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November 2016

My Lecture on “Politically Correct” That the Red-Green Axis (Marxist-Islamic) Tried to Shut Down : Diana West

http://dianawest.net/Home/tabid/36/EntryId/3427/My-Lecture-on-Politically-Correct-That-the-Red-Green-Axis-Marxist-Islamic-Tried-to-Shut-Down.aspx

http://dianawest.net/Home/tabid/36/EntryId/3422/Abroad-in-America-October-2016.aspx

Behold, my own personal protesters (above) in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, snapped en route to the parking lot of a lecture hall where I was to give a speech on October 18. My topic? The origins and impact of the Marxist-Bolshevik-Fabian-Socialist-Democrat-Progessive-Alinskyite-micro-aggression-trigger-warning censorship movement against truth and tradition that is opaquely known as “politically correct.”

Ironic, no?

Actually, we’re way past ironic, and deep into the danger zone where the ideological and the doctrinaire dominate discourse — but also make people cower. As I explained nearly ten years ago in my first book, The Death of the Grown-Up, this same “politically correct” movement to silence speech and political discourse generally has made common cause with the Islamic blasphemy law movement to supress all criticism, including factual discussion, of Islam as “hate speech.” Under Islamic law, such “hate speech,” a.k.a. “blasphemy,” is punishable, and, even in our own time, often punished, by death. In Western society, this Red-Green axis increasingly draws strength to become more and more dictatorial, even as sharia expands its control and influence on law and custom in Europe and beyond.

Last week in Chapel Hill, I saw how the mechanism works up-close, when I, too, became a target for suppression.

There were three distinct phases to this campaign by local groups and individuals of the Marxist and/or Islamic variety to shut down my appearance — as well as appearances by all future speakers hosted by Issues Confronting Our Nation (ICON), the lecture series that sponsored my talk.

The strategy was to demonize and thus delegitimize me as a point of pressure to bear on the management of the venue, Extraordinary Ventures, to convince them to cancel my appearance and sever its standing business relationship with the ICON lecture series forevermore. However outrageous, such thuggish tactics have been successful before, as cancellations of many other events attest (up to and including Milo Yianappolous’s appearance this week at the University of Maryland, canceled over a hastily imposed security fee). Hallelujah, the strategy failed in Chapel Hill last week. However, as I will explain, this was not necessarily a zero-sum-game.

Phase 1 began five days before my arrival in Chapel Hill with emails and Facebook messages to the venue management, smearing my work as “hatred,” “paranoia,” “xenophobia,” etc. Previous ICON speakers Roy Beck, Jim Simpson, Mark Krikorian, and John Guandolo were similarly tarred as “racist” and “bigoted” in this same poisonous effort to pressure EV to stop doing business with ICON.

In one email, the protesters said my work contributed to “the anti-Shariah movement throughout the country”; actually, they said I had contributed to the hysteria that led to the anti-Shariah movement throughout the country — but I’ll take the compliment as it was not meant.

Bonus: I was able to put the email to good use in a PowerPoint slide for my lecture on PC.

‘Hacksaw Ridge’ Review: Saving Grace in the Firing Line Mel Gibson’s film about Desmond T. Doss, the first conscientious objector to receive the Medal of Honor, is a tale of patriotism and faith By Joe Morgenstern

Impassioned patriotism and religious conviction constitute the core of “Hacksaw Ridge,” a stirring—and surpassingly violent—dramatization of the life of Desmond T. Doss, the first conscientious objector to receive the Medal of Honor. As an unarmed combat medic in World War II, Cpl. Doss saved the lives of at least 75 fellow infantrymen during a horrific battle on the Japanese-held island of Okinawa. He’s played by Andrew Garfield, whose extraordinary performance turns inner torment into ardent resolve, and a desperate heroism seldom seen on screen.

The film was directed by Mel Gibson. It’s his first in that capacity in a decade, and at least two films in one, perhaps three. In a beautifully textured, extensively fictionalized preface— Andrew Knight and Robert Schenkkan share credit for the script—Desmond struggles, as a child growing up in small-town Virginia, with his own violent urges focused mainly on the drunken, abusive father he loathes and adores. In basic training he’s persecuted for his pacifist refusal to carry a weapon; the sequence is long, derivative and weakened by floridly literary writing for a drill sergeant played by Vince Vaughn. In subsequent battle scenes, as powerful as they are shocking, Desmond’s faith takes him only so far. He’s terrified by the danger, all but overwhelmed by the carnage, yet he carries on, lowering the wounded to safety at the foot of a steep escarpment and repeating, as a litany, “Please, Lord, help me get one more.”

Through it all there’s also a sense of Mr. Gibson struggling to confront the dynamics of his turbulent career: the penchant for graphic violence that has both distinguished and afflicted such films as “The Passion of the Christ” and “Apocalypto”; the enthrallment with martyrdom that informed “Braveheart” (one fleeting shot finds Desmond, wounded himself, suspended on a litter at the face of the ridge in what could be seen as a state of grace); and, unavoidably, given the dramatic inventions of the preface, the fraught relationship he has had, sometimes in public, with his own father. Remarkably, “Hacksaw Ridge” coalesces into a memorable whole. The movie was shot in Australia by Simon Duggan, and the mostly Australian, uniformly excellent cast includes Teresa Palmer as Desmond’s girlfriend and then wife, Dorothy; Hugo Weaving as Tom, Desmond’s father; Rachel Griffiths as his mother, Bertha, as well as Sam Worthington and Richard Roxburgh as officers in Desmond’s beleaguered rifle company.

ARMOND WHITE REVIEWS “HACKSAW RIDGE”

Mel Gibson’s Hacksaw Ridge is much more than a war movie. Titled after the 1945 Battle of Okinawa on the Japanese bluff known as Hacksaw Ridge, it tells the true-life story of Desmond Doss, a religious conscientious objector who nevertheless saved dozens of fellow soldiers’ lives while serving as a battlefield medic during the final days of World War II. Doss received a Medal of Honor from President Truman, but, ironically, the movie is the work of a famously Christian filmmaker who was publicly excoriated by the mainstream (i.e., secular) media, which lashed out against his 2004 The Passion of the Christ (discussed in my 2014 NRO article “The Year the Culture Broke”).

With Hacksaw Ridge, Gibson openly responds to what has now become a routine character-assassination attempt by the media; he envisions the Battle of Okinawa as a test of morality and religious faith. Doss, a Virginia-born Seventh-day Adventist (portrayed by Andrew Garfield), claimed conscientious-objector status based on his personal Christian pacifism. Gibson shows how that pacifism derived from Doss’s background: Having grown up as a violence-addicted son of a bitterly traumatized WWI veteran (Hugo Weaving), Doss as an adult becomes a devout pacifist who clashes with military tradition to win his right to service. What he encountered in fulfilling his faith and duty is movingly depicted in the film, but it’s the emotional undercurrent that makes Hacksaw Ridge extraordinary.

Gibson disposes of the “anti-war film” cliché with a full-throttle War Is Hell scenario. His scenes of carnage and savagery have nearly surreal intensity. The black-gray, smoke-and-flames imagery of rugged terrain, bodies charred and mutilated in deadly piles, plus head-banging artillery noises and painful human howls express fascination and revulsion. It is a conscientiously masculine vision — male aggression chastened by a sense of horror. Obviously, this is not documentary horror remembered from actual wartime experience. Rather, Gibson vents the ambivalence he probably acquired as a thinking macho (being both a star of violent ’80s and ’90s spectacles and a perceptive, ambitious artiste). Hacksaw Ridge is sensitized by a wounded man’s humility and a thinking man’s sincerity. Thus, the film’s vision of Hell on Earth has peculiar authority.

It’s clear that Gibson is fully conscious of man’s inhumanity to man, maybe more than anyone else in Hollywood. He didn’t have to actually participate in combat to learn about human savagery; the mainstream media taught him that. But alongside the film’s dramatization of Doss’s family life and his courtship of Dorothy (Teresa Palmer), the lovely, bold-spirited nurse he married, Hacksaw Ridge anatomizes military aggression and its complex links to masculine character. Garfield’s Doss uncannily recalls Anthony Perkins’s pacifist performance in Friendly Persuasion. Other, variously wounded American GIs are memorably etched by Vince Vaughn, Sam Worthington, and Luke Bracey as men who sacrifice themselves while dealing with personal issues. (These conflicts are fleetly dramatized by screenwriters Robert Schenkken and Andrew Knight.)

Clinton directed her maid to print out classified materials- !!!!! Paul Sperry

As secretary of state, Hillary Clinton routinely asked her maid to print out sensitive government e-mails and documents — including ones containing classified information — from her house in Washington, DC, e-mails and FBI memos show. But the housekeeper lacked the security clearance to handle such material.

In fact, Marina Santos was called on so frequently to receive e-mails that she may hold the secrets to E-mailgate — if only the FBI and Congress would subpoena her and the equipment she used.

Clinton entrusted far more than the care of her DC residence, known as Whitehaven, to Santos. She expected the Filipino immigrant to handle state secrets, further opening the Democratic presidential nominee to criticism that she played fast and loose with national security.

Clinton would first receive highly sensitive e-mails from top aides at the State Department and then request that they, in turn, forward the messages and any attached documents to Santos to print out for her at the home.

Among other things, Clinton requested Santos print out drafts of her speeches, confidential memos and “call sheets” — background information and talking points prepared for the secretary of state in advance of a phone call with a foreign head of state.

“Pls ask Marina to print for me in am,” Clinton e-mailed top aide Huma Abedin regarding a redacted 2011 message marked sensitive but unclassified.

In a classified 2012 e-mail dealing with the new president of Malawi, another Clinton aide, Monica Hanley, advised Clinton, “We can ask Marina to print this.”

“Revisions to the Iran points” was the subject line of a classified April 2012 e-mail to Clinton from Hanley. In it, the text reads, “Marina is trying to print for you.”

Both classified e-mails were marked “confidential,” the tier below “secret” or “top secret.”

Americans Have a Chance to Dethrone the House of Clinton The Clintons and their minions deserve to be driven from public life. By Deroy Murdock

‘Drain the swamp!” GOP presidential nominee Donald J. Trump has insisted before huge crowds increasingly confident of a well-deserved, sorely needed, come-from-behind victory.

But this slogan doesn’t quite capture the urgency of the moment. This one does:

“Flush the toilet!”

Washington’s corruption under Barack Obama and the Clintons has devolved to fetid depths suggestive of the days before indoor plumbing. Step back and shudder at today’s unsanitary state of public affairs.

The Cosa Nostra–like tone that Hillary Clinton has set for herself and her associates suggests a preview for a new film: The Godmother.

As word emerged on March 2, 2015, that Hillary maintained an outlaw e-mail system in her Chappaqua mansion’s basement, WikiLeaks reports, her campaign chairman, John Podesta, e-mailed her top aide, Cheryl Mills: “We’re going to have to dump all those e-mails.” Podesta now claims that the meaning of the word “dump” is to “release, distribute, or otherwise publicize.” This might be plausible, except that Team Clinton then erased some 33,000 “private” e-mails and used BleachBit software to guarantee that Hillary’s server, at least digitally, sleeps with the fishes. Hillary’s aides demolished her 13 communications devices — not the single one that she lied about having, for “convenience” — some with hammers.

Most of this happened while these public records were under congressional subpoena. This is called obstruction of justice.

Bryan Pagliano, the computer whiz who managed Hillary’s clandestine server, initially took the Fifth Amendment while under congressional scrutiny. But he twice couldn’t be bothered to show up in September, despite being subpoenaed by the House Government Oversight Committee.

Meanwhile, five different FBI offices are probing the Clinton Foundation on suspicion of public corruption. The Wall Street Journal called this “a sprawling cross-country effort.” Fox News Channel’s Bret Baier, citing “more than six” sources in the FBI “with specific knowledge of the Clinton investigations,” reported today that “they confirm that there is an active investigation into the Clinton Foundation that has been going on for more than a year. It is continuing, and for those investigators working it, it is a priority.”

While Clinton apologists call the foundation a font of beneficence, its 2014 IRS filings show that it spent a whopping 5.76 percent of its funds on actual charitable activities — far below the 65 percent that the Better Business Bureau calls kosher. That paltry figure also mocks Hillary’s Las Vegas lie, uttered at the final presidential debate on October 19: “We at the Clinton Foundation spend 90 percent — 90 percent of all the money that is donated on behalf of programs of people around the world and in our own country.”

The Clinton Slush Fund . . . uh . . . Foundation seems to be mainly a travel and full-employment program for Hillary’s government in waiting. It’s also a bribe pump that sucks in money and spews out favors.

As detailed in Peter Schweizer’s Clinton Cash, the IRS wanted information on some $20 billion in 52,000 accounts that well-heeled Americans deposited with the Union Bank of Switzerland. So, UBS gave $60,000 to the Clinton Foundation. Hillary then met in March 2009 with Swiss foreign minister Micheline Calmy-Rey and then intervened with IRS officials on UBS’s behalf. Like magic, IRS asked UBS for only 4,450 accounts — roughly 91 percent fewer than IRS first demanded.

Hacksaw Ridge – A Tribute By Marilyn Penn

You will forget every past ugly incident involving Mel Gibson, every promise you made to protest his anti-semitism by boycotting his films as you sit stunned and shaken throughout the last half hour of Hacksaw Ridge The recreation of one of the horrendous battles for Okinawa is the closest thing in memory to an on-going visceral gut-punch that makes you feel the brutality, madness and devastating grief for countless soldiers fighting and dying for their country. Seeing this movie and then watching a news report of renewed fighting in Mosul points out the chasm between our sanitized sound-bite reports and the real experience of war. Perhaps if part of our requirement as citizens was the obligation to watch this film every week that we have soldiers in battle or in hot zones abroad, we might have the requisite respect for our veterans and a re-shuffling of our national priorities for who deserves the most acknowledgment and assistance first.

Ostensibly a bio-pic of Desmond Doss, a conscientious objector who signed up to be a medic in World War II, the movie begins as an old-fashioned forties film about a Virginia country boy whose violent home-life becomes a pivotal catalyst for his personal redemption. There is a brutal alcoholic father with a military backstory who terrorizes his loving wife and beats his sons, encouraging them to fight each other until the moment when one realizes how close he came to being a killer. We then fast-forward to Desmond as a young man who has become a Seventh-Day Adventist determined to do his patriotic duty by enlisting in the army while refusing to carry a weapon or work on the Sabbath. There is his innocent and passionate first love for a beautiful nurse who agrees to wait for his return. There is the requisite bullying by his fellow soldiers and by a sadistic sergeant (an excellent Vince Vaughan) and a court martial with unexpected drama until we reach the heart of the film – the experience of war. It will not surprise you to read that this is transformative for everyone but you will be moved beyond expectation by the various way in which this happens

Hacksaw Ridge is a film that commemorates heroism in defense of principles as well as valor in battle. It is a paean to the elevation of principles in personal conduct as well as military behavior, to the reality of human fallibility and its converse – the spiritual value of earned forgiveness. Andrew Garfield’s performance as Desmond Doss is so real that you will feel his heart race and his eyes tear before either happens. Mel Gibson has been an excellent actor and filmmaker before but he has achieved a new rung of significance and accomplishment with this remarkable film that will get under your skin and haunt you powerfully and deservedly.

ISIS Voting Guide: ‘We Have Come to Slaughter You and Smash Your Ballot Boxes’ By Bridget Johnson

Three days away from the presidential election, the Islamic State issued a seven-page voter guide warning that both candidates will “undoubtedly” break their election promises and U.S. Muslims should skip the voting booth — and that Americans who do vote are “more deserving” of being killed than soldiers.

ISIS even details what it sees as the nominees’ worst qualities: that Hillary Clinton is a woman, and Donald Trump is “impulsive and unpredictable.”

The release from ISIS’ Al-Hayat Media Center titled “The Murtadd Vote” — the apostate vote — begins with the first George W. Bush administration and the up to 80 percent of Muslims who voted for the Texas Republican over Vice President Al Gore.

“Thus, in addition to committing the apostasy of democratic voting, they share in the crimes committed by Bush against Islam and the Muslims throughout his eight years of rule. The murtadd voters, however, did not learn, as by 2008, Obama got up to 90 percent of their vote,” the booklet reads. “And after almost thirty years of history proving to the entire world that there is no difference between the American Republican and Democratic parties in their policies against Islam and Muslims, the murtadd imams of the so-called ‘Muslim Brotherhood’ and its sister sects continue to advocate voting in the pagan festivals of US democracy, this time campaigning for the Democratic Party and its presidential nominee, Hillary Clinton.”

“They refuse to see that Obama interfered – both directly and indirectly – against the interests of Muslims just as Bush senior, Bill Clinton, and Bush junior had done before him.”

This page of the article includes a footnote: “George W. Bush, John McCain, Donald Trump, Barack Obama, Bill and Hillary Clinton, Joe Lieberman, Joe Biden, John Kerry, and so forth are all supporters of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC). So how can the murtadd imams of the West claim there is any real difference for Muslims between the various US presidential nominees and candidates?”

“The only differences between Trump and Clinton are that Clinton is more skilled in ‘political correctness,’ giving her leverage in the sorcery of hypocrisy,” the ISIS article argues, adding she’s a “female feminist” and the Prophet Muhammad said “never shall a people who give their leadership to a woman be successful.”

Clinton, they continued, sees American Islam as “a project that can be projected to other countries, thereby leading more Muslims astray towards apostasy and eternal Hellfire,” while Trump “has yet to learn that what he refers to as ‘radical Islamic terrorism’ is nothing but the teachings of Islam, plain and simple — no adjective needs to precede Islam to describe the just terror it incites.”

On this page is a photo of Sen. Tim Kaine (D-Va.) with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, captioned: “Hillary Clinton’s running mate courting a Jewish taghut [legislative rival to Islam].”

The article delves into Quranic arguments on why Muslims shouldn’t vote, noting “as the US presidential election day draws nearer, it becomes necessary to remind others what the shar’i ruling on partaking in the rituals of democracy is and that this ruling remains the same whether or not one of the two candidates is ‘the lesser of the two evils.'”

Whoever votes, ISIS declares, “is an apostate whether he is an open secularist or an alleged ‘Islamist,’ as legislation is Allah’s alone and judgment is his alone, not for the people, nor the constitution of the people, nor the representatives of the people.”

The pages also included a photo of Trump “courting Jews at the AIPAC convention” this year and of Khizr Khan — “a murtadd supporting Hillary Clinton and the taghut constitution” — holding his pocket Constitution aloft at the Democratic National Convention.

An Open Letter to the #NeverTrumpers This is not an election like any other. It is a decision for the future of America By David Solway

I recently met with an academic colleague for drinks, and the conversation quickly turned, as seems inevitable these days, to American politics. She was appalled when I expressed my admiration for Donald Trump. How could I break ranks so egregiously? After all, she expatiated, Trump wants to end all immigration to the U.S., he hates Muslims, he intends to launch a vendetta against Mexicans, he is an uneducated barbarian and an unscrupulous mountebank to boot.

I explained that she had been conned by the media blitzkrieg against Trump and had not considered his stated policies, for which he has gone on public record: To reduce the multi-trillion dollar American debt, bring jobs back to a country suffering massive unemployment, seal the porous southern border in order to stem what amounts to an invasion of the homeland, monitor immigration protocols to prevent the Muslimization of the United States and limit jihadist attacks, and stamp out high-level corruption. Anyone against these legitimate and necessary endeavors has either been fast asleep or is in sync with the forces of destruction. What, then, was her position on these issues?

No answer was forthcoming. I was, apparently, an alt-right apologist for political oppression, a traitor to the morally enlightened consensus, and, to put it succinctly, a lost cause. She rose from the table and walked out with an expression of contempt on her face. I suppose one could expect little different from someone who reads only The Huffington Post, The New York Times, the National Post and the Toronto Star, and listens to the pap spewed out by the CBC, CNN and MSNBC. Like most liberals, she was wholly unfamiliar with the countervailing literature and was therefore in no position to weigh evidence, balance competing viewpoints, and make an informed judgment. And like most leftists, her only response to an opposing argument was to shut down the debate. Trump was doubtless the monster rising from the Black Lagoon, slavering to devour the country. Case closed.

I have met people more or less like Trump, businessmen with whom my father had dealings when he was, prior to going bankrupt, a flamboyant millionaire. These men were not so much the salt of the earth as the pepper of the earth—colorful men with fiery temperaments, with neither academic credentials nor pretensions, rough hewn in some ways but likable once you got to know them, and totally indifferent to what people thought of them. They were like characters out of Mordecai Richler: eccentric, highly successful, not always totally immaculate in their transactions, but generally sensitive to the needs of their employees and capable of unexpected charm. When I exchange impressions with people who have come to know Trump, whether personally or indirectly, I feel that I recognize him.

A Message to American Christians on Donald Trump In a secular election, State trumps Church. By David Solway

Many Christians have expressed their horror of Donald Trump as some sort of incarnation of Beelzebub, as a wanton fornicator, as an adulterer, as a man without religious principle, as a pro-abortionist, as an exploiter of the poor—the list of his faults, transgressions and vices seems encyclopedic. I would ask the legion of anti-Trump Christians, including many commenters to my recent PJM article written in favor of Trump, to forgive me if I suggest that they have gone over the top in the intensity and scope of their animadversions. And I would ask them to consider three salient facts:

Jesus advised his followers in Matthew 22:21 to Render therefore unto Caesar the things which are Caesar’s; and unto God the things that are God’s. The ballot within the framework of a secular democracy is a thing that belongs to Caesar, not to God. The two should not be confused.

The American Constitution provides for the separation of Church and State. The ballot in this case is a function of the State, not the Church. The two should not be confused.

If one believes one has a civic duty to vote—and to vote responsibly—in a national election, it becomes crucial to make a distinction between candidates, their character and their policies, and to consider the likely impact of these factors on the conduct and political nature of an incoming administration. One must also remember that a non-vote, or a protest vote for a splinter candidate —an Evan McMullin or a Jill Stein or a Gary Johnson—will generally translate as a vote for whoever is leading in the polls or appears to enjoy an Electoral College advantage, which seems to be Hillary. Such naivety is nothing but an injurious distraction. The race is between Hillary and Donald and no one else. The two should not be confused.

With respect to this third factor and certainly in the current electoral context, it behooves the believer to weigh carefully the moral, intellectual and political qualities of the major candidates vying for the presidency; and if he or she is dissatisfied in either case, there is no alternative but to vote for the lesser evil, despite the naïve urgings of the overly zealous, earnestly gesturing young man representing the organization “Faith Not Fear” not to do so. This young man is dangerously wrong in assuming that voting for a peripheral candidate will have a “statistically significant impact in this election and the major political parties will take note.” The major parties shrug and continue on their way. Remember Ross Perot?

Of course, I am convinced that Donald Trump, for all his shortcomings, is precisely the chief executive that America needs at this critical juncture in its history, but I do not ask anti-Trump Christians to agree with my convictions. I ask them only—despite their theological sensibilities, which I do not share but which I respect—to reflect upon the consequences of their political decision to act in such a manner as to promote the election of Hillary Clinton. For any impartial assessment of her past record, her character (FBI agents reportedly refer to her as “the antichrist”), and her declared and obvious policies irrefutably condemn her as the greater evil. In comparison with Clinton, Trump appears almost a choirboy.

Fair-weather Republicans Finally Getting Onboard? By Brian C. Joondeph

“A true time for choosing. Get on the train or sit at the empty station waving goodbye. ”

Republicans, particularly those of the establishment ilk, cozy with the big donors and other party elites, have been reluctant to join the Donald Trump train. Fearing a landslide defeat on election day, these Republicans felt it in their best political interests to steer far clear of the Trump Titanic so as not to see their political futures dragged to the bottom of the electoral sea.

After sticking their fingers into the political winds, they decided the safer route would be to steer clear of Donald Trump, all in the hopes that come November 9, they could sit atop their high horses and proclaim, “See I told you so.”

As the political winds shifted this past week, with tightening polls and more talk of a Trump victory than a Clinton landslide, some of the fair weather Republicans are reconsidering their sideline stance, preferring to be on the winning train rather than being left at the station.

Paul Ryan was tap dancing around his party’s nominee. At a recent campaign rally, he told voters, “We are going to win everything including the White House.” In Lord Voldemort fashion, Ryan never mentioned, “He Who Cannot Be Named”, the actual candidate Donald Trump. At least Ryan is on the train, perhaps hanging on rather than seated, but on the train. Like Cruz, Ryan is campaigning with Pence, not with Trump.

Mitch McConnell is the GOP leader most firmly on the Trump train, although he too was late to the station and almost missed the train. Speaking at a recent rally, he told voters, “We need a new president, Donald Trump, to be the most powerful Republican in America.”