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A Great Replacement – and a Great Disgrace Britain bans another truth-teller. Bruce Bawer

https://www.frontpagemag.com/a-great-replacement-and-a-great-disgrace/

It’s said that one reason why the British government is so reluctant to address the grooming-gangs horror, so hesitant to cut down on Islamic immigration, and so incapable of expelling even the most dangerous Muslim criminals, is that the government itself has been heavily infiltrated by Muslims. I’m not just talking about the people in high-profile posts, such as Shabana Mahmood, Lord Chancellor and Secretary of State for Justice; Humza Yousaf, First Minister of Scotland; Sadiq Khan, Mayor of London; the dozens of Muslims in Parliament; or the Muslim mayors of Birmingham, Leeds, Sheffield, Blackburn, Oxford, Luton, Oldham, and Rochdale, among other cities. I’m also talking about Muslims in the Civil Service and Home Office, in the upper echelons of the police services, Crown Prosecution Services, and other such agencies. And let’s not forget the estimable Sir Hamid Patel, who just last month was named chair of the Office for Standards in Education, Children’s Services and Skills (Ofsted).

At first I was reluctant to believe that there are quite so many British Muslims in positions of power as some people maintain. Then something like the following happens, and it seems a hell of a lot easier to believe.

What happened is this: Renaud Camus, the 78-year-old French philosopher, author, and intellectual, was banned from entering the UK. Who, you may ask, is Renaud Camus? Well, back when the world was young, Camus was what the French call a ’68-er – a radical on the barricades, the Gallic equivalent of an American hippie, a bookish lad playing at revolution. He was also a leading figure in France’s gay-rights movement. His 1979 novel Tricks, a chronicle of intimate same-sex liaisons, was a bestseller and a critical sensation. The critic Roland Barthes gave it his imprimatur. Gore Vidal praised it in the New York Review of Books.

But no, Camus isn’t being kept out of Britain because of any of that. Tricks, and the civil unrest of May 1968, are, after all, long ago and far away. Nor is Camus (no relation, by the way, to Albert Camus, the Nobel Prize-winning author of The Stranger and The Plague) being punished for having been an active member of the Socialist Party in the 1970s and 80s. How many French intellectuals, after all, weren’t socialists in the 1970s and 80s? Nor is Camus – a man of wide and deep learning – being banned for having accumulated more diplomas than you can fit on a single wall, including degrees in French literature, philosophy, political science, and the history of law.

No, Camus’s offense is having published the 2011 book Le Grand Remplacement (The Great Replacement), which warned that Europe was undergoing, as the title put it, a great replacement – a massive influx of non-Western immigrants who, owing to early marriages and high reproductive rates, were gradually taking the place of native Europeans who were marrying late, if at all, and, in most cases, having no more than one or two children.

The tragedy of Pope Francis How this ‘instrument of God’ too often became an instrument of the global elites. Brendan O’Neill

https://www.spiked-online.com/2025/04/21/the-tragedy-of-pope-francis/

Pope Francis is dead. The 266th Bishop of Rome passed this morning at 7.35am. He was the first Latin American and the first Jesuit to occupy the papacy. It is a testament to his tenacity in the face of illness that he managed to bid Happy Easter to thousands of worshippers in St Peter’s Square yesterday, just hours before he ‘returned to the House of the Father’, as the Vatican described it. Yet for all of Francis’s strength of will, his 12-year-long pontificate was ultimately a tragic one. Rome’s ‘instrument of God’ too often let himself be an instrument of the global elites, and both faith and politics suffered as a consequence.

He was born Jorge Bergoglio in Buenos Aires in 1936, the son of Italian immigrants who had journeyed to Argentina to escape Mussolini’s fascist dictatorship. There’s sweet historical music in the fact that their son later returned to Italy to take up the holiest office in Catholicism: he was elected pope in 2013 following the resignation of Benedict XVI. He sought to bring to the Vatican the virtues he’d embraced as Bishop of Buenos Aires: love for the poor and marginalised. But he was haunted his whole life by accusations that he had abetted the military dictatorship that ruled Argentina from 1976 to 1983. He was head of Argentina’s Jesuit Order back then, and the order backed the junta.

This is the tragedy of Francis: having, in part, been an instrument of the mercenary rulers of Argentina, he later let himself be an instrument for the equally mercenary if not quite as tyrannical influencers of the cultural establishment. In the eyes of the Conclave that elected him, Francis’s pontificate would be a ‘corrective’ to that of Benedict XVI. Where Benedict had been a traditionalist, Francis would be a reformer. Where Benedict was fiercely intellectual, Francis would be humble. Where Benedict waged ceaseless war on the ‘dictatorship of relativism’, on that cursed ideological cult that recognises ‘nothing as definitive’, Francis famously said in response to a query about gay men serving as priests: ‘Who am I to judge?’

Iran Murdering Pakistanis: ‘They Were Slaughtered Like Sheep. If We Stay Silent Now, It Means We Are Sheep Too.’ by Kaswar Klasra

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/21566/iran-pakistan-murders

Pakistanis are asking why these terrorists, these enemies of peace, continue to find shelter inside Iran. For years, groups like the BNA and its sibling, the Balochistan Liberation Army (BLA), have launched attacks…

Behind the scenes, officials acknowledge the seriousness of the moment. There is discussion not just about diplomacy, but about deterrence.

The Iranian regime, meanwhile, remains cagey. Their official statement condemned the attack but offered little detail about any arrests or investigations.

The international community has remained muted. Western governments — so quick to condemn terrorism elsewhere — have yet to speak out. There have been no statements from the UN.

In Islamabad, the Foreign Office is reportedly considering a range of responses, from diplomatic measures to more direct action…. Among cabinet members, there is now open debate: What is the cost of silence? What is the risk of restraint?

ISLAMABAD — The workshop was nothing more than a room carved out of metal and concrete. A few oil drums, rusted toolboxes, and eight tattered mattresses stood lined up against the wall. These were not barracks or hideouts—just a makeshift dormitory for eight Pakistani laborers who had crossed into Iran looking for honest work. That night, they were exhausted after working through the day repairing broken-down trucks in the remote Iranian village of Haiz Abad. They had no enemies, no weapons — just calloused hands and quiet dreams of returning home with enough money to feed their families. But as they slept on April 12, darkness brought something other than rest.

The eight men — citizens of Pakistan, fathers, sons, brothers — were found with their hands bound, and their bodies riddled with bullets. Executed. Slaughtered. Their corpses were discovered in the same positions in which they had gone to sleep, the narrow room now soaked in red. The murderers? The Baloch Nationalist Army (BNA) — a terrorist outfit long known to have sanctuaries inside Iranian territory — was quick to claim responsibility. They had carried out the massacre on Iranian soil. And Iran’s regime, days later, still has no answers, no arrests, no accountability.

Iran’s Endless Rounds of Negotiation: Delay, Deceive, Cheat by Majid Rafizadeh

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/21565/iran-endless-negotiation

The Iranian regime’s primary objective remains preserving its power. The mullahs see their nuclear program as the key to their survival.

Any agreement should aim for nothing less than the total and permanent dismantlement of Iran’s nuclear capabilities. This means no enrichment, no reprocessing, no heavy-water reactors, and no stockpiles – anywhere on the planet — of enriched uranium.

The dismantlement and enforcement processes must not be outsourced to any international organizations or foreign governments…. Ensuring compliance must lie directly with the United States and its most trusted regional ally, Israel. Both countries have the intelligence capabilities, military readiness and political will to ensure that any nuclear dismantlement is not only thorough but irreversible.

Rounds of negotiations, verbal commitments or limited restrictions are invitations to cheat. The mullahs’ plan is one of delay and deception. America’s plan must be not to let them.

The Trump administration, after signaling a preference for dialogue over confrontation, is engaging in renewed a diplomatic effort to end Iran’s nuclear program. President Donald J. Trump has made clear that he is not seeking war. “I would prefer to make a deal,” he stated recently, “because I’m not looking to hurt Iran.”

Given the devastating costs of war, focusing on negotiation rather than on military intervention is a noble and responsible course of action. The Iranian regime, however, is not new to such diplomatic games of chess. The mullahs have mastered the art of prolonging negotiations: appearing cooperative while covertly advancing their strategic interests, especially developing ballistic missiles and nuclear weapons, and operating proxies in the region, such as Hamas, Hezbollah and the Houthis, not to mention Iran’s own Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) as well as smaller militias.

Questions for Carney That the legacy media aren’t gonna ask. by Lloyd Billingsley

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm-plus/questions-for-carney/

Before Canadians cast their votes on April 28 they might run a few questions by Prime Minister Mark Carney, starting with the man Carney has already replaced. For example, did Prime Minister Justin Trudeau ever do anything with which you disagreed? Carney hasn’t made that clear, and there’s more to it.

During the Covid pandemic, the Trudeau government froze the bank accounts of protesting truckers. Does you approve of that action? Does it square with your concept of free speech and civil liberties?

Do you share Justin Trudeau’s admiration for China’s “basic dictatorship?” Did the People’s Republic of China ever do anything with which you disagreed? The PRC maintains police stations in 30 countries, including Canada. Is that a wise policy? Has Canada ever collaborated in any way with China’s military?

Do you agree with David Frum that Pierre Trudeau was “a bad man and a disastrous prime minister?” As Frum explained, Pierre Trudeau “traveled to Josef Stalin’s Soviet Union to participate in regime-sponsored propaganda activities.” Was that a wise choice on Trudeau’s part? Why did the Canadian Security and Intelligence Service destroy secret files on Pierre Trudeau? Can the CSIS be trusted?

According to Justin Trudeau, “Fidel Castro was a larger than life leader who served his people for almost half a century.” Do you agree with Justin? Did Fidel Castro ever do or say anything with which you disagreed? Why does Justin Trudeau look so much like Fidel Castro?

Israel Understands the Enemy It Faces — Do the Rest of Us? Douglas Murray

https://www.nationalreview.com/magazine/2025/06/israel-understands-the-enemy-it-faces-do-the-rest-of-us/?utm_source=recirc-desktop&utm_medium=homepage&utm_campaign=top-of-nav&utm_content=hero-module

From the book On Democracies and Death Cults: Israel and the Future of Civilization, by Douglas Murray. Copyright © 2025 by Douglas Murray. Reprinted by permission of Broadside Books, an imprint of Harper Collins Publishers.

Iran against the West

Today the government most responsible for spreading the accusation that Israel is expansionist and colonialist is the revolutionary Islamic government in Iran, which has spent recent years assiduously expanding its colonies. What has Gaza become but a colony of Iran? What has Iraq become since Iran moved into the vacuum left by America after the overthrow of Saddam Hussein? Or Yemen? Or Syria, into which Iran had poured Hezbollah and other forces? Iran and its proxies and mouthpieces in the West have spent years accusing Israel of being a colonial, expansionist state while all the time expanding and colonizing everywhere they can reach in the region. Why did the mullahs order Hezbollah to engage in the Syrian civil war except to prop up Syria as a forward base of Iran? And what of Lebanon, which even in 2006 still had a government able to distance itself from the actions of Iran’s army, Hezbollah. By the time Hamas started its October 2023 war against Israel and Hezbollah joined in, Lebanon had become practically a colony of Iran — with Hezbollah ruling the country by terror and setting up its weaponry among Lebanese civilians. For years Hezbollah had set up checkpoints at Beirut Airport for passport control and had acted as the government of that country, whether the people wanted that or not. And there is much evidence that they do not.

Everywhere the same rule holds. Groups like Hamas that delight in their bloodlust accuse the Israelis of being insatiable killers. Palestinian groups and their supporters who encourage their youth to view death through “martyrdom” as the highest form of valor claim that the Jews are bloodthirsty child-killers. People who use rape as a weapon of war accuse the Israelis of insatiably raping prisoners in Israeli jails.

On January 31, 1979, a flight took off from Charles de Gaulle Airport in Paris. Its destination was Tehran, where it would land the following day. The plane was carrying the Ayatollah Khomeini, a fanatical Shiite leader who had been living in exile from his native Iran for more than 14 years. His return heralded the end of the reign of the shah (Mohammad Reza Pahlavi), the overthrow of the shah’s government, and the turning point of the Islamic Revolution in Iran. Khomeini and his supporters swiftly seized power, took 52 American citizens and diplomats hostage at the American Embassy in Tehran, and proceeded to kill their domestic political opponents. This included the communists and trade unionists who had struggled alongside the Islamists to overthrow the shah.

How do the lawyers defending Hamas sleep at night? A British law firm is regurgitating the terrorists’ vile propaganda. Luke Gittos

https://www.spiked-online.com/2025/04/17/how-do-the-lawyers-defending-hamas-sleep-at-night/

I didn’t know what to expect when I decided to read the now-infamous application to ‘de-proscribe’ Hamas. This is the application lodged by a British law firm last week to remove Hamas from the UK government’s list of banned organisations under the Terrorism Act. The lawyers have asked home secretary Yvette Cooper to make it legal to openly support Hamas in the UK, given that the act makes expressing support for any proscribed organisation a criminal offence.

I was driven to read the application in full after seeing a bizarre interview on Talk earlier this week with one of the lawyers involved, barrister Franck Magennis. He seemed affronted when the presenter asked him how he sleeps at night. A perfectly reasonable question, given that Magennis acknowledged it was his decision to represent Hamas, an organisation responsible for the largest pogrom of Jews since the Holocaust. Hamas is not a client he was professionally obliged to take on.

In response, Magennis accused the presenter of putting ‘a target on [his] back’ by falsely conflating him and his client. He even suggested that the presenter ‘may receive a call from the police’. (It is worth noting that, on 7 October 2023, Magennis changed his profile picture on X to a bulldozer crashing through a border fence and tweeted ‘Victory to the intifada’, although this has since been deleted.)

As a criminal lawyer who defends just about anybody, I know a bit of what this barrister is talking about. I am not a murderer because I defend murderers. Everyone should be entitled to legal representation. If the Nazi leadership could rely on Britain’s top legal brains during the Nuremberg trials, then there is no reason, in principle, why Hamas should not avail themselves of the best and brightest, either. So I decided to take the application seriously, and read it in good faith.

It turns out the ‘application’ spouts Hamas propaganda from the very first line. It reads: ‘For more than a century, the British state has been responsible for colonisation, ethnic cleansing and apartheid in Palestine.’ This is hardly the impartial, objective language of the courtroom. It takes Hamas’s warped view of history and repeats it unquestioningly. It refers to Israel, quoting a former British governor of Palestine, as a ‘little loyal Jewish Ulster’. It casts Israel as illegitimate, claiming that requiring Hamas to accept Israel’s right to exist would be an ‘unreasonable demand’. In other words, Hamas should be entitled to continue to fight for the eradication of the only democracy in the Middle East and the world’s only Jewish State. It refers to Israel in quotation marks, to ‘signal that it is a colonial term, reflective of a racist attempt to impose an ethno-exclusionary state on a pluralistic and ethnically diverse population’. These are the kinds of things you’d expect to hear from a batshit student in a sixth-form common room, rather than a lawyer in a courtroom.

Texas Recognizes “Pakistan Day” As Pakistan Destroys Human Rights by Uzay Bulut

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/21551/texas-recognizes-pakistan-day

The problem is that at the same time as Texas was celebrating “Pakistan Day”, in Pakistan, Christian citizens were being arrested and sentenced to death for “blasphemy,” and Muslims were abducting young Christian girls to sexually abuse, forcibly “marry,” and coerce into converting to Islam.

Pakistan’s national and provincial parliaments have given their consent to these atrocities…. Christians, Hindus and other non-Muslim communities in Pakistan have been enduring increased levels of violence and persecution….

Under Pakistan’s blasphemy laws, anyone found guilty of insulting Islam, its prophet or other religious figures can be imprisoned and sentenced to death…. The police are often biased and refuse to file reports from Christians and Hindus.

The Texas House of Representatives might instead have dedicated March 23 to Pakistan’s abduction victims and abused children.

“The introduction of a ‘Single National Curriculum’ in schools denigrates religious minorities and enforces the teaching of the Quran and subjects like Mathematics and Science in an Islamized manner. Thus, religion is permeating school education… Radical Islamic groups are flourishing… Such groups are innumerable and even a ban will only make them re-organize, re-brand and re-emerge. The default option for dealing with radical Islamic movements (who are able to mobilize millions for street demonstrations) is appeasement and even accommodation…” — Open Doors, December 2024.

“Occupations that are deemed low, dirty, and degrading—such as cleaning sewers or working in brick kilns—are reserved for Christians by the authorities. Many believers are referred to as ‘chura’, a derogatory term meaning ‘filthy’. Christians are also vulnerable to being trapped in bonded labor.” — Open Doors, 2024.

Have Pakistani Texans done anything to help the victims of these horrific human rights abuses in Pakistan or raised awareness of them in any way while in the US? In what areas have they effectively cooperated with the US government? Have they used their resources to fight Islamic terror groups; if so, to what extent? Has Pakistan been a great US ally? What has the government of Pakistan actually done to deserve being celebrated with an official day by the Texas House of Representatives?

China and Those Not-So-Rare Earths Graham Pinn

https://quadrant.org.au/news-opinions/qed/china-and-those-not-so-rare-earths/

“As ideology dictates renewable electricity sources, and conflict looms, these rare earths are fundamental. Demand for graphite, lithium, cobalt and manganese is surging but, without meeting the increase in future demand for REE’s, we cannot keep the lights on, never mind fight a war.”

As demand increases and China restricts supply, rare earth availability is causing increasing political tensions. Donald Trump is looking for supplies in Greenland, in Ukraine, and in Australia.

Rare earths, also known as rare earth elements (REE’s), are a set of 17 nearly indistinguishable, lustrous heavy metals, most with unpronounceable names. As it happens, it is something of a misnomer to describe them as rare because they are actually quite common. Cerium, for example, is the planet’s 25th most abundant element, even more plentiful than copper.

Compared with other minerals such as iron or bauxite, however, they are thinly spread, making mining difficult, with processing requiring enormous amounts of raw ore. They do at least tend to occur together, but this makes their separation another production issue. Current methods of extraction result in toxic contamination of soil and water and, further complicating matters, deposits are usually found with thorium and uranium, meaning the 2000 tonnes of waste typically generated to produce a single tonne of REE is radioactive. This plunges environmentalists into a state ongoing cognitive dissonance: while they hail the production of CO2-free “clean-energy” minerals as key to “renewable” power sources, they must also countenance the pollution and environmental degradation extraction causes. Fortunately, consistency has never been a prerequisite for the green movement.

Rare earths have diverse applications in electrical and electronic components, lasers, glass, and industrial processes. In the modern age of so-called clean energy, their use has assumed critical importance for batteries, the magnets essential for electric vehicles and wind turbines, not to mention drones, missiles and other military hardware. The global demand for REE’s continues to soar and is expected to at least double again over the next ten years, leaving a supply gap.

The UK’s free-speech crisis is about to get so much worse The Crime and Policing Bill could unleash terrifying new censorship powers. Andrew Tettenborn

https://www.spiked-online.com/2025/04/13/the-uks-free-speech-crisis-is-about-to-get-so-much-worse/

The UK government’s Crime and Policing Bill poses a formidable threat to free speech in the UK. The bill, which is currently at the committee stage in the House of Commons, promises to keep our streets ‘safe’ by giving courts a new power to issue ‘respect orders’. These orders are potentially so draconian and wide-ranging that they could well end up being used for very different purposes – including silencing anyone who says anything online that the authorities disapprove of.

Under the bill, police, local authorities and a number of other bodies will be empowered to ask courts for ‘respect orders’ that can either prohibit someone from doing or require them to do ‘anything described in the order’. You read that right – anything. The only condition that needs to be satisfied is that the court thinks, on a balance of probabilities, that the person ‘has caused, or is likely to cause, harassment, alarm or distress to any person’. This essentially amounts to ‘precrime’. There won’t even be a need to warn people. The court can issue an interim order without notice. Once the order (which can be indefinite in duration) is there, breaching it carries an unlimited fine or two years in prison.

This spectacularly authoritarian measure is supposedly aimed at street hoodlums, but it is not restricted in any meaningful way. It is a racing certainty that the courts will not apply any limits to its scope.

This bill is a particular threat to free speech. Already, you have to worry that police might turn up at your door over a controversial social-media post. At least at present, the poster has a reasonable chance of defending themselves. While our hate-speech laws are vaguely worded and authoritarian, at least the onus is on the authorities to investigate and prosecute.

This changes dramatically under the Crime and Policing Bill. If it passes, all the police would have to do is persuade a county court judge that people are distressed by the post in question. Then, the poster can be compelled, on pain of prosecution, to delete the offending content, not refer to the subject concerned online again and even stay off social media altogether. They might even be forced to provide an official with the passwords to all of their internet-enabled devices.

This law could be used to attack practically anyone who criticises or makes life difficult for their elected officials. It would be straightforward for, say, a local council to obtain such a ‘respect order’, telling a pesky critic to pipe down indefinitely or face possible imprisonment.