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French Catholics Wake up to Islamist Threat, Despite Their Bishops

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The searing novel Submission by Michel Houellebecq is a profane but powerful snapshot of the likely near-future of Europe: Mainstream political parties going through the motions of trying to govern spiritually exhausted and nearly childless Western countries, whose only growing demographic consists of Islamists seeking sharia. In the course of the novel, the godless and bloodless socialists finally give way to the Muslim Brotherhood, whose sole opponent is the angry, right-wing National Front.

Until now, the only real opposition to the Islamic colonization of France has found its home in that party, whose founder, Jean-Marie Le Pen, had dabbled in anti-Semitism. While the party’s current leader, his daughter Marine, has firmly rebuked extremists within its ranks, that party still carries for millions of Catholic voters in France a whiff of neo-paganism, and the ultra-nationalism which in the past led right-wing ideologues like Charles Maurras to call themselves “Catholic atheists.” In other words, they didn’t believe in God, but considered Catholicism a part of the French culture worth fighting to preserve.

Church Leaders Clash with the National Front

Such attitudes, real or suspected, repelled the believing Catholics who still make up a fair swathe of the potential conservative vote in France. It didn’t help that French bishops marched well in advance of Pope Francis in discarding the church’s balanced teaching on immigration, for a reckless open-borders stance that helped invite 2016’s wave of Syrian Muslim colonists.

The open hostility between France’s pastors and the National Front was on full display this week, as The Tablet (U.K.) reports:

Three leaders of France’s far-right Front National (FN) have used post-Christmas interviews on leading radio stations to criticise French bishops for urging Catholics to support refugees. They argue that the clergy should focus on filling up their churches rather than interfering in politics.

FN vice-president Louis Aliot said a “large majority of bishops” had “spit in the face” of the party by “systematically denigrating the FN, its leaders and its policies.”

Gilbert Collard, one of the Front’s two MPs in the National Assembly, said the Church was “disconnected from reality — in the name of welcoming others, they reject us.”

Party secretary general Nicolas Bay denied the interviews were a “declaration of war” but said the Front “didn’t need to hear any lessons from the clergy about migration.”

A New Choice for Faithful Frenchmen

However, French voters concerned about the overwhelming influx of sharia-believing Islamists into their country now have another option. In the wake of the Charlie Hebdo attack and the Bataclan massacre, a conservative movement has arisen with no links to the old, extremist right, with solid Christian credentials. Sens Commun (Common Sense) is a pro-life, pro-family Catholic grass roots group that spans the country, and its members are willing to question the wisdom of their bishops on crucial issues of border control and national identity.

The leading rival Marine Le Pen faces on the right is François Fillon, who has ties to Sens Commun. As The Wall Street Journal reports:

In France, the strict separation between personal faith and public life, known as laïcité, is a pillar of national identity. However, a confluence of events — from the legalization of gay marriage to the more recent string of Islamist terror attacks — has many conservative voters looking to the country’s Christian heritage as a bulwark.

Mr. Fillon’s candidacy is seizing on that impulse. In publicly embracing his faith, the 62-year-old is tapping a wellspring of Catholic voters who have begun coalescing into a potentially decisive voting bloc.

His performance during the country’s first-ever conservative primaries provided the clearest sign yet of the revived Catholic vote.

…

The Catholic vote is shaping up to play an unusually prominent role in the general election in May, when polls predict Mr. Fillon will face-off against Marine Le Pen , leader of the far-right anti-immigrant and anti-euro National Front party.

Many conservative Catholics shifted to the National Front during recent regional elections, feeling more at home with its call for revived nationalism than with the pro-EU principles — free movement of people and goods — espoused by other parties.

A quarter of self-described practicing Catholics voted for the National Front in December 2015 regional elections, up from 16% in local races in March of that year, according to polling firm IFOP.

Mr. Fillon’s Catholicism reassures voters who want to show support for French traditions. “The National Front has made a lot of progress with this group,” said Jerome Fourquet, director of IFOP. “They could come back to the center-right with Fillon.”

The rise of a Catholic vote in France is a measure of how deeply the continent has been shaken by a series of crises, from the arrival of migrant waves from the Middle East to the surge in political parties questioning the future of the European Union itself. …

[Fillon] voted against the gay-marriage bill and criticized the government for not doing more to protect Christian minorities in Syria, Iraq and other parts of the Middle East, organizing a rally in June 2015 to support them.

“We are all Eastern Christians!” Mr. Fillon told the crowd.

Denial Across the Rhine

Meanwhile, in neighboring Germany Angela Merkel — the architect of the Syrian “refugee” invasion — was granted a prestigious Catholic humanitarian award by that country’s Cardinal Reinhard Marx, specifically for her handling of Muslim immigration. However, in Austria, the prominent Cardinal Christoph Schönborn has recently questioned the wisdom of accepting so many Muslim immigrants, and even called for Europeans to give U.S. President-elect Donald Trump a second look, pointing out that Ronald Reagan was also widely dismissed when he took office. (For more from the author of “French Catholics Wake up to Islamist Threat, Despite Their Bishops” please click HERE)

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It’s Not Islamophobia to Recognize That Sharia Is Incompatible with the Constitution

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The Washington Post is trying to pathologize as “Islamophobia” normal, human responses to the worldwide explosion of Islamic supremacism and jihad violence, including recent savage terrorist attacks in America by Muslims our government foolishly welcomed. In a recent column, William McCants tries to cast Donald Trump, Stephen Bannon, Newt Gingrich, Frank Gaffney, and anyone who agrees with them about the danger of Islamist radicalism as tinfoil-hat-wearing hatemongers or fools. That would have to include the scholars of the Claremont Institute, who issued this erudite warning of the grave threat posed to America by Islamist ideology and organizations — such as the many-tentacled Muslim Brotherhood.

No one knows the rules better than the Post: If you want to crush someone in America, link him somehow to racism, if only by some lame analogy. If you want to silence debate about your reasons for crushing him, suggest that he is frothing with hatred, to the point that his condition is a kind of moral disease. If anyone defends him, accuse that defender of that same disease and suggest that if he won’t throw his friend under the bus he could share his fate. Find out where he works, and look into getting him fired.

That’s how opinion is policed in America, where thanks to our Constitution elites don’t have the option of simply throwing dissenters in jail — as the Dutch establishment has jailed patriotic politician Geert Wilders, simply for opposing further Muslim immigration. That’s right, Wilders was sentenced to prison for making a policy argument. Fear not: Opinion polls suggest that he might be elected Prime Minister, at which point even EU minions would probably feel the need to let him out.

Or maybe not. The scorn which European elitists feel for mere citizens is so overpowering, that the Dutch might just leave Wilders to rot and annul the election — as EU satraps in Britain are trying to overturn the Brexit vote, and some Democrats are attempting to nullify the election of Donald Trump with wild charges of Russian “hacking.”

We can scent here the sniffy contempt that Clinton felt for “Deplorables,” which is shared by the Washington press corps. What’s funny is that this sense of superiority is absolutely groundless, built on wishful thinking and ignorance — in this case about what Islam really teaches and what it demands.

Communism was “pseudo-Islam.” The real thing is worse.

The brilliant economist and social philosopher Wilhelm Röpke — the very first professor fired by the Nazis for his ideas — once summed up Communism as a “pseudo-Islam.” A powerful insight: They are both creeds of conquest and domination. For a few generations, people were willing to lay down their lives for the sake of a future “socialist paradise,” but their fervor quickly faded. If you don’t believe in an afterlife, martyrdom is a pretty hard sell.

Islam, by contrast, from the very beginning offered rewards both in this life and the next one. Muhammad recruited warriors by promising them the three things which young men most crave: plunder, power, and pleasure. Those who followed him and his heirs would have Allah’s blessing in stealing loot from the unbeliever, subjugating him, and taking his wife or daughters as sex slaves. Here’s just one of the relevant verses from the Quran:

Quran (33:50) – “O Prophet! We have made lawful to thee thy wives to whom thou hast paid their dowers; and those (slaves) whom thy right hand possesses out of the prisoners of war whom Allah has assigned to thee”

As The Religion of Peace explains: “This is one of several personal-sounding verses ‘from Allah’ narrated by Muhammad — in this case allowing a virtually unlimited supply of sex partners. Other Muslims are restricted to four wives, but they may also have sex with any number of slaves, following the example of their prophet.” And of course if jihad warriors died in battle against the unbeliever, they would go straight to paradise and enjoy a harem in heaven.

Sharia is an ideology, aimed at world domination.

Islamic sharia law is intrinsically political, oriented toward imposing Islam by force if necessary upon every nation on earth, keeping non-Muslims in a servile state, and defending masculine “honor” by savagely policing women’s sexual behavior. In every Muslim-dominated country, sharia does just these things. And every orthodox Muslim must accept sharia — including all its provisions about warring against unbelievers, with the goal of converting, killing, or enslaving every last non-Muslim on earth.

Imagine if rules for burning witches or torturing heretics were mandated in the New Testament, and put into practice in virtually every Christian country on earth, to this very day. Picture evangelicals hounding and killing witches in Alabama, and Pope Francis burning a hundred heretics or so each year in the Vatican. Don’t you think that non-Christian countries would be cautious about admitting Christian immigrants? Not just Christians with actual ties to witch-hunters and inquisitors, but any Christian who wouldn’t clearly renounce such violent practices?

In the center of Sunni Islam, Saudi Arabia, which seeds lands around the world with shiny new mosques and handpicked radical imams, all the most violent practices of primitive Islam are still in effect—from polygamy to blasphemy flogging, from cutting off hands of thieves to executing ex-Muslims for “apostasy.” The Islamic pressure groups funded by Saudi money, such as the Council on American-Islamic Relations, have close links to sponsors of terrorist groups like Hamas, as a U.S. federal judge concluded in 2009.

Time to Change Our Immigration Laws

Given these facts, it is folly to pretend that sharia is compatible with the American experiment. It is not. We need a change to our immigration laws requiring that every potential immigrant renounce the use of force to compel or restrain religious freedom — with provisions for deporting any newcomer who later expresses support for sharia or anything like it. We can model such a law on the perfectly constitutional, decades-long ban on immigration for members of Communist parties.

None of the recent jihadi attackers, in Florida, California, or Ohio, had any provable connection with terrorist groups. The Boston Marathon bombers grew up here since early childhood. What did each of these terrorists have in common? They were simply orthodox Muslims, steeped in sharia — thus primed by their creed and culture to turn against their non-Muslim neighbors. All it took was some piece of bad news, a personal setback, or the right imam spouting on the right message board, to light the spark. It is not Islamophobic to recognize this fact, and to take measures to protect ourselves and our loved ones from it. It is Islamo-realism. (For more from the author of “It’s Not Islamophobia to Recognize That Sharia Is Incompatible with the Constitution” please click HERE)

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New German Secretary of State Is pro Sharia Law

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The daughter of Palestinian immigrants is to be the Berlin senate’s secretary of state for coordinating federal and state affairs, but attention has focused on her recent remarks in support of Sharia law.
Berlin state senate member, former deputy speaker for foreign affairs and Muslim rising star of German politics Sawsan Chebli is to get a new cabinet post. The appointment by the Red-Red-Green coalition government has caused concern after a recent interview in which she expressed her view that Sharia law was perfectly compatable with secular German society.

Speaking back in August alongside Berlin Social Democrat party Mayor Michael Muller, she not only defended Sharia law against suspicion by many Germans who she accused of not understanding what it meant, but she also went on the attack too. Criticising members of anti-mass migration party Alternative for German (AfD), she said their views towards foreigners made them fundementally un-German.

Speaking to the Franzfurter Allgeimeine Zeitung, she said: “My father is a pious Muslim, hardly speaks German, can neither read nor write, but he is more integrated than many functionaries of the AfD who question our constitution”.

Germany’s newspaper of record and the nation’s most widely-read broadsheet Welt reported Sunday that while the politician attempted to portray the image of the perfect “successful migrant” who despite being born to illiterate, stateless parents was able to succeed in education and enter politics, there are “cracks” displayed by her support of Sharia. (Read more from “New German Secretary of State Is pro Sharia Law” HERE)

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‘American Muslims Are Here to Stay,’ CAIR Tells Trump

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The Council on American-Islamic-Relations and other Muslim groups called on President-elect Donald Trump Wednesday to reach out to Muslims and other communities “impacted” by his campaign rhetoric.

“As citizens of this great nation, we accept the result of the democratic process that has bound us together as one nation,” said CAIR national executive director Nihad Awad.

“Regardless of who won or lost yesterday’s election, American Muslims are here to stay. We are not going anywhere, and will not be intimidated or marginalized.”

As a press conference in Washington D.C. reacting to the presidential election outcome, Awad said that to CAIR’s knowledge neither Trump nor any member of his campaign had reached out to representatives of Muslim organizations since the result was announced.

He said CAIR invites Trump, as it has done before, to reach out to Muslim community leaders “to meet and to have a serious and deep conversation about the future of this country and how we can work together.” (Read more from “‘American Muslims Are Here to Stay,’ CAIR Tells Trump” HERE)

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Hillary Loves Religious Freedom… Only for Muslim Foreign Nationals

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Hillary Clinton called for fact checkers to help her out tonight. At the risk of staying up the entire night debunking every word she spoke on policy, lets address what is perhaps the most scandalous part of the debate from a policy perspective. Hillary managed to flip two of the most foundational principles — religious liberty and sovereignty — upside down and inside out.

Early on in the debate, a Muslim voter, who was allegedly undecided, asked the following question:

There are 3.3 Muslims in the United States and I’m one of them. You’ve mentioned working with Muslim nations, but with islamophobia on the rise, how will you help people like me deal with the consequences of being a threat to the country after the election is over.

After a brief back-and-forth between the candidates on refugee policy — one of the few moments when Trump was fully on message — Hillary made the following laughable, hypocritical, outrageous, and dangerous comment:

But it is important for us as a policy, you know, not to say as Donald has said, we’re going to ban people based on a religion. How do you do that? We are a country founded on religious freedom and liberty.

How do we do what he has advocated without causing great distress within our own country … are we going to have religious tests?

Remember folks, Hillary is the leader of the party that believes religious Christians and Jews (or Muslims or anyone else) must service homosexual or transgender events with their own private property. They must engage in involuntary servitude or have their livelihoods terminated unless they agree to violate their conscience; the “most sacred of property” rights, as Madison put it. They believe unelected judges can force a grocery store to include every type of contraception in their pharmacy section when 30 other pharmacies within driving distance sell the products. And they believe a county clerk who has served her jurisdiction for 27 years — predating the concept of a gay marriage –—should be thrown in jail for requesting that someone else sign the license, which in itself runs country to state law that was never changed statutorily.

No, Mrs. Clinton, our country wasn’t founded upon the notion that foreign nationals have an affirmative right to immigrate to this country. But it was founded upon the self-evident truth of natural law and nature’s God — the very God you rejected with your defense of judicial tyranny tonight — that Americans and those accepted into our society through mutual consent have the right to secure their property, earn a living, and practice their religious liberty. They most certainly have the right to not have their religion debased with their own business and property.

So how about those litmus tests? Hillary seems to have figured out how to implement religious tests when it comes to the religions she doesn’t like. Oddly, she has no problem replacing the real religious freedoms of Americans with a phantom and dangerous right for any particular immigrant or groups of immigrants to come here against the will of the people, even though many of them come from cultures that will not disagree with her chosen religion — the sexual revolution — in an agreeable and cordial fashion.

Under Hillary’s dangerous conception of the First Amendment, a view shared by the majority of the modern legal profession, an American Christian has no right to run a business without violating his religion, yet a Pakistani national can sue for discrimination for not being allowed to immigrate to our shores in the first place. This position is not only dangerous, especially during a time of war; it’s ignorant.

Given that Hillary will not read my book, which debunks her premise on both accounts of religious liberty and sovereignty, she would be wise to read one court case: Turner v. Williams, [194 U.S. 279, 290 (1904)]. In Turner, which was unanimous and is the most accepted area of settled law, the Court stated, “[R]ested on the accepted principle of international law, that every sovereign nation has the power, as inherent in sovereignty and essential to self-preservation, to forbid the entrance of foreigners within its dominions, or to admit them only in such cases and upon such conditions as it may see fit to prescribe.”

This is one “precedent” from the courts liberals don’t like to abide by.

That we have a presidential candidate who is this ignorant of our most foundational values of sovereignty and religious liberty should scare us all. Then again, it’s not like we have a Republican Party beating the drums on behalf of true religious liberty either. (For more from the author of “Hillary Loves Religious Freedom… Only for Muslim Foreign Nationals” please click HERE)

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Muslim Expert Torches Obama’s ‘Countering Violent Extremism’ Agenda

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The United States should ditch its current efforts at “countering violent extremism” and focus instead on “countering violent Islamism” (CVE), a prominent Muslim reformist told Congress on Thursday.

“Our current direction and lack of deeply flawed and profoundly dangerous for the security of our nation,” Dr. Zhudi Jasser, president of the American Islamic forum for Democracy, said at a House Homeland Security Subcommittee hearing Thursday. “As a devout Muslim who loves my faith, and loves my nation, the de-emphasis of “radical Islam” and the “Islamist” root cause of global Islamist terrorism is the greatest obstacle to both national harmony and national security.”

Jasser went on to say that until America can “name this, and once we can name it, treat it and then counter it,” its national security efforts will remain channeled through a “Whac-a-Mole program” that focuses on tactics, rather than ideology.

A report issued earlier this year from a DC-based counterterrorism consulting firm found the Obama administration’s CVE programs to be a “catastrophic failure” due to its inefficacy, poor management, and, most of all, because of the administration’s engagementwith organizations that have known extremist affiliations, like the Council on American Islamic Relations (CAIR) and the Islamic Society of North America.

Both organizations were unindicted co-conspirators in the 2007 Holy Land Foundation case; trusting such organizations to counter jihadism is akin to “treating arsonists like firefighters,” Jasser said.

While these groups may not be intrinsically extremist in their messaging, Dr. Jasser said, they “are distributing literature that glorifies political Islam, that glorifies sharia state ideology […] that ultimately ends up causing the harms that radicalize our community.”

Not only does government engagement with these organizations further empower the global jihad movement and “leaves us bare against the threat of radical Islamism,” Jasser added, it also “renders our greatest allies within the Muslim community — genuine reformers — entirely impotent and marginalized.”

Throughout the rest of his prepared testimony, Jasser also suggested that Congress reopen investigations into CAIR’s extremist ties, calling the group “one of the most obvious beneficiaries of this embrace of Islamist groups.” He also recommended that the administration stop all engagement with groups that have ties to the Muslim Brotherhood and “recognize their misogynist, anti-Semitic, homophobic, and anti-American ideological underpinnings.”

Also on the panel was Shireen Qudosi, a senior contributor at CounterJihad.com, who pointed out to members the difference between Islam and Islamism, and that the latter “is a political ideology that must be studied, understood, and defeated.”

Qudosi went on to attack the “Islamophobe” labelling of anyone who criticizes Muslims, saying that the accusation “moves Islam from a religion into a racial or biological context,” rather than approaching it as a belief system.

“Islam is a religion,” she added, one that should be challenged intellectually without fear of automatically being labeled an Islamophobe or racist for doing so. “It is an idea, a set of concepts and beliefs. As such, ideas, concepts, and beliefs do not have human rights; individuals do.”

“The best way to tackle ISIS, beyond Whac-a-Mole CVE systems, is to tackle their political ideology,” said Qudosi.

During an earlier panel in the hearing, George Selim, Department of Homeland Security Office of Community Partnerships director, told the subcommittee that the current CVE program under his direction isn’t even being guided by a complete, strategic plan, according to a report at the Washington Examiner. After being repeatedly hounded by committee members, Selim admitted that a strategic plan for a $10 million endeavor was “nearly ready,” and that he could only point to “anecdotal” evidence that the program had actually countered some violent extremism.

“I can’t sit here before you today and definitively say that person was going to commit an act of terrorism … but we’re developing that prevention framework in a range of cities across the country,” Selim confessed under oath. (For more from the author of “Muslim Expert Torches Obama’s ‘Countering Violent Extremism’ Agenda” please click HERE)

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Islamic Terrorism Is Not a Narrative

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In the aftermath of this past weekend’s Islamic terrorist attacks, White House press secretary Josh Earnest commented, “We are in a narrative battle. ISIL want to project the West as being at war with Islam. It’s a mythology. And we’re debunking that myth … We can’t play into this narrative that somehow the United States is fighting Islam.”

In response, conservative journalist Ben Shapiro wrote, “The people in New York weren’t hit by flying pieces of narrative.”

Indeed, Islamic terrorism is not a narrative, and the victims of Islamic terrorism worldwide, now numbering in the millions, have not been beheaded or tortured or raped or blown to pieces or burned alive or imprisoned or exiled by “flying pieces of narrative.”

No, these men, women, and children are the victims of violent people acting on a violent ideology that is a central part of their violent faith, namely, radical Islam. And so, while heads are literally rolling in the Middle East and other parts of the world, Washington elites are sticking their heads in the sand, saying that, “We are in a narrative battle.”

And what, exactly, is that “narrative”?

It is that we are not in a war with Islam, and therefore, if we acknowledge that these terrorists are Muslims or connect them in any way with the word “Islam,” we “play into this narrative that somehow the United States is fighting Islam.”

As Hillary Clinton tweeted out last November, “Let’s be clear: Islam is not our adversary. Muslims are peaceful and tolerant people and have nothing whatsoever to do with terrorism.”

Consequently, rather than seeking to understand the mindset of radical Islam and most effectively combat Islamic terrorists, our president and his colleagues categorically deny any connection between Islam and terror to the point that, in 2011, “the White House ordered a cleansing of training materials that Islamic groups deemed offensive.”

So, not only is Islamic terrorism not a narrative, but when it comes to the narrative spoken of by Josh Earnest, namely, that radical Islam is not related to Islam, the terrorists have won here too, with the White House scrubbing the all-important references to Islam from our law enforcement books.

In other words, when it comes to the battle the White House does want to fight, it is on the wrong side of the issue, falsely claiming that Muslim terrorists want America to be at war with Islam in general. Hardly. The fact is, these radical Muslims themselves are at war with other expressions of Islam worldwide.

Instead, these terrorists win the battle when we are convinced that they are not Muslims at all, thereby causing us to fight with one hand tied behind our back and one eye closed (at the least).

Note also that there is a false narrative put forth by the White House and Hillary Clinton, namely, that no Muslims are terrorists, as if the moment a lifelong, devoted Muslim commits an act of terror for the cause of Allah, he or she is now disqualified from being a Muslim.

Based on what Islamic tenet or text?

To the contrary, while a Christian could never behead an unbeliever and say, “Hey, I’m just following Jesus’ example,” a Muslim could commit this same act and say, “Hey, I’m just following Muhammad’s example.”

As for Hillary’s statement that, “Muslims are peaceful and tolerant people and have nothing whatsoever to do with terrorism,” does she mean the Muslims in Iran who hang gays, or the Muslims in Saudi Arabia who behead adulterers, or the Muslims in Pakistan who go on a bloody rampage over charges that a Koran has been defiled, or the Muslims in Afghanistan who prevent women from going to school, or the Muslims in those countries that enforce the death penalty for conversion?

Had she said, “Many Muslims are peaceful and tolerant people,” most of us would have agreed without hesitation. Had she even said, “The vast majority of Muslims are not terrorists,” most of us would have agreed with that too.

But her blanket statement, like those of the president and others in the past, is demonstrably false, both ideologically and historically, and it thereby emboldens the terrorists to be more brazen still, since they can more easily fly right under our all too patchy radar.

This brings us back to the reality that the battle with Islamic terrorism is not a battle of narratives, and I can assure you that a Yazidi family in Iraq mourning over the gang rape of their young daughter or a Christian family in Syria mourning over the decapitation of all their males is not wondering about the “narrative,” and thinking, “I sure hope America doesn’t blame all Muslims for this.”

Instead, they are wondering why the West is so slow to recognize the very real threat of radical Islam, and they would be shocked to know that, rather than declare war on Islamic terrorists, the president of the most powerful nation in the world is doing damage control for Islam.

What a narrative. (For more from the author of “Islamic Terrorism Is Not a Narrative” please click HERE)

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Seven Deadly Reasons Why the Left Loves Islam

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Imagine that some splinter Christian sect existed that preached a sneering contempt for women, sex slavery, hatred for Jews, death to non-believers (and homosexuals), child-marriage, religious conquest, segregation and gross religious discrimination, and the legitimacy of lying whenever it suited the church’s purposes. Imagine that it had been practicing all these evils since shortly after its founding, and had left mountains of corpses on three continents — complete with burned libraries, looted cities and ruined civilizations.

Do you think that secular leftists would spend their time and energy making excuses for such a church? Would they fight like wildcats to admit millions of its followers into Western lands? Or would they boycott any country where it predominated as they did racist South Africa? Would they subject its American followers to ruthless surveillance and government harassment, as the Clinton administration did the Branch Davidians? Would they send the FBI to fill its ranks with helpful informers, as the government did to the white-nationalist Christian Identity “churches”?

The question answers itself.

People whose minds work in linear fashion draw from all this the conclusion that leftists concerned with equality, social justice, and personal freedom would strongly oppose orthodox Islam and rethink their attitude toward Islamic immigration if only they knew the facts. Clearly these well-meaning people just haven’t been informed about the teachings of orthodox Islam and the track record of its faithful followers. So it’s our job to share those facts.

So far so good. We have the duty to do just that. Marshal those Quranic suras, those authoritative haditha, and cite abundant examples of atrocities which those canonical texts have directly inspired. Recount the recent sermons of highly placed widely respected Muslim religious authorities who approve recent attacks of terrorism or gross religious violence.

But don’t get your hopes up.

Far too many leftists have built insuperable barriers to that information, and nothing — literally nothing — you say or do could convince them. While knowledge may be power, the human will is stronger. We are richly capable of denying the facts in front of our faces if they go against where our guts want to lead us.

That raises another, more interesting question: Why would leftists who are outraged, say, that the Catholic church won’t ordain women or that Southern Baptists won’t celebrate same-sex weddings, give a pass to a faith that endorses child polygamy and executes homosexuals? What’s in it for them?

As the author of a book on the Seven Deadly Sins, let me step in here and tell you. I’ll taxonomize the motives of pro-Muslim progressives according to each of those classic human motives. Perhaps not every progressive who’s in denial about Islam is in the grip of Deadly Sins. But I’ll wager that most of them are driven by one or more of the following:

Lust

Plenty of progressive men first adopted their views as a mating strategy. And indeed, spouting feminist rhetoric probably did help them in the bedroom. But this easy intimacy filled their lives with a series of thin-skinned, self-righteous women with an unsleeping vigilance for the slightest trace of “patriarchy.” Perhaps, on a deep, subconscious level, such men can’t help admiring bearded foreigners with harems who don’t have to pay this price for pleasure.

Gluttony

This might seem too trivial to make much of a difference, but you’d be shocked at how many progressives form their immigration policies around the crucial issue of access to ethnic restaurants. It’s not just food, of course. People who hunger to see themselves and be seen as sophisticated and cosmopolitan also want access to hookah-pipe cafes, funky foreign clothes and “exotic” neighborhoods where they can dip into alien cultures — but of course, would never live. Other progressives hunger for approval, and look for a cost-free way to gain it, by siding with supposedly “oppressed” groups like Palestinians, or radical Muslims forced out of countries by secular governments.

Wrath

Too many progressives nurse a deep, insatiable hatred for the Christian and Western past, and also for those of us in the present who are loyal to such things as church, nation or Western civilization. These people don’t so much think as feel that if a roadside Pentecostalist church in Oregon is allowed to abstain from gay weddings without swift and certain punishment, within five years the Spanish Inquisition will be burning witches on Wall Street. Or something. As I said, they don’t sweat the details.

Greed

For the past 30 years, no one has been kept off a TV network or failed to get tenure because he was too friendly to exotic, foreign cultures, or too hostile to Western ones. Even Fox News won’t air the most candid critics of Islam. Those critics have to resort to online TV shows (some of which are excellent, by the way, like The Glazov Gang).

Sloth

It’s so much easier to follow the narrative that makes you comfortable, pumped out by elites whom you have decided to trust, than to ferret out facts that are only likely to ruin your day. And anyway, what can you do? What will happen will happen, and trying to push back against overpowering forces of history is exhausting. What’s the point?

Vainglory

Nothing is lower prestige in our culture today than being a narrow-minded bigot — which is how everyone who matters sees people who criticize other cultures. It suggests that you haven’t traveled to foreign countries, attended elite academies, or mixed with the best kind of people. You might as well just put on a Trump hat, drive a red pickup truck to a NASCAR rally, and stand there listening to Nash-Trash while drinking Budweiser (non-ironically). Please.

Envy

If there’s one worldview that’s predicated on frustrating natural human drives and diverting them into strange, unnatural byways, it’s progressivism. You’re expected to prosper while loathing capitalism, raise boys to play with dolls and girls to play with guns, and compete for social status while battling for equality. Muslims don’t have to fake any of that. Their faith is nothing if not candid: It’s about joining the winning team, with God on its side, which will gladly use force and fraud to make sure it comes out on top — in this life and the next one. Its ethics could have been crafted by bands of Vikings or a cabal of adolescent boys. What fun we would have, some progressives may imagine, if they could only swallow Islam. Most can’t. But they can take vicarious pleasure in seeing it in action, and in watching the Christians squirm. Delicious. (For more from the author of “Seven Deadly Reasons Why the Left Loves Islam” please click HERE)

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JUST LIKE ANY OTHER FAITH… Where the Rivers Run Red With Blood

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There’s no violence here against anyone except animals. It’s a surreal sight. Shocking in some ways. And another reminder of just how different Islamic culture is from our civilization.

Huge swathes of animal sacrifices marking the Islamic festival Eid al-Adha turned the streets of Bangladesh’s capital into rivers of blood.

Authorities in Dhaka had designated areas in the city where residents could slaughter animals, but heavy downpours Tuesday rendered them out of action.

Instead, Muslims took to car parks, garages and alleyways to traditionally mark Eid al-Adha – or the Feast of Sacrifice – by slaughtering livestock and when the blood flowed into the streets, it turned them red.

It’s a scene out of a horror movie. And yet it’s life in the Muslim world. (For more from the author of “JUST LIKE ANY OTHER FAITH… Where the Rivers Run Red With Blood” please click HERE)

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AS THE TERROR THREAT RISES: Europe Changes Course

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Sixteen years ago, when Dutch commentator Paul Scheffer published his “Multicultural Drama” declaring that multiculturalism in the Netherlands had failed, the response was swift and angry. Critics across Europe called him racist, bigoted, nationalistic. Others dismissed his views as mere rants and ramblings of a Leftist in search of a cause.

Not anymore.

With over 275 people killed in 10 Islamic terrorist attacks since January 2015, Europeans harbor no more illusions about the multiculturalist vision: where immigrants from Muslim countries are concerned, that idealist vision has more than just failed. It has produced a culture of hatred, fear, and unrelenting danger. Now, with European Muslim youth radicalizing at an unprecedented rate and the threat of new terrorist attacks, Europe is reassessing its handling of Muslim communities and its counterterrorism strategies and laws.

Among the changes being considered are a reversal of laws that allow radical Muslims to receive handouts from the very governments they seek to destroy; restricting foreign funding of mosques; and stronger surveillance on private citizens.

Chief among the new counterterrorism approaches is a program to coordinate intelligence data among European Union countries – a tactic that has not been pursued with any regularity or such depth before now. But following the November attacks in Paris, the Dutch intelligence agency AIVD initiated weekly meetings among intel agencies from all EU countries, Switzerland, and Norway, with the objective of sharing information, exchanging new clues, insights, and suspect alerts, and discussing improvements to a Europe-wide system of counterterrorism and intelligence.

Through these meetings and the improved shared database, it is now possible for each country to contextualize its intelligence and understand links between individuals and various groups from one city to another – and so, between radicals and radical groups as they pass through a borderless EU.

Concurrently, EU members are now beginning to share information about web sites and even details about private citizens where needed. Most countries had been reluctant to make such exchanges, citing both privacy concerns and the need to protect their sources. Other cooperative efforts include an EU initiative begun in February 2015 to counteract Islamic extremist propaganda. The project received a major €400 million boost in June, indicating the high priority Europe now places on fighting recruitment.

Earlier this month, Europol began a new effort to screen refugees still awaiting placement in Greek asylum centers. According to a report from Europa Nu, an initiative between the European parliament and the University of Leiden, Europol agents “specifically trained to unmask and dismantle terrorists and terror networks” will be dispatched to the camps to try to prevent terrorists from infiltrating the flood of refugees to Europe.

Some EU measures, however, have been based more in politics than counterterrorism, including efforts to crack down on the ability of radical Muslims to benefit from welfare programs. British citizens, for instance, reacted with outrage when it was discovered that the family of “Jihadi John” had received over £400,000 in taxpayer support over the course of 20 years. In Belgium, Salah Abdeslam, the terrorist accused of participating in the Nov. 13 Paris attacks, pulled in nearly €19,000 in welfare benefits from January 2014 and October 2015, according to Elsevier. And Gatestone reports that more than 30 Danish jihadists received a total of €51,000 in unemployment benefits all while battling alongside the Islamic State in Syria.

Such concerns have also spread to the United States. Earlier this year, U.S. Rep. Bruce Poliquin, R-Maine, introduced the “No Welfare For Terrorists Act.”

“Terrorist victims and their families should never be forced to fund those who harmed them,” he said in a statement. “This bill guarantees this will never happen.”

But not all of Europe’s new approaches to the terror threat are being coordinated out of Brussels. Many more, in fact, are country-specific, such as England’s decision to follow an example set earlier by the Netherlands and Spain, separating jailed terrorists and terror suspects from other prisoners. The measures follow others the country adopted after the July 7, 2005 bombings of a London underground and buses, to criminalize “those who glorify terrorism, those involved in acts preparatory to terrorism, and those who advocate it without being directly involved,” the New York Times reported.

In fact, prisons worldwide, including in the U.S., have long been viewed as warm breeding grounds for radicals and potential terrorists. Ahmed Coulibaly, the gunman at the Porte de Vincennes siege in January 2015, was serving time for a bank robbery, for instance, when he met Cherif Koauachi, one of the Charlie Hebdo attackers. Both converted to Islam there. It was in that same prison that the two encountered Djamel Beghal, an al-Qaida operative who attempted to blow up the American Embassy in Paris in 2001.

Hence many experts now argue in favor of isolating those held on terrorism-related charges as a way to stop them from radicalizing their fellow inmates.

Yet British officials have until now resisted creating separate wings for terror suspects, arguing that doing so gives them “credibility” and makes it harder to rehabilitate them. But a recent government report on Islamist extremism in British prisons forced a change in thinking, in part by noting that “other prisoners – both Muslim and non-Muslim – serving sentences for crimes unrelated to terrorism are nonetheless vulnerable to radicalization by Islamist Extremists [sic].”

Similarly, France, the site of the worst attacks of the past two years, also balked at first at the idea of separating terrorists from other prisoners, arguing that doing so “forms a terrorist cell within a prison.” But the Charlie Hebdo attacks of January 2015 changed all that. Now, officials are even going further, looking at other potential sources of radicalization: the mosques.

Shortly after the Bastille Day attack in Nice, Prime Minister Manuel Valls announced plans to ban foreign financing for French mosques as part of an effort to establish a “French Islam,” led by imams trained only in France. France hosts dozens of foreign-financed mosques – many sponsored by Saudi Arabia and Morocco – which preach Salafism, an extreme version of Islam practiced in the Saudi Kingdom and the root of much radical Islamist ideology. And according to a new report on counter-radicalization, about 300 imams come from outside France.

That same report also calls for “regular surveys” of France’s 4-5 million Muslims, according to France 24, in order “to acquire a better understanding of this population in a country where statistics based on religious, ethnic, or racial criteria are banned.”

Both proposed measures have been met with resistance. The “surveys,” as even the report itself notes, are a means of circumventing laws against gathering information on the basis of religious criteria – and so, go against democratic principles. And many French officials also oppose the ban on foreign funding for mosques, arguing that French government intervention in places of worship contradicts separation between church and state. Besides, they claim, radicalization doesn’t take place there anyway.

But Dutch authorities and counter-extremism experts are not so sure. The announcement earlier this month that Qatar would finance an Islamic center in Rotterdam, for instance, set off alarms even among Muslim moderates, including Rotterdam’s Moroccan-born mayor Ahmed Marcouch. There are good reasons for this. The Salafist Eid Charity, which sponsors the project, has been on Israel’s terror list since 2008, according to Dutch daily NRC Handelsblad. Moreover, in 2013 the U.S. Treasury Department accused the charity’s founder, Abd al-Rahman al-Nu’aymi, of providing funding for al-Qaida and its affiliates, and named him a “specially designated global terrorist.”

Plans for the center sound much like those of the now-abandoned plans for New York’s “Ground Zero mosque,” with sports facilities, prayer space, tutoring for students, Islamic child care, and, reports Dutch newspaper Volkskrant, imam training.

Yet the center’s prospective director, Arnoud van Doorn, a convert to Islam and former member of the far-right, anti-Islam political party PVV, insists that any fears about the project are unfounded. “Our organization has nothing to do with extremism,” he told the NRC. “We want only to provide a positive contribution to Dutch society.”

Notably, though, France’s proposal to ban foreign mosque funding and the Qatari backing of the Rotterdam center point to some of the deepest roots of Europe’s radical Islam problem, and, despite all the new initiatives now underway, the greatest challenges to ending it. When Muslim immigrants came to Europe in the 1970s, they carved prayer spaces wherever they could: the backs of community grocery stores, in restaurants and tea rooms. But these soon became too small to handle the growing Muslim population. Mosques – real mosques – would have to be built.

But by whom? The Muslim communities themselves were too poor. Western governments, wedded to the separation of church and state, could not subsidize them with taxpayer funds. And so the door was opened to foreign – mostly Saudi – investment, and the placement of Saudi-trained and Saudi-backed imams in European mosques. Europe had, in essence, rolled out the welcome mat for Salafism.

Now they want to roll it in again. But is it too late? Even as Western intelligence is now uniting to fight radical Islam, Islamic countries are pooling together in Europe to expand it. The result, as Manuel Valls told French daily Le Monde, is that, “What’s at stake is the republic. And our shield is democracy.”

Hence as the number attacks against Western targets increase, many Europeans are coming to understand that preserving the core of that democracy may mean disrupting some of the tenets on which it’s built, like certain elements of privacy, for instance, and religious principles that violate the freedom that we stand for . It is, as it were, a matter of destroying even healthy trees to save the forest. But in this tug-of-war between the Islamic world’s efforts to shape the West, and Western efforts to save itself, only our commitment to the very heart of our ideals will define who wins this fight. (For more from the author of “AS THE TERROR THREAT RISES: Europe Changes Course” please click HERE)

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