RUTHFULLY YOURS

“It’s becoming evident that the European elites failed to understand how explosive the migrant issue was until it detonated full in their face. Now it is in the midst of a crisis which could literally bring down the European Union. Why didn’t they see it coming? Because they believed their own Narrative, even when they should have suspected it was a lie of their own making. If the PC Western elites are overtaken by a cascade similar to that which collapsed the Soviet Union, the ultimate irony will be that the very migrants which they had counted on to create the Curley Effect will turn out to be the engine of their own destruction.”

This week marks the 30th anniversary of People’s Power Revolution in the Philippines that historians now regard as marking the start of the Color Revolutions that cumulatively crumbled the Soviet Union. The most astonishing aspect of the entire Color Revolution cycle was that it came largely as a surprise to pundits. As Leon Aron wrote in Foreign Policy, how and why they happened remains an enduring historical mystery. “In the years leading up to 1991, virtually no Western expert, scholar, official, or politician foresaw the impending collapse of the Soviet Union, and with it one-party dictatorship, the state-owned economy, and the Kremlin’s control over its domestic and Eastern European empires.”

Consider: the USSR’s vital signs gave no warning of failure. The Soviet Union in 1986 was as as big and populous as it had ever been. It had thousands of nuclear warheads. It’s economy was bad it’s true but no worse than at many points in its past. There was no significant opposition to the Politburo. “After 20 years of relentless suppression of political opposition, virtually all the prominent dissidents had been imprisoned, exiled … forced to emigrate, or had died in camps and jails. There did not seem to be any other signs of a pre-revolutionary crisis.”

How could such a giant system, which withstood the onslaught of Nazi Germany itself, fail?

Flash back to 1986 before we knew what was then the future. The same things might have been said of Ferdinand Marcos and Nikolae Ceaușescu (about more later) in 1989. They were outwardly strong yet both were doomed. Their regimes would collapse like a house of cards in ways we are still struggling to understand. One of the theories (hat tip commenter Edie_VA) put forward to explain the implosions was preference falsification.

In his book Private Truth, Public Lies, social scientist Timur Kuran argued that people, under pressure to conform by culture leaders often told public lies to get the pollsters and thought police off their backs, even as they nurtured a largely undetected private resentments inside them. Over time two divergent perceptions would emerge: the public lie would determine how the regime thought about itself while the private truth contained the real, but hidden data.

As Western politicians and other talking heads insist that the Islamic State (“ISIS”) has “nothing whatsoever to do with Islam,” not only does ISIS correctly implement Islamic law – whether by demanding jizya from subjugated Christians or by sexually enslaving “infidel” women – but even the “caliphate’s” arcane jihadi tactics belong to Islam.

Consider a recently exposed “recruitment” tactic of ISIS: abducting, indoctrinating, and beating young children in order to mold them into explosive vest-wearing “martyrs” who hurl themselves onto “infidels”:

The children who managed to escape describe how they were indoctrinated into the jihadi group’s radical brand of Islam and taught that they should execute their “unbeliever” [infidel] parents. … “We weren’t allowed to cry but I would think about my mother, think about her worrying about me and I’d try and cry quietly,” he [an escapee] said[.] … Some children who managed to escape ISIS and are now living in the refugee camps in northern Iraq, have also been left badly psychologically scarred. The repeated beatings and endless propaganda have meant that some of the escapees wake up in the night with nightmares while others suffer seizures.

The report goes on to say, “The growing trend for ISIS to use child soldiers as suicide bombers, particularly in Iraq, has been suggested as a sign of how stretched their resources are in the region.”

Or it could suggest that ISIS is simply following another page of the jihadi playbook. For centuries, Muslim caliphates seized Christian boys from their families, forcefully converted them and indoctrinated them in Islam, trained them to be jihadis extraordinaire, and then unleashed them back onto their former Christian kin to wreak havoc in the name of jihad on infidels. (Skanderberg was the exception.)

The tone was plaintive, almost bewildered. “We work tirelessly for the good of British society on several fronts,” Anas Altikriti protested before calling a press conference to refute the government’s charge that he and other like-minded Muslim leaders are doing the opposite.

A classified government review by two of Britain’s leading civil servants, expert in the Arab world and Islamist ideology, has concluded that organisations like the one Altikriti heads are, in effect, fronts for the Muslim Brotherhood — a charge they categorically deny.

The Ikhwan al-Muslimeen, as it is known in Arabic, was established in 1928 in Egypt and its goal was — and remains — the step-by-step Islamisation of Muslim communities with the ultimate aim of creating a global Caliphate ruled by holy law. “Allah is our objective” is the Brotherhood’s motto, “The Prophet is our leader. The Koran is our constitution. Jihad is our way. Dying in the way of Allah is our highest hope.”

With Altikriti on the platform was Omer El-Hamdoon, president of the Muslim Association of Britain, and Mohammed Kozbar, chairman of the Finsbury Park Mosque, North London, where the press conference was held. “We are not enemies of the state,” said the gently-spoken Hamdoon. All three say they “totally reject the allegation” that they are “in any way linked to the Muslim Brotherhood”.

Altikriti, in particular, has emphasised that he has “absolutely no links” and on its face his denial would seem to be consistent with the values of “tolerance” and “positive co-existence” which he says he is devoted to promoting. It’s certainly a vision a world away from the Brotherhood’s founder, Hassan al-Banna, who sought the moral purification of Muslims, because he regarded them as having been infected by Western decadence. That and his belief that Jews were a major source of the infection help explain why he was an admirer of Hitler and why he translated Mein Kampf into Arabic, calling it My Jihad.

“After a few moments of fear, I thought that if there are these threats it is because my fight foiled the plans of the Muslim Brothers by bringing them to light. I decided not to give up.” — Laurence Marchand-Taillade, Secretary of the Parti Radical de Gauche.

Muslim organizations tried to defame his work work and name [Éric Zemmour] by accusing him of “Islamophobia” to silence him.

In France, hunting season is still open for critics of Islam.

“You are sentenced to death. It’s just a matter of time.” This message, in Arabic, was sent by Islamists to Laurence Marchand-Taillade, National Secretary of the Parti Radical de Gauche (Radical Party of the Left). She now lives under the protection of the French police.

Marchand-Taillade forced the Muslim Brotherhood to withdraw, under pressure from France’s Interior Ministry, its invitation of three Islamic fundamentalists to a conference in Lille. The Islamists in question were the Syrian Mohamed Rateb al Nabulsi, the Moroccan Abouzaid al Mokrie and the Saudi Abdullah Salah Sana’an, who deem that the penalty for homosexuality is death, that the international coalition against the Islamic State is “infidel,” that Jews “destroy the nations” and that only religious music is permitted.

Laurence Marchand-Taillade published an article in Le Figaro in which she called for the ban of these Islamists with their “anti-Semitic and pro-jihadist message.”

In the magazine Marianne, Marchand-Taillade then penned, along with the French-Algerian journalist Mohamed Sifaoui, an article calling for the resignation of the leaders of the Observatory of Secularism.

“I am the president of an association that supports secularism in the Val-d’Oise” said Marchand-Taillade to me in an interview,

In reality, Turkey’s “post-modern Islamist” leaders were just Islamists gift-wrapped in a nicer package.

In a span of only seven months, more than 170 people have lost their lives in bomb attacks in Turkey. This number excludes more than 300 security officials killed by Kurdish militants, and more than 1000 Kurdish militants killed by Turkish security forces.

Russia is in the process of encircling Turkey militarily– in Syria, the Crimea, Ukraine and Armenia.

Russia’s fight is not about defeating the Islamic State, but about expanding its sphere of influence in the eastern Mediterranean, including the mouth of the Suez Canal. In a way, Russia is challenging NATO through Syria — the same way Turkey is challenging the Shiites through Syria, or Iran is challenging the Sunnis through Syria.

Less than a decade ago, many Western statesmen and pundits were racing ahead to praise Turkey’s Islamist leaders as “post-modern, democratic, reformist, pro-European Union Islamists” who could play the role model for less democratic Muslim nations in the Middle East. It was “The Rise and Rise of Turkey,” as Patrick Seale put it in the New York Times in 2009.