RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2025/06/the_grand_deception_of_islam_as_a_religion_of_peace.html

A database search of 12 million books published in the 300 years before 9/11 reveals only one instance of the phrase “Islam is a religion of peace.” It appears in fiction and is spoken by Ayatollah Mahmoud Haji Daryaei, an Iranian leader in Tom Clancy’s thriller Executive Orders.

But the dangerous notion that Islam is peaceful has been so frequently reiterated by world leaders, clerics, and the liberal media-academia complex that it has taken on the status of COWDUNG—a facetious near-acronym for ‘conventional wisdom of the dominant group.’

Denying 1,400 years of history, these apologists would have us believe that extremist Islam is a perversion. Their sanitized version presents Islam’s prime motif of violent jihad—or religious war against infidels—as an individual’s “inner struggle” for spiritual growth.

To expose these falsehoods—which have circled the globe before the truth even got out of bed—conservative authors Tommy Robinson and Peter McLoughlin wrote Mohammed’s Koran: Why Muslims Kill for Islam. First published in 2017, the bestselling book saw a second edition and faced an Amazon ban in 2019. (Adolf Hitler’s Mein Kampf and many terror manuals remain available.)

In light of Robinson’s early release from a British prison a few days ago, an overview of this important book seems fitting. The authors assert that the key to understanding what the Koran signifies to Muslims is naskh, an interpretive guideline indicating that in the Koran, what comes after negates what precedes it. Later verses remain valid even if they contradict earlier ones.

By presenting the Koran in reverse chronological order, the authors allow us to see how quotes on peace and the absence of compulsion in religion that Islam’s apologists cherry-pick hold little significance because they precede more violent dictates. The authors utilize a widely popular 1930 translation of the Koran by Muhammad Marmaduke Pickthall, a British convert to Islam, while shedding light on a deception it created. More on that later.

Their 101-page introduction outlines the history of Mohammed’s religion and its misrepresentation after 9/11. It mentions that in the 19th and 20th centuries, authors as diverse as Winston Churchill and Samuel Huntington could openly criticize Islam as frenzied and violent. British Prime Minister William Gladstone (1809-98) proclaimed that “So long as there is this book, there will be no peace in the world.”

https://www.spiked-online.com/2025/05/28/the-post-woke-world/
This is an excerpt from The End of Woke: How the Culture War Went Too Far and What to Expect from the Counter-Revolution.

It was an extraordinary scene. Donald Trump, recently re-elected as president of the United States, found himself surrounded by women and girls in the East Room of the White House. The date was 5 February 2025, and Trump was signing an executive order entitled ‘Keeping Men Out of Women’s Sports’. As the US president took to his desk and prepared his pen, he invited his all-female audience to draw closer. ‘Secret service is worried about them?’, he joked. ‘If we have to worry about them we have big problems.’ There was laughter, applause, a hubbub of palpable relief that an egregious social injustice was on the cusp of being corrected. Photographers captured the moment in a flurry of snapping shutters. Would this be the image that marked the beginning of our post-woke era, the first phase of sobering up for a once drunken world?

The significance of this event could not be dismissed as a mere publicity stunt. Here was one of the most controversial Republican presidents in history, a man who had been accused repeatedly of misogyny, nevertheless enacting the most pro-feminist directive since Richard Nixon signed Title IX of the Education Amendments in June 1972, a measure that prohibited sex-based discrimination in federally funded educational institutions.

The culture war of our times has often been misinterpreted as a conflict between left and right. But, as I shall argue, these designations are hangovers from the French Revolution, ill-suited to today’s complex ideological skirmishes.

The sudden rise in the early 2010s of critical social justice ideology – that sprawling, complex and disparate movement known colloquially as ‘woke’ – has meant that the terms ‘left’ and ‘right’ have lost much of their utility. Definitions of ‘woke’ are as varied as can be imagined, but it is best understood as a cultural revolution that seeks equity according to group identity by authoritarian means. Yet for all its institutional clout, this ideology has never enjoyed popular support. Estimates by More in Common, a nonprofit organisation committed to the promotion of social cohesion, suggest that, at its height, the woke movement was endorsed by approximately eight per cent of the population of both the US and the UK. As such, its power could only ever be sustained through misdirection and imposition.

We now find ourselves entering a new phase of the culture war, one in which the woke ideology is being tamed and will soon relinquish its chokehold on the Western world. The death rattles have become so audible that they can no longer be gainsaid. Major companies such as McDonald’s, Walmart, Ford, Amazon, Google and Meta have scaled back their diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) policies. Black Lives Matter is now a largely discredited movement. Leftist politicians, such as Democratic representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and former US secretary of transportation Pete Buttigieg, have quietly removed the pronouns from their social-media profiles. Multiple sporting bodies have barred men who identify as women from competing in female categories. Gay-rights groups are rejecting the forced teaming with divisive LGBTQIA+ campaigns. The UK Supreme Court has ruled that ‘sex’ means ‘biological sex’ for the purposes of equality law, meaning that men who identify as women have no legal right to enter women-only spaces – the Telegraph ran with the frontpage headline, ‘Trans women are not women’.

From two of America’s most respected journalists, an unflinching and explosive reckoning with one of the most fateful decisions in American political history: Joe Biden’s run for reelection despite evidence of his serious decline—amid desperate efforts to hide the extent of that deterioration

“Explosive.” —The New York Times

“[The] most significant book to date about Biden’s cognitive decline.” — The Atlantic

“Superbly reported . . . Reads like a Shakespearean drama on steroids.” — Los Angeles Times

“The book Biden allies fear the most.” — Politico

In Greek tragedy, the protagonist’s effort to avoid his fate is what seals his fate. In 2024, American politics became a Greek tragedy.

Joe Biden launched his successful 2020 bid for the White House with the stated goal of saving the nation from a second Trump presidential term. He, his family, and his senior aides were so convinced that only he could beat Trump again, they lied to themselves, allies, and the public about his condition and limitations. At his debate with Trump on June 27, 2024, the consequences of that deception were exposed to the world. It was shocking and upsetting.

Now the full, unsettling truth is being told for the first time. Jake Tapper and Alex Thompson take us behind closed doors and into private conversations between the heaviest of hitters, revealing how big the problem was and how many people knew about it. From White House staffers at the highest to lowest levels, to leaders of Congress and the Cabinet, from governors to donors and Hollywood players, the truth is finally being told. What you will learn makes President Biden’s decision to run for reelection seem shockingly narcissistic, self-delusional, and reckless—a desperate bet that went bust—and part of a larger act of extended public deception that has few precedents. The story the authors tell raises fundamental issues of accountability and responsibility that will continue for decades.

The irony is biting: In the name of defeating what they called an existential threat to democracy, Biden and his inner circle ensured it, tossing aside his implicit promise to serve for only one term, denying the existence of health issues the nation had been watching for years, dooming the Democrats to defeat. The decision to run again, the Original Sin of this president, led to a campaign of denial and gaslighting, leading directly to Donald Trump’s return to power and all that has happened as a consequence. Rarely does hubris meet nemesis more explosively. Wherever you stand on the political spectrum, Original Sin is essential reading.

https://tomklingenstein.com/radical-evil-and-the-totalitarian-temptation/

Every time conservatives win elections and begin to govern effectively, or simply push back against authoritarian manifestations of wokeness, the loudest voices on the Left evoke the specter of fascism. One side effect of this is that books like George Orwell’s 1984 or Hannah Arendt’s The Origins of Totalitarianism momentarily become best sellers again. It is simply assumed that both authors took aim at “fascism” broadly define and never saw any enemies on the Left. These subtle books, which belong to neither the Left nor the Right but to the larger cause of liberty and human dignity, are thus instrumentalized for authoritarian “anti-fascist” purposes. 

In no way is this a new phenomenon. Walter Cronkite, the longtime CBS news anchor and “the most trusted man in America” in a bygone age, wrote an introduction to an earlier edition of 1984 in which he suggested that the totalitarian nightmare sketched in that powerful and profound book eerily anticipated…Richard Nixon and Watergate. Last year, Anne Applebaum, who once wrote with erudition and gusto about the crimes of Communism, penned an introduction to a new paperback edition of The Origins of Totalitarianism in which she did not mention Communism once and identified Vladimir Putin’s authoritarian rule in Russia with full-scale totalitarianism. Examples of the systematic abuse of these anti-totalitarian classics could be multiplied. 

However, Arendt herself was a political thinker very difficult to pigeonhole. She was a German Jew who despised National Socialism, yet she defended her teacher (and sometime lover) Martin Heidegger against the charge that his apologetics for the same had discredited him philosophically. She worked indefatigably to aid Jewish refugees and displaced persons both before and after the Second World War, yet she was far from a wholehearted Zionist. She honorably resisted the totalitarian temptation in its Communist form, but had an unreasonable distrust of ex-Communists such as Whittaker Chambers who had borne heroic witness to Communism’s crimes. 

Arendt was hardly a conservative, but she had no interest in the kind of shallow liberalism that places naïve confidence in an ideology of Progress; in fact, she compellingly argued that “Progress” and “Doom” were two sides of the same pernicious coin.

The first investigation into why a ring of senior Washington officials went rogue to derail the election and the presidency of Donald Trump. There was nothing normal about the 2016 presidential election, not when senior U.S. officials were turning the surveillance powers of the federal government—designed to stop terrorist attacks—against the Republican presidential team. These were the ruthless tactics of a Soviet-style police state, not a democratic republic. The Red Thread asks the simple question: Why? What is it that motivated these anti-Trump conspirators from inside and around the Obama administration and Clinton networks to depart so drastically from “politics as usual” to participate in a seditious effort to overturn an election? Finding clues in an array of sources, Diana West uses her trademark investigative skills, honed in her dazzling work, American Betrayal, to construct a fascinating series of ideological profiles of well-known but little understood anti-Trump actors, from James Comey to Christopher Steele to Nellie Ohr, and the rest of the Fusion GPS team; from John Brennan to the numerous Clintonistas still patrolling the Washington Swamp after all these years, and more. Once, we knew these officials by august titles and reputation; after The Red Thread, readers will recognize their multi-generational and inter-connecting communist and socialist pedigrees, and see them for what they really are: foot-soldiers of the Left, deployed to take down America’s first “America First” and most anti-Communist president. If we just give it a pull, the “red thread” is very long and very deep.