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April 2018

Daryl McCann Erdoğan’s Islamic State

Almost everything about the Turkish Republic is a lie or, at best, a half-truth, starting with its name. As the secular state is progressively dismantled the Islamic revivalism of the current regime is no mere nostalgia for the Ottoman heritage. It is something far more sinister.

The imminent demise of Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi’s “caliphate” must be counted as a clear win in the Long War or the War of Freedom and yet, to borrow from Churchill, we are a long way from final victory: “This is not the end. It is not even the beginning of the end. But it is, perhaps, the end of the beginning.” Even that may be overly optimistic. Still incapable of identifying our mortal enemy, we remain stuck in 1938. This major peril confronting us is yet another incarnation of Islamic revivalism, one more manifestation of the hydra-like Global Jihad at war with Dar al-Garb (House of the West). The danger posed to the world by the burgeoning Islamic state of Turkey remains hidden in plain sight.

Almost everything about the Turkish Republic is a lie or, at the very best, a half-truth, starting with its name. Mustafa Kemal Atatürk’s secular Turkish Republic is being dismantled piecemeal by a modern-day demagogue, President Erdoğan. If the Tribune of Anatolia, who possesses the second-largest army in NATO, holds onto power until October 29, 2023—the centenary of the proclamation of the republic—his suzerainty is no doubt going to be reconstituted as the Islamic Republic of Turkey. This development will denote something more than modern-day Turks revisiting their Ottoman heritage. Ottoman-style Islam, as demanding and controlling as it was, might be counted as mild-mannered and easy-going compared with the fanatical millennialism of Recep Tayyip Erdoğan.

The rise and rise of Erdoğan, whose Freedom and Justice Party (AKP) won the 2002 parliamentary elections and has stayed in power ever since, did not occur in a vacuum. Erdoğan, as Soner Cagaptay points out in The New Sultan: Erdoğan and the Crisis of Modern Turkey (2017), was an acolyte of Necmettin Erbakan, a Turkish version of historic members of Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood, Hassan al-Banna and Sayyid Qutb. The reason Erbakan’s vision of Islamic revivalism began to resonate in Turkey during the last twenty-five years of the twentieth century would probably require an investigation rooted in psychiatric anthropology. To make it brief, many Turks, especially in the Anatolian hinterland, were left feeling uncomfortable, dissatisfied and straight-out confused by Atatürk’s experiment in Western-style modernity.

Samuel P. Huntington, in The Clash of Civilisations?, encapsulated the problem as well as anyone. Turkey is a quintessential “torn country”, caught between the House of Freedom to its immediate north and Islamic rectitude to its south:

[Kemalists] allied Turkey with the West in NATO and in the Gulf War; they applied for membership in the European community. At the same time, however, elements in Turkish society have supported an Islamic revival and have argued that Turkey is basically a Middle Eastern society.

Imams in the U.S and Canada: Which Should be Backed? by A. Z. Mohamed

While freedom of speech is permissible in the U.S., for centuries, hateful and violent rhetoric targeting Jews has been invariable in the religious and political discourse of Muslims, and is now as common in US and Canadian mosques, as in the Middle East.

While many Muslims seem never to tire of complaining about “Islamophobia” against their communities, they seem to have no problem disseminating hate speech — and sometimes hate acts — against other groups.

Statistics show that blacks, gays and Jews are far more disproportionately targeted for hate crimes in both the U.S. and Canada than Muslims are. When did anyone in North America last hear of ministers in churches or rabbis in synagogues calling for the death of Muslims?

Progressive Muslims and their imams should be promoted, consulted, and celebrated.

Since U.S. President Donald Trump recognized Jerusalem as the capital of Israel on December 6, 2017, at least three U.S. imams have called for the death of Jews — not Israelis: Jews — in Friday sermons at mosques across the U.S., which treasures freedom of speech, no matter how distasteful — unless it is “directed at inciting or producing imminent lawless action” or “likely to incite or produce such action.”

In Canada, however, there is no freedom of speech — meaning that “hate speech” is regarded as a crime that can be prosecuted. A few years ago, imams who did call for death of Jews in Canada resulted in some of these imams being investigated or prosecuted.

It is important to know what is being said, and by whom.

On Friday, December 8, 2017, for example, a sermon delivered in a Raleigh, North Carolina mosque, a U.S.-based Syrian imam, Abdullah Khadra, cited an anti-Jewish hadith (saying or act of Muhammad) that says, “By the end of time,” Muslims will exterminate all Jews. The sermon was recorded and transcribed by the Middle East Media Research Institute (MEMRI).

220 Airstrikes on Palestinians; World Yawns by Khaled Abu Toameh

Dropping barrels of dynamite on houses and hospitals in a Palestinian refugee camp is apparently of no interest to those who pretend to champion Palestinians around the world. Nor does the issue seem to move the UN Security Council.

UNRWA said that of the estimated 438,000 Palestine refugees remaining inside Syria, more than 95% (418,000) are in critical need of sustained humanitarian assistance.

As for the leaders of the Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza Strip? They are otherwise occupied. Mahmoud Abbas’s Palestinian Authority and Hamas are too busy lunging at each other’s throats and trying to take down Israel to pay much attention to their people’s suffering in Syria.

While all eyes are set on the weekly demonstrations organized by Hamas and other Palestinian factions along the border between the Gaza Strip and Israel, as part of the so-called March of Return, a Palestinian refugee camp near Damascus is facing a wide-scale military offensive and ethnic cleansing by the Syrian army and its allies.

The war crimes committed against the Palestinians in Yarmouk camp have so far failed to prompt an ounce of outrage, much less the sort of outcry emerging from the international community over the events of the past four weeks along the border between the Gaza Strip and Israel.

The international community seems to differentiate between a Palestinian shot by an Israeli soldier and a Palestinian shot by a Syrian soldier.

In the first case, Hamas and several Palestinian groups have been encouraging Palestinians to march towards the border with Israel, with some even trying to destroy the security fence and hurling stones and petrol bombs at Israeli troops. The organizers of the Gaza demonstrations say their real goal is to “achieve the right of return and return to all of Palestine.”

Anarchy At Texas State University Students stalked, threatened with violence — and the administration sides with the perpetrators. Jack Kerwick

The climate that prevails on today’s college campuses can only be described as chilling.

The one institution that is designed to serve as a bastion of critical thought, a marketplace of ideas, has been reduced by many faculty, student, and administrator alike to a so-called “safe space,” a space designed to immunize the campus against any and all ideas that its self-appointed gatekeepers deem a threat to their hard leftist orthodoxy.

Of course, this is not news to anyone who has been paying any attention. And conservatives regularly and loudly complain about the attacks on “free speech” in the University.

However, this way of characterizing the situation, though accurate as far as it goes, doesn’t go nearly far enough. Thus, its focus on the abstraction of free speech grossly understates the real danger that concrete flesh-and-blood human beings risk when they dare to entertain alternative views.

Principles, like the principle of free speech, don’t bleed. People do.

It isn’t an intangible, airy concept that is under attack on today’s campus. It is those speakers, faculty, and, most concerning, students who militant leftist SJWs deem insufficiently “progressive” who enjoy this dubious distinction.

A recent incident at Texas State University is all too representative of the atmosphere with which those who deviate from the Creed of identity-politics must contend.

Connor Clegg, a young white Republican student and student body president, was impeached just two days before his term was set to expire. Those students from such organizations as the Pan-African Action Committee, Latinas Unidas, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People Unit 6875-B, Texas Rising for LGBTQIA Equality, and the Student Community of Progressive Development who had been pushing for Clegg’s ouster erupted in cheers when his impeachment was announced.

A Family Conspiracy: Honor Killing Phyllis Chesler’s fearless new book explores a deadly new trend in the West. Norman Simms

Comprised of ninety-nine chapters, along with an Introduction, this latest book by Jewish feminist, academic and media commentator, Phyllis Chesler, A Family Conspiracy brings together material going back to 2004. The theme that binds all together is Chesler’s concern to bring into focus the phenomenon of “honor killing,” an extremely controversial term. For while it covers a variety of crimes against women perpetrated by families against their own mothers, wives and daughters with the spurious and vague rationalization of protecting or avenging the honor of the family, it is distinct from what is known as “domestic abuse” in westernized countries where such violence against women is against the law and not tolerated by the general public.

Domestic violence or the killing of wives, daughters and other women in the USA and Europe tends to occur randomly and usually against strangers. The more horrific the killing the less likely the perpetrator is to know his victim. When it is a matter of Muslim on Muslim, Sikh on Sikh or Hindu on Hindu murder, the crimes are well-planned out, carefully carried out by members of the family, and honored by the community. Honor killing is a form of social control overwomen and their bodies, a religious and customary or legal mode of punishment carried out on behalf of the whole community, and perceived as a necessary and virtuous act.

Hillary’s Money Laundering Scheme Why is the media ignoring the DNC’s new $84 million campaign finance scandal? Matthew Vadum

While it obsesses over an aging porn star, Russians, discredited ex-FBI officials, and pimple-faced gun-grabbers, the mainstream media has been ignoring an explosive federal lawsuit unearthing a huge illegal money-laundering conspiracy said to have been masterminded last election cycle by the Democratic National Committee and the Hillary Clinton campaign.

It is yet another facet of the plot by which Clinton, possibly in league with then-President Obama, broke the law in an attempt to rig the election. Throughout his agonizingly long presidency, Obama serially abused his powers as the nation’s Chief Executive to undermine his political opponents.

Against this backdrop, the DNC and Hillary’s campaign “allegedly used state chapters as strawmen to launder as much as $84 million in an effort to circumvent campaign donation limits, and the Federal Election Commission ignored complaints exposing the practice,” according to a Fox News report that has been gathering dust since April 16.

The civil proceeding, filed against the FEC earlier this month in the nation’s capital, spells out a vast left-wing criminal conspiracy while providing detailed evidence from FEC filings to support the claim that Democrats orchestrated the scheme to do an end-run around federal campaign limits.

The Stop Hillary PAC, also now known as the Committee to Defend the President (CDP), filed a complaint in December with the FEC stating that the Hillary Victory Fund (HVF) sought funds from high-profile donors and then “sent that money through state chapters and back to the DNC before ending up with the Clinton campaign.”

The complaint went nowhere and the political action committee got tired of waiting.

Donald Trump and the Star Chamber of Horrors By Michael Walsh

Fifteen months into his administration, Donald Trump remains the object of a dedicated attempt by the Democratic Party, the media, NeverTrump Republicans, and rogue members of the deep state to take him down. From the night he was elected, lifelong members of the Permanent Bipartisan Fusion Party and the embedded bureaucracy have refused to accept the results of a national election, and have instead waged a campaign of “lawfare” against a man they consider an interloper—a situation unique in the annals of American democracy.

From Hillary Clinton to James Comey to Robert Mueller to Stormy Daniels, to various minor federal judges, to CNN and MSNBC, the list of Trump’s enemies continues to grow.

Their tactics are breathtakingly simple—and amazingly brazen. As the past year-plus of Robert Mueller’s tedious investigation has proven, there is no very great crime behind Trump’s very great fortune of having been elected the 45th president of the United States. The entire notion of Russian “collusion” (not in itself actionable in the first place) was cooked up in the witches’ cauldron that was Hillary Clinton’s campaign. The resulting brew was liberally dispensed to the cadres of media operatives pretending to be dispassionate reporters in order to assuage the failed candidate’s rage over losing what she thought—what she was assured by her friends at the CIA and the FBI—was a fixed fight.

And so the Big Lie—that Trump had collaborated with Vladimir Putin to change the course of an American election—was born.

There was and is nothing to it, of course. But that hasn’t stopped the Democrats, whose sterling moral history of slavery, segregation, secularism, and sedition has prepared them for just this moment. After all, they had managed to drive Richard Nixon from office in 1974, less than two years after a 49-1 state electoral landslide, turning a minor, botched burglary—with the help of the Washington Post—into a constitutional crisis.

In the case of Trump, they didn’t even have the fig leaf of the “Plumbers” at the Watergate on which to hang their “conspiracy so vast” McCarthyism, but that didn’t matter. Sure, to believe the “Russian” narrative, one would have to credit multiple impossible things simultaneously: that Trump and Putin were even capable of pulling it off; that the Russians somehow changed vote totals in states where Hillary barely deigned to campaign; that they stole John Podesta’s emails from a DNC server and handed them over to Julian Assange and Wikileaks; and that they bought ads on Facebook that changed credulous minds on the spot. Still, two generations of reporters—those raised on James Bond/supervillain movies and those who, thanks to Marvel comics, think people really can fly—regurgitated it proof-free.

The Double Standards of the Mueller Investigation By Victor Davis Hanson

The country is about to witness an investigatory train wreck.

In one direction, special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation train is looking for any conceivable thing that President Donald Trump’s campaign team might have done wrong in 2016.

The oncoming train is slower but also larger. It involves congressional investigations, Department of Justice referrals and inspector general’s reports—mostly focused on improper or illegal FBI and Department of Justice behavior during the 2016 election.

Why are the two now about to collide?

By charging former National Security Adviser Michael Flynn for lying to the FBI, Mueller emphasized that even the appearance of false testimony is felonious behavior.

If that is so, then the Justice Department will likely have to charge former Deputy FBI Director Andrew McCabe with perjury or related offenses. A report from the Office of the Inspector General indicates that McCabe lied at least four times to federal investigators.

Former FBI Director James Comey may also have lied to Congress when he testified that he had not written his report on the Hillary Clinton email scandal before interviewing Clinton. Former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper and former CIA Director John Brennan lied under oath to Congress on matters related to surveillance.

Clinton aides Cheryl Mills and Huma Abedin likely lied when they told FBI investigators they had no idea that their then-boss, Hillary Clinton, was using an illegal private email server. Both had communicated with Clinton about it.

Mueller is said to be investigating whether Trump obstructed justice by requesting that Comey go easy on Flynn.

If so, then the Justice Department will have to look at Comey himself and DOJ officials who obstructed a federal court. On at least four occasions, they were not honest about the deeply flawed Christopher Steele dossier being the source of information used in applications to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court.

Kanye Exposes Liberals and Progressives as the New Reactionaries By Roger L Simon

When Kanye West again declared himself a Trump supporter on Twitter, going so far as to publish a photo of his POTUS-autographed MAGA hat, literally millions of Americans immediately got the vapors. (Either that or the Twitter gestapo got their revenge — unless the sudden disappearance of huge numbers of the rapper’s followers is merely an “inconsistency”?)

Many declared West had “gone off the deep end,” gone crazy, although the man was demonstrably more brilliant and more creative than 99.9% of his decriers.

That these same people are the most slavish and pathetic conformists is the least of this. What these attacks on Kanye demonstrate in bold face is what has lurked beneath the surface for a long time — liberals and progressives are the reactionaries of our time.

It is also a further demonstration of a near complete lack of intellectual curiosity or emotional imagination, an inability to grasp the “remote” possibility that a highly intelligent black man could possibly think differently from them. Something must be wrong with him. (Could anything possibly be wrong with them? Nah!)

But why reactionaries?

When I was a young fellow traveler with the New Left (circa 1965), it was the worst accusation you could make. A reactionary was someone who was living in the past, taking us backwards, what the Trotskyites called the Stalinists — and vice-versa.

Back then, a group of people, Tom Hayden and others, anxious to breathe new life into a Marxist ideology seriously tarnished by Stalin’s supposedly-accidental”excesses,” promulgated, in the Port Huron Statement, a socialism “with a human face.”

It was propaganda, of course, aimed at themselves as much as others, but this Generation of 1968 product was remarkably successful, beyond their wildest dreams, I would guess. Over the decades and into today, they were able to infiltrate just about every aspect of our culture, creating an atmosphere where — in nearly every aspect of our society — nothing was good as is or even relatively satisfactory. Therefore, the fight must always go on. Perpetually. CONTINUE AT SITE

Maine Democrats Vote Down Bill Banning FGM By Tom Knighton (!!!!!????)

If ever there was a bipartisan cause in this country, shouldn’t it be banning female genital mutilation? Well, a bill banning FGM in the state of Maine was just voted down — along party lines.

As Townhall’s Elizabeth Yore reports, “69 GOP (and 1 Dem) [voted] for the bill and 77 Dems and Independents [voted[ against an FGM bill that would criminalize female genital mutilation.”

Yore continues: “The Democratic House legislators who voted against this FGM bill curiously argued that ‘FGM doesn’t happen in Maine,’ despite the fact that Maine is one of only eight federal pilot programs to address the exponential growth of FGM in America. If little girls in Maine are not at risk for FGM, then why is Maine receiving more than $200,000 a year from the federal government to help prevent FGM?”

Even if the Democrats’ claim, that “FGM doesn’t happen in Maine,” was true, what is the objection to banning the practice before it arrives there? In reality, this common practice in the Muslim world is being committed in the United States by immigrant populations.

Keep in mind that Democrats are supposedly the “party of women.” They’re the party that likes to pretend all women think as a monolithic block. Why, then, would Democrats vote unanimously against a bill that outlaws a horrific practice which only victimizes women?

Honestly, I have no answer. CONTINUE AT SITE