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Ayn Rand quotes 



― Ayn Rand,  Atlas Shrugged

“I like to think of fire held in a man's hand.
Fire, a dangerous force, tamed at his fingertips. I often wonder about the
hours when a man sits alone, watching the smoke of a cigarette, thinking. I
wonder what great things have come from such hours. When a man thinks, there is
a spot of fire alive in his mind--and it is proper that he should have the
burning point of a cigarette as his one expression.”

https://www.goodreads.com/author/quotes/432.Ayn_Rand







ANTI-SMOKING PATERNALISM: A CANCER ON AMERICAN
LIBERTY

by Don
Watkins | March 06, 2010

Newport
Beach is considering banning smoking in a variety of new places, potentially including
parks and outdoor dining areas. This is just the latest step in a widespread
war on smoking by federal, state, and local governments — a campaign that
includes massive taxes on cigarettes, advertising bans, and endless lawsuits
against tobacco companies. This war is infecting America with a political
disease far worse than any health risk caused by smoking; it is destroying our
freedom to make our own judgments and choices.

According
to the anti-smoking movement, restricting people’s freedom to smoke is
justified by the necessity of combating the “epidemic” of smoking-related
disease and death. Cigarettes, we are told, kill hundreds of thousands each
year, and expose countless millions to secondhand smoke. Smoking, the
anti-smoking movement says, in effect, is a plague, whose ravages can only be
combated through drastic government action.

But
smoking is not some infectious disease that must be quarantined and destroyed
by the government. It’s a voluntary activity that every individual is free to
abstain from (including by avoiding restaurants and other private
establishments that permit smoking). And, contrary to those who regard any
smoking as irrational on its face, cigarettes are a potential value that each
individual must assess for himself. Of course, smoking can be harmful — in
certain quantities, over a certain period of time, it can be habit forming and
lead to disease or death. But many understandably regard the risks as minimal
if one smokes relatively infrequently, and they see smoking as offering
definite value, such as physical pleasure.

Are
they right? Can it be a value to smoke cigarettes — and if so, in what
quantity? This is the sort of judgment that properly belongs to every
individual, based on his assessment of the evidence concerning smoking’s
benefits and risks, and taking into account his particular circumstances (age,
family history, etc.). If others believe the smoker is making a mistake, they
are free to try to persuade him of their viewpoint. But they should not be free
to dictate his decision, any more than they should be able to dictate his
decision on whether and to what extent to drink alcohol or play poker. The fact
that some individuals will smoke themselves into an early grave is no more
justification for banning smoking than that the existence of alcoholics is
grounds for prohibiting you from enjoying a drink at dinner.

Implicit
in the war on smoking, however, is the view that the government must dictate
the individual’s decisions with regard to smoking, because he is incapable of
making them rationally. To the extent the anti-smoking movement succeeds in
wielding the power of government coercion to impose on Americans its blanket
opposition to smoking, it is entrenching paternalism: the view that individuals
are incompetent to run their own lives, and thus require a nanny-state to
control every aspect of those lives.

This
state is well on its way: from trans-fat bans to bicycle helmet laws to
prohibitions on gambling, the government is increasingly abridging our freedom
on the grounds that we are not competent to make rational decisions in these
areas — just as it has long done by paternalistically dictating how we plan for
retirement (Social Security) or what medicines we may take (the FDA).

Indeed,
one of the main arguments used to bolster the anti-smoking agenda is the claim
that smokers impose “social costs” on non-smokers, such as smoking-related
medical expenses — an argument that perversely uses an injustice created by
paternalism to support its expansion. The only reason non-smokers today are
forced to foot the medical bills of smokers is that our government has
virtually taken over the field of medicine, in order to relieve us inept
Americans of the freedom to manage our own health care, and bear the costs of
our own choices.

But
contrary to paternalism, we are not congenitally irrational misfits. We are
thinking beings for whom it is both possible and necessary to rationally judge
which courses of action will serve our interests. The consequences of ignoring
this fact range from denying us legitimate pleasures to literally killing us:
from the healthy 26-year-old unable to enjoy a trans-fatty food to the
75-year-old man unable to take an unapproved, experimental drug without which
he will certainly die.

By
employing government coercion to deprive us of the freedom to judge for
ourselves what we inhale or consume, the anti-smoking movement has become an
enemy, not an ally, in the quest for health and happiness.

https://ari.aynrand.org/issues/government-and-business/regulations/anti-smoking-paternalism-a-cancer-on-american-liberty/





Ellsworth Toohey, the
chief villain in The Fountainhead,  on the imperative of sacrificing one’s vales
tor the “higher good.” T he Fountainhead Anti-Smoking
Essay.docx (pp. 301-314,
Toohey’s academic and journalism career. Chapter 9, Part 2)   throughout the novel Toohey is the
articulate essence of a power-luster whose unchanging goal is to destroy the
good for being the good.    

  “A man braver than his brothers insults them
by implication. Let us aspire to no virtue which cannot be shared.”…”We are all
brothers under the skin –and I, for one, would be willing to skin humanity to
prove it.”….”Everything that proceeds from the ego is evil; everything that
proceeds from love for others is good.”…”Service is the only badge of
nobility.”

A great many philanthropic undertakings and radical
publications, run by all sorts of people, had a single connecting link among
them, one common denominator: the name of Ellsworth M. Toohey on their
stationery. He was a sort of one-man holding company of altruism.…..

                                                                                          

(Toohey) in his
university career, was considered outstanding as a vocational adviser.

Some of his advice. He seldom let a boy pursue the career he had
chosen.

“No, I wouldn’t go in for law if I were you. You’re much too
tense and passionate about It. A hysterical devotion to one’s career does not make
for happiness or success…”  “No, I
wouldn’t advise you to continue with your music. That’s just the trouble—that
you love it…Yes, give it up, Yes, even if it hurts like hell.”…”The question of
where you could be the most useful to your fellowmen comes first….And where
opportunities for service are concerned, there’s no endeavor comparable to that
of a surgeon. Think it over.”

Of all the many titles bestowed upon him, he preferred one:
Ellsworth Toohey, the Humanitarian.

As he is portrayed in words and actions in the
novel, Ellsworth Toohey is the brain brother and soul mate of most of the
dictators in history. Many of these figures also professed to be humanitarians
– champions of the Race, of the people, of any collective idea or movement
“higher” than the individual, posing as vehicles of salvation. His purpose was
to exact universal obedience, conformity in thought, and in thoughtless,
knee-jerk agreement with the imperative of crushing the exceptional and  individual freedom and choice. Toohey sought
to reduce the tall mountains of individualism to a monotonous, unending expanse
of sand, undisturbed by the least wind of choice and independent thought.

The first prominent anti-smoker was English King James.

https://edu.lva.virginia.gov/dbva/items/show/124

KING JAMES I, A COUNTERBLASTE TO TOBACCO, 1604

Context

This document is the first
page of a treatise that was first issued by King James I (1566–1625) in 1604
and later received a new printing in 1674. He was the King of Great Britain
from 1603 until his death in 1625. The first English ruler from the House of
Stuart, he succeeded Queen Elizabeth I after her death, and was the first
British monarch to rule both England and Scotland. In this treatise King James
I gives various reasons for his strong dislike of tobacco, each of which is
meant to counteract several then common reasons for tobacco usage.



Europeans had been exposed to tobacco as early as 1560 and used it primarily as
medicine. In the following decades, tobacco use among Europeans increased, not
only for medicinal use but also for recreation. For many rulers in Europe,
including King James I, tobacco smoking represented a major social and health
problem. English leaders did not make the sale and smoking of tobacco illegal,
although many other European countries did. Instead, King James I

tried hard to reduce
tobacco usage, even instituting a 4,000 percent tax hike on tobacco in 1604.
The price increase, however, did little to reduce English demand for the
“noxious weed.”

The attitude of the king and members of England's
ruling classes changed when tobacco became a cash crop for its colonies. During
the early years of English exploration and settlement of North America, only a
small amount of tobacco was cultivated and exported. For that reason, in 1604,
when King James issued this statement, the main suppliers of tobacco to the
English were foreign shippers. Not until the 1620s did the English colonies of
Virginia and Maryland began to grow and export large quantities. Accepting the
inevitable King James decided the Crown might as well cash in on the popularity
of tobacco and the state took control of the industry. Ironically, tobacco
cultivation would lay the foundation for the success of England's American
colonies.

Of course, we
know that government anti-smoking powers have emulated King James and his
elitist allies over the centuries by not only frowning on tobacco and smoking
and discouraging them, but decided to impose taxes and controls on the
“noxious” leaf and its use world over because it could not be stamped out, and
collect revenue on its growing use and sale, as the U.S. government, state, and
local governments do now. One cannot enter a pool hall or a bar or a restaurant
anymore, without encountering “No Smoking” signs. Not exactly welcoming the
likes of Minnesota Fats,

.
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------Wikipedia
has an informative entry on the anti-smoking campaign from its early
beginnings.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-Cigarette_League_of_America

Anti-Cigarette League of
America

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

The Anti-Cigarette
League of America was an anti-smoking  advocacy group  which had substantial success in the anti-smoking movement
in the late 19th and early 20th centuries in the United States in passing
anti-smoking legislation. The campaign sought to pass  smoking bans  in public places as well as ban cigarettes themselves.

History

The group was founded in 1899
by  Lucy Page
Gaston , a
teacher, writer, lecturer and member of the  Woman's
Christian Temperance Union .
Gaston maintained that cigarette smoking was a "dangerous new habit,
particularly threatening to the young and thus likely to lead to the use of
alcohol and narcotics, so prevalent in the 1890s." Gaston's mission
attracted the attention and the patronage of like-minded progressives and
members of the WCTU. By 1901 the organization claimed a membership of 300,000,
with a paid staff overseeing chapters throughout the United States and Canada. [1]

Between 1890 and 1930, 15
states enacted laws banning the sale, manufacture, possession, or use of
cigarettes, and 22 other states considered such legislation. [2]

Even the legislature of the
tobacco-producing state of North Carolina considered cigarette prohibition laws
in 1897, 1901, 1903, 1905, 1911, 1913, and again in 1917.

Eventually,
all the states repealed their cigarette prohibition laws and associated smoking
bans in most public places. Kansas was the last to do so, in 1927

The anti-smoking
campaign in America from its beginning in the 19th Century was
compatible with the growth of Progressivism in the U.S, that is, with the rise
of political clamoring for more controls and the regulation of private choices
and behavior. One of my favorite short independent films is “Regulation.”.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P5gVhaum2s0&mc_cid=0c9a3d16c3&mc_eid=b84fd71138

In a not too-far-fetched
plot (not too far from the Democrats’ progressive designs on Americans), a
social worker from the Department of Health and Human Services appears to
attach a “happy patch” or a micro doser to a young girl in conformance with a
law that guarantees that every child has a “right” to be happy, “by law.”. The
girl offers the social worker an unanswerable argument about why she does not
want a “happy patch.” Unable to counter the girl’s argument, the social worker
resorts deception and reports the girl’s non-compliance.

There are dozens of articles on the anti-smoking and
anti-secondhand smoke issues.

We can’t overlook the Nazi contribution to the campaign.
Hitler was a notorious non- and anti-smoker. Had he won WWI he likely would
have banned smoking  not only in Germany
but in all his conquered countries.

https://www.bmj.com/content/313/7070/1450

Nuremberg

The anti-tobacco campaign of the Nazis: a little known aspect of
public health in Germany, 1933–45

BMJ 1996; 313 doi:  https://doi.org/10.1136/bmj.313.7070.1450  (Published
07 December 1996)Cite this as: BMJ 1996;313:1450

·        
Article

·        
Related content

·        
Metrics

·        
Responses

1.      
Robert
N Proctor,
professor of the history

Author affiliations

·        
Accepted 6 November 1996

Historians and epidemiologists have only recently begun to
explore the Nazi anti-tobacco movement. Germany had the world's strongest
antismoking movement in the 1930s and early 1940s, encompassing bans on smoking
in public spaces, bans on advertising, restrictions on tobacco rations for
women, and the world's most refined tobacco epidemiology, linking tobacco use
with the already evident epidemic of lung cancer. The anti-tobacco campaign
must be understood against the backdrop of the Nazi quest for racial and bodily
purity, which also motivated many other public health efforts of the era.

Medical historians in recent
years have done a great deal to enlarge our understanding of medicine and
public health in Nazi Germany. We know that about half of all doctors joined
the Nazi party and that doctors played a major part in designing and
administering the Nazi programmes of forcible sterilisation, “euthanasia,” and
the industrial scale murder of Jews and gypsies.1 2 Much of our present day
concern for the abuse of humans used in experiments stems from the extreme
brutality many German doctors showed towards concentration camp prisoners
exploited to advance the cause of German military medicine.

Tobacco in the Reich

One topic that has only recently begun
to attract attention is the Nazi anti-tobacco movement.4 5 6 Germany had the world's
strongest antismoking movement in the 1930s and early 1940s, supported by Nazi
medical and military leaders worried that tobacco might prove a hazard to the
race.1 4 Many Nazi leaders were
vocal opponents of smoking. Anti-tobacco activists pointed out that whereas
Churchill, Stalin, and Roosevelt were all fond of tobacco, the three major
fascist leaders of Europe—Hitler, Mussolini, and Franco—were all non-smokers.7 Hitler was the most
adamant, characterizing tobacco as “the wrath of the Red Man against the White
Man for having been given hard liquor.” 

Hitler's so-called anti-cigarette actions were quite limited, e.g., he
merely "banned smoking by uniformed police, SA and SS men in public, even
when off-duty." And he merely approved "severe restrictions [not a
ban] on the advertising of cigarettes," Hobhouse, supra, p 232. Germany continues even
through the year 2006 to oppose banning such ads. See Germany's lawsuit to stop
the European Union from establishing such as ban: Germany v Parliament
and Council (Case C-380/03, 12 December 2006). Germany lost, the
court upheld  banning most forms of cigarette advertising .

https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2014/07/the-nazis-forgotten-anti-smoking-campaign/373766/

The Nazis' Forgotten
Anti-Smoking Campaign

The Third Reich viewed
tobacco as a threat to the health of the "chosen folk."

TRACY BROWN
HAMILTON

JULY 9, 2014

DENIS DEFREYNE/FLICKR

“Nazi Germany was governed by a
health-conscious political elite bent on European conquest and genocidal
extermination,” writes Stanford researcher Robert Proctor in his book,  The Nazi
War on Cancer , “and
tobacco at the time was viewed as one among many ‘threats’ to the health of the
chosen folk.”

In 1939, German scientist Franz
Müller presented the first epidemiological study linking tobacco use and
cancer. In 1943, a paper prepared by German scientists Eberhard Schairer and
Erich Schöniger at Jena University confirmed this study, and convincingly established
for the first time that cigarette smoking is a direct cause of lung cancer.

Research by
German doctors also brought to light the harmful effects of secondhand smoke
for the first time, and coined the term “passive smoking.” But Proctor says the
findings cannot be separated from the context in which they were realized.

According to Proctor, Schairer and
Schöniger’s paper needs to be seen as “a political document, a product of the
Nazi ideological focus on tobacco as a corrupting force whose elimination would
serve the cause of ‘racial hygiene.’” The Nazi agenda was centered on the idea
of establishing and maintaining a German Aryan master race that was free of
illness or impurity, and tobacco was just one of the many influences that could
weaken the so-called Übermensch.

“Nazism was a movement of muscular,
health-conscious young men worried about things like the influence of Jews in
German culture and the evils of communism,” Proctor says, “but also about the
injurious effects of white bread, asbestos, and artificial food dyes.”

According to an  article in Toxicological Sciences , before 1900, lung cancer was extremely rare
worldwide, but incidents of the disease increased dramatically by the 1930’s.
This coincided with the growing popularity of cigarette smoking beginning
toward the end of the 20th century, but a link was never identified between
lung cancer and smoking until Nazi-era scientists made the connection.

Research into the harmful effects
of tobacco was funded by the Institute for the Struggle Against Tobacco, which
was established in 1941and funded by Hitler’s Reich Chancellery. The Institute
was led by Karl Astel, a doctor, high-ranking SS officer and fervent
anti-Semite, according to Proctor.

Among other things, Astel’s
institute funded and distributed pamphlets and articles about the harmful
effects of tobacco, including a collection of Goethe’s views on the subject.
The institute conducted research into the potential damage or mutations that
nicotine could cause to the genetic material of the master race

Nazi
Germany’s well-known obsession with creating a master Aryan race led to many
atrocities. But from these same sinister motives came research that may have
had health benefits for the German people during World War II—studies on the
dangers of smoking that led to the most advanced anti-tobacco campaign of its
time. Unfortunately, the campaign was only concerned with protecting the health
of Aryan Germans.

The wholesale ban of smoking on
the Veterans
Administration Medical campus in
October 2020 is an outgrowth (with a $50 fine) that leaves one wondering about
the actual motive for establishing the ban. Is it just an experiment in
sociological engineering or manipulation? A flexing of Progressive muscle? Is
it really a concern about the vets, the children, the elderly, or the planet?
Or is it an exercise in conformity with the consensus that smoking and
secondhand (or passive) smoking comprisa violation of non-smokers’ rights?
Universal bans, such as Tim Kane’s last act as governor of Virginia,
represented the statewide seizure of private property and the obliteration of
freedom of choice. The result was the obedience of bars and restaurants and
businesses; of their compliance, and of the compliance of their customers or
employees.

If enough people who claim to be
harmed by secondhand smoke can agitate for a smoking ban, there are always
politicians ready to endorse a law in their favor; regardless of the ruination
of businesses and private lives. The “harm” is too often feigned or faked;
non-smokers who put on a show to demonstrate their opposition to smoking and
secondhand smoke do so to demonstrate their personal dislike of tobacco and
their agreement with the anti-smokers.

Their dislike of it should not be
the legislative basis of law. But in an era of Progressivism their whims become
the rule.  Everyone must obey and comply.
Smokers who exercise their rights are regarded as pariahs to be shunned and
even punished with social snubbing or an alienation from normal contact with
others.

The harm of smoking and “passive’
smoking may be real, but it cannot be applied to all individuals; it depends on
a person’s physical make-up. I’ve read many stories of individuals who live
past 100 years but who smoked a pack of cigarettes a day for years. There are
numerous studies of the harm (government and private), dating from

the 19th century on
through the Nazi period to the present. I am tempted to doubt the purpose of
these studies. The harm of smoking and “passive’ smoking may be real, but it
cannot be applied to all individuals; it depends on a person’s physical
make-up. I’ve read many stories of individuals who live past 100 years but who
smoked a pack of cigarettes a day for years. There are numerous studies of the
harm (government and private), dating from the 19th century on
through the Nazi period to the present. I am tempted to doubt the purpose of
most of these studies; their purpose seems to be to prove a priori that
smoking is bad and must be suppressed.

This is not to say that Secretary
Wilkie of the VA is a fascist. But it is to suggest that his smoking ban and
policy is in line with the worst consequences of political and social
collectivism.

The wholesale ban of smoking on
the Veterans
Administration Medical campus in
October 2020 is an outgrowth (with a $50 fine) that leaves one wondering about
the actual motive for establishing the ban. Is it just an experiment in
sociological engineering or manipulation? A flexing of Progressive muscle? Is
it really a concern about the vets, the children, the elderly, or the planet?
Or is it an exercise in conformity with the consensus that smoking and
secondhand (or passive) smoking is a violation of non-smokers’ rights?
Universal bans, such as Tim Kane’s last act as governor of Virginia,
represented the statewide seizure of private property and the obliteration of
freedom of choice. The result was the obedience of bars and restaurants and
businesses; of their compliance, and of the compliance of their customers or
employees.

If enough people who claim to be
harmed by secondhand smoke can agitate for a smoking ban, there are always
politicians ready to endorse a law in their favor; regardless of the ruination
of businesses and private lives. The “harm” is too often feigned or faked;
non-smokers who put on a show to demonstrate their opposition to smoking and
secondhand smoke do so to demonstrate their personal dislike of tobacco and
their agreement with the anti-smokers.

Their dislike of it should not be
the legislative basis of law. But in an era of Progressivism their whims become
the rule.  Everyone must obey and comply.
Smokers who exercise their rights are regarded as pariahs to be shunned and
even punished with social snubbing or an alienation from normal contact with
others.

The harm of smoking and “passive’
smoking may be real, but it cannot be applied to all individuals; it depends on
a person’s physical make-up. I’ve read many stories of individuals who live
past 100 years but who smoked a pack of cigarettes a day for years. There are
numerous studies of the harm (government and private), dating from  




the 19th century on
through the Nazi period to the present. I am tempted to doubt the purpose of
these studies. The harm of smoking and “passive’ smoking may be real, but it
cannot be applied to all individuals; it depends on a person’s physical
make-up. I’ve read many stories of individuals who live past 100 years but who
smoked a pack of cigarettes a day for years. There are numerous studies 

of the
harm (government and private), dating from the 19th century on
through the Nazi period to the present. I am tempted to doubt the purpose of
most of these studies; their purpose seems to be to prove a priori that
smoking is bad and must be suppressed.

This is not to say that Secretary
Wilkie of the VA is a fascist. But it is to suggest that his smoking ban and
policy is in line with the worst consequences of political and social
collectivism.

Edward Cline (February 2020)

NO SMOKINGAyn Rand > Quotes...

NO SMOKING




Ayn Rand  > Quotes





Ayn Rand quotes 



― Ayn Rand,  Atlas Shrugged




“I like to think of fire held in a man's hand.
Fire, a dangerous force, tamed at his fingertips. I often wonder about the
hours when a man sits alone, watching the smoke of a cigarette, thinking. I
wonder what great things have come from such hours. When a man thinks, there is
a spot of fire alive in his mind--and it is proper that he should have the
burning point of a cigarette as his one expression.”




https://www.goodreads.com/author/quotes/432.Ayn_Rand







ANTI-SMOKING PATERNALISM: A CANCER ON AMERICAN
LIBERTY

by Don
Watkins | March 06, 2010

Newport
Beach is considering banning smoking in a variety of new places, potentially including
parks and outdoor dining areas. This is just the latest step in a widespread
war on smoking by federal, state, and local governments — a campaign that
includes massive taxes on cigarettes, advertising bans, and endless lawsuits
against tobacco companies. This war is infecting America with a political
disease far worse than any health risk caused by smoking; it is destroying our
freedom to make our own judgments and choices.

According
to the anti-smoking movement, restricting people’s freedom to smoke is
justified by the necessity of combating the “epidemic” of smoking-related
disease and death. Cigarettes, we are told, kill hundreds of thousands each
year, and expose countless millions to secondhand smoke. Smoking, the
anti-smoking movement says, in effect, is a plague, whose ravages can only be
combated through drastic government action.

But
smoking is not some infectious disease that must be quarantined and destroyed
by the government. It’s a voluntary activity that every individual is free to
abstain from (including by avoiding restaurants and other private
establishments that permit smoking). And, contrary to those who regard any
smoking as irrational on its face, cigarettes are a potential value that each
individual must assess for himself. Of course, smoking can be harmful — in
certain quantities, over a certain period of time, it can be habit forming and
lead to disease or death. But many understandably regard the risks as minimal
if one smokes relatively infrequently, and they see smoking as offering
definite value, such as physical pleasure.

Are
they right? Can it be a value to smoke cigarettes — and if so, in what
quantity? This is the sort of judgment that properly belongs to every
individual, based on his assessment of the evidence concerning smoking’s
benefits and risks, and taking into account his particular circumstances (age,
family history, etc.). If others believe the smoker is making a mistake, they
are free to try to persuade him of their viewpoint. But they should not be free
to dictate his decision, any more than they should be able to dictate his
decision on whether and to what extent to drink alcohol or play poker. The fact
that some individuals will smoke themselves into an early grave is no more
justification for banning smoking than that the existence of alcoholics is
grounds for prohibiting you from enjoying a drink at dinner.

Implicit
in the war on smoking, however, is the view that the government must dictate
the individual’s decisions with regard to smoking, because he is incapable of
making them rationally. To the extent the anti-smoking movement succeeds in
wielding the power of government coercion to impose on Americans its blanket
opposition to smoking, it is entrenching paternalism: the view that individuals
are incompetent to run their own lives, and thus require a nanny-state to
control every aspect of those lives.

This
state is well on its way: from trans-fat bans to bicycle helmet laws to
prohibitions on gambling, the government is increasingly abridging our freedom
on the grounds that we are not competent to make rational decisions in these
areas — just as it has long done by paternalistically dictating how we plan for
retirement (Social Security) or what medicines we may take (the FDA).

Indeed,
one of the main arguments used to bolster the anti-smoking agenda is the claim
that smokers impose “social costs” on non-smokers, such as smoking-related
medical expenses — an argument that perversely uses an injustice created by
paternalism to support its expansion. The only reason non-smokers today are
forced to foot the medical bills of smokers is that our government has
virtually taken over the field of medicine, in order to relieve us inept
Americans of the freedom to manage our own health care, and bear the costs of
our own choices.

But
contrary to paternalism, we are not congenitally irrational misfits. We are
thinking beings for whom it is both possible and necessary to rationally judge
which courses of action will serve our interests. The consequences of ignoring
this fact range from denying us legitimate pleasures to literally killing us:
from the healthy 26-year-old unable to enjoy a trans-fatty food to the
75-year-old man unable to take an unapproved, experimental drug without which
he will certainly die.

By
employing government coercion to deprive us of the freedom to judge for
ourselves what we inhale or consume, the anti-smoking movement has become an
enemy, not an ally, in the quest for health and happiness.











https://ari.aynrand.org/issues/government-and-business/regulations/anti-smoking-paternalism-a-cancer-on-american-liberty/





Ellsworth Toohey, the
chief villain in The Fountainhead,  on the imperative of sacrificing one’s vales
tor the “higher good.” T he Fountainhead Anti-Smoking
Essay.docx (pp. 301-314,
Toohey’s academic and journalism career. Chapter 9, Part 2)   throughout the novel Toohey is the
articulate essence of a power-luster whose unchanging goal is to destroy the
good for being the good.    

  “A man braver than his brothers insults them
by implication. Let us aspire to no virtue which cannot be shared.”…”We are all
brothers under the skin –and I, for one, would be willing to skin humanity to
prove it.”….”Everything that proceeds from the ego is evil; everything that
proceeds from love for others is good.”…”Service is the only badge of
nobility.”

A great many philanthropic undertakings and radical
publications, run by all sorts of people, had a single connecting link among
them, one common denominator: the name of Ellsworth M. Toohey on their
stationery. He was a sort of one-man holding company of altruism.…..

                                                                                          

(Toohey) in his
university career, was considered outstanding as a vocational adviser.

Some of his advice. He seldom let a boy pursue the career he had
chosen.

“No, I wouldn’t go in for law if I were you. You’re much too
tense and passionate about It. A hysterical devotion to one’s career does not make
for happiness or success…”  “No, I
wouldn’t advise you to continue with your music. That’s just the trouble—that
you love it…Yes, give it up, Yes, even if it hurts like hell.”…”The question of
where you could be the most useful to your fellowmen comes first….And where
opportunities for service are concerned, there’s no endeavor comparable to that
of a surgeon. Think it over.”

Of all the many titles bestowed upon him, he preferred one:
Ellsworth Toohey, the Humanitarian.


As he is portrayed in words and actions in the
novel, Ellsworth Toohey is the brain brother and soul mate of most of the
dictators in history. Many of these figures also professed to be humanitarians
– champions of the Race, of the people, of any collective idea or movement
“higher” than the individual, posing as vehicles of salvation. His purpose was
to exact universal obedience, conformity in thought, and in thoughtless,
knee-jerk agreement with the imperative of crushing the exceptional and  individual freedom and choice. Toohey sought
to reduce the tall mountains of individualism to a monotonous, unending expanse
of sand, undisturbed by the least wind of choice and independent thought.


The first prominent anti-smoker was English King James.

https://edu.lva.virginia.gov/dbva/items/show/124

KING JAMES I, A COUNTERBLASTE TO TOBACCO, 1604

Context

This document is the first
page of a treatise that was first issued by King James I (1566–1625) in 1604
and later received a new printing in 1674. He was the King of Great Britain
from 1603 until his death in 1625. The first English ruler from the House of
Stuart, he succeeded Queen Elizabeth I after her death, and was the first
British monarch to rule both England and Scotland. In this treatise King James
I gives various reasons for his strong dislike of tobacco, each of which is
meant to counteract several then common reasons for tobacco usage.



Europeans had been exposed to tobacco as early as 1560 and used it primarily as
medicine. In the following decades, tobacco use among Europeans increased, not
only for medicinal use but also for recreation. For many rulers in Europe,
including King James I, tobacco smoking represented a major social and health
problem. English leaders did not make the sale and smoking of tobacco illegal,
although many other European countries did. Instead, King James I

tried hard to reduce
tobacco usage, even instituting a 4,000 percent tax hike on tobacco in 1604.
The price increase, however, did little to reduce English demand for the
“noxious weed.”


The attitude of the king and members of England's
ruling classes changed when tobacco became a cash crop for its colonies. During
the early years of English exploration and settlement of North America, only a
small amount of tobacco was cultivated and exported. For that reason, in 1604,
when King James issued this statement, the main suppliers of tobacco to the
English were foreign shippers. Not until the 1620s did the English colonies of
Virginia and Maryland began to grow and export large quantities. Accepting the
inevitable King James decided the Crown might as well cash in on the popularity
of tobacco and the state took control of the industry. Ironically, tobacco
cultivation would lay the foundation for the success of England's American
colonies.


Of course, we
know that government anti-smoking powers have emulated King James and his
elitist allies over the centuries by not only frowning on tobacco and smoking
and discouraging them, but decided to impose taxes and controls on the
“noxious” leaf and its use world over because it could not be stamped out, and
collect revenue on its growing use and sale, as the U.S. government, state, and
local governments do now. One cannot enter a pool hall or a bar or a restaurant
anymore, without encountering “No Smoking” signs. Not exactly welcoming the
likes of Minnesota Fats,

.
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------Wikipedia
has an informative entry on the anti-smoking campaign from its early
beginnings.




https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-Cigarette_League_of_America


Anti-Cigarette League of
America


From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
















The Anti-Cigarette
League of America was an anti-smoking  advocacy group  which had substantial success in the anti-smoking movement
in the late 19th and early 20th centuries in the United States in passing
anti-smoking legislation. The campaign sought to pass  smoking bans  in public places as well as ban cigarettes themselves.


History


The group was founded in 1899
by  Lucy Page
Gaston , a
teacher, writer, lecturer and member of the  Woman's
Christian Temperance Union .
Gaston maintained that cigarette smoking was a "dangerous new habit,
particularly threatening to the young and thus likely to lead to the use of
alcohol and narcotics, so prevalent in the 1890s." Gaston's mission
attracted the attention and the patronage of like-minded progressives and
members of the WCTU. By 1901 the organization claimed a membership of 300,000,
with a paid staff overseeing chapters throughout the United States and Canada. [1]

Between 1890 and 1930, 15
states enacted laws banning the sale, manufacture, possession, or use of
cigarettes, and 22 other states considered such legislation. [2]

Even the legislature of the
tobacco-producing state of North Carolina considered cigarette prohibition laws
in 1897, 1901, 1903, 1905, 1911, 1913, and again in 1917.





Eventually,
all the states repealed their cigarette prohibition laws and associated smoking
bans in most public places. Kansas was the last to do so, in 1927


The anti-smoking
campaign in America from its beginning in the 19th Century was
compatible with the growth of Progressivism in the U.S, that is, with the rise
of political clamoring for more controls and the regulation of private choices
and behavior. One of my favorite short independent films is “Regulation.”.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P5gVhaum2s0&mc_cid=0c9a3d16c3&mc_eid=b84fd71138


In a not too-far-fetched
plot (not too far from the Democrats’ progressive designs on Americans), a
social worker from the Department of Health and Human Services appears to
attach a “happy patch” or a micro doser to a young girl in conformance with a
law that guarantees that every child has a “right” to be happy, “by law.”. The
girl offers the social worker an unanswerable argument about why she does not
want a “happy patch.” Unable to counter the girl’s argument, the social worker
resorts deception and reports the girl’s non-compliance.


There are dozens of articles on the anti-smoking and
anti-secondhand smoke issues.

We can’t overlook the Nazi contribution to the campaign.
Hitler was a notorious non- and anti-smoker. Had he won WWI he likely would
have banned smoking  not only in Germany
but in all his conquered countries.




https://www.bmj.com/content/313/7070/1450

Nuremberg

The anti-tobacco campaign of the Nazis: a little known aspect of
public health in Germany, 1933–45

BMJ 1996; 313 doi:  https://doi.org/10.1136/bmj.313.7070.1450  (Published
07 December 1996)Cite this as: BMJ 1996;313:1450

·        
Article

·        
Related content

·        
Metrics

·        
Responses

1.      
Robert
N Proctor,
professor of the history

Author affiliations

·        
Accepted 6 November 1996

Historians and epidemiologists have only recently begun to
explore the Nazi anti-tobacco movement. Germany had the world's strongest
antismoking movement in the 1930s and early 1940s, encompassing bans on smoking
in public spaces, bans on advertising, restrictions on tobacco rations for
women, and the world's most refined tobacco epidemiology, linking tobacco use
with the already evident epidemic of lung cancer. The anti-tobacco campaign
must be understood against the backdrop of the Nazi quest for racial and bodily
purity, which also motivated many other public health efforts of the era.

Medical historians in recent
years have done a great deal to enlarge our understanding of medicine and
public health in Nazi Germany. We know that about half of all doctors joined
the Nazi party and that doctors played a major part in designing and
administering the Nazi programmes of forcible sterilisation, “euthanasia,” and
the industrial scale murder of Jews and gypsies.1 2 Much of our present day
concern for the abuse of humans used in experiments stems from the extreme
brutality many German doctors showed towards concentration camp prisoners
exploited to advance the cause of German military medicine.




Tobacco in the Reich




One topic that has only recently begun
to attract attention is the Nazi anti-tobacco movement.4 5 6 Germany had the world's
strongest antismoking movement in the 1930s and early 1940s, supported by Nazi
medical and military leaders worried that tobacco might prove a hazard to the
race.1 4 Many Nazi leaders were
vocal opponents of smoking. Anti-tobacco activists pointed out that whereas
Churchill, Stalin, and Roosevelt were all fond of tobacco, the three major
fascist leaders of Europe—Hitler, Mussolini, and Franco—were all non-smokers.7 Hitler was the most
adamant, characterizing tobacco as “the wrath of the Red Man against the White
Man for having been given hard liquor.” 




Hitler's so-called anti-cigarette actions were quite limited, e.g., he
merely "banned smoking by uniformed police, SA and SS men in public, even
when off-duty." And he merely approved "severe restrictions [not a
ban] on the advertising of cigarettes," Hobhouse, supra, p 232. Germany continues even
through the year 2006 to oppose banning such ads. See Germany's lawsuit to stop
the European Union from establishing such as ban: Germany v Parliament
and Council (Case C-380/03, 12 December 2006). Germany lost, the
court upheld  banning most forms of cigarette advertising .




https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2014/07/the-nazis-forgotten-anti-smoking-campaign/373766/

The Nazis' Forgotten
Anti-Smoking Campaign

The Third Reich viewed
tobacco as a threat to the health of the "chosen folk."

TRACY BROWN
HAMILTON

JULY 9, 2014




DENIS DEFREYNE/FLICKR

“Nazi Germany was governed by a
health-conscious political elite bent on European conquest and genocidal
extermination,” writes Stanford researcher Robert Proctor in his book,  The Nazi
War on Cancer , “and
tobacco at the time was viewed as one among many ‘threats’ to the health of the
chosen folk.”

In 1939, German scientist Franz
Müller presented the first epidemiological study linking tobacco use and
cancer. In 1943, a paper prepared by German scientists Eberhard Schairer and
Erich Schöniger at Jena University confirmed this study, and convincingly established
for the first time that cigarette smoking is a direct cause of lung cancer.

Research by
German doctors also brought to light the harmful effects of secondhand smoke
for the first time, and coined the term “passive smoking.” But Proctor says the
findings cannot be separated from the context in which they were realized.




According to Proctor, Schairer and
Schöniger’s paper needs to be seen as “a political document, a product of the
Nazi ideological focus on tobacco as a corrupting force whose elimination would
serve the cause of ‘racial hygiene.’” The Nazi agenda was centered on the idea
of establishing and maintaining a German Aryan master race that was free of
illness or impurity, and tobacco was just one of the many influences that could
weaken the so-called Übermensch.

“Nazism was a movement of muscular,
health-conscious young men worried about things like the influence of Jews in
German culture and the evils of communism,” Proctor says, “but also about the
injurious effects of white bread, asbestos, and artificial food dyes.”

According to an  article in Toxicological Sciences , before 1900, lung cancer was extremely rare
worldwide, but incidents of the disease increased dramatically by the 1930’s.
This coincided with the growing popularity of cigarette smoking beginning
toward the end of the 20th century, but a link was never identified between
lung cancer and smoking until Nazi-era scientists made the connection.

Research into the harmful effects
of tobacco was funded by the Institute for the Struggle Against Tobacco, which
was established in 1941and funded by Hitler’s Reich Chancellery. The Institute
was led by Karl Astel, a doctor, high-ranking SS officer and fervent
anti-Semite, according to Proctor.

Among other things, Astel’s
institute funded and distributed pamphlets and articles about the harmful
effects of tobacco, including a collection of Goethe’s views on the subject.
The institute conducted research into the potential damage or mutations that
nicotine could cause to the genetic material of the master race


Nazi
Germany’s well-known obsession with creating a master Aryan race led to many
atrocities. But from these same sinister motives came research that may have
had health benefits for the German people during World War II—studies on the
dangers of smoking that led to the most advanced anti-tobacco campaign of its
time. Unfortunately, the campaign was only concerned with protecting the health
of Aryan Germans.





The wholesale ban of smoking on
the Veterans
Administration Medical campus in
October 2020 is an outgrowth (with a $50 fine) that leaves one wondering about
the actual motive for establishing the ban. Is it just an experiment in
sociological engineering or manipulation? A flexing of Progressive muscle? Is
it really a concern about the vets, the children, the elderly, or the planet?
Or is it an exercise in conformity with the consensus that smoking and
secondhand (or passive) smoking comprisa violation of non-smokers’ rights?
Universal bans, such as Tim Kane’s last act as governor of Virginia,
represented the statewide seizure of private property and the obliteration of
freedom of choice. The result was the obedience of bars and restaurants and
businesses; of their compliance, and of the compliance of their customers or
employees.




If enough people who claim to be
harmed by secondhand smoke can agitate for a smoking ban, there are always
politicians ready to endorse a law in their favor; regardless of the ruination
of businesses and private lives. The “harm” is too often feigned or faked;
non-smokers who put on a show to demonstrate their opposition to smoking and
secondhand smoke do so to demonstrate their personal dislike of tobacco and
their agreement with the anti-smokers.




Their dislike of it should not be
the legislative basis of law. But in an era of Progressivism their whims become
the rule.  Everyone must obey and comply.
Smokers who exercise their rights are regarded as pariahs to be shunned and
even punished with social snubbing or an alienation from normal contact with
others.

The harm of smoking and “passive’
smoking may be real, but it cannot be applied to all individuals; it depends on
a person’s physical make-up. I’ve read many stories of individuals who live
past 100 years but who smoked a pack of cigarettes a day for years. There are
numerous studies of the harm (government and private), dating from




the 19th century on
through the Nazi period to the present. I am tempted to doubt the purpose of
these studies. The harm of smoking and “passive’ smoking may be real, but it
cannot be applied to all individuals; it depends on a person’s physical
make-up. I’ve read many stories of individuals who live past 100 years but who
smoked a pack of cigarettes a day for years. There are numerous studies of the
harm (government and private), dating from the 19th century on
through the Nazi period to the present. I am tempted to doubt the purpose of
most of these studies; their purpose seems to be to prove a priori that
smoking is bad and must be suppressed.

This is not to say that Secretary
Wilkie of the VA is a fascist. But it is to suggest that his smoking ban and
policy is in line with the worst consequences of political and social
collectivism.




The wholesale ban of smoking on
the Veterans
Administration Medical campus in
October 2020 is an outgrowth (with a $50 fine) that leaves one wondering about
the actual motive for establishing the ban. Is it just an experiment in
sociological engineering or manipulation? A flexing of Progressive muscle? Is
it really a concern about the vets, the children, the elderly, or the planet?
Or is it an exercise in conformity with the consensus that smoking and
secondhand (or passive) smoking is a violation of non-smokers’ rights?
Universal bans, such as Tim Kane’s last act as governor of Virginia,
represented the statewide seizure of private property and the obliteration of
freedom of choice. The result was the obedience of bars and restaurants and
businesses; of their compliance, and of the compliance of their customers or
employees.




If enough people who claim to be
harmed by secondhand smoke can agitate for a smoking ban, there are always
politicians ready to endorse a law in their favor; regardless of the ruination
of businesses and private lives. The “harm” is too often feigned or faked;
non-smokers who put on a show to demonstrate their opposition to smoking and
secondhand smoke do so to demonstrate their personal dislike of tobacco and
their agreement with the anti-smokers.




Their dislike of it should not be
the legislative basis of law. But in an era of Progressivism their whims become
the rule.  Everyone must obey and comply.
Smokers who exercise their rights are regarded as pariahs to be shunned and
even punished with social snubbing or an alienation from normal contact with
others.

The harm of smoking and “passive’
smoking may be real, but it cannot be applied to all individuals; it depends on
a person’s physical make-up. I’ve read many stories of individuals who live
past 100 years but who smoked a pack of cigarettes a day for years. There are
numerous studies of the harm (government and private), dating from  




the 19th century on
through the Nazi period to the present. I am tempted to doubt the purpose of
these studies. The harm of smoking and “passive’ smoking may be real, but it
cannot be applied to all individuals; it depends on a person’s physical
make-up. I’ve read many stories of individuals who live past 100 years but who
smoked a pack of cigarettes a day for years. There are numerous studies 

of the
harm (government and private), dating from the 19th century on
through the Nazi period to the present. I am tempted to doubt the purpose of
most of these studies; their purpose seems to be to prove a priori that
smoking is bad and must be suppressed.




This is not to say that Secretary
Wilkie of the VA is a fascist. But it is to suggest that his smoking ban and
policy is in line with the worst consequences of political and social
collectivism.




Edward Cline (February 2020)

Philosophy in Motion

Thursday, October 21, 2010





"2081": Philosophy in Motion
I wonder how many readers remember John Rawls’s A Theory of Justice , that scholarly paean to egalitarianism and institutionalized envy, from 1971. How would one dramatize, in visual and auditory concretes, its high-blown, insidious principles?



I recently watched a little gem of a cinematic parable about a Rawlsian dystopia, 2081 , which depicts a society in which “everyone is equal.” The film, made under the aegis of the Moving Picture Institute, produced by Thor Halvorssen and written and directed by Chandler Tuttle (based on a Kurt Vonnegut story, “Harrison Bergeron”) is exactly that, a parable, not meant to be taken literally, because the purpose of a parable is impart profound and lasting lessons.



In 2081 , the exceptionally skilled, beautiful, strong, and intellectually endowed are “made equal” with their averagely endowed fellow men by means of a variety of restraining agents – weights, masks, and taser-like devices that interrupt thought and impede movement. Anyone tested by the state and deemed to be above average in any respect is required by law to be fitted with one or more of these restraints or “equalizers.” The penalty for removing them is imprisonment.



George Bergeron’s son Harrison was arrested and imprisoned for six years for refusing to wear the agents and for “blatantly removing them in public.” He escapes from prison and appears in a concert hall that is staging Tchaikovsky’s “Sleeping Beauty” ballet live in a national broadcast. The ballerinas are also arrested by weights that make their movements clumsy. Harrison announces to the audience that he has placed a bomb beneath the hall. He declares, among other things, that he is “an exception to the accepted,” and that he “was not created equal,” and proceeds to shed all the devices that burden his body, including a yoke fitted over his shoulders and neck.



That is his statement of freedom. He may be mad or perfectly lucid. He does not wish to continue living in a world of “fairness” and “original positions.” That is for the viewer to judge. He then invites a volunteer to do the same. One of the ballerinas rises and discards her weights, as well. (Forgive the plot-spoilers here, they are necessary to making a point.)



In the meantime, SWAT teams of the United States Handicapper General surround the hall, disable the bomb (it is unclear whether it was a real bomb, I don’t think so, but that is mere conjecture), and prepare to capture or kill the “public threat.” The authorities order the broadcast stopped, but Harrison Bergeron has a device that overrides the kill signal and rebroadcasts the program (shades of John Galt’s broadcast in Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged). As Harrison Bergeron and the ballerina perform with total freedom of movement to a doleful composition and for a dumbstruck audience (many members of which are also wearing restraints), the SWAT teams move into the hall itself.



An expressionless, silent woman who is in charge of the operation takes a gun and kills Harrison Bergeson and the ballerina. The action is televised without her knowledge and one of the last things one sees is her slightly startled face staring into the camera. That is what Harrison wanted the nation to see – the vapid face of evil. End of broadcast. The extraordinary has been eliminated. Please stand by.



George (also loaded down with restraints), has watched all this in the comfort of his living room, while his dimly conforming and nattering wife, Hazel, played convincingly by Julie Hagerty (who wears none, because there is nothing extraordinary or exceptional about her), is oblivious to the events on the television screen. She is washing dishes with her back turned to the screen and misses the whole broadcast and a last glimpse of her son, the running water serving as her own sound-obliterating handicapping device.



When George begins to think of the abduction of his son from their home years before, and begins to respond to the broadcast and the heroism of his son, his memory is disrupted by his ear piece. HIs wife asks him why he is looking so upset; he can only reply that he saw something “sad.” He cannot remember what. He shuffles out of the living room to oblivion, because he will not remove the things that hold him down.



The film is only twenty-five minutes long, but it packs a punch as terrible as Michael Radford’s gritty, nearly two-hour long Nineteen Eighty-Four. The production values are as good as any $20 million budget blockbuster’s. As a parable on the price of silence and the fate of those who prefer security and passivity over independence and freedom, it is one of the best films I have ever seen.



2081 is A Theory of Justice , illustrated. It is philosophy in motion.

Islamic Fig Leaves and Duct Tape

Modern art connoisseurs





Giulio Meotti, cultural editor for Il Foglio, and an Italian journalist and author, chronicles the steady, cringing submission of Western culture to Islamic demands and imperatives in an article on Gatestone, ‘Covering Up Our Culture to 'Avoid Giving Offense' on June 16th.

Meotti wrote:




….In the name of fighting "Islamophobia", the British establishment now appears to be submitting to creeping sharia: and purging and censoring speech on its own.




Recently, some major conservative intellectuals have been sacked in the UK.

One is the peerless philosopher Roger Scruton, who was fired from a governmental committee for saying that the word "Islamophobia" has been invented by the Muslim Brotherhood "to stop discussion of a major issue".

Then it was the turn of the great Canadian psychologist Jordan Peterson, whose visiting fellowship at Cambridge University was rescinded for posing with a man wearing an "I'm a proud Islamophobe" T-shirt. Professor Peterson later said that the word "Islamophobia" has been "partly constructed by people engaging in Islamic extremism, to ensure that Islam isn't criticized as a structure".




The instances of Scruton and Peterson only confirm the real meaning of "Islamophobia"; a word invented to silence any criticism of Islam by anyone, or as Salman Rushdie commented, a word "created to help the blind remain blind". Where is the long-overdue push-back?




… We all have been covering up our supposedly "blasphemous" culture with burqas to avoid offending people who do not seem to mind offending us.




I would have retitled Meotti’s column, “Erasing Our Culture to ‘Avoid Giving Offense.’” Not all “offensive” works of art (or critiques) are ‘covered up’ with sheets. They are simply removed from sight or display.




And, to contradict Jordan Peterson, there is no such thing as “Islamic Extremism.” There is just Islam, which emulates the practice of the likes of Google, FaceBook, and other tech giants to remove “offensive” posts or sites from public view (and without much of a definition of what they consider “offensive." Islam, root, trunk, and branch, is a totalitarian ideology, on a par with Nazism, if not worse. Arguably worse, Hitler slaughtered six million Jews, not counting millions of other groups. Islam has slaughtered tens of millions over its entire fourteen-century history.  Aside from Fallaci’s narration of June 14, Robert Spencer’s The History of Jihad From Mohammad to ISIS ought to satisfy your appetite for gory annals. “Extremism” is practiced by the killers, the jihadists; “silent majority,” non-“extreme” Islam is what is practiced by non-violent rank-and-file Muslims.




Meotti continued:




At the Saatchi Gallery in London, two works, again featuring nudes, this time overlaid with Arabic script, prompted complaints from Muslim visitors, who requested that the paintings be removed from the Rainbow Scenes exhibition. In the end, the paintings were covered with sheets. "The Saatchi is behaving like Saudi Arabia, hiding from public view artworks that blaspheme against Islam", commented Brendan O'Neill on Spiked. One expert described the paintings as "The Satanic Verses all over again". The reference was to the book by Salman Rushdie, a British citizen, published in 1988. Iran's "Supreme Leader" Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini in 1989 condemned Rushdie to death for writing the book. The bounty on Rushdie's head was increased to $4 million in 2016 when a group of Iranians added $600,000 to the "reward" -- with no protest from Britain.




The Guardian, a left-wing British newspaper, reported:




A leading contemporary art gallery covered up works featuring an Islamic declaration of faith after complaints from Muslim visitors who said the artworks were blasphemous.




The Saatchi Gallery in west London hosted an exhibition of new material by the artist SKU featuring a variety of works. However, it decided to cover up two paintings that incorporated the text of the shahada, one of the five pillars of Islam, in Arabic script juxtaposed with images of nude women in the style of the US flag.




The gallery, founded by the advertising magnate Charles Saatchi, rejected calls from some visitors to remove the paintings, arguing it was up to visitors to come to their own conclusions on the meaning of the art. However, in response to the complaints, SKU suggested as a compromise the works should remain on the gallery wall but be covered up with sheets.






“It seemed a respectful solution that enables a debate about freedom of expression versus the perceived right not to be offended,” he said in a statement to the Sunday Times.




If Mr. Saatchi understood an inkling of Islam, he would know that most Muslims, having been raised in an anti-reason, anti-thought social environment, are not able to reach their own conclusions; such independence is forbidden by the Koran under pain of being branded an apostate or earning a fatwa’s death sentence.




Mr. Saatchi’s willingness to compromise with Islam is a measure of weak-spined, “respectful” eagerness to oblige Islam, and to surrender the West to Islam’s Sharia demands. 




I would have retitled Meotti’s column, “Erasing Our Culture to ‘Avoid Giving Offense.’” Not all “offensive” works of art (or critiques) are ‘covered up’ with sheets. They are simply removed from sight or display.




And, to contradict Jordan Peterson, there is no such thing as “Islamic Extremism.” There is just Islam, which emulates the practice of the likes of Google, FaceBook, and other tech giants to remove “offensive” posts or sites from public view (and without much of a definition of what they consider “offensive." Islam, root, trunk, and branch, is a totalitarian ideology, on a par with Nazism, if not worse. Arguably worse, Hitler slaughtered six million Jews, not counting millions of other groups. Islam has slaughtered tens of millions over its entire fourteen-century history.  Aside from Fallaci’s narration of June 14, Robert Spencer’s The History of Jihad From Mohammad to ISIS ought to satisfy your appetite for gory annals. “Extremism” is practiced by the killers, the jihadists; “silent majority,” non-“extreme” Islam is what is practiced by non-violent rank-and-file Muslims.




Meotti continued:




At the Saatchi Gallery in London, two works, again featuring nudes, this time overlaid with Arabic script, prompted complaints from Muslim visitors, who requested that the paintings be removed from the Rainbow Scenes exhibition. In the end, the paintings were covered with sheets. "The Saatchi is behaving like Saudi Arabia, hiding from public view artworks that blaspheme against Islam", commented Brendan O'Neill on Spiked. One expert described the paintings as "The Satanic Verses all over again". The reference was to the book by Salman Rushdie, a British citizen, published in 1988. Iran's "Supreme Leader" Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini in 1989 condemned Rushdie to death for writing the book. The bounty on Rushdie's head was increased to $4 million in 2016 when a group of Iranians added $600,000 to the "reward" -- with no protest from Britain.




The Guardian, a left-wing British newspaper, reported:




A leading contemporary art gallery covered up works featuring an Islamic declaration of faith after complaints from Muslim visitors who said the artworks were blasphemous.




The Saatchi Gallery in west London hosted an exhibition of new material by the artist SKU featuring a variety of works. However, it decided to cover up two paintings that incorporated the text of the shahada, one of the five pillars of Islam, in Arabic script juxtaposed with images of nude women in the style of the US flag.




The gallery, founded by the advertising magnate Charles Saatchi, rejected calls from some visitors to remove the paintings, arguing it was up to visitors to come to their own conclusions on the meaning of the art. However, in response to the complaints, SKU suggested as a compromise the works should remain on the gallery wall but be covered up with sheets.






“It seemed a respectful solution that enables a debate about freedom of expression versus the perceived right not to be offended,” he said in a statement to the Sunday Times.




If Mr. Saatchi understood an inkling of Islam, he would know that most Muslims, having been raised in an anti-reason, anti-thought social environment, are not able to reach their own conclusions; such independence is forbidden by the Koran under pain of being branded an apostate or earning a fatwa’s death sentence.



Mr. Saatchi’s willingness to compromise with Islam is a measure of weak-spined, “respectful” eagerness to oblige Islam, and to surrender the West to Islam’s Sharia demands.

Oriana Fallaci Remembered

Lest we forget this courageous, almost forgotten fighter for the freedom of speech....








An essential history lesson from the great Oriana Fallaci that should be required study in all schools. If enough people actually understood what Islam means in practice, there would be no tolerance for it and it would, finally, be relegated to the dustbin of history along with evils like Nazism. Read it all:




 An undated article on Islam, attributed to Oriana Fallaci,  publication unknown. First appearance on Rogan Hazard’s Face Book page. 








https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oriana_Fallaci








“LESSON OF HISTORY

In 635 AD, that is, three years after the death of Mohammed, the army of the Holy Crescent invaded Christian Syria and Christian Palestine.




In 638 they took Jerusalem and the Church of the Holy Sepulcher. 




In 640, seizing Persia, Armenia and Mesopotamia (present-day Iraq), they invaded Christian Egypt and conquered the Christian Maghreb, that is, modern Tunisia, Algeria and Morocco.

In 668 they first attacked Constantinople and besieged it for five years.




In 711 they crossed the Strait of Gibraltar and landed on the highly Catholic Iberian Peninsula, crushing Portugal and Spain, where, despite the resistance of the heroic warriors of Pelayo, Sid Campeador and others, they remained as much as eight centuries.


And the one who believes in “peaceful coexistence that marked the relationship between conquerors and conquered” let him re-read stories about burned abbeys and monasteries, desecrated churches, raped nuns, Christian and Jewish women who were locked in their harems.




Let him remember about those crucified in Cordoba, hanged in Granada, beheaded in Toledo and Barcelona, Seville and Zamora. (The decapitation in Seville was ordered by Mutamid: he used these severed heads of Jews and Christians to decorate his palace. In Zamora, heads were cut at the order of Almanzur, the vizier who is known as the "patron of philosophers and the greatest leader of Islamic Spain"! 




Saying the name of Jesus meant instant execution. Crucifixion, of course, or decapitation, or hanging, or impalement. The same followed those who dared to ring the bell. The same for wearing green, which belonged exclusively to Islam. When a Muslim passed by, every Jew and Christian was obliged to step aside and worship. And woe to that Jew or Christian who dared to respond to an insult from a Muslim. As for that widely advertised detail, that the unfaithful dogs were not obliged to convert to Islam and they were not even pushed towards it, do you know why they were not pushed? 




“Because those who converted to Islam stopped paying taxes.” And those who refused, continued to pay.




In 721 from Spain they proceeded to no less Catholic France.
Under the leadership of the governor of Andalusia, Abd al-Rahman, they massacred the entire male population of the Pyrenees and Narbonne, taking all women and children into slavery, and then continued on their way to Carcassonne.


Moving north, they slaughtered the nuns and monks in all the abbeys encountered on the way. In Lyon and Dijon, they robbed all churches without exception. Their capture of France lasted eleven years, in waves.




In 731, a wave of 380 thousand infantry and 16 thousand horsemen reached Bordeaux and moved to Poitiers, and from there to Tours. And if in 732, Charles Martel did not win the battle near Poitier-Tour, today's France would also be dancing flamenco.




In 827 they landed in Sicily, another goal of their insatiable greed. Cutting, decapitating, planting on coke, crucifying, as usual, they conquered Syracuse and Taormin, then Messina and Palermo, and for three quarters of a century (it took them this time to break the resistance of proud Sicilians) they Islamized the island. They remained here for two centuries, until they were knocked out by the Normans. 




But in 836 they landed in Brindisi, in 840 in Bari, in 841 in Ancona. Then, through the Adriatic Sea, they moved back to the Tyrrhenian Sea and land in Ostia in the summer of 846. They looted and burned it and, moving up the Tiber, reached Rome. Having besieged the city, one night they broke into it. They plundered the basilica of sv. Peter and Paul, destroyed them, and to get rid of their presence, Pope Sergius II was forced to introduce an annual tribute in the amount of 25 thousand silver bars. In order to avoid further attacks, his successor, Leo the Fourth, built the walls of Leonin. After leaving Rome, they attacked Campania. There they remained for 70 years, destroying Montecassino and torturing Salerno. One of their entertainments in this city was the nightly sacrifice of virginity to one of the nuns. And you know where? On the altar of a catholic cathedral.




In 898 they collapsed on Provence, more precisely, on today's St. Tropez. Having settled there, in 911 they crossed the Alps and invaded Piedmont. Having occupied Turin and Casal, they burned down all the churches and libraries, killed thousands of Christians, and then went to Switzerland. Here they got to Lake Geneva, but were stopped by snow, turned around and came back to the warm Provence.




In 940, they occupied Toulon, where they settled and ... well, you already know ..


Today it has become very fashionable to beat oneself in the chest and repent, blaming the West for the crusades. Consider the crusades as injustices inflicted on poor innocent Muslims.
But even before the Crusades turned into a series of expeditions to return to the Christians of the Holy Sepulcher in Jerusalem (which, remember, was captured by Muslims, not my aunt), these trips were the answer to four hundred years of invasions and occupation.




The crusades were a counterattack to halt Islamic expansion in Europe, divert it to the East (meaning India, Indonesia and China), and then to all of Africa and in the direction of Russia and Siberia, where the Tatars who converted to Islam have already crushed the followers of Christ.

But at the end of the crusades, the sons of Allah resumed their policy, as before and more.
This time with the hands of the Turks, who stood on the eve of the birth of the Ottoman Empire, an empire that, until 1700, concentrated all its greed in the West and turned Europe into a favorite battlefield.

Expressions and carriers of this greed, the famous Janissaries today enrich our language, being synonymous with a fanatical killer.




Do you know who these Janissaries really were? These selected troops of the empire, super-soldiers, capable of both self-destruction and war, murder and robbery...




Do you know where they were recruited, or, more precisely, forcibly called to the service?

- In countries subordinate to the empire. In Greece, for example, or in Bulgaria, in Romania, Hungary, Albania, Serbia. Often in Italy, in coastal cities, which their pirates attacked. On these shores, even today you can still see the remains of the watchtowers that were built to look in advance for their approach and warn the residents of the surrounding cities and villages. There is still an echo of the cry that is used today mockingly, but then it was a cry of horror and despair: "Mom, Turks!"




They kidnapped these future killers at the age of eleven or twelve, along with even more young children, to hide them in the harems of sultans and pedophiles, and chose them from the most beautiful and powerful first-born of eminent families. After being converted to Islam, they were locked up in military barracks and here, barring them from any kind, loving, human relations, including marriage, they were treated in the way even Hitler did not indoctrinate his Waffen SS. They were turned into the most terrible war machine that the world has seen since Roman times.




I do not want to delay this little history lesson, which in our politically correct schools would be a real moral sin, but at least briefly I have to refresh the memory of the forgetful and hypocrites. 


So - In 1356, 84 years after the Eighth Crusade, the Turks seized Gallipoli, a peninsula that stretches for 100 km along the northern coast of the Dardanelles.




From here they set off on a march to seize southeastern Europe and in the blink of an eye captured Trieste, Macedonia and Albania. They subjugated Great Serbia and for the next five years again laid siege to Constantinople, paralyzing it and cutting it off from the rest of the West.




True, in 1396 they were forced to stop, because they had to deal with the Mongols, Islamized, but not conquered.




But already in 1430 they resumed their campaign against Europe and captured the Venetian Thessaloniki. Having broken the resistance of the Christians in Varna in 1444, they secured mastery of Wallachia, Moldavia, Transylvania, the territory now called Bulgaria and Romania, and then in 1453 again laid siege to Constantinople, which fell on May 29 into the hands of Mahmet the Second.




By the way, do you know who this Mahmet the Second was? The boy, who, with the help of the Islamic Fratricidal Law, which allows the Sultan to kill his family members, ascended the throne, strangling his three-year-old brother.




You probably do not remember the chronicle of the fall of Constantinople, left to us by the scribe Frances. Can she really refresh the memory of the forgetful .. or, rather, hypocrites? Especially in Europe, which mourns only Muslims, and never — Jews and Christians, or Buddhists, or Hindus — it would be politically incorrect to remember the details of the fall of Constantinople. Its inhabitants at dawn, while Mahmet II bombarded the walls of Theodosius, hid in the cathedral of Sts. Sophia and here began to sing psalms to cause divine mercy.
..
The Patriarch, by candlelight, serves his last Mass and, in order to reduce panic, loudly declares: “Do not be afraid, my brothers and sisters! Tomorrow you will already be in the kingdom of heaven, and your names will live to the end of time!” Children cry in fear, mothers, to give them courage, repeat: "Quietly, quietly, my child! We are dying, for our faith in Jesus Christ! We are dying for our emperor Constantine XI, for our homeland!" The Ottoman army under the drumbeat rushes through the broken walls, crushing Genoese, Venetian and Spanish defenders, chopping them into pieces with their axes, break into the cathedral and behead everyone, including children.




They amuse themselves by knocking out the candles with these small severed heads ... This slaughter continued from dawn until noon and stopped only when the Grand Vizier ascended to the pulpit of St. Sophia appealed to the murderers: "Rest. Now this temple belongs to Allah."

Meanwhile, the city is burning, the soldier crucifies, hangs and puts on coke, the Janissaries rape and cut the nuns (four thousand in a few hours) and chain the survivors into chains for sale in Ankara. 




And the servants of Allah are preparing a triumphal meal. Meal, during which (in violation of the laws of the Prophet) Mahmet the Second gets drunk with Cypriot wine and, having a weakness for young boys, orders to bring the first-born Greek Orthodox grand duke Notaras.

14-year-old boy is famous for his beauty. In front of everyone, Makhmet rapes him, and then sends for his family: parents, grandmothers, grandfathers, uncles, aunts, cousins.
One by one, he beheads them all in front of the boy. He also ordered to destroy all the altars, melt all the bells, and turn all the churches into mosques or bazaars.




This is how Constantinople turned into Istanbul.




But Dodo from the UN and the teachers in our schools don't want to hear about it. Three years later, in 1456, Muslims conquered Athens, where again Mahmet the Second turned all churches into mosques and ... well, then you already know.


The conquest of Athens ended with an invasion of Greece, which they then held and destroyed for four centuries in a row. This conquest in 1476 was followed by an attack on the Republic of Venice.




In 1480, they again attacked Puglia, and on July 28, Ahmet Pasha’s army landed at Otranto, which for only two weeks was defended only by the townspeople and a handful of soldiers. Here, too, Muslims broke into the cathedral, where they immediately beheaded the archbishop, who gave the Eucharist. And at the same time with the archbishop and all the priests. All the young and beautiful women were given to the soldiers, and the rest were killed or taken into slavery. At the end, they drove 800 surviving young people between the ages of 15 and 18 to one spot and took them to the Ahmet Pasha camp, which offered them an ultimatum: "Do you want to convert to Islam or die?" “I would prefer to die,” answered the 16-year-old textile worker, Antonio Grimaldo Pezulla.




Then all the prisoners began to shout after him: "I, too, and I, too!" and Ahmet Pasha satisfied their desire, chopping their heads. A hundred a day. The carnage lasted exactly eight days.

Only one Mario Bernabey was saved by adopting Islam. But he soon turned out to be a very bad Muslim and was punished as a punishment. (So says Pietro Colonna in his "Comments on the Apocalypse.") Over the next century, everything went more or less in the same vein. Because in 1512 Selim the Merciless came to power in the Ottoman Empire. Again, with the help of the fratricidal law, he ascended the throne, strangling two of his brothers, plus five nephews, plus several caliphs and an unspeakable number of viziers.




It was from such a gentleman that a visionary sultan was born, who sought to create an "Islamic state of Europe" - Suleiman the Magnificent.




Immediately after the coronation, Suleiman the Magnificent gathered an army of 400 thousand people, 30 thousand camels, 40 thousand horses and 300 guns. From Islamized Romania already in 1526, he went to Catholic Hungary and, despite the heroism of its defenders, defeated its army in less than 48 hours. Then he reached Buda, modern Budapest. He burned the city and - guess how many Hungarians (men, women and children) got into the slave markets, which Istanbul was now famous for? - One hundred thousand.




Now, guess how many fell next year on the markets competing with Istanbul, that is, on the markets of Damascus, Baghdad, Cairo and Algeria. - Three millions.




But even this did not satisfy Suleymanov’s greed. To create the "Islamic State of Europe", he gathered the second army with 400 more guns and in 1529 moved from Hungary to Austria.

Ultra-Catholic Austria was considered a stronghold of Christianity. He failed to take it, it's true. After five weeks of unsuccessful attacks, he decided to retreat. But, retreating, he planted about 30 thousand peasants on coke, whom he did not consider worthy of selling into slavery, because the price of slaves fell after delivery to the slave markets of three million and another hundred thousand captured Hungarians.




Returning to Istanbul, Suleiman commissioned the reform of his fleet to the famous pirate Khair a-Din, known by the name of Barbarossa, that is, Red Beard. (Remember, Europeans .. and how do you know the word Barbarossa ..) Reform allowed the Mediterranean to turn into the water arena of the battle of Islam, so that by preventing the palace coup by strangling two older sons plus their six children, that is, their grandsons, in 1565 He collapsed on a Christian fortress in Malta.




And it did not help at all that in 1566 he died (hallelujah!) From a heart attack. It did not help at all, because the throne passed to his third son, known by the name not Magnificent, but "Drunkard". And it was under the control of Selim Pianitsa in 1571 that General Lal Mustafa conquered Christian Cyprus, where he committed one of the worst atrocities of which “Ray of Civilization” disgraced and stained himself.




I mean the martyrdom of the Venetian senator Marcantonio Bragadino, the governor of the island. As the historian Paul Fregosi tells in his remarkable book "Jihad", having signed the capitulation, Bragadino went to Mustafa to discuss the conditions of peace. And, being a supporter of the form, he went with all pomp, that is, riding an amazing stallion and dressed in a senate violet robe. In addition to this, he was accompanied by 40 harquebusiers in full dress and stunningly beautiful page boy Antonio Kirini (the son of Admiral Kirini), who held a precious umbrella over the head of the senator. But even then, too, was the wrong time to talk about peace, my dear one-sided pacifists.




Because in accordance with a previously prepared plan, the Janissaries immediately seized the stunningly beautiful Antonio. He was locked in the harem of Mustafa, who adored the boys even more than Mahmet the Second.




Then 40 harquebusiers were surrounded and chopped into pieces with axes. In the literal sense of the word in pieces, like meat to roast.




And, finally, they removed Bragadino from his horse, for a start, cutting off his nose and ears. Then disfigured in this way, he was put on his knees in front of the monster who ordered him to skin alive. Flaying and execution took place after thirteen days, in the presence of the Cypriots, who were obliged to attend.




Under the mockery and ridicule of the Janissaries, who scoffed at his faceless and faceless face, Bragadino was forced to walk round and round the city several times, dragging a bag of garbage and licking the ground every time he passed Lal Mustafa.




And here is the last torture. He died when skin was torn off him. When the flaying was over, Lala Mustafa ordered Bragadino’s skin to be filled with straw and made stuffed. On his orders, the scarecrow was tied astride a cow and once again drove through the city, after which it was tied onto the main mast of Mustafa’s flagship. In the name of the eternal glory of Islam.

It did not help that on October 7, the angry Venetians, united with Spain, Genoa, Florence, Turin Parma, Mantua, Luca, Ferrara, Urbino, Malta, and the Papal State, defeated Ali Pasha’s fleet in the battle of Lepanto.




By this time, the Ottoman Empire was at the top of its power, and, under the control of one sultan after another, she continued to attack the continent without hindrance, where Suleiman Magnificent wanted to create their own "Islamic State of Europe." They reached Poland, which the hordes of the Holy Crescent occupied twice: in 1621 and in 1672




It was not by chance that the realization of the dream of creating the "Islamic State of Europe" was stopped only in 1683, when the Grand Vizier Kara Mustafa gathered 600 thousand soldiers with cannons, 40 thousand horses, 20 thousand camels, 20 thousand elephants, 20 thousand oxen, 20 thousand mules , 20 thousand oxen and cows, 10 thousand goats and sheep, as well as 100 thousand bags of corn and 50 thousand bags of coffee, plus a hundred wives and concubines.




Having collected all this abundance, he returned to Austria and, creating a huge camp (25 thousand tents in addition to his own, which was decorated with ostriches, peacocks and fountains), was located at Vienna, besieging it a second time.




The fact is that in 1683 the Europeans were much smarter than they are today. With the exception of the French, who even then loved close relations with Islam (one need only recall the Treaty of Union, signed by Louis XIV). Promising to maintain neutrality, the Europeans rushed to defend the capital, which was now regarded as a stronghold of Christianity. Everything, namely all Europeans - the British, Spaniards, Ukrainians, Germans, Poles, Italians (that is, the Genoese, Venetians, Tuscans, Piedmontese, and the citizens of the Papal State who joined them)

On September 12, they won an amazing victory that caused Kara Mustafa to flee, leaving their camels and elephants, their oxen and their mules, their corn and their coffee, their ostriches and peacocks, their wives and concubines. hands of unfaithful dogs, Kara Mustafa cut their throats, one and all.




Why am I telling all this? “So that it would be clear that today's Islamic invasion of Europe is nothing but an Islamic Renaissance!”




The revival of centuries-old expansionism of Islam, its centuries-old imperialism, its centuries-old colonialism. To Europeans this may resemble the plague of the Third Reich. This is a good comparison .. but only the foundation of this avalanche of 21st century barbarians is the demographic explosion, plus Islam, one of the world religions, which in itself is much more dangerous than the Nazi theory of superman (übermensch).




This revival of Islam in the 21st century is more cunning. More insidious. Much more dangerous with its demographic base.




Today, this invasion is characterized not only by modern Kara Mustafa or Ali Pashi, or Ahmet Pashi and Suleiman the Magnificent, bin Laden and al-Zarqawi and various Arafat and other thugs who blow themselves up with skyscrapers or buses.


Today, this revival of Islam is organized as an avalanche of immigrants who settle in our countries, in our native land. And instead of respecting our laws, they defiantly impose their own on us. Your traditions - above you have read a little about these traditions - your god.

Do you know how many of them live on the European continent today, that is, on the earth, stretching from the Atlantic Ocean to the Urals?




About 60 million. In the European Union alone, there are about 25 million. Outside the EU - 35 million.




This includes Switzerland, where they account for over 10% of the population, Russia, where they are 15% of the population, Georgia, where they are already 12%, Malta, where they are 13%, Bulgaria, where their number has already reached 15%. 18% in Cyprus, 19% in Serbia, 30% in Macedonia, 60% in Bosnia-Herzegovina, 90% in Albania, 93.5% in Azerbaijan ...

At the moment, there are few of them only in Portugal (0.50%), in Ukraine, where they are 0.45%, in Latvia - 0.38%, in Slovakia -0.19%, in Lithuania -0.14%, in Iceland - 0.04% (oh, happy Icelanders!).




But everywhere, even in Iceland, their number is growing rapidly. And not only because the invasion continues unabated, but also because Muslims are the most prolific ethnic and religious group in the world.




This is facilitated by the demo-expansion mechanism developed in the Middle Ages - polygamy .. as the leaders of Islam proudly declared and declare - the uterus of a woman in the Quran is considered primarily as a weapon!




Oriana Fallaci

Stealing Heaven: A Remembrance

Tomb of Abelard and Heloise
 Lachaise Cemetery, Paris




It is a challenge to review a movie one fell in love with years before, and only recently rediscovered on Amazon Video. The challenge is not to dwell on irrelevancies that occur in the film and which are not fact-based, and do not occur in any of the narratives of the history of the romance… I immediately bought the video and have watched it a dozen times. I have not yet read Marion Meade’s novel of the same title  –  it has not to date arrived in the mail – but I suspect that the film and Meade’s novel diverge at certain points. So I cannot pass judgment on the novel, though I doubt it will disappoint me.




Abelard was Heloise’s highest value, and she never let it go. In her letters to him, she reluctantly revealed that God was his only rival.

  

The emotional, intellectual arguments that comprise the contents of their letters, in the film are scant and brief, with no hint near the end that they had been in correspondence, no hint of the depth in which they were morally and psychologically immersed the  “self-isolation” in their monastic environments.. The introduction states that, ” The letters of Abelard and Heloise were written in Latin about the year 1128, and were first published in Paris in 1616.” Heloise was less concerned about her “repentance” than was Abelard about his (in fact, to judge by his letters, he was consumed by the “duty,”  that he had not repented enough to satisfy God);  his consciousness of his passion for Heloise grows dimmer and dimmer by the sentence, until, in his last letter to her, he asks her not to contact him again..




WRITE no more to me, Heloise, write no more to me; ’tis time to end communications which make our penances of nought avail. We retired from the world to purify ourselves, and, by a conduct directly contrary to Christian morality, we became odious to Jesus Christ. Let us no more deceive ourselves with remembrance of our past pleasures; we but make our lives troubled and spoil the sweets of solitude. Let us make good use of our austerities and no longer preserve the memories of our crimes amongst the severities of penance. Let a mortification of body and mind, a strict fasting, continual solitude, profound and holy meditations, and a sincere love of God succeed our former irregularities.




Abelard was the lesser of the pair. He was completely committed to God, whereas Heloise hated having to be a nun and living in the Paraclete abbey, and at night would have dreams about being close to Abelard. As I remarked before, Fulbert's castration of Abelard "knocked the wind" out of him, that is, erased all desire and capacity to have "earthly" values, not just loving Heloise, and he went on and on to her about his and Heloise's need to "repent" for having "offended" God. Heloise did not back off an inch, and ached to have a letter from him as a means of being with him again. 




Abelard's intent to "repent" wiped out all desire to even remember his passion for her. Heloise never forgot her passion for him, and kind of forgave him for losing his for her. The first scene of her tossing the crucifix against the wall underscores her hatred for the Church and substantiates what she said in her letters to Abelard.  She wrote at one point that he was no longer a "man," just a "person," a "man' being  her tactful, delicate reference to his castration.




While Heloise and Abelard are out walking in the country, she captures a feather from a startled dove. In the film, she tells him, “This will be my holy relic.” It foreshashadows her future, a lonely, isolated life in the Paraclete abbey, long after Abelard has died and was buried in the abbey’s grounds. The dove’s feather, which is the focus of the first scene in the movie, is removed from the pedestal of a crucifix by Heloise on her death bed. "This will be my own holy relic." She had had secreted it in the pedestal,  decades before she took her vows of chastity. Then she tosses the crucifix against the wall, in a violent rejection of Christianity and of the morality which separated her from Abelard, and whispers, rather mysteriously, “I understand.”






Abelard and Heloise Surprised 

by Abbot Fulbert,

by Jean Vignaud, [1819]



Towards the end of the film, Abelard seems to have reconciled his necessity to “repent” with remembering his joy with Heloise. That change of mind  is not in the record. The film’s denouement is so much better than the record. On a Christmas Eve in the new abbey Heloise says to him, “You owe me something.” He replies “It’s practically the law,”  he replies, remembering their days together in Paris. And he kisses her.




Inconsequently, my own tossing of a crucifix occurred when, at the age of 16, I told my adoptive parents that I was an atheist. The result was my being interviewed by the parish priest –  a useless “talking to” –  and then by the parents, who were Catholic, burning my small collection of books, which included science and history titles. I did not “repent” and did not entertain any thoughts of it. I was willing to face whatever would happen after I made my declaration.




But, that’s another story.

Islam and the TweedleDems

Nancy Pelosi performs her shahada in Congress


I present a guest column by a fierce and eloquent campaigner against Islam and its creeping conquest of America, Amil Imani. This is appropriate on the occasion of Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi allowing the opening prayer in the House of Representatives to be read by an anti-Semetic Muslim, Imam Omar Suleiman. . This is a "soft" victory of Islam's goal of Islamizing America. CAIR must be doing victory laps to celebrate this coup. See this startling news item.



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Marxist Democrats is commonly described as a marriage of convenience, where Muslims will ally with leftist politicians, who will joyfully yield some of their authority to this group of enforcers so principled conservative politicians and Christians who advocate sane social policies are kept out of office. To acquire power has always been the goal of the Democrat party.





While America is in hibernation, Muslim organizations with the help of Democrats have been busy, working “stealthily” to change America into what is called “soft jihad.”  Soft jihad is practiced where Muslims are not strong enough to unsheathe the sword of jihad, where the true nature of Islam is exposed and when the public would likely stamp them out.  A critical tool of soft jihad involves penetration of the American educational system, such as Da’wa, the religious duty of each Muslim to convert non-Muslims and strengthen the Islamic Ummah.

The Democrat Party has intentionally put America on a precarious path to lose its freedom and American values we have cherished for over 200 years.  We, not only must accept, but be as vocal as we can to declare the current Democrat Party and enemy of our country. This party is no longer the party of Kennedy.  It has become the greatest threat to our national security and our survival as a nation.

Question: Why do the Democrats support every radical group, back Islamic ideology, honor their holidays and customs, and promote Islam as “the religion of peace,” while they know that Islam is not a religion of peace? In fact, it is an ideology of death. The answer is quite simple: The Democrat Party stands with anyone who dislikes America and the Republican Party.  History has proven that once Muslims reach close to 10% in population, they institute Sharia law and adopt their own legal system – a government within a government. They also will be in a position of hard jihad.

While most Americans have been snoozing, Muslim organizations have been busy and working “stealthily” changing America slowly. Keep in mind that Islam operates by stealth when not yet quite powerful, just the way Muhammad himself operated. Then, gradually builds its power to the point that the soft approach no longer is necessary to subdue others and imposes its will.

The stealth soft strategy is presently playing out in the United States. Islam’s tentacles are expanding into the body of this free and welcoming nation. The total numbers of mosques, these warehouses of terror, have exponentially expanded. No one really knows the exact numbers of these terror centers, but it is still growing like a weed. Try to find one  church or a synagogue in the House of Saud! This 7th century mentality, with the help of our Democrats and some establishment Republicans have managed to increase their house of terror at least by 500% since the 9/11 attacks. Go figure!!



The left is chronically unhappy about America, because it is looking in the mirror and rightfully sees its own miserable reflection. As an example, for the past two years, these mentally retarded people known as the Democrats created the “Russian Collusion Witch Hunt Hoax” in order to impeach the President of the United States. The hoax was based largely on an anti-Trump “dossier” conjured from the fertile imaginations of two nefarious characters: ex-British spy Christopher Steele; and Fusion GPS Founder, Glenn Simpson. 



Meanwhile, the Democrat lawmakers who never seem to miss an opportunity to advance their cause, sent a personalized letter to a the Council on American-Islamic Relations, a designated terrorist group in the United States for future fundraising and assist these terrorist groups to infiltrate our Congress.

A book Dems do not read.





Any time anyone arises to serve this great nation and aims to keep it on its course toward its glorious destiny, the left recoils. In the West, an unholy coalition of mentally-deranged suicidal-homicidal liberals, together with self-aggrandizing Islamic apologists, are doing their best to assist Islamists in the destruction of the existing order of freedom and liberty. To make matters worse, a vociferous clique of local leftists, “useful idiots,” with a suicide wish, are doing all they can to take the country with them to the grave they so earnestly seek.

When the Democrats and their new found allies don’t like what they hear they resort to ridicule, accusations and name-calling. In fact, they call everyone their favorite word “racist.” Wouldn’t it be wonderful if these people would, for once, abandon their primitive mindset and use a civilized method of dialogue?

If Muslims wish to live among civilized people, they must be encouraged to reject, if not Islam itself, one of its deadly derivatives, Islamism, which has become a sharp thorn, inflicting huge pain in our civilized society. They must be encouraged to combat radicalism. They must know that the free people of the world eagerly embrace them with open arms once they rise to the occasion and defeat Islamism.

We, in the United States of America must resist both Marxist Democrats and Islamists’ ideology with all we have. The survival of this country depends on that.

© 2019 Amil Imani – All Rights Reserved



Amil Imani


Amil Imani is an Iranian-American writer, satirist, novelist, essayist, public speaker and political analyst who has been writing and speaking out about the danger of radical Islam both in America and internationally. He has become a formidable voice in the United States against the danger of global jihad and Islamization of America. Amil maintains a website at www.amilimani.com. Imani is the author of Obama Meets Ahmadinejad and Operation Persian Gulf and is currently working on his third and fourth book. He is 2010 honoree of EMET: "The Speaker of the Truth Award" at the Capitol Hill. (Parenthetically, "Radical Islam" is a deceptive, redundant term. Islam is Islam. It suggests that there is a "Moderate," non-violent kind of Islam, when all we have known for 14 centuries it is the violent kind. – EC.)

The Rush to Dhimmitude

Jacinda Ardern, being contrite


It is my pleasure to reprint another article from New Zealand, this one by Olivia Pierson, about the actions of Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern, who went full-dhimmi on the occasion of the attacks on two mosques in Christchurch in March.  Fifty Muslims were killed and dozens were injured. The shooter was a white supremacist Brenton Tarrant, an Australian and “an ordinary white man,” who leaves behind a bizarre manifesto. He wrote, "The origins of my language is European, my culture is European, my political beliefs are European, my philosophical beliefs are European, my identity is European and, most importantly, my blood is European," he claims.

 

Clearly, his premise is that his European culture, ideas, and beliefs were innate and intrinsic, inherent with his “blood.” In order to “atone” for Tarrant’s actions, Ardern advocated internet censorship, the seizure of guns, and New Zealanders to observe a moment of “silence” for the victims, and for women to don the hijab, as she did. This is similar to Angela Merkle’s opening Germany’s doors to countless Third World savages for Germany to “atone” for WWII and the Holocaust. It is akin to the Islamic “holiday” of Ashura, when Shia Muslims flaggelate themselves and their children to wipe away their sins. Arden quoted Mohammad, just to prove that she was “sorry.”

 

Quoting the Prophet Mohammed from a Hadith, she said: "The believers in their mutual kindness, compassion, and sympathy are just like one body. When any part of the body suffers, the whole body feels pain."

 

Well, no.
 


Screwing Over NZ’s Future for Immediate Emotional Gains

8/4/2019






By Olivia Pierson
[First published onIncite 2/4/19]


Just as Angela Merkel wrecked Germany for future generations on her watch as Chancellor by flooding her country with ideological aliens, Jacinda Ardern and her government are embarking on the process of screwing over New Zealand’s future in an attempt to look merciful after the Christchurch shootings.
 

Our leaders should not be exploiting a one-off tragedy on our shores by clamping down on the natural rights of New Zealand citizens, like free speech. They should instead be promoting a long-term vision of keeping our liberties firmly intact and being careful that immigrants who come here hold views that are deeply consonant with those liberties.



One of the greatest virtues of excellent political leadership is the ability of a leader to have a long-range view into a country’s future and act for its improvement.  Individual liberty is the standard of value; the measuring stick. Sometimes the beginnings of improvement require short-term pain, but if a leader’s reasoning is sound and just, long-term gain is the result.  



Thomas Jefferson is a great example of such a leader, considering it was he who wrote the Declaration of Independence which severed the thirteen British Colonies of America from England, igniting the bloody War of Independence.  The result of winning that war was the beginning of the great experiment of self-governance.  This noble experiment was Jefferson’s far-seeing intention.



When Jefferson became America’s third president, his attitude toward freedom of expression was plainly stated in his inaugural speech:



"If there be any among us who would wish to dissolve this Union, or to change its republican form, let them stand undisturbed as monuments of the safety with which error of opinion may be tolerated, where reason is left free to combat it.” [Thomas Jefferson 1801]



Abraham Lincoln was also another far-seeing leader.  Not wanting to break the Union which his Founding Fathers had created (Jefferson died when Lincoln was seventeen years of age), he presided over the outbreak of a terrible civil war in order to halt new territories extending slavery further into the United States, Latin America and the Caribbean.  Lincoln’s famous “House Divided Speech” which he made at the Republican Convention of 1858, two years before the Civil War broke out, shows just how complicated and divisive the whole issue had become for the nation:



"A house divided against itself cannot stand. I believe this government cannot endure, permanently half-slave and half-free. I do not expect the Union to be dissolved—I do not expect the house to fall—but I do expect it will cease to be divided. It will become all one thing, or all the other.” [Abraham Lincoln 1858]



The slave state of South Carolina was the first to withdraw from the Union and fired the first cannons of war upon Fort Sumter in 1860.  Three years later in January of 1863, Lincoln managed to enact the Emancipation Proclamation declaring all the black slaves of ‘the states in rebellion’ to be free.  Enormous war powers constitutionally given to the President enabled him to take his opportunity for this action.  But the congressional vote for the 13th Amendment hung on procuring just two more votes and Lincoln’s words to his cabinet to get those votes shows just how morally far-reaching his vision was:



"The abolition of slavery by constitutional provision settles the fate, for all coming time, not only of the millions now in bondage, but of unborn millions to come — a measure of such importance that those two votes must be procured. I leave it to you to determine how it shall be done; but remember I am President of the United States, clothed with immense power, and I expect you to procure those votes.” [Abraham Lincoln 1853]




The Burj Khalifa in Dubai was lit up with the

image of Ms Ardern in a black hijab

hugging a mourning woman on Friday






In stark contrast to these iconic leaders of yore, the Ardern administration here in New Zealand is using immediate emotional gains to ruin the future for millions of yet unborn Kiwis, who will not be able to speak their minds openly on any issue whatsoever, but instead will have to over-censor themselves lest they be slapped with a “hate speech” charge. 



This reduces citizens into nothing more than subjects; slaves who can be taxed, bossed around and fined, or imprisoned for expressing the “wrong” ideas.  Welcome to Jacinda’s Brave New World.



If Ardern cannot enact her policies of increasing the refugee quota and implementing the insidious UN Global Migration Compact without cracking down on her own citizens’ civil liberties – especially freedom of expression –  it is clear that she is on a political path which is deeply hostile to New Zealand’s way of life.



Ardern’s reasoning is far from sound and just, it is purely emotional, womanish, showy and despotic.



Our prime minister ought to take a leaf out of Jefferson’s book and let all dissenting New Zealanders “stand undisturbed as monuments of the safety with which error of opinion may be tolerated, where reason is left free to combat it.” But will she use reason and persuasion to combat verbal dissent among her citizens, or only repair to criminalising peaceful, outspoken Kiwis?

​

Whether she likes it or not, the answer to this question will be Jacinda Ardern’s legacy.





If you enjoyed this article, please buy my book  "Western Values Defended: A Primer"   

The Dems are our Whisperers

Evil is the leitmotif of today’s culture, in politics and in the arts. It’s an analogy that bedevils my thinking.




 The Democrats remind me of the Whisperers, the latest villains in The Walking Dead TV series, who have rejected civilized life to live in nature (‘as nature intended,’ remarked Alpha), subsisting on worms and grubs. They are determined to erase what is left of civilization, and to punish the living who work to live, by killing the living.  Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Rashida Tliab, and IIlhan Omor are the “living” zombies or walkers, together with their MSM boosters, amongst us. They are the minor “Alphas” who command the herds of the dead. They are the shock troops of the Whisperers. By wearing walker  (zombie) masks, they pretend to be walkers, but are armed with knives and will kill.




The previous super villain, Negan, led a group of looters who raided productive communities of survivors, or held their existence for ransom with the threat of extinction if they did not submit.  Negan killed at the drop of a hat. He was a psychopathic and verbose killer. The difference between Negan and the Whisperers is that at least Negan valued the material comfort he wrested from his victims. Alpha and her Whisperers, far on the other hand, are nihilists to the core. They eschew all civilized comforts, and kill and destroy for the sake of effecting negation. Civilized life and values are a joke, says Alpha.




As a story device, the Whisperers are literally incredible. In reality, no one could live for long the way it is depicted how they live from day to day "in nature." Disease, malnutrition, constant exposure to rain and snow, and a host of parasites would weaken their bodies and ultimately kill them – aside from their cult-driven mental problems – and cause a growing attrition in the human numbers of the Whisperer tribe. Alpha and her second in command, Beta, appear to be the only relatively “healthy” members. Beta is six-foot brute and the “enforcer” of the tribe. He does as Alpha wishes, and kills on  cue.




 Alpha committed her first murder in Baltimore when she was hiding with her family in a basement at the beginning of the zombie apocalypse. She killed her husband when he began to go stir-crazy. She nearly murdered her daughter when the girl began to suffocate from a plastic wrap. In the beginning of the latest episode, she calmly scalps a comely woman she has killed, humming, and uses the hair in a disguise herself, by wearing the scalped hair over her shaven head, to infiltrate a community’s fair, aside from donning the woman’s dress and hat. Her face is blemished with dark spots; she is not an advertisement for living in a raw environment. She shaved her mind of all rational values, just as she shaved her head. See the illustration above of her holding a Whisperer mask.




 The other Dems comprise a herd of “walkers” and stalk humans (wearing  skinned walker masks) led by:   Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez , Ilhan Omar, and  Rashida Tlaib). Nancy Pelosi is the chief Alpha of the story. As a death-worshipping cult, the Whisperers, much like Islam, nurture a festering and implacable malice and hatred for anything that evokes the “old” world and despise anyone who attempts to recreate it. The Dems work to erase a society based on reason.




 I have watched this series from its debut in 2010 to the present to see how it would eventually mirror our crooked and corrupt culture. I’m certainly not a fan of any kind of horror film, but I watched this series because it featured men and women dealing with “emergency” situations.  




The TWD series is pocked with gaping plot holes, marred with gaps of causo- connections in action and dialogue. Often the story continuity falters.




 "May my mercy prevail over my wrath." This is first said by Siddiq in Episode “Mercy” when Carl, the group’s leader, comes across Siddiq (nominally a Muslim) hiding in an abandoned gas station.  Rick repeats it later in the series in one of his hallucinating or dream segments. The homily was likely invented by the writers and producers of the series, because it does not occur in the Koran. This is according to Robert Spencer, an authority on jihad; neither of us could find a statement in the Koran that remotely reflects the Mohammadan homily. Spencer suggested Koran passage at 32:13, but we both came up zilch.




32:13: And if we had willed, We could have given every soul its guidance, but the word from Me will come into effect [that] I will surely fill Hell with jinn and people all together.




Lots of wrath, but no mercy.




In my Rule of Reason column, in answer to a reader’s question whether or not Muslims will be visible among the herds of “walkers.  From Season 8:




“No, it won't be allowed. There were no Muslim walkers or zombies in any episode, just herds of mostly white ones, with a sprinkling of blacks and Asians. No Muslimas in hijabs, abayas, or burkas,  nor Muslim men wearing kufis or caps, attacking the living, as they do in real life. The villains were all white, including the cannibals who ran the Terminus slaughterhouse. TWD will never portray evil Muslims. It made its commitment to Islam through having a character recite from allegedly the Koran at the opening of Season 8: "May my mercy prevail over my wrath." This is Dawah, or proselytizing Islam under the radar of dialogue.”

 

An evil Muslim walker would mirror the repressed character and yearings of the average Muslim.




CAIR doubtless warned the writers and producers of TWD that to portray Muslims as grotesque“ walkers” preying on the living would be regarded as “offensive” and “denigrating.” It would reflect on what Islamic jihadists do daily.




And CAIR doubtless gave TWD a pass on the mercy-wrath homily, confident that most people would not question its authenticity. It sounds Islamic and genuine. In point of fact, the homily sounds Christian, not Islamic. It’s the moral kind of imperative that Jesus would preach, not Mohammad.




The malice displayed by Nancy Pelosi in the House casts her in the role as Alpha, the murderous, malevolent leader of the Whisperers. She has done everything in her power to block President Trump’s border wall and other proposals in his agenda.  She is complemented by one dimwit, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, and the two rabid anti-Semite Muslims, Omar and Tlaib. The other Dems do Pelosi’s bidding, and rally ‘round the anti-Semites  Omar and Tliab. The Dem herd does Pelosi’s bidding, and rallyies  ‘round Omar and Tliab. Pelosi has endorsed the idea of abolishing the electoral college, and granting illegal immigrants the right to vote and the whole panoply of welfare state benefits.  She will endorse the passing of the “Equality Act”, which is intended to “normalize” LGBTs by making any discrimination against them punishable. She is willing to allow thousands of illegal immigrants to break into the country to better the Dems' election prospects in the 2020 election.




The Dems – as our Congressional Whisperers – are determined to rob Americans of every freedom at every turn on the crooked road to socialism and collectivism.

Violent Religions

Violent Religions






A Pakistani mob howling for Bibi's neck.

If you want evidence that Britain has gone down the Yellow Brick Road to Islam in a state of advanced dhimmitude – there is this tidbit to support your suspicion. It refuses to grant asylum to an Iranian who converted to Christianity and left Islam. The reason he was rejected for asylum was because, the government said, Christianity was a violent religion.



And then there is the plight of Asia Bibi, a Christian Pakistani woman with a Muslim mob howling for her head. She, too, has been refused asylum, not because the government thinks Christianity is “violent,” but because granting her asylum would cause trouble in Britain.





Theresa May, the prime minister of the United Kingdom, stated that "the news would be welcomed around the world, and the UK was committed to the global abolition of the death penalty." According to the British Pakistani Christian Association, Bibi appealed to Britain [after her acquittal of the charge of blasphemy] for asylum but was denied because her presence in the country might stir unrest among "certain sections of the population."






Those “certain sections” being Muslim, of course. Perhaps she meant the Pakistani rapists of Rotherham. They might become “violent” and "groom" even more girls just to show May who's boss.




Neon Nettle reported on March 22nd:





Immigration officials in the UK responded to the man's application and 'explained' why they were discriminating against him. Biblical passages from the books of Leviticus and Revelation were cited by immigration officials to back up their rejection for asylum.





According to The Times report: Immigration officials wrote to the man citing violent passages from the Bible to prove their point. They said that the Book of Revelation was “filled with imagery of revenge, destruction, death, and violence.”



Godfather Politics also reported on the 22nd:





In yet another example that Britain is a lost and fetid nation, a Christian from Syria, who left Islam and converted to Christianity, was denied asylum because British officials claim that Christianity is not a peaceful religion.





During an asylum hearing for an Iranian convert from Islam, the UK’s immigration agency claimed that Christianity isn’t a peaceful religion, and quoted Bible passages to prove their claim, the Independent reported.





The asylum seeker said that he left Islam for Christianity because Christianity was a peaceful religion and that by leaving Islam his life was put in danger. But the British court said it was clear that Christians are not peaceful people.









The implication is that Islam is a “peaceful religion” and that Christians were not “peaceful.”





The immigration officials obviously cherry-picked violent sections from the Bible – Leviticus and Revelation – to prove their point. They could have also cited the Middle Ages, the Inquisition, and the wars raged by the Vatican, and the beginnings of Christianity in the immediate post- Roman Empire era (such as the brutal murder of Hypatia circa 415 in Alexandria by fanatical Christians).  Not to mention the violent persecution of the French Huguenots.  But today, Christians are “peaceful” and the Church – Anglican or otherwise – does not preach violence.



However, if they were looking for a religion that is consistently, and almost daily, violent, they need not look further than the Koran. But to cite the Koran as a sanctified prescription for killing and carnage, would upset Muslims. And, besides, to admit an apostate – a man who has left Islam for  Christianity, would probably precipitate demonstrations and, well, more Muslim violence.





They wouldn’t have needed to cherry-pick the Koran or the Hadith to find violence or urgings to follow violence; these works are celebrations of violence.









The Times reported that,





Immigration officials wrote to the man, who had converted to Christianity on the ground that it was a peaceful religion, citing violent passages from the Bible to support their claim. They said that the Book of Revelation was “filled with imagery of revenge, destruction, death and violence”.



The Church of England condemned the “lack of religious literacy” after the man said that he now faced persecution in Iran for his faith. Church officials called for a “serious overhaul” of Home Office policies.





Neon Nettle, from its July 2018, report, “UK Government Caught Rejecting Christian Refugees, Accepting Muslims Only”:



The UK has accepted over 1,100 Muslim Syrian refugees but refused Christians according to reports. Even despite the suffering of Christians during seven years of civil war, including the persecution by Islamic State, the UK government still refused to accept Christian refugees. In official figures, 4,832 Syrians were invited to settle in the UK last year, only 11 were Christian.







As an atheist, God means as little to me as does Allah. It has been that way for me since the age of 15, when I concluded, without having ever heard the arguments of the most notable atheists, that God was a metaphysical impossibility and a moral abomination. Allah was a mystical concept I had yet to hear of at that age. Both concepts are connected to the notion of a “first cause.” God is alleged to have conceived of and created the universe, while Islam claims that it was Allah who worked the cosmological magic, or just snapped his fingers.It's a coin toss.





As for a “first cause,” which rejects the idea that existence exists and has always existed, Wikipedia narrates that





Since Georges Lemaître first noted in 1927 that an expanding universe could be traced back in time to an originating single point, scientists have built on his idea of cosmic expansion. The scientific community was once divided between supporters of two different theories, the Big Bang and the Steady State theory, but a wide range of empirical evidence has strongly favored the Big Bang which is now universally accepted.







Groucho Marx as Mohammad

But a “first cause” is not the chief subject of this column, but rather the discrimination the British government practices against Christians. Neon Nettle continues:





Islamic State fanatics have attacked Christians and churches, as well as carrying out the genocide of Yazidis and other religious minorities. Last week its forces set off bombs in the Syrian city of Sweida, which killed 215 people in an area that blends elements of Christianity, Judaism and Hinduism. Lately, jihadists vandalized several French cathedrals.


This ends the latest instance of my committing “cyber terrorism,” leaving readers,  Muslims and government speech censors quaking at their knees, salving their hurt feelings with Ben Gay, while calling for the banishment of “Islamophobia” and ill-feeling for Islam and Muslims. Robert Spencer reported on March 16th in Jihad Watch.




The International Union for Muslim Scholars (IUMS) has called on non-Muslim countries to ban Islamophobia, following the killing of dozens of people on a deadly attack on two mosques in New Zealand.



“IUMS calls on non-Muslim countries to ban the spread of hatred against Islam and Muslims,” IUMS President Ahmed al-Raisouni said in a statement at the conclusion of a 2-day session held in Istanbul on Friday….





Islamic censorship is a form of violent jihad, but most Western governments purchase it under the guise of “freedom of speech” and being opposed to “hatred.” It relies on the initiation of government force, with the help of the big information tech companies, to zip mouths, break pens in half, and crush keyboards. There is little difference between censorship and gunning down an editorial staff to silence it, with or without the help of Google, Facebook, or Twitter.




Posted by Edward Cline at 2:57 PM