RUTHFULLY YOURS

Separating violent and peaceful Islam: Spengler
A diabolical logic prompted Donald Trump to propose a travel ban on Muslims: if the US government can’t distinguish between peaceful and violent Muslims, then shut the door to all of them. Trump’s instinct for politicals-as-reality-television buoyed his standing in Republican polls, as Americans put terrorism at the top of their concerns. According to Rasmussen, US voters support Trump’s idea by a 46-40% margin. Among Republicans, the margin is 66%-24%.

http://atimes.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/12/crow2.jpgAmericans by and large aren’t bigots, but the outbreak of Instant Jihad Syndrome last week convinced them that something was broken, and that the whole mechanism of Muslim immigration should be mothballed until the problem was fixed. They know perfectly well that some Muslims want to live in peace with non-Muslims and other Muslims want to burn down the world, but they don’t know how to tell the difference. As information about the couple’s longstanding terror connections trickles into the press, the public doesn’ t trust its guardians to tell the difference, either. That was the lesson they learned from the jihadi Bonnie and Clyde of San Bernardino.

This special edition of The Glazov Gang presents The Nonie Darwish Moment. An ex-Muslim who is the author of The Devil We Don’t Know, Nonie focuses on Hiding Tashfeen Malik’s Face, unveiling the sad reasons the photo of the San Bernardino female terrorist was held from the public for a few days.

Don’t miss it!

Demographic scaremongering has played a key role in the sustained campaign to infect Jews with faintheartedness and fatalism, dissuading Jews from settling the Land of Israel, and luring Israel to concede the historically and militarily critical high ground of Judea and Samaria. This campaign preceded Secretary John Kerry’s speech on December 5, 2015, when he stated: “How does Israel possibly maintain its character as a Jewish and democratic state when from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea there would not even be a Jewish majority?”

Historically, policy makers and public opinion molders have issued and employed (and sometime managed) official statistics, in order to advance their agenda, influence public opinion and intensify pressure on their rivals. They have relied on the tendency, by most people and by all governments, to accept official statistics as truism without proper examination.

In March 1898, Theodor Herzl, the founding father of modern political Zionism, was challenged by Simon Dubnow, the leading Jewish historian and demographer, who proposed the establishment of a cultural/social Jewish autonomy in Europe instead of a Jewish state in the Land of Israel. Dubnow did not consider Jewish immigration (Aliyah) to the Land of Israel a viable proposition and issued demographic projections to support his stance ( Public Letters on Ancient and Modern Judaism, 1897-1907 ): “The reconstruction of the Jewish State in the Land of Israel – with a sizeable Jewish population – is impossible politically, socially and economically…. National Judaism should not be advanced by messianic means in Zion, but by a credible struggle for realistic Jewish interests in the Diaspora…. In one hundred years [1998], the total number of Jews in Palestine will be about 500,000, slightly higher than the population of Kiev…. Will that solve the problem of ten million Jews, who are scattered in the Diaspora?!…. Political Zionism is utopian….”

It is not common knowledge, but Ayn Rand, the novelist/philosopher, described the means and ends of Sharia law, doubtless before she had ever heard of it. She died in 1982, but in one key chapter of The Fountainhead, her archvillain, Ellsworth Toohey, newspaper columnist and power-lusting gadabout, describes to Peter Keating, his protégé in destruction, what he wants to see happen to Howard Roark.

Roark is the architect-hero of the novel. He is scheduled to be tried for blowing up a public housing project. Toohey confronts Keating to obtain a key incriminating piece of evidence that Roark designed the project, not Keating. Roark’s plans were altered by a team of second-handers, which included Keating. Roark subsequently dynamited the half-finished project. Toohey bares his soul to Keating for the first time. Keating is frightened, understanding only now the charming, flattering, but dark motive behind Toohey’s friendship with him.

Keating: “Why do you want to kill Howard?”

Toohey: “I don’t want to kill him. I want him in jail. You understand? In jail. In a cell. Behind bars. Locked, stopped, strapped – and alive. He’ll get up when they tell him to. He’ll eat what they give him. He’ll move when he’s told to move and stop when he’s told. He’ll walk to the jute mill, when he’s told, and he’ll work as he’s told. They’ll push him, if he doesn’t move fast enough, and they’ll slap his face when they feel like it, and they’ll beat him with a rubber hose if he doesn’t obey. And he’ll obey. He’ll take orders. He’ll take orders!”*

Holidays are a calendar. They mark points in emotional and physical time. They remind of us who we are.

Many of those celebrating Chanukah celebrate a holiday that does nothing more than celebrate ‘celebration’, the rituals and rites of entertainment, a special food, a symbol whose meaning they don’t remember and a little family fun.

Chanukah is many things but it is not a safe holiday. It is a victory celebration in a guerrilla war. It is a reminder that Obama’s war on Jerusalem was preceded long before him by Antiochus’s war on Jerusalem. It is a brief light in a period of great darkness.

The great irony of Chanukah is that those likeliest to strip away its historical and religious meaning would have been fighting against the Macabees. The battle to preserve the meaning of Chanukah is part of the struggle to preserve the Jewish traditions and culture that the left attacks.

Today’s struggle for Jerusalem, for Judaism, for freedom of religion and a meaningful life continues that same old struggle of Chanukah.

The overt militarism of the Chanukah story has made it an uncomfortable fit for liberal Jews who found it easier to strip away its dangerous underlying message that a time comes when you must choose between the destruction of your culture and a war you can’t win. In those dark days a war must be fought if the soul of the nation is to survive.

There are worse things than death and slavery, the fate that waited for the Maccabees and their allies had they failed, the fates that came anyway when the last of the Maccabees were betrayed and murdered by Caesar’s Edomite minister, whose sons went on to rule over Israel as the Herodian dynasty.

“Get out!!” bellowed Quamisi, jumping up and overturning the coffee service, which tumbled off the desk and clattered to the rug, the pot’s contents spilling over the colors. .…”Get out, killer of my brother!!” Weakened with pent-up rage, Quamisi leaned with both arms on the desktop. “I will have you, and I will have that coin!!”

“Of course you will,” replied Fury. His expression had turned to mild contempt. “When the sun rises in the west.” Then he turned and left the room.

Excerpt from We Three Kings

My very first completed novel, finished sometime in the early 1970s on an Underwood manual typewriter, was a dystopian one, In the Land of the Pharaohs, set in the future in a New York City under the thumb of a fascist dictatorship. I don’t even recall the year I typed the last page of it. I managed to find representation for it by a literary agent, the late Oscar Collier, who was unable to interest a publisher in the novel. The story centered on the exploits of a homicide detective, Kenticott Coldiron, who eventually encounters a gang of patriots who raid the fortress-like Federal Reserve Bank in lower Manhattan and make off with its stash of gold bullion.

The gang’s headquarters were in an abandoned subway station. The story climaxed in a shootout between Coldiron and Treasury Agent Frank Vishonn in a disused subway car. Vishonn perishes, and the gang disappears, as does Coldiron. That gang was a predecessor of what would become the Skelly gang of patriotic but Crown-defying smugglers in Sparrowhawk. I remember few of the other characters’ names. I did, however, appropriate the name Vishonn for a Virginia planter in the Sparrowhawk series, and also Gramatan. The colonial Vishonn dies, too, and violently. I eventually disposed of the manuscript of Pharaohs, after I’d written my second detective novel, First Prize, as unworthy of further submission to publishers, although some fans claim to still have a copy.

Among the favorite claims of climate-change activists is that anyone who dares to disagree with their worldview is a “denier,” and that those who reject their orthodoxy about the workings of the Earth’s atmosphere are “anti-science.”

But when it comes to the technologies that can actually reduce the volume of carbon dioxide we put into the atmosphere, it’s obvious that the climate-change jihadis are the ones who are anti-science. For proof of that, consider the energy plan put forward on Monday by Bernie Sanders, the socialist senator from Vermont and presidential candidate, who has claimed that climate change is the greatest national-security threat facing the United States.

Sanders’s energy plan comes straight from the far-left playbook. It claims that the only thing needed to deal with climate change is renewable energy. On Sanders’s website, the plan carries endorsements from Bill McKibben, the founder of 350.org, who may be America’s most famous climate activist, as well as Annie Leonard, the executive director of Greenpeace USA.

The gist of Sanders’s plan, which is modestly titled “Combating Climate Change to Save the Planet,” is to create a “completely nuclear-free clean energy system for electricity, heating, and transportation.” It also declares that Sanders wants “a moratorium on nuclear power plant license renewals in the United States.”

For over 30 years on American television, and before that on radio, the premier game show was called “Truth or Consequences”. For about 20 years, it was hosted by the ever-popular Bob Barker.

On the show, contestants received roughly two seconds to answer a trivia question correctly (usually an off-the-wall question that no one would be able to answer correctly, or a bad joke) before “Beulah the Buzzer” sounded. If, as was almost always the case, the contestant could not complete the “Truth” portion, there would be “Consequences,” usually a zany and embarrassing stunt. From the start, most contestants preferred to answer the question wrong in order to perform the stunt. Said the show’s producer Ralph Edwards, “Most of the American people are darned good sports.”

In many broadcasts, the stunts on Truth or Consequences included a segment with a popular, but emotional, heart-rending surprise for a contestant, that being the reunion with a long-lost relative or with an enlisted son or daughter returning from military duty overseas, particularly Vietnam.

Bob Barker would sign off the show by saying “I hope all your consequences are happy ones.”

It is my contention that in this sad era of Islamist terrorism, jihadism and attempts to form a “world-wide Caliphate”, (starting with a desire to remove the Jews from Israel, followed by a gradual demographic/migratory take-over of Europe and a myriad of mini-wars in Africa, the Philippines and other Asian countries where Muslims seek the submission of their neighbors), that the idea of accepting hundreds of thousands of Muslim migrants to Canada and the United States, has some consequences, and these should be discussed, frankly and honestly.

On Tuesday I appeared at the US Senate at a hearing called by Senator Ted Cruz’s sub-committee on Space, Science and Competitiveness. Senator Cruz introduced me as “an international bestselling author, a Top Five jazz recording artist, and a leading Canadian human rights activist”. In fact, at that moment, I was America’s Number One jazz vocalist, but I thought it was a bit early in the proceedings to jump up and demand the record be corrected.

You can read various accounts of this event across the Internet from one perspective or another. Among the climate wallahs, there is a lively back-and-forth at Judith Curry’s pad, at Anthony Watts’, Bishop Hill’s, and Junk Science. On the politics of it – ie, Republicans and Democrats – I have a couple of thoughts, one of which has to do with the 2016 election. But that is a separate subject, so I’ll leave it for another day.

There was an altercation underway as I entered the room, when two Greenpeace activists attempted to get in the face of Professor William Happer about something or other. You can see it here. It is, to be legalistic about it, witness-tampering, and a sadly appropriate start to a hearing that at least partly addressed the climate of intimidation in global-warming science.

As for the hours that followed, I’ll let the reports from all sides speak for themselves, and just make a couple of points. On the morning of the event, Senator Bill Nelson, the Florida Democrat and Ranking Member, sent a message, warning me that I was obligated to “respect the decorum of the Senate”. I’ve been invited to Buckingham Palace, the White House and parliaments around the world, and nobody has ever felt it necessary to pre-issue such a warning. In the event, the US Senate has no “decorum” worthy of respect, as we’ll get to in a moment.

You can find my written testimony here. A few excerpts. First, the general overview:

Senator Sasse , formerly a college professor ran and won in 2014 on tough policy and principles…this is a man with a future in the Senate and in the country….rsk

Tonight, Senator Ben Sasse (R-NE) spoke on the Senate floor, criticizing Washington’s lack of urgency and seriousness in confronting the growing threat of militant Islam.
Remarks as prepared for delivery:

I rise today to speak about San Bernardino; about the decades-long fight that our free society now faces; and about our dangerous unwillingness to tell the truth about the nature of this battle – about who our enemy is.

We are at war.

The American people already know this. Our enemies obviously know this. It is only this town – where our so-called leaders dawdle and bicker, pander and misprioritize – it is only this town that seems confused. Washington ignores what it cannot escape.

And that is both a tragedy and a crisis. Because no war is winnable when you pretend that you are not even in one.