respond to any kind of “virtue-signaling”. And it’s useful to the 82 co-sponsoring Democrats, and the Democratic National Committee as a whole, to claim that all Republicans who did not co-sponsor are therefore, by definition:
racist;Islamophobic;bigoted;engaged in hate speech, by the sin of omission of not cosponsoring; andengaged in incitement to hate crimes, by the implied sin of hate speech resulting from the sin of omission of not co-sponsoring. It’s also worth noting that there are 188 Democrats in the House of Representatives, and 246 Republicans. So unless this gets a lot of new co-sponsors in 2016, a counter-argument against the DNC on this Resolution would be that it has met with overwhelming bi-partisan opposition from the majority of Democrats (106) and all Republicans in the House.
But yes, it is a successful effort for the target audiences at which it is aimed, including the foreign funders for CAIR, ISNA etc., all of whom will be tickled pink that this bill has 82 co-sponsors. As will the OIC, who might have helped a bit in drafting the Resolution.
There are dozens of pages of the “cuts” that have been inflicted on this country, many, if most, aided by the eager interference of a Federal agency, the EEOC. I could go on for twenty more pages just to list them. The country is being bled dry, and the wounds will not heal until the EEOC is defunded, Americans see Islam as the death cult it really is, the ISNA, the ICNA, the MSA, and all its terrorist-affiliated ilk are booted out of the country, and the current principals of CAIR are finally indicted, tried, and sent to jail with bread and water as their only solace. All Muslims currently living in this country – legally or illegally – should be disenfranchised, so as to not provide our native statists with an extra power base.
Until then, the cuts will continue in furtherance of the pursuit of death.

Poisonous Peas in a Pod

The Chancellor was a terroristThe Washington Examiner on April 24th, in its article, “Obama: Germany’s Merkel is right on refugee welcome,” reported President Barack Obama’s European musings on immigration:
President Obama says German Chancellor Angela Merkel is “on the right side of history” in how she has responded to the influx of thousands of Syrian refugees surging into Europe.
At a press conference Sunday, the president said he is “proud” of Merkel and the German people for their open-door policy of migrants fleeing violence and uncertainty in their home country.
“She is on the right side of history on this,” Obama said as he stood next to Merkel in Hannover, Germany. “And for her to take on some very tough politics in order to express not just a humanitarian concern but also a practical concern, that in this globalized world, it is very difficult for us to simply build walls.”
And now many Europeans are fleeing their home countries for points that do not welcome hordes of destructive and hostile Muslim barbarians who have boasted that Germany and other Western countries are “dead meat.”  Doors are opening all over the Continent. However, they are swinging doors that can snap back to strike Merkel harshly on her electoral derriere.
Obama again:
Obama’s praise comes after Merkel faced fallout in a referendum of sorts on her immigration policy. In last month’s state elections, Merkel’s party, the Christian Democrats, took a beating. An anti-immigration party made significant gains.
Obama has promised to admit 100,000 Syrian and Iraqi refugees into the U.S. this year. He faces pushback from Republicans who fear a possible security threat. GOP presidential candidates, like front-runner Donald Trump, have attacked Obama’s pledge to allow refugees into this country.
But it is not just a security threat in back of those concerns. The literal invasion of the U.S. by hordes of Muslims – especially Syrian, Iraqi, and Somalian Muslims – poses a cultural and political threat, as well. The introduction of so many hostile and assimilation-resistant Muslims is part and parcel of the Muslim Brotherhood’s overall plan to subvert the country from within, per the General Memorandum of 1991. The country can be rotted from within through demographics and an overall plan to perpetuate the welfare state.
The ideological symbiosis between Obama and Merkel is worth exploring. Obama and Merkel are political leaders determined to “remake” their countries in conformance with their mutual ideologies. Obama’s motivation has been repeatedly demonstrated to be rooted in an undiluted malevolence for America, one closely allied to his Alinsky/Communist agenda. He wants to swamp America and Western culture with hordes of people “of color” more amenable to the welfare state (at least, that is his premise) so that the demographics shift to perpetuate the welfare state, statism, and the Democratic grip on the country. He wants to create the “new American” who isn’t automatically “white.”
Dare, if you will, accuse Obama of racism, of racism by explicit policy and little disguised malice. Obama’s “resettlement” program, paid to Christian “charities” with tax dollars, is community-organizing along ethnic lines. It differs little from Merkel’s except in scale.
I am the "new American man"Merkel is largely motivated by her East German Communist upbringing. Her Communist ideology is proof against all reason. The collapse of Soviet Russia in 1989-1991with its East European satellites, including East Germany, left her in an ideological void, as an outlander. In her life, there was no “yearning to breathe free” of tyranny. Her desire and career path were to become a member of the East German Communist establishment. How could she “relate” to freedom? There was no way she could truly sympathize with what millions of East Germans wanted and what West Germans had enjoyed for decades. She could not “relate” to it without voluntarily undergoing a philosophical and moral sea change, in her politics and in herself. And that was not going to happen. She was in her mid-thirties when the Berlin Wall came down. Too much energy had been invested in pushing the collectivist line. The girl can’t help herself.
You can take the statist ideologue out of tyranny and place him in a relatively free political and social environment, but, after a certain age, you can't take the statist out of the person, together with a tenacious need and compulsion to control things and people. The ideologue isn’t going to be impressed or persuaded by the cornucopia of wealth available in a free country. He will enjoy them, and even extol them, but he will always stump for a “higher” purpose for living other than enjoying life.
Merkel’s grand design is to fabricate the “new German man” who will be of the old stock of Germans somehow amalgamated with immigrant Muslims. Germans are proving highly resistant to the shotgun marriage.
On April 12, 1961, Yuri Gagarin’s historic spaceflight shook the world, sending enthusiastic crowds of Soviet citizens onto the streets to celebrate. Just a few months later, the Twenty-Second Congress adopted new Communist Party program, which set the goal of building the foundations of communism in the Soviet Union by 1980. This all-out drive toward communism had two crucial components: the construction of a material and technical basis of communism, and the development of the “new Soviet man” – “a harmonic combination of rich spirituality, moral purity, and physical perfection.” Who better than Gagarin to embody this new ideological construct? From “New Soviet Man: Inside Machine: Human Engineering, Spacecraft Design, and the Construction of Communism.” Science, Technology and Society Program, E51-185, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Massachusetts Avenue, Cambridge, MA 02139; April 2005)
From the October Soviet coup d’état of the Provisional government to the wheezy collapse of the Soviet Union in December 1991, Soviet citizens and East Europeans were indoctrinated on the vision of the “new Soviet Man.” He was a creature who would mindlessly fit into Communist ideology and be in every way compatible with it, not only in space, but on the ground in industry and agriculture and economic regulation. He would be “programmed” to make Communism be his only motivation, to help to make it work, and be instilled to labor ceaselessly to advance the triumph of Communism in Russia and everywhere else.
Reutersreported in August 2015 on the mass immigration into Germany:
The number of immigrants living in Germany rose by 3.7 percent last year to a record high of 11 million and a fifth of the population is of migrant background, the Federal statistics Office said on Monday.
The figures highlight Germany’s growing reliance on foreign-born workers to drive its powerhouse economy, Europe’s largest, as well as its acceptance of hundreds of thousands of refugees. Many of the immigrants came from other European Union countries, such as Poland, Romania, Italy, Bulgaria, and Hungary.
Last year, the number of people living in Germany of a migrant background had risen by around 1.5 million, or 10 percent, from 2011. The native population – excluding people of a migrant background – fell by 1.4 percent.
Poles, Romanians, and Hungarians might assimilate into Germany enough to be taken for Germans, and perhaps even “feel” German. But Muslims have proven relentlessly over time to resist becoming “German,” that is, to not surrender their Islamic identities, but who, not so ironically, expect their host countries to adapt and defer to Islam. Second generation Muslim immigrants, particularly Turks, are not the “new German men.” They are in the vanguard of Muslim activism and even terrorism. The only thing Muslims are busy doing is preying on European women, harassing European men, hanging around in refugee and asylum centers, trashing private property seized by the government to house “refugees,” and perhaps doing a little dope business on the side to supplement their welfare state handouts.
Refugees and asylum seekers coming to your townAbout those rape statistics in Germanyand Scandinavia, one must ask oneself: Are Muslim women so unattractive that they are not the usual victims of Muslim rapes?  Well, it might have something to do with their Islamic dress, which is to make them as unalluring as possible.
But Merkel, to Obama’s applause and pats on the back, sees the barbarians as the “new Germans.” They will become the new “workforce” of Germany.  Walid Shoebat and others disagree vehemately and pointedly.
German Municipalities estimates that just two percent of Muslim refugees in the rehabilitation program are ready to take a job. “You are not ready to work.” The stamp is the vast majority of refugees by the municipalities. Daniel Greenfield, in his article The Death of Europe, said: “The Muslim migrants are meant to be the retirement plan for an aging Europe. But the Mohammed retirement plan won’t save European Socialism. It will bury it.” Politiken: The figures cover refugees who have been granted asylum in Denmark and 31 in December were doing an integration program in a municipality. The refugees receive either cash or integration performance.
Merkel also wants more propaganda spread through Africa inviting the diseased beggars there to come to Germany and learn a trade. Good luck with that. What Europe and America needs, in addition to “resettled” ISIS fighters, are the killers of Boko Haram and Al-Shabaab planted in our midst.
The retirement plan that Islam has in store for Europe is to end Europe by invitation from Merkel and her political ilk elsewhere on the Continent. Islam is in Europe. And Europe is now a satrap of Islam.

Chomsky at the Bit

Fast on the heels of publishing “Andthe World Was Made Right” (Rule of Reason, April 23), which has had an incredible and positive response from many quarters, I happened to read Cliff Kincaid’s review of Michael Walsh’s The Devil’s Pleasure Palace: The Cult of Critical Theory and the Subversion of the West on AIM’s site (Accuracy in Media). The review is titled “Defunding the Marxist Madrassas.”
Mortar boards on freshly minted flatheads
Kincaid’s review of the Walsh book opens with some richly deserved swipes at Noam Chomsky, the MIT professor of everything under the sun. For decades, the name, “Noam Chomsky,” for me, at least, has evoked the image of a leftist college professor instructing his student victims to “thoroughly chew” his latest theory – say, of Cognitive closure, or of Psychological nativism, or of Recursion in language -- until they can memorize it and recite it back to him verbatim (preferably in a choral mode). That is, after all, the nature of an Islamic madrassa – to memorize – not to understand or critique the Koran and other Islamic texts – until one’s mind is completely subverted by masses of illogic and non sequiturs and one is no longer able to think. Once one has memorized by rote every little comma, simile, and metaphor of the Koran, one is ready to join the Taliban (Islamic students) to kill and terrorize.
And that is, more or less, what American students of Chomsky (and students of his ilk elsewhere in academia) to go out and do: become activists for Socialism, Social Justice, to Occupy Wall Street, occupy your home, occupy your business, and become the snowflakes for “safe places” and the hoarse hollerers for women’s restrooms being open to transgenders and LGBTs of every stripe. And also become advocates and demonstrators for Muslim immigration and trigger-warning sensitive freshmen.
Noam Chomsky, a Marxist professor who says he has been at MIT for 65 years, maintains that we need a new economic system. He has endorsed something called “the next system,” which is supposed to replace free enterprise capitalism. My counter-proposal is for a “next system” to replace Chomsky and other Marxists in academia. My old friend, “Jimmy from Brooklyn,” a legendary anti-communist, says what we need is the defunding of the “Marxist Madrassas,” otherwise known as college and universities.
The “next system” appears to be the total collectivization of the country, and especially of the realm of education. Here, at Alternet, is Chomsky caught with his socialist pants down:
An initial signatory to the Next System statement, Chomsky explores the connections between culture, mass movements, and economic experiments—which in “mutually reinforcing” interaction, may build toward a next system more quickly than you may think. 
Next System Project: As the Next System Project engages in dozens of university campus-based teach-ins across the country, what do you think of such approaches to engaging campus communities in deep, critical inquiry—can they help transform our society?
Doubtless Chomsky applauds Bernie Sanders, the socialist presidential candidate. But perhaps he instead regards Sanders as a doddering, buffoonish, semi-senile old fool suffering from genuine cognitive closure. That would be a fair assessment of the failure in carpentry.
And here is statement by “the next system,” a statement that dances around the term “socialism” and is an instance of sociological puffery:
We are at or near the bottom among advanced democracies across a score of key indicators of national well-being—including relative poverty, inequality, education, social mobility, health, environment, militarization, democracy, and more.
We have fundamental problems because of fundamental flaws in our economic and political system. The crisis now unfolding in so many ways across our country amounts to a systemic crisis.
Today’s political economic system is not programmed to secure the wellbeing of people, place and planet. Instead, its priorities are corporate profits, the growth of GDP, and the projection of national power.
Large-scale system change is needed but has until recently been constrained by a continuing lack of imagination concerning social, economic and political alternatives. There are alternatives that can lead to the systemic change we need.
Kincaid goes on:
Of course, Chomsky does not want to replace the system that pays his salary and provides a platform for his Marxism. A real alternative to the current economic system would take the taxpayers off the hook for subsidizing state colleges and universities that keep Marxists like Chomsky on the payroll and undermine traditional values.
It is said that Chomsky is a “philosopher, linguist, and social critic.” Whatever this means, it looks like he has more time to spout his Marxism than to teach his students anything worthwhile. Perhaps that is his intention. By failing to educate students in practical skills useful for real jobs, he leaves them hopeless and despondent about the system that he wants them to replace. His students are his cannon fodder for “the next system,” which is supposed to be brought into being by students who are turned into activists through brainwashing sessions organized by the likes of Chomsky.
Michael Walsh, as Kincaid reveals, offers a truly radical solution to today’s college “crisis” and the unimaginable debt assumed by college students and by the taxpayer: scrap the Ivy Leagues, state colleges, and community colleges, put the Marxists out of work, and patronize the plethora of existing and future online universities each of which would offer tuition costs infinitesimally lower than the standard costs of about $20,000 per year.

Average, semi-literate college student, now smothered in Federal kudzu debt
Michael Walsh is the latest to document the influence of cultural Marxism in academia and American society at large. His book, The Devil’s Pleasure Palace: The Cult of Critical Theory and the Subversion of the West , examines how American institutions have been taken over by the likes of Chomsky. The solution, however, cannot rest simply with exposure or even reform. The cultural Marxists will not cede power over the minds of the young. Instead, the solution is to establish new institutions that attract parents and young people to educational alternatives which promise marketable skills and jobs in the real economy.
Those alternatives are usually grouped under the rubric of online learning. These low-cost alternatives to brick-and-mortar colleges and universities can also address another pressing problem for many young people—massive college debt through federal loans that in 40 percent of the cases are not repaid. The current federal student loan debt stands at a staggering $1.2 trillion. The current system is unsustainable.
It is unfortunately true that many of these online or vocational schools are already in hock to or dependent on federal and government financing schemes for their students (such as Kaplanand ECPI). The ultimate solution is to get the government out of education altogether.
Writes Kincaid:
Judging by the success of Sanders in the presidential race, it would appear that the real crisis is that higher education has failed to prepare young people for the future and has instead left them struggling to pay tens of billions of dollars in student loan debt. However, those turning out for Sanders have been led to believe that more taxes and debt are the solution. This approach leaves Marxists like Chomsky, still ensconced in academia, agitating for the “next system” of socialism that will leave young people even more hopeless.
Even if their debts are “forgiven,” and the federal debt monkey is off their backs, most of these students will be ill-prepared to live independent, productive lives in the real world. Kincaid writes:

This process of subversion has been going on too long to hope for reform of the academic institutions that have been captured and rotted from within. We need to defund those that already exist, and create new institutions to replace those in the hands of the cultural Marxists. Some of them are online structures such as Amberton University and Western Governors University.
My friend "Jimmy from Brooklyn" says we need to go further, in regard to existing colleges and universities, and demand a "separation of Marx and state," so that affirmative action for conservative professors can be implemented to strive for some sort of equality and real "diversity."
Michael Walsh’s The Devil’s Pleasure Palace is a must read for anyone who is concerned about the costs and the direction of higher education. Today, in America, “higher” education more often than not means brainwashing on psychedelic drugs of the Marxist kind.

Academics like Noam Chomsky should be put out to pasture with Bernie Sanders before they destroy more minds.  
The Devil’s Pleasure Palace: The Cult of Critical Theory and the Subversion of the West, by Michael Walsh. Jackson, TN: Encounter Books, 2015.  280 pp.

And the World Was Made Right

It would be interesting to chronicle the state of the world on the off chance that everything in it would be made right per the demands and expectations of today’s activists, social justice warriors, and champions of Social Progress. This was done in a speech by Louis Farrakhan, head of the Nation of Islam, in a commencement address delivered at the University of Chicago, at which he was presented with an Honorary Doctorate in Racial Harmony.
·    All climate change deniers and skeptics were executed, as advocated for years the Secret Society of the Global Warming Collect, by professional hangmen and executioners hired from ISIS. The first executions were presided over by Al Gore, former vice-president of the old U.S. European culprits were transported to Raqqah, the capital of the Islamic State Caliphate, and dispatched there with graphic footage broadcast to Europe. The experienced executioners there made short work of the liars and falsifiers and acolytes of false science. North American culprits were transported to Death Valley, California, and ISIS executioners were flown in to perform their service. The guilty had been hunted down and rounded up by the combined forces of the European-Islamic Police, of the Special Multi-Gender Law Enforcement Force, and of the American Federal Bureau of Intolerance (FBI) in coordinated raids and dragnets. Once the deniers were gone, all was made right in the world, and the world breathed easier. ·  To the resounding cheers and excellently choreographed Maypole dances of environmentalistsof every age and color everywhere, the Environmental Protection Agency seized all private property and land in America and imposed rigorous controls on the former owners (now reduced to the status  of tenant farmers) governing the use of the new federal possessions. The rules were so all-encompassing and strict that the tenants were unable to produce or grow much of anything, but were blamed for dragging their feet. Trained, armed, and experienced former Bureau of Land Management personnel were empowered to police the land and to punish violators. Thousands of tenant farmers were incarcerated in special FEMA camps, called Spotted Owl Campuses, in Nevada and Illinois and put on short rations. These new felons were also subjected to reeducation courses and new dietary regimes. And all was made right with the world, and a New Earth Day was proclaimed.·     President Bernie Sanders presided over the free distribution of just about everything, including college education, food, personal grooming products, and gas rations. His taxing of major and middle income corporations and small businesses at 99% was intended to pay for the program, but when IRS personnel appeared at these venues, in many instances they found nothing but closed doors or vacant premises. The Bureau of Printing and Engraving announced a “temporary” halt in printing all the new money because of shortages of the proper paper and of the necessary chemicals and inks, while the Treasury Department also announced a halt in the mailing of “Freedom Checks” to everyone because of a shortage of paper on which to print the checks. Suppliers of the currency and check paper to the BPE and the Treasury Department were sued. But President Sanders said the setbacks were just a “blip.” He was also quoted as saying, “You can't make an omelet without breaking heads.” One person was arrested and sentenced by a kangaroo court to twenty years of hard labor for having been overheard to say to a friend in private that President Sanders “not only needed a walker to get to the john but also for his brain.” Still, all was made right in the world and bad-mouthers were taken out of circulation, resulting in a significant drop in aural pollution.·    The inauguration of the new  federal Multi-Gender Police (the MGP) was feted by former U.S. President Barack Obama during a special ceremony in Seattle. The new law enforcement tool was expected to work closely with the re-tailored FBI. The MGP’s ranks were filled with heterosexuals, homosexuals, lesbians, trans-genders, and people of unclassified orientation. True to Barack Obama’s anti-gun philosophy, the troops were armed with only tasers, electronic batons, modified cattle prods, and katanas. Cleverly designed uniforms, modeled after samurai fighting armor, disguised the gender identity of each policeperson. However, during its first assignment, the MGP retreated from a food riot in Philadelphia, resulting in half the city being burnt down, its spokesperson saying that sending the MGP into combat violated the “safe spaces” of many of its members who weren’t quite ready to impose law and order. It also claimed that many thousands of lives were saved by the MGP’s non-intervention in the looting, destruction, and occasional killing. Still, all was made right in the world, as there was no more police brutality. ·    English was demoted from being the official lingua franca of the U.S. Callers to various federal agencies, bureaus, and “crony” corporations were asked to “Press 1 for Arabic, Press 2 for Spanish, Press 3 for English.” Advertising and billboards (where they were permitted) had to communicate in Arabic and Spanish first, with tiny English subtitles. And all was made right in the world, and illiteracy was no longer a social stigma. ·         The Islamic State of America reached a detente with the Hispanic Speakers Alliance and Latino Lives Matter that would allow members of the three entities free and unharassed existence in addition to free movement to and from their particular spheres of influence. The truce was made necessary because it was expected that most Mexicans would refuse to submit to Islam or become Muslims (most of them being Catholics, Jehovah’s Witnesses, and Baptists), and Muslims would refuse to become apostates, and a civil war was imminent. It was mutually agreed that violence could be visited only on whites and other infidels and non-Hispanics. And all was made right in the world, and everyone breathed easier, except for the disenfranchised.·    White privilege was abolished under the guidance of Alicia Garza, Patrisse Cullors, and Opal Tometi, Black Lives Matter founders, with the guidance of Melissa Click, the former University of Missouri professor who accosted a student journalist. A federal law was passed compelling all whites to wear the letter “W” sewn on their clothing when in public. Jews were compelled to wear the letters” WJ” on their clothing when in public. Whites were compelled to defer rights of way to blacks on streets, restaurants, bars, laundromats, and in other public places. Blacks were permitted to “knock out” whites with impunity and without penalty. College history courses were stripped of all formal “white” history and replaced with black, Mexican, Islamic, and LGBT histories. Emulating the Saudi religious police, the Trayvon Martin Brigade was created and was given the responsibility of enforcing black privilege on whites, assisted by the MPG. White school children were required to learn “jive” and “blacklish,” while the speaking of Standard English was outlawed and violators were sentenced to 100 lashes with a whip or cane, whatever was handy. Whites were not permitted to assemble in groups larger than four. Classical music was banned, and also Elvis and Frank Sinatra. The MPG and FBI were tasked with rooting out white “samizdat” that circulated old classic texts and scheduled secret concerts, homeschooling, get-togethers, social gatherings, and lectures in basements. The Statue of Liberty in New York Harbor was dynamited, and replaced with a giant black tower that some said resembled a penis, but which was denied by its federally-funded sculptor. And all was made right in the world, and everyone breathed easier, because whiteness was now out of sight.·     As in Islamic Europe, a vigorous drive was made to submerge “white” culture beneath the lead-weight of “polypolitical” culture, if not altogether obliterate it. Street names were changed to Arabic, Latino, or African names. Germany and Sweden were entirely defoliated of Germanic and Nordic character. “White” art was banished from public view, statues and paintings depicting whites were destroyed, and museums were denuded of all vestiges of “white” supremacy. Scandinavian, German, and French women were required to “cover up” per Islamic rules, and also to expose themselves to Turkish, Syrian, Somalian, and African “citizens” on request and to submit without protest to their desires (complaints earned such women who complained stiff fines and jail sentences). European males were required to wear abbreviated tutus to better identify them to the new “citizens” and were a not permitted to fight back when attacked without incurring automatic counter-charges of assault and intent to commit riot and bodily harm. And all was made right in the world, and no one was reminded of the oppressive past of Western cultural imperialism.·    Israel was destroyed by two Iranian nuclear devices. Eager Palestinians rushed to “occupy” the areas that were once “occupied” by the Jewish state, although thousands of them died of radiation exposure when they marched into the wasteland and attempted to settle there. All Jewish males, regardless of age, in areas not affected by the nuclear bombs, were rounded up and executed; all Jewish women, regardless of age, were executed in separate camps. Attractive Jewish women and girls were selected to serve in special “comfort” centers for the Palestinian elite. Arabs who had cooperated with or were on good terms with Jews were identified and killed. Resistance to ethnic cleansing and slavery earned instant death. Clouds of radiation, however, wafted from the wastelands in shifting winds and caused millions of deaths and illnesses in Egypt, Jordan, Gaza, and Iran. Radiation was also detected in North Africa, felling or sickening thousands. Yet, all was right with the world, as the Little Satan was at last consigned to nuclear flames.
Not counting the eradication of diseases, inventing electricity, cars, etc.·      The Internet was taken over by the federal government, as well as telephone and all other electronic means of personal communication, and run as a regulated public services (when it was working). One could no longer in private conversation call Muslim women in America fat, ugly, and sweaty; one could no longer call Mexico’s culture second-rate; one could no longer aver that the libidos of LGBTs were in corrosive limbos, without being hauled into court and sentenced to five years hard labor for using offensive language and for offending the feelings of protected minorities (which were no longer numerical minorities, but now empowered ones). Informants were everywhere. The only individuals who could not be charged with racism, bigotry, discrimination, hate crimes, and other such crimes were Muslims, Latinos, and blacks. Only whites could commit hate crimes and hate speech. Whites were encouraged to feel shame for being white, and guilt for crimes committed by their ancestors hundreds of years before. This act of contrition resembled in action and in speech the Muslim shadada or expression of insignificance and submission, and was the brainstorm of Anjem Choudary, a British Islamic agitator and provocateur. It was modified from the traditional Muslim shadada for infidels to practice penance for even existing. And the world was made right, when infidels and unbelievers offered their necks to the sword…..  
Of course, you must realize that by the time all these and other conditions could be met, the world’s population would exist in a pronounced tatterdemalion state, all the things they were counting on having perished or been eliminated or been outlawed. The world would stand still and be left in a smoking ruin, with great masses staring into the void that their their social justice warriors, environmentalists, LGBT champions, diversity dilettantes, economic levelers and egalitarians, gender neuterers, and climate changers had created. All people would be left with is the chance to gnaw on bones, or on each other.
The world would be made right – according to the nihilists and to the gospel of Immanuel Kant.

Review: Dangerous Men

A friend sent me a library discard chiefly because she thought I would be interested in its cover of Clark Gable, for Dangerous Men: Pre-Code Hollywood and the Birth of the Modern Man, and the Birth of the Modern Man, by Mick LasSalle. The book was published in 2002, and is available now only on Kindle, although there are probably numerous scores of hard copies and paperbacks of it that can be had for a song from various Amazon associated vendors.

The cover is definitely interesting. The non-mustachioed Gable could very well be cast as Cyrus Skeen, the hero of my private detective series set in San Francisco between 1928 and 1930. The only thing missing from Gable’s arresting and commanding gaze is the lock of hair that often falls over Skeen’s brow and which his wife, Dilys, is forever flicking away. Skeen’s ears, however, would be a mite smaller.
One of the most memorable contrasts LaSalle marks is the on-screen rivalry between Gable and Leslie Howard, who both appeared in “Gone With the Wind” and “A Free Soul” (1931). Howard is steamrolled by Gable over a woman. But Gable “had a way of making any man in the vicinity look like he should be wearing a dress.” (p.65) One look at Gable, and you know he’s not “transgender” material. He’d more likely clean your clock if you ever questioned his virility or his identity as a man.
LaSalle’s book is also interesting in that it paints a picture of the changing status and character of male characters in Hollywood between 1929 and 1934, the Pre-Code era, after which the Hays Office of “voluntary” censorship put the kibosh on “immorality.” Will Hays and his mostly Catholic and Presbyterian allies put visual and vocal fig leaves on men and woman.  There is a political stance in LaSalle’s book but it is difficult to nail down; he implicitly endorses from the right, from the left, and from the middle, and he applauds every position imaginable, as well as the stances taken by the stars he discusses.
LaSalle reviews and critiques with lucid and often biting retrospect the careers of such memorable and forgotten Pre-Codestars as Lon Chaney, Ramon Navarro, Richard Barthelmess, Edward G. Robinson, Clark Gable, James Cagney, Robert Montgomery, John and Lionel Barrymore, Charles Laughton, Gary Cooper, Warren William, John Gilbert, Douglas Fairbanks, Jr. and Sr., Lee Tracy, Paul Muni, and Fredric March.
But his principal position is stated about halfway into Dangerous Men:
More than anything else, the movies of the time emphasized the primacy of the individual and the importance of individual concerns, treating the government as a malign, or at best neutral force. Shady characters, sly operators, and fast-talking con men were often heroes, if for no other reason but that they were individualists making their way in the world. Meanwhile, anyone representing organized power, such as business or government, was part of the problem. That’s why private detectives were almost always good guys, while policemen were usually nuisances. (p. 106)
The onset of the Great Depression in 1929 helped to promote this narrative even on through World War II and in our own time. But the “individualism” of which LaSalle speaks has morphed into a mentally ill kind of narcissism highlighted by “safe spaces” and “trigger warnings.” These certainly had not been invented in 2002, when Dangerous Men was originally published. But try to imagine actors of the caliber, presence, and rough-and-ready style as Cagney, Robinson, Gable, or William whining about having their safe spaces violated or requiring trigger warnings before some actress began vamping them and showing them her legs. It would be too hilarious for words. The contrast would be so violent that it would send any contemporary social justice warrior into frothing, white-knuckled paroxyms of anger and outrage. Oh, the insensitivity!
How did the Production Code Administration, the enforcement arm of the Motion Picture Producers and Distributors of America (MPPA), come about? Through a little judicious arm-twisting and the appeal to some “higher” moral standard – that is, the altruist, selfless brand.
…It was a result of the well-organized effort by a small cabal of lay Catholics, who, working within the church and the film industry, threatened the studios with a loss of Catholic business if certain demands weren’t met.
Caving into pressure, the studios appointed publicity man Joseph Breen as the first head of the Production Code Administration, a new organization empowered with the right to approve or deny the release of any studio film. As of July 1, 1934, Breen, a political reactionary and a raging anti-Semite, became the final arbiter of screen content. He kept the job for nearly two decades. (p. xii)
It didn’t hurt that Franklin D. Roosevelt took office in March 1933, with his promise to “remake” the country as a welfare state with a population of hound-dog faced dependents, in much the same manner as Barack Obama promised to “remake” the country in order to “transform” its political, economic, and demographics to something far more compatible with collectivism than FDR could ever have imagined.
“Dangerous” film censor Joseph Breen
Another contrast, La Salle writes, is in the difference between most of the silent films and the Pre-Code films. In Chapter 1, “Why Are These Men Smiling?” he notes that:
The smiles of the silent heroes suggested a whole attitude toward life, a confidence about the nature of heroism and the ultimate forces of good and evil. Silent heroes not only believed their victories were inevitable, but when they did win, they felt sure enough to gloat a little. They did not go through life expecting the ground to shift beneath their feet…. (p. 2)
But LaSalle prefaced that observation with:
In the Pre-Code era, we find new-fashioned heroes whose manhood was an authoritative force – not pretty boys, not cannon fodder, not pawns of the system, but dangerous men. Together, they represent a vision of manhood more exuberant and contentious, and at the same time more humane, than anything that has followed on the American screen. (p. xiii)
LaSalle dwells on the importance of “irony” in Pre-Code films, a “virtue” hardly lost in today’s film fare.
The great silent heroes of the twenties, stars such as Douglas Fairbanks, Rudolph Valentino, Ramon Novarro, and John Gilbert, were hardly sober men of affairs. They projected the modish virtues: youth, confidence, physical beauty, dynamism, and personality. What they…lack was irony. As historian Paul Fussell has asserted, irony was the great and defining legacy of World War I. That modern sense of irony, seeping into the culture as the twenties progressed, would ultimately make the silent hero and his radiantly unshakeable smile seem old-fashioned indeed. (p. 4)
Irony, in this cinematic context, I take LaSalle to mean that if the “hero” does not laugh at himself for being a “hero,” then the audience will laugh at him. Or take him with a grain of salt. Or the critics will. As a rule, critics have always laid on the internal and external irony super-thick, even when praising films they have liked.
Carole Lombard as Dilys SkeenThe dangerous men of the Pre-Code era, however, were not “heroes,” strictly speaking; they were thugs, gangsters, con men, cheats, a menagerie of ambiguous moralists, and a variety of Don Juans who treated women like discarded Kleenex and their victims as marks, patsies, and suckers. They were not of The Fountainhead or Atlas Shrugged caliber. In Western culture, true individualism had never found a voice until the novels of Ayn Rand. The Pre-Code “heroes,” however well they were played, were still the non-productive, essentially parasitical dross of society.
(Gary Cooper’s old-fashioned heroism was more suited to the Code era than to the Pre-Code era. He thrived in the late thirties, forties, and fifties, making many signature films, including “Mr. Deeds Goes to Town” [1936], “Meet John Doe” [1941], and “High Noon” [1952]. He died in 1961, at age sixty. P. 213)
Left out of this sampling of Cooper’s films are “The Fountainhead” (1949) and “For Whom the Bell Tolls” (1943).
Now that there is no enforceable Code, no powerful censor to play Bowdler to Breen’s latent prurience, the ground keeps shifting under the feet of our culture’s purported “heroes.” It’s deuces wild.  Anything goes. The Production Code was never truly enforced. It more or less lapsed into irrelevancy in the 1940’s, and the MPAA(the Motion Picture Association of America) formally abandoned the Code in 1966, replacing its bizarre guidelines with a wholly arbitrary “rating” system whose center of gravity seems to revolve around the definition of “mature.” 
However, I can see it now. Were some director to decide to produce Civic Affairs, and talked about the script with Clark Gable, Gable would laugh and say, “Hey. I like this scene. I get to kick this Breen character in the pants. That’ll be fun to shoot! Can we get Jimmy Stewart? And who’s playing Skeen’s wife? I could really work with Carole Lombard! She’s a lot of fun!”
Dangerous Men: Pre-Code Hollywood and the Birth of the Modern Man, by Mick LaSalle. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2002. 273 pp.

How to Not Talk About Islam

Not mincing words in Boris Johnson's LondonBoris Johnson, Mayor of London, knows how to not talk about Islam.


Across the sea, Daniel Greenfield, Stephen Coughlin, and a few others not detached from reality, also know how to not talk about Islam.
Boris Johnson wants to find a new term for linking Islamic terrorism without mentioning Islam or Muslims. Or even terrorists or terrorism.
Daniel Greenfield et al. do not think you can discuss Islamic terrorism without mentioning Islam. If you talk about Kellogg’s Corn Flakes, you are talking about a cereal, and not about sushi or hummus. Finding a new term for Islamic terrorism isn’t necessary. The current term says it all.
Boris Johnson does not believe that Islamic “radicalization” has anything to do with Islam. “Radicalization” is a very real term to him, yet it has nothing to do with Islam. By what are British, American, and European Muslims being “radicalized”? The answer to this question is to Johnson as elusive as Peruvian guano dung. He tries several explanations but none of them rings true, for they all avoid “Islam” like the plague. It’s almost funny how finicky he is when trying to solve a problem by evading the simplest answers.
The title of this column lends itself, at Boris Johnson’s expense, to an old Monty Python skit, “How not to be seen.” Or, how not to be heard or seen speaking of Islam in any but praiseworthy and respective language. Language that deprecates or indicts Islam is out of the question. In Britain, it probably isn’t even legal.
Boris Johnson about a year ago, in a June 28th Telegraph article, “Islamic State? This death cult is not a state and it’s certainly not Islamic,” tackled the conundrum with a subheading, “We must settle on a name for our enemies that doesn’t smear all Muslims but does reflect reality.” To Johnson, ISIS, or ISIL, is merely a “death cult” and has no relation to Islam. It isn’t fair to Islam or to Muslims, he says, to characterize Islamic terrorism as something performed exclusively by hooded Muslims who usually quote Koranic verses while broadcasting their latest beheading, stoning, or hurling of a gay from a rooftop. Johnson writes:
If we are going to defeat our enemies we have to know who they are. We have to know what to call them. We must at least settle on a name – a terminology – with which we can all agree. And the trouble with the fight against Islamic terror is that we are increasingly grappling with language, and with what it is permissible or sensible to say.
Johnson first concedes that it is Islamic terrorism that is the “enemy.” However, to call it “Islamic terror” is an unjustified exercise of “profiling.” And in Britain, no longer a bastion of freedom of speech, profiling Muslims and connecting them with Islamic terrorism is no longer permissible.
But what are the objectives of this terrorism? Is it religious? Is it political? Is it a toxic mixture of the two? And what exactly is its relationship with Islam? Many thoughtful Muslims are now attempting – understandably – to decouple their religion from any association with violence of this kind.
Many “thoughtful Muslims,” however, are performing incredible mental and linguistic contortions to dissociate or “decouple” Islam from terrorism. The contortions are but exercises in taqiyya, as detailed in Stephen Coughlin’s Catastrophic Failure: The Blindfolding of America in the Face of Jihad. This important work was partly reviewed in January in “ Interfaith Bridges to Islam” on Rule of Reason. 
Johnson writes:
…They are not running a state, and their gangster organization is not Islamic – it is a narcissistic death cult….
Yes, ISIS employs thugs, killers, sadists, rapists, gangsters, and other homicidal creatures who to a man hope to gain admittance to “Paradise” and 72 virgins by submitting wholeheartedly to Islam and Allah’s will. Yes, ISIS is a state. It has a government, of sorts, a currency, of sorts, and it works ceaselessly to preserve itself as a state. It’s called the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria. The term “State” is not accidental. It does not call itself the Islamic Club, the Islamic Fellowship, or even the Islamic Brotherhood. ISIS’s main goal is to establish a caliphate in as much territory as it can conquer.
Rehman’s point is that if you call it Islamic State you are playing their game; you are dignifying their criminal and barbaric behavior; you are giving them a propaganda boost that they don’t deserve, especially in the eyes of some impressionable young Muslims. He wants us all to drop the terms, in favor of more derogatory names such as “Daesh” or “Faesh”, and his point deserves a wider hearing.
But then there are others who would go much further, and strip out any reference to the words “Muslim” or “Islam” in the discussion of this kind of terrorism – and here I am afraid I disagree. I can well understand why so many Muslims feel this way. Whatever we may think of the “truth” of any religion, there are billions of people for whom faith is a wonderful thing: a consolation, an inspiration – part of their identity.
 The Islamic Anthill, at the Kaaba, MeccaAnd we mustn’t leave them in a state of disconsolation. Somehow, calling killers killers is “playing into their game,” and “dignifying their criminal and barbaric behavior.” We are, Johnson implies, granting Islamic terrorists some sort of legitimacy related to their “hijacking” Islam to better satisfy their homicidal lusts. But Islam is an ideology that sanctions whatever homicidal lusts may motivate the killers. It is they who are dignifying their crimes. Boris Johnson then shakes his head in resignation.
…Why do we seem to taint a whole religion by association with a violent minority? Well, I am afraid there are two broad reasons why some such association is inevitable. The first is a simple point of language, and the need to use terms that everyone can readily grasp. It is very difficult to bleach out all reference to Islam or Muslim from discussion of this kind of terror, because we have to pinpoint what we are actually talking about. It turns out that there is virtually no word to describe an Islamically-inspired terrorist that is not in some way prejudicial, at least to Muslim ears.
We must have a name, a term, one which identifies the killers. Unfortunately, the overwhelming number of killers are Muslims acting in the name of Islam, whether they’re “soldiers” of Allah in the fields of ISIS or bombing Paris or Brussels Airport. “A” cannot be “A” because too many people are in the “A” category, and resent being so labeled. We must somehow render “A” a non-“A.” Johnson then wonders how he can have Aristotle and eat him, too.
If we purge our vocabulary of any reference to the specifically religious associations of the problem, then we are not only ignoring the claims of the terrorists themselves (which might be reasonable), but the giant fact that there is a struggle going on now for the future of Islam, and how it can adapt to the 21st century. The terrorism we are seeing across the Muslim world is partly a function of that struggle, and of the chronic failure of much Islamic thinking to distinguish between politics and religion.
He will not, in the end, admit that Islam by its nature does not distinguish between politics and religion. It does not separate church and state or mosque and state. They are one and the same. Ask any ISIS killer, or any mild-mannered imam, or any humble mullah. They will tell you the same thing in so many words.


Daniel Greenfield in his April 20th Sultan Knish column, “The Fallacy of Focusing on Islamic Radicalization,” is an antidote to Johnson’s agonizing folderol.  
Radicalization programs, under euphemisms such as CVE or Countering Violent Extremism, assume that Islamic terrorism can be countered by forming a partnership with Muslim groups and social services agencies. While the West will ease Muslim dissatisfaction by providing jobs and boosting their self-esteem to make them feel like they belong, the Muslim groups will tackle the touchy issue of Islam.
These partnerships achieve nothing because social services don’t prevent Islamic terrorism; they enable and fund the very no-go zones and dole-seeker lifestyles that are a gateway to the Jihad. Meanwhile the Muslim partners are inevitably Islamists looking to pick up potential recruits for their own terror agendas. Western countries fund terrorism to fight terrorism and then partner with still more terrorists to train their homegrown terrorists not to be terrorists, or at least not the wrong kind of terrorists. This is what happens when the “Islam” part of Islamic terrorism is ignored and outsourced to any Islamist who can pretend to be moderate in front of a television camera for 5 minutes at a time.
None of this actually stops Islamic terrorism. Instead it empowers and encourages it.
In other language, CVE prefers squaring the root of pi over naming Islam. Pi is Islamic “radicalization.” It can have an infinite number of explanations for Muslims being “radicalized” stretching from Earth to the Dark Horse Nebula and beyond. The answers, however, always without exception default back to Islam.

But Islam is a whole number. It can’t be squared. Squaring it only leaves one with “one.” Put another way, you can treat Islam as a pot of sea water. You can boil the water away, and leave the salt behind. The violent verses of the Koran especially are the salt in Islam. It’s the violent verses of the Koran on which the killers act.

Language, for Johnson, is the key culprit. It must be sanitized somehow to both identify the Islamic baddies and also to deny they have a lot to do with the Islam that so many blameless Friday-Go-Mosque Muslims adhere to. Language must conform to wishful thinking or delusions. It must never, never be anchored to reality. That would be “radicalization” and we want none of that. 

Johnson gives an exquisite demonstration of how to not talk about Islam, while at the same time talking about it. Quite a feat of  Saussurean semiotics.

Death Cults in the Culture

There is a growing obsession with death in what passes today for our culture. This would not be a disturbing trend were it simply a fringe phenomenon. But it is ubiquitous throughout the culture.

The first series I discuss here is “Dexter.”  I have watched the whole series (seven seasons, from 2006 to 2013), but it was brought to my attention by Stephen Coughlin in his “Strategic Overview: Understanding the Threat & Strategic Incomprehension in the War on Terror,” p. 6, a synopsis of the salient points of Coughlin’s Catastrophic Failure: Blindfolding America in the Face of Jihad. Coughlin writes in “Strategic Overview”:
From Catastrophic Failure [p. 34], “The “Dexter Standard,” was written to highlight the ridiculousness of the constraints placed on counterterrorism efforts to understand the nature of the threat. It argues there should be no controversy regarding analysis of a self-declared enemy’s self-identified warfighting doctrine and explains this through reference to the Showtime series Dexter. In the fall 2011 season, the plot revolved around a serial killer who acts in furtherance of an idiosyncratic End-Times scenario based on the New Testament’s Book of Revelation. Upon recognizing this, inspectors used Revelation as an essential analytical tool. The necessity of using Revelation was never questioned even as some inspectors were either nominally religious or non-believers. No one suggested that only Christian inspectors were qualified to investigate.
(I review in part Coughlin’s book in “Interfaith Bridges to Islam” on Rule of Reason.)
“Dexter” is Dexter Morgan, a forensic specialist in blood spatter analysis working for a fictive Miami police department. On the surface he is a calm, likeable fellow and gets along with most of his police colleagues. But, in secret, he is a serial killer. In fact, he is a homicidal maniac. He is a kind of vigilante who kills serial killers, and causes them to vanish. The bodies of his victims, each of whom is responsible for horrendous crimes and is ritually murdered by Dexter, are wrapped in plastic and dumped into the ocean. The problem with this, at least with me, is that once the serial killers have been “stopped,” no one knows what has happened to them and whether or not they are still at large and will strike again after a puzzling hiatus. Early in the series some of the bodies are discovered by a diving class. The unknown killer is instantly dubbed “The Bay Harbor Butcher.”
Their crimes are rarely solved by the police. The public is left in the dark about the status or demise of the killers. The police are left with big question marks. Dexter chooses not to enlighten them. He continues to analyze crime scenes and eliminate the serial killers.
My second problem with the series is that Dexter admits that he is homicidal. He likes killing killers. But his killing is done within the parameters of a “code” established by his father, a former (and now dead) policeman. This figure appears occasionally in flashbacks as a real character in the series, but mostly as a ghostly embodiment of a “conscience” with whom Dexter has an ongoing internal dialogue. This device is in addition to the intermittent voice-over narrative of Dexter.
Dexter confesses to an overwhelming urge to kill. He began as a child with animals and graduated to killing men (and some women, particularly the nurse who allegedly poisoned his ill father). It is something he says he cannot control. He is only at peace when he has killed someone. His father taught him everything he knows about tracking killers, capturing them, and finally dispatching them without leaving a single trace of himself or of the victim behind. He adheres to the “code” but sometimes questions his father’s wisdom, and sometimes his ghostly father questions his adopted son’s contemplated actions.
Overall, however, justice is not served, and is not meted out by Dexter, whether or not the death penalty can be condoned. The killers die – and many of them deserve to die – but because society is governed by a system of laws, their deaths at the hands and knives of Dexter are outside the law. The premise that society is a system of laws and not of men is not present in the series. If it had been at the beginning of the series, the series would not have lasted seven seasons, and Dexter would have been brought to justice himself very early on. The series ends, however, with Dexter getting away with his crimes, and sailing his boat into a hurricane and faking his suicide. In the end, he emerges as a bearded logger in Oregon.
The series was suspenseful for a while. But something else must account for it having run for seven seasons. Critics loved or hated it, and critical opinion was divided over the conclusion, when Dexter simply vanishes and does not retire his career and moves to Argentina with his soul mate. However, do people feel so doomed in today’s political and cultural environment that they felt a kind of symbiosis or empathy with Dexter, and the series served as a kind of dramatic objectification of their sense of peril?
I discussed “The Walking Dead” in several other columns on Rule of Reason, concluding with “The Walking Dead: An Obituary” on April 11th,  and will not belabor the series here again. See “Negan and the Walking Jihadists” from March 25th, and “A Walking Dead Postscript” from March 26th.
What has astonished me is the enormous “fan base” of the series. When the Season Six finale of the series was broadcast on AMC earlier this month, there was an almost universal outcry or expression relief. This fan base must number in the tens of thousands. Fans either felt cheated of the introduction of their favorite villain, Negan, or said that it was about time the TV series adhered, at least in part, to the Robert Kirkman graphic comics series, which the author and his artists have been churning out since 2003 and are likely to for many more. Fans treat the Negan character as though he were the Second Coming of Christ, or behave online and at personal appearances of the cast like bobbysoxers once did at the appearance of Frank Sinatra.
Negan, according to one mainstream critic, is “charismatic.” Perhaps even hypnotic. Well, at least he is to “The Walking Dead” fan base, whatever form the series takes. For the fans, Negan is a “necessary” evil in their hierarchy of values. Negan is a “successful” looter and killer; Rick Grimes, the “good” group’s leader, on the other hand, has failed in virtually everything he’s ever attempted.
The debut of Negan, the apotheosis of pure, laughing, nihilist evil in the series, who apparently thrives on the applause of his “Savior” gang as he obliterates the head of a victim with his barbed wire bat, for the comics fans is for them is a cause for celebration. “Once he was lost, and now he is found.”
The TV seriesof “The Walking Dead,” which began airing in 2010, diverges radically from the graphic comics.  It treats the Kirkman comics as a buffett of story lines and adapts specific comics content for the TV series.  In many ways, the TV series hardly resembles the comics. The comics fans have never been satisfied with the TV series, but they watch it anyway. To judge by the comments left on the various “Walking Dead” discussion blogs, their devotion to the comics and the TV series has been literally religious. It is an obsession with a very crude and second-hand story theme. It is hardly original. There are countless novels and a quite a few dozen films and TV shows that dwell on an apocalypse. What the producers and directors of “The Walking Dead” TV series have done, along with Kirkman and his graphic comics, is string out the zombie story and fill in the blanks wherever the principals wish. One could pen a book on the numerous plot holes in the TV series.
“The Walking Dead” offers a moral conflict to most viewers and readers. In fiction, moral conflict is necessary and a guide to successful living. But in “The Walking Dead” the conflict is one in which evil wins, spreads its poisons, and triumphs. For those enamored of the literature of the past, and for whom their lives and their values are of paramount importance, evil and misery are not of metaphysical importance. But, to judge by the reactions to “The Walking Dead” and its finale (and on what is to come in the next season, and the popularity of the graphic comics), evil is a necessary condition for living. It is “entertaining” and welcome as a mode of surcease from the pathetic lives of readers and viewers.
(Parenthetically, the societies established and sought after by Rick Grimes and others are demonstrably collectivist in nature. The survivors live off the residue of a collapsed civilization, but do not attempt to replicate a productive one. Whether it is Grimes or Negan establishing a society, it is basically parasitical on the corpse of a better world. That the TV series would begin to take a “left turn” should not be surprising.
The stress is all on “family,” and “giving,” and “sacrifice.” People who are too “individualistic” are not to be trusted.)
Islam isa death cult. That has been demonstrated for one and a half millennia. At this point, there would be no need to cite any oneof the numerous Koranic verses to prove that Islam requires every one of its adherents – jihadist or passive – to live by Allah’s whimsical diktats to better follow the road to Paradise, where, upon arrival, all restrictive and confining bets and rules are off and the “afterlife” would become one eternal orgy of wine and women and rivers of honey and trees that drip raisins. At least, that is what is promised men, especially those who become “martyrs” by killing Jews and infidels and die in the process. What’s in it for Muslim women has never actually been detailed or laid out. There have been plenty of adlib jokes about a pious Muslim woman’s reward in the great Cloud Bank in the Sky, but neither the Koran nor the Hadith have much elaborated on those prizes.
But Islam is a death cult. In Islam the whole purpose of living is to die. And also to cause non-Muslims, infidels, Jews, and others to die. Especially infidels, because everyone (except Jews) it is claimed was born a Muslim, and those who stray from the “Eternal Word” and the “true” faith are guilty of “infidelity.”
All one really needs to understand Islam and how to live by it is the Secret Magic Decoder Ring (supplied by Ovaltine) to translate the pretzel-like and often incomprehensible  language of the Koran and Hadith. Just follow the advice of Dr. Muhammad Muhsin Khan in his Road to Paradise .
So, what is an Islamic “Paradise” like? Dr. Khan explains it all.
"The description of Paradise which the Muttaqun (the pious believers of Islamic Monotheism) have been promised (is that) in it are rivers of water the taste and smell of which are not changed, rivers of milk of which the taste never changes, rivers of wine delicious to those who drink, and rivers of clarified honey (clear and pure); therein for them is every kind of fruit, and forgiveness from their Lord.
And what about those poor devils who strayed? They shall:
…dwell forever in the Fire and be given to drink boiling water so that it cuts up their bowels?" [(V47:15) The Noble Qur'an]
That cutting up the bowels of the damned part sounds very messy. Looks like a job for Negan. But, it won't be a cakewalk to earn a place in the Divine Disco.
The Road to Paradise is full of hurdles and pits, and not so easy to go through it![1] It needs great patience, self control, and to avoid all evil deeds such as illegal sex, illegal talk (like backbiting, telling lies, etc.), illegal foods and drinks; and to perform regularly compulsory congregational prayers, fasting, Jihad (holy fighting in Allah's cause), and to give obligatory charity (Zakat), and to perform Umrah and Hajj.
And to insure that devout Muslims understand the score, Khan beats a dead horse:
All glory and praise is to Allah, the One to Whom all dignity, honor and respect are due; the Unique with perfect attributes, Who begets not, nor is He begotten. He has no equal but He is the All-Mighty, Omnipotent. He sent His Messengers and Prophets to guide humanity towards Monotheism, to worship Him Alone, the only One Worthy of worship, and to warn them of the eternal dire consequences of polytheism, associating partners with One Allah and the worship of creatures.
What Islam promises is a causeless existence. To reach that state, one must first die, but, before dying, one must deny everything that is promised in Paradise. Go figure. It’s the old carrot-and-stick routine writ large.
In a philosophical and moral vacuum, it’s the fools of the world who rush in: those obsessed with death as a means of escaping, or snuffing out, life.

Preview: Civic Affairs

 Welcome to a preview of Civic Affairs, the 17th Cyrus Skeen detective novel, set in San Francisco in late May, 1929. The novel will be published in late April, and will be available on Kindle and as a print book. Enjoy.
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Chapter 1: The Bum’s Rush
“My wife and I have come to request an unusual action to be taken by you, which, frankly, we hope you regard is in the realm of civic duty, Mr. Skeen.” The man paused, waiting to hear some response from Skeen. “We hope you are amenable to the idea, and respond with the utmost civility, courtesy and responsibility.”Jubal Pickett sat in an armchair in front of Cyrus Skeen’s desk. Next to him sat his wife, Lucinda Pickett. The Pickets had arrived in his office a few minutes ago, without having called for an appointment. He did not know who they were and did not know what they wanted.Skeen asked, his brow darkening in an ominous frown, “Who are you again? And what is it you want?”Jubal Pickett was about half a foot shorter than Skeen. His oiled black hair was parted precisely in the middle. He was thin, as was his face, with a smidgen of a moustache crowning thin lips. Skeen observed that the man, whom he estimated to be in his forties, had that constant, pinched look around his eyes and nostrils as though everything he ever encountered was sour, displeased him, and probably caused him upset stomachs. Skeen had the wild thought that Mr. Jubal Pickett took castor oil with his coffee, regularly. His voice registered perhaps a tad above countertenor. He wore a plain gray suit, a vest, and a black bowtie. A gray derby was hooked over one knee. His wife, Lucinda, was a prim, shriveled, almost emaciated woman with a prune face that reminded him of Olga Quarre, a creature he had met in April on a case. He guessed she was in her forties, as well, but it was hard to determine her age. She wore a Quakerish bonnet and a lacy, high neck collar that that did not quite encase her scrawny neck. She wore a bland brown jacket, an ankle-length brown skirt, and brown, old fashioned women’s shoes that were shin-high and which had to be laced up through a dozen eyelets. One claw-like hand was wrapped around the handle of an umbrella; the other held a shapeless cloth bag that was probably her purse. It had not rained in the city for days, and was not raining now. Some people carried umbrellas regardless of the weather.When the Picketts had been shown into his office by Lucy Wentz, his secretary, Skeen had not come around his desk or even risen to greet the couple. They had not called to make an appointment, and behaved as though they had a right to be here. According to Skeen’s code of etiquette, they did not deserve the acknowledgement.Mr. Pickett reached inside his suit jacket and produced a business card, which he put on the edge of Skeen’s desk. “I am Jubal Salubrious Pickett, sir. I am the president of the local city chapter of the National Committee of Concerned Citizens for Public Decency.”Skeen frowned. He had heard of the outfit. It had been campaigning for years for the government to censor Hollywood movies, tasteless and indecent material in vaudeville theaters, lascivious language in popular songs and ballads, and commercial advertisements that displayed women in various stages of dress or undress. It even condemned some men’s swimming suit ads. Its latest pronouncements, guest editorials, actions, and interviews appeared in all the city newspapers’ religion and Society pages every other weekend. It circulated petitions to Congress and local politicians to have “indecency” banned from the movie and vaudeville theaters, from the radio airwaves, and from printed matter.Committee of Concerned Citizens for Public Decency also campaigned against the death penalty, against what it deemed “cruel and unusual sentences, and for the mandatory rehabilitation of career criminals, and even started a “pen pal” society of Concerned Citizens to write to convicts serving life sentences. The Picketts themselves claimed to have a dozen “pen pal” inmates in Folsom and other prisons in the state and around the country. Newspapers had published some of the correspondence as items of human interest. But there had always been organizations calling for reining in Hollywood and commercial advertising and even for the censorship of books, plays, and popular songs. Skeen could not keep count of the phenomena.  The National Committee of Concerned Citizens for Public Decency was just another such outfit.Mr. Pickett creased his brow and spoke in his odd voice. “My chapter had a meeting last week, Mr. Skeen, and the local Committee has sent me to demand from you a published apology for how you treated that minister and that attorney on the occasion of their arrests for murder earlier this month. Your treatment of them was dastardly, despicable, and utterly heartless. Yes, they committed horrible crimes, but their prominence in this community was of such a nature that they deserved the utmost respect and deference.”Skeen blinked his eyes twice. Was he hearing things? The detective frowned. His mouth was about to bend into a grin of incredulity. He asked, “Would you mind repeating that, sir? I’m not quite sure I heard you correctly.”Mr. Pickett obliged. Skeen grimaced. He could not stand the sound of the man’s voice.Skeen sat forward. “Mr. Pickett, fighting criminals is not a please-and-thank-you business. The criminal’s wardrobe is irrelevant. If a criminal is violent, he must be met with violence. If he is not violent while being apprehended by me or by the police, then he won't be banged up much. The well-respected minister attacked me with an ax. The well-spoken attorney lied to me and crushed the skull of a priest.” Skeen then lost his control and patience. He laughed outloud. “An apology from me? Are you out of your mind? Is this some sort of college fraternity prank?”The Pickett couple’s mouths both pursed in petulance. The man said, “If you do not publish an apology, we shall launch a campaign to discredit you, and to pressure the District Attorney to confiscate or revoke your private investigator’s license. And also your right to carry a gun. We shall do everything in our power short of calumny to stop your violence!”Mrs. Pickett offered her own threat. “You are a disgrace to this city, Mr. Skeen!” Her voice was a tad lower than that of a countertenor. “We shall see you run out of town! You are an atheist, too! You soil the city with your presence! You are no better than that atheist, Enoch Paige, who ought to be electrocuted, but now, thanks to you, he’ll walk free to spread his smut and anti-Christ filth!”The woman was referring to the lecturer, Enoch Paige, who had been accused of murdering his ex-wife, as well. Churches and civic organizations had been howling for his blood. Again, Skeen burst out laughing.Mr. Pickett rose. His face was red with fury. “It will do you no good to insult us, Mr. Skeen! We are deadly serious! You may laugh at us, and mock us, but we shall have satisfaction and have the last laugh!”Skeen rose and said, “I didn’t know you could laugh, Mr. Pickett.” He came around the desk. As he did, the Picketts quickly rose from the armchairs and retreated across the room. Skeen said, “Get out of here, you killjoys! How dare you come to my office to insult and threaten me?” He moved closer to Mr. Pickett and addressed him, emphasizing his words with a finger that tapped the man’s nose every other word. “What you and you lecherous, spiritually arid corpses want to do is ban what you can't have and what no woman would ever offer you, even for a price!”Skeen heard a single hoot of laughter from the front office.Mr. Pickett’s face grew scarlet. Mrs. Pickett sputtered some inarticulate sound and raised her umbrella to strike Skeen. Skeen easily yanked it out of her hands and broke it in half across his knee. “You could be charged with a variety of assaults, but I'll let them pass. I ought to wrap this around your neck!” He handed the broken umbrella back to the woman. The woman stood gaping at it stupidly. Something like a pained “Oh!” escaped from her open mouth. Mr. Pickett was now livid. He stepped up to Skeen and slapped him across the face. “How dare you insult my wife?!?”
“You and she are ripe for insults, sir.” Skeen drew an arm back and gave him a round-house, open-palm slap. If he’d closed his fingers, it would have been a fist. The man staggered back, lost his balance, and fell to the floor. A little blood trickled from a corner of the man’s mouth. Pickett put a finger to his lips and gasped in astonishment when he saw the blood.Skeen said, “And you could be charged, as well, Mr. Pickett, for assaulting me in my own office! Here, let me help you up!” He jerked the man to his feet, spun him around, and then yelled out to Lucy, “Lucy! Open the front door and stand aside!”But Lucy Wentz, startled by the loud commotion in her employer’s office, was standing there, undecided whether to be worried or amused. She rushed to the front office and held the door open.Skeen grabbed the belt in the back of Mr. Pickett’s pants and the back of his shirt collar and marched him out of his office and into the hallway. He shoved the man outside. “Don’t ever come back!”Mrs. Pickett followed her husband out the door, still holding the broken umbrella and looking stunned.Skeen slammed the door on them, then ran back and retrieved the man’s derby. He opened the door again and tossed the hat out. It sailed over the couple’s heads and fell in front of one of the elevators far down the hall. “Here’s your hat! What’s your hurry?
§

© 2016 Edward Cline

The Walking Dead: An Obituary

Who or what is “Negan”?

I answered that question in two columns about the zombie “epic” of The Walking Dead.  Now, with the much anticipated finale of Season Six of the series having come and gone, along with the much expected debut of Negan, purported super villain of the series, it’s time for me to pack my bags and leave the Walking Dead building.
Negan was welcomed by uncounted fans of the series. He was true to the malevolent comic book series written by Robert Kirkman.
This is absolutely the last time I discuss the character or the TV series here.
Negan is a vile, evil character who debuted in April at the end of Season Six of The Walking Dead. Negan is a brutal tyrant who lords over an enclave of plague survivors and likes to smash victims’ heads with a baseball bat sheathed in barbed wire. He has a policy of extortion that requires other, productive enclaves to give him half of what they have in exchange for his not raiding, raping, enslaving, and killing their inhabitants and trashing their communities.
Or perhaps he’ll raid and pillage a productive enclave just for the hell of it.

I will say at the beginning here that the whole “Dead” series is grotesque. I watched it for lack of anything else to watch on TV, just as I have watched Dexter and a few other series about people obsessed with the dead. The Walking Dead had some interesting conflicts. How should one conduct oneself when society has collapsed into anarchy and about ninety percent of the population has succumbed to some zombie-causing plague? What few redeeming elements in it have been diminished if not altogether abandoned. Two of the principal heroes, Carol Peletier and Daryl Dixon, played respectively by Melissa McBride and Norman Reedus, have been sidelined in favor of introducing not only Negan, but his nihilism.
I commented on an April 4th Forbes Magazine article on the series, “”The Walking Dead’ Finale Ruined Negan’s Debut With Its Worst Cliffhanger to Date":
For me, the appeal of the show is not "surviving," but that in today's deteriorating culture, it is one of the few that depicts men and women fighting for their values.  The show has been inconsistent in that respect, but the main characters for me have been Daryl and Carol (I call her my pin-up girl). We've seen Daryl grow from a loud mouthed redneck prone to anger and fighting, to a quietly determined individual who can be sensitive and caring at the right moments, but not in any maudlin, saccharine sense. Carol grew from a mousy homebody and dependent on others, to aggressively self-assertive and independent of mind and values. Love her character.
But the introduction of Negan, regardless of the folly of the cliffhanger, was so overwhelmingly nihilist that I think that will be the tone of Season Seven. I don't need that. There's not a dime's worth of difference between Negan and any ISIS beheaders or any other Islamist killer (remember how concert goers in Paris were tortured before they were killed, their bleeding bodies dragged around the concert floor). I can get real- life Negans in this real world. I don't need to see it in fiction and the main killer being the focus of the series, practically celebrated by TWD fans. I doubt I will watch much or anything of Season Seven. The show is over for me.
Nihilism won. The living zombies won. The animated “dead souls” won. The bloodthirsty Negan fans will get their pounds of flesh. The clueless directors and writers will make tons of money by officiating over the death of a series. Much like Muslims officiate over the slaughter of an animal by slitting its throat and letting it bleed to death. It’s the halal way. It’s the Scott Gimple way. Don’t outright kill it. Let it die in agony, to please the bizarre tastes of fans and others.

And now Carol is shown questioning the moral code that has allowed her to survive and flourish. Rick Grimes, leader of the group of which Carol has been a member from the beginning, said recently about Carol: “I’m proud of her….She’s a force of nature.”
She is tired of having to kill to protect her values and those who are close to her. So she is distancing herself from her values and her friends in order not to kill.
What Paul Tassi, author of the Forbes article,  and legions of The Walking Dead fans are exercised about is that the finale was a cliffhanger, and not the resolution they were hoping for, which was seeing which character would have his brains splattered by a baseball bat sheathed in barbed wire.
One must ask oneself: What are their priorities? Seeing heroes win battles over creeping demons or seeing heroes get turned into human Jell-O? As they are in the last scenes of the finale.
My anonymous correspondent wrote:
Negan and the Savior gang have pretty much given me the terminal creeps as well. That such nihilism and malevolence are being portrayed as "cool" and are somehow supposed to mirror Rick and our Alexandria group is very ominous. If the people behind the series seemed competent of mounting a individualistic rebuttal of that there might still be something to hope for, but I don't really see any signs of it. I'll keep my ear to the spoiler sites ground for the summer and see if there are any hopeful signs, but as of now it does not look good….
 They're upset about the "cliffhanger"? We're introduced to a monster like Negan who beats in the skull of one of the series' heroes, and the fans are miffed about the damn cliffhanger? The whole series is standing at the edge of destroying everything that made it worth watching, and they're running on about the cliffhanger...?
And I'm sure that, if asked, the directors and writers of TWD would jump all over each other to be the first to protest the "Islamophobia" of Negan and the Saviors being equated with ISIS….
About the heroes of The Walking Dead, my anonymous correspondent said:
They were our surrogate fighters against the Islamic zombies, and now they are being treated like the Muslim Brotherhood is writing the story lines. I wish they could come back from this, but it doesn't look good….
Well, guess who is styling himself as the head of "The New World Order". (I can just imagine this monster as a fellow traveler of resurgent Islam or the equivalent.) And yes it is very disturbing that so many fans "love" Negan because he is teeth-grindingly obnoxious. Also, Kirkman who created the comic series was on TalkingDead and it is obvious they are trying to draw a moral equivalency between the Saviors and Rick's group, ignoring the fact that the former are aggressors, extortionists, enslavers, sadists, and murderers for gain. So that approach may be too revolting to take through the next season. 

And that is all I have left to say about The Walking Dead. I cannot bear to write another obituary.