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Ruth King

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The Roots of Left-Wing Violence A vague and dangerous ideology By Ian Tuttle

By on June 5th, 2017

There is currently, on the streets, smashing storefronts and setting things on fire, a group called “Antifa,” for “anti-fascist.” Antifa are not a new phenomenon; they surfaced during the Occupy movement, and during the anti-globalization protests of the late 1990s and early 2000s. Antifa movements began in early-20th-century Europe, when fascism was a concrete and urgent concern, and they remain active on the Continent. Lately, Antifa have emerged as the militant fringe of #TheResistance against Donald Trump — who, they maintain, is a fascist, ushering into power a fascist regime. In Washington, D.C., Antifa spent the morning of Inauguration Day lighting trash cans on fire, throwing rocks and bottles at police officers, setting ablaze a limousine, and tossing chunks of pavement through the windows of several businesses. On February 1, Antifa set fires and stormed buildings at the University of California–Berkeley to prevent an appearance by Breitbart provocateur Milo Yiannopoulos. (They succeeded.) In April, they threatened violence if Ann Coulter spoke on the campus; when the university and local law enforcement refused to find a secure location for her to speak, she withdrew, saying the situation was too dangerous.

These and similar episodes call to mind Woody Allen’s character’s observation in the 1979 film Manhattan: “A satirical piece in the Times is one thing, but bricks and baseball bats really gets right to the point of it.”

All politics is, at some level, a vocabulary contest, and it happens that American politics is currently engaged in a fierce fight over, and about, words. The central word at issue is “fascist,” but there are others: “racist,” “sexist,” and the like. A great many people are currently involved in a turf war, aiming to stake out conceptual territory for these charged words: What is fascism? What isn’t it?

An illustration: In April, Heather Mac Donald was physically blocked from an auditorium at Claremont McKenna College, in Claremont, Calif., where she was scheduled to speak. Mac Donald is a scholar at the Manhattan Institute, a prominent right-of-center think tank. She is a noted expert on law enforcement, especially the complex relationship between law enforcement and minority communities. She was among the first to theorize that anti-police protests in Ferguson, Baltimore, Milwaukee, and elsewhere have facilitated an increase in urban crime; the so-called Ferguson Effect is now a matter of consensus among experts on both the left and the right. National Review readers will be well acquainted with Mac Donald; she publishes in these pages regularly.

A group of students from Pomona College, part of the consortium of Claremont schools, penned a letter to Pomona president David Oxtoby, affirming the protest at their sister institution. Mac Donald, they wrote, should not be permitted to speak; she is “a fascist, a white supremacist, a warhawk, a transphobe, a queerphobe, a classist, and ignorant of interlocking systems of domination that produce the lethal conditions under which oppressed peoples are forced to live.” Mac Donald was not offering any material for substantive intellectual discussion; she was, they claimed, challenging “the right of Black people to exist.”

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ENVIRONMENT AND JUNK SCIENCE Comments turned off

Don’t Apologize for Being Honest about Climate Change A response to Ross Douthat’s lukewarm lukewarmism By Oren Cass —

By on June 5th, 2017

Writing about climate change in the New York Times, Ross Douthat describes “lukewarmers” as those who:

accept that the earth is warming and that our civilization’s ample CO2 emissions are a major cause. They doubt, however, that climate change represents a crisis unique among the varied challenges we face, or that the global regulatory schemes advanced to deal with it will work as advertised. And they raise an eyebrow at the contrast between the apocalyptic, absolutist rhetoric with which these schemes are regularly defended and their actual details, which seem mostly designed to enable the globe’s statesmen to greenwash the pursuit of economic and political self-interest.

Douthat placed himself among the lukewarmers and very graciously referred his readers to some of my recent work for a longer discussion of those themes. But his column was also quite gracious in conceding two problems with lukewarmism, which instead deserve rebuttal.

Douthat’s Problem #1: “No less than alarmism, lukewarmism can be vulnerable to cherry-picking and selection bias, reaching for any piece of evidence — and when you’re dealing with long-term trends, there’s a lot of evidence to choose from — that supports its non-catastrophic assumptions, even if the bulk of the data starts to point the other way.”

This is a generic critique that might apply to any position on any issue. School-choice advocacy is vulnerable to cherry-picking and selection bias, as is support for universal pre-K. So are the claims that Scandinavian-style welfare states are good or bad for innovation and economic growth. And the claims that an interventionist U.S. foreign policy promotes or harms our national interest. Highlighting such a complaint about lukewarmism would make sense only if the position were uniquely reliant on such bad behavior.

To the contrary, the key hypothesis (of my work, anyway) is that even working from the mainstream scientific and economic studies advanced by alarmists, the data do not support a conclusion of catastrophe. That is, the effects identified by the U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change are serious but manageable. The economic costs identified by the Obama administration’s Social Cost of Carbon analysis are no larger than those associated with a variety of other policy issues.

Of course, plenty of people cherry-pick this or that study in an effort to undermine the mainstream conclusions of climate science. But such analysis is unnecessary to a moderate view of climate change and, I would argue, often counterproductive. Lukewarmism is, or should be, about describing accurately the mainstream of climate research and then assessing how well human society’s resilience and capacity for adaptation will allow it to cope with the challenges we might face.

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WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

No, the Problem in London Is Not ‘Islamist Extremism’ Islamists want to impose sharia law on the West — which means all Islamists are ‘extremists.’ By Andrew C. McCarthy

By on June 5th, 2017

The Western schizophrenia about radical Islam is on full display in Britain, in the aftermath of the latest jihadist atrocity, the third in just the past three months.

Three terrorists rammed a van into a crowd on London Bridge and then went on a stabbing rampage, brutally assaulting pedestrians while braying that each blow was struck “for Allah.” A duly outraged Theresa May donned her prime-minister hat to announce that her government is “leading international efforts to take on and defeat the ideology of Islamist extremism around the world.” She also slipped on her amateur-imam cap, adjusted her rose-tinted glasses, and proclaimed that “Islamist extremism” is an ideology

that preaches hatred, sows division and promotes sectarianism. It is an ideology that claims our Western values of freedom, democracy, and human rights are incompatible with the religion of Islam.

And what right-thinking Western politico’s post-mass-murder speech would be complete without May’s insistence that this ideology is — all together now! — “a perversion of Islam and a perversion of the truth.”

Sigh.

What does Theresa May know about Islam such that she can decide what is a perversion of it? Precious little, I’d wager. Otherwise, she’d not babble on about “Islamist extremism,” a term right out of the Department of Redundancy Department.

If you are an Islamist in the West, you are, by definition, an extremist. An Islamist is a Muslim who believes Islam requires the imposition of sharia, Islam’s ancient, totalitarian societal system and legal code.

“Islamist” is a term we in the West use in the hope that, because there are Muslims who are tolerant, pro-Western people, it must not be inevitable that Islam itself — or at least some interpretations of Islam — will breed the fundamentalist, literalist, supremacist construction of Islam.

It may be a grave error to adopt this hope, especially since it has been elevated into seemingly incorrigible policy. Does the incontestable existence of moderate Muslim individuals necessarily translate into a coherent, viable doctrine of moderate Islam? Turkey’s President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, to take just one very influential Muslim leader, says no: The West’s invocation of “moderate Islam” is “ugly,” he counters, because “Islam is Islam, and that’s it.” Erdogan is a close ally of the Muslim Brotherhood, the world’s most influential Islamist organization. If he’s right that there’s just one true Islam, rest assured that it’s not friendly to the West. Erdogan describes the Western call for Muslim migrants to assimilate in their new European societies as “a crime against humanity.”

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NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

GODFATHER NOT BY DIANA WEST

By on June 5th, 2017

Some call it reframing; others put a coat of paint on it and call it a new car. Basically, it is the process by which a deception is perpetrated simply by saying thus is so and pointing to the shiny surface as proof.

This is once again happening with the egregious David Horowitz. Several years ago, I had the unexpected misfortune of having to experience the true nature of David Horowitz due to his spearheading a disinformation campaign against me and my 2013 book American Betrayal. This campaign of lies would end up including nearly two dozen pieces by a cabal of writers, the first of which I rebutted, perhaps ironically, at Breitbart News. (Other rebuttals, too, for that matter, ran at Breitbart when other websites refused me space.) For new readers, American Betrayal, in part, is about how Moscow-directed and -loyal communists and their accomplices were secretly able to infiltrate and influence the US and other great powers into cataclysmic acts that entrenched, enriched and expanded the Soviet empire abroad; at home, they rotted out the Republic long before “the Sixties” ever began — all, according to “court history” ever since, under the banner of “victory” in World War II and the Cold War. It seems fair to say this is not a subject that a normal anti-Communist, especially ex-Communist, would lose his mind over.

In the several years since (and during) this shockingly sustained attack-campaign, I also began to learn how Horowitz has shaded his own biography to obscure the proximity of his early life to the KGB in America — an alarming choice for one self-billed and trusted as a guide to domestic Communist affairs.

There. Disclaimer done. Where was I?

The latest Horowitz-reframing appears in a paint-job-superficial Washington Post piece headlined: “How a ‘shadow’ universe of charities joined with political warriors to fuel Trump’s rise.”

The Post’s premise — the centrality of Horowitz in that “shadow” universe supposedly fueling the rise of Donald Trump — could not be more wrong, or more absurd. For one thing, Trump’s lift-off was in 2015, sans charities or shadow-universe thereof. Where was Horowitz? “This column is not an endorsement of Donald Trump or any candidate,” Horowitz wrote on December 22, 2015. (Full disclosure: My own endorsement of Trump ran at Breitbart News on December 26, 2015; then again, I am not a tax-exempt charity.) Soon thereafter, as Trump swept toward the nomination, Horowitz would start piggybacking onto Breitbart News with a series of look-at-me-Trump op-eds. At the time, it struck me as a naked effort to catch up with the Trump Train before it pulled into Washington without him.

This is somewhat interesting on different levels. One would think, as a universe-creator and all that, Horowitz’s own Frontpagemag.com was the center of that supposed Trumpian firmament; at least, if Horowitz really was, as the Post claims, the “intellectual godfather to the far right.”

For some time in 2016, however, Horowitz was just another Breitbart by-line (average age 25?), apparently seeking some new credentials, if not “cred,” of his own. In May 2016, which was really just in the nick of time to make any kind of a pre-nomination fuss, Horowitz finally scored by dropping the perfect stinkbomb of a headline at Breitbart News: “Bill Kristol: Republican Spoiler, Renegade Jew.”

Antique echoes of Daily Worker jargon aside (who but old-time Bolshis say “renegade” anything?): In the ensuing media clamor over Horowitz’s “Renegade Jew” headline (he *confessed* to writing it himself), Breitbart had to fend off charges of anti-Semitism, which would dog the site throughout the presidential campaign — but now with the help of Horowitz, who is Jewish. Mission accomplished! Having mixed it up with Breitbart boys under siege, Horowitz was now, basically, one of them. Plus, in so gratuitously slamming neocon Kristol, ex-Communist and, now, surely, ex-neocon Horowitz was also able to run up the Jolly Roger of the alt-right. “Renegade Jew,” indeed. Good political positioning is more like it. Meanwhile, the issue that lit him up so much — Obama’s Iran deal — is still on Trump’s table, not that Horowitz cares so much now.

So, why wouldn’t Horowitz just take care of all of this personal reframing exclusively at his own website?

A quick look at the latest Alexa website rankings explains all.

Today, Frontpage.mag is No. 12,639 in the US — which, of course, means there are 12,638 more popular websites than David Horowitz’s website out there today; it ranks 41,338 globally.

Breitbart News, on the other hand, is No. 61 in the US today, and No. 292 in the world.

To be fair, yours truly’s site ranking is barely measurable at No. 140,911 in the US — but perhaps dianawest.net would do a bit better if it raked in some fraction of the $5.4 million David Horowitz’s Freedom Center received as charitable largesse in 2015 alone, as the Post reports. Horowitz, not by the way, skimmed $583,000 of the top in salary that same year. Running a “shadow universe” is so terribly taxing, especially when your fancy web$ite isn’t so widely read.

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“Buy American” May Not Be American By Herbert London

By on June 5th, 2017

https://spectator.org/buy-american-may-not-be-american/

President Trump asserts with patriotic fervor that his administration stands for America First, a commendable but somewhat ambiguous concept. What gives it meaning is the idea that Americans “buy American.” Presumably when facing consumer choices Americans should look for a label that keeps them at home.

The problem with the concept is that it defies an American commitment to the free market – an argument at least as patriotic as America First. Comparative advantage has been a hallmark of trade, notwithstanding many abuses and currency manipulation. Trade is never entirely fair since each of the trading partners seeks an advantage. Yet the market has a mechanism for addressing excesses, such as “dumping.”

If there is confusion in the market, it is over production provenance. The Ford, manufactured (or should I say assembled) in the United States has parts from at least 14 nations. Globalization, for better or worse, has changed the nature of trade and the method of manufacturing. We may choose to call a Ford an American car but it is no more American than a Volkswagen assembled in Mississippi. Even when one says I want to buy American because it is good for the country I love, you cannot be sure the product in question doesn’t have parts from abroad.

“Buy American” invariably requires an undesirable economic choice. Americans may be willing to pay a premium for a product manufactured here, but that is a choice rarely considered as Walmart’s gross sales suggests. Walmart, the nation’s largest retailer, accounts for eleven percent of the unfavorable trade balance with a reliance on electronic products manufactured elsewhere. Unless a tariff is imposed on these products, it is unlikely U.S. counterparts can compete on economic terms. That is a reality the Trump position seemingly overlooks.

Ultimately what is good for the nation is not easy to determine. Job loss is a real problem when U.S. companies are unable to compete. Free market economics often overlook the plight of a steel worker – to cite one example – whose company cannot compete against foreign rivals. This individual may be less interested in efficiency than job protection. On the other hand, an unfavorable balance of trade may have a salutary effect on the economy. The allocation of resources based on products from abroad allows the U.S. economy to concentrate on sectors likely to be most productive. Were it not for this internal market allocation, most Americans would be farmers today.

Clearly the free market is imperfect. Many are left behind in the process of rewards and penalties or what Schumpeter described as creative destruction. As I see it, mature economies must put an emphasis on retraining. The idea that an employee will hold the same position throughout his working life is anachronistic. In fact, while trade has resulted in some job loss, the real culprit in this matter is technological advancement. Yet most Americans are not Luddites and any referendum on the matter would favor advancement.

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ANTI-SEMITISM Comments turned off

The Month That Was – May 2017 Sydney Williams

By on June 5th, 2017

The recent Islamic-inspired killings in Manchester, Kabul and London make more urgent the President’s message on his first trip abroad.

The focus of Donald Trump’s first foreign trip as President was radical Islam. In Riyadh, Mr. Trump, a man the media calls an Islamophobe, was well received by leaders of fifty Muslim nations. He did not patronize them. He did not mince words. He told them we have a common enemy – Islamic extremists who have subsumed the Muslim religion for their purpose. He said: “This is not a battle between different faiths…or different civilizations…This is a battle between barbaric criminals who seek to obliterate human life and decent people, all in the name of religion.” In Jerusalem, he spoke frankly to the duplicitous Mahmoud Abbas and the stolid Benjamin Netanyahu, that living in peace is better than dying in war. To the Pope, he talked of radical Islam in terms of immigration. To the pampered elites in Brussels, he told them what they knew, but had ignored – that peace is not free, that security requires a strong NATO that must be funded. He told them they must live up to their financial and defense obligations. In Sicily, he met with the Group of Seven. Their main concern was the Paris Climate Accord – an “agreement,” as the New York Times put it, that “does not require any country to do anything.” – when the immediate risk is Islamic extremism.

Europe has been living in a cocoon. With the United States providing the bulk of their security needs, their welfare systems have blossomed. Birth rates are far below replacement rates, challenging economic growth and indicative of a pessimistic outlook. The situation cannot endure. Mr. Trump understands consequences of radical Islam better than do European leaders – that the risk is not just terrorists who maim and kill; it is the cultural challenges radical Islam poses for the West – an adherence to religious intolerance, the rise of multiculturalism and the nihilism that is its progeny. As Nietzsche wrote:

“Things fall apart; the center cannot hold;

Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,

…………………………………….

The best lack all conviction, while the worst

Are full of passionate intensity.”

The West needs people who will lead from the front; people who will show that patriotism does not mean retreat from the world. We need leaders who will restore values we are at risk of losing and who will provide a sense of morality – that evil must be confronted, good must be commended and peace can be achieved only through strength. We are a conglomeration of independent nations, each with its individual culture. Countries must respect one another; they must be mindful of one another’s laws. They should encourage trade, with peace as a goal; but all must understand that all compete for economic advantage. In terms of immigration, it is not pluralism we seek, but assimilation, so we can become one. This is not to say that one culture is superior to another, but nations have identities, which should be maintained. It is what makes them unique. As Pierre Manent, the French philosopher, once said regarding immigrants to America: “…people came from all over the world, not to be human beings, but to be citizens of the United States.”

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ISRAEL Comments turned off

MY SAY: THE SIX-DAY WAR JUNE 5, 1967 – JUNE 10, 1967

By on June 5th, 2017

The Six-Day War was fought between June 5 and 10, 1967 by Israel against the more populous and well armed neighboring states of Egypt, Jordan, and Syria, who were cheered on by all the Arab/Moslem states, heeding Nasser’s bloodthirsty calls for Israel’s annihilation. Against all odds Israel succeeded in lightning strikes that liberated and unified Jerusalem and Judea and Samaria (the West Bank of the Jordan River-The East Bank is comprised of Jordan), captured Gaza and the Sinai Peninsula and the Golan Heights.

For most of the ‘ignoranti” academics and journalists, that is when the history of the Israel/Arab conflict began…..a Jewish Palestinian land grab of Arab Palestinian land, and an ensuing “occupation.” The Balfour Declaration, the partitions of Palestine in 1922 and 1947, the 1948 war of Independence, the illegal occupation of Judea and Samaria by Jordan which trashed every single Jewish shrine in the area and limited access to Christian tourists, are all air-brushed.

Furthermore, Israel’s immediate offer to return all territories was categorically rebuffed by The Khartoum Resolution of 1 September 1967. The Arab League summit was convened in Khartoum, the capital of Sudan and was attended by eight Arab heads of state: Egypt, Syria, Jordan, Lebanon, Iraq, Algeria, Kuwait, and Sudan. The resolution is famous for containing (in the third paragraph) what became known as the “Three No’s”: “no peace with Israel, no recognition of Israel, no negotiations with the Jewish State.

United Nations Security Council Resolution 242 (S/RES/242) was adopted unanimously by the UN Security Council on November 22, 1967, in the aftermath of the Six-Day War. It was adopted under Chapter VI of the UN Charter.

It states: “Withdrawal of Israeli armed forces from territories occupied in recent conflict. The word “all” was deliberately omitted regarding territories.

It further calls for “Termination of all states of belligerency and acknowledgement of the sovereignty of every state in the region to live within secure and recognized boundaries.”

By relinquishing the Sinai peninsula (23,166 square miles) and Gaza (140.0 square miles) Israel has returned 92% of all lands captured in 1967 and fully met all its obligations to Resolution 242 and all the Arabs, including those in Judea and Samaria whose life is better and more free than in any other Arab nation.

God bless Israel- an amazing and inspiring democracy…rsk

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EDUCATION Comments turned off

Owning Their Future: The Joy of DECA, Part I By Jay Nordlinger

By on June 5th, 2017

Editor’s Note: In our May 29 issue, we published a piece by Jay Nordlinger about DECA. The organization held its big international conference in late April. This week, Mr. Nordlinger expands his piece in his Impromptus.

Sixteen thousand high-school students have converged here in Anaheim, Calif. — but they’re not going to Disneyland. Well, some of them are. But mainly they’re here to participate in a giant career-development conference. The theme of this conference is “Own Your Future.” The participants, the high-schoolers, are walking around in blue blazers, which have a patch that says “DECA.”

What does “DECA” stand for? “It stands for truth, justice, and the American way,” says John Fistolera, an official with DECA. It’s a good quip. “We’re about free enterprise,” says Fistolera, “and free enterprise is the American way.”

For decades, DECA has been known as “DECA,” plain and simple. (The word is pronounced “Decka” — like the record label, Decca.) But, once upon a time, the letters stood for “Distributive Education Clubs of America.”

The term “distributive education” is now antique — even more antique than “voc-ed” (for “vocational education”). The preferred term now is “career education,” or “career and technical education.” I myself had never heard the term “distributive education” until a few years ago, when I was interviewing Harold Hamm.

He is the 13th and last child of cotton sharecroppers in Oklahoma — and the leading oilman in the United States. When he was in high school, in the early 1960s, he took part in a D.E. program. It meant that you got school credit for working. And the classes you took probably related to the work you were doing. Young Hamm was working at a truck stop. And he wrote a paper on oil exploration.

His D.E. teacher was a man named Jewell Ridge. The teacher meant a lot to Hamm, and to many other students, most of them poor. When Ridge died, Hamm delivered a eulogy at his funeral. Recounting all this to me, Hamm got tears in his eyes.

For the piece I wrote about Harold Hamm, go here. (Incidentally, he has devoted a lot of the money he has earned to providing educational opportunity to the poor.)

DECA was founded in 1946, when going to college was not de rigueur. Young people needed skills for the work world. They still do, of course. But college is a box that increasingly must be checked. Most DECA students are college-bound. Nonetheless, the organization still serves kids who aren’t.

Here in Anaheim, I meet a young man who is going straight to the Air Force. Another one is joining the family business, to learn the ropes.

DECA has 200,000 members in 3,500 high schools. The members, I should make clear, are students. And they pay dues, as members of organizations often do. The dues are $8 a year. If a student can’t afford this sum, he can work for it, for example in a DECA-run school store.

There is also a college division, though smaller: 15,000 members in 275 colleges and universities.

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EDUCATION Comments turned off

The Campus Speech Police Come to Fresno State On campuses across the country, the same illiberal attitude toward disagreeable speech is growing, and the broader public must take notice. By Jake Curtis

By on June 5th, 2017

There is certainly no shortage of examples of progressive attempts to silence “unacceptable” political speech. From Charles Murray to Ann Coulter to David Horowitz, the Left has upped its game when it comes to censoring, and in some cases even silencing, its political opponents. Some Yale students have even gone so far as to “petition” for a repeal of the First Amendment in its entirety.

Nobody, however, has done more to reveal the true nature of modern progressives’ illiberalism than Fresno State professor Gregory Thatcher. Thanks to cell-phone video and a timely complaint filed by the Alliance Defending Freedom, Thatcher’s utter contempt for contrary political thought was exposed after he directed students to scrub pro-life messages that had been scrawled on campus sidewalks by the Fresno State chapter of Students for Life. This sort of mentality is endemic in American academia — and increasingly in society at large.

A month prior to the incident, Students for Life e-mailed the appropriate authorities at the University, asking for permission to move forward with their “chalking” plans. Their request made clear that the plan would aim to convey “different facts about development in the womb” and “celebrat[e] pregnant and parenting students’ hard work as they pursued their education” with messages such as “Support Pregnant and Parenting Students,” “Pregnant on Campus Initiative,” and “Know Your Title IX Rights.” Ultimately, Fresno State’s Event Review Committee approved the request, just as it had approved many other similar requests in the past.

Pursuant to the approval, the students proceeded to chalk a sidewalk near Fresno State’s library on the morning of May 2. The messages included provocative statements such as “love them both,” “choose life,” “save the baby humans,” and “unborn lives matter.”

As seen in the video, after Students for Life chalked around three dozen of these hate-filled messages, students who admitted they had been deputized by Thatcher began scrubbing the sidewalk. Professor Thatcher then came rushing out to the pro-life students, demanding they put an end to the messages and directing them to an unidentified “free-speech area.” After the pro-life students informed him that they had received university approval for their activities, Thatcher himself began scrubbing, and told the students, “You had permission to put it down. . . . I have permission to get rid of it. . . . This is our part of free speech.” As if that weren’t enough, Thatcher concluded by emphasizing that “college campuses are not free-speech areas.”

Let that sink in for a moment: “College campuses are not free-speech areas.” If Thatcher’s right about that, it’s only because he and his progressive ilk have succeeded in perverting the sacred academic mission of free and open inquiry beyond recognition. Thankfully, they don’t seem to have thus succeeded at Fresno State, which in the wake of the incident reaffirmed its policy that “freedom of expression is allowed in all outdoor spaces on campus,” essentially throwing Thatcher under the bus.

On campuses across the country, the same illiberal attitude toward disagreeable speech is growing, and the broader public must take notice.

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WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Ramadan in London The holy month returns with its sacred traditions. Bruce Bawer

By on June 5th, 2017

Yet again it has returned, the sublime and hallowed month of Ramadan – a beautiful and particularly sacred period that was an original part of the magnificent revelation handed down by Allah to the Prophet himself (peace be upon him) in the Holy Quran. Indeed, it has been widely postulated by many of our holiest of men that the precious text of that sacred volume was revealed to the Prophet himself (even more peace be upon him) during the very first Ramadan.

Needless to say, this is an exceedingly special and sanctified period of the year, a period of grace and majesty as well as of prayer and charity – a time during which the eternally beloved people of Allah are encouraged to demonstrate the depth and strength of their faith by engaging in sawm, or fasting, from dawn until sunset, as well as by strictly avoiding the intake of food and beverages, the use of tobacco, and any kind of carnal activity, although the standard acts of incestuous intercourse with minors and, naturally, the brutal sexual violation of the wives and offspring of infidels can be safely pursued per usual. Furthermore, it is to be hoped that the faithful will manifest the great extent of their self-restraint during this period by scheduling such activities as female genital mutilation, wife-beating, and the theologically obligatory honor killing of wives, sisters, and daughters for the hours following sundown – that is to say, after the iftar, the solemn supper taken in the wake of the sinking of the sun below the horizon, and before the suhur, the consecrated common meal that is directed to take place just prior to the rising of the sun.

It is particularly vital that the people of God make a special effort during the holy month of Ramadan not to engage in any act of unkindness, injustice, or insensitivity directed at their fellow believers – although, of course, the tossing of homosexuals from the roofs of buildings, the remorseless stoning to death of rape victims, and the violent execution of apostates may proceed as usual, preferably during the hours of darkness. It it crucial, moreover, to underscore that Ramadan is a time during which the followers of the Prophet are enjoined to take part in even a more extensive and profound degree of spiritual reflection than is their usual practice during the remainder of the year: they are, for instance, called upon to recite the special Ramadan prayers, known as the Tarawih, during the nights of this dearest of months, and even, if they are capable of such an accomplishment, to read prayerfully through the entire Holy Quran from start to finish. All of this contemplative and devout activity, to be sure, should not be permitted to distract the children of Allah from such equally urgent and virtuous tasks as mowing down infidels with cars, trucks, and other vehicles, shooting deadly rockets into the heart of urban areas where civilian non-believers are wont to gather, and committing sundry acts of mass annihilation and bloodshed involving such handy implements as machetes and Kalashnikovs.

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