All jihad is local, but all "Islamophobia" is global. So, if a Muslim of Afghan origin shoots up a gay nightclub in Florida and kills 49 people, that's just one crazed loner and no broader lessons can be discerned from his act. On the other hand, if a white guy shoots up two mosques in New Zealand and kills 50 people, that indicts us all, and we need to impose worldwide restraints on free speech to make sure it doesn't happen again. I'm ecumenical enough to mourn the dead in both gay clubs and mosques, but I wonder why we are so conditioned to accept Islamic terror as (in the famous words of London mayor Sadiq Khan) "part and parcel of living in a big city" that it is only the exceptions to the rule that prompt industrial-scale moral preening from politicians and media. [UPDATE: Utrecht isn't that big a city - 350,000 - but it's today's designated "part and parcel".]
The Christchurch killer published the usual bonkers manifesto before livestreaming his mass murder on Facebook. Brenton Tarrant purports to be an environmentalist - indeed, a self-described "eco-fascist" - who admires Communist China (notwithstanding, presumably, its indifference to environmentalism). He wants to massacre Muslims in order to save the planet:
The environment is being destroyed by over population, we Europeans are one of the groups that are not over populating the world. The invaders are the ones over populating the world. Kill the invaders, kill the overpopulation and by so doing save the environment.
Does he mean this? Or is it a giant blood-drenched leg-pull?
No matter. For the the politicians stampeding to the nearest camera to dust off their tropes, what counts is that, if you're American, Donald Trump pulled the trigger; and, if you're British or European and you're not prepared to say that Google-Twitter-Facebook should silence anybody to the right of Trevor Noah, then you're part of the problem. Here's the rather less homicidal environmentalist Catherine McKenna, Canada's Climate Change Minister, getting it pitch-perfect in two steps. First, visit a mosque (although obviously not to kill everyone to "save the environment", like Mr Tarrant); second, blame those whose exhibitionism isn't as gung ho as yours:
I spoke to parents at Ottawa Main Mosque today whose kids are too scared to pray & go to school. In Canada.
Meanwhile Andrew Scheer has to be called out before he can call out Islamophobia.
For non-Canadians, Mr Scheer is the Conservative Opposition Leader. But the point is you can call him out and, as Maxime Bernier noted of his former colleague, like many jelly-spined Tories he will instantly squeal, "No, wait, hold that last seat on the bandwagon for me." Even more disturbingly, the broadcaster Charles Adler denounced the Governor General for not "calling out" Islamophobia.
The Governor General of Canada is the Queen's vicereine. As the old joke has it, she is obligated to speak in governor-generalities - as, indeed, Her Majesty is. That is what is expected of an apolitical monarch. So, when there is an act of mass murder, the Crown and its viceroys express shock and sympathy and revulsion - and leave the politics to the likes of Ms McKenna and the hapless Scheer.
I would be interested to know why Mr Adler thinks it is in the national interest to lend the imprimatur of the Crown and the state to as specious and opportunistically deployed a conceit as "Islamophobia". One of our Antipodean Steyn Club members, Kate Smyth, drew my attention to a fine example of that: After the Islamic terror attack in Melbourne four months ago, Muslim community leaders refused to meet with Aussie Prime Minister Scott Morrison because of all the systemic Islamophobia. After the Christchurch attack, the same Muslim community leaders are demanding a meeting with Morrison because of all the, er, systemic Islamophobia. To say Terror Attack A is something to do with Islam is totally Islamophobic; to refuse to say Terror Attack B is Islamophobic is even more totally Islamophobic.
Were the Queen or the Governor General to pull an Andrew Scheer and sign on to this somewhat selective view of the world's travails, it would necessarily imply that "Islamophobia" is now beyond and above politics, and in that sense beyond criticism. The use of "Islamophobia" in the Melbourne attack is, in fact, its standard deployment: it is an all-purpose card played to shut down any debate.
Not, of course, that there's much debate as it is. And there's likely to be even less in the future. Facebook, which is unable to devise algorithms preventing a depraved psychopath livestreaming mass slaughter on its platform, is busy fine-tuning its controls to expel the most anodyne dissenters from the social-justice pieties. Less speech inevitably means more violence - because, if you can't talk about anything, what's left but to shoot up the joint?
Thus the revolution devours its own. It goes without saying that right-wing madmen like Donald Trump and Andrew Scheer are to blame for Christchurch, but did you know that, when you peel back the conspiracy and discover who's really pulling the Trump-Scheer strings, you find Islamophobic white supremacist Chelsea Clinton?
Muslim students have berated Chelsea Clinton at a vigil for the victims of the New Zealand mosques massacre, saying she is to blame for the attack...
'This right here is the result of a massacre stoked by people like you and the words that you put out into the world,' says Dweik, gesturing to the vigil for the 49 who were killed in Christchurch when a white nationalist shooter stormed two mosques.
'And I want you to know that and I want you to feel that deeply - 49 people died because of the rhetoric you put out there,' Dweik continues, jabbing her index finger toward Clinton as other students snap their fingers in apparent approval of her words.
Click below to watch:
All poor Chelsea was doing was trying to cut herself a piece of the grief-signaling action, and suddenly she finds herself in one big unsafe space:
According to NYU student Rose Asaf, who posted the video on Twitter, students at the vigil were angry about Clinton's accusation last month that Rep Ilhan Omar, a Minnesota Democrat, used 'anti-Semitic language and tropes' while criticizing Israel...
Clinton was one of many who condemned Omar's remarks, writing in a tweet: 'We should expect all elected officials, regardless of party, and all public figures to not traffic in anti-Semitism.'
It's hate-filled Islamophobic statements like that that will get us all killed, Chelsea. Personally I blame Christchurch on Nancy Pelosi's recent House resolution condemning the Dreyfus Affair.
But I'm sure Chelsea's learned her lesson. How eager do you think she'll be to criticize Ilhan Omar's next outburst?
Things are changing faster than you think. The urge to change New Zealand's gun laws might be politely excused as a reflexive response to the means by which an appalling attack was carried out. But the demand throughout the west to restrict both private gun ownership and free speech are indicative of a more calculated clampdown, and of broader assumptions about control of the citizenry on all fronts. In the transition to the new assumptions, we are approaching a tipping point, in which the authorities of the state (as in the average British constabulary's Twitter feed) are ever more openly concerned to clamp down on you noticing what's happening rather than on what is actually happening.
Finally, an observation from Steyn Club member Steven Payne:
Does anybody know how many mosques there are in the city named Christchurch? Am I the only one who sees the irony there?
Like the old Bonzo Dog Doo-Dah joke about the "24-Hour Dry-Cleaners" shop, "Christchurch" is just the name. In my bleaker moments, I recall a memorable line from the opening scene in Daniel Silva's novel The Secret Servant, about the murder of an old Jew in the streets of multiculti Amsterdam. He dies in the shadow of the Zuiderkerk, a seventeenth-century church where Rembrandt worshiped and which Monet painted, but long since converted into a municipal information center - although the bell tower remains:
No one intervened— hardly surprising, thought Rosner, for intervention would have been intolerant—and no one thought to comfort him as he lay dying. Only the bells spoke to him.
'A church without faithful,' they seemed to be saying, 'in a city without God.'
~We had a busy weekend at SteynOnline, starting with a rare Friday-night appearance by Mark with Tucker to hail the Great White Privileged Home of the Democrat diversity field: Bovine Beto. Our Saturday movie date wished Batman a happy eightieth birthday, and our St Patrick's Day song selection went the only way it could. If you were face down in emerald-hued beer all weekend, I hope you'll want to catch up with one or three of the foregoing as a new week begins.
If you enjoy the time you spend round these parts and you'd like to take it to the next level, there's always The Mark Steyn Club. Tomorrow, Tuesday, Mark will be hosting another Clubland Q&A, taking questions from Steyn Club members live around the planet at 4pm North American Eastern Time - that's 8pm Greenwich Mean Time.
If an hour in Steyn's company isn't enough, there's always a full week on the second annual Mark Steyn Cruise, which will be sailing from Vancouver through Alaska's beautiful Inside Passage this September with Dennis Miller, Michele Bachmann and more. We'd love to have you with us, but cabins are going very fast.
Mark will see you on the telly with Tucker tonight, live across America at 8pm Eastern/5pm Pacific.
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At least, while President Trump is in office, we can hold off the appointment of our very own "Minister of Climate Change"....I guess that would be Secretary, not Minister, but no matter. The Dems running in 2020 have already picked out their own candidate for that office.
I see that the BBC now exults over the entire, substantial left wing base in Australia participating in demonstrations there to exploit the behaviour of a fellow-Australian (whose expressed views cannot be described as conservative) with the obvious aim of silencing any commentators who take anything resembling a conservative perspective on events not confined to the Christchurch massacre. The leading Australian conservative commentators are in fact rather moderate in position and, with a few egregious exceptions, cannot be described as rabble-rousers. The same cannot be said of those trying to shut them down. A widely-broadcast image is of a tonsil-tanner bearing a placard proclaiming, "Hate speech has consequences." The BBC and the protester would be equally taken aback, nay, "outraged", by any interpretation of that placard to refer to incendiary sermons at mosques, which as far as I can tell have not abated a whit after the massacre.
I don't know that it does any good to conceal the murderer's manifesto from the public. Folk should read it, and conclude for themselves whether his opinions are conservative, or rather reflective of that same ubiquitous racist element in left-wing politics from which I diffidently submit the German national socialist labour party once sprang and which nowadays believes that jobs should be reserved for brother-citizens.
Excellent comment.
As for "a few egregious exceptions", the contributions of a certain so-called conservative columnist should not go unmentioned, from "Now we are all Muslims" to "Terrorism must fail this time".
Breath-taking double standards and dhimmitude. But that's to be expected from someone who has written extensively about the minuscule threat posed by a minuscule number of followers of the Religion of Peace, as the corpses piled up.
Thanks K. Your own remarks are lots of fun. I nominate you for the irony Olympiad, if ever the PC police allow one. Keep firing! S.
Thanks! I guess I'm destined for the gulag, if nothing else.
It's a great bunch here, and always good to see fellow Australians in the comments. Did you catch ScoMo vs the insufferable - and sly - Waleed?
Yes: just love to gauge my blood pressure by the throbbing in my inner ear, me! S.
I we (royal) quit watching the free to air five months ago. I didn't even know he was stillness on
Now she just binge watches 'homeland' reminiscing about her bizarre life which found her caught up in intimate relations with followers of the prophet mohomad
In London and Turkey mid ninities when a working class girlfriend from Avalon Beach had no idea what a Muslim even was. Haha. She laughed wryly at the endless CIA interrogation scenes in the series again reminiscent of when In 1998 whilst working at Harrods in the food hall, she rejected the attentions of a er coloured fellow who then promptly reported her for racism whereupon she was hauled into a secret basement interrogation room and questioners about her racsim by Fayeds henchmen until she told them all to "go fk yourselves" and walked out!
I saw on Idiotbook Arden hugged Walid and that bought a tear to my eye (PBUH him not me stupid) but I in the past I hung on every word jacinda said but now I refuse to listen to her unless she (and her smoking hot female security detail) cover up. Dunnies bout you but I'm with our great Egyptian born Sydney based grand mufti who said many years ago of ourselves aussie girls, wandering around in public without a veil like uncovered meat they asking to be raped.!
I understand that Rep AOC has criticized everyone who has expressed "sympathy and prayers" for the Muslim victims of the Christchurch attacks. Presumably that would include the fellow Muslims who were praying in the mosques that day but survived. Isn't that AOC expressing an unsympathetic, anti-Muslim sentiment?
The reactions have gone off the rails.
Apparently Chelsea was criticised not only for causing the slaughter, but also cultural appropriation for attending the event.
I'm assuming AOC forbids infidels' expression of sympathy for similar reasons - ie. they provoked the attack, and have no business pretending to feel sad about it.
All the kiwis living in Australia (just above me on the Gold Coast and Brisbane especially) on the welfare. Is that cultural appropriation?
:) I won't be watching the Jacinda-and-Waleed show when it airs, that's for sure.
I am honestly confused by the sheer ignorance of some of the posters here but even GW Bush demonstrated the same kind of ignorance when he stated that 9/11 was an act of evil doers and Islam means peace. On the contrary Islam means SUBMISSION to Allah and it means war on the unbelievers of all shapes and stripes. So, comparing Islam to Judeo Christianity is comparing wolves to sheep because both of them have four legs. It would be very beneficial for anyone that shares the view of GW Bush or Gen. McMaster and all the other talking heads spend couple of dollars and buy (or order it online from Amazon or other online retailers) an official translation of the Koran and try to read it. If he/she don't want to spend the money can read it or download it on the Internet (Some Browsers return page not found) at http://www.readthequran.org/ONLINE/ENGLISH1/001.html You will find many verses (I have them readily available but don't want to poste them to get Mark Steyn club into trouble) which demand striking off the head of unbelievers, Crucify , or have their hands and feet on alternate sides cut off, strike fear in their heart (Terrorize them). Observant Jews and Christian maybe spared if they pay Jizva (Ransom tax) in willing submission, Polytheist and Atheist have to be killed outright. That is what is called religion of peace. They are not shy about that they admitted that they enjoy beheading of infidels to do that is demonstrating piety. The videos that they post on the internet that dumb infidel censor is to serve for entertainment of their followers. To those that say that The Pentateuch demanded also killing of people of Canaan about 3000 years ago some of the worship of those people involved human mainly children sacrifices. In any case that was 3000 years ago and common practice of warfare at that time.
I've got my copy, AB and I never for a minute believed that Islam was the religion of peace. That's the big lie. I imagine when people say that, they are either posturing to keep violence from erupting or they're flat out lying. Some followers of Islam who espouse peace and assimilation want to live as neighbors. I know people who are Muslim who are good people and who have assimilated into the culture but they are not the people that worry me right now. Radicalized Muslims are the threat and they are the individuals whose hearts must be changed. To eliminate all religion from the planet is not the end goal for millions of human beings. People believe strongly that this world is not our ultimate destination and that we are here only as a stepping stone to an eternal life with their loved ones who have passed before and to be reunited with them and to meet their Father, personal Lord, Savior Christ or Allah. We may never achieve global peace but there is no reason why we who believe trying for it have to live a life of hell on earth for the short time we're here.
I wish Tucker hadn't cut the Chelsea Clinton interview short but had included her response to that female goon's
ad hominen attack. She actually apologized for 'offending' that moron! If you recall her mother did much the same during the '16 campaign when confronted by a black female activist. She was told directly to her face that because of her skin color she wasn't allowed to discuss 'black issues'. Hillary readily agreed!
Well, there we go: just like Beto O'Rourke: simpering, grovelling, dishonest, abject, the full tutti. One is never disappointed by the person, but always by the nature of humanity. Half of me wishes that these people would grow spines, and the other half shudders to contemplate what might happen if they did.
Good point! It has now become a rite of passage in the new left to prostrate yourself before the masses and confess all of your past sins before the world. It's a kind of moral cleansing - or secular baptism if you will - now required for potential democratic office holders. Beto's recent confessions on camera were both revealing and stomach turning. This is also useful if one has actual sins to confess - Ralph Northam and Ilhan Omar issued insincere apologies and immediately received absolution from their party and the national media. Of course this only works if your leftist bona fides are in order.
Thanks, R. Your own points are particularly apt, and I'm sure will be widely noted. S.
Sam's two cents: Seems to me that progressive leftists are the biggest threat to peace in our Western Civilization.
For the last 30 years or so most western countries like Canada, Zealand, Australia, Great Britain, and to some degree the United States of America have rid themselves of most of their old fights and hatreds. The English v the French in Canada, Irish against English in the UK, Whites vs Blacks in the USA, the Roman Catholics and Protestant feuds, the anti-Semitism, pressures against inter-racial/faith love, and church burnings had all but left our lands. Even Europe after two great wars, seemed more interested in getting along with their traditional foes, than marching on them over ancient squabbles.
After centuries of wars and old hatreds, we seemed to have reached an unprecedented state of peace. But I suppose it was too much for our leaders to let us enjoy that. You had to go muck with the recipe. You had to invite Jason Voorhees to the pool party. Enter multi-culturalism. Let's import lots of people, especially from war-torn regions of the world. Why? Was there something wrong with the country the way it was? Couldn't our current diversity be our strength? Was the concept and reality of foreign aid not good enough? Was it Western man's burden to bring peace to the world by importing the world? Was it guilt and self-loathing? Or is it just the old punish success, and let the government take over your freedoms?
So now we have our leaders telling us to get used to the new hatreds, unless it's from the far right - that has to be stopped at any cost to your freedom. It's just part and parcel of your new life, we're told. Well thank you very much. Sorry that the country my ancestors built wasn't good enough for you statists and bloody useless virtue signalers. You could have gone to Russia or Cuba or Venezuela to practice you foolish beliefs. But no, you had to drag my country down. Big thank-you for your wonderful vision and leadership on getting us to Utopia.
I think it was Oliver Hardy who may have said it best; "Well, here's another nice mess you've gotten me into."
p.s. If any snowflakes are triggered or running for their safe spaces, take a deep breath - this is not a 'far-right' manifesto. I don't want the RCMP in my back yard again, trampling all over the flowers and seedlings. It is what I will defend as conservative free speech.
Sam: Self-loathing more than anything else drives the western left in a world now rapidly going stark raving mad.
I haven't always been a fan of Glenn Beck whom remained a never Trumper far too long back in '16 but he's since come to his senses. His chilling warning last night on Fox describing the fate of America should the far left win the presidency in '20 were true words of wisdom. He added that even if Trump somehow prevails it will only slow the ultimate fate of America. Given present trends that seems to me to be a very safe prediction.
Good call on the self-loathing, Roy. Who teaches children to feel that way about themselves or spends that much time absorbing guilt over things they had little to zero part in causing? Humanity, thy name is madness...
I wouldn't get too exercised about Glenn Beck. I used to try and watch him once in a while (admittedly I don't watch many of the talking heads much - Mark being the exception) but more and more he just seemed like an overwrought ninny about every topic.
That said, I am no great fan of the president. He is no conservative and he constantly hands his opponents ammunition or just loads up and shoots himself in the foot. Still, I will vote for him (unless his antics get much worse) and will always be grateful that he ended the Bush and Clinton eras. I am very glad for deregulation and conservative judges. He is not far wrong about many of the things he says, but in these fractious times, a calmer leader might have been better. Then again, the Left is hopeless, so maybe not. And Beck is right about one thing. It would be nice if Trump and the Republicans could get their act together long enough to win the presidency and win back the house, because there is a good percentage of the Democrats in office that are spineless, remarkably dense or just plain crazy, and that won't bode well for a not-so-adorable deplorable like me, even if I am well dug in in flyover country.
I thought Minnesota was fly over country. Then they send us Omar and Tlaib to lecture us on our country's failings, a country that was foolish enough to save them from the hell holes they came from. It's like the Yankees that move to Florida to get away from the tax and spend Utopias of New York and Connecticut and then vote to install the same types of progressive nuts here. Andre Gillum comes to mind. They also write letters to the editor and rant about Trump. They really believe Hillary would have been better. Now that Mueller has stopped wasting my tax dollars on his bogus investigations, maybe Trey Gowdy can investigate the FBI and the Clinton's. I can't believe those idiot women blaming Chelsea, though. We are all down the rabbit hole now.
Always look forward to your comments, Kate, and Fran's, actually all the rest of you guys.
Lowell, this is one of those times in my little life in the world when I thought i've seen it all, but I haven't seen anything yet, something keeps telling me. I think it's more important now than ever before to get out there whatever we're thinking because the Left is trying all they can think of ways to lead the rest of the regular people off a cliff. Most of us are trying to lead a normal life while crazies are running across the planet, across the tv news screens, across the halls of power pretending they're the ones in the know.
I used to think I didn't know anything, but these lunatics know nothing except how to layer lies upon lies upon lies. I've got a friend, really very brilliant and well-read and after the recent shootings told me now we have to grow to be tolerant and accepting because soon we will be in the minority and will not want to be treated the way we've treated minorities. I hate to admit that she has always been a realist and not typically a fear-mongerer, but what have I done to anyone my entire life? I'm not perfect but i've never harmed much more than a fly in over sixty years. It's all too much to stomach this attitude that I victimized legions of peoples on the planet.
I read all the comments as well as yours, too, every day, and likewise, thoroughly enjoy everyone here, too, and gain a lot of comfort from the shared thoughts.
Roy, where did all this self-loathing begin? I was just living a regular happy life and one day it seems we all wake up and started down this self-loathing path. If it's tied into hating America, yes, I can see we've been a grumbling bunch of complainers about this and that because it's human nature to always see there's room improvement, streamlining, innovations and rethinking things but at some point we went down a wrong path towards self-destruction. We started tinkering with the wrong things.
"Or is it just the old punish success, and let the government take over your freedoms"? Sam, you do pack a lot into $.02! Yes, it does seem that history repeats itself, but the take over methods do seem to change to adjust to new circumstances. The bottom line if there's not going to be more violence is to covert or be converted.
We need to stand firm in our beliefs and our respective nation's principles even as we watch our fellow countrymen and women fall away every day. If a nation's principles are not keeping it together, then maybe there's where the battles need to be fought. I don't know really how this will end but I try to keep the faith it will end well for the stronger, smarter and steadfast people.
Be still, keep quiet, and quit noticing things. It's like a mega-version of a local fire, auto accident, or crime, when the 'authorities' encourage the masses to 'move along, there's nothing to see here, people.' Well, we know there IS something to see. Demographic evolution explains most of what we're seeing, including the Remainers counting on aging to make Brexit eventually go away (let's try another vote in 5 years' time); immigration (from afar) and emigration (state to state) in the US to try to make Trump go away, or at least prevent another outsider from ever daring to try; and the solidification of a largely one-voice media by the universities cranking out brainwashed 'journalists', who are, by the way, demographically younger and narrow-minded. Whether or not the electoral college is kept, it makes no difference in the end...popular vote or red states surrounded by a populous blue edge, we're edging closer to an essentially one-party system. Then the swamp will be really wide and smelly,
but it will be so tiring to apologize for noticing things that there'll be little public noticing at all. Move along, folks, nothing to see here.
The thing about people committing mass murder in the name of "European Culture" is there's no European culture without Christianity, and there's no Christianity without the total and complete rejection of intentionally killing innocent people. I'm not talking about bombing a munitions factory even though you know you'll hit the house next door; I'm talking about shooting innocent people intentionally.
That, to a smaller extent, is what I always felt when Trumpists for instance quoted Chesterton's poem about fighting for 'the ashes of your fathers, and the temples of your gods' (about an ancient Roman hero). Our 'fathers' would have thrown Donald Trump out on his ear as a blatantly corrupt serial adulterer. "He's better than Hillary" doesn't change that.
Let's say the Christchurch murderer got his way. Tit-for-tat. Antifa shoots up the NRA, alt-right shoots up CAIR, it escalates into a race war, and ends with all the 'invaders' kicked out. Then all the 'Europeans' look around at each other and realize that the ACTUAL nation they have 'preserved' is not the culture of their ancestors but a bunch of nihilistic, racist murderers. But at least they have white skin. At least till one of them decides that you don't qualify. We junked the Constitution a long time ago, so if you tick off one of the newly empowered murderers they will be more than capable of 'discovering' that you're 1/1024 Hispanic.
It is true that this guy called himself an "eco-fascist" but his "manifesto" started off with an extended discussion of birth rates. Whites are below replacement, and we need to change that, but that'll take a while, and in the meantime we have to stop the "invaders" who'll otherwise swamp us with their high birth rates. The only way that belief, which he shares with a lot of people, doesn't lead to murder is an uncompromising rejection of murder. That in turn only makes sense based on the belief that this world isn't all there is.
Donald Trump is the weapon chosen by the American people to oppose the breakdown of our society, for which they blame those leftists who are anti-family, pro-abortion, pro Political Correctness and whose gospel is preached on the mainstream media 24/7. Those Americans want to return to a stable and great America. This country's motto is "In God We Trust" so a Judeo-Christian base underlies their ethos. But many institutions, including the church, are in fact failing and have lost relevance. The multi-causal degeneration of society engenders all sorts of problems which can trigger all types of crazies -- political or physical. The overt killers are certainly not the rule, they are aberrant psychopaths,and capable of doing enormous harm. (parenthetically, look at the parallels between Sayyid Qutb and Brendon Tarrant. Opposite sides of the same coin). Politcally, there is still a hope among many that Trump can "drain the Swamp", restore our institutions, and protect our citizens. Most who oppose him do so for political or personal gain. They are a part of the problem, and their actions are often costly and destructive.
Good points. In the Answers to Questions section of Mr Tarrant's manifesto, he didn't answer the biggest question that I had.
Why didn't he simply pray to God for salvation from the Muslims and their Prophet of Satan, Mohammad? Prayer worked for Western Civilization in the past. Why not try it again? Doesn't he know that Muslims fear the secret prayers of their enemies more than death itself? Why advocate bizarre untested ideas such as eco-fascism?
Well said, Roy. I struggle constantly with my faith on this very issue. I have a pretty thick hide so seldom get too excited about the foolishness I encounter day to day. Still, I love my kids and grandkids, and I would wish a better world for them that what I appear to be leaving. I understand that loving your neighbors and enemies and turning the other cheek and forgiving trespasses is Biblical and core to the Christian faith. Yet it is next to impossible to reconcile Christian values with a religion that embraces jihad and suicide bombers, hatred for infidels, enslavement and abuse of women and children, and by the 84,000 deaths last year alone, seems to embrace mayhem and slaughter on a regular basis. I cannot see how a civilized nation can tolerate such behavior and remain viable. My two cents, anyway. I am not sure the loon that slaughtered those folks in Christchurch cared much for any kind of people. My experience with certain kinds of eco-fascists (I raise livestock) is that they really don't like people very much and view us (especially folks like me) as a problem to be solved.
I fully understand and respect your reluctance to criticize another religion as a devout Christian. As a 'free thinker' I have no reticence in drawing a very clear distinction between these two belief systems. Christianity reformed long ago and although I am not a believer I see it as a very positive moral force in this troubled world. Islam is intolerant in the extreme and its abysmal treatment of woman is simply acceptable in the 21st century. True, there are more moderate versions in countries such a Malaysia and Singapore so there is a ray of hope down the road. You're so right about the eco-fascists and this point carries over to the far left in general. They 'love' humanity but despise human beings who are of course 'destroying the planet'. Their loathing of humans in general goes triple for anyone opposing them.
"Yet it is next to impossible to reconcile Christian values with a religion that embraces jihad and suicide bombers, hatred for infidels, enslavement and abuse of women and children, and by the 84,000 deaths last year alone, seems to embrace mayhem and slaughter on a regular basis."
Well said, Kris. These truths are impossible to ignore.
Roy,
I am not reluctant to criticize madness when I see it, but I recognize the danger, and our Savior warns us of the consequences of carrying hate around in your heart, no matter the reason. The damage to your soul can be profound and damning.
Kate,
It may be that a hopeless paleoconservative like myself who was born into a clan of hard-headed, practical minded Irishmen who experienced the trials of the greatest generation up close and personal was born with one foot in big h Hell and the other on a banana peel. I accept that despite my good wife's efforts I may not make the cut when Judgement comes. Fair enough. I get the attempts at moral equivalence between Christianity and Islam, because of the long bloody history of each. Yet when the witless children of the West turn their face from evil and simper about tolerance, they ignore a single basic fact. The violence in Christiany occurs when the deranged and the power hungry IGNORE the teachings of our savior. The violence of Islam happens (endlessly it seems) because the followers of the false prophet EMBRACE the teachings of Islam. When three of the people you value most in this world live a short distance from one of the highest concentrations of Muslims in the western world, that sort of thinking can lead to sleepless nights. I trust in the Lord, but faith and innocence can be a paper thin defense against the evil in this world, especially when so many have come to embrace the empty moral preening of identity politics and social justice. You will know the doomed among us as the body count rises and the foolish and the cowardly continue to avert their eyes from evil. You could make a strong case for knowing that the End Times are here (if you worry about that sort of thing) when the citizens of one of the Western nations wake up one morning to find their government now has a state religion and their practice only Sharia law.
If you're a hopeless paleoconservative, Kris, you're not alone. I feel similarly as you but you've done a great job at explaining the important difference between the two religious groups. If the dynamics within each group began to shift in opposite directions and we did the embracing of the valuable tenets of our faith, and they did a little more ignoring, even selective ignoring of their faith, we would be in better shape, but the larger issue with Islam which is largely being ignored is the way they hold the tenets of faith as welded bits and parts to their system of governing and their end goal political aspirations of totalitarianism. If the governments of the West would wake up and see how that one aspect can't be undone without Islam losing all self-respect for itself, then maybe, just maybe they would alter their strategy towards the "religion of peace."
Hi Kris. Thanks for this thoughtful reply; I must've missed the earlier notification somehow.
"The violence in Christiany occurs when the deranged and the power hungry IGNORE the teachings of our savior. The violence of Islam happens (endlessly it seems) because the followers of the false prophet EMBRACE the teachings of Islam."
Precisely! This is everything-you-need-to-know-in a nutshell! (I made the same point on the recent Q&A replay thread.)
Yet the tiresome and dishonest equivalence is still being drawn, nearly 2 decades and tens of thousands of corpses after 9/11. Turns out it's "Islamophobic" to draw attention to these incontrovertible facts.
Eerily consistent with your commment, New Zealanders woke up to a government-imposed, nation-wide call to prayer on Friday, with vast numbers of women faithfully donning hijabs. "You will know the doomed among us as the body count rises and the foolish and the cowardly continue to avert their eyes from evil."
Please continue to comment, Kris. I'm so grateful we have SteynOnline as beacon of free speech - and truth.
Islam is primarily an answer to Judaism and Christianity hence its singling out of those two for special treatment. Its strife ridden spirit goes back at least to the conflict between Isaac and Ishmael, Jacob and Esau. If you are a westerner and don't know who they are, you are not educated in your own culture.
A critical reason for the present weakness of the West is the profound ignorance and disdain its citizens have for their own great spiritual roots. If you don't go to church or synagogue, start going. The degree of corruption of the church is an indicator of the corruption of society. The church is its people. If you attend it will be that much less corrupt. Look for an Alpha Course near you. Be involved in your church or synagogue. That's a key way to support the true value of western culture.
It's impossible to try to interpret or extrapolate reason from a person who has had an obvious fissure with reality. Try as we might, there's just no way that we as sane people can connect the dots to rationally explain the actions of the completely irrational.
But, I'm sure banning guns will for sure help................................
The New Zealand government is prosecuting people who share the original video, and is poised to ban semiautomatic firearms as a response. Wonder how many Kiwi's will comply with that order.
The shooter, as are all, was a raving loon. I did watch the video. Noticed that he had several gas cans in his car. Wonder what he was thinking of doing with them?
When the first response of your government is to go after citizens who had nothing to do with the crime,..be very worried.
I think the best thing any remaining mosques in New Zealand could do would be to buy some of those semiautomatic rifles the government wants to ban, and have them ready for defense. I guess the government cares, but not enough to let the Muslim's defend themselves.
"When the first response of your government is to go after citizens who had nothing to do with the crime,..be very worried." Hear, hear. Suppression of information is maybe not the first step in shackling speech, but it is a fatal one.
In fact, one congregant went home, armed himself, and is credited for driving the shooter away from the second mosque, possibly saving many lives. https://www.nationalreview.com/news/armed-man-chased-fired-on-new-zealand-mosque-shooter/
Well, as has often been pointed out; diversity is not a quilt. But, it's not a totem pole either. It's more like a greased pole that each little diversity faction is constantly trying to ascend while kicking down the competition. Stop competing for the top spot and some other faction will take it from you. Hence, there can be only one aggrieved party; the one I belong to. Anodyne statements about not questioning the loyalties of politicians who support Israel are not sound advice for promoting civil discourse. They are hate speech that causes mosques to be shot up, because allowing them to be anything else causes my faction to slide down the greased pole in favor of some other group.
The New Zealand attacker is an Identitarian. According to reports of his manifesto he moved from the left of the identitarian spectrum (as a communist) to the right of the identitarian spectrum (as an eco-fascist). Identitarians view people in group identity terms. They have essentially a feudal view. Their declared enemy are non identitarians - people who view people as individuals - what we would call center left and center right (Conservatives). What the Identitarians want is to force us non identitarians to choose identitarian sides and for these sides to fight each other - he clearly stated that. What you have there is not a single left \ right dimension but a dual dimension where the second dimension is indentitarianism \ non indentitarianism. That point needs to be strongly made as the media are largely missing it. And us Conservatives are suffering as a result. What we - as non identitarians - need to do is to refuse to engage in anything that is identitarian irrespective of which side it is.
PS: https://imgur.com/a/XoeTtTe - shows the left - right dimension of Identitarianism and the 2nd. dimension of Identitarianism - Non Identitarianism.
I enjoyed the article, and consider it to have touched on an important predicament. I have always found myself to be on the wrong end of public opinion, led by the establishment press. When I was young, I lived where the press was, for the most part, joyously aligned with the right wing of politics. God should help blasphemers in those days, because the press wouldn't. God should help long-haired students who thought that apartheid was wicked, because the press wouldn't. God should help anyone who thought that one's sexuality was one's own business, because the press wouldn't. And God should help anybody who spoke against the righteousness of the establishment, because the press wouldn't. In those days, terrorists were terrorists when they held left-wing views.
Now, in my dotage, God should help adherents of European religions, because the press won't. God should help short-haired students who think that illegal immigration is illegal, because the press won't.God should help anyone who thinks that abnormal sexuality is abnormal, because the press won't. And God should still help anybody who speaks against the righteousness of the establishment, because the press won't. Today, right-wing terrorists are terrible, and left-wing terrorists are human rights warriors.
Suspicion of journalists, most of whom know very little, and understand less, has a long history, and shouldn't be moderated because the establishment journalists have changed sides. This is not only because so many journalists seem to have trouble with facts and the drawing of conclusions which are not non sequitur. I'll try to explain.
Freedom of speech is important whether one likes what somebody else says or not. The struggle really is about defending absolute freedom of speech, not the freedom to say what the establishment journalists rule it is okay to say. Equally important, in my opinion, is rule of law. It is adherence to law which marks to border between acceptable and unacceptable humanity. People who flout that, whomever they shoot at or try to howl down, put themselves firmly in the camp of unacceptable people. In that regard, journalists often put themselves beyond the pale, 'though not quite as far as homicidal terrorists of any stripe, of course.
As ever, it goes without saying. So what is our predicament? Well, simply put, it is that, for a range of practical reasons, we rely on the establishment press for current information, but the very selection of that information predisposes our own conclusions, let alone the intrusion of journalists' opinions. We cannot simply put off the formulation of responsible positions until we are sure of possessing all the facts, and nor can we choose on the basis of our own predispositions which facts to consider and which to accept as the basis of judgement.
I offer this conclusion. The good folk who named the era which we know as "the age of enlightenment" were a little premature. That era did not even mark the beginning of the struggle for enlightenment, not anything close to its culmination. The struggle for enlightenment continues, and its champions are not the journalists; least of all those who claim that they are.
As an aside: I wonder whether Chelsea Clinton will have the wit and honesty to be reconsidering her political alignment now. Not expecting too much, of course. If she was Beto O'Rourke, she'd be finding justifications for the treatment meted out to her.
" When I was young, I lived where the press was, for the most part, joyously aligned with the right wing of politics."
That seems almost like a reversal of nature. I can barely imagine such a scenario.
Thanks, R. Guess you'll have to make up your own mind about my contribution. Perhaps it's just that a new generation has come to town, and not a scenario at all. Would it be useful for me to refer to countries in which the establishment swung abruptly from right to left, as all over southern Africa, for instance, as opposed to the less abrupt and therefore less discernable swing which occurred in, say, Britain? Or would an instance be useful? I'll sketch one, briefly in order to curtail the digression. I'm old, so to me it feels like yesterday that the BBC was criticised for being a bastion of conservatism and derided as "Auntie Beeb". You couldn't think that possible if you had only the present markedly left-wing BBC to judge by. But it's just a view, as I said.
Just observing, not doubting. I objectively know there have been times and places where the media was right-wing, but it's hard to imagine, so to speak. Then I guess we'd find out how many "long-haired students" would still want to fight the establishment without the unceasing adoration of the media.
With you now, R.: sorry to have been obtuse, and thanks for illuminating. Yes, some pretty weird changes have occurred in the half-century gone by. As to long-haired students fighting the establishment, they seemed pretty determined when I was young, although the National Guard (and, outside the U.S., equivalent organisations) sometimes - not routinely - shot at them, and they were adept at producing their own literature to challenge the establishment media. As an aside, not all the long-haired folk taking on the establishment regardless of the establishment media were students. The Manson commune is an example. None of this is to gainsay your projections about today's long-haired students, but to express the hope that conservative students today will be as staunch. To be sure, I've been impressed, so far. In particular, now that the establishment press inclines to the left, I have found a far richer insurrective literature emerging than ever the 'sixties produced. How will conservative students characterise their own corpus of insurrective literature? I do hope that they will eschew the epithet "counter-cultural". That left a bad taste in the mouth, somehow. and should be left to the lefties.
Mark Steyn Club members in Australia and New Zealand should prepare for the immediate end of Western Civilization. I would have thought that you had some time to prepare but coverage of the Christchurch attack has changed my mind.
I don't know New Zealand's politics but NZ's PM was called by a farmer during the election a pretty communist (a Kiwi AOC.) Apparently, her chief accomplishment while in office has been to have a child, take 6 weeks of maternity leave and have a stay-at-home-husband. She was touted as an international leader by reason of taking her child to a UN session. Sometimes when kids cannot get to sleep you take then for a ride in the car. A UN session would be even better for getting anyone sleepy.
Newspapers have called her a leader for our times; by having sympathy, love and integrity (The Guardian) and an inspiration for young Australians (ABC.) Much as been made about her being the leader of a country when NZ is a country in name only. It is about the size of Oregon and Oregon has sheep (and cattle too) and can do the hunting, salmon and deep sea fishing in 24 hours tours too. We don't have Marlin to catch because the water is too cold. But the Oregon National Guard flies F-15's out of Portland so we could whip the Kiwis any day of the week because they have zero combat aircraft. I am an unreconstructed male chauvinist but the leader of a real country cannot take six weeks off.
If young people in Oz and NZ think that this is the ideal leader the end is nigh.
Enjoyed your post. Just to expand on your message for anyone who doesn't know the background, she leads the labour party there: they're of a stripe with the labour party in Australia and Britain, which seem to me to be where the U.S. democratic party is going. All, as you intimate, enjoy the enthusiasm of vocal young people and also that of the constitutionally aggrieved. Happily, not all young people in the Antipodes accept her as the ideal leader, and, like Corbyn, Ocasio-Cortez and the like, she doesn't waste time in using any available rope to hang herself.
Me thinks we are in for a rough ride.
Mark, I for one am fed the hell up with all of this hypocritical virtue signalling by feckless politicians, Islam is a cancer on humanity, plain and simple. There is no other way to describe its bloody trail through the centuries. It is not a religion in my view but rather, a cult of violence, destruction and oppression. Muslims have no place in free societies. So the idea that they have now gained a foothold in our US Congress is quite troubling. Where will it end?
Whenever there is an attack by a Muslim extremist like the one at an Orlando gay club, or on a New York city bike path, the press will usually publish a companion story urging people to stay calm and not retaliate. Then we'll have the story of the police stepping up patrols at mosques to ensure there is no retaliation.
But now we have this case where a murderous nut-job attacks a mosque. I have yet to see the companion story about staying calm, urging for there to be no retaliation. In fact, if you follow the same logic the police should be stepping up patrols at churches and synagogues to ward off retaliation but that hasn't happened. Instead they have stepped up patrols at mosques I suppose to ward off copycat attacks. It just struck me as odd the different way the press and police respond to both types of attacks.
We're seeing patterns now. The key is how are we going to use this new knowledge to save lives. Armed security guards at the places most vulnerable to nutnjobs attacking would be a start.
Patrolling the mosques to ward off copycat attacks does make some sense, of course (there aren't many of them); perhaps they will be "bollardized" like everything else, now. The problem is that the response for events such as Utrecht/NY/London/etc is never along the same lines; no matter what happens, the muslims have to be protected and the Christians (even those so labeled by the merest accident of birth) watched carefully.
But speaking of bollards. The Catholic Priests at a local Parish have done something that will amaze Mark; they've removed the bollards from in front of the church. They are encouraging the police to keep the neighborhood safe, rather than barricading themselves inside the compound. A step of faith, indeed.
The police have acted in Australia. The government has allocated $55M for bollards and cameras. And the police have stepped up patrols. And the security services are very busy pursuing intelligence and leads.
Christians carefully watched?!..............dear God...is it 1938?
Sandy, I have far better faith in the police than I do the press. And I know that, even though not publicized, the police in New Zealand and in other countries where these kinds of attacks take place do in fact conduct heavier patrols on suspected targets once an incident occurs. This includes sites of possible retaliation. My comments were far more critical of the press coverage than the police response.
I forget, but what are the reasons I need to take off my shoes, empty my pockets, etc. at the airport? Or is it only one reason?
You never know if the nice lady on your flight forgot to check her embroidery needle and scissors! Don't forget the mincemeat pie that might have slipped through the X-ray machine.
A minor clarification re Islamophobia-works-both-ways of prominent Muslim leaders in Australia. (And apologies to Mark.)
The PM himself was the focus - the guilty party - of the first Public Islamophobia Message, via a boycott letter outlining concerns about Morrison's statements on Terror Attack A; the second (at a press conference with NSW Police) was directed more generally at "public figures, politicians and media agencies for fuelling Islamophobia" in the context of a Terror Attack B (The New Daily, F Plummer, March 17).
On both occasions, the Grand Mufti was the key Muslim representative.
Details aside, the fact remains that both the PM (just like Ms Clinton) and the Christchurch mass murderer are on the Islamophobic, terrorism-culpability-spectrum.
As usual, the left co-opts words to gain the advantage. "Phobia" means "fear of", so homophobia means an irrational fear of something benign and Islamophobia means irrational fear of Islam. Tell that to the innocent victims slaughtered in the name of the religion of peace. If I am opposed to something, it does not mean I am irrational or fearful, necessarily, and I don't like being labeled that way.
We have a choice between loving or irrationally fearing something. For every other option we have to rely on hatred.
Quite. You might arrive at a position of not being a fan of Islam or decide that it is incompatible with western legal and cultural practices by perfectly rational thinking. Or even simply cultural preferences.
To label an individuals personal preferences as a phobia.....ie..illness, suggests that it can be cured, by drugs...and then surgery and banishment to some sort of facility.
It's all too Orwellian, Soviet and Nazi for me.
Apparently 120 Christians have been killed in Nigeria in the past three weeks but not a peep from our political (so called) leaders or the main stream media. Is it because the perpetrators are islamic militants; the victims are Christian or is it racism on the part of the politicians and media because the victims are African. Draw your own conclusions.
Well, too, some of those Nigerian Christians are Methodists, and just voted to retain Biblical standards for marriage and fornication. So... the press is quietly glad they were raped and murdered, don't you suppose? Serves 'em right.
There was some State Department spokeswoman who may have proposed more jobs for these perpetrators. Maybe they already have found their career paths and it didn't involve the hassle of getting accepted into Western universities.
I think the media narrative is going to be "climate change hysteria led to deranged killing; AOC implicated; we need to tone down the rhetoric". But I could be wrong.
The Democrat Party's surrender to Islam is nearly complete.
"... it is only the exceptions to the rule that prompt industrial-scale moral preening from politicians and media."
Moral preening - and demands for censorship of opinion. And nowhere more than Australia right now. Every politician and journalist is clambering over each other to be the least-Islamophobic and to enforce Islamic blasphemy laws.
Everyone is desperate not to be Chelsea Clinton!! What they don't seem to realise is that their virtue-signalling barely conceals their fear. And their submission - on our behalf.
Meanwhile, the bounds of acceptable discourse shift further: for the average person to say they don't want Australia to evolve into a Muslim-majority country is unconscionable, and far more likely to ignite a terrorist attack than an imam "... calling for 'revenge' on Jewish people" (as Sheik Omar Abdel Kafi, recently touring the country, has urged. Ref- The Australian, March 1st, 2019).
PS. Despite having produced the monstrous Brenton Tarrant, and despite our craven journalists and politicians (with one or two exceptions), Australia has a genuine Muslim reformist - and free speech advocate/ Judeophile - Imam Tawhidi. Given that he's the target of constant death threats due to takfir, it appears the prospect of Islamic reform is some way off. But he puts the opponents of free speech to shame.
"Everyone is desperate not to be Chelsea Clinton!!"
That is why the younger members of the virtue signalling vanity class should calibrate their comments carefully: there could be a new force on the block in another three decades. I just finished reading the manifesto of Mr. Tarrant, youthful terrorist, and "part-time kebab removalist". He compares himself to Nelson Mandela and expects to be out of prison in 27 years time, by which time he expects political conditions to have changed dramatically in his favour. Young spineless commentators take warning and tread softly: your presumptive comments against ethnic nationalists and racists may not be as popular under a Prime Minister Tarrant, or a King Brenton (presuming the demise of the House of Windsor) in your future as they are now. Stranger things have happened. Your future careers could be compromised by silly things you're saying now.
That video clip is priceless. Two silly girls in the grip of something neither understand. Here Chelsea is falsely accused of the murder of Muslims. The next time it will be the turn of her immodestly dressed accuser for insulting Islam by not wearing a hijab. Evil is insatiable.
The video clip perfectly sums up what an Australian writer referred to (post-Boris-on-burkas) as Islam's glass jaw.
Left vs Left - and all of them stupid women too!
Sounds like a Middle-Ages depiction of Hell which, I daresay, it is.
The Left lives by identity politics. And they die by identity politics. Unfortunately they leave substantial amounts of death, destruction, and chaos in their wake before their eventual demise. The only thing standing in their way right now is a free and strong USA. Without a free and strong USA all of the weaknesses and human flaws from which our Constitution was designed to protect us will have to run their full course before the Left finally gets around to consuming itself. How long before the Left acquires enough power here in the USA to make them unstoppable?
We're on the precipice right now David. With an activist judicial system rendering our constitution meaningless in many cases all that that stands in their way now is a weak and fractious republican party. It speaks volumes that they controlled all three branches of the federal gov't for two years and did nothing meaningful to secure our border. As central america and now south america empties out into the land of plenty the ugly truth of what is occurring at our border is clear for all to see. As long as there is a child involved the border petrol basically functions as travel agents. There is now a thriving 'rent a kid' industry south of the border. Almost a quarter of his party in the senate turned against the president in his proposed executive action. If there is a bright spot in all of this I sure can't see it.
I think the answer is simply as soon as the Democrats regain simultaneous control of the House, Senate and executive branch. Unless Trump is able to replace Ginsburg, the judiciary won't stand in the way. And even then it would only be for a few years.
Great Mark. The hypocrisy is overwhelming and stinks as usual.
The UN runs on Arab money. The MSM by Soros and the like money.
While I was typing 3 people killed in Utrecht by a suspected jihadi.
I wonder how long that will be in the news.
This point absolutely captures the current cultural and geo-political zeitgeist: "...we are approaching a tipping point, in which the authorities of the state (as in the average British constabulary's Twitter feed) are ever more openly concerned to clamp down on you noticing what's happening than on what is actually happening.'
It's the modern day version of shooting the messenger, but with even greater breadth and speed because everything is electronic. There is so much power concentrated in so few tech hands now, and that makes the clampdown on "noticing what is happening" all the more frightening.
Google actually just vaporized one of the founders of Greenpeace because the left didn't like the cut of his jib with respect to his feelings about Alexandria Occasional Cortex (I believe he called her a vapid twit, or something like that). POOF!
So they are not just disappearing our current and future conversations and censoring them, they are actually "editing" the past. Terribly frightening.
Bingo Laura - he called her a "pompous little twit" and proceeded to add more truth and common sense in less time than it takes to say Jack Robinson - I saw him twice then he was indeed poofed.
Laura, I suspect that Google's vaporizing of Dr. Patrick Moore, co-founder of Greenpeace, has much more to do with his becoming a very vocal skeptic of human-caused Climate Change than it has to do with his feelings about AOC's vapidity on all matters including Climate Change.
Moore is aggressively calling out the tyranny that the Left is attempting to foist on the USA and Western civilization via fraudulent Climate Change science. They cannot afford to have a Climate Change apostate the likes of someone as credible to the Left's sheep as Dr. Moore freely countering their narrative.
This is a such a profound and yes frightening situation we face today and I was going to submit similar comments but you said it better. With any fear of congressional investigations now out the window these all powerful left wing social media giants are now free to censor at will. Amazon recently banned Tommy Robinson's book (few Americans know who he is) without hardly a ripple of protest in a land that once valued free speech. A few on Fox News spoke out but to no effect. There is a nasty corollary to what you have addressed today that works in reverse. Not long ago the governor of Virginia and rep. Ilhan Omar both appeared to be dead meat and in the blink of an eye both emerged unscathed. Even worse Ms. Omar has been transformed into a victim of Islamophobia. That's the pure power of social media working with the main stream media on full display. "Terribly frightening" indeed Laura.
It's a two-fer.
Two strikes to protect leftist sacrements/prophets for the price of one Stalinesque Google poof.
"There is a nasty corollary to what you have addressed today that works in reverse. Not long ago the governor of Virginia and rep. Ilhan Omar both appeared to be dead meat and in the blink of an eye both emerged unscathed. Even worse Ms. Omar has been transformed into a victim of Islamophobia."
A super-astute observation, Roy, along with those of LRC and Mark Steyn.
Exactly right David.
If it comes to pass that the Democrats regain power in America in the near future, it will be up to the Citizens to re-gain their Constitutional rights and freedoms, and their self-rule. Then things will get very interesting.
"That's the pure power of social media working with the main stream media on full display."
Good point, Roy.
Unfortunately, I don't think we have yet seen the end or the worst of this collaborative axis of weasels (which also includes the Democratic party and leftist parties in most countries).
The next stages, which are trickling out right now in drips and drabs, will be to refuse to provide individuals banking services because of their personal beliefs (this is already happening to many businesses and to many thoughtcrime writers and public intellectuals/personalities).
And it will likely spread to mobile phone service, Internet service provision (and not just hosting or commerce services as we have already seen). I can think of many other possible scenarios, especially when I think about how easily information moves about, how the online mobs work and how data is shared electronically. Maybe public library memberships? Public school enrollment?
I predict that many more private businesses and government actors are going to get utterly punch drunk on this power and that they are already plotting, and thinking about rolling out many new, effective ways to stomp on personal liberties with a few mere clicks of a keyboard.
Would it be indelicate to note that 52 Nigerian Christians were slaughtered by Muslim Fulani "herdsmen" last week, and perhaps as many as 120 since in the past two months? Is that just "part and parcel" of living in a big savannah? There can be no justification of one atrocity by another, but decency demands we at least acknowledge--call out, if you will--the snuffing of their souls.
"Kill the invaders, kill the overpopulation and by so doing save the environment." This is a toxic mix of an acolyte of Paul Ehrlich's "The Population Bomb" and Identity Politics.
Brenton Tarrant, aged 28, is just another Angry Young Man. The world is full of them, and always has been. Angry young men just focus their anger/hatred on something politically motivated and also an easy target.
Sometimes the targets of their hatred/anger are women. Sometimes homosexuals. Sometimes people of colour.
Sometimes Jews. Sometimes the police. Even some Jihadis are just angry young men, not religious fanatics.
He wrote his 'manifesto' to try and justify his hateful, heinous actions. The only identity group he is representative is "Angry Young Men'.
It should come as no surprise that this moron is still highly regarded in academia. Every one of his apocalyptic predictions turned out to be total nonsense as most of us knew full well at the time. The press fell in love with this clown back then as well. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez isn't any dumber than Ehrlich was on environmental issues and at least she's easier on the eyes. The press of course simply adores this woman as does the camera.
Only one "s" in the Dreyfus whose affair I think you mean.
Mark replies:
Corrected. Thank you, David - unless I'm thinking of the Richard Dreyfuss case.
On a movie note, I believe Dreyfuss played the antisemitic defense attorney for Dreyfus in the movie Prisoner of Honor. Dreyfuss was excellent and there were great performances by the likes of Peter Firth, Brian Blessed and Jeremy Kemp. My favorite quote is when Jeremy Kemp hands a straight razor to Peter Firth and suggests that Firth commit suicide by saying "make us proud". Good movie. You might recognize Capt. Dreyfus from Empire Strikes Back.
Also note that in early reporting of Utrecht tram attack "mosques, schools, and airports have been closed", but oddly no churches were mentioned. So it's ok to kill Christians, or the churches are already closed due to lack of interest.
Meanwhile in places other than NZ Muslim jihadists kill hundreds of Christians and the slaughter doesn't make the news, nor do big city US mayors put extra police patrols around churches. To the self-appointed elite Christians are part of the rabble—with higher loyalties than the state—and therefore expendable, while Muslims are one of the left's mascot groups and therefore unassailable.
There has been extensive discussion about the precise ideological label that should be assigned to Brenton Tarrant. Fascist (of whatever sub-category) seems accurate, and is a reminder of the equivalent terminology popularised by Christopher Hitchens et al: Islamofascism.
The term fell out of use, it seems, because drawing attention to Islamofascism is... Islamophobic.
I'm reminded of what inspired the Western world to rise up against Hitler and Mussolini and defeat them. Was it Nazi and Fascist protectionism or a real phobia? Why is there an phobia against a word attached to the word "phobic"? Why can't we put "rational" back to work in the discourse?
Take climate change, for example. Can we look at how this phobia about climate change has seemingly altered the course of politics and very possibly the psychological balance of many true believers. Where did it originate? It originated forty years ago with an intergovernmental panel that didn't ask for or demand due diligence about how the scientists were coming up with their formulas that show the temperature changes are due to one random thing affecting them. They pulled CO2 literally out of the air and buttressed their theories with random fancy names for coefficients and produced models none of which are proving to be true. $189 Billion has been spent in the "research" field so far and what do we have? Nothing! Compared to over $200 billion on the Apollo program and we got something.
For some reason, everyone with few exceptions, buys into the myth now created that climate change has been caused by man. People are afraid to have children now. It's insane. What about all the other complicated factors that go into weather climate? They were ignored. Flat out ignored. Isn't anyone curious in the believer camp about those factors? The governments don't care about analyzing the truth. The money would stop flowing into their pockets. Same with the violence happening against religious sects. Not the correct narrative to plunk down here. Too big a mountain to climb to sort things out truthfully. The money flowing to various hate groups would stop.
When is the inaugural Mark Steyn Club launch to outer space? I'm ready to sign on.
I personally think the women now declaring they won't have any children because of climate change are women who didn't want to have children anyway. They get 15 minutes of "fame" for declaring something they intended to do all along regardless. Either that, or they're just lying, like all those Leftists who declared they would leave the country if Trump got elected - who are still here.
I don't feel sorry for Chelsea because of all the illegal profits she made right along with her parents, but where were her body guards? Was there no one with her to come up along side her in that moment? Though I'm no fan of hers, I want to spank the twit verbally attacking her. How dumb is that? But oh so leftist with their extreme "logic". I'm sure the idiot who attacked the mosques hung on every word Chelsea said in her tweet and it most certainly caused him to act out his hatred. Yep, that's got to be it . . . . .
I hope Chelsea now doubles down on her defense of Israel, but she probably won't.
We'll see, who knows. maybe now that her parents are out of the political spotlight, she'll surprise us and be her own stand up person. She has shown some real chutzpah lately and like you say, feeling sorry for her doesn't enter the picture. Who gains anything from people feeling pity for you anyway? It only makes you a victim, which in today's politically charged #mevictim climate garners attention and a sick purchase power with other needy, immature people but advances you nowhere in your own self-awareness and development. There's something timely about that Patsy Cline song title, "Stop the World and Let Me Off," now.
Apollo cost about $150 billion in today's money.
There's an article where I found the info at climatedollars.org, under the table of contents titled "US Government Funding of Climate Change" by Kenneth Haapala. He talks about a '79 "Charney Report," and there's an informative short video and the numbers came from text below "The Conclusion."
Fran,' human-caused climate change' was a deception from the beginning. It is a tool of the Left, Globalists in particular. Hence the term "Denier" was coined early on (25 years ago) to inhibit debate, as was the '"97% scientific concensus" - 'the science is settled' meme, also to prevent debate, discussion, or questioning of the theory. The IPCC was created to give 'climate change ' scientific and moral authority.
Oh, yeah, I know, and I think that "denier" is now getting tossed out so frequently at those who wish to challenge the findings of the IPCC that it's got the same denigrating and debate-ending purpose as "racist"! Recently, I attended a lecture at our local university by true believer climate scientist, Katherine Hayhoe, from Texas Tech giving a packed house of students mostly the standard absurd basic tenets of the global warming/climate change crowd. My friend asked a question about why she didn't include any info about the Bond cycles and not only did she not know what they were, she asked him if he ever in his life voted for a Democrat! It was such a bs way to respond but here is what they are teaching at our universities. It's a land grant university and we felt since it was supported by tax dollars there should be a chance to give the other side. They don't want to hear the other side. It's another means to shut down debate. This is the higher education system today. They have sold out for the big "research" dollars. More research to give the government the answers it wants so they can soak us into submission and oblivion. The deadly march to Globalism has begun!
Exactly.
Fran,
Do you have a source for that "$189 billion"? I've seen figures ranging from "a few $billion" to "more than a $trillion" but never a source.
I apologize, Fran, for my (slightly) earlier query; I hadn't looked at this whole thread.
Since it seems to be allowed now to post links at SteynOnline, here's the page that you were likely referring to: https://www.climatedollars.org/full-study/us-govt-funding-of-climate-change/
The number used there is $166 billion in 2012 dollars. I haven't looked at the full report that's accessible from that same page.
However, the comparison of total spent for climate change research ($166 billion) with that spent on the Apollo program ($200 billion in 2012 dollars) strikes me as peculiar: **If** human activities are seriously modifying the climate, I think that's of far more moment than the Cold-War-stimulated feat of landing a dozen Americans on the moon. (This assumes that the climate-change work was funded in good faith, as an attempt to answer a real question.)
I'll be interested to read the full report. $166 billion over ~two decades sounds like a huge amount if we're mostly talking about computer modeling. It's important to see what costs for what activities the people at the Capital Research Center who did the report were counting.
I'll double check with my fellow "deniers" (a label we're proud to wear if that means denying fake science) at the CASF.me website. They might know over what about time that money was spent. I assumed it was forty years. They're the real whiz kids on the block, not me. They also take questions, too, if I'm not mistaken. Bernie and Bob are two of the big contributors, and very friendly, too.
Fran, I've been thinking about your comment here, and also noticed you replied to me on the Q&A (the notifications of reply don't seem to work for that page).
I think you're right about "Islamofacism", in that the ideology would be something the West would be obliged to resist - and fight - if that label had been the accepted convention. In contrast, "Islamism" - however extreme - is still part of the rich tapestry of multicultural diversity.
It's another example of what's been pointed out many times around these parts: language matters.
Kate. this isn't going to sound too discreet whichever way you look at it, but frankly, i'm up for the debate. The Islamofascists are by their creed a lying bunch and they slaughter people brutally and indiscrimanently, rape in similar fashion and multilate female babies. They have no timetable to establish their worldwide caliphate and they have already infiltrated our countries by pouring the big bucks in to establish mosques. They've taken over entire neighborhoods and districts so they can elect reps to Congress and mayors of large cities. They have never surrendered on Sharia being the equivalent of our respective constitutions and they use our freedoms to make themselves the number one victim group. Nobody makes them abide by our basic laws of government. in fact, in the case of the US Congress some person among the club membership pointed out that Congress actually passed a law recently now permitting them to wear the head garb of their choice and take their oath on the Koran.
Nothing adds up anymore in my mind. If you want to be an American then we unite around our founding documents and our laws. There are good Muslims around the world, I know some, but they're not the ones i'm afraid of, frankly. I generally am fearful of people who go around sawing off heads while at the same time professing to believe they're serving their Allah higher power. To say theirs illustrates a social behavior conducive to serving humanity is like saying Nazis had a higher calling in their hearts to better the lives of Jews.
It's absolutely crucial that we are able to say these things openly. The steps towards criminalising "Islamophobia" - the rejection of a perverse, murderous ideology - must be resisted.
I'm not sure exactly what Judge Jeannie Pirro said on her show recently because I go straight to Greg Gutfeld on Saturday nights, but I heard Rush hint that she may have said something like a part of this and she was suspended from FOX. I'll be damned if I watch FOX again if she did indeed say something along these lines and they shut her down by removing her permanently. She needs to be able to speak truthfully about all of the miscarriages of justice in this country not just the correct ones. Someone at that network needs to tell management that there's a massive audience of theirs out here that hasn't given up the fight yet and we aren't going to surrender to the PC Leftists no matter what. We'd rather give up our lives than live in the world of radical Islam.
Fran, this attempt to impose de facto Islamic blasphemy laws is accelerating at an alarming rate. Add to that the fact that recent events - capitalised on by those looking to amplify this signal - will drive a culture of self-censorship. That means fewer people will speak out, and the risks to them become greater.
The elephant in the room is that the consequences of the "Islamophobia" label are infinitely more serious for the individual concerned than, say, "transphobia". "Islamophobia" (ie blasphemy) is a capital offence in many Islamic countries, and is also a justification for vigilante (jihadist) murders - so we CANNOT possibly allow this form of "sentencing" with a scarlet (green?) letter *I* in Western countries. To acknowledge the "crime" would endorse the punishment.
Charles Adler is a preening chameleon whose public voice on Islam is quite different than his private voice. That's all I shall say about Mr. Adler.
Forget his comments directed at the Queen's vicereine! Why didn't he address the Queen directly?! Her statement was distinctly "absent 3 key words":
"I have been deeply saddened by the appalling events in Christchurch today. Prince Philip and I send our condolences to the families and friends of those who have lost their lives. I also pay tribute to the emergency services and volunteers who are providing support to those who have been injured. At this tragic time, my thoughts and prayers are with all New Zealanders. Elizabeth R."
QEII is an Islamophobe!! *Fortunately*, Prince Charles is not...
A perfectly appropriate and reasonable statement. Such a dignified and wily leader. Cannot imagine that Prince Charles will be able to muster the same gumption.
As for the other Charles, Charles Adler all I can (and should) say is FEH.
He used to be quite an interesting and an intellectually challenging host, and yours truly was even a featured guest from time to time. I'll borrow a phrase from Mark Steyn now...I was a guest until I made "one infelicitous joke"-and it was so clearly a joke that it was pathetic. He's just lucky I'm so discrete (hope he's reading this).
I suspect he tacked leftward and wimpward in order to save his gig. Most Canadian media outlets run from hard left to squishy left to "conservative lite"-ish, if that so he must have figured out which side of the bread the butter was gonna be on.
Great observations.
My own observations are that they say that the Christchurch mosque was where the terrorists who murdered people in Indonesia were instructed. Australians have been murdered by Islamic terror there.
Would I be wrong to note that the accused assailant seems to be an overly muscled fellow......usually in evidence with steroid users.......the extra testerosterone leading to an advanced anger and sense of revenge for the previous killings?
Larry, I think a full toxicolgy report would be a very interesting and informative addition to all reporting on such atrocities.
Quite.
You're sick of writing it. I'm sick of reading it.
Mark just referenced terror in the Netherlands in a work of fiction, and reality obliges within an hour in Utrecht. How sad.
Regarding causation always somehow winding up being assigned to Trump or others, there needs to be a new analytical tool when the explanation for a phenomena as produced by Occam's Razor is unacceptable. Perhaps "Occasio's Razor": everything bad is Trump's fault.
Nice
Absolutely nothing can justify killing 50 people at prayer. But everyone seems to have forgotten about the 2017 mass attack by at least 40 militant Islamists on the al-Rawda mosque in Sinai, where 311 praying Muslims were murdered and at least 122 were seriously injured.
Now then, Mark, was that 40 'lone wolves' who just happened by? Or were they all part of an International Far Right Conspiracy?
Within minutes of the ghastly news of the Christchurch attack arriving at BBC Broadcasting House, they pushed a microphone into the hands of an "expert" who droned on endlessly that 'it seemed very likely' that this was part of this aforementioned International far Right Conspiracy. Still waiting for chapter and verse on that one...
Typical that all our 'Far Left Elites' didn't take long to move all their agendas forward, gun controll certainly won't be the only move Arden and her Green & Red chums will bring in.
Some parts of Tarrant's Manifesto need to be taken very seriously. The link above leads eventually to this excellent discussion by Rod Dreher of why this diabolical act was inevitable. https://www.theamericanconservative.com/dreher/radicalization-degeneration-brenton-tarrant-white-supremacist/
We had better understand what forces are at work to precipitate these horrific actions. Dreher quotes Tarrant: "Radicalization is the rational response to degeneration."
What is "degeneration"? According to the manifesto, it consists of:
The decline in native European populations, and native European stock in the US, in terms of numbers relative to non-Europeans within those societies.
Politics and policies within European countries (that is, countries with ethnic European majorities, including the US and Canada) that disempower native Europeans.
Widespread drug use.
The loss of worker rights and stability under the reign of globalist capitalism.
Environmental degradation.
The collapse of Christianity (which he seems to value only as a force ethnically binding Europeans)
Rampant hedonism
Dreher notes: Here's the chilling part: Everything Tarrant identifies as qualities of a disintegrating Western civilization is true.
Rod Dreher's essay is well worth the time to read, learn, and inwardly digest. Thanks.
I read through the link you mentioned, Christie, but that one quote at the end of your comment is not chilling if we've been paying attention and here around the club we've been paying attention. The "radicalization" response being "rational" is the part of this statement that isn't reasoned out at all. His seven items listed that follow which indicate why radicalization ought to be the "rational" response are just that, a list. The missing piece for this mass murderer is analysis. He's not telling us anything new, but, only that this is where we're at today. His thinking is not analytical but reactive. Much of what causes the societal upheavals sparked by reactionaries is that they don't think past, "what is the immediate reaction can I expect to get from this"? There is no consideration for the extensive misery these people create.
He missed exploring an in-depth explanation for why Christianity carried the day for much of the building of Western civilization. It was only a binding force to him. He didn't see past that to inquire why? Why is that? I think it is because education about our past is disintegrating before our eyes. Being curious and asking questions and studying the answers seem out of reach today for many and the answers aren't always easy to accept. What was it about the major world religions that created the explosion of art, literature, scientific development and free thinking that built Western Civilization and created intelligent peoples in just the last two thousand years compared to all the millennia passed before? What were the underlying causes of the most devastation that erupted in the last century? Christianity and its roots in Judaism might have helped this man and the act of going on a killing rampage might not have seemed like such a "rational response."
Notice how gutsy-confident and bold the Muslim woman's rhetoric was -- regardless of its absurdity. Now compare that with the usual hand-wringing put out by westerners when a Muslim commits an atrocity. Who's going to win the war of words when only one side shows up?
While we are keeping score of attacks on places of worship and persons of faith, there's a long, long list of Muslim atrocities against Christians that may be found here: https://www.thereligionofpeace.com/attacks/christian-attacks.aspx
The western media chooses not to draw attention to these, probably because of the racism implicit in holding non-whites and Muslims to an infinitely lower standard.
Having cut the cable I don't have tv news - can anyone confirm to me that anxious tv news crews have fanned out to white suburbs all around Christendom, to interview "community leaders", anxious mothers, pious vicars and local police chiefs, about their fears of "a backlash" against whites by Muslims?
Sorry, Perry, but if you are white, not only cannot you not be victimized by the madness infecting the world, but you probably deserve it. The typical leader of the West only wants his citizens complacent and unarmed. The typical citizen of the West only wants to get along. Stephen Payne's memorable comment about mosques in Christchurch was more prophetic than most realize. It's not like the Baptists moved to town. Constantinople was once the flower of Christendom...until the young Turkish empire depopulated it (nice euphemism for slaughter). History can be remarkably annoying to modern Leftist narratives, but it rarely turns out well for those who ignore it.
Indeed. Despite the supposed racial element, Tarrant's murderous rampage clearly targeted religious followers - hence the $55 million for religious organisations to increase security in Australia.
Alas, it seems inevitable that there'll be an escalating pattern of violence by extremists - on both "sides". And churches, as they have been in numerous cases, will almost certainly be a target at some point. What we now know is that future terrorist attacks - whether extreme-right *or* Islamic - will be attributed to the trigger of so-called Islamophobia (as per recent comment on restriction of free speech -
https://www.steynonline.com/9245/beto-goes-bovine)
It is entirely understandable that Muslims would be very fearful after Christchurch. But why is it that following all the other attacks, non-Muslims - the unbelievers - have not been permitted to say that they too are fearful?
That fear is "Islamophobia": not a legitimate fear (as our moral-betters tell us), but one characterised by unfounded paranoia and bigotry.
Whoops! Excuse the double negative...which seems strangely appropriate for this no win situation...
Well-said Kate.