Category: Islamism

Kevin Kim on John Pepple on Sweden as Europe’s Sacrificial Lamb

A tip of the hat to Bill Keezer, and greetings to fellow bloggers Kim and Pepple. The titles of their blogs do not, however, earn the coveted MavPhil transparency of content award.

Feed: BigHominid's Hairy Chasms
Posted on: Thursday, September 5, 2019 1:22 AM
Author: Kevin Kim
Subject: Pepple on Sweden

Is Sweden Europe's sacrificial lamb, to be laid out as a bloody example of what happens when you heedlessly allow an influx of Muslims who refuse to assimilate into your culture? In John Pepple's grim blog post, Dr. Pepple quotes a Frenchwoman who immigrated to Sweden, but who is now leaving the country for Budapest because the crime has gotten so bad, and because PC politicians, who fear being branded as racists, refuse to recognize that there's any problem with current immigration policy and law enforcement. Here's an excerpt of something the woman wrote—one long, cri de coeur sentence:

I can no longer live under this immense mental stress, insecurity, murder, shooting, executions, explosions, rapes and gang rapes, robberies, home burglaries, beatings, car fires, school fires, serious criminals who, after a relatively short prison stay, may again be released to move freely among us, an increasingly dismantled welfare system, lack of health care staff, teachers, elderly housing, lack of elderly care, an increasing number of poor pensioners, municipalities in principle bankrupt or in bankruptcy, all these no-go zones called something else, lack of police resources where it may take 1.5-2 hours for them to arrive at the scene of ongoing crimes if they arrive at all, the lying politicians regardless of political color and the accomplished so-called PC media, the demonization of people who think differently, the shrinking freedom of expression, the increasingly diminishing democracy, and last, but not least, the ongoing and widespread Islamization of the country.

Go read the rest.

A similar picture is being painted of countries like France, which is dealing with its own immigration/assimilation problem. France has a built-in cultural immune system called laïcité or, roughly, secularism. This is why French law has made no bones about disallowing the wearing of religious items like Muslim veils (hijab, etc.). But in the area surrounding Paris, which is filled with tenements and housing projects, there are the same no-go zones, with plenty of robbery, rape, car fires, and so on. In Paris itself, tent cities—with their attendant filth and violence—can be found as well. But once you leave Paris, you'd be forgiven for thinking France is still France. In the area where my buddy Dominique lives, in the small town of Le Vanneau-Irleau, life goes on much as it has for decades, utterly untouched by what's happening in France's big cities.

In the United States, there's a similar state of affairs, albeit with somewhat different demographics. Still, the heart of the US problem has much in common with Europe's problem: a lack of political will when it comes to things like immigration and the true causes of poverty, and a lack of will when it comes to law enforcement. Any teacher knows that losing control of the classroom means the students will rule and nothing of significance will be learned. This is basic human psychology: people need structure if they are to live in harmony and to flourish. Without structure, life is solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.

This is the paradox of freedom: true freedom is, far from being unstructured, veined throughout with structure. The creative freedom and amazing technique you can see in a great painter or martial artist is the result of focus and discipline. It's strange, but it's strictures that allow humans to flourish. And a society is no different from an individual in this regard: a society without strictures—an organic system of rules and laws and unspoken social contracts—becomes flabby and moribund. Look at New York City before and after Rudy Giuliani's two terms: Giuliani enforced the law, and his policies resulted in a few years of glorious prosperity between long periods of poverty and crime. Sweden is experiencing this problem now; so is France, at least in its big cities. The US has its own similar urban problems. As the folk song goes, When will they ever learn?

View article…

Christianity has civilized us . . .

. . . but it has also weakened us.  Our virtues, which once were strengths, are now weaknesses.  Some of our virtues have come to vitiate as much as some of our vices. 

We in the West no longer crucify malefactors or break them on the wheel. We now wring our hands, absurdly, over whether lethal injection is "cruel and unusual punishment."  A nation that has lost the will to execute its worst and most destructive criminals is a nation not long for this earth.  Can the will to live exist in a people who under no circumstances can muster the will to kill?

One of the fruits of civilization is toleration, that touchstone of classical liberalism.  It is a beautiful thing. It becomes a weakness, however, when it extends to the toleration of those who crucify and behead and throw homosexuals off of buildings.

Crucifixion in Islam:

It is all too common to view the practice of crucifixion as a form of torture and execution from antiquity which hasn’t been used in nearly two millennia, yet this is hardly the case. In fact, crucifixion is a standard means of execution in Saudi Arabia, and there is a growing movement among Islamists to bring back crucifixion as the preferred means of punishment for a variety of crimes, including apostasy from Islam, “fitna,” which is a pliable term which can refer to unbelief or mischief-making, or anything which goes against Islam and Shariah. This is explicitly taught in the Qur’an:

The punishment of those who wage war against Allah and His messenger and strive to make mischief in the land is only this: that they should be murdered or crucified or their hands and their feet should be cut off… (Qur’an 5:33).

Ominously for Christians, strongly associated with fitna is “shirk,” the associating of partners with Allah. Believing Jesus to be the Son of God is, for Muslims, one of the worst forms of shirk, and is therefore punishable by death, including crucifixion. (There is a dark irony here, as Muslims do not believe Jesus was crucified, yet they prescribe crucifixion as punishment for Christians.)

Read it all. Disturbing images.

Stealth-Jihad and the Hijab

William Kilpatrick:

After all the years that have passed since 9/11, many American still misunderstand the nature of the Islamic threat. The main way that Islamic power advances in the West is not through terror attacks, but through stealth-jihad—the slow-motion co-option of our cultural and political institutions.

[. . .]

Cultural battles are won—or lost—by cultural institutions. Most stealth jihadists don’t hope to impose sharia law through armed struggle, but rather through influence operations designed to enlist these institutions on their side. They already seem to have enlisted two major cultural institutions on their side—universities and media.

Many universities, for example, seem to have adopted a pro-hijab stance. Faculty and student groups present the hijab as a symbol of a woman’s right to choose—in this case, to choose what clothes she will wear. Thus, on International Hijab Day, students are encouraged to don the hijab in order to show solidarity with their Muslim sisters.

Having thus been primed to see the hijab as a symbol of choice and diversity, the typical college grad will have no difficulty understanding the decision by Fox News to suspend Judge Jeanine Pirro for her criticism of Representative Ilhan Omar’s wearing of the hijab. Pirro suggested that Omar’s hijab might be “indicative of her adherence to sharia law.”  And that was enough to bring on the two week suspension.

Read it all.

Prager, the Left, and ‘Easter Worshippers’

Banning Guns and Banning Muslims

Conservatives are not opposed to gun control, but they strenuously oppose gun confiscation and proposals to ban civilian ownership of semi-automatic weapons. These include semi-auto handguns of .22 caliber,  semi-auto rifles such as the AR-15, and semi-auto shotguns. Most of these same conservatives, however, support a reduction of, or moratorium on, Muslim immigration, either across the board or from selected terror-sponsoring states.  

This raises a question. Is the differential stance of these conservatives reasonable?  According to Libertarian Michael Huemer,

The threat of mass shootings is vastly overblown. The U.S. murder rate is about 4.9 per 100,000 population per year. The comparable *mass shooting* death rate is about 0.002. We should stop freaking out about a relatively tiny risk.

He also maintains that

The threat of terrorism is vastly overblown. In the last 50 years or so, about 3,300 Americans were murdered by terrorists, while about 800,000 were murdered by non-terrorists. We should stop freaking out about a relatively tiny risk.

I will assume that Huemer's numbers are correct, at least  for Americans on American soil. The numbers seem about right. Going by the numbers alone, it is not rational for a random individual to worry about dying either in a mass shooting or in a terrorist attack.  So why the differential stance? is it not irrational for conservatives to support the right of civilians to own semi-auto weapons while wanting to reduce Muslim immigration out of concern that some Muslims will engage in terrorist attacks?

I say it is entirely rational to stand for gun rights while also demanding special vetting of Muslims and a reduction in Muslim immigration.  This is because immigrants bring their culture with them, and in the case of Muslims, their culture, based as it is on sharia, Islamic law, is antithetical to American values of the sort that libertarians and classical liberals tend to uphold.  These include freedom of thought and expression, even unto the mocking of their Prophet, religious liberty including the liberty to eschew religion, and separation of church/mosque and state.  Muslims, bringing their culture with them, are not interested in assimilating, but in remaking our culture in their image.  Taking advantage of our excessive tolerance, they seek to replace our tolerant culture with their intolerant culture.   

Libertarians, however, understand none of this since they tend to think in a narrowly economic way.  Blind to culture, libertarians are blind to the cultural damage that Muslims do by refusing to assimilate to American values and ways.  So they tally up how many are killed by berserk shooters and how many by berserk Muslims.  But that involves vicious abstraction. Once cannot reasonably abstract from the cultural impact of Muslim immigration.

When Americans stand for their Second Amendment rights, they are not altering American culture but insisting on it. Ours is a culture of liberty and self-reliance and limited government. It is a culture that prizes freedom of expression and open inquiry. It is anti-totalitarian in a way that theocratic Muslim culture is not.

Libertarians strike me as embarrassingly un-self-aware. They don't seem to realize that a culture in which they and their ideas can flourish is not a culture re-made along the lines of sharia.  For the sake of their own survival they need to realize that the threat that Muslim immigration poses is not merely the terrorist threat but the broader cultural threat.

More on the Left’s Toleration of Militant Islam

Just over the transom from Kai Frederik Lorentzen:

The French writer Pascal Bruckner, adding a historical dimension, traces the issue back not only to the Iranian revolution of 1979 but even to early Bolshevism:

" … And here is where the strangest factor in the whole Islamophobia controversy emerges: the enlistment of a part of the American and European Left in the defense of the most radical form of Islam—what one might call the neo-Bolshevik bigotry of the lost believers of Marxism. Having lost everything—the working class, the Third World—the Left clings to this illusion: Islam, rebaptized as the religion of the poor, becomes the last utopia, replacing those of Communism and decolonization for disenchanted militants. The Muslim takes the place of the proletarian.

The baton seems to have been passed at about the time of the fall of the Shah of Iran in 1979, with the resulting rise to power of Islamist revolutionaries, which was the occasion for enthusiastic commentary by Michel Foucault, among others on the left. God’s return on history’s stage had finally rendered Marxist and anticolonialist programs obsolete. The faith moved the masses better than the socialist hope. Now, it was the believer in the Koran who embodied the global hope for justice, who refused to conform to the order of things, who transcended borders and created a new international order, under the aegis of the Prophet: a green Comintern. Too bad for feminism, women’s equality, salvific doubt, the critical spirit; in short, too bad for everything traditionally associated with a progressive position.

This political attitude is manifest in progressives’ scrupulous idolatry of Muslim practices and rites, especially the Islamic veil: “modest fashion” is praised to the skies, so much so that, for certain leftist commentators, an unveiled Muslim woman who claims this right can only be a traitor, a turncoat, a woman for sale. The irony of this neocolonial solicitude for bearded men and veiled women—and for everything that suggests an oriental bazaar—is that Morocco itself, whose king is the “Commander of the Faithful,” recently forbade the wearing, sale, and manufacture of the burka in his country. Shall we call the Cherifian monarchy “Islamophobic”? Shall we be more royalist than the king?

It’s worth considering this Islamo-leftism more closely, this hope nourished by a revolutionary fringe that Islam might spearhead a new uprising, a “holy war” against global capitalism, exactly as in Baku in 1920, when Bolshevik leaders, including Zinoviev, published a joint appeal with the pan-Islamists to unleash jihad against Western imperialism. It was an English Trotskyite, Chris Harman, leader of the Socialist Workers Party, who, in 1994, provided a theory for this alliance between militant revolutionaries and radical Muslim associations, arguing for their unity, in certain circumstances, against the common enemy of capitalism and the bourgeoisie. Generations of leftists saw the working class as the messianic leaven of a radiant humanity; now, willing to flirt with the most obscurantist bigotry and to betray their own principles, they transferred their hopes to the Islamists … "

In autumn, Bruckner published a book where he elaborates the theses of his essay. I haven't read it yet, but the table of contents looks promising. While I have doubts that the political fight against the Sharia can still be won in Western Europe, things may take a turn for the better on your side of the big water. At least I hope so.

Mit besten Wünschen!

Kai
 
https://www.city-journal.org/html/theres-no-such-thing-islamophobia-15324.html
https://www.wiley.com/en-ax/An+Imaginary+Racism%3A+Islamophobia+and+Guilt-p-9781509530663
https://maverickphilosopher.typepad.com/maverick_philosopher/2019/03/what-explains-the-lefts-toleration-of-militant-islam.html

What Explains the Left’s Toleration of Militant Islam?

From 1789 on, a defining characteristic of the Left has been hostility to religion, especially in its institutionalized forms. This goes together with a commitment to such Enlightenment values as individual liberty, belief in reason, and equality, including equality among the races and between the sexes. Thus the last thing one would expect from the Left is an alignment with militant Islam given the latter’s philosophically unsophisticated religiosity bordering on rank superstition, its totalitarian moralism, its voluntaristic suppression of reason, and its opposition to gender equality.

So why is the radical Left soft on militant Islam?  The values of the progressive creed are antithetic to those of the Islamists, and it is quite clear that if the Islamists got everything they wanted, namely, the imposition of Islamic law on the entire world, our dear progressives would soon find themselves headless. I don’t imagine that they long to live under Sharia, where ‘getting stoned’ would have more than metaphorical meaning. So what explains this bizarre alignment?

1. One point of similarity between radical leftists and Islamists is that both are totalitarians. As David Horowitz writes in Unholy Alliance: Radical Islam and the American Left (Regnery, 2004) , "Both movements are totalitarian in their desire to extend the revolutionary law into the sphere of private life, and both are exacting in the justice they administer and the loyalty they demand." (p. 124)

2. Horowitz points to another similarity when he writes, "The radical Islamist believes that by conquering nations and instituting sharia, he can redeem the world for Allah. The socialist’s faith is in using state power and violent means to eliminate private property and thereby usher in the millenium." (129)

Perhaps we could say that the utopianism of the Left is a quasi-religion with a sort of secular eschatology. The leftist dreams of an eschaton ushered in by human effort alone, a millenial state that could be described as pie-in-the-future as opposed to pie-in-the-sky. When this millenial state is achieved, religion in its traditional form will disappear. Its narcotic satisfactions will no longer be in demand. Religion is the "sigh of the oppressed creature," (Marx) a sigh that arises within a contingent socioeconomic arrangement that can be overturned. When it is overturned, religion will disappear.

3. This allows us to explain why the secular radical does not take seriously the religious pathology of radical Islam. "The secular radical believes that religion itself is merely an expression of real-world misery, for which capitalist property is ultimately responsible." (129) The overthrow of capitalist America will eliminate the need for religion. This "will liberate Islamic fanatics from the need to be Islamic and fanatic." (130)

Building on Horowitz’s point, I would say the leftist in his naïveté  fails to grasp that religion, however we finally resolve the question of its validity or lack thereof, is deeply rooted in human nature. As Schopenhauer points out, man is a metaphysical animal, and religion is one expression of the metaphysical urge.  Every temple, church, and mosque is evidence of man's being an animal metaphysicum.   As such, religion is not a merely contingent expression of a contingent misery produced by a contingent state of society. On the contrary, as grounded in human nature, religion answers to a misery, sense of abandonment, and need for meaning essential to the human predicament as such, a predicament the amelioration of which cannot be brought about by any merely human effort, whether individual or collective. Whether or not religion can deliver what it promises, it answers to real and ineradicable human needs for meaning and purpose, needs that only a utopian could imagine being satisfied in a state of society brought about by human effort alone.

In their dangerous naïveté, leftists thinks that they can use radical Islam to help destroy the capitalist USA, and, once that is accomplished, radical Islam will ‘wither away.’ But they will ‘wither away’ before Islamo-fanaticism does. They think they can use genuine fascist theocracy to defeat the ‘fascist theocracy’ of the USA. They are deluding themselves.

Residing in their utopian Wolkenskukuheim — a wonderful word I found in Schopenhauer translatable as 'Cloud Cuckoo Land' — radical leftists are wrong about religion, wrong about human nature, wrong about the terrorist threat, wrong about the ‘fascist theocracy’ of conservatives, wrong about economics; in short, they are wrong about reality.

Leftists  are delusional reality-deniers.  Now that they are in our government, we are in grave danger.  I sincerely hope that people do not need a 'nuclear event' to wake them up.  Political Correctness can get you killed.

Why Would Anyone Consider Islam a Race?

Islam is obviously not a race, but a religion.  If you hesitate to call Islam a religion, then it is either a political ideology masquerading as a religion, or a hybrid ideology that blends features of religion and political ideology, or a Christian heresy.  On any of these interpretations it is not a race.  That should be perfectly clear.

No race has apostates. Islam has apostates. Ergo, etc.

With respect to religions and political ideologies, there are conversions and de-conversions. One cannot convert to, or de-convert from, one's race. Ergo, etc.

Why then do some want to call Islam a race?  Here is a very plausible answer. I know of no better:

Criticizing Islam is not racism.  There is no such thing as "anti-Muslim racism" any more than there is "anti-Christian racism," "anti-Republican racism," or "anti-Capitalist racism." 

So why would anyone claim differently?

It is because the battle over Islam is being fought in the West, the only arena in which it can still be critically debated.  It is also here that repugnance toward racism is strong and nearly universal.  From politics to high-risk mortgages and illegal immigration, fear of the race card is one of the strongest influences on public policy.

At the same time, it is nearly impossible to defend Islam on its own merits in the West in free and open debate.  According to its own texts, the religion was founded in terror.  Its political and social code is deeply incompatible with liberal values.

Muslims societies usually rely on threat of violence to suppress intellectual critique of Islam and the freedom of other religion to fairly compete, which, if allowed, would be the slow death of Islam.  Their counterparts in the West have learned to rely on the race card.  If they can paint any criticism of their religion as "racism," then the massive evidence against Islam can be dismissed out of hand without having to contend with it.

Slinging the worst of all slurs to compensate for deficiency of fact and logic is weak enough, but it is ironic given that what is being defended in such cheap fashion is an ideology that is overtly supremacist in nature. 

That's right. Islam is supremacist in nature. Not racially supremacist, but ideologically supremacist. Leftists try to hide this fact by calling critics of Islam racists, from which they then slide to the vicious slur that these critics are white supremacists, which brings them back to the 'race card,' the only card in their deck and the one they never leave home without.

Islam as religion’s most virulent subspecies?

I agree with the gist of Claude Boisson's statement below (via e-mail) who takes minor issue with what he quotes me as saying in the header, turning my declarative into an interrogative. (I haven't checked all his factual statements.) I myself have referred to Islam as a 'hybrid' ideology: it is as much a political ideology as it is a religion.  It is a terrible threat to the West and its values, and it speaks volumes about the Left that leftists refuse to see this.
 
I would rather say that Islam corresponds to an *intersection* between “religion” (as we understand it) and politics, law, etiquette, etc. This is in fact what ulamas have always taught, and they consider this fact as a proof of Islam’s superiority over, in particular, Christianity, a mere religion. 
 
That is why we have the recently revived traditional Arabic phrase “al-dīn wa al-dawla”, the religion and the state. This is what Islam actually is, not a mere dīn. 
 
Hence, for example, the following facts, otherwise uninterpretable:
 
(1) The Islamic era does not begin with, say, Muhammad’s first revelation in the cave on mount Hira in 610 AD, but with the Hegira in 622, the flight from Mecca (where he was not very successful as a “spiritual” leader) to Medina. There Muhammad, already a prophet, became additionally a social, political and (ruthless) military leader and a lawgiver for the Umma, the community. Islam is thus a Gesamtkunstwerk, not simply what we term a religion. 
 
(2) The Islamic scriptures (the Sunna very considerably more than the Qur’an) are full of “lay” rules which seem very strange to the followers of many other religions: a man should urinate holding his penis with his left hand; Muhammad (the beautiful model that the muslimin should imitate) disliked onions, dogs, salamanders, musical instruments; these are the rules for dividing the spoils in warfare, etc.
 
(3) I have collected a list of no fewer than 27 mosques in 15 countries, from Morocco to Indonesia, bearing the name of Tariq ibn Ziyad, the most celebrated of the Muslim generals who conquered Hispania starting in 711. There are notably 2 such mosques in Spain(!), one in Gibraltar (the mountain is named after Tariq), 2 in France, 2 in Belgium, 1 in Germany. This is as odd as if one had Christian religious services in the “Cathédrale Bonaparte” (he invaded Egypt) or a Catholic church named after one of the French generals who defeated Muslim armies in the conquest of Algeria in the 19th c., or Italian churches bearing the name of Italian generals who fought in Libya. 
 

Niall Ferguson on Christine Blasey Ford and #MeToo

Well worth reading. Especially this:

The #MeToo movement is revolutionary feminism. Like all revolutionary movements, it favors summary justice. Since April 2017, more than 200 men have been publicly accused of some form of sexual offense, ranging from rape to inappropriate language. A few of these men seem likely to have committed crimes and are being prosecuted accordingly — notably the Hollywood mogul Harvey Weinstein. But #MeToo seems to have created a single catch-all crime, in which rape, assault, clumsy passes, and banter are elided into one.

With a few exceptions, reputations have been destroyed and careers ended without due process. "I believe her" are the fateful words that, if uttered by enough people, perform the roles of judge and jury.

Sexual harassment is bad, no question. And yet a much bigger threat to women's rights is largely ignored by Western feminists. As my wife likes to point out, verse 2:282 of the Koran states that a woman's testimony is worth only half of a man's testimony in court. (Some people want the opposite to apply in Ford v. Kavanaugh.) Wherever sharia law is imposed — from the armed camps of Boko Haram or ISIS to the sharia courts found in most Muslim-majority countries — it is women who lose out. Do Senate Democrats care? No. When my wife testified on this subject last year, they literally ignored her.

Read it all. I mean it. It gets even better!  If you've seen Ferguson in action on C-Span or on Fox you know he is tops — assuming you have my level of good judgment.

Against Iconoclasm and the Erasure of History

Muslim iconoclasmMuslims are well-known for their iconoclasm, hostility to the arts, and destruction of cultural artifacts. Leftists are like unto Muslims in this regard too.

The trouble with iconoclasm is that all parties can play the game. 

Mass-murdering communist regimes are responsible for some 94 million deaths in the 20th century. Why not then destroy all the statues and monuments that honor the likes of Karl Marx, V. I. Lenin, Fidel Castro and all others who either laid the foundations for or carried out mass murder?  

 

You understand, of course, that I am not advocating this.  For one thing, the erasure of history would make it rather more difficult to learn from it. For another thing, there would be no end to it.  Why not destroy the Colosseum in Rome? You know what went on there.

Or how about St. Robert Bellarmine, S. J. ?  Should paintings and statues of him be destroyed?  He had a hand in the burning at the stake of the philosopher Giordano Bruno! According to Wikipedia:

Bellarmine was made rector of the Roman College in 1592, examiner of bishops in 1598, and cardinal in 1599. Immediately after his appointment as Cardinal, Pope Clement made him a Cardinal Inquisitor, in which capacity he served as one of the judges at the trial of Giordano Bruno, and concurred in the decision which condemned Bruno to be burned at the stake as a heretic.[5]

Better known is the fact that Bellarmine is the man who hauled the great Galileo Galilei before the Inquisition. 

Calling all philosophers and scientists! To your sledge hammers and blow torches!

And then there are the paintings, statues, etc. of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., plagiarist and adulterer. Yes, King plagiarized (portions of) his Boston University dissertation. 

Anyone with sense should be able to understand that high merit worthy of honor can exist alongside deep character flaws.

There is no need to multiply examples. You should be getting the point along about now.

I now assign Victor Davis Hanson, The Ideology of Statue Smashing. Yes, kiddies, this will be on the final.

SCOTUS Rules 5-4 to Uphold ‘Muslim’ Travel Ban

Yet another victory for President Trump and for common sense. And yet another embarrassment for the Never-Trumpers who refused to support Trump and who, by their refusal, indirectly supported Hillary who would never have supported any such travel ban.

And of course, if the Never-Trumpers had their way, the composition of the Court would not have been favorable to conservative rulings.

(Once more: a Never-Trumper is a conservative of some sort or other who opposes Trump. Bill Kristol for example. Remember him? Every Never-Trumper is an Anti-Trumper, but not conversely. Is this just an arbitrary stipulation on my part? No. This is the way the terms are used by those in the know who value clarity of thought and the distinctions that support it.)

Predictably, Associate Justice Sonia Sotomayor wrote a dissent that is rather less than intelligent:

“This repackaging does little to cleanse [the policy] of the appearance of discrimination that the president’s words have created,” she said. “Based on the evidence in the record, a reasonable observer would conclude that the proclamation was motivated by anti-Muslim animus.”

On the contrary, a reasonable observer would conclude that Sotomayor should not be sitting on the Supreme Court. I'll give her this, though: she has a beautiful name.

Imagine the composition of the Court after eight years of Hillarity. 

Seeing as how we are in the vicinity of Islamist issues, I now refer you to William Kilpatrick's latest,  Islamization in the Schools.

Is the Burqa a Mere Fashion Accessory?

William Kilpatrick:

You may look upon the wearing of the burqa as a civil rights issue, but many Muslims look upon it as key element in the Islamization process. Like the Ku Klux Klan hood or the Guy Fawkes mask, the burqa works, in part, through intimidation. Suppose a burqa clad woman (or is she a woman?) enters the bus you are riding. Do your thoughts turn to the riches of diversity, or do you begin to wonder if you just bought a bus ticket to eternity? Do you reflexively think that multiculturalism makes life more interesting, or do you think that it may be time to move to another neighborhood? Oh sure, you know that, realistically, the chances of having drawn the short straw are remote … but still.

The burqa, in short, is not just a personal fashion preference; rather, it’s one way that fundamentalist Muslims have of staking a territorial claim. Where burqas abound, sharia, no-go-zones, and virtue patrols soon follow. And non-Muslims begin to move out. So the burqa is far more than a statement of modesty. It’s a statement on the part of the Muslim community that these streets belong to us. Thus, the burqa can become an effective weapon for advancing Islamic law and culture.

Read the whole of this penetrating essay by Kilpatrick the courageous.

Is William Kilpatrick Too Soft on Pope Francis?

Dr. Vito Caiati writes,

I read your post on “The Church and Islam: Dangerous Illusions,” and while I share your appreciation of Kilpatrick’s continuing commentary on the real nature of Islam, I am uncomfortable with his statement that “It seems clear to me that the pope and others in the hierarchy are enabling the spread of an evil ideology; however, it’s not at all clear that they understand what they’re doing. Francis, for instance, seems to sincerely believe that all religions are roughly equal in goodness. Thus for him, the spread of any religion must seem like a good thing. It’s an exceedingly naïve view, but one that seems honestly held.”

I do not claim that the Pope is a “collaborator,” but I think that Kilpatrick overlooks the deep anti-Western politics and ideology of Bergoglio, who has expressed open contempt for the advanced capitalist nations to exercise their sovereign rights to control illegal immigration (all his asinine remarks on “walls, the obligation to admit endless streams of “migrants,” and so on);  who offered only a highly muted response to the wholesale murder and displacement of Christians in the Middle East by Islamic fanatics (remember the plane full of refugees that he took back to Italy with him: All Muslims?); and who works tirelessly to undermine Roman Catholic doctrine and traditions, which remain fundamental to many Catholics in Eastern and Southern Europe and in the United States and which constitute an important part of the cultural inheritance of Europe.  His embrace of Islam is part of the leftist embrace of this highly dangerous and alien religious-political ideology under the banners of  diversity and globalism. His perspective on Islam is thus not so “naïve” as Kilpatrick would have us believe. Kilpatrick, like so many Catholics, seems fearful of going the full distance and exposing the Pope and most of the hierarchy of the Church as active participants in the ongoing leftist assault on the nation state and Western civilization.

I fear Dr. Caiati is correct.