Why, for the UN, Is One Mosque Massacre So Much Worse than Countless Church Massacres? by Raymond Ibrahim

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/18532/mosque-church-massacres

[I]f one non-Muslim attack on a mosque is enough for the UN to institutionalize a special day for Islam, what about the countless, often worse, Muslim attacks on non-Muslim places of worship? Why have they not elicited a similar response from the UN?

The above list, it should be noted, is hardly comprehensive; there have been many similar attacks on churches — in Egypt alone. But because there were few, if any, fatalities, they received little or no coverage in the Western press.

This dismissal is especially true for those remote — and, apparently, in the views of Western media, “unimportant” — regions, such as Nigeria, where Christians are being purged hourly in a Muslim-produced genocide. Thus, after noting that Muslims have eliminated 60,000 Christians between just 2009 and 2021, an August 2021 report states that, during that same time frame, Muslims also destroyed or torched 17,500 churches and 2,000 Christian schools. How many undocumented souls perished in those largely unreported terror attacks?

Therefore, the original question: If one non-Muslim attack on a mosque, which claimed 51 Muslim lives, was enough for the UN to establish an “international day to combat Islamophobia,” why have so many Muslim attacks on churches, which have claimed thousands of Christian lives, not been enough for the UN to establish an “international day to combat Christianophobia”?

The UN, it seems, would have us ignore and brush aside all these ongoing massacres of Christian church worshippers as unfortunate byproducts of misplaced “Muslim grievances” — and instead fixate on this one singular, if admittedly horrendous, incident.

For the UN, evidently, one incident constitutes a “pattern” — one in dire need of recognition and response. The response is to silence, ignore or attack all those who expose the heavily documented real pattern of abuse and violence against non-Muslims — which, make no mistake, is precisely what “combatting Islamophobia” is all about.

The United Nations recently named March 15 as “international day to combat Islamophobia.” That date was chosen because it witnessed one of the worst terror attacks on Muslims: on March 15, 2019, an armed Australian, Brenton Tarrant, entered two mosques in New Zealand and opened fire on unarmed and helpless Muslim worshippers; 51 were killed and 40 wounded.

Why Does Boston Buy Natural Gas from Russia? The environmental organizations have full veto power on all energy projects through the legal system. By Andy May

https://amgreatness.com/2022/05/29/why-does-boston-buy-natural-gas-from-russia/

Europe is vulnerable and needs our natural gas; prices are absurdly high and going higher. Yet, everyone in the oil and gas industry is afraid to invest any money, even if they have financing available. Who wants to start a 10- to 20-year natural gas project, whether it’s a gas field, pipeline, or LNG (liquified natural gas) terminal, when the current administration is saying it will shut you down in 10 years?

“You’ve got six years, eight years, no more than 10 years or so,” says climate envoy John Kerry. “No one should make it easy for the [natural] gas interests to be building out 30- or 40-year infrastructure.”

In the meantime, India has relaxed its environmental regulations and plans to double its use of coal. China has cut coal import tariffs to zero to ensure energy security and lower costs.

The United States has an abundance of coal and natural gas. Yet, natural gas is actually imported, at great cost, to Boston’s LNG facility from Russia, Canada, and the Caribbean due to the lack of pipeline capacity. In late January natural gas from the Algonquin City Gate Hub (near Boston) sold for over $20 per million BTUs, and more than $23 on the futures market. Natural gas from nearby Pennsylvania cost just $4 in January.

Plenty of cheap natural gas is available in West Virginia and Pennsylvania, a few hundred miles away; and pipelines to supply New England are mostly built, but have been shut down by environmental lawsuits and regulatory hurdles. Because of the regional dearth of natural gas pipelines, and its high price, many in New England are burning oil for heat and electric power plants, and burned more coal in 2021 than in 2020.

One of the many ironies is that carbon dioxide emissions—the bogeyman of radical environmentalists—have decreased where there is sufficient natural gas to replace coal. But any additional gas for New England, as noted, must come from foreign sources.

What Now, Ukraine? We are on new ground, in which a nonnuclear Western ally—understandably but dangerously—may now seek to destroy a nuclear Russia’s assets on Russian soil or in neutral or even Russian seas. By Victor Davis Hanson

https://amgreatness.com/2022/05/29/what-now-ukraine/

It was supposed to be a clear-cut, unambiguous invasion. Vladimir Putin’s much larger, richer, and more bellicose Russia staged a shock-and-awe attack on a much smaller, poorer Ukraine. He intended to decapitate the government in Kyiv. Then he would annex the eastern half of the country, and quickly consolidate his easy wins in preparation to ratchet up pressure to force western Ukraine into the Russian Federation.

The rest is history. The Russian military proved ill-equipped and ill-supplied. It was poorly led, with a high percentage of low-morale, conscript troops. Russia had no viable strategic plan to capture, much less hold, the Ukrainian capital. Ukraine was Russia’s version of our Kabul—but tens of thousands of deaths added to the equation.

Russian strategists naïvely believed NATO would become paralyzed in mutual recriminations and fear and follow the usual German prompt of appeasement. In fact, NATO united precisely because of the dire worries over further Russian aggression, as the alliance pressured Germany to back off from its self-interested Russian romance.

Sanctions seldom have a good record of quickly stopping a war, and they have not so far in this instance, either.

But Russia’s naked use of force, its war crimes against civilians, and pathetic propaganda turned off most of the Western world and it, in turn, boycotted, sanctioned, and embargoed Moscow. These porous and slow-moving efforts nonetheless will eventually make it even more difficult for Russia to muster the economic and military wherewithal to sustain a stalled invasion.

A Lack of Morality and Courage Bing West

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/a-lack-of-morality-and-courage/

With shock and dismay, I read this statement that General Mark Milley, the chairman of the joint chiefs, made on May 23:

Many countries in the world depend on Ukrainian grain. As for what we’re doing about it, we don’t have any naval assets on the Black Sea. We don’t intend to. . . . It’s a no-go for commercial shipping.

Note the use of the pronoun “we.” Milley is the top military adviser to the president. So it is reasonable to assume that the “we” refers to both General Milley and President Biden.

There is a moral component to Milley’s words. Both the president and the chairman profess to be devout in their religion. Tens of thousands of the world’s poor will starve to death because, as Milley put it, “we don’t intend to place naval assets in the Black Sea.” Thus were morality and compassion dismissed.

More important, the president and the chairman are charged with defending our beloved nation. Putting morality aside, we expect courage from those whose job is to protect us. By fleeing from the Black Sea when Putin sailed in, they jointly abandoned the bedrock principle of freedom of the seas. No commercial shipping, General Milley declared, not with Putin glowering. And so they have established the precedent for Xi to push us out of the South China Sea or the Taiwan Straits.

Both morality (feeding the poor) and courage (standing up for the principles of our nation) have been abandoned in the Black Sea. President Biden and General Milley’s peremptory decision to give up is discouraging. The least they could have done was organize a humanitarian convoy, including the United States and many other nations, to escort out the grain ships.

Why haven’t they done it? Do they believe that Putin would go to war against dozens of countries in order to starve the poor? Sadly, our president and the chairman of the joint chiefs took counsel of their fears. It is past time to put aside fear and do the right thing.

Western Civ Has Got to Stay Douglas Murray

https://www.nationalreview.com/magazine/2022/06/13/western-civ-has-got-to-stay/?utm_source=recirc-desktop&utm_medium=homepage&utm_campaign=top-of-nav&utm_content=hero-module

Editor’s note: This essay is adapted from Mr. Murray’s new book The War on the West.

Our hemispheric tradition should contemplate itself before continuing the suicide

It is now over 30 years since the Reverend Jesse Jackson led a crowd of protesters at Stanford University with the chant “Hey hey, ho ho, Western Civ has got to go.” Back then, Jackson and his followers were protesting against Stanford University’s introductory humanities program “Western Culture.” They proposed that there was something wrong with teaching the Western canon and the Western tradition. But it was what happened next that was so striking. The university swiftly gave in, replacing the study of Western culture with the study of many cultures. What happened at Stanford in 1987 was a sign of everything to come.

In the decades that followed, nearly all of academia in the Western world followed Stanford’s lead. The history of Western thought, art, philosophy, and culture became an ever less communicable subject. Indeed, it became something of an embarrassment: the product of a bunch of “dead white males,” to use just one of the charming monikers that entered the language.

Since then, every effort to keep alive, let alone revive, the teaching of Western civilization has met with sustained hostility, ridicule, and even violence. Academics who have sought to study Western nations in a neutral light have been prevented from doing their work and subjected to intimidation and defamation, including from colleagues. In Australia, the Ramsay Centre for Western Civilisation, whose board is chaired by former prime minister John Howard, has had great trouble finding any universities to partner with. And that tells us something about the speed of this great shift. Just a couple of decades ago, a course in the history of Western civilization was commonplace. Today it is so disreputable that you can’t pay universities to do it.

Pelosi’s husband charged with DUI By Diane Ruggiero and Lauren Fox,

https://www.cnn.com/2022/05/29/politics/paul-pelosi-arrested-dui/index.html

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s husband was arrested and charged with driving under the influence after being involved in a collision Saturday night, law enforcement officials said.

Paul Pelosi, 82, was arrested at 11:44 p.m. PT and charged with driving under the influence and driving with a blood alcohol content of 0.08% or higher, according to the Napa County Criminal Justice Network’s public booking report. Both charges are misdemeanors.
TMZ was the first to report the arrest.
Pelosi was attempting to cross SR-29 when his 2021 Porsche was hit by a 2014 Jeep traveling northbound on the road, according to a collision report from the California Highway Patrol, which doesn’t identify either driver as being at fault in the crash. Troopers were called to the scene just before 10:30 p.m., the report said.

There were no injuries reported in the crash and the Jeep’s driver was not arrested, the report said.

Will Senate Bill 1331 limit itself to stopping drunk drivers? By Dale Lowdermilk

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2022/05/will_senate_bill_1331_limit_itself_to_stopping_drunk_drivers.html

Is Senate Bill 1331 the path to virtually unlimited power for the Biden Department of Transportation headed by arch-leftist Pete Buttigieg? The bill, entitled “Reduce Impaired Driving for Everyone Act of 2021” (i.e., the RIDE Act of 1921) was ostensibly introduced to allow the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) to improve vehicle safety standards and prevent drunk or otherwise impaired driving. However, its broad language doesn’t stop there.

The Bill’s stated purpose is

To require the Secretary of Transportation, acting through the Administrator of the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, to prescribe a Federal motor vehicle safety standard for advanced drunk and impaired driving prevention technology, and for other purposes. (Emphasis added.)

With the usual good intentions of curbing DUIs and enhancing crime controls, if passed, starting in 2026, SB-1331 will require that all new cars come equipped with tamper-proof software and factory “kill-switch” components. The bureaucrats hiding behind the Department of Transportation (DOT) and Department of Human Services (HHS), are claiming that a new-and-improved “kill-switch” mandate will save us (from ourselves) reduce freeway carnage and prevent high-speed chases.

As our instincts tell us, “kill-switches” intended for intoxicated drivers may start having expanded uses. They might stop post-game auto accidents, including illegal drag racing; drinking and road rage (or ecstatic celebration), which often follow a nationally televised major sporting event. Even worse, imagine a terrified woman in her car, swerving away from a dangerous situation, only to have the government bring her car to a dead—and we mean “dead”—stop.

Moreover, you can readily imagine that this law is a gateway law to ever more government micromanagement, leading to a horde of collateral regulations. Perhaps we will see Federal Fat Laws, intended to prevent at-risk individuals from purchasing bacon, banana crème pies, chocolate-chip pancakes, or milkshakes.

During times of inflation, a Federal Investment Authority could easily be spawned from SB-1331, requiring government approval before inept (senior) citizens are allowed to spend more than $500 from their retirement or bank accounts. With millions of new skin cancers annually, who would object to a Federal Sunburn Law?

Can the West fix itself? The war in Ukraine may be just the first test of the western alliance Douglas Murray

https://spectatorworld.com/topic/fractured-west-fix-itself/

There are many ways to fracture a people. But one of the best is to destroy all the remaining ties that bind them. To persuade them that to the extent they have anything of their own, it is not very special, and in the final analysis, hardly worth preserving. This is a process that has gone on across the western world for over a generation: a remorseless, daily assault on everything that most of us were brought up to believe was good about ourselves.

Take Britain’s national heroes — the people who used to form the epicenter of my country’s feelings of national pride. Twenty years ago, Winston Churchill easily topped the BBC’s national survey identifying who the nation thought the Greatest Briton. Today whenever the BBC runs a piece about Churchill it includes the “case for the prosecution”: a set of tendentious and fallacious arguments now frequently made against him. This has consequences. When the outburst of iconoclasm crossed the Atlantic in the summer 2020, after the murder of George Floyd, Churchill statues were among the first to be assaulted. Indeed they were attacked so often that the statue in Parliament Square was boxed up, and only got unboxed when the French president arrived in London for the day.

It isn’t just Churchill who gets this treatment. Almost everyone in British history does. Again and again, largely due to our importing some of the worst ideas in modern American life, we are told that we need to scour our past and purge whatever fails to satisfy our current urges.

Europe: Demography Governs Democracy by Giulio Meotti

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/18567/europe-demography-democracy

There is a replacement of civilization and the media is not even covering it.

“By 2050, 50 percent of the French population will be mixed.” — Jean-Luc Mélenchon, Radio Classique, May 17, 2021.

“The mayor of Grenoble adopts the arguments and rhetorical formulas of the Muslim Brotherhood: talking about freedom to impose sexism”. — Céline Pina, Le Figaro, May 4, 2022.

This wokeism talk pretends to be “inclusive” but carefully excludes entire groups on the clearly racist basis of skin color (whites) or ethnicity (Jews). Wokeism, filled with progressive, racist talk, pretends not to be racist but meanwhile is imbued with the syrupy racist ideology of “diversity” — which advocates replacing a society by immigration. It also promotes political correctness, a deadly virus that paralyzes the vital reflexes of the West. Wokeism is the ideal ground for the debut of political Islam in Europe.

This ever-increasing percentage of Turkish, Bosnian, Kosovar, Iranian and Iraqi politicians in Germany will increasingly influence the choices of the first European power in matters of immigration and multiculturalism.

“What we see in big cities today will be normal for the whole country in the future. In a city like Frankfurt, we will have between 65 percent and 70 percent.” — Herbert Brücker, head of migrant research at the Federal Institute for Employment Research, Die Welt, April 11, 2019.

“The massive vote for Mélenchon is proof that the strategy of community victimization that began in the 1990s produced what it was intended to produce in one or two generations. Mélenchon gathered a large part of the Muslim vote, which obviously does not make it a Muslim or Islamist party, but only a ‘cuckoo’ party. Like the cuckoo hatching its eggs in the nest of a bird of another species, a cuckoo party shelters and protects ideas that are not its own. The Muslim Brothers have a strategy that they expressed in their plans from the 1980s: to form an alliance with the most docile parties to propagate their ideas”. — Florence Bergeaud-Blackler, anthropologist, Marianne.net. April 22, 2022.

There is a replacement of civilization and the media is not even covering it.

The Economic Cost of Eliminating Fossil Fuels By Andy May

https://wattsupwiththat.com/2022/05/28/the-economic-cost-of-eliminating-fossil-fuels/

The debate on how much impact humanity has on climate change continues. As nearly everyone knows by now, there is no observational evidence that humans have a significant impact on climate, so the debate is mostly over which future climate projection is likely. It also isn’t clear that the changes we might cause are bad, most of the evidence suggests that additional CO2 and warming have been beneficial so far and will likely be beneficial in the future. But what if we do decide to eliminate fossil fuels? What is the economic impact?

Gregor Semieniuk, and nine co-authors have just published an open-access paper in Nature Climate Change discussing this option. The net present value of future lost fossil fuel profits exceeds $1.4 trillion, with $0.4 trillion lost in the U.S. alone. Compare this to the loss of about $2 trillion in U.S. home value during 2008, according to Zillow, due to the housing crisis. Note the two numbers are not directly comparable, as we are comparing fossil fuel profits to total home value, not homeowner’s equity. Average 2021 U.S. home equity is about $153,000 and the average cost of a home is about $374,900. This ratio reduces the $2 trillion-dollar 2008 loss in home value to a loss of 0.8 trillion in home equity. We could expect a serious economic shock from the loss of oil, gas, and coal assets.

Most of the risk falls on private investors who are overwhelmingly in OECD countries, especially in the U.S. and U.K. To better put this into perspective, the OECD GDP for 2021 was $59 trillion and the U.S. GDP was $21 trillion.