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2016

Europeans Studiously Ignore Muslim Mobs To avoid inciting anti-Muslim sentiment, the press and government overlook repeated, vicious riots targeting women. By John O’Sullivan

Many years ago I read a thought-provoking science-fiction short story about a sociologist who specialized in the important field of bureaucratic expansionism. I can’t recall the story’s title, and I haven’t found the story on the Web, but a colleague better schooled in sci-fi can probably identify it.

Through my hazy memories, however, it goes something like this. The sociologist is excited because he thinks he has gone farther than anyone else in discovering the sociological laws of organizational success. But how can he be sure? Inspired by a blend of scientific curiosity and a sense of fun, he makes friends with his mother’s sewing circle and persuades its members to reorganize it along his scientific lines.

At the close of the story the sewing circle has got three Senate seats, 55 House seats, and a credible contender for the presidency.

Which brings me not to Donald Trump but to the New Year’s riots in Cologne and two other German cities, in which one woman was raped, about 90 others grossly assaulted sexually, and New Year revelers of both sexes jostled, attacked, robbed, and threatened by an estimated 1,000 men of North African and Middle Eastern appearance in “organized” criminal gangs.

Whatever Mohammed’s virtues or defects as a prophet, he was one helluva practical sociologist.

Palestinian Authority, Hamas, Responsible for Torture by Khaled Abu Toameh

For the mainstream media and human rights organizations, human rights violations are news only when they come with a “made in Israel” sticker on them.

The Palestinian Authority (PA) has used international aid funds to build prisons and detention centers in the West Bank where torture has become the norm.

Dr. Ammar Dwaik, Director General of the Independent Commission for Human Rights, a Palestinian group, revealed that his group received 782 complaints regarding torture — 168 in the West Bank and 614 in the Gaza Strip.

Both Hamas and the PA each fears that in a free election it could lose some of its power. Why hold an election if you are not sure about the results?

Needed desperately: scrutiny of Palestinian society by international media and human rights groups — beginning with Palestinian prisons. Anyone stepping up?

The Palestinian Authority and Hamas are torturing Palestinians. Still.

The two Palestinian governments, the Palestinian Authority (PA) in the West Bank and Hamas in the Gaza Strip, are both major violators of human rights. Assaults on public freedoms and crackdowns on political rivals are just the first chapters of a very long story.

Is Europe Giving Up? by Judith Bergman

As a response to a gang of a thousand migrant men sexually assaulting women in Cologne on New Year’s Eve, the mayor suggested a “code of conduct” for German girls and women, as a measure to “prevent such things from ever happening again.”

The idea of a “code of conduct” for girls and women to accommodate male predators not only places the blame on the victim but is an inversion of responsibility unseen in Western jurisprudence. The politically correct urge to accommodate the culture of immigrants means that justice is no longer blind.

Each asylum seeker, upon entering Europe, needs to be informed, in the clearest possible manner, that all women, even infidels, must be treated with respect.

“I feel betrayed by Britain. I came here to get away from this and the situation is worse here than in the country I escaped from.” — A Muslim woman, quoted by Baroness Caroline Cox.

The cathedral opposite the main train station used to be the traditional gathering spot for New Year’s Eve revelers in the German city of Cologne.

Michael Connor 2015, the Year the War Began ****

If members of our diverse nation do not share an unqualified revulsion at Islamist crimes and outrages then we have nothing in common. The lights of Western society — justice, equality, truth — are being extinguished one by one. We may never see them lit again in our lifetime.
On Thursday, Monsieur Hulot’s warning was clear: “Tomorrow, millions of climate refugees”. A photo of ecologist Nicolas Hulot, President Hollande’s special envoy “for the protection of the planet”, was featured on the front cover of the fashionable French Left weekly magazine L’Obs (formerly Le Nouvel Observateur). Tomorrow came and that Friday night there were not millions of climate refugees in Paris but 130 dead and 683 wounded in Islamic terror attacks across the capital.

L’Obs is the magazine which many of the dead and injured would have read before the attacks. The pre-massacre edition had articles on the traffic of Kalashnikovs in the suburbs, Muslim voting trends, and immigration: “Xenophobia, A French Tradition”. This last article discussed waves of hatred towards immigrants, in the 1890s and 1930s, while noting that despite resemblances with the past, “France has become more tolerant”—no doubt due to the exalted attitudes of superior L’Obs writers. The author’s conclusion was like a bite into an elitist artisan baguette filled with PC platitudes which ignored the events of January 2015: “historical studies have shown that in no country in the world has a community of immigrants endangered the state which welcomed them”.

In Quadrant (December 2015) Douglas Murray wrote of the refusal to admit the failure of multiculturalism by a powerful and influential intellectual class who reproduce a “wilfully optimistic version of events” in the face of realities which completely “damn the majority beliefs of a whole generation”. The killers, drawn from the “community of immigrants”, had only just been silenced at the Bataclan when a shocked and traumatised young woman spoke into a radio microphone: “Why us? Why us?”

Fiddling While North Korea Gives Global Tutorials on How to Get the Nuclear Bomb By Claudia Rosett

The timing could be straight from a Hollywood thriller. It’s the first Tuesday of the New Year. In Washington, fresh from a holiday on Oahu, President Obama steps to the podium to talk about gun control, wiping away his own tears as he describes the urgency with which he’d like to disencumber Americans of their guns. Meantime, on the far side of the earth, goose-stepping enemies of America are working on bigger weapons. North Korea is counting down to its fourth nuclear test. That evening Pyongyang announces it has just tested a hydrogen bomb — a thermonuclear weapon that carries far more explosive force than the atomic bombs Pyongyang has been testing since 2006.

Unfortunately, these scenarios are not fiction. This is what played out in the real world on Tuesday, though amid the news of the latest White-House-manufactured domestic crisis, it took a while for most of the TV news channels to catch up with the late-evening news out of North Korea — which was genuinely earth-shaking. The U.S. Geological Survey recorded a sizable tremor, 5.1 on the Richter scale, centered near the Punggye-ri site where North Korea has carried out three previous underground nuclear tests. North Korea’s state-run Korean Central News Agency released a story headlined “DPRK Proves Successful in H-Bomb test.”

Why Does Germany Condone Mass Rape? By David P. Goldman

Germany’s leaders have nothing of signifcance to say about the worst outbreak of sexual assaults in Germany since the Red Army moved out after World War II. Why won’t they do anything? Answer: for the same reason that the Catholic Church insists that Islam is a religion of peace. The alternative–watching from a distance a civilizational collapse in real time with its attendant horrors–is too terrible for Angela Merkel or Pope Francis I to contemplate. They would rather take casualties than absorb the horror of the situation. The root of the problem is theological. The West is paralyzed by its own notion of the good.

Over at Jihad Watch, Robert Spencer quotes Archbishop Bruno Forte’s claim that “Islam teaches ‘non-violence in the name of God,” adding:

How could an organization that claims to speak for God and to be led by the Holy Spirit be so indefatigably committed to a lie? For it isn’t only Bruno Forte: the Pope has said the same thing, and it’s the official policy of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, which winks at dissent on any number of actual Church teachings, but moves ruthlessly to suppress voices that dare to suggest that maybe Islam is not a Religion of Peace. It appears as if protecting the image of Islam is more important to Church leaders today than teaching the contents of their own faith.

I predicted that Germany’s leaders would do nothing about mass sexual abuse by Muslim immigrants in an Oct. 14, 2015 essay at Asia Times. Some extracts:

Germany’s elite knows perfectly well that the migrants bring social pathologies, because they have already seen the world’s worst sex crime epidemic unfold in Scandinavia. Sweden now has the highest incidence of reported rape outside of a few African countries, and nearly ten times the rate of its European peers—and all this has happened in the past ten years. Sweden ranks near the top of the World Economic Forum’s Gender Gap Index, yet it has become the most dangerous country for women outside of Africa, with an incidence of rape ten times that of its European peers. Sweden’s political leaders not only refuse to take action, but have made it a criminal offense to talk about it.

ANGELO CODEVILLA’S FULL COLUMN ON TED CRUZ ****

Simultaneously, as if signals from a council of sachems had summoned them to the warpath, the Republican establishment’s warriors took after Ted Cruz. Pat Buchanan encapsulated this establishment: “… officeholders past and present, donors, lobbyists, think-tankers angling for jobs, party hacks and talking heads [who] discuss how to frustrate the rising rebellion against what they have done to America.”
Ted Cruz

Ted Cruz

The establishmentarian drumbeat against Cruz has involved but a whiff of argument on policy, and a few twisted or out of context attributions. But it has consisted mostly of attacks on the man’s character. Fox News led the way with characterizations ranging from flip-flopper to “servile.”

Britt Hume, heretofore its resident adult, said that Cruz had “difficulty shaking hands with the truth.” The point in print, in the blogosphere, as well as on TV is: he’s not one of us, not of our kind, and hence unsuited for responsible office. This very vehemence ensures the attacks’ success. For sure, Cruz ain’t no part of the establishment. Whether that convinces voters to vote against Cruz or for him is another matter. What follows here is an overview of the written attacks, which reveal more about the attackers than they do about the target thereof.

The Wall Street Journal is the Republican establishment’s intellectual apex. This is what flows down from that hill.

“Establishment tribes beat drums against Ted Cruz” — the great Angelo Codevilla By David Goldman

Angelo Codevilla is the dean of conservative strategists, a senior member of the Reagan team during the 1980s, and the author of the best recent book on American security strategy. Like Ted Cruz, Prof. Codevilla rejects the false dichotomy of isolationism vs. neo-conservative interventionism: America is not out to remake the world in its own image, but to secure itself from foreign enemies. Sometimes that means using power abroad, and using a lot of it–but the criteria must be America’s self-interest.

In a new essay for Asia Times, Codevilla make short work of the Establishment counter-attack against Sen. Cruz, taking on the Wall Street Journal’s Bret Stephens, the Weekly Standard’s Lee Smith, the American Enterprise Institute’s Gary Schmitt, and other luminaries. It’s a must read. Some choice excerpts:

Simultaneously, as if signals from a council of sachems had summoned them to the warpath, the Republican establishment’s warriors took after Ted Cruz. Pat Buchanan encapsulated this establishment: “… officeholders past and present, donors, lobbyists, think-tankers angling for jobs, party hacks and talking heads [who] discuss how to frustrate the rising rebellion against what they have done to America.”

The establishmentarian drumbeat against Cruz has involved but a whiff of argument on policy, and a few twisted or out of context attributions. But it has consisted mostly of attacks on the man’s character. Fox News led the way with characterizations ranging from flip-flopper to “servile.”

State Pollution-Control Employee Busted for Advocating Against Pipeline By Walter Hudson

It’s not often that Minnesota governor Mark Dayton does something that deserves widespread praise. But the Democrat deserves kudos for his handling of a state pollution-control employee who has been caught abusing that position to advocate against a proposed pipeline project.

Scott Lucas works for the Minnesota Pollution Control Agency. A local paper exposed emails sent by Lucas regarding the pending Sandpiper crude oil pipeline. From the Minneapolis Star Tribune:

In one e-mail, Lucas sent a message including a link to an environmental report regarding another pipeline, saying it “could be a very useful tool for us to use when making our case against Sandpiper in this area of the state.” The e-mails were first reported by the Pioneer Press.

“Somebody in that position who’s playing an advocacy role with advocate organizations has really crossed the line of what their professional responsibilities are,” Dayton said Wednesday. “If they’re going to get into political advocacy, they should resign their position and run for the Legislature or go to work for one of the organizations that oppose the pipeline.”

Obama: Gun Proponents’ Suspicions, ‘Conspiracy’ Theories Just Part of American DNA By Bridget Johnson

President Obama scoffed at CNN host Anderson Cooper for questioning whether it was “fair” for him to brand pro-gun opponents as conspiracy theorists for fearing firearm registration or confiscation.

Obama was surrounded by people on both sides of the gun-control issue at a CNN townhall held at George Mason University in Fairfax, Va.

Mark Kelly, husband of former Rep. Gabby Giffords, asked the president “to explain, with 350 million guns in 65 million places, households from Key West to Alaska — 350 million objects in 65 million places — if the federal government wanted to confiscate those objects, how would they do that?”

Obama noted “this notion of a conspiracy out there, and it gets wrapped up in concerns about the federal government.”

“Now, there’s a long history of that. That’s in our DNA. The United States was born suspicious of some distant authority,” he said.

Cooper jumped in, “Is it fair to call it a conspiracy? I mean, there’s a lot of people who really believe this deeply — that they just don’t trust you.”